About

Joseph Reiff is an Assistant Professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business. He holds a PhD in behavioral decision making from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. His research focuses on consumer judgment and decision-making, particularly on choices that promote individuals' wealth, health, and psychological well-being. Reiff collaborates with a variety of organizations, including Fortune 500 technology companies, large hospital systems, and early-stage start-ups, to design field experiments that evaluate how different marketing tactics influence important consumer decisions such as retirement savings and charitable giving. His work often addresses policy issues with the aim of developing actionable solutions to benefit society at large. Reiff's research has been published in reputable journals including the Journal of Marketing Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Psychological Review, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a team scientist at the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at Wharton and a member of the Nudge Unit at UCLA Health.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public economics
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• A Megastudy of Behavioral Interventions to Increase Voter Registration Ahead of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election

  2025-12-01

  articleOpen access

  In the United States, in nearly all cases, one must register in order to vote—yet, a substantial portion of the eligible electorate remains unregistered. Despite this, relatively little is known about how to increase the likelihood that a voter registers. Here, we tested the impact of 10 expert-crowdsourced, theoretically-based psychological interventions on a sample of eligible, yet unregistered, U.S. voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election (N = 12,896). Eight of the interventions increased intentions to vote, and five led individuals to click on the voter registration website. Escalating Commitment, which sequentially employed several social pressure strategies, was the strongest intervention across these outcomes. However, none of the interventions had a significant effect on actual voter registration or voter turnout. The results highlight a substantial disconnect between voters’ intentions and their ultimate behaviors. We discuss potential structural and psychological barriers that undermine the translation of intent into action.

  PublisherDOI

• Perspective-taking in capital punishment decisions

  Behavioural Public Policy · 2025-09-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Perspective-taking has been theorized to be a central psychological process in how people make punishment decisions. However, previous research has only tested theory in low-stakes or hypothetical contexts. The current research describes how jurors perspective-take in real capital punishment trials ( N = 1,198) and tests a series of hypotheses from previous research in a high-stakes, naturalistic context. In examining the predictors of perspective-taking, we found that jurors are more likely to perspective-take for white victims than black victims, but not more likely to perspective-take if the trial participant is demographically similar to themselves. We further uncovered new findings that older jurors perspective-take less (regardless of whether it is for perpetrators or victims), and women perspective-take for victims more than men do. In examining how perspective-taking relates to capital punishment decisions, we found that jurors who take victims’ perspectives are more likely to vote for the death penalty. We found mixed support for the theory that jurors who take defendants’ perspectives are more lenient. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for legal arguments on the arbitrary and biased nature of capital punishment decisions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Megastudy of Behavioral Interventions to Increase Voter Registration Ahead of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election

  2025-12-01

  articleOpen access

  In the United States, in nearly all cases, one must register in order to vote—yet, a substantial portion of the eligible electorate remains unregistered. Despite this, relatively little is known about how to increase the likelihood that a voter registers. Here, we tested the impact of 10 expert-crowdsourced, theoretically-based psychological interventions on a sample of eligible, yet unregistered, U.S. voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election (N = 12,896). Eight of the interventions increased intentions to vote, and five led individuals to click on the voter registration website. Escalating Commitment, which sequentially employed several social pressure strategies, was the strongest intervention across these outcomes. However, none of the interventions had a significant effect on actual voter registration or voter turnout. The results highlight a substantial disconnect between voters’ intentions and their ultimate behaviors. We discuss potential structural and psychological barriers that undermine the translation of intent into action.

  PublisherDOI

• A broad view of time predicts greater subjective well-being

  Personality and Individual Differences · 2024-04-24 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Social inferences from choice context: Dominated options can engender distrust

  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · 2024-06-24 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  • When dominated options – ones that are objectively inferior to at least one other option – are included in a choice set, people distrust the choice architect who offered the menu of choices. • People spontaneously make these negative trust-based inferences, implicating the choice provider’s competence, integrity, and benevolence. • Negative trust inferences diminish people’s interest in choosing any option from that choice provider, even with real stakes on the line. • This finding represents one instance of a broader tendency to make social inferences about the choice provider from the details of the choice environment. The details of a decision context — including the set of alternatives being offered — can considerably influence the judgments and choices that people make. For instance, people’s decisions are often influenced by the presence of a dominated option (one that is objectively inferior to one of the alternatives) in a choice set. In studying such “context effects,” previous research has focused on how the composition of a choice set affects people’s choices and the way they attend to options and weigh attributes. We take a complementary approach. Here, we propose that the composition of a choice set may be interpreted as signaling information about the choice architect who curated the choice set. Further, we hypothesize that these social inferences can systematically influence decisions. Across seven experiments ( N = 3328) using vignette studies and incentive-compatible economic games, we focus on one example of this more general phenomenon, showing that the inclusion of a dominated option can engender distrust in the choice architect. This distrust in turn leads to greater preference for other choice providers. By investigating the social implications of dominated options, we uncover novel psychological and behavioral consequences of choice set composition. We close by considering broader theoretical and practical implications regarding social inferences from choice context.

