Christian T. Elbæk

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• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Aarhus University

Economic dishonesty is a widespread behavior that has substantial implications on organizations and societies. Recent studies suggest that decision making in groups or commitment to other individuals can further increase such dishonesty in contrast to individual decision making. Various interventions have been suggested to curb dishonesty and the m...

Economic dishonesty is a widespread behavior that has substantial implications on organizations and societies. Recent studies suggest that decision making in groups or commitment to other individuals can further increase such dishonesty in contrast to individual decision making. Various interventions have been suggested to curb dishonesty and the m...

This 68-country survey (n = 71,922) examines how people encounter information about science and communicate about it with others, identifies crosscountry differences, and tests the extent to which economic and sociopolitical conditions predict such differences. We find that social media are the most used sources of science information in most count...

This 68-country survey (n = 71,922) examines how people encounter information about science and communicate about it with others, identifies cross-country differences, and tests the extent to which economic and sociopolitical conditions predict such differences. We find that social media are the most used sources of science information in most coun...

Conspiracy beliefs have been linked to perceptions of collective victimhood. We adopt an individual perspective on victimhood by investigating the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and the individual disposition to perceive and react to injustice as a victim (i.e., victim justice sensitivity; VJS). Data from two German samples (Ns = 370, 373)...

Sampling data from organizations and humans associated with those organizations is essential to organizational research. Much of what we know about organizations is based on such work. However, this empirical foundation may be compromised, calling into question the field’s theoretical and empirical findings. Studies often sample data from relativel...

Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists. We interrogated these concerns w...

Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as public health, new technologies or climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science-society nexus acros...

Understanding the factors that influence support for wealth redistribution is essential to address growing economic divides around the world. We propose that perceptions of anomie—the belief that society’s social and political fabric is crumbling—can influence support for redistribution in opposing ways. When people see society as deteriorating, th...

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 ba...

Climate change is currently one of humanity’s greatest threats. To help scholars understand the psychology of climate change, we conducted an online quasi-experimental survey on 59,508 participants from 63 countries (collected between July 2022 and July 2023). In a between-subjects design, we tested 11 interventions designed to promote climate chan...

We tested whether large language models (LLMs) can help predict results from a complex behavioural science experiment. In study 1, we investigated the performance of the widely used LLMs GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in forecasting the empirical findings of a large-scale experimental study of emotions, gender, and social perceptions. We found that GPT-4, but n...

Subjective experiences of resource scarcity can make individuals short-term oriented, capture attention, and trigger feelings of unfairness. However, the impact of scarcity on information processing and ethical decision-making remains poorly understood. This eye-tracking study explored how acute financial scarcity affects selective information sear...

Ethical behavior within groups is shaped by various situational and social factors, including hierarchy and power asymmetries. We present three preregistered studies (Ntotal = 1253) examining the social dynamics that affect ethical decision-making in hierarchical dyads, employing two novel collaborative cheating tasks. In the first two studies, we...

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...

Dishonest behaviors such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex-ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as useful interventions to counteract dishonest behavior, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including...

Economic dishonesty is a widespread behavior that has substantial implications on organizations and societies. Recent studies suggest that decision making in groups or commitment to other individuals can further increase such dishonesty in contrast to individual decision making. Various interventions have been suggested to curb dishonesty and the m...

Economic dishonesty is a widespread behavior that has substantial implications for organizations and societies. Recent studies suggest that decision making in groups or commitment to other individuals can further increase such dishonesty in contrast to individual decision making. Various interventions have been suggested to curb dishonesty, with cl...

Despite being a pivotal aspect of human cooperation, only a few studies within the field of collaborative dishonesty have included communication between participants, and none have yet experimentally compared this to non-communicative contexts. As a result, the impact of communication on unethical collaborations remains unclear. To address this gap...

Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic 1,2. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low pub...

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and a...

Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment may challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science society nexus across different cultural contexts,...

Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public...

Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public...

Effectively reducing climate change requires dramatic, global behavior change. Yet it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an e...

A preregistered meta-analysis, including 244 effect sizes from 85 field audits and 361,645 individual job applications, tested for gender bias in hiring practices in female-stereotypical and gender-balanced as well as male-stereotypical jobs from 1976 to 2020. A “red team” of independent experts was recruited to increase the rigor and robustness of...

