‘The world is starting to realise we were the missing link’

On your way to work, when you look around, do you see what you do in Psychology as grounded in that environment?

The place is everything. On some level, it's the social environment around us, on some level, it's the physical. But I've got some lovely diagrams which show what we've known for years – that intention doesn't predict behaviour very well, and one of the reasons for that is because of the structural influences. If your environment makes something difficult, you're not going to do it, even if you want to.

This environment here, in Swansea, and I say this as someone who either runs or cycles every day, does not make active travel very easy. It makes driving very easy. And it's very interesting how that environmental choice architecture is completely perverse to what we all want. When I leave the house in the morning, I've got four options – I can walk, cycle, take the bus or drive.

The only one that is made easy is the most antisocial, dangerous and polluting. If I take the car, it's safe, it's subsidised, I can store my property, I can park for free – I can even just leave it on the double yellow lines here because no one polices it. If I tried to walk or cycle I spent ages at crossings waiting for permission, because we mustn't interrupt the mighty motorist.

So everything is pushing me to make the antisocial choices. It's no wonder everyone drives. No matter how much we try and change people's attitudes, intentions, all that social cognitive stuff, with environments that are hostile, they're not going to change.

It's the same in energy. Everyone would like to use less energy. There is a psychological gap – most people, and we've studied this quite a lot, don't know where their energy goes, so they don't know how to save it. But even then the barriers are structured.

The best thing you can do is have your house insulated and then buy a better heating system. But that's incredibly expensive. There are economic barriers that the government could address, but chooses not to. So yes, I spend a lot of time going out of government or people like that and saying, 'Stop expecting psychologists to wave the magic behaviour change wand, to fix your problems'.

Because the real barriers are structural. You can persuade people they want to do something. But if they have a go and it turns out to be impossible, they're not going to do it.

And you're identifying that, what you call 'motonormativity', in Swansea, where at least you've got a cycleway along the front, you've got eBikes etc…

Yes, but it's those really unnecessary barriers that could be fixed if priorities are different. To cycle home from here, there's a very fast dual carriageway that I have to negotiate, wait a few times, just to get onto the cycle path.

It doesn't have to be that way. We could be building systems that actively encourage active travel. For example, when you press the pedestrian button, the system says, 'Oh, there's an active traveller here, how can I get them across this road as quickly as possible?' Rather than treating them as a problem. We could be building structures to encourage healthy and sustainable behaviour. 

And they do in other countries.

Yes, and there are places in the Netherlands where those crossings would have a rain sensor. If the weather is bad, it would doubly prioritise the active traveller, which makes so much sense.

There's a bit on my cycle commute that drives me mad because there's a choice of going up a busy A road where there have literally been several cyclist fatalities, or doing a couple of hundred metres on an old pedestrian walkway which says 'no cycling' on it. If you choose the latter, you do get people shouting 'it's no cycling' at you, even though in any other European city it would be full of cyclists safely going up and down.

And they absolutely could do it here. Put on the little blue signs with a bike and a person, it magically becomes safe. It's choosing not to, in this context where everyone drives. 

And now driving has become one of the latest arenas for the culture wars. The narrative around it always seems to reinforce that idea of separate identities, that I'm a cyclist and I'm never a driver too.

I've had senior figures say to me 'Well, of course, the thing about cyclists is they don't understand what it's like to drive a car'. That thinking is endemic. These are camps, and you are one or the other. That binary thinking is preposterous. In reality, most people have those choices I mentioned: walk, drive, cycle, take the bus. Everything pushes them to make the worst choice.

And you're someone who is even all kinds of different cyclists – sometimes full lycra bombing it as fast as a car…

…and then yes, when I come here to work, I'm just in my regular clothes. Your needs are different at different times.

There's been some good work out of the Geography world in the last few years. They're calling it the reverse causality hypothesis, which essentially I think is cognitive dissonance rebadged or rediscovered. You know the classic cognitive dissonance, where if your attitude is one thing but your behaviour is another, you have to shift one of them to ease that feeling of discomfort.

They've essentially shown when it comes to things like transport, whatever the environment makes easy people start to do it as a result of the environment, and then the attitude shifts afterwards. It's a nice challenge to the classic theory of planned behaviour type model, where you think something's a good idea, and therefore you do it; actually what the geographers are showing us is you do things because you can, and then you think it's a good idea.

I've done work on breaking driving habits, and we were showing that even after a month of no longer driving to work, the desire to do so is still latent in people. And then you've got people like Phillippa Lally who have shown that you have to be repeating a behaviour dozens, 80, 100, 200 times before it becomes a new habit. One of the classic mistakes we make is 'Bike to Work Day', or 'Active Travel Week'… it's not long enough for old habits to fade away and new ones to bed in.

You say about geographers. How interdisciplinary would you say your department is?

Very. We're very much in the medical faculty, and that makes sense with a lot of stuff we do: linked in with Health and Care Wales, the clinical side is quite plugged into that medical end, there are collaborations around nutrition. I do most of my work with engineers on building design, or future energies systems.

So I think we're quite an outward-looking school. There are some people who do really hardcore behavioural lab work, and that's incredibly important. But I'd say the balance leans more towards that externally facing, applied, disciplines working with external stakeholders.

It seems to me that has grown over the years. Psychologists are increasingly seeing themselves as a hub science. A psychologist can bring perhaps quite generic skills to a project. For example, the COM-B model pops up all the time, and you might think 'That's so obvious!', but psychologists tell me that when they talk to non-psychologists about it, they don't necessarily see it that way.

I think every project in this university should have a psychologist involved because there's a human element to everything. It's the right time. The number of engineering projects I've been involved in, which probably only got funded because there is a social science element, they would have otherwise just been hardcore engineering projects. A package of work that's going to look at the user's needs and users' understanding, that takes a proposal from being a fairly pedestrian engineering project, to being a very interesting project and quite distinctive. Just by adding psychology.

I've got an old colleague back at Bath, Chris Budd, an amazing mathematician. He always made the point that STEM should be spelt PSTEM, with a silent 'P'. In the same way that maths underpins everything, everything that humans care about has humans involved, and we should be there. We need to take over the world!

But it's a different kind of taking over the world, isn't it… I think when I started out, psychologists were often seeking to prove that psychology was the best, and a hard science, that kind of 'physics envy'. But showing how Psychology underpins, glues, links, that's different. I've come across more humility from psychology and psychologists in recent years, I think that's an important quality to have in any science.

Yes. To give you a concrete example of what we're saying, going back quite a few years now I was talking to one of the automotive engineering guys, and he said, 'Look, we've reached a point in our discipline now, where I could spend five years to get an engine 3 per cent more efficient, but you put the wrong person with it and they use 25 per cent more fuel'. The world is starting to realise we were the missing link.