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: In an online experiment, we examine how ingroup bias and fairness concerns shape the redistributive preferences of UK resident natives and immigrants. Natives and immigrants were paired in a series of distributive situations. They chose how to divide a pie created from either party's previous contributions and stated what they believed to be their fair share from the vantage point of UK residents acting as unbiased spectators. In a complementary survey, we obtained these spectator divisions. We found that natives' and immigrants' distributive choices were absent ingroup bias. Their choices were, however, selfishly biased, as they invoked the fact that the pie was created solely from their own contributions. This behavior was eliminated when it disproportionately harmed the partner. Their fairness beliefs showed evidence of egocentric norm adoption: they favored equity as contributors and equality as noncontributors. They also believed that spectators would negatively discriminate against immigrants in favor of natives, but this perception was unfounded in light of spectators' divisions. We discuss the implications of our results for immigration research and integration policies.

Click for the detailed AER preregistration here.


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. 


Abstract: We report the findings of a preregistered (asPredicted \#254254)  cross-sectional survey of adult women (N = 12, 000) in Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the UK. We investigate the psychological correlates of women’s willingness to share experiences with menopause symptoms, contraception use, and fertility issues with multiple listeners. Women indicated their beliefs about how embarrassing others view discussing these health issues, the negative self-conscious emotions they experience when sharing, the expected benefits of sharing, and we estimate how these factors jointly relate to sharing willingness across health issues and listeners. The willingness to share was highest with healthcare professionals and partners and lowest in online settings. Sexuality-related and urogenital menopause symptoms were the least likely to be shared. A one-standard-deviation increase in expected overall benefit was associated with a 0.71-0.80 SD increase in sharing willingness. Looking separately at the two forms of benefit, a 1 SD increase in expected emotional benefit was linked to a 0.58 to 0.69 SD increase in sharing willingness, compared to a 0.14 to 0.21 SD increase in sharing seen with the equivalent change in expected instrumental benefit. For some health issues, embarrassment beliefs were negatively associated with sharing with negligible magnitudes (-0.10 to -0.01), and so were negative self-conscious emotions (-0.08 to -0.05). Exploratory analyses indicated country-level heterogeneity in baseline sharing, with the lowest observed among Hungarian women. The preregistered SEM did not yield an acceptable fit, so the path estimates were not interpreted. We discuss contributions to health policy and theory on the drivers of self-disclosing health-related information.


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: This is a registered report. In two experiments, we aim to demonstrate that meritocratic illusion emerges in spectators' sequential redistributive choices.  


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.