Todd Rogers

Harvard University | Harvard · Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy

For information interventions to be effective, recipients must first engage with them. We show that engagement with repeated digital information interventions is shaped by subtle and strategically controllable signals of the information’s value. In particular, recipients’ expectations are shaped by signals from the “envelope” that surrounds a messa...

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...

Disinformation in politics, advertising, and mass communications has proliferated in recent years. Few counterargumentation strategies have proven effective at undermining a deceptive message over time. This article introduces the Poison Parasite Counter (PPC), a cognitive-science-based strategy for durably countering deceptive communications. The...

Many educational interventions encourage parents to engage in their child’s education as if parental time and attention is limitless. Sadly, though, it is not. Successfully encouraging certain parental investments may crowd out other productive behaviors. A randomized field experiment (N = 2,212) assessed the impact of an intervention in which pare...

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...

Many states mandate districts or schools notify parents when students have missed multiple unexcused days of school. We report a randomized experiment ( N = 131,312) evaluating the impact of sending parents truancy notifications modified to target behavioral barriers that can hinder effective parental engagement. Modified truancy notifications that...

Increasing virtuous behaviors, such as initiating healthy habits, is an important goal for policymakers and social scientists. To promote compliance with requests to perform virtuous behaviors, we study “returnable reciprocity.” Whereas traditional reciprocity involves giving people unreturnable unsolicited gifts to encourage compliance, returnable...

Firms are increasingly giving consumers the vote. Eight studies show that, when firms empower consumers to vote, consumers infer a series of implicit promises—even in the absence of explicit promises. We identify three implicit promises to which consumers react negatively when violated: representation (Experiments 1A–1C), consistency (Experiment 2)...

It is common for organizations to offer awards to motivate individual behavior, yet few empirical studies evaluate their effectiveness in the field. We report a randomized field experiment (N = 15,329) that tests the impact of two common types of symbolic awards: pre-announced awards (prospective) and surprise awards (retrospective). The context is...

A field experiment (N = 6976) examines how enrollment defaults affect adoption and impact of an education technology that sends weekly automated alerts on students’ academic progress to parents. We show that a standard (high-friction) opt-in process induces extremely low parent take-up (<1%), while a simplified process yields higher enrollment (11%...

People preferentially consume information that aligns with their prior beliefs, contributing to polarization and undermining democracy. Five studies (collective N = 2455) demonstrate that such “selective exposure” partly stems from faulty affective forecasts. Specifically, political partisans systematically overestimate the strength of negative aff...

Attendance in kindergarten and elementary school robustly predicts student outcomes. Despite this well-documented association, there is little experimental research on how to reduce absenteeism in the early grades. This paper presents results from a randomized field experiment in 10 school districts evaluating the impact of a low-cost, parent-focus...

Student attendance is critical to educational success, and is increasingly the focus of educators, researchers and policymakers. We report the results of a randomized experiment examining interventions targeting student absenteeism. Parents of 28,080 high-risk students in grades kindergarten to 12th grade received one of three personalized informat...

Commitment devices impose costs on one's future self for failing to follow through on one's intentions, offer no additional benefit to one's future self for following through on the intention, and people voluntarily enroll in them. Enrollment in commitment devices reflects self-awareness that one may lack sufficient self-control to fulfill one's in...

Commitment devices impose costs on one’s future self for failing to follow through on one’s intentions, offer no additional benefit to one’s future self for following through on the intention, and people voluntarily enroll in them. Enrollment in commitment devices reflects self-awareness that one may lack sufficient self-control to fulfill one’s in...

This article reviews research from several behavioral disciplines to derive strategies for prompting people to perform behaviors that are individually costly and provide negligible individual or social benefits but are meaningful when performed by a large number of individuals. Whereas the term social influence encompasses all the ways in which peo...

Organizational scholarship centers on understanding organizational context, usually captured through field studies, as well as determining causality, typically with laboratory experiments. We argue that field experiments can bridge these approaches, bringing causality to field research and developing organizational theory in novel ways. We present...

