Bastian and Loughnan (2017) on Eating Animals and Morally Troublesome Behavior

Brock Bastian and Steve Loughnan, “Resolving the Meat-Paradox: A Motivational Account of Morally Troublesome Behavior and its Maintenance.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 21(3): 278–299, 2017.

• The “meat paradox”: meat eating is widespread (about 97% of Americans), but so is revulsion at harming animals.

• How can morally troubling behavior be ignored, normalized, and longstanding?

• Cognitive dissonance is a term that refers to the discomfort people feel by holding beliefs that are inconsistent with their actions. Eating meat is inconsistent with an interest in not harming or killing innocent sensitive beings; so, meat eating is a source of cognitive dissonance.

• Cognitive dissonance leads to negative affect, and this condition motivates the search for ways of reducing or eliminating the dissonance.

• “When people take responsibility, acknowledge harm, and accept the identity relevant consequences of their actions, they will experience dissonance and cease their immoral behavior [p. 280].” So, people try not to take responsibility, not acknowledge harm, and not accept the identity implications of meat eating.

• How to reduce dissonance while still eating meat? We can deny that animals suffer; we can do this selectively: we can categorize some animals as “food animals” and act as if that label means that they don’t count or don’t suffer – even as we would never hurt a puppy. The food animal category makes salient the food dimensions (such as taste), and the other dimensions (sentience) become less salient.

• Another approach to fight dissonance is to act as if we are not responsible for our choice to eat meat, that we effectively have no choice, as with the "3 N’s": eating meet is natural, normal, and necessary. People who abstain from meat then appear deviant, their opinions are suspect.

• Further, we can downplay the amount of meat we eat or suggest that we only consume ethical meat. We emphasize that we are relatively responsible!

• Our approaches to dissonance reduction can increase the commitment to meat eating. Indeed, doubling down on meat eating and believing that it is the proper course to take (and that the alternative is weird or unwise) reduces dissonance and negative affect. 

• The ritual and symbolism then, in meat eating (turkey for Thanksgiving, ham for Christmas!), is not surprising. Not eating meat looks almost infeasible and anti-social.

• The habitual, automatic nature of meat eating renders it no longer a decision, reducing dissonance – and this is in part why meat eating becomes habitual.

• Habits can spread throughout a population – seeing someone eating meat suggests that the eater is not experiencing dissonance, that such behavior is consistent with morality.

• The whole culture, then, can shroud the immorality of meat eating (and reduce or eliminate dissonance): look at how nations build identities around morally questionable acts of war. Meat production is hidden away, meat purchasers and eaters don't have to face harms to animals directly.

• But social contagion can work both ways. The positive feedback (sorry) loop could reverse, and meat eating could quickly fall out of favor.

• The theoretical points built up around the discussion of meat eating are then applied by the authors to the treatment of refugees and to prejudice. The authors see their contribution, I believe, mainly in indicating how methods employed to reduce dissonance can strengthen the commitment to the morally-troublesome behavior. 

Colby, Li, and Chapman (2020) on Avoiding Healthy Defaults

Helen Colby, Meng Li, and Gretchen Chapman, “Dodging Dietary Defaults: Choosing Away from Healthy Nudges.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 161: 50-60, 2020.

• Imagine a burger restaurant that makes carrots the default “side” – as opposed to French fries, say. Are people more likely to choose the carrots than if fries were the default? [Yes]. 

• Note that, unlike some environments with default nudges such as organ donations or pension registration, dining is an ongoing choice; so…

• …would people be less likely to return to a restaurant in which carrots are the default side dish?

• Two real-life(ish) and three hypothetical studies are conducted. In Study 1, university mugs are packaged with either M&Ms or a (healthier) fruit-and-nut bar as defaults. Shoppers know that they can easily override the default by asking the cashier for the alternative filling. 

• The defaults turn out to be almost perfectly sticky (unlike those well-designed M&Ms). But, more mugs are sold when M&Ms are the default. People don't override the healthy default, even though they know they could, but the healthy default seems to put them off the mug purchase altogether.

• If the store elected to employ a healthy default to promote customer health, is it doing the right thing? 

• Study 2 is also a real-life one, involving signing up for meal kit deliveries. What (three) meals will serve as the default for the kit? The experiment compares a default kit of three healthy meals (from one company) with an alternative default of three unhealthy meals (from a different company); once again, it is easy for meal kit purchasers to override the defaults.

• Again, the defaults are sticky, and in particular, the healthy default works in terms of nudging the choice of healthy meals. But, when choosing which company to patronize, there is a significant “dodge” effect: people became more likely to choose the company with the unhealthy default meals. So maybe it is not such a good idea for meal kit companies to set up healthy meals as the default?

• Study 3 is an internet-mediated "lab" experiment about which (hypothetical) restaurants people are likely to patronize. A subject is asked to order food from two competing burger restaurants. One burger restaurant uses turkey burgers as the default (this is the relatively healthy version, though not for the turkey), and the other burger place has been hamburgers as the default. (A similar comparison is run between two pizza places, and two sandwich shops). 

• Once again, (hypothetical) patrons tend to stick with the default, whether it is heathy or unhealthy. But they also are asked which of the restaurants they would return to, and in the case of burger joints, for the most part they would return to the unhealthy default version. People stay away from burger joints with a healthy default – turkey instead of beef burger – even though when at the "healthy" place, they generally go with the default. (It turns out that people are not so reluctant to return to pizza or sandwich shops that offer healthy defaults.)

