This study demonstrates how status quo bias (SQB) acts as an obstacle to active travel policy. A pre-registered experiment was undertaken to measure the strength of SQB and to illuminate its likely causes. A large, nationally representative sample evaluated descriptions of a town layout designed...

Generations differ in their contribution to climate change and susceptibility to its effects. Framing climate change as an intergenerational issue may therefore alter public engagement. We report a pre-registered, online experiment with a youth sample (N = 500, aged 16-24 years) that tested...

Mitigating the climate crisis requires changes to policy, business, and consumer behaviour in favour of sustainability. For consumers, use of private motor vehicles and consumption of meat and dairy are high-impact behaviours. To assist behaviour change, it is useful to understand where in the...

This paper summarises useful evidence from behavioural science for fighting the COVID-19 outbreak. It is based on an extensive literature search of relevant behavioural interventions and studies of crises. The findings aim to be useful not only to government and public authorities, but to...

Self-isolation is a vital element of efforts to contain COVID-19. We report an online experiment with a nationally representative sample (N=500) that tested behaviourally informed decision aids to support self-isolation. The experiment had three stages that tested interventions designed to help...

The "obesogenic environment" contributes to the global obesity epidemic. However, many believe that obesity is caused solely by individual choice. This paper investigates how the public in Ireland, the UK, and USA perceive the causes, consequences and severity of obesity compared to an expert...

Nutritional labelling is a means of communicating the nutritional content of food to consumers. When a nutritional label is salient and understandable, consumers tend to make more healthy choices. Nutritional labelling policies can also influence providers by incentivising manufacturers to...

A Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) plan is an innovative, complex and increasingly popular form of car finance. Consumers pay a deposit and monthly payments, but instead of paying off the total value of the car, they pay off the depreciation over a specified term. We used an experiment to...

This paper investigates whether exposure to explanatory diagrams can affect a major financial decision. In a controlled experiment, participants were given pension benefit statements with or without one or two diagrams, before answering incentivised questions that measured recall, comprehension...

Failure to switch service provider is viewed as leaving money on the table. While psychological hassle and switching costs are often invoked to explain the observed inertia, there is little empirical research that directly measures barriers to switching in retail finance markets. This study uses...