Julian J. Zlatev

Behavioral Processes in Long-Lag Intervention Studies

We argue that psychologists who conduct experiments with long lags between the manipulation and the outcome measure should pay more attention to behavioral processes that intervene between the manipulation and the outcome measure. Neglect of such processes, we contend, stems from psychology’s long tradition of short-lag lab experiments where there is little scope for intervening behavioral processes. Studying process in the lab invariably involves studying psychological processes, but in long-lag field experiments it is important to study causally relevant behavioral processes as well as psychological ones. To illustrate the roles that behavioral processes can play in long-lag experiments we examine field experiments motivated by three policy-relevant goals: prejudice reduction, health promotion, and educational achievement. In each of the experiments discussed we identify various behavioral pathways through which the manipulated psychological state could have produced the observed outcome. We argue that if psychologists conducting long-lag interventions posited a theory of change that linked manipulated psychological states to outcomes via behavioral pathways, the result would be richer theory and more practically useful research. Movement in this direction would also permit more opportunities for productive collaborations between psychologists and other social scientists interested in similar social problems.

Default neglect in attempts at social influence

Significance While a great deal is known about how people respond to influence tactics that are used on them, almost nothing is known about whether people understand these tactics and strategically use them to influence others. We examine whether people are successful at using the default effect, a widely studied bias with special policy relevance, to influence others’ choices. Overall, we find that managers, law/business/medical students, and US adults often fail to understand and/or use defaults, with some interesting exceptions. These findings suggest that the scope for improving social welfare via behavioral policy interventions is vast. Current theories suggest that people understand how to exploit common biases to influence others. However, these predictions have received little empirical attention. We consider a widely studied bias with special policy relevance: the default effect, which is the tendency to choose whichever option is the status quo. We asked participants (including managers, law/business/medical students, and US adults) to nudge others toward selecting a target option by choosing whether to present that target option as the default. In contrast to theoretical predictions, we find that people often fail to understand and/or use defaults to influence others, i.e., they show “default neglect.” First, in one-shot default-setting games, we find that only 50.8% of participants set the target option as the default across 11 samples (n = 2,844), consistent with people not systematically using defaults at all. Second, when participants have multiple opportunities for experience and feedback, they still do not systematically use defaults. Third, we investigate beliefs related to the default effect. People seem to anticipate some mechanisms that drive default effects, yet most people do not believe in the default effect on average, even in cases where they do use defaults. We discuss implications of default neglect for decision making, social influence, and evidence-based policy.

Reply to Jung et al.: Default neglect persists over time and across contexts

We appreciate the comments and studies by Jung et al. (1). They test for default neglect in three new default games, finding that “Choice Architects” (CAs) are better than chance at correctly predicting the default effect in these new contexts. That said, we believe that Jung et al.’s claim that CAs are “excellent” at setting defaults (1) is premature. First, they do not present data on default-setting behavior, per se, but rather on beliefs about the default effect. This distinction is important because default-setting behavior does not always correlate with beliefs about the default effect (study 3 in ref. 2). Second, default neglect should be conceptualized as a spectrum from total … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: jjzlatev{at}stanford.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Choice Architects Reveal a Bias Toward Positivity and Certainty

Biases can influence important decisions in social, political, and economic environments, but little is empirically known about whether and how individuals try to exploit others’ biases in strategic interactions. For instance, people must often decide between giving others choice sets with positive or certain options (likely influencing them toward safer options) versus negative or risky options (likely influencing them toward riskier options). In this paper, we study nudge strategies, strategic decisions about how to exploit others’ biases. We show that individuals’ nudge strategies are distorted towards presenting choice sets with positive or certain options, across nine experiments involving diverse samples (including business executives, law students, business students, medical students, and online adults) and multiple important contexts (including public policy, business, and medicine). In many cases, this distortion actually causes a majority of people to use a nudge strategy that backfires. Surprisingly, people’s predictions about the directional effects of nudge strategies are generally correct. Thus, simply prompting people to consider their own predictions can improve nudge strategies that would otherwise be suboptimal. The evidence is consistent with meta-prospect theory, in which properties familiar from prospect theory generate distortions in nudge strategies; for example, loss aversion generates a distortion towards presenting gain frames over presenting loss frames. Overall, our results suggest that improving well-intentioned but suboptimal nudge strategies is a feasible objective which could lead to substantial benefits for both individuals and society.Biases influence important decisions, but little is known about whether and how individuals try to exploit others’ biases in strategic interactions. Choice architects—that is, people who present choices to others—must often decide between presenting choice sets with positive or certain options (influencing others toward safer options) versus presenting choice sets with negative or risky options (influencing others toward riskier options). We show that choice architects’ influence strategies are distorted toward presenting choice sets with positive or certain options, across thirteen studies involving diverse samples (executives, law/business/medical students, adults) and contexts (public policy, business, medicine). These distortions appear to primarily reflect decision biases rather than social preferences, and they can cause choice architects to use influence strategies that backfire.

Doing Good or Looking Good? Distinguishing Between Private and Public Prosociality

Prosociality is central to social and organizational life. The papers in this symposium explore the various ways in which public versus private settings for a prosocial behavior can differentially ...