Reviewer: Reiko Bovee I want to challenge you all
about what you think you know. Many of you are here because you're really interested
in making change. You're thinking about making change in lots of places and lots of ways. But what you don't know is that your greatest adversary
is not that change is hard to make; your greatest adversary is common sense. (Laughter) I know that's kind of a shocker. You think that you're a human being,
and you know the way the world works, but I'm here to burst that bubble. Let's look at a couple of
efforts to make change. One of the things people
have been working on for decades is trying to reduce littering, trying to get us to put our trash
and our waste in appropriate places. So we here we have two campaigns. One that says, "This is the amount of rubbish that's been left around
this bus stop since Monday." That's a really common strategy for trying
to encourage people to stop wasting. If we show people how big
the problem is, they'll stop doing it. The other strategy
is poster B, and it says, "See what this Olympic runner is doing? She cares about our town, Preston,
and she's throwing away her waste." I want each of you to look at
these two ads, A and B, and think to yourself: Which one has the biggest chance
of making a change and reducing littering? Just keep that in your mind. We'll get back to it at the end,
and we'll see how good you are. I promised you that I would talk to you
about common sense and why it's your greatest adversary. There really are three kind of big ways
that common sense leads us astray. The first is that we think if we're going to change
people's behavior, they just need education: if we just give them some information,
then they'll change their behavior. What's missing in this equation is
that people don't know. And if we just fill in the gaps,
then we can get them to do what we want. Let's think about one thing that people
are talking about a lot right now, which is energy conservation. April opened today by telling you that buildings are responsible
for 40% of our energy consumption, 40% of our greenhouse gas emissions. So if we want to make
an impact on climate change, we need to think about buildings. So some social scientists were thinking, "How do we get homeowners
to reduce their energy consumption?" They sent auditors out
to look at people's homes. One of the things they were looking for, and reporting back on,
and giving people information about, is these little gaps
in and around your doors and windows. If you live in an old house
like the house I grew up in, you might have these little cracks. They're letting in cold air, and that's making you
have to turn your furnace up. So if we just tell people
how many cracks there are, how many windows need help,
people will weatherstrip, right? If you give people information, 20%, 20% of people will weatherstrip. But really we're going to spend money
and send people to homes and investigate, and we're only going to get one out of five people
to change their behavior? We can do better than that. We have to know that how you present
information makes a difference. One of the big things
that makes a difference is making information tangible. If you take all of those little cracks
around all of those doors and windows, and you say, "How big is that? ... The gap in your house
is as big as a basketball," people then magically now understand
how important is to fill them. When they just think they
have 16 windows and cracks, they don't see it as important. But when you make it
more tangible and say, "You have a hole in your house
the size of a basketball," people say, "Oh, maybe weatherstripping those doors
would really make a difference." Making information tangible
makes a difference. The folks in this study did more
than just making information tangible, and they also personalized information
in those homeowners, and they interacted with them.
[How you present information matters] Putting up posters that people
might or might not see is never as effective
as talking to other people. Social interaction
is one of the most important tools that we can use for making change. There are other things, though,
that help us when education fails us, when just giving out
information is not enough. Sorry, I skipped that. Back up there. When you give people
all three of these things, 60% of them weatherstripped. That's a three-fold increase
in how big the change is. So how you present the information
triples the effectiveness of your effort, and knowing that makes a difference. There are other things, other things
about how we present information. One of them is that human beings
are loss averse. We fundamentally hate to lose anything. If you tell people what they're losing, they'll engage
in the behavior that you want, just because you've told
them what they're losing. It doesn't matter
how big or small that is, but hearing that you're losing is more likely to change behavior
than hearing what you're gaining. This is the Denver water campaign, and they're trying to encourage people to engage in more water
conservation practices. A lot of people don't understand
the importance of fixing leaks, or fixing a running toilet, because you just hear
a little drip, drip, drip. Big deal, it's just a little drip. But when you add up all those drips, over a few months or a year,
you're wasting gallons, and telling people
that they are losing gallons of water motivates people to change in a new way. So framing loss can make a difference. The other thing
that social scientists know is that you actually have to think
about various audiences. Different audiences need
