Heiko Rauhut

• University of Zurich

This study presents findings from a 4-year panel study examining three major questions regarding the measurement of social value orientation (SVO). First, we investigate the test–retest reliability of the Slider Measure (SLM, Murphy et al., 2014) over a period of up to 4 years in a large, demographically diverse sample. Second, we compare the stabi...

While publication bias has been widely documented in the social sciences, it is unclear whether the problem aggravated over the last decades due to an increasing pressure to publish. We provide an in-depth analysis of publication bias over time by creating a unique data set, consisting of 12340 test statistics extracted from 571 papers published in...

Introduction Global challenges like pandemics and climate change are fundamentally cooperation problems, where individual interests often conflict with the collective good. Rising economic inequality and individualism are believed to erode social cohesion and cooperation, exacerbating these tensions. Public goods games (PGGs) are widely used to stu...

The persistent “leaky pipeline”, i.e. women remaining underrepresented in advanced academic roles, often links to the adverse impact of parenthood on women’s careers compared to men’s. This study delves into how the struggle to balance academic success and family life might be pushing female scientists out of academia, and how the less-studied conc...

Background: Substance use disorders (SUD) are associated with severe negative social and health-related outcomes. Evidence accumulates that chronic substance use is associated with alterations in social interaction behavior, which likely contributes to the vicious circle of SUD. However, little is known if these social problems originate from conte...

This article investigates researchers’ publication strategies and how their perceived pressure to publish and to obtain external funding are related to these strategies. The analyses rely on data from the Zurich Survey of Academics (ZSoA), an online survey representative of academics working at higher education institutions in Germany, Austria, and...

Today's modern world is characterized by an increasing shift from human-to-human interaction toward human-computer-interaction (HCI). With the implementation of artificial agents as inspectors, as can be seen in today's airports, supermarkets, or, most recently, within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, our everyday life is progressively shaped...

While it has been stressed repeatedly that academics nowadays have come to face extensive pressure, the extent and distribution of pressure to publish and to secure third-party funding has not been systematically investigated on a large scale. Based on the Zurich Survey of Academics, a representative large-scale web survey among academics working a...

Are upper-class individuals more inclined to violate rules? Using behavioural data, recent studies have challenged the traditional assumption of upper social class members being less rule violating, while other studies find no or opposite effects. We bring together behavioural decision-making games with traditional survey measures in a unique setup...

The mental models that individual scholars have of science communication – how it works, what it is supposed to achieve and so on – shape the way these academics actually communicate to the public. But these mental models, and their prevalence among scholars, have rarely been analysed. Drawing on a large-scale, representative web survey of academic...

While the ontogeny of prosociality during infancy, childhood, and adolescence has received substantial attention over the last decades, little is known about how prosocial preferences develop beyond emerging adulthood. Recent evidence suggests that the previously observed positive association between age and prosocial preferences is less robust tha...

The importance of social norms for sustainable cooperative societies is largely undisputed. Most of this research analyzes situations where norm violators are known and group members enforce cooperation among each other. However, in many situations norm violators are unknown and detection and punishment is enforced by third parties, such as in plag...

This research analyzes the effectiveness of the list experiment and crosswise model in measuring self-plagiarism and data manipulation. Both methods were implemented in a large-scale survey of academics on social norms and academic misconduct. As the results lend little confidence about the effectiveness of the methods, researchers are best advised...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00675-9

The discussion of the social, political and economic consequences of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic mainly revolves around negative effects. This study exploits a unique opportunity and analyses data from a survey (N = 13,316) that happened to be in the field in the months of the development and eventual manifestation of the COVID-19 pan...

Significance How does society maintain the high levels of prosociality in humans, which are so puzzling to explain? Previous laboratory evidence suggests that human social networks play a critical role; however, if and how this role is played out in field settings is not well understood. We demonstrate that intrinsic social preferences, such as fai...

Values—the motivational goals that define what is important to us—guide our decisions and actions every day. Their importance is established in a long line of research investigating their universality across countries and their evolution from childhood to adulthood. In adolescence, value structures are subject to substantial change, as life becomes...

We investigate how the selection process of a leader affects team performance with respect to social learning. We use a laboratory experiment in which an incentivized guessing task is repeated in a star network with the leader at the center. Leader selection is either based on competence, on self-confidence, or made at random. In our setting, teams...

Dieser Beitrag gibt eine Übersicht über den aktuellen Forschungsstand zur Modellierung von Reziprozität und Reputation. Er beginnt mit einer Begriffsklärung. Reziprozität wird als ein gegenseitiger, konditionaler Austausch von Ressourcen definiert. Spezifischere Formen von Reziprozität werden nach der Motivation, dem Adressaten und der Art des Aust...

