Credibility, communication, and climate change: Lifestyle inconsistency and do-gooder derogation

Credibility, communication, and climate change: How lifestyle inconsistency and do-gooder derogation impact decarbonization advocacy. Gregg Sparkman, Shahzeen Z. Attari. Energy Research & Social Science, Volume 59, January 2020, 101290. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2019.101290

Abstract: The present research examines two distinct pitfalls for advocates aiming to motivate others to use renewable energy and reduce their carbon footprint. Recent research has found that science communicators and advocates may be judged for inconsistency between their behavior and advocacy—where information that an advocate's lifestyle has a large carbon footprint can undermine their appeals to live more sustainably or support policies to address climate change. Conversely, in other advocacy domains, research on do-gooder derogation has found that exemplary behavior among advocates can lead people to feel defensive about their own shortcomings and reject the exemplar and their cause. Do environmental advocates have to worry about both do-gooder derogation and behavior-advocacy inconsistency? Further, do different types of advocates have to worry about these pitfalls equally? To answer these questions, we use an online survey in the United States (N = 2362) to contrast the effectiveness of advocacy from peers and from experts across three levels of sustainable lifestyles: not sustainable, somewhat sustainable, and highly sustainable. We find strong evidence for the negative effects of behavior-advocacy inconsistency for both neighbors and experts, albeit much larger impacts for experts. Further, we also find partial evidence for do-gooder derogation for neighbors and experts: highly sustainable advocates were not more influential than somewhat sustainable ones—instead they were marginally worse. Overall, these results suggest that advocates, especially experts, are most credible and influential when they adopt many sustainable behaviors in their day-to-day lives, so long as they are not seen as too extreme.


4. Discussion

These results show that both experts and neighbors suffered from behavior-advocacy inconsistency effects: when advocates lived unsustainable lifestyles, there were less successful at encouraging others to sign up for a residential renewable energy program. However, behavior-advocacy inconsistency effects were significantly worse for experts than neighbors. It appears that people are more forgiving of neighbors’ unsustainable lifestyles than of experts’ shortcomings—perhaps because we hold experts to higher standards for behavior-advocacy consistency than we hold peers. This also appears to be true for perceptions of advocates’ credibility.

Further, these data find that living a highly sustainable lifestyle (buying renewable energy, having an extremely efficient home, completely avoiding flying, and eating no meat or cheese) does not make advocates even more effective than living a somewhat sustainable lifestyle (buying renewable energy, having a fairly energy efficient home, and making substantial efforts to curb meat eating and flying). In fact, disclosing one's highly sustainable lifestyle amid giving others an appeal to change may run the risk of raising do-gooder derogation, where advocates’ exemplary lifestyles may make others’ feel defensive about their own shortcoming leading them to dislike the advocate and their cause. As such, we found that highly sustainable advocates were marginally less effective at increasing interest in the renewable energy program and no more credible than somewhat sustainable ones. Those who were somewhat sustainable fared well and do not appear to have suffered from concerns about behavior-advocacy inconsistency or do-gooder derogation. It's also possible that participants saw less of a contrast between themselves and the somewhat sustainable advocate: participants may have believed they were more sustainable than unsustainable advocates, and less sustainable than the highly sustainable advocate. If true, somewhat sustainable advocates may also benefit from perceptions of greater similarity, and therefore serve more easily as a social model [14]. Indeed, in a post hoc analysis we find that somewhat sustainable advocates are perceived to be slightly less socially distant than highly sustainable advocates (d = 0.11, see the Supplemental Material).

