Michał Białek

University of Wrocław | WROC · Instytut Psychologii

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is a widely used measure of the propensity to engage in analytic or deliberative reasoning in lieu of gut feelings or intuitions. CRT problems are unique because they reliably cue intuitive but incorrect responses and, therefore, appear simple among those who do poorly. By virtue of being comprised of so-called “...

According to the principle of utilitarianism, the moral status of an action depends on its consequences for the greater good; the principle of deontology states that the moral status of an action depends on its consistency with moral norms. Previous research suggests that processing moral dilemmas in a foreign language influences utilitarian and de...

Across six studies (N = 2,646), we demonstrate the role that perceptions of predictability play in judgments of moral character, finding that people demonstrate a moral preference for more predictable immoral actors. Participants judged agents performing an immoral action (e.g., assault) for an unintelligible reason as less predictable and less mor...

The "drunk utilitarian" phenomenon suggests that people are more likely to accept harm for the greater good when they are under the influence of alcohol. This phenomenon conflicts with the ideas that (1) acceptance of pro-sacrificial harm requires inhibitory control of automatic emotional responses to the idea of causing harm and (2) alcohol impair...

Moral dilemmas often involve a conflict between action-options that maximize outcomes for the greater good (utilitarianism) and inaction-options that conform to moral norms (deontology). Previous research suggests that, compared to individuals, groups show stronger support for outcome-maximizing actions that violate moral norms. The current study u...

Research questions The Moral Foreign Language Effect is a phenomenon in which individuals exhibit lower moral engagement (i.e., are simultaneously less deontological and less utilitarian) when using a foreign language compared to their native language. This paper reports on three experiments involving bilingual participants to investigate the impac...

Research Questions: The Moral Foreign Language Effect is a phenomenon in which individuals exhibit lower moral engagement (i.e. are simultaneously less deontological and less utilitarian) when using a foreign language compared to their native language. This paper reports on three experiments involving bilingual participants to investigate the impac...

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...

Consider Maria, a Spanish-speaking expectant mother with limited English proficiency, struggling to understand her doctor's explanation about amniocentesis. Without an interpreter, she grapples with unfamiliar medical terms and complex risk statistics, leaving her confused and anxious about this critical decision. This scenario, highlighting commun...

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...

This paper reviews the history of the dual-mode information processing idea in philosophy , psychology, and cognitive science. It tracks how the concept that human thinking works through two separate but interconnected systems has developed from ancient times to now. The review looks at early philosophical ideas that suggested two processes in huma...

How strongly do higher investment premiums tempt people to invest in unethical assets, such as harmful 'sin stocks'? We present two experimental studies (Ntotal = 1,260) examining baseline willingness to invest in 'sin stocks' (without a premium), changes in investments as premiums increase, and how individual differences in deontological and utili...

In this retrospective honoring the exemplary psychologist Daniel Kahneman (1934–2024), the authors present a curated selection of quotes from the academic community reflecting on his ideas. These submissions, gathered from a wide range of scholars, highlight Kahneman’s contributions to fields spanning attention, judgment, decision-making, and well-...

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...

This preregistered study examines the effect of physical fatigue on moral decision-making. A sample of N = 107 male participants was subjected to acute physical exercise. Half of the participants were presented with moral dilemmas before the physical exercise, and the other half after the exercise. We measured moral judgement using a shortened vers...

In this study, we examine how perceived vulnerability to disease, psychological resilience, and disgust sensitivity are affected by changing social conditions during the pandemic. We collected data from 314 participants at four different time points, reflecting varying government restrictions and actual morbidity/fatality rates. We found that disgu...

This study tested intuitions about ownership in children of Dani people, an indigenous Papuan society ( N = 79, M age = 7, 49.4% females). The results show that similar to studies with children from Western societies, children infer ownership from (1) control of permission, (2) ownership of the territory the object is located in, and (3) manmade ve...

Vague, impressive language used in descriptions (bullshit) is thought to make art seem more profound and valuable to the viewer. We studied the effect during art exhibitions in real-life gallery-goers who saw paintings of four artists, each with either simplified, neutral, or bullshitty description. We crafted a typical description of each painting...

Bermúdez argues that a framing effect is rational, which will be true if one accepts that the biased editing phase is rational. This type of rationality was called procedural by Simon. Despite being procedurally rational in the evaluation phase framing effect stems from biased way we set a reference point against which outcomes are compared.

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...

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...

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions Using a foreign language is suggested to affect how we think, even reducing bias. However, the exact mechanisms of its influence are still unknown. In this project, we tested two variants of the “thinking more” mechanism driving the foreign language effect: increased cognitive reflection and greater ta...

Vague, impressive language used in descriptions (bullshit) is thought to make art seem more profound and valuable to the viewer. We studied the effect during art exhibitions in real-life gallery-goers who saw paintings of four artists, each with either simplified, neutral, or bullshitty description. We crafted a typical description of each painting...

