Christopher Reinders Folmer

Amsterdam Law School, University of Amsterdam

Department of Jurisprudence

Center of Law and Behavior

P.O. Box 15544

1001 NA Amsterdam

e-mail: c.p.reindersfolmer@uva.nl

Dr. Johannes Schwabe

Editor of PLOS One

Registry of Senior Australians (ROSA)

South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute

North Terrace, Adelaide, SA 5001

Australia

Topic: Revised version of our manuscript

Dear Dr. Schwabe,

With this letter, we send you the revised version of manuscript “The People versus Behavioral Science: Alignment between lay and scientific understanding of compliance” (PONE-D-25-28768).

We were grateful to receive the opportunity to revise our manuscript. We found the comments that were raised by you and by the Reviewers very helpful for improving it in terms of the contribution of our work, its limitations, and the avenues that it reveals for further research. In response, we have revised the manuscript to accommodate the suggestions. The manuscript now more clearly discusses the comparability of our measures of lay and empirical understanding, the question of individual-level variability and depth of understanding, and the relevance of our findings for compliance in other domains. Moreover, the revised manuscript better articulates how the present research is motivated by the ongoing “behavioral revolution” in practice, and omits the standardized regression results from the main text. As a result, we believe that the quality of the manuscript has much improved. We very much hope that you agree, and look forward to hearing from you.

We respond to all comments in detail below. We thank you for considering our manuscript for publication in your journal.

Yours sincerely,

The authors

PS: in response to your question about financial disclosure (additional requirements point 3), we hereby confirm that the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. 

Editor’s points

0. This paper clearly has merit, and I am looking forward to the revised manuscript.

We are happy to hear that the Editor viewed merit in our work, and thank them for their encouragement.

1. I would like to see all reviewer comments addressed, but I would like to highlight the issue

raised by Reviewer 2 around comparability of the statistics reported. Please address that point

thoroughly.

We thank the Editor for highlighting this point. Below, we address all points that were raised by the reviewers. We have made sure to address especially thoroughly Reviewer 2’s point on the comparability of the reported statistics (please see Reviewer 2 Point 1).

Additional requirements

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming.

Thank you for highlighting this. We have carefully checked the manuscript and files and believe that they now fully meet the journal’s requirements.

2. Please note that funding information should not appear in any section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript.

Thank you for attending us to this. We have removed all funding-related text from the revised manuscript.

3. Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."

As noted in the cover letter, we hereby confirm that the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

4. When completing the data availability statement of the submission form, you indicated that you will make your data available on acceptance. We strongly recommend all authors decide on a data sharing plan before acceptance, as the process can be lengthy and hold up publication timelines. Please note that, though access restrictions are acceptable now, your entire data will need to be made freely accessible if your manuscript is accepted for publication. This policy applies to all data except where public deposition would breach compliance with the protocol approved by your research ethics board.

We confirm that all data and materials are now publicly accessible via our institution’s FigShare repository (please see S2 File Dataset and syntax files).

5. Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. If consent was waived for your study, please include this information in your statement as well.

Thank you for highlighting this. In the revised manuscript, we have included a section on ethical approval and consent (p. 17), which provides these details. The manuscript does not include the original ethical approval forms (see attached files). Should the Editor desire for these documents to be included in a final submission, then we are happy to attach these to the manuscript as Supporting Information.

6. If the reviewer comments include a recommendation to cite specific previously published works, please review and evaluate these publications to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. There is no requirement to cite these works unless the editor has indicated otherwise.

We confirm that all publications suggested by the reviewers have been reviewed and evaluated for relevance.

7. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

We have carefully reviewed the reference list to confirm that it is complete and correct. The manuscript (to our knowledge) does not cite any papers that have been retracted.

Reviewer 1’s points

0. This study addresses a significant gap in behavioral science and compliance literature by empirically examining lay understanding of behavioral mechanisms, a topic that has received limited attention despite its policy relevance. The use of a large, representative sample, multiple imputation for missing data, and strong statistical analyses (correlation, regression, rank-order comparisons) enhances the credibility of the findings. The integration of five distinct theoretical frameworks provides a comprehensive lens for understanding compliance. The study offers actionable insights into how public beliefs may support or hinder scientifically informed policy, with implications for behavioral interventions and public communication strategies. The manuscript is well-written, logically structured, and supported by clear tables and figures that effectively communicate the findings.

This is a well-executed and insightful manuscript that makes a valuable contribution to behavioral science and policy research. I recommend publication pending minor revisions that address the points above, particularly the discussion of individual-level variability and generalizability.

We thank the reviewer for their evaluation of our work, and hope that our response and revisions have sufficiently addressed their valuable suggestions.

1. While the aggregate-level comparisons are compelling, the manuscript would benefit from deeper exploration of individual-level variability. Consider including clustering or latent class analysis to identify distinct lay belief profiles.

