PB435      Half Unit
Behavioural Science for Planetary Wellbeing

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

We live on a changing planet and need to confront multiple planetary problems like climate change and mass extinction. Debates about understanding and changing human behaviour are at the centre of solutions to these problems.

This course seeks to impart knowledge of, and critical thinking about, the interconnections between human behaviour and planetary change. Modules will approach environmental and ecological or “eco-behaviour” change, starting at the individual-level and moving onto to collective and societal levels. The course will discuss behavioural theories and frameworks to understand individual and structural antecedents and consequences of eco-behaviours, and how such factors can be incorporated into the design behavioural interventions and solutions. The course is interdisciplinary and draws on frameworks, concepts and tools from Behavioural Environmental and Ecological Economics, and Environmental and Social Psychology, amongst other fields.

Aims:

This course aims to:

• Introduce key complex planetary problems including the idea of coupled human- environmental systems.

• Critically consider how we perceive and understand planetary problems and non-human nature, and how such factors impact behaviour.

• Investigate debates about pro-environmental and ecological behaviours or eco-behaviours including the main models, measures and applications.

• Outline the framework of social and socio-ecological dilemmas and discuss human motivations and behaviour within this framework.

• Examine eco-behaviours in social and societal group contexts and processes.

• Critically compare and contrast range of behavioural interventions targeting eco-behaviours.

• Locate debates about eco-behaviour change within larger debates about planetary health and systems transformations.

Learning outcomes:

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Interpret and critically appraise planetary problems from a behavioural perspective.

• Interpret and critically appraise the models and concepts used to understand eco-behaviour and motivations

• Understand eco-behaviour dynamics within the individual and across social and societal groups.

• Evaluate the potential of different interventions to change eco-behaviour in the context of the need for systems transformations.

• Work cooperatively with peers to carry out a collaborative group project.

• Work independently and creatively by proposing and designing a novel behaviour change intervention.

10 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

The course will be delivered through a combination of interactive classes/seminars and lectures and supplementary interactive live activities. There will be structured learning activities throughout the course, espeically in the seminars, including student presentations and group work. 

 Students will be expected to produce one piece of formative work during WT

• Clayton, S., Devine-Wright, P., Stern, P.C., Whitmarsh, L., Carrico, A., Steg, L., Swim, J. and Bonnes, M., 2015. Psychological research and global climate change. Nature Climate Change, 5(7), pp.640-646.

• Weber, E.U., 2020. Heads in the Sand: Why We Fail to Foresee and Contain Catastrophe. Foreign Aff., 99, p.20.

• Yoeli, E., Budescu, D.V., Carrico, A.R., Delmas, M.A., DeShazo, J.R., Ferraro, P.J., Forster, H.A., Kunreuther, H., Larrick, R.P., Lubell, M. and Markowitz, E.M., 2017. Behavioral science tools to strengthen energy & environmental policy. Behavioral Science & Policy, 3(1), pp.68-79.

• Carlsson, F., Gravert, C., Johansson-Stenman, O., & Kurz, V. (2021). The use of green nudges as an environmental policy instrument. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 15(2), 216-237.

• Ostrom, E., 2010. Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change. Global environmental change, 20(4), pp.550-557.

• Adams, M., 2021. Critical psychologies and climate change. Current Opinion in Psychology.

• Horton, R., Beaglehole, R., Bonita, R., Raeburn, J., McKee, M. and Wall, S., 2014. From public to planetary health: a manifesto. The Lancet, 383(9920), p.847.

• Steffen, Will, Katherine Richardson, Johan Rockström, Sarah E. Cornell, Ingo Fetzer, Elena M. Bennett, Reinette Biggs et al. "Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet." Science 347, no. 6223 (2015): 1259855.

Oral examination (80%)

Presentation (20%)

Presentation (20%, 10 minutes) and verbal examination with discussion (80%, 15 minutes) in WT. Students will have to prepare a presentation based on course content and have a discussion in an interview format. They will also submit the slide deck.