Two concepts that help explain the original article are Diffusion of Innovations and Social Proof.
Diffusion of Innovations is a widely cited theory explaining why people do or don't adopt any kind of innovation, from boiling water to eating limes on British ships to installing telephones. The concept of innovators, early adopters, and late adopters comes from this theory. More relevant to this post is that this theory posits five factors contributing to adoption, one of which is Observability: you can easily see other people gaining benefit from an innovation. The more Observable an innovation, the more likely it is to be adopted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
The other is Social Proof. Seeing what other people are doing, especially those that are similar to you in some way, can help steer your behavior, often in subtle and unconscious ways. There are studies about how simple signs like "people who stayed in this hotel room re-used their towels" or "most of your neighbors are reducing their electricity usage too" can shift people's behaviors, even without people explicitly realizing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof
My colleagues and I used these concepts in several pieces of research on what we called Social Cybersecurity (joking that the term "Social Security" was already taken). The insight we had was that cybersecurity has very low observability, making it hard for innovations to diffuse through one's social network. That is, I don't know what your cybersecurity practices are, and vice versa, making it hard for best practices to be adopted.
One intervention we did was a large-scale intervention on Facebook to improve observability, showing that simple messages like "108 of your friends use extra security settings" did increase clickthru and adoption rates of those settings.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2660267.2660271
Nearly 20 years ago after reading Diffusion of Innovations I decided to use everything in the book. The company ran off a few svn servers (formally cvs) and so I ran a handful of Git courses at my work to help us ultimately migrate to Git (this was early days of Git). I explicitly tried to find folks not just near me, but physically around the office building across all of the floors, teams, and orgs. They were my early adopters and when random folks would come to me either curious or for help I would bring them to the "local" expert and together solve their problem, from there they had a local expert and little hubs sprung up. We had the standard svn => git mirror going when the time came to convert to Git full time in the office it was very painless and a complete success.
I was too young to understand that this is how you run a successful "transformation project", I simply was having fun using every trick from that book and done the same playbook a number of times over my career.
What if a substantial amount of local solar contractors are doing door to door sales? Or other locality/proximity based sales (signs, driving a car with ads on it, and the like?)
> People who prioritize their health are more likely to have friends who prioritize their health. And so on.
>
> We become like the people we choose to be around.
I'm not convinced that that's it. It's more likely that the first person who got solar installed talked to their neighbors about it, and the neighbors were convinced. It's not like after you move to a neighborhood, you're really choosing anything after that point about your neighbors.
You're not actually disagreeing with what you've quoted. Learning about things from those you are near to is one mechanism for we become like those we choose to be around.
> Early adopters of solar panels tend to be people who are interested in innovative technology, who find an installer they trust, and who think having solar panels will benefit them.
For solar panels, many people might be interested but also concerned how they look. When another neighbor gets them, people will get used to how they look, realize it’s not so bad, then be more likely to get them.
I don’t think the final conclusion necessarily follows, not with this example. Solar panels are big and obvious on top of the house. It’s not the same thing as other types of values spreading through a community. The house of a healthy person isn’t any different than that of an unhealthy one.
It could be simply that the door to door solar panel salesperson was covering that 1 km area.
Whether solar is economically reasonable is a matter of the variables of your location. You need strong retail power parity laws, for example. If solar makes sense for one person it makes sense for the other people in the area. Why does there have to be a “catching on” effect?
Theoretically, if solar did not make much economic sense at all, it would be purely a signalling thing. And those kind of things do spread by the ”catching on” effect. People might then get solar panels just to be seen as the kind of people who have solar panels, i.e. not the wrong kind of people.
Kind of reminds me of "nucleation sites" in physics.
I think one factor that's missing from the explanation is the extensive media and political coverage that solar panels got: There are probably very few people by now that don't know what a roof solar panel is or who don't have an opinion on them.
So my guess is that most of those neighbors who "suddenly" decided to also get a panel, were already interested or at least curious about getting one. (In the sense of "I should totally be getting one some time, but I have no time/now idea how to start/other things are more important/etc")
Maybe the early adopter was then what changed peoples' stance from a vague idea to a concrete plan.
Hmm, this actually could have policy implications. If one wants to subsidize a new technology and allocated a limited budget often the first movers are getting it and those first movers may be clusters which is not ideal driving broad adoption. So creating very small geo buckets for adoption oriented subsidies would make sense.
