Promoting sustainable mobility through behavioral change: an online public good experiment using a junior high school student sample

Abstract

Following a social dilemma approach, this work aims to design and test a persuasive system that could potentially increase sustainable mobility behavior. To test the persuasive system, this work makes use of a relatively novel methodology consisting of a description of an urban commuting situation as a public good game. The persuasive system takes into account the heterogeneity in preferences of the participants to increase its persuasive power towards more cooperative behavior in the public good game. To achieve this, an exploratory study was done to find the best persuasive system design that potentially could be applied in an online economic experiment. The public good game seeks to mirror the urban mobility social dilemma by modeling a real-life commuting decision as closely as possible, where the sustainable mobility choice functions as a signal of the participants´ willingness to cooperate with each other. The effectiveness of the persuasive system was done within an online economic experiment, whose main section was the public good game. Results showed that my approach had some impact on motivating users on a personal level to change their behavior and make more cooperative choices in a social dilemma situation. The current findings provided strong evidence in support for the main hypothesis of the work: the persuasive system is effective in its goal to increase cooperation behavior in a social dilemma situation. Also, findings revealed strong evidence that an individual’s cooperation behavior is heavily influenced by individual beliefs. Assuming that the environment in which we live has an important impact on the way we live in society. Assuming this result, it is important to create an environment of trust among the population, if what we seek is to find an effective solution not only to the urban social dilemma but to other types of social dilemmas in society.