Noting how very little empirical work has been conducted
in the consumer behavior literature on the factors that in-
fluence consumers’ prosocial behaviors, and even less on
proenvironmental behaviors, researchers have emphasized
the need for more consumer research in such areas (Bendapudi
et al. 1996; Menon and Menon 1997; Mick 2006;
Robin and Reidenbach 1987). The present research seeks to
redress this gap in the literature while also making theoretical
contributions so as to better understand the types of norms
and identities that are likely to motivate consumer behavior
in general.
The results of two field experiments demonstrated the
power of descriptive norms to motivate others to engage in
the important real-world domain of environmental conservation.
Furthermore, the superiority of the descriptive norm
messages relative to the industry standard, which experiment
2 showed activated guests’ identities as environmentally
concerned individuals but provided no explicit descriptive
norm, suggests that making a meaningful social identity
salient without providing descriptive normative information
is not an optimal approach.
The current research also examined an often-ignored aspect
of social norms. Although the social identity literature
and the literature on the effects of similarity have addressed
the issues of “who” as they related to adherence to social
norms, these literatures have by and large failed to address
the issues of “where.” That is, these bodies of research have
focused on how personal, rather than situational, commonalities
among influence targets and reference groups affect
social norm adherence.
Experiment 2 confirmed that individuals are, in fact, more
likely to be influenced by descriptive norms when the setting
in which those norms are formed is comparable to the setting
those individuals are currently occupying, an issue that no
prior research of which we are aware has addressed. Those
informed that the majority of people who had stayed within
the confines of their immediate surroundings—their
room—had participated in the towel reuse program were
most likely to participate in the program themselves. This
was the case even though the normative information was
rationally no more informative or diagnostic of effective
or appropriate behavior than information about the norms
of less physically proximate surroundings. For example,
there was no logical reason that the norms of people who
had stayed in a guest’s particular room should be any more
informative for the guest’s own conduct than the norms
of those who stayed in a room across the hall. In fact, one
might even argue that it is more rational to follow the
global norms, which should be more diagnostic of effective
action because they describe the actions of a greater number
of people.
Another important finding of this research is that the greater
motivational power of provincial group norms over global group norms does not appear to be driven by the extent to
which people consider the group identities referenced by the
norms to be personally important to them. In experiment 2,
participants were more likely to follow the descriptive norms
of a group of individuals with whom they shared the same
setting than the norms of groups sharing the social identities
that we tested. In fact, consistent with predictions, but contrary
to previous conceptualizations, we found that participation
rates were actually highest for the reference group
that participants felt was the least personally meaningful to
them (but most physically proximate).
How can the data we obtained in these experiments be
reconciled with previous research demonstrating that group
norms are followed to the extent that the group is considered
meaningful to an individual? We are certainly not arguing
that the meaningfulness of a group or social identity to one’s
personal identity is irrelevant; in fact, in many cases, it might
be one of the strongest individual predictors of adherence
to such norms. Instead, we are suggesting that the meaningfulness
of the group to one’s social identity is but one
of several central determinants of consumers’ private adherence
to social norms. In addition to the factors of norm
salience (Cialdini et al. 1991), the level of uncertainty (Festinger
1954), and the extent of meaningfulness/identification
with the reference group (Deshpande´ et al. 1986), another
important factor is the degree of match among one’s setting,
situation, and circumstances and those in which the norms
were formed.