New MIT Sloan research: AI-generated visuals of reimagined sustainable cities enhanced Americans' willingness to support green transportation policies
March 28 2024 - 7:35AM
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 28, 2024 –New research from MIT
Sloan School of Management has found that AI-generated visuals of
re-imagined United States cities with largely car-free downtowns
helped persuade people to support the idea of investing more in
public transportation and related green policies.
The research paper, AI-generated visuals of car-free US
cities help improve support for sustainable policies, published in
Nature Sustainability combines insights from behavioral science
with recent advances in AI. The study was led by Rachit Dubey, a
postdoctoral research fellow at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in
collaboration with Rahul Bhui, assistant professor of marketing at
MIT Sloan. Additional co-authors are Thomas L. Griffiths, professor
of psychology and computer science at Princeton University, and PhD
candidate Mathew D. Hardy at Princeton University.
“America’s infrastructure is extremely car-centric, so using
more sustainable modes of transportation is currently inconvenient
or unavailable to many people,” said Dubey. “And, unfortunately,
public transportation has increasingly become a polarizing topic
for both the American public and elected officials who are
generally reluctant to support policies that try to increase these
investments.”
Bhui said the research results may be significant for
policymakers who hope to promote sustainability without directly
referencing climate change.
The research involved two experiments with approximately 3,200
participants across the political spectrum who were given a
hypothetical transport bill to increase America’s investment in
public transportation, improve and expand sidewalks for better
walkability, and build dedicated bus and bike lanes on major roads
with a price tag of $500 billion.
The study subjects were shown “before” images including Google
maps visuals of heavily used roadways such as the I-35 expressway
through Austin, Texas, and “after” images that depicted how the
streets would look if the proposal went through.
In the study, participants were randomly divided into three
groups. In each case, participants were presented with the same
“before” images of car-centric downtown city streets. However, the
three groups were presented with different “after images”: either a
sentence about how the proposal would transform the location, a
cartoon-like illustration, or the AI-generated scenes.
Participants were then asked to indicate on a scale of 1 to 10
how they felt about the hypothetical bill, where 1 indicated
strongest opposition and 10 indicated strongest support.
When analyzing participant responses, it was observed that
participants who viewed the AI images provided an average support
rating of 6.4 out of 10 for the bill. This level of support was
significantly higher compared to participants who saw no image or
those who saw the cartoon-like images.
Notably, study participants who identified as Republicans made
the biggest shift. While the majority opposed the bill when they
saw no images (average support rating of 3.5) or when they saw
cartoon images (average support rating of 3.7), they were more
supportive of the bill after viewing the AI images (average support
rating of 4.8).
“Nudging someone to change their entire belief system about the
world is a very hard thing to do. But we can still influence the
passing of sustainable policies at a local or national level if we
help people imagine specific outcomes of a policy,” Bhui said.
In the future, Dubey said he’d like to test this approach’s
effectiveness for real-world proposals. With the climate crisis
intensifying, he believes it is more important than ever to
understand human decision-making. “There's rich psychological
literature on imagination that shows when people are able to
imagine something better, they're more motivated to do something
about it,” he said. “We need to show people how much better their
life will be if a green or a sustainable policy were passed.”
- Reimagining urban downtown areas with help from generative
AI
Casey Bayer
MIT Sloan School of Management
914.584.9095
bayerc@mit.edu
Patricia Favreau
MIT Sloan School of Management
617.895.6025