ONE OF THE TRIBE
Imagine someone knocks on your door and asks you to answer a few questions about energy
conservation. How often do you try to use less electricity? Do you conserve water by taking shorter
showers? Have you insulated your house to reduce heat loss? Do you drive a car with high gas
mileage? Then they ask you how strongly you agree that conserving energy will help the environment,
save you money, and benefit future generations. Finally, they ask you two questions:
Which reason
most motivates your energy conservation? Oh, and how many of your neighbors do you think try to
conserve energy?
Eight hundred California residents were asked these questions as part of a study on why people
conserve. They were quite the altruistic bunch, claiming that their strongest motivation was to protect
the environment, followed by helping future generations and saving money. “Because other people are
doing it” came in dead last. But before we congratulate the Californians for being so civic-minded,
consider this: The only survey question that predicted a person’s actual energy conservation was how
much they thought their neighbors tried to conserve. The other beliefs and motivations—saving
money, saving the planet for their grandkids—had zero relationship to what people did. People
thought
they acted for noble reasons, but the only belief that mattered was a far less altruistic
“Everyone else is doing it.”
This is an example of what psychologists call
social proof
. When the rest of our tribe does
something, we tend to think it’s a smart thing to do. This is one of those useful survival instincts that
come with having a social brain. After all, if you see
your whole tribe heading east, you’d better
follow. Trusting the judgment of others is the glue that makes social living work. You don’t have to
know everything yourself and can save your resources for whatever your specialty is, be it making the
finest hippopotamus-hide loincloths, or the most accurate predictions about the stock market.
Social proof has enormous sway over our everyday behavior. It’s why we often check out the
“most read stories” box on news websites, and why we’re more likely to go to the number-one movie
in the country instead of the box-office bomb. It’s why undecided voters can be persuaded by poll
numbers, and why it counts as “news” when parents are fighting in the aisles over the hottest new toy.
What other people want must be good. What other people think must be true. If we don’t yet have an
opinion, we might as well trust the tribe.
The researchers who went door-to-door asking about energy use
decided to test the power of
social proof for changing behavior. They created door hangers that urged residents of San Marcos,
California, to take shorter showers, turn off unnecessary lights,
and use fans instead of air-
conditioning at night. Each door hanger came with a motivational message. Some asked the residents
to protect the environment; others focused on how conserving energy would help future generations,
or lower the residents’ energy bills. The social proof door hangers included only one statement:
“99% of people in your community reported turning off unnecessary lights to save energy.”
A total of 371 households received one of these door hangers once a week for four weeks.
Importantly, each household always received the same type of persuasive message—e.g., four social
proof door hangers in a row, or four “help future generations” door hangers in a row. To find out
which motivational appeal was most effective, the researchers took regular
readings of the energy
meters at each home. They also got a hold of the residents’ electricity bills for the months before and
after the door hangers were delivered. The only persuasive message that decreased a household’s
energy use was the “everyone else is doing it” appeal. The other appeals—for the reasons people say
make them conserve energy—had no effect on behavior.
This study is one of many confirming that we
are
the lemmings our mothers always warned us not
to be. “Would you jump off a bridge if all your friends were doing it?” We knew then, just as we
know now, that the correct answer is supposed to be, “No, never!
I am an independent-minded
person, and other people have no influence over me!” But the more truthful answer is, yeah, maybe
we would.
People rarely want to be reminded of this. In the classroom, I find that just about every student
believes that he or she is the exception. We’ve been trained since birth to do it our way, to stand out
from the crowd,
to be a leader, not a follower. And yet our cultural obsession with independence
cannot suppress our human desire to fit in. Our society may praise being above the influence of
others, but we cannot separate ourselves from our social instincts. As the door hanger study shows,
this needn’t be a bad thing. Social proof can strengthen self-control when we believe that doing the
right thing (or the harder thing) is the norm.
