Motivating relational organizing behavior for biodiversity conservation

As biodiversity loss and climate change accelerate, more people worldwide are engaging in conservation behaviors to “do their part.” Yet, individual behavior change alone is insufficient for the large‐scale, rapid change needed to address these crises. Relational organizing, which involves individuals reaching out to others in their social network, can enhance the speed and scale of conservation behavior change and address the complex, collective action nature of many conservation problems. However, many people practicing conservation behaviors in their own lives do not engage in relational organizing about conservation issues. Here, we suggest this may be the result of specific social‐psychological factors inhibiting people from reaching out to others. We summarize the evidence and offer a research and practice agenda to prioritize (1) understanding the social‐psychological barriers that prevent relational organizing, and (2) addressing these barriers through targeted outreach interventions to help scale and accelerate community action for conservation.


| INTRODUCTION
As the scale and scope of wicked conservation challenges grow, people worldwide are trying to "do their part" to help mitigate climate change and preserve biodiversity. People are urged to change how they live in fundamental ways, including what they eat, how they travel, how they earn a living, and more (Amel et al., 2017;Stern, 2000). What these behaviors have in common is that they are what is known as personal behavior; that is, actions individuals take on their own, often in private or within their households, to reduce their personal contributions to a regional or global environmental problem. Personal behavior is a critical component of conservation. If groups of people shift their everyday actions, they can trigger broader changes in economic, political, and ecological systems Sparkman, Attari, & Weber, 2021). To fulfill the need for widespread shifts in personal behavior, a large and growing body of literature has examined what perceptions influence individual conservation action, and the interventions that alter these perceptions and so change behavior (Abrahamse & Steg, 2013;Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002;McKenzie-Mohr & Schultz, 2014;Reddy et al., 2017;Stern, 2000).
And yet, personal behavior change alone is insufficient to address the need for urgent, widespread, coordinated action for conservation (Amel et al., 2017;Stern, 2000). A singular focus on personal behavior change can lead to inequities. This includes placing the burden of change on the most vulnerable (e.g., resource users) who have few alternatives to current practices, and may not always lead to desired outcomes, by overlooking more powerful actors (e.g., international companies, government officials) whose actions have greater impact (Crosman et al., 2022). Here, we argue that while motivating personal behavior is crucial, achieving conservation objectives will also require motivating people to engage in relational organizing.
We define relational organizing as intentional efforts by motivated individuals to share information about and encourage others they know to engage in a desired personal behavior (Abrahamse & Steg, 2013;Burn, 1991). This term comes from grassroots movements seeking to promote public action about social and environmental issues (League of Women Voters, 2020), especially in historically excluded communities like communities of color (Empower Project, n.d.). Relational organizing repositions the recipients of conservation messaging as active partners in promoting more widespread adoption of conservation behaviors across their communities.
Decades of social influence and social diffusion research have demonstrated that people's actions can lead others to adopt new beliefs and behaviors (Bandura et al., 1963;Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004;Rogers, 2003;Valente & Pumpuang, 2006). What is needed now is to better understand how to motivate individuals to deliberately-and ideally, successfully-harness the power of social influence by engaging in relational organizing with their social network, so others also contribute to a conservation goal (Amel et al., 2017). This focus on catalyzing social influence can complement other systemic efforts to incentivize and normalize conservation, such as through changing economic and governance systems (Carlisle & Gruby, 2019;Holmes & Cavanagh, 2016).
Here, we summarize the literature on social influence that suggests how relational organizing might enhance the speed and scale of conservation behavior change. We then review the evidence about what we call the "personal to relational disconnect" (Figure 1), when people adopting personal conservation behaviors themselves fail to reach out to others. Finally, we outline two priority research areas to help overcome this disconnect and scale up engagement in relational organizing.

| The power of relational organizing
Motivating relational organizing has the potential to enhance the scale and speed of conservation action by harnessing the power of social influence (Abrahamse & Steg, 2013;Sparkman, Howe, & Walton, 2021). Social influence occurs when an individual's perceptions, decision-making, or behavior is affected by what others do or say (Burn, 1991;Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004;Rogers, 2003;White et al., 2019). Social influence can be communicated in various ways. For example, people can observe others' actions (i.e., modeling, such as seeing neighbors planting wildlife-friendly native plants; Gillis & Swim, 2020), be told about others' actions indirectly by receiving social normative information about how many people are engaging in a behavior (e.g., researchers or Will encouraging others to act make me look hypocritical?

MORAL HYPOCRISY
Will people I know judge me if I encourage others to act?

