Published Research

Recent evidence suggests that the default options implicit in economic choices (e.g., 401(k) savings by white-collar workers) have extraordinarily large effects on decision-making. This study presents a field experiment that evaluates the effect of defaults on savings among a highly policy-relevant population: low-income tax filers.

We attempted to reduce college students’ use of their cars with an online intervention. Every other day for 2 weeks, students reported the number of miles they had avoided driving.

The retirement security landscape has changed drastically for most workers over the last thirty years – except for public school teachers and other state and local government employees. Many private-sector employers have stopped offering traditional retirement plans, while most state and local employees remain covered by defined benefit (DB) pension plans.

While the retirement security landscape has changed drastically for most workers over the last twenty years, traditional defined benefit (DB) pension plans remain the overwhelming norm for K–12 teachers. Because DB plans pay off fully with a fixed income after retirement only if a teacher stays in the profession for decades and yield little or nothing if a teacher leaves early, DB plans induce a strong, nonlinear relationship between years of tenure and benefit accrual.

This research qualifies a social psychological truism: that people like others who like them (the reciprocity principle). College women viewed the Facebook profiles of four male students who had previously seen their profiles.

Two experiments utilized a new experimental paradigm—the Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma— Maximizing Difference (IPD-MD) game—to study how relative deprivation at the group level affects intergroup competition. The IPD-MD game enables group members to make a costly contribution to either a within-group pool that benefits fellow ingroup members, or a between-group pool, which, in addition, harms outgroup members.

Using research to develop treatment guidelines is one way to lower medical costs and improve care. However, findings from a national survey show that the public is skeptical about this approach.

We conducted two national surveys of public opinion about comparative effectiveness research and the integration of findings from the research into clinical practice. The first survey found broad support for using research results to provide information, but less support for using them to allocate government resources or mandate treatment decisions. In addition, the public is willing to consider the use of financial incentives to encourage patients to choose cheaper treatments, if research demonstrates that they work as well as more expensive ones. The second survey found that support for comparative effectiveness research dropped in response to general debates about its consequences but that arguments against the research could be effectively countered by specific, targeted rebuttals.

For the first time in American history, the 2000 United States census allowed individuals to choose more than one race. That new policy sets up our exploration of whether and how multiracialism is entering Americans’ understanding and practice of race.

The determinative issue in applying the insanity defense is whether the defendant experienced a legally relevant functional impairment at the time of the offense. Categorical exclusion of personality disorders from the definition of mental disease is clinically and morally arbitrary because it may lead to unfair conviction of a defendant with a personality disorder who actually experienced severe, legally relevant impairments at the time of the crime.