Inequality not only generates status differentials between rich and poor individuals, it also generates status differentials between groups of different composition and income level. We organise the social structure within which groups are embedded to directly manipulate the processes of...

Preferences over social ranks have emerged as potential drivers of weaker than expected support for redistributive interventions among those closest to the bottom of the income distribution. We compare preferences for alterations of the income distribution affecting the decision maker's social...

Beliefs about others' cooperativeness are among the strongest determinants of cooperative behaviours. Beliefs about different others, however, are not necessarily uniform, nor necessarily related to past behaviours: different expectations about different others might solely originate from...

The transmission of adaptively valuable behaviours requires individuals who are more likely to possess them to have greater influence over others’ actions. The conferment of high status to the fittest is functional to this objective. We ask to what extent status recognition and the...

The causal nexus between socio-economic stressors and anti-immigration sentiments remains unclear despite increasing evidence over their correlation. We exploit the social and economic disruptions brought about by the epidemic outbreak in March 2020 to randomly provide survey respondents with,...

Social trust is a crucial ingredient for successful collective action. What causes social trust to develop, however, remains poorly understood. The quality of political institutions has been proposed as a candidate driver and has been shown to correlate with social trust. We show that this...

This paper investigates whether the COVID-19 crisis has affected the way we vote and think about politics, as well as our broader attitudes and underlying value systems. We fielded large online survey experiments in Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, well into the first wave of the...

We investigate how preferences over both the financing and the provision of redistributive policies are affected by immigration and poverty. We find that information about immigration has a negative impact on demanded redistributive taxation among middle income respondents and a positive one...

We explore cheating behaviours in a die roll task in response to information about tax malpractice in Italy using a survey experiment on a representative sample of the Italian population. We thus generalise laboratory findings on conditional behaviours (cooperation, cheating) to uncover their...