- Project report
Using behaviorally informed communication to drive civic engagement
Busara
- April 20, 2018
- 6:37 am
SECTOR
PROJECT TYPE
DOI
Location
BEHAVIORAL THEME
OVERVIEW
How can communication drive individuals to engage with issues affecting their communities?
Active engagement in community issues is a critical driver of accountable political systems. Civic engagement can be measured through a number of ways: direct political participation such as voting, expressing political opinion through rallies and signing petitions, or attending community meetings and other venues of discussion.
THEMATIC AREAS
Based on our previous research, we saw that intrinsic self–efficacy was more effective than extrinsic motivation in driving civic engagement. In this study, we wanted to expand our set of interventions to include additional nudges that could improve participation. More specifically, we wanted to look at whether a descriptive norm prime could perform as effectively as a self–efficacy prompt in motivating civic participation.
We compared these two interventions against no prompt (control), as well as a basic informational prompt employed by many activitist groups.