Can “nudging” play a role to promote pro-environmental behaviour?

Abstract

Rising environmental issues are now a global concern, in part due to human behaviour which is generally not environmentally friendly in doing daily living activities such as littering, excessive vehicle use, wasteful resources consumption, combustion of fossil fuel, consume non-recyclable product and consume non-organic product. An emerged behavioural change approach known as “nudging” offers an insight to promote pro-environmental behaviour amongst people by influencing people's decisions with choice architecture. This paper aims to review the status quo of pro-environmental context in nudging for behaviour change and the nudging techniques that are available for selection to promote pro-environmental behaviour. PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) framework was adopted in this review. A total of 37 eligible articles were identified from acknowledged databases, Web of Science (WOS) and SCOPUS for inclusion of review. This review found that the majority of nudging studies show positive effects in nudging the targeted behaviour of people and demonstrate that the nudging technique has great potential to influence pro-environmental behaviour. Furthermore, this review presented seven types of nudging techniques (prompting, sizing, proximity, presentation, priming, labelling, functional design) which can be adopted for pro-environmental purposes. This paper provides an insight for pro-environmentalists and stakeholders into the usefulness of the nudging approach and how it can be applied in pro-environmental context. The concepts of implementation and recommendations for each nudging technique are described in this paper.