Present bias seems to be a common challenge contributing to global health and environmental problems (e.g., antibiotic over-prescribing leading to antibiotic resistance, energy consumption and climate change, sugar intake and obesity). Have you had (or heard of) success in using nudging to help address these issues or are they too complex to be addressed by nudging?
Thanks so much for sharing Inka Eberhardt! I was lucky enough to meet with Michael Hallsworth to discuss his antibotic prescribing nudging intervention in the UK. In fact we were inspired by his work and have just completed two randomized controlled trials using peer comparison/social norm feedback to high antibotic prescribers in Ontario, Canada.
Perhaps what I should have asked is if you or others are aware of nudging interventions that specifically address the present bias aspect of these issues? E.g. making potential future events more salient or reducing discounting of temporally distant events?
Hunt Allcott (2011) shows that providing households with statistics on their neighbours' energy use, this decreases their energy use (especially for high-consumers; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272711000478). Jachimowicz et al (2018) found that especially second-order normative beliefs(so the belief that your community thinks that saving energy helps the environment) are the driver of these result (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0434-0?report=reader). Andor et al (2020) have found that the effect is a lot lower in Germany (where average household energy consumption is lower than in the US); https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069620300747?casa_token=Vlws2BsBvLQAAAAA:szD88F2NxcxnsUF9LWxEl2LLrBfR-kRsFQqspiQkofGDB7pDD4LgOEE_WuCvFNCwEEmXv1g).