Marcel Zeelenberg

• PhD, University of Amsterdam, 1996
• Tilburg University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Greed is the insatiable desire for more. Greed research has mainly focused on economic decisions, and little is known about greed in the realm of social relationships, despite these being essential to people’s well-being. We explored in four studies how dispositional greed is associated with various aspects of social relationships. We analyzed surv...

Dispositional greed is characterized as the insatiable desire for more. Although greed may be a driving force for wealth accumulation, it can also relate to increased financial difficulties and risk-taking. Across two studies in different countries, The Netherlands (Study 1, N = 1,118) and England, Study 2, N = 4,855), we tested the degree to which...

Tax morale, commonly measured as a moral evaluation of cheating on taxes, is important for shaping policy to increase voluntary compliance. Although tax morale is commonly understood as citizens' moral responsibility to pay taxes, there is a dearth of empirical research on whether and how differences in basic morality shape tax morale. Three studie...

Greed combines dissatisfaction with one’s current state of affairs with an unsatisfiable desire for more. It motivates people to acquire more and has many societal implications. Various scholars have argued that greed is associated with, or even equated to the motive of self-interest. And hence, they have also argued that greed is associated negati...

Financial policymakers increasingly rely on behavioural insights to protect the interests of consumers. However, little is known about how citizens feel about interventions designed to nudge their financial behaviour. Most literature on the acceptability of behavioural interventions focuses on the health domain. To address this gap, we present the...

Greed is best defined as the “experience of desiring to acquire more and the dissatisfaction of never having enough” (Seuntjens, Zeelenberg, Breugelmans, & Van De Ven, 2015, p. 518). The Dispositional Greed Scale (Seuntjens, Zeelenberg, Van De Ven, & Breugelmans, 2015) is most often used to measure greed and has been validated for various languages...

Purpose Understanding consumer brand relationships from the perspective of the consumer has been a research topic for years. Despite this, there are still various ways in which the construct is interpreted. This paper aims to identify the most typical interpretation of brand relationships by consumers. Design/methodology/approach A four-study prot...

This study investigates the relationship between the motive of greed and various asset market indicators, such as trading activity and bubble formation (i.e., mispricing, overpric-ing, and price amplitude). We ran experimental asset markets that allowed us to measure individuals' greed in order to create markets populated with greedy individuals an...

Recent literature on taxation suggests that a “service and client” approach by the authorities is required in order to establish a synergistic tax climate between taxpayers and tax offices and thus enhance voluntary tax compliance. The present study investigates whether lay people’s conceptions about taxation reflect such a synergistic (vs. an antago...

Whereas previous research has often struggled to disentangle the behavioral effects of gratitude and indebtedness felt in response to favors received by individuals, the present article clearly manifests their unique functions by investigating what happens if not just the individual but also their romantic partner is involved in a mutual exchange o...

Do people share their feelings of guilt with others and, if so, what are the reasons for doing this or not doing this? Even though the social sharing of negative emotional experiences, such as regret, has been extensively studied, not much is known about whether people share feelings of guilt and why. We report three studies exploring these questio...

The present study investigates the relation of procedural transparency and compliance with authorities’ regulations. The underlying assumption is that procedural transparency encourages compliance with regulations. In an incentivized experiment, 666 participants took on the role of a business owner and had to fill in a form and spend a certain amou...

Background Smoking is the leading behavioral risk factor for the loss of healthy life years. Many smokers want to quit, but have trouble doing so. Financial incentives in workplace settings have shown promising results in supporting smokers and their design influences their impact. Lotteries that leverage behavioral economic insights might improve...

This article examines how product attractiveness in interaction with decision-making style influences purchase intentions. Participants in four different conditions rated their likelihood of buying an experiential product, showing that when using an emotional decision-making style condition, they have higher purchase intentions for the high attract...

What is greed good for? Greed is ubiquitous, suggesting that it must have some benefits, but it is also often condemned. In a representative sample of the Dutch population (N = 2,367, 51.3% female, Mage = 54.06, SD = 17.90), we examined two questions. First, inspired by Eriksson et al., we studied whether greedy people generate more personal and ho...

Investors are often inclined to keep losing stocks too long, despite this being irrational. This phenomenon is part of the disposition effect (“people ride losers too long, and sell winners too soon”). The current research examines the role of hope as a potential explanation of why people ride losers too long. Three correlational studies (1A, 1B, a...

