Essays in Behavioral Science

In this thesis, I explore three topics in behavioral science. In the first chapter, we propose and test a new approach to making defaults more effective: asking people to justify their decision if they want to deviate from the default. Across six pre-registered studies, including one field experiment, we find a consistent justification aversion effect. In the second chapter, we investigate the extent to which the knowledge generated by the field of behavioral economics was already known by laypeople. We find that almost all foundational phenomena can be predicted by the majority of our participants. In the third chapter, we investigate how well commonly used measures of trust capture trust across different contexts in two countries. We show that not all trust measures are equally good predictors of context-specific trust.