• Study 4 looks at what happens if potential customers see an ad that lets them know in advance that turkey is the default burger meat. People become more enamored of the alternative restaurant that offers a beef default, and also suspect that ordering will be more of a hassle with the healthy default.

• Study 5 looks at healthy versus unhealthy defaults in a familiar setting, a McDonalds. There is a line, and a subject observes that the five people ahead of him or her in the line each stick with the default burger, where it is healthy or unhealthy. Does this social confirmation influence subsequent orders? 

• Once again, people tend to stick with default – but less so when the default is a turkey burger, when a third of folks request an override. Nonetheless, people indicate that they would dodge the healthy default restaurant in the future – but the dodgers were primarily folks who did not bother to override the healthy default!

• So, defaults can be quite sticky. Set up a health default, and you can expect that it will increase the percentage of customers who choose the healthy option. But there is a partial offset: some customers will dodge the restaurant with the healthy default, reducing the effectiveness of the healthy nudge by some 25%.

Azar (2020) on “The Economics of Tipping”

Ofer H. Azar, “The Economics of Tipping.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 34(2): 215-236, Spring 2020.

• Many features of tips make them hard to explain as a result of standard rational behavior.

• Tips are directly costly to those who give tips, but they are not mandatory – nor are tip practices identical around the world. 

• The US has a reputation as a country where tipping takes on a rather prominent role. 

• Some activities are tipped, but seemingly similar other activities might not be tipped.

• The practice of tipping as a percentage of the bill seems somewhat strange. And the typical percentage seems to creep up over time.

• Tips can be “rationalized” based on the potential for future interactions – but they occur in contexts (cabs, travel) in which such potential is minimal. And tipping does not take place in some repeated service situations, such as laundromats.

• Another attempted rationalization might be that tips occur in situations where the low-cost monitoring of employee behavior is provided by customers. But again, tip behavior does not seem to track this rationale very closely. (And when monitoring is difficult, it might be easy for employees to behave in a manner that will increase their tips but at the employer’s expense.)

• Maybe customers are willing to pay for their feeling of control?

• The not-uncommon claim by tippers of warm-glow from providing extra compensation to low-paid workers – is this a case of cognitive dissonance?

• Does tipping create price illusion that makes goods seem cheaper than they are? If so, then businesses that switch from tips to “equivalent” service charges or service-inclusive prices will be harmed.

• People often cite their tipping behavior as meeting a social norm. But it is a strange social norm: is it consistent with efficiency? Are there limits on how inefficient social norms can be before they cease being norms?

• Various nudges promote tips, including suggested tip levels or prominent tip jars.

• Sometimes tipping seems to be a sort of bad equilibrium: many people do not like tipping, but tip (or receive tips) anyway.

• “an explanation for tipping based on rational forward-looking consumers is not supported by the evidence. Instead, tipping is better explained as a result of psychological and social motivations of consumers who obey a social norm [p. 216].”

• [Incidentally, the pandemic surely has altered tipping behavior. In the US, for instance, tipping for take-away food has become common, when before Covid it was not a standard practice.]

Sachs (2019) on Addiction and Happiness

Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Addiction and Unhappiness in America.” Chapter 7 in World Happiness Report 2019.

• In the US, the Easterlin paradox continues to appear: "the average life evaluation in the United States, as measured by the Cantril ladder, has declined during the past dozen years, from 7.2 in 2006 to 6.9 in  2018, despite ongoing U.S. economic growth [p. 124]."

• Sachs hypothesizes that the US is in the midst of an addiction epidemic – with rising unhappiness and depression as consequences. 

• The addiction epidemic includes alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, of course, but also the internet, food, sex, exercise, work...  

• Co-morbidities are common 

• Causes of the increase in addictions are hard to identify precisely, but there are many candidates: current life conditions, inequality, marketing (and designing more addictive goods, such as slot machines and cigarettes), failure to sufficiently regulate industries such as opioids and sweetened foods and social media...

• "The U.S. has had, by now, two startling wake-up calls: back to back years of falling life expectancy and declining measured subjective well-being [p. 130]." Better public policy is desperately needed, and directions to go are outlined in the Global Happiness and Well-Being Policy Report, 2019.

Allcott, Lockwood, and Taubinsky (2019) on Soda Taxes

Hunt Allcott, Benjamin B. Lockwood, and Dmitry Taubinsky, “Should We Tax Sugar-Sweetened Beverages? An Overview of Theory and Evidence.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 33(3): 202-227, Summer 2019.

• Some US cities, and many nations, tax beverages with added sugar; often such drinks do not receive the favorable tax treatment otherwise provided to groceries, too

• In the US, consumption of sweetened beverages falls with income, and the top 20% of consumers drink a lot of soda

• Associated health risks include weight gain, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease

• Fiscal externalities abound throughout the health care “system," so someone's unhealthy behavior is in part paid for by others. [Nonetheless, I am very wary of justifying policy on the basis of such fiscal externalities, in part because they seemingly justify any draconian measure. Your lack of exercise is costly to me! You must be coerced to exercise more and to eat in a more healthy way! Perhaps our willingness to provide subsidies for those in health crisis is predicated on the notion that we don't ask too many questions of how they got in such dire straits.] 