People have been observed to take more (calculated) risks when deciding in their foreign language compared to their native language. But the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon remains unclear. In three experiments involving a total of 544 lab participants, we explored two potential explanations: (1) the effect is attributed to reduced anticipa...

A person who arrives at correct solutions via false premises is right and wrong simultaneously. Similarly, a person who generates "logical intuitions" through superficial heuristics can likewise be right and wrong at the same time. However, heuristics aren't guaranteed to deliver the logical solution, so the claim that system 1 can routinely produc...

Who is tempted by versus resilient to investment premiums from ‘sin stocks’ that produce social harm? We present a correlational (N = 218) and experimental study (N = 646) to examine a) willingness to invest in sin stocks without a return premium, b) how temptation increases as premiums increase, and c) moderation by individual differences in deont...

Debiasing is a method of improving people’s decisions by reducing their reliance on salient intuitions causing them to behave suboptimally or biasedly. However, many of the known debiasing techniques have limited effectiveness or can only remedy a one-shot decision, rather than having a lasting impact. In this work, I focus on the role of metacogni...

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...

Across two preregistered within-subject experiments (N = 570), we found that when using their foreign language, proficient bilinguals discerned true from false news less accurately. This was the case for international news (Experiment 1) and more local news (Experiment 2). When using a foreign (as opposed to native) language, false news headlines w...

People tend to appraise their distant future self better than their near future self (future self-enhancement effect). An open question is whether this tendency has implications for current performance. In two sets of experiments (N = 554), after envisioning their near or distant future, participants made future self-appraisals and performed an ana...

The Foreign Language effect is claimed to decrease risk aversion. We found no such effect. First, we asked N = 229 Polish native speakers to assign numerical values to verbal probability phrases in Polish and English. After finding very few differences, we conducted an incentivized experiment, N = 281, where Poles had to decide whether they would p...

To further understand how to combat COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy, we examined the effects of pro-vaccine expert consensus messaging on lay attitudes about vaccine safety and intention to get a COVID-19 vaccine. We surveyed 729 unvaccinated individuals from four countries in the early stages of the pandemic and 472 unvaccinated individuals from tw...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures...

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...

In this chapter, the way people consider possibilities in decision making are unpacked and explored. It begins by outlining the concept of rational choice – what a decision maker ought to choose. Specifically, it discusses how, for a given decision, a rational choice can (or cannot) be determined. Whether people often make rational choices, and wha...

Debiasing is a method of improving people’s decisions by reducing their reliance on salient intuitions causing them to behave suboptimal (or, biased). In this work, I focus on the role of metacognition in debiasing decision-making and examine various methods of achieving it. I discuss the use of the foreign language effect as a potential method for...

Two publications have called for the redefinition of statistical significance as 0.005, or justification of the alpha. We argue that these papers expose a vicious cycle: scientists do not adopt recommendations because they are not standard, and they are not standard because few scientists adopt them. We call on journals and preregistration platform...

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research QuestionsUsing a foreign language is suggested to affect how we think, even reducing bias. However, the exact mechanisms of its influence are still unknown. In this project, we tested two variants of the “thinking more” mechanism driving the foreign language effect: increased cognitive reflection and greater tas...

Bermúdez argues that a framing effect is rational, which will be true if one accepts that the biased editing phase is rational. This type of rationality was called procedural by Simon. Despite being procedurally rational in the evaluation phase framing effect stems from biased way we set a reference point against which outcomes are compared.

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...

The COVID-19 pandemic (and its aftermath) highlights a critical need to communicate health information effectively to the global public. Given that subtle differences in information framing can have meaningful effects on behavior, behavioral science research highlights a pressing question: Is it more effective to frame COVID-19 health messages in t...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions Extant research suggests that processing information in a second language (L2) affects decision-making, possibly by affecting metacognition. We hypothesized that processing in L2 will reduce the bias blind spot effect, whereby people (on average) erroneously think that they are less susceptible to bias...

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...

Mere ownership effect is the phenomenon that people tend to value what they own more than what they do not own. This classic effect is considered robust, yet effect sizes vary across studies, and the effect is often confused for or confounded with other classic phenomena, such as endowment or mere exposure effects. We conducted a pre-registered met...

Using a foreign language is suggested to affect how we think and decide. However, the exact mechanisms of its influence are still unknown. In this project, we tested one of the potential mechanisms: increased cognitive engagement in a foreign language. If so, we would expect increased performance in cognitive ability tests, e.g., in numeracy, when...

Intuitions about ownership, originally established in Canadian preschooler, were tested in children of indigenous Papuan society (N = 79, Mage = 7, 49.4% female). Successful replications of the findings showed that people infer ownership from (1) control of permission, (2) ownership of the territory the object is located in, and (3) manmade vs natu...

