Topic 9
[Lecture notes]
Moving away from informational campaigns and starting with influencing techniques.
Nudging does not include forbidding options and using incentives.
Popular nudging techniques do include defaults, prompts, priming, BYAF-method,
implementation intention.
The default
- Study about student loans: no option ‘maximum amount’ anymore was proven to be
effective
- Other effective examples: donor opt-out instead of opt-in; stickers for
advertisements; printing two-sided as default
- Order effects: reversing the order of options (e.g., putting coke zero before regular
coke).
- Save more tomorrow study: pension savings
Underlying mechanisms:
- Uncertainty about what to do
- Recommendation
- Going against the default may require effort
- Salience (e.g., order effects)
- Present bias
- Loss aversion
- Inertia
Default can lead to sustainable changes in behaviour, but…
- … only when they influence the relevant psychological processes
- … only when they do not evoke resistance
Effects are constraint to one choice situation.
Changing the environment
- Study about elevator/stair usage: When increasing the amount of time it takes to
close the doors of the elevator, less people used the elevator.
- Salience: Increasing the visibility of certain choices increases the number of times
that option is chosen.
o Study at train station Kiosk: increased sales of healthy foods
o Salience appears to have long-term effects (empirically proven)
o Sometimes weak effects for healthy foods because healthy choices are usually
not impulsive choices because health is a complicated concept and needs
more time to be processed than unhealthy choices (‘do I like it?’)
- Changing behaviour in the moment
Underlying mechanisms:
, - Law of least effort
A change in the environment can sustainably change behaviour by changing effort or
convenience, adding friction or manipulation salience.
- Sometimes a temporary change is sufficient, sometimes changed need to remain
implemented
- Be careful of reactance!
Limitations of changing the environment:
- Limited to one situation
- Resistance may arise
- Environments may not be changeable
Point-of-choice prompts
- A sign that points to a certain option
- How does a sign affect value?
o Should be aimed at people that are motivated to display the behaviour
o Appeal to the right goal
o Refer to positive outcomes
o Presented during the choice moment
o It should be possible to act on the message
- Empirical research: Targeting different groups with the different goals showed that
prompts indeed affect the right group with the right goals.
- It remains effective for as long as you keep the intervention
o Can feel manipulative (especially in public spaces)
Underlying mechanisms:
- People attend to new things in the environment
[Byerly et al., 2018]
This meta-analysis researches the effect of nudging on different types of pro-environmental
behaviour.
The types of nudging that are discussed are:
- Commitments: Making people commit to a goal by asking them to say it out loud or
write it down
- Defaults: Adjusting the status quo to the goal behaviour
- Messenger: Adjusting the identity of the messenger (e.g., male to female)
- Norms: Communicating peer comparison
- Priming: Making certain information more readily accessible in the mind
- Salience: Adjusting the features of something so that attention is repeatedly drawn
to it
[Lecture notes]
Moving away from informational campaigns and starting with influencing techniques.
Nudging does not include forbidding options and using incentives.
Popular nudging techniques do include defaults, prompts, priming, BYAF-method,
implementation intention.
The default
- Study about student loans: no option ‘maximum amount’ anymore was proven to be
effective
- Other effective examples: donor opt-out instead of opt-in; stickers for
advertisements; printing two-sided as default
- Order effects: reversing the order of options (e.g., putting coke zero before regular
coke).
- Save more tomorrow study: pension savings
Underlying mechanisms:
- Uncertainty about what to do
- Recommendation
- Going against the default may require effort
- Salience (e.g., order effects)
- Present bias
- Loss aversion
- Inertia
Default can lead to sustainable changes in behaviour, but…
- … only when they influence the relevant psychological processes
- … only when they do not evoke resistance
Effects are constraint to one choice situation.
Changing the environment
- Study about elevator/stair usage: When increasing the amount of time it takes to
close the doors of the elevator, less people used the elevator.
- Salience: Increasing the visibility of certain choices increases the number of times
that option is chosen.
o Study at train station Kiosk: increased sales of healthy foods
o Salience appears to have long-term effects (empirically proven)
o Sometimes weak effects for healthy foods because healthy choices are usually
not impulsive choices because health is a complicated concept and needs
more time to be processed than unhealthy choices (‘do I like it?’)
- Changing behaviour in the moment
Underlying mechanisms:
, - Law of least effort
A change in the environment can sustainably change behaviour by changing effort or
convenience, adding friction or manipulation salience.
- Sometimes a temporary change is sufficient, sometimes changed need to remain
implemented
- Be careful of reactance!
Limitations of changing the environment:
- Limited to one situation
- Resistance may arise
- Environments may not be changeable
Point-of-choice prompts
- A sign that points to a certain option
- How does a sign affect value?
o Should be aimed at people that are motivated to display the behaviour
o Appeal to the right goal
o Refer to positive outcomes
o Presented during the choice moment
o It should be possible to act on the message
- Empirical research: Targeting different groups with the different goals showed that
prompts indeed affect the right group with the right goals.
- It remains effective for as long as you keep the intervention
o Can feel manipulative (especially in public spaces)
Underlying mechanisms:
- People attend to new things in the environment
[Byerly et al., 2018]
This meta-analysis researches the effect of nudging on different types of pro-environmental
behaviour.
The types of nudging that are discussed are:
- Commitments: Making people commit to a goal by asking them to say it out loud or
write it down
- Defaults: Adjusting the status quo to the goal behaviour
- Messenger: Adjusting the identity of the messenger (e.g., male to female)
- Norms: Communicating peer comparison
- Priming: Making certain information more readily accessible in the mind
- Salience: Adjusting the features of something so that attention is repeatedly drawn
to it