• Sugary drinks also present the potential for internalities, perhaps emanating from poor information or present bias or addiction or some other rationality shortfall

• The monetary incidence of a soda tax is likely to be regressive; do the internality benefits reverse the full incidence of such a tax? (That is, those who consume the most will pay the most tax, but (presumably) also receive the lion's share of benefits in the form of better health down the road from reduced soda consumption.)

• Soda tax revenues can be earmarked for programs benefiting people who pay the taxes, but if those programs are desirable, they should be funded anyway, and not have their funding dependent on a single dedicated revenue source. 

• Perhaps 1-to-2.1 cents per ounce is an “optimal” soda tax?

• Lessons? (1) Focus on the externalities and internalities (therefore…); (2) target those consumers who present the largest ex- and in- ternalities; (3) Implement the tax in terms of grams of added sugar; (4) Diet drinks and fruit juices are another story; (5) Be sophisticated about incidence; (6) Reduce avoidance through statewide (not municipal) taxes; and... (7) Reasonable soda taxes probably bring net social benefits.

• Here's a previous outline of an article on the sweetening of diets.

Fennell (2019), "Personalizing Precommitment"

Lee Anne Fennell, “Personalizing Precommitment.” University of Chicago Law Review 86(2): 433-458, March 2019.

• Achieving long-term goals such as losing weight or writing a book requires the cooperation of many temporal selves of the same individual -- and perhaps the indulgences of some Mr. Hydes will undermine Dr. Jekyll's best-laid schemes. Precommitment can help, and the law might have a role to play in making such precommitments more available.

• Fennell invokes the "scale mismatch" terminology of Drazen Prelec; scale mismatch is when the goal (such as losing weight) is achieved in aggregate terms but the steps (literally?) to achieve the goal are lots of small individual decisions.

• Rigid rules – exercise one hour every day – might work in overcoming these temporal internalities, but such rules might be excessive or so demanding that they are abandoned.

• Perhaps people can fashion their own, less rigid but more sustainable rules? Good choices of “partitions” and “menus” can aid the process. For instance, appropriate serving sizes and types of serving utensils and single-serve packaging: all of these nudges can contribute to achieving a weight-loss goal.

• Segmentation eases metering and monitoring. How much cake did I eat? It might be easier to know the answer when the cake is consumed in segmented units -- I had three cupcakes -- than when I just keep picking at some unsegmented blob o' cake.

• Writing a book might be made manageable by segmenting the task into chapters and sections. But…while smaller chunks are easier to complete, given scale mismatch, they also look less meaningful in terms of progress, and more capable of postponement.

• Instead of segmenting work time, what about segmenting time not spent working – like limiting breaks to ten minutes?

• Monetary issues often can be addressed with precommitments and partitions. Purchasing a home can be a sort of forced saving – but this commitment device can be undone by easily acquired home equity loans. Can programs be provided that allow people to opt into a "no home equity loans" condition? 

• People might try to earmark money for savings by having special accounts or even physical envelopes -- though the commitment can be undone if an emergency arises. In general, setting high savings targets with sub-partitions (so that prematurely opening one savings envelope does not mean that all the others are opened, too) looks like a pretty good strategy. Even precommitting some money to indulgences can aid the larger goal of saving money. Should bank savings accounts come with earmarked sub-accounts that are made salient in web-based representations, say?

• Online menus could be personalized, by removing some excessively tempting items at the consumer’s request. 

• Rigid rules such as “no dessert” prune the menu to two choices: comply or don’t comply: “the reason that they can be so effective – the extreme chunkiness of the choices they present – is also the reason why they often fail” 

• Rules change the effective payoffs: the good choice becomes more automatic, and the wrong choice bears a higher price. 

• Lapses can induce further failures. Ex ante, it often is best to believe that behavior is bundled, that a lapse today will mean a rapid downward spiral. (Fennell calls such notions "behavioral firewalls"; in this case, good behavior today prevents future bad behavior.) Ex post (after a lapse), however, it is best to believe that the lapse was anomalous, that it doesn’t fore-ordain future behavior. Now the firewall changes: future behavior must be sealed off from the lapse.

• As with money set aside for financial indulgences, limited, planned exceptions can be helpful – but perhaps not implementable, perhaps zero tolerance, rigid rules are needed. 

• Receiving an income tax refund can be a form of forced savings or a welcome source of wam – but private firms can offer products that undo the commitment element of tax refunds. The IRS, incidentally, provides a split-refund facility, to allow the funneling of part of a refund into savings.

Sax and Doran (2019) on Ambiguity and Biotechnology

J. K. Sax and N. Doran, “Ambiguity and Consumer Perceptions of Risk in Various Areas of Biotechnology.” Journal of Consumer Policy 42(1): 47-58, March 2019 [gated copy here].

• Biotechnology-driven consumer goods such as vaccines, fluoridated water, and foods produced with GMOs seem particularly susceptible to exaggerated views of health and safety risks. Does ambiguity aversion drive these risk misperceptions?

• A survey with 14 scenarios is administered to 318 American adults with at least a high school education. Four questions attempt to measure the respondent's underlying ambiguity aversion. These questions are followed up with a series of items concerning views on vaccines, organic foods, bottled water, and embryonic stem cells, where at least one response to each item is (treated as) inconsistent with the consensus scientific view. 

