Psychology
for a Better
World
Working with people to save the planet

Niki Harré‘Harré manages to navigate the complexities of moral psychology
with admirable ease and insightful purpose – balancing theobjective of scientifically informed political advocacy with herown struggles to be the change she wants to see in the world. This
book should inspire.’ – Thomas Suddendorf, author of The Gap:
The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals
Can you save the planet and have some fun along the way? Aimedat the teacher who updates students on the latest climate changenegotiations, the conservationist who works to protect endangered
species, the office manager who buys fair-trade coffee or the city
councillor who lobbies for cycle lanes, this book is a guide foreveryone who is trying to create a more sustainable planet.
Psychology for a Better World explains how we can get others to join
us. Based on the latest psychological research, Niki Harré shows
which strategies work (drawing on positive emotions, role modellingand social identity), which don’t, and why. The book ends with a selfhelp guide for sustainability advocates that outlines how we can workfor change at the personal, group and civic level.
‘This book is a great introduction to the psychological literature
on motivation and change for newcomers to advocacy. It could
be an excellent tool for new organizers, as well as for teachers,
university professors, or anyone who works to develop newleaders in environmental advocacy’ – Allison Eady and ManuelRiemer, Community Practitioner

Niki Harré is an associate professor of psychology at the Universityof Auckland. She is the author of highly-cited articles on social andenvironmental activism, editor, with Quentin Atkinson, of the book
Carbon Neutral by 2020: How New Zealanders Can Tackle Climate
Change and author of The Infinite Game: How to Live Well Together(Auckland University Press, 2018).

Chapter One

Positive Emotions and Flow:
Encouraging Creativity andCommitment

Positive experiences are an important way to inspire and motivate
people, as they attract us towards the activity or message being promoted.
Think about it: if an issue, person or event makes you feel good, you wantmore. People are happiness seekers – we are attracted to that whichinduces positive feelings like moths to a flame. Furthermore, positive
moods bring out important personal qualities that are essential tosocial progress. This chapter is about how positive emotions and ‘flow’states – states in which people feel particularly alive and engaged –can contribute to building sustainability.

The secret of positive emotions
Beginning this chapter are two very different passages, both of which
are designed to persuade a reader that our current way of life needs
to change. I’ve included these to give you a feel for the emotional
effects of positive and negative communications. To get the most outof the passages, read them slowly, and as you read, reflect on how you
feel. Next, think about or list the actions you wish to take, given youremotional response to the material. Read and reflect on the first passage
and the actions it inspires before moving on to the second one.
3

Passage One

Passage Two‘The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last
as long as 100,000 years’ – James Lovelock (2006)8‘Urban New Zealand in 2020 – An organic society’– Holger Kahl (2007)9Imagine a young policewoman delighted in the fulfilment of her vocation; then imagine
her having to tell a family whose child had strayed that he had been found dead,murdered in a nearby wood. Or think of a young physician newly appointed who has totell you that the biopsy revealed invasion by an aggressive metastasising tumour . . .
Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my profession seriously, and now
I, too, have to bring bad news.
The climate centres around the world, which are the equivalent of the pathology
lab of a hospital, have reported the Earth’s physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as longas 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth’s family and an intimate
part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger . . . as the century
progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and5 degrees in the tropics . . . We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke,and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs ofpeople that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.
By failing to see that the Earth regulates its climate and composition, we haveblundered into trying to do it ourselves, acting as if we were in charge. By doing this,we condemn ourselves to the worst form of slavery. If we chose to be the stewards ofthe Earth, then we are responsible for keeping the atmosphere, the ocean and the land
surface right for life. A task we would soon find impossible – and something before wetreated Gaia so badly, she had freely done for us.
So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change
and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation mustfind the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as theycan. Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so weneed the security of a powered descent . . .
We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War,but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms,
is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United Statesor the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are themain source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to ahell of a climate.

