Author: Lisa Williams

Pride and Guilt: Affective Keys to Sustainability

Lisa Williams

Lisa Williams

By most accounts, the 2015 Paris COP21 Summit in December was a success. Member nations committed to restricting global warming to no more than 2°C, and ideally only 1.5°C, above pre-industrial levels – largely by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. While such nation-level commitment is of utmost import, slowing or curbing the negative effects of climate change will also require people to take actions themselves. A body of recent research highlights how emotions might play a pivotal role in motivating such actions.

Empirical findings point to two specific emotions that might be at the heart of pro-environmental action: pride and guilt. Pride arises from engaging in socially-valued behaviors and reinforces doing them. Guilt, on the other hand, stems from performing socially-sanctioned behaviors and dissuades doing them.

It appears that the simple anticipation of pride or guilt carries the potential to shape pro-environmental behavior. Specifically, anticipated pride from engaging in sustainable behavior and guilt from not doing so promotes intentions to engage in sustainable consumption.1,2 As such, it appears that it would require no more than thinking about the pride one would feel after buying an electric car or the guilt over choosing to not install solar panels to bring about sustainable choices.

There is also promise that pride and guilt can be leveraged to promote sustainability at the group level. In one study, when guilt was elicited by thinking about the in-group’s responsibility for environmental damage, individuals endorsed efforts to redress the damage.3 Pride elicited by thinking about the in-group’s responsibility for environmental protection led individuals to endorse further environmental protection.

We have insight into why pride and guilt have these effects. Once feeling guilty or proud, individuals feel more responsible for their choices,4,5 thus increasing the likelihood that they take it upon themselves to make better choices. More generally, both pride and guilt promote self-control,6 which is key if individuals want to change entrenched past patterns of behavior.

Whether at the individual or group-level, felt in the moment or anticipated in the future, or via responsibility or self-control, it is clear that pride and guilt carry the power to lead us to engage in actions that benefit the environment. If we set personal sustainability targets, pride and guilt will provide the impetus to stick to them.Earth marble

The challenge, then, becomes how to capitalize on pride and guilt to maximize positive environmental behavior. Research in the context of voting behavior suggests that something as simple as the threat of publicizing individuals’ (in)action can be the spark to bring about these socially-oriented emotions, and, in so doing, behavioral change.7 In fact, I’d suggest that pride and guilt may underlie the success of the Neighbourhood Scoreboards Project,8 which investigated the effect of posting energy usage and ranking on the facades of houses in a neighborhood in Sydney, Australia. Simple outcome: a 2.5% drop in energy consumption.

 

References:

1 Onwezen, M. C., Antonides, G., & Bartels, J. (2013). The Norm Activation Model: An exploration of the functions of anticipated pride and guilt in environmental behavior. Journal of Economic Psychology, 39, 141–153.

2 Onwezen, M. C., Bartels, J., & Antonides, G. (2014). The self‐regulatory function of anticipated pride and guilt in a sustainable and healthy consumption context. European Journal of Social Psychology, 44(1), 53–68.

3  Harth, N. S., Leach, C. W., & Kessler, T. (2013). Guilt, anger, and pride about in-group environmental behavior: Different emotions predict distinct intentions. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 34, 18–26.

4 Antonetti, P., & Maklan, S. (2014). Feelings that make a difference: How guilt and pride convince consumers of the effectiveness of sustainable consumption choices. Journal of Business Ethics, 124(1), 117–134.

5 Antonetti, P., & Maklan, S. (2014). Exploring postconsumption guilt and pride in the context of sustainability. Psychology and Marketing, 31(9), 717–735.

6 Hofmann, W., & Fisher, R. R. (2012). How guilt and pride shape subsequent self-control. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3(6), 682–690.

7 Panagopoulos, C. (2010). Affect, social pressure and prosocial motivation: Field experimental evidence of the mobilizing effects of pride, shame and publicizing voting behavior. Political Behavior, 32, 369–386.

