Changing shopping habits, particularly those that come at a cost to the environment, can be a hard nut to crack. But UNE PhD student Cassandra Sundaraja believes she may be a step closer to understanding the complex thinking behind our supermarket choices.
Cassandra has been investigating the role a psychological approach can play in encouraging healthier decisions for the planet, particularly purchases that address the palm oil crisis.
About 80-90% of palm oil is used for human consumption and approximately half of supermarket products contain palm oil, including convenience foods like biscuits, noodles, chips and chocolate. It is grown in plantations throughout South-East Asia, at the cost of rainforests that help to regulate global temperatures and are home to endangered animals like the orang-utan, Bornean elephant and Sumatran tiger. According to the Palm Oil Action Group, more than 300 football fields of rainforest are burnt every hour to meet the global demand for palm oil. When drained, the underlying peatlands also release copious amounts of greenhouse gases.
After moving from India to Australia, registered psychologist Cassandra was keen to explore whether psychological principles used one-on-one in clinical practice could be applied to this much larger environmental issue.
"In therapy or counselling, we aim to help people to change their patterns of thinking and behaviour in order for them to be emotionally healthy," Cassandra says. "The palm oil situation (or any environmental issue really) requires people to change the way they think and act for the sake of the planet - to consider an issue beyond themselves that is not always at the forefront of their minds."
Initial interviews with 12 conservation scientists, sustainability experts, environmental journalists and activists suggested to Cassandra that avoiding palm oil altogether was impractical for most shoppers, and harmful to the livelihoods of farmers in South-East Asia.
"I wanted to target a behavioural change that people would be likely to adopt and was likely to be effective, and it needed to be something they weren't already doing, so I could design an intervention," Cassandra says.
A subsequent survey identified a potential target behaviour instead - encouraging the purchase of products containing sustainable palm oil.
Next, Cassandra interviewed Australian consumers on what they thought were the barriers and drivers to buying products containing sustainable palm oil, using the capability, opportunity and motivation model drawn from a framework called the 'behaviour change wheel'.
“Capability is the idea that you are able to do something, and can refer to the physical or psychological ability to perform the behaviour, like knowledge and awareness," she says. "Opportunity includes all the factors outside of one’s control, like the physical and social environment, and motivation pertains to the reasons why one does something, for example a sense of responsibility for the environment.
Research targeting individual change in the environmental sphere has a tendency to focus a lot on motivation and the responsibility of the individual consumer. But if capability and opportunity are lacking, it makes it very difficult for a consumer to change.
An online survey of 781 Australians established that people lacked awareness of the impact of palm oil production and were not sure where they could find sustainable products. This led Cassandra to believe that better education and helping people to easily find products with sustainable palm oil would encourage them to engage with the issue.
Intervention goes online
COVID social distancing requirements put paid to Cassandra's original intention of conducting "kitchen table conversations" over a meal to facilitate discussions about the issue, offer social support and encouragement. So she moved her intervention online.
"We didn't know where the pandemic was going to take us at that point and I was on an international scholarship, on a student visa, and it didn't seem wise to sit on the study and wait it out," she says.
Instead, Cassandra developed an interactive website narrated by a baby orang-utan and tiger cub, designed to impart knowledge about the palm oil issue and equip people with shopping guides to help them to find sustainable palm oil products.
She exposed one group to this website, another to a Chester Zoo video advocating a 'Sustainable Palm Oil Challenge', and a third to an interactive website on a completely different subject. Participants were then asked how likely they would be to purchase sustainable palm oil, and were assessed after two weeks to see if there was an actual change in their behaviour.
While her website did improve knowledge and awareness, it didn't help people to think that they could easily find sustainable products as much as Cassandra had expected. Out of the total study group of 628 people, those exposed to the designed intervention expressed intentions to change their shopping behaviour - but it failed to translate into action.
Again, it's possible that COVID intervened. "Peoples' shopping habits changed during the height of the pandemic: they wanted to just duck in and out of supermarkets as quickly as possible, and would have been less likely to spend time checking labels," Cassandra says. "And it seems that providing shopping guides and a list of sustainable brands was not enough to make people feel that it was easy to change their shopping choices."
Individual change not enough
This has led Cassandra to conclude that focusing on individual change to combat entrenched environmental problems is insufficient.
"It needs to be supported by the government or policy changes to make it easier for people to do the right thing," she says. "Perhaps this might be legislation requiring that palm oil and sustainable palm oil products be prominently labelled, or a national procurement policy in support of sustainable palm oil. My research highlights that this has to be a combined effort.
Changes need to be top-down as well as bottom-up.
Still, Cassandra believes that identifying an impactful target behaviour, exploring barriers and drivers to its adoption, and then designing an intervention is an effective strategy that can be applied to a variety of vexing environmental or social issues. She's now writing up her conclusions, having been granted an extension to her scholarship due to the COVID complications.
"I was really grateful for the extension; it has eased the pressure on me," Cassandra says. "My supervisors have been very supportive and understanding throughout. They really helped me to get through the disappointment of not being able to do what I originally wanted to do with the research."
Casual employment for Cassandra and her husband Anoop Alex at UNE has also provided a vital safety net throughout the pandemic. "We have felt very safe to be here and have not once considered leaving Australia," she says.
