General discussion
The goal of the current study was to test the effectiveness of personal stories to nudge policymakers from the NWT to attend a policy briefing on gendered impacts of policy. Overall, we found that using personal stories in the email invitation was not successful in increasing attendance at the briefings, response rate to the invitations, or pledge signing. In fact, our results were the opposite to our hypothesis regarding attendance rate, suggesting a backfiring effect in which the control group was more likely to attend the briefing than the treatment group. These results contrast with the previously reviewed literature, which generally suggest a persuasive benefit to personal stories. However, few of these studies contained pre-registered hypotheses as ours did, potentially alerting to the presence of bias in this literature. The current results suggest the need for caution in the use of personal stories and reveal their limitations to change behaviors among policymakers.There were several possible reasons for the backfiring effect. First, we found that the treatment and control conditions differed in the number of elected officials (vs. policy influencers) who accepted the invitation to the briefing. This may be due to the fact that several communities in the NWT experienced severe flooding during our study and many elected officials in these communities had to prioritize community evacuations over the briefing. These elected officials just happened to be in the treatment condition. The imbalance of policymakers between conditions despite random assignment could explain the finding that fewer participants in the treatment condition attended the briefing. Second, two communities in the NWT held local elections and some elected officials in the treatment condition were away on duty travel during our study. This likely limited the available time that elected officials would have to attend our briefing. Given that the treatment group had a greater proportion of elected officials who accepted the invitation, but ultimately did not attend, these two external factors may explain the backfiring effect in attendance rate. This is supported by qualitative data collected from our follow-up phone calls with participants, which showed that travel and changing priorities were the second and third most frequently stated reasons for not attending the briefing.The top reason was that participants did not know that alternative dates/times were available, suggesting that the poll—which gave them the option to choose from five alternate dates/times—was not sufficiently salient to capture attention. The presence of alternatives may have been particularly obscured in the treatment group emails, in which the addition of personal narratives placed the note about alternative dates/times much further into the email than in the control group. Given that effective communication with policymakers likely depends upon succinct language, this increased length may explain why the treatment produced the opposite of the hypothesized effect. Finally, policymakers may find personalized stories detract from the larger structural cause of the problem, and therefore are more likely to ignore the briefing. Future studies could use depersonalized stories presented from the perspective of constituent groups, rather than individuals, and see whether collective stories are more effective in motivating action from policymakers.Designing an effective intervention that influences policymakers on gender equity issues would likely take some time. Qualitative data collected after the study reveals some insights on how to design such an intervention, such as increasing the salience of alternative briefing sessions. Overall, we received a number of anecdotal comments from participants regarding the importance of the issue and offering additional support, suggesting that the study was well received among participants. This indicates that many policymakers may already be aware of the importance of the issue and may be looking for ways to improve gender equity in the NWT. Future research can consider providing policymakers with more tangible ways that gender equity can be incorporated into their policy work, in addition to a policy briefing or a public pledge.Additionally, we note that the participants in the treatment condition who signed the public pledge did so without attending the briefing, signing only after receiving a thank-you email with a link to the pledge website. Considering the many studies that found pledges to be effective at promoting target behaviors [Finally, due to the small, interconnected nature of the political community in the NWT, the potential for contamination between conditions as a result of sharing emails was a possibility. We attempted to mitigate this possibility by including a statement in the email invitation discouraging forwarding the email invite to other people. While we did not encounter contamination between conditions in the study, we did notice an interesting phenomenon in which several uninvited guests, who were not on the original participant list, responded to the email invitation, or actually attended a briefing. While these uninvited guests were not included in our data analysis, this may reveal a ‘chain of influence’, allowing us to track how information and issues are disseminated throughout the NWT political community, and could be an interesting avenue for future research.While the current study yielded null results, it is important to publish these findings, especially backfiring results, for two reasons. First, the null results provide an empirical contribution to show that this particular intervention did not produce the predicted effect in this particular population, such that future studies can improve the study design. Second, the study provides a theoretical contribution to show the limits of this intervention, revealing the unique barriers faced by this particular population of policymakers that are different from past study populations. As the qualitative data suggest, policymakers may be more impacted by external factors (e.g., flooding, local elections) then personal stories.