2026-09-03
What do people think about.
Room: E5.22, 12:00.
Conscious thoughts are fundamental to the human experience, yet they remain remarkably understudied. Using randomized daily surveys, subjects report their thoughts along with perceived cause, concurrent activity, and happiness. The data set reveals patterns in what people think about and why, which core relationships play center stage in people’s minds, people’s occupying wants and needs, and the objects of people’s love, hate, and worry. Thoughts explain more of happiness than what people are doing, demographics, and socio-economic status combined. We explore individual-level heterogeneity, identifying thought patterns in different clusters of thinkers. Finally, we conclude by showing a tradeoff between productive thoughts and consumptive thoughts, akin to a labor-leisure tradeoff, suggesting the presence of an economic thought-allocation problem in the mind.
What do people think about.
Room: E5.22, 12:00.
Conscious thoughts are fundamental to the human experience, yet they remain remarkably understudied. Using randomized daily surveys, subjects report their thoughts along with perceived cause, concurrent activity, and happiness. The data set reveals patterns in what people think about and why, which core relationships play center stage in people’s minds, people’s occupying wants and needs, and the objects of people’s love, hate, and worry. Thoughts explain more of happiness than what people are doing, demographics, and socio-economic status combined. We explore individual-level heterogeneity, identifying thought patterns in different clusters of thinkers. Finally, we conclude by showing a tradeoff between productive thoughts and consumptive thoughts, akin to a labor-leisure tradeoff, suggesting the presence of an economic thought-allocation problem in the mind.
2026-08-20
Evidence and Influence.
Room: A1.04, 12:00.
When information is abundant but attention is limited, attention incentives can distort evidence dissemination, favoring individual studies over syntheses. Individual studies can be more novel, engaging, and easier to communicate, even though syntheses reduce the search and aggregation required to learn from evidence across individual studies. This paper compares attention to syntheses of scientific evidence (meta-analyses) with attention to the individual studies they cite. First, in experiments with over 6,000 professionals and lay people, meta-analyses are disseminated less than individual studies. We test whether the gap reflects novelty, writing style, or summarization costs, and find that writing style is a key barrier: making meta-analysis articles more narrative, while preserving their informational content, closes the dissemination gap. Second, we examine online attention to over 71,000 papers. We find a consistent dissemination gap for meta-analyses in news articles and evidence that writing style matters for dissemination. Taken together, these findings suggest a tension between informativeness and attention that is partly malleable: changing how synthesized evidence is presented can substantially reduce it.
Evidence and Influence.
Room: A1.04, 12:00.
When information is abundant but attention is limited, attention incentives can distort evidence dissemination, favoring individual studies over syntheses. Individual studies can be more novel, engaging, and easier to communicate, even though syntheses reduce the search and aggregation required to learn from evidence across individual studies. This paper compares attention to syntheses of scientific evidence (meta-analyses) with attention to the individual studies they cite. First, in experiments with over 6,000 professionals and lay people, meta-analyses are disseminated less than individual studies. We test whether the gap reflects novelty, writing style, or summarization costs, and find that writing style is a key barrier: making meta-analysis articles more narrative, while preserving their informational content, closes the dissemination gap. Second, we examine online attention to over 71,000 papers. We find a consistent dissemination gap for meta-analyses in news articles and evidence that writing style matters for dissemination. Taken together, these findings suggest a tension between informativeness and attention that is partly malleable: changing how synthesized evidence is presented can substantially reduce it.
2026-08-03
What do people think about.
Room: E5.22, 12:00-13:00.
Conscious thoughts are fundamental to the human experience, yet they remain remarkably understudied. Using randomized daily surveys, subjects report their thoughts along with perceived cause, concurrent activity, and happiness. The data set reveals patterns in what people think about and why, which core relationships play center stage in people’s minds, people’s occupying wants and needs, and the objects of people’s love, hate, and worry. Thoughts explain more of happiness than what people are doing, demographics, and socio-economic status combined. We explore individual-level heterogeneity, identifying thought patterns in di?erent clusters of thinkers. Finally, we conclude by showing a tradeo? between productive thoughts and consumptive thoughts, akin to a labor-leisure tradeo?, suggesting the presence of an economic thought-allocation problem in the mind.
What do people think about.
Room: E5.22, 12:00-13:00.
