Using personalised nudges to encourage sustainable diets

The challenge

Encouraging consumers to eat more plant-based meals is better for their health and better for the environment. For meal-delivery kit providers, it is also more profitable. This research will test the efficacy of personalised nudges – strategically applied based on the consumer’s personal traits in light of known relations between different traits (e.g., decision-making style, personality, attitudes, etc.) and different nudges (e.g. defaults, social norms, translated information, etc.). The primary aim of this project is to build and test a theoretical model of nudge delivery personalisation to encourage better decisions around food consumption.

Solution

To achieve this goal, an estimated 1,000 participants will be recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) to interact with the study interface across five sequential phases and two samples. The first sample will be used to learn the relationship between different nudges and different individual traits. The second sample will be used to experimentally test the anticipated increased efficacy of nudges that have been targeted based on the relationships learned with the first sample versus nudges that have not been targeted in this way.

Outcome and impact

Findings from the study will help improve the efficacy of nudges, thus improving the decisions of nudge recipients. Given the target behaviour is to nudge consumers towards plant-based meals, the ultimate consequences of the personalised nudges developed in this project are improved health and reduced carbon footprints.

So, the Behavioural Lab brings together researchers from across the UTS Business School from fields such as economics, marketing, management, finance – and we all have the common goal of understanding how people make judgments and decisions, and then we take that knowledge and try to apply it to societal issues with the goal of improving people's decisions and also improving public policy.

Now it turns out that meat consumption, particularly red meat has a very high carbon footprint associated with it and many consumers don't realize this; so, in one particular project we created a food label that attempted to express the carbon footprint of different foods. We did this by expressing the carbon footprint in terms of the number of minutes that a light bulb would be turned on for, and our results did find that presenting this light bulb minutes equivalent did encourage consumers to shift their purchases away from beef products towards products that have a lower carbon footprint.

Since publishing our research on carbon footprint labels in the context of meals we've been approached by some restaurants that have really embraced sustainability as a core part of their identity. We also have numerous behavioural insight units embedded within government organisations: there's one in the Federal Government and there's also a group in the New South Wales State Government – and once again the they employ PhD graduates from fields such as psychology and economics who have this behavioural science knowledge and are trying to embed it in all of the other teams that they work with on a day-to-day basis.