How our emotions shape energy transitions

Lennart Grün

It is no surprise that humans are no rational actors. Beyond economic textbooks, the homo oeconomicus does not exist. Human behavior instead is largely driven by habits, biased cognitions, emotions, social norms or identities.

While we as a society fully acknowledge this irrational nature in our personal lives, we tend to disregard it in political discussions about managing energy transitions. Congruent to modern worldviews, we take psychological dynamics into account when it comes to consumption behavior as well as technology acceptance from citizens, but when it comes to behaviors and decisions of business professionals, or politicians there is lack of investigating which psychological factors drive their behavior. There is a need to not only acknowledge psychological decision making but also engage with deeper operating principles to figure out how such psychological barriers to energy transitions can be resolved.

While there is a lack of such discussions on a broader societal level, these perspectives are not new to fields such as environmental psychology. More specific to energy transitions, there is a growing community of scholars focused on integrating academic knowledge of the psychology discipline, which focuses on micro-level decision making, with the academic field of transition studies, in which the focus lays on meso- to macro-level structures and their influence on system functioning and development trajectory (Dütschke et al. 2024; Bögel und Upham 2018; Bögel et al. 2023; Upham et al. 2025).

In this approach, research on sustainability transitions helps to understand how our behavior as societies is shaped by man-made incentive structures and the actor networks embedded in them. From psychological research we can learn how individual behavior is brought about by individual mental structures (e.g. attitudes) and therefore understand how agency is turned into action. Often criticized because of a lack of contextualization, psychology might fail to account for the broader social dynamics that determine and are impacted by individual behavior.

But, how exactly can we link both perspectives? One possible linkage is the psychological concept of identity. In this view, the identity of a person encompasses specific internalized societal norms and values, which proceed to guide the persons behavior in energy transitions. Upham et al. (2025) describe this as a multiscale linkage approach, as identity links individual and societal level analyses. In the case of energy communities, actors construct their identities disparately, leading to diverse activities and positioning in the energy transition (Vogler und Kump 2024). Identities can also be a source of conflict (Colvin 2020; Zilles und Marg 2023), and a connecting element between people (Becker et al. 2021).

Yet, the concept of identity could be leveraged to a far larger degree to explain barriers and hence also potentials for accelerating energy transitions. Employing it not only to explain behaviors of less powerful actors, but also more high-level dynamics in industry and politics – on an individual or group level – may bring us closer to finding leverage points to dissolve lock-ins and motivate new green pathways. In this line of reasoning, one can argue that identity has an important role in sustaining established societal structures as well as in the formation of new ones and thus plays an important role in how established energy systems are sustained, how emerging energy systems are supported and how conflicts arise between both systems.

As a first initiative, I have organized a workshop together with Anna Theis from the University of Vechta called “Integrating the Human Perspective: Emotions and Identity in Sustainability Transitions”. The workshop was part of the NEST Conference 2025 at Sussex University, which was kindly sponsored by the EDRC Flexible Fund. Engaging discussion at the workshop showed us how interesting and vast this new research field really is. We will continue to further develop our thoughts and ideas. In doing so, we are not alone but join a group of authors working on that topic (Sarrica et al. 2016; Clayton et al. 2015; Raven et al. 2025; Upham et al. 2025).

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