Behavioral Sustainability Lab

    Jiaying Zhao, PhD, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair (she/her)

Our Vision

We want to see a world without poverty or environmental crises, a world where we thrive sustainably.


Our Mission

We use psychological principles and insights to design behavioral solutions to solve financial and environmental sustainability challenges. We do so by running field and lab experiments to promote behavior change in resource conservation, waste reduction, climate mitigation, and financial independence. These experiments draw upon principles and methods from cognitive science, judgment and decision making, behavioral economics, and social psychology. Crucially, our work demonstrates the value of psychology in addressing urgent societal problems and informing the design and implementation of public policy. We are currently investigating the following four lines of research: