Why fear won’t always persuade

0:00Elizabeth Dunn: I'm recording today's episode during the hottest June on record here in the UK. Temperatures are above 38 degrees. Train operators have warned commuters not to travel and my 1930s house is just unable to stay cool. Last night at 2am the temperature was 33 degrees Celsius. Heat waves aren't new, but summers over the past decade are consistently hotter than summers over the past few centuries. The planet is heating up, and the vast, vast majority of scientists, smarter than me, link that change in temperature to the actions of humans, burning gas, drilling for oil, and guzzling petrol. I'm scared about these changes, and this fear tempts me to use this podcast to share my feeling of doom and gloom, to tell all of you about how heatwaves are debilitating the economy, destroying crops, and ending lives.

0:53Elizabeth Dunn: But I won't. I won't share those doom and gloom messages, not out of some need for impartiality, but because doom and gloom messages do not work.

1:02JZ: Yeah, so when they saw the doom and gloom message, they actually decreased their climate action.

1:08Elizabeth Dunn: That is Jay-Z, a world-leading expert on climate change.

1:12JZ: I'm Jay-Yin Zhao, but I go by Jay-Z. I'm a climate behavioural scientist at UBC.

1:18Elizabeth Dunn: She was part of a team that recruited 59 ,000 adults from 63 countries and randomly assigned them to an intervention designed to increase their climate actions. One of the interventions was doom and gloom messages. Specifically, this group saw facts about climate change that were framed in a doom and gloom style. The team gave all participants the option to donate time and energy in exchange for a donation to a tree planting organisation. Those who read the doom and gloom message volunteered less of their time than participants in the control group who hadn't read any messages about climate change at all.

1:55Elizabeth Dunn: In other words, doom and gloom messages were worse than not hearing anything about climate change.

2:01JZ: So this doom and gloom message backfired. Ironically, it increased people's willingness to share this doom and gloom information on social media. So it has a double whammy. It makes the negativity spread on social media while

2:16Elizabeth Dunn: prohibiting climate action. Today on Nudge, we'll cover why fear doesn't always persuade, how happiness changes behaviours and the only way to change the habits of others.

2:34Elizabeth Dunn: Most businesses have an overwhelming amount of data. It's typically scattered across the business in different tools with different teams, but because it's scattered, no one can use it. that is where HubSpot come in. HubSpot connects it all, every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation and they connect it into one platform that every team can work from because when you know more you grow more. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Hello you're listening to Nudge with me Phil Agnew. I'm joined by the world-leading climate expert Jay-Z and one of my favourite behavioural science researchers of all time.

3:18Elizabeth Dunn: She is the author of the fantastic book, Happy Money. It's Elizabeth Dunn.

3:23JZ: So I'm Elizabeth Dunn. I am a professor at the University of British Columbia and I'm a happiness researcher.

3:29Elizabeth Dunn: Liz and Jay-Z work in very different fields. Behavioural science and climate science don't tend to share department buildings. So I asked Liz how the two started working together.

3:40JZ: So I was biking to work one day and thinking about climate change as you do. And I was thinking how it was kind of a bummer that my life's work on happiness has no bearing whatsoever on one of the most important existential challenges of our time, namely climate change. And then I started thinking about biking. So I bike to work because I arrive in a better mood than if I fight traffic in my car. And of course, biking is also one of the most sustainable forms of transportation. And so then it kind of dawned on me that in fact, so many of the things that we need to do to tackle climate change are actually good for our happiness, too.

4:13JZ: So when I got to work, I made a beeline for Jay-Z, who, of course, is one of the world's leading experts on the behavioral side of climate change, and kind of spilled out this idea to her. So Liz asked me a question, which is, can we make climate action feel happy instead of miserable? Her question gave me a light bulb moment. I realized that happiness is the missing weapon to fight against climate change.

4:37Elizabeth Dunn: The result of that work is their book, Leave the Lights On. They start the book with Jay-Z's study on the ineffectiveness of doom and gloom messages. To start, I asked her why these doom and gloom messages fail to persuade.

4:51JZ: Doom and gloom makes people worried, scared, afraid, elicits a number of negative emotions that I think are counterproductive to encouraging behaviour change. I will say as a happiness researcher, you know, I think negative emotions have their place. Negative emotions can be powerful motivators. You know, if you want to get everybody out of a theater because it's on fire, you want to scare them and get them out of there quickly. So fear and other negative emotions can spur quick, decisive action. But over time, they become exhausting. And so we really need positive emotions to be part of the story, too.

