Do We Care About the Environment? It Depends on How the Issues Are Framed

Here’s an article the theme of which I’ve seen before, called behavioral economics.  In essence, people’s reaction to a certain subject, and their buying behavior, is to a huge degree a function of the words used to describe it.

I’m reminded of a discussion I had with economics professor Jason Scorse, Associate Professor and Chair of the International Environmental Policy Program at The Monterey Institute of International Studies, who helped me to understand the subject in preparation for my book “Is Renewable Really Doable?”

One of the key discoveries of (Nobel prize-winning behavioral psychologists) Kahneman and Tversky was this thing called “loss aversion,” meaning that the impact of losing something is much more impactful and has greater magnitude than the benefit of gaining something.  This has huge public policy implications.  The implications are, for example, that if you ask someone to take money out of their savings to put it into a 401k, they’re going to feel a big sense of loss.  They’re going to feel, “Wow, I know I should do it; I know it’s good for me, but taking that money out of my check is going to really hurt me.”  And so what that has in terms of public policy implication is if you set up a retirement plan so that a person’s future raises go toward their 401k, people will like that a lot more than taking it out of their current income stream. 

So you can do the exact same thing and get the exact same money going into a 401k account by changing the way it’s done; people will sign up for it more easily.  So, again, it’s little tweaks like this that work on people’s psychology, getting them to do good things.  I’ll give you an example in the environmental realm.

Let’s take organic food.  You go into the store and you see food that’s unlabeled, say an avocado. Then you see an organic avocado labeled organic, and say it’s 50% more.  So you’re thinking: should I do the good thing and spend extra money to buy the organic avocado?  So again, remember, here it’s now a potential benefit. Some people do, some people don’t. Now let’s take the exact same scenario and leave the organic avocado unlabeled, and the conventional avocado says “grown with pesticides.”  Nothing’s changed; it’s the exact same avocado.  All we’ve done is change the label, but now it’s framed as a loss, because the organic is unlabeled and the one with pesticides is labeled and so you think, “Oh, this is going to harm me.  It’s going to hurt me.”  That’s going to make more people buy the one that’s organic.  You’ve done nothing; you haven’t changed any production processes, you haven’t changed the prices, you’ve done absolutely nothing, but I guarantee you, you would have at least a double increase in the purchase of the organic by just changing the labels and changing the psychology of how people view the product.

In the case of the article linked at the top, we’re talking about how conservatives tend to vote against environmental regulation.  Yet there are exceptions, especially when appropriate language is used in making the case.