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Recycling Norms |
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Ann E. Carlson |
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| The recent explosion of legal scholarship focused on the role social norms play in governing collective behavior has largely omitted intensive exploration of one important issue: whether social norms can resolve “large-number, small-payoff” problems of collective action. The resolution of these problems requires heterogeneous groups of individuals with no real connection to one another to change their behavior for little or no economic gain. Many environmental problems are illustrative: energy overuse, littering, and air pollution. In this Article Professor Carlson ex-amines empirical evidence about a particular large-number, small-payoff collective action problem, solid waste reduction through recycling, to de-termine whether and how social norms work to induce behavioral change necessary to resolve the problem. Professor Carlson concludes that despite the optimism among some scholars about social norm management as a regulatory tool, our national experiment with recycling suggests that norm creation or management is by itself not likely to be terribly effective in resolving a large-number, small-payoff collective action problem if the desired behavioral change is relatively inconvenient or requires significant effort. Governments are likely to have more success in solving such problems through reducing the amount of effort required or by using financial incentives to induce the be-havioral change rather than by engaging in efforts to strengthen social norms. Professor Carlson also concludes that norm management can have some payoff where a collective action problem requires relatively high-effort behavioral change if governments or other norm managers can suc-ceed in converting some low or moderate believers in the norm to true be-lievers. The Article shows that norm management efforts that involve face-to-face communication or individual feedback can have some success in inducing behavioral change. The Article should help governments and other agents of social change who need to rely on the altruism of many individuals in order to resolve a social problem by providing an understanding of the relationship between effort, norms, and financial incentives. The Article also provides evidence in the ongoing scholarly debate about what motivates compliance with social norms. |
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Copyright
© 2001 by California Law Review, Inc. |
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