• These preliminaries are succeeded by vignettes about fluoridated water, GMO foods, and so on, where the information presented is either conflicting or less-than-complete. The respondents rate the scenarios on the basis of risks and benefits, where the most positive response would view the scenario as one holding great benefit at low risk. 

• The idea is that scientists often are willing to assign low risk/high benefit status to various innovations even in the absence of complete information, or in the presence of some conflicting information. Do the respondents behave similarly, and does being more ambiguity averse in general lead to more pessimistic assessments of such innovations? 

• People view ambiguity concerning food to be particularly off-putting. Nonetheless, respondents who prefer bottled water to fluoridated tap water tend in other domains to go with the scientific consensus.

• The bottom line, from the Abstract (p. 47): "Participants who reported greater aversion to ambiguity tended to respond in a way that signals the assignment of high risk, and low benefit, when presented with some unknown or uncertain risk."

Dai and Luca (2018) on Restaurant Hygiene Scores

Weijia (Daisy) Dai and Michael Luca, “Digitizing Disclosure: The Case of Restaurant Hygiene Scores.” Harvard Business School, Working Paper 18-088, 2018 [pdf of 2019 version here].

• San Francisco does not mandate that restaurants post their hygiene scores – which are public information generated by unannounced inspections – but is willing to facilitate the posting of the scores on Yelp. (The scores already are available on the City's Department of Public Health website -- but people don't usually go there to order food online!) The (common) reluctance to require disclosure by the restaurants themselves might draw in part from restaurant industry opposition.

• Two interventions are examined: (1) Yelp posts the hygiene scores on its restaurant webpages; and (2) Yelp makes low scores salient via a “hygiene alert” box (which covers the customer reviews part of the Yelp listing)

• A “Poor” restaurant hygiene score (70 or below) results from multiple high-risk violations

• The hygiene alert box informs the webpage visitor that food safety is the point of the hygiene score, and that the score is based on government inspection; further, the alert reveals that the restaurant received a Poor rating in its most recent review, which puts it in the bottom 5% of hygiene ratings.

• Prior to the Yelp interventions, less hygienic restaurants see slightly lower consumer purchasing intentions than do their more hygienic counterparts. Those purchasing intentions are measured via Yelp page visits, “leads,” and the number of Yelp reviews. A "lead" is tallied through various behaviors by online shoppers, such as calling the restaurant, seeking directions to the restaurant, or checking out the restaurant's own webpage (as opposed to its Yelp listing).

• Leads and Yelp reviews respond in the expected direction to Yelp posting of the hygiene scores; Yelp (star) ratings do not

• “Poor” restaurants see a 12% decline in leads compared to the non-Poor

• The salience intervention enhances the posting effect: take-out orders for Poor restaurants fall 12.8%. That is, how information is disclosed seems to matter, along with the disclosure itself.

• Poor restaurants seem to be (somewhat) motivated to clean up their act after Yelp posts the alert

Bar-Gill, Schkade, and Sunstein (2018) on Mistaken Inferences

Oren Bar-Gill, David Schkade, and Cass R. Sunstein, “Drawing False Inferences from Mandated Disclosures.” Behavioural Public Policy, published online 15 February 2018.

• When the government mandates that sellers (of food products, say) reveal some information to potential purchasers, the message that the consumers take away from the disclosure might not be what the government intended to convey.

• The perceived motivation(s) behind the government's requirement could affect consumer responses. Some mandates are aimed to convey a verified health risk; others might satisfy a somewhat nebulous consumer "right to know," even if no health risk is involved. Interest group pressures or social values of some sort (e.g., supporting domestic employment) are other motivations for disclosure mandates.

• People are more disposed to be influenced by the information relayed in a mandated disclosure if they believe the motive behind the mandate is new research findings (as opposed to political pressures). Problems arise when consumers are misled by mandated information; such misleading is likely when consumers misperceive the motives behind the mandate.

• The Bar-Gill, Schkade, and Sunstein article itself seems motivated by proposed and sometimes enacted government mandates that require firsm that sell foods including GMOs to indicate that fact. The potential issue is that there seems to be no evidence that GMO-containing foods possess higher health risks than do other foods; nonetheless, the mandated information could lead consumers to believe that GMOs are known to be unsafe.

• The authors’ Mturk survey (n=1675) concerns either GMOs or a fictitious synthetic food preservative, Z25.

• The government could: (1) let voluntary disclosure do all the work (that is, take no action); (2) mandate disclosure; or (3) mandate a warning. Government motives are either: (1) right-to-know; (2) political pressure; or (3) new research.

• After learning the government action, some subjects are told the government motive, while others are asked what they think the motive is.

• Subjects rate perceived risk (ex post and, for GMOs, ex ante, too) on a 0 to 100 scale, and indicate their intentions to purchase.

• False inferences may be a problem: posterior risk changes as much from new research as from right-to-know motivations; perhaps consumers do not trust that right-to-know motives are pure.

• A political pressure motive seems to lower the perceived risk of GMOs after disclosure (relative to no action).

• Subjects with strong prior beliefs about GMOs do not appreciably alter their beliefs based on government actions and motives.

• Can counter-advertising fix the false inference problem?

Sugden v. Sunstein on Nudging, Round 2: Sunstein's Turn

Cass R. Sunstein, “’Better Off, as Judged by Themselves’: A Comment on Evaluating Nudges.” International Review of Economics 65(1): 1-8, March 2018.

