Sometimes a nudge goes wrong:
The notion of illusory superiority — the misguided belief that we’re better than others — is a basic tenet of social psychology. In one early study, 93 percent of Americans rated themselves as better than average drivers (as compared with 69 percent among the more modestly deluded Swedes in the sample). It’s also one of the quirks of human behavior that best-selling author Robert Cialdini is exploiting to get us to behave better. In one academic study, Cialdini and his co-authors found that simply telling hotel guests that a majority of other guests reused their towels boosted reuse rates by 34 percent more than telling them to do it for the sake of the environment. Cialdini is now retired from his academic position at the Arizona State University and is working as chief scientist at Opower, a company that aims to make money by helping utility companies design social nudges to get their customers to conserve.
In early 2008, Opower collaborated with a California utility to send a Home Energy Report to 35,000 randomly selected customers. (It came bundled with the household’s regular energy bill.) Each report contained a bar depicting the household’s energy use alongside bars showing consumption for average neighbors and also “efficient” ones. The principle behind highlighting the household’s own use relative to its neighbors is the same as in Cialdini’s towel study — no one wants to be worse than average. In addition, Opower reinforced the household’s performance by awarding one or two smiley faces for good households and adding the words “ROOM TO IMPROVE” to the charts of energy gluttons. (The reports also included a few energy-saving tips and suggested what customers might save if they followed them.)
In a study evaluating the program’s effectiveness, Opower researchers compared power use before and after the HER reports began arriving, and further compared this change with a group of control households that never received the reports. On average, the HER households reduced their consumption in the months that followed by a little less than 2 percent. Not bad, but probably not enough to save the planet.
Working with the same utility as Opower, Costa and Kahn matched up information on the households in the pilot study to data on political affiliations and a database of past charitable giving to environmental organizations. The economists found that the 2 percent average decline in energy use obscured significant differences in the responsiveness of different types of households to the conservation message. Registered Democrats who give to environmental organizations and live near other liberals reduced their consumption by 3 percent. For liberals who started out as heavier-than-average consumers, the reduction was almost 6 percent. Republicans who live in conservative neighborhoods (and hence had no neighborly pressure to conserve) and had no record of giving to environmental organizations actually increased their consumption by 1 percent.
Why would some energy-conscious Republicans all of a sudden become power hogs? One explanation is that many conservatives don’t believe that burning energy harms the planet, so when they learn that they’re better than average, they become less vigilant about turning the lights off. That is, they’re simply moving closer to what they now know is the norm (what psychologists call the boomerang effect). Costa and Kahn also look for guidance from the patron saint of right-wing fundamentalists, Rush Limbaugh, who encouraged his listeners to turn on all their lights during Earth Hour. Costa and Kahn suggest that ardently right-wing electricity customers might respond to paternalistic nudges by burning more energy, just to thumb their noses at Big Brother.