Feb 23, 2024
The last time we spoke to Leong Ching, Vice Provost for Student Life, NUS, and Associate Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, we discussed the "yuck factor" which describes people's visceral aversion to drinking recycled water. Today, we'll be expanding on that topic to look at the rationale behind irrational environmental behaviour in general.
As an institutional economist with graduate degrees in philosophy, information technology and journalism — and with experience as a television and newspaper journalist — Professor Leong uses narratives, perceptions and stories to understand collective public behaviour as well as environmental identities. I began by asking her to give us some background on her work.
Leong Ching: Why do people do things? Why do people behave the way they do? Why do some countries, for example, drink recycled drinking water and other countries just cannot overcome the yuck factor? So that's one instance of a large problem. The problem being, if you want people to behave in a certain way, what can you do?
So there are two sort of things that people think about if it comes to the rules of the game.
There are formal rules like laws, right? Laws make certain acts crimes. And those are hard coded in societies that we live in.
At the same time, there are many informal rules, which are also institutions. Informal rules are sometimes more sustainable, more lasting, more self-directed, more regulated, self-regulated than formal rules. Like norms, beliefs, and even certain biases.
That's what I do. I study institutions, so I'm an institutional economist.
Within that I study how these rules and the making of them fit into large policy ideas. For example, policy theories — why do governments behave the way they behave?
The classic answer is that they want to avoid blame and they want to claim credit. Blame avoidance and credit claiming is one of the mainstays of policy theory.
Now I'm doing some work on human values and how they translate into government actions when things go wrong and when things go right, how does that happen?
You'll see this like the big debate between structure and agency. To what extent is our behaviour determined by the structures of our society? And to what extent is it determined by our own sort of human striving, our own human weaknesses, our own human strengths?
So that's the second thing I do, which is the policy theory part.
And the third thing I explore is the how of things. How do people get influenced by norms? How do people decide what they want to do with certain decisions? My main area of curiosity is the stories we tell ourselves, which is policy narratives, right?
What we talked about the last time was about policy narratives in drinking water. What are the narratives we tell ourselves? And it's not just drinking water, it's everything, right? It's water privatisation. Do you vaccinate yourself? Do you invest in water utilities? Do you reprice your water?
Everything that we do as a collective really depends on the stories we tell ourselves. So that's my third area. That's what I do.
David Austin: With that in mind, and that broad framework, I'd like to limit the discussion a bit to just behaviour as it relates to what's called irrational environmental behaviour.
Can you tell us what we mean by this and what are some of the factors contributing to this? And do these factors differ amongst countries?
Leong Ching: I used the word irrational, but it carries some baggage that I don't think it should carry.
So it could be very reasonable behaviour from a certain perspective. And what I mean by irrationality really, talks about how you think people ought to behave and the way they actually behave. And there is a gap, right? And if you were Dr Spock, you wouldn't behave this way.
But we are not Dr Spocks, we are all like Homer Simpson, right? We are all at some point at the mercy of various impulses. It's not to say it's irrational but it certainly is different from what you would think if you just strip everything to a perfectly fine, balanced calculus.
I'll give you an example. Why do people oppose water privatisation? Why do people refuse to drink recycled drinking water? It's a little bit the same, right? But not really. But I'll give you an example for privatisation. There's a lot of hostility towards it, but in essence privatisation is neither good nor bad. It's really how you regulate the operators. So that's just one instance.
Vaccinations, for example. It's now become such a fraught issue. You're not allowed to say whether it's irrational or not to vaccinate. When I say you're not allowed to say I just meant that it's disrespectful to say a certain thing. The decision whether to inject something into your own body or not is entirely a private decision, except when it's not, and when is it not?
When the decision has significant impact on the people around you who disagree with your decision and there is a case for preserving bodily integrity, right? Your autonomy over what you decide to do for yourself and the public policy decision which is what a whole country or a whole city or a whole community has to do for itself.
