Arvid Erlandsson

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Verified

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• Ph.D
• Senior Associate Professor at Linköping University

Sustainable financial investments play a role in mitigating climate change. With this research, we explored how decision-makers use three investment strategies illustrating different primary motives: (1) money maximization (economic self-interest), (2) exclusion (not personally harming the environment), and (3) inclusion (helping the environment mo...

This research demonstrates that people distance themselves not just from out-group partisans or policies but also from completely neutral and apolitical consumer products that have been “contaminated” simply by being preferred by the political out-group. Using large representative samples of Swedish adults, we investigated how aesthetic judgments o...

This theoretical article summarizes the various psychological and motivational processes that underlie prosocial decision-making. To this aim, we propose a novel way to organize and synthesize research related to emotions, thoughts, and beliefs (i.e., psychological mechanisms) that motivate or demotivate human prosociality. This is done with a new...

This article revisits and further investigates the extent to which scope insensitivity in helping contexts can be reduced by the unit asking (UA) method. UA is an intervention that first asks people to help one unit and then asks for willingness to help multiple units. In 3 studies ( N = 3,442), participants took on the role of policymakers to allo...

This research investigated whether belief in truth relativism yields higher receptivity to misinformation. Two studies with representative samples from Sweden (Study 1, N = 1005) and the UK (Study 2, N = 417) disentangled two forms of truth relativism: subjectivism (truth is relative to subjective intuitions) and cultural relativism (truth is relat...

People often choose the option that is better on the most subjectively prominent attribute-the prominence effect. We studied the effect of prominence in health care priority setting and hypothesized that values related to health would trump values related to costs in treatment choices, even when individuals themselves evaluated different treatment...

Did the outbreak of COVID‐19 influence spontaneous donation behavior? To investigate this, we conducted a natural experiment on real donation data. We analyzed the absolute amount, and the proportion of total payments, donated by individuals to charitable organizations via Swish—a widely used mobile online payment application through which most Swe...

This study investigated ideological belief bias, and whether this effect is moderated by analytical thinking. A Swedish nationally representative sample (N = 1005) evaluated non-political and political syllogisms and were asked whether the conclusions followed logically from the premises. The correct response in the political syllogisms was aligned...

Charitable giving, volunteering, climate-friendly choices, and most recently changing one’s lifestyle to stop the spread of the coronavirus are all examples of prosocial behavior. Prosociality can be investigated from different perspectives including the “who-question” (which people are more likely to help), and the “when-question” (which situation...

Are people motivated to feel that clothes worn by members of their political ingroup (outgroup) are more (less) beautiful and valuable? Building on research on politically motivated judgments, affective polarization, and social distancing, this study investigated how aesthetic judgments about the design and color of clothes, and willingness to pay...

Helping dilemmas occur when it is impossible to help everyone in need, and when one must decide how to allocate resources across multiple beneficiaries. Deciding which patient that should be connected to the only available respirator, or deciding which charitable organization to donate to, are both examples of real-life helping dilemmas. This paper...

In ten studies (N = 9187), I systematically investigated the direction and size of seven helping effects (the identifiable-victim effect, proportion dominance effect, ingroup effect, existence effect, innocence effect, age effect and gender effect). All effects were tested in three decision modes (separate evaluation, joint evaluation and forced ch...

Both theory on motivational crowding and recent empirical evidence suggest that nudging may sometimes backfire and actually crowd out prosocial behavior, due to decreased intrinsic motivation and warm glow. In this study, we tested this claim by investigating the effects of three types of nudges (default nudge, social norm nudge, and moral nudge) o...

Knowing the descriptive norm concerning others' prosociality could affect your behavior, but would you seek out or avoid such knowledge? This high‐powered preregistered experiment explores the effect of both forced and optionally revealed descriptive norms on real monetary donations. These norms were established by learning the proportion of previo...

Helping dilemmas occur when it is impossible to help everyone in need, and when one must decide how to allocate resources across multiple beneficiaries. Deciding which patient that should be connected to the only available respirator, or deciding which charitable organization to donate to, are both examples of real-life helping dilemmas. This paper...

