Effects on Knowledge of Nudging Citizens with Information

ABSTRACT

Nudging is a policy instrument that can affect citizen behavior, often by providing information. We argue that nudging can also affect citizens’ knowledge, which can become the basis for future choices. In this manner, providing information can make the nudging initiative stick. We test the effect of an information treatment on three types of knowledge in a field experiment. The treatment consists of information on reading strategies designed to nudge parents to read with their children, randomly assigned to 1438 families. We show how nudging by providing information does in fact increase parents’ knowledge, irrespective of socio-economic background.

KEYWORDS:

• Field experiment
• knowledge
• information provision
• nudging

Acknowledgment

The authors would like thank Maiken Kjær Milthers and Line Scott Nesbit for excellent research assistance. Maiken and Line were responsible for data collection, and they contributed during this process with many excellent ideas. They also provided very valuable assistance in developing the booklet. The authors would also like to thank the municipality of Aarhus for an excellent partnership and for great openness and flexibility. We received help and goodwill from many at the Department of Children and Young People. Special thanks to Catharina Damgaard, Jens Møller Hald, Dennis Møller Hansen, and Morten Hjortskov Larsen. Finally, thanks to Solveig Gaarsmand from the National Association of School Parents for valuable help in developing the booklet.

Notes

¹ The experiment has also been used (for other purposes) in Nesbit and Milthers (2012), Jakobsen and Thomsen (2015), and Thomsen and Jakobsen (2015).

² Field experiments can be ethically problematic if they affect citizens adversely. In this field experiment, it was ensured that the information intervention was additional to the information that is normally distributed to parents, meaning that the control group subjects did not receive less information than they normally would have. Moreover, we expected the effect of the extra information to be beneficial to the treatment group citizens (or, in the worst case, have no effect at all). We therefore see no ethical problems in conducting the experiment.

³ Because of the few categories of the dependent variables, ordered logistic regression could be an alternative. For simplicity, however, we present the OLS estimates. Estimating the effects by ordered logistic regressions does not change the conclusions (results available upon request).