Conscious thoughts are fundamental to the human experience, yet they remain remarkably understudied. Using randomized daily surveys, subjects report their thoughts along with perceived cause, concurrent activity, and happiness. The data set reveals patterns in what people think about and why, which core relationships play center stage in people’s minds, people’s occupying wants and needs, and the objects of people’s love, hate, and worry. Thoughts explain more of happiness than what people are doing, demographics, and socio-economic status combined. We explore individual-level heterogeneity, identifying thought patterns in di?erent clusters of thinkers. Finally, we conclude by showing a tradeo? between productive thoughts and consumptive thoughts, akin to a labor-leisure tradeo?, suggesting the presence of an economic thought-allocation problem in the mind.
2026-06-25
The arbitrary evolution of cooperation.
Room: A2.08, 12:00 - 13:00.
Can we use contemporary empirical results to draw inferences about the evolution of human social behavior, and if so how? To illustrate the complexities, I examine the evolution of strategies for the repeated play of social dilemmas. Repeated interactions enjoy favorable status as an explanation for the evolution of human cooperation. So favorable, in fact, that one influential hypothesis paradoxically invokes repeated interactions to explain human cooperation in anonymous one-shot experiments. Some studies, however, suggest that repeated interactions in isolation, given a suitably flexible strategy space, do not reliably support cooperation. If generally true, this latter finding would contradict the status of repeated play as a basis for the evolution of both repeated and one-shot cooperation. Using a mix of analytical results and a large number of simulations, I consider this question with a social dilemma involving a continuous action space. Continuous action spaces arguably capture the social dilemmas people play in their daily lives better than games in which players can only choose to cooperate fully or defect fully. Continuous action spaces also allow us to study the effects of extending the strategy space without positing super-human players who can remember long histories of past play. Under repeated play of such a game, I examine eleven strategy spaces and seven approaches to implementation errors in all combinations. Results show an overall pattern of limited cooperation. In particular, given a combination of strategy space and implementation error that supports the evolution of cooperative strategies, some suitable generalization of the model typically destabilizes cooperation. Although these results do not constitute a general proof, they are consistent with the notion that repeated interactions only support the evolution of cooperation given arbitrary, biologically groundless restrictions on the set of strategies that can arise via mutation or innovation. This finding further implies that an important evolutionary explanation for one-shot cooperation enjoys a privileged status it does not deserve.
The arbitrary evolution of cooperation.
Room: A2.08, 12:00 - 13:00.
Can we use contemporary empirical results to draw inferences about the evolution of human social behavior, and if so how? To illustrate the complexities, I examine the evolution of strategies for the repeated play of social dilemmas. Repeated interactions enjoy favorable status as an explanation for the evolution of human cooperation. So favorable, in fact, that one influential hypothesis paradoxically invokes repeated interactions to explain human cooperation in anonymous one-shot experiments. Some studies, however, suggest that repeated interactions in isolation, given a suitably flexible strategy space, do not reliably support cooperation. If generally true, this latter finding would contradict the status of repeated play as a basis for the evolution of both repeated and one-shot cooperation. Using a mix of analytical results and a large number of simulations, I consider this question with a social dilemma involving a continuous action space. Continuous action spaces arguably capture the social dilemmas people play in their daily lives better than games in which players can only choose to cooperate fully or defect fully. Continuous action spaces also allow us to study the effects of extending the strategy space without positing super-human players who can remember long histories of past play. Under repeated play of such a game, I examine eleven strategy spaces and seven approaches to implementation errors in all combinations. Results show an overall pattern of limited cooperation. In particular, given a combination of strategy space and implementation error that supports the evolution of cooperative strategies, some suitable generalization of the model typically destabilizes cooperation. Although these results do not constitute a general proof, they are consistent with the notion that repeated interactions only support the evolution of cooperation given arbitrary, biologically groundless restrictions on the set of strategies that can arise via mutation or innovation. This finding further implies that an important evolutionary explanation for one-shot cooperation enjoys a privileged status it does not deserve.
2026-06-11
Norm Pluralism, Tolerance, and Social Sanctions in a Divided World: Investigating Political Polarization through an Economist’s Lens.
