This is the P2PU Archive. If you want the current site, go to www.p2pu.org!
Intro to Concepts in Behavioral Economics and Decision Making - Mar 2010
My recent threads
You haven't posted any discussions yet.
Recently updated threads
- Discussion Assignment Week Four Wed, 2010-05-05 18:39
- Discussion Assignment Week Three Sun, 2010-04-18 17:25
- Discussion Assignment Week One Thu, 2010-04-08 21:03
- Discussion Assignment Week Two Mon, 2010-03-29 19:16
Reading the week four articles got me thinking about my own energy consumption patterns. I'm a relatively new California resident and by this state's standards, an energy hog. Between frequent work-related travel, driving a non-hybrid vehicle, and keeping my apartment at a toasty 74F, I use a lot of energy. It's not that I don't want to change my consumption patterns, but the inertia is great. The more I think about ways I can be goaded to drastically cut back on my energy use, the more I gravitate towards something like Google's Power Meter, which uses data, nice visuals and an energy-conscious community to motivate energy efficiency.
http://www.google.com/powermeter/about/about.html
Personally I think this method will work well for me. This tool helps me stay informed about my day-to-day energy use, convinces me that it is within my power to change my consumption, and provides access to peers who're doing the same thing (thus harnessing the power of descriptive norms, no puns intended!). But I'm also a bigger data junkie than most. How many people would change their behavior after using this tool, I wonder?
I think feedback is really important. From what I recall Thaler talked a bit about it in the video (or perhaps it was a different talk). If the consequences of our actions are salient and immediate it makes it much easier to control behavior. Regarding resource use and carbon emissions I always thought it was interesting that things like flights emit a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere, and yet so much attention goes into things like saving plastic bags which is relatively less important. Given that I don't have a car (and try to save bags) I always felt I was a good citizen until I put my details in one of those online carbon meters and found that flying is really bad! Why do so many people put more attention into saving bags rather than avoiding flights (perhaps I'm just speaking for myself here)? I was also discussing with my adviser why people don't more often buy carbon offsets. It's just so intangible and hard to "feel" like it's doing anything but dropping money into a big unknown hole. In that sense, the plastic bag, and things like the meter are much more tangible and salient.
For me, this raises some interesting questions about which 'group' we identify with. As in Ying Shi's examples, should we compare ourselves with other Californians (if we happenn to live in California) or other Americans, or other citizens of industrial democracies? Are geographical boundaries the right way to think about this, when the issue of climate change transcends those borders? If we take a global perspective, we're probably all 'energy hogs' but the difference between our current consumption, and our 'fair share' would be too painful to contemplate.
Because of the 'salience' issues, you're more likely to conform to your immediate neighbours, but doesn't this just narrow the distribution around the median in each country or region, rather than lowering consumption overall. When I lived in the US, people (on average) had much bigger houses than I was used to in England, air-conditioning, much bigger cars/SUVs and much cheaper fuel, swimming pools, and covered their houses in bright lights for every holiday. I quite liked many of these things, and I'm sure my energy use increased. I never drove an SUV, but I often felt uncomfortable in a normal size car when I couldn't see past the small tanks which everyone around me was driving. Feedback of various sorts may persuade the very highest users to move closer to the average, but I think we need to incorporate government policy on housing, transport, employment, taxation and so on, as well as attempts to change individual behaviour through 'choice architecture'. We should certainly make it easier for people who already want to use less energy, but we should also use the power of government to change the behaviour of people even if they don't want to (higher taxes on fuel, developing public transport alternatives, requiring new housing or products to meet environmental standards etc).
The readings this week seem to assume that 'conformism' is a good thing, which can be harnessed for 'good' purposes (which are assumed to be uncontroversially obvious). But conformism is just as likely to lead us to do the wrong things. It's easier to do the right thing if you think everyone else is, but it's also easier to do the wrong thing if you're part of a crowd. In our current situation, there are some crowds who think that we're heading for climate change catastrophe, and that we should be acting now to protect the interests of people in far-off countries or future generations who are likely to bear the brunt (even if it doesn't benefit us directly). There are other crowds who think global warming is a conspiracy based on bogus science intended to cripple the US economy, and deprive Americans of their god-given right to drive snowmobiles. Instead of just trying to conform to the crowd in which we find ourselves, we have to be able to ask the difficult question about whether the crowd around us is right, and what we can do about it. If we are part of a crowd which is wrong, it may not help to point to some other crowd over there which feels differently.
I was recently thinking about how to get people to stop relying on norms so much. In some cases it's good (hanging up towels and saving electricity) but I think most of the time as you suggest it's bad (complacency, etc.).