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# Making Coastal Decisions

## NOAA Ocean Podcast: Episode 61

Our ocean and coasts affect us — and we affect them. Almost 40 percent of the country's population lives in coastal shoreline counties. And these counties contribute more than 9 trillion dollars to the U.S. economy. But many challenges face our coasts, like climate change, rising sea levels, more intense storms, and population growth. So we must make sound decisions today to help our coasts continue to thrive tomorrow. This podcast is the second installment in a three-part series from the U.S. Global Change Research Program that explores how we make these decisions. In this episode, we explore what the latest behavioral science research can tell us about how we make conservation and environmental decisions.

Behavioral science can shed light on how we make conservation and environmental decisions, such as how we develop our coastal areas. In this episode, listen to an interview with Philipe Bujold, a behavioral scientist with Rare's Center for Behavior & the Environment. Chris Parsons, a communications and policy specialist for the Oceans Division of the National Science Foundation, interviews him. Pictured here: a New Jersey beach with a view of the New York City skyline. View Transcript

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### Philipe Bujold

 Philipe's Bio

*Dr. Philipe Bujold is a behavioral scientist at Rare's Center for Behavior & the Environment where he translates the latest insights from the behavioral sciences into real-world conservation and environmental interventions.*

### Chris Parsons

 Chris's Bio (interviewer)

*Dr. Chris Parsons is a policy and communication specialist and a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the National Science Foundations’ Division of Ocean Sciences.*

### About This Series

This is the second installment of a three-part series exploring how we make decisions about developing, protecting, and conserving our coastal areas. The podcasts were developed collaboratively with the U.S. Global Change Research Program's Coasts Interagency Group and funded by the Adaptation Sciences (AdSci) Program in NOAA's Climate Program Office. 

Learn More

*This special three-part series is from the Coasts Interagency Group of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. This is a federal program mandated by Congress to coordinate research and investments in understanding the human and natural forces shaping the global environment and their impacts on society. Members of the program include people from NOAA, along with NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Energy. The series was funded by Adaptation Sciences, or AdSci for short, a group out of NOAA's Climate Program Office.*

### Transcript

**HOST:**This is the NOAA Ocean Podcast. I'm Troy Kitch. Today, we  are continuing a three-part series brought to you by the Coasts Interagency  Group of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The series explores how we  make decisions about developing, protecting, and conserving our coastal areas —  home to about 40 percent of the U.S. population. In the first episode of this  series, we learned about equity and justice in coastal planning. Today, we  explore what the latest behavioral science research can tell us about how we  make conservation and environmental decisions. We'll hear from Philipe Bujold,  a behavioral scientist with Rare's Center for Behavior & the Environment.  He is interviewed by Chris Parsons, a communications and policy specialist for  the Oceans Division of the National Science Foundation. Check our show notes  for bios on our guests, links to more information, and details about the  genesis of this series. You'll hear Chris Parsons first. Let's listen in.

**CHRIS PARSONS:**Thank you, Philipe, for joining us today and I'm really  excited about asking you these questions about behavioral science. So my first  question is, ocean scientists tend to try to convince members of the public  about issues by presenting them with facts. Do we have any information on how  successful a strategy this is? And what could scientists better do to connect  with the public?

**PHILIPE BUJOLD:**Yeah, definitely. First of all, thank you for having me.  It's a great pleasure to be here. And yeah, the, second part of the question I  think is probably the first bit that I want to address. So what could  scientists do better? Especially when it comes to facts and giving facts to  members of the public. So when we think about traditional interventions to  change people's behavior, facts are going to be the first thing. So can you  give people facts or information about a specific behavior or a problem? But  what we tend to rely a lot on also is regulating behaviors. So trying to stop  people from doing something or encouraging them to do something. And also  material incentives. So fines or even rewards. And those are the three  traditional ways that we have of pushing people towards specific behaviors that  we want them to partake in.

The reality of that, unfortunately, is that we don't  necessarily always think in a way where these three types of interventions will  actually lead to the behaviors that we want. The reason I say this is because  we can define decision-making in two different ways. A lot of the time we think  of it as very rational, slow, deliberate, and very conscious. But behavioral scientists  define this as "system two", which intuitively means that there is a  "system one" in the way that we make decisions. And that "system  one" is actually the one that guides most of our decisions. It's  irrational, it's fast, it's unconscious, and it's very, very effortless. Which  means that most of our decisions are made by the system one. A few are made by  system two, but using processes like information deficits (giving facts to  people), using rules, regulations, or using material incentives only targets  that system two bit, the one that's very rational and very conscious. So we're  missing about 80% of the decisions that people make. So facts are great, but we  need to be very careful with what situations we use them in because they're not  always as effective as we think they are.

