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Nudging with Care: The Risks and Benefits of Social Information
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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, providing or eliciting 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.
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... Especially when goal nudging is involved, interventions can be simple but also potentially complex and time consuming, involving what Bicchieri and Dimant (2019) call "nudging with care", specifically when dealing with norms. Complex goal nudging possibly involves campaigns that affect beliefs, not just in terms of information but also considering the fact that beliefs are often distorted because they are self-serving (Bicchieri and Dimant, 2019;Hauser et al., 2018); campaigns that affect identities (Mols et al., 2015); campaigns that establish trust; campaigns that link issues explicitly to norms. In addition, complex nudging also requires careful consideration of the goal nudging powers of institutional arrangements (Lindenberg, 2017). ...
What is considered to be fair depends on context-dependent expectations. Using a modified version of the Ultimatum Game, we demonstrate that both fair behavior and perceptions of fairness depend upon beliefs about what one ought to do in a situation-that is, upon normative expectations. We manipulate such expectations by creating informational asymmetries about the offer choices available to the Proposer, and find that behavior varies accordingly. Proposers and Responders show a remarkable degree of agreement in their beliefs about which choices are considered fair. We discuss how these results fit into a theory of social norms.
We explore the relationship between norm-uncertainty and lying. Lies are ubiquitous, and people often lie for their own benefit or for the benefit of others. Research in environments in which social norms are clearly defined and communicated finds that social norms influence personal decisions, even when they are not in our own self-interest. We deviate from this approach and study lying under norm uncertainty with scope for opportunistic interpretation of the norm. We introduce variation along three dimensions: salience of different types of norm-uncertainty (normative/empirical), the beneficiary of the lie (self/other), and ex-ante knowledge about the opportunity to tell a lie in order to tease out potential belief-distortion mechanisms. We find compelling evidence that individuals engage in self-serving belief distortion to increase lying overall. However, we observe this only when uncertainty about what others do (empirical uncertainty) but not when uncertainty about what others approve of (normative uncertainty) is made salient. We also observe conditional liars, but only when the lie is self-serving rather than to the benefit of a third party. We discuss policy implications to improve the effectiveness of norm-based interventions.
Nudge and boost are two competing approaches to applying the psychology of reasoning and decision making
to improve policy. Whereas nudges rely on manipulation of choice architecture to steer people towards better
choices, the objective of boosts is to develop good decision-making competences. Proponents of both approaches
claim capacity to enhance social welfare through better individual decisions. We suggest that such efforts should
involve a more careful analysis of how individual and social welfare are related in the policy context. First,
individual rationality is not always sufficient or necessary for improving collective outcomes. Second, collective
outcomes of complex social interactions among individuals are largely ignored by the focus of both nudge and
boost on individual decisions. We suggest that the design of mechanisms and social norms can sometimes lead
to better collective outcomes than nudge and boost, and present conditions under which the three approaches
(nudge, boost, and design) can be expected to enhance social welfare.
This article reviews research from several behavioral disciplines to derive strategies for prompting people to perform behaviors that are individually costly and provide negligible individual or social benefits but are meaningful when performed by a large number of individuals. Whereas the term social influence encompasses all the ways in which people influence other people, social mobilization refers specifically to principles that can be used to influence a large number of individuals to participate in an activity. The motivational force of social mobilization is amplified by the fact that others benefit from the encouraged behaviors, and its overall impact is enhanced by the fact that people are embedded within social networks. This article may be useful to those interested in the provision of public goods, collective action, and prosocial behavior, and we give special attention to field experiments on election participation, environmentally sustainable behaviors, and charitable giving. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology Volume 69 is January 4, 2018. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Moral norms are fundamental for virtually all social interactions, including cooperation. Moral norms develop and change, but the mechanisms underlying when, and how, such changes occur are not well-described by theories of moral psychology. We tested, and confirmed, the hypothesis that the commonness of an observed behavior consistently influences its moral status, which we refer to as the common is moral (CIM) heuristic. In 9 experiments, we used an experimental model of dynamic social interaction that manipulated the commonness of altruistic and selfish behaviors to examine the change of peoples' moral judgments. We found that both altruistic and selfish behaviors were judged as more moral, and less deserving of punishment, when common than when rare, which could be explained by a classical formal model (social impact theory) of behavioral conformity. Furthermore, judgments of common versus rare behaviors were faster, indicating that they were computationally more efficient. Finally, we used agent-based computer simulations to investigate the endogenous population dynamics predicted to emerge if individuals use the CIM heuristic, and found that the CIM heuristic is sufficient for producing 2 hallmarks of real moral norms; stability and sudden changes. Our results demonstrate that commonness shapes our moral psychology through mechanisms similar to behavioral conformity with wide implications for understanding the stability and change of moral norms. (PsycINFO Database Record
Social norms messaging campaigns are increasingly used to influence human behavior, with social science research generally finding that they have modest but meaningful effects. One aspect of these campaigns in practice has been the inclusion of injunctive norms messaging, designed to convey a social judgment about one's behavior (often in the form of encouraging or discouraging language, or a visual smiley or frowny face). While some prominent research has provided support for the use of such messaging as a tool for positive behavior change, causal evidence on the effect of injunctive norms messaging as a motivator (as opposed to just one part of a multifaceted messaging campaign) is limited. This paper presents a field experiment on water conservation behavior conducted by an organization in California, involving over 40,000 households, which provides some of the most precise evidence to date regarding the effect of injunctive norms on decision making. I find that not only do injunctive norms encourage conservation behavior, there is also no evidence that they discourage individuals from further attending to norms messaging–regardless of whether the social judgment conveyed is negative or positive. Taken together, this suggests that injunctive norms are a useful tool in “nudge”-style campaigns tackling behavior change.
We document the hidden costs of a popular nudge and show how these costs distort policy making when neglected. In a field experiment with a charity, we find reminders increasing intended behavior (donations), but also increasing avoidance behavior (unsubscriptions from the mailing list). We develop a dynamic model of donation and unsubscription behavior with limited attention. We test the model in a second field experiment which also provides evidence that the hidden costs are anticipated. The model is estimated structurally to perform a welfare analysis. Not accounting for hidden costs overstates the welfare effects for donors by factor ten and hides potential negative welfare effects of the charity.