INJUNCTIVE SOCIAL NORMS
Will it jeopardize the relationship if I encourage someone I know to act?

RELATIONAL CONCERNS
Am I the kind of person who encourages others to do things?

MORAL EXPORTING
Do I think encouraging others to act is the right thing to do?

PERSONAL NORMS
How much do I care about this issue anyway?

CONSERVATION ATTITUDES
Are more and more peopletaking action on this issue?

DYNAMIC SOCIAL NORMS
Does encouraging others fit with who I am and how others see me?

Personal behavior
Relational organizing Disconnect Do I know how to encourage others to act?

SELF-EFFICACY
Will encouraging others to act actually work?

RESPONSE EFFICACY
F I G U R E 1 A disconnect seems to exist between engagement in personal behavior and relational organizing about the personal behavior, which may be addressed by understanding the social-psychological barriers to relational organizing (Gap 1) and developing effective interventions to scale up participation (Gap 2) managers explaining how many neighbors have planted native plants or would support others doing so), or be told about a behavior directly by peers engaging in relational organizing (e.g., a neighbor describing their own experience planting native plants; Niemiec, Jones, Lischka, & Champine, 2021).
While all these social influence approaches have been shown to affect personal behavior, studies suggest relational organizing is one of the most effective social influence approaches for achieving widespread personal behavior change (Abrahamse & Steg, 2013;Green & McClellan, 2020). A meta-analysis of six different types of social influence interventions tested in 29 field experiments found that individuals recruiting others in their social network was most effective at encouraging resource conservation (Abrahamse & Steg, 2013). Community outreach interventions where individuals engage in relational organizing have enhanced participation in recycling (Burn, 1991), invasive species control (McKiernan, 2018), forest conservation programs (Ma et al., 2012), and purchasing of electric vehicles and solar panels (Wolske et al., 2020).
Individuals reaching out to others in their social network is effective because it creates and reinforces social norms (i.e., socially constructed unwritten rules) about what behaviors are acceptable or commonplace, and applies social pressure that incentivizes group conformity and compliance (Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004;Geiger et al., 2019). People are more likely to comply with requests coming from people they know or perceive similarity with (Sparkman & Attari, 2020), so relational organizing may increase the chance that others trust new information and change their behavior accordingly. Relational organizing can also help information reach new audiences who would not otherwise seek it out (Bujold & Thulin, 2021). Roger's (2003) diffusion of innovations theory shows interpersonal outreach by early adopters who share their opinions and knowledge about a new behavior can effectively spread innovations to larger segments of the population. This echoes research on social mobilization (i.e., interventions prompting individual contributions to collective action), which is more effective when it is personal, accountable, normative, identity-relevant, and connected (Rogers et al., 2018).

| Participation in relational organizing may be rare compared with personal behavior
People already taking conservation action would seem to be ideal volunteers for relational organizing about conservation causes. And yet, research suggests many people engaging in a conservation behavior do not intentionally reach out to others to encourage them to also adopt this behavior (Geiger & Swim, 2016;Nolan, 2013). Despite high support for climate change mitigation, only onethird of the US population regularly discusses climate change (Leiserowitz et al., 2021). A survey by Larson et al. (2015) found <10% of rural landowners participated in "social environmentalism" (i.e. relational organizing) often, despite many seeing the value of such outreach. Niemiec et al. (2018) found that while 87% of residents surveyed in Hawaii had tried to control invasive species on their property, less than half (46%) had tried to recruit and coordinate with others across property boundaries. In an experiment facilitating public communication about wolf reintroduction, Berl et al. (2022) found that while 45% of participants accessed scientific information, only 3.7% referred others to this information.
This unwillingness to promote proenvironmental behavior suggests a likely "personal to relational disconnect," in which many people adopt personal conservation behaviors but do not take the next step of actively encouraging others to do likewise. Overcoming this disconnect will be crucial for accelerating more widespread uptake of conservation actions across communities. We suggest this will require addressing two core gaps. First, conservation needs a holistic understanding of the socialpsychological barriers and drivers guiding decisions to reach out to others. Once these factors are understood, a second gap can be addressed: the need to design outreach interventions influencing those drivers and test their effectiveness at scaling up participation. Addressing socialpsychological drivers can promote personal conservation behavior (Dietsch et al., 2020), in concert with a more structural focus on social networks (de Lange et al., 2019), institutions (Constantino et al., 2021), and context (Cumming, 2018).

