Psychological Perspectives on Evaluations of Environmental Policy Interventions Targeting Individuals

Policymakers implement measures to promote environmentally friendly behavior. The interventions will, if all goes well, be effective in stimulating green behavior change. Their impact on the individual is however not limited to the targeted behavior.

Invariably, interventions also lead to a host of psychological consequences; they will have experiential, hedonic, effects on individuals.

For instance, a congestion tax might lead to reduced driving, but it could also leave people frustrated every time they pass the tax line.The project adopts an experiential perspective and empirically compares classes of individuals-targeting interventions, such as informational tools, psychologically informed “nudges”, financial instruments, and regulatory instruments.

Two overarching questions are posed: 1) How do individuals experience green behavior change policies (and are there differences between types of interventions targeting the same behavior)? 2) How do individuals predict interventions will affect them experientially? The first theme informs the net (welfare) effect assessment of an intervention.

The second theme informs policy acceptability, and by extension, feasibility of implementation.

The topics will be investigated by means of theoretical analysis, an interview study, survey experiments and a field experiment.The results will inform policymakers in making comparisons between classes of policy interventions, and provide novel suggestions for effective policy communication.