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Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved March 18, 2016 (received for review December 16, 2015)
Significance
Reputational concern is one reason people perform behaviors that are good for society but have little benefit for individuals (e.g., energy efficiency, donation, recycling, voting). In order for a behavior to influence reputations, it must be observable. However, many strategies for encouraging these behaviors involve communicating privately and impersonally (e.g., mail, email, social media) with little or no observability. We report a large-scale field experiment (N = 770,946) examining a technique for harnessing the benefits of observability when encouraging these behaviors privately. Get-out-the-vote letters become substantially more effective when they say, “We may call you after the election to ask about your voting experience.” This technique can be widely used to encourage society-benefiting behaviors.
Abstract
People contribute more to public goods when their contributions are made more observable to others. We report an intervention that subtly increases the observability of public goods contributions when people are solicited privately and impersonally (e.g., mail, email, social media). This intervention is tested in a large-scale field experiment (n = 770,946) in which people are encouraged to vote through get-out-the-vote letters. We vary whether the letters include the message, “We may call you after the election to ask about your voting experience.” Increasing the perceived observability of whether people vote by including that message increased the impact of the get-out-the-vote letters by more than the entire effect of a typical get-out-the-vote letter. This technique for increasing perceived observability can be replicated whenever public goods solicitations are made in private.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: Todd_Rogers{at}hks.harvard.edu.
Author contributions: T.R. and J.T. designed research; T.R. and J.T. performed research; T.R. and J.T. analyzed data; and T.R., J.T., and E.Y. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: The data and analysis code have been deposited in the Open Science Framework’s archive, https://osf.io/thxj5.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1524899113/-/DCSupplemental.
Potential follow-up increases voter turnout
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