The Psychology of
Changing Farmer’s Behaviours
Amanda Lucas
Marginal Abatement Cost Curves for UK Agricultural
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Dominic Moran, Michael Macleod, Eileen Wall, Vera Eory, Alistair McVittie, Andrew Barnes, Robert
Rees, Cairistiona F. E. Topp, Andrew Moxey (2010)
WIN WIN!
Journal of Agricultural Economics
Volume 62, Issue 1, pages 93-118, 27 AUG 2010 DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-9552.2010.00268.x
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1477-9552.2010.00268.x/full#f3
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Address two questions
• Why don’t farmer’s take up ‘win-wins’?
• How can we move beyond ‘win-wins’ to accelerate
behavioural change?
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Why don’t farmer’s take up Win Wins?
• Economic Theory
1. Humans make decisions individually
2. Humans are self interested
3. Humans are rational
• If farmers are provided with appropriate information
they will weight up costs and benefits, and make a
rational choice in their own self interest
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Why don’t farmer’s take up Win Wins?
• Economic assumptions are flawed
• Psychological and Evolutionary Evidence
1. Humans are social learners (not individual learners)
2. Humans are inherently cooperative (not self-interested)
3. Human decision making is constrained (not rational)
– Humans do not make individual, rational, economic
decisions to change their behaviour.
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Humans are Social Learners
• What is the crucial difference?
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Humans generate cumulative culture
1. High fidelity preservation
2. Relatively modest capacity
for innovation
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The ‘Ratchet’ Effect
Michael Tomasello
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
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Over-Imitation
Chimps are excellent social
learners – but they don’t
develop cumulative culture
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Humans generate cumulative culture
Chimps will never imitate actions for which they
cannot see the immediate goal
Humans: faithful imitation =
cumulative culture
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Mechanisms of Social Learning
• Learning from others more important to us than
learning for ourselves
• We don’t learn from others randomly
• Adaptive social learning mechanisms:
• Conformity
• Prestige Bias
Boyd & Richerson (1985); Henrich & Broesh (2011) ; Henrich & Gil-White (2001); Laland (2004)
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The Diffusion of Innovations
The good news is that we can harness our
dependence on social learning to
encourage behavioural change
‘The diffusion of innovations is
essentially a social process, in which
subjectively perceived information
about a new idea is communicated
from person to person’
Everett Rogers (2003)
• Originated in studies of Farmers
• Uptake of new behaviours is governed by social contagion
• Characterised by an S-shaped curve
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S-Shaped adoption curve
• Conformity (the more people adopt, the faster the rate of
adoption)
• Prestige (the influence of ‘opinion leaders’)
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Motivating Behavioural Change
• Behaviour change in farmers can be facilitated:
– at a geographical level
– by paying attention to farmers’ social networks
– by targeting individuals and institutions known to
influence farmers’ opinions.
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Why don’t farmer’s take up Win Wins?
• Psychological and Evolutionary Evidence
1. Humans are social learners (not individual learners)
2. Humans are inherently cooperative (not self-interested)
3. Human decision making is ‘bounded’ (not rational)
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Humans are inherently cooperative



Human success as a species was reliant on the development of
strong instincts for cooperation and altruism
Those who did not collaborate may have been ostracised, denied
public goods to which they did not contribute, or be viewed as
unattractive to potential mates
Selection favoured characteristics that facilitated group cohesion,
such as morals for fairness and conformity to group norms.
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‘Shared’ Meaning-Making
• Our reliance on learning from, and cooperating with, others means that
human perception of the world has evolved to become inherently
shared.
• This is readily observable in human infants who show unique abilities
(unparalleled in the animal kingdom) to align themselves with others’
emotions, perceptions and goals.
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‘Shared’ Meaning-Making
We are not just following like sheep.
Rather we derive meaning and value from participating in behaviours
that have a shared meaning amongst members of a cultural group 18
‘Shared’ Meaning-Making
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Cultural Capital
Pierre Bourdieu
French Social Scientist, Anthropologist,
Philosopher
Rob Burton
Agricultural Social Scientist
New Zealand
‘Cultural capital’ refers to valuable accumulated cultural knowledge
 providing status to those that possess it
 exchanged amongst members of a cultural group.
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A ‘good farmer’
 Practices associated with being a ‘good farmer’ are inherent as
‘symbols’ in farmers’ fields.
 These symbols offer farmers a way of judging each others proficiency
based on their shared understanding of what it is to be a ‘good farmer’
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A ‘good farmer’
‘Wherever it is, if I see a field of sheep I always have
to slow down and look at them ... If they look better
than mine we drive on and if they look worse than
mine I feel quite pleased.”
Burton, R. J. (2004). Seeing through the ‘good farmer's’ eyes: towards
developing an understanding of the social symbolic value of
‘productivist’behaviour. Sociologia Ruralis, 44(2), 195-215.