different information. This is a campaign poster
from here at CSU, and it's one of several
that was created by students to help reduce high-risk alcohol use. Students who are heavy users of alcohol,
they want different information. They're not interested in
what all CSU students are doing. The only reference group, the only people
that are important, that matter, to them, are what other drinkers are doing. And so their poster says 71% of CSU freshmen who drink,
drink once a week or less, because that's the norm. But the students who are
more average, lighter drinkers, they're interested in how much
the whole student body drinks. This data from the same survey says that 71% of the entire
student body drinks. You all laughed when you read the poster. I love this poster. My students love this poster. There are students in the room -
anybody have this poster in your home? Yes! Thank you! I have not given out
this poster for free since 2009. (Laughter) But you can thank
the students who created it. The message here is
that you have to give a message that is appealing to the audience,
to the people that you're talking to, that resonates with them, and that also gives them the information that they, in particular, are
interested in hearing about. So we have two different posters. One for heavy users
and one for light users with slightly different information. The difference for heavy drinkers
between 77% and 71% maybe sounds like
a tiny bit of difference to you It's a big difference to them. It's the difference between the campaign being believable
and influencing their behavior, and the campaign being unbelievable
and having no effect. It's 6%, but it's the difference
between believability and unbelievability. So knowing your audience is
a key factor in making change. There are some other things, ways, that common sense leads us astray. This is my personal favorite. We think, kind of generally,
that if you want to change behavior, you've got to change people's attitudes. I talk about energy conservation
often in my research, and people say to me, "How am I going to get people
to believe in climate change? I can't get people to conserve energy if they don't believe
that we're killing the planet." And I say to them, "You don't, you really don't, have to change anybody's attitude
about climate change." And people just don't believe me. To them I say, "You don't have to
change attitudes to change behavior." And people always say, "Then what do you do? If you don't change attitudes,
what do you do?" Let's start with
what the environmental sociologists have found over and over again
in dozens of studies. Attitudes follow behavior. If you survey people about whether their attitudes
are pro-environmental or not, it will not predict whether or not
they engage in conservation behaviors, it will not predict whether or not
they conserve water, it will not predict
whether or not they recycle. Attitudes follow behavior;
they do not predict it. So stop trying to change it. When people engage in
the behaviors you want, you'll be able to measure
the attitudes you expect. But before that, you need
to do something else. How many of you were asked by your parents to turn off the light
when you leave the room? Raise your hands. Turn off the light
when you leave the rooms. Okay, this is an effective strategy. Almost everyone in the audience
had their arm up. That's because your parents do know that setting expectations works. They just don't that it works
for all kinds of things. Much bigger things than turning off
the light in your room when you leave it. So, don't change attitudes;
set behavioral expectations. This is a poster of high school students at Rocky Mountain High School. Little placards they put over the lights
in all of the rooms in their high school, reminding teachers and students
to turn off the lights. And that's what people do. When I interviewed people at this school, new teachers to that school said, "I know that this school cares
about energy conservation, because I see this everywhere. It not only reminds me to engage
in conservation behavior, but it also tells me that people
in this place care about this issue, and that encourages me
to think about it in my daily life." If we're not going
to change people's behavior by changing their attitude, how do we deal with a tough issue
like climate change? Building green buildings like this one, convincing cities and school districts
and other public organizations that they should adopt
green building standards can be a highly politically
contentious issue. Citizens say, "Let's not waste money
on stuff that we don't need, that's not going to do any good." How do we deal with that? We don't deal with that
by changing anybody's attitudes. We deal with it by understanding
what people's underlying values are. What is it that people really care about? This is a knowable thing. You can ask people and they will tell you
what really matters to them. The environmentalists
care about green buildings for all of these reasons. They care about building
green buildings foremost because they see it as saving the planet. They also care about it because they think green buildings produce
better learning environments for students. They also care about
building green buildings because they know that it saves resources like electricity and natural gas. And they care about it, because, of course, doing all
of those things, saves money, but that's kind of secondary. There's a whole other set of people that identify specifically
not as environmentalists. They can bind to green building too, but we have to understand
