Desert blooms

Have you ever tried going door-to-door fundraising for a charity in a suburban Connecticut neighborhood to the east of the Connecticut river during a Red Sox playoffs game? 

This was the unexpectedly unfortunate situation that a friend and I found ourselves in after one of our parents dropped us off in a subdivision and promised to come back in a couple of hours. We were teenagers fundraising for the Relay for Lifeand had run through our own neighbors trying to reach some suggested fundraising threshold ($100?). So here we were in the subdivision, with a clipboard, paper forms to collect donor info, and a Ziploc full of small bills in case someone asked for change (and they did!).

After several dispiriting houses of on-edge Red Sox fans handing us whatever small bills were in their pockets ($2, $4, $5), we noticed something. People often consulted our donor info sheet before reaching into their pockets. They were checking what their neighbors had given! And the string of single digits continued.

So we had an idea. The first couple of lines on the form were examples that we had put in. The columns were labeled, but on-edge Red Sox fans don’t want to read column headings. After the first line resulted in a bunch of cross-outs and scribbles, we started a new sheet that we seeded with a few example entries – name, address, phone number, amount donated, check or cash etc. 

What would happen if we seeded the example lines with higher donation amounts?

We started a new sheet. This time the example lines listed donations of higher amounts – something like $20, $30, $25. 

And it worked! The first person who saw the new sign-up sheet dug out their checkbook. And the rest went relatively easily. A new door opened, a new person glanced at the donation log and trotted back indoors for their wallet or checkbook. A short walk to the next house.

Too bad we were ordinary teens with a clipboard and a Ziploc full of cash, and not super teens with a time machine and skills in the dark arts of psychological publishing, ready to skip back decades and scoop Kahneman and Tversky’s seminal work on the anchoring bias.

Aside from the anchoring bias, there was something else at work, though: normative influence. We do what others do, even if it’s not the reason we give ourselves for our actions. Why else scan the list of donations from neighbors before deciding what to give?

Today we’ll explore the power of social norms, as well as other research-based solutions to encourage pro-environmental behavior. We’ll focus on one key pro-environmental behavior to keep things constrained: water conservation in the garden. 

California’s in a drought, once again, but many parts of the rest of North America aren’t looking good either.

It’s important to get a handle on outdoor water use, because it varies considerably by climate and is much higher in dryer, hotter regions. For example, household outdoor water use in Waterloo, Canada is 13K gallons per year, while it’s almost ten times higher –120K gallons per year—in Scottsdale, Arizona. And Arizona is currently in a state of extreme and exceptional drought, while Waterloo is not.

Behavior change is hard! First, let’s understand why people might choose to plant high-water-use or low-water-use gardens in desert areas. Then, we can talk about research-based solutions to encourage desert blooms instead.

Image source. Water conservation doesn’t have to be so bad.

What do high-water-use gardens in desert areas signal?

Previously, we’ve talked about how the insides of our homes can say a lot about us. Well, the outsides of our homes can, too.

A series of experiments tested how people in a hot desert climate—Phoenix, Arizona—perceive local homeowners with low-water-use and high-water use gardens. 

In two experiments, participants read descriptions of homeowners with either low-water-use gardens made up of cacti and desert plants or high-water-use gardens made up of grass, trees, and shrubs. They then made inferences about the homeowners. 

Homeowners with high-water-use gardens were seen more positively: they were perceived as more attractive, more prosocial and extraverted, more conscientious, and more family-oriented. People with high-water-use gardens were also seen as higher-status, which was true even when researchers specified the neighborhood’s socio-economic status (working class, middle class, or upper class).

The only positives for homeowners with low-water-use gardens were that they were seen as more environmentally minded and more masculine (if that’s a particular homeowner’s landscaping goal!).

To test whether people could use landscaping to present themselves in a certain way to others, another group of participants were given a self-presentation goal and asked to choose a landscaping option to achieve it. For example, they were asked: “Which landscaping option would you choose if you wanted to convey conscientiousness (being dependable, self-disciplined, or organized)?” People then rated how likely they would be to choose desert vs. grass landscaping.

People knew what they were doing! They chose the grass landscaping option to be seen more positively, to be seen as higher-status, more family-oriented, more agreeable, more prosocial, and more extraverted, among other traits. What was the desert landscaping option good for? People chose it to be seen as more environmentally minded, more masculine, more open to experience, and more liberal.

Another study found that people tend to think gardens with grass and shrubs are safer, better for people to interact in, and better for kids to play in. Perhaps this explains the strong link between high-water use landscaping and being seen as more social and family-friendly. A lawn is more likely to bring forth images of parties and BBQs with friends or kids playing in the yard than rocks and cacti.

What can we do about it?

