School of Business and Management Department of Management 188 Judgment and Decision Making in Organizations Supervisor: HAGMANN, David / MGMT Student: LIAO, Yi-tsen / ECOF Course: UROP1100, Fall UROP2100, Spring Many of the most salient policy problems involve in multiple actors and may therefore best be tackled by a range of policies. To protect the environment, for example, one may want policies regulating producers and awareness campaigns targeting individuals. In this project, we will test whether policies nudging individual behavior lead people to allocate their attention to individuals as a source of the problem. We hypothesize that, as a result of limited attention, they will be less likely to propose policies targeting organizational actors and attribute more of the responsibility of the problem to individuals. Policies that promise small gains by nudging subtle behavior may therefore have an unanticipated attentional cost that makes it less likely for more effective, structural reforms to be implemented. Recent work in behavioral public policy has found that green nudges—soft intervention that targets individual behavior at no or low economic cost—can undermine the support for a carbon tax (Hagmann, Ho, and Loewenstein 2019). Chater and Loewenstein (2022) argue that crowding-out effect could be generalised beyond the domain of climate change, although this view has been challenged by others (Sunstein, 2022). However, so far there is no experimental evidence supporting these argument. This project examined whether the perception of individual intervention as a policy alternative can crowd out people’s support for implementing systemic solutions on account of limited attention. We find that being aware of the availability of individual policies can not only diminish the support for their systemic counterparts, but also hinder people from forming them. The political implication of inattention reminds us the underlying cost arising from an extensive focus on individual intervention, for it may shift public attention away from systemic policies and, consequently, squeeze them out of policy agenda.
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