The environment has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. I was a child with exceptionally lofty expectations for the world and the people around me: I looked down on my peers who preferred Ren and Stimpy to Captain Planet, I scoured Zoobooks instead of MAD magazine, and during recess I would stay inside to read about endangered animals while angrily stewing over the appalling injustice of poaching. I was a budding eco-warrior and, I’m sure, a complete nightmare for my parents and teachers. Then, when I was about 20, I found that I had become a person who said nothing when my friends dropped their cigarette butts on the ground. What caused me to remain silent, and was there any value in speaking up in the first place?
When I initially became aware of the fact that my friends were littering by dropping their cigarette butts on the ground, I justified my silence by telling myself that the butts are really quite tiny, and they’re likely built to be biodegradable due to environmental regulations. Unfortunately, upon further research this excuse falls apart: cigarettes are not biodegradable, as they contain plastic filters. Worse, when the butts get swept into rivers and storm drains, they just lay there and slowly release toxic chemicals that can be extremely harmful to both the environment and human health (Kaufman, 2009). In addition to this, cigarette butts make up 28-30% of all litter nationwide (not by volume, but by number), and the City of San Francisco alone spends about 11 million dollars a year cleaning up cigarette litter. Now while I did look up these statistics for the purpose of this blog posting, I had actually done the same research when I found myself to be uncomfortable with my friends’ behavior.
Despite being armed with cigarette-butt knowledge, I still didn’t speak up when my friends dropped their butts on the ground. Sometimes I would tell myself that I actually didn’t remember the information properly, and that it wasn’t worth bringing up if I wasn’t positive about what I had read. It would be irresponsible of me to spread inaccurate information, after all. In fact, I told myself, I rarely actually saw cigarette butts in the streets where I lived, or at my school, or at many of the other places we would go, so how bad could the problem be, really? I can now safely say that what was going on in my head was cognitive dissonance, which can be described as holding beliefs or cognitions that are in direct contrast with each other (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2012). In my case, I was specifically was suffering from post-decisional dissonance, which is the dissonance that results after a decision was made, and the efforts made to justify the decision. I saw myself as a fantastic environmentalist, which was at direct odds with the fact that a fantastic environmentalist wouldn’t just stand by while people littered around her. Captain Planet certainly wouldn’t have taken that behavior sitting down.
My silence in the face of my friends’ littering unfortunately fed into their feelings of false consensus, which occurs when people assume that those around them act and think like them when, in reality, they don’t. My friends assumed that I was fine with their behavior, even though I was actually quite opposed to it. My passivity did nothing to improve my friends littering behavior (why would it?), which makes sense in light of research that indicates that the behavior of a group of friends largely informs the behavior of an individual member of that group. According to their 2014 study, Long, Harré, and Atkinson were able to conclude that littering and recycling rates could be predicted by the littering and recycling rates of close friends. Throughout the course of this study, the researchers studied the recycling and littering rate of a group of high school students and then performed an intervention which included creating a social network and creating focus groups to encourage positive waste behavior. The results of the intervention indicated that recycling and avoiding littering became a social norm within the study group, which improved overall recycling and littering behaviors. Additionally, the focus groups gave students a vocal outlet so that others could hear their actual opinions on littering, and students could be held responsible by their peers for their words and actions.
The study performed by Long, Harré, and Atkinson (2014) clearly illustrates the power of social pressures over human behavior, and empowers others to be vocal about their positive behaviors in the hopes that others in their orbit will follow-suit. My own journey reinforces the idea of the power of education as a tool to create cognitive dissonance, which will eventually need to be reconciled within an individual – hopefully in a positive direction. Finally, we don’t have to passively accept the norms, because until we actually talk about them we are just guessing at what they actually are in the first place. We can create our own norms and become influences for positive change, and perhaps even get our friends to stop throwing their cigarette butts on the ground.
References:
Kaufman, L. (2009, May 28). Cigarette Butts: Tiny Trash That Piles Up. Retrieved February 04, 2018, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/29cigarettes.html
Long, J., Harré, N., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2014). Understanding change in recycling and littering behavior across a school social network. American Journal of Community Psychology, 53(3-4), 462-74. doi:10.1007/s10464-013-9613-3
Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., & Coutts, L. M. (2012). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Who would have imagined such a small item could be such a major contributor to litter in our country? I did some research after reading your post and found some startling facts to add to the ones you have already outlined about cigarette butts. These items are the single most collected item in international beach cleanups. The estimate weight for littered cigarette butts around the world is nearly 1.7 billion pounds (Novonty, Lum, Smith, Wang, & Barnes, 2009).
You have brought up an excellent point about dissonance and the impact it can have on our decision making. I have also recently discovered that I also fell into a cycle of dissonance regarding my efforts to recycle. I have taken several environmental classes that always seemed to encourage us to actively participate in recycling. Knowing the positive impacts recycling has on waste management, I always agreed with the concept of recycling and limiting my environmental footprint. Unfortunately, I have not practiced the techniques or concepts I have learned. I have been guilty of trying to justify correcting the dissonance, as you had with your scenario. The excuses range from saying I do not have the time to do it, or that there are hardly any places to recycle in my community.
I can say that I agree with the study and how it illustrates the power of social pressure over human behavior. If my friends or family members were actively recycling, I would be inclined to follow suit, and engage in a similar behavior. This would be done to prevent a negative self-image among my friends and family. It is about time we kick our butts into gear, and help eliminate this type of littering!
Reference:
Novotny, T. E., Lum, K., Smith, E., Wang, V., & Barnes, R. (2009). Cigarettes Butts and the Case for an Environmental Policy on Hazardous Cigarette Waste. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 6(5), 1691–1705. http://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph6051691
Such an interesting choice for a topic of discussion, as you mentioned, throwing cigarette butts on the ground is something that most people wouldn’t even think of as having an impact or being harmful. Even as a smoker I will say that tossing cigarette butts on the ground has little to no excuse. As a member of the military we tend to be very strict about how we handle that sort of waste. In a normal environment it causes pollution and is unattractive and in the field can leave evidence of our presence, so field stripping and disposing of butts becomes second nature. Also, as a motorcycle rider I must say that when a car driver throws a cigarette butt in your face while waiting at a stoplight causes new definitions of rage rage. The evidence you referenced was intriguing and while it discusses the effects of long term exposure of cigarette butts in the natural environment, I am curious what kind of effects butts have in a landfill environment. Did they discuss it at all?