Essays on the application of behavioural insights to environmental policy[Essais sur l’application des connaissances comportementales aux politiques environnementales]

The works compiled in this thesis are concrete examples of how methods, insights and evidence from behavioural science and economics could enlighten policy makers wishing to understand and reinforce pro-environmentalism. The 1st part is an application of methods and insights from psychology to environmental public policy and is the product of a collaboration with policy makers in the French Parisian region, to tackle two polluting behaviours: littering and household combustion. The 1st chapter shows how laboratory experiments using psychometric methods from vision research could be crucial to inform policy makers on how to maximise the effectiveness of littering interventions, by quantifying the increase in visual salience following a change in the colour of trash bins in an urban setting. The 2nd chapter, using a field experimental setting, shows that while information provision is not enough to change household combustion behaviour, increasing the salience of indoor pollution by combining feedback provision and social comparison is effective in changing behaviour and decreasing indoor air pollution. The 2nd part of this thesis examines the relationship between socioeconomic status and the psychological mechanisms underlying pro-environmentalism and behavioural interventions. The 3rd chapter shows that the positive association between socioeconomic status and pro-environmental attitudes is partially mediated by individual time preferences. Chapter 4 is a short review suggesting that socioeconomic backgrounds could moderate the effectiveness of popular environmental behavioural interventions that leverage on biases likely to be heterogeneous across income groups.