Our guest today is Professor Emeritus Bas Verplaken from the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath. He’s very much an elder in the study of attitude and habits in relation to health and human behavior and he has also been the editor of the book, The Psychology of Habits.  We discuss "Habit Discontinuity Hypothesis" which is a phenomenon whereby people are more apt to adopt new behaviors when their daily lives are disrupted, meaning some kind of discontinuity occurs, like moving...

In this episode, I explore the ongoing debate between individual and system actions in promoting pro-environmental behavior, challenging the notion that these are the only two types of actions. This episode points out that there are five different types of actions that can bring about change: daily recurring habits, big-ticket once-off changes, lifelong career mastery, political engagement, and social influence. Individual actions are more than small lifestyle changes, such as composting...

People often ask me why we should practice individual environmental behavior change when what we really need is "systems change." It's not an easy question to answer. We need "systems change" implemented by governments as policy (like plastic bans), economic levers (like a carbon tax), and physical infrastructure (like bike paths). Yet, all systems are made up of networks of individual people who influence systems and are allowed individual freedoms. The two cannot be separated. In this...

In this episode, I unpack six unconscious assumptions that people make when they ask me the question "Why do we need to study individual behavior when we need system-level change?" There is often some flawed thinking in the way this question is asked. While it's true we need systems-level change, this doesn't undermine, nor is it in opposition to, the role of behavioral psychology. Before we can give a thorough answer, we need to question the assumptions and expectations behind the...

In this episode, I share a new journaling practice that I've recently started that involves answering four specific questions. This practice has been an absolute game-changer for me, and I believe it can profoundly impact your life and work too. Inspired by her previous episode on the Fun-O-Meter, I emphasize the importance of asking meaningful and substantial questions to shape the trajectory of our lives. These questions are designed to align the inner compass of your environmental work...

What are the behavioral science secrets behind making a climate action dashboard for cities that ACTUALLY gets people to act? In this episode, I'll take you a deep dive into the design theory behind creating a climate action dashboard for a city using a behavioral science-informed approach. I share the importance of distinguishing between action design and graphic design, as well as climate reporting and climate accounting. Climate Action Design is different. It's not "reporting," it's...

In this episode, we chat with Sophie Poisel, an award-winning innovative teacher who hosted the first Earth Imagination Week with her students. Sophie showed us that when you give children the tools to imagine positive new ecological worlds, they come up with incredible work! Eco Minecraft worlds, green Lego lands, biophilic architectural illustrations, 3D building models - the kids made it. We delved into the power of environmental imagination and how it can spark awe-inspiring creativity...

Do you gauge the quality of your work, content, and life by how "fun" it is? Weird secret - I used to HATE being asked what I did "for fun." In this episode, I share how I started taking the theory and pursuit of fun more "seriously" (lol) as a daily practice and how it's changed everything. I discovered how asking this one question "What is the most fun thing I could do?" can breathe magic into your environmental work, expand your creativity, and unexpectedly redirect you more closely to...

Don't let your audience walk away without actually doing anything. Here's the action design shorthand you need. Use each of these evidence-based techniques in your project, campaign, or startup to ensure every person you touch goes on to take a real action that shifts the numbers. Download The 7 Pillars of Behavioral Science for Climate Action Poster PDF: http://bit.ly/43Ip9E2 How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take...

Today's guest is Dan White. He is the CEO and Founder of the award-winning impact-games development company, Filament Games. Dan is an artist and entrepreneur and probably the world’s most prolific games-for-impact developer. We talk about the nuance of how to create a game that engages, educates, and transforms people and we explore what happens when we put art, action, and impact together into an educational game format. Dan and his team at Filament have created nine games specifically...

This month's guest expert on the How to Save the World podcast is Nicole Sintov, Associate Professor of Behavior, Decision-Making, and Sustainability from Ohio State University. We'll be interviewing Nicole on her published research paper, "Guilt consistently motivates pro-environmental outcomes while pride depends on context." The gist of this research shows that telling people they are performing worse than most others on environmental and climate action, stimulates people to do...

MeshMinds makes planet-themed augmented reality games designed to massively increase engagement and social media sharing of environmental campaigns. Kay and Olivier and I met when we were working for UNEP on the Clean Seas campaign. They do some really interesting work using the software Spark AR (that’s only used for instagram and Facebook applications) to make these very novel, light, immersive, and fun experiences - kind of like a mini or micro game - that people access by pressing the...

Today's guest is environmental psychologist, Veronica Champine, PhD Candidate and Graduate Research Assistant at Colorado State University. We're breaking down the science of "social diffusion" in her research paper "Understanding individual and diffusion behaviors related to native plant gardening" recently published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. Her research explores the difference between asking people to take individual action vs asking people to talk to people around them...