Impression of helpers can vary as a function of the magnitude of helping (amount of help) and of situational and motivational aspects (type of help). Over three studies conducted in Sweden and the US, we manipulated both the amount and the type of help in ten diverse vignettes and measured participants’ impressions of the described helpers. Impress...

This paper asks whether moral preferences in eight medical dilemmas change as a function of how preferences are expressed, and how people choose when they are faced with two equally attractive help projects. In two large-scale studies, participants first read dilemmas where they "matched" two suggested helping projects (which varied on a single att...

To be able to implement nudges in an effective and ethically defensible manner, it is important to understand why some persons find nudges objectionable. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we investigated the moral roots of attitudes to pro-self nudges (which benefit the agent) and pro-social nudges (which benefit society). This registered report...

People may act differently in public environments due to actual reputation concerns, or due to the mere presence of others. Unlike previous studies on the influence of observability on prosocial behavior we control for the latter while manipulating the former, i.e. we control for implicit reputation concerns while manipulating explicit. We show tha...

Moral foundations theory proposes that intuitions about what is morally right or wrong rest upon a set of universal foundations. Although this theory has generated a recent surge of research, few studies have investigated the real‐world moral consequences of the postulated moral intuitions. We show that they are predictably associated with an impor...

This research investigated the congruence between the ideologies of political parties and the ideological preferences (N = 1515), moral intuitions (N = 1048), and political values and worldviews (N = 1345) of diverse samples of Swedish adults who voted or intended to vote for the parties. Logistic regression analyses yielded support for a series of...

This research investigated the congruence between the ideologies of political parties and the ideological preferences (N = 1515), moral intuitions (N = 1048), and political values and worldviews (N = 1345) of diverse samples of Swedish adults who voted or intended to vote for the parties. Logistic regression analyses yielded support for a series of...

Do people consider alternative uses of money (i.e., opportunity cost) when asked to donate to a charitable cause? To answer this question, we examined the effect of providing versus not providing participants with an opportunity cost reminder when they are asked to donate money to causes with identified and non-identified victims. The results of tw...

Nudges are increasingly being proposed and used as a policy tool around the world. The success of nudges depends on public acceptance. However, several questions about what makes a nudge acceptable remain unanswered. In this paper, we examine whether policy alternatives to nudges influence the public's acceptance of these nudges: Do attitudes chang...

This research systematically mapped the relationship between political ideology and receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit— that is, obscure sentences constructed to impress others rather than convey truth. Among Swedish adults (N = 985), bullshit receptivity was (a) robustly positively associated with socially conservative (vs. liberal) self-plac...

This article investigates how donation behavior to charitable organizations and helping intentions toward begging European Union (EU)-migrants are related. This question was tested by analyzing survey responses from 1,050 participants sampled from the general Swedish population. Although the overall results suggested that donations to charitable or...

Do differences in worldview ideology hinder people from objectively interpreting the effect of immigration? In an experiment with Swedish adults ( n = 1015), we investigate whether people display motivated reasoning when interpreting numerical information about the effects of refugee intake on crime rate. Our results show clear evidence of motivate...

Statistical information such as death risk estimates is frequently used for illustrating the magnitude of a problem. Such mortality statistics are however easier to evaluate if presented next to an earlier estimate, as the two data points together will illustrate an upward or downward change. How are people influenced by such changes? In seven expe...

Bullshit-sensitivity is the ability to distinguish pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (e.g. “Your movement transforms universal observations”) from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new”). Although bullshit-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet...

English translation and Swedish original of the full survey. (DOCX)

Key for understanding variables in dataset. (DOCX)

Raw data in .csv format. (XLS)

Summary of each section included in the survey (see S2 File for an English translation of the full survey). (DOCX)

Appendix A: Structural Equation Modelling. (DOCX)

Moral foundations theory proposes that intuitions about what is morally right or wrong rest upon at least five universal foundations. Despite generating a recent upsurge of research, a crucial issue has remained unsettled: Do the posited moral foundations have real-world moral consequences? We show that they are predictably associated with a major...

