Large UK retailers' initiatives to reduce consumers' emissions: a systematic assessment

In the interest of climate change mitigation, policy makers, businesses and non-governmental organisations have devised initiatives designed to reduce in-use emissions whilst, at the same time, the number of energy-consuming products in homes, and household energy consumption, is increasing. Retailers are important because they are at the interface between manufacturers of products and consumers and they supply the vast majority of consumer goods in developed countries like the UK, including energy using products. Large retailers have a consistent history of corporate responsibility reporting and have included plans and actions to influence consumer emissions within them. This paper adapts two frameworks to use them for systematically assessing large retailers’ initiatives aimed at reducing consumers’ carbon emissions. The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) is adapted and used to analyse the strategic scope and coherence of these initiatives in relation to the businesses’ sustainability strategies. The ISM ‘Individual Social Material’ framework is adapted and used to analyse how consumer behaviour change mechanisms are framed by retailers. These frameworks are used to analyse eighteen initiatives designed to reduce consumer emissions from eight of the largest UK retail businesses, identified from publicly available data. The results of the eighteen initiatives analysed show that the vast majority were not well planned nor were they strategically coherent. Secondly, most of these specific initiatives relied solely on providing information to consumers and thus deployed a rather narrow range of consumer behaviour change mechanisms. The research concludes that leaders of retail businesses and policy makers could use the FSSD to ensure processes, and measurements are comprehensive and integrated, in order to increase the materiality and impact of their initiatives to reduce consumer emissions in use. Furthermore, retailers could benefit from exploring different models of behaviour change from the ISM framework in order to access a wider set of tools for transformative system change

Context as foundation for a semantic desktop

Adoption of semantic web technologies and principles presents an opportunity to change the conceptual model of desktop computing. Moving from a traditional position where the desktop is largely tied to a specific computational device, a semantic desktop could exist as a broad, networked space defined relative to the user. In this position paper we argue that personal, computing, and knowledge contexts are the appropriate means by which to define and shape the desktop space, and that collectively they provide the foundation for novel functionality in a semantic desktop

Italian translation and cross cultural comparison with the Childhood Attachment and Relational Trauma Screen (CARTS)

Background: The Childhood Attachment and Relational Trauma Screen (CARTS) is a computer-administered survey designed to assess retrospectively the socio-ecological context in which instances of child abuse may have occurred. To date, studies supporting the validity of the CARTS have only been undertaken in English-speaking North American populations. Validation projects in other countries and cross-cultural comparisons are therefore warranted. Objective: Develop and preliminarily evaluate the psychometric properties of an Italian version of the CARTS on college students and compare such observations to data acquired from Canadian students. Method: Seventy-nine undergraduate students from the University of Padua (Italy) completed an Italian translation of the CARTS as well as measures of childhood experiences, mental health and attachment, responses to which were compared to those obtained in 288 Canadian students who completed the CARTS in English. Results: Internal consistency and convergent validity with the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and Parental Bonding Instrument were found to be acceptable for the Italian translation. Within the Italian sample, correlation analyses suggested that CARTS Mother ratings referring to attachment and abuse were associated with romantic attachment, whereas CARTS Father ratings were significantly correlated to PTSD symptoms and other symptoms of psychopathology-distress. Significant differences between Italian and Canadian students across the relationship types for the CARTS abuse and attachment scales were found, indicating that Italian students rated their mothers and fathers as simultaneously less abusive, but also less as a source of secure attachment. Conclusions: The results of this preliminary study seem to suggest convergent validity of the Italian CARTS and the association between childhood attachment-related experiences and romantic attachment. Cultural variations were identified between Canadian and Italian students in both attachment and abuse scales. Future studies to investigate cross-cultural variations in the relational context of childhood abuse and in order to boost Italian CARTS psychometric features are warranted

The effect of spatial position of calorie information on choice, consumption and attention. ESRI WP615, February 2019

We report a “lab-in-the-field” experiment designed to test the impact of posting calories on menus. The study adds substantially to previous work by testing different spatial arrangements of price and calorie information. Choices were real, not hypothetical, and participants were unaware that their lunch choice was part of a study, even though their eye-movements were being tracked. Participants exposed to calorie information ordered 93 fewer calories (11%) relative to a control group. The impact was strongest when calorie information was presented on menus just to the right of the price, in an equivalent font. The difference in number of calories consumed was greater still. These effects were mediated by knowledge of the amount of calories in the meal, implying that calorie posting led to more informed decision making. There was no impact on enjoyment of the meal. Eye-tracking data suggested that this arrangement altered the decision process such that greater decision weight was given to calorie content

Peacemaking among inconsistent rationalities?

