Your Hairdresser May Sway Your Climate Choices, Not a Celebrity

Think about who last talked you into changing something. Not a policy, not a headline, but an actual choice: the food shop, the car, the boiler sitting in your airing cupboard. Odds are it was a person you know, or sort of know. A neighbour, a colleague, the woman who cuts your hair every few weeks and knows more about your life than most of your family.

That everyday web of trust, according to a new synthesis in Nature Climate Change, may be one of the most underused levers we have for shifting climate behaviour. And most climate campaigns, the authors reckon, have been pulling the wrong ones.

The paper, led by psychologists at the University of Bath, is not new fieldwork. It’s a structured review that gathers up decades of scattered research on social influence and organises it into a single framework with four moving parts: the messenger (who is doing the influencing), the audience (who they reach), the mode (how the message travels, whether through a chat, a broadcast or simply being seen to do something) and the behavioural domain (what you are actually being nudged towards, from cycling to a heat pump). The team behind it works within a UK climate research centre that spans four universities and the charity Climate Outreach.

The starting problem is a familiar one. Public concern about climate change is high and has been for years, yet the shift in how people actually live has been slow. Part of the trouble, as a large US survey of pluralistic ignorance has shown, is that most people badly underestimate how many others share their worry.

Where the synthesis gets interesting is in who we actually listen to. Politicians and celebrities, it turns out, are trusted far less on climate than our personal connections and, in some surveys, the news media. Yale polling tells much the same story, with family and friends among the most trusted sources and oil and gas companies sitting right at the bottom. Which makes the standard reflex, sign up a famous face, look a bit shakier than it seems.

“We need to use the influence of different people and lean on social norms to cultivate environmentally friendly behaviours,” says Sam Hampton at the University of Bath, one of the authors.

The Everyday Influencers Nobody Studies

This is the gap the researchers keep circling back to. There is remarkably little published research, they note, on the climate influence of ordinary people in public-facing jobs: hairdressers, taxi drivers, healthcare workers, the person running the corner shop. These everyday influencers have something a celebrity endorsement usually lacks, which is trust built through routine, informal, repeated contact. One strand of research the paper draws on found that hairdressers, often treated as confidantes, can open up climate conversations with a genuinely diverse clientele, the sort of spread a targeted campaign struggles to reach. A study of sustainable salons across the UK and Ireland reported that these conversations were already happening and were nudging clients’ habits, with the salons’ own trusted relationships doing the work. The mode here is just talk, in person, with no explicit advocacy and time to actually think. It is about the least glamorous channel imaginable, and possibly one of the most effective.

High-profile figures are not written off. When high-status people are visibly seen to change, flying less, eating less meat, switching to an electric car, a UK survey experiment found the public’s willingness to follow tends to rise, and people rate those figures as more credible for having walked the walk. A study in Vietnam found celebrity influence could help cut the use of disposable plastic. The catch is authenticity: even those living low-carbon lives may hesitate to say so out loud, put off by the fear of coming across as sanctimonious, or of alienating their followers.

Where the Evidence Runs Thin

The authors are careful about what all this does and doesn’t show. Most of the underlying evidence is correlational, drawn from self-report, one-off snapshots and lab studies rather than the long-term field experiments that could prove influence actually sticks. So the framework is a way of organising what we know and finding the gaps, not a tested machine you can switch on. It maps possibilities; it does not promise outcomes.

There is also a flipside. Social influence runs both ways: affluent people can lock in high-carbon norms just as readily as low-carbon ones, and many fossil fuel companies have worked to slow policy through lobbying, while a rash of corporate sustainability claims has drawn scrutiny over greenwashing.

Still, the practical thrust is hard to miss. If the strongest signals come from people we already trust, then the useful question stops being which celebrity to hire and becomes something more local: who in a given community already holds the room, and what would help them feel able to speak. Norms are, as the researchers put it, silent signals, the quiet business of watching what everyone around us seems to be doing and adjusting to match. Make the low-carbon choice the visible, normal one on your street, and you may not need a campaign at all.

The next step, the authors argue, is evidence that actually tracks this over time and across cultures, rather than the snapshots the field has leaned on. Until then, the most powerful climate messenger in your life is probably not on a screen. They might be holding a pair of scissors.

Frequently Asked Questions