The current work estimated the relative importance of joke and audience characteristics for the occurrence of amusement. Much psychological research has focused on stimulus characteristics when searching for sources of funniness. Some researchers have instead highlighted the importance of perceiver characteristics, such as dispositional cheerfulnes...

Greed is often regarded as a negative trait that impedes prosocial behavior in adults. Yet, relatively little is known about the development of greed and its effects on children. We examine the effect of dispositional greed on sharing behavior in 4-to-6-year-olds. In addition, we identified potential factors associated with child greed, including c...

Regret is an important emotion in the context of decision-making and has many implications for individuals. Most of the previous research focused on contexts in which regret is more likely, while fewer studies examined for whom bad decisions are more likely to elicit regret. In this article, we examine the effect of one such individual difference –...

We investigate varieties of dissatisfaction by examining how the similar, yet distinct emotions of regret, disappointment, and anger are related to electoral behavior. In a 2-wave longitudinal study conducted around the UK General Election of 2017 (N₁ = 817, N₂ = 768), we measured these emotions in response to 3 levels of electoral decision-making...

Emotions, like regret, have been heralded as instruments of self-regulation, by instigating reflection, learning and feedback for betterment and thus increasing well-being. Yet, this view neglects taking the frequency of regret into consideration. Frequently experiencing regret may instead be a sign of repeatedly failing to achieve betterment. Prev...

Greed is the insatiable desire for more. It is an important economic motive with numerous implications for consumer behavior and decision processes. We describe research showcasing the good, the bad and the ugly of dispositional greed. The good of greed refers to the potential advantageous consequences for society as a whole and for greedy people t...

Emotions, like regret, have been heralded as instruments of self-regulation, by instigating reflection, learning and feedback for betterment and thus increasing well-being. Yet, this view neglects taking the frequency of regret into consideration. Frequently experiencing regret may instead be a sign of repeatedly failing to achieve betterment. Prev...

A recent, large-scale study among Chinese adolescents found that childhood socioeconomic status (CSES) was positively related to dispositional greed (i.e., the “luxury hypothesis”), instead of negatively related (i.e., the “scarcity hypothesis”; Liu et al., 2019c). This relationship was found for only-children, not for children with siblings. The g...

People use clothing to make personality inferences about others, and these inferences steer social behaviors. The current work makes four contributions to the measurement and prediction of clothing-based person perception: first, we integrate published research and open-ended responses to identify common psychological inferences made from clothes (...

To lend money to someone and to later ask this same person to pay the money back should be relatively unproblematic in modern, monetized societies. Still, some people find it difficult to ask for lent money to be paid back, even though it is in their own interest that this happen and they have the legitimate right to ask their money back. In this a...

Prosociality (measured with economic games) is correlated with individual differences in psychological constructs (measured with self-report scales). We review how methods from Natural Language Processing (NLP), a subfield of computer science focused on processing natural text, can be applied to understand the semantic content of scales measuring p...

Regret is an important emotion in the context of decision making and has many implications for the behavior of consumers. Although regret may be an inevitable outcome, it is possible to cope with it through various regulation strategies. This research investigates one of those strategies, namely, decrease the goal level strategy (DGL), in which one...

In recent years, different scales have been developed to assess individual differences in dispositional greed. We report two studies ( N 1 = 300, N 2 = 1,000) on the comparative psychometric properties of these scales. We find that all scales are reliable and that they correlate highly, suggesting that all can be used to assess dispositional greed....

Saving money is important but challenging. To spur financial saving intentions, we propose a new strategy—gamification. Specifically, we investigate the effectiveness of competitive leaderboards in increasing individuals’ saving intentions. The results of two studies (total N = 618) show consistently that people’s saving intentions are higher when...

Greed has been shown to be an important economic motive. Both the popular press as well as scientific articles have mentioned questionable practices by greedy bankers and investors as one of the root causes of the 2008 global financial crisis. In spite of these suggestions, there is as of yet no substantive empirical evidence for a contribution of...

Regret and guilt are self-conscious emotions. They stem from negative events for which people feel responsible. Both emotions reflect discrepancies between how people are (their “actual” self) and how they would like to be (their “ideal” or “ought” self). We examined whether regret and guilt were related to different self-discrepancies (i.e., “idea...

Machine learning methods for prediction and pattern detection are increasingly prevalent in psychological research. We provide an introductory overview of machine learning, its applications, and describe how to implement models for research. We review fundamental concepts of machine learning, such as prediction accuracy and out‐of‐sample evaluation...

