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Informing Versus Nudging in Environmental Policy

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Abstract

Information has not been proven a very successful means to promote voluntary behaviour change to protect the environment. On this backcloth, there is currently increasing interest in recommendations from behavioural economics focusing on making the choice architecture more facilitating for the desired behaviour. The authors present three studies demonstrating how mental shortcuts, based on subtle cues in the context, unconsciously influence human decision-making, with important consequences for the environment. Two of our own studies illustrate the behavioural impacts of (a) anchoring (the design of the European energy label) and (b) default effect (the framing of a request to participate in the Smart Grid), and data from Göckeritz et al. (Eur J Soc Psych 40:514-523, 2010) are used to illustrate the impacts of (c) herding or descriptive norms (the social context of energy saving). The authors end by pointing at theoretical weaknesses in behavioural economics and calling for research to strengthening the theoretical underpinnings of this approach to behaviour change.

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Notes

  1. For example, it has been shown that the framing of an issue is important for attitudes towards climate change and that a gain frame is superior to a loss frame when the goal is to increase positive attitudes and awareness of the severity of the climate problem (Spence and Pidgeon 2010).

  2. The study was carried out by Andrea Suarez Cardenas as a master thesis project under the supervision of John Thøgersen. We would like to thank Simone Mueller Loose for developing the design and Joachim Scholderer for valuable advice regarding the data analysis.

  3. The study was carried out by John Thøgersen, Geertje Schuitema, and Madeleine Broman Toft as part of the Improsume project, financed by Energinet.dk in the framework of EraNet Smart Grid.

  4. The third and last conditions was an “active choice” condition (cf. Keller et al. 2011). For a discussion of the results regarding this condition, see Toft et al. (2014).

  5. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for sharing this point of view with us.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Administration, Aarhus University, School of Business and Social Sciences, Bartholins Allé 10, 8000, Aarhus C, Denmark

    Folke Ölander & John Thøgersen

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  1. Folke Ölander
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  2. John Thøgersen
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Correspondence to John Thøgersen.

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A former version of this article was published in J. Scholderer & K. Brunsø (Eds.), Marketing, food and the consumer. Festschrift in Honour of Klaus G. Grunert. Harlow, UK: Pearson. Folke Ölander was effectively the first author of this article, although it was not finally accepted and published until after his death.

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Ölander, F., Thøgersen, J. Informing Versus Nudging in Environmental Policy. J Consum Policy 37, 341–356 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-014-9256-2

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