A Room with a Viewpoint Revisited: Descriptive Norms and Hotel Guests
Gerd Bohner and Lena Erika Schlüter report two studies in German hotels that repeat the design of the hotel towel experiments, varying messages by how close the reference group was and by how recent the figure was, and recording towel reuse unobtrusively. Reuse was high overall, and both standard and descriptive-norm messages increased reuse compared with a no-message baseline. Descriptive-norm messages were not more effective than the standard message, and the effects of proximity were inconsistent across the two studies. The authors discuss cultural and conceptual issues in comparing their findings with the original.
Gerd Bohner and Lena Erika Schlüter report two studies in German hotels that repeat the design of the hotel towel experiments, varying messages by how close the reference group was and by how recent the figure was, and recording towel reuse unobtrusively. Reuse was high overall, and both standard and descriptive-norm messages increased reuse compared with a no-message baseline. Descriptive-norm messages were not more effective than the standard message, and the effects of proximity were inconsistent across the two studies. The authors discuss cultural and conceptual issues in comparing their findings with the original.
Written from the abstract as published with the paper, read 2026-10-28.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Towel Reuse Behavior.' PLOS ONE, 9(8), e104086. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0104086.