The Social Scientist’s Handbook for Inspiring Change

In February 2020, just before the world went a bit mad, I was invited to a unique opportunity. The UK Research and Innovation Department was hosting a cross-disciplinary workshop to discuss how best we should tackle air pollution in the UK.

Upon arrival, I discovered I was the only social scientist in the room.

Engineers, architects, chemistry and atmospheric scientists, government and trade representatives from all industries filled the room, but no one else worked in the humanities or social sciences.

The lead speaker emphasised the need for people to realise that air pollution is bad and change their behaviour. In essence, we heard from scientists who tried to answer the question through modifications of objective reality—building things, planting things, changing things. Few spoke about how these subjective beliefs would impact the success of objective transformations.

This was when I first realised how social science perspectives were needed more than ever.

As a researcher, I am interested in discovering why people think the way they do and how their identities, attitudes and beliefs affect their behaviour. This research is well-established in my home field of the social sciences, but in large STEM-led projects aiming to change the world, it's under-explored.

Social scientists are answering the question, ‘How do we get people to adopt all this shiny new tech?’ Technological progress in sustainability is making headlines every other day, but social acceptance of sustainable technology still lags.

The obstacles for people to change are myriad and complex.

And that’s where my team and I enter the story. We’re part of a large multidisciplinary project helping UK households decarbonise their domestic heating; our team at Aston University is particularly interested in how attitudes affect people’s uptake of sustainable heating. We’ve been conducting household interviews to ask people’s opinions and commissioned a national survey, hoping for more generalised insight.

We discovered that change comes down to individual hearts and minds.

Many people assume the reason we’re resistant to change is simply ‘too much hassle’ or ‘not enough awareness.’ But it's not enough to just inform people about beneficial new technologies and behaviours–they need to be willing to adopt them. How do we do that?

Our research found that turning awareness into a habit is the best way to induce change.

In the UK, district heating (a communal heating network that distributes heat through insulated pipes from a centralised location) is slowly becoming more popular. For example, during our fieldwork in Nottingham, one subject told us that her mum and dad had district heating in their home and wouldn't consider switching to anything else because she's used to it. Another tells us they've used district heating before coming to the UK, which was familiar to them, too.

However, on the other side, those resistant to the concept had never experienced a communal, sustainable heat-sharing concept before; they worried about being trapped, scammed and conned, powerless against a faceless corporation.

The resistance against top-down policies and mistrust against institutional authority that we observe is due to a lack of control: people want to believe they are making a change because of their choice and free will. Yet, once a change is made and a habit is formed, people will find a way to rationalise it and internalise it as the norm.

How do we encourage sustainable behaviour to become a habit? We need to encourage new technologies in public and transitional settings, introducing people to the idea of them. Suppose sustainable heating was used in hotels, commercial facilities, and university accommodations. In that case, people could become familiar with it before implementing it in their homes. Adopting new technology feels comfortable when people have used it (even in passing) and have a good impression of it.

Recycling is the perfect example of this; it’s already such a habit that people often don’t think twice about it. Most see it as a trivial everyday environmental action compared to more significant decisions, such as installing solar panels or using centralised heating.

But if we look towards Northern Europe, sustainable heat networks are so common that they don't bat an eye against them. We once had a visitor from Norway who was very confused when he heard the local debates over sustainable heating in the community. "For this?" he said. “We’re seventy steps ahead, and we don’t fret over decisions like this nearly as much.”

It's not enough to assume that an information campaign will change people's minds: We must demystify technology and show that unfamiliar changes can be made into familiar habits.

Every new norm started somewhere.

*Our research is generously supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), UK under Grant No. EP/V041452/1.