Standard social choice experiments generally force subjects to make decisions about giving money to another person, but the ability to avoid information outside of the lab could lead to less altruistic or fair behavior than such experiments tend to suggest. I expand on the design of Dana, Weber,...

Individual competitiveness is a personality trait of high importance. While substantial differences between individuals have been documented, the sources of this heterogeneity are not well understood. To contribute to this issue we conduct an incentivized field study with pre-school children. We...

Previous work on the Dunning–Kruger effect has shown that poor performers often show little insight into the shortcomings in their performance, presumably because they suffer a double curse. Deficits in their knowledge prevent them from both producing correct responses and recognizing that the...

We develop a game-theoretical model of honesty and fairness to study cooperation in social dilemma games with communication. It is based on two key intuitions. First, players suffer a utility cost if they break norms of honesty and fairness, and this cost is highest if most others comply with...

Individuals in a social dilemma may experience a self-control conflict between urges to act selfishly and their better judgment to cooperate. Pairing a public goods game with a subtle framing technique, we test whether perception of self-control conflict strengthens the association between...

This paper provides evidence from a field experiment on the effect of psychological pressure in competitive environments. In our experiment, we analyze a setup of sequential tournaments, in which participants are matched in pairs and experience a kind of pressure that, as in most real world...

Many people judge that it is permissible to harm one person in order to save many in some circumstances but not in others: it matters how the harm comes about. Researchers have used trolley problems to investigate this phenomenon, eliciting moral judgments or behavioral predictions about...

Experiments show that people give money away to other people, even when contributions are anonymous. These findings contradict the common economic assumption that people maximize their own payoffs. Here we take the approach that human altruism is shaped by a set of cognitive models for distinct...

We conduct two simple experiments in which student participants are invited to give some of the money that they have earned to an international development charity for use in one of two African countries. In the between-groups experiment, participants are given the opportunity to donate to one...

We investigate how cross-cutting ethnic and religious identities as well as the strength of individual religiosity and fundamentalism affect individual cooperation. In a repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiment, information about subjects’ religious and ethnic identities was either revealed or...