Despite a serious need for sustainable alternative water supplies in many parts of the world, public opposition remains a barrier to implementing solutions such as safe wastewater recycling schemes. Here, we compared two strategies to increase acceptance of recycled water: default nudges and informing choices. Experiment 1 (N = 81) showed that defaults increased acceptance of recycled water. Experiment 2 (N = 142) replicated the effect but also indicated that weak educational interventions (simple infographics) interacted with confidence, such that those who switched from the default option had measurably higher confidence in their choice when given the infographic. Experiment 3 (N = 146) suggested that in a college undergraduate sample, strong educational interventions (educational videos) eliminated the effect of nudges on recycled water acceptance, increased acceptance, increased knowledge of recycled water, and also interacted with confidence in the same way observed in Experiment 2. Experiment 4 (N = 271) showed that strong educational interventions can also increase recycled water acceptance in an MTurk sample. Since both education and defaults may be effective, we suggest that future work would benefit from cost–benefit analyses between strategies.
Reliable clean drinking water is becoming increasingly scarce. One potential additional source of drinking water is recycled water. However, public acceptance of potable recycled drinking water is low. One likely factor involved in the acceptance of recycled drinking water is objective knowledge about recycled water. In three studies (N = 229, 590, and 200), we developed a 34‐item measure of objective knowledge of recycled drinking water. The objective knowledge measure was often a strong and unique predictor of intentions to accept and use recycled drinking water compared to other prominent factors including disgust and subjective knowledge of recycled water. Measuring knowledge of recycled drinking water holds the potential to estimate how and whether educational interventions aimed at increasing acceptance of recycled drinking water programs work.
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