Jiaying Zhao helps people enjoy protecting the planet

As the past year’s raging fires and storms have shown, the climate crisis is now. Jiaying Zhao, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia (UBC), says we need not feel helpless in the face of extreme weather.

Her guiding question for lab and field research is, “Can we make meaningful climate action feel happy instead of miserable?” The answer, as revealed in her 2023 TED Talkopens in new window and a 2024 APA webinar on human-centered approaches to designing a sustainable future, is a resounding “Yes!” Reframing environmental responsibility as a positive, even joyful, undertaking is central to her work as Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Sustainability. Zhao (or JZ, as she is known) talked to the Monitor about putting psychological principles to work for the common good.

Right now, it’s the climate crisis. It’s not just the rising temperatures but also the ensuing natural disasters that people have to cope with. So, the questions are: One, how do we reduce carbon emissions? And two, how do we adapt to the changing climate going forward?

We’re actively testing a lot of behavioral solutions in the lab. For example, in testing the relative power of four different message frames—a “happy climate” frame on how climate action boosts happiness, a doom-and-gloom disaster frame, a factual frame, and a control—the “happy climate” frame led to the greatest willingness to take individual and civic climate action overallopens in new window. What’s more, it was especially effective for people with low and average levels of belief in human-caused climate change. In a second experiment, “do more good” messages performed better than “do less bad” messagesopens in new window. That’s a simple change in messaging from, say, “eat less meat” to “eat more plants.”

This work is in close collaboration with Elizabeth Dunn [a UBC professor of social psychology]. We are also writing a how-to book to show people how they can reduce carbon emissions and increase happiness at the same time.

[Related: Helping youth move from climate anxiety to climate action]

Pioneering research by psychologist Alice Isen showed that positive emotions make people more creative at solving problems and other cognitive tasks. And as I just mentioned, our research on messaging for climate action confirmed that positive emotions are more likely to change behaviors across the ideological spectrum. We also know that positive reinforcement is more effective than negative reinforcement at changing behaviors. Negative emotions like fear, anxiety, and anger can get people to act but not sustain their actions over time. People burn out, they quit. They may share more on social media, but they actually do less. So, joy is important—we need to create and sustain behavior change over time.

We look beyond the traditional measures of academic success—publications and grants—to improvement in the real world, measuring our societal and policy impact. We do lab studies using hypothetical scenarios, but we also do field experiments. The field experiments are difficult—dealing with real-world noise and variance, recruiting participants, working with partner organizations, investing up front, and waiting longer for results—but it’s the gold standard for this work. And the results, as with our earlier research on how cash transfers reduce homelessnessopens in new window, are more ecologically valid than lab studies.

[Related: How heat affects the mind]

Let’s start with food, where we’ve been testing both individual and system changes. For example, “feng shui your fridge” means put your produce in the door and condiments in the drawers. You’re more likely to eat the produce and reduce food waste, a major contributor to climate change. At the institutional level, my lab teamed up with Vancouver General Hospital and a celebrity chef to revamp the hospital menuopens in new window and include low-carbon meats and fresh local food. Nutritionally, it was almost identical to the old menu, and it wasted a lot less food. Above all, patients loved it. One said, “I forgot I was in pain.” We also plan to give patients a recipe booklet to take home after discharge.

To mention another good example of system change, Norway offers a bottle recycling lottery that gives people the traditional option of getting back a small amount of money, like 10 cents per bottle, or entering a bottle-recycling lottery with a chance to win a huge jackpot. But whether the lottery actually increased recycling was unknown. So, we were the first to test the recycling lottery. We found that people not only preferred the lottery option, but they were happier even if they didn’t win. Most important, the lottery causally increased recycling by almost 50%opens in new window, at no additional cost, compared with the status quo. This “gambling for good” can be adopted by governments to increase recycling rates, and we are working with our local government to help implement this policy.

We need to figure out how to make people change their behaviors for the benefit of their own well-being and for the planet. There’s also not enough experimental evidence to show what intervention has a lasting impact. Behavioral science has prioritized making change easy, but making things easy doesn’t build resilience—and change doesn’t persist when things get hard. The best things I’ve done in my life were not easy but have been hugely rewarding in terms of social impact, connection, and other intangible rewards. We should be looking at intangible rewards and positive reinforcement, which can be very powerful in changing behaviors.

I’d also like to see psychology shift from focusing on individual behavior change to understanding the decision-making process of policymakers and politicians. At this point in my career, I only say yes to projects if they could have significant societal impact: Will this affect policy? The way people think more broadly? The way that businesses and governments operate? I’m interested in looking at ways to institute positive reinforcement to sustain those changes.