In recent years, the “nudge” method of behavioral science, represented by default options, has been increasingly used to improve the public approval of social policies. However, its effectiveness and public acceptability have been questioned by some public and scholars. Therefore, from the perspective of social policy, our study explores the effectiveness, acceptability, and mechanism of default options and its variants to provide scientific basis and empirical psychological data to introduce various public policies in social governance. We conducted three studies.
The first study summarized the literature on default options in recent years and used the meta-analysis technique to explore the validity of default options in previous studies. The results showed that the default options changed people’s behavior. The results of moderating effect showed no significant difference in the effectiveness of default options between Eastern and Western cultures. Meanwhile, the nudge effect of the default options was better in the money-related domain than in the health and environmental domain.
The second study set up a comprehensive waste treatment plant to investigate whether the variants of default options could improve further the public’s policy agreement more than the traditional default set. The results show that, compared with the traditional “opt-out” default set, increasing the transparency and variant of educational information on the basis of this method can effectively improve the public’s policy agreement. Furthermore, different nudge methods have different effects.
Study 3 took mask-wearing and pay reduction in the COVID-19 epidemic as the situation and further investigated the public’s acceptance of this method and its mechanism of action on the basis of verifying the default options and the agreement degree of its variants policy. With the policy of promoting mask-wearing as the research context, Study 3a found that the score of the education variant was significantly higher than that of the “opt-in” method. In contrast, the difference of other variants was not significant. However, no mediating effect was found in the further exploration of the evaluation of public attitude, which could be because of the ceiling effect in the mask-wearing scenario of the epidemic. In Study 3b, we found that the public’s approval of the policy under the opt-out and its three variants was significantly higher than that under the opt-in condition. Furthermore, compared with the traditional opt-in and opt-out methods, the variant of the default options can ensure the public’s acceptance of the policy and effectively improve their acceptance of the nudge method. In further mechanism exploration, we find that trust mediates between transparency variant; policy consent, trust, and morality mediate between education variant; and policy consent and freedom restriction mediate between feedback channel variant and policy consent.
In conclusion, starting from social policy issues, this study examines the effect of default options and their variants on improving the public’s policy approval and acceptance and their mechanisms. The study found that the default options can effectively improve the public’s approval of social policies and the variant of the default options can improve the public’s acceptance of the nudging method on the basis of ensuring the public’s approval of the policies. Thus, this research provides new ideas and evidence support for social managers to promote public behavior change in social policy issues effectively and help social managers realize real refined social governance.
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