Presentation by Leo Lades on “Pro-Environmental Behaviour in Everyday Life”

I (Leo) had the pleasure to give a presentation at the international researcher seminar of the Ferdinant Porsche Fern FH organised by Prof Eva Hofmann. I know Eva from the Managing Committee of IAREP and was delighted that she invited my to present. They uploaded the presentation which you can watch below and also wrote a summary in German available here.

The short presentation blurb was: What economic and psychological factors influence our daily environmentally friendly behavior? How does this behaviour affect our mood? And do people really put their intention to reduce their meat consumption into practice? These and other questions will be examined in detail during the lecture.

One of the aims of this talk was to showcase my favourite survey methodology, the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) as introduced to behavioural science by Kahneman et al. (2004) 20 years ago. I believe that the DRM is under-utilised in behavioural science. For example, one audience question asked whether the method has been used to evaluate behavioural interventions, and I know only of one study which did that (Doyle et al. 2017). I really think there should be more behavioural science work using the method.

The DRM allows us to measure everyday experiences as they occur in real life. It allows us to take a picture or a snapshot of how people live their lives, their behaviours and their feelings. And this can be done efficiently also with rather large samples.

Below are some of my papers in which my co-authors and I used the DRM. You will see that the method can be flexibly applied to many areas.

Lades, L. K., Laffan, K., Daly, M., & Delaney, L. (2020). Daily emotional well‐being during the COVID‐19 pandemic. British journal of health psychology, 25(4), 902-911.

Lades, L. K., Laffan, K., & Weber, T. O. (2021). Do economic preferences predict pro-environmental behaviour?. Ecological Economics, 183, 106977.

Laffan, K., Lades, L. K., & Delaney, L. (2023). Paths that lead astray: Examining the situational predictors of intention-behaviour gaps in meat consumption. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 89, 102045.

Delaney, L., & Lades, L. K. (2017). Present bias and everyday self‐control failures: a day reconstruction study. Journal of behavioral decision making, 30(5), 1157-1167.

Lades, L. K., Barbett, L., Daly, M., & Dombrowski, S. U. (2022). Self-control, goal interference, and the binge-watching experience: An event reconstruction study. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 7, 100220.

Lades, L. K., Martin, L., & Delaney, L. (2022). Informing behavioural policies with data from everyday life. Behavioural Public Policy, 6(2), 172-190.

We are working on some more papers these days as well. I also have a manuscript on my laptop that I have not found a home for. Let me know if you’d like to read the below slightly cheeky application of the DRM:

Title: It Did Not Come Home: Emotional Reactions to Watching the England Football Team Win and Lose at the Euro 2020

Abstract: An important benefit of spectator sport events is that they create emotional experiences. These experiences should be recognized in event evaluations, benefit cost analyses, and policy and management decisions. However, measuring the spectators’ emotional experiences at scale is difficult. Using the experience of England supporters at the Euro 2020, this paper illustrates that the event reconstruction method (ERM) is an effective tool to better understand how people experience watching important sport events. The paper presents data from 448 England supporters on how they felt before, during, and after watching five matches at the Euro 2020, where England’s only loss was in the final. The results from multivariate regression models suggest that the positive emotions (happiness, excitement, relaxation) were experienced stronger during and after the four wins compared to the loss in the final and that the reverse was true for the negative emotions of sadness and anger. The data also suggest that spectators who felt a closer psychological connection to the England team experienced the wins as better and the loss as worse compared to participants with a weaker connection to the team.

Keywords: emotions; happiness; football; soccer; event reconstruction method

Theme by the University of Stirling