Disclosure mandates are pervasive. Though designed to inform consumers, such mandates may lead consumers to draw false inferences – for example, that a product is harmful when it is not. When deciding to require disclosure of an ingredient in or characteristic of a product, regulators may be motivated by evidence that the ingredient or characteristic is harmful to consumers. But they may also be motivated by a belief that consumers have a right to know what they are buying or by interest-group pressure. Consumers who misperceive the regulator's true motive, or mix of motives, will draw false inferences from the mandated disclosure. If consumers think that the disclosure is motivated by evidence of harm, when in fact it is motivated by a belief in a right to know or by interest-group pressure, then they will be inefficiently deterred from purchasing the product. We analyze this general concern about disclosure mandates. We also offer survey evidence demonstrating that the risk of false inferences is serious and real.

Behavioural public policy is increasingly interested in scaling-up experimental insights to deliver systemic changes. Recent evidence shows some forms of individual behaviour change, such as nudging, are limited in scale. We argue that we can scale-up individual behaviour change by accounting for nuanced social complexities in which human responses to behavioural public policies are situated. We introduce the idea of the ‘social brain’, as a construct to help practitioners and policymakers facilitate a greater social transmission of welfare-improving behaviours. The social brain is a collection of individual human brains, who are connected to other human brains through ‘social cues’, and who are affected by the material and immaterial properties of the physical environment in which they are situated (‘social complex’). Ignoring these cues and the social complex runs the risk of fostering localised behavioural changes, through individual actors, which are neither scalable nor lasting. We identify pathways to facilitate changes in the social brain: either through path dependencies or critical mass shifts in individual behaviours, moderated by the brain's property of social cohesion and multiplicity of situational and dispositional factors. In this way, behavioural changes stimulated in one part of the social brain can reach other parts and evolve dynamically. We recommend designing public policies that engage different parts of the social brain.

Some object to paternalism when it forecloses options – when it makes it impossible, or at least very difficult, to pursue a particular course of action. This is because some argue that liberty is intrinsically valuable, and that to have liberty is to have options; thus, to lose options is to lose something intrinsically valuable. On that account, even if the loss of an option can be justified by gains of other intrinsically valuable things, it should be regarded as a loss. I argue that, in fact, some options have no value, so that their loss is not in itself even pro tanto bad. And, when losing options makes it more likely that we will achieve greater welfare, the loss of options is an unqualifiedly good thing. Thus, coercion, which removes some options, is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, and its loss can often be easy to justify.

The paper by Frijters, Clark, Krekel and Layard makes a strong historical case for treating happiness as a primary measure of human welfare. They argue that it is now time to revamp the science of policy-making to re-establish this central tradition, building on recent progress in measuring and understanding subjective wellbeing. I agree with them. There are three key questions raised in or by their presentation that need further evidence. I shall try to address these in turn. The questions relate to how to measure happiness, how to measure and deal with inequality and how to take due account of the social context of wellbeing, including the need to achieve consistency between individual and societal happiness.

Some of the most important decisions young people make are choices about education. Yet recent research shows that educational decisions are poorly explained by classical models of human capital investments: adolescents do not always choose what would best optimize their long-term net outcomes. Instead, students have been shown to be influenced by their current group of peers at the time when they make educational decisions. We expand on existing models by showing that students’ stated educational preferences can be influenced by simply priming them with their peers’ preferences. Further, we show that students are unaware of this peer influence in the sense that: (1) they claim that peers have no influence; (2) in a conjoint experiment, they do not select educations based on peers’ assessments; and (3) in a list experiment absent of any social desirability bias, they do not ascribe any influence to their peers either. All in all, the results show that young people are unwittingly influenced by their peers. These results have important implications for public policies aimed at encouraging young people to make more deliberate and informed educational choices.

The over-utilization of plastic bags has pushed governments to implement a mix of policy measures ranging from banning the bags altogether to charging a fee for them. However, these policies are often accompanied by unintended consequences. Paying for plastic bags, in particular, may crowd out the negative emotions tied to their harmful impact on the environment, and may be subject to a ‘rebound effect’. In a randomized controlled experiment, I tested four different treatments aimed at nudging or encouraging consumers to carry their own bag to the stores. Specifically, I tested the effects of changing the framing of the question regarding carrier bags at the checkout till in stores using a yes/no response format, in which the yes option corresponds to the desired behaviour. The treatment with the yes/no framing format was found to have as strong and significant an effect as a charge of 5 pence per bag on discouraging single-use plastic bag consumption.

