Nudge for Good? Choice Defaults and Spillover Effects.

Claus Ghesla,Jan Schmitz,Manuel Grieder

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00178

Claus Ghesla, Jan Schmitz + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00178

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Abstract

Policy makers increasingly use choice defaults to promote “good” causes by influencing socially relevant decisions in desirable ways, e.g., to increase pro-environmental choices or pro-social behavior in general. Such default nudges are remarkably successful when judged by their effects on the targeted behaviors in isolation. However, there is scant knowledge about possible spillover effects of pro-social behavior that was induced by defaults on subsequent related choices. Behavioral spillover effects could eliminate or even reverse the initially positive effects of choice defaults, and it is thus important to study their significance. We report results from a laboratory experiment exploring the subsequent behavioral consequences of pro-social choice defaults. Our results are promising: Pro-social behavior induced by choice defaults does not result in adverse spillover effects on later, subsequent behavior. This finding holds for both weak and strong choice defaults.JEL Classification: C91, D01, D04

Highlights

Behavioral policy interventions from the toolkits of psychology and behavioral economics have gained increasing attention recently (e.g., List and Price, 2016; Liebe et al, 2018, for reviews of the literature)
We follow the structure of the hypotheses laid out in section 3 by first testing whether our default manipulations had a significant effect on giving in Dictator Stage I (Hypothesis 1) and testing whether the choice defaults affected the spillover of giving in Dictator Stage
We investigated the potential spillover effects of increased pro-social behavior triggered by pro-social choice defaults on not directly targeted, subsequent behavior

Summary

Introduction

Behavioral policy interventions from the toolkits of psychology and behavioral economics have gained increasing attention recently (e.g., List and Price, 2016; Liebe et al, 2018, for reviews of the literature). The goal of such interventions is to steer behavior in a desired direction when the use of classical policy instruments, such as taxes, subsidies, or command-and-control regulation, is not feasible and policies need to rely on the voluntary participation of actors (e.g., Croson and Treich, 2014; Kesternich et al, 2017). Even though there is a lively debate on the ethicality of using defaults as nudges (Bovens, 2009; Hausman and Welch, 2010; Desai, 2011; Sunstein, 2015), their distributional effects (Brown et al, 2011; Loefgren et al, 2012), and whether their use fits the criteria of “libertarian paternalism” (Carroll et al, 2009; Keller et al, 2011; Ghesla, 2017b), the effectiveness of default nudges for promoting “good” causes has generally been taken for granted

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