Transparent by choice: Proactive disclosures increase compliance with digital defaults.

Default nudges successfully guide choices across multiple domains. Online use cases for defaults range from promoting sustainable purchases to inducing acceptance of behavior tracking scripts, or "cookies." However, many scholars view defaults as unethical due to the covert ways in which they influence behavior. Hence, opt-outs and other digital decision aids are progressively being regulated in an attempt to make them more transparent. The current practice of transparency boils down to saturating the decision environment with convoluted legal information. This approach might be informed by researchers, who hypothesized that nudges could become less effective once they are clearly laid out: People can retaliate against influence attempts if they are aware of them. A recent line of research has shown that such concerns are unfounded when the default-setters proactively discloses the purpose of the intervention. Yet, it remained unclear whether the effect persists when defaults reflect the current practice of such mandated transparency boils down to the inclusion of information disclosures, containing convoluted legal information. In two empirical studies (N = 364), respondents clearly differentiated proactive from mandated transparency. Moreover, they choose the default option significantly more often when the transparency disclosure was voluntary, rather than mandated. Policy implications and future research directions are discussed.

The Psychology of Morality: A Review and Analysis of Empirical Studies Published From 1940 Through 2017.

We review empirical research on (social) psychology of morality to identify which issues and relations are well documented by existing data and which areas of inquiry are in need of further empirical evidence. An electronic literature search yielded a total of 1,278 relevant research articles published from 1940 through 2017. These were subjected to expert content analysis and standardized bibliometric analysis to classify research questions and relate these to (trends in) empirical approaches that characterize research on morality. We categorize the research questions addressed in this literature into five different themes and consider how empirical approaches within each of these themes have addressed psychological antecedents and implications of moral behavior. We conclude that some key features of theoretical questions relating to human morality are not systematically captured in empirical research and are in need of further investigation.