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Encouraging Positive Behaviours

I first heard these statistics from Ken Haycock and I was reminded of them last week when I saw them in the Wall Street Journal (May 20, p. A13)
There are some good reasons to encourage hotel guests to re-use towels on longer stays. It saves the hotel laundry costs and every little bit adds up in helpig to reduce our impact on the environment. Read these communication differences:
1. “Help the hotel save energy” results in 16% towel reuse.
2. “Partner with us to help th environment” results in 31% towel reuse.
3. “Almost 75% of guests reuse towels” results in 44% towel reuse.
4. “75% of the guests who stayed in this room reuse towels” results in 49% towel reuse.
Hmmmm. And Wow.
Now think about libraries. We have alll followed the Flickr group on bad library signs. There’s much to learn. If we had a good discussion about behaviours we wanted to encourage what would our signs look like?
If you accepted the research based communication results above, how would you:
1. Communicate about fines or returning books (on time)?
2. Communicate about not reshelving books?
3. Encourage parents and caregivers to attend story hours?
4. Pushing DVD’s or books that weren’t bestsellers?
5. Appropriate mobile phone use?
6. Encouraging good teen behaviours or dealing with loud and boisterous seniors?
7. Etc.
Lots of good stuff could emerge while creating a postive communication environment.
Stephen

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Posted on: June 1, 2009, 9:38 am Category: Uncategorized

2 Responses

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  1. Olsen said

    Libraries should stop short of lying to people, always. Lying to people to change their behavior is outrageous.
    BJ Fogg talks about how behaviors change not just because of the message, but because there is an opportunity to change.
    In the context of hotel towels, opportunities might be something like extra drying racks for wet towels. An extra incentive for me would be a soft, fluffy towel I would actually want to re-use.
    Could you provide a more full citation to the article your referencing? I’m not finding the article you reference and could use a pointer (thanks!)

  2. Sarah Polkinghorne said

    Hi there,
    Just wanted to chip in a citation for the towel research:
    Goldstein, N. J., Cialdini, R. B., & Griskevicius, V. (2008). A room with a viewpoint: Using social norms to motivate environmental conservation in hotels. Journal of Consumer Research 35, 472-482.
    I agree with you about the importance of honesty. These researchers did have a basis for their claim that 75% of guests reuse towels. It’s interesting to see how their findings actually diverge from this claim.
    Stephen, thanks for the food for thought.
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Thanks for the cite. You did a great job at CLA.
    SA