Nudging sugar portions: a real-world experiment

Background Sugar overconsumption is a major contributor to overweight and obesity, with daily consumption greatly exceeding the WHO’s recommendations. The aim of the present study was to determine whether using a functionally modified sugar shaker as a food environment nudge could be an effective means to reduce the sugar used in hot beverages. Methods Sugar shakers were functionally modified to reduce the amount of sugar in each pour by 47%. A real-world experiment was conducted to compare the amount of added sugar per hot beverage during default and nudge conditions over the course of four weeks (17,233 hot beverages sold) in a university take-away café. In addition, 59 customers were surveyed to evaluate the acceptance of the intervention. Results Modifying the functional design of sugar shakers resulted in a reduction of added sugar by 20% (d = 1.35) compared to the default condition. In the survey, most participants evaluated the intervention strategy positively. Conclusion The present real-world experiment demonstrates that a simple environmental intervention can significantly reduce sugar consumption in public places while meeting with consumer approval, making it a promising means of reducing sugar overconsumption.

Multiculturalism beyond citizenship: The inclusion of non-citizens

This article questions multiculturalism’s reliance on citizenship as a default condition of inclusion. While agreeing with multiculturalists that there are groups within the citizenry who are excluded from citizenship rights on the basis of their cultural background, this article highlights the misrecognition of non-citizens that is yet unaccounted for by Anglophone theories of multiculturalism where eligibility to multicultural rights-claiming hinges on the condition of formal citizenship. The status of non-citizenship affects conceptions of ‘difference’ where representations of cultural ‘otherness’ are compounded by the ‘foreignness’ of non-citizens. Frameworks of multicultural citizenship entail recognition through group-specific rights, but only for citizens, in so doing excluding the needs and rights of non-citizens. The assumption made by multiculturalists is that citizenship is a condition of multicultural rights and/or recognition despite scenarios where non-citizens may not desire the citizenship of their host country, or the idea of ‘belonging’ it is attached to. Appealing to multiculturalist principles and the neo-republican notion of non-domination, I argue that multiculturalism as a theory can challenge the limitations of citizenship by expanding its compass to include non-citizens as multicultural subjects.

A young precarity or an old self-management

The title Precarity or Self-Management provokes me. On the one hand, I can agree that self-management is a way out of precarity, while on the other, this raises the questions of which precarity, whose precarity, which self-management and for whom. Since the temporalities of these two notions are divergent, I feel like time-traveling while staying in one spot – the spot where precarity and self-management are bound together by the curatorial gesture of Maska. My metaphor here is predicated on a thesis that in order to analyse the art and the phenomena in art today, one needs to situate them in a twofold social process: one of its streams consists of the economization of politics and the other of the politicization of production. Within the present article I invite the reader to situate both the precarity and the self-management today within that process, as a default condition of making and doing art in neo-liberal capitalist and democratic society. The same goes for many other social practices, such as mass media, the film industry, professional sports, clubbing, education, tourism, etc.

When Too Few Is Bad for the Environment

Defaults are an effective tool in shaping consumers’ decisions. However, only a few studies have investigated the role of defaults regarding consumers’ choices of electricity products. Moreover, each of these studies used binary choice sets (gray vs. green electricity). Notably, decision-making research has shown that consumer choice patterns are considerably influenced by the size of the choice set (e.g., adding a third option). The question is, does this also hold for defaults, that is, do they function differently depending on the choice set size? In our experimental study, participants could choose between three electricity products (gray, green, and eco), which varied in their environmental friendliness and price, the default randomly being one of the three products. In addition, we had a no-default condition. Contrary to the other studies, we found not only a default effect for the least environmentally friendly gray product, but also for the environmentally friendlier products green and eco electricity. Moreover, the popularity of the middle option – the green electricity product – was not reduced by adding a third product. The results indicate that increasing the set size by adding an eco-product and by intelligently setting the default could increase the number of consumers buying environmentally friendly electricity products.

The Application of Optimal Defaults to Physical Education Courses in College Students: A Simulation Study

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine if automatic enrollment in exercise-promoting courses on a college campus, with a choice to opt out, would increase enrollment. Method: In a simulated course selection paradigm, 317 college students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: optimal default (automatic enrollment in an active physical education well-being course with the choice to opt out to a sedentary alternative), suboptimal default (automatic enrollment in a sedentary well-being course with the option to select an alternative active physical education courses), or free choice. Data were analyzed using logistic regression. Results: Participants in the optimal default condition were significantly more likely to enroll in an active physical education well-being course compared with those in the suboptimal-default and free-choice conditions. Discussion/Conclusions: Setting optimal physical education course defaults in the college environment can promote student health by increasing the likelihood of enrolling in exercise-promoting courses.