But vaccination is a really interesting case. What to you, for example, would be an interesting variable to look at?
What affects people's decision to vaccinate — do you think it's science? Do you think if an overwhelming percentage of evidence is in a certain direction that people will vaccinate? Not really. Or do you think that if it's free that people will vaccinate? Not really either.
What do you think is the main thing that influences people's decision to vaccinate or not in the COVID-19 pandemic? What do you think it is, David?
David Austin: Going back to something you said earlier, I think it's more about the narratives that they're a part of. How do they see themselves fitting into the different narratives that are being told, maybe in their media environment? That would be my first guess, but I don't know. Did I miss the mark?
Leong Ching: David, that's really interesting that you should say that. I'm going to tell you a little bit about that later on. But in this specific instance, I investigated a very narrow thing. It's exactly the rules of the game; I investigated the force of social conformity.
I investigated, to what extent does social conformity influence people to vaccinate?
And I found that it was highly significant that people would agree to vaccinate if there was at least 25 per cent of people in their community who had agreed to vaccinate. We somehow think that if there are people doing it, that we would be willing to do it.
David Austin: Very interesting. Is your research focused more on individual decisions, or policy decisions or international decisions?
How are you looking at that as far as environmental decisions?
Leong Ching: That's a really good question. I'm looking at both, but the investigation is quite different so maybe I'll go back a little and talk about why is it so hard to make good decisions when it comes to the environment.
The environment is a really peculiar thing. We generally make decisions every day. We make thousands of them, right? And some of them are pretty good and some of them are pretty bad. But in relation to the environment, it tends to be pretty bad. It's the kind of thing that the environment is, and I'll give you an example why.
When it comes to the environment, our biases work against us. For example, a long-term discount. When things are further in the future, we discount them. And the environment, of course, used to be very far into the future.
And now, we've seen it, more severe, more extreme weather conditions. We've seen it now, the effects, right? So it's not that long term, but even then, when we think of sea levels rising, when we think of the climate, that the planet is getting hotter, it's in the long term and we tend to discount that.
And that's a really poor basis for making decisions.
The second is collective action. And the environmental problems are almost always collective action problems. Collective action problems are contingent on everybody pulling together and everybody trusting that everybody is pulling together.
It's a real problem of sinking cities. All across the world, cities are sinking and a key reason for that is over extraction of water. Everybody's drilling wells and getting the water, and as a result, the land is sinking. And to stop that, you need everybody to stop. That one guy out of 200,000 stopping, it ain't going to work.
Collective action problem really requires this kind of coordinating mechanism. And when you have a trade-off between private gains and social goods, essentially, that's exactly what you're going to get, right? So that's the second thing.
And the third which answers your question though, do I investigate the behaviour of individuals or the behaviour of governments?
The third is about the behaviour of governments. Why don't governments do more when it comes to the environment? Why don't we regulate more? Why don't we stop certain behaviours more? Why don't we price water correctly? Why don't we just tell people to eat less meat? Why don't we do that? Why don't we stop deforestation? Why don't we have higher prices for carbon emissions?
It's the classic thing, right? You know what to do, you just can't get elected after you've done it. The key variable here is blame and credit. Very hard to get credit. Very easy to get blamed for environmental problems.
Although as I say now, the calculus may be changing because we are seeing so clear, the effects of environmental issues.
David Austin: Okay. There's a lot to unpack there, but let me just ask you simply, what more can be done to encourage better environmental decisions, let's say in Singapore?
Leong Ching: The answer is simple, but doing it so hard, David. If I had a choice, not just in Singapore, I mean I think we've done it in Singapore already, but if there's a chance to do it across Asia, because I think that's such a good way, is to price things properly.
The key thing is to price water properly because really providing good water forms the basis of so much human flourishing and welfare.
In developing countries when you don't have a secure supply of clean water —meaning water that you can drink without getting sick, without risk of cholera, without risk of diarrhoea — it increases your welfare and increases your health by leaps and bounds. And really that's the best form of welfare. The way to do that is to price it properly and then to use the money to invest in water infrastructure.
