Many decisions are curated, incentivised or nudged by a third party. Despite this, only a handful of studies have looked at paternalistic decision-makers and the psychological processes by which they arrive at their decisions. The role of affect, in particular, has been ignored so far, and yet restricting agency on a potentially large group of people might be highly unpleasant. We are the first to propose a conceptual framework of affective paternalism which explicitly accounts for the role of affect in paternalistic decision-making, identifying all entry points through which affect may create systematic deviations in decision outcomes. We shed light on some of these phenomena by using a novel survey experiment in which we let participants make paternalistic decisions whilst also asking them about their motivations behind their choices, including cognitive reasons and affect. Our findings suggest that affect may play a significant role in paternalistic decision-making and lead to systematically different decision outcomes. To the extent that these that could result in inefficient, undesirable or unfair consequences, our framework may help more accurately predict a paternalist's decision and suggest entry points for where and possibly how to intervene in the paternalistic decision-making process.

Showering is one of the most water-intensive behaviours in urban households, accounting for 20–30% of water use. Real-time feedback from smart devices has been proven to significantly reduce water consumption in showers. Still, it is not known whether these devices have spillover effects on other water use behaviours. For the first time, we provide empirical evidence for a significant and negative within-domain spillover effect from the use of such devices, showing an increase in water use in other activities by 2.5% per day per household. Up to one-third of conservation effects are eroded by such spillovers, resulting in a two steps forward, one step back situation. Overall, however, net water use is still reduced by 4.7% in the 385 households that were observed. This study points out an important behavioural limit on the use of such smart shower devices and suggests that such use be accompanied by informational or other campaigns to reduce the large negative spillovers.

Counter-serious and organised crime (SOC) strategies often include an awareness-raising element. Such messaging aims to build support for counter-SOC efforts, and intolerance for organised criminal activity. However, a growing body of research suggests that raising awareness to ‘social bads’ like SOC may risk backfiring by encouraging pessimistic attitudes about whether they can be controlled and could even nudge people to agree with populist narratives which argue that political outsiders represent the only hope for tackling systemic problems. A nationally representative survey experiment in Albania was conducted to test, for the first time, the impact of messages about SOC. Typical of counter-SOC messaging in practice, the first message emphasised the harms SOC causes. The second was more positive, highlighting high levels of social disapproval of SOC, a theme that social norms research suggests may be effective. We find that the first message backfires by reducing confidence in law enforcement and encouraging support for populist ideas. The second message is unexpectedly found to also encourage support for a populist sentiment, while having no positive impact on attitudes about law enforcement. This suggests that even positive messaging about ‘social bads’ can risk triggering unwanted responses.

Behavioural public policy (BPP) operates within one of four cultural models of public management, an illustration of an influential scheme set out by Christopher Hood. Even though BPP can be fatalist, individualist or egalitarian, so far it has been hierarchicalist. Hallsworth's manifesto is largely an expression of this hierarchicalist form of public management, with all its limitations and contradictions. As the manifesto pays relatively little attention to decentralist and egalitarian approaches, it misses a radical opportunity. Future work on BPP could incorporate entrepreneurial and egalitarian possibilities while recognising the difficulties of moving away from hierarchalism completely. Even though Hood cautions against a ‘public management for all seasons’, it remains a plausible path for the next generation of researchers and practitioners of BPP.

I'm grateful to the authors for taking the time to read and respond to the manifesto. I have great respect for the contributions each of them has made to our field, and I'd like to offer some clarifications and reflections prompted by their thoughts.

Private refugee sponsorship is a desirable behaviour – it leads to positive outcomes for sponsors, refugees, the Canadian government and the general public. The most commonly reported motivations to sponsor are related to identity, including moral and national identity. Self-determination theory (SDT) suggests that identity is a strong intrinsic motivator; individuals who identify more strongly as a sponsor may be more intrinsically motivated to take on additional sponsorships. This proposed behavioural policy uses the components of SDT to design a certificate programme that bestows an official title on sponsors after completing a sponsorship. The certificate design reflects the three components of SDT (autonomy, competence and relatedness) and encourages moral and national incentives. Official titles are shown to increase identity with a role – titles act themselves as mechanisms of identity-building, which can lead to identity-motivated behaviours. The proposed certificate programme aligns with existing practices and resources already used by the Canadian government. It suggests that official titles could be a cost-effective mechanism for encouraging subsequent sponsorships.

