Getting Groups To Complete Towards a Sustainability Goal + The Social Dilemma with Assistant Professor Laila Nockur, PhD

<p>This episode is about testing if putting people into groups and asking them to compete towards an environmental goal works to get the group members to increase their environmental behavior, compared to asking people as individuals can often fail to get people to take the action. Group competition (like we see in sport) is a powerful psychological mechanism that has been largely untapped by the sustainability profession and it could be harnessed to reach our climate goals.&nbsp;</p> <p>Our guest today is Assistant Professor Laila Nockur Ph.D. from Aarhus University in Denmark. She recently published a paper titled “Fostering Sustainable Behavior Through Group Competition.” She specializes in the study of the "social dilemma." It's a tricky incentive problem that plagues most environmental change missions. A social dilemma means that to do something for the greater good (which ultimately helps everyone), each individual person has to make a personal sacrifice. These problems all involve an "environmental commons" - a resource we all share like the air, climate, streets, oceans, and forests. Laila's research shows how we can override the vexing problem of the social dilemma by putting people into groups and asking groups to compete against one another to reach an environmental goal.&nbsp;</p> <p><br></p> <p>Read the paper, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494419305742">Fostering sustainable behavior through group competition </a><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494419305742">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494419305742</a></p> <p><a href="https://amzn.to/2Z4jivL" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Get a copy of How to Save the World on Amazon</a></p> <p>Sign up to <a href="https://katiepatrick.com/" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">katiepatrick.com</a> for my free video course on environmental gamification and behavior design.</p> <p>Follow me on <a href="https://twitter.com/katiepatrick" rel="