Using Social Norms to Green

I was catching up on a little bit of reading and found this article in the Atlantic about Robert Cialdini’s work on motivation in creating proenvironmental actions*.  It’s a rather catchy and interesting bit of social psychology which gets at what encourages people to take action in a more sustainable manner.  His team studied those little hotel plaques which encourage guests to reuse their towels.  His findings indicate that those guests who were told that the “the majority of guests ‘in this room’ had reused their towels” actually was the most effective way of changing behavior versus the traditional “please reuse your towels” signs.  By indicating that other people engage in this activity, the sign creates a social cue to indicate what is normative - in this case reusing your towels.

While I do think this is clever, I wonder if it would be more effective as a method of control if we could more easily watch the  data and perhaps have a sense of how our own behavior changes the numbers.  More than just translating your 20 minute commute to get a Starbucks latte (yes that’s how long it would take if I was into Starbucks latte’s) into how many trees you’ve killed if we were to see our behavior in the aggregate and in comparison to others who are “like me”.  There are some creative uses of technology towards this end.  The ones that come to mind are the Kill-A-Watt (also turned into a Tweet-A-Watt) and this clever use of LED lights in a shower to show water consumption.

But I’m sure I’m missing more of the clever ways to do this - how else are people using social norms to encourage environmentally friendly practices?

* The original article is interesting too: Noah J. Goldstein, Robert B. Cialdini, and Vladas Griskevicius. 2008. “A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels.” Journal of Consumer Research: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 35:472-482.