Resistance: how to encourage uptake of new innovations 

What are the reas­ons why people adopt or reject an innov­a­tion? Can we encour­age people to fol­low a spe­cif­ic beha­viour rather than one that is adop­ted “nat­ur­ally”? This is the research top­ic of Cécile Chamaret, lec­turer at École Poly­tech­nique (IP Par­is). She is inter­ested in the mech­an­isms of res­ist­ance to innov­a­tion by indi­vidu­als, but also by lar­ger scale organ­isa­tions such as loc­al authorities. 

Cécile Chamaret has pub­lished a study on the reas­ons why nearly 1,000 muni­cip­al­it­ies in France refused, under pres­sure from their con­stitu­ents, to replace con­ven­tion­al elec­tri­city metres with Linky “smart” metres. The lat­ter are designed to be more effi­cient and provide new ser­vices such as remote activ­a­tion and daily mon­it­or­ing of energy con­sump­tion. “We looked in detail at the reas­ons behind nearly 450 decrees issued by muni­cip­al­it­ies to pro­hib­it the install­a­tion of these new metres,” explains the researcher.

Some town coun­cils put for­ward the risk of data pir­acy (and there­fore of non-respect pri­vacy), some insisted on the eco­nom­ic risk such as high­er bills, and oth­ers feared the phys­ic­al effects on con­sumers’ health, linked to the waves eman­at­ing from these metres. Finally, eco­lo­gic­al argu­ments were also put for­ward such as what is the need to replace 50 mil­lion metres, which are still func­tion­al and expec­ted to last 50 years, with metres with a life span of 15 years? And what’s more, without know­ing what was going to be done with the old metres!

As Cécile Chamaret points out, if people or pub­lic author­it­ies per­ceive risks linked to an innov­a­tion, how­ever small, then the phe­nom­ena of res­ist­ance and oppos­i­tion will be very sig­ni­fic­ant. Because the vari­ous risks asso­ci­ated with the new metres were not con­sidered, well-foun­ded or not, « pos­it­ive » com­mu­nic­a­tion efforts by the pub­lic energy com­pany installing them, Ene­dis, did not con­vince the recal­cit­rant – argu­ments which included free install­a­tion the eco­lo­gic­al bene­fits. “Adopt­ing a new product rep­res­ents fin­an­cial costs for the indi­vidu­al, but also the psy­cho­lo­gic­al costs of learn­ing and giv­ing up the pre­vi­ous product”, she points out.

The dish­wash­er is a good example. Described as a dis­rupt­ive innov­a­tion, because it provided a ser­vice that did not exist before its inven­tion, it nev­er­the­less had a hard time gain­ing accept­ance. At first, people only saw the dis­ad­vant­ages! It was expens­ive, required a lot of hand­ling and adap­ted products (rins­ing liquid, salts, spe­cif­ic dish­wash­ing products); it made noise, took up space, and moreover it endangered the social role of the house­wife! Faced with the out­cry, man­u­fac­tur­ers quickly changed their strategy, and rather than tar­get­ing private indi­vidu­als, they sold dish­wash­ers to kit­chen design­ers, who were respons­ible for intro­du­cing them into the daily lives of private individuals… 

“Con­trary to what you might think, people tend to over­value what they have and over­es­tim­ate the losses rather than the gains that a new product is likely to bring them,” adds Cécile Chamaret. If your innov­a­tion is just a little bet­ter than what already exists, it is unlikely to be adop­ted. It’s a bal­an­cing act between a cost and a bene­fit: what will this new product bring and vice versa?

If your innov­a­tion is just a little bit bet­ter than what already exists, it is unlikely to be adopted.

Today, Cécile Chamaret is work­ing on a new research pro­gramme on sobri­ety to bet­ter under­stand an indi­vidu­al’s motiv­a­tions for chan­ging or not chan­ging their beha­viour. She is also study­ing « dro­pouts », drivers who have adop­ted the elec­tric vehicle only to return to the intern­al com­bus­tion vehicle. In the United States, this rep­res­ents 20% of elec­tric vehicle buy­ers! This shows that innov­a­tion is nev­er easy… 

But it is always pos­sible to influ­ence con­sumer beha­viour so that they go for a par­tic­u­lar product, par­tic­u­larly through what are known as “nudges”. Étienne Bres­soud, deputy dir­ect­or gen­er­al of the BVA Nudge Unit, is the spe­cial­ist in France the nudge – incent­ives that can be visu­al or aud­it­ory, and that will lead an indi­vidu­al to opt for a beha­viour, or for a product, rather than another. 

