Several aspects of the findings from experiment 2 are
noteworthy. First, the social identity salience data suggested
that the social categories highlighted in each of the messages
focused the participants on the intended social identity and
that the messages did so equally. Second, the data confirmed
our expectations regarding the large disparities in the extent
to which the various social categories were considered by
participants to be important to their own identities.
the categories of both hotel guest and guest in a
particular room were significantly less important to participants’
identities than were those associated with gender,
citizenship, and environmentalism. Third, we found that the
towel reuse rates of the four descriptive normative message
identities did not map onto the extent to which individuals
consider those identities personally meaningful and important
to them. These data are particularly interesting in light
of the research suggesting that the more important a social
category is to an individual’s social identity, the more likely
he or she will be to follow the norms of that category. That
is, much of the extant literature suggests that participants’
conservation behaviors should map onto the importance ratings.
According to the importance ratings, participants
should have been most likely to follow the norms of citizens
or males/females and least likely to conform to the norms
of hotel guests for the particular room in which the participants
were staying. Yet, the data indicate that the appeal
conveying the descriptive norm of those who had previously
stayed in the guests’ room yielded not the lowest compliance rate, as predicted by the importance ratings, but, in fact, the
highest compliance rate