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...

Exposure to radon gas is a leading cause of lung cancer. Testing homes for the gas is straightforward, yet most people do not undertake tests even when offered freely. We report a pre-registered randomised controlled trial of communications to encourage test uptake. Households (N = 3,500) in...

A basic function of government is to manage environmental risks. This requires measurement of how the public perceive different risks, but it is hard to measure risk perceptions in a neutral, unbiased way. In a pre-registered experiment with a nationally representative sample (N = 800), we...

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...

Exposure to radon gas is a leading cause of lung cancer. Testing homes for the gas is straightforward, yet most people do not undertake tests even when offered freely. We report a pre-registered randomised controlled trial of communications to encourage test uptake. Households (N = 3,500) in...

A basic function of government is to manage environmental risks. This requires measurement of how the public perceive different risks, but it is hard to measure risk perceptions in a neutral, unbiased way. In a pre-registered experiment with a nationally representative sample (N = 800), we...

Excess clothing consumption severely harms the environment, through greenhouse gas emissions, resource degradation and water pollution. For consumers, however, the trade-off between this environmental impact and the convenience of "fast fashion" is hidden at the point of purchase. We present a...