The social and behavioural sciences have shown that social norms offer tremendous potential to affect pro-social behaviours, provided that we understand how to craft the message. For example, among policy makers, it is standard practice when advocating for action to emphasise the breadth of a problem. That makes sense because policy makers can be expected to provide additional resources or regulations to address those abuses that appear most widespread. However, a different - and even opposite - logic may apply when communicating with the public about a problem. To understand that logic, consider the following incident.
A graduate student of mine visited the Petrified Forest National Park in the US with his fiancée - a woman he described as the most honest person he'd ever known, someone who had never taken a paperclip without returning it. They encountered a park sign warning visitors against stealing petrified wood: "Our heritage is being vandalized by the theft of 14 tons of wood every year."
While still reading the sign, he was shocked to hear his fiancée whisper, "We'd better get ours now."
What could have spurred this wholly law-abiding young woman to want to become a thief and to deplete a national treasure in the process? I believe it has to do with a mistake that park officials made when creating that sign. They tried to alert visitors to the park's theft problem by telling them that many other visitors were thieves. In so doing, they stimulated the behaviour they had hoped to suppress by making it appear the norm - when, in fact, less than 3% of the park's millions of visitors have ever taken a piece of wood.
Bad publicity
Park officials are far from alone in making this kind of error.
Those responsible for developing and enforcing public policy blunder into it all the time. Teenage suicide prevention programmes inform students of the alarming number of adolescent suicides and, research shows, cause participants to become more likely to see suicide as a possible solution to their problems. When publicising cases of school violence, news outlets assemble accounts of incident after incident and, in the process, spawn the next one. During prominently announced crackdowns on the problem, government officials decry the frequency of tax evasion and, as demonstrated by one follow-up study, increase tax cheating the next year.
Although their claims may be both true and well-intentioned, the creators of these information campaigns have overlooked something basic about the communication process. Within the lament, "Look at all the people who are doing this undesirable thing" lurks the powerful and undercutting message, "Look at all the people who are doing it". One of the fundamental lessons of human psychology is that people follow the crowd. In my view, this point is being missed in attempts to communicate the importance of one increasingly crucial form of pro-social activity - environmental protection and energy conservation.
