In light of the Eagles’ recent ‘huge dub’ at the Super Bowl, I present to you, dear Frankly Speaking reader, a hacky allegory: I grew up in Philadelphia, and there’s a certain reputation our city has for sports hooliganism. Some may say it represents a larger city-wide ethos of sorts, others find it annoying—take your pick. There is a Philadelphian habit of climbing poles during major sports-related events in Center City. So much so that the PPD regularly greases the poles in anticipation of any such event. However, as the NFC championship game loomed, no such poles were greased. The implicit message being: “please don’t misbehave… because we asked you to.” This approach certainly has its merits, but on that very same day, an eighteen-year-old Temple University student fell to his death climbing a pole near City Hall. This is in no way to say that this tragedy could have in some way been avoided by a greasy pole, but does speak to the extent to which asking people to modify their habits for the greater good has its limits.
I might add here that I, being a complete ‘woosie’ with a limited interest in professional sports, do not climb poles. The presence or absence of grease on a pole does not compel me one way or the other. As someone who already has a lifetime subscription to the tendencies of risk aversion, someone telling me not to climb a pole and someone making it hard for me to are indistinguishable. For those Philadelphians or visitors living out the image of a die-hard Eagles fan though, the behavior may as well be instinctual—it is part and parcel what you do in Center City when the Eagles play, win or lose—that, or cheering it on.
This idea of behavior modification came to me once again when visiting a Milas Hall bathroom and glancing upon the sustainability-green flusher on the toilet, complete with usage instructions printed above. For those unacquainted, a traditional downwards push on the lever uses a higher volume flush, and an upwards pull uses less water, for liquid waste. Let’s say, for example, that you don’t like to read stuff. You go to the bathroom, turn around, and push the lever the way you’re conditioned to do by years upon years of bathroom usage, regardless of what you’ve left in the toilet. Does this mean the lean green handle doesn’t work? Certainly not; there is simply a mismatch between the desired behavior change and the underlying behavior. Different example: you do like reading, but even having parsed the instructions behind the flusher, you just push it down like you’re used to. It saves water, sure, but for a large institution you don’t balance the books for, and you’re in a rush. Now, of course, we shouldn’t need an incentive to do something that’s ‘good’ and ‘green’–we should all have a vested interest in conservation of resources and what is good for the planet. But, as I think we can all attest to on some level, that’s not an attitude ‘we’ truly all share, or ‘we’ truly act on at all moments in our lives.
‘We’ should of course not wring our hands and self-flagellate over this, but perhaps we can take the time to think about how these interventions might be re-designed. In this silly example of the toilet, what if the ‘default’ behavior saved water, and the ‘alternative’ behavior expended more? For our undesirable behaviors, would it not make more sense to make the behavior more challenging to continue, rather than say ‘please don’t do that’?
