TY - JOUR
T1 - Designing information provision to serve as a reminder of altruistic benefits
T2 - A case study of the risks of air pollution caused by industrialization
AU - Komatsu, Hidenori
AU - Kubota, Hiromi
AU - Tanaka, Nobuyuki
AU - Ohashi, Hirotada
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) KAKENHI Grant Number 18K18241. https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/ grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-18K18241/ The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Komatsu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2020/1/1
Y1 - 2020/1/1
N2 - A well-known phenomenon is that humans perceive risks to threaten future generations as more dangerous in many cases. However, this tendency could be changed depending on certain conditions and could potentially be explained by the evolution of altruism. Our multi-agent simulation model, which was constructed to identify attributes contributing to subjective assessment of a risk source based on kin selection theory, showed that support from relatives can affect the agents’ subjective risk assessment. We utilize this insight, which has never been explored in the context of nudge, to show that real-world messages reminding respondents that they are supported by their relatives can moderate the perception of a risk source as extremely dangerous. A randomized control trial based on an internet questionnaire survey was conducted to identify the intervention effect of such messages, using air pollution caused by industrialization as the risk source for the case study. Our analysis suggests that messages moderate extreme attitudes. Presentation of additional visual information can boost the sense of familial support and increase the effect of a message compared with a message comprising only textual information. The attributes and personality traits of the respondents who are responsive to the intervention message are also discussed.
AB - A well-known phenomenon is that humans perceive risks to threaten future generations as more dangerous in many cases. However, this tendency could be changed depending on certain conditions and could potentially be explained by the evolution of altruism. Our multi-agent simulation model, which was constructed to identify attributes contributing to subjective assessment of a risk source based on kin selection theory, showed that support from relatives can affect the agents’ subjective risk assessment. We utilize this insight, which has never been explored in the context of nudge, to show that real-world messages reminding respondents that they are supported by their relatives can moderate the perception of a risk source as extremely dangerous. A randomized control trial based on an internet questionnaire survey was conducted to identify the intervention effect of such messages, using air pollution caused by industrialization as the risk source for the case study. Our analysis suggests that messages moderate extreme attitudes. Presentation of additional visual information can boost the sense of familial support and increase the effect of a message compared with a message comprising only textual information. The attributes and personality traits of the respondents who are responsive to the intervention message are also discussed.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0227024
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0227024
M3 - Article
C2 - 31945069
AN - SCOPUS:85078006264
VL - 15
JO - PLoS One
JF - PLoS One
SN - 1932-6203
IS - 1
M1 - e0227024
ER -