Norm violations can be contagious. Previous research analyzed two mechanisms of why knowledge about others’ norm violations triggers its spread: (1) Actors lower their subjective beliefs about the probability or severity of punishment, or (2) they condition their compliance on others’ compliance. While earlier field studies could hardly disentangle...

When do more severe punishments not deter crimes and when are stronger incentives for control personnel ineffective to motive control? This contribution shows when incentives for crime control have paradoxical effects. It follows from game theoretical reasoning that the opposed interests between criminals and inspectors lead to strategies where bot...

There is a growing body of research showing that people altruistically enforce cooperation norms in social dilemmas. Most of this research analyzes situations where norm violators are known and group members enforce cooperation among each other. However, in many situations norm violators are unknown and detection and punishment is enforced by third...

Understanding norms is a key challenge in sociology. Nevertheless, there is a lack of dynamical models explaining how one of several possible behaviors is established as a norm and under what conditions. Analysing an agent-based model, we identify interesting parameter dependencies that imply when two behaviors will coexist or when a shared norm wi...

Field experiments have shown that observing other people littering, stealing or lying can trigger own misconduct, leading to a decay of social order. However, a large extent of norm violations goes undetected. Hence, the direction of the dynamics crucially depends on actors' beliefs regarding undetected transgressions. Because undetected transgress...

The median of independent judgments usually outperforms most individual estimates of vaguely known facts. This wisdom-of-crowd phenomenon emerges from largely dispersed individual estimates whose aggregate is typically less biased than the average individual. Since democracy is to aggregate people's diverse preferences and judgments, it is crucial...

Why does the adherence to norms not prevent conflict? While the current literature focuses on the emergence, maintenance and impact of norms with regard to cooperation, the issue of norm-related conflict deserves more attention. We develop a general game theoretical model of "normative conflict" and explain how transaction failures on the macroleve...

While preference-based explanations play an increasing role in economics and sociology, the accurate measurement of social preferences deserves more attention. Most laboratory experiments measure social preferences by studying the division of "a cake that nobody had to bake" (Güth and Kliemt, 2003). This article reports results of the first ultimat...

Policies against crime often focus on more extensive crime control schemes and more severe punishments (Foucault, 1977; Garland, 2001). Examples are the ‘zero tolerance’ policy or the program ‘three strikes and you’re out’ (Cohen, 1985; Dreher and Feltes, 1997; Austin et al., 1999; Zimring, 2001; Hudson, 2002).

What does ‘likely’ mean, when respondents estimate the risk to become a victim of crime? Victimization risks can either be interpreted as gains (“being spared of offences”) or as losses (“becoming a victim of crime”). Because losses are perceived as more severe, respondents will state lower subjective victimization probabilities in the loss-frame,...

Analyzing the data of the wisdom of crowd experiment by Lorenz et al. (1), Farrell (2) points out that information exchange improves individual estimates of answers to factual questions. He furthermore suggests that information exchange increases individual rewards and that this comes with an increase in confidence in their estimates. However, it h...

Social groups can be remarkably smart and knowledgeable when their averaged judgements are compared with the judgements of individuals. Already Galton [Galton F (1907) Nature 75:7] found evidence that the median estimate of a group can be more accurate than estimates of experts. This wisdom of crowd effect was recently supported by examples from st...

Why is it that well-intentioned actions can create persistent conflicts? While norms are widely regarded as a source for cooperation, this article proposes a novel theory in which the emergence of norms can be understood as a bargaining process in which normative conflicts explain the nally emerging norm. The theory is tested with a dynamical exper...

The joint knowledge of many diverse individuals can outperform experts in estimation and decision-making problems. This wisdom of the crowd has been demonstrated in different societal areas such as internet search engines, political elections or stock markets. Recently, psychologists argued that humans may even simulate a diverse society in their o...

Zusammenfassung „Die Präventivwirkung des Nichtwissens“ ist eine Hypothese über die Stabilität des Normensystems, die von Heinrich Popitz (1968) aufgestellt wurde. Die Hypothese schreibt der Dunkelziffer eine normstabilisierende Kraft zu. Würde demnach das tatsächliche Ausmaß von Normabweichungen bekannt, müsste dies das Normensystem schwächen. Bei...

We demonstrate with computational simulation scenarios how social environments and individual behavior coevolve and how fundamentally different macro-effects emerge, when separate micromechanisms are combined. Our framework considers social interactions among agents on a spatial grid or in networks. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, neither imitation of m...

The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences. While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologists rather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suffer from distinct weaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in the measurement of more complex elements, such as the conditionali...

