Just a quick note about a great post today from sustainability writer Marc Gunther.
He reports on a conference on behavior and climate change. How to change people’s behavior is a thorny problem with no easy solution. But the work of thinkers like Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) and Richard Thaler/Cass Sunstein (Nudge) shows us that we’re not rational animals. To vastly oversimplify Nudge, we need the ‘better’ option to be the default option (the classic situation they use is the automatic 401K deposits vs. asking people to sign up). If there’s inertia, in other words, we’ll do the right thing.
Marc’s describes an amazing example of this principle in action — it’s about food at the conference. One of my major pet peeves is that organizations invariably serve meat at sustainability conferences. Why can’t we work to shrink the footprint at our own events?
Here’s how the behavior conference did it according to Marc…

When a meat-based entrée is being served, and people are offered a vegetarian alternative, about 5 to 10% will request it.
But what if the choices were reversed? Organizers of the 2009 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference, which began today in Washington, tried an experiment: They made a vegetarian lunch the default option, and gave meat eaters the choice of opting out.
Some 80% went for the veggies, not because there were lots of vegetarians in the crowd of about 700 people but because the choice was framed differently. We know that because, at a prior BECC conference, when meat was the default option, attendees chose the meat by an 83% to 17% margin.

These are fairly stunning results that make total sense in retrospect. In a group that ‘gets’ sustainability issues, a large number will choose the sustainable option if it’s really easy. I’m sure there are major ramifications of this kind of finding for consumers…lots to mull over here…