David Austin: Recycled drinking water is not a new concept. In Singapore, it has been around for two decades, but if you talk to people about it, there's still a certain "yuck factor" that surrounds the idea. Leong Ching, Associate Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, dedicates a lot of time studying why people behave the way they do when it comes to the environment. She jokes, sometimes calling it "useless research", but it actually sheds light on the subject and as it turns out, this phenomenon is much more complex than you might think.
So let's get right into it with recycled drinking water, and especially the "yuck factor". So if you want to tell me, what's the situation and what is it that you're looking at in your study?
Leong Ching: Recycled drinking water is one of the most difficult policies to implement and in a time where so many cities across the world are running out of water, it's certainly an option that more governments should be thinking about.
David Austin: And what makes it so difficult?
Leong Ching: So one of the factors is what we would call the "yuck factor".
So most people would agree. The science is pretty old, maybe 30, 40 years old. It's been implemented for decades in California, in Windhoek, in Namibia, and of course in Singapore since year 2000. Despite this long history, there's still quite a lot of visceral aversion to drinking recycled water, which to put it bluntly, its water that comes out of, you know, the toilet, of sewage, or of different things that we've used before. So that idea is abhorrent to many people and they cannot accept it. So this is a sort of, visceral idea.
David Austin: That's understandable. People have a natural aversion to excreta. But also it doesn't take long, if you're looking at water rationally in any way, to see that this is the natural water cycle and that water is always being run through different systems and life-forms. What have your studies shown about people's emotional reactions to this recycled drinking water?
Leong Ching: So one of the main ideas I'm trying to work against, is the idea that the choice to drink recycled water is a rational or irrational one, that if you refuse it, it's irrational because the science shows it's okay. So I would think this framing needs to change because there are good reasons to reject it, as well as good reasons to accept it. So I guess for policymakers, what you would need to do, is to see what reasons there are to accept it. And it's a choice based on local circumstance, on ecological realities, on what other choices you have. So yeah, I guess for policymakers that framing and contextual understanding is so important.
David Austin: Then let's talk specifically about Singapore. This is the same thing that's called NEWater, is that right? I believe, it's used on an industrial scale, like industry uses the water quite regularly. But as far as the drinking water, what is the current state of it, and how is it available?
Leong Ching: So it's been in use for 20 years since year 2000, and you're right, the majority, much of the NEWater that we produce goes to industry. And of course that's easy to understand because industries are not visceral in a sense. There is no aversion to adopting this but – and here's where my earlier point about understanding of human behaviour and lived experience comes in – even though the water that comes out of the NEWater plant is perfectly clean, what we do is we inject it back into the reservoir, so making it "dirty" in a manner of speaking, but also maybe making it natural. So in that sense NEWater is cleaned twice before it reaches our drinking water supply. So if you want to adopt a purely rational frame, maybe there is no sense in that, but if you look at it from a policy frame, it makes quite a lot of sense to accommodate the human lived experience and I think that's so important when we think about recycled drinking water.
David Austin: What have you done? Have you done surveys, focus groups, what kind of things have you done to study people's reactions and what have you learned?
Leong Ching: So here's a really interesting piece of research I've done and maybe it's pretty useless in the end, but I'll tell you about it because real interesting. What will motivate people to drink recycled drinking water? So I did a test in the lab, it's a lab experiment. Will they drink it because it's cheaper, will they drink it because they have information and they know the science, or will they drink it because they think the majority of the people around them are drinking it?
Turns out that the force of conformity, meaning social norms, is the strongest variable that influences them. And you can understand now why I said earlier this is pretty useless research, because if I were a policymaker and I was trying to implement recycled drinking water, I want to know what I can do to bring this about, because obviously most people are not drinking it yet.
That's what I'm trying to do, but if the research says that, well, the only way to get people to drink it is to tell the person that most other people are drinking it, that's pretty useless research. But I think it can inform policymaking in this way. If you give what I would say a demonstration effect, so you can say, other countries, other places in the US, in Orange County in California, in Singapore. You can do that.
Or you can start a pilot and you can say, well, we have 50,000 people and they've started drinking it. And it really does make a lot of sense because economically it's half the price of desalination, and it's secure and reliable because you know where the supply is coming from, the supply is basically what you had used.
So I think in terms of its application and its power to improve lives and to sort of give greater security, I think this option will become increasingly important.
David Austin: I've always been curious. Are there any studies that show that maybe humour might be a way to overcome the aversion, like letting people joke about it and kind of get that out of the way, you know, maybe break the tension with humour. Is there anything in your studies about that?
