Research

Working Papers

An S-Frame Agenda for Behavioral Public Policy Research (with Nick Chater and George Loewenstein)

Chater and Loewenstein (2023) argue that behavioral scientists have been testing and advocating individualistic (i-frame) solutions to policy problems that have systemic (sframe) causes and require systemic solutions. Here, we consider the implications of adopting an s-frame approach for research. We argue that an s-frame approach will involve addressing different types of questions, which will, in turn, require a different toolbox of research methods. 

Available at SSRN, updated July 22, 2024

Beliefs about Skill Decay (with Sami Horn & George Loewenstein)

Across five experiments, we investigate the accuracy of beliefs about skill decay in oneself and others. Participants consistently underestimated their own skill decay by 28% to 59% across tasks. Even after experiencing skill decay firsthand, participants still underpredicted its extent, though accuracy improved. Participants were more accurate when predicting declines in others' skills than in their own, but still underestimated decay. We find significant heterogeneity by age: older participants exhibit greater declines, but their predictions fail to account for this. Taken together, these findings reveal a consistent underestimation of skill decay, suggesting a potential for errors in human capital investment.

Available at SSRN, updated August 5, 2024

Nonconstant Forgetting Implies Increasing Consistency of Memories over Time (with George Loewenstein)

It is often said that people only gain perspective on events following the passage of time. Here, we show that this pattern follows naturally from the power law of forgetting, a well-documented functional relationship in experimental psychology which posits thatthe largest changes in memory happen over the earliest periods. As a result, two memories of the same event, recalled at a constant interval apart from each other, become more consistent the farther they are from the original event. In three studies we document systematic realignments of memories for life events over time and show that, consistent with nonconstant changes in memory, these realignments occur over relatively short early intervals, after which time memories tend to stabilize. As a result, these memories become more consistent over time.

Working paper, updated September 21, 2024

Work in Progress

Differential Memory Decay Over Information Types Shapes Beliefs Over Time (with George Loewenstein)

In a series of online experiments, we find that people have better memory for a single written review of a product than they do for the number of total positive reviews of the product. As a result, while people are able to form an accurate belief about the product's quality when both signals are presented simultaneously, their beliefs move in the direction of the written review after a one-day delay.

Errors, Noise, & Partisan Difference In Voter Beliefs: Evidence and Implications (with Saurabh Bhargava)

We document a substantial degree of error, imprecision and partisan difference in beliefs about three recent major policy events in the United States. Using contemporaneous surveys of American voters during the Trump tax cuts, Biden stimulus, and the 2020 presidential election, we show that voters systematically misunderstand the effects of these major policy events on their personal welfare. We also show that the effect of partisanship is small relative to the average error in beliefs across the sample. We simulate a Bayesian spatial model in which voters receive noisy signals about candidate policies and show that noisier signals lead to less candidate convergence to the median voter. 

Conference talk, Second International Behavioral Public Policy Conference, September 3, 2023

Poster, presented at the Behavioral Models of Politics Conference, May 29, 2024 

Argument Visualization Improves Comprehension & Persuasive Effects of Economic Arguments (with Danny Oppenheimer & Simon Cullen)

We show via a series of online experiments that argument visualization (a novel diagramming technique from philosophy) improves people's comprehension of explanations of economic policies. It also improves participants' comprehension or arguments for and against those policies and changes evaluations of the intelligence of these arguments. We are currently investigating the effects of argument visualization on argument persuasiveness.

Poster, presented at the Society for Judgement and Decision Making Annual Conference, November 20, 2023