Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1177/23794607231192720
Daniel D. Shephard, Ali Osseiran, Fadi Makki
Values-affirmation (VA) exercises, which direct people’s attention to aspects of their lives that they value and broaden their sense of self, have been shown to improve performance in many populations, particularly those who worry that doing poorly will feed into negative stereotypes of the ethnic or other social groups they belong to. Most studies of VA have examined its benefits in highly literate, economically stable, English-speaking populations and have used written exercises. We conducted a randomized controlled trial of a visual VA exercise in an understudied population: marginalized Arabic-speaking students (mostly Syrians) living in a context (Lebanon) affected by conflict. Before taking final exams for a program to improve basic Arabic and English literacy skills and math proficiency, the participants, ages 14-24 years, made a drawing that represented a value important to them. This visual VA exercise improved performance on the Arabic test, particularly among the Syrians, suggesting that, at least for the Arabic test, it reduced anxiety related to stereotyping, allowing students to relax enough to demonstrate their true ability. If replicated, our findings would suggest that schools could use such exercises to improve the value of test scores for guiding decisions about next steps in the education of marginalized students in a context affected by conflict.
{"title":"Can a visual values-affirmation intervention improve test scores of students in areas affected by crisis?","authors":"Daniel D. Shephard, Ali Osseiran, Fadi Makki","doi":"10.1177/23794607231192720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23794607231192720","url":null,"abstract":"Values-affirmation (VA) exercises, which direct people’s attention to aspects of their lives that they value and broaden their sense of self, have been shown to improve performance in many populations, particularly those who worry that doing poorly will feed into negative stereotypes of the ethnic or other social groups they belong to. Most studies of VA have examined its benefits in highly literate, economically stable, English-speaking populations and have used written exercises. We conducted a randomized controlled trial of a visual VA exercise in an understudied population: marginalized Arabic-speaking students (mostly Syrians) living in a context (Lebanon) affected by conflict. Before taking final exams for a program to improve basic Arabic and English literacy skills and math proficiency, the participants, ages 14-24 years, made a drawing that represented a value important to them. This visual VA exercise improved performance on the Arabic test, particularly among the Syrians, suggesting that, at least for the Arabic test, it reduced anxiety related to stereotyping, allowing students to relax enough to demonstrate their true ability. If replicated, our findings would suggest that schools could use such exercises to improve the value of test scores for guiding decisions about next steps in the education of marginalized students in a context affected by conflict.","PeriodicalId":72347,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral science & policy","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135772894","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}
Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1177/23794607231192721
Sean Fath, Richard P. Larrick, Jack B. Soll
One strategy for minimizing bias in hiring is blinding—purposefully limiting the information used when screening applicants to that which is directly relevant to the job and does not elicit bias based on race, gender, age, or other irrelevant characteristics. Blinding policies remain rare, however. An alternative to blinding policies is self-blinding, in which people performing hiring-related evaluations blind themselves to biasing information about applicants. Using a mock-hiring task, we tested ways to encourage self-blinding that take into consideration three variables likely to affect whether people self-blind: default effects on choices, people’s inability to assess their susceptibility to bias, and people’s tendency not to recognize the full range of information that can elicit that bias. Participants with hiring experience chose to receive or be blind to various pieces of information about applicants, some of which were potentially biasing. They selected potentially biasing information less often when asked to specify the applicant information they wanted to receive than when asked to specify the information they did not want to receive, when prescribing selections for other people than when making the selections for themselves, and when the information was obviously biasing than when it was less obviously so. On the basis of these findings, we propose a multipronged strategy that human resources leaders could use to enable and encourage hiring managers to self-blind when screening job applicants.
