Affect and impact: Integrating individual and system levels to change consumption in line with climate goals

We need unparalleled behavioral changes to mitigate climate change. Thus, insights from behavioral sciences are needed to understand factors influencing individual behavior.

However, several important aspects determining sustainable consumer behavior and decision-making are currently being overlooked, limiting the contribution of psychology to climate change mitigation.

Arguably, there is a disproportionate focus on behaviors with limited mitigation potentials like recycling, emotion-driven mechanisms of behavioral change and decision-making are seldom integrated, and a multilevel perspective accounting for the complexity and interconnectedness of factors operating at various levels influencing sustainable behavior is lacking.

Hence, we propose a research agenda to investigate individual, social, emotional, and systemic determinants of perception and adoption of high-impact sustainable behaviors.

To address the challenge, we will employ representative and diverse samples, emphasize analysis-levels other than individual, and implement a diverse methodological toolbox combining surveys, factorial studies, longitudinal data, and computational modeling.

The adoption of a system-perspective, by considering the nested and complex structure that individual action has many determinants operating at various levels, will provide a richer understanding of individual behavior and ultimately provide insights for effective interventions tailored to specific contexts and social networks.