Encouraging behavioural change

Frederick LEMARCHAND, socio-anthropologist at the University of Caen, Co-director of the Risks-MRSH/CNRS cluster. Researcher at the Centre for risk and vulnerability study and research (CERREV). Encouraging change, whether it be in a way of life or in behaviour, is nothing new. One might even argue that the advent of the consumer society, the consequences of which today are the destruction of resources and common goods, rests entirely on the possibility of encouraging consumers to adopt the expected behaviour, i.e. to desire the merchandise, both in itself (technical object) and for itself (what another does not have). We might equally state that this enterprise, combining mass production, advertising, the promotion of certain individualist values, resting on a cornucopian conception of the world-that is to say an optimistic vision of the latter offering unlimited resources in order to satisfy equally unlimited needs-has, to a large extent, succeeded… to the detriment of the sustainability of the said resources and the economic system that gave rise to it. There is then a great temptation to turn to social even behavioural psychology in order to build an empirical and simplistic approach to the problem, which most often takes the form of delivering communication messages of a more or less educational and sometimes even childish nature to set citizens on the path to 'best practices'. But this behaviourist and mechanistic-and therefore reductionist-approach has its limits, as sociology has been able to measure in the field of risk management, for example. If, in the majority of cases, these incentive policies do not work at all or to only a limited degree, it is not so much because the populations concerned haven't understood the challenges and cannot change but that they do not want to. Numerous examples make this clear. They include the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa in the face of deeply rooted cultural practices or policies for the prevention of industrial risks at work, from the farmer who refuses to wear protective clothing when spraying pesticides in order to save face in front of his neighbours to the worker who handles dangerous products without gloves in the belief that the skin offers sufficient protection (he will wear gloves once it is damaged). The externalization of many determinisms underlying actions such as the nature of social relations and institutions that transcend the individual, challenges of a symbolic nature or even the existence of social constructs (such as that of productivism) in most cases overwhelm sector policies that aim to produce changes in behaviour, such as the action of using fewer resources (water, energy). Especially in the case of sustainable development, changing practices means that one must not simply question oneself on what is at stake in terms of benefits to be gained but also about what an individual or group of individuals is ready to renounce, or not!