People buy some goods that they do not enjoy and wish did not exist. They might even be willing to pay a great deal for such goods, whether the currency involves time, commitment or money. One reason involves signaling to others; so long as the good exists, nonconsumption might give an unwanted signal to friends or colleagues. Another reason involves self-signaling; so long as the good exists, nonconsumption might give an unwanted signal to an agent about himself or herself. Yet another reason involves a combination of network effects and status competition; nonconsumption might deprive people of the benefits of participating in a network and thus cause them to lose relative position. With respect to real-world goods (including activities) of this kind, there is typically heterogeneity in relevant populations, with some people deriving positive utility from goods to which other people are indifferent, or which other people deplore. Efforts to measure people's willingness to pay for goods of this kind will suggest a welfare gain, and possibly a substantial one, even though the existence of such goods produces a welfare loss, and possibly a substantial one. Collective action, private or public, is necessary to eliminate goods that people consume but wish did not exist. Legal responses here might be contemplated when someone successfully maneuvers people into a situation in which they are incentivized to act against their interests, by consuming a product or engaging in an activity they do not enjoy, in order to avoid offering an unwanted signal. Prohibitions on waiving certain rights might be justified in this way; some restrictions on uses of social media, especially by young people, might be similarly justified.

This study investigates the impacts of behavioral finance on stock market volatility. The primary aims are to explain the reasons behind changes in the S&P 500 price within the context of behavioral finance and to analyze investor behavior in response to these changes. To achieve this, the research employs time-series analysis over a 10-year period, focusing on the S&P 500, real interest rates, consumer confidence, market volatility and credit default swaps while considering the effects of behavioral biases. The findings reveal several significant correlations: rising real interest rates negatively affect stocks due to loss aversion and sentiment. Conversely, higher consumer confidence tends to positively influence the stock market, driven by herding behavior and optimism. Additionally, market volatility shows a negative correlation with the S&P 500, influenced by risk aversion, recency bias and herding behavior. Moreover, an increase in credit default swap rates leads to stock market declines, primarily influenced by risk perception, loss aversion and herding behavior.

Some products, notably but not only platforms, increase in value for users as the number of other users increases. These interaction or network effects can result in ‘product market traps’ (Bursztyn et al., 2023) where people who use the product would be better off if they all stopped using it and switched to another product, but cannot because of coordination problems. A parallel but overlooked phenomenon is the labor market trap, where employees would be better off if they collectively left an employer, job, or profession, but cannot because of the difficulty of coordination. Product market and labor market traps pose a challenge to public policy because of the complexity of people's behavior in networks, but can be mitigated in some cases with relatively simple taxes and regulatory interventions.

Many foodborne illness outbreaks originate in food service establishments. We tested two behavioural interventions designed to improve the duration and quality of handwashing. We ran a three-armed parallel trial in a laboratory kitchen, from 7 March to 27 May 2022. Participants were n = 195 workers who handle food. We randomly allocated participants to three groups: Timer – tap-mounted timer that counted seconds while participants washed their hands; Precommitment – agreed to five statements on good hand hygiene before attending the kitchen; and Control. Participants completed a food preparation task under time pressure. Cameras focused on the sink captured handwashing. Outcome measures were number of times participants washed their hands; number of times they washed their hands using soap; number of times they washed using soap and washed the backs of their hands; and mean duration of handwashing attempts using soap. Participants in Timer washed their hands for 1.9 s longer on average than Control (β = 2.20, 95% CI = 0.34-4.06, p = 0.021). Participants in Precommitment washed their hands for 2.5 s longer on average than Control (β = 2.30, 95% CI = 0.33-4.27, p = 0.022). We found no statistically significant differences on any other outcome measure.

This study examines how beliefs interact with heterogeneous donation preferences in determining people's donation decisions and choices of revision and observability. We conducted an online experiment eliciting participants’ first-order beliefs, that is, beliefs about an average donor's contribution, with the opportunity of being recognized. We also provided the opportunity for donation revision to a group of randomly selected participants. Our study results show that people's first-order beliefs are positively correlated with their willingness to donate and their actual donations. Moreover, first-order beliefs also interact with people's heterogeneous donation preferences in jointly determining their decisions of donation revision and observability – their tendency to opt in for public recognition. Donors with low first-order beliefs and high donation preferences are most likely to opt in for recognition, but they are unlikely to revise their donations. Donors with high first-order beliefs and low donation preferences are most likely to revise their donations, but they are less likely to choose to be recognized. Donors with low first-order beliefs and low donation preferences display the lowest tendency toward revision and observability.

Consequentialist theories of the behavioral state are largely grounded in satisfying self-interested preferences through policies that employ choice architecture and related strategies to encourage rational decision-making. Even when allowing for free choice, however, this stance tends to be characterized by a paternalistic ‘view from nowhere’ that may not fully accommodate a plurality of values. Alternative approaches such as contractarianism position policy in the context of marketplace exchange, bolstered by shared beliefs in the legitimacy of social institutions. Yet this view may not sufficiently consider issues of asymmetric access, or ideological frames that do not see these institutions as legitimate. To address these deficits, we propose the value of a dialogical approach to behavioral public policy that facilitates collaborative engagement and behavioral justice to redress asymmetries and inequities through a more discursive approach, which builds on practices employed by design for public policy. In so doing, this political theory suggests an actionable counterpoint to paternalistic and competition-based conceptions of the State to address frame plurality and increase the potential for system equity.

