Manipulation
Task 1
Nudge should be immediate, targeted at behaviour (not attitudes, beliefs etc.) and there should be a
choice.
de Ridder, D. (2014). Nudging for beginners: A shortlist of issues in urgent need of research.
Nudge: simple changes in the presentation of choice alternatives that make the desired choice the easy,
automatic or default one. It respects the freedom of choice (libertarian) but suggest sensible choices at
the same time (paternalistic). Nudges aline with the insight that behaviour is often not rational or
deliberate. Nudges may thus be an important alternative to existing methods for promoting health
behaviour that typically encourage individuals to make effortful changes/choices. Nudges are also
often cheaper and more efficient that current health solutions.
There are 3 principles of nudging:
1. Autonomy: people have the choice to ignore the nudgealternative options must remain
available. So, taxing or banning unhealthy food is not a nudgeno other choice (for people
with limited financial resources). But putting unhealthy foods at a distance in a buffet is a
nudge because it makes the unhealthy choice less obvious but not impossible. Examining how
nudges affect feelings of autonomous decision making is therefore an important area of
research on nudging.
2. Awareness: on the one hand, it can be argued that awareness of being nudged might ruin the
nudge effect and even cause feelings of manipulation. On the other hand, it might be that a
slight suspicion of being nudged contributes to nudges’ acceptability. If people would be
completely unaware of being nudged and realize afterwards that they were tricked, it would
threaten the definition of nudges as respecting autonomous choice. Right now, it is unclear
whether there is awareness or not so this should be researched.
3. Default: if we want people to choose healthy, the health choice should be default and not
exceptional. For example, placing little stickers with ‘healthy choice’ on healthy foods
indicates that it is exceptional and that people should be convinced of the choice. So simply
stating that a choice is healthy does not make the choice easy and can backfire. More research
into strategies promoting default healthy choices beyond ‘this is healthy’ is thus needed.
Demarque, C., Charalambides, L., Hilton, D. J., & Waroquier, L. (2015). Nudging sustainable
consumption: The use of descriptive norms to promote a minority behavior in a realistic online
shopping environment.
Social influence on environmentally friendly behaviour can be informational and normative.
Informational means providing consumers with information about a product. The success hereof is
however, limited.
A green label/eco-label may on the other hand not only give product information but also confer a
certain social value on productssocially approved (normative). The labels are easily recognized and
may therefor serve as a nudge. The aim of this study is to develop and test a methodology for
presenting true and effective descriptive norms in a population where prevalence of the target
behaviour (sustainable consumption) is initially low.
Descriptive norms constitute decisional shortcuts whereas injunctive norms introduce the prospect of
social rewards and sanctions. The norms will however only motivate behaviour if they are activated
(when they are made salient)focus theory.
Assertions about social norms that rely on unverifiable assertions or factually incorrect information
raise ethical concerns. Such manipulations may be acceptable in the context of an experiment but
would seem difficult for a large retailer to utilize, as well-known corporations and retailers rely on
public trust in order to obtain and retain business.
In sum, the use of descriptive norms to encourage pro- environmental behavior may backfire for at
least three reasons. The first is that giving true information about the extent of pro- environmental
behavior may draw attention to the fact that many people do not respect the norm, thus giving them a
“license” to disregard it. The second is that using non- factual norms that misleadingly give the
impression that most people indeed follow the pro-environmental norm runs the risk of sapping public
confidence in the source, a potentially disastrous outcome for a public company or retailer. Finally,
although drawing attention to injunctive norms may sometimes be a solution, companies and retailers
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, may also be reluctant to use these if they are perceived to be too moralizing or patronizing towards
(sections of) their clientele.
Framing also has an effect on the effectiveness of norms. For example, ‘few people went to the party
because’ makes you think about reasons why not to go vs. ‘a few people went to the party’ makes you
think about reasons why to goWhen paired with valued behaviors, positive polarity quantifiers may
implicitly suggest reasons for performing the behavior in question thus serving as implicit injunctive
norms that encourage people to perform more of a non-prevalent behavior.
Method: in an online shopping environment, students could choose between green/bio products vs.
standard products with a 25-euro budget. Strong and weak norms were defined (e.g. 70% bought at
least one ecological product vs. 9% purchased an ecological product).
Experiment 1: tested whether the descriptive norms would increase sustainable consumption
compared to a condition with no norm information and whether the descriptive norm
information would have different effects on sustainable consumption depending on its
formulation (weak vs. strong). Results reveal that participants spend more and buy more
ecological products when the norm is present. The type of norm (strong vs. weak) has no
effect. This might be because simply activating a norm is already enough or because
participants had troubles with the percentages.
Experiment 2: it ensured that the results of study 1 could be replicated, checked whether the
effects were not merely the result of attentional effects and assessed whether different levels
of norm information (extremely low vs. extremely high) actually did have an effect on
shopping behaviour. First, we observed that participants in the new attentional control
condition did not buy significantly more eco-products or spend significantly more money on
them than participants in the baseline control condition. It therefore seems that the mere fact
of drawing attention to the green products is not sufficient to induce new visitors to do the
same. consumers in both strong norm conditions bought and spent more money on green
products than those in the control condition. In contrast to Experiment 1 however, the results
showed that consumers in the strong norm conditions bought and spent more money on green
products than those in the weak norm condition. In addition, we observed a marginally
significant tendency for extremely strong norms to lead to more green purchases and more
money spent on green products than extremely weak norms. Thus the observed effects are not
because of an attentional effect and also not because of differences in recall or perceived
plausibility.
Discussion and conclusion: descriptive norms can be used as nudges and have an impact on pro-
environmental behaviour.
Task 2
What does social exclusion mean in this context?
What are social determinants of health?
How are psychosocial and physiological health outcomes linked?
What are possible intervention routes – distal and proximal? Proximal is acting immediately to do
something about the disease (e.g. giving someone with depression anti-depression pills)more
individual. And distal is that there are many steps to reach the outcomemore about environmental,
societal factors.
Koudenburg, N., Jetten, J., & Dingle, G. A. (2017). Personal autonomy in group-based interventions.
Group activities can foster feelings of inclusion and the had positive outcomes for health and well-
being. The current research examines the process that fosters these positive outcomes.
Importance of personal autonomy: it is crucial that changes in behaviour result from
autonomous decisions. Behaviour change is then expected to sustain. Members of
disadvantaged groups often feel disempowered, locating the responsibility for their position in
the hands of otherslittle self-efficacy. Self-efficacy can be improved through
reinforcementthe belief that one has self-efficacy should begin by experiencing one’s own
behaviour resulting from autonomous and self-determined decisions.
In this paper it is hypothesized that people can develop a sense of personal autonomy by engaging in
activities that foster their inclusion in social groups. Research in the social identity tradition shows that
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