I don’t always agree with John Tierney, but I have to thank him for pointing me in the direction of ‘Nudge‘, a new book by University of Chicago professors, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler.
The authors agree with economists who’d like to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by imposing carbon taxes or a cap-and-trade system, but they think people need extra guidance.
“Getting the prices right will not create the right behavior if people do not associate their behavior with the relevant costs,” says Dr. Thaler, a professor of behavioral science and economics. “When I turn the thermostat down on my A-C, I only vaguely know how much that costs me. If the thermostat were programmed to tell you immediately how much you are spending, the effect would be much more powerful.”
It would be still more powerful, he and Mr. Sunstein suggest, if you knew how your energy consumption compared with the social norm. A study in California showed that when the monthly electric bill listed the average consumption in the neighborhood, the people in above-average households significantly decreased their consumption.
Meanwhile, the people with the below-average bills reacted by significantly increasing their consumption – not exactly the goal of the project.
That reaction was avoided when the bill featured a little drawing along with the numbers: a smiling face on a below-average bill or a frowning face on an above-average bill. After that simple nudge, the heavy users made even bigger cuts in consumption, while the light users remained frugal.
Mr. Sunstein and Dr. Thaler suggest applying those principles with something more sophisticated than smiley faces. A glowing ball called the Ambient Orb, programmed to change colors as the price of electricity increases at peak periods, has been given to some utility customers in California, who promptly reduced their usage by 40 percent when the ball glowed red in peak periods.
Another gadget, the Wattson, which changes colors depending upon how much electricity a house is using, collects data that can be displayed on a Web site. Clive Thompson, a columnist for Wired, has suggested that people start displaying the Wattson data on their Facebook pages, an excellent idea that I’d like to take a little further.
I have written before about the need for people to be recognized for their good deeds, and what that means in terms of behavioral strategies for the climate fight. At heart, we remain little children. No matter how grown up I may pretend to be, there is this place inside my heart, that smiles whenever my efforts get acknowledged . . . I call that the ‘sticker effect‘. The other insight deals with the ‘lemmings‘ phenomenon, a behavior I have often observed in myself! Both behavioral tendencies are interrelated and stems from our inherent nature as social beings.
‘Nudge‘ is behavioral psychology at its best. Maybe not as appealing to the big boys as fancy technology, but potentially just as effective to fight climate change.
Interesting article. Motivating people to think and act on their individual impact on climate change is such a complex issue, both practically and intellectually.
I wanted to suggest this site to you to see what you think:
http://climatepact.org
It’s like a Kyoto protocol agreement for individuals to sign.
A Vision, Accessibility, Prices, Fulfillment and Social Recognition
First, I’d like to begin this post by acknowledging your efforts, Marguerite: Great job! (Now please don’t forget to smile.)
Yes, the info in Tierney’s article was great. (Although I appreciated the info when I read the article, I have some concerns about other aspects of his article and how it came across to me.)
In any case, I think “solutions” need to involve a range of elements that work together. In oversimplified and brief terms . . .
A New Vision or Paradigm. That is, one needs to replace the old vision (or paradigm), i.e. the greenhouse-gas spewing way of life, with a new more attractive vision (or paradigm) of ways of life that are more healthy with respect to nature, more conducive to genuine happiness, and so forth. In other words, people have to be able to “see where they are heading”, and the vision of where they are heading should be healthy and motivating.
Accessibility. This is partly a policy thing and partly a market thing. To put it simply, think of washing machines: If the most effective, least expensive, and best distributed washing machines are energy hogs, then most people will buy these energy-hog washing machines. If, in order to protect the atmospheric “commons” and in order to motivate manufacturers to make more energy-efficient machines, we need to establish a simple, basic standard (i.e., a minimum standard for energy efficiency), so be it. In the future, in this case, no energy-hog washing machines would be available. There would still be a wide variety of washing machines available, of course, with lots of competition among suppliers, and lots of colors, or whatever, but all machines would need to meet a decent standard of energy efficiency. That’s what I mean by “accessibility.” Products that are the worst energy culprits just wouldn’t be available.
