Still Waters Run Deep: Comparing Assertive and Suggestive Language in Water Conservation Campaigns

David Katz,Udi Nisan,Ann Kronrod,Amir Grinstein

doi:10.3390/w10030275

Abstract

The current work focuses on non-price policies to achieve residential water conservation, specifically on water conservation campaigns. The authors report the results of a large-scale longitudinal field experiment encouraging residential water conservation among 1500 households. The effectiveness of two commonly-used message phrasings is compared: an assertive and a suggestive message. Assertive messages employ a commanding tone, such as “You must conserve water”, whereas suggestive messages employ a more gentle approach, as in “Please consider conserving water”. Despite the ubiquitous use of assertive phrasing in pro-social messages, and previous research that suggests that, in some cases, assertive language can increase message compliance, the authors show here that the suggestive, gentler, message language can make a more accentuated change in residential water conservation behavior. This may stem from the status of water as a basic needs resource, which may reduce the appropriateness of freedom restricting language, such as an assertive tone.

Highlights

Water conservation is an important goal in many countries around the world
This study involved a controlled field experiment designed to evaluate the relative effectiveness of different demarketing messages, an “assertive” message versus a suggestive one
The longitudinal controlled field experiment revealed the relative effectiveness of two types of demarketing messages: an assertive and a suggestive one

Summary

Introduction

Water conservation is an important goal in many countries around the world. Water managers and policy-makers have a wide range of policy tools available to attempt to implement demand management [1]. Public awareness campaigns have proven to be an increasingly popular means of encouraging environmental conservation, in general (e.g., [2,3,4,5]), and water conservation, in particular (e.g., [6,7,8,9,10]). Such conservation campaigns have various benefits over traditional market-based mechanisms, such as pricing, or command and control mechanisms, such as quotas or use restrictions. There is increasing evidence that water conservation campaigns can be effective in changing consumer behavior, especially for short periods of time and with relatively low-cost [9,13,14]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion