By com­par­ing cus­tomers’ usage to that of oth­ers in the neigh­bour­hood, util­ity com­pa­nies are start­ing to reduce their energy con­sump­tion. This, from an exper­i­ment con­ducted by Robert Cial­dini, author of Influ­ence:

In a 2004 exper­i­ment, he and a col­league left dif­fer­ent mes­sages on door­knobs in a middle-class neigh­bor­hood north of San Diego. One type urged the res­i­dents to con­serve energy to save the earth for future gen­er­a­tions; another empha­sized finan­cial sav­ings. But the only kind of mes­sage to have any sig­nif­i­cant effect […] was one that said neigh­bors had already taken steps to curb their energy use.

You can see how effec­tive this is just by look­ing at the graphic used to head the Times’ arti­cle. This has now got me won­der­ing how this could be used with recycling.

via Mind Hacks