Article by Jiangyan Li, Juelin Yin, Wei Shi, And Xiwei Yi: “As corporate lists and awards that rank and recognize firms for superior social reputation have proliferated in recent years, the field of CSR is also replete with various types of awards given out to firms or CEOs, such as Fortune’s “Most Admired Companies” rankings and “Best 100 Companies to Work For” lists. Such awards serve to both reward and incentivize firms to become more dedicated to CSR. Prior research has primarily focused on the effects of awards on award-winning firms; however, the effectiveness and implications of such awards... (More >)
Against longtermism
Essay by Phil Torres: “The point is that longtermism might be one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities and Silicon Valley have ever heard about. I believe this needs to change because, as a former longtermist who published an entire book four years ago in defence of the general idea, I have come to see this worldview as quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today. But to understand the nature of the beast, we need to first dissect it, examining its anatomical features and physiological functions…. Why do... (More >)
The Future is not a Solution
Essay by Laura Forlano: “The future is a particular kind of speaker,” explains communication scholar James W. Carey, “who tells us where we are going before we know it ourselves.” But in discussions about the nature of the future, the future as an experience never appears. This is because “the future is always offstage and never quite makes its entrance into history; the future is a time that never arrives but is always awaited.” Perhaps this is why, in the American context, there is a widespread tendency to “discount the present for the future,” and see the “future as... (More >)
Building the Behavior Change Toolkit: Designing and Testing a Nudge and a Boost
Blog by Henrico van Roekel, Joanne Reinhard, and Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen: “Changing behavior is challenging, so behavioral scientists and designers better have a large toolkit. Nudges—subtle changes to the choice environment that don’t remove options or offer a financial incentive—are perhaps the most widely used tool. But they’re not the only tool. More recently, researchers have advocated a different type of behavioral intervention: boosting. In contrast to nudges, which aim to change behavior through changing the environment, boosts aim to empower individuals to better exert their own agency. Underpinning each approach are different perspectives on how humans deal with bounded... (More >)
Consumers Are Becoming Wise to Your Nudge
Article by Simon Shaw: “The broader question, one essential to both academics and practitioners, is how a world saturated with behavioral interventions might no longer resemble the one in which those interventions were first studied. Are we aiming at a moving target? This was the basis for a research project we completed in February 2019 examining reactions of the British public to a range of behavioral interventions. We took a nationally representative sample of 2,102 British adults, and undertook an experimental evaluation of some of marketers’ most commonly used tactics. We started by asking participants to consider a hypothetical... (More >)
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
Book by Steven Pinker: “Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it help you understand why there is so much irrationality in the world? These are the goals of Rationality, Steven Pinker’s follow-up to Enlightenment Now. In the 21st century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding—and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that developed vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, medical quackery, and conspiracy theorizing? Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are an irrational species — cavemen out of... (More >)
Psychology and Behavioral Economics: Applications for Public Policy
Book edited by Kai Ruggeri: “…offers an expert introduction to how psychology can be applied to a range of public policy areas. It examines the impact of psychological research for public policymaking in economic, financial, and consumer sectors; in education, healthcare, and the workplace; for energy and the environment; and in communications. Your energy bills show you how much you use compared to the average household in your area. Your doctor sends you a text message reminder when your appointment is coming up. Your bank gives you three choices for how much to pay off on your credit card... (More >)
Nudgeability: Mapping Conditions of Susceptibility to Nudge Influence
Paper by Denise de Ridder, Floor Kroese, and Laurens van Gestel: “Nudges are behavioral interventions to subtly steer citizens’ choices toward “desirable” options. An important topic of debate concerns the legitimacy of nudging as a policy instrument, and there is a focus on issues relating to nudge transparency, the role of preexisting preferences people may have, and the premise that nudges primarily affect people when they are in “irrational” modes of thinking. Empirical insights into how these factors affect the extent to which people are susceptible to nudge influence (i.e., “nudgeable”) are lacking in the debate. This article introduces... (More >)
Public health and expert failure
Paper by Roger Koppl: “In a modern democracy, a public health system includes mechanisms for the provision of expert scientific advice to elected officials. The decisions of elected officials generally will be degraded by expert failure, that is, the provision of bad advice. The theory of expert failure suggests that competition among experts generally is the best safeguard against expert failure. Monopoly power of experts increases the chance of expert failure. The risk of expert failure also is greater when scientific advice is provided by only one or a few disciplines. A national government can simulate a competitive market... (More >)
Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It
Book by Cass Sunstein: “How we became so burdened by red tape and unnecessary paperwork, and why we must do better. We’ve all had to fight our way through administrative sludge—filling out complicated online forms, mailing in paperwork, standing in line at the motor vehicle registry. This kind of red tape is a nuisance, but, as Cass Sunstein shows in Sludge, it can also impair health, reduce growth, entrench poverty, and exacerbate inequality. Confronted by sludge, people just give up—and lose a promised outcome: a visa, a job, a permit, an educational opportunity, necessary medical help. In this lively... (More >)
