“Hi, I’m Terri Towel. Please reuse me” Can anthropomorphising towels prompt tourists to reuse them?

Washing just 1kg of towels in a modern machine uses approximately 13L of water, 0.2 kWh of heat energy and 0.12 kWh of electrical energy. Prompting guests to reuse their towels will benefit the environment and save hotels money. Environmental appeals and interventions that aim to trigger social norms have been used in the past to achieve this – with mixed results. Further, most past studies ignore hotel guests’ emotional reactance or satisfaction. This is a potentially critical oversight because hotels cannot afford to compromise on guest satisfaction. In this study, we test a new approach that leverages anthropomorphism – the personification of objects – to prompt positive reactions (e.g., entertainment, amusement) and reduce negative reactions (e.g., annoyance, irritation) from guests. We directly compare interventions based on competing theories such as social norms and environmental appeals, enjoyment, and perceived effort with and without anthropomorphism. Through two field experiments we found that when a towel was anthropomorphised people believed it had more human like qualities and that they were able to relate to the towel and sympathise/emphasise with it more. The perceived effort messages passed manipulation check and prompted positive reactions from participants. When combined with anthropomorphism the effort message significantly increased the reuse of hand towels (but not other towel types) in a field experiment without compromising guest satisfaction. A fourth study (cross-sectional) showed that the effect might have been limited to hand towels due to a significantly lower self-efficacy to reuse bath and face towels particularly when they are damp or not completely clean. The cost-effective intervention tested in this study can be immediately deployed by hotels to increase hand towels reuse therefore improving sustainability and saving on laundry costs.