Jesse Wise
Theme
Transport, Behaviour and SocietyProject
SMEs as mediators of pro-environmental social transformations: Designing and evaluating behaviour change interventions for scalable transport-demand-side mitigationSupervisor(s)
Prof Lorraine Whitmarsh, Dr Sam HamptonBio
Jesse graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2022 with a first-class MA (Hons) in Psychology and Economics. During her degree she focused on the design and evaluation of interventions aimed at changing behaviour for the public good. Her undergraduate dissertation tested how framing voluntary climate actions as losses or gains influenced cooperation, and her MRes thesis examined how political signalling shapes opposition to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.
Jesse applies a wide range of methods to fit the tool to the job. So far she has drawn on experimental economics, computational psychology, traditional quantitative and qualitative methods and creative arts-based approaches.
Motivated by the need for demand-side solutions to complement technological advances in reducing UK carbon emissions, Jesse has turned her attention to the transport sector, where emissions remain persistently high and behaviour particularly resistant to change. She joined the AAPS CDT to explore how behavioural interventions can support more sustainable travel and help reduce demand-side emissions. Her current work is particularly focused on the role of middle actors in climate mitigation and adaptation.
Fun Facts
- In my spare time I am an avid rock-climber.
- I also love board games. To this day, my favourite weekend trip away was spent at the largest board game convention in the world. 100,000 people attended!
- I spent lockdown working on a farm on the Isle of Arran. Even though I didn't have my license, my boss lent me his quad-bike, which would skip between 2nd and 4th gear and had no breaks.... best commute of my life!
SMEs as mediators of pro-environmental social transformations: Designing and evaluating behaviour change interventions for scalable transport-demand-side mitigation
Within Behavioural Science Public Policy, there has been a large focus on changing behaviour at the individual level, within certain contexts. This has not achieved the rapid and transformative change required to hit Net Zero by 2030. New approaches are required that target large swathes of the population; but what does this look like? How might this reasonably be achieved?
Organisations are a good point of intervention for behavioural policymakers. Pragmatically, organisational policy is less politicised than public policy, it is more flexible to the local population and context, and organisations can implement changes faster than the public sector can. They may also be effective at behaviour change for several reasons. Organisations are able to influence the choice environment, or the ‘mid-stream’ in the Behavioural Insight Team’s model. This is very important for modal shift, which is highly influenced by infrastructure and habits. Organisations have the additional benefit of having access to key information about moments of change (such as employees starting a new job, retirement, changing home or paternity leave) which are crucial times to change habits. Organisations also have the power to tackle social change through their roles as influencers of employees, the community and the supply chain.
Why would an organisation implement these interventions (workplace travel plans and corporate travel management)? How do we encourage millions of businesses to implement them? Larger organisations are often required to do so due to planning laws, but the 5.5 million SMEs in the UK have no such incentive. Regulations would be heavy-handed and add additional burden to these businesses, not the least that they are highly unlikely for scope 3 emissions. Existing studies suggest that organisations implement WTP are motivated by personal values and commitment to the community (although this evidence is mixed), yet they are hindered by lack of time, knowledge, and finances. These barriers and invisible nature of workplace travel plans may re-enforce a status-quo or ‘social norm’. This may also be symptomatic of a large pluralistic ignorance (a shared mis-perception of how others’ think or behave) existing among firms. What interventions might break this impasse and lead to a social tipping point? What would good business support look like for the implementation of this intervention? Jess's thesis focuses on the transport domain given it generates 26% of the UK’s total emissions, it is very difficult to change, and scope 3 among SMEs is largely neglected.
