Stefan Pfattheicher

• PhD
• Professor at Aarhus University

Although abundant research documents positive interpersonal outcomes of perspective taking, a growing body of evidence indicates perspective taking can also induce negative interpersonal outcomes (i.e., it “backfires”). We aim at integrating these seemingly contradictory findings, suggesting that perspective taking backfires when it causes the pers...

Recent research on humans’ prosociality has highlighted the crucial role of Honesty-Humility, a basic trait in the HEXACO personality model. There is overwhelming evidence that Honesty-Humility predicts prosocial behavior across a vast variety of situations. In the present contribution, we cloud this rosy picture, examining a condition under which...

The last decades of research provided overwhelming evidence that compassion fosters a vast range of behaviors toward reducing suffering of others. In this regard, compassion has been described as a prosocial tendency par excellence, fostering helping behavior across a variety of social situations. With the present contribution, we apply a different...

What gives rise to sadism? While sadistic behavior (i.e., harming others for pleasure) is well-documented, past empirical research is nearly silent regarding the psychological factors behind it. We help close this gap by suggesting that boredom plays a crucial role in the emergence of sadistic tendencies. Across nine diverse studies, we provide cor...

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a major challenge to societies all over the globe. To curb the spread of the disease, two measures implemented in many countries are minimizing close contact between people (“physical distancing”) and wearing face masks. In the present research, we tested the idea that physical distancing and wearing face masks can be...

Economic dishonesty is a widespread behavior that has substantial implications on organizations and societies. Recent studies suggest that decision making in groups or commitment to other individuals can further increase such dishonesty in contrast to individual decision making. Various interventions have been suggested to curb dishonesty and the m...

Semantic priming has been studied for nearly 50 years across various experimental manipulations and theoretical frameworks. Although previous studies provide insight into the cognitive underpinnings of semantic representations, they have suffered from small sample sizes and a lack of linguistic and cultural diversity. In this Registered Report, we...

Semantic priming has been studied for nearly 50 years across various experimental manipulations and theoretical frameworks. Although previous studies provide insight into the cognitive underpinnings of semantic representations, they have suffered from small sample sizes and a lack of linguistic and cultural diversity. In this Registered Report, we...

Collective action problems emerge when individual incentives and group interests are misaligned, as in the case of climate change. Individuals involved in collective action problems are often considered to have two options: contribute towards a public solution or free-ride. But they might also choose a third option of investing in a private solutio...

Economic dishonesty is a widespread behavior that has substantial implications on organizations and societies. Recent studies suggest that decision making in groups or commitment to other individuals can further increase such dishonesty in contrast to individual decision making. Various interventions have been suggested to curb dishonesty and the m...

Economic dishonesty is a widespread behavior that has substantial implications on organizations and societies. Recent studies suggest that decision making in groups or commitment to other individuals can further increase such dishonesty in contrast to individual decision making. Various interventions have been suggested to curb dishonesty and the m...

This study investigated the robustness of the seven-factor HEXACO–Disintegration (HEXACOD) personality model in children and adolescents, across three age groups (10–13, 14–15, and 16–18 years). Using exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), we assessed the invariance of the proposed seven-factor model. The results supported the HEXACOD mod...

Collective action problems emerge when individual incentives and group interests are misaligned, as in the case of climate change. Individuals involved in collective action problems are often considered to have two options: contribute towards a public solution or free-ride. But they might also choose a third option of investing in a private solutio...

Collective action problems emerge when individual incentives and group interests are misaligned, as in the case of climate change. Individuals involved in these problems are often considered to have two options: contribute towards public solutions such as global mitigation or free ride. However, many collective action problems today involve a third...

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...

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...

Collective action problems emerge when individual incentives and group interests are misaligned, as in the case of climate change 1–5 . Individuals involved in collective action problems are often considered to have two options: contribute towards a public solution or free-ride. But they might also choose a third option of investing in a private so...

The current research is a contribution to the ongoing scientific efforts to understand the emotional implications of acts of kindness. While a large body of studies has examined the benefits of remembering past episodes of prosocial (monetary) spending toward others, considerably fewer studies have examined the implications of past acts of kindness...

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...

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...

Cooperation in the Public Goods Game (PGG) is determined by a mixture of individual differences (e.g., personality, social preferences) and group dynamics (e.g., reciprocation, social norms). However, to our knowledge, no thorough attempt has been made to separate individual and group levels of cooperation and quantify the variance in cooperation t...

