Abstract
Welcome back to Behavioral Science & Policy (BSP).
Perhaps you notice something different? With this issue, we are excited to begin a new publishing partnership with Sage Publications, which will enable us to bring the latest in actionable behavioral science to a broader audience and help us continue to enhance the impact of the work contained within these pages. The mission of BSP and its parent organization, the Behavioral Science & Policy Association, is to promote the thoughtful application of rigorous behavioral science to policy and practice in ways that serve the public interest. In short, we seek to bridge the divide between science and practice.
To do this, we publish articles that highlight novel and actionable insights from a wide range of social and behavioral sciences. Uniquely, BSP submissions are reviewed by both disciplinary scientists (to guarantee their rigor) and policy and practice analysts (to enhance their actionability). Moreover, authors of accepted manuscripts receive writing guidance from professional editors so that the articles are accessible to a diverse audience that includes scientists and policymakers in and out of government and members of the educated lay public.
The current issue features an excellent slate of articles that make good on this ambition. They provide important insights for readers interested in health care, financial decision-making, education, and management. Among the articles can be found empirical work and reviews, experiments that took place in the lab and in the field, and work conducted in the United States and abroad.
The first three articles all attempt to translate established laboratory insights into practices that can be carried out in more naturalistic environments.
Juan David Robalino, Alissa Fishbane, Daniel G. Goldstein, and Hal E. Hershfield provide a critical field test of a behavioral insight that was previously established only in laboratory settings. One of the obstacles to preparing for retirement is people’s tendency to be biased toward spending money on things to be enjoyed in the present time, in part due to a lack of adequate consideration of the financial needs of their future selves. Laboratory experiments have found that providing people with age-advanced photographs of themselves can increase their stated motivation to save more for retirement—at least in hypothetical scenarios. This article presents a unique large-scale field test of this method among users of a Mexican mobile banking app, which yielded a statistically significant effect on real retirement saving decisions that was small but cost-effective.
Next, Heather Barry Kappes, Mattie Toma, Rekha Balu, Russ Burnett, Nuole Chen, Rebecca Johnson, Jessica Leight, Saad B. Omer, Elana Safran, Mary Steffel, Kris-Stella Trump, David Yokum, and Pompa Debroy take stock of a variety of vaccination-promoting communication strategies that were studied in eight large- scale randomized controlled trials run by the U.S. Office of Evaluation Sciences prior the pandemic. These interventions are noteworthy for the scale of their application (having a median sample size of 55,000), their transparency (all trials were preregistered), and their focus on actual vaccination behaviors (rather than intentions to get vaccinated). Although most of these interventions were not successful, two proved somewhat effective in increasing vaccination rates: sending letters reminding older Medicare beneficiaries to be vaccinated for influenza and sending postcards reminding seniors in Louisiana to get a variety of vaccinations. The effects of these interventions were modest when compared with the greater effects of messaging on vaccination intentions seen in published academic literature, and so they serve as an important reality check about the perils of expecting stated intentions to translate into action outside the lab. The interventions also provide valuable insights for future researchers and practitioners attempting to promote vaccination using only messaging strategies.
Several previous studies have found that the test performance of members of stigmatized minority groups can be harmed by their worries about confirming unflattering stereotypes about their group’s academic abilities (for example, women being poor at math). Moreover, other studies have found that these effects can be buffered by providing people with an opportunity to engage in self-affirmation by writing about a value that is important to them (for example, friendships or religion). Daniel D. Shephard, Ali Osseiran, and Fadi Makki show that this technique can be extended to low-literacy populations (in this case, Syrian refugees in Lebanon) by using a values-affirming drawing exercise. In particular, students enrolled in an accelerated basic literacy and numeracy program who completed this intervention achieved higher subsequent test scores in Arabic than did students who did not complete the intervention (although scores on tests of English and mathematics were not significantly affected). This proof of concept will no doubt inspire follow-up attempts to expand the application of values-affirmation interventions around the world.
The final two articles in this issue explore the application of research insights to organizational practice.
Sean Fath, Richard P. Larrick, and Jack B. Soll present an intriguing study of participants who all had prior experience making hiring decisions. The researchers were interested in the conditions under which hiring managers choose to remain unaware of information about job candidates that is obviously biasing (for example, race or gender), biasing in less obvious ways (for example, a name or a photograph), or relevant (for example, college major or work experience). Participants chose to avoid biasing or potentially biasing information under three conditions: (a) when asked to indicate what applicant information they wanted to receive rather than what information they did not want to receive, (b) when making selections for other people rather than when making the selections for themselves, and (c) when the information was obviously biasing rather than when it was less obviously biasing. Although this study involves hypothetical decisions, the authors use their demonstration to provide practical advice for human resource officers. When explicit blinding policies are not feasible, human resource decision-makers can use these approaches to encourage hiring managers to voluntarily blind themselves from potentially biasing information.
In the final article in this issue, Gudela Grote and Steve W. J. Kozlowski synthesize many decades of research on teamwork, a critical capability for managing crisis and fostering innovation. Fortunately, the capacity for better teamwork can be achieved through training and effort. The authors distill policy recommendations for educators, regulators, and organizational leaders.
In the eight years since the launch of BSP, we have been excited to witness an explosion of interest in applied behavioral science among policymakers and other practitioners. Meanwhile, we have been gratified to see a number of disciplinary journals publish more applied work and field studies, and we have noted that the list of new translational journals is growing. BSP is a unique outlet for authors who wish to see their best behavioral science research and insights have impact both inside and outside academia and who, by working a little harder (with our help), are able to translate their findings into immediately actionable recommendations expressed in language that is accessible to a broad audience. In this way, we hope that our journal will continue to serve an important role in bridging the divide between science and practice.
