Give and Take: a revolutionary Approach to Success pdfdrive com

Save money by conserving energy: According to researchers at Cal State
San Marcos, you could save up to $54 per month by using fans instead

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of air conditioning to keep cool in the summer.
Protect the environment by conserving energy: According to researchers at
Cal State San Marcos, you can prevent the release of up to 262 lbs. of
greenhouse gases per month by using fans instead of air conditioning to
keep cool this summer.
Do your part to conserve energy for future generations: According to
researchers at Cal State San Marcos, you can reduce your monthly
demand for electricity by 29% using fans instead of air conditioning to
keep cool this summer.
Join your neighbors in conserving energy: In a recent survey of households
in your community, researchers at Cal State San Marcos found that 77%
of San Marcos residents often use fans instead of air conditioning to
keep cool in the summer.
Cialdini’s team conducted door-to-door interviews at each household,
without knowing which door hangers they had. When asked how motivating the
door hangers were, the residents whose hangers emphasized joining their
neighbors reported the lowest motivation. They reported 18 percent lower
desires to conserve energy than residents with the protect-the-environment
hangers, 13 percent lower than residents with the future-generations hangers, and
6 percent lower than residents with the save-money hangers.
But when Cialdini’s team looked at the residents’ energy bills to see what
people actually did, they found something surprising: the residents were wrong
about what motivated them. During the following two months, the residents
whose door hangers emphasized joining their neighbors actually conserved the
most energy. On average, the “join your neighbors” hanger led to between 5 and
9 percent fewer daily kilowatt-hours of energy used than the other three hangers
—which were all equally ineffective. Knowing that other people were
conserving energy was the best way to get residents to follow suit.
But perhaps it was the people who were already conserving electricity in
each neighborhood who responded most visibly, picking up the slack for the
electricity takers. To find out whether sharing information about their neighbors’
conservation efforts could motivate conservation among people who were
consuming high levels of electricity, Cialdini’s team ran another experiment with
nearly three hundred households in California. This time, they gave residents
door hangers that provided feedback on how their electricity consumption
compared with similar households in their neighborhood over the past week or

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two. These door hangers provided feedback on whether residents were
consuming less (giving) or more (taking) than their neighbors.
Over the next few weeks, the electricity takers significantly reduced their
energy consumption, by an average of 1.22 kilowatt-hours per day. Seeing that
they were taking more than the average in their neighborhood motivated them to
match the average, decreasing their energy consumption.
*
But this only works
when people are compared with their neighbors. As Cialdini’s team explains:
The key factor was which other people—other Californians,
other people in their city, or other residents in their specific
community. Consistent with the idea that people are most
influenced by similar others, the power of social norms grew
stronger the closer and more similar the group was to the
residents: The decision to conserve was most powerfully
influenced by those people who were most similar to the
decision makers—the residents of their own community.
Inspired by this evidence, the company Opower sent home energy report
letters to 600,000 households, randomly assigning about half of them to see their
energy use in comparison with that of their neighbors. Once again, it was the
takers—those consuming the most—who conserved the most after seeing how
much they were taking. Overall, just showing people how they were doing
relative to the local norm caused a dramatic improvement in energy
conservation. The amount of energy saved by this feedback was equivalent to the
amount of energy that would be saved if the price of electricity increased by up
to 28 percent.
People often take because they don’t realize that they’re deviating from the
norm. In these situations, showing them the norm is often enough to motivate
them to give—especially if they have matcher instincts. Part of the beauty of
Freecycle is that members have constant access to the norm. Every time a
member offers to give something away, it’s transparent: others can see how
frequent giving is, and they want to follow suit. Because Freecycle is organized
in local communities, members are seeing giving by their neighbors, which
provides feedback on how their own giving stacks up relative to the local norm.
Whether people tend to be givers, takers, or matchers, they don’t want to violate
the standards set by their neighbors, so they match.
Today, according to Yahoo!, only two environmental terms in the world are

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searched more often than Freecycle: global warming and recycling. By the
summer of 2012, Freecycle had more than nine million members in over 110
countries, expanding at a rate of eight thousand members every week. Many
people still join with a taker mentality, hoping to get as much free stuff as
possible. But receiving benefits from a group of local citizens who serve as role
models for small acts of giving continues to create a common identity in
Freecycle communities, nudging many members in the giver direction. Together,
the nine million Freecycle members give away more than thirty thousand items a
day weighing nearly a thousand tons. If you piled together the goods given away
in the past year, they’d be fourteen times taller than Mount Everest. As Charles
Darwin once wrote, a tribe with many people acting like givers, who “were
always
ready to aid one another
, and to sacrifice themselves for the common
good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural
selection.”
When I learned about the success of Freecycle, I began to wonder if these
principles could play out in everyday life, in an organization without an
environmental focus. What would it take to create and sustain a giving system in
a company or a school?

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