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Why Nudge?
Based on a series of pathbreaking lectures given at Yale University in 2012, this powerful, thought-provoking work by national best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein combines legal theory with behavioral economics to make a fresh argument about the legitimate scope of government, bearing on obesity, smoking, distracted driving, health care, food safety, and other highly volatile, high-profile public issues. Behavioral economists have established that people often make decisions that run counter to their best interests-producing what Sunstein describes as \"behavioral market failures.\" Sometimes we disregard the long term; sometimes we are unrealistically optimistic; sometimes we do not see what is in front of us. With this evidence in mind, Sunstein argues for a new form of paternalism, one that protects people against serious errors but also recognizes the risk of government overreaching and usually preserves freedom of choice.Against those who reject paternalism of any kind, Sunstein shows that \"choice architecture\"-government-imposed structures that affect our choices-is inevitable, and hence that a form of paternalism cannot be avoided. He urges that there are profoundly moral reasons to ensure that choice architecture is helpful rather than harmful-and that it makes people's lives better and longer.
eBook
How to SHIFT Consumer Behaviors to be More Sustainable
Highlighting the important role of marketing in encouraging sustainable consumption, the current research presents a review of the academic literature from marketing and behavioral science that examines the most effective ways to shift consumer behaviors to be more sustainable. In the process of the review, the authors develop a comprehensive framework for conceptualizing and encouraging sustainable consumer behavior change. The framework is represented by the acronym SHIFT, and it proposes that consumers are more inclined to engage in pro-environmental behaviors when the message or context leverages the following psychological factors: Social influence, Habit formation, Individual self, Feelings and cognition, and Tangibility. The authors also identify five broad challenges to encouraging sustainable behaviors and use these to develop novel theoretical propositions and directions for future research. Finally, the authors outline how practitioners aiming to encourage sustainable consumer behaviors can use this framework.
Journal Article
\How Do I Carry All This Now?\ Understanding Consumer Resistance to Sustainability Interventions
Given the increasingly grave environmental crisis, governments and organizations frequently initiate sustainability interventions to encourage sustainable behavior in individual consumers. However, prevalent behavioral approaches to sustainability interventions often have the unintended consequence of generating consumer resistance, undermining their effectiveness. With a practice–theoretical perspective, the authors investigate what generates consumer resistance and how it can be reduced, using consumer responses to a nationwide ban on plastic bags in Chile in 2019. The findings show that consumer resistance to sustainability interventions emerges not primarily because consumers are unwilling to change their individual behavior—as the existing literature commonly assumes—but because the individual behaviors being targeted are embedded in dynamic social practices. When sustainability interventions aim to change individual behaviors rather than social practices, they place excessive responsibility on consumers, unsettle their practice-related emotionality, and destabilize the multiple practices that interconnect to shape consumers' lives, ultimately leading to resistance. The authors propose a theory of consumer resistance in social practice change that explains consumer resistance to sustainability interventions and ways of reducing it. They also offer recommendations for policy makers and social marketers in designing and managing sustainability initiatives that trigger less consumer resistance and thereby foster sustainable consumer behavior.
Journal Article
Consumer culture theory
\"Outlining the key themes, concepts and theoretical areas in the field, this book draws on contributions from prominent researchers to unravel the complexities of consumer culture by looking at how it affects personal identity, social interactions and the consuming human being.\" -- Publisher's website.
Book
Bought and Sold
Yugoslavia was unique among the communist countries of the Cold War era in its openness to mixing cultural elements from both socialism and capitalism. Unlike their counterparts in the nations of the Soviet Bloc, ordinary Yugoslavs enjoyed access to a wide range of consumer goods and services, from clothes and appliances to travel agencies and discotheques. From the mid-1950s onward the political climate in Yugoslavia permitted, and later at times encouraged, a consumerist lifestyle of shopping, spending, acquiring, and enjoying that engaged the public on a day-to-day basis through modern advertising and sales techniques. InBought and Sold, Patrick Hyder Patterson reveals the extent to which socialist Yugoslavia embraced a consumer culture usually associated with capitalism and explores the role of consumerism in the federation's collapse into civil war in 1991.
Patterson argues, became a land where the symbolic, cultural value of consumer goods was a primary factor in individual and group identity. He shows how a new, aggressive business establishment promoted consumerist tendencies that ordinary citizens eagerly adopted, while the Communist leadership alternately encouraged and constrained the consumer orientation. Abundance translated into civic contentment and seemed to prove that the regime could provide goods and services equal to those of the capitalist West, but many Yugoslavs, both inside and outside the circles of official power, worried about the contradiction between the population's embrace of consumption and the dictates of Marxist ideology. The result was a heated public debate over creeping consumerist values, with the new way of life finding fierce critics and, surprisingly for a communist country, many passionate and vocal defenders.
eBook
Nonprice incentives and energy conservation
Significance We investigate the effectiveness of nonprice incentives to motivate conservation behavior. We test whether tailored information about environmental and health damages produces behavior change in the residential electricity sector. In a randomized controlled trial with real-time appliance-level energy metering over 8 mo, we find that environment and health-based information strategies outperform monetary savings information to drive energy conservation. Environment and health-based messages, which communicate the environmental and public health externalities of electricity production—such as pounds of pollutants, childhood asthma, and cancer—motivated 8% energy savings versus control. This strategy was particularly effective on families with children, who achieved 19% energy savings. However, we do not study the persistence of these behavioral changes after the conclusion of the study.
In the electricity sector, energy conservation through technological and behavioral change is estimated to have a savings potential of 123 million metric tons of carbon per year, which represents 20% of US household direct emissions in the United States. In this article, we investigate the effectiveness of nonprice information strategies to motivate conservation behavior. We introduce environment and health-based messaging as a behavioral strategy to reduce energy use in the home and promote energy conservation. In a randomized controlled trial with real-time appliance-level energy metering, we find that environment and health-based information strategies, which communicate the environmental and public health externalities of electricity production, such as pounds of pollutants, childhood asthma, and cancer, outperform monetary savings information to drive behavioral change in the home. Environment and health-based information treatments motivated 8% energy savings versus control and were particularly effective on families with children, who achieved up to 19% energy savings. Our results are based on a panel of 3.4 million hourly appliance-level kilowatt–hour observations for 118 residences over 8 mo. We discuss the relative impacts of both cost-savings information and environmental health messaging strategies with residential consumers.
Journal Article