Overearning is the tendency to forgo leisure and to earn more than one needs. Despite the important individual and societal consequences of overearning, little is known about who overearns and why. We examined the role of dispositional greed in explaining overearning. Study 1, an incentivized behavioral lab study (N = 153), found that greedy indivi...

To what extent are intergroup attitudes associated with regional differences in online aggression and hostility? We test whether regional attitude biases towards minorities and their local variability (i.e. intraregional polarization) independently predict verbal hostility on social media. We measure online hostility using large US American samples...

Although hope is a well-studied topic, there is no consensus on its definition. Using a prototype analysis (a bottom-up approach collecting laypeople’s views on hope), the present research defines hope and provides insights into its associations with other related constructs.􀀁 Study 1 identified a list of features of hope derived from characteristi...

Sometimes interesting statistical findings are produced by a small number of “lucky” data points within the tested sample. To address this issue, researchers and reviewers are encouraged to investigate outliers and influential data points. Here, we present StatBreak, an easy-to-apply method, based on a genetic algorithm, that identifies the observa...

Upward social comparison can give rise to the emotion of envy: the pain caused by the good fortune of others. This chapter explains what envy is and what the possible function of envy is to an organism experiencing it. The authors provide an overview of past work on envy, the distinction between two subtypes (benign and malicious envy), possible an...

Greed has been shown to be an important economic motive. Both the popular press as well as scientific papers have mentioned questionable practices by greedy bankers and investors as one of the root causes of the 2008 global financial crisis. In spite of these suggestions, there is as of yet no substantive empirical evidence for a contribution of gr...

In a landmark study in 2006, Bartlett and DeSteno found that receiving help promoted reciprocal behavior and that this effect was mediated by gratitude. Recent research, however, suggested that indebtedness is more closely associated with reciprocation than gratitude. Therefore, we examined whether reciprocal behavior could (also) be attributed to...

Accumulating wealth is one of the main concerns for consumers. Higher education is widely associated with higher wealth, but the underlying reasons for this association remain unclear. Using data from a field study conducted with 218 adults in agrarian communities in Peru's Andean highlands, we explored the extent to which education, non‐numeric fl...

People feel various negative emotions after a terrorist incident. We investigate if these different emotional reactions are associated with prior political efficacy beliefs. There was a terrorist attack during our two-wave study on emotion and political participation in the UK (N = 816, 94% response rate), so we added terror-related emotion items (...

Which decision processing information is most diagnostic for assessing (moral) character? We test if decision time is a more ambiguous cue than more direct types of decision processing information, such as difficulty, doubt, or effort. Our direct information hypothesis predicts that these more direct cues will have a larger effect on competence, wa...

Two studies, using both qualitative and quantitative methods, showed that tax decisions elicit different emotions, which have an impact on compliance. Study 1 used focus groups with self-employed (N = 7) and employed (N = 9) taxpayers as well as tax auditors (N = 8) to identify the emotions that are relevant in the taxation context and to single ou...

Machine learning methods for pattern detection and prediction are increasingly prevalent in psychological research. We provide a comprehensive overview of machine learning, its applications, and how to implement models for research. We review fundamental concepts of machine learning, such as prediction accuracy and out-of-sample evaluation, and sum...

Consumer decision-making is part of the purchase process. Therefore, as a relevant element for the evaluation of the purchase process, it is essential to have valid, reliable and culturally relevant measurements. For that reason, in this study the development and validation of the Purchases Decision-Making Inventory (PDMI) are presented. The genera...

Five studies tested the emotional experience and prosocial motivations in observers (i.e., third parties) of unjust situations. Studies 1 and 2 found that anger was the most dominant emotion experienced in unjust situations, and that prosocial behavior towards a victim decreased when justice had already been restored by compensation of the victim....

Disgust sensitivity is related to a wide variety of psychological constructs (e.g., moral decision-making, political ideology, person perception) and psychopathological disorders (e.g., anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders). In the present article, we aim to provide more insight into the basic information processing st...

People often have to make trade-offs. We study three types of trade-offs: 1) "secular trade-offs" where no moral or sacred values are at stake, 2) "taboo trade-offs" where sacred values are pitted against financial gain, and 3) "tragic trade-offs" where sacred values are pitted against other sacred values. Previous research (Critcher et al., 2011;...

Research on the endowment effect has shown that simply endowing people with a good can increase the salience of the good and make it more likely to be chosen over alternatives. Other lines of research suggest that previous preferences are hard to override and may be chronically accessible to decision makers. We investigate the relationship between...

