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Earth Day, which we celebrated this week, was filled with messages urging us to take action to protect the environment.

Do these messages actually work?

Suppose someone put hangers on doors urging people to conserve energy. Which message on the hanger would actually get people to cut down on how much energy they used?

1. “You save money by conserving energy”

2. “You can save the Earth’s resources by conserving energy”

3. “Socially responsible citizens conserve energy”

4. “Most of your neighbors try regularly to conserve energy”

I placed my bet on the “You save money” message. After all, don’t people care most about what’s in their own interests?

I was wrong. The most effective message turned out to be “Most of your neighbors try regularly to conserve energy.”

“This was the only type of door hanger information that led to significantly decreased energy consumption, almost two kilowatt hours per day,” found Robert Cialdini, professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University.

When it comes to persuading people to take eco-friendly actions, the message “Everybody else is doing it” works better in some situations than appealing to people’s desire to save money, save the earth, or safeguard the earth for their children and grandchildren.

Take the message you often find now in your hotel room — please reuse your towels. I am cynical about whether these messages work. Fresh towels are one of the luxuries you get when you pay the money to stay at a hotel.

Cialdini looked at how hotel guests react to different message cards asking them to reuse their towels.

Each card contained a different message: “Help save the environment” or “Help save resources for future generations,” or “Join your fellow citizens in helping to save the environment.” The last message included the information that the majority of hotel guests do reuse their towels.

When they believed “everybody else is doing it,” more than a third more people reused their towels.

What we think are brilliant environmental advertising campaigns may have no effect whatsoever, Cialdini believes, if the advertisement unwittingly makes people think that a lot of people are damaging the environment.

Take the advertising spot named the 16th best commercial of all time. The commercial shows a stately, buckskin-clad American Indian paddling his canoe up a river filled with individual and industrial pollution.

Coming ashore near a litter-filled highway, the Indian watches as a bag of garbage falls on the road. The bag breaks and garbage splatters. A tear trickles down the Indian’s cheek.

This commercial actually carries an unintended message: “A lot of people are polluting and littering.”

To see if environmental messages that unwittingly carry the message “Lots of people are polluting” don’t do much good, Cialdini tried to stop people from taking petrified wood in the Arizona Petrified Forest National Park. Visitors steal over a ton of wood each month.

He placed secretly marked pieces of petrified wood along visitor pathways.

At the entrance to each path, he put different signs telling people not to steal wood. The first sign carried the message that a lot of people were stealing the wood: “Many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the Park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest.” A picture showed three people removing the wood.

The second sign just asked people not to take the wood and showed only one visitor removing the wood.

When the new visitors read that “many past visitors” were stealing the wood, they were significantly more likely to slip a piece into their own pockets.

If we are serious about getting people to protect the environment, we need to go beyond public information campaigns and moralistic messages.

What’s surprising is that the persuasion technique that children so often use, “Everybody else is doing it,” has such a big impact on adults.