what their underlying value is, and their core value is frugality. And the value of frugality
is just not wasting. We shouldn't waste money,
we shouldn't waste people's time, we shouldn't waste natural resources; we should just eliminate waste. This idea of conserving is what unites both of those two ends
of the political spectrum that are so likely
to be fighting with each other. If we sell green buildings
because they are conservative, because they conserve our money,
our time, our resources - and the resources can be money
as well as environmental resources - if you sell it based on conservation, both sides, the left and the right, the environmentalists
and the people who care about frugality, will all buy in. But you must understand values, and that's a fundamentally
different tactic than changing attitudes. We have one more way
that common sense tends to lead us astray. People think that they know
what motivates them. Now you all are human beings, and you think that
because you're a human being you're qualified to say
what motivates you. You are wrong. (Laughter) I know, it makes you laugh. You actually don't know. It's kind of an insult to think
I'm a human being and I can't be counted on
to identify what motivates me. But social scientists
know this to be true. One of the biggest things
that does influence our behavior is social norms. Street musicians know this
and take advantage of it. It's why they put coins and money
into their guitar cases, or whatever their musical
case is, on the ground. Because we know that when other people
are doing something, other people are more likely to follow. What the street musicians don't know, is that seeding their case
isn't really enough, because you haven't actually
seen another person doing it. What they really should be doing
is bringing their friend with them and asking their friend to come by
every five minutes and drop a dollar in: "Anytime there's no action, can you just walk by
and drop something in?" The number one predictor
of giving money to a street musician is walking past the musician directly
behind someone who did contribute. That's the greatest predictor: that you saw somebody else do it. That increases the likelihood
that you will do it. Unfortunately, social norms
are a great motivator of behavior, and they are the most understood
and underestimated by human beings. How many of you have been to a hotel
and have seen the wonderful message: "Please reuse your towel
and help us save the environment"? OK, hotels are using
the least effective method that they could possible use. The reason they're using that
is because they asked people. They said, "Which one of these messages will motivate you the most
to change your behavior?" People said, "If you ask me
to protect the environment, that will work. If you tell me that other
people are doing it, I'm going to report, I don't think
that's a very effective message." The sad news is that social scientists,
especially psychologists, like to do experiments, and when you do an experiment
and expose people to different messages, you discover that social norms
have the biggest impact on behavior. If you tell people: "75% of the people in this hotel room
reused their towels," you will get the biggest
bang for your buck. If you ask people to save the environment, you will be about half as effective as if you told people
that other people are doing it. So not only are social
norms really effective, but they're really underestimated. Not only do human beings
not know what motivates them, they reverse the order of importance. So, if you ask people, you will design a campaign
around their priorities that is the least effective
that it possibly could be. Let's go back to this one. How many of you thought
A will be the most effective? Be honest, raise your hands. How many of you thought A? Alright, now you know that you're wrong. (Laughter) How many of you thought B? Alright, we have some
social scientists in the crowd, some people who have taken
one of my classes, or someone else's. You know that B is the most effective because it utilizes social norms,
and it also uses modeling; it shows someone doing the behavior
that you are interested in. What's wrong with A is
that it sets the inadvertent norm, the behavior that you're not
interested in having people do. You're like, "Everybody litters." Since social norms
are the most influential, you can create campaigns
that are not only - Does this say the wrong thing? Why are we laughing? Not only can you be
ineffective in your campaign, many people, including
the federal government, have created social norms campaigns that increase the behavior
that they're trying to reduce, because they use social norms
in a way that is ineffective, because they don't
know about their importance. I started with saying that many of you
are interested in creating change. We started today by listening to Mike. Mike encouraged all of you
to think about making a meaningful life. I want to encourage you
to think about making effective change. Make your change meaningful. Many of you are going to go out
and try to be entrepreneurs. You might be trying to improve health, you might be trying
to change the environment; all of these things require making change. We can be successful. But you will be the least successful if you let common sense be your guide. (Laughter) I know, it's kind of hard news to hear. It's the greatest kept
secret of social science. Dan encouraged us
to think about what is our magic? Really, truthfully, honestly, I think that sociology
and social science is magic. So thank you for letting
me share it with you today. Please use it in your lives. Thanks. (Applause)
