Would you rule out going green? The effect of inclusion versus exclusion mindset on pro-environmental willingness

Two experiments demonstrate that participants’ willingness to endorse adopting pro-environmental behaviors is influenced substantially by a decision-framing effect: the inclusion–exclusion discrepancy. Participants were presented with a list of 26 pro-environmental behaviors (e.g., take a shorter shower, buy local produce). In both experiments, participants asked to cross out the behaviors they would not be willing to engage in (exclusion mindset) generated 30% larger consideration sets than those asked to circle behaviors that they would be willing to do (inclusion mindset). Experiment 2 identified qualities of the behaviors that accounted for the differences in the size of consideration sets, namely effort and opportunity. The results suggest the counter-intuitive notion that encouraging people to think about what they would not do for the environment might lead them to do more. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. When confronted with a complex environmental issue like climate change, individuals may be unsure about what they can do to reduce their own carbon footprint (Lorenzoni, Nicholson-Cole, & Whitmarsh, 2007). A brief internet search for the simple question “How can I be more environmentally friendly?” leads to numerous websites offering myriad suggestions. For example the site “50 ways to help the planet” (www.50waystohelp.com) has options ranging from “take a shorter shower” to “go vegetarian” to “telecommute.” Although engaging in all of these behaviors might be desirable from an environmental perspective, a more realistic goal is to encourage people to consistently engage in as many highimpact pro-environmental behaviors as possible. But how can this goal best be achieved? In the current research, we tested the influence of one type of framing on people’s willingness to engage in a range of individual pro-environmental behaviors. Although large-scale actions such as the introduction of emissions restrictions are necessary to mitigate the effects of climate change, individual behavioral change still plays a big role. Research suggests that household-level behavioral changes could result in a 7.4% decrease in national emissions in the United States within 10 years (Dietz, Gardner, Gilligan, Stern, & Vandenbergh, 2009). Exclusion or Inclusion? When faced with myriad recommendations about what to do about climate change, people are not likely to engage in all recommended behaviors for a variety of reasons, such as the difficulty of engaging in a specific behavior. Instead, they are *Correspondence to: Rachel I. McDonald, Department of Psychology, University E-mail: [email protected] Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. likely to winnow down a large number of behaviors into a subset they are willing to consider (a consideration set). The process of winnowing down the behaviors is likely to occur in one of two ways. Inclusion is when a person reduces the size of the initial set by including in the consideration set only those options that surpass some threshold on a given criterion (e.g., desirability, cost, and practicality—cf. Tobler, Visschers, & Siegrist, 2012). In contrast, exclusion requires a person to exclude all of the options that fall short of the threshold. In some situations, adopting either the inclusion or exclusion procedure will lead to the same consideration set. For example, if you were buying a new shower head and had a flow rate criterion of “less than 15 liters per minute,” then it would not matter if you chose to exclude all shower heads with flow rates greater than 15 l per minute or include all those with flow rates lower than 15: The options in the final set would be the same. However, in many other situations, the nature of the criteria and thresholds are more ambiguous. For example, the perceived benefit of a given environmental behavior may vary according to the perceived cost or difficulty of engaging in the behavior as well as the perceptions that others are engaging in it. Such additional considerations may influence the establishment of criteria and the setting of thresholds. Thus, although logically exclusion and inclusion should be invariant procedures, their adoption can lead to large differences in the size of final consideration sets (e.g., Kogut, 2011; Yaniv & Schul, 1997, 2000; Yaniv, Schul, Raphaelli-Hirsch, & Maoz, 2002). The standard finding is that exclusion produces a larger consideration set than inclusion. This pattern has been found with judgments regarding political candidates (Yaniv et al., 2002), of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA. Received 5 August 2013, Accepted 2 May 2014 508 Rachel I. McDonald et al. entities deemed worthy of moral consideration (Laham, 2009), job candidates (Yaniv & Schul, 2000) and school-support programs (Kogut, 2011), among others. These findings suggest that a person viewing the “50 ways to help the planet” website who asks “which of these behaviors am I not willing to engage in?” (exclusion) will end up with a longer list of possibilities than one who asks “which of these behaviors am Iwilling to engage in?” (inclusion). One account of why exclusion-derived-sets are larger is that the two procedures imply different types of status quo, which in turn lead to different selection criteria and thresholds (Yaniv & Schul, 2000). Under inclusion instructions, the status quo is one of inaction, an empty consideration set to which options must be added; under exclusion, the status quo is full engagement, a complete set of behaviors from which options must be eliminated. Several studies suggest that people have a strong bias to maintain the status quo (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1991; Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988) and that people feel more accountable for decisions that change the status quo rather than