Decisions about overdraft coverage: Disclosure design and personal finances.

Policymakers often require disclosures to help consumers make informed decisions, despite considerable debate over disclosures' effectiveness. Traditional accounts argue that consumers with stable preferences use disclosures to become informed. In contrast, behavioral research suggests that consumers may be inattentive or construct preferences in the moment. We contrast these accounts in the context of overdraft, where consumers can "opt in" to coverage and fees. In Study 1, we use conjoint analysis to assess perceptions of whether consumers in varying circumstances should opt in. Both overdraft program characteristics (including fees) and consumers' personal financial characteristics (e.g., having a financial buffer) matter. In Study 2, we compare three overdraft disclosures, finding variation in the proportion of consumers who make an active choice (15%-65%) and limited effects on comprehension and opt-in rates. In Study 3, we augment overdraft disclosures with text about personal financial characteristics. These disclosures increase active choice without detrimental effects on comprehension. Together, our studies support a constructed preferences account and highlight specific benefits of reminding consumers about the match between financial products and their personal situations. We discuss implications for financial disclosures and overdraft policy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Helping consumers to evaluate annual percentage rates (APR) on credit cards.

To help consumers make informed decisions, regulators often impose disclosure requirements on financial institutions. However, disclosures may not be informative for consumers if they contain difficult-to-evaluate attributes, such as annual percentage rates (APRs). To improve a consumer's ability to evaluate the relative attractiveness of products with difficult-to-evaluate attributes, evaluability theory suggests providing consumers with distributional information. Here, we tested whether credit card disclosures containing graphs of the distribution of APRs in the credit card market help consumers estimate the relative costs of credit and evaluate credit cards. In two studies, we found that consumers using standard credit card disclosures (without distributional information) underestimated the costs of credit card APRs relative to the market. We then built on the graph design literature to design different graphs for presenting distributional APR information. A comparison of the graphs we designed showed that a histogram was most successful at improving consumers' estimates of APR costs relative to the market and modifying consumers' evaluations of an expensive credit card. We discuss the implications of our findings for evaluability theory, graph design, and communication efforts that aim to provide consumers with meaningful financial disclosures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Bored in the USA: Experience sampling and boredom in everyday life.

We report new evidence on the emotional, demographic, and situational correlates of boredom from a rich experience sample capturing 1.1 million emotional and time-use reports from 3,867 U.S. adults. Subjects report boredom in 2.8% of the 30-min sampling periods, and 63% of participants report experiencing boredom at least once across the 10-day sampling period. We find that boredom is more likely to co-occur with negative, rather than positive, emotions, and is particularly predictive of loneliness, anger, sadness, and worry. Boredom is more prevalent among men, youths, the unmarried, and those of lower income. We find that differences in how such demographic groups spend their time account for up to one third of the observed differences in overall boredom. The importance of situations in predicting boredom is additionally underscored by the high prevalence of boredom in specific situations involving monotonous or difficult tasks (e.g., working, studying) or contexts where one's autonomy might be constrained (e.g., time with coworkers, afternoons, at school). Overall, our findings are consistent with cognitive accounts that cast boredom as emerging from situations in which engagement is difficult, and are less consistent with accounts that exclusively associate boredom with low arousal or with situations lacking in meaning. (PsycINFO Database Record

Identifying a reliable boredom induction.

None of the tasks used to induce boredom have undergone rigorous psychometric validation, which creates potential problems for operational equivalence, comparisons across studies, statistical power, and confounding results. This methodological concern was addressed by testing and comparing the effectiveness of six 5-min. computerized boredom inductions (peg turning, audio, video, signature matching, one-back, and an air traffic control task). The tasks were evaluated using standard criteria for emotion inductions: intensity and discreteness. Intensity, the amount of boredom elicited, was measured using a subset of the Multidimensional State Boredom Scale. Discreteness, the extent to which the task elicited boredom and did not elicit other emotions, was measured using a modification of the Differential Emotion Scale. In both a laboratory setting (Study 1; N = 241) and an online setting with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers (Study 2; N = 416), participants were randomly assigned to one of seven tasks (six boredom tasks or a comparison task, a clip from Planet Earth) before rating their boredom using the MSBS and other emotions using the modified DES. In both studies, each task had significantly higher intensity and discreteness than the comparison task, with moderate to large effect sizes. The peg-turning task outperformed the other tasks in both intensity and discreteness, making it the recommended induction. Identification of reliable and valid boredom inductions and systematic comparison of their relative results should help advance state boredom research.