5:31Elizabeth Dunn: Fear can persuade you to take an immediate action. The sound of a bomb siren will cause you to run for cover. But it doesn't cause lasting behavior change. And Jay-Z has some evidence to prove it.

5:43JZ: A lot of the messaging so far is about cutting down on the bad things that we do, like cutting down waste, cutting down emissions, cutting the don't eat meat or eat less meat, don't drive, don't fly, et cetera, et cetera. So what we did in the study was we turned this do less bad frame into a do more good frame. So let me give you an example. So instead of saying eat less meat, we said eat more plants. instead of saying go zero waste, we said reuse, repair, recycle. Instead of saying cut emissions down to zero, we said accelerate green energy growth. So we flipped the script to focus on the desirable actions that people should do.

6:26JZ: And we found that in that study, people are more likely to take those do more good actions as opposed to do less bad actions. And they actually feel a little happier thinking that they would do so. I will also add this approach really stems from one of the foundational principles of behavioral science, which is that if something feels good, we'll want to do it again. It's such a basic principle. It's almost not worth doing the study, but it underlies behaviorism. It's how you teach a rat to water ski. It's how you get your dog to sit, right? give them a treat. I mean, you can punish them too. But like when I, when my dog was a puppy, we were taught, no, no, no, use positive reinforcement.

7:09JZ: And I think this all makes sense when we're thinking about puppies and children. And it's when we're thinking about adults and ourselves that we kind of get confused and start to think, oh, let's pull in shame and anxiety and guilt and fear. No, no, no. Let's make this enjoyable. If we make this enjoyable, we're going to want to stick with it.

7:25Elizabeth Dunn: There's a study in Jay-Z and Liz's book that took this idea further. In the study, they told one group to do three good things for the planet, like walk to work, while another group was told to do three good things just for yourself, like treat yourself to a nice meal or take a hot bubble bath. The results from this study in the University of North Carolina found that doing those positive climate actions saw their happiness increase to the same amount as doing conventional self-care activities, like taking a bath. In Leave the lights on, Jay-Z and Liz prove that dread and fear will not persuade.

7:58Elizabeth Dunn: Say you run a restaurant. If you want to reduce the amount of beef your customers eat to lower your climate footprint, you might think that putting an image of a slaughterhouse on the menu with some fear-laden messages about glaciers and the beef industry might reduce the amount of beef that your customers order. But Jay-Z says that won't work. Instead, she suggests something far, far more subtle, traffic light symbols.

8:21JZ: We made the carbon footprint of the different foods visible by placing climate icons on the menu.

8:29Elizabeth Dunn: This was a study run by Jay-Z's lab at the University of British Columbia's largest dining hall.

8:34JZ: So we used the traffic light, so red, yellow, green, indicating high, medium, low levels of carbon footprint of different dishes. So a red icon would be something like a Philly cheesesteak or Korean short ribs. And the medium one will get like, you know, chorizo penne or butter chicken or pork belly bao. And the green will be vegetarian food or vegan food like tofu jambalaya and curry chickpea bowl. So we put those icons up on the menu. We described what the icons mean on the poster. And we tracked the sales of the different meals that are sold in this dining hall. And what we found was after the labels were put up, the red dishes, the sales of red dishes went down, but the yellow dishes actually went up, not necessarily the green dishes, partly because people are not eating a lot of vegetarian dishes to start with.

9:28JZ: So the green dishes had the lowest share of sales anyway. But what we saw was these climate labels led to a switch from high to medium carbon foods at this dining hall. One thing I find so interesting about this study is that it's so common to see, you know, those little green icons on menus indicating that a dish is low in carbon emissions. Right. But we all already know that like tofu jambalaya is low. in terms of its carbon footprint. And what I think most people don't realize, I didn't realize it until I started working with Jay-Z, is that there's a big difference between ordering, you know, curry chicken and a beef brisket.

10:12JZ: So because beef and lamb have such an outsized carbon impact, just by kind of cutting out some of those foods, we can make a huge difference. And just enabling people to see that distinction, which is, you know, a relatively subtle one between two different types of meats, really made a difference for their behavior.

10:26Elizabeth Dunn: A red traffic light symbol on a Philly cheesesteak will encourage some diners to opt for the chorizo pasta. But what other tactics have behavioural scientists found? What else persuades people to change the food they eat?

10:40JZ: So if you want to change behaviour around what you're eating, I think the biggest thing you can do is make it easy for yourself. You know, if we decide to make a change in our diet, it's tempting to kind of get excited and think, oh, I'm going to make these beautiful, fancy vegetarian dishes when I get home from work. And then you get home from work and you're tired and you're like, oh, forget it, I'm just going to order a hamburger from takeout, right? And so if you can just make it easy, that goes a really long way.

