The critical role of second-order normative beliefs in predicting energy conservation

Jachimowicz, Jon M.; Hauser, Oliver P.; O’Brien, Julia D.; Sherman, Erin; Galinsky, Adam D.

doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0434-0

Cited by 129 publications

(103 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…In line with prevailing theories on influence, the financial information was more decision relevant and thus more influential (Sunstein 2016;Cialdini 2007). An effective use of descriptive social norms should present norms that are meaningful, both in the specific context and to the population to which they are applied and are at least as salient as the other information presented to the decision makers (Jachimowicz et al 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimising nudges and boosts for financial decisions under uncertainty

2019

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Behavioural interventions that directly influence decision-making are increasingly popular policy tools. Two prominent interventions used are nudges, which promote an optimal choice without restricting options, and boosts, which promote individual capabilities to make more informed choices. Direct comparison is a critical step toward understanding the populations and contexts where they may be most efficient, or potentially complementary toward improving their effectiveness. Two trials in the US and Serbia (N = 1423) tested a series of choices under uncertainty using both nudge and boost interventions. In a replication setting, hypothetical and consequential decisions are used. Findings indicate that disclosure nudges and boosts, unlike social nudges, promote more advantageous financial decisions. Furthermore, the effects of disclosure nudges and boosts generally differ depending on loss and gain framing-boosts promoted more advantageous decisions under gain frames while disclosure nudges did so under loss frames. Finally, boosts were typically more effective for those who initially made suboptimal choices and sociodemographic factors did not mediate the effectiveness of the interventions. These insights provide clarity to highly nuanced, complex patterns across population behaviours in the context of financial choice under uncertainty and considerable implications for the design of interventions for policies that impact population behaviours.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimising nudges and boosts for financial decisions under uncertainty

2019

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“…It can also benefit science by increasing our understanding of why certain interventions (fail to) work. For instance, Jachimowicz et al () used more than 200 field experiments by the company Opower to understand why social norms interventions to reduce energy use show high variability in effectiveness. I hope that in the coming years, more such collaborations will follow.…”

Section: Future Research Into Behavior Change By Governmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Policy and Behavior Change

Tummers

2019

Public Administration Review

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Changing behavior is often necessary to tackle societal problems, such as obesity, alcohol abuse, and debt problems. This article has two goals. First, it aims to highlight how governments can try to change the behavior of citizens. Government can use policy instruments to do so, including incentives, bans and mandates, information campaigns, and nudges. However, the government should not be a manipulator that applies policy instruments without societal support. Therefore, the second goal of the article is to provide a conceptual framework that helps analyze whether public policies to stimulate behavior change are effective and supported by key stakeholders. This conceptual framework has five criteria indicating the extent to which there is effective and supported behavior change: the policy is (1) effective and (2) efficient, and there is support for the policy among (3) politicians, (4) implementing organizations, and (5) citizens. The article ends with suggestions to study public policy aimed at behavior change.

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“…To illustrate the potential of budges, consider again the use of social norms, but in the context of reducing household energy consumption. Social norm interventions have been highly successful, such as in bringing forward late tax payments by showing peers' timely payments (Hallsworth et al 2017), decreasing the prevalence of unethical behaviour when interacting with government services (Hauser et al 2018), and reducing energy and water usage by comparing nearby household usage (Allcott 2011;Allcott and Rogers 2014;Bhanot 2017b;Jachimowicz et al 2018), but have not always worked successfully (e.g. (Silva and John 2017;Verkooijen et al 2015)).…”

Section: Budgesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are likely other beliefs that could be of interest. For example,(Jachimowicz et al 2018) show that social norms to reduce energy consumption depends in part on the decision-makers' beliefs about their neighbours' beliefs of the importance on sustainable behaviour ("second-order beliefs"). This suggests that higher-order beliefs can also be influenced to nudge behaviour.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…To the best of our knowledge, a very similar experiment was run by the economists at Opower several years ago and they have continued to run randomised controlled trials to evaluate the performance of social norms in most of their new programmes since then, focusing primarily on the comparison between one's own energy usage and one's own usage plus neighbours' usage(Allcott 2011;Allcott and Rogers 2014;Jachimowicz et al 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Budging beliefs, nudging behaviour

2018

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Nudges have become a popular tool for behaviour change; but, some interventions fail to replicate, even when the identical, previously successful intervention is used. One cause of this problem is that people default to using some of or all of the previously-successful existing nudges for any problem-the "kitchen sink" approach. We argue that the success of an intervention depends on understanding people's current behaviour and beliefs to ensure that any nudge will actually "budge" them from their current beliefs. We introduce the Beliefs-Barriers-Context model, with three components: understanding beliefs, barriers, and context to change behaviour through a budge. Designing a budge has the goal of identifying the psychological mechanism that drives a target behaviour, focusing on the psychology of the target population before attempting to change that behaviour. In contrast to the "kitchen sink" approach, budges are best complemented with mechanism experiments to identify what undergirds behaviour change. Moving away from simply nudging behaviour to budging minds-by understanding beliefs, barriers and context-has the potential to inform both the successes and failures of behavioural interventions.

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The critical role of second-order normative beliefs in predicting energy conservation

Abstract: The version presented here may differ from the published version. If citing, you are advised to consult the published version for pagination, volume/issue and date of publication

Cited by 129 publications

References 62 publications

Optimising nudges and boosts for financial decisions under uncertainty

Optimising nudges and boosts for financial decisions under uncertainty

Public Policy and Behavior Change

Budging beliefs, nudging behaviour

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