I nudge myself: Exploring ‘self‐nudging’ strategies to drive sustainable consumption behaviour

Abstract

AbstractFailure to translate intentions into actual behaviour is known in many areas of human action. The intention to consume more sustainable is no exception and often fails to be translated into behaviour. Behavioural research emphasized the use of nudges as one of the remedies to ensure that most of the people's daily choices on what to buy or what to eat end up being in their best interest. The behavioural economics literature usually focusses on interventions supporting automatic and unconscious processes, mostly being the result of cognitive shortcuts produced by System 1 (e.g., by setting better default options or making existing contexts more intuitive and easy to handle). However, this begs the question, what consumers themselves can do to ensure a consumption behaviour that is more in line with their pro‐environmental intentions? This article explores a possible ‘self‐nudging’ strategy of consumers signing up for an organic box scheme subscription, whereby they change a large number of small daily choices to a larger decision on exclusively getting organic groceries delivered to their doorstep. It does so based on qualitative in‐depth interviews with 10 customers of such an organic box scheme. The analysis reveals that signing up for the subscription scheme indeed means that low‐involvement decisions in regular supermarkets are replaced by a high‐involvement decision on subscribing to an organic box scheme. In this context of the organic box scheme, the self‐nudging phenomenon is in fact the active choice of consumers to set their default consumption option to ‘organic’ in the long run.