You are pedalling back from work with the other seven passengers sharing thesolar-assisted Octocycle. You are cruising at a leisurely 60 km/h assisted by a lighttail wind. You admire the fresh green, and the ripe and luscious fruit on the trees thatline the traffic lanes; the birds giving a free concert to your delight.
Cycle vehicles are everywhere, with passengers and by-passers waving andgreeting you. You see people cruising around having a free and healthy snack fromthe trees.
‘It’s good,’ you think, ‘that we don’t have to worry about pollution when we bite
into a fresh fruit offered by someone on the traffic lane side path.’ Land transport has
been completely exhaust-free for the last six years. Even all the trains are running onsustainably generated electricity.
As you pedal past fields of naturally grown wheat and vegetables you help yourself
to wonderfully aromatic, under-rainforest-canopy-grown fair trade coffee from thetraffic lane side bar, transported from Brazil on wind assisted containership. Boatsand ships are still using the precious oil, although much less, thanks to the new saildesigns.
Just then your daughter reminds you via your personal mobile 3D screen to makea detour and pick her up from school. As you reach the school you return the usedcoffee cup to the traffic lane side bar for re-use.
Your daughter greets you with a glass of freshly pressed juice made from apples,carrots and beetroot – all grown in the school gardens and juiced in the school kitchen.
She is all smiles. She has just won her school’s compost making contest in the temperature category. Her pile made it to a staggering 87°C. ‘She’s a smart little cookie,’
you think. ‘Last year she came second in the earthworm breeding competition.’
Both of you wait at the depot until two seats become available on a flash new,photo-voltaic hexacycle going in the direction of your home. Almost everyone on
board wants to stop at the local gardens for some fresh produce, so the hexacycle
pulls into the parking lot of the food garden cooperative.
Fresh strawberries are everyone’s favourite as the season is now rapidly coming
to an end. You purchase some antioxidant purple potatoes, and you find a nice mix ofsalad greens as well. All harvested earlier that day.
In the old days, all this would have been organically certified, you remember; now,of course, everything is organic by default. There is no organic labelling required.

Finally arriving home, your husband takes the lettuce off you and, together withsome herbs and home-made dressing, based on real egg mayonnaise from the local
delicatessen factory, turns it into a beautiful salad. This will go well with the maincourse, home-made pizza. It only takes four minutes in the adobe, dome-shaped
oven, fired with sustainable, locally grown firewood.
After the meal, you relax in front of the 3D screen watching the semi-final gamesin the soccer championships. The teams look good in their latest hemp fibre outfits.
You enjoy the game, while thinking back to the times when television broadcasting wasinterrupted so frequently by annoying commercials. With very little globalised trade
and the emphasis on local production and processing, there is no need for nationwide
or international advertisements.
The favourites have won again and enjoy the applause and celebrations from thecrowd. ‘Oh well, time for bed,’ you think. After visiting the bathroom you get into yourlinen nightie sewn by your daughter at school, crawl under the woollen duvet (thanksto Uncle Albert’s home flock of sheep) and cuddle up to your husband. Another day
in Ecotopia.

The first passage, by James Lovelock, probably made you feel anxious,angry, sad – or a similar cocktail of unpleasant feelings. It is certainly
designed to shock. In the second passage, Holger Kahl’s vision ofa possible 2020 has a very different tone designed to make you feel
hopeful, intrigued and positive about what the future might bring.
Did either communication inspire you to action? If you are like thepar­tici­pants in many psychological experiments, the passage thatcreated negative emotions will have dampened your ability to imagine
possible actions, whereas the passage that left you feeling good will
have encouraged you to think broadly about how you and others could
contribute to a new way of life. You may not have agreed with everything Kahl suggests is possible, but his imagined future is still likely tohave ignited that welcome spark of hope.
What is it about feeling good that gets people going? To answer
that, let’s look at several psychological studies that have explored thisquestion.

6•PSYCHOLOGY FOR A BETTER WORLD

How positive emotions work
Positive emotions work in at least four ways that are of interest here.
They open the mind, encourage creativity, make threatening information more palatable, and facilitate cooperation. Hope also has a specialrole in inspiring us to act collectively.
Positive emotions open the mind
Emotions have three components. First, they are bodily sensations(they aren’t called feelings for nothing), such as hands trembling withnervousness, jaw clenched with anger, and the particular weightlessness that comes from joy. Second, emotions are thoughts – pictures andwords that invade our heads in ways that can be highly disruptive, goodor bad. Third, they are ‘action tendencies’; that is, ideas about what todo next.10
Barbara Fredrickson from the University of North Carolina suggeststhat one of the differences between positive and negative emotions isthat positive emotions broaden our sense of what we can do, whereas
negative emotions narrow this sense.11 According to Fredrickson,a negative emotion is telling us that something is dangerous, and we
had better attend to it. So we narrow our focus to the potential threat
and work out how to make it go away. If we feel anger, for example,
we have the sense that we or someone we care about has been wronged,
and we want to attack in order to restore justice. Anxiety makes us
churn the threat over and over in our minds, trying to work out whatmight happen and what we could do to prevent it. If we are scared
we want to retreat. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are a signalthat things are going well. One of the implications of this is that we
can afford to look around at what the world has to offer. We might trythings we haven’t done before, even take a few risks. Positive emotions
are therefore conducive to creativity, expansion, and looking for andseizing opportunities.12
In one study, Fredrickson and her colleague Christine Branigan
divided 104 university students into groups.13 Each group watched oneof five short films intended to produce particular emotional responses.
The film Penguins shows groups of penguins ‘waddling, swimming, andINTRODUCTION•7$29.99Paperback
210 x 140mm, 236 pages
ISBN 978 1 86940 885 5
10 May 2018