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Publications (98)
Honesty, defined as freedom from fraud or deception, is widely valued in many aspects of life, from personal relationships to professional settings. Yet acts of dishonesty remain widespread, including political and corporate scandals, misinformation, personal betrayal, and so on. Understanding honesty and the factors that influence it provides insi...
This position paper discusses the benefits of longitudinal behavioural research with customised AI tools for exploring the opportunities and risks of synthetic relationships. Synthetic relationships are defined as "continuing associations between humans and AI tools that interact with one another wherein the AI tool(s) influence(s) humans' thoughts...
This position paper discusses the benefits of longitudinal behavioural research with customised AI tools for exploring the opportunities and risks of synthetic relationships. Synthetic relationships are defined as "continuing associations between humans and AI tools that interact with one another wherein the AI tool(s) influence(s) humans' thoughts...
The growing integration of AI tools in communication promises enhanced efficiency and productivity. However, concerns about the erosion of trust and authenticity have fueled debates over the disclosure and regulation ofAI-mediated communication. It remains unclear a) how AI mediation influences trust, b) whether the efficiency gains outweigh potent...
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...
While artificial intelligence (AI) enables significant productivity gains from delegating tasks to machines, it can also facilitate the delegation of unethical behaviour. Here, we demonstrate this risk by having human principals instruct machine agents to perform a task with an incentive to cheat. Principals’ requests for cheating behaviour increas...
Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention for their ability to generate human-like text and responses across various domains. This study delves into examines the social and strategic behavior of the commonly used LLM GPT-3.5 by investigating its suggestions in well-established behavioral economics paradigms. Speci...
Artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance human communication, for example, by improving the quality of our writing, voice or appearance. However, AI mediated communication also has risks—it may increase deception, compromise authenticity or yield widespread mistrust. As a result, both policymakers and technology firms are developing approaches to p...
Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention for their ability to generate human-like text and responses across various domains. This study delves into the social and strategic behavior of the commonly used LLM GPT-3.5 by investigating its suggestions in well-established behavioral economics paradigms. Specifically,...
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...
Humans, aware of the social costs associated with false accusations, are generally hesitant to accuse others of lying. Our study shows how lie detection algorithms disrupt this social dynamic. We develop a supervised machine-learning classifier that surpasses human accuracy and conduct a large-scale incentivized experiment manipulating the availabi...
Previous studies have found a negative relationship between creativity and conservatism. However, as these studies were mostly conducted on samples of homogeneous nationality, the generalizability of the effect across different cultures is unknown. We addressed this gap by conducting a study in 28 countries. Based on the notion that attitudes can b...
Previous studies have found a negative relationship between creativity and conservatism. However, as these studies were mostly conducted on samples of homogeneous nationality, the generalizability of the effect across different cultures is unknown. We addressed this gap by conducting a study in 28 countries. Based on the notion that attitudes can b...
There is growing interest in the field of cooperative artificial intelligence (AI), that is, settings in which humans and machines cooperate. By now, more than 160 studies from various disciplines have reported on how people cooperate with machines in behavioral experiments. Our systematic review of the experimental instructions reveals that the im...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly becomes an indispensable advisor. New ethical concerns arise if AI persuades people to behave dishonestly. In an experiment, we study how AI advice (generated by a Natural-Language-Processing algorithm) affects (dis)honesty, compare it to equivalent human advice, and test whether transparency about advice s...
The increasing prevalence of image-altering filters on social media and video conferencing technologies has raised concerns about the ethical and psychological implications of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manipulate our perception of others. In this study, we specifically investigate the potential impact of blur filters, a type of appearan...
The rapid development of AI-mediated communication technologies (AICTs), which are digital tools that use AI to augment interpersonal messages, has raised concerns about the future of interpersonal trust and prompted discussions about disclosure and uptake. This paper contributes to this discussion by assessing perceptions about the acceptability a...
Bribery, a grand global challenge, often occurs across national jurisdictions. Behavioral research studying bribery to inform anticorruption interventions, however, has merely examined bribery within single nations. Here, we report online experiments and provide insights into crossnational bribery. We ran a pilot study (across three nations) and a...
Touch is the primary way people communicate intimacy in romantic relationships, and affectionate touch behaviors such as stroking, hugging and kissing are universally observed in partnerships all over the world. Here, we explored the association of love and affectionate touch behaviors in romantic partnerships in two studies comprising 7880 partici...
Recent cross-cultural and neuro-hormonal investigations have suggested that love is a near universal phenomenon that has a biological background. Therefore, the remaining important question is not whether love exists worldwide but which cultural, social, or environmental factors influence experiences and expressions of love. In the present study, w...
Digital technologies offer new communicative affordances to fight corruption. Bottom-up efforts increasingly use algorithmic tools, i.e., bots, to automate corruption reporting on social media platforms. This study investigates how to design a bot to effectively and responsibly mobilize people for collective action against corruption. In a large (n...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly becomes an indispensable advisor. New ethical concerns arise if AI persuades people to behave dishonestly. In an experiment, we study how AI advice (generated by a Natural-Language-Processing algorithm) affects (dis)honesty, compare it to equivalent human advice, and test whether transparency about advice s...
