Abstract
AbstractNudging has become a well-known policy practice. Recently, ‘boosting’ has been suggested as an alternative to nudging. In contrast to nudges, boosts aim to empower individuals to exert their own agency to make decisions. This article is one of the first to compare a nudging and a boosting intervention, and it does so in a critical field setting: hand hygiene compliance of hospital nurses. During a 4-week quasi-experiment, we tested the effect of a reframing nudge and a risk literacy boost on hand hygiene compliance in three hospital wards. The results show that nudging and boosting were both effective interventions to improve hand hygiene compliance. A tentative finding is that, while the nudge had a stronger immediate effect, the boost effect remained stable for a week, even after the removal of the intervention. We conclude that, besides nudging, researchers and policymakers may consider boosting when they seek to implement or test behavioral interventions in domains such as healthcare.
Highlights
Nudging has become an increasingly accepted and successful policy instrument to steer the behavior of citizens and public professionals
We explore boosting as an approach that encourages public professionals to change their behavior by exerting their own agency
We show that nudges and boosts are both effective in a highly relevant field setting
Summary
Nudging has become an increasingly accepted and successful policy instrument to steer the behavior of citizens and public professionals. Some raise moral objections, such as the reduced individual autonomy (e.g., Wilkinson, 2013), while others emphasize the short-term duration of nudges: the effect of a nudge may whither, and over time, existing cognitive biases may prevail again (Hertwig, 2017)
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