The aim of this study is to respond to Cass Sunstein's question: ‘Why are some nudges ineffective, or at least less effective than choice architects hope and expect?’—particularly in view not only of the rational basis in decision-making but also of the direct influence of emotions on the behavior of those who must choose. In this study, I used findings from psychology surveys, specifically considering the influence of emotions on the fallibility of nudges in social interactions when wealth is compared. Special attention is dedicated to vanity, a combined emotion that leads to emotional choices, which arises in self-presentation and self-comparison when external signs of wealth are displayed. Imagination plays an important role in simulation to the extent that it causes failure in further nudges. In conclusion, I argue that vanity impels people to act differently, as expected of choice architects.

Global climate change is the largest existential threat of our time. Glaciers are retreating, sea levels are rising, extreme weather is intensifying and the last four years have been the hottest on record (NASA, 2020; World Meteorological Organization, 2020). Although climate change is already significantly impacting natural and human systems around the world, mitigating further and potentially disastrous climate change will require large-scale individual and collective action, including public support for mitigation policies, as well as the more rapid development and implementation of adaptation plans (van der Linden et al., 2015; Pearson et al., 2016).

Few Americans demand that their local policy-makers take action to address the effects of large earthquakes, even in ‘high-risk’ areas. This poses an important political problem. If policy-makers do not perceive a mandate to prepare for catastrophe, certain areas of the country may be vulnerable to loss of life and economic productivity. Why do Americans not demand more from their policy-makers? We propose a simple answer – many Americans do not accurately appraise the likelihood that they will experience a major earthquake. In a unique survey of West Coast adults, we compared respondents’ perceived likelihood of experiencing a major earthquake to their actual geocoded hazard. We uncover a wide disconnect between actual and perceived earthquake hazard, even in areas where earthquakes are comparatively more common. Critically, and in contrast to previous public policy research, we show that threats in the physical environment can shape policy opinion, but only under certain circumstances. We show that accurate appraisals of hazard significantly increase the likelihood that respondents will support preventative local policy measures. Our results shed new light on the opinion dynamics of public attitudes toward natural disasters and ameliorative policy efforts and highlight the policy importance of communicating earthquake hazard to at-risk constituencies.

Are people more likely to (mis)interpret information so that it aligns with their ideological identity when relying on feelings compared to when engaging in analytical thinking? Or is it the other way around: Does deliberation increase the propensity to (mis)interpret information to confirm existing political views? In a behavioral experiment, participants (n = 1207, Swedish sample) assessed numerical information concerning the effects of gender quotas and immigration either under time pressure or under no time pressure. To measure trait differences in cognitive sophistication, we also collected data on numeric ability. We found clear evidence of motivated reasoning when assessing both the effects of gender quotas on companies’ financial results and the effect of refugee intake on crime rates. Subjects who prioritized equality over liberty on the labor market were 13 percentage points less likely to correctly assess numerical information depicting that companies that used gender quotas when hiring made less profit. Subjects who classified themselves as ‘Swedes’ rather than ‘World citizens’ were 14 percentage points less likely to correctly assess numerical information depicting that crime rates decreased following immigration. Time pressure did not affect the likelihood to engage in motivated reasoning, while subjects with higher numeric ability were less likely to engage in motivated reasoning when analyzing information concerning refugee intake, but more likely to engage in motivated reasoning when analyzing information regarding the effect of gender quotas. Together these results indicate that motivated reasoning is primarily driven by individual differences in analytical thinking at the trait level and not by situational factors such as time pressure, and that whether motivated reasoning is primarily driven by analysis or feelings depends on the topic at hand.

Adolescence is a period of remarkable psychosocial and neural development. Many life-long health habits are established during adolescence, making it a window of opportunity for health promotion. One way to promote adolescent health is through mass and social media campaigns. Although some health media campaigns that target adolescents are effective in changing health-relevant cognitions and behaviors, there is considerable room for improving these outcomes. Recent advancements combining neuroimaging tools and health persuasion have suggested key neural mechanisms underlying behavior change and retransmission of health-relevant ideas and norms in adults. This line of work highlights the integral role of the brain's value system in health persuasion and its importance for improving campaign design and effectiveness. Less is known about how these insights could be leveraged to inform adolescent health persuasion. In this article, we review what is known and unknown about the development of the brain's value system and its connections with cognitive control and social cognition systems across adolescence. Combining these insights, we propose that neuroimaging tools offer unique possibilities that could improve adolescent media health campaigns and promote adolescent well-being.

Al-Ubaydli et al. set out a valuable prospectus, but they operate with too simple a view of the policymaking process. Politicians and bureaucrats have additional objectives to that of maximizing human welfare: the former wish to endorse policies that get them re-elected; the latter need to manage complex bureaucracies and advance their careers. Both need to be persuaded that trials are in their long-term interests to adopt. Because Al-Ubaydli et al.'s proposals may increase the costs of doing trials, the demand for robust evidence might reduce rather than increase.