Whereas several recent studies demonstrated that some animal species are able to recognize human emotions based on information from body odor [...].

Significance Communicating in ways that motivate engagement in social distancing remains a critical global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study tested motivational qualities of messages about social distancing (those that promoted choice and agency vs. those that were forceful and shaming) in 25,718 people in 89 countries...

In five experiments with a total N = 1558, we studied to which extent the perception of wrongdoers’ morality depends on wrongdoers’ cognitive and emotional penitence on the example of deontological beliefs and guilt. Both types of penitence improved the target’s moral impressions to a similar degree. We established a penitence congruity effect, whe...

Although the susceptibility to reasoning biases is often assumed to be a stable trait, the temporal stability of people’s performance on popular heuristics-and-biases tasks has been rarely directly tested. The present study addressed this issue and examined a potential determinant for answer change. Participants solved the same set of “bias” tasks...

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...

Judgments differ from decisions. Judgments are more abstract, decontextualized, and bear fewer consequences for the agent. In pursuit of experimental control, psychological experiments on bias create a simplified, bare-bone representation of social behavior. These experiments resemble conditions in which people judge others, but not how they make r...

The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychol...

Investors sometimes invest in the so-called “sin” stocks that cause social harm as a by-product of doing business (e.g., tobacco companies). Three studies examined whether people who reject harm and maximize outcomes in sacrificial dilemmas approve less of investing in sin (but not conventional) stocks. We employed process dissociation to assess ha...

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...

Mere ownership effect is the phenomenon that people tend to value what they own more than what they do not own. This classic effect is considered robust, yet effect sizes vary across studies, and the effect is often confused for or confounded with other classic phenomena, such as endowment or mere exposure effects. We conducted a pre-registered met...

To further understand how to combat COVID-19 vaccination hesitancy, we examined the effects of pro-vaccine expert consensus messaging on lay attitudes of vaccine safety and intention to vaccinate. We surveyed N = 729 individuals from four countries. Regardless of its content, consensus messaging had an overall small positive effect. Most critically...

Although the susceptibility to reasoning biases is often assumed to be a stable trait, the temporal stability of people’s performance on popular heuristics-and-biases tasks has been rarely directly tested. The present study addressed this issue and examined a potential determinant for answer change. Participants solved the same set of “bias” tasks...

Mammalian body odour conveys cues about an individual’s emotional state that can be recognised by conspecifics. Thus far, little attention has been paid to interspecific odour communication of emotions, and no studies have examined whether humans are able to recognise animal emotions from body odour. Thus, the aim of the present study was to addres...

Earlier findings suggest that men with daughters make judgments and decisions somewhat in line with those made by women. In this paper, we attempt to extend those findings, by testing how gender and parenting daughters affect judgments of the appropriateness of investing in and working for morally controversial companies (“sin stocks”). To do so, i...

Across six studies (N = 1988 US residents and 81 traditional people of Papua), participants judged agents acting in sacrificial moral dilemmas. Utilitarian agents, described as opting to sacrifice a single individual for the greater good, were perceived as less predictable and less moral than deontological agents whose inaction resulted in five peo...

Across six studies (N = 2646), we demonstrate the role that perceptions of predictability play in judgments of moral character, finding that people demonstrate a moral preference for more predictable immoral actors. Participants judged agents performing an immoral action (e.g., assault) for an unintelligible reason as less predictable and less mora...

The mere ownership effect is an increase in the subjective value of owned objects compared to identical but non-owned objects. We tested whether the effect differs in magnitude between material and immaterial objects (e.g., information). Three hundred participants played an incentivized detective game in which they had to connect clues to identify...

Extant research suggests that processing information in a second language (L2) affects decision making, possibly by affecting metacognition. We hypothesized that processing in L2 will reduce the bias blind spot effect, whereby people (on average) erroneously think that they are less susceptible to biases than others. In Experiment 1, participants a...

To analyze the results of the research, behavioral scientists widely use a statistical rule that sets the significance level to 0.05. Recently, two recommendations on how to improve statistical inference were published: to redefine statistical significance to 0.005, and to select and justify the alpha. We analyzed the empirical work that cited the...

The “drunk utilitarian” phenomenon suggests that people are more likely to accept harm for the greater good when they are under the influence of alcohol. This phenomenon conflicts with the ideas that (1) acceptance of pro-sacrificial harm requires inhibitory control of automatic emotional responses to the idea of causing harm and (2) alcohol impair...

Despite autonomous vehicles (AVs) being safer than human drivers, people are averse to their presence on roads. Across three studies (N = 4,014), we examined peoples’ perceptions of human drivers and AVs acting within a moral dilemma. Scenarios involved an out-of-control vehicle (piloted by a human, or autonomously) that could stay on its present c...