The model of ownership psychology as a cognitive adaptation proposes that people flexibly navigate cognitive systems of cooperation and competition, thus enabling them to justify unethical behavior. We discuss how this model captures previous accounts of unethical behavior and propose that a disengagement heuristic can help us understand recent fin...

Large-scale corporate fraud often evolves from the intricate, coordinated actions of several individuals. Despite being a pivotal aspect of human cooperation, only few studies within the field of collaborative dishonesty have included communication between participants, and no studies have yet experimentally compared this to non-communicative conte...

Individuals can experience a lack of economic resources compared to others, which we refer to as subjective experiences of economic scarcity. While such experiences have been shown to shift cognitive focus, attention, and decision-making, their association with human morality remains debated. We conduct a comprehensive investigation of the relation...

This pre-registered work tests the replicability of seven studies covering the most important effects associated with mental accounting across 5,589 participants from 21 countries. Findings support the robustness of the original studies across time and culture, confirming the role of mental accounting as a critical driver of human decision-making.

Experiences of financial scarcity (i.e., perceptions of “having less than needed”) can distort decision-making, capture attention, and make individuals risk-seeking and short-term oriented. However, the influence of scarcity on information acquisition and ethical decision-making remains poorly understood. This eye-tracking study explored how acute...

Subjective experiences of economic resource scarcity, shaped by social comparison, can make individuals risk-seeking and short-term oriented, capture attention, and trigger feelings of unfairness. However, the impact of scarcity on information acquisition and ethical decision-making remains poorly understood. This eye-tracking study explored how ac...

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...

Psychologists, economists, and philosophers have long argued that in environments where deception is normative, moral behavior is harmed. In this article, we show that individuals making decisions within minimally deceptive environments do not behave more dishonestly than in nondeceptive environments. We demonstrate the latter using an example of e...

Over the past decade, governments and organizations around the world have established behavioral insights teams advocating for randomized experiments. However, recent findings by M. N. Meyer et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116, 10723-10728 (2019) and P. R. Heck, C. F. Chabris, D. J. Watts, M. N. Meyer, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 18948...

How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing the accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment...

Leaders are frequently said to shape ethical conduct of subordinates in organizations in a top- down manner. Yet, subordinates may also exert important influence on leaders. Building on research on collaborative corruption and ethical leadership, we present two preregistered studies (N = 874) that examine the social dynamics affecting ethical decis...

Economic inequality is detrimental to modern societies, but support for redistributive policies tends to be low. Recent research has suggested that drawing individuals’ attention towards a group of wealthy individuals (vs. a single wealthy individual) can increase support for redistribution. However, a central prerequisite of such an argument is th...

High economic inequality is detrimental to modern societies, but public support for redistributive policies tends to be low. Recent research by J. Walker et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118 , e2100430118 (2021), has suggested that drawing individuals’ attention to a very wealthy individual (vs. group) lowers support for redistribution by lead...

Design/methodology/approach: We conducted two high-powered field studies (N = 1,312) to test whether salesperson‐customer proximity influences consumers’ purchase behavior and store loyalty. Moreover, we investigated whether the short-term effects on purchase behavior were moderated by the extent to which the consumption context had a clear connect...

How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment on s...

Believing in conspiracy theories is a major problem, especially in the face of a pandemic, as these constitute a significant obstacle to public health policies, like the use of masks and vaccination. Indeed, during the COVID-19 pandemic, several ungrounded explanations regarding the origin of the virus or the effects of vaccinations have been risin...

Though human social interaction in general seems effortless at times, successful engagement in collaborative or exploitative social interaction requires the availability of cognitive resources. Research on Dual-Process suggests that two systems, the affective (non-reflective) and the cognitive (reflective), are responsible for different types of re...

This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching...

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N = 10, 535 participants from 24 countries...

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied ma...

This study investigated whether individuals’ preferences for masculine (vs. feminine) consumption options could be predicted by a biological sex cue (the 2D:4D digit ratio; a biomarker linked to prenatal testosterone exposure), and a psychological gender cue (self-perceived gender identity). Chinese participants (N = 216) indicated their preference...