The 19th and 20th centuries produced breakthroughs in physics, chemistry, and the biological sciences. Laboratory research played an important role in the rapid advances made in these fields. Laboratory research can also contribute progress in the social sciences and, in particular, to law and criminology. To make this argument, we begin by discuss...

A large extent of undetected norm violations may have positive effects for society. If many norm violations are hidden, society seems to be in good order so that actors are more willing to comply with the norms themselves. In this sense, ignorance promotes norm compliance. We challenge this view by arguing that in scenarios, in which norms are cont...

We report the first ultimatum game experiment with bargaining over waiting time. The experiment was created to avoid effects of windfall gains. In contrast to donated money, time is not endowed by the experimenter and implies a natural loss to the subjects. This allows for a better measurement of the inherent conflict in the ultimatum game. We impl...

Rational choice theory predicts for higher punishment less crime. However, many field studies could not support this conclusion. A game theoretic approach can explain these puzzling findings because it takes not only criminals' but also control agents' rationality into account. Mixed Nash equilibria predict for higher punishment less control and no...

Während frühere kriminologische Theorien von kategorialen Unterschieden zwischen kriminellen und nicht-kriminellen Personen ausgingen, wird in der Neutralisationstheorie argumentiert, dass die Grenzen zwischen Normalität und Abweichung subtiler seien. Straffällige unterschieden sich vielmehr darin, Rechtfertigungen für ihre Straftaten zu lernen. Mi...

Is it rational to reduce criminal activities if punishments are increased? While intuition might suggest so, game theory concludes differently. From the game theoretical perspective, inspectors anticipate the effect of increased punishments on criminal behavior and reduce their inspection activities accordingly. This implies that higher punishments...

Norms play an important role in establishing social order. The current literature focuses on the emergence, maintenance and impact of norms with regard to coordination and cooperation. However, the issue of norm-related conflict deserves more attention. We develop a general theory of "normative conflict" by differentiating between two different kin...

Zusammenfassung In Feldstudien konnte häufig mittels der Low-Cost Hypothese gezeigt werden, dass normkonformes Verhalten von den dafür aufzuwendenden Kosten abhängt. Doch die Gültigkeit der Low-Cost Hypothese ist bei der Durchsetzung sozialer Normen bislang wenig erforscht. In unserer Studie werden diese kollektiven Güter zweiter Ordnung anhand nac...

Die empirische Wahlforschung in Deutschland hat in der jüngsten Zeit großes Interesse an der engen Verfl echtung zwischen Bundes-und Landespolitik gezeigt. Eine zentrale Frage-stellung hierbei lautet, ob es sich bei Landtagswahlen primär um Bundestestwahlen handelt oder ob vielmehr landes(partei)politische Aspekte die individuellen Wahlpräferenzen...

Was bedeutet ‚wahrscheinlich’ wenn Befragte das Risiko einschätzen, Opfer einer Straftat zu werden? Solche Risiken können einerseits als Gewinne interpretiert und dargestellt werden, indem man hofft, von Straftaten verschont zu bleiben. Andererseits können solche Risiken als Verluste interpretiert werden, indem Respondenten ihre Wahrscheinlichkeit...

Frühere empirische Studien zur Vergewaltigungsmythenakzeptanz und selbstberichteter Vergewaltigungsneigung analysierten vorwiegend heterosexuelle Männer. In solchen Stu-dien steigt die Korrelation zwischen Vergewaltigungsmythenakzeptanz und Vergewalti-gungsneigung, wenn die Mythen vor der Neigung abgefragt werden. Der Grund liegt dar-in, dass die V...

Field studies show that normative behavior depends on the costs of obeying the norm. This effect is known as the low-cost hypothesis. However, does the enforcement of social norms also depend on the costs of enforcing the norm? So far, there has been little research on the validity of the low-cost hypothesis for these so-called "second order collec...

"Die Entstehung sozialer Ordnung setzt die Evolution kooperativen Verhaltens voraus. Inzwischen zeigen vielfältige experimentelle Studien, dass altruistische Sanktionen ein wichtiger Lösungsmechanismus des Kooperationsproblems sein können. Neben diesen häufig betrachteten informellen Sanktionen existiert in modernen Gesellschaften jedoch auch ein f...

Under the right circumstances, groups can be remark-ably intelligent and statistical aggregates of individuals' de-cisions can outperform individual's and expert's decisions. Examples of this wisdom of crowds effect range from mar-kets, auctions, political polls, internet search engines to quiz shows (Galton, 1907; Lorge, Fox, Davitz, & Brenner, 19...

Social norms are known to establish social order and cohesion if actors commonly agree on them. In heterogeneous populations, however, normative conflict may result and social order may collapse. In this article, we show by means of a computational simulation model that homogeneous social norms may even come about in heterogeneous societies consist...

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