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"Hertwig, Ralph"
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When to consider boosting: some rules for policy-makers
In recent years, public officials have shown a growing interest in using evidence from the behavioural sciences to promote policy goals. Much of the discussion of behaviourally informed approaches has focused on ‘nudges’; that is, non-fiscal and non-regulatory interventions that steer (nudge) people in a specific direction while preserving choice. Less attention has been paid to boosts, an alternative evidence-based class of non-fiscal and non-regulatory intervention. The goal of boosts is to make it easier for people to exercise their own agency in making choices. For instance, when people are at risk of making poor health, medical or financial choices, the policy-maker – rather than steering behaviour through nudging – can take action to foster or boost individuals’ own decision-making competences. Boosts range from interventions that require little time and cognitive effort on the individual's part to ones that require substantial amounts of training, effort and motivation. This article outlines six rules that policy-makers can apply in order to determine under which conditions boosts, relative to nudges, are the preferable form of non-fiscal and non-regulatory intervention. The objective is not to argue that boosts are better than nudges or vice versa, but to begin to spell out the two approaches’ respective conditions for success.
Journal Article
Nudging and Boosting
In recent years, policy makers worldwide have begun to acknowledge the potential value of insights from psychology and behavioral economics into how people make decisions. These insights can inform the design of nonregulatory and nonmonetary policy interventions—as well as more traditional fiscal and coercive measures. To date, much of the discussion of behaviorally informed approaches has emphasized “nudges,” that is, interventions designed to steer people in a particular direction while preserving their freedom of choice. Yet behavioral science also provides support for a distinct kind of nonfiscal and noncoercive intervention, namely, “boosts.” The objective of boosts is to foster people’s competence to make their own choices—that is, to exercise their own agency. Building on this distinction, we further elaborate on how boosts are conceptually distinct from nudges: The two kinds of interventions differ with respect to (a) their immediate intervention targets, (b) their roots in different research programs, (c) the causal pathways through which they affect behavior, (d) their assumptions about human cognitive architecture, (e) the reversibility of their effects, (f) their programmatic ambitions, and (g) their normative implications. We discuss each of these dimensions, provide an initial taxonomy of boosts, and address some possible misconceptions.
Journal Article
Homo Ignorans: Deliberately Choosing Not to Know
Western history of thought abounds with claims that knowledge is valued and sought. Yet people often choose not to know. We call the conscious choice not to seek or use knowledge (or information) deliberate ignorance. Using examples from a wide range of domains, we demonstrate that deliberate ignorance has important functions. We systematize types of deliberate ignorance, describe their functions, discuss their normative desirability, and consider how they can be modeled. To date, psychologists have paid relatively little attention to the study of ignorance, let alone the deliberate kind. Yet the desire not to know is no anomaly. It is a choice to seek rather than reduce uncertainty whose reasons require nuanced cognitive and economic theories and whose consequences—for the individual and for society—require analyses of both actor and environment.
Journal Article
Risk Preference
Psychology offers conceptual and analytic tools that can advance the discussion on the nature of risk preference and its measurement in the behavioral sciences. We discuss the revealed and stated preference measurement traditions, which have coexisted in both psychology and economics in the study of risk preferences, and explore issues of temporal stability, convergent validity, and predictive validity with regard to measurement of risk preferences. As for temporal stability, do risk preference as a psychological trait show a degree of stability over time that approximates what has been established for other major traits, such as intelligence, or, alternatively, are they more similar in stability to transitory psychological states, such as emotional states? Convergent validity refers to the degree to which different measures of a psychological construct capture a common underlying characteristic or trait. Do measures of risk preference all capture a unitary psychological trait that is indicative of risky behavior across various domains, or do they capture various traits that independently contribute to risky behavior in specific areas of life, such as financial, health, and recreational domains? Predictive validity refers to the extent to which a psychological trait has power in forecasting behavior. Intelligence and major personality traits have been shown to predict important life outcomes, such as academic and professional achievement, which suggests there could be studies of the short- and long-term outcomes of risk preference— something lacking in current psychological (and economic) research. We discuss the current empirical knowledge on risk preferences in light of these considerations.
