Hi all, A fee is placed on disposable coffee cups at the checkout counter of a café. Preferential parking is given to electric vehicle owners at city hall. User fees are charged to residential homeowners for garbage they place on the curb. What do all these scenarios have in common? They are all examples of incentives that can be applied to encourage or discourage certain behaviors. Incentives tend to work best when motivation to engage in a behavior is low. When people are not inherently motivated to take action, incentives provide the extrinsic motivation, or an external reason, for them to act in order to receive a reward or some other benefit. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when applying incentives: - Use caution when there is an existing intrinsic motivation to engage in a behavior. Applying incentives may undermine that intrinsic motivation (e.g. paying volunteers when they already feel they are doing something for a good cause) - Consider the size of the incentive. Make sure the incentive is large enough for people to take it seriously but not so large that you get diminishing returns by applying it - Closely pair the incentive and the behavior. Apply the incentive at the time the behavior occurs. For example, charge for disposable plastic bags when at the checkout counter. This will draw attention to the undesirable behavior and incentivize people to alter it (e.g., in the UK, the 5p/7 cent USD plastic bag charge reduced bag use by 83%) - Make the incentive visible. Be sure to draw attention to the incentive so that people know it exists. This can easily be taken for granted and result in suboptimal outcomes - Be cautious about removing incentives. If you introduce an incentive, such as user fees, ensure that you can maintain the incentive over time. If you remove the incentive in the future, the positive results that you see from the incentive may disappear because the extrinsic motivation to engage in the behavior has been removed To read more about the use of incentives, consider purchasing the newest edition of Dr. Doug McKenzie-Mohr’s book, Fostering Sustainable Behavior here. Also, check out Rare’s Behavioral Science Toolkit for Practitioners (Section 3.1) here.
