In "Discouragement through incentives" we have shown that monetary incentives, as represented by penalty schemes, may work against intentions, and in fact discourage pro-environmental behaviour instead of encouraging it. Our earlier work on incentives demonstrates that non-monetary motivation may play an even more more important role than monetary stimuli in shaping behaviour. A traditional non-monetary instrument to encourage pro-environmental behaviour is informing and reminding through posters. For example, a poster in a public bathroom would remind people about the potential water losses through dripping taps, and call them to save water. We ask if this is effective and using one campus of HSE Perm as a platform for a field experiment: from September 2018 all bathrooms are equipped with posters (see below), and monthly measurements of water usage are taken and compared to the pre-2018 period. Moreover, we also measure electricity usage, to detect if there is any spillover effect.Â
Results so far indicate no measurable effect of posters. A possible explanation is that people get used to them and don't notice them anymore. In a concurrent work, we also find that informing people about more general things, like inflation and monetary policy, has a short-lived impact on beliefs. It appears that to have a sustained effect, reminders and information should act for a long period of time, to develop a habit. To investigate this more, as part of this experiment we will conduct a survey of HSE-Perm staff and students, with more publicity of it on campus, drawing attention to environmental issues. We anticipate that drawing attention to pro-environmental actions will act as a new "reminder" and may have an impact on the actual water and electricity consumption. On top of that, the survey is designed to shed light on the way people perceive new information and reminders (such as posters), how attentive they are to them and what are the alternative non-monetary mechanisms to trigger pro-environmental behaviour.