| Gap 1: What factors constrain or motivate relational organizing?
The small body of existing research on this topic suggests several interconnected social-psychological factors may be barriers to relational organizing for conservation. First, people might need to have a certain level of preexisting interest in the conservation behavior to want to reach out to their friends, family, and social networks about it. Attitudes about conservation issues have been linked to personal behavior in many studies (although their impact can be overstated, as Nilsson et al., 2019 describe), and may also predict relational organizing. In one study, bait shop owners' intentions to communicate with customers about preventing the spread of invasive species were associated with their attitudes towards invasive species (Howell et al., 2015).
Second, social identity, or feelings of membership in a particular group, may influence relational organizing (Stets & Burke, 2000). People may seek to identify or avoid identifying with a group associated with the personal or relational organizing behavior. In a series of studies about climate action, Brick et al. (2017) found individuals were less likely to engage in socially visible behaviors, which might send a signal to others about how to act, when those behaviors conflicted with their own proenvironmental or antienvironmental identity. Nolan (2013) suggests that a key barrier preventing people from sanctioning others may be the fear of being seen as hypocritical if they do not always engage in the behavior themselves. Specifically, people may be held back from acting by moral hypocrisy beliefs, through which individuals are only seen as trustworthy and consistent when their actions align with what they advise others to do (Dong et al., 2019).
Third, people might abstain from relational organizing because they doubt their ability to do it successfully, or do not think relational organizing will effectively influence others. For example, people may be affected by relational organizing self-efficacy, that is, their perceived ability to convey a message to others effectively and competently (Hamann & Reese, 2020). Indeed, in the above study of bait shop owners, intentions to reach out about invasive species management were influenced by perceived selfefficacy to effectively inform customers (Howell et al., 2015). Interventions bolstering people's self-efficacy about discussing climate change have increased willingness to do so (Geiger et al., 2017). In another study, residents who reached out to others about native plant gardening were motivated by both social response efficacy (their belief that doing so would motivate others to act) and environmental response efficacy (their belief that this outreach would achieve environmental benefits) . Similarly, Guckian et al. (2018) found beliefs about whether sanctioning would be effective best predicted catch-and-release anglers' intent to sanction other anglers engaging in harmful fishing practices.
Alternately, people may be constrained from relational organizing if they believe it is wrong to try to influence others' actions. Personal norms are internal standards of right and wrong behavior (Cialdini et al., 1991), and personal norms about relational organizing may influence willingness to act. In one study representative of the US population, the most common barrier to reaching out about plant-based eating was a personal norm against telling others what to do, and the second was respect for others' autonomy (Niemiec, Jones, Mertens, & Dillard, 2021). Another study on moral exporting, that is, people's willingness to try to persuade others to agree with them on moral issues, found individuals higher in environmental moral exporting were more likely to have tried to influence others previously and be willing to confront transgressors in future (Maki & Raimi, 2017).
Finally, relational organizing may be influenced by perceptions of other people's beliefs and actions, also known as perceived social norms. Because relational organizing is a deliberate attempt to socially influence others, people's willingness to reach out may be related to their beliefs about how outreach might be received, especially if they are concerned about the social risks of public-sphere behaviors (Stern, 2000). A perceived lack of supportive social norms related to approaching others can be a barrier to sanctioning environmental transgressors (Nolan, 2013). People may be concerned about being social sanctioned themselves (Niemiec et al., 2019) or perceived as unlikeable or incompetent  if they reach out. Conversely, a perceived descriptive norm that the personal behavior is common, or a dynamic normative belief that it is becoming increasingly common (Sparkman & Walton, 2017) can increase willingness to promote the behavior Xu et al., 2017). However, false beliefs can also affect action: people have been shown to self-silence if they believe public support for a conservation cause is lower than it actually is (i.e., pluralistic ignorance; Geiger & Swim, 2016). This can lead to a "spiral of silence" in which the less common an opinion is believed to be, the less likely someone is to discuss it with others (Noelle-Neumann, 1993). Experimental interventions demonstrating others are in fact supportive of and interested in a cause can enhance people's willingness to bring up topics like climate change and invasive species management (Geiger & Swim, 2016;Niemiec et al., 2019). This may be particularly important for politicized or ideological conservation issues. In one study, perceived in-group social consensus around climate change was most important for predicting conservatives' climate policy support (Goldberg et al., 2020), while politicization in conservation initiatives such as wolf management (Ditmer et al., 2022) can trigger in-group/out-group thinking, reducing people's likelihood of reaching out to others they believe might disagree (Lee, 2021). So far we have described the existing research on how different social-psychological factors affect relational organizing for conservation, but many questions remain to be answered. For instance, different people might find different forms of relational organizing more or less intrinsically motivating, depending on how it fulfills their fundamental psychological needs (Deci & Ryan, 2000). People with different values may be more or less drawn to relational organizing; for instance, those with high biospheric, altruistic, or relational values (Kis et al., 2020;Klain et al., 2017) might be more likely to promote personal behaviors. Some factors may have stronger effects on the adoption of relational organizing than others, or may moderate or mediate the effect of other factors on behavior. For instance, individuals high in moral exporting might be less likely to be influenced by reputational concerns about others' judgment (Maki & Raimi, 2017). Or social response efficacy might be influenced by social norms: individuals may assume from normative cues that neighbors would react poorly to new information, making potential relational organizers believe reaching out would be ineffective (Markowski & Roxburgh, 2019). Additional research could explore causal connections to help foster beneficial feedback loops between social psychological factors and relational organizing behaviors.
Cultural context may also be crucial. Concerns about others' judgment or right to autonomy, for example, may vary by how individualist or collectivist a society is (Lou & Wai Li, 2021;Rhodes et al., 2020). Research could compare the importance of various behavioral drivers across cultures, especially given that most previous conservation behavioral science has occurred in European and North American settings (Crosman et al., 2022) rather than in the Indigenous and nonwestern communities that often lead conservation efforts (Dawson et al., 2021).

