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Nudging is a framework for directing individuals toward better behavior, both for personal and societal benefits, through heuristics that drive the decision-making process but without preventing any available choice. Considering the Grand Challenges that our society faces today, nudging represents an effective framework to tackle some of these pressing issues. In this work, we assessed the effectiveness of informational nudges in the form of detailed, customized feedback, within an energy-demand-management project. The project aligns energy production and demand, thereby reducing greenhouse gases and pollutant emissions to mitigate climate change. We also offered evidence that this kind of feedback is efficacious in involving individuals as citizen scientists, who volunteer their efforts toward the success of the environmentally-related aim of the project. The results of this research - based on surveys, electroencephalography measurements and online participation measures - indicate that feedback can be an effective tool to steer participants' behavior under the libertarian paternalistic view of nudging, increase their motivation to contribute to citizen science, and improve their awareness about environmentally-related issues. In so doing, we provide evidence that nudging and citizen science can be jointly adopted toward the mitigation of pressing environmental issues., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The use of crowds in research activities by public and private organizations is growing under different forms. Citizen science is a popular means of engaging the general public in research activities led by professional scientists. By involving a large number of amateur scientists, citizen science enables distributed data collection and analysis on a scale that would be otherwise difficult and costly to achieve. While advancements in information technology in the past few decades have fostered the growth of citizen science through online participation, several projects continue to fail due to limited participation. Such web-based projects may isolate the citizen scientists from the researchers. By adopting the perspective of social strategy, we investigate within a measure-manipulate-measure experiment if motivations to participate in a citizen science project can be positively influenced by a face-to-face interaction with the scientists leading the project. Such an interaction provides the participants with the possibility of asking questions on the spot and obtaining a detailed explanation of the citizen science project, its scientific merit, and environmental relevance. Social and cultural factors that moderate the effect brought about by face-to-face interactions on the motivations are also dissected and analyzed. Our findings provide an exploratory insight into a means for motivating crowds to participate in online environmental monitoring projects, also offering possible selection criteria of target audience., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)