What Happens When Payments End? Fostering Long-Term Behavior Change With Financial Incentives.

Financial incentives are widely used to get people to adopt desirable behaviors. Many small landholders in developing countries, for example, receive multiyear payments to engage in conservation behaviors, and the hope is that they will continue to engage in these behaviors after the program ends. Although effective in the short term, financial incentives rarely lead to long-term behavior change because program participants tend to revert to their initial behaviors soon after the payments stop. In this article, we propose that four psychological constructs can be leveraged to increase the long-term effectiveness of financial-incentive programs: motivation, habit formation, social norms, and recursive processes. We review successful and unsuccessful behavior-change initiatives involving financial incentives in several domains: public health, education, sustainability, and conservation. We make concrete recommendations on how to implement the four above-mentioned constructs in field settings. Finally, we identify unresolved issues that future research might want to address to advance knowledge, promote theory development, and understand the psychological mechanisms that can be used to improve the effectiveness of incentive programs in the real world.

Determining the role of eudaimonic values in conservation behavior.

Values are the fundamental reasons why people engage in conservation behaviors. Recent research has called for a more refined approach to studying values in a way that accounts for the concept of eudaimonia. However, the empirical properties for a eudaimonic value scale have not been tested given that previous investigations have remained at the theoretical level. Drawing from an on-site survey of visitors to Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska, we used a latent profile analysis used a latent profile analysis to better understand the expression of multiple values of nature. Specifically, we segmented respondents by their value orientations with a particular focus on evaluating eudaimonic and hedonic values, alongside the established dimensions of altruistic, biospheric, and egoistic values. We identified 4 distinct subgroups defined by value orientations and validated these subgroups based on measures of conservation behavior and sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., age). These results indicated campaign messaging should harness a combination of eudaimonic, biospheric, and altruistic values to propel individual behavior. We also observed that hedonic and egoistic values defined how people related to nature and played a role, albeit less pronounced, in motivating them to take action. Our study is one of the first efforts to operationalize eudaimonia in a conservation context; thus, we have opened a new avenue for protected-area managers to align their strategies with the underlying values of stakeholders.

Determinación del Papel de los Valores Eudaimónicos en el Comportamiento de Conservación Resumen Los valores son las razones fundamentales por las cuales las personas participan en los comportamientos de conservación. Las investigaciones recientes piden una estrategia más refinada para estudiar los valores de una manera que consideren el concepto de eudaimonia. Sin embargo, las investigaciones han sido a nivel teórico, así que las propiedades empíricas para una escala de valores eudaimónicos no han sido probados a fondo. Usamos un análisis de perfil latente basado en una encuesta a visitantes realizada in situ en el Parque y Reserva Nacional Denali, Alaska para explorar cómo se expresaron los valores múltiples. Después separamos a los respondientes según la orientación de los valores con un foco particular sobre la medición de las nuevas dimensiones de los valores eudaimónicos y hedonistas junto con las dimensiones establecidas de los valores altruistas, bioesféricos y egoístas. Identificamos cuatro subgrupos distintos definidos por estas orientaciones de los valores y luego los validamos con base en las medidas del comportamiento de conservación y las características sociodemográficas (p. ej.: la edad). Estos resultados indicaron que los mensajes emitidos durante una campaña deberían sacar partido de una combinación de valores eudaimónicos, bioesféricos y altruistas para impulsar el comportamiento individual. También observamos que los valores hedonistas y egoístas definieron la forma en que las personas se relacionan con la naturaleza y que desempeñan un papel, aunque menos pronunciado, en motivarlos para actuar. Nuestro estudio es uno de los primeros esfuerzos por poner en práctica la eudaimonia en un contexto de conservación; así, hemos abierto una nueva vía para los administradores de las áreas protegidas para alinear sus estrategias con los valores subyacentes de los actores.