| Gap 2: Which outreach interventions scale up relational organizing?
Identifying the factors that drive relational organizing behavior is only half the battle. To scale up engagement in relational organizing for conservation, researchers and practitioners must develop real-world messaging interventions to encourage conservation-minded individuals to reach out to others (Kidd et al., 2019). We conclude with three suggestions for such interventions: addressing influential factors, targeting different types of relational organizing, and focusing on different audience segments.

| Interventions to address most influential factors
First, research is needed to determine if interventions can change social-psychological drivers, and if that changes actual relational organizing behavior. For instance, audience research might reveal people are avoiding relational organizing because of inaccurate interpersonal beliefs. In that case, motivating relational organizing might be as straightforward as showing people that their social network is more supportive of working together or more interested in the conservation issue than they thought (Geiger & Swim, 2016;Niemiec et al., 2019). If people are constrained by believing their outreach will not motivate others to act, an intervention could boost response efficacy by sharing facts about how relational organizing has previously prompted action (Niemiec, Jones, Lischka, & Champine, 2021). Such intervention research might also compare which social-psychological factors are easiest to shift.

| Interventions targeting different types of relational organizing
Different forms of relational organizing might be necessary depending on context. For example, in some cases, people might try to recruit their friends, family, and neighbors for a conservation program through public signaling (e.g., putting up a yard sign) or through direct conversation (e.g., door-belling). Relational organizing can also vary in its social normative pressure: people might praise others for trying the desired behavior, or they could confront others engaging in the undesired behavior (Nolan, 2013). Campaigns could be tested to see which forms of relational organizing are more likely to be adopted, and what social-psychological factors are most relevant in each case. More intensive or demanding relational organizing might require forming volunteer groups to build small-scale supportive norms, or offering compensation for people's time ).

| Interventions focusing on different audience segments as relational organizers or recipients
Different drivers related to relational organizing may be more meaningful for different people (Bujold & Thulin, 2021;Rogers, 2003). For instance, are people with a long history of the personal behavior most motivated to reach out to others, or are recent adopters? Conversely, are recent adopters more effective relational organizers than people with extensive experience in the personal behavior, as has been found elsewhere (Sparkman & Attari, 2020)? Research could guide which audiences conservation organizations reach out to as potential relational organizers (e.g., through targeted analysis of online networks; Chang et al., 2022), and what outreach strategies they prioritize. Similarly, organizations could help individuals focus on different potential adopters in their networks. Potential relational organizers may think they cannot influence others because they are picturing talking to people they know are unreceptive. Interventions could help relational organizers target members of their social network they feel most comfortable reaching out to and who are most likely to change.

| CONCLUSIONS
Behavior change campaigns are one important tool for conservation, and will continue to be critiqued and refined as the field grows (Gregg et al., 2022;Kidd et al., 2019;Reddy et al., 2017). Here, we suggest relational organizing can address some of the limitations of individual behavior change campaigns by facilitating more rapid, widespread, and collective efforts by everyday people. By describing this approach and some of the factors that may influence its adoption, we invite conservationists and behavioral scientists to consider individual actors as conservation messengers in their own right, who can use their own social influence to help conservation practices scale across their communities-and perhaps, across society as a whole.

FUNDING INFORMATION
This study was funded by two National Science Foundation Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences grants (grant 1919353 to Rebecca M. Niemiec and 2227074 to Megan S. Jones).

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.