A new study says YES!

Great story about Plogging and behavior change.

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-behavior-people.html

Researchers from Zeppelin University, University of Cologne, and UNSW Sydney have published a new study that explores marketing uses for ”behavioral labeling,” or giving behaviors specific names or tags to encourage people to adopt those behaviors.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled ”Behavioral Labeling: Prompting Consumer Behavior Through Activity Tags” and is authored by Martin P. Fritze, Franziska Völckner, and Valentyna Melnyk.
The term ”plogging” is a combination of the Swedish verbs plocka upp (pick up) and jogga (jog), and it refers to the activity of picking up trash while jogging to reduce litter. According to Wikipedia, plogging started as an organized activity in Sweden around 2016 and spread to other countries following increased concern about plastic pollution. An estimated two million people plog daily in over 100 countries and some plogging events have attracted over three million participants.
Linguistic relativity theory shows that language is not just an expression of thought—it also channels how people think and act. Marketing literature suggests consumers adjust their behaviors in response to words that evoke certain images, such as brand and company labels. This new study finds that naming or tagging an activity with a special word can make people want to do that activity, which the researchers call ”behavioral labeling.”
The study shows that labels can encourage people do all sorts of different things, even if the connection between the label and the action seems random. This happens because when we give something a name, it can create pictures in our minds of what we are talking