A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels
Noah Goldstein, Robert Cialdini and Vladas Griskevicius report two field experiments testing signs that ask hotel guests to join a conservation programme. Appeals using descriptive norms, such as the fact that most guests reuse their towels, outperformed a conventional appeal that focused only on environmental protection. Normative appeals worked best when they described the behaviour of people in the guests' own setting, which the authors call provincial norms, and the paper closes with implications for encouraging pro-environmental behaviour.
Noah Goldstein, Robert Cialdini and Vladas Griskevicius report two field experiments testing signs that ask hotel guests to join a conservation programme. Appeals using descriptive norms, such as the fact that most guests reuse their towels, outperformed a conventional appeal that focused only on environmental protection. Normative appeals worked best when they described the behaviour of people in the guests' own setting, which the authors call provincial norms, and the paper closes with implications for encouraging pro-environmental behaviour.
Written from the abstract as shown on the OpenAlex record, read 2026-10-28.
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Goldstein, N. J., Cialdini, R. B., & Griskevicius, V. (2008). A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels. Journal of Consumer Research, 35(3), 472-482. doi:10.1086/586910.