Earth Hour – why I have decided not to participate

By: Lykke E. Andersen*

You have got to be impressed by anybody who can rally several hundred million people around a cause.  WWF has managed to do that several years in a row by getting people to turn off the lights for one hour every year to highlight the impacts of our energy use on the global climate.

However, there are two important reasons why I have decided not to join this global event.

First, I think electricity is the World’s best poverty-reducing invention ever, and if we wanted to turn it off for an hour, it should be to think very hard about how to bring this crucial invention to the 1.3 billion people who still don’t have it and thus suffer from darkness, low productivity and extreme poverty.

Second, and a lot less obvious, is the fact that symbolic do-good-events like this tend to be counter-productive because they make people feel like they have acquired a license to indulge in self-interested and unethical behaviors (Mazar and Zhong, 2010).

I don’t think any experiments have actually been made on Earth Hour participation, but the behavioral changes caused by Earth Hour compliance may be similar to the ones observed for people buying green products. A very interesting behavioral economics experiment by Mazar and Zhong (2010) shows that people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products than after purchasing conventional products.

This astonishing result warrants more detailed explication. The basic set-up of the Mazar & Zhong (2010) experiment was the following: Ninety undergraduate students from the University of Toronto volunteered for the experiment in exchange for CAD$5. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two on-line stores (conventional vs. green). Upon arrival, each participant was seated at a desk equipped with a computer and one envelope containing CAD$5 in various denominations. Participants were informed that they were going to engage in a number of unrelated tasks.

In the first task, they were randomly assigned to make purchases in either the conventional or the green-product store. Specifically, they were told that they could fill their baskets (maximum of one item per product) with up to $25 worth of items and that 1 out of 25 students would be randomly chosen to actually receive the products in his or her basket.

Afterward, they engaged in an ostensibly unrelated visual perception task in which a box divided by a diagonal line was displayed on the computer screen. Participants were told that on each trial they would see a pattern of 20 dots scattered inside the box. The pattern would stay on the screen for 1 second, and the task was to press a key to indicate whether there were more dots on the left or right side of the diagonal line. Participants were paid 0.5¢ for each trial on which they indicated there were more dots on the left and 5¢ for each trial on which they indicated there were more dots on the right.  On 40% of the trials, there were more dots on the right than on the left side

After completing 90 trials over a few minutes, participants saw a summary screen that showed the total amount of money they had earned and instructed them to pay themselves by taking out the corresponding amount from the provided envelope. Thus, in addition to having the opportunity to lie, participants could steal to increase their payoff.

The results showed a significant difference between performances on the dots task depending on the previous shopping activity. Participants who had purchased in the conventional store identified 42.5% of trials as having more dots on the right side (which was about right), whereas participants who had purchased in the green store identified 51.4% of trials as having more dots on the right side—which suggests that the latter were lying to earn more money.

Independently of deciding to lie, participants could also steal by taking more money from the envelope than shown on the summary screen. The results indicated that participants in the green-store condition on average stole $0.48 more from the envelope than those in the conventional-store condition. Altogether, participants in the green-store condition left the experiment with on average $0.83 more in their pockets than did participants in the conventional-store condition.

Happy Earth Hour! Try to use it to reduce poverty rather than increasing lying and stealing.

* Dr. Lykke E. Andersen is the Director of the Center for Economic and Environmental Modeling and Analysis (CEEMA) at the Institute of Advanced Development Studies (INESAD), La Paz, Bolivia.

For your reference:

Mazar, N., & Zhong, C. B. (2010). Do Green Products Make us Better People? Psychological Science, 21(4), 494-498.