Showing papers by "Charles Efferson published in 2021"

Promotion of behavioural change for health in a heterogeneous population.

Abstract: Public health policy often involves implementing cost-efficient, large-scale interventions. When mandating or forbidding a specific behaviour is not permissible, public health professionals may draw on behaviour change interventions to achieve socially beneficial policy objectives. Interventions can have two main effects: (i) a direct effect on people initially targeted by the intervention; and (ii) an indirect effect mediated by social influence and by the observation of other people’s behaviour. However, people’s attitudes and beliefs can differ markedly throughout the population, with the result that these two effects can interact to produce unexpected, unhelpful and counterintuitive consequences. Public health professionals need to understand this interaction better. This paper illustrates the key principles of this interaction by examining two important areas of public health policy: tobacco smoking and vaccination. The example of antismoking campaigns shows when and how public health professionals can amplify the effects of a behaviour change intervention by taking advantage of the indirect pathway. The example of vaccination campaigns illustrates how underlying incentive structures, particularly anticoordination incentives, can interfere with the indirect effect of an intervention and stall efforts to scale up its implementation. Recommendations are presented on how public health professionals can maximize the total effect of behaviour change interventions in heterogeneous populations based on these concepts and examples.

Investigating the Structure of Son Bias in Armenia With Novel Measures of Individual Preferences.

Abstract: Sex ratios at birth favoring boys are being documented in a growing number of countries, a pattern indicating that families selectively abort females. Son bias also explains why, in many countries, girls have more siblings and are born at relatively earlier parities compared with their brothers. In this study, we develop novel methods for measuring son bias using both questionnaire items and implicit association tests, and we collect data on fertility preferences and outcomes from 2,700 participants in Armenia. We document highly skewed sex ratios, suggesting that selective abortions of females are widespread among parents in our sample. We also provide evidence that sex-selective abortions are underreported, which highlights the problem of social desirability bias. We validate our methods and demonstrate that conducting implicit association tests can be a successful strategy for measuring the relative preference for sons and daughters when social desirability is a concern. We investigate the structure of son-biased fertility preferences within households, across families, and between regions in Armenia, using measures of son bias at the level of the individual decision-maker. We find that men are, on average, considerably more son-biased than women. We also show that regional differences in son bias exist and that they appear unrelated to the socioeconomic composition of the population. Finally, we estimate the degree of spousal correlation in son bias and discuss whether husbands are reliably more son-biased than their wives.

Policy to activate cultural change to amplify policy.

Abstract: If you were driving down the road in Sweden at 04:50 on September 3, 1967, the Swedish government required you to stop. You then had to move from the left to the right side of the road, and at 05:00 you could continue on your way. Although Sweden invested heavily in preparing for this pivotal 10 minutes, the transition from left to right created some inevitable confusion (1). Nonetheless, the transition to a new equilibrium was fast. Traffic accidents and insurance claims declined immediately after the change, presumably because of extra caution behind the wheel, but they soon returned to normal (2). With a one-time government initiative, Swedes tipped from driving on the left to driving on the right, where they have remained ever since. The rest of us gained a compelling metaphor, arguably too compelling, for how social tipping can support society-wide changes consistent with policy goals. I say “arguably too compelling” because choosing a side of the road is a special problem maximally suited to rapid change. The question is, When does the potential for rapid social tipping extend to other coordination problems that are similar in some ways but different in others? More broadly, can we predict and even control tipping in settings that are typical precisely because they are more complex than choosing the left or right side of the road? Andreoni et al. (3) examine exactly these questions with a theoretical and experimental approach. Apart from basic scientific interest, the questions are relevant across an impressive array of policy domains where social norms, applied cultural evolution, and tipping appear as related mechanisms for behavior change (4, 5). Example domains range from equality, social justice, and health (6, 7) to resource conservation (8, 9) and climate change (10). Choosing a side of … [↵][1]1Email: charles.efferson{at}unil.ch. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Collectively jumping to conclusions: Social information amplifies the tendency to gather insufficient data.

Abstract: False beliefs can spread within societies even when they are costly and when individuals share access to the same objective reality. Research on the cultural evolution of misbeliefs has demonstrated that a social context can explain what people think but not whether it also explains how people think. We shift the focus from the diffusion of false beliefs to the diffusion of suboptimal belief-formation strategies and identify a novel mechanism whereby misbeliefs arise and spread. We show that, when individual decision makers have access to the data-gathering behavior of others, the tendency to make decisions on the basis of insufficient evidence is amplified, increasing the rate of incorrect, costly decisions. We argue that this mechanism fills a gap in current explanations of problematic, widespread misbeliefs such as climate change denial. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Leading with the (recently) successful? Performance visibility and the evolution of risk taking

Abstract: The popular practice of “leading by the successful” is viewed as a hallmark of motivational leadership. A central rationale for leaders to make successful team members salient is that it may induce social learning, where followers strive to adopt a favorable behavior. The reliance of a leader on such success-biased social learning presumes that imitation by followers occurs only to the extent as outstanding success was caused by a superior ability or knowledge of the respective peer. In this article, we conduct a laboratory experiment to study whether imitation of the successful may occur even if imitation necessarily fails to be an effective way of improving one’s performance. The experimental approach establishes the necessary control to assure that success-biased learning cannot systematically improve the decisions made, and allows us to isolate the behavior of the followers from possible feedback effects of the leader. The data show that a substantial amount of imitation occurs, which in our setting leads to a sizeable and persistent increase of the average risk taken in the teams. Our finding thus indicates a limitation of the practice to lead with the successful.