An awareness based approach to sustainability
Mechanisms of psychological ownership , social proof and social influence are basic concepts to approach behavioral changes in resource consumption .
Psychological ownership describes a state in which a person feels closely connected to an object or idea , to the degree that it becomes part of her " extended self " ( Pierce , Kostova , & Dirks , 2002 ).
Instruments have to be appropriated by users , i . e . contextualized in their daily routine , to become effective ( Klopfert & Wallenborn , 2011 ). A way to extend a social norm is to use rewards for “ socially acceptable behavior ” like incentives , although not necessarily monetary ones ( Sissa , 2008 ).
As soon as people see something as “ their own ”, its perceived value increases and they are more likely to invest time and effort in preserving it ( Fischer , 2012 ; Dick et . al ., 2011 ). Social proof describes how people act in a certain way because they see others acting that way ( Cialdini , 2009 ; Fischer , 2010 ). In such situations , the fact that others make a choice acts as a proof that this choice is preferable . Individuals replace common background or geographic proximity with a sense of well-defined purpose and successful common pursuit of this purpose ( EC 2011 ).
Social influence is an umbrella term for a loose congregation of social , psychological , and economic mechanisms , including :
• Identifying with ( or distancing oneself ) |
from certain social groups ; |
• Obeying |
authority |
and |
avoiding |
sanctions ; |
|
|
|
• Reducing |
the |
complexity |
of |
the |
decision making process ; |
• Inferring |
otherwise |
inaccessible |
information about the world ; |
• Gaining access to a particular network ;
• Reaping the benefits of coordinated action .
The dynamics of collective decisions is driven by the influence network , i . e . the network of “ who influences whom ” that can determining , for example , the likelihood that “ cascades ” of influence can originate from small initial seeds , the ability of prominent individuals to trigger such cascades , and the importance of group structure in triggering and propagating large cascades ( Watts & Duncan , 2002 ). Some models of social influence tend to assume , often implicitly , that all actors involved are of the same type . Whereas in reality , individuals may be influenced by a variety of actors - for example , peers , role models , media organizations , and high profile individuals – each of which may exert a different kind of influence , and may in turn be influenced differently . A growing research area inside social network analysis is now focusing on a special case of influence response - namely threshold rules , according to which individuals adopt a new state based on the perceived fraction of their peers who have already adopted the same state . While research on threshold models dates back to the late Seventies , the effectiveness of threshold rules for describing and forecasting collective decision-making processes is still an open research question ( Grannovetter , 1978 ; Watts & Dodds , 2009 ).
Threshold models are well understood in certain special cases , like all-to-all approximation where all individuals are influenced equally by the states of all others . Some researches moved systematically up the complexity chain , reviewing the dynamics of cascades of influence on random networks . Other models ( Watts , Dodds , & Newman ,
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