Social encouragement is treated as an effective tool: tell someone that many people around them already do something, and they will tend to join. At an American company, letters went to employees making it easier to join a retirement plan, and some of the letters also carried that figure. What happened?
Fewer people joined. Among employees who were saving nothing at all in the , the addition dropped enrollment from 9.9% to 6.3%. The authors suggest can discourage: someone who sees that others have already reached a hard goal does not necessarily imitate them. In other groups no clear average effect appeared.
The company offered employees a simple way to join or increase a contribution. Only some of them also received a figure on the enrollment rate of . This was : real letters, real decisions.
In the group that had not been participating and whose default contribution rate was zero, the social information reduced enrollment by about a third relative to the comparison group.
The data support the possibility of discouragement at the size of the gap, and they do not read minds: other feelings about colleagues may have played a part too.
No significant average response of that strength appeared across all the subgroups. So it does not follow that peer messages are always harmful or always useful.
wat. When employees who were saving nothing saw how much their colleagues already saved, fewer of them joined the pension plan.
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A social message meant to prompt action can push away exactly the people who need the help.
How do we know?
A field experiment at a large company compared almost identical enrollment letters, with and without information about peers of the same age, and measured actual enrollment.
What is still unknown
The work ran at one workplace and in an American pension plan; the effect is no fixed rule about every kind of social comparison.
Learn something?
Where to next
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