Nudging for sustainable water consumption : Positive vs. negative information

Abstract: Previous literature shows that information influences people's environmental friendly behavior, and is a surprisingly strong motivator. It is not only the content of information that significantly influences attitudes and behavior intentions, people are also sensitive for how information is framed. Recent literature shows that people react differently in the environmental context, depending on whether the information is framed as gain or loss outcomes. To the best of my knowledge, it has not been investigated whether stated information about environment situations should be positively or negatively framed to be mostly effective. I conducted an online experiment with a sample of students from Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden. Treatment group 1 received positively framed information about the water situation, and treatment group 2 received negatively framed information with the same informational. A control group did not receive any information. Instead of asking respondents for their water saving intentions only, I measure their intentions through actual donation to a water charity. This way, their response is costly and therefore more credible. My experiment indicates that positively framed water conservation nudges could have an impact on real world water consumption, at a low cost of implementation.