TY - JOUR
T1 - Motivating the adoption of new community-minded behaviors
T2 - An empirical test in Nigeria
AU - Blair, Graeme
AU - Littman, Rebecca
AU - Paluck, Elizabeth Levy
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank R. Gomila for the extraordinary research assistance. We are also very grateful to A. Bland, M. Clark-Barol, A. Coppock, S. Cuerda, J. Drost-Lopez, A. Edgell, M. Gleave, J. Okeke, and M. Offer-Westort for additional research assistance. We thank our partners in the interventions and data collection, especially Integrity Nigeria; iROKO TV; Magic Movies; a major mobile phone firm in Nigeria that wishes to remain anonymous; TNS RMS Nigeria, and especially M. Fagbemi and C. Egbulefu; MK&I, and especially Y. Aderoju and A. Seosan; Funmobile, and especially A. Adetule; and Social Action. We also thank K. Egbon and K. Henshaw for assistance in developing the interventions, and C. Okpowhor and C. Uche for help in developing and translating our measurement. We are grateful for the useful comments from audiences at Yale, Harvard, Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP), the Contemporary African Political Economy Research Seminar (CAPERS), the Paluck laboratory, the UCLA Improving Designs in the Social Sciences workshop, and the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting. Funding from an anonymous private donor and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research to E.L.P. is gratefully acknowledged.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Social scientists have long sought to explain why people donate resources for the good of a community. Less attention has been paid to the difficult task of motivating the first adopters of these important behaviors. In a field experiment in Nigeria, we tested two campaigns that encouraged people to try reporting corruption by text message. Psychological theories about how to shift perceived norms and how to reduce barriers to action drove the design of each campaign. The first, a film featuring actors reporting corruption, and the second, a mass text message reducing the effort required to report, caused a total of 1181 people in 106 communities to text, including 241 people who sent concrete corruption reports. Psychological theories of social norms and behavior change can illuminate the early stages of the evolution of cooperation and collective action, when adoption is still relatively rare.
AB - Social scientists have long sought to explain why people donate resources for the good of a community. Less attention has been paid to the difficult task of motivating the first adopters of these important behaviors. In a field experiment in Nigeria, we tested two campaigns that encouraged people to try reporting corruption by text message. Psychological theories about how to shift perceived norms and how to reduce barriers to action drove the design of each campaign. The first, a film featuring actors reporting corruption, and the second, a mass text message reducing the effort required to report, caused a total of 1181 people in 106 communities to text, including 241 people who sent concrete corruption reports. Psychological theories of social norms and behavior change can illuminate the early stages of the evolution of cooperation and collective action, when adoption is still relatively rare.
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U2 - 10.1126/sciadv.aau5175
DO - 10.1126/sciadv.aau5175
M3 - Article
C2 - 30891494
AN - SCOPUS:85063300405
SN - 2375-2548
VL - 5
JO - Science advances
JF - Science advances
IS - 3
M1 - eaau5175
ER -