Despite professing to care about the environment and supporting
environmental causes, individuals behave in environmentally
irresponsible ways like driving when they can take public transportation,
littering, or disposing of toxic materials in unsound ways. This is my
fourth exploration of how to encourage individuals to stop behaving
irresponsibly about the environment they allege to care deeply about.
The prior three articles all explored how the norm of environmental
protection could be enlisted in this effort; this Article applies those
theoretical conclusions to the very practical task of getting people to
switch the type of light bulb they use and thus adhere to the concrete
norm of energy conservation.
To help situate this piece better in my prior work, the first article
proposed expanding the abstract environmental protection norm to
include individual environmental responsibility as the approach most
likely to overcome barriers to behavioral change.1
That article
recommended enlisting environmental groups as the most effective
“norm entrepreneurs” to achieve widespread change in personal
environmental conduct.2
The piece concluded that the best way to
change norms and thus change behavior is through education, but that