Recent article: “The effectiveness of nudging: A meta-analysis of choice architecture interventions across behavioral domains”

In one of my prior Applied Behavioral Economics lectures, I mentioned the notion of not only looking at individual studies but also finding meta studies (essentially studies of studies) to help inform behavioral perspectives. This article covers a meta study of behavioral architecture interventions: https://www.pnas.org/content/119/1/e2107346118 

In this article, there were two observations that really stuck out to me:

1) Considering a range of domains (health, food, environment, finance, prosocial) where behavioral architecture is applied, there is the highest effect on food choices and lowest effects in the financial domain; effects are potentially moderated by domain because of lower behavioral costs and lower perceived consequences in the former versus higher behavioral costs and higher perceived consequences in the latter. 

2) Decision structure changes (choice architecture) outperforms decision information (information architecture) and decision assistance approaches, potentially because choice architecture approaches require less demand on cognitive information processing, and there is low susceptibility to individual differences and goals. (But remember that we will start to address personalization and individual differences in upcoming classes).

If you are interested in learning more about meta studies and how to do them, I highly recommend the book: Borenstein, Michael, et al. Introduction to meta-analysis. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470057246/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2