11:07Elizabeth Dunn: Our preference for ease isn't even a uniquely human trait. Jay-Z and Liz write that this principle extends to almost all creatures, including slime mold. Slime mold is a simple organism that looks a lot like dog vomit. It crawls through space consuming carbohydrates. rates. Now, when scientists place a blob of slime mould at the entrance of a maze, with some oats at the outside of the maze, the slime mould finds the shortest path to the food. In other words, they take the easy option. In a follow-up study, the researchers use piles of oats to represent the 36 cities that surround Tokyo, and then set the slime mould to work.

11:48Elizabeth Dunn: And they found that in just over a day, the mould found the shortest paths connecting the oat cities, moving through the space in an efficient pattern that actually mirrored Tokyo's rail network, because Tokyo's rail network is built for the most easy, efficient way of getting around. Humans, like many other organisms, pick the easy option. And just like other organisms, we also copy the actions of others. We mimic behaviour, including when it comes to buying food. Here's Jay-Z covering a study from 2018 that proves this.

12:18JZ: Students lighten up in front of a small cafeteria to get lunch, and they offer only a veggie option and a meat option. So what the researcher did was they sat close by to observe which dish each person ordered. And what they found was essentially you are very likely to order what the previous person ordered.

12:40Elizabeth Dunn: 72 % of diners ordered the exact same dish as a random stranger standing in front of them. When the stranger in front ordered meat, only 27 % of people ordered a vegetarian option, but 42 % of people chose a veggie option if the person in front chose a veggie option.

12:57JZ: Yeah, so if you're making lower carbon choices for yourself and you're out to dinner with friends, when the waiter kind of looks at everybody and says, are you ready to order? Pipe up with your order. And you've got some friends who are kind of on the fence. They're going to be more likely to copy what you just ordered. So you don't have to lecture people about the heavy carbon emissions of beef. You can just go ahead and order your low-carbon food and know that you're influencing those around you.

13:22Elizabeth Dunn: Once you order that low-carbon penne arabiata or chicken jalfrezi, you should think about the words you use to describe that meal. Because the language you use has a dramatic effect on the behaviors of others.

13:35JZ: Yeah, so this is a French team. They study Epicurean eating. So Epicureans is providing sensual descriptions of the meal on the menu. They also receive smaller portions of those meals as well. So instead of saying roasted tomato, which sounds really boring, it's sun-kissed tomatoes. And they found that diners enjoyed those meals better than a control group. I'll just say maybe some of the words. So there's a beautiful list of words that prompt people to think in more Epicurean terms to sort of see food as pleasure. So, you know, even if you're whether you own a restaurant or you are just throwing a dinner party this weekend, you might think about describing your food as frothy, gooey, luscious, nutty, pan fried, velvety, succulent, seared, sultry.

14:32JZ: These words seem to trigger this more Epicurean mindset. And what's interesting about that and relevant from a climate perspective is that people seem to be more content with smaller portions. So as a restaurant, you could offer smaller portions, but describe the food in these more succulent terms. And that can make people really enjoy the meal while actually consuming a little bit less food. And again, this is where if you're going to eat beef, make sure it is succulent and luscious and sultry and that you're not having a huge portion of it, but getting the maximum enjoyment possible that you can from every bite.

15:05Elizabeth Dunn: For the behavioral science kinos like me who are listening, this is the concrete phrases effect at play. If you describe foods in terms that our brains can visualize, we will enjoy that food more. And interestingly, we'll also eat less and we'll enjoy that smaller portion more as well. And this all reminded me of a very similar study Liz ran where she gave participants a giant bag of chocolate and measured exactly what happened when you limited the amount of chocolate that one group could eat.

15:33JZ: Yes, we wondered whether having foods we enjoy a little less often might actually increase our capacity to savor them. So we brought students into the lab. We asked them to eat a bit of chocolate and we measured how much they enjoyed it. Then we politely asked one group of the students to please refrain from eating any chocolate for one whole week. Meanwhile, we told other students that we were going to give them this big bag of chocolate, and we asked them to eat as much as they comfortably could over the ensuing week. And finally, there was a control group that didn't get any chocolate-related instructions.