**CHRIS PARSONS:**Great. Thank you very much. So what you are saying  essentially is that scientists are missing a major component of engaging with  the public and interacting with the public.**PHILIPE BUJOLD:**Yeah, exactly. So if you think of decision-making in these  two types of systems, system one (which is most of our decisions) is very fast,  irrational, and very effortless, and that's the one that's usually ignored. And  that's really the most important one when it comes to daily decisions for most  people. System two is the one we target, but it's the one that's really for a  minimal set of decisions.

**CHRIS PARSONS:**Oh, very interesting. Because scientists are very often  trained to be sort of unemotional and illogical. But really interacting with  the public, we have to sort of embrace this emotional and irrational part of  us.

**PHILIPE BUJOLD:**Exactly. So I think that comes from our training as  scientists. We're so interested in a very specific topic that we tend to think  that if we give people that information, they will agree with us and probably  do the exact same thing that we do, right? Unfortunately that's not the reality  of behavior. Actually behavioral science is now really, really growing. It  includes the neurosciences, economics, psychology, and a lot of social  sciences. These sciences combined have started to really pick at the different  things that do affect the "system one" that I was talking about  earlier, which really drives about 80% of our behaviors. And for that we can  simplify this into three different categories.

The first one is that context really matters. So the way  that choices are presented really, really matters to people. And you can  imagine something where presenting it as a gain versus a loss can have a huge  impact. So if I present, for example, solar energy to people and I focus on the  cost of installation, then solar energy feels like a loss. But if you focus on  the gains that come later on by saving on a utility bill, that feels like a  gain. So context really matters. It's the same information, essentially, you're  just choosing to present specific things in a different frame.

The second thing that's really important is that we're  social animals. People have evolved to be in communities. We've evolved to be  in groups, and that really, really matters when it comes to influencing our  decisions. So a lot of the time we're going to refer to what we call social  norms. Social norms are huge in guiding people's behavior, because we tend to  want to conform to what other people are doing or what we think other people  want us to do. So this second point is very, very important when it comes to  decision making.

And then the last one is that, although we like to think  that we're very rational with system two thinking, we're also very emotional,  and actually emotions drive a lot more of our decisions than we like to think.  And so the way that things are presented, the emotions that they engender, they  really tend to sway people's decisions. And there's a great example here that  came out a few years ago. Maybe a few of the listeners will remember, there's a  video of a turtle with a straw in its nose. We all know the statistics,  thousands of turtles die every year because of plastic pollution, but that one  turtle with a straw is very, very powerful. And that's the kind of emotions  that engender and change behavior. So three things to remember: 1) on top of  basically material incentives, rules and information, we really need to start  thinking about context; 2) we need to start thinking about social norms; and 3)  we need to think about the emotions that our interventions engender in people.

**CHRIS PARSONS:**So you've mentioned a number of factors. Which are the  most important when the public makes decisions?

**PHILIPE BUJOLD:** Yeah. So I wish I could  give you a very straightforward answer for that. Like many things in science,  however, the answer is "it depends," and it's going to depend on  really what is driving the specific behavior that you're trying to change. So  again referring to the "system one, system two" thinking earlier.  System two is for a very narrow set of behaviors. For system one (about 80% of  our decisions), we're going to be able to influence decisions with this "choice  context" (sometimes called choice architecture), with the social norms I  was talking about earlier, or with the emotions. But still that's 80% of  behaviors and one of those three things might be better at specific behaviors  than others, right? So for different situations you're going to be wanting to  focus on different things, but there are some broad categories that fit across  the board.

Especially for behaviors that require cooperation among  people or where the results really matter when a lot of people cooperate,  there's a quick toolkit that came out of MIT. They say there are these three  items on a checklist that you really want to hit every time, and they really  fit in those boxes I was talking about earlier. So the first thing that you  want to do is to make sure that everyone in the community knows about the  benefit of something. In this case, let's take the adoption of solar panels,  for example. So here there's a great benefit. We know that it's sustainable.  Doing that alleviates climate change. Great, you tell that to everyone.

The second thing you want to do is to make the behavior  unambiguous and categorical. And the reason you wanna do this is because you  don't want people to have the option to get away with not doing it; you don't  want them to have plausible deniability. So that's the second thing you wanna  do. You can tell people that, basically, people that have solar panels on their  roof are the ones that are adopting the behavior. Everyone who doesn't are not  doing it. So, easy. The behavior is observable, it's simple, everyone  understands.

