“Preaching to the choir” is often considered fruitless, although a choir is at least a receptive audience for a preacher’s message. But if the message is that the church needs more money, some choir members might decline to chip in—after all, aren't they already doing their part by singing?

In a way, that’s the issue Stanford’s Seth Werfel explored through surveys sent to more than 14,000 people in Japan. Instead of church business, the surveys asked about support for raising Japan’s carbon tax to accelerate the transition to non-carbon-emitting energy sources. After a tsunami caused a disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011, a national energy-saving campaign was launched to help avoid summer blackouts. You might assume that people reminded of how they pitched in to reduce their electricity use would also be the most amenable to stronger government intervention on energy, but that’s not how this choir felt.

Surveying the choir

The first survey was filled out by about 12,000 people, who were split into three groups. The first read a short description of the energy-saving campaign and then were presented with a list of personal actions to check off what they had done. The second group read the description but didn't get the checklist, and a third group saw nothing about the energy-saving campaign (as a baseline for comparison).

Everyone was then asked some other questions, including whether they would support an increase in the national carbon tax. People in the groups who got a checklist of personal actions turned out to be a little less likely to support the carbon tax. While about 34 percent of the other survey respondents supported the carbon tax, about 30 percent of the checklist respondents did—a statistically significant (although not massive) difference. So a reminder about how people saved energy at home seems to have had an effect.

And this response wasn’t just limited to a specific policy. The checklist group was about 15 percent more likely to indicate that individual actions were more important than government actions for the goal of energy sustainability. They also rated energy and the environment as a lower national priority by about 20 percent.

A second survey completed by about 2,000 people asked if they had recycled something before getting to the carbon tax question to see if a different kind of action at home would have the same effect. People who answered that they had recycled were perhaps a little less likely to support the carbon tax, but the difference was statistically insignificant. However, those who ticked a box to indicate that they felt recycling was important were also about 15 percent less likely to support the carbon tax—again illustrating a tension between individual and government actions.

Unlicensed slacking off

This second survey also explored whether people were less supportive of government action because they were busy patting themselves on the back. So people were asked whether they had helped someone in the last week, or how moral they perceived themselves to be with respect to other people or the environment. The idea here is that people sometimes give themselves “moral license” to slack off because they feel they’ve already done good things. This didn’t seem to explain things, though—there was no significant difference when it came to the carbon tax question.

So overall, Werfel thinks the answer is that people have a simple column in their head for an issue like energy sustainability. If you put a check in that column—by turning off some unnecessary lights or unplugging appliances that aren't being used—you might treat the issue as taken care of. You may also start to think that government action isn’t necessary because other people can simply do what you did or because enough progress has probably been made already.

The problem is that while individual actions are important, they can be far from sufficient. It’s not that campaigns to promote energy efficiency in the home necessarily backfire, but their benefits could be slightly blunted by diminished support for other sorts of energy initiatives.

Of course, truths about the Japanese populace may not map directly onto a country like the United States. Political views had little impact on the results of the Japanese surveys, for example, and that's unlikely to be the case in the US. But other aspects of identity are fairly important to attitudes like this—if you think of yourself as an environmentalist, you might be a choir member who is still willing to drop more money in the collection plate.

Nature Climate Change, 2017. DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE3316 (About DOIs).