Winkler-Schor Sophia, Brauer Markus
Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2024 May 20:17456916241247152. doi: 10.1177/17456916241247152.
Financial incentives are widely used to get people to adopt desirable behaviors. Many small landholders in developing countries, for example, receive multiyear payments to engage in conservation behaviors, and the hope is that they will continue to engage in these behaviors after the program ends. Although effective in the short term, financial incentives rarely lead to long-term behavior change because program participants tend to revert to their initial behaviors soon after the payments stop. In this article, we propose that four psychological constructs can be leveraged to increase the long-term effectiveness of financial-incentive programs: motivation, habit formation, social norms, and recursive processes. We review successful and unsuccessful behavior-change initiatives involving financial incentives in several domains: public health, education, sustainability, and conservation. We make concrete recommendations on how to implement the four above-mentioned constructs in field settings. Finally, we identify unresolved issues that future research might want to address to advance knowledge, promote theory development, and understand the psychological mechanisms that can be used to improve the effectiveness of incentive programs in the real world.
经济激励措施被广泛用于促使人们采取理想行为。例如，发展中国家的许多小土地所有者会获得多年期付款以参与保护行为，人们希望他们在项目结束后仍会继续采取这些行为。尽管经济激励措施在短期内有效，但很少能导致长期行为改变，因为项目参与者往往在付款停止后不久就会恢复到初始行为。在本文中，我们提出可以利用四种心理结构来提高经济激励计划的长期有效性：动机、习惯养成、社会规范和递归过程。我们回顾了在公共卫生、教育、可持续性和保护等多个领域中涉及经济激励措施的成功和失败的行为改变倡议。我们就如何在实地环境中实施上述四种结构提出了具体建议。最后，我们确定了一些未解决的问题，未来的研究可能希望解决这些问题，以推进知识、促进理论发展，并理解可用于提高现实世界中激励计划有效性的心理机制。
