Getting people to change their behavior is a challenging task.
From the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment to the Piano Stair Experiment, scientists have been trying to understand what motivates people to alter their actions for decades. Those hurdles are especially pronounced when it comes to climate change, where overcoming the intention-action gap is a major challenge. Just because someone is concerned about climate change doesn’t mean they will change what they do on a daily basis.
So what might actually help change people’s behavior?
In testing what strategies actually work, especially within families, researchers at Northeastern University found that children may hold the key to changing their parents’ behaviors around climate change.
The convention might be to think parents, as the older group, are better teachers, but, “It does show us that probably kids are better teachers than parents are,” said Nirajana Mishra, an assistant professor of marketing at Northeastern.
With support from the World Bank, Mishra and an interdisciplinary team of researchers conducted a field study in which they enrolled more than 1,500 families with children in grades 6 to 8 in an environmental education program.
The study took place in Patna, India. The capital of India’s Bihar state, Patna has the kind of severe environmental issues that cities across the world face, like air pollution, flooding and rising temperatures. Mishra and her Northeastern co-author, public policy and economics professor Nishith Prakash, also had a personal connection: They both grew up in Patna.
Beyond the environmental context, Mishra and Prakash were also interested in seeing the effect of family dynamics. Within Indian households, there is still more of a hierarchy, Mishra explained.
“The context in a place like Patna is, there, parents still wield some authority over kids,” Mishra said.
The team was curious to see if and how their study design would work to have children bring back to their homes what they learned.
Over the course of a week, specially trained educators would visit each family’s home for four 30-minute lessons to the designated group, but each family didn’t get the same experience. To test the spillover effect of this kind of education, the researchers randomly assigned families to one of three groups: one where only children took part in the program, one where only parents took part, and another where both parents and children received education. There was also a control group that did not receive the curriculum at all.
The team designed the curriculum to do three things: raise awareness about environmental issues, about the impact their behaviors, even things as small as recycling, can have on mitigating those issues and about what advocates are doing to combat climate change on a broader level.
Importantly, the lessons were designed to be interactive, making space for conversations between parents and children at the end of each session to create a potential “spillover effect,” as the researchers call it.
“If you just do a plain session, nothing is going to work, so you have to make it more fun, more engaging,” Prakash said.
To figure out whether these lessons had any effect, the researchers gave out completion certificates to both parents and children at the end of the curriculum. Families could choose to either immediately get a certificate printed on standard paper or wait a week to receive a recycled paper version. The researchers wanted to test whether families would be willing to incur a cost — in this case of time — to choose the more environmentally friendly option, which they had learned about during the course.
Parents who took part in the program were more likely to choose a recycled certificate, but their children were not equally as likely to make the same choice.
But parents whose children did participate in the program, either by themselves or with their parents, were 26% more likely to opt for a green certificate.
Interestingly, according to data collected in conversations and surveys, children also had more of an effect on their parents’ perception of the risks posed by climate change and the sense that their actions could make a difference. Parents had little to no effect on their children’s perceptions of the environment.
Of the six environmental behaviors the researchers focused on, which included certificate choices but also attitudes and awareness around climate change, such as its impact on their local environment,, children had a spillover effect in four. Parents only had one: the completion certificates.
“It’s hopeful in itself that kids can make these changes, but it is more so to me that it is happening in a context where I would not have predicted this to happen,” Mishra said. Even when parents hold more decision-making power and probably have more authority, for a topic such as the environment, kids are better messengers.”
For Megan Willig, environmental education program manager for the National Environmental Education Foundation, which is a leading environmental education organization, it’s surprising but not hard to see why this might be happening.
“Kids are really curious, they ask a lot of questions, they then pose the questions to everyone else in their life,” Willig said. “Their learning doesn’t just stop after the school day. They take it home.”
Mishra and Prakash are particularly interested in the fact that their discovery could point to a potential new strategy for environmental advocates and educators, who often work with smaller budgets or in other contexts where they are making do with less.
“If I’m resource-constrained and if I have to choose who to target in a household, perhaps kids are better targets in terms of changing attitudes,” Mishra said.
