Costly Distractions: Focusing On Individual Behavior Undermines Support For Systemic Reforms

Authors:

Abstract: Policy challenges can typically be addressed both through systemic changes (e.g., fuel emission standards) and by encouraging individual behavior change (e.g., eating less meat). In this paper, we propose that, while in principle complementary, systemic and individual perspectives can compete for the limited attention of people and policymakers. Thus, focusing the public's attention on one of these two ways can distract attention from the other---a form of "attentional crowd-out." In five pre-registered experiments (n = 5,901) covering four high-stakes domains (climate change, retirement savings, obesity, and gender inequity in the workplace), we show that when people learn about policies targeting individual behavior (such as awareness campaigns), they are more likely to themselves propose policies that target individual behavior, and to hold individuals rather than organizational actors responsible for solving the problem, than are people who learned about systemic policies. This shift in attention makes people more likely to donate to an organization that educates individuals rather than one seeking to effect systemic reforms. We find that this attentional shift occurs even when the interventions are described as having failed to solve the problem; even with such negative information, people propose "more of the same" kind of intervention rather than shifting to the other frame. Our findings hold when showing real newspaper headlines to participants, and in an experiment with a neutral condition, we show that the attentional shift occurs away from systemic reforms in the individual condition, rather than toward systemic reforms in the systemic condition. Policies targeting individual behavior may, therefore, have the unintended consequence of redirecting attention and attributions of responsibility away from systemic factors toward individual behaviors.

Track: DEC

Keywords: Behavioral public policy, Attention, Responsibility, Attribution