Joël Berger

Universität Bern | UniBe · Department of Sociology

Many green products are costlier than their nongreen counterparts, for a variety of reasons. This “green premium” is a key challenge marketers face when targeting consumers with these green products. A potential solution to this issue is provided by signaling theory. According to the theory, green products can have a signaling benefit. This benefit...

Hubris is a tendency of leaders to hold an overly confident view of their own capabilities and to abuse power for their own selfish goals, sometimes with disastrous consequences for organizations. A major reason for hubris is the rigorous selection process leaders typically undergo. This study proposes a governance mechanism used successfully in hi...

Gender differences in choosing to enter competitions are an important cause of the leaky pipeline for women in leadership roles and represent a considerable waste of human resources. We used an incentivized laboratory experiment to evaluate whether the introduction of random elements alters the gender gap in competitiveness. We found that focal ran...

Rapid and comprehensive social change is required to mitigate pressing environmental issues such as climate change. Social tipping interventions have been proposed as a policy tool for creating this kind of change. Social tipping means that a small minority committed to a target behaviour can create a self-reinforcing dynamic, which establishes the...

Social capital, comprising networks, generalized trust, and cooperation norms, is often considered a key factor in promoting prosperity and cooperation. Informal norm enforcement also drives cooperation. While early theories of social capital and norm enforcement propose that networks encourage sanctions, strong reciprocity theory argues that sanct...

The rise of populism has reignited scholarly interest in the paradox of societal advancement leading to frustration and social tension. Globalization and digitalization have increased social opportunities for parts of the population, but a substantial portion of society feels disadvantaged, resulting in discontent. This study, rooted in Boudon's mo...

Many social exchanges produce benefits that would not exist otherwise, but anticipating conflicts about how to distribute these benefits can derail exchange and destroy the gains. Coordination norms can solve this problem by providing a shared understanding of how to distribute benefits, but such norms can also perpetuate group-level inequality. To...

The diffusion of environmentally sustainable consumption patterns is crucial for reaching net carbon neutrality. As a promising policy tool for reaching this goal, scholars have put forward social tipping interventions (SOTIs). “Social tipping” refers to the phenomenon that a small initial change in a parameter of a social system can create abrupt,...

Costly signaling theory provides an explanation for why humans are willing to a pay a premium for conspicuous products such as luxury brand-labeled clothing or conspicuous environmentally friendly cars. According to the theory, the extra cost of such products is a signal of social status and wealth and leads to advantages in social interactions for...

Signaling theory is concerned with situations of strategic interdependence inwhich one actor (the sender) aims at persuading another actor (the receiver) of a fact the receiver does not know or is uncertain about. The unobserved fact can be a quality of the sender the receiver would like to know and act upon. Signaling theory has been used to expla...

A long-standing hypothesis in the sociology of education is that the timing of ability tracking impacts the inequality of educational opportunity. While earlier studies mainly focused on how early tracking impacts the primary effect of social origin (systematic performance differences due to social background), the impact of early tracking on the s...

Numerous laboratory experiments have established peer-sanctioning as an important driver of norm compliance and cooperation in human groups. However, systematic evidence of peer-sanctioning occurring in the field is still rare. Here we present results from a quasi-experimental field study investigating the enforcement of the silence norm in the tra...

In laboratory experiments, people are willing to sanction norms at a cost—a behavioral tendency called altruistic punishment. However, the degree to which these findings can be generalized to real-world interactions is still debated. Only a small number of field experiments have been conducted, and initial results suggest that punishment is less fr...

Verbesserungen in der Opportunitätsstruktur eines sozialen Systems - bei­spielsweise einer Gesellschaft oder einer Firma - können paradoxerweise wachsende Unzufriedenheit hervorrufen. So gingen Aufständen und Revolu­ tionen oft Reformen und eine Erhöhung des allgemeinen Wohlstands voran (Tocqueville-Paradox). In Organisationen kommt esvor, dass die...

An improvement in the availability of opportunities for actors in a social system (e.g. a society or a firm) can coincide with a growing rate of frustrated individuals. For instance, uprisings have repeatedly been preceded by forms of political liberalization that have provided greater opportunities (the so-called Tocqueville paradox). In organizat...

The evolutionary legacy hypothesis proposes that an evolved reciprocity-based psychology affects human behavior in anonymous one-shot interactions when reciprocity is not explicitly possible. Empirical support rests on experiments showing that altruism among adults increases in the presence of stylized eye spots or faces. Such stimuli do not affect...

In their well-known study of social mobility in the army, Stouffer et al. report the paradoxical finding that soldiers in the US Army were more satisfied with promotion opportunities in branches with low upward mobility compared to high-mobility branches. Similar puzzling phenomena have been discussed by classical social scientists such as Tocquevi...

Wenngleich die Bildungsexpansion in Europa nicht zu einem radikalen Abbau schichtspezifischer Bildungsungleichheiten geführt hat, ist doch ein Ergebnis der Entwicklungen der letzten Jahrzehnte unzweifelhaft: Frauen gehören zu den Gewinnerinnen der Bildungsexpansion, denn ihre Bildungsbeteiligung und ihr Bildungsniveau haben stetig zugenommen (Hadja...

Eine grundlegende Frage der Soziologie ist jene nach der Entstehung sozialer Ordnung. Obwohl die Emergenz von Kooperationssystemen unter rationale Egoisten möglich ist, stützen jüngere experimentelle Befunde die klassische soziologische Sichtweise, dass eine internalisierte Reziprozitätsnorm einen Beitrag zur Aufrechterhaltung von Kooperationsbezie...

Eine Kernfrage bildungssoziologischer Debatten ist, inwieweit über die Bildungsexpansion herkunfts- und geschlechtsspezifische Bildungsungleichheiten abgebaut werden konnten. Mit neueren Daten und im Rahmen eines Vergleichs der Entwicklungen in drei verschiedenen Untersuchungsgebieten – in Westdeutschland, Ostdeutschland und der Schweiz – wird unse...

The emergence of social order (e.g. cooperation) is central to sociological thought. Although the creation of a system of cooperation is possible in a group of rational and selfish actors, recent experimental evidence supports the classical sociological view that an internalized norm of reciprocity contributes to the maintenance of social order. Wh...

A key question in current debates in the sociology of education is to what extent educational inequalities with regard to social origin and gender are being reduced by the expansion of educational systems. We explore this question by using a new set of data with which developments in Switzerland, West Germany, and East Germany can be comparatively...