At the Net Impact conference last week, a waiter stopped by before lunch to ask if anyone at our table wanted a vegetarian meal instead of chicken. Just one or two people did.
This, as it happens, is typical. When a meat-based entrée is being served, and people are offered a vegetarian alternative, about 5 to 10% will request it.
But what if the choices were reversed? Organizers of the 2009 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference, which began today in Washington, tried an experiment: They made a vegetarian lunch the default option, and gave meat eaters the choice of opting out.
Some 80% went for the veggies, not because there were lots of vegetarians in the crowd of about 700 people but because the choice was framed differently. We know that because, at a prior BECC conference, when meat was the default option, attendees chose the meat by an 83% to 17% margin.
More than lunch is at stake here. “Omnivores contribute seven times the greenhouse gas emissions, when compared to vegans,” says Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, the conference chair, who works for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.
Might there be broad-based ways to promote a vegetarian diet, while giving people the freedom to choose what they want? How can smart-grid technology be designed to encourage people to conserve energy? Which “green” marketing messages work, and which don’t? Can the insights of behavioral economics help fight climate change?
Those are the questions that engaged the policy makers, academics, and business executives at this BECC event, which differs from most conversations about climate change. Typically, when politicians, environmentalists or corporate executives discuss the issue, they focus on technology (solar, wind, electric cars) or regulation (cap-and-trade, the UN climate talks). The BECC crowd focuses on another powerful lever, albeit one that doesn’t get as much attention: human behavior, and in particular the irrational, emotional, self-defeating, short-term, inconsiderate and plain old silly human behavior that most of us engage in every day.
Like keeping incandescent light bulbs burning, when we know CFLs are cheaper (and most work very well). Or looking at the price tag of an appliance, rather than its lifecycle costs. Or buying things–like over-sized homes–that we can’t afford.
As Erhardt-Martinez notes, personal choices have a huge collective impact on the climate crisis. Home energy use and the use of personal vehicles—that is, the way we live—accounts for about 38% of U.S. energy consumption. Behavior change could generate energy savings of 25 to 30% over the next five to eight years, she said.
There’s no need to wait for technology breakthroughs. “We already have much better choices,” she said. “People aren’t making them.”
Dan Ariely
Dan Ariely, professor of behaviorial economics at Duke and director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight (!) — gave the opening keynote at BECC, and he left no doubt that most of us are not nearly as rational in our decision-making as we would like to think we are. (I blogged in June about Ariely’s entertaining book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. If this topic interests you, I can also enthusiastically recommend Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Sunstein has since joined the Obama administration as a shaper of regulations.) Ariely, Sunstein, Thaler and others have all brought the insights of psychology to the study of economics, helping explain how we humans actually behave> Hint: we’re not always the dispassionate, rational, self-interested, utility-maximizers of Econ 101.
“We wake up every morning with an incredible sense of agency,” Ariely says, meaning that we see ourselves as masters of our own fate. But evidence suggests that emotion, not to mention the people who design user interfaces—from the lunch menu to the choices presented by our 401-K plans—play a large role in our lives.
The climate crisis is a particular challenge for behavioral economists. It’s a long-term problem, and we tend to focus on the immediate. (That’s why Americans can’t resist dessert, and had a negative savings rate for many years.) Greenhouse gases are invisible, unlike other pollutants. Measuring the impact of individual actions is all but impossible. Global warming will harm other people, mostly poor people in the global south, before it damages the U.S.
“If you said, I want to create a problem that people don’t care about, you would probably come up with global warming,” Ariely says.
Still, there’s creative work being done to change behavior. Check out the Energy Smackdown, a community-based competition to excite people about saving energy. Some utility companies put smiley faces on bills of efficient consumers, promoting friendly neighborhood rivalries. Speakers at the conference addressed such topics as “Consumption-Based Carbon Footprint Accounting Tools,” “Pay as You Drive Insurance” and “Framing Matters: The Impact of Policy Context on Willingness to Change Energy Consumption Behavior.”
