Abstract
The unwillingness of college students to use recycled water has become a key barrier to sewage recycling on campus, and it is critical to strengthen their inclination to do so. This paper used college students in Xi’an as a case study and adopted event-related potential technology to explore the effect of social norms on the willingness to use recycled water and the neural mechanism of cognitive processing. The results suggested the following: (1) The existence of social norms might influence college students’ willingness to use recycled water. (2) When individuals’ willingness to use recycled water is lower than the social norm, there is a bigger feedback-related negative amplitude. (3) College students pay more attention to social norms in groups with closer social distance. These findings can be used to provide a scientific basis for persuading the public to use recycled water from the perspective of the social norm to drive public acceptability.
Highlights
By 2040, two billion people will be affected by the global groundwater crisis (Catley-Carlson, 2019; Tortajada and van Rensburg, 2020), as a result, forcing more and more cities to seek unconventional water sources
In order to explore college students’ perception of social norm deviation in recycled water usage, the difference between participants’ social norm situation and their willingness to use recycled water was divided into three categories: no social norm deviation, positive social norm deviation, and negative social deviation
By comparing the Feedback-related negativity (FRN) in the waveform, it can be observed that if there is a deviation between the willingness of self-recycled water reuse and the social norm, the FRN amplitude would most likely be more significant than without social deviation (M = −1.985, SE = 2.798)
Summary
By 2040, two billion people will be affected by the global groundwater crisis (Catley-Carlson, 2019; Tortajada and van Rensburg, 2020), as a result, forcing more and more cities to seek unconventional water sources. Sewage recycling is one of the most commonly used unconventional water sources It alleviates water environmental pollution, the current challenge of water scarcity, and increases water resource use efficiency by re-developing and utilizing urban domestic sewage treatment after reaching the standard. The recycled water treatment technology can almost produce recycled water that meets any water quality standards, and the technical issues are no longer an obstacle to its utilization (Fielding et al, 2019). Given the importance of public participation in the implementation of new technologies or policies (Guo et al, 2021), enhancing the public’s willingness to use recycled water has become a pressing issue to be addressed
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