Shifting investors towards social responsibility: a narrative review of effective intervention strategies

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the most promising behavioral interventions to foster socially responsible investment (SRI) among retail investors. Using the SHIFT framework, five key avenues that underpin sustainable behavior change are elaborated: harnessing social influences, embedding new investment habits, navigating individual influences, as well as feelings and cognitive drivers, and enhancing SRI’s tangible impact. Significant barriers arise from the lack of comparability, reliability and tangibility of SRI information, exacerbated by low levels of SRI and financial literacy. Meanwhile, investors often perceive SRI as underperforming. Promising interventions include simplifying the decision-making context through labelling and defaults, tailoring information to specific motives and capturing the tangible impact of SRI to increase self-efficacy. Priming and framing techniques can be used to create a long-term focus, leverage social and personal norms, and activate self-conscious emotions such as guilt and pride, or align financial with ethical interests. Despite growing academic evidence on the drivers and barriers to SRI, this narrative literature review encourages more research that causally tests intervention strategies aimed at changing investor behavior toward socially responsible investing.This study explores behavioral interventions to accelerate socially responsible investment (SRI) adoption among retail investors, addressing barriers such as low financial literacy, information overload, and skepticism about SRI’s performance and tangible impact. Utilizing the SHIFT framework, the research identifies five pathways for fostering sustainable investment behaviors, including leveraging social influences, enhancing tangibility, and aligning financial with ethical motives. The findings offer actionable strategies for policymakers, educators, and practitioners—such as labeling, defaults, framing, and feedback mechanisms—that simplify decision-making and align financial with ethical motives. This review underscores the untapped potential of behavioral interventions in driving SRI adoption and calls for experimental research to validate these approaches across diverse contexts and investor profiles.