Prices. Of course, prices and related economic factors should reflect the fact that we can’t use the atmosphere as a dumping ground. So, we’ll need a carbon “cap-and-auction system” or carbon tax of some sort to help inform healthier “consumer” choices and to also harness market dynamics to help address the matter.
Social Recognition and Personal Fulfillment. Here is where today’s topic comes in. As you mention, people are social beings. We like acknowledgment, respect, and an occasional reward or two. I agree with the key point of your post.
In sum, all of these elements will be necessary and helpful, I think, and they all interrelate and should complement each other. Any one of these elements wouldn’t work without the others. They (along with some things not mentioned) are part of a whole. Indeed, our current ways of life involve all of these elements, of course, but the existing versions of these elements all motivate and reward all sorts of unsustainable things, including pouring carbon dioxide into the skies.
Cheers for now.
Nudge, i read this word everywhere, it has become the friendly shove in the right direction.
How predictable humans are, for a smiley face to encourage us to do what we already know is correct.
We only need a few more incentives to roll consumption down to sustainable levels, each one of us, social creatures.
Dan, thanks for the link. Ideas such as the climate pact have been tried before, and are the basis of many of the green social networks, and other ventures such as carbonrally, or dothegreenthing, etc . . . The problem with such isolated initiatives is the one highlighted by Jeff. Just on its own, artificial peer pressure will not work. They need to be a part of the whole system of living, and integrated into broader efforts, such as the ones mentioned in the article, or Jeff.
Nadine, I love your optimism . . .
Here in Victoria in the next couple of years they’ll be rolling out “smart meters” – electricity meters that sit inside your house instead of outside in a box, and which have a digital display saying how much power you’ve used today, the current rate of use, and the cost.
So when you whack the toaster on or whatever you’ll see the number go up. They reckon this will encourage conservation.
The idea is also to flatten the load across the day. They’ll introduce “peak” and “offpeak” different pricing, to try to encourage people to turn their AC off during peak times when everyone else has it on, and use washing machines and so on in the nights rather than during the day.
This helps the company save money because the grid must be built for the highest ever use, not merely for the average use; if the highest comes closer to the average, then they can save money on infrastructure. It also helps if they want to put more renewable energy into the mix. Obviously it’s easier to plan the grid and buy energy from interstate when the wind/solar production is down if the load is pretty steady throughout the day.
The hope is also that by seeing how this or that appliance uses a lot of energy, people will tend to use it less, so that overall energy consumption drops.
Whether it’ll work I don’t know. Power’s a bit too cheap. The rate is something like $0.1655/kWh, so even a crazy 5kW AC is only 90 cents an hour. If you call it 90 cents an hour nobody’s going to be worried; if you call it $350 a year for an hour a day then they notice. How it’s listed matters. Just think of the people who buy their lunch at work every day, $10 a day makes $2,000 a year, but “it’s only ten bucks, howcome I can’t save money?” People look at the immediate.
So anyway we’ll see, but I think it’s a step in the right direction.
With the smilie faces they could take it further, maybe have five different ones, the high consumption one crying and the low-consumption one with an enormous grin.
Locally our recycling bins, it’s everything in one bin. This has the advantage of easy processing for the people picking it up – the truck can lift the bins, rather than the old smaller ones the people had to lift – but the disadvantage that a lot of nonrecyclable stuff tends to go into it, like plastic bags and polystyrene foam. If your bin has nonrecyclable stuff in it, they won’t take it. This creates an incentive to get it right.
But if your mix is right a few times in a row, then they put a little sticker on it, and note your address, and there’s a random draw for some movie tickets, you and the Mayor go in the council newsletter. It’s a bit lame, really, and I doubt it has any effect, but it’s a step in the right direction.
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