Conference Agenda

Despite the urgency of addressing climate change and other environmental challenges, individual, collective and policy action has remained limited. Changing relevant beliefs, values, and norms through education programs is one potentially high-impact lever for increasing pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. Immersive education interventions have been shown to have deeper and longer-lasting effects than other behavioral interventions. However, these studies typically measure only the direct effects of the intervention on those exposed to the treatment. To the extent that there are spillovers to others in the household, the total effects of the intervention could be even larger than previously estimated. Here, we design a study to understand both the direct and indirect effects of an immersive education program. We ask whether parents or children are more effective targets of educational interventions when accounting for indirect spillover effects. While most accounts of intrahousehold socialization or intergenerational transmission of beliefs and norms focus on the influence that parents have on their children, climate change and environmental challenges are intergenerationally asymmetric: parents have more agency over household decisions yet children are the ones who face the brunt of unmitigated climate change. These asymmetries could make children more effective conduits for the transmission of environmental knowledge, attitudes and behaviors, as they have greater moral leverage. Using a randomized field experiment with 1,545 child-parent pairs in Patna, India, we analyze both direct program effects on participants and indirect spillover effects on non-participating family members. Our design has four distinct treatment arms: a control group, child-only participants, parent-only participants, and joint child-parent participants. This allows us to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of targeting different household members for an environmental education program when accounting also for the indirect effects of the intervention. We find strong direct effects of the intervention on both adults and children. We also find spillover effects on non-participating family members, but these effects vary by the type of behavior and the direction of influence. While both parents and children influence each other’s observable pro-environmental behaviors, we find that children uniquely shape their parents’ attitudes toward climate change and perceptions of environmental risks. Interestingly, joint participation by both parent and child does not yield stronger results than targeting either member individually, suggesting that selective targeting may may offer a more scalable and cost-effective approach to promoting sustainable household behavior.