Kacelnik, Schuck-Paim and Pompilio (this volume, p. 377) show that rationality axioms from economics are neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee that animal behavior is biologically adaptive. To illustrate that biological adaptiveness does not imply conformity with the consistency axioms of economics, Kacelnik et al describe animals that sensibly experiment with actions yielding sub-maximum levels of short-term energy intake to monitor their environments for change, leading to apparently intransitive patterns of choice that are nevertheless biologically adaptive. Invalidating the converse claim that economic rationality implies biological adaptiveness is Kacelnik et al’s example of female ruffs that are worse off when they conform to the constant-ratio rule, frequently interpreted as a normative consistency requirement of economic rationality. Together, the two examples demonstrate that axiomatic norms are both unnecessary and insufficient for determining whether a particular behavior is biologically adaptive. Additionally, Kacelnik et al call into question what has been reported in the animal behavior literature as preference reversals, such as risk attitudes among wild rufous hummingbirds or the food-hoarding propensities of grey jays. Kacelnik et al attribute apparent reversals to state-dependent fitness functions modulated by subtle differences in the training phase of animal experiments. For example, animals trained on menus that include a strictly dominated option will tend to have lower accumulated energy reserves and therefore exhibit systematically different patterns of choice––not because they fail to maximize, but because their training has induced systematically different nutritional states. Another possible explanation for preference reversals in animal studies with strictly dominated, or “decoy” options is that menus containing dominated items may convey valid information about future opportunities (Houston and McNamara, 1999). If menus are correlated through time, then menus with inferior options today predict scarcity in the future and imply a distinct optimal course of action, in violation of regularity assumptions that posit invariance with respect to the inclusion of strictly dominated alternatives. In environments with payoff structures that can be modeled as cooperative games, a family’s best response sometimes requires individual family members to behave suboptimally as part of a diversification strategy that reduces the risk of reproductive failure (Hutchinson, 1996). Futhermore, theoretical biologists have documented the fragility of expected fitness maximizing behaviour with respect to the assumption of stable environments. Once the model allows for shocks to the environment’s stochastic structure, simple behavior rules that are suboptimal (in terms of expected fitness) when viewed narrowly from the perspective of unchanging payoffs in a fixed environment may outperform rules based on maximazation within a static small world (Bookstaber and Langsam, 1985).Rationality, rationalities, irrationality, bounded rationality, biology, biological rationality

EU Ecolabel for food and feed products – feasibility study

The environmental impacts of the production and processing of food, feed and drinks make up between 20% and 30% of the total environmental impacts of consumable goods in the EU. In the case of eutrophication (the accumulation of nutrients in water causing a reduction in oxygen availability) they account for as much as 58% of the total impacts. The EU Ecolabel is a voluntary scheme that forms part of overall EU policy to encourage more sustainable consumption and production. To date, the EU Ecolabel scheme has developed criteria for products in the non-food sector. The Regulation that governs the scheme (66/2010) aims to extend the EU Ecolabel into new product categories including food. However, the Regulation stipulates that before extending to the food sector, a feasibility study should be undertaken

Intimate interfaces in action: assessing the usability and subtlety of emg-based motionless gestures

Mobile communication devices, such as mobile phones and networked personal digital assistants (PDAs), allow users to be constantly connected and communicate anywhere and at any time, often resulting in personal and private communication taking place in public spaces. This private -- public contrast can be problematic. As a remedy, we promote intimate interfaces: interfaces that allow subtle and minimal mobile interaction, without disruption of the surrounding environment. In particular, motionless gestures sensed through the electromyographic (EMG) signal have been proposed as a solution to allow subtle input in a mobile context. In this paper we present an expansion of the work on EMG-based motionless gestures including (1) a novel study of their usability in a mobile context for controlling a realistic, multimodal interface and (2) a formal assessment of how noticeable they are to informed observers. Experimental results confirm that subtle gestures can be profitably used within a multimodal interface and that it is difficult for observers to guess when someone is performing a gesture, confirming the hypothesis of subtlety