Loss aversion is a foundational bias and is a natural choice for interventions encouraging compliance during COVID-19. We compare the effectiveness of loss and gain messages and find no difference in the intention to comply with guidance or lockdown beliefs.
Successful responses to the coronavirus pandemic require those without COVID-19 and asymptomatic individuals to comply with a range of government guidelines. As nudges have been widely found to be effective at increasing compliance to prosocial behaviours in many contexts, how good are they for the COVID policy toolkit? In particular, is more of a reflective response–nudge plus— needed as well as classic nudges? In an online experiment with 1,500 people, we show that social norms and portrayal of the victim do not work on their own, but when the victim is combined with the more reflective task of carrying out a writing task to a relative there are impacts on intentions to comply with the guidelines. After two weeks, however, these intentions do not persist. There is much work to do when designing nudges in the context of COVID-19 and other public health pandemics to ensure persistence.
Insufficient saving for retirement is one consequence of excessive discounting of the future but attempts to mitigate it often involve costly or time‐intensive personalized interventions. Marques, Mariano, Lima, and Abrams, by contrast, found that using a generic Future Time Perspective questionnaire to increase future “self‐relevance” was an effective method to increase money allocation to retirement when the salience of future aging was also higher. Originally conducted in Portugal, the present study aimed to replicate Marques et al’s findings in the UK context. In the present study (n = 219), participants were shown a website advertising a financial product. The results support Marques and colleagues’ assertion that, alone, a website priming future aging was insufficient to increase retirement savings in a money allocation task. However, in contrast to Marques et al’s original findings, we find no evidence that future self‐relevance moderates the effect such that priming future aging becomes effective when individuals have higher future self‐relevance. Instead, we find that aging primes are ineffective at increasing retirement saving regardless of whether individuals are high or low in future self‐relevance. Possible explanations for this discrepancy in findings, including methodological and cultural differences, are explored as well as directions for future research.
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