The BWA behaviour change database: November 2020 update

BehaviourWorks Australia (BWA) researchers at the Monash Sustainable Development Institute (MSDI) have spent several years curating a database of over 6,000 behaviour change publications. This database is used to inform many of our research projects and is now available for others to use.

Here are some of the most interesting and useful papers added this month:

Signing at the beginning versus at the end does not decrease dishonesty

Honest reporting is essential for society to function well. However, people frequently lie when asked to provide information, such as misrepresenting their income to save money on taxes. A landmark finding published in PNAS [L. L. Shu, N. Mazar, F. Gino, D. Ariely, M. H. Bazerman, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109, 15197-15200 (2012)] provided evidence for a simple way of encouraging honest reporting: asking people to sign a veracity statement at the beginning instead of at the end of a self-report form. Since this finding was published, various government agencies have adopted this practice. However, in this project, we failed to replicate this result. Across five conceptual replications (n = 4,559) and one highly powered, preregistered, direct replication (n = 1,235) conducted with the authors of the original paper, we observed no effect of signing first on honest reporting. Given the policy applications of this result, it is important to update the scientific record regarding the veracity of these results

Deconstructing bias in social preferences reveals groupy and not-groupy behavior

Group divisions are a continual feature of human history, with biases toward people’s own groups shown in both experimental and natural settings. Using a within-subject design, this paper deconstructs group biases to find significant and robust individual differences; some individuals consistently respond to group divisions, while others do not. We examined individual behavior in two treatments in which subjects make pairwise decisions that determine own and others’ incomes. In a political treatment, which divided subjects into groups based on their political leanings, political party members showed more in-group bias than Independents who professed the same political opinions. However, this greater bias was also present in a minimal group treatment, showing that stronger group identification was not the driver of higher favoritism in the political setting. Analyzing individual choices across the experiment, we categorize participants as “groupy” or “not groupy,” such that groupy participants have social preferences that change for in-group and out-group recipients, while not-groupy participants’ preferences do not change across group context. Demonstrating further that the group identity of the recipient mattered less to their choices, strongly not-groupy subjects made allocation decisions faster. We conclude that observed in-group biases build on a foundation of heterogeneity in individual groupiness.

The Persuasion Knowledge Model: How People Cope with Persuasion Attempts

 In theories and studies of persuasion, people's personal knowledge about persuasion agents' goals and tactics, and about how to skillfully cope with these, has been ignored. We present a model of how people develop and use persuasion knowledge to cope with persuasion attempts. We discuss what the model implies about how consumers use marketers' advertising and selling attempts to refine their product attitudes and attitudes toward the marketers themselves. We also explain how this model relates to prior research on consumer behavior and persuasion and what it suggests about the future conduct of consumer research.

Temperature, cultural masculinity, and domestic political violence: A cross-national study

Cross-national data sets were used to examine the association between ambient temperature and internal political violence in 136 countries between 1948 and 1977. Political riots and armed attacks occur more frequently in warm countries than in both cold and hot countries, after controlling for effects of population size and density and levels of socioeconomic development and democracy. National differences on the cultural masculinity dimension, however, do account for this curvilinear temperature-violence association, in a subsample of 53 countries, suggesting that culture mediates the association. An explanation for this mediation in terms of Paternal Investment Theory is proposed

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time, and our motivational systems may have been naturally selected to navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by such recurrent interactions. We hypothesize that modern redistribution is perceived as an ancestral scene involving three notional players: the needy other, the better-off other, and the actor herself. We explore how three motivational systems-compassion, self-interest, and envy-guide responses to the needy other and the better-off other, and how they pattern responses to redistribution. Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel support this model. Endorsement of redistribution is independently predicted by dispositional compassion, dispositional envy, and the expectation of personal gain from redistribution. By contrast, a taste for fairness, in the sense of (i) universality in the application of laws and standards, or (ii) low variance in group-level payoffs, fails to predict attitudes about redistribution.

The small effects of political advertising are small regardless of context, message, sender, or receiver: Evidence from 59 real-time randomized experiments

Evidence across social science indicates that average effects of persuasive messages are small. One commonly offered explanation for these small effects is heterogeneity: Persuasion may only work well in specific circumstances. To evaluate heterogeneity, we repeated an experiment weekly in real time using 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign advertisements. We tested 49 political advertisements in 59 unique experiments on 34,000 people. We investigate heterogeneous effects by sender (candidates or groups), receiver (subject partisanship), content (attack or promotional), and context (battleground versus non-battleground, primary versus general election, and early versus late). We find small average effects on candidate favorability and vote. These small effects, however, do not mask substantial heterogeneity even where theory from political science suggests that we should find it. During the primary and general election, in battleground states, for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, effects are similarly small. Heterogeneity with large offsetting effects is not the source of small average effects.

A strategy for optimizing and evaluating behavioral interventions

Background: Although the optimization of behavioral interventions offers the potential of both public health and research benefits, currently there is no widely agreed-upon principled procedure for accomplishing this. Purpose: This article suggests a multiphase optimization strategy (MOST) for achieving the dual goals of program optimization and program evaluation in the behavioral intervention field. Methods: MOST consists of the following three phases: (a) screening, in which randomized experimentation closely guided by theory is used to assess an array of program and/or delivery components and select the components that merit further investigation; (b) refining, in which interactions among the identified set of components and their interrelationships with covariates are investigated in detail, again via randomized experiments, and optimal dosage levels and combinations of components are identified; and (c) confirming, in which the resulting optimized intervention is evaluated by means of a standard randomized intervention trial. To make the best use of available resources, MOST relies on design and analysis tools that help maximize efficiency, such as fractional factorials. Results: A slightly modified version of an actual application of MOST to develop a smoking cessation intervention is used to develop and present the ideas. Conclusions: MOST has the potential to husband program development resources while increasing our understanding of the individual program and delivery components that make up interventions. Considerations, challenges, open questions, and other potential benefits are discussed.

To access the database of over 6,000 behaviour change publications, please use this link. For further information about BehaviourWorks please email: [email protected]