Petr Houdek

Prague University of Economics and Business | VŠE · Department of Management

The article reviews recent literature on the effects of host manipulation by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii (prevalent in about a third of the world’s population) on perception, cognition, and behavior of humans, and on the changes in their physical appearance and personality characteristics. I argue that the mind-affecting parasite paradigm offers...

This essay is a critical perspective of the applicability of behavioral ethics in business and policy interventions. I summarize a series of proposed interventions to increase people’s honesty, inspired by ethical dissonance theory, such as increasing salience of moral norms, visibility, and self-engagement. Although I agree that behavioral ethics...

The development of behavioral ethics has brought forth a detailed understanding of the processes of moral perception, decision-making and behavior within and beyond organizations and communities. However, prescriptive recommendations of behav-ioral research regarding how to support an ethical environment often underestimate the specifics of organiz...

In many situations people behave ethically, while elsewhere dishonesty reigns. Studies of the determinants of unethical behavior often use random assignment of participants in various conditions to identify contextual or psychological factors influencing dishonesty. However, in many real-world contexts, people deliberately choose or avoid specific...

On the 1st of April 2006, an amendment to the Act on State Social Support came into force in the Czech Republic. This amendment more than doubled the value of the one-off birth grant. The increase was announced less than nine months ahead of implementation and only mothers from low-income households were eligible. We explored whether the change of...

This perspective shows how neurodiversity can increase public organizations’ innovations and output quality. Studies from business and entrepreneurship fields are used to argue that public organizations may prosper if they recruit neurologically atypical individuals. Their unique thinking styles, coping strategies, and life experiences can lead to...

We conducted focus groups with participants of a laboratory experiment on cheating with the aim to describe and structure participants' lived experience with the experiment and to compare their perceptions with experimenters' expectations. Our results suggest that participants often perceive both control and experimental conditions differently than...

Does the choice of an environment where cheating is possible lead to its escalation? We analyzed behavior of employees (N = 284) hired to perform a task online. In the manual reporting (MR), employees could overreport the number of hours worked. In the automatic reporting (AR), the hours were counted automatically, making cheating impossible. Two-t...

When it comes to the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and the effectiveness of measures against the disease, many citizens worldwide do not trust their governments or health authorities. This brief essay discusses several psychological mechanisms which, under certain conditions, lead people to ignore important sources of information and hinder effec...

Does the choice of an environment where cheating is possible lead to its escalation? We analyzed behavior of employees (N = 284) hired to perform a task online. In the manual reporting (MR), employees could overreport the number of hours worked. In the automatic reporting (AR), the hours were counted automatically, making cheating impossible. Two-t...

This study is a registered replication of a field experiment on dishonesty by Azar et al. (2013). Their main finding was that most customers of an Israeli restaurant did not return excessive change; however, customers who received a higher amount of excessive change returned it more often than people who received a lower amount. Our study, which wa...

The article focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of various methods enabling to uncover fraudulent and dishonest behavior of organizations’ stakeholders — employees, managers and costumers. Based on illustrative studies, it further shows how these tools can be used in empirical fraud risk management. A comprehensive approach that is absent i...

The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries (N = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower stat...

Many experimental studies use random assignment to identify factors influencing dishonesty. However, in real-life, people deliberately choose dishonesty-enabling environments. In two laboratory experiments, we let participants self-select in two tasks, one of which enabled them to cheat. We found that participants low in the honesty-humility were m...

The Trivers–Willard Hypothesis (TWH) states that parents in good conditions bias the sex ratio towards sons and parents in poor conditions bias the sex ratio towards daughters. This study used data from a large nationwide population dataset (N=1,401,851) from the Czech Republic – a modern contemporary society. The study included air pollution and p...

The anchoring effect, the assimilation of judgment toward a previously considered value, has been shown using various experimental paradigms. We used several variations of the sequential anchoring paradigm, in which a numeric estimate influences a subsequent numeric estimate on the same scale, to investigate how anchoring is influenced by multiple...

