I nudge myself: Exploring ‘self‐nudging’ strategies to drive sustainable consumption behaviour

Abstract

Failure to translate intentions into actual behaviour is known in many areas of human action. The intention to consume more sustainable is no exception and often fails to be translated into behaviour. Behavioural research emphasized the use of nudges as one of the remedies to ensure that most of the people's daily choices on what to buy or what to eat end up being in their best interest. The behavioural economics literature usually focusses on interventions supporting automatic and unconscious processes, mostly being the result of cognitive shortcuts produced by System 1 (e.g., by setting better default options or making existing contexts more intuitive and easy to handle). However, this begs the question, what consumers themselves can do to ensure a consumption behaviour that is more in line with their pro-environmental intentions? This article explores a possible 'self-nudging' strategy of consumers signing up for an organic box scheme subscription, whereby they change a large number of small daily choices to a larger decision on exclusively getting organic groceries delivered to their doorstep. It does so based on qualitative indepth interviews with 10 customers of such an organic box scheme. The analysis reveals that signing up for the subscription scheme indeed means that low-involvement decisions in regular supermarkets are replaced by a high-involvement decision on subscribing to an organic box scheme. In this context of the organic box scheme, the self-nudging phenomenon is in fact the active choice of consumers to set their default consumption option to 'organic' in the long run. K E Y W O R D Sconsumer decision making, intention-behaviour gap, organic, qualitative, self-nudging, sustainable food choice

Ethical consumption applications as failed market innovations: exploring consumer (non) acceptance of ‘quasi’ market devices

“…Thus, the app could work as a 'self-nudge' apparatus to keep consumers on the right track of the market relationship, i.e. empowering consumers or counter-working merchandising (Torma et al 2018). This potential to add a digital device that reconfigured consumers' choice architecture is something the apps had in common.…”

The Meat Paradox, Omnivore’s Akrasia, and Animal Ethics

“…In fact, the majority of consumer decisions go against the rational beliefs held by the consumers. Factors such as cognitive biases, cost aversion, favoring short-term goals, habits, and mental shortcuts play a large, unconscious role in our everyday dietary choices [41,43,[47][48][49]. All of this lends support to the prevalence of akrasia in decisions concerning what to eat, and underlines the manner in which also omnivore's akrasia may be a widespread phenomenon.…”

“…Therefore, nudging can help one's values to align with one's actions [48]. Importantly, it need not forsake reasoned decision-making altogether.…”

Self-nudging and the citizen choice architect

“…The concept of self-nudging has been used by, for instance, Torma, Aschemann-Witzel, and Thøgersen (2018) and Service and Gallagher (2017), and is sometimes mentioned in passing (e.g., Bovens 2008, Footnote 5;Halpern 2016, chapter entitled "Well-being: Nudging ourselves, and each other, to happier lives"). To the best of our knowledge, however, there has not yet been a systematic proposal to harness self-nudging for policy purposes.…”