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
Lately, the causes and effects of political polarization have received much attention across behavioral science and related disciplines. In this talk, I’ll present how behavioral economists can advance the knowledge using innovative methods. Drawing on a series of recent studies, I aim to offer insights into the following two questions: 1. Can we develop new methods and tools to measure the existing norm-pluralism (= coexistence of possibly competing social norms) to better understand how we follow and enforce norms in polarized environments? This will be the core of my talk. Here, I will mostly rely on two experimental projects jointly developed with Kimbrough, Panizza & Vostroknutov, one of which introduces the method and the other one validates and applies the method to various contentious topics in the U.S. (just out in PNAS Nexus). 2. How do political shocks (like the outcome of a close 2024 U.S. presidential election) shift the perceptions of fairness and the need for norm enforcement in social interactions? Here, I will briefly preview insights from a new manuscript (joint with Gelfand, Hochleitner & Sonderegger) in which we leveraged the election to study fairness and norm perceptions.
Norm Pluralism, Tolerance, and Social Sanctions in a Divided World: Investigating Political Polarization through an Economist’s Lens.
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
Lately, the causes and effects of political polarization have received much attention across behavioral science and related disciplines. In this talk, I’ll present how behavioral economists can advance the knowledge using innovative methods. Drawing on a series of recent studies, I aim to offer insights into the following two questions: 1. Can we develop new methods and tools to measure the existing norm-pluralism (= coexistence of possibly competing social norms) to better understand how we follow and enforce norms in polarized environments? This will be the core of my talk. Here, I will mostly rely on two experimental projects jointly developed with Kimbrough, Panizza & Vostroknutov, one of which introduces the method and the other one validates and applies the method to various contentious topics in the U.S. (just out in PNAS Nexus). 2. How do political shocks (like the outcome of a close 2024 U.S. presidential election) shift the perceptions of fairness and the need for norm enforcement in social interactions? Here, I will briefly preview insights from a new manuscript (joint with Gelfand, Hochleitner & Sonderegger) in which we leveraged the election to study fairness and norm perceptions.
2026-06-04
Votes (not) for sale.
Room: E0.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
We document that “cash for votes” (C4V) is pervasive in Tamil Nadu (TN), India, and argue that it undermines democratic accountability. Survey data from voters and politicians show that TN is stuck in a bad equilibrium: voters have high prior beliefs about candidate corruption, expect politicians to offer cash, parties distribute it to mobilize reciprocal voters, and candidates who can raise large sums are favored, entrenching corruption. Using a natural experiment created by an arbitrary border with neighboring Kerala, we show that Kerala has coordinated on a more efficient equilibrium without C4V. Paying C4V backfires in Kerala: voters hold lower prior beliefs about corruption and offering C4V signal politicians’ corrupt intent. Therefore, parties refrain from offering C4V, allowing less corrupt candidates to also enter politics. Our spatial discontinuity design highlights voter beliefs—rather than reciprocity alone—as the key mechanism explaining C4V. The recent victory of a new party (TVK) believed to be less corrupt than incumbents in TN highlights the role beliefs in shifting equilibria.
Votes (not) for sale.
Room: E0.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
We document that “cash for votes” (C4V) is pervasive in Tamil Nadu (TN), India, and argue that it undermines democratic accountability. Survey data from voters and politicians show that TN is stuck in a bad equilibrium: voters have high prior beliefs about candidate corruption, expect politicians to offer cash, parties distribute it to mobilize reciprocal voters, and candidates who can raise large sums are favored, entrenching corruption. Using a natural experiment created by an arbitrary border with neighboring Kerala, we show that Kerala has coordinated on a more efficient equilibrium without C4V. Paying C4V backfires in Kerala: voters hold lower prior beliefs about corruption and offering C4V signal politicians’ corrupt intent. Therefore, parties refrain from offering C4V, allowing less corrupt candidates to also enter politics. Our spatial discontinuity design highlights voter beliefs—rather than reciprocity alone—as the key mechanism explaining C4V. The recent victory of a new party (TVK) believed to be less corrupt than incumbents in TN highlights the role beliefs in shifting equilibria.
2026-05-28
Learning, Persistence, and Transfer of Strategic Sophistication in Games.
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00 .
