Effectiveness of ex ante honesty oaths in reducing dishonesty depends on content.

Dishonest behaviours such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex ante honesty oaths-commitments to honesty before action-have been proposed as interventions to counteract dishonest behaviour, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a baseline oath)-proposed, evaluated and selected by 44 expert researchers-and a no-oath condition in a megastudy involving 21,506 UK and US participants from Prolific.

Children Sustain Cooperation in a Threshold Public-Goods Game Even When Seeing Others' Outcomes.

Many societal challenges are threshold dilemmas requiring people to cooperate to reach a threshold before group benefits can be reaped. Yet receiving feedback about others' outcomes relative to one's own () can undermine cooperation by focusing group members' attention on outperforming each other. We investigated the impact of relative feedback compared to (only seeing one's own outcome) on cooperation in children from Germany and India (6- to 10-year-olds, = 240).

Cheating and the effect of promises in Indian and German children.

Cheating is harmful to others and society at large. Promises have been shown to increase honesty in children, but their effectiveness has not been compared between different cultural contexts. In a study (2019) with 7- to 12-year-olds (N = 406, 48% female, middle-class), voluntary promises reduced cheating in Indian, but not in German children.

Heterogeneity of rules in Bayesian reasoning: A toolbox analysis.

How do people infer the Bayesian posterior probability from stated base rate, hit rate, and false alarm rate? This question is not only of theoretical relevance but also of practical relevance in medical and legal settings. We test two competing theoretical views: single-process theories versus toolbox theories. Single-process theories assume that a single process explains people's inferences and have indeed been observed to fit people's inferences well.

Promises on the go: A field study on keeping one's word.

Promises are voluntary commitments to perform a future action and are often thought to be powerful levers for behavioral change. Here we studied the effectiveness of promises in two preregistered, incentivized field experiments with German students ( = 406) on the premises of a cafeteria. In Experiment 1, the majority of participants (63%) kept their promise to pay back at least half of a € 4-endowment, even though there was no foreseeable cost of breaking the promise, reputational or otherwise.

Forecasting Postoperative Delirium in Older Adult Patients with Fast-and-Frugal Decision Trees.

Postoperative delirium (POD) is associated with increased complication and mortality rates, particularly among older adult patients. However, guideline recommendations for POD detection and management are poorly implemented. Fast-and-frugal trees (FFTrees), which are simple prediction algorithms, may be useful in this context.

The transmission game: Testing behavioral interventions in a pandemic-like simulation.

During pandemics, effective nonpharmaceutical interventions encourage people to adjust their behavior in fast-changing environments in which exponential dynamics aggravate the conflict between the individual benefits of risk-taking and its social costs. Policy-makers need to know which interventions are most likely to promote socially advantageous behaviors. We designed a tool for initial evaluations of the effectiveness of large-scale interventions, the transmission game framework, which integrates simulations of outbreak dynamics into large-group experiments with monetary stakes.

Age differences in deliberate ignorance.

People sometimes choose to remain ignorant, even when information comes at low marginal costs and promises high utility. To investigate whether older adults enlist deliberate ignorance more than younger adults, potentially as an emotion-regulation tool, we presented a representative sample of 1,910 residents of Germany with 13 scenarios in which knowledge could result in substantial gains or losses. The strongest correlate of deliberate ignorance was indeed age.

Mental health and the wish to have a child: a longitudinal, cross-cultural comparison between Germany and China.

Background: The desire to have children has been declining globally, especially in industrialized nations. This study examines the physical health correlates, and positive and negative mental health correlates of the wish to have a child across time and in two countries.

Method: Questionnaire data were obtained from large-scale university samples of 12,574 participants in Germany and China.

Genesis or Evolution of Gender Differences? Worldview-Based Dilemmas in The Processing of Scientific Information.

Some issues that have been settled by the scientific community, such as evolution, the effectiveness of vaccinations, and the role of CO emissions in climate change, continue to be rejected by segments of the public. This rejection is typically driven by people's worldviews, and to date most research has found that conservatives are uniformly more likely to reject scientific findings than liberals across a number of domains. We report a large (N > 1,000) preregistered study that addresses two questions: First, can we find science denial on the left? Endorsement of pseudoscientific complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) has been anecdotally cited as being more consonant with liberals than conservatives.

Upon Repeated Reflection: Consequences of Frequent Exposure to the Cognitive Reflection Test for Mechanical Turk Participants.

Participants from public participant panels, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, are shared across many labs and participate in many studies during their panel tenure. Here, I demonstrate direct and indirect downstream consequences of frequent exposure in three studies ( = 3, 660), focusing on the cognitive reflection test (CRT), one of the most frequently used cognitive measures in online research. Study 1 explored several variants of the signature bat-and-ball item in samples recruited from Mechanical Turk.

Most People Keep Their Word Rather Than Their Money.

Promises are crucial for human cooperation because they allow people to enter into voluntary commitments about future behavior. Here we present a novel, fully incentivized paradigm to measure voluntary and costly promise-keeping in the absence of external sanctions. We found across three studies ( = 4,453) that the majority of participants (61%-98%) kept their promises to pay back a specified amount of a monetary endowment, and most justified their decisions by referring to obligations and norms.

Social contact patterns can buffer costs of forgetting in the evolution of cooperation.

Analyses of the evolution of cooperation often rely on two simplifying assumptions: (i) individuals interact equally frequently with all social network members and (ii) they accurately remember each partner's past cooperation or defection. Here, we examine how more realistic, skewed patterns of contact-in which individuals interact primarily with only a subset of their network's members-influence cooperation. In addition, we test whether skewed contact patterns can counteract the decrease in cooperation caused by memory errors (i.

Description and experience: How experimental investors learn about booms and busts affects their financial risk taking.

A few years ago, the world experienced the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. According to the depression baby hypothesis, people who live through such macroeconomic shocks take less financial risk in their future lives (e.g.

Correlates of diagnostic accuracy in patients with nonspecific complaints.

Objective: To investigate diagnostic accuracy in patient histories involving nonspecific complaints and the extent to which characteristics of physicians and structural properties of patient histories are associated with accuracy.

Methods: Six histories of patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) with nonspecific complaints were provided to 112 physicians: 36 ED physicians, 50 internists, and 26 family practitioners. Physicians listed the 3 most likely diagnoses for each history and indicated which cue(s) they considered crucial.

Introducing MASC: a movie for the assessment of social cognition.

In the present study we introduce a sensitive video-based test for the evaluation of subtle mindreading difficulties: the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC). This new mindreading tool involves watching a short film and answering questions referring to the actors' mental states. A group of adults with Asperger syndrome (n = 19) and well-matched control subjects (n = 20) were administered the MASC and three other mindreading tools as part of a broader neuropsychological testing session.