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

Risk, uncertainty and prophet: The psychological insights of Frank H. Knight

Economist Frank H. Knight (1885–1972) is commonly credited with defining the distinction between decisions under “risk” (known chance) and decisions under “uncertainty” (unmeasurable probability) in his 1921 book Risk, U...

Forecasting elections with mere recognition from small, lousy samples: A comparison of collective recognition, wisdom of crowds, and representative polls

We investigated the extent to which the human capacity for recognition helps to forecast political elections: We compared naïve recognition-based election forecasts computed from convenience samples of citizens’ recognit...

To increase engagement, offer less: The effect of assortment size on children’s engagement

In a world that offers children abundant activities from which to choose, understanding how to motivate children to engage longer in productive activities is crucial. This paper examines how the offered assortment size a...

A new test of the risk-reward heuristic

Risk and reward are negatively correlated in a wide variety of environments, and in many cases this trade off approximates a fair bet. Pleskac and Hertwig (2014) recently proposed that people have internalized this relat...

The role of character strengths in economic decision-making

We aggregated data from 28 studies (total N=13,386) to assess the relationship between individual differences in character strengths, as described by the VIA model of character, and economically-relevant behaviors and co...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP678394
  • DOI -
  • Views 166
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Haoyang Yan and J. Frank Yates (2019). Improving acceptability of nudges: Learning from attitudes towards opt-in and opt-out policies. Judgment and Decision Making, 14(1), -. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-678394