It is common for organizations to offer awards to motivate individual behavior, yet few empirical studies evaluate their effectiveness in the field. We report a randomized field experiment (N = 15,329) that tests the impact of two common types of symbolic awards: pre-announced awards...

Many states mandate districts or schools notify parents when students have missed multiple unexcused days of school. We report a randomized experiment (N = 131,312) evaluating the impact of sending parents truancy notifications modified to target behavioral barriers that can hinder effective...

How accurate are responses to questions about intentions to vote in an upcoming election? Questions of this type are studied in a range of work in political science to understand the effects of other factors on political engagement, as well as in public opinion research. We analyze six phone...

Can independent groups change voters’ beliefs about an incumbent’s positions? Does reframing how candidates’ are perceived by changing beliefs about their positions influence actual voter choices? Past laboratory and observational research suggests that candidate reframing is difficult and...

Should political campaigns in close races communicate that they may win (over-confidence) or that they may lose (under-confidence)? In six studies (three survey experiments, two field experiments, and one archival study) we demonstrate the motivating power of under-confidence. While uncommitted...

We study an intervention designed to increase the effectiveness of parental involvement in their children’s education. Each week we sent brief individualized messages from teachers to the parents of high school students in a credit recovery program. This light-touch communication increased the...

We propose that people hold a belief in a favorable future (BFF), projecting that the future will change in ways advantageous to their current interests. People believe that their political views, entertainment preferences, and scientific beliefs will be more widely held by others in the future...

A field experiment examines how enrollment defaults affect the take-up and impact of an education technology (N=6,976). It shows that a standard (high-friction) opt-in process induces extremely low parent take-up (1%), while a simplified process yields higher take-up (11%), but both fail to...

Partisan identity shapes social, mental, economic, and physical life. Using a novel dataset, we study the consequences of partisan identity by examining the immediate impact of electoral loss and victory on happiness and sadness. Employing a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity model we...

Modern campaigns develop databases of detailed information about citizens to inform electoral strategy and to guide tactical efforts. Despite sensational reports about the value of individual consumer data, the most valuable information campaigns acquire comes from the behaviors and direct...