Do Narratives about Psychological Mechanisms Affect Public Support for Behavioral Policies?

Abstract

Behavioral policy, such as leveraging defaults, is increasingly employed by governments worldwide, but has sometimes faced public backlash, which limits political feasibility. We conducted a survey experiment with a large, representative sample to explore how the narrative describing the psychological mechanism by which a default rule impacts a socially significant outcome affects public approval. Respondents are presented with a vignette in which an unemployed person follows a default to participate in further training. We experimentally vary the narrative about his reasons for doing so. Compared to the baseline condition in which no information on the psychological mechanism is provided, voluntary ignorance, involuntary ignorance, perceived social expectations and perceived social pressure each reduce policy approval. These factors also lead to more negative perceptions of the default rule's impact on the decision maker's welfare and autonomy. The benign mechanism of deliberate endorsement, however, does not significantly raise approval or perceptions. We show that these findings hold irrespective of assumed preferences and discuss their practical implications.