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Reading 2.3

Crafting Normative Messages to

Protect the Environment

Source: Cialdini, R. B. (2003, August). Crafting normative

messages to protect the environment. Current Directions in

Psychological Science, 12(4), 105-109.

Social PsychologyProfessor Scott Plous

Wesleyan University

Note:This reading material is being provided free of charge to Courserastudents through the generosity of Robert B. Cialdini and the

Association for Psychological Science, all rights reserved. Unauthorized

duplication, sales, or distribution of this work is strictly forbidden and

makes it less likely that publishers and authors will freely share

materials in the future, so please respect the spirit of open education by

limiting your use to this course.

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Copyright 2003 American Psychological Society 105

CURRENT DIRECTIONSIN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

It is rare when a public serviceannouncement (PSA) is believedto have the sort of effectivenessachieved by the most successfulmass media commercial messages,which typically benefit from muchlarger production budgets and

broadcast frequencies. Yet there isone PSA that is regularly creditedas having such status. Called theIron Eyes Cody spot (after theNative American actor who starred

in it), it begins with a shot of astately, buckskin-clad American In-dian paddling his canoe up a riverthat carries various forms of indus-trial and individual pollution. Aftercoming ashore near the littered sideof a highway, the Indian watches as a

bag of garbage is thrown, splatteringand spreading along the road, fromthe window of a passing car. Fromthe refuse at his feet, the camerapans up slowly to the Indians face,where a tear is shown tracking

down his cheek, and the slogan ap-pears: People Start Pollution, Peo-ple Can Stop It.

Broadcast for many years in the1970s and 1980s, the spot won nu-merous awards and millions uponmillions of dollars of donated air-time. Indeed, it has even beennamed the 16th best televisioncommercial of all time by TV Guidemagazine (The Fifty Greatest,1999). However, despite the fame ofthis touching piece of public ser-vice advertising, research suggeststhat it contains features that may

be less than optimal, and perhapseven negative, in their impact onthe littering actions of those whosee it. In addition to the laudablemessage in the ad urging viewersto stop littering, there is the under-

lying message, as well, that a lot ofpeople do litter: Debris floats on theriver, litter lies at the roadside,trash is tossed from an automobile.

DESCRIPTIVE VERSUSINJUNCTIVE NORMS

Thus, the creators of the Iron EyesCody spot may well have pitted twokinds of norms against one another,

injunctive norms

(involving percep-tions of which behaviors are typi-cally approved or disapproved) and

descriptive norms

(involving percep-tions of which behaviors are typi-cally performed). Much research in-

dicates that both kinds of normsmotivate human action; people tendto do what is socially approved aswell as what is popular. The wisdomof setting these two kinds of motiva-tions in line with (rather than inopposition to) one another within acommunication has direct implica-tions for the development of pro-environmental messages. Experi-ences that focus individuals on theall-too-frequent occurrence of an of-fense against the environment have

the potential to increase the occur-rence of that offense.

An Initial Experiment

To explore this possibility as itapplies to individuals decisions todespoil the environment, my col-leagues and I have conducted a va-riety of studies over the past sev-eral years. In one investigation(Cialdini, Reno, & Kallgren, 1990,Experiment 1), participants weregiven the opportunity to litter (ahandbill they found on their carwindshields) into either a previouslyclean or a fully littered environmentafter first witnessing a confederatewho either dropped trash into theenvironment or simply walked

Crafting Normative Messages to Protectthe Environment

Robert B. Cialdini

1

Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona

Abstract

It is widely recognized thatcommunications that activate so-cial norms can be effective inproducing societally beneficialconduct. Not so well recognizedare the circumstances underwhich normative informationcan backfire to produce the op-posite of what a communicatorintends. There is an understand-able, but misguided, tendency to

try to mobilize action against aproblem by depicting it as re-grettably frequent. Informationcampaigns emphasize that alco-hol and drug use is intolerablyhigh, that adolescent suiciderates are alarming, andmostrelevant to this articlethat ram-pant polluters are spoiling theenvironment. Although theseclaims may be both true and wellintentioned, the campaigns cre-ators have missed somethingcritically important: Within thestatement Many people aredoing this undesirable

thinglurks the powerful and under-cutting normative messageMany people are

doing this.Only by aligning descriptivenorms (what people typically do)with injunctive norms (whatpeople typically approve ordisapprove) can one optimizethe power of normative ap-

peals. Communicators who failto recognize the distinction be-tween these two types of normsimperil their persuasive efforts.

