Less Wash, More Dry; November 2008; Scientific American Magazine; by Marina Krakovsky; 2 Page(s)

Most travelers staying at hotels have encountered a bathroom sign asking them to help save the environment by reusing their towels. Daily laundering makes a large hotel go through several million gallons of water a year, and detergent and energy use take a hefty toll, too. New research shows, however, that appealing to people¿s green conscience is hardly the most effective way of convincing guests how best to dry off.

In experiments whose results ultimately confirmed what persuasion experts long believed, a team led by Noah Goldstein, now at the University of California, Los Angeles, created two types of professional-looking signs: one with the standard environmental message and the www.SciAm.com SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 29 JUAN SILVA Getty Images other telling guests that most of their fellow guests had reused towels. ¿It¿s one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book,¿ says Goldstein, citing the plentiful research showing that in ambiguous situations people tend to follow the pack. Sure enough, as the investigators describe in the October Journal of Consumer Research, the social-norm message worked about 25 percent better than the standard environmental one. In a follow-up study that tested different tweaks to the social-norm message, Goldstein¿s team got even more remarkable results. Telling guests that those who had stayed in this room had reused towels worked better than saying that other guests at the same hotel had done so¿even though all the rooms were alike.