This paper studies the learning, persistence, and transfer of strategic sophistication in interactive games. Prior work has shown that strategic sophistication — understood as the depth of higher-order reasoning a player actually performs — can be enhanced through targeted feedback. What remains unclear is whether such improvements persist over time and whether they generalize across strategically distinct environments. To address this knowledge gap, we designed and ran a longitudinal experiment combining incentivized choices and eye-tracking data. A total of 250 participants were assigned to either a feedback (treatment) or baseline condition and observed at three time points: the day of the experiment, then two weeks, and three months later. Participants played two types of games against a payoff-maximizing algorithm: single-stage games (3×3 normal-form games with a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium) and multi-stage games (a preliminary entry decision by the algorithm, followed — conditional on entry — by a simultaneous 2×2 coordination game). The treatment consisted of a learning phase in which participants played repeated single-stage games with feedback, whereas baseline participants received no feedback. This design allows us to study learning within context, persistence over time, and transfer of strategic sophistication from single- to multi-stage games. Training generates large and persistent improvements in equilibrium choice rates in single-stage games. Treated subjects significantly outperform the baseline group at all follow-up horizons, with no evidence of decay over three months. Using eye-tracking data, we identify three attentional types — defined by characteristic patterns of information search — and show that behavioral gains arise across all of them. Alongside this, we identify a complementary mechanism: subjects initially focused on their own payoffs are significantly more likely to shift attention toward their opponent's payoffs over time, and this attentional restructuring predicts long-run improvements in equilibrium play. We also document consistency in sophistication across environments: attentional types identified in single-stage games are correlated with performance in multi-stage games, with more sophisticated attention patterns associated with higher coordination rates. However, we find no evidence of transfer. Although performance improves over time in multi-stage games, treatment and baseline groups evolve in parallel, ruling out treatment-induced gains. Overall, the results point to two distinct components of strategic learning—rule acquisition and attentional restructuring—and show that while strategic sophistication is durable and correlated with patterns of information acquisition across environments, its transfer remains limited.
Learning, Persistence, and Transfer of Strategic Sophistication in Games.
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00 .
This paper studies the learning, persistence, and transfer of strategic sophistication in interactive games. Prior work has shown that strategic sophistication — understood as the depth of higher-order reasoning a player actually performs — can be enhanced through targeted feedback. What remains unclear is whether such improvements persist over time and whether they generalize across strategically distinct environments. To address this knowledge gap, we designed and ran a longitudinal experiment combining incentivized choices and eye-tracking data. A total of 250 participants were assigned to either a feedback (treatment) or baseline condition and observed at three time points: the day of the experiment, then two weeks, and three months later. Participants played two types of games against a payoff-maximizing algorithm: single-stage games (3×3 normal-form games with a unique pure-strategy Nash equilibrium) and multi-stage games (a preliminary entry decision by the algorithm, followed — conditional on entry — by a simultaneous 2×2 coordination game). The treatment consisted of a learning phase in which participants played repeated single-stage games with feedback, whereas baseline participants received no feedback. This design allows us to study learning within context, persistence over time, and transfer of strategic sophistication from single- to multi-stage games. Training generates large and persistent improvements in equilibrium choice rates in single-stage games. Treated subjects significantly outperform the baseline group at all follow-up horizons, with no evidence of decay over three months. Using eye-tracking data, we identify three attentional types — defined by characteristic patterns of information search — and show that behavioral gains arise across all of them. Alongside this, we identify a complementary mechanism: subjects initially focused on their own payoffs are significantly more likely to shift attention toward their opponent's payoffs over time, and this attentional restructuring predicts long-run improvements in equilibrium play. We also document consistency in sophistication across environments: attentional types identified in single-stage games are correlated with performance in multi-stage games, with more sophisticated attention patterns associated with higher coordination rates. However, we find no evidence of transfer. Although performance improves over time in multi-stage games, treatment and baseline groups evolve in parallel, ruling out treatment-induced gains. Overall, the results point to two distinct components of strategic learning—rule acquisition and attentional restructuring—and show that while strategic sophistication is durable and correlated with patterns of information acquisition across environments, its transfer remains limited.
2026-05-07
Credible Threats (with Flora Li & Alec Smith).
Room: E0.22, 13:00-14:00.
We study the effect of communication on deterrence and costly punishment. We show that a dynamic theoretical model of belief-dependent anger captures how updated expectations make threats credible. We test our model in a between-subjects experiment with belief elicitation where one-sided communication is available as a treatment.
Credible Threats (with Flora Li & Alec Smith).
Room: E0.22, 13:00-14:00.
We study the effect of communication on deterrence and costly punishment. We show that a dynamic theoretical model of belief-dependent anger captures how updated expectations make threats credible. We test our model in a between-subjects experiment with belief elicitation where one-sided communication is available as a treatment.
2026-04-30
***CANCELLED*** What's in a u? (joint paper with Larbi Alaoui).
Room: E0.03, 12:00 - 13:00.
