social learning on choice making and behaviour have not been individuals’ investigated in the transport context. This paper introduces the use of a laboratory experiment for exploring the effects of social interaction on choice making and behaviour. A hypothetical travellers’ employer-based demand management initiative to reduce car use, which employees’ is framed as a social dilemma situation, is used in the experiment. One of the main features designed into the experiment is a social interaction feature for participants to communicate and exchange information in a repeated decision making environment. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews relevant studies of social interaction and social learning in travel behaviour and explains the types of social interaction and social learning studied in this paper. Section 3 describes the detailed design of a laboratory experiment to explore the effects of social interaction on behaviour, while Section 4 presents the results of a small-scale experiment travellers’ run. Section 5 discusses the implications of the results and Section 6 highlights further useful studies that may follow from this study. SOCIAL INTERACTION AND SOCIAL LEARNING Jones and Sloman (2003) argued that the existence of the a ‘snowball effect’, phenomenon where long-term effects may be greater than short-term ones, increases the effectiveness of travel demand management measures over time. They stated that there is some evidence that changes may be slow at first, but then accelerate as people see their colleagues and neighbours changing their travel behaviour. Exploring the implementation of voluntary household travel behaviour change
social learning on individuals’ choice making and behaviour have not been investigated in the transport context. This paper introduces the use of a laboratory experiment for exploring the effects of social interaction on travellers’ choice making and behaviour. A hypothetical employer-based demand management initiative to reduce employees’ car use, which is framed as a social dilemma situation, is used in the experiment. One of the main features designed into the experiment is a social interaction feature for participants to communicate and exchange information in a repeated decision making environment. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews relevant studies of social interaction and social learning in travel behaviour and explains the types of social interaction and social learning studied in this paper. Section 3 describes the detailed design of a laboratory experiment to explore the effects of social interaction on travellers’ behaviour, while Section 4 presents the results of a small-scale experiment run. Section 5 discusses the implications of the results and Section 6 highlights further useful studies that may follow from this study. SOCIAL INTERACTION AND SOCIAL LEARNING Jones and Sloman (2003) argued that the existence of the ‘snowball effect’, a phenomenon where long-term effects may be greater than short-term ones, increases the effectiveness of travel demand management measures over time. They stated that there is some evidence that changes may be slow at first, but then accelerate as people see their colleagues and neighbours changing their travel behaviour. Exploring the implementation of voluntary household travel behaviour change
Sunitiyoso_Avineri_Chatterjee_Transportation_Research_Part_A_2011_Social_Interactions_Accepted_Version.docx