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.

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)

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?

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.