This week I travelled to Sydney to attend my first meeting of the World Social Marketing Conference.
As noted in the conference program, my talk, titled “Aggregating Potential Collective Action To Motivate Pro-Social Consumption”, was scheduled for Monday 20 April at 11:30am in Seminar Room 4. The work is a collaborative venture with Prof. Rick Larrick at Duke University.
The abstract for this paper: Is the statement “If X people all do Y action then Z outcomes will be achieved” motivating? We answer this question by conducting a series of laboratory experiments focused on motivating pro-environmental actions. It turns out that such statements are motivating. Join us, and find out why. The talk was well attended.
I found the conference a bit hit-and-miss. There was a clear passion in all of the presenters. More than half the attendees were practitioners, so there was an interesting mix of people. However, I found it hard to connect with a lot of the practitioners’ talks and the level of science was a bit lower than I would prefer.
The conference was marred by the worst storms in Sydney in over a decade. I really felt for all the visitors, especially those two came all the way from overseas – this was not the Sydney that I know and love!