Gerald T. Gardner

Household actions can provide a behavioral wedge to rapidly reduce US carbon emissions

Most climate change policy attention has been addressed to long-term options, such as inducing new, low-carbon energy technologies and creating cap-and-trade regimes for emissions. We use a behavioral approach to examine the reasonably achievable potential for near-term reductions by altered adoption and use of available technologies in US homes and nonbusiness travel. We estimate the plasticity of 17 household action types in 5 behaviorally distinct categories by use of data on the most effective documented interventions that do not involve new regulatory measures. These interventions vary by type of action and typically combine several policy tools and strong social marketing. National implementation could save an estimated 123 million metric tons of carbon per year in year 10, which is 20% of household direct emissions or 7.4% of US national emissions, with little or no reduction in household well-being. The potential of household action deserves increased policy attention. Future analyses of this potential should incorporate behavioral as well as economic and engineering elements.

The Short List: The Most Effective Actions U.S. Households Can Take to Curb Climate Change

(Updated on December 15, 2009) The U.S. Congress, presidential candidates, lobbyists, and political commentators have focused much of their attention lately on the need for policies to limit the United States’ contribution to climate change. They promote and debate cap-and-trade systems, stricter automobile fuel economy standards, investments in renewable energy and “clean coal,” and other policies to change the behavior of energy and manufacturing corporations. The debates presume that these policies will reverberate through the entire economy, and their advocates seem willing to wait—in some cases for decades—for that to happen.

Psychological research and energy policy

Psychologists have recently begun to show interest in energy policy issues and to conduct energy-related research. The authors argue that psychology can provide valuable input to energy policy, but that its contribution has been impeded by psychologists general unfamiliarity with world and national energy systems. A behaviorally oriented analysis of the US energy system is presented, and its implications for psychological research are discussed. The analysis identifies behaviors with major conservation potential that have been little studied by psychologists. It further suggests that subdisciplines which have not attended to energy issues could make major contributions, and that psychologists could move beyond energy-conservation concerns to make important policy contributions in areas affecting energy supply. Finally, emphasis is given to the need to conduct research with an awareness of major long-term trends in national and global energy systems. 52 references, 3 tables.

Effects of federal human subjects regulations on data obtained in environmental stressor research.

A series of experiments on environmental noise was performed over a 3-year period. Those experiments in the series that incorporated federal subjects guidelines concerning informed consent failed to replicate the negative aftereffects of noise found earlier by Glass and Singer. The experiments that were performed before implementation of the federal guidelines, however, successfully replicated the Glass and Singer findings. To clarify this pattern of results, a final experiment was performed on two groups of subjects treated identically except that one group gave informed consent while the other did not. The results confirmed that the subject procedures involving informed consent as defined by the federal guidelines prevent the emergence of negative aftereffects of noise, possibly because these procedures give the subjects what amounts to control over the stressor. Similar phenomena may occur in research on other environmental stressors, such as crowding and electric shock, in which subjects perception of control is a critical variable. Possible techniques for performing future research of this type are discussed.

Design Principles for Carbon Emissions Reduction Programs

Thegoal,articulatedbyPresidentObamain2009,ofreducingU.S. carbon emissions 17% from the 2005 level by 2020 iseminentlyachievablewithoutnewtechnologyorappreciablesacrifice by energy users. However, achieving it will in partrequire sophisticated energy efficiency and conservationprograms.Toovercomeinstitutionalandbehavioralbarriers,these programs will need to implement six principles ofeffectivedesignderivedfrom30yearsofbehavioralandsocialscience research. We focus on the household sector, butbelieveourgeneralconclusionslikelyapplytoothersectorsas well.We recently developed an analysis for the householdsector senergy use in homes and for nonbusiness travel ofwhat we call Reasonably Achievable Emissions Reductions(RAER) (

Parallel perceptual processing and decisional strategies: A reinterpretation of the Shaw and LaBerge effect

A reinterpretation is offered for an effect found by Shaw and LaBerge (1971) in a tachistoscopic detection paradigm. Their Ss were instructed to “scan” the letters of a multiletter stimulus array in a particular sequence. The Ss were more accurate in identifying a target letter if it occurred earlier rather than later in the instructed sequence. Although Shaw and LaBerge interpreted this result as supporting a limited-capacity attentional mechanism, the result is also consistent with a nonattentional parallel processing conception: the payoff incentives used to encourage the correct “scanning sequence” could alter Ss’ postperceptual decisional strategy so as to produce the results obtained. Given the compatibility of a parallel processing conception with the results of Shaw and LaBerge and the results of other detection experiments, the need for postulating a spatial capacity limit or attentional mechanism is questioned.

Parallel perceptual channels at “deep” processing levels

This work extended the tachistoscopic paradigm developed by Shiffrin and Gardner (1972) to experimental tasks necessitating “deep” levels of perceptual processing. The results paralleled the Shiffrin and Gardner findings and supported the view that all perceptual analysis prior to decisional and memorial processing involves independent parallel channels.

Tracking afterimage shrinkage during fading

Using a method in which the S adjusted the distance of a comparison stimulus of fixed size, the size changes of projected afterimages (AIs) were tracked during fading. Foveal Als and extrafoveal Als were found to contract slightly over time, with the foveal Als fading more rapidly and contracting to a greater extent.