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Passion for work is highly coveted, but many employees report struggling to maintain their passion over time. In the current research, we explain the challenge of pursuing passion by conceptualizing passion as an attribute with temporal variation. Viewed through a daily lens, we argue that self-regulation plays a critical role in understanding the challenges underlying the daily maintenance of passion. More specifically, we hypothesize that—unless employees adequately regulate their passion on any given day—higher levels of passion will lead them to invest more time and energy into their work, decreasing their psychological detachment from work after the workday, and consequently resulting in higher levels of emotional exhaustion the next day. Higher levels of emotional exhaustion on a given day subsequently prompt a greater need for recovery, shifting employees' focus away from devoting time and energy into work, thereby eroding their passion on the following day. Two daily-diary studies covering 30 and 10 consecutive working days provided support for our predictions (Ntotal = 798; ktotal = 15,702). Employees who felt more in charge of their passion on any given day engaged in self-regulation during their workday, increasing their psychological detachment from work and subsequently being less likely to suffer the detrimental consequences of higher daily passion. Our theory and findings demonstrate the daily interplay between passion and emotional exhaustion and specify why passion may be self-limiting unless employees adequately manage it, reflecting a challenge they need to navigate each day in pursuing their passion. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.1673 .

AbstractWhen people make decisions with a pre-selected choice option – a 'default' – they are more likely to select that option. Because defaults are easy to implement, they constitute one of the most widely employed tools in the choice architecture toolbox. However, to decide when defaults should be used instead of other choice architecture tools, policy-makers must know how effective defaults are and when and why their effectiveness varies. To answer these questions, we conduct a literature search and meta-analysis of the 58 default studies (pooledn= 73,675) that fit our criteria. While our analysis reveals a considerable influence of defaults (d= 0.68, 95% confidence interval = 0.53–0.83), we also discover substantial variation: the majority of default studies find positive effects, but several do not find a significant effect, and two even demonstrate negative effects. To explain this variability, we draw on existing theoretical frameworks to examine the drivers of disparity in effectiveness. Our analysis reveals two factors that partially account for the variability in defaults' effectiveness. First, we find that defaults in consumer domains are more effective and in environmental domains are less effective. Second, we find that defaults are more effective when they operate through endorsement (defaults that are seen as conveying what the choice architect thinks the decision-maker should do) or endowment (defaults that are seen as reflecting the status quo). We end with a discussion of possible directions for a future research program on defaults, including potential additional moderators, and implications for policy-makers interested in the implementation and evaluation of defaults.

AbstractHow might irrelevant events infiltrate voting decisions? The current research introduces a new mechanism—regulatory focus—by which incidental environmental factors can affect vote choice. Regulatory focus theory proposes that there are two fundamental psychological orientations in how people navigate their worlds: A prevention focus tunes cognition towards security, safety, protection, and risk aversion, whereas a promotion focus orients attention toward achieving growth and positive outcomes. We present a model for how wind speed on Election Day affects voting by shifting the regulatory focus of voters. We propose that increased wind speed shifts voters toward selecting prevention-focused options (e.g., restricting immigration, rejecting Brexit, rejecting Scottish Independence) over promotion-focused options (e.g., promoting immigration, favoring Brexit, favoring Scottish Independence). We further argue that wind speed only affects voting when an election clearly offers a choice between prevention and promotion-focused options. Using a mixed-method approach—archival analyses of the "Brexit" vote, the Scotland independence referendum, and 10 years of Swiss referendums, as well as one field study and one experiment—we find that individuals exposed to higher wind speeds become more prevention-focused and more likely to support prevention-focused electoral options. The findings highlight the political importance of incidental environmental factors. Practically, they speak to the benefit of absentee voting and expanding voting periods beyond traditional election days.