This paper explores the complexities and unintended consequences of conflict of interest (COI) disclosures in various professional settings. It highlights key psychological processes encountered by recipients of such disclosures. Notably, it describes the burden of disclosure effect, which paradoxically reduces trust while increasing compliance due to social pressures, and disclosure's expertise cue, where disclosures inadvertently increase trust and persuasiveness by signalling expertise. The paper also outlines best practices for improving COI disclosures, emphasising the need for external third-party involvement and encouraging deliberation. It concludes that effective disclosure depends not only on how recipients process information but also critically on how the disclosure influences the behaviour of advisors, underscoring the need for a holistic approach to managing COIs that goes beyond mere transparency. A version of this paper was presented as a keynote at the Second Annual International Behavioural Public Policy Conference at the University of North Carolina in September 2023.

Similarly to other domains of the social sciences, behavioural science has grappled with a crisis concerning the effect sizes of research findings. Different solutions have been provided to answer this challenge. This paper will discuss analytical strategies developed in the context of computational social science, namely causal tree and forest, that will benefit behavioural scientists in harnessing heterogeneity of treatment effects in RCTs. As a mixture of theoretical and data-driven approaches, these techniques are well suited to exploit the rich information provided by large studies conducted using RCTs. We discuss the characteristics of these methods and their methodological rationale and provide simulations to illustrate their use. We simulate two scenarios of RCTs-generated data and explore the heterogeneity of treatment effects using causal tree and causal forest methods. Furthermore, we outlined a potential theoretical use of these techniques to enrich behavioural science ecological validity by introducing the notion of behavioural niche.

Companies face increasing pressure to adopt social responsibility initiatives while simultaneously providing shareholder value. However, consumers may respond negatively to ‘win-win’ initiatives that benefit society while bringing financial gain to the corporation, producing a backlash effect. Previous researchers have attributed this backlash effect to the violation of a communal relationship norm that companies trigger in consumers when communicating their win-win initiatives. We propose the alternative hypothesis that the backlash derives from people's deception aversion. We find evidence supporting deception aversion in three preregistered studies showing that companies are evaluated negatively when their actions differ from those implied by their stated prosocial policy and not, as predicted by the communal norm violation hypothesis, when they merely earn a profit. Our results suggest that companies should not fear that earning a profit from prosocial activities will carry reputational risk, so long as they are transparent.

Compliance with hygiene and other safety measures in the workplace was an important component of society's strategy for reducing infections at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular before vaccinations were widely available. We report the results of a field trial of well-established behavioural interventions (social norms, pledging and messenger effects) we implemented to improve compliance with such measures in an occupational setting. We use daily reports of own and other's behaviour to assess the effects of these interventions and supplement these subjective (self-reported) measures with objective data on hand sanitiser usage. The behavioural interventions tested have statistically significant but quantitatively moderate effects on subjective compliance measures and minimal effects on hand sanitiser usage. All effects of our interventions are short-term in nature and dissipate shortly after implementation. Our findings thus provide at most weak support for the notion that typical behavioural interventions can help support compliance with infection prevention measures in the workplace.

Boosts and nudges are two separate types of behavioral public policies, distinguished by the mechanisms through which they operate. We investigated whether this theoretical distinction translates into different effects when instances of these policy types are implemented in the context of energy consumption. In a long-term field randomized controlled trial, we competitively tested boosts against nudges. We found that boosts outperform nudges throughout a seven-month period in a student dormitory setting – both in terms of accumulated energy savings, as well as in keeping consumption consistently low during the experimental period. Furthermore, we explored the processes behind the boosts and nudges through a number of mechanistic markers and showed that the tested interventions indeed are instances of the respective types.

Political scientists have proposed that party cues can be used to compensate for the public's well-documented lack of substantive political knowledge, but some critics have argued that applying party cues is more difficult than assumed. We argue that this debate has proven intractable in part because scholars have used ambiguous normative criteria to evaluate judgments. We use a unique task and clear normative criteria to evaluate the use of party cues in making political judgments among two samples: a sample of state legislators and an online sample of the public. We find that the public sample performs poorly when using cues to make judgments. State legislators make much more accurate judgments on average than even the most attentive segment of the public and are more likely to place less weight on irrelevant cues when making judgments, although there is evidence that both samples performed worse with the inclusion of non-diagnostic cues. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of the results, which we interpret as showing that party cue use is more difficult than theorized, and discuss some practical implications of the findings.