Again, I say this knowing it's incredibly difficult to do because anytime you raise water prices all across the world, it becomes hugely unpopular. But one of the failures of allocation of environmental capital is a failure of pricing. It's not a failure of economics per se. It's a failure of us really to price things properly. And it's not just water.
I start with water because it's really the clearest point. But it's everything else. Carbon emissions, pollution, everything else. We don't really price things properly. So the first thing is price, right?
And the second and maybe counterintuitively, it's to take time for contested decisions. And what does that mean? It means, sometimes we have a tendency to think that if you make things quick and easy and efficient, that you should make things easy for people. Yeah, sure, most of the time you should, but sometimes you should take time to understand why we make certain decisions and to take time for those decisions that are contested.
I'll give you an example: we have this law called HOTA, and that's the Human Organs Transplants Act. And we changed the Act some years ago to change the default from an opt-in, to an opt-out. Everybody is an organ donor unless they say they don't want to be.
That still preserves autonomy while making it easy for everybody to be an organ donor, which is what you want as a policymaker. But is that necessarily a good thing because you changed the default, it sounds like a classic 101 thing to do, but not really. In something like organ donations, maybe you want some friction, maybe you want it to be discussed. Maybe you want an active discussion, an active self-consent rather than a default consent.
In addition to changing the default, I think also we ought to take time to have the discussion, a public sort of policy discussion each time a new generation comes on why it's a good idea.
I think in a lot of things we maybe ought to have to take time for discussions.
David Austin: How are you thinking of that kind of discussion taking place? Would it be through town halls or just through the media?
What kind of real-world examples do you have in mind for something like that?
Leong Ching: It's a little bit tied to the pricing recommendation, David. I read recently about low-cost carriers and carbon emissions. About how the best way to lower our carbon emissions are actually to do the things that low-cost carriers have been doing on flights: strip down everything. No food. No drinks. Make the seats lighter and everything sparer. That is really a more carbon friendly way to fly, right? But it's not really. Because when you make it cheaper, more people fly and then you have more flights, and then you have more carbon emissions.
What is the real solution to lowering your carbon footprint? It's not what the budget carriers were doing. It's something else. And what is that something else? It's obvious, but it's really difficult to say. The something else is: just stop flying so much.
That's what I mean, how would it play out? It's really to have these conversations and to see what changes we really need to make. And how would we really have a greener and bluer planet?
David Austin: I'd like to jump ahead a little bit because you did talk earlier about the position of governments either seeking credit or avoiding blame.
Could you speak a little bit about that and relate it back to the environmental problem and how that is shaping government decisions?
Leong Ching: I wanted to say a little bit about blame and credit because it's one of the deep intuitions that we have about how governments and how administrators behave. In a way that seeks to accrue credit for their behaviour and to avoid blame. And it's not in any way moralistic or anything like that. It's natural, right? This is how bureaucrats and how political leaders behave.
But really empirically, how do we test that? One of the ways that we sought to test it was to look at the tweets at the time when it was still Twitter and the data was still public, to say, do governments actually try to claim credit when things go right and do they actually try to avoid blame when things go wrong?
And to what extent is this observable in their tweets? And we tested it during the pandemic because it was a long enough time for us to have some variations in this cluster and also things going up, and things going down. We found really interesting that when things were going up, it's no problem. It's true. The hypothesis of credit claiming was there, that the governments and leaders do try to claim credit. When things were going poorly though, it's less clear that they were avoiding blame.
First of all, maybe it's hard to do, and second, maybe it wouldn't be well taken by the population. The members of the public would not like to see their leaders going, “Okay, it's not my fault,” or something like that. So maybe it's less clear when things are not going well that leaders try to avoid blame or at least they might be doing it in such a sophisticated way that it's not obvious from the tweets at least.
