Science Spotlight: McCauley Lab

Environmental issues are currently a hot topic, and Professor of Psychology Michelle McCauley has taken the issue to heart through her research in her conservation psychology lab.

For the past decade McCauley has been researching how underlying psychological needs and motivations relate to pro-environmental behavior.

“Many people thought that, if you just give people the science, there will be bliss and people will change their behaviors, but, no, it hasn’t happened,” said McCauley.

“One of the areas that I’m involved with right now is looking at environmental behavior and how we can understand or predict and encourage stronger environmental values,” she said.

In practice, this might look like a meticulous breakdown of how pro-environmental campaigns, like Less Meat Mondays, go about communicating their agendas, and whether or not these initiatives are provoking the desired response.

Yet McCauley notes there is great variability in pro-environmental values and subsequent behaviors, despite what science reveals. The fact is that those who care about the environment are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviors, regardless of others’ opinions.

As McCauley puts it: “I have autonomy, and I own it.”

The concept of autonomy falls under Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which McCauley is using as a lens for her research.

Thesis student Olivia Blahut ’13 explained this concept further.

“Humans operate optimally when they’ve had their needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness met,” said Blahut. “And basically, once those three things are met in your life, then the things that you aspire to do are more intrinsically motivated … [and are] usually things that are a bit more noble.”

In the past four years, students have been working with McCauley in an effort to examine the extent to which personal well-being, as described in SDT, relates to participation in pro-environmental behavior. In particular, McCauley has expressed interest in relatedness, which describes one’s satisfaction in connections to others.

One student’s experiment looked at participant’s choices when provided with social normative information about pro-environmental behavior. This design was much akin to that of market researching, where companies measure the likelihood a person will buy a product once they learn that other people have it.

Interestingly, the experiment found a need for relatedness to be a better predictor of choice, even though it was not part of the manipulation.

This finding has been consistent with student surveys of the community.

“Often people who have need for relatedness, in particular, but also the other psychological needs not met, compensate,” said McCauley. “They end up with more of an extrinsic motivation. So things like status and materialism become a bigger part of a person’s personality. And those are things that correlate negatively with environmental behavior.”

Although her thesis is still in the beginning stages of development, Blahut plans to build on these results by studying the relationship between psychological need satisfaction and willingness to cooperate, particularly for the sake of the common good.

Danielle Baker ’13 is taking a different approach for her thesis, by dealing with “how time spent in nature can improve cognition and mood.”

Both theses address McCauley’s main goals, which deal with the desire to shift behavior to more pro-environmental standards, as well as discover better means to support people’s psychological health needs and build a healthy, engaged community.

“Staying engaged doesn’t just mean you do it when somebody tells you to turn off the light because it’s there, but rather say ‘Oh, that’s a great point. What else can I do?’” said McCauley.

“I can get people to use all this creativity that’s on campus to continue not only here but when they go out into the world. She continued, “There are some important discussions to be had, but you need to have that autonomy and freedom and intelligence to improve our world.”