00:03Hi everyone, my name is Kate White and I am Professor of Marketing and Behavioral Science
00:09and Senior Associate Dean Strategy and Responsible Business at the Sautter School of Business,
00:14University of British Columbia. First of all, I just want to say thank you so much for this
00:19recognition. I'm very honored to be included among this fabulous group of people working
00:25towards positive change. I'm a social psychologist by training and I've always been fascinated by
00:32how can we influence behavior for good and so a lot of my research looks at a little bit of
00:36a paradox.
00:38We often see that people have very positive intentions around behavior so they want to act
00:43sustainably, they want to act pro-socially, they want to do things that are good for their own health
00:48and financial well-being. They have these positive intentions but their positive intentions don't
00:54follow suit and become behavior change. And so the question is and what my research is really
01:00interested in is why is this the case and how can we encourage people to close these intention action
01:07gaps? So how can we encourage people to follow through on their very well-meaning intentions?
01:13And so drawing on a systematic literature review, some of my own research looks at a framework for
01:20thinking about how we can encourage people to be more sustainable in their behaviors. So the framework
01:25is called the SHIFT framework and it's an acronym. So S is for social influence. So we are very much
01:32influenced by what other people are doing and what we think other people expect from us. The H stands for
01:38habit formation. So we can think about breaking bad habits and building positive habits in the domain of
01:46sustainability. Individual self talks about how individuals see themselves and what they value and
01:54what's important to them. The F is for feelings and cognition which is all about how can we think about
02:01the interplay between emotions and thoughts and use that to encourage behavior change. And then tangibility
02:08is this idea that if you ask people to be sustainable it's really vague and abstract and hard for people
02:14to wrap their heads around. So if you can make it very tangible and concrete more close to people
02:19they're much more likely to change their behavior to be more sustainable. So in the research that I do
02:25I tend to run experiments and I tend to run these experiments often in field settings so real real world
02:32contexts. So in one example in a field study of households in the city of Calgary we found that a
02:39social norm message so saying hey your neighbors are doing this behavior and the behavior was composting
02:45so your neighbors are composting along with a message that highlighted the collective self or
02:52feeling that the self is a part of a group having a social norm with the collective messaging so
02:58we our us together increased composting rates by 89 percent.
03:04So a lot of my research has looked at encouraging individual consumer behaviors over time I've also
03:10started to think a lot about the bigger picture so in my role as senior associate dean I've been
03:16thinking a lot about well what about the systems the institutions the environments that surround these
03:22behaviors that might make the social good choices either easier to do more natural
03:30more enjoyable or more like or more more likely to happen so this is increasingly shaped some of the
03:37work that I'm doing in my leadership role and so one of the things we try to do is weave
03:42responsible
03:42business and sustainable development goals into our strategy in our curriculum so one way we've done
03:48this it would be asked is we've asked instructors to report on what are they doing in their classes
03:54and how are they bringing responsible business content into what they're teaching the students
03:59another example is that we've created initiatives and centers such as the center for business and
04:05climate solutions and the dylan center for business ethics in order to encourage some of these behaviors
04:11and mindsets that we want to foster and so the goal is at the end of the day that every
04:16student will
04:17start to know not only a little bit about business but also understanding a bit about how business can be
04:22a force for good
04:24so i've come to see changes happening at multiple levels so it's of course i'm a social psychologist so
04:31i'm really interested in people's individual choices and the psychology underlying it but i'm increasingly
04:37noticing the policies the incentives the cultures the institutions that shape what's possible
04:44encourage these behaviors make these things seem normative all these things are also really important
04:51i was asked to end by giving advice to emerging change makers and i'll say two things so the first
04:57is if you want to change individual behaviors as part of the work that you're doing you can start small
05:02and you can build from there so choose one thing to influence at a time um and then focus on
05:10things that
05:10really move the needle in terms of behavior change so make it social show what other people are doing
05:15make it easy seamless habitual to do um connect it to what people value and how they see themselves
05:24speak to both the heart and the head make it feel tangible and close to home
05:30the second is we also need to think about the set of systems policies and institutions that might make
05:36these behaviors more likely to occur um and this seems like a big task we're not all making policies and
05:43institutions but each of us has more influence than we think so our own behaviors are social influence
05:49we can model the change we want to see we can vote we can advocate um we can indicate our
05:56support with
05:57our actions and our wallets there's a lot we can do as individuals to also shape institutions and systems
06:07um to end i'll just say that you don't need a fancy title to do either of these things um
06:12influencing
06:13individuals and and trying to work towards system change we can start you can start where you are you
06:19can start small you can bring others with you small actions add up especially when we work together
06:26so i'll say thank you very much for this honor and have a great day