Given that high-water-use gardens make their owners look good, this behavior will be hard to change! But I have a few ideas to encourage low-water-use gardens. Here we go.

Directly address the assumptions that make low-water-use gardens unattractive

Low-water-use gardens are seen as less safe, less family-friendly, and worse for hosting. How about a campaign to change all of that?

I’m thinking: images of desert gardens set up for parties and friend hang-outs, before-and-after shots showing how a desert garden can be adapted for kids’ and families’ needs, and tips to make desert gardens feel safe. 

When it comes to perceptions of status, there could also be examples of “expensive” or “designer” looking desert gardens to convey the idea that there are other motivations to have one besides saving money on maintenance and water (or being environmentally minded and manly).

Image source. Low-water-use but high-status.

Change the narrative around desert plants

Desert plants are often touted as low-maintenance. But that might do little to get people to want to plant them.

Maybe highlighting that native desert plants are native could do more good?

People are willing to pay more for native plants if they’re labeled as native and to pay more for landscaping with native plants as long as the landscaping is well-designed.

Perhaps a little tag with a ‘native plant’ designation at garden centers could sway consumers’ choices?

I, for one, would be more willing to take another look at a native plant if I knew what to look for. This seems similar to the idea of identifying locally grown food. Here in Montréal, local produce at the Jean-Talon market is identified with a blue fleur-de-lis. And it certainly seems to sell faster.

Image source. Québec apples marked with a fleur-de-lis at the Jean-Talon market. Could native plants be marked with a special symbol to help buyers identify them as they look around a garden center?

Use the power of social norms 

Now we finally come back to social norms, which have also been shown to sway garden behavior. 

A new study examined what factors predict homeowners’ intended and actual planting of native plants in their yards. Participants filled in a survey where the key outcomes were (1) their intention to plant native plants in the front and backyard, and (2) their actual planting behavior – the self-estimated percent of the front and backyard that consists of native plants.

To predict these intended and actual behaviors, the researchers collected people’s attitudes toward native plants, the social norms in the neighborhood (About what percentage of your neighbors’ (front/back) yard consists of native plants?), and the degree to which people felt their yard was a socially constraining situation. People tend to behave more similarly when a situation is tightly constraining (e.g., people behave pretty similarly when waiting in an airport security line). 

People saw their front yards as more socially constraining than their backyards. The backyard is a personal kingdom of sorts, but what you can do in the front yard without enraging your neighbors is more constrained. Neighborhood social norms—whether neighbors had native plants in their yards—predicted planting behavior more strongly in the front yard than in the backyard. If your neighbors have a lot of native plants in their front yards, then you most likely will, too.

Social norms at work. There were other cool findings, too. 

Attitudes toward plants predicted intended and actual planting behavior, but some attitudes were more powerful than others. For example, people believed that native plants are important to ecosystems. Great. But holding this attitude only predicted the intention to plant native plants, and not the actual behavior. 

People also thought native plants are attractive. And this attitude had power. Holding this attitude predicted both the intention to plant native plants and the behavior. 

People also thought that native plants are easy-to-take-care-of, but this attitude didn’t predict either intended or actual planting behavior.

So, while we might all agree that desert plants are low-maintenance, highlighting how low-maintenance they are might not sway anyone’s choice. 

Highlighting that desert plants are native and that they’re pretty might be more powerful.

 Image source. Pretty pretty. 

Social norms can do a lot to change behavior, and people might not even recognize what’s going on, instead attributing their behavior changes to other causes. 

A very nicely done field experiment examined the effect of social norms on energy conservation. In this study, households were left doorhangers with a message about conserving energy, and their actual energy usage was measured over time to assess the effect of the message. A subset of households was also interviewed to understand what was going on. 

The doorhanger message had several iterations. There was a baseline version only containing information on how to minimize energy use, or an additional appeal to environmental protection, social responsibility, self-interest, or social norms. 

For example, the appeal to environmental protection included the following: “How can you protect the environment this summer? By using fans instead of air conditioning! … You can prevent the release of up to 262 lbs of greenhouse gases per month by using fans instead of air condition to keep cool this summer!”.

In the social norms condition, this text was replaced with: “How are San Marcos residents like you conserving this summer? By using fans instead of air conditioning! … 77% of San Marcos residents often use fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool in the summer”.

Here is where it gets cool. What people said and what they did diverged. People who received the social norm message reported they were the least motivated to conserve energy by the message they received. Both those who received the environmental appeal and the social responsibility appeal reported being more pumped up.

But behavior doesn’t lie. Those households that received the social norm message ended up reducing their actual energy use more than those who received any other message. And all the while, thinking the message did little.

So, a last solution I’d propose is a quick survey to build out some social norm messaging. “Did you know that 98% of your neighbors think desert plants are pretty? And that 87% have some planted in their garden?”