Research
Working Papers
Psychological Change and Kinship Intensity in China over Two Millenia (2025); with Yuqi Chen, Mohammad Atari, Edward Slingerland, Ze Hong, Xiaokang Fu, Hongsu Wang, Peter Bol, and Joseph Henrich
A growing body of evidence suggests that important aspects of psychology culturally co-evolve with different institutions and social norms over historical time. Here, using two classical Chinese corpora, we apply a new computational text-analysis pipeline to capture psychological characteristics across time (770 BCE to 1911 CE) and space (270 prefectures). Our results offer two key insights. First, our psychological measures demonstrate both substantial regional variation and non-linear temporal dynamics, bringing into question any monolithic, static, linear, or essentialized views of Chinese psychology. Second, to explain historical and regional diversity in psychological traits, we test and find support for the hypothesis that family organizations—captured by kinship intensity—predictably co-evolve with particular socio-cooperative aspects of psychology. Our contribution extends efforts to measure psychological attributes from textual sources beyond Western societies (and predominantly English-language data) and highlights the importance of kinship in shaping psychological outcomes in Chinese history.Culture and Gender Differences in Honesty (2023); with Caroline Graf and Andreas Pondorfer. (R&R, Economic Journal)
Gender differences in preferences play a crucial role for economic outcomes. This study explores the origins of gender differences in honesty preferences assessing the influence of innate traits versus social factors. Socialization emerges as pivotal. Across societies, gender differences in honesty are malleable; while women are more honest than men in Western societies, this is not the case in non-Western ones. This pattern is underpinned by social norms. In second-generation immigrant analyses, we provide evidence of the intergenerational transmission of gender-specific honesty norms. Lastly, gender differences in honesty norms evolve over time; they narrow as countries become wealthier.Kin-based Institutions and Economic Development (2022); with Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich. (R&R, Review of Economic Studies).
Kin-based institutions are the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, and post-marital residence. We establish a robust and economically significant negative association between the tightness and breadth of kin-based institutions---their kinship intensity---and economic development. To measure kinship intensity and economic development, we deploy genotypic measures and quantified ethnographic observations on kinship with data on satellite nighttime luminosity and regional GDP. Our results are robust to controlling for a suite of geographic and cultural variables and hold across countries, within countries at both the regional and ethnolinguistic levels, and within countries in a spatial regression discontinuity analysis. Considering potential mechanisms, we discuss evidence consistent with mediating roles for the division of labor, trust, institutions and innovation.Land Rights Institutions and the Scope of Cooperation (2022); with Marco Fabbri and Daniele Nosenzo. (R&R, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences).
Impersonal prosociality, the inclination to trust and cooperate outside one's social circle, varies widely across societies. This study examines whether formalizing land property rights in a society previously governed by informal use rights expands the circle of prosocial behaviors. We hypothesized that formal land property institutions, backed by state enforcement, reduce reliance on local social networks for property protection, potentially broadening social interaction and fostering prosociality toward strangers. To test this hypothesis, we leverage a large-scale land rights formalization program in Benin, implemented as a randomized control trial (RCT). Using lab-in-the-field experiments, vignette studies, and attitudinal surveys, we find no evidence that the reform increased the circle of trust, trustworthiness, or prosocial norm enforcement toward strangers in other villages. Instead, exploratory analyses suggest that formalized land rights tend to enhance prosociality among co-villagers. While we examine changes in kinship structures as a possible mechanism, results remain inconclusive. These findings suggest that land tenure reforms may reshape social behavior by reinforcing local ties rather than broadening prosociality beyond immediate communities.Publications
Guilt- and Shame-Driven Prosociality Across Societies, Nature Human Behavior, accepted, with Catherine Molho, Ivan Soraperra, and Shaul Shalvi
How Cultural Diversity Drives Innovation: Surname and Patents in U.S. History, Journal of Political Economy, accepted, with Max Posch and Joseph Henrich.
The Chronospatial Revolution in Psychology. Nature Human Behavior, accepted, with M. Atari and J. Henrich.
The Science of Honesty: a Review and Research Agenda. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, accepted, collaboration led by S. Shalvi.
Strategic Competition and Self-confidence. Management Science, 2024, with S. Brilon, S. Grassi, and M. Grieder.
The Behavioural Mechanisms of Voluntary Cooperation across culturally diverse societies: Evidence from the US, the UK, Morocco, and Turkey. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2023, with T. Weber, B. Beranek, F. Lambarraa-Lehnhardt and S. Gächter.
Social norms and dishonesty across societies. PNAS, 2022, 119 (31) e2120138119, with D. Aycinena, L. Rentschler, and Ben Beranek.
Replication Data: click here.Kin networks and institutional development. Economic Journal, 2022, 132(647), 2578-2613.
Winner of the Royal Economic Society Prize for best paper Replication Data: click hereSelection into experiments: New evidence on the role of preferences, cognition, and recruitment protocols. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2022, with P. Thiemann, U. Sunde, and C. Thoeni.
Reply to: Life and death decisions of autonomous vehicles. Nature, 2020, 579, E3–E5, with A. Edmond, S. Dsouza, R. Kim, J. Henrich, A. Shariff, J. Bonnefon, and I. Rahwan.
The Church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation. Science, 2019, 366 (6466), with D. Bahrami-Rad, J. Beauchamp and J. Henrich.
Selected Media: Washington Post, Washington Post Opinion, Newsweek, The Economist, New York Times, Telegraph, NPR, Scientific American, Science Magazine, Science Podcast, FAZ I, FAZ II, NZZ, Focus, Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane TimeReplication Data: click hereTime pressure increases honesty in a sender-receiver deception game. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2019, 79, 93-99, with V. Capraro and D. Rand.
The moral machine experiment. Nature, 2018, 563, 59-64, with A. Edmond, S. Dsouza, R. Kim, J. Henrich, A. Shariff, J. Bonnefon, and I. Rahwan.
Selected Media: The Economist, Washington Post, The New Yorker, BBC, The Guardian, Scientific America, WIRED, Spiegel, Le MondeNudging generosity: choice architecture and cognitive factors in charitable giving. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2018, 74, 139-145, with P. Thiemann and C. Thöni.
Media: Third SectorIntrinsic honesty and the prevalence of rule violations across societies. Nature, 2016, 531, 496-499, with S. Gächter.
Selected Media: The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Science Magazine, Observer, Ars Technica, Spiegel. News and Views by Shaul Shalvi.Overconfidence and career choice. PLoS ONE, 2015, 11(1), e0145126, with C. Thöni.
Selected Media: The Independent, Real Clear Science, Vocativ, Bustle, The Boar, Mother JonesAffect and fairness: Dictator games under cognitive load. Journal of Economic Psychology, 2014, 41, 77-87, with U. Fischbacher, C. Thöni and V. Utikal.
Accepted pre-registered reports
The Cultural Prevalence of the Minimal Group Effect and its Relationship with two Forms of Real-World Bias (pre-registered report principally accepted at Nature Human Behavior) proposing author for the PSA with Kate Yang and Yarrow Dunham. More info here
Work in Progress
The Complementarity of Good Institutions and Voluntary Cooperation: Experimental Evidence from 43 Societies with S. Gächter and C. Thöni
Intuitive cooperation in children across societies with Y. Dunham, E. Mandelbaum, K. McAuliffe, and D. Rand