Faculty & Research - Business & Environment

2020
Working Paper

Nudging the Commute: Using Behaviorally-Informed Interventions to Promote Sustainable Transportation

By: Ashley Whillans, Joseph Sherlock, Jessica Roberts, Shibeal O'Flaherty, Lyndsay Gavin, Holly Dykstra and Michael Daly

Dramatic reductions in carbon emissions must take place immediately. A human-centric method of reducing environmental impacts is to “nudge” people away from single-occupancy vehicles (SOVs) toward more sustainable commuting options. While an abundance of research has...

01 May 2020
In Practice

COVID-19’s Hard Lessons Might Prepare Business for Climate Change

by Danielle Kost

                                       We asked experts from the HBS Business and Environment Initiative how the coronavirus crisis might change the way companies think about sustainability.

Nature Human Behaviour

What We Can Learn from Five Naturalistic Field Experiments that Failed to Shift Commuter Behaviour

By: A.S. Kristal and A.V. Whillans

Across five field experiments with employees of a large organization (n = 68,915), we examined whether standard behavioural interventions (“nudges”) successfully reduced single-occupancy vehicle commutes. In Studies 1 and 2, we sent letters and emails with nudges...

December 24, 2019
Harvard Business Review (website)

Why It's So Hard to Change People's Commuting Behavior

By: Ariella Kristal and A.V. Whillans

Car commuters report higher levels of stress and lower job satisfaction compared to train commuters—in large part because car commuting can involve driving in traffic and navigating tense road situations. Some employers are trying to get involved and reduce car...

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Thinking About Time as Money Decreases Environmental Behavior

By: Ashley V. Whillans and Elizabeth W. Dunn

Surprisingly, Americans are no more likely to engage in environmental behavior today than 20 years ago. A novel explanation for this pattern may lie in the increased tendency to see time as money. Using large-scale survey data, we show that people are less likely to...