In another experiment, Griskevicius and his team asked subjects to consider buying green or non-green products in two different shopping scenarios. One group was asked to imagine making the purchase online, in the privacy of their homes, while another group was asked to imagine making the purchase in public, out at a store. What they found is that, when subjects are primed with a status motive, they show a stronger preference for green products when shopping in public, and a weaker preference for green products when shopping online. Clearly their motive isn’t just to help the environment, but also to be seen as being helpful. Savvy marketers at Toyota, maker of the popular Prius brand of hybrid cars, no doubt had this in mind when they designed the Prius’s distinctive body. For the U.S. market, they chose to produce a hatchback instead of a sedan, even though sedans are vastly more popular. Why change two things at once, both the engine and the body? A likely reason is that a distinctive body makes the car more conspicuous. Whether out on the road or parked in a driveway, a Prius is unmistakable. If the Prius looked just like a Camry, fewer people would notice it. Discussions of conspicuous consumption often focus on how we use products to signal wealth and social status. But the expressive range is actually much wider. Hybrid owners, for example, probably aren’t trying to advertise their wealth per se. A Prius doesn’t cost much more than a standard combustion car, and doesn’t have the high-end cachet of a BMW or Lexus. Instead, what Prius owners are signaling is their prosocial attitude, that is, their good-neighborliness and responsible citizenship. They’re saying, “I’m willing to forego luxury in order to help the planet.” It’s an act of conspicuous altruism, which we’ll see much more of in Chapter 11, on charitable behavior.
One of the hidden motives of buying environmental friendly products is signalling your environmental friendliness to others. Nothing wrong with that. Many of the things we do is to basically promote and cultivate our identity, especially on social media. Likewise, I recognise that what I’m trying to do here is to take part in this outward display of my identity to show that I am someone who reads a lot so any criticism of such motives will be hypocritical to say the least.
The key is whether we are able to acknowledge this fundamental characteristic in humans. We can use this to our advantage, especially when planning for policies and nudging people towards actions that benefit the common good.
