Data Donations and Digital Nudges for Sustainable Behavior Change

Project description

The project DataDonations4SustainableChange addresses the overarching question of how awareness and willingness to donate data can be promoted by means of digital nudges in order to achieve sustainable behavioral changes in the areas of environment and health. With the creation of new legal frameworks, citizens‘ rights to access their data have been strengthened considerably in recent years. This makes it much easier for individuals to donate their data, thus enabling large-scale data donations by the general population. The spread of digital technologies into various domains of people’s life is thereby creating a plethora of promising application contexts for data donation to foster the common good, particularly in the context of complex challenges in the areas of health and the environment.

Despite these efforts, there are significant challenges with respect to mobilization, motivation, and value creation to establish data donation as a common and effective form of active citizen participation. The research project investigates what role digital nudges can play to address these challenges. In particular, the impact and interdependencies of digital nudges across the different stages of the data donation process will be investigated. Thereby, nudges are understood as changes in decision-making processes that can influence people’s behavior without resorting to prohibitions or altered economic incentives. Digitalization offers new opportunities for the personalized and dynamic design of nudges, which will be anlayzed within the project from the perspectives of communication science, information systems and behavioral economics.

DataDonations4SustainableChange thus provides insights and recommendations on data donations as a means of active citizen participation in solving societally pressing challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity, or for early detection, prevention, and mitigation of serious diseases. Based on empirical findings, the project aims to demonstrate the actual potential of data donations, but also their limitations in different application contexts. Moreoever, the project results will provide a theoretically groundend and empirically informed basis to derive recommendations on how to design and develop an effective legal framework for data donations.

Project team