In retirement saving, many people miss out on early opportunities to save and subsequently fail to take adequate actions for a long time thereafter. We examined whether these two observations—the initial failure to act and the subsequent inertia—could be related through the phenomenon of inaction inertia. In Experiment 1 (N = 180), participants wer...

Children are confronted with an increasing amount of choices every day, which can be stressful. Decision-making skills may be one of the most important “21st century skills” that children need to master to ensure success. Many aspects of decision-making, such as emotion regulation during stressful situations, develop in the context of caregiver-chi...

Greed is often seen as immoral. Although the assumption that greed elicits unethical behavior is widespread, there is surprisingly little empirical research testing this relationship. We present a series of three studies in- vestigating the association between greed and unethical behavior, using different methodologies and samples from the USA, The...

Why do connected users in online social networks express similar emotions? Past approaches have suggested situational emotion transfers (i.e., contagion) and the phenomenon that emotionally similar users flock together (i.e., homophily). We analyze these mechanisms in unison by exploiting the hierarchical structure of YouTube through multilevel ana...

In a two-wave longitudinal study conducted around the UK General Election, 2017 (N=816, response rate of 94%), we examined various types of dissatisfaction by examining how the similar, yet distinct emotions of regret, disappointment, and anger are related to political participation.

Many people delay their preparation for retirement. Policy-makers often attempt to motivate people to take timely action by increasing the perceived importance of retirement saving, yet the effectiveness of such strategies can be doubted. We examined why a strategy of emphasizing importance may be ineffective by distinguishing between intention to...

Research suggests that to restore equity, third parties prefer compensation of a victim over the punishment of a perpetrator. It remains unclear, however, whether this preference for compensation is stable or specific to certain situations. In six experimental studies, we find that adjustments in the characteristics of the situation or in the avail...

Upward social comparison can give rise to the emotion of envy: the pain caused by the good fortune of others. We explain what envy is, and what the possible function of envy is to an organism experiencing it. We provide an overview of past work on envy, the distinction between two subtypes (benign and malicious envy), possible antecedents of envy,...

Decisions often produce considerable levels of doubt and regret, yet little is known about how these experiences are related. In six sets of studies (and two pilot-studies; total N = 2268), we consistently find that doubts arising after a decision (i.e., when people start questioning whether they made the correct decision) intensify regret via incr...

Behavioral public policies are aimed at influencing the behavior of the public in a way that is advantageous for the public itself and within the law. Sanders, Snijders and Hallsworth (2018, this issue) summarize the state of the art of this new field of study and introduce a number of challenges and opportunities for the time to come. We address a...

To overcome self-control difficulties, people can commit to their health goals by voluntarily accepting deadlines with consequences. In a commitment lottery, the winners are drawn from all participants, but can only claim their prize if they also attained their gym-attendance goals. In a 52-week, three-arm trial across six company gyms, we tested i...

Disgust sensitivity predicts judgments of moral issues, especially when they concern transgressions of the purity domain. The reason for this domain-specific relationship is unclear. One potential explanation is that measures of disgust sensitivity and purity transgressions share an important characteristic: They are weird. We test this “weirdness...

Speaking ill about politicians is not uncommon. Here we examine how external and internal political efficacy are related to discrediting politicians. We conducted a two-wave study around the 2017 UK General Election (N=816, 94% response rate) that included measures of internal and external political efficacy as well as negative word-of-mouth commun...

Pride expressions draw positive attention to one’s achievements. There is also evidence that expressing pride can result in negative outcomes, such as being envied and negatively evaluated. We investigated whether people anticipate such negative outcomes and regulate their pride expressions accordingly. Five experiments (total N = 953) suggest that...

Anger has traditionally been associated with aggression and antagonistic behavior. A series of studies revealed that experiences of third-party anger (anger experienced when observing that harm is done to someone) can also lead to prosocial behavior. More specifically, three studies, hypothetical scenarios as well as a behavioral study, revealed th...

Many people aim to change their lifestyle, but have trouble acting on their intentions. Behavioral economic incentives and related emotions can support commitment to personal health goals, but the related emotions remain unexplored. In a regret lottery, winners who do not attain their health goals do not get their prize but receive feedback on what...

Background The World Health Organization has identified physical inactivity as the fourth leading risk factor for global mortality. People often intend to engage in physical activity on a regular basis, but have trouble doing so. To realize their health goals, people can voluntarily accept deadlines with consequences that restrict undesired future...

At present, the consequences and functions of experiences of shame are not yet well understood. Whereas psychology literature typically portrays shame as being bad for social relations, motivating social avoidance and withdrawal, there are recent indications that shame can be reinterpreted as having clear social tendencies in the form of motivating...

