An economics experiment suggests that ‘most people are willing to make enough of a sacrifice to keep resource use down to where there will be a sustainable environment in the future.’ However, people can become demotivated if they feel their sacrifice is in isolation. Here’s how to keep sustainability goodwill high.

The experiment gave people up to 100 credits, which they could choose to keep for themselves, or pass onto other people. If enough people passed on their bonus, the next group would reap the benefit, but if too few people passed on their bonuses, the next group received no benefit. The researchers explain their results and application:

‘But if individuals are left completely free to do what they each want to do, there are unfortunately enough selfish individuals to tip the balance toward an environmental catastrophe. The good news is that if people can be assured that they’re not the only ones making the sacrifice and the sacrifice is not for naught, there is more than enough willingness to make those sacrifices. Achieving that assurance requires that there be some sort of mechanism for making joint decisions, with some kind of institution that binds everybody [..]

‘What’s very novel about this study is the mimicking of a multi-generational setting. There are a lot of studies of dilemma situations in which the individual interest and group interest are potentially opposed to each other, and those studies have shown that often many individuals are willing to cooperate if they believe that others are willing to cooperate. But they haven’t been done in this intergenerational framework. What’s interesting is that in the one-generation studies, one of the surefire solutions is to let the subjects vote on what each is supposed to do. The conflict between group and individual interest is almost magically washed away by voting. But the intergenerational thing is novel because future generations who would also be affected by the vote are not present. It requires some actual concern for the future or some moral weighing in for these future generations in order for the voting to be an effective solution and that’s what’s novel here. They are able to demonstrate at least in the experimental environment that that’s present among hundreds of anonymous participants.’

Source.