Call me a geek, but I’d like to know more. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend most of the conference. So if you presented, or want to offer insights on how behaviorial economics can mitigate climate change, feel free to comment below, send me an email or propose a guest blogpost on the topic.
Marc,
Great post. It’s always been a pet peeve of mine that sustainability events serve a lot of meat. It seems like an easy thing to have one day of vegetarian meals. But i love the idea of just making it the default, but giving people the option. The numbers on that (80/20) are unreal, but I guess not surprising. I can also recommend Nudge — great book.
Andrew Winston
Your article, coupled with the piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, ‘Bellying Up to Environmentalism by James E. McWilliams, takes me back about 35 years to my commitment to vegetarianism (abandoned 25 years ago) influenced by Francis Morre Lappe’s ‘Diet for a Small Planet’. The arguments are still sound. The facts more sobering. You have me thinking very hard. Thank YOU.
I thought your blog entry was very interesting and thought provoking. You state in your article,”Erhardt-Martinez notes, personal choices have a huge collective impact on the climate crisis. Home energy use and the use of personal vehicles—that is, the way we live—accounts for about 38% of U.S. energy consumption.” I just want to say that personal choices are probably the largest contributors to climate change and environmental degradation. I don’t know how one would conduct a study and come up with a percentage, but it would make sense that that percentage would be much higher than 38%.
I mean if you think about it, personal choices are made based on our desires (of course, there are ways of changing our choices as your lunch menu example demonstrates). Realistically speaking, most people in the West, when they talk about protecting the environment, act under the notion that they want to keep their current lifestyle.
What I think is extremely obvious, but unacceptable by most people is the suggestion to live modestly. If we believed in living a modest life, then it would effect all of our decisions concerning consumption would it not? So, I think the behavior discussion is limited to the extent where it would not reduce our luxurious lifestyle and therefore, limited and not holistic.
I think the solution is to convince ourselves and the people around us to live modestly until the day when consumption does not result in environmental degradation.
Love the reframing. One of my vegetarian cousins used to ask his little son Noah if he would like a dead animal burger. That probably doesn’t help as much as offering meat as a default – or not at all. Same with free plastic bags in grocery stores. Plastic or paper would give way to “pay or using your own?”
I think I read people pay even more attention to a frowny face on their utility bill, showing they are using more energy than their neighbors.
Louis Tenenbaum brought this article to my attention. After reading I am curious about the level of satisfaction of the meat by default group vs the veggie by default group. Did having to ask for your preferred entree impact the level of satisfaction? Hopefully both dishes were equally tasty so as not to skew the data. Great read. Thank you.
It may be less sheeplike behavior amenable to “reframing”and more smart consumer behavior than you think. If I think the vegetarian dish is an afterthought, an accommodation by those who don’t know vegetarian cooking, I won’t select it–too often I have received a simple plate of bland steamed mixed vegetables which is not enjoyable, not balanced, and leaves me hungry. Take a look at the photo you’ve used to represent a vegetarian meal!
But if it is the planned offering (the default as they unpalatablyput it) then I know they have put themselves on the line to make a good dish, and I’ll choose it in a heartbeat. Others are making the same calculation.
Jean, this is a very good point. The vegetarian meal is likely to be better if it is being served to everybody, or at least designed as the default option.
And I agree with you–the illustration doesn’t appear to be very yummy!
This is almost funny – everyone should suffer so the veggies get what ‘they’ consider a satisfactory meal.
Feed all participants anything you want – the next meal they will go back to their normal type of food.
The only control and guide there is or can be is economic. If something costs more then people may and often will change their choice.
The offering of green power is silly – it should be part of the mix and everyone pay their share. The way it is presently used it just allows some (with extra funds) to buy their way out while accomplishing nothing.
Dead animal or dead carrot – what is the difference?
Russ – Omnivores, or should I say, “everyone” would suffer if served a thoughtfully-prepared vegetarian entree? Is it safe to assume you’ve never experienced quality cuisine in your life? Bummer, dude.