Across the globe, every workday people commute an average of 38 minutes each way, yet surprisingly little research has examined the implications of this daily routine for work-related outcomes. Integrating theories of boundary work, self-control, and work-family conflict, we propose that the commute to work serves as a liminal role transition between home and work roles, prompting employees to engage in boundary management strategies. Across three field studies (n = 1,736), including a four-week-long intervention study, we find that lengthy morning commutes are more aversive for employees with lower trait self-control and greater work-family conflict, leading to decreased job satisfaction and increased turnover. In addition, we find that employees who engage in a specific boundary management strategy we term role-clarifying prospection (i.e., thinking about the upcoming work role) are less likely to be negatively affected by lengthy commutes to work. Results further show that employees with higher levels of trait self-control are more likely to engage in role-clarifying prospection, and employees who experience higher levels of work-family conflict are more likely to benefit from role-clarifying prospection. Although the commute to work is typically seen as an undesirable part of the workday, our theory and results point to the benefits of using it as an opportunity to transition into one's work role.

AbstractPoor compliance of prescription medication is an ongoing public health crisis. Nearly half of patients do not take their medication as prescribed, harming their own health while also increasing public health care costs. Despite these detrimental consequences, prior research has struggled to establish cost-effective and scalable interventions to improve adherence rates. We suggest that one reason for the limited success of prior interventions is that they make the personal health costs of non-adherence insufficiently prominent, while a higher saliency of these costs may motivate patients to adhere more. In the current research, we test whether an intervention that makes the personal health costs of non-compliance more salient for patients will increase their medication adherence. To do so, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with 16,191 patients across 278 UK pharmacies over a 9-month time period and manipulated the perceived consequences of medication non-adherence. We find that patients who received a treatment highlighting the personal health costs of non-compliance were significantly more likely to adhere to their medication than three comparison groups (odds ratio = 1.84, 95% confidence interval = 1.37–2.47). Shifting patients' focus to the personal health costs of non-compliance may thus offer a potentially cost-effective and scalable approach to improving medication adherence.

The extent of inequality that people perceive in the world is often a better predictor of individual and societal outcomes than the level of inequality that actually exists. As such, scholars from across the social sciences, including economics, sociology, psychology, and political science, have recently worked to understand individuals' (mis)perceptions of inequality. Unfortunately, many researchers treat the process underlying such perceptions as a black box, focusing predominantly on lay people's numeric estimates of inequality, and paying less attention to how people come to form these perceptions or what these perceptions mean to participants. In the current review, we draw on research in perception, cognition, and developmental and social psychology, to introduce a novel comprehensive framework for understanding individuals' perceptions of inequality. We argue that subjective perceptions of inequality should be viewed as a process that unfolds across five interlinked and iterative stages. To form perceptions of the scope of inequality in society, people need to (1) have access to inequality cues in the world, (2) attend to these cues, (3) comprehend these cues, (4) process these cues (often succumbing to motivational biases), and (5) summarize these cues into a meaningful representation of inequality. Our framework highlights when and why lay people may misperceive the scope of inequality in society and provides a roadmap for research to examine how the processes in people's minds affect the outcomes researchers are ultimately interested in.

The extent of inequality that people perceive in the world is often a stronger predictor of individual and societal outcomes than the level of inequality that actually exists. It is therefore imperative for researchers to theoretically conceptualize and empirically operationalize perceived inequality in a coherent and consistent manner. However, the lack of consensus on what constitutes perceived inequality can lead researchers to use the same words to study different phenomena. What seem like minor methodological decisions made in the study of inequality can substantially influence the outcomes and conclusions that researchers dra from their work. In this review, we draw on a wide range of interdisciplinary work, including from social and cognitive psychology, economics, political science, and sociology, to unpack the assumptions researchers often make. We develop the four questions framework which illustrates the important theoretical and empirical decisions researchers are recommended to address when studying perceived inequality: (1) What kind of inequality? (2) What level of analysis? (3) What part of the distribution? and (4) What comparison group? We posit that this framework provides the conceptual clarity necessary for understanding when, how, and why perceptions of inequality affect individuals and societies.

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens' and governments' responses at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reported holding normative beliefs in support of COVID-19 containment measures, as well as high rates of adherence to these measures. They also believed that their government and their country's citizens were not doing enough and underestimated the degree to which others in their country supported strong behavioral and policy responses to the pandemic. Normative beliefs were strongly associated with adherence, as well as beliefs about others' and the government's response. Lockdowns were associated with greater optimism about others' and the government's response, and improvements in measures of perceived mental well-being; these effects tended to be larger for those with stronger normative beliefs. Our findings highlight how social norms can arise quickly and effectively to support cooperation at a global scale.