We used a survey company that obtains samples from registered respondents. The company disseminated the online questionnaires that we designed for the experiment and the entire survey process was conducted online. We performed an RCT to identify the effects of our nudge message on attitudes toward IT innovation risks compared with simpler messages. The survey company obtained written informed consent from the respondents on our behalf. The questionnaire survey was anonymized, did not retrieve personal information, did not use samples taken from human bodies, and assumed no psychological distress of the respondents. The surveys were approved by the ethics committee of the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry in Japan.
The responses were collected on January 29 and 30, 2020, prior to start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. Although the first case of COVID-19 was already reported on January 15, 2020, the number of cases was limited and the effects of the pandemic on this experiment were negligible during the survey term. All the respondents were over 20 years old and living in Japan. Responses were collected from an equal number of men and women. To extract only valid samples, we set two conditions that excluded unreliable samples. One condition ensures that number of children who are living with the respondents or working in paid jobs is smaller than the number of the respondents’ children. The other condition ensures that the respondents’ own income is smaller than the household income. The total number of valid samples was 3,242 and the sex ratio was 99.0, which is higher than that in the general population in Japan of 94.8 in 2019 [44 ].
Fig 1 shows the distribution of the respondents by age and sex. The average ages were 51.3 years for men and 41.9 years for women, resulting in an overall average age of 46.6 years (median of 46 years). A greater number of younger women were included in the samples than men. Because the estimated median age of the population of Japan in 2015 is 46.4 [45 ], the samples were similar to the population in terms of age.
The responses were collected on January 29 and 30, 2020, prior to start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. Although the first case of COVID-19 was already reported on January 15, 2020, the number of cases was limited and the effects of the pandemic on this experiment were negligible during the survey term. All the respondents were over 20 years old and living in Japan. Responses were collected from an equal number of men and women. To extract only valid samples, we set two conditions that excluded unreliable samples. One condition ensures that number of children who are living with the respondents or working in paid jobs is smaller than the number of the respondents’ children. The other condition ensures that the respondents’ own income is smaller than the household income. The total number of valid samples was 3,242 and the sex ratio was 99.0, which is higher than that in the general population in Japan of 94.8 in 2019 [44 ].
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