Since the publication of the seminal book Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, several critics have highlighted preference endogeneity as a serious obstacle to nudging. When individuals hold preferences that are dynamic and endogenous to the nudge frame, it is unclear what the normative benchmark for libertarian paternalistic policies should be. While acknowledging this issue, the pro-nudging camp has not yet sufficiently addressed it. This article aims to fill this void by presenting a conditional defence of nudging when preferences are endogenous. We explain the learning process through which individuals establish ‘agentic’ preferences: preferences that are sufficiently stable, reasonable, autonomous and associated with organismic well-being to ground the ‘welfare’ principle of libertarian paternalism. To describe this process, we draw on theories from psychological science, in particular self-discrepancy theory and self-determination theory. We argue that agentic preferences are not only welfare-relevant and thus appropriate to libertarian paternalism but can also be identified by choice architects.

Why and when does outrage grow? This essay, based on the 2018 LSE Behavioural Public Policy Lecture delivered in February 2018, explores two potential answers. The first points to a revision or weakening of social norms, which leads people to express outrage that they had previously suppressed. The second points to a revision or weakening of social norms, which leads people to express outrage that they had not previously felt (and may or may not now feel). The intensity of outrage is often a product of what is most salient. It is also a product of ‘normalization’; people compare apparently outrageous behavior to behavior falling into the same category in which it is observed, and do not compare it to other cases, which leads to predictable incoherence in judgments. These points bear on the #MeToo movement of 2017 and 2018 and the rise and fall (and rise again, and fall again) of discrimination on the basis of sex and race (and also religion and ethnicity).

Gambling is considered a public health issue by many researchers, similarly to alcohol or obesity. Statistical risk warnings on gambling products can be considered a public health intervention that encourages safer gambling while preserving freedom of consumer choice. Statistical risk warnings may be useful to gamblers, given that net gambling losses are the primary driver of harm and that gambling products vary greatly in the degree to which they facilitate losses. However, there is some doubt as to whether statistical risk warnings are, in their current form, effective at reducing gambling harm. Here, we consider current applications and evidence, discuss product-specific issues around a range of gambling products and suggest future directions. Our primary recommendation is that current statistical risk warnings can be improved and also applied to a wider range of gambling products. Such an approach should help consumers to make more informed judgements and potentially encourage gambling operators to compete more directly on the relative ‘price’ of gambling products.

Gender-neutral bathrooms are usually framed as an accommodation for trans and other gender-nonconforming individuals. In this paper, we show that the benefits of gender-neutral bathrooms are much broader. First, our simulations show that gender-neutral bathrooms reduce average waiting times: while waiting times for women go down invariably, waiting times for men either go down or slightly increase depending on usage intensity, occupancy-time differentials and the presence of urinals. Second, our result can be turned on its head: firms have an opportunity to reduce the number of facilities and cut costs by making them all gender-neutral without increasing waiting times. These observations can be used to reframe the gender-neutral bathrooms debate so that they appeal to a larger constituency, cutting across the usual dividing lines in the ‘bathroom wars’. Finally, there are improved designs and behavioural strategies that can help overcome resistance. We explore what strategies can be invoked to mitigate the objections that gender-neutral bathrooms (1) are unsafe, (2) elicit discomfort and (3) are unhygienic.

Financial incentives are often designed to benefit from behavioral insights. Individuals’ preferences for such behaviorally inspired incentives are rarely studied, nor is the role played by the behavioral insights that motivated them. This study aimed to let individuals design their own incentives (i.e., tailored incentives) and to explore which individual characteristics are associated with these preferences for tailored incentives. A sample of students (n = 182) tailored hypothetical incentives for visiting the gym. Incentives could be tailored by: (1) committing personal funds; (2) picking weekly payouts (increasing or decreasing); and (3) introducing payout risk while increasing value. Afterwards, (inter alia) loss aversion, probability weighting, time discounting, present bias, cognitive reflection and trait self-control were measured. A large majority indicated being willing to deposit their own money, and only very few individuals selected risky incentives. These heterogeneous preferences for financial incentives are poorly predicted by the individual characteristics measured (i.e., economic preferences and psychological traits). These results suggest that preferences for tailored incentives could be studied as input for the design of financial incentives. However, it is unclear whether tailoring incentives improves cost-effectiveness, as the lack of association between tailored incentives and the behavioral insights that motivate them has multiple conflicting interpretations.

Recently, defaults have become celebrated as a low-cost and easy-to-implement nudge for promoting positive outcomes, both at an individual and societal level. In the present research, we conducted a large-scale field experiment (N = 32,508) in an educational context to test the effectiveness of a default intervention in promoting participation in a potentially beneficial achievement test. We found that a default manipulation increased the rate at which high school students registered to take the test but failed to produce a significant change in students’ actual rate of test-taking. These results join past literature documenting robust effects of default framings on initial choice but marked variability in the extent to which those choices ultimately translate to real-world outcomes. We suggest that this variability is attributable to differences in choice-to-outcome pathways – the extent to which the initial choice is causally determinative of the outcome.