Political Ideology Affects Energy-Efficiency Attitudes and Choices

This research demonstrates how promoting the environment can negatively affect adoption of energy efficiency in the United States because of the political polarization surrounding environmental issues. Study 1 demonstrated that more politically conservative individuals were less in favor of investment in energy-efficient technology than were those who were more politically liberal. This finding was driven primarily by the lessened psychological value that more conservative individuals placed on reducing carbon emissions. Study 2 showed that this difference has consequences: In real-choice context, more conservative individuals were less likely to purchase a more expensive energy-efficient light bulb when it was labeled with an environmental message than when it was unlabeled. These results highlight the importance of taking into account psychological value-based considerations in the individual adoption of energy-efficient technology in the United States and beyond

The Mind, the Brain, and the Law

In this chapter, we explore the potential influence that advances in neuroscience may have on legal decision makers and present the findings from some recent studies that probe folk intuitions concerning the relationships among neuroscience, agency, responsibility, and mental illness. We first familiarize the reader with some of the early research in experimental philosophy on people\u27s intuitions about agency and responsibility. Then, we focus on a more specific issue—namely, whether people respond to explanations of human behavior framed in neuroscientific terms differently than they respond to explanations framed in more traditional folk psychological terms. Next, we discuss some new findings which suggest that explanations of criminal behavior that are couched in neural terms appear to make people less punitive than explanations couched in mental terms, especially in the context of mental illness. Finally, we offer what we take to be the best explanation of these differences in people\u27s intuitions—namely, when people are presented with neural explanations of human behavior, they tend to think that the agent\u27s “deep self” (the values and beliefs the agent identifies with) is somehow left out of the causal loop or bypassed, which in turn mitigates the agent\u27s responsibility

A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies

Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. To assess whether text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and what kinds of messages work best, we conducted a megastudy. We randomly assigned 689,693 Walmart pharmacy patients to receive one of 22 different text reminders using a variety of different behavioral science principles to nudge flu vaccination or to a business-as-usual control condition that received no messages. We found that the reminder texts that we tested increased pharmacy vaccination rates by an average of 2.0 percentage points, or 6.8%, over a 3-mo follow-up period. The most-effective messages reminded patients that a flu shot was waiting for them and delivered reminders on multiple days. The top-performing intervention included two texts delivered 3 d apart and communicated to patients that a vaccine was “waiting for you.” Neither experts nor lay people anticipated that this would be the best-performing treatment, underscoring the value of simultaneously testing many different nudges in a highly powered megastudy

Differences in sensitivity to deviance partly explain ideological divides in social policy support

We propose that political differences in social policy support may be partly driven by the tendency for conservatives to show greater sensitivity to deviance than liberals, even among targets lacking social or functional relevance. In 3 studies, participants were shown geometric figures and were asked to identify the extent to which they were “triangles” (or circles, squares, etc.). More conservative participants reported greater differentiation between perfect and imperfect shapes than more liberal participants, indicating greater sensitivity to deviance. Moreover, shape differentiation partly accounted for the relationship between political ideology and social policy, partially mediating the link between conservatism and harsher punishment of wrongdoers (Studies 1 and 4), less support for public aid for disadvantaged groups (Study 2), and less financial backing for policies that benefit marginalized groups in society (Study 3). This effect was specific to policies that targeted deviant groups (Study 3) and who were not too highly deviant (Study 4). Results suggest that, in addition to commonly cited affective and motivational reactions to deviant actors, political differences in social policy may also be driven by conservatives’ greater cognitive propensity to distinguish deviance

A victim-centered approach to justice? Victim satisfaction effects on third-party punishments

Three studies investigated whether victims' satisfaction with a restorative justice process influenced third-party assignments of punishment. Participants evaluated criminal offenses and victims' reactions to an initial restorative justice conference, and were later asked to indicate their support for additional punishment of the offender. Across the three studies, we found that victim satisfaction (relative to dissatisfaction) attenuates people's desire to seek offender punishment, regardless of offense severity (Study 2) or conflicting reports from a third-party observer (Study 3). This relationship was explained by the informational value of victim satisfaction: Participants inferred that victims felt closure and that offenders experienced value reform, both of which elevated participants' satisfaction with the restorative justice outcome. The informational value communicated by victim satisfaction, and its criminal justice implications, are discussed

Targeting Behavioral Interventions Based on Past Behavior: Evidence from Vaccine Uptake

Understanding and planning for heterogeneous treatment effects is critical to developing nuanced theories of human behavior and offering more useful guidance to organizational leaders and policymakers. We introduce past behavior as a systematic source of heterogeneity in the effectiveness of interventions that either target insufficient intentions as a barrier to behavior change or combat the intention-action gap. In online and field experiments (total N=17,362), an information intervention designed to enhance intentions to receive the flu shot by correcting misconceptions only led to a detectable increase in vaccination intentions and uptake for those who had not been vaccinated in the prior flu season. In contrast, an intervention designed to encourage follow-through by increasing the salience and convenience of vaccination only detectably improved vaccine uptake for those who had been vaccinated against the flu in the prior season. This work paves the way for a theoretically-informed approach to customizing interventions

Running head: EMOTION AND ALTRUISM 1 Selfish or selfless? On the signal value of emotion in altruistic behavior

*The first two authors contributed equally to this research, and order of authorship was determined by a coin toss