16:05JZ: And then we bring everybody back into the lab a week later, and once again, we ask them to eat some chocolate. And the first thing that kind of pops out from the data is that most people enjoy the chocolate less the second week than they did the first week. And this is like the sad reality of the human experience encapsulated in a single study. We just enjoy repeated pleasurable experiences less than we did the first time. But there was an exception. So students who had been asked to give up chocolate for a week showed an enhanced capacity to savor it.

16:34Elizabeth Dunn: Not only do we habituate to treats that we enjoy too often, we also prefer goods that are scarce. That is why participants preferred the chocolate when they spent a week without it.

16:44JZ: So what this means is that if we have the high carbon foods that we enjoy a little less often, we may actually get better at savoring them. And chocolate actually is a high carbon food, surprisingly. It's one of the few plant-based foods that's actually pretty high carbon. But I've applied this in my own life to steak. I do love steak, but I've really learned to make it a treat and to only have it as sort of a special thing. I really savor and enjoy. And I do think I get a lot of pleasure out of a steak. Like my return on emissions in terms of pleasure is very, very high. And that's sort of our goal here is to make sure we're not just kind of stuffing high carbon foods in our face, but really appreciating them when we do have them.

17:28Elizabeth Dunn: So we've covered how doom and gloom messages won't work and how our food order is dramatically affected by the person ahead of us. But what about travel? After the break, we'll cover the seminal study on transport and happiness and discover what form of transport makes us most unhappy.

18:06Elizabeth Dunn: including something I care a lot about, which is how a small percentage of your efforts can drive the majority of your results. So go and listen to The Ross Simmons Show wherever you get your podcasts. Keeping up with training really does take a lot of effort when you're running a business all by yourself. There is no team around you pushing things forward, so you won't be surprised to hear that I like to invest in my own training. And the Federation of Small Businesses makes that easy, which is one of the reasons I joined as a member. I get access to over 750 online courses plus face-to-face sessions for just£80 plus VAT for 12 months.

18:41Elizabeth Dunn: It's sector-specific, compliance-focused, and designed for busy small business owners. Visit get.fsb.org forward slash nudge or click the link in the show notes to sign up and use code nudge to get 10 % off your membership. Hello, welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. So far, we've covered food. Let's now move on to transport. In a bit, we'll cover how to nudge people onto more sustainable forms of transport. But to start, let's first cover what travel makes us the happiest.

19:10JZ: So there are actually a lot of studies of commuting and happiness, and the form of transportation that consistently rises to the top is biking. So people feel the happiest with biking, which makes sense. We're getting some exercise, we're getting fresh air. So it seems to be really the winner. Of course, not everybody can bike. So we really don't want to tell everybody, oh, you need to bike in order to cut your carbon emissions. Some places don't have the infrastructure for it. It's not going to work. Your workplace is 60 miles away from where you live. And so if you don't have the option to bike, then one strategy we think is really good is carpooling.

19:50JZ: And this is sort of like old fashioned approach, but we know that commuting tends to be one of the least happy activities in most people's day, whereas spending time with others is a great source of happiness. So if we can turn that long, lonely commute into a time where we can catch up with somebody we actually like, then suddenly some of the worst minutes of the day can become some of the best.

20:14Elizabeth Dunn: So there you go. Carpooling is a way to make commuting more bearable. And it's worth trying because Liz says that commuting is one of the worst activities that humans have to do regularly?

20:25JZ: Commuting is almost always near the bottom in terms of all the activities that people do in a typical day, right? If you look at the average person's day, particularly on the commute home, people tend to be in a really bad mood. And so thinking about, you know, can we do a makeover on that time of day is a really powerful way to tackle climate change and enhance happiness. Because of course, commuting is also one of our biggest sources of carbon emissions. So our big source of unhappiness and our big source of carbon emissions is actually the same activity, commuting. So if we can redo or rethink how we commute, we can have a really big impact.

21:02Elizabeth Dunn: Now in their book, Liz and Jay-Z write about probably one of the most jaw-dropping studies I had ever heard about, a study where hundreds of people were given huge sums of money and can spend it however they wanted.

21:14JZ: So this was probably the most amazing phone call I ever got in my life. Chris Anderson, who is the head of TED, called me up and said, hey, Liz, there's this wealthy couple in the TED community that wants to give away$10 ,000 to hundreds of people around the world. Is this something you would be interested in studying? And I was like, oh, yeah, count me in. And thus, the TED mystery experiment was born. We called it the mystery experiment because we didn't want people to know when they signed up that they might get a huge amount of money. We just wanted to get a broad swath of folks. And one of the incredible things about this study was that thanks to TED's global reach, we were able to recruit participants from seven different countries, including places like Kenya, Indonesia, and Brazil, as well as the UK, the US and other countries.