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A ‘good farmer’
‘When I drill at night then sometimes it happens that I
fail to drill straight lines. It annoys me for the rest of
the year....Of course there are farmers who can’t
do straight tramlines! ... and you get comments like
‘you’ve been to the fair last night’ or something like
that’
Burton, R. J., Kuczera, C., & Schwarz, G. (2008). Exploring Farmers'
Cultural Resistance to Voluntary Agri‐environmental Schemes.
Sociologia Ruralis, 48(1), 16-37.
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A ‘good farmer’
• F: You would put your best beasts at the roadside
fields, yes, definitely!
• I: Why would you do that?
• F: Because people would notice them ... I would
say 75–80 per cent of farmers would admit that
they put the best ones to the roadside.
Burton, R. J., Kuczera, C., & Schwarz, G. (2008). Exploring Farmers'
Cultural Resistance to Voluntary Agri‐environmental Schemes.
Sociologia Ruralis, 48(1), 16-37.
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A ‘good farmer’
‘I think the most satisfaction I have of being a farmer
is when I go by my fields to see them all look neat
and tidy. And then go along the road and think
“God, I couldn’t live like that” when I see another
farmer’s yard with a lot of rubbish in it. And they call
themselves the same as I call myself, a ‘farmer’.’
Burton, R. J. (2004). Seeing through the ‘good farmer's’ eyes: towards
developing an understanding of the social symbolic value of
‘productivist’behaviour. Sociologia Ruralis, 44(2), 195-215.
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A ‘good farmer’
 CAP greening reforms are action based, prescriptive and at often at
odds with symbols of ‘good farming’
 Paying farmers for environmental results (rather than actions) would
promote innovation and new expertise. New cultural capital to exchange
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with others, creating a new shared repertoire of behaviours
New Cultural Capital
 New visual symbols of good practice,
however, would take much time to emerge
 Farmers observing symbols of good
farming on others’ land supported through
use of flags or billboards displaying carbon
footprint certification in roadside fields
 Enabling farmers to display their ‘good
environmental farmer’ credentials to their
peers, and indeed the public
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Flag in a field
Carbon
Accredited
Farm
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New ‘good farming’ symbols
‘New Holland and Adam Henson: Flying the flag for Britain’
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Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Values
• Intrinsic Values:
• Community
• Cooperation
• Action for the public good
• Extrinsic Values
• Individualism
• Money
• Status
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Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Values
• Growing literature showing that financial incentives
diminish human capacity for cooperation and
altruism and accentuate tendencies towards
selfishness and independence.
Evans, L., Maio, G. R., Corner, A., Hodgetts, C. J., Ahmed, S., & Hahn, U. (2012). Self-interest
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and pro-environmental behaviour. Nature Climate Change, 3, 122-125
Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Values
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Framing
‘Improve farm efficiency’
‘Get paid for keeping warm’
May inhibit farmer’s willingness to take action for the public good
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Legacy
Prepare your
farm for a
carbon
conscious
future
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Adaptation
‘For many 2012’s extreme weather will stick
in the memory’ Farmer’s weekly
Protect your farm from the changing weather’
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Why don’t farmer’s take up Win Wins?
• Psychological and Evolutionary Evidence
1. Humans are social learners (not individual learners)
2. Humans are inherently cooperative (not self-interested)
3. Human decision making is ‘bounded’ (not rational)
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Humans are not rational
 Our cognition is governed by
predictable heuristics and biases
that lead to maladaptive decision
making.
 Even when we want to change our
behaviour, these heuristics operate
to thwart achievement of our goals
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Heuristics and Biases
•
•
•
•
Hyperbolic Discounting
Prospect Theory
Status Quo Bias
Availability Bias
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Making a public commitment
Community-Based Social Marketing
= behavioural economics
+ diffusion of innovations
 Making a public commitment prevents us from reverting
to our old habits and routines
 It also makes the behaviour visible in order to facilitate
social learning and to encourage a new shared practice
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Flag in a field
Legacy
Farm
Carbon
Carbon
Accredited
Accredited
Farm
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Lobbying the media and institutions
• Availability Bias = we value ideas that are readily
brought to mind with a positive association
–
–
–
–
The agricultural press
Trade institutions,
Public Farming Figures
Farming Radio
....will help create a media environment packed with
affirmative climate change messages, raising
farmer’s availability for change.
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Summary
• Humans do not make individual, rational, economic
decisions to change their behaviour.
• Human behaviour is influenced socially by the actions
and beliefs of others in our cultural groups
• It is often not self-serving, but altruistic and
cooperative.
• Indeed human ‘meaning making’ is inherently shared
and culturally embedded
• Constraints in human cognition thwart us in achieving
rational profit maximisation, even if we did seek it.
• All of these facets can be harnessed to facilitate
behavioural change
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