A new study has found that in order to encourage eco-friendly behavior consumers need to be carefully nudged along. They may not be inclined to do so if they were told to follow a certain practice. Encouraging voluntary commitment may induce them to change their behavior.
Making people behave with sustainable values is a continuous challenge. As a sustainability initiative, many hotels ask their guests to reuse towels. This approach has met with limited success as half of the guests do not respond to such requests. However, requesting guests to follow social norms, which involves reuse of towels, has elicited significant response.
A study was performed on people who stayed at a hotel in California. Guests were requested to make a commitment to reuse the towels supplied to them or undertake to be environmentally friendly generally. Some guests were given a “Friend of the Earth” lapel pin when they expressed their commitment.
Guests who made specific commitments adhered to their commitments in reusing their towels. Guests who were given a pin followed more sustainable and eco-friendly practices in their subsequent activities.
The study was conducted by Katie Baca-Motes and Amber Brown from Disney Research, Leif D. Nelson from the University of California, Berkeley, and Ayelet Gneezy and Elizabeth A. Keenan from the University of California, San Diego. It has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Source: http://ejcr.org/