From Niches to Norms: Drivers and Diffusion of Green Social Tipping

How common must a behavior be, before a reluctant person decides to conform?

And can information campaigns and behavioral interventions instigate enough change to transition to a new norm with the least disruption? The project addresses these topical questions, contributing key insights to the ecological transition.

The netzero transition poses unprecedented societal challenges, that cannot be tackled with technology and markets alone. It requires behavioral and social change.

Abandoning entrenched detrimental norms, including those that perpetuate the fossil-fueled lock-in, is notoriously difficult, preventing change and limiting policy efficacy.

A nascent literature tackles Social Tipping Interventions -STI, aiming at cost-effective disproportionate change, by pushing behaviors past an adoption threshold beyond which further uptake is self-reinforcing.

Intervening on target groups can greatly reduce the societal cost of a policy and thus holds promise for precipitating change. Yet, research in this field is confined to theory or small-scale experiments.

GREEN TIPPING aims to provide an innovative and rigorous analysis of the untapped potential of tailored interventions to scale sustainable behavior and trigger systemic shift. To this end, I plan a four-pronged approach: posit, test, refine, validate. The team derives predictions on the conditions and timing for abandoning a detrimental social norm.

We then test the effectiveness of a battery of interventions on representative multi-country samples, to quantify the hypothesized effects. This allows for refining target specific STI, to be tested in controlled group experiments.

Lastly, we validate the findings by assessing contagion in the field, focusing on renewable energy adoption in targeted samples elsewhere.

The interdisciplinary approach draws from the natural and social sciences, with transformative theoretical, experimental and policy advances relevant to environmental and other high-stake challenges.