Experts appear to be judged more harshly, as their efforts suffer more greatly from behavior-advocacy inconsistency. This is unfortunate given that experts, with their wealth of knowledge and dedication to the topic, hold an irreplaceable role in increasing understanding by disseminating science and in advocacy for action on climate change. Notably, advocacy itself may not be problematic for climate change experts. Scientists, academics, and others can advocate for climate related policies and solutions in a number of ways [43], and are able to do so without hurting their credibility to the public [44] or their colleagues [45]. Research suggests that experts may be able to make substantial reductions to their footprint, such as reducing flying, without adversely affecting their academic success [46]. However, if experts involved in advocacy are unwilling to live somewhat sustainable lives, they may have trouble avoiding negative effects of behavior-advocacy inconsistency. By comparison, neighbors experienced much weaker behavior-advocacy inconsistency effects. In fact, for neighbors there was no significant difference between being highly sustainable and being unsustainable for participant's interest in adopting renewable energy. This may present a silver lining to these findings: non-professionals, no matter their lifestyle, can still be fairly effective advocates for decarbonization.


4.1. Limitations & future directions

In the present research we examined behavior-advocacy inconsistency effects and do-gooder derogation effects in the context of someone self-disclosing their personal actions. While self-disclosure is not uncommon for advocates of sustainability [47], [48], in other contexts the targets of advocacy may come to learn about an advocate's sustainable practices through their own inquiry, a third party, or some other indirect means. For example, after the release of “An Inconvenient Truth” Al Gore came under attack for his household energy consumption from a series of news articles attempting to impugn his reputation and the sincerity of his cause [49]. It is possible that our results would differ if the information about the advocate's lifestyle were learned through some other means or method. Future research is needed to assess whether the form and source of disclosure about an advocate's lifestyle impacts the results found here.

The operationalization of do-gooders used in the present work required the advocate stating both the criteria for living sustainability (references to home energy, diet, and flying) as well as their excellent performance relevant to that criteria. However, participants may lack personal knowledge about how these behaviors correspond to sustainability. For instance, participants may have been unaware that dietary choices have a substantial impact on the environment. If participants felt great uncertainty about whether these actions were actually important to sustainability, they may not have experienced any negative social comparison to do-gooders. Therefore, one possibility is that do-gooder derogation may be more prominent in cases where people already understand the importance of or care about the domain and behavior their performance is being compared on.

The study design used here relies on asking all our participants to envision highly similar vignettes in order to control for all aspects beyond those we seek to manipulate. This ensures strong internal validity, but raises questions regarding external validity and generalizability. In particular, our approach does not assess actual behavior change and instead assesses self-reported interest in the vignettes which may differ from real-world behavior. Further, a survey experiment is limited in terms of providing realistic experiences with advocates. In particular, a fictional peer may not adequately resemble the vivid information people would have in real life about one's neighbors. Therefore, it's possible that rich social interactions that come with real social ties may produce different and potentially stronger results than those found here. Similarly, envisioning attending a talk may differ from actually attending a presentation in ways that meaningfully change the results observed here. The present research lays the groundwork for studies seeking to assess such phenomenon in the field which can provide greater confidence in how they generalize to real-world experiences.

While the present research examined an important outcome, interest in a residential renewable energy program, it is possible that results may differ for other sustainable behaviors. For instance, past research on eliminating meat consumption has found stronger evidence for do-gooder derogation than we found in the present context [24]. Therefore, the relative strength of behavior-advocacy inconsistency and do-gooder derogation may vary across different domains of sustainability. Further research is needed to explore how behavior-advocacy inconsistency effects and do-gooder derogation may differ depending on the behavior in question.

We also need to better understand how to overcome behavior-advocacy inconsistency concerns and do-gooder derogation. Recent research on advocacy for decarbonization policies finds that when advocates indicate that they have reduced their carbon footprint from a previously high footprint, credibility is restored [10], i.e., advocates are judged on their current carbon footprint and not their past footprint. More generally, information about others changing has been shown to be inspirational [50], and help resolve a variety of psychological barriers that prevent personal change [51]. In the advocacy context, it may also be helpful address threats to one's self image from comparisons to do-gooders. Specifically, if advocates indicate they have changed and had to improve over time, they may present themselves not as perfect exemplars, but as people who have not always acted ideally, much like the audience they're addressing. Exploring the consequences of advocates disclosing that they changed may thus be a fruitful direction for future research.