Seminar: "The roles of motivation, social norms, and habits for fostering long-term adoption of agroforestry among Indigenous landholders in Yucatán, Mexico"

Sophia Winkler-Schor will be visiting us to give a seminar. It will be followed by an informal lunch at 13 hours with those who attend the seminar.

Seminar: "The roles of motivation, social norms, and habits for fostering long-term adoption of agroforestry among Indigenous landholders in Yucatán, Mexico"

Speaker: Sophia Winkler-Schor, University of Wisconsin USA
 

Date: Wednesday, June 12th 2024
Time: 12pm
Venue: Room Z/032
 

Mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss hinges on changing human behavior. Financial incentives like conditional cash transfers or payments for ecosystem services are popular policies because they promote widespread and quick adoption of new behaviors and provide economic support to help landholders transition to sustainable land use practices. However, social psychologists warn that extrinsic motivational strategies (e.g., financial incentives) are not durable over the long run, and participants tend to revert to past behaviors once payments end. Intrinsic motivational strategies (e.g., fostering genuine interest, enjoyment) are heralded as superior alternatives for ensuring long-term adoption, but they have their own limitations: intrinsic motivation is slow to develop and difficult to incentivize. Leveraging insights from psychology can help foster persistence among participants who are predominantly extrinsically motivated. Our study focused on Mexico’s flagship agroforestry program, Sembrando Vida, which pays landholders for 5-6 years to establish agroforestry parcels to help reduce rural poverty and mitigate environmental degradation. We evaluated the effects of three psychological factors—motivation, social norms, and habits—on participants’ intentions to continue agroforestry practices post-incentive. We used a mixed-methods approach that included surveying 261 program participants in Yucatan in 2023. We found that gender and social norms moderated the relationship between motivations and persist intentions. While extrinsic and intrinsic motivation equally influenced men’s intentions to persist, only intrinsic motivation influenced women’s persistence (p = .1, ηp² = .01). Moreover, positive social norms (e.g., the perception that most peers were participating out of interest or to protect nature) significantly enhanced extrinsically motivated participants’ intentions to persist post-payments (p = .03; ηp² = .02). Results for habits were not statistically significant. Overall, these results underline the importance of incorporating psychological insights into financial incentive programs. Program designs that leverage “motivational mixes” of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation as well as social norms can strengthen long-term engagement in conservation behaviors.

Sophia Winkler-Schor is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin in the USA and Fulbright-Hays Scholar. Her research is focused on fostering the adoption of biodiversity conservation practices in-forest-dependent communities across Latin America. Sophia’s doctoral research looks at how to leverage insights from psychology to improve the design of short-term financial incentive programs to increase long-term adoption of conservation practices among Indigenous landholders in Mexico. Sophia’s research uses a mixed-methods approach drawing predominantly from the conservation social sciences and social psychology. Sophia received her bachelor’s degrees in environmental science (BSc) and environmental studies (BA) with a focus on Latin American Studies from the University of Washington (USA) and a bi-national Master of International Nature Conservation at the Universität Göttingen and Lincoln University (New Zealand).