Many proponents of behavioural public policy work within a broadly consequentialist framework. From this perspective, the ultimate aim of public policy is to maximise utility, happiness, welfare, the satisfaction of preferences, or similar; and the behavioural aspect of public policy aims to harness a knowledge of human psychology to make this maximisation more effective. In particular, behavioural insights may be crucial to help policy-makers ‘save us from ourselves’ by helping citizens avoid falling into non-rational choices, for example, through framing effects, failures of will-power, and so on. But an alternative reading of the psychological literature is that human thoughts and actions are not biased from a rational standard, but are simply systematically inconsistent. If so, then utility and similar notions are not well defined either for individuals or as an objective of public policy. I argue that a different, contractarian viewpoint is required: that the determination of public policy is continuous with the formation of agreements we make with each other at all scales, from momentary social interactions, to linguistic and social conventions, to collective decisions by groups and organisations. Behavioural factors do not over-ride, but can (among many other factors) inform, our collective decision-making process. The point of behavioural insights in public policy is primarily to inform and enrich public debate when deciding the rules by which we should like to live.
{"title":"What is the point of behavioural public policy? A contractarian approach","authors":"N. Chater","doi":"10.1017/bpp.2022.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2022.2","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Many proponents of behavioural public policy work within a broadly consequentialist framework. From this perspective, the ultimate aim of public policy is to maximise utility, happiness, welfare, the satisfaction of preferences, or similar; and the behavioural aspect of public policy aims to harness a knowledge of human psychology to make this maximisation more effective. In particular, behavioural insights may be crucial to help policy-makers ‘save us from ourselves’ by helping citizens avoid falling into non-rational choices, for example, through framing effects, failures of will-power, and so on. But an alternative reading of the psychological literature is that human thoughts and actions are not biased from a rational standard, but are simply systematically inconsistent. If so, then utility and similar notions are not well defined either for individuals or as an objective of public policy. I argue that a different, contractarian viewpoint is required: that the determination of public policy is continuous with the formation of agreements we make with each other at all scales, from momentary social interactions, to linguistic and social conventions, to collective decisions by groups and organisations. Behavioural factors do not over-ride, but can (among many other factors) inform, our collective decision-making process. The point of behavioural insights in public policy is primarily to inform and enrich public debate when deciding the rules by which we should like to live.","PeriodicalId":29777,"journal":{"name":"Behavioural Public Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46932836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Malte Dewies, A. Schop-Etman, I. Merkelbach, Kirsten I. M. Rohde, S. Denktaş
Debtors were stimulated to contact their creditors to negotiate a repayment plan. Contacting creditors was important because debtors were unlikely to repay the debt immediately and upon contacting, debtors could agree on a repayment plan to repay the debt in the long run. Using insights from scarcity theory and nudging techniques, a standard debt repayment letter was adapted and both letters were compared. Experimental results (N = 3,330) provide support for the use of nudging techniques as more debtors agreed on a repayment plan and response rates increased. The results underline the importance of stimulating debtors to contact their creditors.
{"title":"Call first, pay later: stimulating debtors to contact their creditors improves debt collection in the context of financial scarcity","authors":"Malte Dewies, A. Schop-Etman, I. Merkelbach, Kirsten I. M. Rohde, S. Denktaş","doi":"10.1017/bpp.2022.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2022.7","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Debtors were stimulated to contact their creditors to negotiate a repayment plan. Contacting creditors was important because debtors were unlikely to repay the debt immediately and upon contacting, debtors could agree on a repayment plan to repay the debt in the long run. Using insights from scarcity theory and nudging techniques, a standard debt repayment letter was adapted and both letters were compared. Experimental results (N = 3,330) provide support for the use of nudging techniques as more debtors agreed on a repayment plan and response rates increased. The results underline the importance of stimulating debtors to contact their creditors.","PeriodicalId":29777,"journal":{"name":"Behavioural Public Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49600006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A desert menu","authors":"Lawrence D. Brown","doi":"10.1017/bpp.2021.45","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2021.45","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29777,"journal":{"name":"Behavioural Public Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42843911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Brian Barry (1965, pp. 112–15) once suggested that the concept of desert flourishes in a liberal society in which each person’s worth can be ascertained by the market, a society like that of the late nineteenth century. He went onto to suggest that public policy in the twentieth century saw a ‘revolt against desert’, exemplified in a welfare state that catered for the underserving poor. By contrast, Hayek (1976, pp. 70–3) famously saw the idea of equating merit with returns in a market economy as a mirage. He saw the revolt against desert not as an abandonment of a liberal market order, but as a necessary condition for understanding how such an order could work well. The extremes touch: either way, desert is seen as a thing of the past. Oliver (2021) suggests a counter-revolution to this revolt against desert. He is motivated by a concern that public perceptions of the legitimacy of income transfer systems depend upon their respecting considerations of desert. The paying public are entitled to demand that those at the bottom of the income