responded most visibly, picking up the slack for the electricity takers. To find out whether sharing
information about their neighbors’ conservation efforts could motivate conservation among people
who were consuming high levels of electricity, Cialdini’s team ran another experiment with nearly
three hundred households in California. This time, they gave residents door hangers that provided
feedback on how their electricity consumption compared with similar households in their
neighborhood over the past week or two. These door hangers provided feedback on whether residents
were consuming less (giving) or more (taking) than their neighbors.
Over the next few weeks, the electricity takers significantly reduced their energy consumption, by
an average of 1.22 kilowatt-hours per day. Seeing that they were taking more than the average in their
neighborhood motivated them to match the average, decreasing their energy consumption.* But this
only works when people are compared with their neighbors. As Cialdini’s team explains:
The key factor was which other people—other Californians, other people in their
city, or other residents in their specific community. Consistent with the idea that
people are most influenced by similar others, the power of social norms grew
stronger the closer and more similar the group was to the residents: The decision
to conserve was most powerfully influenced by those people who were most
similar to the decision makers—the residents of their own community.Inspired by this evidence, the company Opower sent home energy report letters to 600,000
households, randomly assigning about half of them to see their energy use in comparison with that of
their neighbors. Once again, it was the takers—those consuming the most—who conserved the most
after seeing how much they were taking. Overall, just showing people how they were doing relative
to the local norm caused a dramatic improvement in energy conservation. The amount of energy saved
by this feedback was equivalent to the amount of energy that would be saved if the price of electricity
increased by up to 28 percent.
People often take because they don’t realize that they’re deviating from the norm. In these
situations, showing them the norm is often enough to motivate them to give—especially if they have
matcher instincts. Part of the beauty of Freecycle is that members have constant access to the norm.
Every time a member offers to give something away, it’s transparent: others can see how frequent
giving is, and they want to follow suit. Because Freecycle is organized in local communities,
members are seeing giving by their neighbors, which provides feedback on how their own giving
stacks up relative to the local norm. Whether people tend to be givers, takers, or matchers, they don’t
want to violate the standards set by their neighbors, so they match.
Today, according to Yahoo!, only two environmental terms in the world are searched more often
than Freecycle: global warming and recycling. By the summer of 2012, Freecycle had more than nine
million members in over 110 countries, expanding at a rate of eight thousand members every week.
Many people still join with a taker mentality, hoping to get as much free stuff as possible. But
receiving benefits from a group of local citizens who serve as role models for small acts of giving
continues to create a common identity in Freecycle communities, nudging many members in the giver
direction. Together, the nine million Freecycle members give away more than thirty thousand items a
day weighing nearly a thousand tons. If you piled together the goods given away in the past year,
they’d be fourteen times taller than Mount Everest. As Charles Darwin once wrote, a tribe with many