Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

Demanding people do the right thing and for the right reason is setting the bar rather too high. When Ogilvy was asked to increase the level of waste recycling in British homes we made the suggestion of shelving all discussion of what a household thinks about the growth of landfill or the loss of polar bears; instead we suggested that the principal behavioural driver of recycling is to do with circumstances rather than attitude. Put bluntly, if you have two bins in your kitchen, you’ll separate your recyclable rubbish and recycle quite a lot, but if you have only one bin you probably won’t. Under the slogan ‘One bin is rubbish’ we focused our campaign entirely around encouraging people to have more than one bin in their household – avoiding the issue of how to convert people to be card-carrying members of the green movement.fn1 We were not being defeatist in this campaign, or giving up on the attempt to make people more environmentally aware – we were just solving the problem backwards. Conventional wisdom about human decision-making has always held that our attitudes drive our behaviour, but evidence strongly suggests that the process mostly works in reverse: the behaviours we adopt shape our attitudes. Perhaps someone who separates their rubbish into waste and recyclables will become more environmentally conscious as a result of having adopted the behaviour, just as Tesla drivers will wax enthusiastically about the environmental purity of their vehicles, regardless of th...