Societal Well-Being: Embedding Nudges in Sustainable Cultural Practices

This study provides a behavior-analytic framework for a previous nudging experiment from Kallbekken and Sælen (Economics Letters 119(3), 325–327, 2013). We are concerned with achieving societal well-being from a selection-of-cultures perspective, and we call for increasing synergies between the 2 fields. The original experiment achieved a 20% reduction in food waste among restaurant customers by implementing 2 independent nudges: reducing plate size and socially approving multiple servings. We use this experiment as an example to introduce an analysis of the social contingencies (metacontingencies) responsible for not only establishing but also maintaining sustainable behavioral repertoires. We show how reducing food waste can be a simple, economic, effective example of a behavioral intervention when programmed with contingencies of cooperation. Furthermore, we generalize our model to social architectures that create and sustain cultural practices. Namely, our model addresses the long-term effects of nudging as a result of cooperation between stakeholders and how these effects are maintained by feedback loops. Whereas the aggregate effect of individual choice behavior can affect food consumption significantly, it may not suffice to change an enduring cultural practice. We argue that a behavior-analytic approach in studying complex systems informs nudging applications at the policy-making level.