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Publications (37)
Behavioural economics and behavioural public policy have been fundamental parts of governmental responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. This was not only the case at the beginning of the pandemic as governments pondered how to get people to follow restrictions, but also during delivery of the vaccination programme. Behavioural Economics and Policy for...
As behavioural science is increasingly adopted by organizations, there is a growing need to assess the robustness and transferability of empirical findings. Here, we investigate the transferability of insights from various sources of behavioural science knowledge to field settings. Across three pre-registered randomized controlled trials (RCTs, N =...
Applied behavioral science has grown rapidly in the past few decades as organizations and governments seek to incorporate research on human behavior into policy decisions ¹ . At the same time, there is a growing recognition of the need to examine the robustness of empirical findings and their transferability to consequential behaviors 2,3,4 . Here,...
Purpose
To evaluate if nudges delivered by text message prior to an upcoming primary care visit can increase influenza vaccination rates.
Design
Randomized, controlled trial.
Setting
Two health systems in the Northeastern US between September 2020 and March 2021.
Subjects
74,811 adults.
Interventions
Patients in the 19 intervention arms receive...
The efficacy of behavioral interventions targeting policy-relevant outcomes often varies across sub-populations. Understanding and planning for heterogeneous treatment effects is critical to developing nuanced theories of human behavior and offering more useful guidance to policymakers. We identify one theory-driven source of heterogeneity in the e...
To encourage farsighted behaviors, past research suggests that marketers may be wise to invite consumers to pre-commit to adopt them “later”. However, the authors propose that people will draw different inferences from different types of pre-commitment offers, and that these inferences can help explain when pre-commitment is effective at increasing...
Behavioral interventions applied to policy problems often yield varying degrees of success in different sub-populations. Understanding and planning for heterogeneous treatment effects is critical to developing nuanced theories of human behavior and offering more useful guidance to policymakers. In this research, we identify one source of heterogene...
Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes¹. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals². The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their po...
We conducted a field experiment to study the effect of framing future moments in time as new beginnings (or “fresh starts”). University employees (N = 6,082) received mailings with an opportunity to choose between increasing their contributions to a savings plan immediately or at a specified future time point. Framing the future time point in relat...
Many Americans fail to get life-saving vaccines each year, and the availability of a vaccine for COVID-19 makes the challenge of encouraging vaccination more urgent than ever. We present a large field experiment ( N = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findin...
High performance expectations often improve performance. When individuals with high external performance expectations encounter early setbacks, however, they face impression management concerns and the prospect of embarrassment. As a result, when the going gets tough, individuals facing high external expectations may be less likely to persist than...
Expanding on evidence that interventions to improve health are more effective when informed by behavioral science, we explore whether reminders designed to harness behavioral science principles can improve medication adherence. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 46,581 U.S. participants with commercial or Medicare Advantage insurance f...
Low medication adherence is problematic.¹ Well-designed reminders can increase adherence,² but when should reminders be sent to maximize their effect? Prior observational studies³ and laboratory experiments⁴ have shown that engagement in healthy activities increases considerably following fresh-start dates: life and calendar events signaling the be...
The design and use of standard processes are foundational recommendations in many operations practices. Yet, given the demonstrated performance benefits of standardized processes, it is surprising that they are often not followed consistently. One way to ensure greater compliance is by electronically monitoring the activities of individuals, althou...
People often fail to muster the motivation needed to initiate goal pursuit. Across five laboratory experiments, we explored occasions when people naturally experience enhanced motivation to take actions that facilitate goal pursuit and why certain dates are more likely to spur goal initiation than others. We present causal evidence that emphasizing...
To deliver high-quality, reliable, and consistent services safely, organizations develop professional standards. Despite the communication and reinforcement of these standards, they are often not followed consistently. Although previous research suggests that high job demands are associated with declines in compliance over lengthy intervals, we hyp...
The popularity of New Year's resolutions suggests that people are more likely to tackle their goals immediately following salient temporal landmarks. If true, this little-researched phenomenon has the potential to help people overcome important willpower problems that often limit goal attainment. Across three archival field studies, we provide evid...
In this chapter, we review and synthesize past research on want/should conflict. We begin with a formal definition of relative wants and shoulds and summarize prior work on the underlying cognitive processes that produce want/should conflict. We then describe empirical research on the levers that predictably tip the balance in favor of want versus...
Recent field research on the “fresh start effect” has shown that temporal landmarks – distinct calendar dates (e.g., the start of the week/month/year, a holiday) and life events (e.g., a birthday) that stand out from other days in our lives – spur goal-directed, aspirational activities (e.g., dieting, exercising). Across six laboratory studies, we...
Building on psychological insights about the way people make decisions, behavioral scientists have proposed various methods to increase behaviors that promote welfare without limiting freedom of choice (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). Recently, researchers have begun exploring the power of such methods for encouraging people to engage in beneficial healt...
In order to deliver high quality, reliable, and consistent services safely, organizations develop professional standards. These standards may be adopted from external agencies (e.g., professional industry groups, external regulators) or developed through the internal documentation and proliferation of best practices. Despite the communication and r...
Existing apology research has conceptualized apologies as a device to rebuild relationships following a transgression. Individuals, however, often apologize for circumstances for which they are obviously not culpable (e.g., heavy traffic or bad weather). In this article, we define superfluous apologies as expressions of regret for an undesirable ci...
Many view the commencement of each New Year as an opportunity for a fresh start, which motivates them to pursue virtuous goals. We demonstrate that this well-known uptick in virtuous behavior following New Year’s is just one example of a broader phenomenon, which we refer to as the 'fresh start effect.' Specifically, special (and mundane) occasions...