Sonja Vogt

Universität Bern | UniBe · Department of Social Sciences

Discussions of the environmental impact that revolve around monetary incentives and other easy-to-measure factors are important, but they neglect culture. Pro-environmental values will be crucial when facing sustainability challenges in the Anthropocene, and demand among green consumers is arguably critical to incentivise sustainable production. Ho...

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

Anthropogenic carbon emissions have the potential to trigger changes in climate and ecosystems that would be catastrophic for the well-being of humans and other species. Widespread shifts in production and consumption patterns are urgently needed to address climate change. Although transnational agreements and national policy are necessary for a tr...

Social tipping can accelerate behaviour change consistent with policy objectives in diverse domains from social justice to climate change. Hypothetically, however, group identities might undermine tipping in ways that policymakers do not anticipate. To examine this, we implemented an experiment around the 2020 US federal elections. The participants...

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

Public health policy often involves implementing cost-efficient, large-scale interventions. When mandating or forbidding a specific behaviour is not permissible, public health professionals may draw on behaviour change interventions to achieve socially beneficial policy objectives. Interventions can have two main effects: (i) a direct effect on peo...

Sex ratios at birth favoring boys are being documented in a growing number of countries, a pattern indicating that families selectively abort females. Son bias also explains why, in many countries, girls have more siblings and are born at relatively earlier parities compared with their brothers. In this study, we develop novel methods for measuring...

Developing interventions to change human behaviour at scale is critical to achieving the new Global Biodiversity Framework goals. One strategy that conservation practitioners can adopt in pursuing this ambition is to look for lessons from other fields engaged in sustainable development, such as development economics and behavioural science. Over th...

The popular practice of “leading by the successful” is viewed as a hallmark of motivational leadership. A central rationale for leaders to make successful team members salient is that it may induce social learning, where followers strive to adopt a favorable behavior. The reliance of a leader on such success-biased social learning presumes that imi...

For a policy-maker promoting the end of a harmful tradition, conformist social influence is a compelling mechanism. If an intervention convinces enough people to abandon the tradition, this can spill over and induce others to follow. A key objective is thus to activate such spillovers and amplify an intervention’s effects. With female genital cutti...

Preliminary report on study of son bias in Armenia

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 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...

The importance of culture for human social evolution hinges largely on the extent to which culture supports outcomes that would not otherwise occur. An especially controversial claim is that social learning leads groups to coalesce around group-typical behaviours and associated social norms that spill over to shape choices in asocial settings. To t...

Worldwide, an estimated 200million girls and women have been subjected to female genital cutting. Female genital cutting is defined as an intentional injury to the female genitalia without medical justification. The practice occurs in at least 29 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In addition, globalization and migration have brought i...

As globalization brings people with incompatible attitudes into contact, cultural conflicts inevitably arise. Little is known about how to mitigate conflict and about how the conflicts that occur can shape the cultural evolution of the groups involved. Female genital cutting is a prominent example. Governments and international agencies have promot...

Economic exchange between strangers happens extremely frequently due to the growing number of internet transactions. In trust situations like online transactions, a trustor usually does not know whether she encounters a trustworthy trustee. However, the trustor might form beliefs about the trustee's trustworthiness by relying on third-party informa...

Raw data. (XLS)

Description of control variables and robustness checks. (PDF)

For cooperation to evolve, some mechanism must limit the rate at which cooperators are exposed to defectors. Only then can the advantages of mutual cooperation outweigh the costs of being exploited. Although researchers widely agree on this, they disagree intensely about which evolutionary mechanisms can explain the extraordinary cooperation exhibi...

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The World Health Organization defines female genital cutting as any procedure that removes or injures any part of a female's external genitalia for nonmedical reasons (1). Cutting brings no documented health benefits and leads to serious health problems. Across six African countries, for example, a cohort of 15-year-old girls is expected to lose ne...

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

We examine how the timing of trust violations affects cooperation and solidarity, including trust and relational cohesion. Past studies that used repeated Prisoner’s Dilemmas suggest that trust violations are more harmful when they occur in early rather than later interactions. We argue that this effect of early trust violations depends on cultural...

We examine how the timing of trust violations affects cooperation and solidarity, including trust and relational cohesion. Past studies that used repeated Prisoner’s Dilemmas suggest that trust violations are more harmful when they occur in early rather than later interactions. We argue that this effect of early trust violations depends on cultural...

Evolutionary theory predicts that observable traits should evolve to reliably indicate unobservable behavioral tendencies in coordination games but not social dilemmas. We conducted a two-part study to test this idea. First, we recorded 60-s videos of participants, and then these participants played a stag hunt game or a prisoner’s dilemma. Subsequ...

The evolution of cooperation requires some mechanism that reduces the risk of exploitation for cooperative individuals. Recent studies have shown that men with wide faces are anti-social, and they are perceived that way by others. This suggests that people could use facial width to identify anti-social men and thus limit the risk of exploitation. T...

Zusammenfassung In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir prosoziales Verhalten im Sinne wechselseitiger Hilfeleistungen. Als formales Modell verwenden wir ein asymmetrisches wiederholtes Solidaritätsspiel zwischen zwei Akteuren. Wir modellieren Asymmetrie in drei Dimensionen: (1.) Nutzen, den ein Akteur aus der Hilfeleistung des anderen zieht, (2.) Kosten...

This paper studies how dyadic social support is affected by heterogeneity of the partners. We distinguish heterogeneity with respect to three parameters the likelihood of needing support; the benefits from receiving support; and the costs of providing support. Hypotheses are based on a game-theoretic analysis of an iterated support game. First, we...

This paper derives hypotheses on how dyadic social support is affected by heterogeneity of the actors. We distinguish heterogeneity with respect to three parameters. First, the likelihood of needing support; second, the benefits from support relative to the costs for providing support; and, third, time preferences. The hypotheses are based on a gam...