People believe that future others' preferences and beliefs will change to align with their own. People holding a particular view (e.g., support of President Trump) are more likely to believe that future others will share their view than to believe that future others will have an opposing view (e.g., opposition to President Trump). Six studies demon...

Government agencies around the world have begun to embrace the use of behavioural policy interventions (such as the strategic use of default options), which has inspired vigorous public discussion about the ethics of their use. Since any feasible policy requires some measure of public support, understanding when people find behavioural policy inter...

A large-scale experiment assessed the turnout effects of the “Neighbors” mailer, which exerts social pressure to vote by disclosing the past turnout records of recipients and their neighbors. A prior large-scale experiment conducted in a low salience election found that this mailer increased turnout substantially. The experiment reported here gauge...

Paltering is the active use of truthful statements to convey a misleading impression. Across 2 pilot studies and 6 experiments, we identify paltering as a distinct form of deception. Paltering differs from lying by omission (the passive omission of relevant information) and lying by commission (the active use of false statements). Our findings reve...

To date, field experiments on campaign tactics have focused overwhelmingly on mobilization and voter turnout, with far more limited attention to persuasion and vote choice. In this paper, we analyze a field experiment with 56,000 Wisconsin voters designed to measure the persuasive effects of canvassing, phone calls, and mailings during the 2008 pre...

Significance People are regularly asked to report on their likelihoods of carrying out consequential future behaviors, including complying with medical advice, completing their educations, and voting in elections; responses, however, are notoriously unreliable. For example, more than half of people who state a self-prediction that they will vote in...

People often fail to follow through on good intentions. While limited self-control is frequently the culprit, another cause is simply forgetting to enact intentions when opportunities arise. We introduce a novel, potent approach to facilitating follow-through: the reminders-through-association approach. This approach involves associating intentions...

Significance Reputational concern is one reason people perform behaviors that are good for society but have little benefit for individuals (e.g., energy efficiency, donation, recycling, voting). In order for a behavior to influence reputations, it must be observable. However, many strategies for encouraging these behaviors involve communicating pri...

When people perceive themselves as similar to others, greater liking and closer relationships typically result. In the first randomized field experiment that leverages actual similarities to improve real-world relationships, we examined the affiliations between 315 9th grade students and their 25 teachers. Students in the treatment condition receiv...

People are exposed to exemplary peer performances often (and sometimes by design in interventions). In two studies, we showed that exposure to exemplary peer performances can undermine motivation and success by causing people to perceive that they cannot attain their peers’ high levels of performance. It also causes de-identification with the relev...

Behavioral decision researchers have provided naturally suggesting innovations in how interventions are structured. There has been an explosion in the use of randomized field experiments across the social sciences. This chapter uses the insights and perspective of behavioral science to analyze how field interventions to improve societal well-being...

People fail to follow through on all types of important intentions, including staying fit, studying sufficiently, and voting. These failures cost individuals and society by escalating medical costs, shrinking lifetime earnings, and reducing citizen involvement in government. Evidence is mounting, however, that prompting people to make concrete and...

In Reply Our Viewpoint described commitment devices and argued that they should be more widely used in health care. Commitment devices enforce voluntarily imposed restrictions on people until they have accomplished their goals or enforce voluntarily imposed penalties if they do not accomplish their goals. Taking disulfiram in the morning so a perso...

Interventions intended to change people’s behavior are ubiquitous in modern society. Some interventions produce changes in behavior that persist even after the interventions are discontinued, while other interventions generate only short-term behavior changes that disappear once the interventions stop. The framework presented here guides understand...

Unhealthy behaviors are responsible for a high percentage of health care costs and poor health outcomes. In large companies, unhealthy behaviors by employees are considered an important challenge to affordable benefits coverage. Employers increasingly leverage incentives to encourage changes in employees’ health-related behaviors. In this viewpoint...

