Belief Correction,Habit And Self-control

Self-control is a key issue in behavioral economics and has important implications for economic production and saving at the macro level and human capital accumulation at the micro level.In this paper,we introduce belief correction and social comparison into the self-control problem-solving framework and design a natural field experiment that provides social information to help college students reduce addiction to bad habits and procrastination on good habits.This paper measures the bias of college students’ beliefs about the level of self-control and discusses the effects of providing social information on self-control across gender and habit.Our experimental results showed,first,that subjects had a slightly conservative belief bias about their level of self-control and that there were gender and foundational habit differences,with women generally more conservative than men(Z=1.747,P=0.08)and subjects with good foundational habits more conservative than those with poor foundational habits.The effect of providing statistical information on overall beliefs was not significant,and subjects with good foundational habits were more likely to make conservative estimates of information than those with poor foundational habits.Second,the mean processing effect of mean information was highest among all social information.We estimated the effects of the information intervention using the classical DID model,and the cross-sectional term results showed that overall,providing mean information reduced cell phone use by 16.87 hours,which was the most significant among the information treatment groups,and the other information groups also reduced cell phone use and increased exercise time,but were not statistically significant.Finally,the optimal messages differed by gender and by underlying habits.The effect was more pronounced for the female and median samples for cell phone use time;for exercise time,males and subjects in the bottom 10%(no basal exercise habit)were more significantly motivated.The above results suggest that the optimal intervention information is different for different types of people,so the choice of intervention information requires appropriate decision-making measures.For subjects with average self-control,providing mean information about others’ bad habits was more effective,probably because of the social comparison mentality of “I have to be at least in the top 50%”;for subjects with bottom self-control,providing mean information about others’ good habits was more effective,while providing statistical information about others’ bad habits was not effective.Providing statistical information about the bad habits of others was not effective.At the end of this paper,we provide the optimal types of information for different types of people and habits for policy makers to consider.