This time in our journal club we decide to take a slightly differ journey and read a psychology paper by Robert B. Cialdini (2003).
The author addresses a problem of how normative and injunctive environmental messages are perceived by people. The author argues that such message might promote behavior that is harmful to environment if they are placed in a wrong context. The article raised and emphasizes the importance of combining normative and injunctive messages to achieve the maximum effectiveness in building environmental awareness.  

Perhaps more recent studies have been published to address this topic, but we were recommended this reading in an online psychology course. We thought that this might be an interesting read for the rest of our group. Our journal club unanimously agreed that the article it is still a relevant paper even if it was published already ten years ago. It gives a nice overview of the topic, especially for non-psychologists. However, one of studies in this paper did not escape our picky eyes.

The experiment demonstrates how normative and injunctive messages influence environmental theft behavior. The author and his colleagues build the experiment with the hypothesis that message emphasizing the social disapproval of thievery will be more powerful in comparison with a message emphasizing popular behaviour.

As a case study, they used Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. The problem park faced was the removal of the petrified wood. The original sign that park used to stop the thievery was stating: “Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time.” The experiment’s authors concluded that such message is indeed encouraging thievery behavior. According to Cialdini (2003) two action motivate people: what is popular and what is socially acceptable. In author’s opinion, the original sign promoted the popular action – wood thievery. In other words, the park visitors quickly learn that stealing of the wood is a norm.

Authors designed new signs to test if an injunctive norm message (what is socially acceptable) would change peoples’ behaviors towards wood. The descriptive norm sign now was stating: “Many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the Park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest”. The injunctive norm message stated: “Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the Park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest”. While we agree with the general idea of the authors’ experiment, we were not convicted that they experiment set up was complete. Indeed, we thought that the modified version of the normative message was much weaker in comparison with the original message. The modified message only stated that people remove the wood while the original text had much stronger popular action verb “vandalise”. Vandalise also means socially unapproved action. The second message, according to authors, should emphasize socially unacceptable behavior. However, we thought that the message was very settle in stating social disapproval.

In our opinion, in this experiment authors could have kept the original park message and contrast it with they designed injunctive norm message. In current experiment set up, the injunctive and normative messages are presented in complete isolation. In the following example on recycling, the author demonstrates that the results are the best when both norms are combined. It would have been interesting to see the results of a control. Author himself states that people might be encouraged by messages, thus it would be important to know what happens when people do not have any prior knowledge on either popular or accepted behaviour in this case study.

Overall, we enjoyed reading the paper. The take home message from this paper, take care when designing environmental messages. No message is perfect, but suggested experiments and methods in this paper could be good test tools insuring that a designed message is encouraging behaviour one intended.