Some of it may also be neighborhoods where solar contractors went door to door selling the systems. Even if you don't buy from that salesman you get the numbers in your head and start to realize it isn't some exotic tech for elite weirdos.
My sister was just such a representative going door to door in Connecticut. This was likely a factor. The southern coast of Connecticut, being in the shadow of New York and thus dense with rich exurban homeowners, is a prime market for such contractors.
A short and sweet message in this little learning of the day post. You tend to learn from your geographic neighbors. It makes sense! Can we see the same thing for ebikes, and low water lawns?
It's cool to see CT mentioned on HN. I haven't seen any mentions until today.
My family has installed solar on every house we've lived while there. There is a strong economic incentive. CT has some of the most expensive avg. electricity cost in the country (a few cents cheaper than California for comparison). And Eversource, the utility company, is universally hated. Most people want to switch from their terrible service and are looking for any reason to.
Assuming this is as reliable effect as implied in the article, a cost-effective method to jump start solar install rates would be to map out roughly 1km wide zones and provide a high and declining subsidies for the first/early people to get solar installed. E.g., go to map and find your house and zone, if five haven't signed up in your zone, it's open, the first to put deposit on install contract gets a $15k subsidy when install complete, $12k for second, $9k for 3rd, $6k 4th, $3k 5th. Adjust zone sizes and/or subsidy amounts for subsidy budget, population density, etc.
Probably a lot cheaper than a $3k subsidy for everyone, as this is only 15 $3k subsidies in each zone. Also probably a lot better to do this with everyone gets a $2.5k subsidy and the first five get the higher incentives.
Two concepts that help explain the original article are Diffusion of Innovations and Social Proof.
Diffusion of Innovations is a widely cited theory explaining why people do or don't adopt any kind of innovation, from boiling water to eating limes on British ships to installing telephones. The concept of innovators, early adopters, and late adopters comes from this theory. More relevant to this post is that this theory posits five factors contributing to adoption, one of which is Observability: you can easily see other people gaining benefit from an innovation. The more Observable an innovation, the more likely it is to be adopted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
The other is Social Proof. Seeing what other people are doing, especially those that are similar to you in some way, can help steer your behavior, often in subtle and unconscious ways. There are studies about how simple signs like "people who stayed in this hotel room re-used their towels" or "most of your neighbors are reducing their electricity usage too" can shift people's behaviors, even without people explicitly realizing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof
My colleagues and I used these concepts in several pieces of research on what we called Social Cybersecurity (joking that the term "Social Security" was already taken). The insight we had was that cybersecurity has very low observability, making it hard for innovations to diffuse through one's social network. That is, I don't know what your cybersecurity practices are, and vice versa, making it hard for best practices to be adopted.
One intervention we did was a large-scale intervention on Facebook to improve observability, showing that simple messages like "108 of your friends use extra security settings" did increase clickthru and adoption rates of those settings. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2660267.2660271
We also have many other studies along similar lines, e.g. many triggers for talking about and adopting security are social in nature (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/soups2014/sou...), that security settings that are more social in nature are more likely to be adopted (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2675133.2675225), and more.
Nearly 20 years ago after reading Diffusion of Innovations I decided to use everything in the book. The company ran off a few svn servers (formally cvs) and so I ran a handful of Git courses at my work to help us ultimately migrate to Git (this was early days of Git). I explicitly tried to find folks not just near me, but physically around the office building across all of the floors, teams, and orgs. They were my early adopters and when random folks would come to me either curious or for help I would bring them to the "local" expert and together solve their problem, from there they had a local expert and little hubs sprung up. We had the standard svn => git mirror going when the time came to convert to Git full time in the office it was very painless and a complete success.
I was too young to understand that this is how you run a successful "transformation project", I simply was having fun using every trick from that book and done the same playbook a number of times over my career.
How about an alternative explanation?
What if a substantial amount of local solar contractors are doing door to door sales? Or other locality/proximity based sales (signs, driving a car with ads on it, and the like?)
Is there evidence for this?
I worked at a company that made a product just for this purpose: making estimates for solar panels for door-to-door sales. It was pretty popular.
I wonder how effective the UK "green flash" plates (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/road-to-zero-in-sight-as-...) have been at EV marketing. I'm making a habit of looking out for them since I'm considering getting an EV myself.