{"title":"Encouraging self-blinding in hiring","authors":"Sean Fath, Richard P. Larrick, Jack B. Soll","doi":"10.1177/23794607231192721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23794607231192721","url":null,"abstract":"One strategy for minimizing bias in hiring is blinding—purposefully limiting the information used when screening applicants to that which is directly relevant to the job and does not elicit bias based on race, gender, age, or other irrelevant characteristics. Blinding policies remain rare, however. An alternative to blinding policies is self-blinding, in which people performing hiring-related evaluations blind themselves to biasing information about applicants. Using a mock-hiring task, we tested ways to encourage self-blinding that take into consideration three variables likely to affect whether people self-blind: default effects on choices, people’s inability to assess their susceptibility to bias, and people’s tendency not to recognize the full range of information that can elicit that bias. Participants with hiring experience chose to receive or be blind to various pieces of information about applicants, some of which were potentially biasing. They selected potentially biasing information less often when asked to specify the applicant information they wanted to receive than when asked to specify the information they did not want to receive, when prescribing selections for other people than when making the selections for themselves, and when the information was obviously biasing than when it was less obviously so. On the basis of these findings, we propose a multipronged strategy that human resources leaders could use to enable and encourage hiring managers to self-blind when screening job applicants.","PeriodicalId":72347,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral science & policy","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135772895","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}
Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1177/23794607231192690
Heather Barry Kappes, Mattie Toma, Rekha Balu, Russ Burnett, Nuole Chen, Rebecca Johnson, Jessica Leight, Saad B. Omer, Elana Safran, Mary Steffel, Kris-Stella Trump, David Yokum, Pompa Debroy
The COVID-19 pandemic has added new urgency to the question of how best to motivate people to get needed vaccines. In this article, we present lessons gleaned from government evaluations of eight large randomized controlled trials of interventions that used direct communications to increase the uptake of routine vaccines. These evaluations, conducted by the U.S. General Services Administration’s Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) before the start of the pandemic, had a median sample size of 55,000. Participating organizations deployed a variety of behaviorally informed direct communications and used administrative data to measure whether people who received the communications got vaccinated or took steps toward vaccination. The results of six of the eight evaluations were not statistically significant, and a meta-analysis suggests that changes in vaccination rates ranged from -0.004 to 0.394 percentage points. The remaining two evaluations yielded increases in vaccination rates that were statistically significant, albeit modest: 0.59 and 0.16 percentage points. Agencies looking for cost-effective ways to use communications to boost vaccine uptake in the field—whether for COVID-19 or for other diseases-may want to evaluate program effectiveness early on so messages and methods may be adjusted as needed, and they should expect effects to be smaller than those seen in academic studies.
{"title":"Using communication to boost vaccination: Lessons for COVID-19 from evaluations of eight large-scale programs to promote routine vaccinations","authors":"Heather Barry Kappes, Mattie Toma, Rekha Balu, Russ Burnett, Nuole Chen, Rebecca Johnson, Jessica Leight, Saad B. Omer, Elana Safran, Mary Steffel, Kris-Stella Trump, David Yokum, Pompa Debroy","doi":"10.1177/23794607231192690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23794607231192690","url":null,"abstract":"The COVID-19 pandemic has added new urgency to the question of how best to motivate people to get needed vaccines. In this article, we present lessons gleaned from government evaluations of eight large randomized controlled trials of interventions that used direct communications to increase the uptake of routine vaccines. These evaluations, conducted by the U.S. General Services Administration’s Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) before the start of the pandemic, had a median sample size of 55,000. Participating organizations deployed a variety of behaviorally informed direct communications and used administrative data to measure whether people who received the communications got vaccinated or took steps toward vaccination. The results of six of the eight evaluations were not statistically significant, and a meta-analysis suggests that changes in vaccination rates ranged from -0.004 to 0.394 percentage points. The remaining two evaluations yielded increases in vaccination rates that were statistically significant, albeit modest: 0.59 and 0.16 percentage points. Agencies looking for cost-effective ways to use communications to boost vaccine uptake in the field—whether for COVID-19 or for other diseases-may want to evaluate program effectiveness early on so messages and methods may be adjusted as needed, and they should expect effects to be smaller than those seen in academic studies.","PeriodicalId":72347,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral science & policy","volume":"98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135772897","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}
Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1177/23794607231190607
Juan David Robalino, Alissa Fishbane, Daniel G. Goldstein, Hal E. Hershfield
One psychological barrier to putting money aside for retirement may be an inability to fully empathize with the economic woes of one’s future self. In tests of ways to lower this barrier, previous studies have had experimental participants interact with visualizations of their future selves. Despite the promise shown by such interventions in small-scale tests in the lab, little is known about their effectiveness in the real world. Our research evaluates the effectiveness of an aging filter (that is, software that creates an image of how a participant might look when older) in a randomized field study involving nearly 50,000 people saving for retirement in Mexico. The intervention, carried out over a month, modestly increased the number of account holders who made one-time contributions (from 1.5% in the control group to 1.7% in the treatment group, representing a 16% increase), as well as the value of those contributions. Although the total amount of money put aside was modest and the number of sign-ups for a recurring contribution savings program did not change significantly, this intervention proved cost-effective: It increased savings at a rate almost 500 times the cost of the intervention. Such psychologically informed interventions can effectively complement other initiatives to encourage people to save for retirement.
