Political polarization has ruptured the fabric of U.S. society. I quantify this phenomenon through the use of 5 pre-registered studies, comprising 15 behavioral experiments and a diverse set of over 8,600 participants. The focus of this paper is to examine various behavioral-, belief-, and...

This paper uses a novel experimental design to study the contagion of pro- and anti-social behavior and the role of social proximity among peers. Across systematic variations thereof, we find that anti-social behavior is generally more contagious than pro-social behavior. Surprisingly, we also...

This paper analyzes the impact of migration on destination-country corruption levels. Capitalizing on a comprehensive dataset consisting of annual immigration stocks of OECD countries from 207 countries of origin for the period 1984 - 2008, we explore different channels through which corruption...

The enforcement of social norms is the fabric of a functioning society. Through the lens of mul-tiple studies using different methodologies (a behavioral experiment and a vignette experiment in Study 1, as well as a norm elicitation experiment in Study 2), we examine how motives for lying and...

Does U.S. military aid make the United States safer? To answer this question, we collect data on 173 countries between 1968 and 2014. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the global patterns of U.S. military aid, our paper is the first to provide causal estimates of the effect of U.S. military...

We examine framing effects in nudging honesty, in the spirit of the growing norm-nudge literature, by utilizing a high-powered and pre-registered study. Across four treatments, participants received one random truthful norm-nudge that emphasized ‘moral suasion’ based on either what other...

We experimentally investigate whether individuals strategically distort their beliefs about dominant norms. Embedded in the context of lying, we systematically vary both the nature of elicited beliefs (descriptive about what others do, or normative about what others approve of) and whether...

Both theory and recent empirical evidence on nudging suggest that observability of behavior acts as an instrument for promoting (discouraging) pro-social (anti-social) behavior. We connect three streams of literature (nudging, social preferences, and social norms) to investigate the universality...

We study how an individual‘s compliance with social norms is inuenced by other actors‘ norm compliance. In a repeated non-strategic Take-or-Give donation experiment we show that giving is considered socially appropriate while taking is socially inappropriate. Observing norm violations erodes...

We investigate the effect of U.S. military aid and U.S. troop deployments on anti-American terrorism, using a sample of 106 countries between 1986 and 2011. We find that greater military commitment leads to more anti-American terrorism. We study the underlying mechanisms using a mediation...