Welcome to PlanetLAB!
I’m Ganga Shreedhar, an Assistant Professor in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
I study how we can transform our behaviour, societies, and systems to face eco-challenges facing humanity like biodiversity loss, mass extinction, and climate change.
Changing behaviour to benefit people and the planet.
We face multiple, interconnected challenges that influence our own, and the planet’s health and wellbeing like air pollution, biodiversity loss and extinction and climate change.
To address these challenges, at PlanetLAB, my team and I study consumer and citizen understanding, motivations and behaviours, and support for transformative policies and approaches to change. We focus on designing, testing, and implementing behavioural interventions at multiple levels—individual, organisational, and in communities and society. Our inter-disciplinary approach builds on insights and methods from behavioural environmental and ecological economics, social and environmental psychology, public policy, and conservation.
Current research questions
How do we understand, perceive, and respond to systemic eco-challenges?
What motivates us to cooperate, and conversely, what mitigates eco-behaviour change?
How can we transform systems through multi-level behavioural approaches?
Current research projects
Public understanding of biodiversity loss and mass extinction to explore how the public perceives and is willing to respond to, the sixth mass extinction event in the UK, India, USA, Brazil, and South Africa.
Public Perceptions of the Sixth Mass Extinction across the world report (coming soon…)
Public preferences to address the Water-Energy-Nature nexus in Kuwait, funded by LSE’s Middle East Centre Kuwait Programme Research Grant & in collaboration with the Canadian University Dubai).
Climate change mitigation and adaptation in the Gulf Cooperation Council funded by LSE’s Middle East Centre as part of their LSE Academic Collaboration with Arab Universities Programme.
BASIN – Behavioural Adaptation for water Security and INclusion funded through the CLimate Adaptation and REsilience programme (CLARE; UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and Canada’s International Development Development Centre). It aims to synthesise, assess, and test the application potential of multi-level behavioural and psychological science perspectives (at the individual level to the more systemic, organisational, and political levels) for adaptation in Africa to enhance water security for the most vulnerable.
Apex: An Air pollution exposure model to integrate protection of vulnerable groups into the UK Clean Air Programme funded by UKRI and in partnership with Imperial University, examines how human perceptions and behaviours can be correctly reflected in indoor and outdoor air pollution exposure models, including how citizens might react to the introduction of proposed clean air policies.
Miscellaneous projects: Collective climate action (e.g. organisational, social and political action), pro-ecological and environmental behaviour change (e.g. biodiversity conservation, food waste, donations, diets), public support for transformative behavioural policies and approaches, including degrowth, behavioural public policy (green nudges and brown sludge), and creative communication interventions.
What we’re doing…
-
Inoculating against threats to climate activists’ image: Intersectional environmentalism and the Indian farmers’ protest
An emerging strategy in climate movements is to build solidarity with other social movements to mobilize climate action—but can this backfire? In a pre-registered experiment (N=541 Indian adults), we investigated the effect of Greta Thunberg's tweets expressing solidarity with the Indian farmers’ protest on Indians’ receptivity to her climate advocacy and their intentions to take collective climate action. Protest support moderated the effect of her tweets such that after reading her tweets, those who opposed the farmers’ protest found Thunberg to be less effective as a climate advocate compared to the control condition. Exposure to the tweets also lowered protest opposers’ collective climate action intentions. In contrast, those who supported the farmers’ protest became more receptive to her climate advocacy after reading her tweets. Pre-emptively clarifying Thunberg's motives using an image-prepare pre-bunk inoculated against the negative effects on her image– protest opposers who received the pre-bunk before reading Thunberg's tweets were as receptive to her as were protest opposers in the control condition. The results suggest that climate advocates’ intervention in other social movements can polarise the public's opinion about them and the public's pro-climate action intentions. This unintended effect may be mitigated by clarifying advocates’ motives before they intervene.
-
Stories of intentional action mobilise climate policy support and action intentions
What makes a climate story effective? We examined if short fiction stories about everyday pro-environmental behaviours motivate climate policy support, and individual and collective climate action in a nationally representative experiment (N = 903 UK adults). The story featuring protagonists driven by pro-environmental intentions (i.e., the intentional environmentalist narrative) increased participants’ support for pro-climate policies and intentions to take both individual and collective pro-environmental actions, more so than did stories featuring protagonists whose pro-environmental behaviours were driven by intentions to gain social status, to protect their health, and a control story. Participants’ stronger feelings of identification with the protagonist partially explained these effects of the intentional environmentalist narrative. Results highlight that narrating intentional, rather than unintentional, pro-environmental action can enhance readers’ climate policy support and intentions to perform pro-environmental action. Therefore, the intentions driving pro-environmental action may have implications for the extent to which observes identify with the actor and take pro-environmental action themselves.
-
Personal or planetary health? Direct, spillover and carryover effects of non-monetary benefits of vegetarian behaviour
There is a debate about whether framing motivations as personal or planetary benefits - or both - is more effective at encouraging sustainable actions and promoting positive behavioural spillovers. In a pre-registered online longitudinal experiment, we randomly allocate n = 1242 respondents to either a control condition, or to one of three novel, interactive implementation intention interventions framing the benefits of a vegetarian diet in terms of either personal health, or planetary health, or both personal and planetary health. We ask respondents to choose between real vegetarian or non-vegetarian foods. We then ask them to donate part of their money to a charity. We finally measure their food choices three days and two months after the interventions. Compared to the control group, we find that participants assigned to any of the behavioural interventions are twice as likely to choose a vegetarian option. We find no statistically significant differences in the proportions of vegetarian options across the three experimental conditions. We find evidence of a positive behavioural spillover on the donations to charity amongst participants exposed to combined personal and planetary health. Three days after the interventions, participants allocated to this combined frame still reported to eat more vegetarian meals than in the control group. Such carryover effects, however, did not persist two months after the interventions. Overall, our research offers new insights about framing behavioural interventions to motivate sustainable actions and their potential behavioural spillovers.