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People 'go green' for a lot of reasons. Some are educated in environmental science and make it a lifelong ambition, some are seriously concerned about climate change and want to do their part, and others are nature lovers who ardently believe we need to conserve natural habitats and protect species. And some people want to gloat about their moral superiority and do things better than their neighbors.
So which is the best attitude to emphasize in order to get as many people living greenly as possible? This question is the focus of a recent, fascinating piece in the Atlantic, Greening With Envy. And its answer? Three guesses.
Yup. It's the last one. Of course, I was being a little harsh for effect there—and it's not necessarily moral superiority—but the principle remains the same: people will be more likely to go green if their neighbors are doing it. Because mostly, people just don't want to be the odd man out.
Going Green with Envy
Allow me to explain a bit. Greening With Envy begins with an account of a researcher's experiment:
A few years ago, Cialdini, a professor at Arizona State University, conducted a study in several Phoenix hotels comparing the effects of those ubiquitous hotel-bathroom placards that ask guests to reuse towels, testing four slightly different messages. The first sign had the traditional message, asking guests to "do it for the environment." The second asked guests to "cooperate with the hotel" and "be our partner in this cause" (12 percent less effective than the first). The third stated that the majority of guests in the hotel reused towels at least once during their stay (18 percent more effective). The last message was even more specific: it said that the majority of guests "in this room" had reused their towels. It produced a 33 percent increase in response behavior over the traditional message.
Which is a pretty staggering margin. And I know nobody likes to consider themselves sheep, but the experiment highlights a pretty indisputable aspect of human nature—we're more likely to do things that are considered normal, things that we feel everybody else is doing for a good reason. We may not personally care about, say, the way we smell, but since the standard is having a pleasant scent, we use deodorant products to fit the mold.
The ASU professor went on to do another experiment—using the same principle gleaned from the previous experiment, he set about attempting to improve energy efficiency.
Now Cialdini is applying that concept to energy consumption, with promising results. Positive Energy, a company that has drawn on his work (he's the chief scientist), has created software that assesses energy usage by neighborhood. Results are sent to consumers on behalf of their local utility, praising you with a row of smiley faces (you've used 58 percent less electricity than your neighbors this month!) or damning you with none (you used 39 percent more electricity than your neighbors in the past 12 months, and it cost you $741 extra).
The Tangible Green Envy Factor
We've seen such methods before. But it turns out that saving money individually isn't enough—you need to be saving more money than your neighbor to really make the commitment to going green.
In Positive Energy's reports, a once-intangible bit of social information—how much energy you use relative to your neighbors—is made tangible. Now you can find out not just what people in the same city are doing, but what people in your neighborhood, living in the same-size houses, are doing—akin to discovering what guests in "your" hotel room have done, but also with customized tips on how to do better.
In a trial run in Sacramento, the users of the program reduced energy by 2%. Which may not seem like a big deal, but as the Atlantic points out, "In energyspeak, a 2 percent reduction is huge; with the pilot sample of 35,000 homes, it's the equivalent of taking 700 homes off the grid."
Is the point that encouraging behavior that's apt to inspire envy in your neighbors a good way to increase the 'greenness' of communities? Maybe, to some extent. But it's really just a more concentrated form of what we've been trying to do all along: to lead by example. When you're neighbors see you recycling every day, even (especially) if you don't make a big deal out of it, the hope is they'll follow suit. This principle is applicable to most aspects of green living: recycling, toting reusable bags and goods, buying local and organic food plant based food, and so on.
So go on. Make your neighbors jealous.
More on Green Envy:
Your new car makes me Green with Envy.
Green with Service Envy – The Live|Work and Streetcar Partnership.
View and Vote: DIY Around the House Projects
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