Environmental mandates such as car bans can erode green attitudes, a new study reveals. In a survey of more than 3,300 German residents, many people who said they would be happy to adopt green lifestyle practices on a voluntary basis said they would turn against those actions if they were required.
“Seat belt laws and smoking bans have shown that enforced mandates are essential public health policies,” says study team member Katrin Schmelz, a behavioral economist and psychologist at the Santa Fe Institute. “But we found that mandates can also backfire. So, for example, before you outlaw gas stoves, think about the possible anti-green pushback that might undermine support for other environmental policies.”
Schmelz and her coauthor, Santa Fe Institute professor Samuel Bowles, analyzed data from an online survey that was carefully worded to reveal people’s environmental values, teasing apart their agreement with taking five different climate-friendly actions from their willingness to comply with mandates and their abstract support for a given policy.
The survey also included questions about five COVID-related policies, providing a point of comparison with another high-stakes and politically contentious societal challenge.
For both climate-friendly and COVID-safe actions, most respondents support adopting the behavior if it is voluntary. They agree less if it is mandatory. This reflects a well-known psychological phenomenon known as “crowding out,” or in everyday terms “nuh-uh, you can’t tell me what to do.”
The crowding out effect is 52% stronger for climate policies than for COVID policies, the researchers found. “We were not prepared for finding that the backlash provoked by climate mandates could be much more severe,” Schmelz says.
The usual model of environmental policy making assumes that people’s attitudes and values are fixed, but the new findings suggest that policies themselves can actually shift underlying values. That’s important because in a democracy, policy must enjoy popular support in order to have staying power.
“The top priority for designing politically viable environmental policies…is to find ways that policies can cultivate green values rather than undermining them,” Schmelz says.
The study offers three clues as to how to achieve this. First, mandates that involve less invasive actions, such as taking public transit rather than driving, draw less opposition than those that impinge on privacy or bodily autonomy, such as reducing meat consumption.
In addition, people are less turned off by mandates when they feel the policies are effective. In fact, this belief in effectiveness can actually “crowd-in” agreement with mandated policy. “A key here, as our research shows, is to convince people that the policies in question work,” Schmelz says. “We do not know how to do this yet, but a sustainable planet may depend on our finding out.”
Finally, mandates provoke less backlash when people feel they don’t restrict their freedom – for example, Germans don’t really mind the idea of banning short-haul flights, perhaps because they have access to a great train network.
“Our evidence comes from my native Germany; having lived in the U.S. for 3 years now I wonder if the ‘don’t mess with my freedom’ reaction that we found might be even greater here,” Schmelz says. “I plan to find out.”
Source: Schmelz K. and S. Bowles. “An empirically based dynamic approach to sustainable climate policy design.” Nature Sustainability 2025.
Image: Liudmila Kiermeier/iStock.com.
