Behavioral Insights for the Analysis of Green Tips☆
Introduction
In many countries, individuals are increasingly encouraged to adopt green tips in order to help protecting the environment. Among well-known examples, one can mention the stop-buying-bottled-water, switch-the-lights-off-for-an-hour, choose-locally-produced-food, drying outside and the car free days movements. The About My Planet's website suggests more than 700 green tips and tricks (http://www.aboutmyplanet.com/all-green-tips/). These initiatives are frequently motivated by good intents regarding the common good and share the common feature of indicating simple and easily implementable ways to individuals to preserve the environment. According to a 2010 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Garrison Institute, ‘if Americans adopted a series of simple and inexpensive emissions-reducing measures in the areas of transportation, household energy consumption, diet, and waste over the next ten years, the U.S. could avoid 1 billion tons of emissions annually, beginning in 2020, and save money’.1
Without questioning the underpinning motivations of the promoters of such initiatives, the objective of this note is to identify some circumstances and mechanisms under which green tips can do more harm than good, that is, where they can lead to a net environmental degradation instead of a net environmental improvement. Examining such mechanisms, derived from behavioral sciences findings, is important for at least two reasons. First, an increasing number of scholars (e.g., Venkatachalam, 2008) argue that behavioral concerns are not marginal and may considerably influence the overall environmental outcome. Second, (environmental) policies ignoring such dimensions may lead to flawed prescriptions (e.g., Mzoughi, 2011, Mzoughi, 2014). Moreover, while leading in some circumstances to unexpected outcome, behavioral biases can also be part of the solution. Hence, in order to avoid a ‘pessimistic approach’, we also use some advances in behavioral and psychological science to suggest ways to avoid counterproductive effects and even turn green tips into productive steps towards deeper behavioral changes. Our analysis does not aim at being exhaustive but rather seeks to raise important issues for further academic and policy attention.
The remainder of the contribution is organized as follows: Section 2 defines and characterizes green tips or reminders and presents some arguments used to promote them. Section 3 develops several biases and mechanisms that can make green tips harming the environment rather than improving it. Section 4 is devoted to policy implications and suggestions to minimize the potential counter-productive effects of green tips. Section 5 concludes and suggests directions for future research.
Section snippets
Green Tips: A Continuum From Token Actions to Real Solutions?
It is difficult to provide a clear-cut and universal definition of green tips given the large variety of initiatives. Nevertheless, green tips are generally small actions that are voluntary, easy to do, quasi-costless and intended to be useful for a large number of people (even for future generations). These characteristics are, however, relative and frequently culturally determined. For example, some tips (e.g., drying laundry outside) can be easy to achieve in a given community or area while
How can Green Tips Harm the Environment Rather Than Help It
Standard economics frequently assumes poor behaviors result from a lack of information and prescribes information provision as a natural and self-sufficient solution. Nevertheless, a sizeable literature documents that providing information is not enough (Grolleau et al., 2016). Increased information can lead to higher levels of knowledge, but not necessarily to behavioral change due to bounded rationality issues (Abrahamse et al., 2005, Bolderdijk et al., 2013). Information-based interventions
Policy Implications: How to Transform Green Tips in Net Environmental Gains?
A natural and important issue that remains to be addressed is how to transform green tips in steps conducive to substantial and sustainable environmental changes. In the following, we emphasize some behavioral solutions likely to overcome the aforementioned behavioral issues.5
Conclusion
Green tips do not occur in a vacuum. They arise in a specific context that can either transform them in useful steps conducive to more awareness and environmental friendliness or detrimental levers for environmental change. We analyzed green tips from a critical viewpoint, to emphasize their huge potential but also the mechanisms by which they may fail to deliver expected results and even generate counter-productive effects in terms of environmental change. We argued that green tips can
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2021, Ecological EconomicsCitation Excerpt :Alterations of costs structures often come in the form of financial incentives and these can shift focus on monetary terms strongly associated with self-regarding preferences (Gneezy and Rustichini, 2000; Bowles, 2008). Moreover, it is important that policy instruments do not encourage token actions that may actually have degrading net effects on the environmental quality, e.g., when low-cost and low-impact PEBs are promoted, which then license other harmful behaviours or end up to be one-off actions only (Grolleau et al., 2017). The political challenge is therefore to reduce costs and/or to increase benefits of PEB without making price incentives the main or only motivation for action.
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The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.