Social Science for Sustainability

Many Voices. One sustainable future.

Author

Matthew A Turner

Published

August 28, 2025

Preface

Welcome to Social Science for Sustainability. This book develops a framework for understanding how people learn, coordinate, and act together to build a sustainable future.

It is an existential question whether people can join forces in sufficient volume to jolt history towards sustainable, resilient futures, and rescue ourselves from our current rut, collectively coursing towards ecological collapse. Technological solutions to climate change and environmental degradation are proliferating. But technology alone will not suffice. The critical question is: will enough people adopt sustainable practices, and under what conditions will those practices spread and endure?

This book shows how sustainability can benefit from a deeper understanding of social diffusion: how behaviors are transmitted, adopted, and consolidated across populations. Behaviors get transmitted through other behaviors: teaching, learning, speaking, listening, writing. Each of these is composed of a nested complex of behaviors, learned or genetically encoded. These micro-level processes scale up to collective adaptation, shaping whether communities converge on sustainable or maladaptive practices.

The chapters introduce a modeling framework designed to represent these processes in a way that is clear, transferable, and flexible. The framework adapts insights from evolutionary anthropology, cognitive science, psychology, and sociology, just to name a few broad disciplines. I selected topics from different disciplines based on their practical application to sustainability. Each chapter situates theory in problems of urgent concern, from climate action to cooperation over natural resources, from norm change to gender equity in leadership.

Applications in later chapters include:

Diffusion of sustainable practices, including when conformity fails and when success-biased learning accelerates adoption.
Spatial agent-based models of cooperation, exploring how migration and local interaction shape conservation outcomes.
Game-theoretic models of tipping points, showing how social norm change can rapidly cascade through societies, such as normalizing women leaders and women’s right to healthcare.

Together, these examples illustrate how computational models function like a “wind tunnel” for sustainability interventions. Just as cars are tested in wind tunnels before being built, interventions can be prototyped in simulations before being deployed in the world.

The aim is not to provide a single theory of sustainability, but rather to equip readers with tools and concepts that allow for careful reasoning, transparent assumptions, and comparative analysis across different contexts. In short: to show how social science, rigorously and creatively applied, can support the transition to a sustainable future.

Sincere thanks for your time and attention. Feedback is always welcome: matt@mat.phd.

This book and associated course materials are free and open, licensed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

Roadmap

Chapter 1 introduces the motivation, scope, and basic quantitative tools that will appear throughout the book. Chapter 2 turns to diffusion, showing how different social learning models drive the spread of adaptive behaviors. Later chapters build on this foundation to explore cooperation, norms, opinion change, and leadership. Each step adds new techniques and applications, gradually expanding the toolkit for understanding and designing sustainability interventions.

# Preface {.unnumbered} Welcome to *Social Science for Sustainability*. This book develops a framework for understanding how people learn, coordinate, and act together to build a sustainable future. It is an existential question whether people can join forces in sufficient volume to jolt history towards sustainable, resilient futures, and rescue ourselves from our current rut, collectively coursing towards ecological collapse. Technological solutions to climate change and environmental degradation are proliferating. But technology alone will not suffice. The critical question is: **will enough people adopt sustainable practices, and under what conditions will those practices spread and endure?** This book shows how sustainability can benefit from a deeper understanding of *social diffusion*: how behaviors are transmitted, adopted, and consolidated across populations. Behaviors get transmitted through other behaviors: teaching, learning, speaking, listening, writing. Each of these is composed of a nested complex of behaviors, learned or genetically encoded. These micro-level processes scale up to collective adaptation, shaping whether communities converge on sustainable or maladaptive practices. The chapters introduce a modeling framework designed to represent these processes in a way that is clear, transferable, and flexible. The framework adapts insights from evolutionary anthropology, cognitive science, psychology, and sociology, just to name a few broad disciplines. I selected topics from different disciplines based on their practical application to sustainability. Each chapter situates theory in problems of urgent concern, from climate action to cooperation over natural resources, from norm change to gender equity in leadership. Applications in later chapters include: - **Diffusion of sustainable practices**, including when conformity fails and when success-biased learning accelerates adoption. - **Spatial agent-based models of cooperation**, exploring how migration and local interaction shape conservation outcomes. - **Game-theoretic models of tipping points**, showing how social norm change can rapidly cascade through societies, such as *normalizing* women leaders and women's right to healthcare. Together, these examples illustrate how computational models function like a “wind tunnel” for sustainability interventions. Just as cars are tested in wind tunnels before being built, interventions can be prototyped in simulations before being deployed in the world. The aim is not to provide a single theory of sustainability, but rather to equip readers with tools and concepts that allow for careful reasoning, transparent assumptions, and comparative analysis across different contexts. In short: to show how social science, rigorously and creatively applied, can support the transition to a sustainable future. Sincere thanks for your time and attention. Feedback is always welcome: [matt@mat.phd](mailto:matt@mat.phd). This book and associated course materials are free and open, licensed under the [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) License. ## Roadmap Chapter 1 introduces the motivation, scope, and basic quantitative tools that will appear throughout the book. Chapter 2 turns to *diffusion*, showing how different social learning models drive the spread of adaptive behaviors. Later chapters build on this foundation to explore cooperation, norms, opinion change, and leadership. Each step adds new techniques and applications, gradually expanding the toolkit for understanding and designing sustainability interventions.