Research

Commitment strategies – costly self-control devices that restrict future choices or change future incentives – can effectively boost goal pursuit, yet consumers frequently fail to adopt them. People forgo withdrawal-restricted accounts despite intentions to save, fail to block distracting apps despite wanting to cut back on their phone use, and are reluctant to add monetary stakes to goals despite knowing the motivational power of doing so. In this research, we explore the role of obstacle salience in demand for such strategies. Across 5 studies, we demonstrate how a more vivid, realistic view of future obstacles is positively associated with demand for commitment. Building on this theoretical insight, we develop a novel intervention that prompts consumers to reflect on past obstacles before thinking about the future. We find that this intervention uniquely increases demand for commitment strategies through two interrelated mechanisms: first, by increasing awareness of the potential for future failure; and second, by increasing recognition of the need for future assistance in avoiding that negative outcome. Our results illuminate a key psychological underpinning of how consumers forecast their future self-control and provide novel insights for practitioners seeking to increase uptake of strategies that help people follow through on their goals.

People frequently encounter dynamic systems that involve inflows, outflows, and accumulated stocks – whether within their own households (e.g., financial accounts, stocks of food or supplies) or in larger institutional settings (e.g., manufacturing inventory, government benefit accounts). In this research, we introduce a novel stock-flow reasoning error, inflow neglect, and argue that this error can lead to important misperceptions regarding future outflows. To study this reasoning, we first focus on the United States’ Social Security trust funds, whose impending depletion generates significant attention due to implications for American retirees. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3 we show participants information about the trust funds over time that focus on the stock (i.e., balance) or flows (i.e., tax revenue and benefits payments), finding that those who see flows presentations are significantly less likely to expect benefits to cease completely after depletion (i.e., hold zero-outflow beliefs). In Experiments 4a and 4b, we show that prompting participants to reflect on the continuity of inflows (i.e., by reminding them that they expect payroll taxes to continue) significantly reduces inflow neglect and zero-outflow beliefs. Experiment 5 replicates these results in a separate domain, illustrating the generalizability of inflow neglect and the underscoring the efficacy of presentations and targeted questions that emphasize the flows. This research contributes both theoretically and practically, advancing the literature on stock-flow reasoning and highlighting how communications about particular components of dynamic systems may contribute to – or be used to remedy – misconceptions that outflows will cease after depletion.

Citizens are frequently called on to evaluate government policy spending proposals when responding to public opinion polls and when voting on ballot initiatives. Rational spending decisions require thorough consideration of cost, scope, and alternative priorities. We argue that because lay citizens are unfamiliar with government budgets, they must instead rely on heuristic cues to evaluate policy spending proposals. In particular, we assert that preferences are shaped by a primary affective response to spending in the focal policy area plus secondary affective responses to contrasts evoked by any salient alternatives that make the focal proposal appear “better” or “worse” than it otherwise might be. Across eight preregistered studies (total N = 6,663), we show that when evaluating proposals in isolation, laypeople are relatively insensitive to scope (spending amount) and alternative priorities (opportunity costs), though they respond differently depending on their political ideology. Meanwhile, when evaluating focal policies in the context of alternative amounts or priorities, laypeople exhibit systematic biases that are consistent with reliance on the affect heuristic and inconsistent with boundedly rational consideration of policy cost and opportunity costs. Our results provide insights for pollsters, policy makers, and election officials wishing to better understand citizens’ biases and develop corrective procedures.

Patients undergoing invasive neurosurgical procedures offer researchers unparallelled opportunities to conduct basic neuroscience research to better understand human brain function. Yet, these studies raise significant ethical concerns about informed consent. Although these concerns generally focus on participant understanding, little attention has been paid to participant understanding of study benefits, especially when these are framed using translational language. We conducted an archival analysis of consent forms (N = 19) from NIH BRAIN Initiative-funded studies and found substantial variation in how the benefits were described. To examine the effects of this variation, we conducted a preregistered online experiment (N = 1,197) testing the impact of different benefit framings. Results showed that a consent form emphasizing specific therapeutic potential increased participants’ beliefs that the study had greater translational intent. These beliefs were, in turn, associated with a higher likelihood of consent. Surprisingly, however, mentioning specific therapeutic potential led to an overall decrease in willingness to consent, suggesting a more complex relationship between perceptions of risks and benefits and ultimate consent decisions. Together, these results highlight the ethical salience of linguistic framing in consent forms and call for empirically informed guidelines to minimize translational misconceptions that may distort participants perceptions and decision-making.