The Fast & The Frugal (Fashion):
Bridging the gap between climate literacy and action
Taking the PSYC 421: Environmental Psychology with Dr. Jiaying Zhao was not something I had planned to do ahead of time. It was a last-minute decision made shortly before the term began, and I couldn’t be more glad that I made it. The course was largely centered around understanding the cognitive, behavioural, and social relationships between human psychology and the environment with half of it dedicated purely to conducting a research project on a topic of our choice. The students of the course partnered with the SEEDS Sustainability Program at UBC to explore a range of project ideas, from food security to enhancing composting behaviours. The project my group and I worked on was geared towards understanding the relationship between climate literacy and sustainable behaviours.
In particular, we examined the factors that contribute to high self-perceived climate literacy of students to investigate whether higher literacy is associated with increased communication of those ideas. A random sample of UBC undergraduates was surveyed about their personal sustainability practices, familiarity with sustainability
as a norm in Canada, sources of information, actual literacy on sustainable clothing consumption, number of conversations held by them around these topics, and self‐perceived literacy. Our results suggested that personal sustainability practices and information from critically selected sources positively predict the participants’ self-perceived climate literacy. We also found that participants who thought they had high climate literacy were more willing to have conversations on the topic. However, those who actually scored high on climate literacy did not think they knew a lot and therefore weren’t inclined to share their thoughts on it!
This points to a gap between how much people think they know and how much they really know. Addressing this is an extremely important step towards curbing the spread of faulty information, and hence encouraging impactful sustainable action.
Read the full research paper below:
This research was conducted by Sahana Babu, Clayton Hutt, Anna Mylvaganam, Samarth Srivastava & Quyanna Whittaker who were all undergraduate students at the Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia (Vancouver Campus). It was run under the supervision of Dr. Zhao & Tara Moreau.
UBC Point Grey (Vancouver) campus sits on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of
the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil- Waututh) Nations.