Abstract:Suboptimal efficiency in activities involving the consumption of fossil fuels, such as driving, contributes to a miscellany of negative environmental, political, economic, and social externalities. Demonstrations of the effectiveness of feedback interventions can be found in countless settings, as can demonstrations of individual differences in sensitivity to feedback interventions. Mechanisms providing feedback to drivers about fuel economy are becoming standard equipment in new vehicles but vary considerably in their constitution. A keystone of the philosophy of radical behaviorism and its related scientific discipline, behavior analysis, is the acknowledgment that verbal behavior plays a role in mediating individual responses to delayed contingencies. In the current feasibility study, samples of individuals’ verbal behavior (rules about how to drive efficiently) were collected in the context of two eco-driving feedback interventions— one with commercial fleet drivers and one with civilian drivers. Analysis revealed that the rate at which drivers generated novel verbal rules (per week) accounted for a substantial proportion of the variability in relative efficiency gains across participants. Findings support the utility of behavior-analytic conceptual tools in this field of research, such as the basic distinction between contingency-shaped and rule-governed behaviors and the elaboration of direct-acting and indirect-acting contingencies.