People are not very good at detecting lies, which may explain why they refrain from accusing others of lying, given the social costs attached to false accusations - both for the accuser and the accused. Here we consider how this social balance might be disrupted by the availability of lie-detection algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence. Wil...
Are shorter or more accessible anti-bribery Policies more effective? We did a field experiment amongst over 1200 employees at a large tech company. We found that the policies (long, short or infographics) had no significant effect on employee knowledge of appropriate norms, even when compared to a fourth group that received no information about the...
Report summarizes how Artificial Intelligence can be a new tool for corrupt practices and what can be done to meet that emerging risk.
There is growing interest in the field of Cooperative AI, hence settings where humans and machines cooperate with each other. By now more than 160 studies from various disciplines have studied how people cooperate with machines in behavioral experiments. Our systematic review of the instructions of these studies reveals that the implementation of th...
Corruption poses one of the biggest current societal problems that commonly originates in organizational settings. Most approaches explain corruption based on rational cost-benefit calculations, neglecting the role of emotions. This dominant approach stands in contrast to the observation that most corruption cases are emotionally charged. A growing...
Curbing bribery presents a global grand challenge. Increasingly bribery occurs across national jurisdictions. While behavioral approaches to study bribery have gained popularity to help design better anti-corruption policies, research has merely examined bribery within single nations. Here we provide first behavioral insights on cross-national brib...
Bribery, a grand global challenge, often occurs across national jurisdictions. Behavioral research studying bribery to inform anti-corruption interventions, however, has merely examined bribery within single nations. Here, we report online experiments and provide first insights into cross-national bribery. We ran a pilot study (across three nations...
Corruption presents one of the biggest challenges of our time, and much hope is placed in artificial intelligence (AI) to combat it. Although the growing number of AI-based anti-corruption tools (AI-ACT) have been summarized, a critical examination of their promises and perils is lacking. Here we argue that the success of AI-ACT strongly depends on...
A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-021-00772-y
Although dishonesty is often a social phenomenon, it is primarily studied in individual settings. However, people frequently collaborate and engage in mutual dishonest acts. We report the first meta-analysis on collaborative dishonesty, analyzing 87,771 decisions (21 behavioral tasks; k = 123; nparticipants = 10,923). We provide an overview of all...
Artificial intelligence and robotics are rapidly advancing. Humans are increasingly often affected by autonomous machines making choices with moral repercussions. At the same time, classical research in robotics shows that people are adverse to robots that appear eerily human—a phenomenon commonly referred to as the uncanny valley effect. Yet, litt...
A wide range of literature connects sex ratio and mating behaviours in non-human animals. However, research examining sex ratio and human mating is limited in scope. Prior work has examined the relationship between sex ratio and desire for short-term, uncommitted mating as well as outcomes such as marriage and divorce rates. Less empirical attentio...
Hyper-realistic manipulation of audio-visual content, i.e., deepfakes, presents a new challenge for establishing the veracity of online content. Research on the human impact of deepfakes remains sparse. In a pre-registered behavioral experiment (N=210), we show that (a) people cannot reliably detect deepfakes, and (b) neither raising awareness nor...
A wide range of literature connects sex ratio and mating
behaviours in non-human animals. However, research
examining sex ratio and human mating is limited in
scope. Prior work has examined the relationship between
sex ratio and desire for short-term, uncommitted mating
as well as outcomes such as marriage and divorce rates.
Less empirical attentio...
A wide range of literature connects sex ratio and mating behaviours in non-human animals. However, research examining sex ratio and human mating is limited in scope. Prior work has examined the relationship between sex ratio and desire for short-term, uncommitted mating as well as outcomes such as marriage and divorce rates. Less empirical attentio...
As machines powered by artificial intelligence (AI) influence humans’ behaviour in ways that are both like and unlike the ways humans influence each other, worry emerges about the corrupting power of AI agents. To estimate the empirical validity of these fears, we review the available evidence from behavioural science, human–computer interaction an...
Corruption continues to be one of the biggest societal challenges of our time. New hope is placed in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to serve as an unbiased anti-corruption agent. Ever more available (open) government data paired with unprecedented performance of such algorithms render AI the next frontier in anti-corruption. Summarizing existing effo...
Interpersonal touch behavior differs across cultures, yet no study to date has systematically tested for cultural variation in affective touch, nor examined the factors that might account for this variability. Here, over 14,000 individuals from 45 countries were asked whether they embraced, stroked, kissed, or hugged their partner, friends, and you...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming a trusted advisor in people's lives. A new concern arises if AI persuades people to break ethical rules for profit. Employing a large-scale behavioural experiment (N = 1,572), we test whether AI-generated advice can corrupt people. We further test whether transparency about AI presence, a common...
The release of openly available, robust natural language generation algorithms (NLG) has spurred much public attention and debate. One reason lies in the algorithms' purported ability to generate humanlike text across various domains. Empirical evidence using incentivized tasks to assess whether people (a) can distinguish and (b) prefer algorithm-g...