Journal Article
Experiencing statistical information improves children’s and adults’ inferences
How good are people’s statistical intuitions? Recent research has highlighted that sequential experience of statistical information improves adults’ statistical intuitions relative to situations where this information is described. Yet little is known about whether this is also the case for children’s statistical intuitions. In a study with 100 children (8–11 years old) and 100 adults (19–35 years old), we found that sequentially experiencing statistical information improved both adults’ and children’s inferences in two paradigmatic reasoning problems: conjunction and Bayesian reasoning problems. Moreover, adults’ statistical competencies when they learned statistical information through description were surpassed by children’s inferences when they learned through experience. We conclude that experience of statistical information plays a key role in shaping children’s reasoning under uncertainty—a conclusion that has important implications for education policy.
Journal Article
The link between cognitive abilities and risk preference depends on measurement
Risk preference is an important construct for understanding individual differences in risk taking throughout the behavioral sciences. An active stream of research has focused on better understanding risk preference through its connection to other psychological constructs, in particular, cognitive abilities. Here, we examine two large-scale multimethod data sets and demonstrate that the method used to measure risk preference is an important moderator. In self-report measures, we found small but consistent positive correlations between working memory capacity/numeracy, facets of cognitive abilities, and risk tolerance. In behavioral measures, we found, on average, no correlation and large intermethod heterogeneity. This heterogeneity can be explained by the choice architecture that is created in behavioral methods—in particular, the relation between risk and reward and the impact of decision error in a task. Consequently, investigating how risk preference relates to psychological constructs such as cognitive abilities require a profound understanding of the choice architecture in measurements of risk preference and in the real world.
Journal Article
Grandparental investment: Past, present, and future
What motivates grandparents to their altruism? We review answers from evolutionary theory, sociology, and economics. Sometimes in direct conflict with each other, these accounts of grandparental investment exist side-by-side, with little or no theoretical integration. They all account for some of the data, and none account for all of it. We call for a more comprehensive theoretical framework of grandparental investment that addresses its proximate and ultimate causes, and its variability due to lineage, values, norms, institutions (e.g., inheritance laws), and social welfare regimes. This framework needs to take into account that the demographic shift to low fecundity and mortality in economically developed countries has profoundly altered basic parameters of grandparental investment. We then turn to the possible impact of grandparental acts of altruism, and examine whether benefits of grandparental care in industrialized societies may manifest in terms of less tangible dimensions, such as the grandchildren's cognitive and verbal ability, mental health, and well-being. Although grandparents in industrialized societies continue to invest substantial amounts of time and money in their grandchildren, we find a paucity of studies investigating the influence that this investment has on grandchildren in low-risk family contexts. Under circumstances of duress – for example, teenage pregnancy or maternal depression – there is converging evidence that grandparents can provide support that helps to safeguard their children and grandchildren against adverse risks. We conclude by discussing the role that grandparents could play in what has been referred to as Europe's demographic suicide.
Journal Article
How behavioural sciences can promote truth, autonomy and democratic discourse online
Public opinion is shaped in significant part by online content, spread via social media and curated algorithmically. The current online ecosystem has been designed predominantly to capture user attention rather than to promote deliberate cognition and autonomous choice; information overload, finely tuned personalization and distorted social cues, in turn, pave the way for manipulation and the spread of false information. How can transparency and autonomy be promoted instead, thus fostering the positive potential of the web? Effective web governance informed by behavioural research is critically needed to empower individuals online. We identify technologically available yet largely untapped cues that can be harnessed to indicate the epistemic quality of online content, the factors underlying algorithmic decisions and the degree of consensus in online debates. We then map out two classes of behavioural interventions—nudging and boosting— that enlist these cues to redesign online environments for informed and autonomous choice.
Lorenz-Spreen et al. argue that effective web governance is needed to empower individuals online. They describe two classes of behavioural interventions—nudging and boosting— that can help redesign online environments for informed and autonomous choice
Journal Article