PhD in Sustainable development and cooperation

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Supervisor

Phd thesis

THINK GREEN GO GREEN: tailor awareness-raising to reduce the anthropogenic impact on the environment

Climate-relevant individual attitudes are at the core of climate change and proximal factors such as individual behavior can have a high-impact and short- and middle-term efficacy upon climate change. However, individual environmentalism is still restricted to few proactive citizens and, while an increasing concern about environmental issues has been observed in last years, most people still do not adopt consistent behaviors. This reveals that large-scale awareness-raising campaigns succeed in spreading knowledge, but are still insufficient to effectively drive citizens’ behavior. Why is it so hard to change individuals’ behaviors? Human decision-making and behavior are largely influenced by emotional processing and recent research has suggested that most of climate-change attitudes and behaviors are determined by emotional and affective factors. Environmental behavior operates at intrapersonal (e.g., motivation), interpersonal (ethic and societal) and external (reward/punishment) levels. Consistently, it has been argued that climate-related issues are not perceived as emotionally impacting because the spatial-temporal relationship between individual behavior and its long-term consequences is too lose. Therefore, the present project aims at exploiting two proximal psychological mechanisms – associative learning and social influence – to develop a high-tech awareness-raising platform capable of reducing the psychological distance between everyday misbehaviors and their middle-long term consequences on the environment. We will exploit Virtual Reality to artificially manipulate the spatio-temporal distance between a behavior and its negative consequences (associative learning) as well as the social judgement of virtual citizens interacting with the participant (social influence). In order to personalize each single session of virtual experience, we will also record several neuro-psychological measures online, which will allow to adapt the virtual environment itself in real time based on the participant’s explicit choices and implicit psychological state. This will allow developing an innovative and captivating pseudo-ludic tool to be integrated with classical knowledge-based awareness-raising campaigns organized at local and national scales.