Abstract
This article provides an overview of possible beneficial interactions between the demands stemming from global climate change and the skill set of human factors/ergonomics professionals. Four levels of interaction are distinguished: enterprise level, consumer product level, individual level, and national/international advocacy.
Given that human behavior is a factor in addressing climate change, HF/E is well positioned to weigh in.
We are living in an unsustainable way. Our assumptions about the consequences of our actions must be changed. When we lived in a world where humans were only a minor part of the ecology, we could happily assume that our actions would lead to a future very much like the past. This unfortunately is no longer true (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007). Particularly in the context of climate change and global warming (or “global weirding,” as Friedman, 2006, put it) the Earth’s thermal future looks quite different from its past.
A good illustration of the problems ahead is Wackernagel et al.’s (2002) casting of the issue as one of global overshoot. We have exactly one Earth to sustain life, but we use more Earth equivalents each year, and use is accelerating. We overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity somewhere in the 1970s and continue with our growth. These authors see overshoot as inevitable given the following three factors: continued growth, a fixed resource limit, and a delay or mistake in perception of trouble or response to that trouble. Whereas the first two conditions are global in nature, the third condition is behavioral and hence legitimately a concern of human factors/ergonomics (HF/E).
Perhaps the most useful perspective on global climate change is that of the “tragedy of the commons.” Any limited but shared resource (the commons) tends to elicit a selfish individual response, which collectively leads to overuse (the tragedy). “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” (Hardin, 1968, p. 1244). An economist – for example, Stiglitz (2006) – sees the freedom of the commons as a function of the true societal costs remaining external to the individual. To quote an HF/E professional, Nickerson (1992a) stated, “Unfortunately, as human beings, we seem to share a fairly strong bias to situations that benefit us personally at the expense of others” (p. 340). From the viewpoint of HF/E science, the major implication is that the issue is one of behavioral change, something that we should be able to weigh in on professionally.
Potential HF/E Responses and Issues
If the tragedy of the commons seems inevitable, have we any chance to achieve sustainability? From the economist’s viewpoint, the answer is to internalize the costs of our actions so that the true costs to society are borne partially by each individual. Societies do manage to balance individual self-interest with societal good. We have socially agreed laws (at least in most societies) whereby people trade some apparent freedom of action for collective well-being (e.g., laws against murder, robbery, drunk driving). As Hardin (1968) stated, internalization is a matter of trading some freedoms for others: “Every new enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of somebody’s personal liberty. . . . It is the newly proposed infringements that we vigorously oppose; cries of ‘rights’ and ‘freedom’ fill the air. But what does ‘freedom’ mean?” (p. 1248).
Even at the global level, we have managed some laws that mitigate the road to ruin. For example, nations have collectively agreed to stop the production and use of many stratospheric-ozone-damaging chemicals. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 has stabilized ozone depletion and is slowly reversing it (http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/). The world has phased out 98% of ozone-depleting substances (http://ozone.unep.org). This example does show that long-term and widespread actions are needed by the international community, but it also provides proof that optimism is not entirely unfounded. At the national level, the laws of many societies have changed behavior, reducing smoking and at least some forms of discrimination, both of which have previously “benefited” some individuals at the expense of society.
HF/E professionals have been pointing out that there is a need for our concerted action to help change the direction of our global trajectory. Nickerson’s (1992b) paper and book (Nickerson, 1992a) concentrated on actions that we as professionals can pursue; for example, increasing efficiency of energy use or designing for recycling. The series of papers by Moray (1993, 1995, 2000) provided a call to action emphasizing behavioral change within a systems approach. More recently, Hancock and Drury (2011) raised the issue of how we need to respond ethically. Last year, a complete issue of Ergonomics (Haslam & Waterson, 2013) was devoted to HF/E and sustainability. However, the editors of that special issue found, on the basis of the 70 papers submitted and 17 accepted, that “ergonomics activity on this front appears limited and tentative” (Haslam & Waterson, 2013, p. 347), so all is not yet well.
One major difference in our traditional HF/E approach is that we tend to regard the operator in a system as prone to errors, whereas much of the global climate change debate seems to revolve around willful human folly. A basic tenet of HF/E (Drury, 2003) is that people in the system are trying to do a good job but are prevented from doing so by poor interfaces, incomplete understanding of system behavior, poor training, and inadequate environment (all the usual HF/E culprits).
When we read of companies or politicians behaving like unruly children, we see ourselves as powerless. Here we need to promote policies at the national and international levels that will avoid the tragedy of the commons while recognizing that such behavior is precisely what appears to motivate business, labor, and political leaders. If a country refuses to endorse an international policy that makes scientific sense because some other country will not take action, “tragedy of the commons” seems like a kind way of describing a selfish action that would otherwise be labeled as human folly. Another obstacle is that we are long on techniques and technical solutions but miserably short on philosophy and applied ethics (Moray, 1995).
Practical HF/E Steps
Models for change are all very well, but what do HF/E professionals do tomorrow or next year? Earlier, I proposed that three levels of HF/E intervention would be required for making any contribution to sustainability (Drury, 2008a):
At the level of work in an enterprise, where most HF/E is implemented
At the level of responsibility outside the workplace, a traditional topic in HF/E via consumer product design and use
At the level of our own activities as individuals and as members of a world society.
Six years later, I would split the last level to emphasize the need to take action at a governmental level:
3a. At the level of our own activities as individuals
3b. At the level of advocates for change at all levels of society.
