Evidence-Based Behavioral Interventions
Classic policy instruments such as taxes, subsides, and bans are often not sufficient to motivate systematic behavior change or lack the needed support in the public. We develop and validate theory-based behavioral interventions to promote more sustainable develop and validate theory-based behavioral interventions to promote more sustainable behavior and test how their effectiveness varies across contexts. We further aim to unravel the cognitive and affective mechanisms driving behavior change.
To this end, we couple experimental paradigms with process tracing tools to examine how behavior change is driven by changes in information search during the decision making process. For example, in recent studies we showed that tailored information on compatibility of electric vehicles (EV) with one’s individual mobility demand can increase adoption (here) and sustainable usage decisions (here). The results showed that tailored information altered the prioritization of EV range information in the decision making process, especially for participants with low mobility demand. That is, the intervention specifically targeted behavior of those that would benefit most from behavior change and did not “nudge” individuals with high mobility demand into suboptimal behavior. This research offers important contributions to our understanding of heterogeneity in intervention effects and ethical considerations in the application of behavioral intervention.
In current research, we examine how behavioral interventions can be optimally combined with classic instruments (e.g., taxes) and when such combinations lead to “crowding out” effects of one intervention component. Taken together, this research can reveal when, where, and how behavioral interventions work.