Works in progress

Abstract: The impact of smartphones and social media use on adolescent mental health remains widely debated. To clarify expert opinion, we convened over 120 international researchers from 11 disciplines, representing a broad range of views. Using a Delphi method, the panel evaluated 26 claims covering international trends in adolescent mental health, causal links to smartphones and social media, and policy recommendations. The experts suggested 1,400 references and produced a consensus statement for each claim. The following conclusions were rated as accurate or somewhat accurate by 92–97% of respondents: First, adolescent mental health has declined in several Western countries over the past 20 years. Second, heavy smartphone and social media use can cause sleep problems. Third, smartphone and social media use correlate with attention problems and behavioural addiction. Fourth, among girls, social media use may be associated with body dissatisfaction, perfectionism, exposure to mental disorders, and risk of sexual harassment and predation. Fifth, evidence on social deprivation and relational aggression is limited. Sixth, the evidence for policies like age restrictions and school bans is preliminary. Overall, the results of this deliberative process and the set of concrete recommendations provided can help guide future research and evidence-informed policy on adolescent technology use. 


Abstract: Public demands to restrict immigrants' access to welfare typically invoke immigrants' outgroup status and their allegedly insufficient contributions. While contributions are fundamental to the welfare state, immigrants' contributions are not directly observable, which creates fertile ground for misperceptions that political rhetoric often exploits when portraying natives as the main contributors. We present results from a stylized experiment in which UK-resident natives and immigrants are paired to divide resources. We isolate how ingroup favoritism and framed contributor status shape distributive choices and fair-share beliefs, even in the absence of actual differences in contributions to the resources. We find no statistically significant effect of ingroup favoritism on choices, but both natives and immigrants claim more when framed as contributors. Making unequal allocations costly reduces claims, and secondary analyses suggest that costliness also attenuates the contributor effect. Both groups also report higher fair-share beliefs when framed as contributors than when they are not. These findings show that merely framing individuals as contributors shapes distributive preferences in self-serving ways and produces egocentrically biased fair-share beliefs.  We propose that incorporating such self-serving dynamics into the microfoundations of preferences for redistribution toward immigrants could help explain exclusionary welfare preferences beyond explanations centered on anti-immigrant attitudes and nationalism.

Click for the detailed AER preregistration here.


Abstract: Welfare chauvinism—the restriction of immigrants' access to social benefits relative to natives—poses a central challenge to the sustainability of redistributive social policy in increasingly diverse European welfare states. This research examines whether variation in the restrictiveness of individual welfare-chauvinistic attitudes is more strongly associated with general distributive preferences or with immigrant-targeted beliefs and attitudes. Using a pre-registered survey of 1,822 UK residents, we focus on Universal Credit (UC), the UK's primary means-tested benefit.  Anchoring responses to equally needy natives allows us to construct an immigrant-specific deservingness premium: the additional conditions respondents impose on immigrants relative to natives. We document that 91% of respondents apply stricter eligibility criteria to immigrants than to equally needy natives, most commonly conditioning access on prior contributions or legal integration (i.e., settled status or citizenship). Using dominance analysis, we show that immigrant-specific beliefs—such as perceptions of welfare abuse, attributions of responsibility for poverty, and anti-foreigner attitudes—account for substantially more variation in welfare chauvinism than do general redistributive preferences.  In contrast, experimentally elicited fairness preferences are not robustly associated with the restrictiveness of immigrants' access to benefits. Our findings suggest that welfare chauvinism is driven primarily by group-specific deservingness judgments rather than by general views about redistribution. This pattern matters for social policy because support for redistributive policy may hinge on group-contingent deservingness judgments alongside need.


Abstract: The spectator task elicits third parties' inequality acceptance, allowing researchers to estimate population distributions of fairness-preference types. In its within-subject form, spectators make two subsequent choices in situations involving merit- and luck-based inequalities with randomized order. We document a carry-over effect: redistribution is lower in the second choice, and inferred fairness-type distributions vary with choice order. We cannot determine whether this pattern is driven by a psychological mechanism active during repeated choices or a contrast between inequality causes. Either interpretation implies a violation of causal transience and calls for caution when using this design.


Summary: In a large-scale experiment, we show that spectators' fairness preferences are biased when they share a social identity with any stakeholder. 


Summary: This is a registered report. In an experiment, we demonstrate that narratives given about the cause of inequality systematically shape how third parties allocate resources between stakeholders.  


PROJECTS ON HOLD

Abstract: People often judge how embarrassing an activity or condition is on the basis of its perceived prevalence. They infer prevalence in part by considering how often they hear other people discussing it.  But how often a condition is discussed is a function not only of its prevalence but also of how embarrassing it is. If people fail to take this into account, they will tend to judge embarrassing conditions as being rarer, which will accentuate their embarrassment, and, in turn, further amplify their reluctance to disclose those conditions -- a ``spiral" of shame and silence.  We present results from two studies that support the existence of such a feedback process.  The first, a cross-sectional survey study, asked respondents a series of questions about different embarrassing and non-embarrassing conditions.  Respondents (1) indicated whether they had the conditions, (2) judged how embarrassing the conditions were, (3) reported whether they had disclosed, or would disclose, having the conditions to others, and (4) estimated what fraction of survey respondents had the conditions.  As predicted, reports of disclosure were negatively related to judgments of embarrassment, and when embarrassment was greater, estimates of prevalence were lower, both for conditions that respondents had and for conditions they did not have.   The second, an experimental study, manipulated whether people received a high or low estimate of population prevalence for 5 different conditions, and found that receiving a high prevalence estimate reduced embarrassment and increased self-reported willingness to disclose the condition to others, and vice versa. 

Summary: In three studies, we demonstrate that people value medical indemnity payments more when they are paid out-of-pocket than via an insurance scheme and that these asymmetric valuations are shared norms among participants.