Disclosure as a Remedy

What it is

Omri Ben-Shahar and Carl Schneider surveyed the empirical record on mandated disclosure and concluded that it rarely works, because the chain requires lawmakers, disclosers and disclosees each to perform a demanding role well. Their findings are that most people find disclosures complex, obscure and dull, that people choose by stripping information away rather than layering it on, that so many disclosures are now mandated that nobody could heed them all, and that plainer language cannot fix what is inherently complex. Their sharpest point is about the regulator rather than the consumer, that disclosure is a lawmakers' panacea chosen because it is cheap and looks like action. Lilian Edwards and Michael Veale give the algorithmic version of the same objection and call the search for an explanation at best distracting and at worst a new transparency fallacy.

In effect

The sponsorship literature supplies the clearest demonstration of the failure mode. Eva van Reijmersdal and colleagues recruited 206 participants and analysed the 133 who correctly recalled whether a disclosure was present, and in the total sample the disclosure did not activate conceptual persuasion knowledge at all, working only among the people who remembered seeing it. The same study found two mechanisms running in opposite directions, so a label makes a reader distrust the brand and simultaneously makes the publisher look honest, and the net sign depends on which is stronger. Anocha Aribarg and Eric M. Schwartz then measured the commercial incentive in the field, finding that advertisers can increase clicks by making disclosures less prominent while remaining minimally compliant with regulatory guidance.

What it does not say

It does not say labels never do anything. In the only nationally representative test of the question in reach, readers reported being most receptive to native advertising where publishers were transparent about its commercial nature, and that pro-disclosure finding belongs alongside the trust cost rather than instead of it. It also does not say disclosure fails at everything, because the accountability case, in which a mandate produces a public record that journalists, litigants and regulators can use whether or not any consumer reads it, is not measured by the behaviour-change studies at all. And the calorie-labelling evidence often cited on both sides was reached in this vault through search summaries rather than primary texts, so no figure from it is printed here.

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