YRE team from Turkey made a presentation of the project at the WEEC 2019 Congress in Bangkok, Thailand

UMUT DİLSİZ, YRE Turkey, Saint-Joseph French High School, Coordinator Teacher

I believe that young people are the key part of the solution to the environmental threats, because they have the talent and innovation to find creative solutions to these challenges. That’s why I love working with them. Besides having made a very successful presentation and explaining their projects, they also introduce YRE programme in an international platform.

The presentations of YRE Students were as follows: Is it possible to create a behavioral difference with perception management? A social experiment “Nudge”.

Below is the short summary of the presentation.

The easiest way to change a person’s behavior can simply be achieved by creating the proper environment and possibilities. Before changing people’s motivations, thoughts and beliefs, our goal is to prove that when their behaviors change, their thoughts will also be affected.

A human is a subjective being, generally it behaves according to itself, so they are week in understanding the environment. However, when their perception is managed, they sometimes do not behave how they normally do. With chosen information specific group of people have been tried to be persuaded.

In our project that evolves around perception management we chose the “Nudge” method. We did a social experiment to see what we can do to make people lean more towards environmental and natural products. With this two-day process; on the first day we asked a couple questions to the customers that had a potential of buying environmental and natural products. According to the 30283 numbered regulation of Packaging and Waste by the Ministry of the Environment and City issued on the 27th of December in 2017 on the national newspaper, selecting easy, recyclable packages for products and economic packages is a part of the extended consumer responsibility. We, as the project team, determined the products who follow these regulations and “Nudge” labeled them on the shelves of the supermarkets. Our goal was to influence the consumption habits of the consumers in a better way.

The results that we obtained from this social experiment, showed us that the we can change the behaviour of consumers approximately by 40% by using the perception management method. This proves that “perception management” can affect opinions, unbiased ways of thinking and overall actions of people. Therefore, why shouldn’t there be a perception management to raise awareness for the environmental problems.

In short, I congratulate my students for this valuable projects and wish them to gain further experiences. Since they also experienced the different culture so they broadened their minds in term of different cultures besides what they learned from the conferences and their interviews with the speakers.

We hope to see you again in the WEEC2021 which is due in Prague since my students are invited by the general secretary, Mario Solomonie.