It’s A Jungle Out There: Social Norms, Waste, and the Complex Challenge of Fostering Sustainable Household Behaviors in Multi-Family Dwellings

Abstract

Household waste behaviors play a crucial role in the sustainable transformation of society but remain underexplored in behavioral research, especially in multifamily contexts – an oversight that is becoming increasingly problematic given global urbanization trends and population growth. This dissertation addresses this societally relevant research gap by examining the impact of social norm-based interventions on household waste and recycling behaviors in multi-family dwellings. Two large-scale field studies investigate how IoT-enabled waste chutes (which enable household-level waste tracking) combined with a smartphone-based intervention, can drive meaningful behavior change aligned with sustainability goals. The studies employ a multi-method approach to evaluate both behavioral outcomes (such as increased recycling rates and improved waste sorting) and social outcomes (including strengthened social identity and social capital), offering a comprehensive view of how social norm interventions influence both, individual behaviors and broader social dynamics. In addition to its empirical contributions, this work develops a conceptual framework that underscores the importance of contextual complexity in behavioral research. By identifying five complexity dimensions – measurement, goal, social, spatiotemporal, and institutional complexity – the framework highlights critical distinctions between waste behaviors and other household consumption domains, as well as between multi-family dwellings and singlefamily dwellings. This approach provides a robust foundation for future studies seeking to capture the real-world dynamics of household waste behaviors. Taken together, this dissertation demonstrates that addressing complex sustainability challenges through rigorous, transdisciplinary research can yield both theoretical advancements and actionable insights. The findings illustrate that scalable, technology-driven interventions can significantly influence proenvironmental behaviors, while emphasizing the necessity of systematically incorporating social and contextual complexities into behavioral studies. These insights offer valuable guidance for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers and pave the way for future work exploring social norms as a tool for achieving broader societal impact in line with sustainable development targets.