The NUSSRoSE project

I've copied  below the Project Summary that I, Woodrow Wilson Center (my new home for a while) and Columbia U/Earth Institute proposed to NSF a few weeks ago.  Excuse the bureaucratic NSF title -- I prefer to call it the Francella Project after a woman in my evening spinning class who used behavior modification to get rid of 175 pounds (and now teaches spinning along with practicing law).   I am currently re-writing the larger proposal so it can be submitted to foundations.  We are seeing a lot of enthusiasm for this idea.

Project Summary

Climate change offers a unique challenge for human problem solving.  Evolution has equipped us well to address immediate threats to life or limb but not for slow moving abstract risks like climate change, a statistical phenomenon understood only through the methods of climate science with large uncertainties about the pace or extent of change and its consequences. Polling shows that even the US public persuaded by the science does not give this issue the priority that rational analysis would suggest in light of the severity and irreversibility of potential consequences.

Significant action is required now to contain a threat that may not fully manifest itself in present lifetimes. It is time for basic re-thinking about how these issues are discussed, how risk management options are evaluated and presented, and how behavioral change is motivated. An increasingly rich body of research in behavioral and social sciences from cognitive and social psychology, anthropology, behavioral economics, to sociology is examining human cognition and motivation and gaining insights about decision processes.  This research may hold the key to building constituencies for addressing climate change and for motivating behavioral change, but its results are largely confined to academic literature, in stylized language not always accessible to NGOs, businesses, policy makers and others that would benefit from its insights. Within the academic community, the research remains in disciplinary silos and academic papers as well and is rarely applied to concrete problems in field settings.

The proposed RCN—Network for Utilization of Social Science Research on Sustainability and Energy (NUSSRoSE)—will help integrate research on human perception, reaction, and response to environmental risks across social science disciplines and make such insights accessible to practitioners, giving social sciences beyond economics a role in the development of policy options, programs for behavioral change, and in public communication about climate change, energy consumption, and other sustainability challenges.

The network will act as a market maker between the supply and demand side for social science research, using physical and virtual meetings and a software platform to create a forum for the integration and sharing of theory, results, and experience across disciplinary lines, to stimulate robust cross-fertilization, additional research, cross-training of postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty.  The goal is to promote a trans-disciplinary academic sub-specialty that will raise the status and reach of individual efforts and create awareness for the need of institutional support and attracting more creative minds into the effort, including young researchers.

Equally important, NUSSRoSE will find systematic ways to connect research to application, by integrating into this platform approach the knowledge and needs of the non-governmental world and to some extent government policy-makers. The NUSSRoSE Steering Committee consists of Geoffrey Dabelko (Director of the Environmental Change and Security Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars), Tom Dietz (sociologist from Michigan State University), Michael Dorsey (anthropologist, Dartmouth), Robert Fri (MBA, Resources for the Future, EPA, industry experience), Nancy Jackson (environmental history, not for profit sector, Kansas), Barry Rabe (Political Science, U of Michigan), in addition to Ruth Greenspan Bell (law, Wilson Center) and Elke Weber (psychology, Columbia University).

Intellectual Merits. Individual contributing social and behavioral sciences will be able to test, expand, and qualify their theories of human cognition and action by examining their interactions with those of neighboring disciplines.  Synergistic interactions can be promoted in the design of interventions that use complementary cognitive and motivational tools to help decision makers overcome myopic response tendencies, and potential negative interactions (“crowding out”) will be recognized. Such interdisciplinary examination of existing theories and mechanisms has the potential to lead to a transformative integrated social science of human behavior.

Broader Impacts. This integrated social science of human behavior can be put to use and test in the design of novel and more effective ways of motivating, implementing, and maintaining behavior change at the individual, organizational, and political level that climate change and related sustainability challenges will require.