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 behavior change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public h...

Trust in the era of the pandemic has been a key determining factor of compliance with health protective behaviors and policies. However, little has been evidenced on underlying mechanisms of this relationship, such as national identification. Lack of trust may give rise to xenophobic attitudes, making national identities salient and leading to perc...

Monetary bonus schemes are one of the most well-used forms of employee compensation in the modern business world. Yet, such schemes are primarily constructed as gains to incentivize an increase in work effort and performance. Using insights from behavioral economics, we construct a novel extrinsic compensation system modelled after Loss Aversion an...

Acute hunger leads to self-protective behaviour, where people keep resources to themselves. However, little is known about whether acute hunger influences individuals' inclination to engage in unethical behaviour for direct monetary gains. Past research in moral psychology has found that people are less likely to cheat for monetary than non-monetar...

Psychologists, economists, and philosophers as well as lay people have long argued and intuited that in environments where deception is normative, moral behavior is harmed. After we confirmed this folk intuition, we challenge it and show that individuals making decisions within deceptive environments do not behave more dishonestly than in nondecept...

Psychologists, economists, and philosophers have long argued that in environments where deception is normative, moral behavior is harmed. In this article, we show that individuals making decisions within deceptive environments do not behave more dishonestly than in nondeceptive environments. We demonstrate the latter using an example of experimenta...

Psychologists, economists, and philosophers have long argued that in environments where deception is normative, moral behavior is harmed. In this article, we show that individuals making decisions within minimally deceptive environments do not behave more dishonestly than in nondeceptive environments. We demonstrate the latter using an example of e...

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and str...

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact people worldwide–steadily depleting scarce resources in healthcare. Medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises a much-needed relief but only if the technology gets adopted at scale. The present research investigates people’s intention to adopt medical AI as well as the drivers of this adoption in a repre...

A fundamental characteristic of modern societies is economic inequality, where deprived individuals experience chronic economic scarcity. While such experiences have been shown to produce detrimental outcomes in regards to human judgment and decision-making, the consequences of such scarcity for our morality remain debated. We conduct one of the mo...

Covid-19 har økonomiske indvirkninger på danske virksomheder. Ved hjælp af en spørgeskemaundersøgelse af 237 danske SMV’er fortaget under Covid- 19 kan vi præsentere foreløbig evidens for, at virksomheder, der anvendte flere freelancere, også var dem, som oplevede en højere grad af usikkerhed og koordineringsproblemer som følge af pandemien. Vi arg...

Individuals around the globe experience different forms of material resource scarcity in terms of aspects such as hunger, thirst, or financial strains. As experiences of material scarcity have been found to make individuals more risk-taking, impulsive, and focused on regaining resources in the short-term, a growing body of research has investigated...

Individuals around the globe experience different forms of material resource scarcity in terms of aspects such as hunger, thirst, or financial strains. As experiences of material scarcity have been found to make individuals more risk-taking, impulsive, and focused on regaining resources in the short-term, a growing body of research has investigated...

Beliefs in conspiracy theories are a major problem, especially in the face of a pandemic, as these constitute a significant obstacle to public health policies, like the use of masks and vaccination. Indeed, during the COVID-19 pandemic, several ungrounded explanations regarding the origin of the virus or the effects of vaccinations have been rising...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

Unethical behaviour, such as corruption and fraud, is a massive problem in today’s business world. Research in the fields of business ethics and moral psychology has presented compelling evidence of a series of behavioural concepts that might influence an individual’s propensity to engage in unethical conduct. Yet, it is still unknown how these con...

This study investigated the link between individuals’ 2D:4D digit ratio (a biomarker associated with prenatal testosterone exposure) and their inclination to make masculine food choices. Furthermore, the study investigated whether this potential association would be moderated by consumers’ levels of hunger (vs. satiation). Participants (N = 216; 50...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a devastating global health crisis. Without a vaccine or effective medication, the best hope for mitigating virus transmission is collective behavior change and support for public health interventions (e.g., physical distancing, physical hygiene, and endorsement of health policies). In a large-scale international co...