HOUDINI AMONG THE SPIRITS: A LESSON IN CRITICAL THINKING

In spite of the widespread recognition of critical thinking as an elementary aim of education, and an important tool for people to evaluate information and make reasonable decisions in their daily lives, to think critically is a difficult task. We are consciously and unconsciously biased, and our basic beliefs strongly influence the way we assess evidence, so our cognitive default condition seems to move us away from critical thinking. However, it is possible appropriately to exercise critical thinking to evaluate subjects to which we are emotionally attached, and the experience of the illusionist Harry Houdini investigating Spiritualism is a striking example of it. My objective here is to discuss how Houdini incorporated core elements of critical thinking, such as the ability to evaluate reasons, and the disposition to calibrate his beliefs accordingly, in his assessment of the claim that Spiritualist mediums could contact the spirits of dead people, as described in his book A Magician among the Spirits.

Transparency effects on policy compliance: disclosing how defaults work can enhance their effectiveness

From an ethical standpoint, transparency is an essential requirement in public policy-making. Ideally, policy-makers are transparent and actively disclose the presence, purpose and means of a decision aid. From a practical point of view, however, transparency has been discussed as reducing the effectiveness of decision aids. In the present paper, we elaborate on how transparency affects the effectiveness of defaults. In three experiments, we manipulated whether the endorser was transparent about the default or not and assessed participants’ decisions to opt out or comply. Throughout the experiments, we found that proactive transparency reduced opt-out rates as compared to a non-transparent default condition. Moreover, proactive disclosure of a default reduced opt-out rates as compared to informed control groups, where participants imagined they had retrieved the default-related information by themselves (Studies 1 and 2). The results further indicate that a lack of proactive disclosure may lead targets to perceive the endorser as less sincere and to feel deceived, which in turn hinders the effectiveness of the default. In general, our findings lend support to the proactive transparency paradigm in governance and show that a default-based policy can be transparent and effective at the same time.

Revisiting “Most People Are Happy”—And Discovering When They Are Not

In our 1996 article, “Most People are Happy,” we presented evidence showing that the majority of humans are above neutral in happiness. The article was popular perhaps for several reasons. First, we shed light on the ubiquity of positive or pleasant emotions, whereas previously many scholars had focused on negative or unpleasant ones. Second, our article may have received attention because, as we showed, most people believe that humans are much less happy than they actually are. Thus, our article provided an impetus for understanding the role of positive emotions as well as illuminating an important aspect of human happiness—the fact that happiness is not unusual but may be the default condition. In the current article, we review evidence from the first representative sample of humanity, the Gallup World Poll, and include many more nations that are very poor and troubled. We find that the majority of people are above neutral in affect balance but not life satisfaction. Furthermore, there are extremely bad life circumstances in which most people are below neutral in affect balance as well. This suggests that one explanation for most people’s happiness is that most societies, but not all, can meet enough human needs that they provide the conditions for human happiness. Finally, our findings suggest that human happiness is not just in our heads or genes but is also influenced by personal and societal circumstances.

Enhancing Navigability: An Algorithm for Constructing Tag Trees

Purpose This study introduces an algorithm to construct tag trees that can be used as a user-friendly navigation tool for knowledge sharing and retrieval by solving two issues of previous studies, i.e. semantic drift and structural skew. Design/methodology/approach Inspired by the generality based methods, this study builds tag trees from a co-occurrence tag network and uses the h-degree as a node generality metric. The proposed algorithm is characterized by the following four features: (1) the ancestors should be more representative than the descendants, (2) the semantic meaning along the ancestor-descendant paths needs to be coherent, (3) the children of one parent are collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive in describing their parent, and (4) tags are roughly evenly distributed to their upper-level parents to avoid structural skew. Findings The proposed algorithm has been compared with a well-established solution Heymann Tag Tree (HTT). The experimental results using a social tag dataset showed that the proposed algorithm with its default condition outperformed HTT in precision based on Open Directory Project (ODP) classification. It has been verified that h-degree can be applied as a better node generality metric compared with degree centrality. Research limitations A thorough investigation into the evaluation methodology is needed, including user studies and a set of metrics for evaluating semantic coherence and navigation performance. Practical implications The algorithm will benefit the use of digital resources by generating a flexible domain knowledge structure that is easy to navigate. It could be used to manage multiple resource collections even without social annotations since tags can be keywords created by authors or experts, as well as automatically extracted from text. Originality/value Few previous studies paid attention to the issue of whether the tagging systems are easy to navigate for users. The contributions of this study are twofold: (1) an algorithm was developed to construct tag trees with consideration given to both semantic coherence and structural balance and (2) the effectiveness of a node generality metric, h-degree, was investigated in a tag co-occurrence network.

Influencing Factors and Scaling Law of Bubble Detachment at a Submerged Orifice

Bubble formation and detachment are important in the drag reduction of underwater vehicle by using gas injection, which are involved in the integrated scaling law considering bubbles coalescence. The parameters of influencing factors are theoretically derived by dimensionless analysis on this issue. Then the effects are shown by analyzing results with various parameters. Results indicate that, the viscous force can be neglected near the default condition, and the bubble is difficult to detach if the viscosity is very large. Surface tension is the major constraint force in the default condition, which is also sensitive. The bubble easily crushes if the surface tension is small, while the neck of bubble can hardly break up if the surface tension is large. For the contact angle, the bubble profile significantly exceeds the orifice boundary if the wall surface is hydrophobic, which makes detachment period becomes larger.