Elanor F. Williams

Ethically Deployed Defaults: Transparency and Consumer Protection Through Disclosure and Preference Articulation.

Defaults are extremely effective at covertly guiding choices, which raises concerns about how to employ them ethically and responsibly. Consumer advocates have proposed that disclosing how defaults are intended to influence choices could help protect consumers from being unknowingly manipulated. This research shows that consumers appreciate transparency, but disclosure does not make defaults less influential. Seven experiments demonstrate that disclosure alters how fair consumers perceive defaults to be but does not attenuate default effects because consumers do not understand how to counter the processes by which defaults bias their judgment. Given that defaults lead consumers to focus disproportionately on reasons to choose the default even with disclosure, debiasing default effects requires that consumers engage in a more balanced consideration of the default and its alternative. Encouraging people to articulate their preferences for the default or its alternative, as in a forced choice, shifts the focus away from the default and reduces default effects.

Being All That You Can Be The Weighting of Potential in Assessments of Self and Others

An accurate assessment of an individual often requires taking their potential into account. Across six studies the authors found that people are more inclined to do so when evaluating themselves than when evaluating others, such that people credit themselves for their perceived potential more than they credit others for theirs. Participants rated potential as a more telling component of the self than of others, and the importance participants placed on their own potential led to attentional biases toward information about their own future potential that did not apply to information about the potential of others. Furthermore, when assessing themselves and other people, participants required more tangible proof that someone else has a given level of potential than they required of themselves, and they relied more on how they would ideally perform in self-assessment but more on how others actually performed in judging them.

Consumers Believe They Will Have More Control Over the Future than They Did Over the Past

Consumers repeatedly fail to bring about desired outcomes, and yet they also fail to learn from their own and others’ mistakes. This paper proposes a potential cause for this failure to learn: people believe that they will have more control over the future than they had over the past. Across several real-life and hypothetical scenarios, participants express the belief that, despite the uncertainty inherent in the future, future outcomes will be more under their control than were identical past outcomes. This is true in self-control contexts as well as for more general behaviors and life circumstances. The difference does not arise due to a sense of general optimism, but instead is related to the fact that people perceive it to be more important to have control over events and behaviors in the future than it was in the past.