Improving acceptability of nudges: Learning from attitudes towards opt-in and opt-out policies
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2019, Vol 14, Issue 1
Abstract
Policy makers should understand people’s attitudes towards opt-out nudges to smoothly promote and implement the policies. Our research compares people’s perceptions of opt-in and three improved versions of opt-out (transparency, emphasis on the low-cost opt-out option, education) in pro-social and pro-self policy domains, e.g., organ donation (N=610), carbon emission offset (N=613), and retirement saving (N=602). We found that people acknowledged more practical and societal benefits of opt-out than opt-in in organ donation and retirement saving but less so in carbon emission offset. Improved opt-out policies failed to address ethical concerns and most emotional discomfort concerns in organ donation whereas opt-out transparency and emphasis on low-cost opt-out were more successful than education at addressing concerns in retirement saving and carbon emission offset. Nonetheless, transparency and education may raise consciousness of policies’ aims. The results suggest that 1) acceptability of opt-out approaches may be more difficult to enhance in some domains than others; 2) policy makers should ensure the public understands that opt-out is a convenient choice and may consider combining all forms of improvement to increase people’s acceptance of opt-out nudges.
Authors and Affiliations
Haoyang Yan and J. Frank Yates
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678394
- DOI -
- Views 169
- Downloads 0
Deconstructing the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations
Previous work showed that people find explanations more satisfying when they contain irrelevant neuroscience information. The current studies investigate why this effect happens. In Study 1 (N=322), subjects judged psych...
Anticipated and experienced emotions in environmental risk perception
Affective forecasting with respect to two environmental risks (ozone depletion, air pollution) was investigated by studying tourists who travelled to either Australia or Bangkok and were thus confronted with one of these...
Who makes utilitarian judgments? The influences of emotions on utilitarian judgments
Recent research has emphasized emotion’s role in non-utilitarian judgments, but has not focused much on characteristics of subjects contributing to those judgments. The present article relates utilitarian judgment to ind...
Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection
Decision scientists have identified various plausible sources of ideological polarization over climate change, gun violence, national security, and like issues that turn on empirical evidence. This paper describes a stud...
The effect of dynamic proximity cues on counterfactual plausibility
Previous research has found that people consult closeness or proximity cues when they evaluate the plausibility or likelihood of a counterfactual alternative to reality. In this paper we asked whether the plausibility of...