Social Tipping Games: Experimental Paradigms for Studying Consumer Movements

Žan Mlakar, Jan Willem Bolderdijk, Hans Risselada, Bob M. Fennis, Mengbin Ye, Lorenzo Zino and Ming Cao

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2024, vol. 9, issue 4, 427 - 440

Abstract: Consumer movements like Extinction Rebellion are being increasingly examined for their potential to change current consumption conventions and thus facilitate societal-level change. Past consumer research employs primarily qualitative methods to examine how such movements emerge, mobilize, and what strategies they employ. It is less clear though when these movements succeed in provoking enduring social change. We here introduce a collection of experimental paradigms that allow researchers to examine when and how consumer movements can provoke a change across a social network over time: social tipping paradigms grounded in game theory. Specifically, these paradigms help provide insight into the causal role of different interventions (e.g., consumer activists being identifiable or not) in boosting or buffering societal-level social tipping provoked by a movement. Our goal is to create an approachable review of existing paradigms and provide consumer researchers with a primer for employing these paradigms in their own research.

Date: 2024
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