Nobody on our street has one. I wonder if I get one it will spark a trend.
> People who prioritize their health are more likely to have friends who prioritize their health. And so on. > > We become like the people we choose to be around.
I'm not convinced that that's it. It's more likely that the first person who got solar installed talked to their neighbors about it, and the neighbors were convinced. It's not like after you move to a neighborhood, you're really choosing anything after that point about your neighbors.
You're not actually disagreeing with what you've quoted. Learning about things from those you are near to is one mechanism for we become like those we choose to be around.
> Early adopters of solar panels tend to be people who are interested in innovative technology, who find an installer they trust, and who think having solar panels will benefit them.
Also, conspicuous conservation, people like to signal how green they are: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027249442...
For solar panels, many people might be interested but also concerned how they look. When another neighbor gets them, people will get used to how they look, realize it’s not so bad, then be more likely to get them.
I don’t think the final conclusion necessarily follows, not with this example. Solar panels are big and obvious on top of the house. It’s not the same thing as other types of values spreading through a community. The house of a healthy person isn’t any different than that of an unhealthy one.
It could be simply that the door to door solar panel salesperson was covering that 1 km area.
Whether solar is economically reasonable is a matter of the variables of your location. You need strong retail power parity laws, for example. If solar makes sense for one person it makes sense for the other people in the area. Why does there have to be a “catching on” effect?
Theoretically, if solar did not make much economic sense at all, it would be purely a signalling thing. And those kind of things do spread by the ”catching on” effect. People might then get solar panels just to be seen as the kind of people who have solar panels, i.e. not the wrong kind of people.
Good point.
Kind of reminds me of "nucleation sites" in physics.
I think one factor that's missing from the explanation is the extensive media and political coverage that solar panels got: There are probably very few people by now that don't know what a roof solar panel is or who don't have an opinion on them.
So my guess is that most of those neighbors who "suddenly" decided to also get a panel, were already interested or at least curious about getting one. (In the sense of "I should totally be getting one some time, but I have no time/now idea how to start/other things are more important/etc")
Maybe the early adopter was then what changed peoples' stance from a vague idea to a concrete plan.
Hmm, this actually could have policy implications. If one wants to subsidize a new technology and allocated a limited budget often the first movers are getting it and those first movers may be clusters which is not ideal driving broad adoption. So creating very small geo buckets for adoption oriented subsidies would make sense.
Some of it may also be neighborhoods where solar contractors went door to door selling the systems. Even if you don't buy from that salesman you get the numbers in your head and start to realize it isn't some exotic tech for elite weirdos.
My sister was just such a representative going door to door in Connecticut. This was likely a factor. The southern coast of Connecticut, being in the shadow of New York and thus dense with rich exurban homeowners, is a prime market for such contractors.
A short and sweet message in this little learning of the day post. You tend to learn from your geographic neighbors. It makes sense! Can we see the same thing for ebikes, and low water lawns?
Somewhat analogously the best predictor of if I read a book on a given day is if I read the day before, I'd guess.
It's cool to see CT mentioned on HN. I haven't seen any mentions until today.
My family has installed solar on every house we've lived while there. There is a strong economic incentive. CT has some of the most expensive avg. electricity cost in the country (a few cents cheaper than California for comparison). And Eversource, the utility company, is universally hated. Most people want to switch from their terrible service and are looking for any reason to.
CT is too far north for solar PV to save on the CO2 generated. The solar albino there is less of .25.
This reminds me to get solar.
Proximity is not just geographical.
Assuming this is as reliable effect as implied in the article, a cost-effective method to jump start solar install rates would be to map out roughly 1km wide zones and provide a high and declining subsidies for the first/early people to get solar installed. E.g., go to map and find your house and zone, if five haven't signed up in your zone, it's open, the first to put deposit on install contract gets a $15k subsidy when install complete, $12k for second, $9k for 3rd, $6k 4th, $3k 5th. Adjust zone sizes and/or subsidy amounts for subsidy budget, population density, etc.
Probably a lot cheaper than a $3k subsidy for everyone, as this is only 15 $3k subsidies in each zone. Also probably a lot better to do this with everyone gets a $2.5k subsidy and the first five get the higher incentives.
a/k/a "Keeping up with the Joneses"