Leveraging Mobile Sensing Technology for Societal Change Towards more Sustainable Behavior

TL;DR

This paper explores how mobile sensing technology can be used to promote societal shifts towards sustainable behaviors by leveraging environmental psychology principles and implementing innovative behavior change strategies.

Contribution

It introduces new ideas for using mobile sensing and psychometric data to foster long-lasting pro-environmental attitudes and societal change.

Findings

Potential of mobile sensing to influence societal attitudes

Proposed strategies for behavior change using mobile data

Framework for evaluating mobile sensing interventions

Abstract

A pro-environmental attitude in the general population is essential to combat climate change. Society as a whole has the power to change economic processes through market demands and to exert pressure on policymakers - both are key social factors that currently undermine the goals of decarbonization. Creating long-lasting, sustainable attitudes is challenging and behavior change technologies do hard to overcome their limitations. Environmental psychology proposes social factors to be relevant, a.o. creating a global identity feeling and widening one's view beyond the own bubble. From our experience in the field of mobile sensing and psychometric data inferences, we see strong potential in mobile sensing technologies to implement the aforementioned goals. We present concrete ideas in this paper, aiming to refine and extend them with the workshop and evaluate them afterward.