9/ Why does this happen?
🧠 Compromise effect: Temporary laws seem like a "middle ground."
🏛️ Status quo bias: Once a law exists, people prefer to keep it.
🔄 Ratchet effect: Temporary laws often get extended rather than repealed.

8/ Real-world examples:
USA PATRIOT Act (2001): Originally temporary, but many provisions remain.
State of emergency laws in France: Post-2015 terror attacks, later made permanent.
COVID-19 policies: Some surveillance measures still in use today.

7/ Main takeaway:
Temporary laws can erode resistance to rights restrictions. Once enacted, they become easier to extend—eventually leading to permanent policy shifts.
The "sunset clause paradox": Laws meant to expire tend to stick around.

6/ Experiment 3:
When given multiple options (temporary vs. permanent), most chose temporary.
However, once a policy was in place, people were more likely to extend it than approve a new one.
Status quo bias at work. 🔁

5/ Experiment 2:
Even people who initially rejected the policy were more willing to approve it if framed as temporary.
This suggests policymakers can use "temporary" framing to push through controversial policies.

4/ Experiment 1:
Participants were asked whether they approve a policy allowing harsh interrogation techniques.
Some saw it as temporary, others as permanent.
Those who saw it as temporary were more likely to approve it!

3/ Do temporary policies make people more likely to approve rights-restricting measures they would otherwise reject?
To find out, we conducted 3behavioral experiments. 🧪📊

2/ Governments frequently enact temporary policies during crises.
Examples:
🦠 COVID-19 restrictions
🛂 Counterterrorism laws
👮 Surveillance measures
But do these policies remain temporary, or do they become the new normal? 🤔

Emphasis on "still". This may change if the issue becomed salient over time.

Relatedly, in this paper we showed the implications of cognitive biases (alternative cost neglect & impact bias) for ex-ante public support for policy.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

These findings challenge the assumption that public sector culture promotes honesty, and suggests that societal honesty norms and institutional measures play a more significant role in shaping public officials' ethical behaviour and corruption levels.
osf.io/preprints/os...
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We find no evidence for the effect of public sector culture on honest behavior in both individual (studies 1-4) and collaborative tasks (study 5), although it had an effect on reported public sector motivation (PSM).
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Next, we employed this instrument in 5 preregistered RCTs among civil servants in 5 countires (Germany, Israel, Sweden, Italy & UK) (N=2,827), and measured actual cheating behavior in both individual and collaborative games.
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We first validated an instrument for priming public sector identity in two countries 🇮🇱🇩🇪, measuring its effect on the cognitive availability of public sector concepts using word-completion tasks.
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We take advantage of the relationship between culture and identity, and the possibility to randomly prime the latter, for estimating the effect of public sector culture on honest behavior of public employees.
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