Sunday, October 16, 2011

Economics

Last week, the only social psychology that I connected to a class came from Environmental Economics. I went to my first session of training for my new job at Lush today, though, and of course any jobs with sales has to do with social psychology.

Environmental Economics: We began to talk about green jobs, and why so many companies are becoming more and more green. Sometimes, the reason for these companies to become more environmentally friendly is not to be environmentally friendly. Green jobs attract employees, because if a person is choosing between two workplaces, and they're about the same, they pay the same, etc., but one of them is green and the other one isn't, they will likely choose the green job. Also, we talked about this concept applying to Meredith. For Meredith, being green attracts employees, tuition-paying students, donors, and lets people in the community hear about the college because of certain events Meredith holds as well. Therefore, being green is not only beneficial to the environment, but actually moreso beneficial to companies at an economical standpoint. Being green on a small scale makes us feel better, due to cognitive dissonance. If we think of ourselves as good people, and a commercial tells us that good people recycle and encourage others to recycle, green jobs are attractive because we can continue to be good people!

Energy Saving & Desperate Housewives

These observations occurred the week of fall break. I got very jumbled, busy, and--basically a mess during and after fall break, so I got behind on posts. Luckily I keep a "sticky note" on my computer desktop with all of my blog ideas week to week, so I'm planning on doing a few separate posts for the weeks I missed.

Environmental Science: In environmental science, Laura Fieselman came into our class and had a presentation about encouraging people to have more sustainable behavior within a group--whether it be a company, a school, your family, etc. First of all, she said you have to state your goal(s), and for the company it was to increase commingled recycling, reduce paper use, and purchase environmentally friendly products. Then you have to list the barriers, and ways to get around those barriers. One example she had was simply the fact that some employees thought the recycling bins were ugly, and didn't want them in their offices. The way to get around that was to convince them that having that bin shows that they are a good person and an environmentally conscious person, so who cares if it's ugly--it makes you look good. Then, you have to set up "marketing" for these behaviors to constantly remind people to change it. This includes logos, titles and taglines; prompts (for example to recycle, or a sticker above the lights that remind people to turn them off when they leave); commitment to following through with the project (which links to making a public commitment in social psychology, the people are more likely to follow through with it if they have told many people, or themselves, that they will); and incentives, like a party for the office who recycled the most or something. Then, at the end of a project, or at checkpoints throughout the project, you want to share successes of others and communicate the effect of the project so far. All of these components are important for changing someone's behavior. These are effective means to change someone's behavior, especially since they involve incentives and specific instructions to get to those incentives. In order for people to change a habit, constantly being surrounded by signs, logos, stickers, etc. that remind someone of the project/behavior change will ensure more effective cooperation as well.

Desperate Housewives: Since we were out of school less than we were in school this week, another source of linkage to social psych was good ol' television. There was a perfect example of cognitive dissonance that related exactly with the Opie the bird man video. Sorry if you aren't familiar with the characters, but Susan on Desperate Housewives is a good mom, a positively influential kindergarten teacher, a good, honest wife, and lastly a law abiding citizen. However, when Carlos kills Gabby's abusive step-father, and Susan and many other housewives help cover up this murder and decide not to tell anyone--not even their husbands--Susan has a great cognitive dissonance on her hands. She begins committing small crimes, trying to get punished. She ends up having to do community service, and several other small punishments, but nothing makes her feel punished enough in the end. Just like Opie, who just wants an instant punishment so he can go back to being a good boy, she wanted to do her time or punishment and become a law abiding citizen and honest person again. She cannot handle it and soon enough she tells her husband (and that's all I know for now, but when we went over that video in class it reminded me of this episode).

That was about it for social psychologically related stuff in my life for that week.