Saturday, February 23, 2019

Social "Science" and Towel Recycling


Amy Chozick, "Can Peer Pressure Defeat Trump?" The New York Times, Feb. 22, 2019

Image result for holiday inn towels
image (not from article) from
Excerpt:
“We are intensely social creatures and need to situate ourselves inside the collective,” said Robert Cialdini, a professor emeritus of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University and the author of several books on peer influence.

He cited a study he did at a Holiday Inn in Tempe, Ariz. His team compared the usual cards requesting that guests reuse their towels to protect the environment with several alternatives: One added that most guests of the hotel had reused their towels; another said that most guests “who stayed in this room” had reused their towels.

The last spurred a compliance rate of 49 percent, the largest spike in towel recycling the hotel had ever seen. “We think we’re free-standing individuals,” Dr. Cialdini said. But we “believe that the choice of our peers will work well for us, too.”

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