Naturalistic monitoring tools provide detailed information about people's behaviours and experiences in everyday life. Most naturalistic monitoring research has focused on measuring subjective well-being. This paper discusses how naturalistic monitoring can inform behavioural public policy-making by providing detailed information about everyday decisions and the choice architecture in which these decisions are made. We describe how the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) – a naturalistic monitoring tool popular in the subjective well-being literature – can be used to: (i) improve ecological validity of behavioural economics; (ii) provide mechanistic evidence of the everyday workings of behavioural interventions; and (iii) help us to better understand people's true preferences. We believe that DRM data on everyday life have great potential to support the design and evaluation of behavioural policies.

Many people delay their preparation for retirement. Policy-makers often attempt to motivate people to take timely action by increasing the perceived importance of retirement saving, yet the effectiveness of such strategies can be doubted. We examined why a strategy of emphasizing importance may be ineffective by distinguishing between intention to prepare for retirement and action in actually taking steps toward preparation. Two surveys (n1 = 1171; n2 = 832) showed that importance and difficulty were both predictive of people's intentions to prepare for retirement, but that difficulty was a much stronger predictor of people's actual actions. Using data from an additional survey (n3 = 986), a series of follow-up tests provided further evidence that difficulty of retirement preparation is a stronger predictor of inaction than importance of retirement saving. These findings help explain why policies aimed at simplifying retirement preparation (e.g., automatic enrollment) have been more successful than policies aimed at increasing the importance of retirement saving (e.g., tax advantages).

Do differences in worldview ideology hinder people from objectively interpreting the effect of immigration? In an experiment with Swedish adults (n = 1015), we investigate whether people display motivated reasoning when interpreting numerical information about the effects of refugee intake on crime rate. Our results show clear evidence of motivated reasoning along the lines of worldview ideology (i.e., whether people identify themselves primarily as nationally oriented or globally oriented). In scenarios where refugee intake was associated with higher crime rate, nationally oriented people were 18 percentage points more likely to make the correct assessment compared to globally oriented people. Likewise, in scenarios where refugee intake was associated with lower crime rate, nationally oriented people were 20 percentage points less likely to make the correct assessment compared to globally oriented people. Individuals with higher numeric ability were less likely to engage in motivated reasoning, suggesting that motivated reasoning more commonly is driven by feelings and emotional cues rather than deliberate analytical processes.

Gamblers are frequently reminded to ‘gamble responsibly’. But these qualitative reminders come with no quantitative information for gamblers to judge relative product risk in skill-based gambling forms. By comparison, consumers purchasing alcohol are informed of product strength by alcohol by volume percentage (ABV%) or similar labels. This paper uses mixed logistic regression machine learning to uncover the potential variation in soccer betting outcomes. This paper uses data from four bet types and eight seasons of English Premier League soccer, ending in 2018. Outcomes across each bet type were compared using three betting strategies: the most-skilled prediction, a random strategy and the least-skilled prediction. There was a large spread in betting outcomes, with, for example, the per-bet average loss varying by a factor of 54 (from 1.1% to 58.9%). Gamblers’ losses were positively correlated with the observable betting odds across all bets, indicating that betting odds are one salient feature that could be used to inform gamblers about product risk. Such large differences in product risk are relevant to the promotion of responsible gambling.

When policymakers focus on costs and benefits, they often find that hard questions become easy – as, for example, when the benefits clearly exceed the costs, or when the costs clearly exceed the benefits. In some cases, however, benefits or costs are difficult to quantify, perhaps because of limitations in scientific knowledge. In extreme cases, policymakers are proceeding in circumstances of uncertainty rather than risk, in the sense that they cannot assign probabilities to various outcomes. We suggest that in difficult cases in which important information is absent, it is useful for policymakers to consider a concept from poker: ‘freerolls.’ A freeroll exists when choosers can lose nothing from selecting an option but stand to gain something (whose magnitude may itself be unknown). In some cases, people display ‘freeroll neglect.’ In terms of social justice, John Rawls’ defense of the difference principle is grounded in the idea that, behind the veil of ignorance, choosers have a freeroll. In terms of regulatory policy, one of the most promising defenses of the Precautionary Principle sees it as a kind of freeroll. Some responses to climate change, pandemics and financial crises can be seen as near-freerolls. Freerolls and near-freerolls must be distinguished from cases involving cumulatively high costs and also from faux freerolls, which can be found when the costs of an option are real and significant, but not visible. ‘Binds’ are the mirror-image of freerolls; they involve options from which people are guaranteed to lose something (of uncertain magnitude). Some regulatory options are binds, and there are faux binds as well.

This study examines how moral intuitions toward debt relief vary depending on whether a debt contract involves one country borrowing from another country or an individual borrowing from a bank. Participants respond to a vignette describing a basic debt dispute between a debtor and a lender. A judge in charge of settling the dispute decides to allow debt relief and participants express how fair they find the decision. Treatments vary (1) the debt context (international or person-bank), (2) the responsibility of lenders and debtors (whether their situations stem from bad luck or poor choices) and (3) whether a lender's profit motive is made salient. Results show that, across both international and person-bank debt, debt relief is perceived as being fairer when debtors are unlucky and when lenders are careless; profit salience, however, does not affect the perceived fairness of debt relief in either debt context. Results, when integrated with those from an initial related study, also point to anti-bank sentiment increasing the perceived fairness of debt relief when an individual borrows from a bank and to a consistent across-context ranking of the perceived fairness of debt relief in the scenario.

Microcredit – joint-liability loans to the poorest of the poor – has been touted as a powerful approach for combatting global poverty, but sustainability varies dramatically across banks. Efforts to improve the sustainability of microcredit have assumed defaults are caused by free-riding. Here, we point out that the response of other group members to delinquent groupmates also plays an important role in defaults. Even in the absence of any free-rider problem, some people will be unable to make their payments due to bad luck. It is other group members’ unwillingness to pitch in extra – due to, among other things, not wanting to have less than other group members – that leads to default. To support this argument, we utilize the Ultimatum Game (UG), a standard paradigm from behavioral economics for measuring one's aversion to inequitable outcomes. First, we show that country-level variation in microloan default rates is strongly correlated (overall r = 0.81) with country-level UG rejection rates, but not free-riding measures. We then introduce a laboratory model ‘Microloan Game’ and present evidence that defaults arise from inequity-averse individuals refusing to make up the difference when others fail to pay their fair share. This perspective suggests a suite of new approaches for combatting defaults that leverage findings on reducing UG rejections.

A multi-item questionnaire concerning lay people's attitudes toward organ procurement without consent from executed prisoners was given to several hundred respondents. The items ranged from all-out condemnation (“It is tantamount to murder”) to enthusiasm (“It is great to have this organ supply”). Overall, we found two guiding principles upheld by most respondents: (1) Convicts have as much a right to their bodies and organs as other people, so the practice should be judged by the same standards as those that guide organ procurement from any donor. Procuring organs without consent is wrong. (2) Benefiting from those organs should be held to more lenient standards than are demanded for their procurement. So, benefitting from these ill-gotten organs should be tolerated.