Exploring normative perceptions and misperceptions of private, environmentally impactful behaviours

Social norms have been shown to be an effective behaviour change mechanism across diverse behaviours, demonstrated from classical studies to more recent behaviour change research. Much of this research has focused on environmentally impactful actions. Social norms are typically utilised for behaviour change in social contexts, which facilitates the important element of the behaviour being visible to the referent group. This ensures that behaviours can be learned through observation and that deviations from the acceptable behaviour can be easily sanctioned or approved by the referent group. There has been little focus on how effective social norms are in private or non-social contexts, despite a multitude of environmentally impactful behaviours occurring in the home, for example. The current study took the novel approach to explore if private behaviours are important in the context of normative influence, and if the lack of a referent groups results in inaccurate normative perceptions and misguided behaviours. Findings demonstrated variance in normative perceptions of private behaviours, and that these misperceptions may influence behaviour. These behaviours are deemed to be more environmentally harmful, and respondents are less comfortable with these behaviours being visible to others, than non-private behaviours. The research reveals the importance of focusing on private behaviours, which have been largely overlooked in the normative influence literature.