Getting people to change their behavior is a challenging task. From the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment to the Piano Stair Experiment, scientists have been trying to understand what motivates people to alter their actions for decades. Those hurdles are especially pronounced when it comes to climate change, where overcoming the intention-action gap is a major challenge. Just because someone is concerned about climate change doesn’t mean they will change what they do on a daily basis. So what might actually help change people’s behavior?
In testing what strategies actually work, especially within families, researchers at Northeastern University found that children may hold the key to changing their parents’ behaviors around climate change. The convention might be to think parents, as the older group, are better teachers, but, “It does show us that probably kids are better teachers than parents are,” said Nirajana Mishra, an assistant professor of marketing at Northeastern.
