For some time in the energy policy world, there’s been a trend toward trying to use subtle techniques, often termed “nudges,” to change people’s behavior. For instance, if you learn that your neighbors use less electricity than you do, you might be promoted to act similarly, due to the strong power of social norms. Writ large, behavior changes like this could have a substantial impact on overall U.S. energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. But there’s a problem: What if some attempted behavioral nudges actually backfire, and don’t produce the desired change at all — or produce unexpected and undesirable changes?
Humans are, after all, notoriously quirky and weird beasts. There is even some research suggesting so-called “negative spillover” can occur in the wake of certain pro-environment behavioral changes. Thus, to give a hypothetical example, getting people to turn the lights out when they leave a room may make them feel like they’ve shown their environmentalist cred already and don’t have to do anything else – an effect that scholars call “moral licensing.”
So how often do such backfires happen, and why? Psychologist Heather Truelove of the University of North Florida and her colleagues set up an intriguing experiment to test when virtuous, and vicious, cycles of environmental behavior occur. Their study involved a sample of 231 college students — fair-sized for these types of studies, though some research has questioned how representative college students are of the population as a whole. The research was recently published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
In the experiment, study subjects visited a psychology lab setting — but the actual test wasn’t what they thought. When they arrived, the desk where they were supposed to sit was a mess. Hurrying to clean it up, and apologizing, the experimenter asked each student to help out — to “toss” a plastic water bottle, which had been sitting on the desk, in the bin outside. In different conditions of the experiment, the hallway featured either a prominent recycling bin alongside a trash bin, with a sign telling people to recycle, or an easy to reach trash bin, filled with recyclable objects (including a plastic water bottle), very near the lab and closer than the recycling. Thus, one experimental condition strongly nudged the students to recycle the bottle, while the other condition strongly nudged them to throw it in the trash. (In the “control” condition, the desk was messy but there was no bottle and students weren’t asked to do anything.)
The researchers also subtly labeled the bottles, so they could keep track of what happened to each one — where each student chose to dispose of it. Then came a more standard battery of psychology measures in which the students were asked, among other things, about their political beliefs, environmental identities, views on global warming, and whether they supported the idea of a “campus green fund” in which each student would pay $ 20 extra to help maintain a nature preserve on campus.
And that’s where the very surprising finding came in: having recycled the bottle led Democrats, as a group, to be somewhat less likely to support the green fund. “Democrats who recycled the water bottle had lower environmental identities and were less supportive of the green fund than those in the control condition,” the study found….
Read the full article at www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/04/04/democrats-and-republicans-were-prompted-to-recycle-youll-be-surprised-what-happened-next.