Then the last thing that you want to do is create the  sense that it's the norm. And so usually you're going to do that by making the  behavior very, very observable, but also you're going to make not engaging in  the behavior very, very observable. So once people know what is correct or not  correct and you've hit those other two things, usually you're well on your way  for generating these cooperative behaviors.

For other types of behaviors that are a bit more complex,  usually what you want to address is the uncertainty that people feel around  adoption. I work a lot on climate smart agriculture, and that's something that  is very ambiguous for people. And by "ambiguous" I mean people really  don't know what climate smart agriculture means and farmers don't necessarily  know exactly what practices they're going to have to adopt. It's not even that  they expect that it might or might not work, they just don't know what to  expect at all. In those cases, humans are very uncertainty averse  ("ambiguity averse"). And so when that happens, it's much easier for  us to go with something that we expect, even if we expect to lose, than  something that is ambiguous, something we don't know what to expect from. So social  norms are very powerful for cooperative behaviors, but really addressing that  uncertainty in the way you frame a question and the way you generate emotions  is going to be very important for these non-cooperative behaviors. So two  buckets, but again, you always want to dig into it to figure out what's driving  your situation.

**CHRIS PARSONS:**Ah, very interesting. So you mentioned renewable energy  and this is something that is often a controversial issue in coastal areas, but  it's something that the public is going to have to embrace for us to meet our  climate change goals for reducing emissions. So you've worked on several  renewable energy projects in the past. What did you find to be successful in  these projects and were there any problems that you encountered? Can you tell  us about your experiences?

**PHILIPE BUJOLD:**Yeah, there are many. I think the biggest one is to not  rely on assumptions, and that's probably the biggest thing that a lot of us  working in conservation do. We assume that something is going to work without  actually having validated it, or without having built an evidence-based  hypothesis. And so I want to put that at the top here because that's really  going to be one of the main mistakes. And that has driven a few bad experiences  that we've had with different intervention programs, where you build an entire  intervention before realizing that ultimately that's not what was guiding  behavior.****

So, for example, in some of the work that I'm doing on  agriculture, the assumption that is reigning in the field is this information  deficit model that we referred to earlier. So people don't know about a  behavior, they don't know how to do a behavior well. In some of the countries I  work, actually that's very easy to address. The issue is that when people look  around, they see that 90% of their neighbors are not adopting this behavior.  They only have to look around to convince themselves that, well, there's  probably a good reason for that, right? And that's also the case for other  behaviors like adopting electric vehicles. A lot of the time you see no one  else is doing it, so maybe it means that they're not ready yet. And you can  think of that also when it comes to energy generation for oceans.

I worked recently on a project in Australia, where they're  trying to regenerate some of the ocean front. People just don't know what that  means, and they also don't know who's doing it, who's not doing it. So the ask  isn't clear, people don't know what the benefits are, and they don't know that  it's a norm. Actually it's not a norm because no one else is doing it, because  no one wants to try! And so people keep giving information because they assume  that that's what's going to change the behavior, but it's not actually working.  So that's one of the big issues that we tend to see is that we rely on  assumptions without having dug into what's causing a behavior.

**CHRIS PARSONS:**And talking about coastal projects like that, we're  obviously going out on NOAA's podcast and many of the listeners are probably  involved in coastal and marine issues where it's important for them to  understand what local stakeholders think. What sort of behavioral science is  important to do to help them better understand and better connect with local  stakeholders so that their projects can be successful.

**PHILIPE BUJOLD:**Yeah, so I'm going to reframe that question a little bit,  because it's not necessarily about the evidence that you need but rather about  the process that you need to put in place or the framework that you need to put  in place to be successful at changing behavior. So a great analogy that  sometimes isn't super popular, but I'm going to say it anyways: you wouldn't  necessarily trust "anyone" to build a building or a house, right? We  all live in them, but you trust an architect or an engineer to build it. Well,  it's the same with behavior. We all engage in it, but we need to start thinking  about who the experts are on behavior that can really inform an intervention or  a program that we want to be designing. And that's usually going to be  behavioral scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, economists, or social  scientists that are very good at getting to the crux of a problem and  understanding what creates or reduces value for different communities.

So once you have that established and you've gotten the  expertise that you need, another thing that's very important is to go through a  design framework that really forces you to gather evidence to not just  understand the communities you're working with, but mainly to focus on a  behavior. And that's one of the biggest problems that teams are generally just  not set up to do. We're usually designed to focus on information, to focus on a  problem, not to focus on a specific behavior. And once you have that in place,  you find out that things are a lot easier.

