By now, we recognise nudges as a tool that helps us lead people towards socially desired behaviours, but… what happens when these nudges don’t work the way we want them to and the results turn out to be negative? i.e., when people are accidentally led to make a non-desirable action like increasing their sugar intake instead of reducing it.
If the nudges we plan are not properly designed and implemented, there is a big risk that those nudges may actually backfire on us. This tends to happen in social-media campaigns, where the messages that we try to communicate are not properly embraced by our audience. To understand this we must differentiate the circumstances under which the descriptive norms (what people usually do) and the injunctive norms (what people usually approve or disapprove) work.
If the nudges we plan are not properly designed and implemented, there is a big risk that those nudges may actually backfire on us. This tends to happen in social-media campaigns, where the messages that we try to communicate are not properly embraced by our audience. To understand this we must differentiate the circumstances under which the descriptive norms (what people usually do) and the injunctive norms (what people usually approve or disapprove) work.