Publications

Strategic Curiosity : An experimental study on curiosity and dishonesty - joint with Katrine Berg Nødvedt and Joel Berge Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization-January 2024

In this study, we investigate the motives behind additional rolling behavior in a die-rolling task and explore the strategic use of curiosity when participants are tempted to report dishonestly. We conducted a virtual die-rolling experiment with four conditions, manipulating the number of allowed rolls and the type of die used (numbers or symbols) to understand the factors driving participants to roll the die more than once. Our findings reveal that participants tend to roll more when observing lower first-roll outcomes, and this finding holds regardless of whether the die displays numbers or random symbols. Dishonest participants tend to stop rolling at the highest possible outcome, indicating a pattern of strategic curiosity. However, we find no variation in dishonesty across treatments, suggesting dishonest individuals self-select into rolling more and search for higher numbers to support their dishonest reports. Therefore, our study offers mixed support for the justified ethicality theory and sheds light on the motivations underlying additional rolling behavior, contributing to a better understanding of the factors that drive strategic information acquisition.

See our paper here

Some results we could not fit in the paper are here

Crowdsourced projects

Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs joint with Christoph Huber and others PNAS-May 2023

Social and moral psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries Joint with Flavio Azavedo and others Nature Scientific Data-May 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public health behaviour, we present a dataset comprising of 51,404 individuals from 69 countries. This dataset was collected for the International Collaboration on Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 project (ICSMP COVID-19). This social science survey invited participants around the world to complete a series of moral and psychological measures and public health attitudes about COVID-19 during an early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (between April and June 2020). The survey included seven broad categories of questions: COVID-19 beliefs and compliance behaviours; identity and social attitudes; ideology; health and well-being; moral beliefs and motivation; personality traits; and demographic variables. We report both raw and cleaned data, along with all survey materials, data visualisations, and psychometric evaluations of key variables.

See an overview of the dataset here: https://icsmp.shinyapps.io/icsmp_covid19/

National identity Predicts Public Health Support During a Global Pandemic - joint with Jay van Bavel and others Nature Communications- January 2022

The goal of this collaboration is to bring together scholars from around the globe to examine psychological factors underlying the attitudes and behavioral intentions related to Covid-19. To date, data from over 44.000 citizens in 67 countries are collected. Paper and Project Website

Work in Progress

Information Avoidance in Reciprocal Decisions

In this paper, I document findings that show people may choose to avoid information about the consequences of a decision when it can signal an undesired characteristics like being selfish or betraying someone’s trust. There is a clear pattern of behavior when avoiding information: people who make selfish decisions are more likely to avoid information. This behavior is observed even when the decision is already made and the information cannot change the outcome, particularly when information can show that the decision caused a loss for someone else. This paper contributes to the behavioral and experimental research on information preferences and moral decisions by documenting that decisions may not only be motivated by the desire for certain outcomes but also desire to be regarded as a good person by oneself.

Self-Image Considerations in the Provision of Helpful Feedback - joint with Stefan Meißner

Targeted Paternalism - joint with Alexander Cappelen, Eleonora Freddi and Bertil Tungodden

Information Avoidance and Privacy - joint with Eleonora Freddi and Ole Christian Wasenden