Natural resource managers are regularly faced with the challenge of trying to influence people to behave in certain ways in order to meet certain conservation objectives. While approaches such as regulations and law enforcement can be quite successful, they are not always the most desirable, effective and efficient means of influencing behaviour. For this reason, managers are supplementing more restrictive and authoritative approaches with less intrusive behavioural influence tools that aim to influence people’s decision-making processes. A persuasive communication intervention informed by the social sciences is one such tool. Instead of relying on intuition or other arbitrary sources of information, persuasive communication relies on theoretical frameworks grounded in social psychology to identify and understand the underlying reasons why people decide to do certain behaviours.
Understanding these reasons means it is more likely that a persuasive communication intervention will be successful in bringing about a desired behaviour change. However, natural resource managers often have a lack of exposure to these theoretical frameworks for analysing behaviour, making decisions with respect to communication efforts more challenging
