Journal of Environmental Psychology 86 (2023) 101971

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Environmental Psychology

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jep

Water bottles or tap water? A descriptive-social-norm based intervention to

increase a pro-environmental behavior in a restaurant
Alessia Dorigoni *, Nicolao Bonini
Consumer Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Economics and Management, University of Trento, Italy

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Handling Editor: W. Schultz The impact of humanity’s behavior on the ecological environment is a hot topic that has been widely studied
over the past few years. The consumption of plastic bottled water has steadily increased, even in countries where
Keywords: the quality of tap water is considered excellent. This poses a problem for the environment for multiple reasons,
Nudging for example: emissions due to transportation and non-biodegradable plastic waste. This paper addresses the issue
Environment
of how policy-makers implement interventions aimed at increasing the consumption of tap water instead of
Consumer decision-making
bottled water. Specifically, it investigates how the use of a descriptive social norm in a restaurant might reduce
Social norms
Pro-environmental behavior the plastic bottled water consumption. Results show that the presence of the message “TWO IN THREE PEOPLE
FROM THIS AREA DRINK TAP WATER” induced a significant impact on behavior because it decreased plastic
bottled water sales by 12 percentage points, from 96% to 84%, considering only the 4055 water requests, bottled
or tap, and not the overall number of drink orders. Behavioral public policy is discussed to discourage bottled
water consumption.

1. Introduction
Plastic pollution is one of the most urgent problems today: 850
million tons of plastic are produced each year worldwide. The WWF
report (2022) shows that between 86 and 150 million tons of plastic
have accumulated in the seas. Every day we make decisions that are
related to environmental plastic pollution problems (e.g., waste sorting,
non-plastic materials, etc.), and they play a crucial role in reducing the
negative human impact on the ecological environment. Pro-
environmental behavior (PEB) has been a hot topic for the past decade
(Van der Werff, Steg, and Keizer (2013); Hornsey and Fielding (2020);
Lu, Zou, Chen, and Long (2020); Lu et al. (2021)) and it is considered
essential for conserving natural resources, protecting ecosystems and
ensuring the long-term viability of current and future generations (Ones,
Wiernik, Dilchert, and Klein (2015); Kharat, Murthy, Kamble, and
Kharat (2017)). PEBs refer to behaviors relating to personal transport,
water and energy consumption, the production and management of
waste. Consumption of tap water instead of bottled water is a PEB for
two main reasons: it reduces non-biodegradable plastic waste that poses
a serious threat to marine life and avoids the environmental impact of
the transportation of the bottled water from one place to the other. The
consumption of bottled water has steadily increased over the past years,
even in countries where the quality of tap water is considered excellent
(Kasdan, Lee, and Yang (2020)).
In the paper by Johnstone and Serret Johnstone and Serret (2012),
the authors analyzed the determinants of a households’ decision to
purchase bottled water using a survey of 10,000 households; they found
that household income, living in an urban area and car ownership (used
to transport the bottled water) has a positive impact on the bottled water
consumption while concern about solid waste has a negative impact.
Research has shown that people decide to consume bottled water rather
than tap water for two main factors: socio-demographic (e.g., women
drink disproportionately more bottled water then men while under­
graduate students drink more than graduate students (Saylor, Prokopy,
and Amberg (2011)) and psychographic factors (Dolnicar, Hurlimann,
and Grün (2011); Etale, Jobin, and Siegrist (2018)), such as satisfaction
with organoleptic properties (especially flavor, odor and taste), risk
perception, level of trust in the water authority and perceptions of
chemicals (Levallois, Grondin, and Gingras (1999); Doria (2006); Doria,
Pidgeon, and Hunter (2009); Ross, Fielding, and Louis (2014)). Several
studies highlighted that people reject tap water mainly because of
concerns about health risks; in order to mitigate this effect, we decided
to collect data in a place where it is common knowledge that the quality
of the water is high since the water comes from the near mountains.

