Do minorities like nudges? The role of group norms in attitudes towards behavioral policy

Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2019, Vol 14, Issue 1

Abstract

Attitudes of public groups towards behavioral policy interventions (or nudges) can be important for both the policy makers who design and deploy nudges, and to researchers who try to understand when and why some nudges are supported while others are not. Until now, research on public attitudes towards nudges has focused on either state- or country-level comparisons, or on correlations with individual-level traits, and has neglected to study how different social groups (such as minorities) might view nudges. Using a large and representative sample, we tested the attitudes of two distinct minority groups in Israel (Israeli Arabs and Ultra-Orthodox Jews), and discovered that nudges that operated against a minority group’s held social norms, promoting a more general societal goal not aligned with the group’s norms, were often less supported by minorities. Contrary to expectations, these differences could not be explained by differences in trust in the government applying these nudges. We discuss implications for public policy and for the research and applications of behavioral interventions.

Authors and Affiliations

Eyal Pe’er, Yuval Feldman, Eyal Gamliel, Limor Sahar, Ariel Tikotsky, Nurit Hod and Hilla Schupak

Keywords

Related Articles

Reply: Birnbaum’s (2012) statistical tests of independence have unknown Type-I error rates and do not replicate within participant

Birnbaum (2011, 2012) questioned the iid (independent and identically distributed) sampling assumptions used by state-of-the-art statistical tests in Regenwetter, Dana and Davis-Stober’s (2010, 2011) analysis of the “lin...

On emotion specificity in decision making: Why feeling is for doing

We present a motivational account of the impact of emotion on decision making, termed the feeling-is-for-doing approach. We first describe the psychology of emotion and argue for a need to be specific when studying emoti...

Preference for increasing wages: How do people value various streams of income?

Prior studies have found that subjects prefer an improving sequence of income over a constant sequence, even if the constant sequence offers a larger present-discounted value. However, little is known about how these pre...

Enlarging the market yet decreasing the profit: An experimental study of competitive behavior when investment affects the prize

In many competitive situations, our investments increase our gains: Developing better products or research proposals may lead to higher contracts or patents or larger grants. Does increasing investment in such cases alwa...

Effects of ignorance and information on judgments and decisions

We compared Turkish and English students’ soccer forecasting for English soccer matches. Although the Turkish students knew very little about English soccer, they selected teams on the basis of familiarity with the team...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP678395
  • DOI -
  • Views 130
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Eyal Pe’er, Yuval Feldman, Eyal Gamliel, Limor Sahar, Ariel Tikotsky, Nurit Hod and Hilla Schupak (2019). Do minorities like nudges? The role of group norms in attitudes towards behavioral policy. Judgment and Decision Making, 14(1), -. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-678395