[Round 1 here; Round 3 here]

• In trying to improve wellbeing, individuals’ judgments of their own welfare are a central metric. This metric is complicated, however, if people have different judgments before and after a nudge, say. 

• Sugden argues that two potential interpretations of “as judged by themselves” (AJBT) are flawed, one by applying only to relatively rare self-control issues, and the second by allowing individual preferences to be sacrificed to the whims of nudgers. 

• Sugden's title asks if people really want to be nudged towards healthier living. The empirical answer is “yes.” 

• AJBT is not our method to rule out charges of paternalism, but rather, to limit the coercive element of paternalistic acts – like a GPS, we want to improve “navigability,” so people can better serve their own interests. Nudges are about means, not ends. 

• Reminders (such as text messages) serve people’s pre-nudge preferences -- likewise with information provision, as with calorie counts. Other nudges can change behaviors in a manner that the nudged individual endorses after-the-fact, but not before, such as a mechanism to dissuade texting while driving. 

• With self-control problems (akrasia), nudges might help to bolster Dr. Jekyll (planner) at Mr. Hyde’s (doer) expense. Sunstein asked folks online if they had a self-control problem: the majority said yes. And programs to ends addictions are quite popular. 

• Yes, preferences can be formed in the process of elicitation; for instance, people might stick with, and endorse, any of various default settings. Then nudgers are forming preferences, but AJBT limits what nudgers can do. 

• To summarize, some nudges serve ex ante preferences when they increase navigability; some help with (widespread!) self-control shortcomings; and some contribute to preference formation, but in a manner that still respects after-the-fact preferences.

Silver et al. (2017) on the Berkeley Soda Tax

Lynn D. Silver, Shu Wen Ng, Suzanne Ryan-Ibarra, et al., “Changes in prices, sales, consumer spending, and beverage consumption one year after a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages in Berkeley, California, US: A before-and-after study.” PLoS Med 14(4), April 18, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002283.

• Berkeley imposed a 1-cent per ounce tax for sugar-sweetened beverages starting in January, 2015; even before the tax, Berkeley per-capita soda consumption was quite low by US standards. 

• The study compares the before-and-after situation in Berkeley stores with comparable stores outside of Berkeley. 

• The tax led to higher soda prices in chain-stores, and to a significant fall in soda purchases, as well as a rise in water purchases. Consumers don’t seem to spend more on beverages after the tax is imposed. The overall effect on calories consumed is uncertain.

Popkin and Hawkes (2016) on Sweetening of Diets

Barry M. Popkin and Corinna Hawkes, “Sweetening of the Global Diet, Particularly Beverages: Patterns, Trends, and Policy Responses.” The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology 4(2): 174–186, February 2016.

• Added caloric sweeteners in beverages seem to involve special health risks, such as diabetes. (The jury is still out on low-calorie sweeteners and 100% fruit juices.) Chile, Mexico, and the US lead the league table.

• Most food and most beverage calories consumed in the US come from items with added sweeteners. In recent years, the US has seen some movement away from beverages with added caloric sweeteners. 
 
• As incomes rise, much of the rest of the world is adopting US-style added-caloric-sweetener habits. 

• Early studies of sweet taxes suggest that they do dissuade consumption, and possibly even lead to changes in the composition of food items. 

• Sustained public information campaigns employing multiple channels of dissemination can dissuade unhealthy behaviors. The precise right approach (or approaches) to label information and warnings remains unresolved.

• Many jurisdictions have imposed restrictions on sugar marketing and in-school availability, as well as promoting public awareness and requiring nutritional information and warnings on packaging.

Downs and Loewenstein (2011) on Obesity

Julie S. Downs and George Loewenstein, “Behavioral Economics and Obesity.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Obesity, John Cawley, editor, 2011.

• The rise in obesity is hard to explain via rational choice: think of the huge expenditures on failed diets and exercise programs, for instance. “Informational” interventions, such as better calorie information, might be fairly limited in terms of combatting obesity, then. 

• One cannot take a zero tolerance approach towards food; also, people have a habit of understating their consumption, or simply forgetting about snacks. 

• It doesn’t seem as if an increase in discount rates spurred the obesity rise, because discount rates have not risen, even though obesity is concentrated among those with higher discount rates. And present bias seems more applicable to food than it does to other types of decisions. 

• The future health costs of a bad diet are intangible, and for a single meal, negligible. Any one dietary indiscretion is (metaphorically) peanuts, but routinely neglecting these indiscretions – the “peanuts effect” – can lead to obesity and serious harm. 

• Field studies don’t show much improvement in calorie reduction from posting calorie counts. A decrease in consumption in one meal can be offset by later meals. 

• The rise in obesity tracks the rise in restaurant serving sizes fairly closely.

Arad and Rubinstein (2015) on the People’s Perspective on Nudges

Ayala Arad and Ariel Rubinstein, “The People’s Perspective on Libertarian-Paternalistic Policies,” July 2015. This outline draws on the July, 2015 version of the paper, but a later version (October, 2017) of the paper is available here, as a pdf.

• Two online studies (each n>1000) are conducted with university students in Israel, Germany, and the US.

• In Study 1, subjects either are presented with an opt-in employee savings plan, or a government-mandated opt-out version with an 8% savings default. 

