Recycling Norms

California Law Review, Jul 2012

By Ann E. Carlson, Published on 10/31/01

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Recycling Norms

Ann E.Carlsont 0 0 Copyright © 2001 California Law Review, Inc. California Law Review, Inc. (CLR) is a California t Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law. I thank Rick Abel , Alison Anderson, Mike Asimow, Steve Bainbridge, George Cardona, Joe Doherty, Bob Ellickson, Jody Freeman, Carole Goldberg, Laura Gomez, Mitu Gulati, Joel Handler, Rick Hasen, Ken Karst, Russell Korobkin, Jim Krier, Gillian Lester, Tim Malloy, Carl Moor, Kal Raustiala, Rick Sander, Seana Shiffrin, Kirk Stark, Buzz Thompson, John Wiley, Steve Yeazell , Jonathan Zasloff and participants at the Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum, Stanford Law School's Environmental Workshop, the UCLA Law School the Dean's Fund and the UCLA Council on Research. Lily Chinn, Tim Tree and Dan Hargis provided extremely helpful research assistance, Wendy Haro provided superb editorial assistance and, as always, the work ofthe UCLA Law Library staffwas exceptional , USA The recent explosion of legal scholarshipfocused 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 behaviorfor little or no economic gain. Many environmental problems are illustrative: energy overuse, littering,and airpollution. In this Article Professor Carlson examines empirical evidence about a particularlarge-number,small-payoff collective actionproblem, solid waste reduction through recycling, to determine whether and how social norms work to induce behavioralchange necessaryto resolve theproblem. - OCTOBER 2001 small-payoff collective action problem if the desired behavioralchange is relatively inconvenient or requires significant effort. Governments are likely to have more success in solving suchproblems through reducingthe amount of effort requiredor by usingfinancialincentives to induce the behavioral change rather than by engaging in efforts to strengthen social norms. ProfessorCarlsonalso concludes that norm managementcan have some payoff where a collective action problem requires relatively higheffort behavioralchange if governments or other norm managers can succeed in convertingsome low or moderate believers in the norm to true believers. The Article shows that norm management efforts that involvefaceto-face communication or individualfeedback can have some success in inducingbehavioralchange. The Article should help governments and other agents of social change who need to rely on the altruism of many individualsin order to resolve a socialproblem by providingan understandingofthe relationship between effort, norms, andfinancialincentives. The Article also provides evidence in the ongoing scholarlydebate about what motivates compliance with social norms. INTRODUCTION Across the country, hordes of people religiously separate their trash from recyclable materials, and often their recyclables from one another, and either place them at curbside or drive them to the nearest drop-off center. In most jurisdictions their efforts are voluntary, and many (perhaps most) recyclers receive no compensation for their efforts. In rational economic terms, most individuals probably should not recycle: the costs (time, labor, storage space) surely exceed the monetary benefits. What, then, motivates their behavior? An intuitively appealing answer is that a social norm in favor of recycling is at work. Recyclers get either intrinsic satisfaction for doing the right thing, approval from friends and neighbors for their environmentally correct behavior, or both. At least one prominent legal scholar has offered this explanation for recycling behavior,' and another uses recycling as an example of the way in which social norms operate.2 And several scholars embrace government "social norms management" as a promising regulatory tool for resolving problems of collective action like recycling: if governments can change the psychic cost or benefit of a particular behavior without resort to formal law or financial inducements, and hence persuade 2001] large numbers of people to engage in or stop that behavior (wearing seat belts, using condoms, quitting smoking, recycling solid waste), social norms management might be a cheap and effective alternative to more traditional regulatory means. 3 The viability of norms management as a regulatory approach depends, however, on the nature of the social problem, the context in which it arises, and the availability of other regulatory tools. Although recent law and norms scholarship has engendered optimism that social norms can change behavior, this may be true only for certain subsets of social problems, such as those that arise in small, homogenous groups. Indeed much recent law and norms literature has focused on precisely these types of groups to demonstrate the pow (...truncated)


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Ann E. Carlson. Recycling Norms, California Law Review, 2012, Volume 89, Issue 5,