Also, I would emphasize that at the enterprise level, we need to work specifically to influence corporate policy as much as the workplace or even the sociotechnical system.
So what have we done so far? There is a recent but growing literature on evaluating HF/E and other technological interventions in human terms. Not all of these human-centered evaluations have come from the HF/E community, suggesting that we should perhaps take a stronger leadership role. The following sections provide brief examples of what we have done in this domain.
Enterprise level
One of the main HF/E advocates for corporate sustainability has been Klaus Zink (e.g., Zink & Fischer, 2013). Zink and Fischer (2013) discussed organizational and theoretical approaches to sustainability and ergonomics, providing a sociotechnical framework for corporate sustainability, although no examples of successful direct impact of HF/E are given. Others have advocated for a broader approach, including human rights. For example, Harris (2011) provided cogent arguments why it is in the best interests of an enterprise to practice, and brand itself with, corporate social responsibility.
At a more obviously HF/E-influenced level of the enterprise, Lee and Kang (2013) studied the managers of residential living facilities to determine how they adopted new energy-efficient strategies of building design, finding support for a diffusion-of-innovation model. However, the main determinants of design “seem to be conservative and plan work activities within a given budget” (Lee & Kang, 2013, p. 489), suggesting existing strong habits of work that would need to be overcome for large-scale change to ensue. Also on the topic of green building design, a note of caution is provided by Hedge and Dorsey (2013), who examined several buildings that had been designed to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards of green design. They concluded that although these buildings generally offered a good ergonomic environment, there were still important ergonomics design factors that needed to be addressed.
Of course, green building design is just one aspect of the interaction between HF/E and sustainability. A different concrete example, although not energy usage per se, is the series of papers in Applied Ergonomics Volume 41 – for example, Engkvist (2010) – on the systems design of a waste-recycling plant. These examples of sustainability at the enterprise level provide evidence that HF/E professionals are engaged in such issues, but there is no consensus on models relating individual behavior directly to HF/E factors known to influence behavior, such as the list in Gardner and Stern (1996). That list included seven points, from initial attention getting and making normally imperceptible information visible, through providing relevant information close in space and time to the behavior, to participation and the characteristics of effective feedback (Gardner & Stern, 1996).
Consumer product design and use
The implications of sustainability in the home have produced many studies. Earlier research summarized by Fleming, Hilliard, and Jamieson (2008) has shown that interventions, such as rapid feedback (Sauer, Schmeink, & Wastell, 2007) and frequent feedback (Abrahamse, Steg, Vlek, & Rothengatter, 2005), average only about 10% to 15% energy reduction. A recent study by Kobus, Mugge, and Schoormans (2013) showed that people could interact with a smart washing machine and a computer program that predicted solar power availability to choose better times for using the machine. Based on semistructured interviews, they concluded that the keys to success were a good interface; appropriate contextual factors, such as household conditions; and environmental and financial motivation to develop new habits.
Peffer, Perry, Pritoni, Aragon, and Meier (2013) examined programmable thermostats to help determine why they had caused so little energy saving. They concluded that the interfaces of all the programmable thermostats tested were not helping users to perform the required tasks. It is clear that more HF/E work is needed in this area: As Hedge and Dorsey (2013) noted for green buildings, important HF/E issues need to be addressed in consumer product design.
Individual level
What we can do as HF/E professionals is to practice sustainability in our daily lives and our societal interactions. Our own homes should be well insulated, be able to use sustainable power sources, have efficient recycling systems, and allow walking and bicycling as alternatives to driving. Even if our homes provide these features, we still have to use them, making our own behavioral changes. The organizations we interact with (clubs, churches, restaurants, etc.) should be places where we can advocate for change. Doing so is much easier if we are indeed utilizing these strategies in our own lives.
The work of Harvey, Thorpe, and Fairchild (2013) on eco-driving may provide clues about the barriers to the behavior changes needed to enhance sustainability. In surveys and focus groups of drivers, respondents were generally concerned about environmental sustainability but failed to act on these concerns. The main determinants of their behavior were convenience and time saving rather than energy attitudes or even costs. Clearly, we have a difficult task ahead of us to change behavior in the wider context of what matters in peoples’ lives.
Advocates for change
At the national and international levels, the popular book Nudge, by two behavioral economists (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008), looks at encouraging environmental responsibility through application of the classic HF/E list of human decision characteristics developed by Tversky and Kahneman (1974). Examples cited there, and in Gardner and Stern (1996), are the decision biases of risk misperception, availability of examples, and overconfidence bias. Thaler and Sunstein (2008) showed how some legislation has led directly to environmental benefits, even when not intended to do so (chapter 12). HF/E professionals tend to avoid political action, although many of us have testified before our legislative bodies (e.g., Drury, 2008b; Moray, 2000) on these and other issues. We can, and should, take such initiatives when they are offered, and we should push for consideration when no offer is forthcoming. This is unlikely to be comfortable for us!
Conclusions
This viewpoint on the HF/E response to global climate change has outlined how HF/E professionals can bring their expertise to bear on the problems. Prior work reviewed herein has suggested practical ways of encouraging behavior change through good design at the corporate and product levels, personal living, and advocacy. From even this brief review, it is clear that more work is required to demonstrate conclusively that the skills and knowledge within the HF/E profession can be used to improve the sustainability of our individual and collective behavior. If the tragedy of the commons is not to define our collective future, then the HF/E profession must find its place to contribute effectively.