Changing habits in the cause of climate

Grist’s David Roberts published a fascinating interview last week with behavorial psychologist and marketing guru Robert Cialdini. It basically deals with the problem of how to motivate people to change their behavior.

In addition to being an expert on persuasion, Cialdini’s spent considerable effort on studying the “social psychology” of consumers’ energy choices. The following exchange is particularly interesting:

Q: It seems like [social psychology is] fine-grained understanding of how people interact. How do you scale it up as policy, to get substantial effects?

A: As I argued in Influence, I’ve tried to identify the universals of human experience—those things that produce assent across the widest range of situations and settings and practitioners. You follow an authority; you pay back those who have given to you; you seize scarce or dwindling opportunities; you follow the lead of others like you and what they’re doing; and so on.

Take an example. The fastest growing development within marketing right now is called “social cause marketing”—it’s even outstripped sports sponsorship. It involves some entity, usually a corporate group, saying to its customers or its market, “if you purchase our product or employ our services, we will donate so much money to a good cause.” They’re banking on an understanding of the rule of reciprocity: people want to give back to those who have given to them in a meaningful exchange.

Well, we put signs in hotel room bathrooms—this isn’t published yet—that said, “[Re-use your bath towels] for the environment.” That was the control group. The other sign said, “If you [re-use your towels], we’ll donate a percentage of the savings that we get at the end of the year to an environmental cause.” That didn’t produce any increase in towel reuse.

But if we said, “We’ve already donated to an environmental cause in the name of our guests,” now we get reciprocity. That produced, I think, a 28 percent increase over either of the other strategies. You can apply this to social cause marketing: if you’re going to give a donation anyway, you should give it first.

So it is possible to employ these principles in broad-gauged ways to produce large-scale change. And it’s costless— that’s the thing.

See the entire interview on Grist.