| Popis: |
Motivating the wealthy to engage in sustainable behaviors is both crucial and challenging; they consume vastly more resources per capita than less wealthy individuals, and they are relatively unresponsive to economic incentives (e.g., taxes). To test whether appeals advocating sustainable behavior may be more effective for the wealthy when framed in terms of the prosocial benefit, we conduct a field experiment to reduce residential water use among 10,500 high-income households in the state of Connecticut. In a 9-month campaign, we find that messages emphasizing the “Public Good” (e.g., to the environment) are more effective in motivating the wealthy to conserve water than messages emphasizing the “Private Benefit” (i.e., financial savings) as well as a control (no messaging). We conceptually replicate these results using two field experiments (one preregistered) that reached 59,882 Facebook users from high-income households in New England, showing significantly greater engagement with prosocial compared to self-interested framed posts. |
