Using episodic future thinking to improve climate decision making and action in organisations

Background and rationale

According to a 2022 Times survey, 66% of small businesses in the UK never sought information on how to reduce their carbon footprint. One reason for poor engagement with climate change is psychological distance. It is well established that temporally distant and uncertain events are perceived as less extreme in value, and are therefore not fully included in businesses decision making.

A recent meta-analysis (Rösch et al., 2022) showed that mental simulations of likely future experience (known as Episodic Future Thinking or EFT) reduce discounting in monetary as well as health-related choices. In addition, Lee at al. (2020) demonstrated that engagement in EFT increases climate related risk-perception and subsequent tendencies to engage in pro-environmental behaviour.

In contrast to other, more abstract forms of future thinking, EFT elicits concrete mental representations, and thus makes an otherwise elusive future more tangible. EFT can be used to imagine positive (e.g. benefits derived from having implemented mitigative action) or negative futures (e.g. costs associated with unmitigated climate change).

Aim of the research

The studentship will build on existing work conducted as part of the GAIA and CAST centres, both based at CU's School of Psychology, on how organisations make decisions and establish change to achieve a low-carbon transformation. Research questions and methodologies will be identified and shaped to examine how stakeholders conceive the future and their capacity to shape it with regards to climate change.

This will be used to determine what influence EFT has on businesses commitment to and implementation of sustainable practices. The collaboration between the School of Psychology and K Sharp Ltd will ensure the research has relevance and is directly disseminated to businesses located in Wales, while maintaining its methodological and theoretical integrity.

Possible methods and design

The project will take a multi-stage approach, using methods from both social/environmental and cognitive psychology. The first year of the studentship will be used to scope the applicability of EFT as a nudge for organisational decision-making and action as well as develop a literature review to refine the thinking and its application to climate ergonomics.

This will be used to then develop methodology that will test the efficacy of an EFT based intervention, run a pilot study based on student population and refine the intervention appropriately.

Year two will see the application of the intervention on the target cohort, this will focus on small businesses because they potentially need more support and guidance than large businesses. This will require data capture and dynamic visualisation.

Year three will seek to evaluate the advantages/disadvantages of EFT use against current approaches with a view to determining other suitable stakeholder groups that it would work with and adapt the EFT approach to work with those groups.

This project seeks rapid application, and therefore engagement with key stakeholders throughout the project will be sought to ensure it can be exploited. These stakeholders include (but are not restricted to) Local Government, Welsh Government, Federation of Small Business and Aerospace Wales.