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: alessia.dorigoni@unitn.it (A. Dorigoni), nicolao.bonini@unitn.it (N. Bonini).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.101971
Received 30 November 2022; Received in revised form 23 January 2023; Accepted 29 January 2023
Available online 2 February 2023
0272-4944/© 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
A. Dorigoni and N. Bonini Journal of Environmental Psychology 86 (2023) 101971

Green nudging strategies, which aim to promote environmentally hypothesis is that the presence of the above-mentioned social norm will
friendly behavior (Steg and Vlek (2009); Bonini, Hadjichristidis, and change the type of water requested: we expect that customers will ask
Graffeo (2018); Wee, Choong, and Low (2021)), have been used as more frequently for tap water when the social norm is present in the
environmental policy instruments. Choice architecture interventions environment.
aim to nudge people toward personally and socially desirable behavior
through the design of choice environments (for a meta-analysis of choice 2. Field experimental study
architecture interventions across behavioral domains see Mertens,
Herberz, Hahnel, and Brosch (2022)). Some authors are suspicious about 2.1. Methodology
nudge-type interventions stating that their effectiveness can vary
depending on different conditions (Szaszi et al. (2022)). Other authors The experiment is divided in two parts. The first part, spanning four
(DellaVigna & Linos, 2022) report inconsistent impact of nudging; re­ weeks (July 2022), where the social norm was not present and a second
sults in academic journals (33.4% increase) are substantially larger part, four weeks span (August 2022) where the social norm, reported on
compared to Nudging units (8% increase) and the authors suggest that six posters, was visibly present in the restaurant. In choosing these
this incongruence might be due to publication bias. Corroborating this spans, we followed a similar methodology used in previous studies (e.g.,
suspicion, Maier and colleagues’ re-analysis (Maier et al. (2022)) of Goldstein et al. (2008); Reese et al. (2014)). Guests were not aware that
Mertens et al. (2022) shows no evidence for nudging after adjusting for they were participants in the study.
publication bias. However, the environment has long been recognized to The restaurant is a small establishment located in a valley close to a
have a significant impact on individuals’ choices (Carlsson, Gravert, mountain. It is attended by local people and tourists that, during the
Kurz, and Johansson-Stenman (2019-a); Kamenica (2012)); there are summer, visit for hiking. The quality of tap water in the area is high since
several ways to modify the choice environment to nudge people, such as it comes from the mountain.
floor signage and “green foot-prints" (Sunstein and Reisch (2014); Col­ The restaurant consists of two dining rooms. In one dining room
leoni, Rossetti, Magatti, Palestini, and Iannantuoni (2021), products’ there are five tables for four people each and in the other room there are
position (Goldberg and Gunasti (2007); Colleoni et al. (2021)), and the five tables for four people and two tables which can accommodate up to
presence of social norms (Reddy et al. (2017)). The latter are defined as six people. The first dining room has a rectangular shape with one side
“patterns of behaviors or values that depend on expectations about what three times longer than the other. The tables were placed next to each
others do and/or think should be done” (Constantino et al. (2022)). other on the same line along the long side of the room and two posters
Social norms are the predominant behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and were presented on the two walls. The other dining room has a square
codes of conduct of a group (Cialdini and Jacobson (2021)) and they are shape, and the tables were placed in pairs with one in the middle. The
implicit, conditionally followed, and motivated by external (vs. internal) four posters in this room were on the four walls. In both dining rooms the
enforcement (Farrow, Grolleau, and Ibanez (2017)). The perception of posters were visible from all perspectives. In the restaurant the bottled
what the majority of group members is doing, perceived directly or waters served are plastic bottles (500 ml), the tap water is free (500 ml
indirectly through information provided by third parties, induces people jug) and before the study, the restaurant had never applied descriptive
to socially conform (Asch (1952); Cialdini (2003); Nolan, Schultz, social norm nudges. Following the methodology of Robinson and col­
Cialdini, Goldstein, and Griskevicius (2008); Abrahamse and Steg leagues Robinson et al. (2014) where the social norm was on a poster
(2013); Farrow et al. (2017)). that contained images of vegetables and two lines of text, the posters in
Several classifications of social norms have been proposed in the the restaurant (Fig. 1) showed a neutral image (a glass full of water) as a
literature (e.g., actual/perceived; prescriptive/proscriptive) but the background and a rectangle with capital letters where the descriptive
difference between descriptive and injunctive norms has been the most
utilized. Whereas descriptive norms refer to what most people do
(described by Morris, yi Hong, yue Chiu, and Liu (2015) as a “social
autopilot”), injunctive norms describe what most people approve of
doing (“social radar”). The psychological tendency to conform has
important consequences for the environment. Santos and van der Linden
(2016) showed that by signaling that the “prototypical” behavior of
Princeton students should be “sustainable”, students were less likely to
consume bottled water. The influential effects of social norms are
evident in healthy food choices (Robinson, Fleming, and Higgs (2014);
Mollen, Cheung, and Stok (2023)), antisocial behaviors, such as tax
evasion and substance abuse (for a review see Schultz (2022)),
low-carbon consumption (Castro-Santa, Drews, and van den Bergh
(2023)) and the major categories of climate change-related behavior:
eco-friendly consumer choices (e.g., towels reuse in a hotel: Goldstein,
Cialdini, and Griskevicius (2008); Reese, Loew, and Steffgen (2014)),
energy conservation and water conservation (for a review see Cialdini
and Jacobson (2021) and Constantino et al. (2022)).
Although many studies have applied descriptive social norms to
promote PEB, the potential of this nudging strategy to invert preferences
from bottled water to tap water has not been widely studied. The aim of
this paper is to study the effect of the presence of a descriptive social
norm in a restaurant. The norm must be salient and visible to the in­
dividuals in order to have an impact on their behavior (Schwartz
(2007)); we placed six 50 cm X 50 cm posters on the wall of the two
dining rooms, clearly visible from all the perspectives, showing the
descriptive norm “TWO IN THREE PEOPLE FROM THIS AREA DRINK Fig. 1. Posters showing the descriptive norm “TWO IN THREE PEOPLE FROM
TAP WATER”. In this pre-post between-subject design experiment on THIS AREA DRINK TAP WATER" and the information source: “SOURCE:
social influence (presence/absence of the social norm), our research PROVINCIAL ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY".

