Wednesday 22 July 15:40
- 17:10
Hall: 25 - Room 4 SPT
Chair and Presenter:
Bielig Mona
Co-Chair:
Kacperski Celina
Discussant:
Florian Kutzner
Division: Division 4: Environmental Psychology
Real-world experiments in environmental psychology have become a cornerstone of climate behavior research. They take many forms: field trials introduce interventions in real-world contexts and track actual behaviors (e.g., energy consumption), while other studies leverage and experimentally manipulate real-world circumstances and examine psychological outcomes such as attitudes, perceptions, or acceptance. Across designs, such experiments share the goal of moving beyond lab settings to study how people act within authentic settings, enhancing ecological validity and causal inference. Yet all these approaches face substantial challenges arising from the applied, interdisciplinary, and often unpredictable nature of research in real world contexts.
Our symposium offers a meta-perspective on how such work can enrich psychology, while also addressing the trade-offs and constraints involved. This is relevant for ICAP: a strong real-world focus and application-centered orientation carry important methodological implications. Accordingly, we highlight considerations for design, measurement, partnerships, ethics, and scalability in applied settings.
Mona Bielig will present the Total Experimental Field Trial Error framework, drawing on experience from 12 experimental field trials conducted in energy-transition-focused projects. This lays groundwork for methodological reflections. Jordana Composto will present field experiments with companies in event-management settings in Canada, with a focus on challenges of interdisciplinary grant writing involving non-academic partners. Emily Bringmann will demonstrate a longitudinal study of a collaboration with an initiative that founded hundreds of energy communities in Austria in the last two years, using exposure as an independent variable. She discusses challenges in impact assessment. Josianne Kollmann will report results from an experimental study on optimized configurations for wastewater use in India, highlighting challenges of intercultural fieldwork. Finally, Celina Kacperski will present a study about aligning electric-vehicle charging with renewables via smartboard integration, with a real-world quasi-experimental pre-post design in Belgium, focusing on the methodological challenges of measuring behavior and identifying a suitable control group.
