Boosts are behavioural interventions that improve decisions by teaching people simple skills. In sustainability, the main barrier is often not willingness, but know-how. Drawing on new evidence, Yavor Paunov argues that boosts can build lasting competences, helping people make sustainable choices even after the policy intervention itself is removed.
Nudges and Boosts
For the longest time, behavioural interventions were understood as tools to guide people towards better outcomes by shaping their decision environment. Opt-outs, normative comparisons, reminders, and others have been enlisted to help people who already knew what is good for them, but struggled to act.
Sometimes, however, we simply do not know what is best for us, and even more so, how to get there. That is where boosts enter the picture.
Boosts are behavioural interventions which try to strengthen people’s own competences by teaching them a simple skill, a quick heuristic, or a new way of interpreting information. Examples include the use of fast and frugal decision trees, implementation intentions or providing energy efficient cooking recipes. Put simply, while nudges reshape the context of choice, boosts try to improve the chooser.
Boosts and the sustainability context
Nudges are often highly effective when the main obstacle is inattention, hassle, or procrastination. If people already know what to do, but fail to follow through, a well-designed nudge can be exactly the right tool. However, many sustainability-related decisions are not like that. Consumers may need to interpret complex energy efficiency information, calculate carbon footprints, or understand which household behaviours save energy. In such cases, the main bottleneck may not be motivation, but competence. On top of that, the rewards for behaving sustainably are often delayed and the benefits appear gradually over longer periods of time. Hence, one needs a certain degree of persistence to achieve meaningful sustainable outcomes.
For years, one of the main arguments for boosts was that they could do something nudges often cannot: build competences that persist after the intervention is gone. That was an attractive idea, especially for those worried that behavioural policy can become infantilising if it repeatedly steers people without helping them understand what they are doing (Bovens, 2008). However, the competence claim remained easier to defend in theory than to demonstrate in practice.
New evidence from two experiments suggests that this is beginning to change.
What we found in household energy use
In a longitudinal field study (under review) with colleagues from the Stockholm Sustainable Behavioral Interventions Group, we compared a standard choice architecture with a boost-type intervention in the context of household electricity use. The nudge relied on descriptive and injunctive normative feedback, while the boost provided short, device-specific energy-saving tips.
On average, both interventions appeared highly effective. A more detailed look revealed that the effects were driven by participants with high pre-treatment consumption, where only the boosted treatment significantly reduced their electricity consumption. In other words, the competence-building intervention worked where the need for improvement was greatest. Moreover, only the boost improved people’s domestic energy-saving competence. That was important in itself, because as it suggested the boost did not just change behaviour; it changed what participants knew how to do.
Table 1: Findings from a longitudinal field study on energy saving
| What we looked at | Nudge: normative feedback | Boost: practical energy-saving tips | Summary |
| Electricity use among participants with low pre-treatment consumption | −0.18 kWh/week Not significant | +0.42 kWh/week Not significant | Neither intervention meaningfully changed behaviour among participants who were already using relatively little electricity |
| Electricity use among participants with high pre-treatment consumption | −3.12 kWh/week p = 0.09 | −3.97 kWh/week p = 0.01 | The clearest savings came from high-consuming households, and only the boost produced a statistically reliable reduction in this group |
| Domestic energy-saving competence | +1.11 competence points Not significant | +1.98 competence points p = .05 | Only the boost measurably improved what participants knew how to do to save energy at home |
While encouraging, the field evidence is still limited. The boost did not decisively outperform the nudge over time, and sustaining engagement in real-life settings remained difficult. Still, the findings have the potential to move the effect longevity debate forward: the idea that boosts can build usable competence is no longer only a philosophical claim.
What we found in online consumer choice
A second study showed the mechanism more clearly. A UK representative sample of participants had to identify the most energy-efficient products using EU energy labels an online shopping experiment. In this setting, the effectiveness of a short video tutorial (boost) was compared against default selections (most efficient products pre-selected) and vicarious choice framing (choosing for best friend). The boosted participants steadily outperformed everyone else. More importantly, the effect was fully mediated by their competence (see Figure 1). The effect persisted after the intervention was removed. Participants continued to perform better in subsequent decisions, which is consistent with a simple but important point: skills can carry over. When policy helps people learn, that learning may travel beyond the original intervention.
Figure 1: Effect of video boost on energy-efficient choices through competence
Note: Random assignment to the video boost is used as an instrument for competence in interpreting EU energy-label information.
Why competence matters for policy
If a boost works by building competence, then its value is not limited to one immediate behavioural outcome. Competences can make effects more durable, reducing the need for repeated interventions. Moreover, boosting can help answer a longstanding criticism of behavioural policy: that policy should not treat citizens as incapable of behaving well on their own.
That does not mean boosts are always better. It means they may be especially valuable in policy settings where people face similar decisions repeatedly, where misunderstanding is a central barrier, and where there is enough time and cognitive space for learning to occur.
Why nudges may still be the better tool in some cases
In a separate study on policy preferences, people tended to prefer nudge-type energy policies over boost-type ones. One reason was that boosts were often seen as requiring too much time, too much effort, and too much mental work. People may like the idea of learning in principle, but not every decision context gives them the bandwidth to do it. Such findings highlight a limit of boosts – where resources such as time and effort are scarce, a low-friction nudge may be more acceptable and more effective overall.
The policy takeaway
It is still early days, and the evidence base remains limited. But one point is becoming clearer: boosts matter not because they are superior to nudges, but because they can do something different – they furnish people with the ability to maintain beneficial behaviours in the long run.
As a policymaker, if your problem is short-term friction, distraction, or inertia, nudges may be the right choice. But if the bottleneck is low literacy or missing practical know-how, boosts may offer something nudges might not: durable behavioural change.
The field work and consumer choice studies are currently under review. To keep pace with current research, please visit the homepage of the research team here.
Yavor Paunov is a Lecturer at the University of Mannheim in Germany, and a researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His main research interests are in behavioral economics, competence enhancement, and transparent policymaking. He is also keen on playing D&D and singing.