It’s not easy being green.

Digital nudging, a promising tool to promote sustainable consumption

Intention without action

Who doesn’t want to support the environment? If we go out on the street and ask random people: are you willing to buy sustainble products? Probably, 6 out of 10 people would agree. Unfortunately, we don’t see this in the share of organic products in the supermarket, which is only 3.2%. This action-intention gap means that consumers are willing to buy green products, but for many reasons they don’t end up buying these products.

Household consumption in industrial countries is identified as one of the main causes of environmental problems. At the same time, e-commerce is growing at an unprecedented rate and online shopping is swiftly becoming a preferred way to shop for consumers. This means that as e-commerce will grow over the coming years, consumers make more consumption decisions online. We are consuming more and more, whilst the impact on our planet is becoming outrageous. Because of these reasons researchers are increasingly studying how consumers can be influenced to sustainable consumption behavior. The aim of this research was to explore the important issue of how to promote online sustainable household consumption.

Digital nudging

A powerful tool to overcome this gap is digital nudging. It can be defined as a tool to influence decision-making in a predictable way in a digital environment, which is beneficial for society. By influencing people in their subconsciousness, people are enabled to make a better choice. There are countless ways to apply digital nudging: by changing the interface, using social norms, or giving feedback. A well-known example is the default nudge, which is now used for organ registration in the Netherlands. Citizens used to make the decision themselves whether they would register as a donor or not. Since this year, inhabitants are automatically registered as donors. It is estimated that this pre-made decision by the government will double the amount of donors (!). The best thing about digital nudging is that it’s cheap and effective — plus, you don’t need a big marketing budget to achieve a high output.

Digital experiment

I created a digital experiment with an online webshop called The Store. The participant was asked to buy sustainable and/or non-sustainable householding products, such as washing detergent. I investigated three different types of digital nudging: default, feedback, and social norms.

Consequently, three different manipulations and a control condition were represented. In the first condition, the default was set by only showing sustainable products on the homepage. With regards to the feedback nudge, all sustainable products were provided with a smile :) and non-sustainable products with a sad face :(. Last, a social norm represented the following quote on the homepage: ‘9 out of 10 people in the Netherlands contribute to a better environment by buying sustainable householding products, are you in? Individuals tend to follow others and seek approval. By setting a social norm, people are more likely to copy that behavior.

All three nudging tools appear to have a significant positive effect on sustainable consumption, which means that if a participant was ‘nudged’, he/she/they was more likely to buy more sustainable householding products, compared to the control condition.

But what about people who identify themselves as a green consumer, would they make better choices? To learn more about this I conducted a survey to find out if the participant would see himself as a ‘green’ consumer. Literature assumed that if a person would have a green self-identity, he or she is more likely to buy sustainable products. However, it turned out that a green self-identity was not a predictor of sustainable consumption. This shows that digital nudging is almost more prevalent than a green self-identity.

A promising tool

The findings of my research suggest that digital nudging could have the potential to tackle our consumption problem. However, digital nudging is still in its early stages so more research is needed to explore this extremely interesting topic (Weinmann et al., 2016). In conclusion, digital nudging is a promising tool to promote sustainable consumption and is worth researching.

About Simone Kuijer

My name is Simone and I am passionate about sustainability, social entrepreneurship and digital innovation. Next week I will officially launch my new webshop in zero waste products, called trus. Here is a sneakpeak: trus.store. I am on a mission to help people living with less waste in an easy and accessible way. I believe that being aware of your waste streams also leads to more consciousness about your overall consumption behaviour. By this means a zero or ‘less’ waste lifestyle contributes to our environment on different levels.

Stay tuned and let’s connect on Linkedin!