Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, January 2025
Ambiguity acts as a veil that can help conceal and justify dishonest behavior. While an individual’s ability to disambiguate information in a task may help remove the veil of ambiguity and thus promote honesty, the relationship between ambiguity, ability, and dishonesty is currently unexplored. To investigate this, we employed an experimental design where participants attempted to resolve an ambiguous task and reported their performance. Results showed that ambiguity and dishonesty increase in unison. Importantly, the participants who resolved ambiguity acted less dishonestly (Study 1). In Studies 2a, 2b, and 3, we increased participants’ ability by briefly training them to disambiguate the information presented in the task. The results showed that participants acted less dishonestly when their ability levels were increased. Overall, the findings indicate that dishonesty can be reduced not only by making tasks less ambiguous but also by enhancing an individual’s ability to successfully resolve ambiguity.
PLOS ONE, January 2023
One’s willingness to accept an outcome or even to correct it depends on whether the underlying procedure is deemed legitimate. We examine a modified version of the dictator game, where dictatorship is assigned by a fair procedure that is linked to the participant actions but in effect is completely random, to illustrate that this belief is not independent of the outcome and is self-serving in its nature. We also discuss the perceptions of fairness and merit as potential drivers of the observed behavioral phenomenon.
Journal of Economic Psychology, Vol. 85, August 2021
We use a public good experiment to study how in-group cooperation is affected by payoff-irrelevant information about cooperation in other groups (i.e., descriptive out-group feedback). We find that positive out-group feedback, indicating above average-cooperation, deters low in-group contributors from increasing their contribution towards the in-group average. By contrast, negative out-group feedback, which informs participants about below-average cooperation, deters high in-group contributors from decreasing their contribution towards the in-group average. These to effects work together to damplen contribution patterns associated with conditional cooperation. Further, we show that the effects are stronger for individual-level feedback (comparing individual contributions with the out-group average) than for group-level feedback (comparing total controbutions by in-group members with that of the other groups). Interestingly, when allowed to avoid out-group feedback information, the propensity to consult the feedback is similar for high and low in-group contributors, suggesting that information acquisition is not alway self-serving.
Economics Letters, Vol. 188, March 2020
This field experiment quantifies the impact of social norm information on the demand for indoor temperature. Based on high-frequency data from indoor temperature monitors, we provide participating households with a comparison of average temperature in their apartment relative to that measured in a control group. For more than 90 percent of participants, financial benefits of energy savings are only indirect, as building-level heating costs are shared across apartments in proportion to their volume. Despite the associated collective action problem, we estimate that the intervention induces a −0.28 °C reduction in average indoor temperature. This suggests that direct monetary incentives is not a pre-requisite for social comparison feedback to induce energy savings.
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Vol. 74, June 2018, p. 70-78
In this study we want to find out how people behave in a situation where they can themselves lie or they can share the responsibility for lying with others. To answer this question we study a sender-receiver game followed by a dictator game. It is possible to delegate the act of lying in the sender-receiver game and take pro-social actions in the subsequent dictator game. We examine how delegation affects the outcomes of current and future ethical decisions. We find that a non-trivial fraction of participants delegate their decision and delegation is associated with higher transfers in the subsequent dictator game.
Economics Letters, Vol. 153, April 2017, p. 54-56
Avoidance of certain pieces of information, i.e. ignoring the consequences of one’s choices for the well-being of others, has been shown to enhance selfishness. We argue that preferences for uncertainty or deliberate ignorance can also be employed by those seeking to behave pro-socially. We use a dictator game with hidden pay-offs for the dictators and allow participants to reveal their own pay-offs without a cost before making their allocation choice. We observe that a non-trivial fraction of participants do not reveal their pay-offs and choose the allocation that benefits others.
Journal of Economic Psychology, Vol.52, February 2016, p.91-101
People passing by beggars without leaving a penny are not necessarily pure money-maximizers. In the world of sincere and dishonest recipients, some donors might anticipate the disutility they will suffer at the moment they realize their help is misdirected and reduce their willingness to donate to avoid these psychological costs. I employ a dictator game with ex-ante uncertainty about recipient’s endowment and requests from recipients to study how donors react to ex-post revelation of recipient’s type. I observe no difference in donations with and without ex-post information about recipient’s endowment. However, if donors could choose if they want to receive such information themselves, nearly a third of dictators choose to remain ignorant. Those dictators who choose to ex-post reveal the endowment of the recipient give significantly more.
Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Vol. 65, December 2016, p. 146 – 153.
Rule-based people strive to conform to a moral norm. Outcome-based people, on the other hand, adjust their behavior to the concrete consequences of their acts. We argue that the categorization of the mind-set may also be informative when it comes to explaining the effects that good and bad moral examples have on the moral behavior of the observer. To test this, we play a dictator game after dictators observed prosocial and antisocial third-party actions in a different domain. The consequences of these actions affected dictator and receiver identically. We hypothesized that this makes it unnecessary for an outcome-minded dictator to intervene correctively, while it influences a rule-minded dictator to follow the example by aligning her behavior. In line with our hypothesis, we find that only rule-minded dictators reacted to the example set by others. They are, however, asymmetrically incited by moral transgressions, while being left uninspired by praiseworthy examples. Our findings call for some precaution when applying policy measures based on informing people about prosocial and antisocial behavior, especially in cultures in which the moral focus is on rules.
RECYCLING UNCAST VOTES AS A MEANS TO INCREASE VOTER TURNOUT
SNF SPARK GRANT
Sufficient voter turnout is a desirable property of a healthy democratic system. Unfortunately, historical data show that a sizable portion of the eligible electorate tends to abstain (e.g., less than 50% of the Swiss participate in federal votes). This project aims to increase voter turnout by leveraging important insights from personal and social psychology and behavioral economics. The main idea is to modify the current vote counting rule in the following manner: uncast votes are not ignored but rather, randomly allocated to the alternatives. We hypothesize that this intervention will prompt people to turn out to vote to avoid having their votes '(mis)used' or misallocated by the random mechanism. The intervention does not restrict voters' freedom (as opposed to, e.g., obligatory voting) and would be easy to implement in real life. We test the effectiveness of the proposed intervention both in the field (upcoming U.S. presidential elections) and in the laboratory experiments in Switzerland and Germany.
Everyday life produces many inequalities that both the disadvan taged and advantaged parties may be willing to reduce. Even in case of a general agreement on the level of the redistribution, there need not be one on the procedure. We use a real-effort task to generate income inequality in pairs of participants and enable either the dictator or the recipient to initiate a monetary transfer in the context of a modified dictator game. We find that all recipients accept such transfers but not all are willing to ask for one, especially if other opportunities for redistribution are available. The dictators punish proactive recipients by lowering the transfer amount even if the latter have their hand forced. This punishment is not anticipated by the recipients, though.