{"title":"Saving for retirement: A real-world test of whether seeing photos of one’s future self encourages contributions","authors":"Juan David Robalino, Alissa Fishbane, Daniel G. Goldstein, Hal E. Hershfield","doi":"10.1177/23794607231190607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23794607231190607","url":null,"abstract":"One psychological barrier to putting money aside for retirement may be an inability to fully empathize with the economic woes of one’s future self. In tests of ways to lower this barrier, previous studies have had experimental participants interact with visualizations of their future selves. Despite the promise shown by such interventions in small-scale tests in the lab, little is known about their effectiveness in the real world. Our research evaluates the effectiveness of an aging filter (that is, software that creates an image of how a participant might look when older) in a randomized field study involving nearly 50,000 people saving for retirement in Mexico. The intervention, carried out over a month, modestly increased the number of account holders who made one-time contributions (from 1.5% in the control group to 1.7% in the treatment group, representing a 16% increase), as well as the value of those contributions. Although the total amount of money put aside was modest and the number of sign-ups for a recurring contribution savings program did not change significantly, this intervention proved cost-effective: It increased savings at a rate almost 500 times the cost of the intervention. Such psychologically informed interventions can effectively complement other initiatives to encourage people to save for retirement.","PeriodicalId":72347,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral science & policy","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135772803","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}
Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1177/23794607231192734
Gudela Grote, Steve W. J. Kozlowski
Teamwork has been at the core of human social organization for millennia and is essential for organizational productivity and innovation. Yet teamwork often is not as effective as it could be. Drawing on extensive research into the factors that enable teams to function well, this article offers policy recommendations for bolstering teamwork capabilities in society at large and in organizations. Our proposals call for teaching teamwork skills as part of the curricula in higher education and in lower grades in school, creating government and industry regulations designed to enhance teamwork, and designing jobs and organizational workflows in ways that prioritize and support teamwork.
{"title":"Teamwork doesn’t just happen: Policy recommendations from over half a century of team research","authors":"Gudela Grote, Steve W. J. Kozlowski","doi":"10.1177/23794607231192734","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23794607231192734","url":null,"abstract":"Teamwork has been at the core of human social organization for millennia and is essential for organizational productivity and innovation. Yet teamwork often is not as effective as it could be. Drawing on extensive research into the factors that enable teams to function well, this article offers policy recommendations for bolstering teamwork capabilities in society at large and in organizations. Our proposals call for teaching teamwork skills as part of the curricula in higher education and in lower grades in school, creating government and industry regulations designed to enhance teamwork, and designing jobs and organizational workflows in ways that prioritize and support teamwork.","PeriodicalId":72347,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral science & policy","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135772896","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}
Gretchen B Chapman, Meng Li, Howard Leventhal, Elaine A Leventhal
The majority of U.S. adults do not receive an annual influenza vaccination Behavioral economics tools can be harnessed to encourage health behaviors. Specifically, scheduling patients by default for a flu shot appointment leads to higher vaccination rates at a medical practice than does merely encouraging flu shot appointments. It is not known, however, whether default appointments actually increase net vaccination or merely displace vaccinations from other venues. In the current field experiment, we examined the use of default appointments in a large medical practice and established that automatically scheduled appointments increased the total vaccination rate by 10 percentage points within the practice without displacing vaccinations that patients would otherwise have received in other settings. This increased vaccination rate came at the cost of a high no-show rate. These findings point to an effective way to increase vaccination rates and may offer a cost-saving measure in the scope of accountable care organizations.
{"title":"Default clinic appointments promote influenza vaccination uptake without a displacement effect.","authors":"Gretchen B Chapman, Meng Li, Howard Leventhal, Elaine A Leventhal","doi":"10.1353/bsp.2016.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/bsp.2016.0014","url":null,"abstract":"The majority of U.S. adults do not receive an annual influenza vaccination Behavioral economics tools can be harnessed to encourage health behaviors. Specifically, scheduling patients by default for a flu shot appointment leads to higher vaccination rates at a medical practice than does merely encouraging flu shot appointments. It is not known, however, whether default appointments actually increase net vaccination or merely displace vaccinations from other venues. In the current field experiment, we examined the use of default appointments in a large medical practice and established that automatically scheduled appointments increased the total vaccination rate by 10 percentage points within the practice without displacing vaccinations that patients would otherwise have received in other settings. This increased vaccination rate came at the cost of a high no-show rate. These findings point to an effective way to increase vaccination rates and may offer a cost-saving measure in the scope of accountable care organizations.","PeriodicalId":72347,"journal":{"name":"Behavioral science & policy","volume":"2 2","pages":"40-50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9878580/pdf/nihms-1866986.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10584264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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