Screening decisions—choosing a costly action that reveals information about an unknown quality—can be crucial in various situations, such as hiring workers or designing policies. Choosing whether to screen can be difficult because it requires recognizing and trading off the benefits of information with the costs of getting it. We investigate whether people recognize when the benefits of screening dominate its costs and what causes them to choose otherwise. Our online experiment simulates a hiring scenario with an initial trial task. Participants can first reveal candidates’ quality at a small cost and then choose which candidate to hire. Most participants choose the dominated task that does not reveal the candidates’ quality, and this mistake persists even with experience and feedback. We show that this insufficient screening is driven by failures to anticipate inference and plan the full strategy.

Teamwork is prevalent in many forms of production, but individual contributions to team output are often ambiguous. We use a large-scale online experiment with an interactive team task to investigate gender differences in claiming credit for contributions to teamwork with misaligned incentives: Team members have an incentive to exaggerate their contribution, but this harms the other team member. In this setting, we observe that men claim to have contributed more than equally contributing women. Using two further between-subject treatments, we find no evidence that gender differences in altruism or in overconfidence explain the observed gender claim-gap. Further, the gender gap is present only among high contributors, and we show that the gap is particularly pronounced for large claims, which has potentially important consequences for gender equity in labour market outcomes.

We study whether and why the mode of decision-making affects reciprocation in a binary trust game, using three preregistered online experiments. Trustees – some of whom were exogenously induced to be surprised by trust – either decided whether to reciprocate after observing their partner’s choice (hot mode) or committed in advance to a contingent response plan (cold mode). In our Baseline experiment, once participants gained experience, reciprocation became more likely under hot than under cold decision-making, especially when trust was unlikely – consistent with a model in which positive surprise at being trusted increases the utility of reciprocating. Results from the other two experiments show that surprise promotes reciprocation only when trust reflects an intentional choice by the trustor and when cognitive load in the decision environment is not too high.

We evaluated an edutainment intervention to encourage electoral corruption reporting in northern Nigeria via a live broadcast of a popular Hausa-language TV show, which aired October–December 2022, shortly before the February 2023 presidential elections. We incorporated behaviorally informed anticorruption messages into the scripts of the TV drama to encourage its tens of millions of viewers to report instances of electoral corruption. We used a randomized encouragement trial design, sampling over 6,000 participants across northern Nigeria through pre-recorded phone surveys. Watching the show caused a statistically significant increase in the perceived helpfulness and frequency of reporting, but we could not detect changes in knowledge of how to report or reporting behaviors.

We design and conduct a real-effort experiment to jointly estimate present bias and sophistication across effort and monetary domains. Unlike prior work (e.g.,Augenblick and Rabin, 2019; Fedyk, 2024), we do not assume that these parameters are identical across domains. We explain and empirically demonstrate how assuming identical sophistication across money and effort domains can bias the estimates of key parameters. In our online experiment, participants chose to (predicted to) complete 14% (10%) fewer tasks on the same day than on a future day, leading to an estimated present bias ($\beta_e$) over effort of 0.70–0.79, and an estimated sophistication ($\widehat{\beta}_e$) of 0.80–0.88. For money, aggregate present bias ($\beta_m$) is near zero, but there is substantial heterogeneity, with roughly equal numbers of participants exhibiting present bias and future bias. At the individual level, roughly three quarters of all participants correctly anticipate the direction of their bias in both domains, even if not its full magnitude.

This study investigates the emergence of metaphorical meanings in abstract visual symbols within an ‘alien language’ artificial language learning game. Findings reveal that participants extend concrete meanings to abstract meanings based on metaphorical mappings proposed by Conceptual Metaphor Theory, but not consistently across all cases. When multiple salient mappings are possible, participants’ choices exhibit greater variability. Certain mappings, such as SAD IS DOWN and ANGER IS FIRE, are particularly salient and chosen frequently, whereas others, like POWERFUL IS UP, show less consistency. Additionally, some unexpected mappings were observed. While some could be explained via post hoc analysis, others remain unexplained. Experimental manipulations to enhance the salience of metaphorical mappings did not significantly alter participant responses. Overall, results suggest that participants spontaneously engage in semantic and metaphorical meaning extensions, supporting the idea that these cognitive mechanisms underpin polysemy and the conventionalisation of new word senses. Participants make choices for semantic extensions in a motivated manner, with some extensions being based on conceptual metaphorical mappings, and others on other types of salient associative mappings. This study contributes to theories of language evolution that highlight the central role of metaphor in shaping meaning extensions and the cultural emergence of linguistic structure.

The differential susceptibility model suggests that the same children who are more susceptible to peer rejection are also more susceptible to peer acceptance. Testing this within-child assumption, we examined whether a subgroup of children exists who are more reactive to both rejection and acceptance, and whether higher levels of sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) characterize this subgroup. We randomly assigned 455 preadolescents (Mage = 10.86, 49.5% boys) to receive either counterbalanced rejection and acceptance feedback (experimental group) or neutral feedback (control group) from online fictitious peers, and assessed their emotional, self-esteem, attributional, and behavioral responses. Results revealed two subgroups of children showing elevated emotional or self-esteem reactivity to both rejection and acceptance, supporting within-child differential susceptibility. However, SPS did not distinguish these subgroups or moderate children’s responses to peer feedback – suggesting limited support for SPS as a differential susceptibility marker to experimentally manipulated peer acceptance and rejection.

