Negabehaviors and Environmental Sustainability
Helping people learn to adopt more pro-social lifestyles usually involves persuading them to take new, beneficial actions. However, certain pro-social goals, such as achieving environmental sustainability, also require people to stop performing harmful actions—people are commonly instructed to drive less, use less electricity, and otherwise reduce the amount of resources they consume and waste they produce. In order to help people adopt this potentially unintuitive form of behavior change, we introduce a theoretical framework for the concept of “negabehaviors.” A negabehavior is a manner of conducting oneself that supplants undesirable actions—that is, the behavior of not performing specific, undesirable actions. Negabehaviors are a variation on the idea of “negawatts” (a unit of energy saved through conservation), and offer a way to view and teach environmental sustainability that focuses on subtractive elements rather than additive ones. In this paper we present a framework and theoretical grounding for understanding negabehaviors. We discuss the relationship between negabehaviors and environmental sustainability, describing potential ways that this concept can be used in formal and informal sustainability education. By placing an emphasis on actions people need to stop taking, we
Joel Ross is a Ph.D. candidate in the Informatics department at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on social computing, ubiquitous systems, and human-computer interaction. He studies the ways that technological systems affect and influence how people interact, and in particular how social and game dynamics can be employed to encourage environmentally preferable behaviors. He also studies participatory culture, massively-distributed forms of work, and user interactions with and through mobile devices. Joel holds an M.S. from UCI and a B.A. in Mathematics and English from Colorado College, where he graduated magna cum laude and with distinction in both majors. 
Bill Tomlinson is an Associate Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and a researcher in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. He studies the fields of environmental informatics, human-computer interaction, multi-agent systems and computer-supported learning. His book Greening through IT (MIT Press, 2010) examines the ways in which information technology can help people think and act on the broad scales of time, space, and complexity necessary for us to address the world's current environmental issues. In addition, he has authored dozens of papers across a range of journals and conferences in computing, the learning sciences, and the law. His work has been reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Wired.com, Scientific American Frontiers, CNN, and the BBC. In 2007, he received an NSF CAREER award, and in 2008 he was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow. He holds an A.B. in Biology from ... 
