Minority influence in climate change mitigation

University of Groningen

Minority influence in climate change mitigation

Bolderdijk, Jan Willem; Jans, Lise

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10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.02.005

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Bolderdijk, J. W., & Jans, L. (2021). Minority influence in climate change mitigation. Current Opinion in Psychology, 42, 25-30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.02.005

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Review

Minority influence in climate change mitigation

Jan Willem Bolderdijk

and Lise Jans

Abstract

While the majority of people care about environmental quality, they keep engaging in carbon-intensive practices that exac-erbate climate change. Can we expect humans to collectively change by themselves, from the bottom up? Social change is often initiated by minorities – individuals who challenge the status quo. The dominant literature paints a rather pessimistic picture about the ability of minorities to instigate change in the environmental domain: environmental activists, vegans, and other minority members often elicit social sanctions, thereby ironically reinforcing the majority’s commitment to current, environmentally harmful norms. Recent findings, however, point towards more optimism: pro-environmental minorities can pave the way towards_{‘tipping points’ and spontaneous social} change. Policymakers can speed up this process by offering top-down support for minorities – by giving them ‘voice’. Addresses

1

Department of Marketing, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Groningen, Nettelbosje 2, 9747 AE Groningen, The Netherlands

2_{Department of Psychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social}

Sci-ences, University of Groningen, Grote Kruisstraat 2/1, 9712 TS, The Netherlands

Corresponding author: Bolderdijk, Jan Willem (j.w.bolderdijk@rug.nl)

Current Opinion in Psychology 2021, 42:25–30

This review comes from a themed issue on Psychology of Climate Change

Edited by Mark F. Ferguson and Michael T. Schmitt For a complete overview see theIssueand theEditorial

Available online 17 February 2021

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.02.005

2352-250X/© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Keywords

Minorities, Social influence, Pro-environmental behaviour, Social change, Tipping points, Moral do-gooders.

Human behaviour plays a key role in the rise and severity of environmental problems, including climate change. Dropping common but carbon-intensive prac-tices such as eating red meat on a daily basis and flying across the ocean for holidays is, therefore, part and parcel of the transition to a more sustainable society [1]. The majority of people see this need for social change.

They are aware of the environmental costs of their current actions [2], value environmental quality [3,4], and perceive protecting the environment as their moral duty [5]. Yet, they keep engaging in practices that exacerbate climate change. Acting sustainably is often-times still the (descriptive) social norm [6e8]. Can we expect more sustainable social norms to evolve from the bottom up - emerging organically as a result of social interactions between individuals?

Social change is often instigated by minorities e those taking an anti-normative position, holding no position of status [9]. As discussed below, recent literature paints a rather pessimistic picture about minorities’ ability to overthrow current, unsustainable norms: individuals who publicly challenge normative but unsustainable practices often run the risk of being ridiculed by ma-jority members. Other findings, however, offer room for optimism: minorities who go against current, unsus-tainable norms may be able to pave the way for social change in society at large. However, their influence is often subtle and indirect, and thus easily overlooked, both by policymakers and minorities themselves.

Why social change from the bottom up

seems unlikely

By challenging the status quo, minorities give exposure to alternatives [10], thereby gradually ‘infecting’ others in their social network [11]. Ultimately, such alterna-tives may become adopted by the majority and thus become the new social norm. Social change unfolds more quickly when people anticipate they can reap reputational benefits by being among the first to adopt [12,13]. This dynamic helps to explain the rapid diffu-sion of new technologies (e.g. smartphones) across human networkse frontrunners are typically considered ‘savvy’.

However, the same reputational benefits may not befall frontrunners whose practices challenge an unsustainable status quo, such as vegans, environmental activists, and ethically conscious consumers. These individuals are typically motivated by non-selfish, moral concernse e.g. the conviction that meat consumption is exacerbating climate change and thus harming future generations. Their lack of self-interest could make them especially effective change advocates [14,15], but recent research found that such ‘do-gooders’ can also elicit hostile re-sponses in others. When acting out of moral concern,

frontrunners may implicitly question the moral integrity [16,17] and altruistic reputation [18] of those who stick with the current, unsustainable status quo. As a result, majority members can respond defensively when inter-acting with environmentally conscious frontrunners; they may derogate, ridicule, or even exclude individuals who stand up to environmental disregard [19], refuse to eat meat [20] or promote no-packaging stores [21*]. This sanctioning of do-gooders is not unique to the environmental domain and appears to happen across different cultures [22], but especially in ‘tight’ societies [23*]. Importantly, by inviting social sanctions from majority members [17], triggering negative stereotypes [24,25], and by shaping exclusive social identities [26**], environmentally conscious frontrunners have even been argued to reinforce the majority’s commit-ment to the current, environcommit-mentally damaging norms, thus potentially slowing down social change.