There's a line in a song that says "Words are hotter fire. Words are wetter than water." You might not think that words possess a superpower that can help you change the world, but if you're in the job of influencing people to change, language is your secret weapon.  In this episode, I talk through some of the mistakes I see people make and how you can get better at crafting your written story and your copywriting. I hope you take the time to master the art of sculpting words that deeply...

What would it take to make "A Fitbit of the world's forests"? As you could imagine, it would be a momentous task. Global Forest Watch is doing it. It's one of the world's most technically ambitious ecological monitoring projects that maps and monitors the entire Earth's forest cover, with high-frequency updates, and ecological health insights, and displays it on a beautiful and easy-to-use browser interface. Global Forest Watch a partnership between the World Resources Institute and multiple...

We can get better at telling the story of sustainability, climate, and greener futures. I wrote down these 24 evocative words, backed by science to motivate people, and riffed on ideas of how you use each of them to tell better stories to get people to join your environmental project. We need to be able to inspire epic feelings in people. Here are some examples of how you can do it.  * * *   How to Save the World is a Podcast About the Psychology of What Gets People To Take On Sustainable...

Have you ever seen a "sustainability street" program you thought was a great idea? In this month's Gamify the Planet Masterclass, we're creating one! In this episode, I share a simple tutorial on how you can design a gamified sustainability street program to promote decarbonization, electrification, and roof-top solar - and we'll learn the theory behind behavioral techniques work to tap into the human motivational core. Images and info to follow along + register for the class:...

In this episode, we speak with Thijs Bouman, assistant professor and researcher from the Environmental Psychology group at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He’s done some fascinating research into the relationship between group and individual environmental values. We often think of our value systems and beliefs as if they were created by our own independent thoughts, but we as humans, are highly influenced by the groups we interact with. Seeing environmental change through the...

We need to avoid the trap of getting caught up in a single idea. Ideas are plentiful. When it comes to climate or social change, an idea is just a hypothesis. Will your idea actually create the change you think it will? You'll only know by testing it.  In this episode, I talk about how you need to have lots of ideas and rapidly iterate them. You need to test them and discover the causal mechanism of what works on people. The faster you can test and iterate, the faster you can get to the...

This episode is a short tutorial on my custom behavior mapping process for climate action. It's the most powerful thing I've ever learned how to do and once I learned how to do it, it changed everything. If you're trying to influence humans to take any action at all for the climate, you need to learn how to behavior map. It's the secret to great ideas that get real impact results. I developed a specialized behavior mapping system designed specifically for climate and environmental...

How do we persuade homeowners to make climate upgrades to their homes such as electrifying, installing solar, or improving energy efficiency? Do we persuade them using environmental facts and energy data, or is a social mechanism more effective, like sparking a conversation with a neighbor or friend?  Our guest today is Brian Southwell. Brian is the Adjunct Professor at Duke University’s School of Medicine, the director of the Science in the Public Sphere Program at a large non-profit...

You need to tell the world why your idea or mission matters – and not just in any way. You need to tell a story that deeply resonates so that people will fund you, work with you, and take action to support you. In this episode, I talk through the power of using The Hero's Journey template to tell your non-fiction story – and how discovering this twelve-step structure dramatically changed the course of not just my environmental work,  but my life, and how it might change yours, too. See the...

People come to me with all sorts of elaborate ideas to "change the world," like games, festivals, art projects, films, and apps. Often, these ideas have little connection to how the idea will make a real change happen on the ground once people have "experienced" the idea . . . (i.e. "I suppose we'll just put a link somewhere, then people will . . . ") This entrepreneurship model is back-to-front. If you have an idea to make an impact, you need to forget your crazy idea and go straight to a...

Do you ever hear animals you never see? Secretive and rare animals, such as Eastern bristlebirds, can be most easily found by the sounds that they make. We can only do this, however, if we learn how to decipher their calls!  In her PhD research, Jessie is exploring how to design future technologies that support people in becoming familiar with identifying bird calls from audio recordings. Birders and members of the public explored Jessie’s research prototypes, such as the Bristle Whistle...

Does your website, pitch deck, and marketing material ACTUALLY explain what you do, clearly? Or is it a confusing word salad of environmental world-saving generalities? Remember this phrase: "If you confuse, you lose." In my experience, most climate and environmental projects struggle to simply explain what they do. In this episode, I explain how to write a "power sentence" in three easy steps so anyone can immediately "get it." You need to follow the steps to write this power sentence...