We revisit the long-lasting debate about the meaning of the utility function used in Expected Utility (EU). Contrary to the common view that EU inherently links risk aversion to diminishing marginal utility, we demonstrate that these two concepts need not coincide. Marginal utility of money is an input into risk attitude, but it is not its sole determinant. An independent ‘pure risk’ attitude is also a contributing factor. We discuss some theoretical implications of this result for the following topics: non-neutral risk attitudes for profit maximizing firms; risk aversion over time lotteries in the presence of discounting, and convex time budget decisions; the equity premium puzzle. We also discuss matters of identification: for firms; via proxies; via MLE methods under parametric restrictions; in intertemporal choice problems; and cross-context elicitation in multi-dimensional settings, and its relationship with the methods and results from Psychology.
***CANCELLED*** What's in a u? (joint paper with Larbi Alaoui).
Room: E0.03, 12:00 - 13:00.
We revisit the long-lasting debate about the meaning of the utility function used in Expected Utility (EU). Contrary to the common view that EU inherently links risk aversion to diminishing marginal utility, we demonstrate that these two concepts need not coincide. Marginal utility of money is an input into risk attitude, but it is not its sole determinant. An independent ‘pure risk’ attitude is also a contributing factor. We discuss some theoretical implications of this result for the following topics: non-neutral risk attitudes for profit maximizing firms; risk aversion over time lotteries in the presence of discounting, and convex time budget decisions; the equity premium puzzle. We also discuss matters of identification: for firms; via proxies; via MLE methods under parametric restrictions; in intertemporal choice problems; and cross-context elicitation in multi-dimensional settings, and its relationship with the methods and results from Psychology.
2026-04-16
Co-producing compliance: Evidence from a waste-sorting experiment in Lebanon.
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
Securing citizen compliance is a foundational challenge of governance, particularly where enforcement is costly and state capacity is limited. Co-production—arrangements pairing government with civil society and citizens to deliver public goods—holds promise as an alternative, but evidence from low-capacity settings remains thin. We evaluate a cluster-randomized field experiment in Lebanon, where a social enterprise and municipal government co-designed a waste-sorting program. Inspectors evaluated household sorting quality and a mobile app delivered personalized feedback. Sorting quality improved by 0.24 stars out of 5 on average and by 2.4 stars among compliers. Knowledge drove initial gains, as treated households improved their understanding of sorting rules. Sustained monitoring proved necessary for durability, however, with effects attenuating once the program ended. Compliance gains also crowded out civic behaviors like volunteering, pointing to moral licensing rather than civic identity activation. Co-production can therefore unlock compliance in the absence of enforcement, but when the state recedes, so do citizens.
Co-producing compliance: Evidence from a waste-sorting experiment in Lebanon.
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
Securing citizen compliance is a foundational challenge of governance, particularly where enforcement is costly and state capacity is limited. Co-production—arrangements pairing government with civil society and citizens to deliver public goods—holds promise as an alternative, but evidence from low-capacity settings remains thin. We evaluate a cluster-randomized field experiment in Lebanon, where a social enterprise and municipal government co-designed a waste-sorting program. Inspectors evaluated household sorting quality and a mobile app delivered personalized feedback. Sorting quality improved by 0.24 stars out of 5 on average and by 2.4 stars among compliers. Knowledge drove initial gains, as treated households improved their understanding of sorting rules. Sustained monitoring proved necessary for durability, however, with effects attenuating once the program ended. Compliance gains also crowded out civic behaviors like volunteering, pointing to moral licensing rather than civic identity activation. Co-production can therefore unlock compliance in the absence of enforcement, but when the state recedes, so do citizens.
2026-04-02
Human Expertise in the Age of AI (joint work with Ivan Dedyukhin).
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
This study examines whether people believe AI chatbot assistance can substitute for strategic expertise and how these perceptions vary across generations. Using the 11-20 money request game, we measure how participants adjust their strategic sophistication when facing opponents of varying skill levels with or without AI assistance. Our findings suggest that generational differences may play a crucial role in shaping these responses. Older generations appear to respond differently to AI-assisted opponents compared to younger cohorts. We also explore whether participants perceive AI assistance as comparable to human expertise and find early evidence that AI may act as a complement to human expertise, prompting participants to think more deeply.
Human Expertise in the Age of AI (joint work with Ivan Dedyukhin).
