The Department of Psychology announces a PhD position in Environmental Psychology for a period of 3 years, without teaching duties. This is an educational position that shall provide promising research recruits the opportunity for professional development through studies towards a PhD. The position is connected to the PhD-program at the Faculty of Social and Educational Sciences, and the faculty will be the employer. The working place will be at the Department of Psychology.

The Department of Psychology currently has approximately 110 employees and 1100 students. The Department holds a large and diverse research community covering a variety of disciplines within psychology, and offers studies at the bachelor-, master- (specializations in learning – brain, behavior, environment and in work- and organizational psychology) and PhD level in addition to a study programme in clinical psychology. The Department also has three outpatient clinics that offer outpatient treatment as part of the educational programme in clinical psychology. In addition, the Department participates in extensive local, national and international research collaborations. Our research ambition is to be internationally and nationally leading in various disciplines of psychology.

The position is connected to the joint project “Narrating Sustainability” in cooperation with the Department of Language and Literature and the Department of Design. The project funding, which comes from NTNU’s thematic strategic area Sustainability, will fund an additional PhD positions at the Department of Language and Literature, supervised by Prof. Hanna Musiol and a postdoc at the Department of Design, which will be supervised by Prof. Casper Boks.

The joint project will address forms, functions, and uses of narratives of sustainability societal discourses in product, behaviour, lifestyle and societal contexts. It aims to research sustainability narratives across fields, and thereby increase understanding about how narratives and temporality affect engagement and participation of audiences/citizens in the socio-ecological crises debates and how that affects, and can be used to enable, facilitate, nudge, tempt and seduce towards desirable behavior.

The PhD position in psychology will focus on research questions such as the following: How do people who engage with different forms of narratives about sustainability as identified by the PhD in literature and constructed in the postdoc project in sustainable design react to these narratives? How is their emotional reaction in the short and longer run (comparing for example fictional and scientific narratives)? Can differences in emotional activation explain differences in intentions to act and manifest behaviour? Do complex (fictional and non-fictional) narratives train and stimulate systems thinking in people being confronted with such narratives in different settings (laboratory, in the field for example in an exhibition or an event, in a situation where people can explore different narratives and interact with them)? Do higher levels of system thinking lead to a broader engagement with and trade-offs between diverse sustainability goals and enable people to resist simplistic mono-thematic narratives? Do narratives with different concepts of the temporality of sustainability lead to changes in the time perspective in people with respect to a broad variety of sustainability goals? Can techniques of experimenting with narratives open the ground for local co-construction of resilient sustainability narratives? These questions will be studied with a broad mix of quantitative and qualitative methods.