This article tries to clarify whether negative charity appeals (i.e., advertisements emphasizing the bad consequences of not helping) or positive charity appeals (i.e., advertisements emphasizing the good consequences of helping) are more effective. Previous literature does not provide a single answer to this question and we suggest that one contri...

In “Empathy and its discontents” Bloom (2017: see also Bloom, 2016) argues that we should abandon empathy as a moral compass in favor of compassion. Bloom’s central premise is that empathy is narro ...

How do donors reason and justify their choices when faced with dilemmas in a charitable context? In two studies, Swedish students were confronted with helping dilemmas based on the identifiable victim effect, the proportion dominance effect and the ingroup effect. Each dilemma consisted of two comparable charity projects and participants were asked...

Significance We cannot assume that the statistics of mass human crises will capture our attention or move us to take action, no matter how large the numbers. The data that we present show that the world was basically asleep as the body count in the Syrian war rose steadily into the hundreds of thousands. The iconic image of a young Syrian child, ly...

Including the same data as the published article: Erlandsson, A., Björklund, F., & Bäckström, M. (2017). Choice-justifications after allocating resources in helping dilemmas. Judgment and Decision Making, 12(1), 60-80.

One important motivation for people behaving prosocially is that they want to avoid negative and obtain positive emotions. In the prosocial behavior literature however, the motivations to avoid negative emotions (e.g., guilt) and to approach positive emotions (e.g., warm glow) are rarely separated, and sometimes even aggregated into a single mood-m...

We extend past research on the congruency between moral foundations and morally relevant outcomes to ingroup- and outgroup-focused charitable giving. We measured intentions to donate to outgroup members (begging EU-migrants) and self-reported donations to ingroup (medical research) and outgroup (international aid) charity organizations in a heterog...

It is known that both the characteristics of the victims one can help and the existence of victims one cannot help influence economic helping decisions in suboptimal ways. The aim of this study was to systematically test if these two aspects interact with each other. In Studies 1 and 2, we created hypothetical charity appeals related to the Syrian...

Research has demonstrated that two types of affect have an influence on judgment and decision making: incidental affect (affect unrelated to a judgment or decision such as a mood) and integral affect (affect that is part of the perceiver’s internal representation of the option or target under consideration). So far, these two lines of research have...

Figure 1. Number of participants induced with emotional or calculating mindset intending to donate something to charity in Study 1a. We induced people with either an emotional or a calculative mindset in an ostensibly unrelated study. We then asked them to make a helping decision. The decision was either about their intention to donate to charity (...

Although Moral Foundations Theory claims that the foundations of morality are universal, there are still few studies addressing it through non-English measures. In the current research, 540 persons filled out a Swedish translation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, and 332 of them filled out political attitude measures. Confirmatory factor ana...

This study investigated possible mediators of the identifiable victim effect (IVE), the proportion dominance effect (PDE), and the in-group effect (IGE) in helping situations. In Studies 1-3, participants rated their emotional reactions (distress and sympathy toward the victims), perceived impact of helping, perceived responsibility to help, and he...

The proportion dominance effect (PDE) refers to a higher motivation to help when the victims are part of a small (you can help 56 out of 60) rather than a large (you can help 56 out of 560) reference group. In two studies using different experimental paradigms, we investigated possible mediators of the PDE. Study 1 (N = 168) was conducted in three...

237 Japanese university-students read nine moral stories based on three moral aspects (absolute rules, absolute loyalty and retributive punishment) and rated which of two endings (one typically consequentialistic and one typically non-consequentialistic) they believed to be morally preferable. Participants also rated themselves on several personali...

The aim was to determine whether the relationship between personality traits and Subjective Well-Being (SWB) differs when the affective component of SWB is measured in terms of frequency or intensity. Extraversion and Neuroticism were expected to show significant but different associations to SWB depending on the dimension of the affective componen...

The present study investigated the relation between reaction to negative stimuli and memory for stimuli. The relation was further investigated using as a framework individuals’ affective temperaments (AFTs). Eighty adolescents participated in the study. The AFTs are based on selfreported affect and categorizes individuals in four temperaments: self...