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
This study examines whether people believe AI chatbot assistance can substitute for strategic expertise and how these perceptions vary across generations. Using the 11-20 money request game, we measure how participants adjust their strategic sophistication when facing opponents of varying skill levels with or without AI assistance. Our findings suggest that generational differences may play a crucial role in shaping these responses. Older generations appear to respond differently to AI-assisted opponents compared to younger cohorts. We also explore whether participants perceive AI assistance as comparable to human expertise and find early evidence that AI may act as a complement to human expertise, prompting participants to think more deeply.
2026-03-19
The New Psychophysics of Risk and Time.
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
Descriptive models explain regularities in risk-taking and delay-discounting by applying stable subjective transformations to objective choice primitives. Noisy cognition models instead represent behavior as the outgrowth of optimal reactions to noisy perceptions and re-combinations of choice primitives. Here, we test the predictions of the two model classes by varying presentation formats of identical choice primitives in ways we expect to affect cognitive noise, but that should be immaterial under the lens of descriptive models. Our findings illustrate that behavioral regularities such as insensitivity to probabilities and to time delays can be systematically shifted and even reversed by subtle alterations in the presentation of identical choice tasks. The results show that noisy cognition models have generative and hence causal meaning, and highlight the limits of approaches that treat economic choices as detached from the brain’s information-processing constraints.
The New Psychophysics of Risk and Time.
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
Descriptive models explain regularities in risk-taking and delay-discounting by applying stable subjective transformations to objective choice primitives. Noisy cognition models instead represent behavior as the outgrowth of optimal reactions to noisy perceptions and re-combinations of choice primitives. Here, we test the predictions of the two model classes by varying presentation formats of identical choice primitives in ways we expect to affect cognitive noise, but that should be immaterial under the lens of descriptive models. Our findings illustrate that behavioral regularities such as insensitivity to probabilities and to time delays can be systematically shifted and even reversed by subtle alterations in the presentation of identical choice tasks. The results show that noisy cognition models have generative and hence causal meaning, and highlight the limits of approaches that treat economic choices as detached from the brain’s information-processing constraints.
2026-03-05
Measuring Norm Multiplicity.
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
This study introduces the Norm-Drawing Task, a novel approach to measure pluralism, or the coexistence of multiple normative beliefs in a given context. By combining established methods, we identify heterogeneous normative beliefs in well-known economic games, challenging the typical assumption of a single prevailing norm. Moreover, we are able to link norm multiplicity to actual behavior. We observe that participants who perceive multiple norms are more tolerant and punish norm violations less frequently and less severely than those who perceive a singular norm. In a second experiment, we show that this effect is causal. Comparing two elicitation protocols that allow participants to report multiple norms versus requiring them to report a single norm, we find that punishment is lower in the former than in the latter: pluralism breeds tolerance. The implications of our study are broad, indicating that societal structures and policy decisions could be influenced by the underlying multiplicity of norms. Moreover, the Norm-Drawing Task, for which we provide a ready-made software implementation, offers a new avenue for exploring important societal issues like the perception of minority groups and the dynamics of polarization.
Measuring Norm Multiplicity.
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
This study introduces the Norm-Drawing Task, a novel approach to measure pluralism, or the coexistence of multiple normative beliefs in a given context. By combining established methods, we identify heterogeneous normative beliefs in well-known economic games, challenging the typical assumption of a single prevailing norm. Moreover, we are able to link norm multiplicity to actual behavior. We observe that participants who perceive multiple norms are more tolerant and punish norm violations less frequently and less severely than those who perceive a singular norm. In a second experiment, we show that this effect is causal. Comparing two elicitation protocols that allow participants to report multiple norms versus requiring them to report a single norm, we find that punishment is lower in the former than in the latter: pluralism breeds tolerance. The implications of our study are broad, indicating that societal structures and policy decisions could be influenced by the underlying multiplicity of norms. Moreover, the Norm-Drawing Task, for which we provide a ready-made software implementation, offers a new avenue for exploring important societal issues like the perception of minority groups and the dynamics of polarization.
2026-02-26
Cancelled! Parental Messages and Child Confidence..
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
Unfortunately this seminar is cancelled due to illness of the presenter. This paper studies how parents influence the ego-relevant information children receive about themselves and how this shapes children’s beliefs and behavior. Using a field experiment with 7th-grade Norwegian students and their parents, we show that parents provide their children with messages that are systematically more positive than their private beliefs. Children incorporate these positively biased messages into their self-assessments. The gap between parents’ private beliefs and their communicated messages is larger when the message is received before the child works on a task, suggesting that the desire to motivate the child is one mechanism behind the positive message bias. The study contributes to understanding how the inter-personal transmission of self-relevant information, rather than solely intra-personal cognitive biases, shapes overconfidence.
