Engel, Stefanie

Participatory vision-building (PVB) seems promising in fostering collective action to overcome social dilemmas and attain socially desirable outcomes. By assisting the relevant actors in visualising their desired future and imagining how it would feel to be an active part, PVB can provide the necessary guidance, inspiration and motivation to galvanise collective action. Through a (pre-registered) framed lab-in-the-field economic experiment conducted with 728 farmers from Lake Tota, Colombia, we contribute to assessing whether PVB's causal impacts on collective action go beyond those of other elements of participatory processes that PVB also comprises, such as social interaction, information exchange and coordination around desirable strategies and outcomes. In a ‘lake game’, participants chose between two stylised farming practices over multiple hypothetical growing seasons, impacting their seasonal earnings and the water levels of a hypothetical lake as a shared resource. A subgroup of participants, randomly assigned to a PVB experimental condition, discussed and imagined a desired vision for the future. In this presentation, we discuss the potential of participatory approaches (such as the ‘lake game’ and the PVB treatment used in this study) to foster collective action, e.g. by raising awareness on social dilemmas, impacting relevant emotions such as inspiration, sadness and irritation and nurturing preferences for pro-social and pro-environmental action. We also indicate how future research could test the generalisability of our findings to other contexts, particularly those with heterogeneous interests, delve deeper into the underlying psychological mechanisms and explore the interplay of these aspects with other institutional mechanisms for sustaining collective action.

Addressing pressing social-environmental challenges requires the involvement and connection of interdependent actors with varying perspectives. Inducing perspective-taking can heighten other-regarding considerations and actions in favour of socially desirable outcomes in such situations. By encouraging decision-makers to consider broader perspectives, perspective-taking can foster concern for the well-being or expectations of others and/or for upholding personal and social norms. As a result, perspective-taking can compel prosocial behaviour. In this presentation, we draw on an extensive literature review and behavioural data obtained from fieldwork to explore how perspective-taking alters individuals' assessments of decision situations. Specifically, we examine how perspective-taking induces decision-makers to connect with, appreciate, and feel compelled to address others' needs when feasible and convenient (i.e., helping is within the realm of possibilities and not detrimental to their well-being). Our data comprises the behaviour of 206 farmers in a Peruvian watershed who learned through videos or field trips about the watershed's social and ecological conditions and interactions. A subset of these downstream farmers was asked to consider the perspectives of farmers living and working upstream while undertaking this learning activity.

Market prices often do not reflect the social and environmental externalities resulting from the production of consumption goods, nor may consumers always be aware of them. Certified labels, such as Fairtrade, aim to address these sustainability concerns, but could be hampered by (a) the distance between consumption and production, and (b) a lack of knowledge regarding the local impacts of one’s purchase decisions. This paper addresses these barriers by analysing whether using a 360° Virtual Reality (VR) video, providing information on production impacts in a distant part of the world, increases sustainable consumption behaviour compared to a text-with-picture treatment and a no-information control. We do so in the context of the cocoa-chocolate value chain. We find that consumers are willing to pay a premium for prosocial and environmentally friendly features in chocolate at existing levels of information provision (i.e., no-information control). These preferences for sustainability features are positively related to consumers’ post-treatment feature knowledge and feelings of connection to beneficiaries, and moderated by their interaction. However, VR does not increase the premiums for sustainability features. Rather, VR enhances the willingness to pay for all chocolate types, i.e., with or without sustainability features. In exploring this further, we find that participants who experience immersive VR for the first time offer to pay more for chocolate broadly, as well as for sustainability features. In addition, though VR did not induce increases in the degree of consumers’ connection to sustainability beneficiaries, it led to a positive framing of individuals from the cocoa producing country by the participants. By providing a novel experience and/or conveying general insights into cocoa farmers' lives and production efforts, VR thus has the potential to increase funds for living incomes and sustainable production initiatives.