Nudging with Care: The Risks and Benefits of Social Information

Abstract

Norms and nudges are both popular types of interventions. Recent years have seen the rise of 'norm-nudges'-nudges whose mechanism of action relies on social norms, eliciting or changing social expectations. Norm-nudges can be powerful interventions, but they can easily fail to be effective and can even backfire unless they are designed with care. We highlight important considerations when designing norm-nudges and discuss a general model of social behavior based on expectations and conditional preferences. We present the results of several experiments where norm-nudging can backfire, and ways to avoid these negative outcomes.

Requiem for a Nudge: Framing effects in nudging honesty

“…Norm messages varied along two dimensions: content and framing. With respect to the content, we followed the tradition of norm-nudge interventions (see conceptual discussion in Bicchieri and Dimant, 2019). We also followed the social norm tradition of Bicchieri (2006, see also Cialdini and Trost, 1998;Cialdini et al, 2006;Schultz et al, 2007) by distinguishing between empirical information (what the majority of other people have done in a similar situation) and normative information (what the majority of other people have approved of doing in a similar situation).…”

“…Prior research has shown that providing "norm-nudges", such as information on how relevant peers behave and what behavior they consider appropriate, can crucially affect whether individuals adhere to norms and, in turn, demonstrate behavioral change (Bicchieri and Dimant, 2019). Our paper seeks to understand how different versions of truthful normrelated information and their frames (positive versus negative) affect deviant behavior in the form of misreporting a random outcome for a monetary bonus.…”

“…We model our hypotheses after the methodological discussion provided in Bicchieri and Dimant (2019). In their research, the authors provide a theoretical foundation of the existing social norms research, in particular with respect to nudging, and discuss its insights on the basis of other existing empirical research.…”

“…We study the impact of norm-nudges on deviant behavior by creating interventions that are in the spirit of the growing norm-nudge literature (for a recent methodological discussion, see Bicchieri and Dimant, 2019). There, personalized messages -and sometimes physical letters -are being sent with the intent to achieve behavior change in the forms of increasing tax compliance, charitable giving, primary school enrollment, and student learning, or in the form of decreasing energy consumption, student absenteeism from school, credit card debt, and even the spread of HIV infections, among other examples (Reinikka and Svensson, 2005;Dupas, 2011;Luttmer and Singhal, 2014;Boyer et al, 2016;Brandon et al, 2017;Rogers and Feller, 2018;Bursztyn et al, 2019).…”

“…We must understand the specific context in which the targeted behavior occurs (see discussion in Gino et al, 2019). In addition, despite a long tradition in social psychology, philosophy, and economic literature showing when, why, and how individuals react and conform to descriptive and normative information of peers (e.g., Deutsch and Gerard, 1955;Cialdini and Trost, 1998;Gino et al, 2009;Cialdini and Goldstein, 2004;Bicchieri, 2006;Schultz et al, 2007;Bicchieri et al, 2019a;Dimant, 2019;van Kleef et al, 2019), science is still working towards a better understanding of how to properly frame norm-nudges, which is a highly debated topic in ongoing research (see discussions in, e.g., Bicchieri and Dimant, 2019;Larkin et al, 2019). It is important to advance our understanding on how to best frame norm-nudges because better framing can serve as a cost-effective way to increase the effectiveness of nudge interventions.…”