• A large percentage (28-53% across the three countries) of subjects have a negative view of the opt-out version (especially if they are aware of the opt-in alternative), even if they intend to save 8% monthly. Indeed, fewer people indicate that they will take up the 8% savings rate when it is presented as the default than would take it up on an opt-in basis. 

• Study 2 concerns attempts to decrease the consumption of fatty foods. Some measures (taxes, one-day-per-week ban) are hard paternalism, one is a System 1 nudge (shifting the placement of food items on menus), and two are System 2 nudges involving information provision (media campaign, smartphone app).

• The effectiveness of each of the measures in reducing consumption of fatty foods is presented to the subjects, with seven variations. 

• Up to 25% of subjects think that government shouldn’t be in the business of trying to change diets. 

• Most subjects (among those who do not object to the government being involved) seem to prefer whatever measure is most effective. 

• But 19 to 54% of subjects prefer the info provision, even when it is less effective than the System 1 nudge. 

• The “hard” interventions attract little support.

• The October 2017 version of the paper includes these two sentences in the abstract: "The opposition to soft interventions appears to be driven by concerns about manipulation and the fear of a 'slippery slope' to non-consensual interventions. Opposition to soft interventions is reduced when they are carried out by employers rather than the government."

Jung and Mellers (2016) Look at US Attitudes Towards Nudges

Janice Y. Jung and Barbara A. Mellers, “American Attitudes toward Nudges.” Judgment and Decision Making 11(1): 62-74, January 2016.

• System 1 nudges are those that take advantage of our relatively automatic, unthinking mechanism for making decisions – canny default settings are an example of a System 1 nudge.

• System 2 nudges enhance our cognitive abilities, perhaps by providing more information – calorie counts on food items are an example of a System 2 nudge. 

• Study 1 conducted by Jung and Mellers looks at nine System 1 nudges and four System 2 nudges, in an internet-based survey (n=250). Subjects are asked if they are for or against nudges, and then rate the intensity of their feelings on the subject. (If you are unsure, you will be asked to explain why!) Subjects also rate nudges on various scales, such as whether they are a threat to autonomy. 

• Jung and Meller's Study 2 manipulates the “framing” of the nudges, sometimes emphasizing individual effects, sometimes social effects; sometimes highlighting the benefits, sometimes highlighting the avoidance of costs. Attitudes also are collected about companies that institute nudges. 

• System 2 nudges receive more support than System 1 nudges – but one System 2 nudge, where government provides a website that tracks people’s expenditures on food, energy, and so on, is disliked in a System 1-like manner. 

• Also disliked are opt-out organ donation lists, those misleading white lines on Lake Shore Drive, one-click charitable donation opportunities at store check-outs, and credit card online payment mechanisms that default to fully paying off the debt. 

• Empathic folks tend to support System 1 and System 2 nudges; conservatives and individualists tend to oppose both types of nudges. (“Reactant” people oppose System 1 nudges.) System 2 nudges are viewed as more effective, though evidence generally supports the superior effectiveness of System 1 nudges. 

• Framing doesn’t matter much on average, but does matter with some sub-groups; for instance, “reactant” people oppose nudges more strongly when the frame points out the individual costs of not going along. Feelings about companies that nudge basically track the feelings about the nudges the companies implement.

Samek (2016) Nudges Schoolchildren to Drink Healthier Milk

Anya Samek, “Gifts and Goals: Behavioral Nudges to Improve Child Food Choice at School.” CESR-Schaeffer Working Paper Series, Paper No: 2016-007, January, 2016; available at SSRN.

• The author arranges for a field experiment to take place at eight public elementary schools in Chicago; the 1400 or so child subjects do not know that they are participating in an experiment. 

• The only lunch menu choice that is available to these schoolkids every day is whether to get the (low-fat) white milk, the (low-fat) chocolate milk, or do without milk altogether. On the first day of the experiment, students are nonchalantly observed when they make their milk choices. Chocolate milk is the big favorite: more than 85% of kids take the chocy, 11% take white, and 3.4% go milkless.

• In the second and final day of the experiment, a control and two treatment goups are implemented. In the control condition, teachers very briefly explain the relative merits of white milk (chocy milk has added sugar, and that is less healthy, you see) shortly before lunch. In the “Gift” condition, the explanation is followed up by a gift of a sticker to all students, no questions asked and nothing required in return; and in the third condition, “Goal,” students are asked to make an unenforceable goal, a written pledge, as it were, to choose the white milk (though they can pledge themselves to chocolate). 

• The control condition induces a huge increase in white milk purchasing, to over 47%. The Gift condition brings a slightly larger shift to white, with the Goal condition in between. The goal-setting “works” better for younger kids, but the sticker “works” about the same for everyone. 

• The unconditional gift tries (and seemingly succeeds) to connect the milk choice to reciprocity; one advantage of an unconditional gift is that no enforcement (of conditions) is needed. 

• The choices in the Goal group suggest a good deal of time inconsistency – lots of kids who pledge to get the white milk change their mind when the decision itself is at hand – even though the elapsed time between pledge and decision is only about 15 minutes. 

• The fact that the nudge and its recorded effects are of the one-day-only variety is a pretty severe restriction on drawing policy advice from the experiment. My main takeaway, as it were, concerns the large shift towards choosing white milk in the control condition: a very short piece of pro-white-milk propaganda delivered by a teacher alters lots of elementary student milk choices. Use this power wisely!

