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Can hotel towels save the world?

10th June, 2010 by Anonymous

Stephanie Draperon the psychology of behaviour change.

How many times do you arrive in your hotel room and celebrate the fact that its environmental programme exhorts you to reuse your towel? Not often, I imagine. Of course, avoiding washing towels every day helps, but it’s hardly going to save the planet on its own.

But you’d be surprised how much we can learn from towels.

The messages that encourage us to put the towel on the rack and not in the bath have been scrutinised by social psychologist Robert Cialdini and others. They provide some interesting insights into how to persuade people to do the right thing.

Hotels generally tell us that keeping our towel for more than a day is all about doing our bit for the environment. And a lot of people respond to that. According to this research, 40% of us reuse towels at least once per hotel visit. Not bad. But when the same establishment changes the message to “the majority of people who stay in this hotel have reused their towels” the reuse rate increases by 26%. Make that even more specific –“the majority of guests who have stayed in this room have reused their towels” – and the reuse rate goes up 33%.

Now if you ask me, this is a bit weird. I don’t generally like to think about what other hotel users might have done in there before me! But clearly the guests identify more with people who they see as close to them. This is a demonstration of the importance of ‘social proof’ in achieving behaviour change. People are driven by the need to conform to social norms – and that largely means they like to do what everyone else is doing.

Yet the environmental movement often uses exactly the opposite psychology to try to persuade. We explain that there are lots of people polluting and it must stop, that everyone is littering and that it is ruining our streets. And that can simply be counter-productive. Cialdini et al did another study of the US Petrified Forest National Park. When visitors were told that lots of people had been taking bits of the trees and that it had to stop if the forest was to survive, this actually increased the theft from the forest. Unwittingly, this message had suggested to people that everyone was at it, it was the social norm, and that they’d better get their bit of tree before it was all gone!

We may not like it very much, but it seems that we are, after all, like sheep. Rather than asking people to buck the trend, we need to show that being green is all about going with the flow. We need sustainability behaviours to be the social norms. And that means we need to take social proofing into account when we are trying to persuade people to change.

Stephanie Draper is Director, Change Strategies at Forum for the Future.

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