Cases of clear scientific misconduct have received significant media attention recently, but less flagrantly questionable research practices may be more prevalent and, ultimately, more damaging to the academic enterprise. Using an anonymous elicitation format supplemented by incentives for...

People exhibit an "illusion of courage" when predicting their own behavior in embarrassing situations. In three experiments, participants overestimated their own willingness to engage in embarrassing public performances in exchange for money when those performances were psychologically distant:...

Is variety of the spice of life? The present research suggests that the answer depends on the rate of consumption. In three experiments, we find that, whereas a variety of stimuli is preferred to repetition of even a better-liked single stimulus when consumption is continuous, this preference...

People tend to value objects more simply because they own them. Prior research indicates that people underestimate the impact of this endowment effect on both their own and other people’s preferences.We show that underestimating the endowment effect and hence owners’ selling prices can lead...

In 5 studies, the authors examined people's perceptions of the endowment effect, or the tendency to value an object more once one owns it. In the 1st 2 studies, the authors documented egocentric empathy gaps between owners and buyers regarding the endowment effect: Both owners and buyers...

Curiosity has been described as the "wick in the candle of learning" but its underlying mechanisms are not well-understood. We scanned subjects with fMRI while they read trivia questions. The level of curiosity when reading questions is correlated with activity in caudate regions previously...

Principal-agent relationships are typically motivated by efficiency gains from comparative advantage. However, such delegation may also arise because it allows principals the pursuit of selfish outcomes while avoiding explicitly selfish behavior. We report laboratory experiments in which...

Neuroeconomics has further bridged the once disparate fields of economics and psychology. Such convergence is almost exclusively attributable to changes within economics. Neuroeconomics has inspired more change within economics than within psychology because the most important findings in...

Since the advent of the discounted utility (DU) model economists have thought about intertemporal choice in very specific terms. DU assumes that people make explicit tradeoffs between costs and benefits occurring at different points in time. While this explicit tradeoff perspective is simple and...