“How to Get People to Pitch In”

“What does consistently work may be surprising: interventions based not on money, but on leveraging social concerns.

There are two ways to do this, both building on people’s desire for others to think highly of them. One is to make people’s cooperative (or selfish) choices more observable to others, like neighbors or co-workers. The second works in the opposite direction, providing people with information about how others around them are behaving (this is called a “descriptive social norm”).

To see how this might work, consider the California drought. The state could set up a website where homeowners pledge publicly to reduce their water consumption by 15 percent. Those who do would get a lawn sign that would say something like, “My lawn is yellow because I took a pledge to help California. Join me at yellowlawns.ca.gov.”

And what about norms? Innovative companies and public utilities are already on the case. A San Francisco-based firm, WaterSmart Software, sends mailers that allow homeowners to compare their water use to their neighbors’. Estimates suggest that these mailers reduce water use by 2 to 5 percent — the same as a 10 percent price increase.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/opinion/sunday/how-to-get-people-to-pitch-in.html?rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=article

I love “yellowlawns.ca.gov” – or, more likely, scrubbydesertareainfrontofmyhouse.ca.gov.

Also, this is a reminder that capitalism is an artificial system of incentives and resource distribution, and that social rules are the real situation.