Understanding the psychological blocks to reuse behaviours to design interventions
Reduce, reuse and then recycle, we all know the mantra, so why is reduce and reuse just the behaviours of the concerned environmentalist and thrifty person?
Personally I fall into the first category and try to avoid single-use items where possible including carrier bags, coffee cups, takeaway boxes and unnecessary packaging. Although this isn’t so practical for unplanned lunches or stops at the shops on the way back from a meeting etc.
Being prepared for the unprepared
Thankfully the Zero Green shop, a Bristol zero waste shop, have thought of this and have a collection of clean pre-loved packaging, brought in by customers, in their ‘Container Library’.
But for the rest of the high street, it is hardly surprising that places that don’t sell carrier bags, have found ‘Bags for Life’ becoming single-use; or that only 4% of takeaway coffees are in reusable containers. It’s clear that a lot of the ‘reuse’ and ‘reduce’ initiatives are focused on planned and intentioned behaviours and don’t allow for human laziness, forgetfulness, impulse actions or the importance of social acceptance on behaviours.
The reality is that the motivations for our behaviours are complicated and very infrequently driven by rationality. Studies on reuse and recycling behaviours have found that reuse is value-driven rather than a social norm. Whereas people, in communities with kerbside recycling collections, recycle because their neighbours do it; so it has become a social norm.
It is therefore easy to see how disposable packaging and single-use materials have become so ubiquitous and indispensable in our busy, consumer-driven culture of instant gratification, minimal effort and time poverty.
So how can reuse behaviours be woven back into our daily actions?
Designing behavioural interventions?
When we consider designing behavioural interventions there are many things to consider. And as a good starting point, Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University says that we have to assume that people:
- have low motivation
- low patience
- hate doing anything
- And are trying to complete a task as quickly as possible
In other words, we have to remove the friction from a behaviour and design “the path of least resistance”.
For reusing carrier bags or bags for life, this could include providing points to drop off and pick up pre-used carrier bags. In many supermarkets, they already provide places to drop off carrier bags for recycling and other shops have places full of cardboard boxes, so why not extend this to cotton bags and bags for life?
What motivates us to do things?
We also have to consider what motivates behaviours and this can be many things including:
- identity
- social acceptance
- pleasure
- feeling good
In this list doing the “right thing” or education isn’t included and this is because behaviours are rarely motivated by these. Look at smoking, for instance, many people know it could kill them but they still do it and mainly for identity.
Interestingly, drinking bottled water is all about social status. This is exemplified by the massive increase of sales in China with the growing middle-classes. In the West, drinking bottled water is a symbol of being healthy. This is now being challenged by the plastic reduction movement becoming mainstream and more socially acceptable. Furthermore, carrying a reusable bottle is gathering status as A-list celebrities are ‘papped’ carrying reusable bottles.
So what motivations and interventions should be adopted?
Changing behaviours is a combination of mechanisms and infrastructure plus cues and reinforcements. It also involves some trial and error to see what will engage people in different contexts.
If you have a particular reuse challenge that you would like to address then come to a workshop. I will be running an introductory workshop “Understanding the Barriers and Motivations to Reuse”, with Bristol Reuse Campaign. This includes learning about the theory and then putting it to work on a reuse challenge.
Wednesday 22nd May, The Centrespace, Bristol.
