Emily Falk

They ran an experiment where they gave some people messages that were focused on social proof.

Like, for example, 77% of San Marcos residents often use fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool in the summer.

So that's a message that's highlighting that a lot of your neighbors are doing this thing.

And other people got messages that were focused on, you know, just asking them to consider how they might conserve energy, like, for example, by using fans instead of air conditioning.

And other people got other kinds of appeals.

So things like saving money.

And they found, the researchers found that the households that were told about their neighbors' conservation efforts, that they ended up saving more energy than people in the other groups.

And the thing that I think is really fascinating about this study is that those folks who are influenced by the messages still reported that what other people were doing was the least important reason for them making the energy decisions that they were making.

Yeah, well, that term, the credit goes to Elliot Berkman, who's also a neuroscientist who studies goal pursuit.

The idea of whatty-what-what is an acronym for work on that thing you don't want to work on time.

There are a lot of things that we don't necessarily want to do, you know, things that we don't feel like doing, but that we know we need to do.

And what we do in our lab is we try to make those things that we know we don't really want to work on more rewarding by doing them together.

So somebody might post on our messaging platform.

Does anybody want to have a work on that thing session?

And then a bunch of other people will get together.

And the idea is that there's a set amount of time.

You don't have to do a thing that you don't want to do forever.

But we give each other support and encouragement and hold each other accountable for the thing.

And so having somebody else there kind of helps rebalance the value calculation because it's fun to get to catch up with somebody else and committing to doing it together with somebody else taps into that idea of social rewards as well and makes it more likely that we'll get it done.

Yeah.