Ah my favorite subject/beloved nemesis, plant-based defaults!
I am a bit of a skeptic, as I laid out in Scaled up, I expect defaults to reduce meat consumption by ~1-2 pp. My basic point is that we don’t have a good sense of the effect of these interventions on dietary change rather than meal change, and that some theoretical considerations might give us pause.
Regarding this essay specifically:
You write “The default effect was popularized by Johnson and Goldstein in 2003, demonstrating how countries with similar cultures and religions show dramatic differences in organ donation after death, all because of choice architecture”. Alas, when comparing countries that have opt-in vs opt-out policies, Arshad et al. (2019) find that “no significant difference was observed in rates of kidney (35.2 versus 42.3 respectively), non-renal (28.7 versus 20.9, respectively), or total solid organ transplantation (63.6 versus 61.7, respectively).”
The NYC hospital data is not an RCT and doesn’t offer much of an identification strategy so I’m never sure what to make of those numbers. That being said, I’m ready to accept in principle that hospitals are a particularly promising environment for defaults and for people rethinking their diets generally.
The Ginn & Sparkman numbers are interesting but the decline in overall sales on plant-based default days is going to be a bit of a challenge for selling the strategy to institutions. On the other hand, Sodexo is apparently happy to scale them up so who knows.
I am working on a plant-based default evaluation that I hope to share with the forum soon 😃
Ah my favorite subject/beloved nemesis, plant-based defaults!
I am a bit of a skeptic, as I laid out in Scaled up, I expect defaults to reduce meat consumption by ~1-2 pp. My basic point is that we don’t have a good sense of the effect of these interventions on dietary change rather than meal change, and that some theoretical considerations might give us pause.
Regarding this essay specifically:
You write “The default effect was popularized by Johnson and Goldstein in 2003, demonstrating how countries with similar cultures and religions show dramatic differences in organ donation after death, all because of choice architecture”. Alas, when comparing countries that have opt-in vs opt-out policies, Arshad et al. (2019) find that “no significant difference was observed in rates of kidney (35.2 versus 42.3 respectively), non-renal (28.7 versus 20.9, respectively), or total solid organ transplantation (63.6 versus 61.7, respectively).”
The NYC hospital data is not an RCT and doesn’t offer much of an identification strategy so I’m never sure what to make of those numbers. That being said, I’m ready to accept in principle that hospitals are a particularly promising environment for defaults and for people rethinking their diets generally.
The Ginn & Sparkman numbers are interesting but the decline in overall sales on plant-based default days is going to be a bit of a challenge for selling the strategy to institutions. On the other hand, Sodexo is apparently happy to scale them up so who knows.
I am working on a plant-based default evaluation that I hope to share with the forum soon 😃