• Jesse Wise

  • Theme:Transport, Behaviour and Society
  • Project:Facilitating pro-environmental social transformations through organisational participants: Designing and evaluating behaviour change interventions for scalable transport-demand-side mitigation
  • Supervisor: Lorraine Whitmarsh ,Sam Hampton
  • The Gorgon's Head - Bath University Logo
Photo of Jesse Wise

Bio

Jesse graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2022 with a first-class MA(Hons) in Psychology and Economics. Throughout her degree, Jesse studied the design and testing of interventions to affect behaviour for the public good. Her dissertation explored, in a laboratory setting, how the presentation of information (on voluntary climate actions) to be framed as a loss or a gain could influence cooperation. Her MRes thesis used Twitter data and methods from computational psychology to explore the role of political signalling in opposition to Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.

Upon graduating, Jesse recognised that the UK has made significant steps in reducing carbon emissions through technological advances, but relatively little through demand reduction. At the same time, emissions in the transport sector remain stubbornly high and transport behaviour difficult to change. Hence, she joined AAPS CDT to contribute to reducing demand-side emissions in the transport sector, through behavioural interventions.

FunFacts

  • In my spare time I am an avid rock-climber. I also love board games.
  • To this day, my favourite weekend trip away was spent at the largest board game convention in the world. 100,000 people attended!
  • I spent lockdown working on a farm on the Isle of Arran. Even though I didn't have my license, my boss lent me his quad-bike, which would skip between 2nd and 4th gear and had no breaks.... best commute of my life!!!
  • I grew really quickly as a kid so my knees weren't very strong.... my tap-dance teacher said I looked like bambi dancing on ice
Facilitating pro-environmental social transformations through organisational participants: Designing and evaluating behaviour change interventions for scalable transport-demand-side mitigation

Reaching Net Zero in the timescale required will require enormous behavioural changes. For the UK, the CCC estimates that as much of 62% of emission reductions depend on behaviour change for the bare minimum scenario. Therefore transformative changes are required. Between 20 to 40% of a population needs to adopt a new behaviour before it becomes a social norm, and a tipping point is reached whereby the remaining population rapidly adopts it too (Kaaronen & Strelkovskii, 2020). How can we reach these early adopters? How do we enable them to change their behaviour and speed up this tipping point?

Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (businesses of less than 250 staff) offer a unique opportunity in that they represent 99% of businesses in the EU. Businesses are under increasing security to reduce their scope 3 emissions, which includes their staff commutes. Some already appear to be increasingly open to demand reduction interventions like the Carbon Literacy Program. How can these demand reduction interventions be tailored to the requirements of SMEs? How do these interventions affect the pro-environmental behaviour of employees? Not just in the transport domain but other key areas such as heating choices, material consumption and diets? Do these behavioural changes influence other household members?

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