Publications

Information about changes in platform economy taxation diminishes optimism regarding future use
Some economic interactions are based on trust, others on monetary incentives or monitoring. In the tax compliance context, the …
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The social construction of ignorance: Experimental evidence
We experimentally study the social transmission of “inconvenient” information about the externalities generated by one’s own …
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Guilt- and Shame-Driven Prosociality Across Societies
Impersonal prosociality is considered a cornerstone of a thriving civic society, well-functioning institutions, and a growing economy. …
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Giving (In) to Help an Identified Person
People give more to a person in need when this person’s identity is known. Such altruistic behaviors may arise from a genuine concern …
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Meta-nudging honesty: Past, present, and future of the research frontier
Achieving successful and long-lasting behavior change via nudging comes with challenges. This is particularly true when choice …
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(Dis)honesty in the face of uncertain gains or losses
We examine dishonest behavior in the face of potential uncertain gains and losses in three pre-studies (N = 150, N = 225, N = 188) and …
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Psychological Science for a Responsible Sharing Economy
The sharing economy is fueled by trust, which allows strangers to cooperate. To share responsibly, one needs to be aware of the various …
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Psychological Science for a Responsible Sharing Economy
Social norms of corruption in the field: social nudges on posters can help to reduce bribery
Corruption in the form of bribery continues to be a major societal challenge around the world. The current lab-in-the-field study …
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Ignorance by Choice: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Underlying Motives of Willful Ignorance and Its Consequences
People sometimes avoid information about the impact of their actions as an excuse to be selfish. Such “willful ignorance” reduces …
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Collaborative dishonesty: A meta-analytic review.
Although dishonesty is often a social phenomenon, it is primarily studied in individual settings. However, people frequently …
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When leading by example leads to less corrupt collaboration
We contribute to the pressing question of how organizational design influences corporate wrongdoing by studying different decision …
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The opportunities and challenges of behavioral field research on misconduct
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The Consequences of Participating in the Sharing Economy: A Transparency-Based Sharing Framework
The sharing economy is estimated to add hundreds of billions of dollars to the global economy and is rapidly growing. However, …
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Social mindfulness and prosociality vary across the globe
Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but …
Niels J. Van Doesum, Ryan O. Murphy, Marcello Gallucci, Efrat Aharonov-Majar, Ursula Athenstaedt, Wing Tung Au, Liying Bai, Robert Böhm, Inna Bovina, Nancy R. Buchan, Xiao-Ping Chen, Kitty B. Dumont, Jan B. Engelmann, Kimmo Eriksson, Hyun Euh, Susann Fiedler, Justin Friesen, Simon Gächter, Camilo Garcia, Roberto González, Sylvie Graf, Katarzyna Growiec, Serge Guimond, Martina Hřebíčková, Elizabeth Immer-Bernold, Jeff Joireman, Gokhan Karagonlar, Kerry Kawakami, Toko Kiyonari, Yu Kou, D. Michael Kuhlman, Alexandros-Andreas Kyrtsis, Siugmin Lay, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Norman P. Li, Yang Li, Boris Maciejovsky, Zoi Manesi, Ali Mashuri, Aurelia Mok, Karin S. Moser, Ladislav Moták, Adrian Netedu, Chandrasekhar Pammi, Michael J. Platow, Karolina Raczka-Winkler, Christopher P. Reinders Folmer, Cecilia Reyna, Angelo Romano, Shaul Shalvi, Cláudia Simão, Adam W. Stivers, Pontus Strimling, Yannis Tsirbas, Sonja Utz, Leander van der Meij, Sven Waldzus, Yiwen Wang, Bernd Weber, Ori Weisel, Tim Wildschut, Fabian Winter, Junhui Wu, Jose C. Yong, Paul A. M. Van Lange
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Moral currencies: explaining corrupt collaboration
Overall, people want to behave ethically. In some cases temptation steers them away from ethical behavior. In other cases purely …
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Fooled twice: People cannot detect deepfakes but think they can
Hyper-realistic manipulations of audio-visual content, i.e., deepfakes, present new challenges for establishing the veracity of online …
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Artificial intelligence versus Maya Angelou: Experimental evidence that people cannot differentiate AI-generated from human-written poetry
The release of openly available, robust natural language generation algorithms (NLG) has spurred much public attention and debate. One …
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Similarity increases collaborative cheating
We report two experimental studies testing how a cognitive feeling of similarity affects dishonesty in individual and collaborative …
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Leaving with something: When do people experience an equity–efficiency conflict?
