So says new research from ASU in a recent MarketWatch article.

Robert B. Cialdini, a social psychologist and Regents' Professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University in Tempe, has been researching relationships between psychology and pro-environmental action since the early 1990s. He addressed the House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science Education last week with some of his recent findings.

Cialdini pointed to a pair of studies that he conducted that began with a simple survey distributed to about 3,000 Californians... "They indicated that their neighbors' behaviors would be of little impact on their own," Cialdini said of the survey's respondents. But when he looked at what they did, compared to what they said, "the only factor that had any significant impact on whether they conserved energy was their perceptions of what their neighbors were doing."...

"I can absolutely see the social pressures working," [the Sierra Club's Howard] Page said. "If you're a mom in a neighborhood where everyone else on your block drives an SUV, you probably don't feel too bad. But if everyone else drives a hybrid, well, that pressure works both ways."

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