  PublisherDOI

• Social Inferences from Choice Context: Dominated Options Can Engender Mistrust

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Save More Today or Tomorrow: The Role of Urgency in Precommitment Design

  Journal of Marketing Research · 2023-01-13 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  To encourage farsighted behaviors, previous research suggests that marketers should invite consumers to precommit to adopting these behaviors “later.” However, the authors propose that people will draw different inferences from different types of precommitment offers, and that these inferences can help explain when precommitment is (and is not) effective at increasing adoption of farsighted behaviors. Specifically, the authors theorize that simultaneously offering consumers the opportunity to adopt a farsighted behavior now or later (i.e., offering “simultaneous precommitment”) may signal that the behavior is not urgently recommended; however, offering consumers the opportunity to adopt that behavior immediately and then, only if they decline, inviting them to adopt it later (i.e., offering “sequential precommitment”) may signal just the opposite. In a multisite field experiment (N = 5,196), the authors find that simultaneously giving consumers the chance to increase their savings now or later reduced retirement savings. Two preregistered lab studies (N = 5,080) show that simultaneous precommitment leads people to infer that taking action is not urgently recommended, and such inferences predict less adoption of recommended behaviors. Importantly, offering sequential precommitment increases inferred urgency, predicting greater adoption. Together, this research advances knowledge about the limits and potential of precommitment.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• When peer comparison information harms physician well-being

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022-07-14 · 41 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Policymakers and business leaders often use peer comparison information-showing people how their behavior compares to that of their peers-to motivate a range of behaviors. Despite their widespread use, the potential impact of peer comparison interventions on recipients' well-being is largely unknown. We conducted a 5-mo field experiment involving 199 primary care physicians and 46,631 patients to examine the impact of a peer comparison intervention on physicians' job performance, job satisfaction, and burnout. We varied whether physicians received information about their preventive care performance compared to that of other physicians in the same health system. Our analyses reveal that our implementation of peer comparison did not significantly improve physicians' preventive care performance, but it did significantly decrease job satisfaction and increase burnout, with the effect on job satisfaction persisting for at least 4 mo after the intervention had been discontinued. Quantitative and qualitative evidence on the mechanisms underlying these unanticipated negative effects suggest that the intervention inadvertently signaled a lack of support from leadership. Consistent with this account, providing leaders with training on how to support physicians mitigated the negative effects on well-being. Our research uncovers a critical potential downside of peer comparison interventions, highlights the importance of evaluating the psychological costs of behavioral interventions, and points to how a complementary intervention-leadership support training-can mitigate these costs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Relational incentives theory.

  Psychological Review · 2021-10-28

  preprintOpen access

  Our life is built around coordinating efforts with others. This usually involves incentivizing others to do things and sustaining our relationship with them. Using the wrong incentives backfires: it lowers effort and tarnishes our relationships. But what constitutes a "wrong" incentive? And can incentives be used to shape relationships in a desired manner? To address these and other questions, we introduce relational incentives theory, which distinguishes between two aspects of incentives: schemes (how the incentive is used) and means (what is used as an incentive). Prior research has focused on means (e.g., monetary vs. nonmonetary incentives). Our theory highlights the importance of schemes, with a focus on how they interact with social relationships. It posits that the efficacy of incentives depends largely on whether the scheme fits the relational structure of the persons involved in the activity: participation incentive schemes for communal sharing relations, hierarchy for authority ranking relations, balancing for equality matching relations, and proportional incentive schemes for market pricing relations. We show that these four schemes encompass some of the most prevalent variants of incentives. We then discuss the antecedents and consequences of the use of congruent and incongruent incentive schemes. We argue that congruent incentives can reinforce the relationship. Incongruent incentives disrupt relational motives, which undermines the coordinating relationship and reduces effort. But, importantly, incongruent incentives can also be used intentionally to shift to a new relational model. The theory thus contributes to research on relational models by showing how people constitute and modulate relationships. It adds to the incentives and contracting literatures by offering a framework for analyzing the structural congruence between incentives and relationships, yielding predictions about the effects of incentives across different organizational and individual-level contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• When Appealing to Agency Backfires: Evidence from a Multinational Field Experiment and the Lab

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jana Gallus

  17 shared

• Alan Page Fiske

  University of California, Los Angeles

  12 shared

• Hengchen Dai

  Anderson University - South Carolina

  10 shared

• Hal E. Hershfield

  University of California, Los Angeles

  7 shared

• Emir Kamenica

  University of Chicago

  6 shared

• Sitaram Vangala

  5 shared

• Craig R. Fox

  Anderson University - South Carolina

  5 shared

• Maria Han

  University of California, Los Angeles

  5 shared