Leading by example
Rather than advertising bad behaviour and exhorting us not to copy it, research has shown that highlighting the good our neighbours are doing is the most effective form of altering our habits. By Robert Cialdini
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.
There is a better way to proceed. We need to be diligent in making clear to the public that many unwelcome actions are performed by a small minority of the population. Would such an approach work? My colleagues and I at Arizona
State University in the US have done research indicating that it well might. At the Petrified Forest National Park, we erected a pair of signs in problem areas. The first urged visitors not to take wood and depicted a scene showing three thieves in action. After passing that sign, visitors became over twice as likely to steal than before. Our other sign also urged visitors not to take wood, but it depicted a lone thief. Visitors who passed it became nearly half as likely to steal than before. I believe that this lesson applies to other forms of environmental offences such as energy wastage. The secret is to avoid validating the deviant actions of a small minority of wrongdoers by making them appear the rule rather than the exception. Otherwise, we ensure that a few rotten apples will spoil the barrel.
Copy cats
We should also be sure to raise the profile of the majority that do act pro-environmentally, because that spurs others to follow suit. For instance, my fellow environmental researcher, Wesley Schultz, and I, with our students, have begun to study how descriptive social norms (the perception of what most people do in a situation) can influence energy conservation decisions. Our survey of nearly 2,500 Californians showed that those who thought their neighbours were conserving were more likely to conserve themselves. But, at the same time, almost all of the survey respondents underestimated the conservation efforts of their neighbours.
In a follow-up study, we placed door hangers on the doors of San Diego-area residents once a week for a month. The door hangers carried one of four messages, informing residents that (1) they could save money by conserving energy, (2) they could save the earth’s resources by conserving energy, (3) they could be socially responsible citizens by conserving energy, or (4) the majority of their neighbours regularly tried to conserve energy. We also included a control group of residents in the study whose door hanger simply encouraged energy conservation but provided no rationale.
Even though an earlier survey indicated that residents felt they would be least influenced by information regarding their neighbours’ energy usage, it was the only type of door hanger information that led to significantly decreased energy consumption: almost 2kWh/day. This suggests a clear way to increase conservation activity – we should trumpet the true levels of conservation that are going unrecognised.
Saving resources
To investigate this idea further, we examined resource conservation choices in upmarket hotel rooms, where guests often encounter a card asking them to reuse their towels.
This card may urge the action in various ways. Sometimes it requests compliance for the sake of the environment; sometimes for the sake of future generations; and sometimes it exhorts guests to co-operate with the hotel in order to save resources. What the card never says, however, is that the majority of guests do reuse their towels when given the opportunity. We suspected that the omission of this fact was costing the hotels – and the environment – plenty.
Here’s how we tested our suspicion. In collaboration with the management of an upmarket hotel, we put one of four different cards in its guestrooms. One stated ‘Help save the environment’, and then stressed respect for nature. Another stated ‘Help save resources for future generations’, and stressed the importance of saving energy for the future.
A third card stated ‘Partner with us to help save the environment’, and urged guests to co-operate with the hotel in preserving the environment. A final type of card stated ‘Join your fellow citizens in helping to save the environment’, and informed the reader that the majority of hotel guests do reuse their towels when asked. The outcome? The final social norm message increased towel reuse by an average of 34%.
Two things are noteworthy about the results of the hotel study. First, the message that generated the most participation in the hotel’s towel recycling programme was the one that no hotel has (to our knowledge) ever used. This simple but effective appeal didn’t emerge from a history of trial and error to become a hotel best practice. Instead, it emerged from a scientifically based understanding of human psychology, which points out the need to call on social scientific research in a systematic fashion to help advance sound environmental policy.
The second notable aspect of the study was that the significant increase in programme participation was nearly costless – an important consideration for governments increasingly burdened with the expenses of implementing large technological fixes, tax incentives or new regulations to increase pro-social action. In this instance, none of that was necessary. Rather, what was required was a presentation of the facts about the preferred behaviour of the majority.
Contagious behaviour
When communicating with the public, it is important to avoid trying to reduce the incidence of a damaging problem by describing it as regrettably frequent. Such an approach, while understandable, runs counter to the findings of social science regarding the contagiousness of social behaviour, even socially harmful behaviour. Moreover, the problem under consideration is often not widespread at all. It only comes to seem that way by virtue of a vivid and impassioned presentation of its dangers. Instead, it would be better to honestly inform citizens of the harm resulting from even a small amount of the undesirable conduct.
Furthermore, when most people are behaving responsibly, we’d be less than responsible ourselves if we failed to publicise that fact, as the social science evidence plainly shows that the information will serve both to validate and stimulate the desired action.
Robert B Cialdini is the co-author, with Noah J Goldstein and Steven J Martin, of Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion (2007). He is also a Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University
Further reading
To read more from Robert Cialdini visit: www.influenceatwork.com
