This article considers survey questions that have been used to measure environmental attitudes and beliefs, along with evidence addressing the question of whether these items are best thought of as unidimensional or multidimensional. It begins by outlining the main theme: employing different measures of environmental attitudes and beliefs leads to strikingly different conclusions about Americans' commitment to environmental protection. It assesses evidence on the measures' trends over time and the measures' correlations with social and political variables. Taken together, this evidence leads to the conclusion that each measure has integrity and would be best examined on its own, rather than combined with other measures into indexes seeking to describe higher-order constructs. The article then considers evidence on how such environmental attitudes and beliefs may have impacted environmental policy via candidate choice, dynamic representation, and ballot propositions. Finally, it highlights directions for future research on public opinion and environmental policy.

Current theories suggest that people understand how to exploit common biases to influence others. However, these predictions have received little empirical attention. We consider a widely studied bias with special policy relevance: the default effect, which is the tendency to choose whichever option is the status quo. We asked participants (including managers, law/business/medical students, and US adults) to nudge others toward selecting a target option by choosing whether to present that target option as the default. In contrast to theoretical predictions, we find that people often fail to understand and/or use defaults to influence others, i.e., they show "default neglect." First, in one-shot default-setting games, we find that only 50.8% of participants set the target option as the default across 11 samples ( = 2,844), consistent with people not systematically using defaults at all. Second, when participants have multiple opportunities for experience and feedback, they still do not systematically use defaults. Third, we investigate beliefs related to the default effect. People seem to anticipate some mechanisms that drive default effects, yet most people do not believe in the default effect on average, even in cases where they do use defaults. We discuss implications of default neglect for decision making, social influence, and evidence-based policy.

Diversity research has long assumed that individuals' perceptions of diversity are accurate, consistent with normative theories of judgments in economics and decision theory. We challenge this assumption. In six experiments, we show that when there is more diversity along one dimension (e.g., race, clothing color), people also perceive more diversity on other dimensions (e.g., gender, skill) even when this cannot reflect reality. This spillover bias in diversity judgment leads to predictable errors in decision making with economic incentives for accuracy, and it alters support for affirmative action policies in organizations. Spillover bias in diversity judgment may help explain why managerial decisions about groups often appear to be suboptimal and why diversity scholars have found inconsistent associations between objective diversity and team outcomes.

BackgroundClinicians’ use of choice architecture, or how they present options, systematically influences the choices made by patients and their surrogate decision makers. However, clinicians may incompletely understand this influence.ObjectiveTo assess physicians’ abilities to predict how common choice frames influence people’s choices.MethodsWe conducted a prospective mixed-methods study using a scenario-based competency questionnaire and semistructured interviews. Participants were senior resident physicians from a large health system. Of 160 eligible participants, 93 (58.1%) completed the scenario-based questionnaire and 15 completed the semistructured interview. The primary outcome was choice architecture competency, defined as the number of correct answers on the eight-item scenario-based choice architecture competency questionnaire. We generated the scenarios based on existing decision science literature and validated them using an online sample of lay participants. We then assessed senior resident physicians’ choice architecture competency using the questionnaire. We interviewed a subset of participating physicians to explore how they approached the scenario-based questions and their views on choice architecture in clinical medicine and medical education.ResultsPhysicians’ mean correct score was 4.85 (95% CI 4.59 to 5.11) out of 8 scenario-based questions. Regression models identified no associations between choice architecture competency and measured physician characteristics. Physicians found choice architecture highly relevant to clinical practice. They viewed the intentional use of choice architecture as acceptable and ethical, but felt they lacked sufficient training in the principles to do so.ConclusionClinicians assume the role of choice architect whether they realise it or not. Our results suggest that the majority of physicians have inadequate choice architecture competency. The uninformed use of choice architecture by clinicians may influence patients and family members in ways clinicians may not anticipate nor intend.