22:01JZ: And so we had a really, really diverse set of participants. And for many of these folks, getting$10 ,000 doubled their annual income. So it was a massive intervention.

22:12Elizabeth Dunn: It sounds absolutely great. But what was Liz trying to measure with this generous study?

22:17JZ: One of the things that we were able to do with this study was to look at how people chose to spend the money and how happy it made them.

22:25Elizabeth Dunn: So that's the goal. Find a link between spending and happiness.

22:29JZ: We let people spend the money any way they wanted. We did politely ask them not to spend it on organized crime. But other than that, they could do whatever they wanted. All they had to do was just report how they spent every dollar. And every time they used any of the money, they had to tell us how they felt about it. So one of the things that we discovered was that people spent over$1 ,600 of this$10 ,000 windfall just on charitable donations. So when people got this generous gift, they paid it forward. They used it in generous ways. And what was perhaps most remarkable was that of all the wonderful things people did with this money, and people did lots of great stuff.

23:07JZ: They went on family trips to Disney World. They invested in education for themselves. You know, of course, they bought new iPhones, all kinds, everything you can think of. But the single type of spending that made people the happiest was actually charitable donations. And this was pretty notable. It dovetailed with earlier work that I had done thinking about climate. This is important because it means that contributing, if you care about climate change, then contributing to organizations that are fighting climate change can actually be a really great source of happiness.

23:40Elizabeth Dunn: This is amazing, right? It is so counter to what we intuitively believe. We believe that spending money on products, goods and services provides the most amount of happiness. We're told that a holiday to Spain will make us relax and be joyful. But Liz has discovered the opposite. If you want to spend your way into happiness, donate your money to charity. It is something Liz has discovered time and time again.

24:04JZ: In our previous studies, we had given people a small amount of money, usually something like$20, and based on the flip of a coin, told them how to spend it. And what we had discovered was that when people were randomly assigned to spend this small amount of money on other people, they ended up happier than when they were assigned to spend this money on themselves. I always recognized that the fact that we were using relatively trivial amounts of money was an important limitation of our work, but I just figured, you know, this is something we're never going to get past. This is how research grants are.

24:34JZ: But then I got that call.

24:36Elizabeth Dunn: And I think that is a pretty lovely point to end this episode. To buy happiness, give to charity. To commute happily, jump on a bike or carpool. To eat happily, limit your favourite treats. And to persuade others, do not argue. Do not share doom and gloom stats. None of that will work. For lasting change, show how adopting new behaviour could make someone happier. That is all for today's episode of Nudge, folks. Thank you so much for listening. But Liz and Jay-Z and I did not finish our conversation there. In fact, we went on to chat about how Liz and Jay-Z have changed their lives, changed their habits, changed their behavior to reduce their own environmental impact.

25:20JZ: One thing I've done is to change the way that I shop.

25:24Elizabeth Dunn: We also covered some of the most effective ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

25:28JZ: If you keep$1 ,000 in a savings account at a typical bank in the US or Canada, it's like you are buying a one-way ticket from Seattle to New York for your money.

25:40Elizabeth Dunn: And I even asked about the amount of energy AI typically consumes.

25:44JZ: If you just take ChatGPT, you know, the latest model, I think each query is like one second in the microwave.

25:52Elizabeth Dunn: All of that is in today's bonus episode of Nudge. The bonus episode, as always, is totally free. To access, all you have to do is click the link in the show notes of today's episode. So just scroll down to find today's show notes. Click the link which says access the bonus episode. Enter your email and you'll be taken straight there. So just scroll down to the show notes, find the bonus episode link, and you can listen right after this. If you're already a Nudge Newsletter subscriber, then you already have the link in your email. Just go to the email I sent you today and click the link in that email.

26:24Elizabeth Dunn: don't miss that bonus episode it's really fantastic and it contains more of the individual behaviors that jay-z and liz have adopted to reduce their emissions massive massive thank you to both jay-z and liz for coming on their book leave the lights on is great for a behavioral science geek like me i absolutely loved reading through the hundreds of different studies on human behavior the book is is just jam-packed with fault-provoking examples and studies so if you like today's episode i guarantee you will love their book there is a link to pick up a copy of the book in the show notes. That's all for today's episode.

26:57Elizabeth Dunn: Thank you again for listening. I've been your host, Phil Agnew. I do hope you'll now go and tune into the bonus episode, but if not, I'll be back again with another episode of Nudge next Monday. Cheers.