The Effectiveness of Nudging in Commercial Settings and Impact on User Trust

Abstract

Persuasive technologies and nudging are increasingly used to shape user behaviors in applications ranging from health and the environment to business. A thorough understanding of the effectiveness of nudges across different contexts and whether they affect user perception of a system is still lacking. We report the results of a controlled, quantitative study with 20 participants which focused on testing the effectiveness of three different nudges in an e-commerce environment and whether their use has an impact on participants' trust. We found that products nudged via an anchoring effect were more frequently "bought" by participants, and that while participants deemed a store version implementing nudges and one which did not to be equally trustworthy, they perceived the former as technically inferior. Overall we found the effects of nudging to be less dominant than reported in previous studies.