ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Psychological ownership interventions increase interest in claiming government benefits.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- Linkage of Emergency Department Patients With Public Benefits Navigators via Text Messages: A Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA health forum · 2026Trial
- Trial
- Automated Text Messages to Link Emergency Department Patients With Public Benefits Navigators.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Effectiveness of Digital Interventions for Low-Income, Food-Insecure Populations: Natural Language Processing Study of WIC Smartphone App User Reviews, 2013-2024.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Interventions to bolster benefits take-up: Assessing intensity, framing, and targeting of government outreach.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Is in-kind kinder than cash? The impact of money vs. food aid on social emotions and aid take-up.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Communicating amounts in terms of commonly used budgeting periods increases intentions to claim government benefits.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Each year, eligible individuals forgo billions of dollars in financial assistance in the form of government benefits. To address this participation gap, we identify psychological ownership of government benefits as a factor that significantly influences individuals' interest in applying for government benefits. Psychological ownership refers to how much an individual feels that a target is their own. We propose that the more individuals feel that government benefits are their own, the less likely they are to perceive applying for them as an aversive ask for help, and thus, the more likely they are to pursue them. Three large-scale field experiments among low-income individuals demonstrate that higher psychological ownership framing of government benefits significantly increases participants' pursuit of benefits and outperforms other common psychological interventions. An additional experiment shows that this effect occurs because greater psychological ownership reduces people's general aversion to asking for assistance. Relative to control messages, these psychological ownership interventions increased interest in claiming government benefits by 20% to 128%. These results suggest that psychological ownership framing is an effective tool in the portfolio of potential behavioral science interventions and a simple way to stimulate interest in claiming benefits.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.