The study measures how often customers are cheated in real-world transactions. In a pre-registered field study in Prague, Czech Republic, hired confederates posed as foreigners unfamiliar with local currency. While buying snacks in grocery stores (N = 259) either in the morning or in the evening, they provided cashiers with an opportunity to steal...

We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variation in effect magnitudes across samples and settings. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples that comprised 15,305 participants from 36 countries and territories....

We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance to examine variation in effect magnitudes across sample and setting. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples and 15,305 total participants from 36 countries and territories. Using co...

The anchoring effect, the assimilation of judgment toward a previously considered value, has been shown using various experimental paradigms. We used several variations of the sequential anchoring paradigm, in which a numeric estimate influences a subsequent numeric estimate on the same scale, to investigate how anchoring is influenced by multiple...

Providing people with more information and more options may seem as a good policy. However, because of limited attention and cognitive resources, people are not able to use all available information and freedom of choice effectively to achieve their own best interests. When cognitive resources and attention are depleted, decision making becomes sha...

Although Boyer & Petersen (B&P) make the case for evolutionary roots of folk economics stronger, their evolutionary model ultimately does not deliver folk-economic explanations that are both novel and correct. We argue that (a) most current explanations are evolutionary already; (b) B&P's model is as ad hoc as other theories, and proves too much; a...

The article is a perspective on utilization of microorganisms and chemosignals in studying human economic behavior. Research in biological roots of economic development has already confirmed that parasitic pressure influenced the creation and development of cultural norms and institutions. However, other effects of microorganisms on human groups an...

Dishonest behavior presents a serious problem in many countries’ institutions and was found to be relatively widespread in post-communist countries. We focus on the prevalence of cheating in a sample from such country, the Czech Republic, and individual characteristics influencing dishonest behavior. We used a die rolling task where participants ca...

The article examines the differences in individual discount rates among the Roma ethnic group (Gypsies) and the Czech ethnic group. Low income, low education, and currently unemployed participants (Roma N=27, Czechs N=23) were subjected to pilot experiments based on in-depth questionnaires. In addition to impulsivity (delay-discount rates), the cor...

The aim of this perspective article is to show that current experimental evidence on factors influencing dishonesty has limited external validity. Most of experimental studies is built on random assignments, in which control/experimental groups of subjects face varied sizes of the expected reward for behaving dishonestly, opportunities for cheating...

This essay discusses the fraud triangle, or how factors such as opportunity to cheat, motivation to cheat or ability to rationalize or justify dishonest behavior lead to dishonesty. The fraud triangle is applied on behavior of professionals active in fields such as medicine, education, research and science or clergy. Evidence shows that even in the...

The article presents several reasons explaining why executives receive rewards for luck. Processes enabling this phenomenon are psychological, that is they are due to an incorrect attribution of success to CEO skills, as well as rational, dependent on the mechanisms of rewarding executives, the labor market or optimal sector diversification.

This short perspective article presents an overview of empirical evidence on the behavioural organizational economics on the basis of the extended standard model of worker’s behaviour. The advancements of behavioural economics theories, new detailed and structured data on actions of economic actors, and increasingly used fi elds experiments provide...

The current study explores how people respond when asked about their biggest weakness during a job interview and how effective are different response strategies. First, we show that common strategies are to present a positive characteristic in the guise of a weakness (i.e., to humblebrag), to simply present a weakness, or to present a weakness that...

In an anonymous 4-person economic game, participants contributed more money to a common project (i.e., cooperated) when required to decide quickly than when forced to delay their decision (Rand, Greene & Nowak, 2012), a pattern consistent with the “social heuristics” hypothesis proposed by Rand and colleagues. The results of studies using time pres...

We argue that individuals systematically interpret sequences of events in a causal manner. The aim of this article is to show that people do so even if they are aware of the stochastic nature of the respective sequence. The bias can explain some anomalous behaviour of investors in financial markets. Small as well as professional investors may illus...

The article presents an application of the cost-benefit analysis to human sexual behavior. We suggest that an event or occasion which lowers the costs of sex – such as increasing free time, decreasing health risks of sexually transmitted diseases or lowering the probability of parenthood (or costs connected with parenthood) – usually leads to an in...

