... It is something we are continuing to explore with much enthusiasm.  A really great new source of information on the topic recently came from WWF, entitled Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity.  Touching on similar areas to George Lakoff's explorations of cognitive psychology, it looks into how environmental campaigns can avoid pitfalls and be more effective.  Some pointers and highlights include:

• To combat the power of self-enhancing and materialistic values, encourage people to place greater priority on values such as self-acceptance/self-direction, affiliation, benevolence, and community feeling/universalism.
• By previously embracing self-enhancing, materialistic values and life goals (e.g. playing by the current rules and norms of society, such as trying to put a $ value on ecosystems), the environmental movement has actually served to reinforce the dominance of these values and goals. These are the very values and goals that lead to more negative environmental attitudes and damaging behaviour.
• Studies have shown that a more sustained, reflective meditation on the feelings aroused by thoughts of death can actually decrease material strivings, bringing a greater sense of meaning in life.
• Highlighting the scale and finality of an environmental threat may actually be counterproductive.  It is important to spread the understanding of such impacts, but should not be done in a way that stimulates fear.
• Exaggerating environmental impacts of simple and painless steps might actually encourage people to deploy strategies for diversion (e.g. avoiding the topic, seeking pleasure, or blaming the problem on someone else), and also potentially leave people less inclined to adpt other more difficult and signficant behavioural changes.
• Blaming other groups or nationalities (such as SUV drivers around carbon emissions for instance) also is counterproductive in that these campaigns might heighten the sense of threat of those targeted, encourage them to dig in further into their damaging behaviour, and engage others outside the group to deny their own responsibility, instead projecting the problems onto the target group (e.g., the target group becomes the "bad guys").
• Behaviour is a strong determinant of opinion, which is why one cannot drive behaviour with information based on opinion.  People adopt views which explain or are consistant with their their behaviours.
• In terms of wider social/environmental movements, it has been commonly noted that "Any oppression helps to support other forms of domination."  Basically then, wars that dominate one group over another, abusive treatment of animals, and oppression of women all have some common causes.  Working systematically and connecting these dots shows promise to changing the bigger picture for social and environmental issues of global importance. 

Check out the WWF study, and also a related post here on Forward Thinking.

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