Digital nudging to overcome cognitive resistance in innovation adoption decisions

ABSTRACT

Consumers often resist adopting innovations, even in cases where they acknowledge that these would be beneficial for them. Cognitive biases in consumers’ decision-making may trigger resistance to innovation. We explore cognitive biases’ effects in innovation adoption decisions. Further, we investigate how digital nudging can be used to mitigate this in order to increase the adoption likelihood for an innovation. We build a set of hypotheses and test them in a quasi-field experiment with 821 participants. We first show that the occurrence of cognitive biases correlates with an up to 44% lower likelihood of adopting an innovation. Second, we find that digital nudging can partially overcome resistance to innovation and can increase the innovation adoption likelihood. Our findings contribute to theory by explaining how resistance to innovation is built from a cognitive perspective and how nudging can be used to increase innovation adoption.

KEYWORDS:

• Resistance to innovation
• digital nudging
• cognitive bias
• innovation adoption
• sustainable innovation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.