2
A. Dorigoni and N. Bonini
norm was presented: “TWO IN THREE PEOPLE FROM THIS AREA
DRINK.
TAP WATER". We also provided the source of the information
(“SOURCE: PROVINCIAL ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY").
The descriptive norm, as mentioned above, indicates what most
people do in the local geographical area. As discussed in the Introduc­
tion, the presence of a descriptive social norm should induce people to
behave in accordance with the norm (e.g., to ask more for tap water).
The sentence (i.e., to social norm used in our study) is taken from an
intervention for the World Health Organization (2022)done by the
provincial agency for environmental protection in that area and thus
provided accurate information.
In July the requests of bottled water and tap water were recorded
during lunch and dinner (while people seated in the group with friends
and colleagues since there were not people sitting alone in the two
months of the study) but the social norm was not present. In August, the
same requests of type of water were recorded while six posters were
placed in the restaurant so that wherever the customer sat, they could
clearly see the sign. The experimenter was in direct contact with the
owner of the restaurant. She received a form in which the number of
water demand (500 ml plastic bottles and 500 ml jugs of tap water) was
recorded. If, for example, in a table of four people they ordered 2 L of
bottled water, they received four bottles of 500 ml each of plastic bottled
water and the owner took note on the form of four bottled water de­
mand. Careful instructions were given to the owner to ensure she un­
derstood the protocol and the importance of not affecting the choice (e.
g., not mentioning the posters or do not suggesting the tap water instead
of the bottled water). In addition to this, the outside temperature was
recorded daily at 10.30 a.m. (a thermometer was placed outside the
restaurant in the shade).
The independent variable of the experiment is the presence vs.
absence of the poster. The dependent variable is the choice of tap water
or bottled water. The temperature was recorded since the meteorolog­
ical variable could affect the quantity water ordered.
Due to the nature of this field experiment, collection of individual
data (e.g., clients’ gender, age, attitudes, political views) was not
possible. First, this would likely have resulted in suspicion about the
social norm presented in the dining room, and thus affected the actual
behavior. And second, most people would not have time to answer the
questionnaire because they have a short lunchtime before they return to
work or because they are tourists that want to travel a certain route in
the least possible time. The owner was happy to participate in this
research because she is a person that cares about PEB behavior even if it
means to sell less bottled water. The partnership for research was limited
for the months of the interventions and ended after August.
3. Results
The water requests (both tap and bottled water) were 4055 (1751 in
July and 2304 in August). In the following bar chart (Fig. 2) we repre­
sented the demand of tap and bottled water in July (absence of the social
Fig. 2. Water demand between the two conditions.
3
Journal of Environmental Psychology 86 (2023) 101971
norm) and August (presence of the social norm).
Between the two conditions the bottled water sales decrease of 12
percentage points (and the demand for tap water changed from 4% to
16%). In order to understand if this difference is significant and to
control for the temperature, we ran a generalized linear model (Table 1)
with the tap water demand as a binomial dependent variable (1 for tap
water and 0 for bottled water) and the presence/absence of the social
norm and the external temperature as predictor variables.
As we can see from Table 1 the tap water demand is affected only by
the presence of the social norm and not by the temperature. It means
that the presence of the social norm significantly increases the tap water
demand (β= 1.44, z = 8.13, p < 0.01).
4. Discussion
Bottled water consumption is becoming a serious problem for the
environment. It is important to change the purchase decision a/o con­
sumption styles to increase the use of tap water. One way to influence
the decision-making is nudging (Thaler and Sunstein (2008)). In this
paper, we studied whether the presence of a descriptive social norm in a
restaurant environment increases the demand for tap water.
A simple message, “TWO IN THREE PEOPLE FROM THIS AREA
DRINK TAP WATER”, significantly shifted demand away from bottled
water to tap water as shown in the Results section. Although the par­
