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• Article | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

  Default Neglect in Attempts at Social Influence

  Julian Zlatev, David P. Daniels, Hajin Kim and Margaret A. Neale

  Current theories suggest that people understand how to exploit common biases to influence others. However, these predictions have received little empirical attention. We consider a widely studied bias with special policy relevance: the default effect, which is the tendency to choose whichever option is the status quo. We asked participants (including managers, law/business/medical students, and US adults) to nudge others toward selecting a target option by choosing whether to present that target option as the default. In contrast to theoretical predictions, we find that people often fail to understand and/or use defaults to influence others, i.e., they show “default neglect.” First, in one-shot default-setting games, we find that only 50.8% of participants set the target option as the default across 11 samples (n = 2,844), consistent with people not systematically using defaults at all. Second, when participants have multiple opportunities for experience and feedback, they still do not systematically use defaults. Third, we investigate beliefs related to the default effect. People seem to anticipate some mechanisms that drive default effects, yet most people do not believe in the default effect on average, even in cases where they do use defaults. We discuss implications of default neglect for decision making, social influence, and evidence-based policy.

  Keywords: social influence; default effect; nudges; choice architecture; Decision Making; Behavior;

  Citation:

  Zlatev, Julian, David P. Daniels, Hajin Kim, and Margaret A. Neale. "Default Neglect in Attempts at Social Influence." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 52 (December 26, 2017).  View Details

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• Article | Perspectives on Psychological Science | May 2017

  Behavioral Processes in Long-Lag Interventions

  Dale T. Miller, Jennifer E. Dannals and Julian Zlatev

  We argue that psychologists who conduct experiments with long lags between the manipulation and the outcome measure should pay more attention to behavioral processes that intervene between the manipulation and the outcome measure. Neglect of such processes, we contend, stems from psychology's long tradition of short-lag lab experiments where there is little scope for intervening behavioral processes. Studying process in the lab invariably involves studying psychological processes, but in long-lag field experiments it is important to study causally relevant behavioral processes as well as psychological ones. To illustrate the roles that behavioral processes can play in long-lag experiments we examine field experiments motivated by three policy-relevant goals: prejudice reduction, health promotion, and educational achievement. In each of the experiments discussed we identify various behavioral pathways through which the manipulated psychological state could have produced the observed outcome. We argue that if psychologists conducting long-lag interventions posited a theory of change that linked manipulated psychological states to outcomes via behavioral pathways, the result would be richer theory and more practically useful research. Movement in this direction would also permit more opportunities for productive collaborations between psychologists and other social scientists interested in similar social problems.

  Keywords: Field Experiments; interventions; behavioral mediation; theories of change; longitudinal studies; Behavior; Research; Change; Theory;

  Citation:

  Miller, Dale T., Jennifer E. Dannals, and Julian Zlatev. "Behavioral Processes in Long-Lag Interventions." Perspectives on Psychological Science 12, no. 3 (May 2017): 454–467.  View Details

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• Article | Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

  Moral Traps: When Self-serving Attributions Backfire in Prosocial Behavior

  Stephanie C. Lin, Julian Zlatev and Dale T. Miller

  Two assumptions guide the current research. First, people's desire to see themselves as moral disposes them to make attributions that enhance or protect their moral self-image: When approached with a prosocial request, people are inclined to attribute their own noncompliance to external factors, while attributing their own compliance to internal factors. Second, these attributions can backfire when put to a material test. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that people who attribute their refusal of a prosocial request to an external factor (e.g., having an appointment), but then have that excuse removed, are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior than those who were never given an excuse to begin with. Study 3 shows that people view it as more morally reprehensible to no longer honor the acceptance of a prosocial request if an accompanying external incentive is removed than to refuse a request unaccompanied by an external incentive. Study 4 extends this finding and suggests that people who attribute the decision to behave prosocially to an internal factor despite the presence of an external incentive are more likely to continue to behave prosocially once the external incentive is removed than are those for whom no external incentive was ever offered. This research contributes to an understanding of the dynamics underlying the perpetuation of moral self-regard and suggests interventions to increase prosocial behavior.

  Keywords: Morality; attributions; decision making; prosocial behavior; Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Perception;

  Citation:

  Lin, Stephanie C., Julian Zlatev, and Dale T. Miller. "Moral Traps: When Self-serving Attributions Backfire in Prosocial Behavior." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 70 (May 2017): 198–203.  View Details

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