Modern campaigns develop databases of detailed information about citizens to inform electoral strategy and to guide tactical efforts. Despite sensational reports about the value of individual consumer data, the most valuable information campaigns acquire comes from the behaviors and direct responses provided by citizens themselves. Campaign data an...

Unhealthy behaviors are responsible for a large proportion of health care costs and poor health outcomes.1 Surveys of large employers regularly identify unhealthy behaviors as the most important challenge to affordable benefits coverage. For this reason, employers increasingly leverage incentives to encourage changes in employees’ health-related be...

Behavioral science is increasingly being used to develop interventions to influence important behaviors throughout society. We explore three ways that time interacts with psychological processes to affect the impact of behavioral interventions. The first is how and when there would be a lag between the moment in which an intervention is administere...

We propose that people hold a belief in a favorable future (BFF), projecting that the future will change in ways advantageous to their current interests. People believe that their political views, entertainment preferences, and scientific beliefs will be more widely held by others in the future (Study 1). BFF is greater in magnitude than the false-...

Can independent groups change voters’ beliefs about an incumbent’s positions? Does reframing how candidates’ are perceived by changing beliefs about their positions influence actual voter choices? Past laboratory and observational research suggests that candidate reframing is difficult and of little consequence; because the messages must be believe...

People often hold extreme political attitudes about complex policies. We hypothesized that people typically know less about such policies than they think they do (the illusion of explanatory depth) and that polarized attitudes are enabled by simplistic causal models. Asking people to explain policies in detail both undermined the illusion of explan...

Public opinion researchers, campaigns, and political scientists often rely on self-predicted vote to forecast turnout, allocate resources, and measure political engagement. Despite its importance, little research has examined the accuracy of self-predicted vote responses. Seven pre-election surveys with postelection vote validation from three elect...

To date, field experiments on campaign tactics have focused overwhelmingly on mobilization and voter turnout, with far more limited attention to persuasion and vote choice. In this paper, we analyze a field experiment with 56,000 Wisconsin voters designed to measure the persuasive effects of canvassing, phone calls, and mailings during the 2008 pre...

Ballot initiatives are consequential and common, with total spending on initiative campaigns in the US rivaling that of Presidential campaigns. Observational studies using regression approaches on observational data have alternately found that initiative campaign spending cannot affect initiative outcomes, can increase the number of votes rejecting...

Interventions to affect repeated behaviors, such as smoking, exercise, or workplace effort, can often have large short-run impacts but uncertain or disappointing long-run effects. We study one part of a large program designed to induce energy conservation, in which home energy reports containing personalized feedback, social comparisons, and energy...

How accurate are responses to questions about intentions to vote in an upcoming election? Questions of this type are studied in a range of work in political science to understand the effects of other factors on political engagement, as well as in public opinion research. We analyze six phone surveys conducted over two elections which include pre-el...

Three randomized experiments found that subtle linguistic cues have the power to increase voting and related behavior. The phrasing of survey items was varied to frame voting either as the enactment of a personal identity (e.g., "being a voter") or as simply a behavior (e.g., "voting"). As predicted, the personal-identity phrasing significantly inc...

Dale and Strauss’s (DS) noticeable reminder theory (NRT) of voter mobilization posits that mobilization efforts that are highly noticeable and salient to potential voters, even if impersonal, can be successful. In an innovative experimental design, DS show that text messages substantially boost turnout, challenging previous claims that social conne...

What happens when speakers try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? In 4 studies, we show that listeners can fail to detect dodges when speakers answer similar-but objectively incorrect-questions (the "artful dodge"), a detection failure that goes hand-in-hand with a failure to rate dodgers more nega...

The fact that many citizens fail to vote is often cited to motivate others to vote. Psychological research on descriptive social norms suggests that emphasizing the opposite – that many do vote – would be a more effective message. In two get-out-the-vote field experiments, we find that messages emphasizing low expected turnout are less effective at...