8 Vande Moere, A., Tomitsch, M., Hoinkis, M., Johansen, S., & Trefz, E. (2011). Comparative Feedback in the Street: Exposing Residential Energy Consumption on House Facades. Proceedings of 13th IFIP TC13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT ’11), Part I, LNCS 6946, Springer: 470-488.

 

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/70626035@N00/14327910926 licensed via Creative Commons

Emoting online – more than just smileys

Lisa Williams
Lisa Williams

Social media: love it or hate it, it’s here to stay. Speaking of love and hate, a surge of recent research has tackled core questions regarding emotional processes as they play out on social media.

How do we e-communicate our emotional states? Emoticons, and their more graphical cousins emoji, are one popular route. Since the 1980’s, online communicators have been using combinations of punctuation marks to convey sarcasm or a joking tone (e.g., “bugger off!” and “bugger off :-)” certainly convey different meanings). Recently, social psychologist Dacher Keltner teamed up with folks at Pixar to develop a ‘sticker’ set of animated emoji called Finch. Finches were designed to reflect the great variety of emotional experience that simply can’t be captured with semicolons, parentheses, and dashes, including love, sympathy, awe, jealousy, and embarrassment.

Not only are Finch emoji quite popular, analysis of their use presented by Dacher Keltner at the February meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology reveals fascinating trends around the world. Use of the ‘loving’ Finch is highly frequent in Russia and Mediterranean regions; use of the 93571524_43b1e4070f_o‘sympathetic’ Finch is highly frequent in Australia and the Americas. What can emotion communication tell us about a culture? Apparently, quite a bit.

Emotion communication in social media is of course not limited to emoticons and emoji. The words we use also convey how we felt about a past event, currently feel at the moment, or anticipate feeling in the future. Linguistic analysis of Facebook and Twitter posts reveals a great deal about users’ emotions. An intriguing interface at the World Wellbeing Project (www.wwbp.org) allows visitors to track word usage across age groups, including, but not limited to, words with emotional tone. Analyses are based on over 75,000 Facebook users. My own cursory analysis revealed that older users use ‘grateful’ more often and ‘angry’ less often than their younger counterparts. So, the informative nature of emotional e-communication isn’t just cultural – emotive language online varies according to age groups, genders, and personality traits.

It turns out that online emotive language is not just descriptive – it can serve as an indicator of a community’s level of wellbeing. Analysis of 148 million Twitter posts conducted by a team led by Johannes C. Eichstaedt revealed that communities whose residents tweet with angry language are communities high in risk for mortality from atherosclerotic heart disease. In fact, language on Twitter did a better job of predicting cardiac disease mortality than a set of 10 predictors including demographics (e.g., gender), socioeconomic variables (e.g., income), and health risk factors (e.g., smoking).

Complemented by findings that online emotions are ‘contagious,’ it becomes clear that emotional processes on social media are potent. Controversial Facebook experiment aside, the concept that emotions spread through social media networks has received robust empirical support. Analysis of 3.5 million Twitter-like posts from China (on Weibo) 5653817859_3567ac7c8f_orevealed that joy spreads quickly through the network, but is outpaced by anger. In another study conducted on millions of Facebook users, positive posts by one user increased positive posts by that user’s friends at a factor of 1.75 (and decreased negative posts at a factor of 1.80). The factor for one user’s negative posts increasing friends’ negative posts was 1.29 (and 1.26 for decreasing friends’ positive posts). Additional evidence for emotional contagion online comes from Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, who analyzed the viral nature of 7,000 New York Times online articles. Content that angered readers was more likely to be shared than those that saddened readers.

It’s not as dire as it may seem: in that latter study, NYT content that resulted in a sense of awe was also shared widely. Negativity is viral – but so two is positive content – especially that which ‘wows’ us.