When allocating resources, people often have to resolve a conflict between equity and efficiency concerns. That is, sometimes for …
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Precision in a Seller's Market: Round Asking Prices Lead to Higher Counteroffers and Selling Prices
Precise, compared with round, asking prices lead to counteroffers and final agreements that are closer to the asking price. …
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Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking
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(Not) alone in the world: Cheating in the presence of a virtual observer
We conducted an experiment in a high-immersive virtual reality environment to study the effect of the presence of a virtual observer on …
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(Not) alone in the world: Cheating in the presence of a virtual observer
The implicit honesty premium: Why honest advice is more persuasive than highly informed advice
Recipients of advice expect it to be both highly informed and honest. Suspecting either one of these attributes reduces the use of the …
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Requiem for a Nudge: Framing effects in nudging honesty
We examine framing effects in nudging honesty, in the spirit of the growing norm-nudge literature, by utilizing a high-powered and …
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Honesty Speaks a Second Language
Theories of dishonest behavior implicitly assume language independence. Here, we investigated this assumption by comparing lying by …
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Buy-one-get-one-free deals attract more attention than percentage deals
Promotion deals and price reductions are common strategies retailers use to attract consumers. We investigate which of two common types …
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Intuitive Honesty Versus Dishonesty: Meta-Analytic Evidence
Is self-serving lying intuitive? Or does honesty come naturally? Many experiments have manipulated reliance on intuition in …
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Is the victim Max (Planck) or Moritz ? How victim type and social value orientation affect dishonest behavior
Does the potential victim of dishonest behavior—a family or a bank, a pensioner or an insurance firm—affect the propensity to engage in …
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Group moral discount: Diffusing blame when judging group members
People lie more when they work as a group rather than alone. However, do people suspect and morally evaluate groups and individuals …
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Uncertain lies: How payoff uncertainty affects dishonesty
In this paper we experimentally explore how lying changes when its consequences are not certain. We argue that, when consequences are …
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Loss framing increases self-serving mistakes (but does not alter attention)
In ambiguous settings, people are tempted to make self-serving mistakes. Here, we assess whether people make more self-serving mistakes …
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Financial temptation increases civic honesty
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Doing Bad to Look Good: Negative Consequences of Image Concerns on Prosocial Behavior
Several studies show that social image concerns stimulate prosocial behavior. We study a setting in which there is uncertainty about …
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Dishonest helping and harming after (Un)fair treatment
People experience fair and unfair treatment daily, and at times may react by breaking ethical rules and lying. Here, we assess the …
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A Market for Integrity - An Experiment on Corruption in the Education Sector
Corruption in the education sector is pervasive in many (developing) countries. We examine two interventions to fight corruption in …
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Taxing the Brain to Uncover Lying? Meta-analyzing the Effect of Imposing Cognitive Load on the Reaction-Time Costs of Lying
Lying typically requires greater mental effort than telling the truth. Imposing cognitive load may improve lie detection by limiting …
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Ethical Free Riding: When Honest People Find Dishonest Partners
Corruption is often the product of coordinated rule violations. Here, we investigated how such corrupt collaboration emerges and …
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The bad consequences of teamwork
People are rather dishonest when working on collaborative tasks. We experimentally study whether this is driven by the collaborative …
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What Provides Justification for Cheating-Producing or Observing Counterfactuals?
