Sustainable Development

I use insights from motivation and self-regulation as well as other psychological subfields to promote progress toward sustainability. Making the earth systems’ functioning more sustainable is one of the most pressing global challenges today. Two particularly urgent problems include biodiversity loss and climate change. While progress has been made toward sustainability in several domains, many scientists highlight the need to accelerate sustainability efforts.

Attaining significant progress toward sustainability requires every available tool from the toolbox, ranging from individual behavior change, lasting systemic changes, and an openness to existing and new technologies. It also requires concerted actions across scientific disciplines, societal levels, and countries. In the past decades, psychological research has substantially contributed to understanding sustainable behavior at the individual and collective level. In so doing, psychology and the behavioral sciences could potentiate their leverage force to address sustainability challenges.

People often wonder why changes in sustainable behavior seem so difficult to achieve. Although surveys consistently reveal widespread awareness and agreement that sustainability challenges such as mitigating climate change are real, human-made, and pressing, sustainable action frequently falls behind. In this line of work, I explore psychological and societal barriers that may hinder sustainable behavior and how they can be overcome.

Current projects involve:

  1. Examining psychological attributes (e.g., perceived effectiveness) that help sustainability managers, whose role is to accelerate and monitor companies’ progress toward sustainability, to surmount difficulties and hindrances in making their companies more sustainable (together with Prof. Stefan Schaltegger, Leuphana University Lüneburg).
  2. Investigating misperceptions among politicians about the public’s willingness to accept climate actions. Such misperceptions – in particular the underestimation of the public support for climate action – may hinder sustainable development. (together with Prof. Wilhelm Hofmann, Ruhr-University Bochum).
  3. Examining rules-of-thumb that consumers use to decrease their biodiversity-footprint when shopping food and how effective those rules are (together with Prof. Astrid Kause; Leuphana University Lüneburg).
  4. Developing short video interventions using mental contrasting to promote individual sustainable behaviour (together with Prof. Ulf Hahnel from Leuphana University Lüneburg).