I got this sense a few years ago, that if people could see the numbers that made up their environmental footprint (such as the litres of water they used in a shower or the number trees felled to make their toilet paper) in an immediate and easy-to-understand way, then this data must, absolutely must, cause the person the use less resources, right?

I had such a strong hunch about this connection that it has obsessed me ever since.

But there was a glitch. Every time I would google terms like “environmental data”, “showing data” or “measuring environmental footprint”, I just wasn’t finding any academic research on the field, or even anything useful at all.

I even spent an afternoon at Stanford University’s library hunting through their environmental psychology section, trying to find literature on this topic. There were many books containing plenty of theories, but nothing specifically on the effect of showing people the numbers.

I didn’t work it out for quite some time. But then finally, after reading many papers on environmental psychology, I came across a paper by professor Archon Fung from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He used the terms “disclosure” and “transparency” to explain the phenomenon. Finally! I had found the proper terminology to advance my quest.

Then BAM! It was on.

What was fascinating, was that this team at Harvard had come to this field through the path of public policy.

I had discovered the field from my time working on environmental technology in Silicon Valley.

But both disciplines, significantly different and frequently siloed, had reach this same conclusion. It roughly goes like this,

We need to make the data issues publicly available, and when we do this, people or organisations naturally, without needing punishment or coercion, improve their scores dramatically.

It really makes sense when you think about it.

If companies all unanimously disclose the wages paid to both genders, then all those scores can easily be put together and sorted by rank, and then these scores can be publicly distributed.

The force of this disclosure of information will drive people in these companies to adjust their operations to get a better score. No one wants to be explicitly pinned as “America’s worst wage gap employer”, and every company will want to do a bit better than they did before.

There are big benefits on getting disclosure policies adopted by governments. Data that is free and open to the sunshine, is a quest that is generally perceived favourably, as explained in the Annual Review of Economics, University of Chicago,

“Mandatory disclosure of information is among the most ubiquitous and least controversial elements of public policy, often promoted as an attractive alternative to so-called ‘hard’ forms of regulation . . . Disclosure policies have proved highly attractive to legislators and regulators.”

Al Gore has also proclaim