That's where I am now and I'm thinking of a good way to investigate this more, this blame and credit. But on the face of it, it seems that the relationship towards things going well and things going badly, it's not so clear between blame and credit.
David Austin: When it comes to these tough environmental decisions you said that we know what to do, it's just it might be impossible to get elected after that, if you were to do it. But are there any other workarounds for that, are there any other overlooked factors that affect policy success when it comes to changing citizens' environmental behaviour?
Leong Ching: That's one interesting thing, David, that I thought I might want to talk about. It's called social resilience. Quite a lot of times when we think about environmental problems, especially when you think of future scenario casting, right? The only way to make yourself ready for the future is to have a population that's highly adaptable because you don't know what's coming up.
And this thing about social resilience is really interesting to me. Because when it comes to the environment, it interacts with something like infrastructural resilience.
I'll give you the example of Singapore. How prepared are Singaporeans for floods and droughts? Because in terms of infrastructure, we've made it such that we hardly ever flood. There's a low percentage of land area which are prone to floods, and even then, it's for short periods of time.
But if it really comes to floods — given the fact that you no longer can predict how large storms can get, or how long the intense rainfall can get — we're going to have floods. How do you prepare people for floods when they've never in their lifetime, experienced a flood? How do you prepare people for droughts?
I think in 2015 we had the longest drought in 150 years. How did Singaporeans react? Actually, we didn't use less water, we used more water during the time. So there's a little bit about social resilience, meaning how we adapt to changes that needs to be worked on and how we've improved our infrastructure may paradoxically work against it.
I don't have a solution. I'm not suggesting that we should all have flood-prone areas or have very poor supply of water. One crazy idea could be to simulate it in some way. To (have) water rationing to simulate something.
We are already doing some of that. In Singapore's case, in Total Defence, we are simulating what it's like to eat emergency rations for example. In relation to environmental scenarios, we could simulate some of it. What is it like to experience drought?
And we could do that by water rationing quite easily.
David Austin: Referring to the resilience, what do you think about the neighbouring countries? Do you have any take on anything interesting about the way they're addressing it?
Leong Ching: I did some interesting work in Kathmandu on social resilience. And it's an interesting finding because, and this shows how hard it is to get the policies right. It's a paradox of social resilience. And we think generally social resilience is a good thing because I just explained how it increases adaptability and sometimes you really need it because you don't know what's coming up.
In the case of Kathmandu, it's a paradox because there's a very high self-perception of resilience in Kathmandu, which is the capital city of Nepal.
The population there had been waiting for water utility for many years, and they had found different ways of coping with it. And as a result, the narrative there was that the people were highly adaptable, they were self-resilient, and they could cope, right?
But that then had an interaction with the motivation of the government to fix the problem. It's a really interesting case which shows you how policy inaction can take place. That for many years that there was quite a high level of inaction, it took decades, really. So this is a really curious case. Why does it take decades to build up the water utility? And it turns out that this self-perception of resilience I wouldn't say it definitively led to, but (it) was certainly a component in quite a lot of policy inaction in that way.
David Austin: If I could ask you now to look ahead for the next five years. Is there anything on the horizon that encourages you, that makes you think that we might be seeing some shifts for the better for the next five years?
Leong Ching: David, to work in the environmental space, you really have to have a strong heart because you've got to shoulder on, in the absence of any positive news.
Aside from my work at the Lee Kuan Yew School, I'm also the Vice Provost of Student Life at NUS. At NUS we have 50,000 students. To answer the question, what gives me hope is the incredible attention that young people are paying to environmental issues and the number of initiatives and bright ideas. Quite a lot of them are willing to make severe adjustments in their own lifestyles. So that to me is the greatest hope, the energy and the attention and the willingness to engage in environmental issues among the young people. That is the greatest shift, and that must be our greatest hope for the next five years and the next 50.
David Austin: That is really encouraging. Thank you so much for joining us.
Leong Ching: Thank you very much, David.