According to Yale University polling, roughly four out of five Sacramento County residents acknowledge the fact of climate change. But consensus for what to do about the quickening creep of eco-catastrophe is far more fragmented. That’s where Gregg Sparkman comes in. A former Stanford researcher who now teaches psychology at Boston College, he studies people’s behaviors regarding environmental issues—and how they can be motivated to adjust those behaviors in the spirit of saving the planet. The 35-year-old Sacramento native speaks about how to influence change, the trouble with do-gooderism, and how walking the River City’s levees as a young man spurred him to action of his own.
You are a social psychologist whose work focuses largely on climate change and environmental sustainability. First things first: What is a social psychologist, and how does that differ from a regular psychologist?
Unlike clinical psychologists who study topics like depression and anxiety, social psychologists study how people make decisions in social contexts—how we’re influenced by the thoughts and behaviors of others, and how people behave differently around other people than when they’re by themselves.
Social influence and social change—how we respond when we learn that there are trends in society or norms that are shifting—are the two broad areas that I study. The bulk of the work that I do takes place in domains like climate change or other environmental issues.
What role do social psychologists play in climate activism—or the lack thereof?
Social psychologists can do two things in terms of helping understand and address climate change: We can better understand the problem itself. And then we can also design interventions that can be used to help society mitigate or adapt to climate change.
Some of the factors that make climate change a really difficult problem to solve involve the fact that it’s informationally complex. People aren’t always—even if they want to do the right thing—sure what to do. Also, we find that it’s a difficult problem to solve because people might doubt their ability to solve the problem. It’s such a large collective action problem that as individuals, we often feel fairly disempowered to do anything about it.
You’ve also addressed a psychological phenomenon called the “spiral of silence.” Can you tell us about that?
When we don’t think others care about an issue, we tend to self-silence. We don’t talk about it as much. We don’t bring it up. We’re afraid we’ll look weird if we do. But if everyone has that perception that nobody cares and so nobody brings it up, it kind of confirms for you this idea that nobody cares. Everyone is having that moment internally, and failing to talk about it.
Two-thirds of Americans are at least somewhat worried about climate change and support climate mitigation actions at a policy level: putting a tax on carbon that fossil fuel industries would have to pay, or considering making a mandate for 100% renewable energy, or something like a Green New Deal, for instance. These things are actually pretty popular, but most Americans think only a minority of people like them, so they don’t talk about them with other people as much.
How do you overcome these obstacles and try to convince someone to make more eco-friendly lifestyle choices?
One way to do it is to highlight positive changes, like the rise in EVs or the increased adoption of solar panels or people shifting to a more plant-based diet. That’s an effective approach because it signals that if others can change, you can change too. It helps people feel more effective and empowered. I like that approach. It kind of addresses many concerns a person might have all at once.
Telling people or asking people outright to change something often makes them feel defensive, and they’re pretty likely to double down on their current behavior. It’s really easy to seem holier-than-thou in a domain like climate change, where rarely is anybody perfect by any kind of metric. So instead, people are inclined to hear what you’re saying and then want to disobey you. This is called “do-gooder derogation” in psychology.
Do-gooder what?
Do-gooder derogation. So when someone does “moral” things that we don’t do, we tend to get upset about that. It makes us feel a little defensive. One way to stop feeling defensive and to not feel so bad about ourselves is to derogate that person: “You’re dumb, and your cause is dumb, and I don’t like you.”
It turns out you can disarm that; you can make people feel better. Everyone’s heard of the compliment-critique sandwich, right? You lead with something nice, then you offer some constructive criticism, and you finish off with a nice thing again. For instance, if you know somebody who drives a gasoline car and you want to encourage them to consider other ways of getting around, you don’t want to lead with saying, “Hey, your car’s bad. It’s bad for the environment. You’re harming future generations by using it in your day-to-day life.” That would be a terrible, terrible approach. Instead, you might want to point out something nice about this person, like “I’ve noticed that you care about the environment—you make an effort to turn off the lights, you recycle.” That way, when you come back and say, “But I think there’s one thing you could improve on,” now it’s in the context of them being good generally, so it’s easier to accept [advice].
People respond better to suggestions that they should change if framed in this way. You maintain someone’s sense that they’re a decent person. You can kind of buttress someone’s self-esteem for them and then gently deliver the suggestion that they maybe alter course a little bit.
When did you start in this field, and how has the reception—particularly the openness to your perspective and your pitch—changed since you began?