Bratanova et al. (2015) Find that Ethical Food Tastes Better

Boyka Bratanova, Christin-Melanie Vauclair, Nicolas Kervyn, et al., “Savouring Morality. Moral Satisfaction Renders Food of Ethical Origin Subjectively Tastier.” Appetite 91(1): 137-149, August 2015 [pdf here].

• The taste of food isn’t just about the chemical and physical properties of the food; rather, it also depends on the environment in which the food is consumed and the expectations of the consumer: Zinberg’s Drug, Set, and Setting applies to food, too. 

• It is the connection between consumer expectations and taste that is at the heart of the analysis in this article. Taste expectations might be enhanced if you are supportive of the perceived underlying ethics of the food; for example, if the food carries a Fair Trade certification, you might expect it to taste better – and therefore it might actually taste better to you. Further, this mechanism can also augment your willingness-to-pay for the food, and bolster your intention to purchase the food in the future. The ethical origin creates a sort of halo effect whereby other dimensions of the food are perceived more favorably. 

• The first study involves a 2005 survey of some 4000 adult grocery shoppers spread throughout eight European nations; the relevant questions concern tomato sauce. First, beliefs about the environmental benefits of organic tomato sauce (relative to conventional, non-organic sauce) are gauged; then, whether buying organic is viewed as doing the right thing, or making the consumer a better person. 

• In the survey – which was not accompanied by actually tasting any food – beliefs about environmental benefits were positively correlated with beliefs about better taste; the beliefs about better taste increased future buying intentions. 

• Follow-up experiments added some actual tasting of food into the mix. Besides environmental benefits, beliefs about fair trade and local sourcing also were examined. 

• A biscuit (cookie) company was described as either environmentally friendly or unfriendly, in two treatments applied to a total of 112 undergraduate students. Students thought that the environmentally friendly company would produce a higher quality biscuit (though whether the perceived quality difference is due to the halo effect of being environmentally friendly, or to the alternative biscuit being produced by an environmentally unfriendly company, is unclear). Upon eating the biscuits, however, the reported actual taste of the two types of biscuits did not differ in a statistically significant way. 

• The final experiment looked at fair trade chocolate and locally produced apple juice, in comparison with conventional products (that is, not as opposed to environmentally unfriendly products). One hypothesis is that people who endorse altruistic values will find the fair-trade chocolate to be taste-enhanced, while people who endorse environmental values will like the taste of the local apple juice. The data from 50 undergraduates tends to support the fair-trade hypothesis, but for the apple juice, taste experience and willingness-to-pay are reduced for the locally sourced juice. Nonetheless, if we look only at that subset of the participants who endorse environmental values, the better taste and higher willingness-to-pay results are restored.

Viscusi and Gayer (2015) on Reasons to Distrust Government Nudges

W. Kip Viscusi and Ted Gayer, “Behavioral Public Choice: The Behavioral Paradox of Government Policy.” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 38(3): 973-1007, 2015 [pdf].

• Behavioral departures from full rationality are often used as justifications for government interventions in markets. But the resulting government policies can institutionalize, not rectify, the rationality shortfalls.

• Regulators themselves possess rationality shortfalls, and there are features of the environment in which regulators operate that push them away from pursuing first-best policies.

• If the median voter possesses biases, then a democratic government is likely to share those biases.

• Less-than-rational individuals tend to bear the costs of their errors themselves – not so with regulators. Further, individuals might have enhanced incentives (relative to bureaucrats) to acquire relevant information. Regulators, like all of us, can be overconfident in their abilities.

• Can we trust the claims that people are less-than-rational, or at least the universality of the claims? People are heterogeneous, and what looks like a mistake might reflect specific, reasonable preferences.

• Many consumer durables now have energy efficiency mandates, justified by internalities. But the energy-efficiency misjudgment is far from a proven problem. The claims of energy savings tend to be engineering-based, unavailable in practice, while individual circumstances can rationalize seemingly myopic choices.

• We could be more confident in an even-handed use of behavioral economics if a lot of pre-existing mandates were being replaced by non-coercive nudges. But instead, we see behavioral economics being used to tighten regulation, not to loosen it. Notice that the less-than-complete (narrow) self-interest that behavioralists often emphasize implies that even externalities might be internalized without government policy.

• The EPA instituted a fuel economy labelling requirement that seems intended to remedy all the problems that their later efficiency mandates also targets – don’t they trust their own labelling regulation?

• In dealing with health and safety risks, government does not seem to be more rational than individuals. In practice, worst-case scenarios are over-weighted in regulatory policy; EPA methodology leads to cascading of conservative estimates so that extremely low-likelihood problems can dominate policy. Further, the number of people exposed to a risk, which should be central in formulating policy, is ignored.

• Increases in risk are a sort of loss, and loss aversion kicks in – in the form of alarmist regulatory responses to ebola, terrorism, etc.

• The FDA fears errors of commission much more than errors of omission. [Nonetheless, the evidence base is weak – look how often risks are revealed only after approval; then there are off-label uses, which are quite legal, despite not having been tested in the usual sorts of controlled trials.]

• If organic veggies carry less risk than non-organic vegetables, but they cost more, it could still be better health-wise for people to eat more, non-organic veggies.

