TY - JOUR
T1 - Requiem for a Nudge
T2 - Framing effects in nudging honesty
AU - Dimant, Eugen
AU - van Kleef, Gerben A.
AU - Shalvi, Shaul
N1 - Funding Information:
This work benefited from conversations with Johannes Abeler, several researchers at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Daniela Puzzello, and two anonymous reviewers. IRB approval was obtained from the University of Pennsylvania. This work was supported by European Research Council Grant No. ERC-StG-637915. The data collection and analyses were pre-registered at AsPredicted.org #23244 and #23283 entitled ‘Same same but different? The role of framing in norm-nudge interventions’.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2020/4/1
Y1 - 2020/4/1
N2 - We examine framing effects in nudging honesty, in the spirit of the growing norm-nudge literature, by utilizing a high-powered and pre-registered study. Across four treatments, participants received one random truthful norm-nudge that emphasized ‘moral suasion based on either what other participants previously did (empirical message) or approved of doing (normative message) and varied in the framing (positive or negative) in which it was presented. Subsequently, participants repeatedly played the ‘mind game’ in which they were first asked to think of a number, then rolled a digital die, and then reported whether the two numbers coincide, in which case a bonus was paid. Hence, whether or not the report was truthful remained unobservable to the experimenters. We find compelling null effects with tight confidence intervals showing that none of the norm-nudge interventions worked. A follow-up experiment reveals the reason for these convincing null-effects: the information norm-nudges did not actually change norms. Notably, our secondary results suggest that a substantial portion of individuals misremembered norm-nudges such that they conveniently supported deviant behavior. This subset of participants indeed displayed significantly higher deviance levels, a behavior pattern in line with literature on motivated misremembering and belief distortion. We discuss the importance of this high-powered null finding for the flourishing norm-nudge literature and derive policy implications.
AB - We examine framing effects in nudging honesty, in the spirit of the growing norm-nudge literature, by utilizing a high-powered and pre-registered study. Across four treatments, participants received one random truthful norm-nudge that emphasized ‘moral suasion based on either what other participants previously did (empirical message) or approved of doing (normative message) and varied in the framing (positive or negative) in which it was presented. Subsequently, participants repeatedly played the ‘mind game’ in which they were first asked to think of a number, then rolled a digital die, and then reported whether the two numbers coincide, in which case a bonus was paid. Hence, whether or not the report was truthful remained unobservable to the experimenters. We find compelling null effects with tight confidence intervals showing that none of the norm-nudge interventions worked. A follow-up experiment reveals the reason for these convincing null-effects: the information norm-nudges did not actually change norms. Notably, our secondary results suggest that a substantial portion of individuals misremembered norm-nudges such that they conveniently supported deviant behavior. This subset of participants indeed displayed significantly higher deviance levels, a behavior pattern in line with literature on motivated misremembering and belief distortion. We discuss the importance of this high-powered null finding for the flourishing norm-nudge literature and derive policy implications.
KW - Norm-Nudges
KW - Nudge
KW - Social Norms
KW - Social information
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85081211165&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jebo.2020.02.015
DO - 10.1016/j.jebo.2020.02.015
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85081211165
SN - 0167-2681
VL - 172
SP - 247
EP - 266
JO - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
JF - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
ER -