In sum, recent literature seems to paint a rather pessi-mistic picture of the ability of environmentally conscious frontrunners (e.g. activists, vegans) to over-throw current, unsustainable social norms and that of social change to emerge in a bottom-up fashion. How-ever, this interpretation overlooks another stream of literature, one that documents the positive impact of minorities on social change.

A more optimistic view on the impact of

minorities

Within a group, minorities are a source of intragroup conflict, as they threaten the validity of the majority opinion and thus prevent group consensus [9,27]. The most obvious way to resolve this intragroup threat is for majority members to pressure minority members to change their public behaviour via social sanctions (i.e. conformity) or to exclude or derogate those unwilling to budge [28,29]. As reviewed above, this response has been frequently documented in recent psychological literature on responses to environmentally conscious minorities. Conformity pressure and the social exclusion of minorities are, however, not the only ways for groups to deal with deviance [9,27e29]. Minorities, although not always in obvious ways, can influence majorities.

Minorities can change private opinions

By introducing deviant views, minorities (especially when consistently sticking to the same deviant position on multiple occasions) can trigger majority members to consciously reconsider their private opinion about the status quo, a process called ‘conversion’ [9,27,28]. While private conversion can occur directly as a result of expo-sure to dissent, minority influence on publicly visible actions tends to be indirect, as people want to avoid po-tential social sanctions from the majority [9,27]. On a societal level, this means that minorities initially only affect others’ opinions and only later affect their public

behaviours [30]. Indeed, within human networks, atti-tudes and opinions often spread before actions do [31]. The same process may hold in the context of pro-environmental minorities. While many people, thanks to the groundwork by minorities in the past, now pri-vately have adopted the notion that climate change is an urgent problem and that drastic change is needed, their public actions often lag behind. This lag, at least partly, may be driven by fear of social sanctions: people strongly fear social exclusion when their deviant moral principles are exposed to majority members [32], and fear of stigma has been found to prevent aspiring vegans from adopting a plant-based diet [33]. Indeed, particularly in ‘tight’ societies, in which conformity pressure is strong, public behaviours often do not reflect private pro-environmental opinions [34]. Thus, while pro-environmental minorities may affect others’ private opinions, their effect on others’ public actions is often less visible. As a result, both minority and majority members may underestimate the influence that minor-ities can have.

Minorities can change norm perceptions

Norms tend to be self-fulfilling [35*,36]. An oft-cited example is that of meat consumption: if most people believe that most people eat meat, most people will keep eating meat [37] without questioning the validity of that practice. At the collective level, the pressure to conform to current majorities can create a self-perpetuating feedback loop, whereby a network of in-dividuals can end up getting ‘locked in’ [38**] by a social norm that is societally disadvantageous [39]. One crucial effect of minorities is that they challenge the self-fulfilling nature of current norms. By deviating from the status quo, they show that an alternative path is possible: an increase in the number of vegetarians, for instance, signals to majority members that high levels of meat consumption are not a ‘natural’ or lasting feature of prosperous societies per se. Thus, the awareness that an increasing minority is deviating from the norm (i.e. dy-namic norms) can give majority members the feeling that the current norm is ‘vulnerable’ [40], less ‘tight’ than previously thought [41,42], and will likely change in the future [43**], thus motivating majority members to deviate as well.

Recent studies have demonstrated this outcome in the context of meat consumption [44]. Mentioning the fact that a minority of Americans already limits their meat consumption had little impact on non-vegan partici-pants. They, however became more interested in eating less meat themselves after reading a message indicating that, although still a minority, more and more Americans ‘make an effort to reduce/limit their meat consumption’. Communicating that an increasing number of people are 26 Psychology of Climate Change

choosing meatless dishes may even increase the number of vegetarian orders, provided that recipients perceive that trend to apply to their own group [45].