• For people to accept a small increase in risk often involves a payment some six times larger than they would pay for the same reduction in risk – a reflection of loss aversion. The “first, do no harm” principle leads to a similar effect in policy. It is often hard to identify victims of the FDA’s failure to approve a useful drug.

• Agencies can have tunnel vision, treating their issue in isolation. In OSHA, for example, regulators are not even allowed to look at the costs of fixing a hazard. One result: costs per life saved vary widely across domains, in ways that seem to be far from optimal.

Sugden (2008) on Incoherent Preferences and Paternalism; or, Let Me See Cake

Robert Sugden, “Why Incoherent Preferences Do Not Justify Paternalism.” Constitutional Political Economy 19(3): 226–248, September 2008.

• Standard economics takes individual preferences as sacred; hence, revealed preferences are respected and interference in individual choices, absent externalities, is disparaged.

• Behavioral economics questions whether choices reflect preferences, and whether preferences are stable, context-independent, and rational; as a result, behavioral economics seems to undermine the pre-disposition against paternalistic interventions.

• From the point of view of behavioral economics, nudges are forms of paternalism that are respectful of the deeper concerns about influencing individual choices that traditional economics reflects. Behavioral researchers sometimes argue that because choices are not context-independent, influencing choice is inevitable, so we might as well be paternalistic about it.

• The incoherent preferences that behavioral economists highlight look like a sort of “corrupted data [p. 229]” from the point of view of a welfare-maximizing planner. But if we take Hayek’s approach, we can dispense with the planner, and note that incoherent preferences provide little bits of information about preferences, and that markets can still use these bits of information in socially productive ways, and perhaps help to form more regular preferences.

• Voluntary exchange and mutual advantage are hallmarks of market exchange. Further, Sugden argues, these features are not compromised by incoherent preferences: for the version of a person who makes the trade, at least, these exchanges are welfare improving. Competitive markets will still exhaust all such mutually advantageous exchanges, even with incoherent preferences.

• Can a planner do better than mutual, voluntary exchange? How can a soft paternalist know that he or she is serving the interests of the nudged individual if preferences are incoherent?

• In the “arranging food in a cafeteria” example, why not task the choice architect with the pursuit of profit maximization? Profit maximization leads to a “customer is always right” bias, which doesn’t seem bad for customers.

• The profit-maximizing cafeteria owner doesn’t care about the coherence of customer preferences, only about the willingness-to-pay of the acting version of actual customers. A person with incoherent preferences nevertheless understands his interests.

• The cafeteria example, as well as others, suffers from the initial set-up, that there is some choice architect (planner) who will give the people what they really want: control is vested in the planner from the start. This hardly captures the crux of the argument against paternalism.

• Which approach, a choice architect aiming to maximize customer well-being, or entrepreneurs wanting to maximize profits, will best serve social welfare? Shouldn’t we, like the profit-maximizing cafeteria owner, privilege the acting self, too?

• Perhaps cafeteria managers don’t so much serve preferences as create them. But how is that a problem? Do people have preferences for fashion designs before they are produced? Doesn’t profit maximization do a good job in this incoherent setting to get desirable designs produced and exchanged, even without knowledge of consumer preferences?

• “…I would rather have my willpower challenged by tempting cakes than license cafeteria managers to compromise on the attractiveness of their products so as to steer me towards the ones that they think best for me [p. 247].”

Coelho do Vale, Pieters, and Zeelenberg (2016) on "The Benefits of Behaving Badly"

Rita Coelho do Vale, Rik Pieters, and Marcel Zeelenberg, “The Benefits of Behaving Badly on Occasion: Successful Regulation by Planned Hedonic Deviations.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 26(1): 17-28, January, 2016.

• Is abstinence or some other zero-tolerance regimen the best approach to avoid succumbing to temptation? The authors argue that planned deviations from the path of righteousness are helpful in reaching long-term goals. 

• Planned lapses, as it were, can bolster one’s motivation to persist in pursuing the long-term goal; improve the emotional experience of the regimen; and, help to sustain willpower. 

• In the absence of planned deviations, any lapse might be interpreted as a failure, and result in complete rejection of the goal (due to its revealed hopelessness). Planned deviations, alternatively, are seen as prizes for progress, not as markers of failure. 

• The studies reported here concern weight loss. The first study (n about 50) takes place at a computer, and involves role-playing a diet. There are two (virtual) diets, each averaging 1500 calories per day. But one diet maintains a limit of 1500 calories day after day, while the second involves 1300 calories/day until the seventh day, when 2700 calories are available. The second part of this experiment has subjects answer questions after opening a box containing snack foods. How many ways can they think of to prevent themselves from falling into temptation? Those who simulate the intermittent diet come up with more distractions; they also feel happier. 

• The second study (n=36) involves actual 14-day diets, one of the straight-striving variety and one of the intermittent type. The subjects keep diaries, and their motivation to continue the diet is tracked. Straight-strivers tend to be more demotivated by deviations from their diet than are the intermittent dieters, and other metrics seem to favor the intermittent approach, too. Nor is there any loss in efficacy of the diet from the intermittent approach. 

• The third study is a web-based survey of university-affiliated personnel (n=64) who are striving towards some long-term goal, such as weight loss. The two conditions involve imagining either a (1) straight or (2) intermittent plan to achieve their goal. Those in the intermittent condition express higher motivation to pursue their goal.