distribution genuinely deserve assistance. Although Oliver does not draw this implication, a demand to incorporate considerations of desert into income transfer programmes might come as much from net beneficiaries as from net contributors, since the beneficiaries who constituted the respectable poor might regard themselves as deserving, unlike those whose poverty was not due to unavoidable misfortune but to the lack of thrift. Oliver contrasts public perceptions with what he calls Rawls’s ‘transcendental proposition’, the principle of just distribution derivable from the original position. Oliver suggests that the view from the original position will lead decision makers to focus solely on the least well-off independently of their deserts, since behind the veil of ignorance those decision makers would focus their minds on how they would wish to be treated if they were in unfortunate circumstances. However, so the argument continues, this view from the original position is unaligned with the world in which we live, and the requirements of people living together will allow for knowledge of personal circumstances and, hence, for considerations of deservingness. Without getting side-tracked too much into questions of Rawlsian exegesis, there is a way of understanding the supposed reasoning of the parties in the original position that is closer than this interpretation suggests to the position that Oliver himself
{"title":"Should we partake in Adam Oliver's taste for desert?","authors":"A. Weale","doi":"10.1017/bpp.2021.43","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2021.43","url":null,"abstract":"Brian Barry (1965, pp. 112–15) once suggested that the concept of desert flourishes in a liberal society in which each person’s worth can be ascertained by the market, a society like that of the late nineteenth century. He went onto to suggest that public policy in the twentieth century saw a ‘revolt against desert’, exemplified in a welfare state that catered for the underserving poor. By contrast, Hayek (1976, pp. 70–3) famously saw the idea of equating merit with returns in a market economy as a mirage. He saw the revolt against desert not as an abandonment of a liberal market order, but as a necessary condition for understanding how such an order could work well. The extremes touch: either way, desert is seen as a thing of the past. Oliver (2021) suggests a counter-revolution to this revolt against desert. He is motivated by a concern that public perceptions of the legitimacy of income transfer systems depend upon their respecting considerations of desert. The paying public are entitled to demand that those at the bottom of the income distribution genuinely deserve assistance. Although Oliver does not draw this implication, a demand to incorporate considerations of desert into income transfer programmes might come as much from net beneficiaries as from net contributors, since the beneficiaries who constituted the respectable poor might regard themselves as deserving, unlike those whose poverty was not due to unavoidable misfortune but to the lack of thrift. Oliver contrasts public perceptions with what he calls Rawls’s ‘transcendental proposition’, the principle of just distribution derivable from the original position. Oliver suggests that the view from the original position will lead decision makers to focus solely on the least well-off independently of their deserts, since behind the veil of ignorance those decision makers would focus their minds on how they would wish to be treated if they were in unfortunate circumstances. However, so the argument continues, this view from the original position is unaligned with the world in which we live, and the requirements of people living together will allow for knowledge of personal circumstances and, hence, for considerations of deservingness. Without getting side-tracked too much into questions of Rawlsian exegesis, there is a way of understanding the supposed reasoning of the parties in the original position that is closer than this interpretation suggests to the position that Oliver himself","PeriodicalId":29777,"journal":{"name":"Behavioural Public Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45649489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
At least a minority of people consider it morally offensive for someone to tell them about the negative environmental impact of their own diet, especially when that diet has a greater negative impact (Bose et al., 2020). Less than a quarter of people at risk of Huntington’s disease elect to determine if they are a carrier of the lethal gene even though most who find out the answer, whether positive or negative, are happier than those who remain uncertain (Wiggins et al., 1992). On these and many other topics, people often choose not to know. What motivates this willful ignorance, what are its implications, and what should we do about it, if anything? Why we choose not to know is the topic of a new book by Ralph Hertwig and Christoph Engel, entitled Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know. The question: If knowledge is so important to so many things – democracy, the environment, making choices in one’s own best interest – then what is the psychological basis for deliberate ignorance? The book itself is a model of scientific crowdsourcing, collecting more than 40 of the world’s experts on topics such as cognitive science, law, biology, history, bioethics, and economics, with the goal of laying out a foundation for starting to understand why it is that we often don’t want to know. In a leading chapter, Dagmar Ellerbrock and Ralph Hertwig set the stage with the case of the Stasi files. During the era of the German Democratic Republic, East Germany’s Secret Police – the Stasi –relied on civilian informers to provide information about who was disloyal to the party. Those living in East Germany could expect family members, friends, colleagues, even their spouses to potentially be an informer, providing information about them to the Stasi. This information along with who the informers were was collected in the Stasi files. After East Germany ceased to exist as a political entity, the Stasi files were eventually made public. A curious individual could go and look up their own file and discover who among their networkof friends and family was an informant, what information was provided, and what impact it had. But would you want to know? Should you even be allowed to know? Opinions are deeply divided, and as Ellerbrock and Hertwig’s chapter reveals in somewhat spine-tingling detail – imagine if you had been an informer – the history of the Stasi files is marked by controversy and incredible twists and turns.