My research began in earnest in about 2012. But I think before that, I was just someone concerned about the issue. In some sense, we are all lay social psychologists. We all try to navigate this world of motivation and persuasion, and we try to interact with people in terms of goals that we have and that we care about. And we’re trying to guess how that’s going to go. Social psychologists just kind of study that empirically. Before [studying social psychology], I don’t think I was doing a great job. I was like, “People are rational. If I just give them the information about why what they’re doing is bad, surely they’ll change.” It didn’t work most of the time, and I don’t think people liked it at all. [Laughs]
Let’s go back even further. What is your Sacramento story?
I was born in Sacramento. I grew up in Arden-Arcade, and then went to El Camino High.
Fly, Eagles, fly!
That’s right. And then I popped over to the Bay Area for college [at UC Berkeley] after that. I think that I was concerned about climate change way back in high school, but I don’t think I understood the extent of the problem at that point. I don’t think I registered the magnitude until I was in college and I was learning more about environmental issues and realizing, “Oh, this pretty much dwarfs every other social cause I am worried about.” Given that, I really wanted to understand why people aren’t taking action and how you can get them to.
Was there anything that you encountered or experienced in Sacramento that alerted you to the climate crisis?
Looking at flood maps. Sacramento is just a big bathtub basically, right? I’ve walked on levees and looked at the water and thought, “That’s weird. That [water level] seems a little higher than the land over here.” I’ve had those moments along the Sacramento and American rivers, and that’s scary.
How is Sacramento doing relative to other cities when it comes to grappling with, reckoning with, or combating climate change?
The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has climate opinion maps that you can look at, and they go down to the county level. Seventy-nine percent of people in Sacramento think global warming is happening. Relatively speaking, Sacramento is a little higher than the national average, which is 72%. There’s a lot more consensus than people think about an issue like this.
Maybe we can give readers some small steps they can take in their lives to mitigate environmental harms. For example, animal agriculture—particularly beef farming—is known to significantly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, and other factors. Could perhaps eating a more plant-based diet help the planet?
The first change that someone could consider for their diet would be cutting out red meat because of how big an impact it has on climate change. If I remember right, it’s somewhere between like four- and eight-fold the impact that chicken or pork has. People are much more receptive to being asked to cut back on animal products than they are to eliminate animal products. In terms of lifestyle changes that a person could contemplate, diet choice is easily in the top three, [along with] flying or driving, and what kind of energy you use to power your home.
READ MORE: Planting Ideas – Sacramento’s plant-based burger joint, Burger Patch
I don’t own a car and I eat a plant-based diet, but I fly a lot. People can always get me on the air travel.
You don’t have to be perfect to make a world of difference when it comes to climate issues. I think a lot of people involved in activism have realized how beneficial it is to say, “I’m not doing everything perfectly. No one should be expected to.” And in fact, it’s kind of unfair to ask a given individual to do that. Frankly, the infrastructure is not really there for you to do it. And I think this bleeds into the conversation about individual action and systemic change. We need both. We need people to take action where they can, and we need structural change—there’s no way to do this without structural change.
Here’s why behavior and political change are actually very related: When people take personal lifestyle action, it doesn’t actually necessarily distract from policies. In fact, often what it does is deepens our sense that we care about this cause and develops an identity within us as someone who cares about the environment. If you take two people who are equally committed to policy change, but one of them also engages in sustainable behavior, and you check in with those two people again in the future, the person who engages in sustainable behavior goes on to have even greater policy support for climate issues.
Can social psychology also be used to influence business leaders who have the power to make systemic changes?
It can and should. When we do research on developing these kinds of approaches to help motivate and empower people to take action on climate change, we should encourage them to do it at their place of work too—within their roles and positions of power, whatever they may be. Maybe you’re a librarian, maybe you’re a teacher, maybe you’re on a school board, or maybe you do work in a business and you recognize that business can have better practices. There’s actually a lot of pushing that employees can do. They can get that business to change.
Maybe you can play clinical psychologist for a second. With all the doom-and-gloom stats out there, how do we navigate the fear of millennia of 106-degree summer evenings or flooded coastal cities—or a flooded Sacramento for that matter?
Doomerism—this idea of climate fatalism—is a big problem. It’s a big problem for clinical reasons because it increases depression and anxiety, and it’s also a problem because people don’t feel very empowered when they assume [climate collapse] is a sealed deal. But it’s hard to say what the future holds. Are we talking about two or three times these awful events like fires and hurricanes, or are we talking about Mad Max? I mean, it really depends how much we change right now. This is not about what we’re going to do in the next 10 years. It’s about what we’re going to do in the next two years. Climate change is an emergency. We need to treat it like an emergency.
This interview has been edited for length, flow and clarity.
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