- Trial lecture starts at 10.15
- Public defence starts at 12.00
The title of the trial lecture is "Beyond Nudges: What psychology can (and can't) do for sustainability"
Assessment committee:
- Professor Ellen Nyhus
- Professor Maureen Schulze, Leuphana University Lüneburg
- Associate Professor Erik Løhre, BI
Supervisors in the doctoral work:
Summary of thesis
Household waste behaviors play a crucial role in the sustainable transformation of society but remain underexplored in behavioral research, especially in multifamily contexts – an oversight that is becoming increasingly problematic given global urbanization trends and population growth.
This dissertation addresses this societally relevant research gap by examining the impact of social norm-based interventions on household waste and recycling behaviors in multi-family dwellings. Two large-scale field studies investigate how IoT-enabled waste chutes (which enable household-level waste tracking) combined with a smartphone-based intervention, can drive meaningful behavior change aligned with sustainability goals. The studies employ a multi-method approach to evaluate both behavioral outcomes (such as increased recycling rates and improved waste sorting) and social outcomes (including strengthened social identity and social capital), offering a comprehensive view of how social norm interventions influence both, individual behaviors and broader social dynamics.
In addition to its empirical contributions, this work develops a conceptual framework that underscores the importance of contextual complexity in behavioral research. By identifying five complexity dimensions – measurement, goal, social, spatiotemporal, and institutional complexity – the framework highlights critical distinctions between waste behaviors and other household consumption domains, as well as between multi-family dwellings and singlefamily dwellings. This approach provides a robust foundation for future studies seeking to capture the real-world dynamics of household waste behaviors. Taken together, this dissertation demonstrates that addressing complex sustainability challenges through rigorous, transdisciplinary research can yield both theoretical advancements and actionable insights.
The findings illustrate that scalable, technology-driven interventions can significantly influence proenvironmental behaviors, while emphasizing the necessity of systematically incorporating social and contextual complexities into behavioral studies. These insights offer valuable guidance for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers and pave the way for future work exploring social norms as a tool for achieving broader societal impact in line with sustainable development targets.
What to do as an online audience member
The disputation is open to the public. To follow the trial lecture and the public defence online, register on Zoom.
We ask online audience members to join no earlier than 10 minutes in advance. After these times, you can leave and rejoin the meeting at any time.
Opponent ex auditorio:
Deadline for the public to pose questions is during the break between the two opponents. Questions ex auditorio can be submitted to disputation chair.
Questions?
- gunvor.guttormsen@uia.no
- Phone
- +47 38 14 16 48