How accurate are people when predicting whether they will vote? These self-predictions are used by political scientists to proxy for political motivation, and by public opinion researcher to predict election outcomes. Phone surveys from three elections, including one survey experiment, are analyzed to compare respondents’ pre-election vote intentio...

In their 2009 article published in the American Journal of Political Science, Dale and Strauss (DS) introduce the Noticeable Reminder Theory (NRT) of voter mobilization, which posits that mobilization efforts that are highly noticeable and salient to potential voters, even if impersonal, can be successful. In an innovative experimental design, DS s...

For various local elections in November 2009, I worked with the San Mateo County Registrar to conduct various voter mobilization field experiments, including emails, text messages, and most notably including pre-paid envelopes with absentee ballots, to measure the effectiveness of administration-led efforts to increase turnout. This paper will revi...

How do decisions made for tomorrow or 2days in the future differ from decisions made for several days in the future? We use data from an online grocer to address this question. In general, we find that as the delay between order completion and delivery increases, grocery customers spend less, order a higher percentage of “should” items (e.g., veget...

Phone calls encouraging citizens to vote are staples of modern campaigns. Insights from psychological science can make these calls dramatically more potent while also generating opportunities to expand psychological theory. We present a field experiment conducted during the 2008 presidential election (N = 287,228) showing that facilitating the form...

We report on a field study demonstrating systematic differences between the preferences people anticipate they will have over a series of options in the future and their subsequent revealed preferences over those options. Using a novel panel data set, we analyze the film rental and return patterns of a sample of online DVD rental customers over a p...

Although observers of human behavior have long been aware that people regularly struggle with internal conflict when deciding whether to behave responsibly or indulge in impulsivity, psychologists and economists did not begin to empirically investigate this type of want/should conflict until recently. In this article, we review and synthesize the l...

How do decisions made for tomorrow or 2 days in the future differ from decisions made for several days in the future? We use data from an online grocer to address this question. In general, we find that as the delay between order completion and delivery increases, grocery customers spend less, order a higher percentage of “should” items (e.g., vege...

Although observers of human behavior have long been aware that people regularly struggle with internal conflict when deciding whether to behave responsibly or indulge in impulsivity, psychologists and economists did not begin to empirically investigate this type of want/should conflict until recently. In this article, we review and synthesize the l...

People often experience tension over certain choices (e.g., they should reduce their gas consumption or increase their savings, but they do not want to). Some posit that this tension arises from the competing interests of a deliberative “should” self and an affective “want” self. We show that people are more likely to select choices that serve the...

We report on a field study demonstrating systematic differences between the preferences people anticipate they will have over a series of options in the future and their subsequent revealed preferences over those options. Using a novel panel data set, we analyze the film rental and return patterns of a sample of online DVD rental customers over a p...

No abstract is available for this paper.

People often experience tension over certain choices (e.g., they should reduce their gas consumption or increase their savings, but they do not want to). Some posit that this tension arises from the competing interests of a deliberative "should" self and an affective "want" self. We show that people are more likely to select choices that serve the...

To combat climate change, many economists and policymakers advocate price-based approaches, such as greenhouse gas emissions taxes and emissions trading programs, or technology-based approaches, such as R&D subsidies and public-private R&D partnerships. In the end, however, both types of approaches rely on consumers and firms to make different choi...

The fact that many citizens fail to vote is often cited to motivate others to vote. Psychological research on descriptive social norms suggests that emphasizing the opposite – that many do vote – would be a more effective message. In two get-out-the-vote field experiments, we find that messages emphasizing low expected voter turnout are less effect...

For The Behavioral Foundations of Policy, edited by Eldar Shafir [ABSTRACT] Traditional models of why people vote conceptualize voting as a static, self-interested decision. This conceptualization cannot explain why people vote given the miniscule probability that their vote will affect most election outcomes. In this chapter we advance a new behav...