Leong Ching: Yeah we haven't actually tested for humour, but you're right, and it really – when you say get it out of the way, it never really quite goes away because you know, even today, 20 years later, people still making jokes about recycled water and NEWater. So it never goes away but humour is still an interesting psychological way to cope with a lot of things.
David Austin: Regarding the study [in which] you said the most compelling factor was people knowing that other people were using the drinking water, could we talk about that a bit, the ways of nudging people towards using less water and water conservation?
Leong Ching: So the big idea that comes from recycled drinking water is the force of conformity. Meaning conformity, rather than knowing the science or giving economic incentives, was for me at least, in the experiment, the big variable that impacted whether people accept it or reject it, or were more or less likely to want to drink recycled drinking water. This force of conformity or the force of social norms drives quite a lot of other environmental behaviour. So there was another experiment that we did, which is a field experiment, on more than a thousand households in Singapore.
The question we were interested in was this: What would drive people to conserve water? Is it money or is it a sense that they were doing the right thing? So we titled it "Money or Morals?" and we set it up real different from what you would expect. The intuitive experiment to do, if you were interested in this question is this:
One group of people, you supply money, another group of people, you give moral motivation, meaning you tell them, what a good thing they are doing, how they're saving the environment and so on, but we didn't do that. Because we are pretty sure at this point now in time, environmental issues are so salient in people's minds, so you can never get a clean group like people who didn't care about the environment at all.
So what we did was we told both groups that it's good to conserve water. We gave both groups campaign messages and [for] one group, we layered on an economic incentive. We gave them some money, equivalent to a month's utility bills and say, will this economic incentive give them any more incentive to save water? Meaning, will they feel a greater compulsion aside from the moral incentive to change their behaviour? So turns out, the answer is no.
So this is a really powerful insight because it tells us that in terms of environmental behaviour, and in terms of saving water at least, the entire extent of your behavioural change can be almost captured by the moral incentive to do the right thing. So money gives you no extra power.
David Austin: Do you think that there is a sufficient level of awareness about environmental issues right now, or do we still have a ways to go?
Leong Ching: The difficulty is translating awareness to action, being aware of something – and this is maybe the paradoxical nature of being human – being aware of something doesn't mean you will act towards that thing. We often and in so many ways act against our own self-interests. We eat more sugar than we should, we don't save for our retirement, we all do all sorts of perverse things that harm ourselves. And for the environment at least, this is even worse because we harm not just ourselves, but we harm everybody else along with us.
So aside from this individual perverse sort of behaviour, there's also the collective action problem, which happens peculiarly for common pool resources, like clean air and clean water – that each person takes from the environment to his personal benefit but to collective cost.
David Austin: What are the methods that we can take action, where the point of leverage of where awareness can be turned into action?
Leong Ching: That's such a difficult question. If I could answer it, I would be in the Nobel Prize podium by now. But less facetiously, I guess the question is, what can we do to motivate people to change? So I guess we ought to do as many things as we can do .
So the question is: should we target public behaviour or behaviour of firms? And of course, the answer is both. Should we target individual behaviour or should we seek to influence others? The answer is both, the answer is everything possible that can be done.
David Austin: What about like on an industrial scale and a worldwide scale? Because the industrialisation that got us to this point, was much more than just people's consumer choices or anything like that. So to address it, it also has to be done on such a large scale. Do you have any information on that or have you done any research on to the scale of a response that's necessary?
Leong Ching: Yes. So in a sense the global scale of the environmental problem is really a planetary tragedy of Commons, right? Every country wants to pollute and every country wants to grow its economy, and because the cost is global right? But I think very slowly we would need to rethink that narrative. So in the past, even for a small country like Singapore, our narrative always has been, "We are such a small country, we're 700 square kilometres, what difference can we possibly make?" But even for a small island city-state we have started to make adjustments to our lifestyles, not primarily because such a small country can have such a big difference across the planet, but because we make such a difference to the 5.5 million people living here. So increasingly the limits are really quite local and you no longer can pollute with immunity, thinking the sea will wash it away, the air will blow over.
David Austin: You gave the speech on the "behavioural state". Can you tell me a little bit about that? What's the through line of that discussion?
Leong Ching: So one of the big paradoxes about the policy sciences is how they are two parallel threads, that we think policy sciences are truly a science, as in it's a scientific endeavour. You build knowledge by trying experiments and rational motivations and incentives, and you think: "If I plan the policy this way, people will react this way and then we'll get the results that we want." There's a parallel thread that says, "People are completely messed up. We are just muddling along. We have no idea what's going to come out." And this is the reality of policymaking.
