Disgust, Shame, and Soapy Water: Tests of Novel Interventions to Promote Safe Water and Hygiene

Raymond Guiteras, David Levine, Stephen P. Luby, Thomas H. Polley, Kaniz Khatun-e-Jannat and Leanne Unicomb

Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 2016, vol. 3, issue 2, 321 - 359

Abstract: Lack of access to clean water is among the most pressing environmental problems in developing countries, where diarrheal disease kills nearly 700,000 children per year. While inexpensive and effective practices such as chlorination and hand washing with soap exist, efforts to motivate their use by emphasizing health benefits have seen only limited success. This paper measures the effect of messages appealing to negative emotions (disgust at consumption of human feces) and social pressure (shame at being seen consuming human feces) on hand-washing behavior and use of and willingness to pay for water chlorination among residents of slum compounds in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Neither the traditional, health-based message nor the new disgust-and-shame message led to high levels of chlorination during a free trial, nor to high willingness to pay for the chlorine at the end of the free trial. Provision of low-cost hand-washing facilities did increase hand washing, although the effect size is modest.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/684161 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/684161 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jaerec:doi:10.1086/684161

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().