Earlier this month, the Washington Post’s Chris Mooney wrote a piece regarding the disappearing and reappearing lakes on Greenland’s ice sheet, which I spent some time to address. Today, Mooney brought up a study conducted in Germany that explored the behaviors of people who were given choices for their energy purchases. The researchers employed the use of psychological nudging through something called the “default effect,” which produced some interesting results.
Mooney writes,
“This is the first demonstration of a large-scale nudging effect using defaults in the domain of energy choices,” says Sebastian Lotz of Stanford University and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who conducted the research with Felix Ebeling of the University of Cologne in Germany.
The study was gigantic – the research started out with 41,952 German households. That’s because the researchers had the cooperation of a large energy company.
The researchers conducted a randomized, controlled trial of individuals who were buying a home electricity contract online. Individuals had the option of choosing a contract with a high or low level of service andwhether or not they wanted 100 percent of their power to come from renewable sources.
But here’s where the experiment kicked in: Individuals were randomly assigned to one of two cases. In one case, the box presenting “100 % green” as an “optional choice” was already checked — meaning, if you did not want green energy you had to actively uncheck it and opt out. In the other case, by contrast, the box was unchecked — so if you wanted 100 percent green energy you had to actively check it and opt in.
In other words, in some scenarios 100 percent clean energy was the default — the status quo — and in other cases, it was not.
The difference in responses in the two scenarios was dramatic, especially among the customers who went all the way through the process and purchased an energy contract. “Conditional on the purchase of a contract, merely 7.2% of purchased contracts in the opt-in treatment were ‘green’, whereas in the opt-out treatment, a majority of 69.1% of purchased contracts were ‘green,’” wrote Ebeling and Lotz.
And crucially, this occurred even though the clean energy option was slightly more expensive than the dirty energy one.
Mooney added that people in the study who were more eco-sympathetic were more likely to opt in to choosing green energy while those who hate the planet were “less environmentally attuned” were not likely to checkmark the unchecked green energy option. Not exactly a revelation.
The researchers also conducted a supplementary experiment in the U.S. in which subjects were randomly given an imaginary scenario of the experiment in Germany involving either opting into green energy or opting out. The participants were then asked if they could recall checking/unchecking the options. 100% of the participants who opted in to using green energy by checking the box recalled doing so. If they’d gotten the other scenario, 84% remembered leaving the green energy option checked. This means that most people are aware of their green energy choices, the researchers declared.
This experiment shows one method in which progressives are able to get their way–by taking advantage of people’s apathy. Something as simple as unchecking a box takes a degree of effort that many don’t care enough to do, even when it means they will pay extra one way or another. They see that they’re paying more, but they won’t care until the bills come in and they notice that their bank accounts are taking a hit. That’s when they think, what the hell? Only when matters begin to affect them directly do they start to care.
Whether it’s a health care mandate, a new gun control law, control of the internet without transparency, or the increased encroachment of “protected class” claptrap, people don’t care enough to participate, to speak up about the continued changes and restrictions to their everyday lives. They won’t care enough to vote. Then they’ll complain about added expectations and requirements, rising costs of living, and stupid changes to things they felt were already working. They’ll wonder aloud how it possibly could have happened. They would know these things could have been prevented if they had paid a bit more attention to the initial decisions they had made.
The maddening thing about it is that when they’re informed that they could have prevented these things from happening, they’ll either get defensive and say they didn’t know, or they’ll get frustrated with themselves for making a choice that wasn’t so bright, then they will go ahead afterward and keep being stupid and careless.
It’s like those annoying computer updates. Before the downloading begins, the program has a couple of checkmarked items, and it asks if you also want this thing or that thing. You think, yeah, whatever, I don’t care, just update the damn thing so I can get back to what I was doing. You hit “Next” and proceed with the downloading. Only after you finish and open up your web browser do you notice that half your window is now full of search boxes and little gimmicks and gadgets you never use. You think, where the heck did all this come from? I didn’t want any of it! But then you don’t do anything to get rid of it. You leave all the junk there, taking up space on your screen. Every once in a while you might try that one search box or click the link to that one site to see where it takes you, you find it serves you no purpose, and you’ll never use it again. So now you end up with more clutter in your world, and you adjust to it. You get used to it being there.
That’s the exact sort of concept at work here. Often it’s easier to leave the default option of stupidity and laziness checked and complain about the ramifications of poor decisions later than it is to take the effort to uncheck a box now to save some future grief. The Left knows this. The Left knows that some people would rather trust what others are doing and leave the decisions to them. The Left knows it can slip in one little thing here, one little thing there, and people will adjust to the subtle changes in their lives that are happening right under their noses. The Left knows how to exploit people’s carelessness and lack of attention to certain things. Something as simple as pre-checking a box is a form of manipulation that doesn’t seem to bother people or catch their immediate attention. They must have had a good reason for making me pay more for my electricity, so I’ll leave it alone, those people may think.
The researchers for this energy purchasing experiment stated, “We have provided a simple example of how behavioural science can be used to incur large-scale behavioural changes among consumers that may help us mitigate adverse effects of climate change…The goal of the present research was to increase our knowledge and to tackle the question of whether default setting can promote enrolment into more expensive ‘green’ energy. The answer seems to be yes, which can be interpreted as a useful add-on to policymakers’ toolboxes.”
The agenda is clear. Environmentals–and the do-gooder Left in general–are seeking solutions on how to alter and engineer human behaviors on a mass scale. It’s not a conspiratorial claim. They aren’t keeping it a secret. Now that this research has been made public, progressive activists and politicians will likely take advantage of the information and put this “default” method of manipulation into practice. When they do, who will pay enough attention or bother to opt out?