To study the issue, Etienne Bres­soud uses beha­vi­our­al sci­ences (cog­nit­ive psy­cho­logy, social psy­cho­logy, neur­os­cience), which show that human beings are not as ration­al as we might think in their decisions and that they are greatly influ­enced by the phys­ic­al and social con­text in which they find themselves. 

For example, if you are with your col­leagues in a room where there is a free cof­fee machine and a small sign tells you to put 20 cents in a piggy bank when you have a cof­fee, you will cer­tainly put the 20 cents if your col­leagues are present, but if you are alone, you will tend to “for­get”. To check this, research­ers used a visu­al nudge: they stuck a poster above the cof­fee machine show­ing a pair of wide-open eyes fixed on the poten­tial cof­fee con­sumer. With the poster, the money donated was three times greater!

Richard Thaler and Cath­er­ine Steen are the two Amer­ic­an co-authors of the nudge concept, which they pub­lished in 2008. Hav­ing become an advisor to Dav­id Camer­on in Eng­land in 2010, Richard Thaler first used nudges in pub­lic policy to encour­age the Eng­lish to pay their taxes more quickly, by send­ing out a gen­er­al­ised let­ter stat­ing that 9 out of 10 people paid their taxes as soon as they received their tax notice. To com­ply with this social norm, more Eng­lish people paid their taxes quickly! In France, from 2013 onwards, nudges have also been used by the tax author­it­ies to encour­age more people to switch from paper to elec­tron­ic declarations. 

Nudges help people move from inten­tion to action.

“Finally, the nudge allows us to help people move from inten­tion to action,” says Étienne Bres­soud. It’s not about get­ting them to adopt beha­viours that they don’t want to do. Applied to con­sump­tion, nudge is not going to make a cus­tom­er buy a product he or she does­n’t want. But nudge can guide cer­tain pur­chas­ing behaviour. 

For example, man­u­fac­tur­ers have developed com­pressed deodor­ant bottles that have exactly the same con­tent as tra­di­tion­al bottles but are more envir­on­ment­ally friendly (same amount of product trans­por­ted with few­er trucks, less space on the shelves, etc.). “But no mat­ter how much you explain to the con­sumer that they have the same con­tent in a clas­sic deodor­ant as in a com­pressed deodor­ant, they will have the impres­sion that they are pay­ing the same price for a less inter­est­ing product, » explains Etienne Bres­soud. “Because in the super­mar­ket aisle, the indi­vidu­al is in an almost auto­mat­ic, non-reflect­ive pur­chas­ing sys­tem. The nudge in this case will con­sist of modi­fy­ing the phys­ic­al envir­on­ment of the con­sumer, by play­ing on the shelf lay­out: by pla­cing the small deodor­ant on a wedge, it will be at the same height as the large one, so that the con­sumer will more eas­ily buy the com­pressed deodorant.”

Can the nudge be used to manip­u­late indi­vidu­als? “If the com­pany uses nudges for its own pur­poses at the expense of the con­sumer, this is called the dark nudge,” says Etienne Bres­soud. For example, many com­pan­ies use default choices (pre-ticked boxes, for example) in mail­ings sent online to their cus­tom­ers to force them into their data­bases and then force them to receive pro­mo­tion­al offers, some­times daily. This meth­od of choice by default is so power­ful that the legis­lat­or has seized upon it and pro­hib­ited its use to pro­tect per­son­al data. “But if I explain the reas­ons why I have set up a par­tic­u­lar nudge and the per­son agrees with the motives (to encour­age the pur­chase of more eco­lo­gic­al products, for example), then we are very far from a purely com­mer­cial approach,” argues Étienne Bressoud. 

Depend­ing on the indi­vidu­al and the type of nudge, the effect­ive­ness will be more or less import­ant, but it is pos­sible to obtain up to 20 to 30% of beha­vi­our­al changes in a giv­en population.

Marina Julienne