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Simulating the impact of cognitive biases on the mobility transition

Carole Adam

TL;DR

The paper tackles inertia in the mobility transition by modeling how cognitive biases—habits, reactance, and halo bias—shape daily commuting choices under evolving urban planning. It introduces three interactive, lightweight agent-based simulators (each focusing on a single bias) implemented in NetLogo to illustrate mechanism-driven scenarios and to serve as a debiasing intervention. The work demonstrates how habit formation can slow adoption of soft mobility, how reactance can undermine persuasive campaigns, and how halo bias can preserve satisfaction despite negative evidence, while offering avenues to evaluate impact and equity. While simplified, the simulations provide a useful framework for exploring policy and communication strategies that facilitate a shift toward sustainable mobility and inform future integration with broader serious-game tools like SWITCH.

Abstract

Climate change is becoming more visible, and human adaptation is required urgently to prevent greater damage. One particular domain of adaptation concerns daily mobility (work commute), with a significant portion of these trips being done in individual cars. Yet, their impact on pollution, noise, or accidents is well-known. This paper explores various cognitive biases that can explain such lack of adaptation. Our approach is to design simple interactive simulators that users can play with in order to understand biases. The idea is that awareness of such cognitive biases is often a first step towards more rational decision making, even though things are not that simple. This paper reports on three simulators, each focused on a particular factor of resistance. Various scenarios are simulated to demonstrate their explanatory power. These simulators are already available to play online, with the goal to provide users with food for thought about how mobility could evolve in the future. Work is still ongoing to design a user survey to evaluate their impact.

Simulating the impact of cognitive biases on the mobility transition

TL;DR

The paper tackles inertia in the mobility transition by modeling how cognitive biases—habits, reactance, and halo bias—shape daily commuting choices under evolving urban planning. It introduces three interactive, lightweight agent-based simulators (each focusing on a single bias) implemented in NetLogo to illustrate mechanism-driven scenarios and to serve as a debiasing intervention. The work demonstrates how habit formation can slow adoption of soft mobility, how reactance can undermine persuasive campaigns, and how halo bias can preserve satisfaction despite negative evidence, while offering avenues to evaluate impact and equity. While simplified, the simulations provide a useful framework for exploring policy and communication strategies that facilitate a shift toward sustainable mobility and inform future integration with broader serious-game tools like SWITCH.

Abstract

Climate change is becoming more visible, and human adaptation is required urgently to prevent greater damage. One particular domain of adaptation concerns daily mobility (work commute), with a significant portion of these trips being done in individual cars. Yet, their impact on pollution, noise, or accidents is well-known. This paper explores various cognitive biases that can explain such lack of adaptation. Our approach is to design simple interactive simulators that users can play with in order to understand biases. The idea is that awareness of such cognitive biases is often a first step towards more rational decision making, even though things are not that simple. This paper reports on three simulators, each focused on a particular factor of resistance. Various scenarios are simulated to demonstrate their explanatory power. These simulators are already available to play online, with the goal to provide users with food for thought about how mobility could evolve in the future. Work is still ongoing to design a user survey to evaluate their impact.
Paper Structure (51 sections, 8 figures)

This paper contains 51 sections, 8 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Cognitive biases
  4. Some biases that impact mobility
  5. Existing models
  6. Debiasing
  7. Simulator 1: habits
  8. Conceptual model
  9. Simulator interface
  10. Results
  11. Baseline scenario.
  12. Scenario 2: building habits.
  13. Scenario 3: time of crisis.
  14. Discussion
  15. Simulator 2: reactance bias
  16. ...and 36 more sections

Figures (8)

  • Figure 1: Habits simulator interface
  • Figure 2: Interface of the reactance bias simulator
  • Figure 3: Average opinion dynamics without reactance bias: convergence
  • Figure 4: Average opinion dynamics with reactance bias: divergence
  • Figure 5: Progressively adapting the content of the message to avoid triggering reactance
  • ...and 3 more figures