至少有少数人认为，有人告诉他们自己饮食对环境的负面影响在道德上是冒犯的，尤其是当这种饮食产生更大的负面影响时（Bose等人，2020）。不到四分之一的亨廷顿舞蹈症高危人群选择确定自己是否是致命基因的携带者，尽管大多数找到答案的人，无论是阳性还是阴性，都比那些仍然不确定的人更快乐（Wiggins等人，1992）。在这些和许多其他话题上，人们往往选择不知道。是什么激发了这种故意的无知，它的含义是什么，如果有什么不同的话，我们应该怎么办？拉尔夫·赫特维格（Ralph Hertwig）和克里斯托夫·恩格尔（Christoph Engel）的新书《故意无知：选择不知道》（Considere Ignorance:Choice not know）的主题是我们为什么选择不知道。问题是：如果知识对许多事情如此重要——民主、环境、为自己的最大利益做出选择——那么故意无知的心理基础是什么？这本书本身就是一个科学众包的典范，收集了40多位世界上认知科学、法律、生物学、历史、生物伦理学和经济学等主题的专家，目的是为开始理解我们通常不想知道的原因奠定基础。在开头的一章中，达格玛·艾勒布罗克和拉尔夫·赫特维格以斯塔西档案案为舞台。在德意志民主共和国时代，东德的秘密警察——斯塔西——依靠平民告密者来提供谁对党不忠的信息。那些生活在东德的人可能会期望家人、朋友、同事，甚至他们的配偶成为告密者，向斯塔西提供有关他们的信息。这些信息以及告密者是谁都被收集在斯塔西的档案中。东德作为一个政治实体不复存在后，斯塔西的档案最终被公开。好奇的人可以去查阅自己的档案，发现他们的朋友和家人网络中谁是线人，提供了什么信息，以及产生了什么影响。但是你想知道吗？你应该被允许知道吗？意见分歧很大，正如埃勒布罗克和赫特维格的章节所揭示的那样——想象一下，如果你是一名告密者——斯塔西档案的历史充满了争议和令人难以置信的曲折。
{"title":"The calculus of ignorance","authors":"Thomas T. Hills","doi":"10.1017/bpp.2022.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2022.6","url":null,"abstract":"At least a minority of people consider it morally offensive for someone to tell them about the negative environmental impact of their own diet, especially when that diet has a greater negative impact (Bose et al., 2020). Less than a quarter of people at risk of Huntington’s disease elect to determine if they are a carrier of the lethal gene even though most who find out the answer, whether positive or negative, are happier than those who remain uncertain (Wiggins et al., 1992). On these and many other topics, people often choose not to know. What motivates this willful ignorance, what are its implications, and what should we do about it, if anything? Why we choose not to know is the topic of a new book by Ralph Hertwig and Christoph Engel, entitled Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know. The question: If knowledge is so important to so many things – democracy, the environment, making choices in one’s own best interest – then what is the psychological basis for deliberate ignorance? The book itself is a model of scientific crowdsourcing, collecting more than 40 of the world’s experts on topics such as cognitive science, law, biology, history, bioethics, and economics, with the goal of laying out a foundation for starting to understand why it is that we often don’t want to know. In a leading chapter, Dagmar Ellerbrock and Ralph Hertwig set the stage with the case of the Stasi files. During the era of the German Democratic Republic, East Germany’s Secret Police – the Stasi –relied on civilian informers to provide information about who was disloyal to the party. Those living in East Germany could expect family members, friends, colleagues, even their spouses to potentially be an informer, providing information about them to the Stasi. This information along with who the informers were was collected in the Stasi files. After East Germany ceased to exist as a political entity, the Stasi files were eventually made public. A curious individual could go and look up their own file and discover who among their networkof friends and family was an informant, what information was provided, and what impact it had. But would you want to know? Should you even be allowed to know? Opinions are deeply divided, and as Ellerbrock and Hertwig’s chapter reveals in somewhat spine-tingling detail – imagine if you had been an informer – the history of the Stasi files is marked by controversy and incredible twists and turns.","PeriodicalId":29777,"journal":{"name":"Behavioural Public Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47333508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"BPP volume 6 issue 2 Cover and Front matter","authors":"Leonhard K. Lades, L. Martin, L. Delaney","doi":"10.1017/bpp.2022.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2022.8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29777,"journal":{"name":"Behavioural Public Policy","volume":"6 1","pages":"f1 - f4"},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44615223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As US college costs continue to rise, governments and institutions have quadrupled financial aid. Yet, the administrative process of receiving financial aid remains complex, raising costs for families and deterring students from enrolling. In two large-scale field experiments (N = 265,570), we test the impact of nudging high-school seniors in California to register for state scholarships. We find that simplifying communication and affirming belonging each significantly increase registrations, by 9% and 11%, respectively. Yet, these nudges do not impact the final step of the financial aid process – receiving the scholarship. In contrast, a simplified letter that affirms belonging while also making comparable cost calculations more salient significantly impacts college choice, increasing enrollment in the lowest net cost option by 10.4%. Our findings suggest that different nudges are likely to address different types of administrative burdens, and their combination may be the most effective way to shift educational outcomes.
