From FB post to climate change group.
The Value-Action Gap….the real bane of solving climate change issues……….
The value-action gap is a phenomenon where people act in a way that’s inconsistent with their values.
Examples of value-action gaps include people eating unhealthy food even though they care about their health, people avoiding green energy sources even though they care about the environment, and people buying products that were manufactured in unethical working conditions, even though they care about the workers.
People display value-action gaps because translating values into actions generally requires actively going through a number of steps, and various issues can interfere with this process, including competing values, counter-incentives, and lack of relevant options. Accounting for the value-action gap can be beneficial when it comes to understanding and predicting people’s actions, including your own, and you can estimate future gaps by looking at past ones, and by considering factors such as what process people will have to go through in order to translate a specific value into action.
To reduce value-actions gaps, you should identify and address their causes, and potentially also use general techniques, such as reminding people of their values, making people care more about their values, encouraging and helping people to take action, making it easier to act in a way that’s consistent with relevant values, and making it harder to act in a way that’s inconsistent with relevant values.
