Perhaps the single most important consumer trend of the last decade is consumers’ stated desire to consume more responsibility across a range of consumption decisions. Two-thirds of Americans report reducing their reliance on single-use plastics, half report choosing brands based on their environmental performance, and a third report reducing their consumption of meat or animal products.
Meanwhile, hybrid and electric vehicle (E.V.) sales are the fastest growing segment of the car market; in 2022, for the first time, the proportion of new car buyers expressing an interest in an E.V. was over 50%. And, multiple recent surveys from the likes of Pew and Yale report very high — usually around 80% — and bipartisan support for adoption of renewable electricity, as well as a willingness to pay a premium for it.
Experts and investors seem to think this is just the tip of the iceberg. According to Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, “… the next 1,000 unicorns — companies that have a market valuation over a billion dollars — won’t be a search engine, won’t be a media company, they’ll be businesses developing green hydrogen, green agriculture, green steel, and green cement.” Bill Gates agrees with him. “There will be eight Teslas, 10 Teslas. There will be Microsoft, Google, Amazon-type companies that come out of this space.”
And yet ….
Most consumers still don’t choose sustainable products when the option is available. Americans may claim to be willing to pay more for green energy, but while green energy is available in the majority of states — 35 out of 50 states or roughly 80% of American households as of 2018, at least — only 14% of households were even aware of the green option, and less than half of these households purchased it. Hybrids and electric vehicles are available nationwide, but still amount to just 10% of sales — 6.6% and 3.4%, respectively, according to S&P Global’s subscription services.
Now it may be that this virtue thinking-doing gap will eventually close. I hope so. But it will certainly need help, because in these situations there’s often an insidious behavioral dynamic at work that often stops stated good intentions from turning into actual good deeds.
The Plausible Deniability Effect
Allow me to illustrate what I mean by “the plausible deniability effect” with an example from a now-classic behavioral economics study. Every year, around the holidays, Salvation Army volunteers collect donations for the needy outside supermarkets and other retail outlets. Researchers Justin Rao, Jim Andreoni, and Hanna Trachtmann teamed up with a Boston chapter of the Salvation Army to test ways of increasing donations.
Taking a supermarket that had two exit/entry points, the team randomly divided the volunteers into two groups. In one group, just one volunteer was assigned to stand in front of one door. For the other group, volunteers were stationed at both doors.
When the volunteers stood in front of both doors, people gave at relatively high rates, but when the volunteers stood in front of just one door, giving fell, because the supermarket goers walked out the other door. (There was also a funny twist. Throughout the study, one of the members of the research team hid in the parking lot, counting how many shoppers went out of each door. When the Salvation Army volunteers stood in front of both doors, it suddenly seemed as if many people stopped coming out of the store at all. The researchers discovered that these people were going out through utility doors — the metal kind that clang shut — which led to the recycling bins.)
The randomization in this study allows us to deduce that the same people who would otherwise have given to the volunteers, avoided doing so by taking advantage of the plausible excuse afforded by volunteer-free doors. Turns out that a general feature of people’s desire to do good is that we’re awfully keen to do it — until there’s a plausible excuse not to.
Why it happens
Although our simultaneous willingness to do good and keenness to exploit plausible deniability might at first seem irrational, one can make sense of it by looking under the hood, at the social forces that shape our desire to do good in the first place.
Here’s a very brief primer (for more details, check out chapter 13 in my recent book with Moshe Hoffman, Hidden Games, which uses game theory to explore puzzles like these). We all want to be seen as good citizens, and to avoid being seen as mooches. Whether we are aware of it or not, this desire to build a good reputation is an important motivator of good deeds.
But plausible deniability dilutes reputation’s motivational effect because it allows people to avoid doing the right thing without taking a reputational hit. Said no to the Salvation Army volunteer? Everyone knows what to make of that. Walked out the other door? Hmm. Maybe you didn’t even see the volunteer, or maybe you parked over by the other door, and as you were walking out, you forgot about them. Maybe you would have given if you’d seen the volunteer or remembered.
And even if I know that these plausible excuses don’t apply — maybe I saw you looking at the volunteer, and then you suddenly changed directions and walked out the door, so I’m certain you saw and remembered the volunteer — well, did others see all that, or will I be the jerk for saying something when everyone else thinks you did nothing wrong? The open door allows you to avoid giving without getting it pinned on you in the same way as if you said no outright.
I’m not saying that plausible deniability is something people consciously take into account. People generally don’t ask themselves, “do I have a plausible excuse?” before deciding whether to do a good deed. But it does shape people’s intuitions about doing good without their awareness. When there’s no plausible deniability, they feel strongly moved to do good. When there’s plausible deniability, that feeling is weaker. They might not pay as close attention. They might be more easily distracted and pulled away. It might not feel as important or pressing.
And when it comes to consuming more sustainably, plausible deniability is a big problem. Even though many of us can buy green energy or EVs, our motivation is weakened by the presence of plausible deniability. Too expensive! Too complicated! Even if excuses like these aren’t actually true, they’re plausible.
How do we fix it?
The best thing we can do is to chip away at these excuses. As we saw, for the Salvation Army volunteers, this meant standing in front of both doors. Here are some behavioral nudges designed to eliminate plausible deniability that other researchers and I have tried in other contexts.