The prevalence of false and misleading news has become an issue of great concern in recent years. Academic researchers, policymakers, and social media firms all continue to seek effective solutions to reduce the sharing of misinformation. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of two policies in particular: competition among media firms and fact-checking of published news articles by independent organizations. We first develop a theoretical model that predicts the effect of each policy and then conduct a behavioral experiment to test those predictions. Our experimental findings indicate that media competition is most effective at nipping misinformation in the bud because media firms spend significantly more resources on improving the accuracy of their news when readers obtain news from multiple sources. We also find that fact-checking improves the overall quality of news available to viewers; however, it does not incentivize firms to improve the accuracy of their own news articles. Last, our results from an interaction treatment suggest that under competition, fact-checking adversely affects firms’ investment in news accuracy.

In welfare states, there is considerable interest in the potential of guaranteed income (GI) experiments to improve the well-being of (marginalised) populations. However, understanding the mechanisms by which GI affects interrelationships between financial well-being, mental health, and crime and under which conditions is limited. This paper addresses these gaps by analysing a Dutch GI experiment involving fourteen forensic psychiatric clients, employing a mixed-methods approach. Using realistic evaluation principles, the study identifies four key mechanisms that contributed to a decrease in recidivism risk: meeting basic needs; alleviating financial scarcity and its psychological repercussions; strengthening social connections; and facilitating social withdrawal. Additionally, contextual factors such as social networks, identity, and life events are explored to explain variations among participants over time. Our analysis illuminates the intricate relationships among livelihood security, health care, and criminal behaviour while exploring the potential for targeted welfare interventions to enhance both individual health outcomes and public safety.

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) help voters make informed choices by aligning their policy preferences with party positions. This study examines whether VAA exposure enhances young citizens’ ideological knowledge – understanding political dimensions and party positions. A randomized experiment (n = 2308) in Belgium (Flanders) tested whether VAA exposure improved young voters’ ability to place a fictional party on the left-right axis. We replicate these effects in an additional observational study (n = 1221) tracking effects of natural VAA exposure during the campaign. We find that VAAs increase ideological knowledge, helping participants more accurately classify a fictional party as left- or right-wing. Exposure to a youth-targeted VAA has particularly strong effects. The impact is greater for politically less sophisticated individuals, suggesting an equalizing effect. These findings indicate that VAAs’ political learning benefits extend further than previously documented, contributing not only to policy-specific knowledge but also to a broader understanding of ideological structures.

Agents frequently engage with multiple principals simultaneously – for example, when borrowing from several banks or peers. In such settings, principals typically possess less information about the agent’s ability or intentions (e.g., to repay a loan) and must rely on trust. This paper presents experimental evidence from trust games framed in a credit market context to examine the role of reciprocity in interactions involving multiple principals (lenders) and a single agent (borrower). Agents were asked to decide whether to act trustworthily and repay, or to default and act selfishly, after receiving the same credit amount from either one or multiple principals. The results show that reciprocity declines when the number of trusting principals increases. A key mechanism appears to be the reduced marginal harm that an agent’s default imposes on each individual principal. Additionally, agents seem less sensitive to the negative consequences of their actions when multiple principals are affected. These findings suggest that interactions involving multiple principals are behaviorally riskier than bilateral ones. The results have implications for the design of incentive structures in multi-principal-agent environments, such as crowdlending platforms.

Peaceful transfers of power are a fundamental principle of democracy. Yet, in times of heightened affective polarisation, election losses may trigger strong negative emotional reactions in partisans, which in turn undermine support for fundamental democratic principles among partisans. We test this idea through two pre-registered survey experiments conducted after the 2022 and 2024 elections in the United States. We randomly assign partisans to receive either a placebo or an emotive reminder about the election that their party lost, containing others’ angry or worried reactions at the election outcome. Contrary to our pre-registered expectations, we do not find evidence that priming negative feelings about electoral loss affects support for political violence or democratic norms. Emotive reminders about salient political events can momentarily turn up the heat on politics, but are not enough to propel partisans to adopt extreme anti-democratic attitudes. By linking the study of emotions to democratic norms, this article contributes to our understanding of when negative emotions (fail to) radicalise partisans.

It is often suggested that one way to reduce affective polarization is to remind citizens of a common in-group identity – such as the national one – to bridge partisan divides. Yet, to our knowledge, such a causal link has only been found in the United States, and even there, it has not been tested by exposure to the most common national symbol: the flag. Thus, we still do not know if such implicit yet ubiquitous reminders of national identity, rather than those that explicitly invoke national pride, are able to reduce affective polarization. In order to fill this research gap, we conducted a survey experiment in Sweden and Denmark in 2023/2024, two countries where national flags are omnipresent yet often ‘unwaved’. Using two versions of subtle flag treatments, our results show that in Sweden, subjects who were primed with a picture of the national flag showed lower levels of affective polarization measured as social distancing, but not in terms of trait stereotyping or party dislike. This effect was not mediated, however, by the strengthening of explicit national identity attitudes, such as national pride. These results suggest that flags need indeed not be explicitly waved in order to work their unifying magic.