Seven Questions with... Sabine Topf

This week we meet Sabine, a third-year PhD student in Experimental Psychology and part of the Psychology and Language Sciences Green Impact Team. Here, she chats to us about all things sustainability and building her own house, which has the perfect bedroom view to the stars. What are you studying, why are you interested in this subject and what do you plan to do in the future?. I'm in my third year of a PhD in Psychology. My starting point was the question why do people behave pro-environmentally when whatever one person does will not make a substantial difference? What I now look at are behavioural traces, that is, evidence of behaviour in the shared environment without direct observation of that behaviour. For example, if you see evidence that other people behave pro-environmentally (such as bikes outside the lecture theatre, reusable bottles on desks, correctly recycled items), are you more likely to engage in the behaviour as well? My tentative answer is that behaviours can spread via these traces and therefore little things can indeed have a tangible impact - even though we may not be aware of our own influence on others. I don't really have a plan beyond my PhD.