Habitual behaviors or patterns of practice? Explaining and changing repetitive climate‐relevant actions

By T. Kurz, Benjamin Gardner, Bas Verplanken, C. Abraham. 2015

309 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding human behavior lies at the heart of responses to climate change. Many environmentally relevant behavior patterns are frequent, stable, and persistent. There is an increasing focus on understanding these patterns less in terms of deliberative processes and more in terms of habits and routines embedded in everyday life. Examinations of the ‘habitual’ nature of environmentally consequential activities have been approached from two theoretically distinct perspectives. From a social psychological perspective, ‘habit’ is studied as an intra‐individual psychological construct that sustains ingrained behavior patterns in stable settings and obstructs adoption of more environmentally friendly alternatives. Sociologists from the social practice tradition, in contrast, have sought to highlight the ways in which resource‐intensive ‘habitual practices’ become established and maintained in society through a commingling of material, procedural, and socio‐discursive elements. We reflect critically upon key theoretical differences underpinning these two approaches to repetitive behaviors and review empirical work from both traditions that speaks to the relevance of ‘habitual behavior patterns’ central to addressing climate change. Finally, we examine how changes in habits are theorized and operationalized within both social psychological and social practice approaches, and practical implications for promoting environmentally sustainable societies. WIREs Clim Change 2015, 6:113–128. doi: 10.1002/wcc.327

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3527d32da4751593140023d6ec5189ad0f35a477

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In Applied Psychology

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Carbon Lock-In: Types, Causes, and Policy Implications (2016, unknown): “(cid:2) Random, unintentional events affect ﬁnal outcomes (cid:2) Powerful economic, social, and political actors seek to reinforce (cid:2) Institutions are designed to stabilize and lock in (cid:2) Beneﬁcial and intended outcome for some actors”
Empowering interventions to promote sustainable lifestyles: Testing the habit discontinuity hypothesis in a field experiment (2016, background): “Other ‘systems’ may be culturally defined, such as social practices, for instance those involving hygiene or leisure activities (e.g., Kurz et al., 2015; Reckwitz, 2002; Shove, Pantzar, & Watson, 2012).”
Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve? (2021, unknown): “From a psychological perspective, this bears the hallmarks of habitual behavior, in that environmentally significant actions are often stable, persistent, and an automatic response to particular contexts (159), e.”
Different shades of green? Unpacking habitual and occasional pro-environmental behavior (2015, background): “Habitual, routine behavior tends to present considerable material and motivational hurdles regarding their persistent upkeep over time (Kurz et al., 2014), many of which arise from people’s day-to-day exposure to a largely unsustainable system of production and consumption.”