Highlighting Inaction Versus Action to Motivate Desirable Consumer Behaviors

Abstract

People benefit from behaviors such as eating healthy food, exercising, ­recycling, and consuming sustainably. Motivating people to engage in desirable behaviors is hard, and many strategies to help people have a healthier and more sustainable lifestyle fail. This paper examines how messages describing these behaviors as current inaction (i.e., what people are not doing) versus current action (i.e., what people are doing) motivate people to engage in the behavior. In a series of studies, we show that messages suggesting current inaction (vs. action) are more motivating. This effect occurs because current inaction messages provide direct information on what people can do for their goals, which increases their belief that they are capable of achieving these goals (e.g., have a healthier lifestyle, become more sustainable). Our conceptualization and findings have implications for societal wellbeing, advertisers, and public policymakers trying to create positive change in people’s behavior.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.