by Rona Fried
As we know, the American consumer has yet to embrace the big changes required to halt climate change.
We have a big hole to dig ourselves out of and don’t have the time to do it gradually. Americans have demanded everything to be cheap and industry has responded: food, clothes, airline tickets have become inexpensive enough for us to buy pretty much whatever we want when we want it. If we don’t have the cash, we just put it on a credit card or take the retailer’s offer to pay nothing for a year. That also worked for buying houses until recently; we continue to see car manufacturers hawk SUVs the same way in their endless television commercials.
This consumer society is completely unsustainable for our environment and our economy. We’ve shipped our manufacturing offshore where it’s cheapest, hurting our economy and making it vulnerable to China’s whims.
We are suffering from a severe leadership vacuum that few are willing to fill – utter words that intimate we might have to curtail our excesses and expect to get crushed by the political process and the media.
I believe peoples’ attitudes will evolve with time – and strong visionary leadership – as it has with health threats such as smoking and high cholesterol, but we don’t have several more decades to coax and pry them into action.
For now, people continue to drive gas guzzlers, protest buying hybrids because they are too expensive and put climate change concerns near the bottom of the list for the presidential race. They rise up to protest human rights violations in Tibet but don’t make a murmur when it comes to climate change or the trashing of our environment.
It’s time to get down and dirty and practical, so let’s focus on what might really work to make progress on climate change at the grassroots level.
Why is it that Americans are more than willing to spend $30,000 or more on cars because they are "cool" or have "status" but they see spending $22,000 on a hybrid as too expensive?
Americans are driven by:
– saving money
– emotional and financial security (feeling safe)
– status and prestige
– keeping up with "Jones"
Add a touch of human psychology on how to create behavior change: identify the behavior you want and give people positive feedback on how close they are to achieving it, rewarding them as they get closer and closer.
Example: RecycleBank gives people discount coupons to favorite retailers like Starbucks and Whole Foods based on the amount they recycle. Suddenly, communities with miniscule recycling rates are recycling 75% of their waste. Why? People save money and, very importantly, they receive positive feedback for their actions. Recycling no longer relies on "doing the right thing." Each week, a truck comes along that weighs their recyclables and gives them positive feedback – the more they recycle, the more coupons they get.
Because of this innovative business model that’s based on psychology, RecycleBank is rapidly expanding from 35 communities serving 125,000 homes in 2007, to an estimated 500,000 homes by year end.
Example: Hybrid cars have a feedback system that other vehicles don’t have. A gauge shows you your gas mileage every time you put your foot on the gas pedal. Push it down hard and you can see you’re using a lot of gas. Accelerate gradually and you can see the car using less gas. It’s a lot of fun to play with it to try to get the best gas mileage you can, especially when you see yourself cruising at 75 miles a gallon!
Why not make this simple, yet very effective feedback/ reward mechanism standard in all vehicles? Why doesn’t every home and business have a meter inside that shows how much water and energy is used by heating and air conditioning systems, appliances, lights, toilets and showers? The meter would also indicate what they’re paying for that energy and how much it would be reduced by lowering consumption.
Then there’s the power of keeping up with the Jones’. Besides giving people feedback on the amount of energy they use (and how much it costs them), why not double the impact by also informing them about how much energy their neighbors are using?
Our local utility includes a graph in its electric bills that compares the amount of electricity I used this year versus last year. How about including a graph that compares my use with my neighbors? When this tidbit of additional information was added to one California utility’s bills, heavy energy users quickly used a lot less energy! How about offering an incentive to people that reduce their load below the average of the neighborhood?
Many hotels now have in-room cards asking people to reuse towels to save energy. They’ve found that cards that say something like, "most hotel visitors reuse towels, we’ll assume you will too unless you indicate otherwise" and what works even better is a card that says, "most people who stay in this room reuse towels."
The morale: People will take action if they think others like them are doing it. The ‘everybody’s doing it’ pitch could be the most effective tool we have. As more people drive hybrids, it will be harder and harder for people to feel comfortable driving SUVs. More people will put solar on their homes, when they see their neighbors doing it.
Car manufacturers know that people buy cars based on what they "like" – which is greatly influenced by how they think others will perceive them. So, we have to change what people like.
I drive a hybrid because I’m clear about the climate change crisis and my impact, but it sure helps to drive a car that says "hybrid" on the back. What’s important to me is that others view me as an ethical, thoughtful person. That’s why the Prius outsells the Honda Civic Hybrid. The Prius looks different from every other car and screams, "I care and am taking action." Honda overlooked this critical psychological point when it designed its hybrid version of the Civic and Accord to look the same as its conventional models – it hopes to make up for it when it comes out with its own unique looking hybrid car in 2009.
A new book, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, details how human psychology needs to be incorporated into public policy, showing how to design programs that give people choices but also subtly coax them away from bad ones.
Example: if you want people to choose healthy food options, put them first in the cafeteria line. People are hungry and will choose more of what comes first.
Example: to get more people to sign onto utility clean energy programs, check the box that enrolls them and ask them to uncheck the box if they don’t want to enroll. Instead of asking people to "opt-in," ask them to opt-out. People tend to go with the default option, so make the default the option you want them to choose. Even just forcing people to make a decision one way or the other boosts enrollment.
Let’s think psychologically!
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Rona Fried, Ph.D. is president of SustainableBusiness.com.
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