Social comparison nudges, known to bring about behavioral change, rely on providing information to agents about other agents' decisions or expectations regarding specific actions. Although the procedure consists in transmitting true information, it classically implies a reduction of the transmitted reality: the information provided about others is an average, a proportion, a percentile. What would happen if, instead, full information were shared on what all others do (as nudged agents might legitimately expect), and what would this tell us about how nudges actually work? We assume that cognitive biases occur unintentionally when the information provided is incomplete. By mobilizing Akerlof's (1997) model of social distance, accurately describing polarization effects in social decision-making, we show how the nudge-information conveyed can then act as a decoy: effective in triggering behavioral change, but giving rise to renewed ethical considerations. We illustrate our conjectures with a randomized controlled trial in the context of pesticide use in agriculture in which winegrowers receiving full information about their co-workers' performances are compared with growers receiving the more conventional average performance. After showing that the two differ in their understanding of what others do, we show in the field that the latter nudge induces change unmet by the former.

中文翻译：

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社会比较助推：当我们被告知别人做什么时，实际上会发生什么？


众所周知，社会比较助推会带来行为改变，它依赖于向代理提供有关其他代理对特定行动的决定或期望的信息。尽管该过程包括传递真实信息，但它通常意味着对传输的现实的简化：提供的关于他人的信息是一个平均值、一个比例、一个百分位数。相反，如果共享有关所有其他代理所做的事情的完整信息（正如被轻推的代理人可能合法地期望的那样），会发生什么，这将告诉我们关于轻推的实际工作原理的什么信息？我们假设当提供的信息不完整时，认知偏差会无意中发生。通过调动 Akerlof （1997） 的社会距离模型，准确描述社会决策中的两极分化效应，我们展示了所传达的助推信息如何充当诱饵：有效地触发行为改变，但引发新的道德考虑。我们用一项在农业中使用农药的背景下的随机对照试验来说明我们的猜想，在该试验中，将获得有关其同事表现的完整信息的葡萄种植者与接受更常规平均表现的种植者进行了比较。在证明两者对他人行为的理解不同之后，我们在该领域表明，后者的推动会引起前者无法满足的变化。