Integrating web applications into popular survey platforms for online experiments.

Research using custom-made web applications is burgeoning as scholars increasingly conduct their experiments online. We show how researchers can integrate their web applications into popular survey software such as Qualtrics in five simple steps and provide the full JavaScript code and screenshots. This procedure allows participants to seamlessly switch from Qualtrics to their web applications without leaving the survey platform.

Preferences for Prevention: People Assume Expensive Problems Have Expensive Solutions.

People support inefficient spending on preventing disasters, and these preferences are translated into inefficient policies as elected officials try to appeal to their constituents. Here, we find preferences for prevention spending are biased by the "cost conflation" mechanism, where people assume expensive problems have expensive solutions. In this article, we present a formal model of collective action, and illustrate how cost conflation causes people to deviate from the equilibria.

Is a Rational Politics of Disaster Possible? Making Useful Decisions for Others in an Experimental Disaster Game.

Unlabelled: Disaster responses are political. But can citizens make useful disaster decisions? Potential obstacles are that such decisions are complex, involve public goods, and often affect other people. Theories of political decision-making disagree on whether these problems can be overcome.

Pay Your Debts: Moral Dilemmas of International Debt.

Unlabelled: Should a government repay its international debts even if this imposes severe hardships on its citizens? Drawing on moral psychology, we investigate when people think a government is morally obligated to pay its debts. Participants read about a government that has to decide whether to default on its debt payments or cut vital programs. Across conditions, we varied the number of jobs at stake and whether a full or partial default is required to save them.

Two-wave panel survey dataset on who feels affected by Hurricane Florence.

Feeling affected by climate change related natural disasters is an important predictor of engaging in climate change mitigation behavior. We therefore collected data to identify who felt affected by Hurricane Florence, which made landfall in the United States on September 14, 2018. In the months before Hurricane Florence, we collected survey responses from a nationally representative sample of United States citizens.

Differentiated responsibilities and prosocial behaviour in climate change mitigation.

A characteristic feature of the global climate change dilemma is interdependence between the underlying economic development that drives anthropogenic climate change-typically modelled as a common pool resource dilemma-and the subsequent dilemma arising from the need to mitigate the negative effects of climate change, often modelled as a public goods dilemma. In other words, in a carbon-based economy, causal responsibility for climate change is a byproduct of economic development, and is therefore endogenous to it. To capture this endogeneity, we combine these two dilemmas into a 'compound climate dilemma' and conduct a series of incentivized experiments in the United States and China to test its implications for cooperation and prosocial behaviour.

Spending too little in hard times.

People's decisions to consume and save resources are critical to their wellbeing. Previous experiments find that people typically spend too much because of how they discount the future. We propose that people's motive to preserve their savings can instead cause them to spend too little in hard times.

Beyond market behavior: Evolved cognition and folk political economic beliefs.

Boyer & Petersen (B&P) lay out a compelling theory for folk-economic beliefs, focusing on beliefs about markets. However, societies also allocate resources through mechanisms involving power and group decision-making (e.g.

Looking Under the Hood of Third-Party Punishment Reveals Design for Personal Benefit.

Third-party intervention, such as when a crowd stops a mugger, is common. Yet it seems irrational because it has real costs but may provide no personal benefits. In a laboratory analogue, the third-party-punishment game, third parties ("punishers") will often spend real money to anonymously punish bad behavior directed at other people.

Group Cooperation without Group Selection: Modest Punishment Can Recruit Much Cooperation.

Humans everywhere cooperate in groups to achieve benefits not attainable by individuals. Individual effort is often not automatically tied to a proportionate share of group benefits. This decoupling allows for free-riding, a strategy that (absent countermeasures) outcompetes cooperation.

Prosocial effects of MDMA: A measure of generosity.

Background: 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) produces "prosocial" effects that contribute to its recreational use. Few studies have examined the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms by which MDMA produces these effects. Here we examined the effect of MDMA on a specific prosocial effect, i.