We agree with the reviewer that further exploration of individual-level variability in lay understanding would be a valuable area of further exploration. We indeed consider it likely that lay understanding of compliance may vary between individuals, and that it is important to understand how. However, we assert that this question is better suited for follow-up research. The main purpose of the present research was to examine whether lay understanding about the mechanisms that shape compliance may align with empirical scientific evidence on these processes. As such, the study was designed to compare sample-wide statistical associations between these mechanisms and compliance (e.g. correlations) with aggregated perceptions of these associations across lay participants. The study design is concerned with the aggregate level (i.e., correlations computed across the whole sample), thus our data is not well suited to assessing variability in alignment at the individual level. Moreover, zooming in on individual-level variability would also raise questions about which individual-level factors may explain such variability—questions that the present research was not designed to provide answers to. We consider individual-level variability in lay understanding to be a highly important question for further exploration, which requires a research design that allows us to chart people’s individual differences. Instead of their understanding of the relative influence of different mechanisms, such a project might focus more on the depth of their understanding of the way that particular mechanisms operate, and how this aligns with the scientific understanding of these processes (e.g., see Kuiper, 2025). To do so, such research might utilize qualitative methods, which are suitable for assessing the depth and accuracy of lay understanding (see Reviewer 1’s point 3 below), and for distinguishing different belief profiles (e.g., see Kuiper, van Rooij, & Reinders Folmer, 2025). In the revised manuscript, we mention this as an important avenue for future research (p. 46-47):

A third limitation concerns our focus on alignment at the aggregate (rather than the individual) level. As noted previously, while our current approach allowed us to assess the alignment between lay and scientific alignment of compliance at the aggregate level, this was not well suited to assessing such alignment at the individual level, or to evaluating the depth of people’s understanding of these processes. We consider it likely, however, that people’s lay understanding of compliance may show variation at the individual level, such that people may differ in which mechanisms they perceive to be more or less influential. Moreover, people likely will also vary in the depth of their understanding of these processes, such that they have different understandings of the way that particular mechanisms operate. For example, when reflecting about particular mechanisms, like punishment, individuals may not only recognize deterrent effects, but may also recognize more complex effects that have been identified in scientific research, like criminogenic effects, evasion, or adaptation (for a recent review, see van Rooij, Kuiper, & Piquero, 2025). Accordingly, it would be valuable for future research to zoom in on individual-level variability in lay understanding of compliance—both in terms of the mechanisms that people see as relevant, and the way in which they perceive these to operate. For this purpose, such research could rely on qualitative methods, which are both suitable for assessing depth and accuracy of lay understanding (e.g., diSessa, 1993, 1998) and for identifying different belief profiles (e.g., see Kuiper, van Rooij, & Reinders Folmer, 2025). In this way, future research may build on the present findings by identifying different ideal types in individuals’ lay understanding of compliance, as well as evaluating its alignment with the scientific understanding on a deeper, more substantive level.

2. The study is context-specific. The authors acknowledge this, but a brief discussion of how findings might translate to other domains (e.g., tax compliance, environmental behavior) would strengthen the manuscript.

We agree with the reviewer that it would be valuable to know whether our sample’s lay understanding of what shapes compliance with COVID-19 mitigation measures might translate to other domains, including tax compliance and environmental behavior. This is, however, an empirical question, which the present study is unable to answer—not only because our study did not assess participants’ lay understanding of these other domains, but also because behavioral science has not yet produced a full image of how the different mechanisms that have been identified in the compliance literature may shape compliant behavior in these settings. Due to these limitations, it is at present impossible to provide a concrete answer as to whether the observed alignment between lay and scientific understanding of compliance in context of COVID-19 mitigation may translate to other domains.

Nonetheless, there are some concrete differences between these domains that may allow us to speculate about this question. To begin with, mitigation measures against COVID-19 were new and applied universally; compliance with these measures was often highly visible; and interventions to shape such behavior were widely implemented by governments. This contrasts sharply with domains like taxation and the environment, where many rules have existed for a long time, and may apply differently to different subsets of the population; where compliance is often not directly observable; and where there may be less of a concentrated effort to shape behavior. Based on these differences, it is possible that laypersons’ understanding of what shapes compliance in these domains will be less well developed than observed in this domain. However, it is also possible that people’s lay understanding in any of these domains is rooted in more universal beliefs about behavioral influence that transcend the specific setting of COVID-19 mitigation, and thus may apply also in different domains. This, however, is an empirical question, and one that only further research can answer. In the revised manuscript, we discuss this on pages 48-49:

At present, our findings are restricted to the setting of mitigation measures against COVID-19 in the setting of the Netherlands, at the stage of the pandemic that our study took place. They do not yet illuminate participants’ lay understanding of compliance in other settings, such as taxation, traffic, finance, or the environment, or for criminal offenses—or its alignment with science and policy there. Mitigation measures against COVID-19 were new and applied universally; compliance with these measures was often highly visible, and interventions to shape such behavior were widely implemented by governments. This contrasts sharply with compliance in other settings, where rules often have existed for a long time, and may not apply universally; where compliance may not be directly observable; and where interventions to shape behavior may be less concentrated. Because of these differences, it is possible that laypersons’ understanding of what shapes compliance may be less well developed in these domains. However, it is also possible that people’s lay understanding of compliance is rooted in more universal beliefs about behavioral influence, which transcend the specific setting of COVID-19 mitigation, and thus may also translate to different domains. As such, an important avenue for future research would be to explore people’s understanding of compliance in other settings, such as taxation, traffic, finance, or the environment, or for criminal offenses. One particular challenge here is that behavioral science has not yet produced a full image of how the different mechanisms that have been identified in the compliance literature may shape compliant behavior in these settings. Rather, specific mechanisms have often been narrowly studied in context of a particular type of offending (e.g., legitimacy and opportunity in criminal offenses, see Gill et al