“…participants who said they did lots of environmentally responsible things on the energy front actually had less accurate perceptions of all this—suggesting that while people may think they’re doing the planet good, they are not.”
- ”Green and Clueless”, Sharon Begley, Newsweek, 8/17/10
This essay is another reminder that facts are not incentives.
We get facts wrong all the time. The piece points out that people don’t know how much energy things use, either in absolute terms or in relationship to each other. This ignorance isn’t limited to the relative environmental impact of clothes lines versus cell phones – most of us don’t know state capitals, how the federal budget process works or who signed TARP into law.
Even if we get the facts right, that does not mean that we will act on them. Flossing will keep my teeth healthier and diminish the amount of shame I feel at the dentist, yet I haven’t flossed in a week. A number of Republican candidates, and presumably their potential voters, simply don’t believe in global warming in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary.
And even if we get the facts right that doesn’t mean we will act in ways that those pointing out the facts would like us to. One study of the effects of messages about global warming found that scare tactics made people want to drive SUVs more and economy cars less; clearly not the conclusion advocates were hoping people would reach (the logic is that if we are about to be under siege from storms and rising waters we want to be in cars that can handle it – what you rather be driving through armageddon, a Mini Cooper or a Hummer?)
Some of us do get the facts right and do intend to act in ways that we think make sense from the facts – but still get it wrong. My dad is very environmentally conscious and talks a good global warming talk. One of his solutions is to “hyper mile”, squeezing every possible mile out of a gallon of gas. But to the best of my knowledge he has never cleaned the lint-filter in his dryer.
A better solution than dumping facts on the field and hoping they get picked up in the right ways is to provide clear incentives to act. One example of relying on incentives rather than data is a company called OPower which uses competition and social norms to drive down individual energy consumption. Homeowners can track how much power they are using compared to their neighbors in the context of who is saving more – sort of keeping down with the Joneses. So far their approach works, with individuals cutting energy consumption by 2.5%. Cutting your power consumption by that amount may not seem like much, but added up across all of the homes in a city or region it quickly becomes real and important.
If you want someone to behave differently find a way to reward that person for the behavior.