We just have to take things as they come, and in between, there is now in recent years, the influence of behavioural science, decision sciences and behavioural economics into the field of policymaking. And this has given rise to what I would call the behavioural state, where so much of policymaking seems to be targeted at changing behaviour to meet policy goals. And this is a range of instruments at our disposal and that's why policymakers should know about these instruments.
David Austin: Well, what's an example of a type of method, the methodology at least?
Leong Ching: So the rise of what we call nudging now, especially since it has been adopted in the US and the UK, and so much of behavioural insights work by consultancies. A lot of them try in experiments to influence public behaviour towards government goals like reduction of wastage of food, electrical use, increase in saving rates for retirements, and to very relatively minor things such as attending hospital appointments that you've been given. So all these small changes with large impacts if they are applied at scale, these are examples of what I would call the "behavioural state". Of course, this is not new. I mean, in Singapore, which has been called the paternalistic state, we've doing these sorts of interventions for decades, but now I think two recent or relatively recent developments have allowed states to do this at much larger scales. Data, data analytics and computing power is so much cheaper now, and the data that we have on behaviour is so much richer than it has ever been in the past, so the sophistication has gone up.
David Austin: I saw that in your background that you were a journalist and a senior correspondent for many years. I was wondering how that experience in the mass media has informed your research and your approach to studying people's behaviour and especially relating to them, whether through the narrative and the messaging.
Leong Ching: So my background has been in journalism and communications, and that has informed my work by looking at the audiences and the impact of policy work on policy publics. A lot of times, we think that facts are self-evident and a finding is self-evident, the research insight is self-evident, but it's not. And a lot of times we think we don't really understand this piece of behaviour because it's irrational. Why do people behave this way? But it's partly a function of the public's perception of various things across the world. And this bridge between what you perceive, what other people perceive, and what the government perceives, this triangulation, it's really at the heart of so much of what we don't understand about policymaking.
David Austin: Would you like to comment on some of the ways that human behaviour is irrational, like some of the hardwired things, the biases that affect people's behaviour and decisions that they may not be aware of?
Leong Ching: So one example I can give you is showering behaviour. Why do people take showers of a particular length? Why do people bathe more than they need to or less than they need to, or do people actually bathe at the optimal number of minutes? Part of it is, we just don't know and it turns out – I did an experiment [and] I wanted to know who used the most water.
So I asked people to self-declare: "Do you think you use an average amount of water, below average, above average, or you don't know?" and then I cross-checked that against their real water usage. Turns out that the people [who] use the most water are those who don't know how much water they're using. So this is this is not an irrationality but it just shows what informs our behaviour. So if you wanted to adjust people's behaviour, let's say if you wanted them to use less water, one of the most obvious ways is to just tell them how much water you're using.
So I have this experiment in showers, I have what we call a "smart showerhead" and beyond a certain level of water, your shower head will turn from green to red. The point it turns red, it just shows you your shower's longer than you need to get clean.
David Austin: Any other examples along that line, I think this is really fascinating.
Leong Ching: Tray returns right? Why would people return trays? Again, this is where my useless research then becomes relevant, right? The reason people return trays is because most people are returning them.
So in some hawker centres run by the government, they are trying to get people to return trays in a variety of ways. You have to pay for your tray and when you return it, you get the money back. There are lots of signs all over the place saying it's really a good idea to return your trays. Despite this however, people still are not returning their trays, and here at NUS we don't have this campaign. We don't have signs everywhere saying its good idea to return your trays. We don't charge people for trays, and we don't sort of give you back the money, but yet people return their trays. Why is that so? It's just because most people do it. It's a community norm. So this is one of the puzzles, right?
David Austin: Then let's talk about what you foresee happening. I guess let's break it down to a few things. One, how do you foresee this knowledge – I mean you've jokingly said some of your useless research – but I think could be quite useful. How do you foresee it being used or how would you hope that it's going to be used from this point on?
Leong Ching: So foreseeably, for the future I think recycled drinking water will become such an important part of the water security equation for cities all over the world. This is partly a result of more frequent and more severe uncertainties in our water, our rainfall floods, [and] droughts. Given that people will be increasingly open to a source of water that is reliable, that's clean, that's affordable. And that's recycled drinking water. How will my research inform this transformation? The first thing is to say that the more information hypothesis may not be right, meaning if you want people to adopt recycled drinking water, it's not merely an exercise in giving information. So that's one.
The second is to think of people who reject recycled drinking water as merely irrational. I will argue that we need to rethink it as a choice. When is it rational to take this choice? And when is it not rational to make this choice? I think if you are a policymaker or a national leader, what you would need to do is to supply people with good reasons for taking this.
Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash