Would you choose the vegetarian dish if it was the norm?
On how social norm messages might not be as effective to encourage sustainable food choices as previously thought.
Welcome back to Climate Psyched, the newsletter where we explore all things psychological, behavioral and emotional related to the climate and ecosystem crises.
The other day I was having a conversation about how to have conversations about climate, without getting people to feel attacked or accused of not doing enough. I’m not sure it’s doable, since the mere mentioning of the fact that a lot of people’s lifestyle choices are unsustainable - and sometimes the mere presence of someone who’s done changes to live more sustainably - can cause people to feel attacked or accused. Climate engaged people and climate conversations are challenging something that plays an important role in many groups and societies: social norms. Which is why the climate transition needs to involve a massive norm shift - but how do we do that? In today’s post we’ll look closer at new research that shows that it’s not as straight forward as previous research sometimes has implied.
Situation
Part of the reason there’s still a lot of responsibility put on climate engaged people to not stir up emotions in those who are still passive or reluctant to take climate action, is because behaving unsustainably, or living fossil intensive lives, is still - in high emitting societies - regarded as the norm. And everything that’s challenging that norm is easily perceived as triggering, upsetting and “sure, you can do that, as long as it doesn’t affect me”. This is why changing social norms around high emitting people’s lifestyles is an important part of the climate transition. Social norms is generally something that influence people’s behavior to a large extent, and throughout the years there’s been a lot of studies and experiments exploring how to design interventions to change perceived social norms. But how easy is it to use social information to get people to change behavior?
Explanation
Back in the 2008, researchers Goldstein, Cialdini & Griskevicius published an article that became the talk of the town, since they’d seemingly found an easy way to get people to behave more environmentally friendly. They did an experiment in a hotel where they wanted to test what was most effective in getting hotel guests to save water by reusing their towels and thereby reducing the amount of laundry. They put up a sign in every hotel room that was included in the experiment, encouraging guests to reuse their towels by reminding them of the environmental benefits. The signs said:
“HELP SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. You can show your respect for nature and help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.”
In half of the rooms, they added a sentence stating that 75% of overnight guests had reused their towels:
“JOIN YOUR FELLOW GUESTS IN HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. Almost 75% of guests who are asked to participate in our new resource savings program do help by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.”
Which rooms saw the greatest increase in reusable towels? Exactly, in the rooms that stated that 75% of other guests had reused the towels. In their follow-up experiment they tested the effect of adding the sentence
“JOIN YOUR FELLOW GUESTS IN HELPING TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT. In a study conducted in Fall 2003, 75% of the guests who stayed in this room (#xxx) participated in our new resource savings program by using their towels more than once. You can join your fellow guests in this program to help save the environment by reusing your towels during your stay.”
which turned out to be even more effective (note that (#xxx) would be replaced with the actual room number). So it seems that the closer we can identify with others, the more likely we are to want to do the same.
Using social information as a way to nudge people to behave more environmentally friendly has for the past few decades been popular. Not the least in the sector of dietary choices, an area where people seem quite susceptible to being nudged in a pro-environmental direction. But is it really as simple as if we just get people to believe that others are eating climate friendly food, they too will be more prone to do the same. New research is indicating that it’s not.
A systematic review of how social norms can promote sustainable food consumption
A research group recently published a systematic review that systematically assesses studies that have used social norm interventions to encourage sustainable food choices - a research field that, according to the researchers, has increased significantly since 2017. It seems that this is the first systematic review in the field - meaning that this is the first time a lot of studies on the subject are assessed systematically in one paper.
After having conducted a large literature search and gone through thousands of studies to assess which met all inclusion critera, they finally included 23 research papers, which in turn included 34 individual studies, all published no earlier than 2017. 57% came from peer-reviewed journals, and the remaining 43% consisted of working papers, unpublished manuscripts and student dissertations. The interventions in the included studies were designed and carried out in quite a few different ways, where half of the studies used a climate framing alone, while the other half used combinations of environment, health and animal welfare framings. Most of them used written text to communicate the norm statement (i.e. the statement about what most other people do, similar to the “75% of guests are reusing the towel” mentioned above), and a few also used graphic content, like colorful pictures of vegetables, to enhance the norm message.
Social norm interventions might not be as effective as we think
Quite surprisingly, what the research group found was that 65% of the included studies found no effect of the social norm interventions, and only 12% reported a significant positive effect. Perhaps even more surprisingly, 6% of the studies reported a significant negative effect, and the remaining 17% reported inconclusive findings. In this systematic review the researchers only reported so called main effects of the social norms’ interventions compared to each study’s comparison group, and categorized each study in one of these four categories (null, positive, negative, inconclusive). In easier words: they looked at whether the intervention in each study yielded significant results or not.
As with much other research, almost all studies were conducted in Europe (50%) and North America (44%), which is a limitation - however, since these are two high emitting continents it’s also arguably important to explore what inverventions work and don’t work in these places.
When social norm messages backfire
Two of the included studies yielded negative effects, i.e. the norm messages lowered the odds of participants choosing a more sustainable food option (you can find one of the papers here, while the other is a student dissertation and seems harder to find online). The research group discuss that potential reasons for these negative effects can be related to participants perceiving the norm messages as an attempt to manipulate them, which triggers reactance and an increased motivation to keep their freedom of choice, i.e. reject the vegetarian choice. Previous research has pointed out that the goal of a nudge and designer of the nudge influence whether people accept the nudges or not. People in individualistic countries generally seem less prone to accept nudges, which might be one explanation for the many null and even negative results in the systematic review. Perhaps they weren’t all that surprising after all.
As often is the case, numerous factors influence people’s behavioral choices, and more research might be needed to fully understand how (and if!) to best use social norm messages to facilitate sustainable food choices. The research group suggest a better tailoring of the messages so they feel more socially relevant. For us to be influenced by social information, there needs to be enough of a social connection, which is sometimes lost in too general messages or communication. There’s no one social norm or social group that feels relevant to everyone, and with that no one message or intervention that will work for all groups.
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I think one big difference between the nudging studies is that we’re used to reusing towels at home so it’s not such a big difference to also reuse them in hotels. There’s also a knowledge asymmetry where we don’t exactly know if we’re the only ones throwing towels on the floor but the house keepers definitely know, and even if I never talk to the house cleaners I don’t want them to talk about my room with their colleagues.
On the other hand it’s straight forward to figure out what other people eat since I eat with other people often enough. Telling me what strangers eat doesn’t change things a lot since I’m already aware that my circle and I might be eating differently than the norm in one way or the other. One thing that might be interesting would be to look at interpersonal norm shifting and if it would be effective to target vegetarian or vegetarian-curious people specifically with nudges/information, seeing as they might be the ones who would introduce vegan/vegetarian dishes in the community.