Table S1. Categories of coded alternatives, experiments 3 and 5

Pepper & Nettle describe possible processes underlying what they call a behavioral constellation of deprivation (BCD). Although we are certain about the application of evolutionary models to our understanding of poverty, we are less certain about the utility of behavioral constellations. The empirical record on poverty-related behaviors is much mor...

A common solution to mitigate risk is to buy insurance. Employing the trust game, we find that buying insurance against the risk of betrayal has a hidden cost: trustees are more likely to act opportunistically when trustors choose to be insured against the breach of trust. Supposedly, trustees are less likely to cooperate when trustors buy insuranc...

Individual differences in disgust sensitivity are associated with a range of judgments and attitudes related to the moral domain. Some perspectives suggest that the association between disgust sensitivity and moral judgments will be equally strong across all moral domains (i.e., purity, authority, loyalty, care, fairness, and liberty). Other perspe...

A common solution to mitigate risk is to buy insurance. Employing the trust game, we find that buying insurance against the risk of betrayal has a hidden cost: trustees are more likely to act opportunistically when trustors choose to be insured against the breach of trust. Supposedly, trustees are less likely to cooperate when trustors buy insuranc...

People often neglect opportunity costs: They do not fully take into account forgone alternatives outside of a particular choice set. Several scholars have suggested that poor people should be more likely to spontaneously consider opportunity costs, because budget constraints should lead to an increased focus on trade-offs. We did not find support f...

Disgust sensitivity is more strongly related to moral judgments in the purity domain than to moral judgments in other moral domains. While this finding highlights the distinctiveness of moral domains, anti-modularity accounts suggest that the relationship is caused by the relative weirdness of purity transgressions and come to the conclusion that m...

Receiving favors is often a mixed blessing and commonly triggers two emotions: the positive emotion gratitude and negative emotion indebtedness. In three studies, we examined the hypothesis that gratitude and indebtedness have distinct functions in social exchange. Contrary to current views, we believe that the function of gratitude does not primar...

This article investigates if and when anger appeals (communications that elicit anger in people), can be used to increase donations to charity. In an experimental study the idea was tested that anger leads to higher charitable donations, under the condition that people can restore equity with that donation (i.e., restore the harm done to the victim...

Voters prefer political candidates who are currently in office (incumbents) over new candidates (challengers). Using the premise of query theory (Johnson, Häubl & Keinan, 2007), we clarify the underlying cognitive mechanisms by asking whether memory retrieval sequences affect political decision making. Consistent with predictions, Experiment 1 (N =...

Individual differences in disgust sensitivity are associated with a range of judgments and attitudes related to the moral domain. Some perspectives suggest that the association between disgust sensitivity and moral judgments will be equally strong across all moral domains (purity, authority, loyalty, care, fairness, and liberty). Other perspectives...

Pride is seen as both a self-conscious emotion as well as a social emotion. These categories are not mutually exclusive, but have brought forth different ideas about pride as either revolving around the self or as revolving around one’s relationship with others. Current measures of pride do not include intrapersonal elements of pride experiences. S...

Financial problems in adolescents have increased over the last decades. We investigated if individual differences in greed relate to financial behavior. Greed is an important motive for economic behavior and refers to the tendency to never be satisfied and to always want more. We developed a short version of the Dispositional Greed Scale (Seuntjens...

Saving for retirement is one of the most important financial matters people face during their lives. Whereas the Dutch, on average, accumulate sufficient retirement wealth, quite a few people will end up with lower savings than they expect or need. It is surprising that many people remain inactive even when action is needed. This paper by Job Krijn...

Social events such as weddings, christenings, and bar mitzvahs are very important to many people. They commemorate noteworthy occasions and enable hosts and guests to rejoice with and honor each other. Recently, a shift has occurred whereby hosts ask guests for money, instead of presents, as gifts at such social events (particularly weddings). Inte...

A series of 7 experiments found that people defer important decisions more than unimportant decisions, and that this is independent of choice set composition. This finding persists even when deferral does not provide more flexibility (Experiment 2), when deferral has potential disadvantages (Experiment 3), and when deferral has no material benefits...

Schwartz (2015) argues that a rational decision-maker should not always strive for maximization. In cases where it is not possible to assign prob- abilities and/or weights to the possible outcomes of choice alternatives, Schwartz argues it is better to engage in robust satisficing, ensuring a good enough outcome when things go awry. Schwartz thus a...