Cancelled! Parental Messages and Child Confidence..
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
Unfortunately this seminar is cancelled due to illness of the presenter. This paper studies how parents influence the ego-relevant information children receive about themselves and how this shapes children’s beliefs and behavior. Using a field experiment with 7th-grade Norwegian students and their parents, we show that parents provide their children with messages that are systematically more positive than their private beliefs. Children incorporate these positively biased messages into their self-assessments. The gap between parents’ private beliefs and their communicated messages is larger when the message is received before the child works on a task, suggesting that the desire to motivate the child is one mechanism behind the positive message bias. The study contributes to understanding how the inter-personal transmission of self-relevant information, rather than solely intra-personal cognitive biases, shapes overconfidence.
2026-02-19
Interacting Mental Models (joint work with Benjamin Bushong and Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch).
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
People rely on mental models to make predictions, yet these models often differ across individuals—even when based on the same information—contributing to persistent disagreement. In practice, however, individuals rarely form models in isolation: they observe and interact with others’ forecasts. We study whether and how such social exposure reshapes mental models using a controlled rule-learning experiment. Specifically, we ask whether disagreement leads to convergence toward the true model, persistence of heterogeneous beliefs, or coordination on a misspecified model. We further test whether attentional constraints during initial learning limit subsequent model revision due to social learning by varying whether participants can revisit the original data after social interaction. We find that participants learn from others, but that exposure to divergent predictions alone is insufficient to induce substantive model revision.
Interacting Mental Models (joint work with Benjamin Bushong and Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch).
Room: E5.22, 12:00 - 13:00.
People rely on mental models to make predictions, yet these models often differ across individuals—even when based on the same information—contributing to persistent disagreement. In practice, however, individuals rarely form models in isolation: they observe and interact with others’ forecasts. We study whether and how such social exposure reshapes mental models using a controlled rule-learning experiment. Specifically, we ask whether disagreement leads to convergence toward the true model, persistence of heterogeneous beliefs, or coordination on a misspecified model. We further test whether attentional constraints during initial learning limit subsequent model revision due to social learning by varying whether participants can revisit the original data after social interaction. We find that participants learn from others, but that exposure to divergent predictions alone is insufficient to induce substantive model revision.
2026-02-12
Symbolic Policies Cause Economic Harm: Cognitive and Behavioural Responses to Identity-based Exclusion.
Room: E5.22, 12:00-13:00.
Ethnonationalist governments frequently adopt policies that challenge the status of ethnic minorities as equal members of the nation. We propose that such policies – even when purely symbolic – have tangible consequences for the groups they target through a previously understudied channel. Exposure to exclusionary policies may reduce the cognitive bandwidth of individuals belonging to marginalized groups, leading to worse economic decisions. We test this hypothesis in India where the party in power promotes a nationalist ideology that favours Hindus over Muslims. We employ close to 2000 gig workers to complete basic data entry and information processing tasks. We randomize whether workers encounter content that mentions either symbolic or material exclusionary policies, and we give workers the opportunity to select one of two payment contracts. We show that exposure to exclusionary policies increases the probability that treated Muslims choose the “wrong” contract, leading to lower earnings. Even symbolic policies can cause economic harm.
Symbolic Policies Cause Economic Harm: Cognitive and Behavioural Responses to Identity-based Exclusion.
Room: E5.22, 12:00-13:00.
Ethnonationalist governments frequently adopt policies that challenge the status of ethnic minorities as equal members of the nation. We propose that such policies – even when purely symbolic – have tangible consequences for the groups they target through a previously understudied channel. Exposure to exclusionary policies may reduce the cognitive bandwidth of individuals belonging to marginalized groups, leading to worse economic decisions. We test this hypothesis in India where the party in power promotes a nationalist ideology that favours Hindus over Muslims. We employ close to 2000 gig workers to complete basic data entry and information processing tasks. We randomize whether workers encounter content that mentions either symbolic or material exclusionary policies, and we give workers the opportunity to select one of two payment contracts. We show that exposure to exclusionary policies increases the probability that treated Muslims choose the “wrong” contract, leading to lower earnings. Even symbolic policies can cause economic harm.