Keywords

norms; environment; public ser-vice announcements

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through it. By varying the state ofthe environment (clean vs. littered),we sought to manipulate the per-ceived descriptive norm for litter-ing in the situation. By manipulat-ing whether the confederate drop-ped trash into the environment, we

sought to differentially focus partici-pants attention on the state of theenvironment and, consequently, tomanipulate the salience of the per-ceived descriptive norm there (i.e.,what most people did).

We had three main predictions.First, we expected that participantswould be more likely to litter intoan already littered environmentthan into a clean one. Second, weexpected that participants who sawthe confederate drop trash into a

fully littered environment wouldbe most likely to litter there them-selves, because they would have hadtheir attention drawn to evidence ofa pro-littering descriptive normthat is, to the fact that people typi-cally litter in that setting. Conversely,we anticipated that participants whosaw the confederate drop trash intoa clean environment would be leastlikely to litter there, because theywould have had their attentiondrawn to evidence of an anti-litter-

ing descriptive normthat is, to thefact that (except for the confederate)people typically do not litter in thatsetting. This last expectation distin-guished our normative accountfrom explanations based on simplemodeling processes in that we werepredicting decreased littering afterparticipants witnessed a model litter.

As can be seen in Figure 1, thedata supported our experimentalhypotheses. Overall, there was morelittering in the littered environmentthan in the clean environment. Inaddition, the most littering occurredwhen participants saw a model droptrash into a littered environment;and, most tellingly, the least litteringoccurred when participants saw amodel drop trash into a clean envi-ronment.

Rethinking the Iron EyesCody PSA

At this point, it is appropriate tolook back at the Iron Eyes CodyPSA, as the findings of our studypoint to reasons for concern about

the effectiveness of that ad. Recallthat it depicts a character whosheds a tear after encountering anarray of litter. No doubt the tear isa powerful reminder of the injunc-tive norm against littering in U.S.culture. But accompanying the ben-eficial reminder is the potentiallydamaging message that many peo-

ple do

litter. Thus, the resultant im-pact of the injunctive norm againstlittering may be undermined by theunintended presentation of a de-

scriptive norm for littering. More-over, that presentation occurs in away that, according to the results ofour study, may be especially dam-aging. That is, the creators of the ad

seem to have been correct in theirdecision to show a dismaying in-stance of someone (the passing mo-torist) actively littering the environ-ment; but they may have beenmistaken in their decision to use analready-littered environment, as the

observation of another person litter-ing into a littered environment pro-duced the greatest littering in ourstudy. In contrast, the combinationof a (single) litterer and an other-wise clean environment generatedthe least littering from our partici-pants.

Were we to suggest a revision ofthe Iron Eyes Cody PSA, then, itwould be to make the procedurallysmall but conceptually meaningfulmodification of changing the de-

picted environment from trashed tocleanand thereby changing theperceived descriptive norm regard-ing littering. Then, when the disap-proving tear appeared, viewers

Fig. 1. Percentage of participants littering as a function of the salience of the descrip-tive norm and the state of the environment.

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That study was designed to de-termine whether our PSAs had theintended effect of conveying toviewers that recycling was preva-lent (descriptive norm) and ap-proved (injunctive norm), whetherthese perceived norms influenced

viewers intentions to recycle, andwhether the two types of normsoperated similarly or differently toaffect recycling intentions. A statis-tical analysis of the results indi-cated that both normative and non-normative factors influenced theintent to recycle (see Fig. 2). Ofcourse, the finding that nonnorma-tive factors (prior attitude, new in-formation, humor) had causal im-pact is not incompatible with ourtheoretical position, as we certainly

would not claim that normative

factors are the only motivators ofhuman responding.

At the same time, it is encourag-ing from our theoretical perspec-tive that both injunctive and de-scriptive normative informationsignificantly influenced recycling

intentions. That is, as a result ofviewing the ads, the more partici-pants came to believe that recy-cling was (a) approved and (b)prevalent, the more they plannedto recycle in the future. It is note-worthy that, despite a strong corre-

lation (

r

.79) between partici-pants perceptions of the existingprevalence and approval of recy-cling, these two sources of motiva-tion had independent effects on re-cycling intentions. Such results

affirm the theoretical distinction

between descriptive and injunc-tive norms.