At Rare we have this behavioral design competition every  year, where we essentially train startups to engage in different behavior and  to start designing interventions about specific behaviors. Before that, they  just run what they're used to. But once we've gone through the process, they  focus on a specific behavior and usually the intervention is actually very  different to what they had imagined. Because it's behavioral-based and not  information-based, systems-based, or action-based, really it's based on the  exact behavior that you need. So I think that's probably one of the main things  that could actually help a lot of your listeners here in thinking about  behavior change.

**CHRIS PARSONS:**So when scientists are putting together a proposal for a  project and they're thinking about the social science, behavioral science, the  outreach side of things, do they tend to think like a scientist in terms of  numbers of things to do, numbers of workshops, numbers of interviews, or do  they talk about changing the behavior of stakeholders?

**PHILIPE BUJOLD:** Yeah, definitely. I think one of the drivers of this is  because oftentimes we have to report those numbers to either a funder, a grant,  or a government body. I think we can start at the bottom, but we also need to  start thinking behaviorally at every level of these interventions and at every  level of this decision-making system, really. Too often even in our work, we're  going to have grant proposals where we have to report numbers of people  reached, not necessarily the number of people whose behavior was converted. And  that I think is still the big problem. It's starting to change, thankfully, now  that the behavioral sciences are becoming a bit more mainstream. And I think  with that we'll get a lot more impact in the work that we do.

But another problem that we also have is that we're not  necessarily evaluating and reporting on a lot of the behavior change  interventions that we do have. So there's a lot of work being done all around  the world right now, but no one's talking about it. There are no controls. You  can't know for sure if your impact is actually there. So there are a lot of  great ideas out there; they just need to be a bit more refined here. And I  think the system needs to change a little bit to put behavior at the center, as  opposed to all these other metrics that are very, very useful but might not be  a direct indicator of if people are doing what you need them to do.

**CHRIS PARSONS:**So do you have any specific suggestions for listeners how  they can put behavior up front and center?

**PHILIPE BUJOLD:**Yeah, definitely. So that usually starts directly at the  beginning of the design process. We have our own behavioral centered design  process here at Rare. There are many that exist that are based in behavioral  sciences. But the way we work at it is that the first step is really to frame  everything you're going to do specifically for a single behavior. Then from  that we design a theory of change around that specific behavior. So if you're  going to have multiple behaviors, you need to have a theory of change for every  single behavior. The way that works is that you want the start of the behavior,  you want to understand the drivers. So the levers I was talking about earlier:  material incentives change this, would the context of the choice change this,  would social norms change this behavior. Once you understand that, then you can  design activities that will address what you need, and that should result in  your behavior. If you're starting at the bottom, where you have an intervention  that you know how to do and let's figure out what the behavior is that you can  change, you're going at it the wrong way. So I think that's one big suggestion  that I have for everyone, start at the behavior and that has to be your focus  point and then design everything from that point onwards.

**CHRIS PARSONS:**Thank you very much. That was really interesting. Very  inspiring and gives us a lot to think about. So as we wrap up this episode, do  you have any take home messages for our listeners?

**PHILIPE BUJOLD:** Yeah, so in perfect science  fashion, I have two here. The first one, is really going to be "never  assume." And never assume that what you've done in the past is the correct  way of doing it. So we have a lot of expertise around the behavioral sciences.  Use them. The second one I really want to emphasize is "focus on  behavior." That should be at the forefront of every intervention design.  If we're not putting behavior first, we're probably not going to be able to  change the behavior in the way we want to.

**HOST:**That was Philipe Bujold, a behavioral scientist with  Rare's Center for Behavior & the Environment. He was interviewed by Chris  Parsons, a communications and policy specialist for the Oceans Division of the  National Science Foundation. Head to our show notes for details on our guests  and additional links. This interview was edited and produced by Ashley Scarlett  of Absolutely Smashing Events and Consulting. It was developed in collaboration  with the U.S. Global Change Research Program's Coasts Interagency Group and  funded by Adaptation Sciences, or AdSci for short, a group out of NOAA's  Climate Program Office. Ideas expressed in this podcast do not necessarily  reflect the position of the U.S. Global Change Research Program or its member  agencies. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next month with the third episode  in this series. We'll hear a panel discussion on lessons derived from this  series on coastal planning — and how these lessons are relevant to the federal  government.

From corals to coastal science, connect with ocean experts to explore questions about the ocean environment.

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**First episode in this series: Equity and Justice in Coastal Planning**

##### More **Information**

U.S. Global Change Research Program, Coasts Interagency Group

Adaptation Sciences (AdSci) Program, NOAA Climate Program Office

Philipe Bujold, Behavioral Scientist at Rare's Center for Behavior & the Environment 

NOAA Office for Coastal Management

##### **Last updated:**

###### 						 12/15/22					

**Author:** NOAA

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