ticipants in this study preferred bottled water overall (only 4% of cus­
tomers chose tap water without nudging), the presence of the social
norm poster increased the request of tap water by four times (from 4% to
16%).
The nudging strategy applied in this study has a high relative
effectiveness. The results are remarkable, even though the social norm
did not reverse the typical consumption pattern which favors bottled
water. The findings show that the presence of a poster with a descriptive
social norm increased the consumption of tap water by four times. Given
the very low production and management/running costs for an inter­
vention like this, we argue that this intervention has a high return
compared to its costs (i.e., good “cost-effectiveness" or relative effec­
tiveness). Furthermore, from a public policy perspective (with the aim of
increasing sustainable water resource consumption behavior), this
intervention may be more cost-effective compared to other potential
public or mixed public/private enforcements such as increased taxes on
bottled water consumption, vouchers/discounts for tap water requests,
reduced taxes for tap water consumption, etc. Also, whereas social
norms have been widely used to nudge PEBs (e.g., to reduce energy or
water consumption; increase correct recycling, etc.), to the best of our
knowledge, this is the first field study where a social norm was used to
favor the consumption of tap water in a restaurant. Thus, our results help
Table 1
Tap water demand.
Dependent variable:
Tap water
Temperature − 0.001
(0.025)
Social Norm 1.438***
(0.177)
Constant − 3.091***
(0.609)
Observations 4,055
Log Likelihood − 1,310.135
Akaike Inf. Crit 2,626.270
Note: *p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01.
A. Dorigoni and N. Bonini
to fill this gap in the literature and the outcomes of this research have
provided insight about how descriptive social norms can be used to
nudge people toward tap water consumption instead of plastic bottled
water. However, further studies are needed in order to improve on the
limitations of this research. For example, this simple pre-post design
experiment could become a more sophisticated cluster-randomized
controlled intervention; the information about the participants/cus­
tomers exposed to the intervention could be collected during the pay­
ment of the bill (in order to understand if there are features in common
among the clients that have chosen tap water) and whether participants
order water while seated in groups or alone (data on single versus
multiple subjects’ choice) could be recorded in order to understand if
there is a potential influence from other people in decisions about the
type of water to order. A follow up could be useful for understanding if
the effect of the social norm remains after the posters are removed. It
would be helpful for follow-up tests to also compare the demand for
water to the total number of drink orders in order to understand if the
presence of social norms makes people focus more on water, such that
the total water demand increases.
The applicability of these new results could be tested in different
environments in order to understand if the effect is robust and to test its
generalizability to other contexts and other places. As mentioned in
Bergquist, Nilsson, and Schultz (2019) there is a stronger influence of
social norms in student samples compared to non-student samples. It
could be interesting to use a descriptive social norm, like the one used in
this study, in a university canteen in order to understand if students are
more strongly influenced by social norms than non-students. It would
also be interesting to analyze other nudge strategies (e.g., visual cues;
injunctive social norms) and their combination (e.g., text and images) to
understand if there are nudges that more effectively increase choices of
tap water, which will ultimately benefit the environment, sea life and
personal finance.
CRediT author statement
Alessia Dorigoni: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software,
Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing- Original draft preparation,
Visualization, Investigation, Validation. Nicolao Bonini: Conceptuali­
zation, Investigation, Supervision, Writing- Reviewing and Editing,
Funding acquisition, Project administration.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their sugges­
tions and comments on earlier versions of this paper. We would like to
thank Eleonora Bazzoli, Student of the Tourism Sustainability Manage­
ment course at the University of Trento, for her help with data
collection.
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