Thus, pro-environmental minorities can influence ma-jority members when they are perceived as frontrunners of an emerging social norm. While summary statistics [46*] and written messages (‘more and more people are switching from to-go-cups to sustainable alternatives’) can convey that change is imminent [47], physical dis-plays of deviance are typically more powerful in inspiring others [48,49]. Indeed, by organising pro-environmental initiatives in public settings (e.g. jointly picking up litter, community energy projects), minority members can make majority members of the same overarching group re-appraise their shared identity, strengthening the perception of pro-environmental group norms and identification with this group [50**]. Minority mem-bers’ public pro-environmental initiatives can thereby motivate other members of the overarching group to also display pro-environmental actions [50,51].

Minorities can offer social support for others

Asch [52] and others after him [53] demonstrated that dissenters can facilitate others to also withstand major-ity pressure, and liberate them to deviate as well. For majority members who are privately uncomfortable with existing environmentally harmful norms but whose be-haviours lag behind due to fear of social sanctions, the physical presence of ‘allies’ seems pivotal. During social encounters with a unanimous majority of meat-eating peers, many vegetarian participants chose to keep their meat-free principles to themselves, thus silently reinforcing the meat-eating norm [54**]. This pattern disappeared, however, when a physically present moderator from the same overarching group showed visible support for the minority position: vegetarian participants now consistently displayed their meat-free principles, despite the physical presence of a majority of meat-eating peers.

In sum, by breaking the consensus, visible minority members can give witnesses the feeling they would not be alone when publicly challenging an environmentally damaging practice as well, thus facilitating others to follow suit.

Change may come

Without realising it, minority members can influence the opinions and actions of majority members. Minor-ities seem most influential when they are perceived as representative of the larger group they share with the majority [45,50**, cf.55], and when they ‘walk the talk’ [56]e when their words are supported by their actions (e.g. joining a solar panel program themselves while promoting it among majority members [57]). Impor-tantly, those ‘infected’ majority members may, in turn,

start influencing other majority members as well [58]. By showing their deviant principles, minorities can therefore help to create a vicious cycle [59,60] whereby the magnetic force of the new norm increases over time, up to the point where ‘critical mass’ is reached; when a pro-environmental practice reaches a certain threshold, the likelihood of it spreading throughout the entire social network (i.e. the majority) increases dramatically. However, when a minority is significant but has not reached critical mass (recently pinpointed to hover around 25% of the population [61]) or fails to elicit sufficient ‘momentum’ [62], there is a chance that, despite seeing the benefits of behavioural change, the majority will not change their behaviour. The lack of visible change in behaviours, however, does not mean that the majority has a different opinion than the mi-nority or that the mimi-nority is not influential. Rather, it may mean that the pro-environmental minority is not influencing behaviours, i.e. descriptive norms, yet.

Concluding remarks

The fact that currently, carbon-intensive practices are still commonplace (e.g. high levels of meat consump-tion) and that minorities challenging those norms un-dergo social sanctions does not mean that social change is not happening, nor that minorities are ineffective in instigating change from the bottom up. Rather, minority influence is often more indirect: they initially change majority opinions (e.g. more and more people consider themselves ‘flexitarian’) and often only later affect ma-jority behaviours. Although subtle, their influence is crucial: once majority members notice that norms are shifting, sudden tipping points can ensue. Thus, we see room for optimism.

To kickstart this process, however, existing minorities need to share their desire for change with majority members during social interactions. There is reason to assume this will not happen readily: existing minorities may erroneously believe they are not ‘infecting’ others and merely risk social sanctions by deviating from an unsustainable norm. We, therefore, believe that policymakers may be able to speed up social change in the environmental domain by encouraging (preferably consistent and representative) minority members to publicly challenge unsustainable norms during social interactions. We see this as an important avenue for future research.

Specifically, policymakers can introduce interventions targeted at making it more socially comfortable for vegans, environmental activists, and other minority members to challenge the environmentally damaging norms in their social network during interactions with majority members [see e.g. 63]. The introduction of vegetarian defaults, for instance, could make it more comfortable for aspiring vegetarians to introduce

plant-based meals in more conservative social environments. Further, policymakers can (financially and logistically) support bottom-up pro-environmental initiatives, thereby facilitating minority members to influence ma-jority members through their visible, pro-environmental actions [cf.50**].

In sum, while social change can and does occur spon-taneously in a bottom-up fashion (e.g. #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter), policymakers may be able to speed up this process in the environmental domain by giving existing minorities ‘voice’.

Conflict of interest statement

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Hans Risselada and Anna Tirion for providing comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. This research was supported by grant 421-14-020 awarded to Jan Willem Bolderdijk by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

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