Psychological ownership interventions increase interest in claiming government benefits.

Each year, eligible individuals forgo billions of dollars in financial assistance in the form of government benefits. To address this participation gap, we identify psychological ownership of government benefits as a factor that significantly influences individuals' interest in applying for government benefits. Psychological ownership refers to how much an individual feels that a target is their own. We propose that the more individuals feel that government benefits are their own, the less likely they are to perceive applying for them as an aversive ask for help, and thus, the more likely they are to pursue them. Three large-scale field experiments among low-income individuals demonstrate that higher psychological ownership framing of government benefits significantly increases participants' pursuit of benefits and outperforms other common psychological interventions. An additional experiment shows that this effect occurs because greater psychological ownership reduces people's general aversion to asking for assistance. Relative to control messages, these psychological ownership interventions increased interest in claiming government benefits by 20% to 128%. These results suggest that psychological ownership framing is an effective tool in the portfolio of potential behavioral science interventions and a simple way to stimulate interest in claiming benefits.

A cooperative-competitive perspective of ownership necessitates an understanding of ownership disagreements.

Boyer's cognitive model of ownership, based on cooperation and competition, underscores the importance of studying disagreements in ownership. We argue that exploring the factors that can lead to different perceptions and experiences of ownership will uniquely inform our understanding of legal, psychological, and perceived ownership beliefs.

Scarcity and intertemporal choice.

Scarcity often encourages decisions that favor the present over the future. While prevailing theories largely attribute these decisions to myopic, impulsive decision making, five studies find support for an alternative, less prevalent perspective. We introduce the time horizon of threatened needs as an important determinant of scarcity's effect on intertemporal choice, demonstrating that people's decisions under scarcity reflect attempts to address threatened needs. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (Study 1) and preregistered studies (N = 10,297) show that time horizon moderates intertemporal decisions under scarcity. Study 2 manipulates scarcity perceptions among people engaged to be married, leading to increased preferences for sooner outcomes when wedding dates have shorter time horizons and a significant reversal when wedding dates have longer time horizons. Study 3 demonstrates that time horizon predicts intertemporal choice only when the intertemporal choice can help address threatened needs. Study 4 holds expense salience constant and replicates the moderation by time horizon using a paradigm that manipulates both scarcity and time horizon. Study 5 introduces multiple needs that vary in time horizon and importance, finding that decisions under scarcity reflect consideration of both the importance and temporal proximity of needs. These findings align with the perspective that people facing scarcity attempt to make decisions that are contextually appropriate. This work underscores the importance of understanding contextual variation in experiences of scarcity, suggests that decision making under scarcity is less thoughtless than presumed by the impulsive, myopic account, and offers recommendations for interventions for changing behavior under scarcity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).