In an anonymous 4-person economic game, participants contributed more money to a common project (i.e., cooperated) when required to decide quickly than when forced to delay their decision (Rand, Greene & Nowak, 2012), a pattern consistent with the “social heuristics” hypothesis proposed by Rand and colleagues. The results of studies using time pres...

Finkel, Rusbult, Kumashiro, and Hannon (2002, Study 1) demonstrated a causal link between subjective commitment to a relationship and how people responded to hypothetical betrayals of that relationship. Participants primed to think about their commitment to their partner (high commitment) reacted to the betrayals with reduced exit and neglect respo...

Finkel, Rusbult, Kumashiro, and Hannon (2002, Study 1) demonstrated a causal link between subjective commitment to a relationship and how people responded to hypothetical betrayals of that relationship. Participants primed to think about their commitment to their partner (high commitment) reacted to the betrayals with reduced exit and neglect respo...

We present arguments that the analogy between humans and social insects is coincidental, rather than based upon real similarities. In their claims, Gowdy & Krall largely omit the role of institutions in the formation of complex societies, warfare, and regulation. They also offer no strong explanation for the expansion of agriculture despite its ear...

This perspective article builds upon the theory of local thinking in interpretation and prediction of consumer behavior in a contemporary world of information overload. It is shown that even informed and socially and environmentally responsible consumers (consumers 3.0) exhibit selective recall, limited attention, and bounded search in the percepti...

The article presents a short overview of heuristics and biases in managerial decision-making under risk and the consequences of such non-standard preferences for financial health of organisations. It is argued that, particularly in the case of inefficient ownership control or poor corporate governance, such bounded rationality manifestations can ha...

This article develops a model of local thinking in managerial decision making. According to the concept, attention is drawn by selectively salient factors or recalls in specific decision-making contexts. Although decision makers are aware of the changing conditions, they do not make a sufficient mental correction for the fact that the relevance of...

We discuss cultural group selection under the view of the frozen plasticity theory and the different explanatory power and predictions of this framework. We present evidence that cultural adaptations and their influence on the degree of cooperation may be more complex than presented by Richerson et al., and conclude with the gene-environment-cultur...

We argue that individuals systematically interpret sequences of events in a causal manner. It seems that people do so even if they are aware of stochastic nature of the respective sequence. Consequently, on financial markets small as well as professional investors may illusorily perceive causality of former random success and the future yield. Labo...

Providing people with more information and more options may seem as a good policy. However, because of limited attention and cognitive resources, people are not able to use all available information and freedom of choice effectively in order to achieve their own best interests. When cognitive resources and attention are depleted, decision making be...

The essay outlines selected psychological attitudes towards taxes. We argue that the application of behavioural economics methodology to taxation is more than justified because, in their decision-making, taxpayers seem to be influenced by the perception of taxes rather than solely by their existence. We also discuss several real life examples of ho...

In a recent Nature article, Cohn et al. (2014, henceforth CFM) boldly claim that their results “suggest that the prevailing business culture in the banking industry weakens and undermines the honesty norm” (p. 1). The main empirical finding of the CFM paper is that a group of bank employees that answered a series of questions about their work subs...

The article presents an overview of heuristic and biases in managerial decision-making under risk and the consequences of such nonstandard preferences on financial management of organizations. It is argued that particularly in case of a limited or inefficient ownership control or corporate governance such bounded rationality manifestations can reac...

Allowing players to punish their opponents in Public Goods Game sustains cooperation within a group and thus brings advantage to the cooperative individuals. However, the possibility of punishment of the co-players can result in antisocial punishment, the punishment of those players who contribute the most in the group. To better understand why ant...

Užití poznatků kognitivních a neuro-věd odkrývajících vnitřní fungování mozku již může přinést analytické nástroje k předvídání chování lidí v reálném prostředí. V článku jsou posouzeny výzkumy hledající neuronální koreláty mezičasového rozhodování. Získané výsledky ukazují, že mezičasové rozhodování není jednotným fenoménem jak implikuje exponenci...