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When some people in a society are engaging in negative behaviors, society may want to discourage them from doing so. In order to help change these behaviors, it seems natural to begin by informing everyone that the behaviors have been commonly occurring. Surprisingly, however, informing people that these negative behaviors are happening may actually lead to an increase in these negative behaviors, a phenomenon known as the boomerang effect. Psychologists think the boomerang effect occurs because people have a natural tendency to want to behave similarly to a majority of other people. Therefore, an unintended consequence of trying to prevent a behavior by informing people about it may be that the negative behavior actually increases instead of decreases.
Now listen to part of a lecture in a psychology class.
OK. So let's look at an example of this. Let's say a particular town is trying to encourage people to stop throwing away trash that could be recycled. The town wants people to put certain household trash like cans and bottles and paper items into recycling bins. So they can be made into new products rather than going into dumps and landfills and polluting the environment.
So the town does a study and determines that most of the recyclable trash is not getting recycled right now. So they send out that a letter to every home that tells people this, saying they found that most of the trash that could be recycled is not being recycled. The intention is to get more people to care about the issue and start recycling to get them to stop just throwing away all their trash.
Well, when people get this letter indicating that most of the recyclable trash in town simply gets thrown away, they'll realize that this means that a lot of people in the town probably most people are just throwing away things that could be recycled. And the people who have been making the effort to recycle will realize that most other people haven't bothered to. So what happens? Well, several months after sending out this letter, the town does another study. And unfortunately, it turns out that even less of the trash in town is being recycled now, only 10%, so even more people are just throwing stuff away instead of recycling it.
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