Interventions for Motivating Residents to Recruit and Coordinate with their Neighbors

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Addressing complex, large-scale, and rapidly growing environmental threats requires that individuals not only engage in pro-environmental behaviors in their own life, but also convince others in their social networks to engage in such behaviors. Motivating individuals to recruit others can increase the scale and speed at which society adopts a pro-environmental behavior. Existing social science research, however, finds that people who are willing to engage in pro-environmental behavior in their own life are often unwilling to reach out to others on behalf of environmental causes. This research project explores how to motivate individuals to recruit and coordinate with others for environmental conservation. The study focuses on the pro-environmental behavior of replacing grass lawns with native plants on residential properties to reduce water use and increase habitat for native species. The research leads to the creation of outreach interventions that could be used by organizations seeking to promote the widespread adoption of a pro-environmental or pro-social behavior.The objective of the study is both highly practical as well as contributory to basic scientific research: whether interventions designed to enhance perceptions of self-efficacy and norms increase individuals' recruitment and coordination behaviors to promote environmental conservation. The research team partners with the City of Fort Collins and Audubon Rockies to apply this objective to enhancing habitat in peri-urban landscapes in the Colorado Front Range through wildscaping practices. Stage 1 of the research uses surveys and interviews with over 500 Colorado residents to test specific hypotheses adapting prior research on normative influence and self-efficacy in other contexts; the results then are used to design interventions motivating recruitment and coordination behaviors for environmental conservation. Stage 2 involves two large-scale field experiments in collaboration with research partners, involving more than 1000 Coloradan residents in low-cost outreach programs with controls to assess causal impacts on individual engagement in recruitment and coordination behavior. The researchers assess effects based not only on perceptual measures but also on indicators, collected by partner organizations, of actual recruitment and coordination behaviors undertaken for lawn replacements.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.