The Psychology of Shopping Cart Return Behavior: A Social Norms Investigation

One cart was wedged into a curb, another sat toppled over in a parking spot, a third drifted like a metal tumbleweed across the lot.

Perhaps the choice to not return a shopping cart seems trivial, but what we do with our cart says a lot about how we think about others and what we believe we owe o

For reasons I can't fully explain, people's failure to return their carts bothers me more than it probably should. But then I realized I can do something about it.

I'm a psychologist who has spent the past decade studying how we think about our own behavior in relation to others.