Promoting Sustainable Lifestyles | #ICEP2019 Environmental Psychology Conference with CUSP

CUSP session on lifestyle transitions at the 2019 International Conference on Environmental Psychology, with Amy Isham and Birgitta Gatersleben
Plymouth University, 4-6 September 2019

‘Protecting People and Planet Through Social and Behavioural Science’ is the theme of this year’s International Conference on Environmental Psychology to be held in Plymouth, with several presentations from CUSP researchers throughout the three day event.

One of the sessions is organised by Amy Isham, and is focusing on the problematic effects of high-consumption lifestyles on both personal and ecological wellbeing (ranging from adverse impacts on mental health to catastrophic climate breakdown). With the title Transitioning away from materialistic lifestyles: Pathways, potentialities, and problems, the workshop aims to uncover ways of promoting more sustainable ways of living. The presented work is based on a range of methodologies including surveys, qualitatively informed experiments, and longitudinal interventions by employing UK-based and international samples.

Across the presentations, the variety of approaches is set to increase the understanding of how situationally altering materialistic values and related levels of self-regulatory strength may be able to facilitate flow experiences; how social norm, commitment, and hypocrisy interventions may influence public acceptance of low-consumption policy options and behavioural intentions; how promoting the pursuit of intrinsic goals to a predisposed materialistic cohort can lead to changes in values plus pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours; and, based on work by CUSP researchers Birgitta Gatersleben, Patrick Elf and Ian Christie, how consumer identities predict the adoption of a range of environmentally relevant consumption behaviours. 

Together, the findings from these papers demonstrate that a variety of tools might be considered to support widespread behaviour change towards a society with low materialistic values and low-consumption lifestyles.