Lemmings

My mom used give me the usual "if everyone else jumped off a cliff would you jump too?" when I tried to tell her that I had to do something because everyone else was...

This morning I got this information in an email at work:
Robert B. Cialdini, an emeritus professor at Arizona State University


who studies environmental behaviors, points to two phenomena:
 Humans hew to the “normative” behaviors of their community. In places
where bike lanes or wind turbines or B.R.T. systems are seen as an
integral part of society, people tend not protest a new one; if they are
not the norm, they will. Second, whatever feelings people have about
abstract issues like the environment, in practice they react more
passionately to immediate rewards and punishments (like a ready parking
space) than distant consequences (like the threat of warming).
Test yourself: When a sign in a hotel bathroom exhorts you to reuse your
towel for the sake of the planet, do you nonetheless tend to throw it on
the floor to get a new one? (Me: Guilty.) “I’m a persuasion researcher,
and here you have convenience and luxury working against you — just like
in the bike-lane issue, “ Professor Cialdini said.

Professor Cialdini’s research has found that the best way to get a guest
to reuse towels is to inform him that a majority of the previous guests
in that room did not switch towels daily. Likewise, in a study to
determine how to get people to reduce home energy use, conducted with
Wesley Schultz, Professor Cialdini found that people were most likely to
comply if told that all the neighbors were doing it — rather than
informed that saving energy would save money or was good for the planet.
“People need to be in alignment with their contemporaries,” he said. “It
validates them. It becomes something they should do and can do.”

Are you like that? Bowing to peer pressure? I can be - more willing to try something if I know people I care about are. I'll watch a show or try a recipe if others I know like it. I kinda guilted my supervisor into recycling yogurt containers at work this way...

Whatever it takes to get good behavior - I'm all for it!