This isn’t to say that we are passive users of social media, subject to the emotional whims of others. Indeed, we use social media as a forum for emotion regulation: research by Benjamin K. Johnson and Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick shows that, when in feeling a bit down, individuals seek out downward social comparisons to other social media users that might be worse off (apparently in an effort to feel better about ourselves).

The emotional tenor of online communication reveals a great deal about who we are as people, as cultures, and as humankind. Not only do we influence others, we are also influenced by the emotions we share via social media. Social scientists are just beginning to understand the emotion processes that play out in social media – we are at the exciting forefront of the era of ‘big data’.

Photo credits: https://flic.kr/p/9gzy9 and https://flic.kr/p/9BBi5g

The Science of Saying Thanks

Lisa Williams
Lisa Williams A few months ago, gratitude challenges were all the rage. Social media feeds filled with outward expressions of gratitude, lists of appreciation, and photos of ‘the small things’. The arrival of the holiday season has brought the next generation of social media-driven gratitude outpourings (see Facebook’s Say Thanks Campaign). This time of year, even our face-to-face interactions have a distinctly grateful tone. For many of us, Thanksgiving Day meals have a round-the-table tradition of saying out loud one (or more) things for which we are grateful.

However you might feel about these trends and traditions, science corroborates the benefits of expressing gratitude. Longitudinal, cross-sectional, and experimental data from individuals, couples, and even near-strangers suggests that saying ‘thank you’ serves to foster and strengthen social relations.Please do not reproduce without explicit permission

First, let’s take a look at romantic relationships. Individuals who express gratitude to their partners naturally or who are asked to do so for the purpose of research experience a number of benefits: boosts in relationship satisfaction, more comfort in voicing concerns about the relationship, and increases in perceived strength of that relationship. Some studies have even found benefits of hearing thanks from a partner (but some haven’t). Benefits of expressing gratitude in romantic relationships, whether for the thanker or the thankee, appear to be supported by the oxytocin system, a system related to social bonding in mammals.

In recent research, Monica Bartlett and I tested whether saying thanks might foster nascent relationships – that is, amongst previously unacquainted individuals. The first challenge was to create a situation in the lab where we could manipulate the expression of gratitude in a way that mimicked real life. We devised a cover story about piloting a new mentoring program run by the university. As part of the pilot, participants gave advice as mentors on a writing sample from a high-school student mentee – thus engaging in an action that might prompt gratitude in the mentee.

A week later, participants returned to the lab and received a note purportedly written by the high school mentee. The note either simply acknowledged the advice or also included an expression of gratitude. We next gave participants the opportunity to write a note to their mentee, and hence the chance to further foster the relationship by leaving their contact details. As expected, participants who had received a note expressing gratitude from their mentee were 50% more likely to leave their contact information for the mentee. In other words, expressions of gratitude for simple acts of kindness amongst strangers can kick start the formation of new social relationships.

Yet the question remains: does saying thanks on Facebook or cursorily at the Thanksgiving table also impact relationships? I can’t yet answer that question with empirical evidence. Yet, our study suggests that an expression of gratitude serves as a signal – a signal that conveys interpersonal warmth. It remains to be tested whether that signal is only relevant between a thanker and a thankee, or if overhearing thanks or seeing someone else’s gratitude campaign postings might invoke an affiliative response in us.

To our loved ones, the key appears to be how responsive the expression of gratitude is to the person being thanked. That is, a thank you that conveys understanding, validation, and caring is bound to be effective. When asked to thank one another in a lab setting, romantic partners who believed that their better half’s expression of gratitude was attuned and authentic experienced more improvements in their relationship over the ensuing six months compared to partners receiving less responsive expressions of gratitude. It’s likely that these same processes unfold with expressed gratitude amongst non-romantic familial ties.

So whether you celebrate American Thanksgiving, Canadian Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, St. Nicolas Day, New Year’s, and/or Festivus, it’s a good time of year to reflect on how and to whom you might express gratitude. Chances are, you and your relationships will benefit.

And thank you for reading.

 

photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/swanksalot/10918286064