Great article, Marc.
Among my several businesses, I founded the August Green Software Unconference Silicon Valley where I brought entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, sustainability professionals, and entrepreneurs together at the Computer History Museum to work on software solutions to reduce climate emissions. http://greensoftwareunconference.eventbrite.com/
In keeping with low carbon and environmental principles, no plastic water bottles were bought (glass water pitchers only) and all the meals were vegetarian and vegan from Whole Foods (delicious sandwiches, salads, and fruit).
I still remember hearing an attendee ask the question, “Do you have Vegetarian?” The Whole Foods Employee answered, “It’s all Vegetarian.”
During the Lunch, I got on the microphone and stated why there were no plastic bottles and vegetarian and vegan, and they were interested.
I personally attend many technology conferences and this was the first one which only served vegetarian and vegan.
People were pretty happy with the quality of the food and there were no complaints during the event or in the post online survey.
Thanks,
Mary Vincent
I was a participant the full 3 days of the conference, and here is an interesting ethnographic observation about BECC’s little Nudge experiment:
We discovered that there was a little glitch in the implementation of this choice architecture. Although at the point of registration the choices were framed with veggie as default (as described in the blog), no one had thought to provide a meal card or confirmation of each person’s lunch choice. This meant that at the point of consumption, we were asked to remember what we had picked. Servers had been trained to frame the choices thus: Step 1, ask the diner to remember their meal choice. Step 2, remind the diner what the choices were. Interestingly, I observed several servers offering the meat choices first. In any case, there were no references (in the 4 or 5 interactions I observed) to veggie being the default, although usually someone brought this up because we all remembered Karen’s salient anecdote about the experiment.
Result? Although the kitchen staff did prepare the meals according to the pre-ordered choices (80% vegetarian meals), some of the people who had originally opted for the default meals switched to the meat option at the last minute and deprived some meat eaters of the meals for which they had opted. Why? At the tables at which I sat, most people couldn’t remember their choices. Some then opted for the meat choice without remembering if that was what they had originally chosen. Both days I was sitting at tables which were among the last to be served, and both days everyone, even those who wanted the meat entree, all received veggie entrees. The reason given by the wait staff was that people had been given the meals they had opted for THAT DAY, and by the time they got to serving our tables, those meat entrees had already been snapped up. I observed folks who had specifically chosen meat who expressed disappointment, and folks who were regretting opting for default and got excited about the chance to switch to meat… So, at the point of consumption, when the choice architecture was changed, meat won out, and the possibility of taking a detour around the socially engineered choice was enough to dampen people’s satisfaction.
I personally enjoyed all the meals even though I had opted for meat and gotten veggie
But this did remind me that we sometimes get excited about our experiment results on paper, and forget how things actually play out with real people! **Simple tip – either provide a mechanism for people to follow through on their socially engineered option (like a meal card to give the server), or educate all the people along the whole supply chain who have to implement your choice architecture!!
-Sharon Talbott (Twitter:@peoplesgrid)
I attended an Energy, Economy and Environment (3E) conference sponsored by the U of MN this week, and was amazed at all the papergoods being used, even if there was a reusable option (i.e. coffee cups). I had ordered a veg meal, but the servers quickly put a lunch in front of you and disappeared without asking if you had ordered anything special – so I guess everyone got the meat meal. It seems that these attendees are very up on the technical aspects of all of this, but don’t ever consider the implications of their individual choices.
[...] Gunther, contributing editor for Fortune, posted a fascinating blog about his experience of lunch choices at the 2009 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change [...]
Marc:
I was hoping to attend the BECCC Conference but unfortunately I did not make it. Thank you for your report. Many of the issues raised by your readers are addressed in a great book – Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Communicy Based Social Marketing by Doug McKenzie Mohr and William Smith. Mohr and Smith describe the key components to a successful “campaign” to change behavior. It is amazing how effective simple techniques can be. We need to convince policy-makers that behavior changes are an essential, and cost-effective, way to save energy.