{"title":"Demystifying college costs: how nudges can and can't help","authors":"E. Linos, Vikash T. Reddy, Jesse Rothstein","doi":"10.1017/bpp.2022.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2022.1","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 As US college costs continue to rise, governments and institutions have quadrupled financial aid. Yet, the administrative process of receiving financial aid remains complex, raising costs for families and deterring students from enrolling. In two large-scale field experiments (N = 265,570), we test the impact of nudging high-school seniors in California to register for state scholarships. We find that simplifying communication and affirming belonging each significantly increase registrations, by 9% and 11%, respectively. Yet, these nudges do not impact the final step of the financial aid process – receiving the scholarship. In contrast, a simplified letter that affirms belonging while also making comparable cost calculations more salient significantly impacts college choice, increasing enrollment in the lowest net cost option by 10.4%. Our findings suggest that different nudges are likely to address different types of administrative burdens, and their combination may be the most effective way to shift educational outcomes.","PeriodicalId":29777,"journal":{"name":"Behavioural Public Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47492330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Evolutionary explanations for behavioral findings are often both fascinating and plausible. But even so, they do not establish that people are acting rationally, that they are not making mistakes, or that their decisions are promoting their welfare. For example, present bias, optimistic overconfidence, and use of the availability heuristic can produce terrible mistakes and serious welfare losses, and this is so even if they have evolutionary foundations. There might well be evolutionary explanations for certain kinds of in-group favoritism, and also for certain male attitudes and actions toward women, and also for human mistreatment of and cruelty toward nonhuman animals. But those explanations would not justify anything at all. It is not clear that in Darwinia (a nation in which departures from perfect rationality have an evolutionary explanation), policymakers should behave very differently from Durkheimian policymakers (a nation in which departures from perfect rationality have a cultural explanation).
{"title":"On the limited policy relevance of evolutionary explanations","authors":"C. Sunstein","doi":"10.1017/bpp.2022.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2022.4","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Evolutionary explanations for behavioral findings are often both fascinating and plausible. But even so, they do not establish that people are acting rationally, that they are not making mistakes, or that their decisions are promoting their welfare. For example, present bias, optimistic overconfidence, and use of the availability heuristic can produce terrible mistakes and serious welfare losses, and this is so even if they have evolutionary foundations. There might well be evolutionary explanations for certain kinds of in-group favoritism, and also for certain male attitudes and actions toward women, and also for human mistreatment of and cruelty toward nonhuman animals. But those explanations would not justify anything at all. It is not clear that in Darwinia (a nation in which departures from perfect rationality have an evolutionary explanation), policymakers should behave very differently from Durkheimian policymakers (a nation in which departures from perfect rationality have a cultural explanation).","PeriodicalId":29777,"journal":{"name":"Behavioural Public Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43632729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cass Sunstein's contention that evolutionary explanations for behavioural economic phenomena are of limited relevance to public policy – and his support for soft paternalism – rests on his view that policymakers ought to be pursuing increases in some overarching social planning conception of welfare. In this reply to Sunstein, I argue that people have differing and multifarious desires in life, with the social planner's conception of welfare being, at best, perhaps only a partial consideration for most people. The phenomena that behavioural economists and psychologists have empirically observed may well facilitate people in the pursuit of their own desires in life. Consequently, paternalistic manipulation or coercion to save people from themselves is questionable in the behavioural public policy space, but government intervention is warranted when one party implicitly or explicitly uses these phenomena to exploit others.