Introduce specific expectations
You might have seen these during the last election, if canvassers asked you questions like, “What day are you going to vote? Do you know where your voting station is? Are you going with anyone? How are you getting there?”
These questions prompt voters to sort out the logistics of going to the polls in advance, eliminating excuses like, “oh, man, I really wanted to vote, but I forgot to check where my voting station was, and then I didn’t have a ride.” In one study, planning prompts increased voter turnout from by 4 percentage points relative to a control whose voting rate was 43%; in another, it increased the share of participants who obtained a flu vaccine by 4 percentage points, relative to a control in which 33% of individuals obtained a vaccine.
Another wildly popular nudge, pledges, work similarly. It’s not plausible that you didn’t know you should do something if you already pledged to do it. Pledges have been successfully used in many, many contexts. For instance, in a field experiment involving over 2,000 Swiss taxpayers, Ann-Kathrin Koessler, Benno Torgler, Lars P. Feld, and Bruno S. Frey used pledges to reduce tax delinquency by 10 percent, and for three decades, Southern Baptists have used public “virginity pledges“ to (successfully!) delay first intercourse.
More generally, the literature on behavioral science suggests that leaving things open-ended can leave a lot of plausible deniability, and the introductuon of nudges like prompts and pledges introduce specifities that close down opportunities for plausible deniability.
There are other ways of introducing specificity. For example, we once advised a water company on reducing water use during a draught. In the area we focused on, a large share of residential water consumption went towards watering lawns with most residents watering three times a week, probably because that’s the default setting on most automatic watering systems. Yet most lawns do just fine if they’re watered only twice a week. Our aims were to convince residents to make the switch.
One might, naively, think that the best way to do this is to simply ask people to water two times a week, which gives them the flexibility to water when most convenient. But think about what would happen if you were to see your neighbor watering the lawn for the third time in a week. You might be sure of this, but would you be sure that other neighbors also saw them water twice before? This might prevent you from speaking up. And that in turn might make people more likely to give excuses like, “oh, shoot, I totally forgot which day it is.”
Thus, our advice was to request people to water their lawns only on particular days (Monday and Thursday). The idea was that if you saw a neighbor water on the wrong day, you could be sure that others would agree that they were in the wrong and could feel more comfortable speaking up. And that means everyone would feel less licensed to make excuses. Unfortunately, the introduction of a hosepipe ban interrupted the experiment so we never got to quantify the effect.
Remind, remind, and verify
In one of our collaborations, with the startup Keheala, we helped to design a digital health platform to support Tuberculosis (TB) patients as they undergo treatment. TB continues to be a major menace, infecting an estimated 10 million people each year, and killing roughly 1.5 million. This is particularly tragic because TB has had a cure since the mid 1940s, and a highly effective one at that.
But the cure requires that patients take a powerful antibiotic every day for six-plus months, returning to their clinic regularly to obtain medication refills, which, in places with poor transportation, can mean taking a half day or more off work. Plus, there’s often a terrible stigma associated with TB, so it’s better to avoid being seen at the clinic. Because of all this, people are often tempted to cease treatment early, gambling that there’s some chance they’ve been cured, and if they haven’t, well, they’ll just restart treatment.
The trouble is that they’re not just gambling with their own lives. If they haven’t been cured, then they’ll become infectious again, passing the disease on to others in the community. They are also quite likely to develop drug resistance, which is much harder and more costly to treat. Sticking to one’s TB regiment isn’t just good for the TB patient, it’s good for the community, too.
To motivate TB patients to take their medication, we built our digital health platform with a variety of extra features. One of the features we wanted to include was a daily reminder to take their medications. But we knew not to stop at that. Text reminders leave too much room for plausible deniability to creep in. “I didn’t see the text.” “My phone ran out of battery.” “I lent my phone to my mom.” “My dog ate my phone.” We needed to eliminate those excuses.
So, instead of just texting patients, we asked them to log in and verify that they’d taken their medication. If they didn’t do so within an hour, we sent another reminder. Then another. If, after three reminders, the patient still didn’t verify, our team texted or called them to try to get them back on the wagon. Now, “my phone ran out of battery” wouldn’t cut it.
The Keheala platform has been very successful at motivating TB patients to complete their treatment. In 2016, we tested the platform in a year-long randomized trial involving 1,100 TB patients in Nairobi. The proportion who failed to complete treatment fell by about two-thirds — from around 13%, to less than 5%. In 2018, we followed this up with a three-year trial involving over 15,000 TB patients throughout Kenya. We’re still in the process of analyzing the results, but our preliminary findings are that the platform meaningfully reduced the proportion who failed to complete treatment, this time, by about one-third — from around 13% to around 8.5%.
. . .
When it comes to marketing sustainable consumption, eliminating plausible deniability is perhaps the major challenge. There are just so many plausible excuses: “I tried, but it’s so hard to know what to do.” “I just don’t believe all these sustainable claims.” “I can’t afford it,” (of course some people really can’t afford it, but even those who can swing it can make use of the excuse). “I have so much on my plate, I just haven’t gotten to it yet.” It’s not easy for a single firm to counter this behavior alone; it will require coordination amongst industry members and regulators. But unless we find ways to stand in front of all the doors — even the small, forgotten ones — consumers will find their ways to the doors with cheaper, easier options. If the world leaves consumers lots of plausible excuses, sustainability will remain the stuff of talk.
Nudging Consumers to Purchase More Sustainably - HBR.org Daily
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