Moving citizens online: Using salience & message framing to motivate behavior change

Nudges That Promote Channel Shift: A Randomized Evaluation of Messages to Encourage Citizens to Renew Benefits Online

“…It appears that the trial helped the council move more generally toward online renewals for Blue Badges, and this could be a model for the more general transformation of services whereby the learning that comes from a trial can help generate better knowledge about the drivers of change. Overall, the study showed the potential for using behavioral insights to promote channel shift and the effect sizes were at the high end when compared to other studies, such as the study carried out by Castelo et al (2015) which tested for color changes and message framing. Our findings suggest that using more standard behavioral approaches from the MINDSPACE framework could have great potential and indicate there is no need for the more conventional budge approach of compelling people to go online: nudges work.…”

“…Behavioral public policy has been strongly advocated in recent years (Thaler & Sunstein, ), and has been used to reform many standard administrative processes in government (Halpern, ). The question for this article is whether is it possible to design nonobtrusive nudges to help users shift channels without them losing access to services (see also Castelo et al, ). In addition, the aim is to find out whether it is possible to customize nudges that appeal to citizens’ wider collective efficacy as a way to motivate them to embrace digital technologies.…”

Choice Architecture in Consumer Financial Decisions

“…As some key principles underlying the effect of nudging and behavioral economics, prior work demonstrates classic effects such as status quo effect (e.g., setting organ donation as a default leads to significantly higher donation rates compared with when the default is to not donate; Johnson and Goldstein, 2003), endowment effect (e.g., pre-owning an option increases valuation of the option; Kahneman et al, 1991;Thaler, 1980), sunk-cost effect (e.g., people hold on to losing stocks because of sunk cost; or they visit the gym more frequently when sunk cost is salient; Gourville and Soman, 2002;Thaler, 1985), availability and salience heuristics (e.g., making the desirable option more salient to increase adoption of online service instead of the more costly on site visit; Castelo et al, 2015;Tversky and Kahneman, 1974), anchoring effect (e.g., using a random number in the decision context as an anchor for price; referring to social norm as an anchoring point to encourage green behavior; Ariely et al, 2003;Tversky and Kahneman, 1974), and the simplicity effect (e.g., using traffic light imagery to highlight (un)healthiness of food and nudge healthy eating, or using green and red "lights" to indicate water (over)usage and reduce utility cost; Ly et al, 2013).…”

“…Several important questions remain: Is behavioral economics always effective, and is it too manipulative? While a great amount of research proves the effectiveness of behavioral economics in nudging choices across a wide range of domains (Castelo et al, 2015;Haggag and Paci, 2014;Johnson and Goldstein, 2003;Ly et al, 2013;Madrian and Shea, 2001;Thaler, 2015;Thaler and Sunstein, 2008;Tversky and Kahneman, 1974), there are certainly many areas where nudging is not enough or not the best practice. Compared with other strategies to change behavior such as law enforcement, economic incentive, or education, the advantage of nudge is that it does not take away the freedom of choice from the decision-makers, and it can usually be easily incorporated in the decision context with low cost.…”

The INSPIRE Framework: How Public Administrators Can Increase Compliance with Written Requests Using Behavioral Techniques

“…There are many examples in which incorporating behavioral techniques in written communications has helped increase public administrators' impact. To name just a few, incorporating behavioral techniques helped U.K. tax authorities collect £5.6 billion more in overdue revenue in a single financial year (Martin ), reduced U.K. doctors' overprescribing of antibiotics by 73,406 doses during a six‐month trial (Hallsworth et al ), helped attract more diverse job applicants (Linos ), and encouraged more people to use online e‐government services (Castelo et al ; Faulkner, Jorgensen, and Koufariotis ). Additionally, letters from government are often criticized for being unclear, cold, and lacking in empathy (e.g., Faulkner et al , Wenzel ), which applying behavioral principles may help address.…”