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FV-101 | Persuading to Investing into Sustainability

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

Common wisdom has it that optimists see the glass as half full, whereas pessimists see it as half-empty. Now consider that companies or politicians could describe either version of the glass, and maybe turn their audience into optimists or pessimists. We can generalize from this metaphor to message framing , a technique invented by Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky, where a message describes the identical event either in reference to losses or in reference to gains. As much prior research we asked how effective a message would be at changing a person's attitude toward an issue when framed either in gain terms or in loss terms . We studied attitudes toward policies that force companies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Principally four types of message frames exist, such as, removing CO2 from the atmosphere reduces risks to the environment (non-loss frame), not removing CO2 increases risks (loss frame), regaining CO2 is an opportunity for the environment (gain frame), not regaining CO2 misses out on an opportunity (non-gain frame). Note that any persuasive message of the type "doing X will result in Y" has to use one of the four types of frames, or a mix of them. We address two problems. First, in practice it is often unclear whether a complex persuasive message expresses a gain, non-gain, loss, or non-loss, impeding choice of the most persuasive frame. We have developed a measure that allows such classifications. Second, which frame is most persuasive depends on the situation. However, for some situations two existing theories, one of them by us, make contradictory predictions. We have conducted one successful experiment as part of a master's thesis 2 . We seek to conduct a second experiment that would address a weakness of the first one and test if the first one is replicable. We need to succeed with both to be able to publish the research in a competitive academic journal. Based on the evidence gathered in the proposed project we would be in a strong position to apply for public funding to further investigate this important issue. We summarize our prior result, and expect to observe it again: We showed consumers two different approaches to get society to remove CO2. One approach involved voluntary consumer payments, the other forcing companies to invest. After reading a message consumers rated their attitudes toward these approaches. A new type of measure we developed showed that respondents perceived the consumer voluntary approach as non-loss, and the company mandatory one as gain. For each approach we developed two persuasive messages that communicated that not doing anything about CO2 is bad, thus urging to do something. One message expressed this badness as damage to the environment (loss), and the other as lost opportunity for the environment (non-gain). When we considered all respondents, neither of these two message frames persuaded them more than the other. However, we then divided respondents into two groups depending on how much they cared about the environment, that is, how involved they were with the topic at hand. For those highly involved, one of the two theories predicted well which frame is most persuasive, whereas for those with low involvement, the other theory predicted well. In retrospect, this result is theoretically meaningful, but we did not expect it. Involvement may be a missing piece in the puzzle as to which theory makes more accurate predictions.

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Predicted pleasure, motivation, and psychological utility

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

According to economics people base their decisions on how valuable they expect the result of the decision to be. Economics assumes that a decision maker can map the value of every outcome of a decision onto a single scale, called utility. This way they can choose between outcomes that are very different. They can trade off the pleasure of eating a desert now with the expected pain of a heart attack later by comparing the expected utilities from eating and suffering from a heart attack. Psychologist focus on how we best describe utility itself, how the mind represents it, and which factors it is influenced by. Historically it has been hypothesized that the mind represents utility in terms of the pleasure and pain of decision outcomes. It has also been hypothesized that pleasure and pain are the ultimate causes of motivation. It would thus follow that the utility a decision maker predicts for an outcome corresponds to the pleasure s/he expects for that outcome, and this in turn drives the degree to which s/he is motivated to pursue the outcome. In this project we seek to provide evidence that motivation to pursue an outcome can be high while predicted pleasure can be relatively low, or more generally, that motivation and predicted pleasure may diverge. This raises the question whether predicted pleasure or motivation underlies utility. We attempt to show that overt behavior that seeks to bring about an outcome can be influenced either by predicted pleasure or by motivation, even if they diverge. This would suggest that the utility of the outcome could be based on either predicted pleasure or motivation, even if the two are not the same.