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Social Norms And Water Consumption Essay

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Success of strategies for solving environmental problems more and more depends on whether changes in individual behaviour can supplement the technical solution available. Nudging appears to be the new promising way to influence behaviour in a sustainable direction without changing values of people.

Throughout this report, I will focus on how social norms can be harnessed to influence people behaviours of water consumption at home- especially water consumption when showering.

Why should we care about water consumption? From 1991 to 1999, residential water use in Canada increased by 21%. Today, Canadian rank as the world’s second highest per capita water use, with an average use of 329 litres of water per person per day. However, only … liters are really “needed” for proper living. Even scarier is that the water crisis is the #1 global risk based on impact to society (as a measure of devastation), as announced by the World Economic Forum in January 2015.

Therefore, I believe this nudge experiment can help us get some insights in order to reverse this trend, help people reduce their water usage and thus …show more content…

Indeed, psychologist research have shown that people are profoundly influenced by those around them. Social norm refers to the tendency of people to want to “fit in”. Essentially, it constitutes a social standard from which people typically do not want to deviate, because of social pressure. In his book “Influence, the psychology of Persuasion’ Robert Cialdini talks about two ways in which social norms affect the individuals: the injunctive norm and the descriptive norm. During my nudge experiment, I focused on the descriptive norm; it refers to the simple observation of how everyone behaves (thus the “normal” way), which is thereafter replicated by the individual who might be unsure about how best to act in a certain

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