{"title":"On the importance of attempting to know the causes of things: a reply to Sunstein","authors":"A. Oliver","doi":"10.1017/bpp.2022.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2022.5","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Cass Sunstein's contention that evolutionary explanations for behavioural economic phenomena are of limited relevance to public policy – and his support for soft paternalism – rests on his view that policymakers ought to be pursuing increases in some overarching social planning conception of welfare. In this reply to Sunstein, I argue that people have differing and multifarious desires in life, with the social planner's conception of welfare being, at best, perhaps only a partial consideration for most people. The phenomena that behavioural economists and psychologists have empirically observed may well facilitate people in the pursuit of their own desires in life. Consequently, paternalistic manipulation or coercion to save people from themselves is questionable in the behavioural public policy space, but government intervention is warranted when one party implicitly or explicitly uses these phenomena to exploit others.","PeriodicalId":29777,"journal":{"name":"Behavioural Public Policy","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57046199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
J. Reynolds, A. Hobson, M. Ventsel, M. Pilling, T. Marteau, G. Hollands
Communicating evidence that a policy is effective can increase public support although the effects are small. We investigate whether two interventions can enhance evidence communication: i. visualisation of evidence, and ii. re-expressing evidence into a more interpretable form. We conducted an online experiment in which participants were randomly allocated to one of five groups differing in how evidence of policy effectiveness was presented. We used a 2 (text only vs visualisation) X 2 (no re-expression vs re-expression) design with one control group. Participants (n = 4500) representative of the English population were recruited. The primary outcome was perceived effectiveness and the secondary outcome was public support. Evidence of effectiveness increased perceptions of effectiveness, d = .14, p < .001. There was no evidence that visualising, d = .02, p = .605, or re-expressing, d = -.02, p = .507, changed perceptions of effectiveness. Policy support increased with evidence, d = .08, p = .034, but this was not statistically significant after Bonferroni adjustment, α = .006. Communicating evidence of policy effectiveness increased perceptions that the policy was effective. Neither visualising nor re-expressing evidence increased perceived effectiveness of policies more than merely stating in text that the policy was effective.
传达一项政策有效的证据可以增加公众的支持，尽管效果很小。我们研究了两种干预措施是否可以加强证据交流:1 .证据的可视化;将证据重新表达为更易于解释的形式。我们进行了一项在线实验，参与者被随机分配到五组中，这五组在政策有效性证据的呈现方式上存在差异。我们在一个对照组中使用了2(纯文本vs可视化)x2(无重新表达vs重新表达)设计。招募了具有英国人口代表性的参与者(n = 4500)。主要结果是感知有效性，次要结果是公众支持。有效性的证据增加了对有效性的感知，d = .14, p < .001。没有证据表明可视化，d = 0.02, p = .605，或再表达，d = -。02, p = .507，改变了对有效性的认知。政策支持增加有证据，d = .08, p = .034，但经Bonferroni调整后无统计学意义，α = .006。传达政策有效性的证据增加了人们对政策有效性的看法。与仅仅在文本中说明政策是有效的相比，可视化或重新表达证据都不能提高政策的有效性。
{"title":"The effect of visualising and re-expressing evidence of policy effectiveness on perceived effectiveness: a population-based survey experiment","authors":"J. Reynolds, A. Hobson, M. Ventsel, M. Pilling, T. Marteau, G. Hollands","doi":"10.31234/osf.io/z6gvp","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/z6gvp","url":null,"abstract":"Communicating evidence that a policy is effective can increase public support although the effects are small. We investigate whether two interventions can enhance evidence communication: i. visualisation of evidence, and ii. re-expressing evidence into a more interpretable form. We conducted an online experiment in which participants were randomly allocated to one of five groups differing in how evidence of policy effectiveness was presented. We used a 2 (text only vs visualisation) X 2 (no re-expression vs re-expression) design with one control group. Participants (n = 4500) representative of the English population were recruited. The primary outcome was perceived effectiveness and the secondary outcome was public support. Evidence of effectiveness increased perceptions of effectiveness, d = .14, p < .001. There was no evidence that visualising, d = .02, p = .605, or re-expressing, d = -.02, p = .507, changed perceptions of effectiveness. Policy support increased with evidence, d = .08, p = .034, but this was not statistically significant after Bonferroni adjustment, α = .006. Communicating evidence of policy effectiveness increased perceptions that the policy was effective. Neither visualising nor re-expressing evidence increased perceived effectiveness of policies more than merely stating in text that the policy was effective.","PeriodicalId":29777,"journal":{"name":"Behavioural Public Policy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.1,"publicationDate":"2022-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47694016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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