Recycling behavior can recover valuable materials and mitigate green house gas emissions from landfills and incinerators. The potential positive impact of individuals' recycling behavior depends on others also making an effort, for instance, avoiding contamination. Knowing what other people have done may therefore influence recycling behavior. Behavioral traces are evidence of other people's behavior in a shared environment. Here, they relate to waste items already placed in one of two bins, a mixed recycling bin and a nonrecyclable waste bin. In two online experiments and one real-life intervention study, we investigate the role of behavioral traces on the willingness to recycle as well as the correctness of recycling. We find that seeing behavioral traces of previous recycling behavior makes recycling generally more likely, and people tend to copy item placement. This in turn increases correctness in groups where the average individual has good knowledge of recycling. Introducing correct items at the start of the day in the intervention study did not increase correctness, possibly because the correct items were soon buried by other items. Implications and future directions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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以我为例，无论好坏：行为痕迹对回收决策的影响。

回收行为可以回收有价值的材料并减少垃圾填埋场和焚化炉的温室气体排放。个人回收行为的潜在积极影响取决于其他人也在做出努力，例如，避免污染。因此，了解其他人做了什么可能会影响回收行为。行为痕迹是共享环境中其他人行为的证据。在这里，它们与已经放置在两个垃圾箱之一中的废物有关，一个是混合回收箱，另一个是不可回收垃圾箱。在两项在线实验和一项现实生活干预研究中，我们调查了行为痕迹对回收意愿以及回收正确性的作用。我们发现看到以前回收行为的行为痕迹使得回收通常更有可能，人们倾向于复制物品放置。这反过来又增加了普通人对回收有很好了解的群体的正确性。在干预研究的一天开始时引入正确的项目并没有增加正确性，可能是因为正确的项目很快就被其他项目掩埋了。讨论了影响和未来的方向。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。