When people can profit financially by lying, they do so to the extent to which they can justify their lies. One type of justification …
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The effects of extreme rituals on moral behavior: The performers-observers gap hypothesis
Religious rituals are found all over the world. Some cultures engage in extreme religious rituals in which individuals take on forms of …
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Too Lucky to Be True: Fairness Views under the Shadow of Cheating
The steady increase in inequality over the past decades has revived a lively debate about what can be considered a fair distribution of …
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Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness
Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically …
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Not taking responsibility: Equity trumps efficiency in allocation decisions
When allocating resources, equity and efficiency may conflict. When resources are scarce and cannot be distributed equally, one may …
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Lies that feel honest: Dissociating between incentive and deviance processing when evaluating dishonesty
This study investigated neural responses to evaluations of lies made by others. Participants learned about other individuals who were …
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Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures
We test the theory that shame evolved as a defense against being devalued by others. By hypothesis, shame is a neurocomputational …
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Corruption corrupts
A cross-cultural experiment involving thousands of people worldwide shows that the prevalence of rule violations in a society, such as …
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One-by-One or All-at-Once? Self-Reporting Policies and Dishonesty
Organizational monitoring relies frequently on self-reports (e.g., work hours, progress reports, travel expenses). A “one-by-one” …
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Rule orientation and behavior: Development and validation of a scale measuring individual acceptance of rule violation
There is individual variation in the extent to which individuals believe it is acceptable to violate legal rules. However, we lack a …
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Corrupt collaboration: a behavioral ethics approach
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Editorial overview: Morality and ethics: New directions in the study of morality and ethics
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Justifications Shape Ethical Blind Spots
To some extent, unethical behavior results from people’s limited attention to ethical considerations, which results in an ethical …
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Self-Serving Justifications
Unethical behavior by “ordinary” people poses significant societal and personal challenges. We present a novel framework centered on …
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The collaborative roots of corruption
Cooperation is essential for completing tasks that individuals cannot accomplish alone. Whereas the benefits of cooperation are clear, …
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Deliberate honesty
Studies on lying, especially on inhibiting honest responses and generating dishonest responses, suggest that honesty is the default …
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The Truth Comes Naturally! Does It?
Does the truth come naturally? And by implication, does this mean that a lie may not come as naturally as the truth? Truth-Default …
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Oxytocin promotes group-serving dishonesty
To protect and promote the well-being of others, humans may bend the truth and behave unethically. Here we link such tendencies to …
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“I cheated, but only a little”: Partial confessions to unethical behavior.
Confessions are people’s way of coming clean, sharing unethical acts with others. Although confessions are traditionally viewed …
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Self-reported ethical risk taking tendencies predict actual dishonesty
Are people honest about the extent to which they engage in unethical behaviors? We report an experiment examining the relation between …
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Being Honest About Dishonesty: Correlating Self-Reports and Actual Lying
Does everybody lie? A dominant view is that lying is part of everyday social interaction. Recent research, however, has claimed, that …
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Moral firmness
Firm moral judgment deems dishonest acts as categorically wrong, and considers any self-serving justification for them as further …
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Honesty requires time — a reply to Foerster et al. (2013)
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Honesty Requires Time (and Lack of Justifications)
Recent research suggests that refraining from cheating in tempting situations requires self-control, which indicates that serving …
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Dishonestly increasing the likelihood of winning
People not only seek to avoid losses or secure gains; they also attempt to create opportunities for obtaining positive outcomes. When …
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The Right Side? Under Time Pressure, Approach Motivation Leads to Right-Oriented Bias
Approach motivation, a focus on achieving positive outcomes, is related to relative left-hemispheric brain activation, which translates …
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People avoid situations that enable them to deceive others
Information advantage enables people to benefit themselves by deceiving their counterparts. Using a modified ultimatum bargaining game …
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Justified ethicality: Observing desired counterfactuals modifies ethical perceptions and behavior
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Ethical Manoeuvring: Why People Avoid Both Major and Minor Lies
This research examines whether and why people manoeuvre their unethical behaviour so as to maximize material gains at a minimal …
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Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism
Human ethnocentrism - the tendency to view one’s group as centrally important and superior to other groups - creates intergroup …
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Overcoming Initial Anchors: The Effect of Negotiators' Dispositional Control Beliefs
In negotiation, opening offers affect negotiated agreements. Across various negotiation settings, negotiators' outcomes are …
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The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict Among Humans
Humans regulate intergroup conflict through parochial altruism; they self-sacrifice to contribute to in-group welfare and to aggress …
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Write when hot - submit when not: seasonal bias in peer review or acceptance?
At a top psychology journal, Psychological Science (PS), submissions peak during the summer months. We tested whether this seasonal …
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