Dr. Jiaying Zhao, an Icon of Change in Canada

Icons of Change™

Icons of Change International Awards 2026  Dr. Jiaying Zhao  Professor, Department of Psychology and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia Founder and Director, Behavioral Sustainability Lab Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Sustainability, 2014-2024 Invited Researcher, J-PAL North America, MIT  Faculty Affiliate, Center for Effective Global Action, UC Berkeley  Faculty Affiliate, Stone Centre on Wealth and Income Inequality, University of British Columbia  Steering Group Member, UN Global Sustainable Development   Research Advisory Group Member, OECD International Network on Financial Education  University of British Columbia Sauder Distinguished Scholar, 2023-2026   SDG Focus: SDG 1, No Poverty Complementary SDGs: SDG 12, Responsible Consumption and Production | SDG 13, Climate Action  Changemaker for Behavioral Solutions to Poverty and Climate Action (Canada)   ________  Transforming Behavioral Science into Solutions for Sustainable Development  Dr. Jiaying Zhao stands at the forefront of a field that is increasingly important to the future of sustainable development: understanding how human behaviour, decision-making and psychology can be translated into practical solutions for some of society's most persistent challenges.  As a Professor at the University of British Columbia and the founding director of the Behavioral Sustainability Lab, Dr. Zhao bridges cognitive psychology, behavioural science and sustainability to address challenges that cannot be solved by policy design alone. Her work asks a fundamental question: how can institutions, communities and individuals be supported to make decisions that improve human wellbeing while advancing environmental and social sustainability?  Through more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, over $22 million in research funding led or contributed to, and more than 160 invited presentations to governments, businesses and communities across five continents, Dr. Zhao has helped build a body of evidence connecting behavioural science with poverty reduction, responsible consumption, climate action and public policy.  Her contribution is significant not simply because she studies behaviour, but because she translates behavioural insights into interventions that can be tested, measured and implemented in the real world.  ________  Behavioral Science and the Challenge of Poverty  One of Dr. Zhao's most influential contributions to poverty research began with her landmark 2013 study published in Science, which demonstrated how financial scarcity can consume cognitive bandwidth and affect decision-making.  The research helped advance understanding of poverty beyond the question of income alone. It demonstrated that living under conditions of scarcity can itself shape cognitive resources and decision-making, providing important evidence for understanding why conventional approaches to poverty reduction may not always produce the outcomes policymakers expect.

Transcript

00:00Hello, my name is Jiaying Zhao. I'm a professor of psychology and sustainability at the University

00:05of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where I founded and direct the Behavioral Sustainability

00:11Lab. Thank you to the Icons of Change organizing committee for this honor, and congratulations

00:17to my fellow honorees around the world. I'm trained as a cognitive scientist. I study

00:22attention, what the mind notices, what it ignores, and how cognition translates into

00:28action. The more I looked at the global challenges like poverty and climate change, the more I

00:36saw the cognitive drivers that are the same across these challenges. Poverty and climate

00:43change look like look like completely different problems. One is about money, the other one

00:48is about carbon emissions. But both come down to tasking the same human mind that has limited

00:56bandwidth. When you're poor, the constant juggling of bills and rent and payments consume the

01:03cognitive bandwidth, and it becomes hard to plan for the future or anything else. When

01:10it comes to climate, the emission reductions are slow. Some of the climate actions feel too

01:17abstract and distant. And this is exactly the kind of thing that the human mind is not trained

01:23for. So the question that has driven my career is, with our finite cognitive capacity, how do we

01:32design the world such that good decisions, the rational, the effective solutions are the easy ones for

01:40people to adopt? So I built my lab to address this question. My lab sits between psychology, climate

01:50change, climate science, and environmental science. And we ran a lot of our studies in the real world.

01:57We collect data, we run experiments with people in shelters and grocery stores and apartment buildings

02:03and hospitals. Our philosophy is don't lecture people, but create the conditions for good decisions to

02:12happen. Let me give you some examples. On poverty, we first show that scarcity impairs cognitive function.

02:20Poverty taxes the mind. So what this means is that to alleviate poverty, we need to alleviate the

02:27conditions of scarcity. And that could be a form of cash transfer. So literally giving people money.

02:34And this is all we did with the New Leaf Project. In collaboration with Foundations for Social Change,

02:40we ran the first randomized control trials where we gave people experiencing homelessness a one-time

02:47unconditional cash transfer of $7,500. And we tracked people for one year to quantify the impact of the

02:57cash transfer on people's lives. What we found was, well, very promising. First, people moved into housing

03:05much sooner than those without the cash transfer. They spent fewer nights in shelters, which saved society

03:13money. And in a subsequent expansion project, we also found improvements in cognitive function,

03:20that people were able to make better decisions after receiving the cash transfer.

03:28And these can be cost-saving for the government, for society, for taxpayers in the long run.

03:36On the climate front, our work has been about attention, design, and joy. So in a recent study in

03:45Vancouver General Hospital with surgeons and dieticians and chefs, we redesigned an inpatient food menu

03:56around planetary health. So we lowered the carbon emissions of the food that we fed to patients. We

04:03made the food much more appealing, visibly more attractive, and taste better. And what we found was

04:10not only the emissions went down of the food, food waste also went down, but patient satisfaction of the

04:18food was very high. So it's a triple win for the climate, the planet, and for humans.

04:25And with my colleague Elizabeth Dunn, we recently published a book, Leave the Lights On, that makes

04:32climate actions feel happy instead of miserable. So what I've learned so far is one, creating more

04:42cognitive bandwidth is key. Giving people the mental freedom to make their own choices is better than

04:49telling them what to do. Second, sustainability should feel like abundance, not deprivation. Abundance

04:57is what lets people take action. So to the young changemakers around the world, watching my video and

05:06watching this prize, I would encourage you to pick a problem that you can tackle, start small, and build

05:13upon it. Think about endowing cognitive bandwidth to the people that you're working with, and make your

05:21solution joyful and abundant. Thank you.

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