CONCLUSION

Public service communicatorsshould avoid the tendency to sendthe normatively muddled messagethat a targeted activity is sociallydisapproved but widespread. Norm-

based persuasive communicationsare likely to have their best effectswhen communicators align de-scriptive and injunctive normativemessages to work in tandem ratherthan in competition with one an-other. Such a line of attack unitesthe power of two independent

sources of normative motivation

Fig. 2. Impact of public service announcements intended to promote recycling. The arrows in thediagram depict the pathways through which viewers attitudes and perceptions affected their in-tentions to recycle. Alongside each arrow is the corresponding path coefficient, a measure ofcausal impact; all the path coefficients shown are significant atp.05.

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Copyright 2003 American Psychological Society

CURRENT DIRECTIONSIN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 109

and can provide a highly success-ful approach to social influence.

At the same time, certain issuesremain to be clarified if communi-cators are to optimize the impact ofnorm-based messages. The firstconcerns the nature of the psycho-

logical mechanisms that underliedescriptive and injunctive norms.The results of our last study sug-gest an intriguing difference be-tween them. Information about so-cial approval or disapproval affectedrecycling intentions by influencingassessments of the ads persuasive-ness (see Fig. 2). Information aboutrelative prevalence, in contrast, in-fluenced intentions directly, with-out affecting the perceived persua-siveness of the ads. Why should

that be the case? One possibility isthat because descriptive norms are

based in the raw behavior of otherindividuals, it is relatively easy toaccommodate to such norms with-out much cognitive analysis. In-deed, organisms with little cogni-tive capacity do so: Birds flock, fishschool, and social insects swarm.Injunctive norms, however, are

based in an understanding of themoral rules of the society (i.e., whatother people are likely to approve),

and should therefore require morecognitive analysis to operate suc-cessfully. Hence, one might expectthat the impact of injunctive (but

not descriptive) normative informa-tion would be mediated throughcognitive assessments of the qual-ity or persuasiveness of the norma-tive information. Additional workis necessary to test this possibility.

A second important research is-

sue concerns the problem of dimin-ished salience of the normativemessage at the time when a tar-geted behavior is likely to be per-formed. Often, the message is nolonger present when the desired

behavior must take place. For ex-ample, PSAs are typically radio,television, and print communica-tions that are encountered at timesfar removed from the opportuni-ties to perform the socially desir-able actions that the PSAs promote.

A crucial question to be answeredby fu tur e in ve stig atio n is ho wcommunicators can structure theirmessages to maximize the likeli-hood that the motivational compo-nents of those messages will be sa-l i e nt a t the t i me f o r ac t i o n .Research that identifies persuasiveor mnemonic devices for achiev-ing this goal will be of immense

benefit to public service communi-cation efforts.

Recommended Reading

Bator, R.J., & Cialdini, R.B. (2000).The application of persuasion the-

ory to the development of effec-tive pro-environmental publicservice announcements.Journal ofSocial Issues

, 56

, 527541.Kallgren, C.A., Reno, R.R., & Cial-

dini, R.B. (2000). A focus theory ofnormative conduct: When normsdo and do not affect behavior. Per-

sonality and Social Psychology Bulle-tin

, 26

, 10021012.Schultz, P.W. (1999). Changing behav-

ior with normative feedback inter-ventions: A field experiment oncurbside recycling. Basic and Ap-

plied Social Psychology

, 21

, 2538.

Notes

1. Address correspondence to Rob-ert B. Cialdini, Department of Psychol-ogy, Arizona State University, Tempe,AZ 85287-1104; e-mail: robert.cialdini@

asu.edu.2. These data are best understood

in the context of previous research in-dicating that the ratio of thefts to parkvisitors falls just under 3%.

References

Cialdini, R.B., Barrett, D.W., Bator, R., Demaine,L.J., Sagarin, B.J., Rhoads, K.v.L., & Winter,P.L. (2003).Activating and aligning social normsfor persuasive impact

. Manuscript submitted forpublication.

Cialdini, R.B, Reno, R.R., & Kallgren, C.A. (1990).

A focus theory of normative conduct: Recy-cling the concept of norms to reduce litteringin public places.Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology

, 58

, 10151026.

The fifty greatest TV commercials of all time.(1999, July 39). TV Guide

, pp. 234.