Social "Science" and Towel Recycling

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

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.”