Hyper-realistic manipulation of audio-visual content, i.e., deepfakes, presents a new challenge for establishing veracity of online content. Research on the human impact of deepfakes, addressing both behaviors in response to and cognitive processing of deepfakes, remains sparse. In a pre-registered behavioral experiment ( N = 210), we show that (a)...
The sharing economy is estimated to add hundreds of billions of USD to the global economy and is rapidly growing. However, trust-based commercial sharing—the participation in for-profit peer-to-peer sharing-economy activity—has negative as well as positive consequences for both the interacting parties and uninvolved third parties. To share responsi...
The Triangular Theory of Love (measured with Sternberg’s Triangular Love Scale – STLS) is a prominent theoretical concept in empirical research on love. To expand the culturally homogeneous body of previous psychometric research regarding the STLS, we conducted a large-scale cross-cultural study with the use of this scale. In total, we examined mor...
Precise, compared with round, asking prices lead to counteroffers and final agreements that are closer to the asking price. Consequently, popular advice for sellers is to set precise asking prices. We propose that the advice is useful, but only in a buyer’s market, in which buyers counter below the asking price. In a seller’s market, in which buyer...
Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives—an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective—offer alternative explanations for the...
Precise, compared with round, asking prices lead to counteroffers and final agreements that are closer to the asking price. Consequently, a popular advice for sellers is to set precise asking prices. We propose that the advice is useful, but only in a buyer’s market, in which buyers counter below the asking price. In a seller’s market, in which buy...
The release of openly available, robust text generation algorithms have spurred much public attention and debate. The reason for this public interest lies in algorithm’s purported ability to generate human-like text across various domains. Yet, empirical evidence using incentivized tasks on human behavioral reactions to such algorithms is lacking....
Corruption in the form of bribery continues to be a major societal challenge around the world. The current lab-in-the-field study tested whether dynamic descriptive norms messages on posters can help to reduce bribery. Before, during and after placing posters throughout a medium-sized South African town, incentivized measures of social norms and br...
Humans express a wide array of ideal mate preferences. Around the world, people desire romantic partners who are intelligent, healthy, kind, physically attractive, wealthy, and more. In order for these ideal preferences to guide the choice of actual romantic partners, human mating psychology must possess a means to integrate information across thes...
Mate choice lies close to differential reproduction, the engine of evolution. Patterns of mate choice consequently have power to direct the course of evolution. Here we provide evidence suggesting one pattern of human mate choice—the tendency for mates to be similar in overall desirability—caused the evolution of a structure of correlations that we...
Corruption in the form of bribery continues to be a major societal challenge around the world. The current lab-in-the-field study tested whether descriptive norms messages on posters can help to reduce bribery. Before, during and after placing posters throughout a medium sized South African town, incentivized measures of social norms and bribery we...
Is self-serving lying intuitive? Or does honesty come naturally? Many experiments have manipulated reliance on intuition in behavioral-dishonesty tasks, with mixed results. We present two meta-analyses (with evidential value) testing whether an intuitive mind-set affects the proportion of liars ( k = 73; n = 12,711) and the magnitude of lying ( k =...
Corruption in the education sector is pervasive in many (developing) countries. We examine two interventions to fight corruption in education. The first is an increase of the fixed-wage of teachers. The second is the introduction of a piece-rate scheme that rewards teachers according to the number of students that they attract. We model these mecha...
Research in behavioural ethics repeatedly emphasizes the importance of others for people’s decisions to break ethical rules. Yet, in most lab experiments participants faced ethical dilemmas in full privacy settings. We conducted three experiments in which we compare such private set-ups to situations in which a second person is co-present in the la...
Corruption in the education sector is pervasive in many (developing) countries. We examine two interventions to fight corruption in education. The first is an increase of the fixed-wage of teachers. The second is the introduction of a piece-rate scheme that rewards teachers according to the number of students that they attract. We model these mecha...
Corruption marks a major societal challenge. Although many corrupt practices such as bribery are outlawed in national codes of laws, stark differences in (perceived) corruption levels persist around the world. To explain this gap between legal norms and actual behavior, the current corruption literature emphasizes the importance of social norms, th...
A social norms approach can help practitioners design effective anti-corruption reforms. Social norms in communities, families, and organisations help explain why corruption persists. The threat of social sanctions for norm violations creates pressures on officials and citizens to sustain corrupt practices. Practitioners can use various methods to...
Call: Meta-study on Bribery Games
Dear colleagues,
Nils Koebis, Bruno Verschuere and I are conducting a meta-study on bribery games. Our aim is to compare behavior across behavioral paradigms used to study bribery in the lab, in the field and online to obtain aggregate insights about behavioral factors of bribery.
We kindly ask you to share data...
Lying typically requires greater mental effort than telling the truth. Imposing cognitive load may improve lie detection by limiting the cognitive resources needed to lie effectively, thereby increasing the difference in speed between truths and lies. We test this hypothesis meta-analytically. Across 21 studies using response-time (RT) paradigms (1...
Lying typically requires greater mental effort than telling the truth. Imposing cognitive load may improve lie detection by limiting the cognitive resources needed to lie effectively, thereby increasing the difference in speed between truths and lies. We test this hypothesis meta-analytically. Across 21 studies using response-time (RT) paradigms (1...