Enhanced ‘Green Nudging’: Inducing Sustainable Preferences

What is it about?

The behavioral effects of “green nudges’” are often small and subject to decay. To address this problem, this article proposes “enhanced green nudges” that incorporate learning biases as features of humans’ capacity for culture. These provide information for the formation of enduring “green” preferences. The effectiveness of “enhanced green nudges” hinges, however, on learning environments that resemble the one biases evolved from in humans’ phylogenetic past. Several scenarios based on a model of cultural evolution that captures preference learning dynamics illustrate our arguments, deliver several propositions, and enable the derivation of political implications. The explicit integration of evolved cognitive learning biases into “nudges” to boost their effectiveness is a novel idea. Based on a model of cultural evolution and a scenario-based analysis, we account for direct bias, role model bias, conformity, norm-following, and self-similarity. What is more, connecting a “nudge’s” impact to particular learning environments represents another original modification of the “green nudging”. Political implications are straightforward: “green nudges” as political instruments should be enhanced by incorporating learning biases taking effect in cultural transmission. Moreover, learning environments should feature characteristics of ancient settings, such as group-bound direct, face-to-face communication with self-similar local peers and visibility as well as assignability of behaviors to concrete peers or role models.

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Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The paper addresses “green” preference acquisition of agents via “nudges”, which represents a prominent political instrument in the transition toward more sustainable consumption. Our model of cultural evolution is a valuable tool for ecologic-economic analyses. Its behavioral assumptions and formal setup extend current economic and ecological paradigms, an endeavor high on this journal’s agenda. Moreover, by drawing on insights as well as methods from anthropology and by incorporating psychological and economic contents, we provide an interdisciplinary approach to research in the field of ecological economics.

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