PALS student Tobias Nash discusses his documentary on solving environmental issues

Psychology student Tobias Nash from the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences (PALS) talks to Greg Cooper about his upcoming documentary set in the Andes Mountain Range (working title: Denizen, release date: early 2023).

The documentary focuses on what we can learn from the Andean cultures to live more in harmony with our environment. It will explain why our brain biases us towards non-environmental actions and how we can bias ourselves towards more environmental actions. Tobias is currently in his first year of BSc Psychology at UCL. He is also a student sustainability representative in the award winning PALS Green Impact Team.

Why did you want to make this documentary?

Most documentaries seem to focus on the problems, with only a small segment at the end offering a solution. We may leave feeling inspired for the next week, but the trouble is this often doesn’t precipitate into action as we don’t know how to prioritise issues and have not been told how to put the proposed solutions into practice. With countless issues and all of them being described as high-threat, we become overwhelmed with all the things we “must do” to survive.

I want to change this.

I am making a documentary all about solutions with the aim that you will watch it and better understand how you make decisions and how you can bias that process to act more environmentally.

Whilst studying psychology, I started to see that psychology could both explain global issues and offer solutions to them. Ultimately, environmental issues are caused by human action. Our actions are shaped by our thinking. So, if we can use the tools of psychology to transform our thinking, we can change our actions and help solve environmental issues.

How would you describe the common biases towards non-environmental action that we hold?

In this documentary I also want to mitigate the eco-anxiety that all of these lamenting calls to action vying for our attention induce. We are not terrible people (“bad consumers” as the narrative goes), our brains have neurologically adapted to bias us towards non-environmental actions. Fortunately, we can use these adaptations to our advantage and bias ourselves towards more environmental actions.

We are biased towards whatever the convenient option is. This is a neural adaptation that helps us to conserve resources (time, energy, money) which helps us to fulfill our most fundamental desire to survive and thrive. Our linear economy is structured so that non-environmental products such as single-use plastics and fossil fuels are often the most convenient options.

However by understanding our hierarchy of needs and engineering our decision making process by modifying our choices, we can bias ourselves towards currently less convenient, but more environmental options.

What kind of psychological tools are available to us? How will you be highlighting these tools in your documentary?

The desire to conserve resources is one of the fundamental ‘deficiency needs’ within Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. This means that although we may feel passionate about acting environmentally, this ‘self actualisation’ need comes way after fulfilling our need to conserve resources. Therefore, we can bias our choices by making certain options more or less resource-demanding, that is: more or less convenient.

For example, if plastic bags were not offered but hidden and bought at £1 per bag, they would be inconvenient to use and not resource efficient. Subsequently their usage would plummet. At the same time, those taxes could be funnelled into subsidising reusable material bags and offering recycling for worn bags. As this more environmental option is now also more convenient, we would both bias ourselves towards it and contribute to turning our linear economy circular.

Understanding how we make decisions and what our biases are empowers us to engineer our decision making processes and bias ourselves towards environmental actions. As we are neurally adapted to choose the path of least resistance, if you want to change behaviour, you need to play with friction. If you want to stop an action, put obstacles in the way of you performing the action and if you want to encourage an action, remove any barriers. For example, if you want to get into the habit of cycling to work, add barriers to driving (e.g lock your car keys in a safe) and remove barriers to cycling (e.g clothes ready and bike by the door).

Aside from these tools from behavioural psychology, the documentary will highlight the need to eliminate the concept of waste and change our mindset from linear economy to circular economy.

Waste is products that we don’t want anymore. They don’t disappear when ‘throw them away’, we simply move them out of sight where they trap valuable resources in a useless state. Instead, we can break down undesired products into their component raw materials to replenish our finite stores of natural resources.

Professors, researchers and influential figures in sustainable industry will be featured explaining these key concepts and psychological tools, showing us how we can bias ourselves (personally and corporately) towards more environmental actions.

Where can we see your documentary?

It is likely that the documentary will initially be released on YouTube. But discussions with distribution companies are in progress. The goal is to share this knowledge with as many people as possible so that many people can use it to live more environmental lives.

Could you tell us about the #MyNextStep campaign?

We are all on a journey of living more in harmony with our environment. This is a constant process where we need to take step after step to become more environmental than we were before. The #mynextstep campaign, which will be launched on UCL PALS Instagram, is about creating a culture of moving forward and living more in harmony with our environment day by day and step by step. Your commitment to becoming more environmental will create change.

Where can we hear more from you?

I will be posting content and updates on my Instagram @tobiasnashofficial.

Find out more about what Toby and the PALS Green Impact Team are doing