Puntiroli, Michael

2022-6-9, Puntiroli, Michael, Alavi, Sascha, Bezençon, Valéry, Kocher, Bruno

Billions of people worldwide experience vulnerability in different ways. States, nonprofit and even private organizations develop offers to support vulnerable individuals. It is however unclear how to best encourage such individuals to engage with these offers that are designed to help them. We conducted a field experiment study, in the form of a direct marketing campaign. A total of 9002 randomly selected unemployed people received one of six support messages by SMS, informing them about trainings that could help them find a new job. The support message was either a plain message plus a link to the courses (control), or communicated additional monetary or psychological value. We measured whether participants engaged with the offer. The results showed that all the support messages that communicated additional value generated less engagement compared to the plain control message. Moderation analyses using primary and district-level secondary data associated to vulnerability further highlighted that the level of vulnerability indeed enforces this tendency to mistrust value communicated in messages. The findings suggest that for vulnerable people a more defensive, careful, communication approach is required to foster engagement in well-intentioned offers.

2020-9-25, Puntiroli, Michael

Invited to give an annual talk on "Applied Sectors for Psychologists" aimed at inspiring psychology Masters students on how they can make use of their psychology knowledge to help solve concrete world problems as part of governmental projects or within business.

2019-12-16, Puntiroli, Michael

Invited to give an annual talk on "Applied Sectors for Psychologists" aimed at inspiring psychology Masters students on how they can make use of their psychology knowledge to help solve concrete world problems as part of governmental projects or within business.

2019-9-19, Puntiroli, Michael, Bezençon, Valéry

2022-4-26, Puntiroli, Michael, Moussaoui, Lisa S., Bezençon, Valéry

It is unclear whether knowledge about a customer’s current sustainable behaviours, such as their choice of lightbulbs or travel mode, allows us to predict the sustainable behaviours they will carry out in the future. We address this in a large longitudinal study (N = 2177) where participants provided self-reports on electricity-, heating- and mobility related consumption at two separate times, three years apart. The results highlighted a high level of temporal consistency, whereby carrying out one sustainable behaviour predicted consumers would be carrying out the same behaviour three years later. However, sustainable behaviours generally did not drive other different sustainable behaviours years later (i.e. no spillover). In fact, isolated instances of spillover emerged only between different kinds of mobility-related consumption among consumers with high environmental values. Overall, the findings indicate a high degree of consistency in sustainable behaviour even years apart, and limited spillover from one sustainable behaviour to another.

2020-9-1, Lagomarsino, Maria, Lemarié, Linda, Puntiroli, Michael

This paper sheds light on the reasons why conventional messages prove largely ineffective at fostering pro-environmental behaviors among individuals with high egoistic values. We conducted three experiments comparing the effectiveness of prevention-focused and promotion-focused messages at promoting pro-environmental behaviors. We found that egoistic individuals exposed to prevention-focused messages tended to perceive pro-environmental efforts as less worthy, compared to those exposed to promotion-focused messages. This effect, in turn, decreased their willingness to take environmental action. We also observed that the negative effect prevention-focused messages have on egoists is attributable to a defense mechanism. Egoistic people exposed to prevention-focused messages seem to deny the veracity of the message, which in turn decreases the perceived worthiness of the environmental effort and thus the intention to act. The findings highlight the best way to frame environmental communication to reach those who are least likely to adopt eco-responsible behavior, i.e., egoistic people.

2019-10-17, Puntiroli, Michael, Bezençon, Valéry, Pino, Giovanni, Lemarie, Linda

2021, Puntiroli, Michael

2020-6-6, Puntiroli, Michael, Bezençon, Valéry

Technological advancements spawn products that tend to be useful when placed in the appropriate hands. Here we investigated whether potential benefits of owning a feedback device were driven by individual differences in environmental values (i.e. biospherism), or whether the device alone is sufficient to reduce energy over time. We examined a total of 276 households, 138 equipped with a feedback device formed our treatment group, and 138 control households selected from a wider pool of households (+2000) based on their similarity to the treatment households, according to a statistical matching procedure. The results indicated that individuals with low biospheric values fail to decrease their electricity expenditure when paired with a feedback device. Conversely, highly biospheric individuals do engage in more pro-environmental behaviour when they receive feedback, but only when they have owned the device for about three years or more. We obtained additional insights, by focusing on differences within the treatment group that suggest, once again, that only highly biospheric individuals who owned the device for over three years successfully implement changes in the household. Overall, these results indicate that feedback devices such as smart meters can be important tools in achieving energy reductions only when paired with environmentally concerned individuals. Given the current trend towards increased feedback technology, policy implications for decision makers are discussed.

2019-10-1, Szinte, Martin, Puntiroli, Michael, Deubel, Heiner

When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are focused at the saccade target and its immediate vicinity. Here we show that this does not hold true when saccades are prepared toward a recently extinguished target. We obtained detailed maps of orientation sensitivity when participants prepared a saccade toward a target that either remained on the screen or disappeared before the eyes moved. We found that attention was mainly focused on the immediate surround of the visible target and spread to more peripheral locations as a function of the distance from the cue and the delay between the target’s disappearance and the saccade. Interestingly, this spread was not accompanied with a spread of the saccade endpoint. These results suggest that presaccadic attention and saccade programming are two distinct processes that can be dissociated as a function of their interaction with the spatial configuration of the visual scene.