maintain it (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984). These biases toward maintaining the status quo or remaining with the default naturally give rise to the exclusion–inclusion discrepancy. According to this account, people in the exclusion mindset face a tradeoff between maintaining the status quo and ruling out options they may find undesirable. In contrast, in inclusion mindsets, avoiding these same behaviors by not including them in the consideration set will maintain the status quo. Inclusion sets are thus smaller because status quo biases lead the threshold for acceptance to be higher: The higher the threshold, the fewer the options included, the smaller the departure from the status quo, and thus the lesser the accountability. Under exclusion, more options remain in the consideration set because the threshold for acceptance is lower (as exclusion is a departure from the status quo, evidence for exclusion needs to be extreme), thereby maintaining the “larger” status quo and avoiding feelings of accountability (Yaniv & Schul, 2000). Thus, status quo biases provide a compelling account of why thresholds differ in inclusion and exclusion mindsets. The effects of inclusion and exclusion mindsets have some parallels with the well-established effects of default choices (Johnson & Goldstein, 2003; Park, Jun, & MacInnis, 2000; Pichert & Katsikopoulos, 2008). In default effects, an option is more likely to be chosen when it is the default and requires no action to choose. A classic example is rates of organ donation, which differ markedly in countries where donating is the default, rather than a choice that must be actively registered (Johnson & Goldstein, 2003). However, there are important differences between the effects of defaults and the inclusion/ exclusion discrepancy. Default effects typically examine single, formalized choices, where people opt to be an organ donor or sign up to a green electricity plan, whereas the present study examines decisions about engaging in multiple, repetitive, individual pro-environmental behaviors on a regular basis, in which no option can be formally established as the default. Knowledge of the effects of defaults allows us to nudge people toward more pro-environmental choices where these are formally made, such as offering a more efficient product Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. as the standard. In contrast, the inclusion/exclusion discrepancy has the potential to shed light on ways of communicating with people about everyday environmental behaviors that may lower their carbon footprint. Appropriate framing could result in an increase in repetitive, individual pro-environmental behaviors in a similar manner to the way in which default effects increase uptake of pro-environmental options in formalized, single choice contexts. Examining the effects of inclusion/exclusion discrepancies in the environmental domain thus has the potential to contribute to our knowledge of behavior change communications, over and above what we know from the default literature. In the context of pro-environmental behavior, inducing a larger consideration set may enhance pro-environmental behavior. A larger consideration set can be thought of as a larger subset of intended behaviors. Given that the correlation between intention and actual behavior is far from perfect (Bamberg & Möser, 2007), a larger set of intended behaviors is preferable because it raises the likelihood that at least one of those behaviors will be adopted. One potential caveat to this argument is that the longer list of activities generated via an exclusion mindset might lead to a “paradox of choice” whereby a person is overwhelmed with options and finds it harder to settle on a particular one. Although a popular notion in the consumer choice literature (e.g., Iyengar & Lepper, 2000), a recent meta-analysis suggests no overall relation between the number of available options (across a variety of contexts) and behavior (Scheibehenne, Greifeneder, & Todd, 2010). Thus, although large considerations sets might not hinder adoption of behaviors, they might, according to Scheibehenne et al., not help either. We note, however, that Scheibehenne et al. (2010) did not consider studies in which consideration sets were self-generated (e.g., via exclusion or inclusion) as a moderator in their analysis, so it remains plausible that increased uptake of behaviors can result from the active involvement in generating a larger consideration set. Moreover, given that the behaviors we examine differ in context and time (e.g., installing energy-efficient light bulbs and ordering a vegetarian meal in a restaurant), it is unlikely that a larger consideration set will hamper behavior by generating competing intentions. In addition, once some behaviors from a consideration set have been engaged in, then there may be some spillover to other behaviors, and the potential for spillover could be greater the larger the consideration set (e.g., Evans et al., 2013; Thøgersen, 2004). Even if reverse spillover or licensing effects occur among some people (in which engaging in one pro-social behavior reduces the likelihood of engaging in subsequent behaviors; Merritt, Effron, & Monin, 2010), on average, a larger consideration set may still be associated with increased pro-environmental intentions and behavior. In Experiment 1, we examined the effect of inclusion versus exclusion mindsets on willingness to engage in green behaviors. We confirmed that participants given an exclusion mindset retained a larger number of intended behaviors in their consideration sets than those given inclusion instructions. In our second experiment, we replicated the main finding of Experiment 1 and also identified properties of the proenvironmental behaviors that explain the discrepancy in rates of endorsement between the mindset conditions. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 44, 507–513 (2014) Inclusion versus exclusion 509