Dr Maddie Judge
Department of Marketing

Addressing the climate crisis and related sustainability challenges will require transformative changes to existing societal systems. Current approaches to social change often focus either on individual-level behaviour change or on systems-level change, with relatively less attention paid to how collective social processes connect these levels.

In this talk, I summarise recent insights from social and environmental psychology on how social change happens, including how small groups of morally motivated individuals can influence public discourse and social norms, and contribute to broader shifts in societal systems on the longer term. I illustrate these processes through the example of the protein transition - a shift away from industrialised production and consumption systems that emphasise animal-based proteins toward more plant-based and alternative proteins. I conclude by discussing how social and environmental psychology can contribute to broader interdisciplinary efforts to understand and accelerate sustainability transitions.

Maddie Judge is a researcher in social and environmental psychology who focuses understanding on how social psychological processes can accelerate or hinder transitions towards more sustainable futures. She is currently working as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Marketing at the University of Otago. Maddie is also interested in how people relate to nature, non-human animals and artifacts, and how scientists’ identities shape their intentions to co-produce research with Māori iwi and hāpu, industry, and other community groups. She has published in journals such as Personality and Social Psychology Review, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, European Journal of Social Psychology and OneEarth.