Encouraging Civic Behaviour: A Randomised Controlled Trial of Interventions to Influence Organ Donor Registration

1 st Draft and very preliminary findings, please treat with caution! Corrine Wales for their helpful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank those who took part in the study, and the students at the University of Southampton who helped us conduct the experiments. Any errors or omissions are entirely the authors'. Influencing citizens in order to help resolve social dilemmas and to encourage civic behaviour is a core aspect of the work of modern government. Social dilemmas occur where there are conflicts of interest between individuals and society more broadly (Van Vugt et al 2000). Civic behaviour refers to 'action that shows regard for others; reflects both wisdom and responsibility in its employment and…is oriented toward the collective good' (Cotterill et al, 2009: 3). Consideration for the environment, paying taxes, and looking after one's own health are just a few areas where individual behaviour has a civic dimension, since individual actions or inactions have consequences for wider society. They are also social dilemmas, with the needs and desires of individuals often in conflict with those of society as a whole. In such areas governments are challenged to find ways of encouraging civic behaviour and there have been recent debates about the most effective methods for doing this (John et al. 2009). Much of the recent discussion of public policy interventions to influence citizen behaviour has centred around the use of policy tools which exploit principles from behavioural economics. These policy tools have gained popularity in the UK and elsewhere partly under the influence of arguments put forward by Thaler and Sunstein in their book Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). Several recent policy papers and think tank publications have also made the case for using such approaches While there is fairly robust science behind the principles underlying behavioural economics itself, there is less evidence of how well these principles stand up in empirical terms when they are translated into policy designs in the area of civic behaviour. There is also little evidence of how these approaches compare to other methods for generating civic behaviour. In particular, there is another school of thought which suggests an alternative to the largely top-down 'nudging' approach to behavioural change in citizens. The alternative put forward by John et al (2009) has a more bottom-up orientation and involves governments providing citizens with opportunities collectively to deliberate and 'think' their own way through to …