Explaining prosocial behavior is a central goal in classic and contemporary behavioral science. Here, for the first time, we apply modern machine learning techniques to uncover the full predictive potential that personality traits have for prosocial behavior. We utilize a large-scale dataset ( N = 2707; 81 personality traits) and state-of-the-art s...

Economic dishonesty is a widespread behavior that has substantial implications on organizations and societies. Recent studies suggest that decision making in groups or commitment to other individuals can further increase such dishonesty in contrast to individual decision making. Various interventions have been suggested to curb dishonesty and the m...

Economic dishonesty is a widespread behavior that has substantial implications for organizations and societies. Recent studies suggest that decision making in groups or commitment to other individuals can further increase such dishonesty in contrast to individual decision making. Various interventions have been suggested to curb dishonesty, with cl...

In this chapter, we discuss how aggression is a cure for boredom with aggressive entertainment pleasing the ancient Romans of the grand Colosseum just as it does the modern movie and game consumer. We theorize that aggression provides a much-needed increase in stimulation for the bored individual. However, this efficient alleviation can result in n...

The concluding chapter of this book represents a collaborative effort between the editors and all contributing authors, resulting in a comprehensive overview of the current directions in boredom research. Summaries of each chapter not only underscore the multitude of perspectives on boredom but also elucidate the diverse approaches employed in its...

In this chapter, we discuss how aggression is a cure for boredom with aggressive entertainment pleasing the ancient Romans of the grand Colosseum just as it does the modern movie and game consumer. We theorize that aggression provides a much-needed increase in stimulation for the bored individual. However, this efficient alleviation can result in n...

Despite being a pivotal aspect of human cooperation, only a few studies within the field of collaborative dishonesty have included communication between participants, and none have yet experimentally compared this to non-communicative contexts. As a result, the impact of communication on unethical collaborations remains unclear. To address this gap...

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...

Explaining prosocial behavior is a central goal in classic and contemporary behavioral science. Here, for the first time, we apply modern machine learning techniques to uncover the full predictive potential that personality traits have for prosocial behavior. We utilize a large-scale dataset (N = 2,707; 81 personality traits) and state-of-the-art s...

Large-scale corporate fraud often evolves from the intricate, coordinated actions of several individuals. Despite being a pivotal aspect of human cooperation, only few studies within the field of collaborative dishonesty have included communication between participants, and no studies have yet experimentally compared this to non-communicative conte...

Two participants completing a psychometric scale may leave wildly different responses yet attain the same mean score. Moreover, the mean score often does not represent the bulk of participants’ responses, which may be skewed, kurtotic, or bimodal. Even so, researchers in psychological science often aggregate item scores using an unweighted mean or...

Past research on determinants of victim blaming mainly concentrated on individuals’ just-world beliefs as motivational process underlying this harsh reaction to others’ suffering. The present work provides novel insights regarding underlying affective processes by showing how individuals prone to derive pleasure from others’ suffering—individuals h...

Past research on determinants of victim blaming mainly concentrated on individuals’ just-world beliefs as motivational process underlying this harsh reaction to others’ suffering. The present work provides novel insights regarding underlying affective processes by showing how individuals prone to derive pleasure from others’ suffering—individuals h...

Past research on determinants of victim blaming mainly concentrated on individuals' just-world beliefs as motivational process underlying this harsh reaction to others' suffering. The present work provides novel insights regarding underlying affective processes by showing how individuals prone to derive pleasure from others' suffering-individuals h...

Schools can be a place of both love and of cruelty. We examined one type of cruelty that occurs in the school context: sadism, that is, harming others for pleasure. Primarily, we proposed and tested whether boredom plays a crucial role in the emergence of sadistic actions at school. In two well-powered studies (N = 1038; student age range = 10–18 y...

In social dilemmas, asymmetric opportunities among actors can aggravate the conflict between individual and collective interests. We examine if and under what conditions redistributing extraction opportunities symmetrically fosters sustainable resource consumption. Participants in two studies (total n=640) completed a common resource game, first un...

Does the basic prosocial trait of Honesty-Humility predict crime? We test whether Honesty-Humility (1) differentiates between prisoners and the national population, (2) predicts the frequency of criminal behavior (the number of reported crimes), and (3) predicts the type of crime leading to imprisonment (violent, non-violent, and sexual). We found...

Cooperation—although typically connoted with prosocial behaviour—plays a crucial role in facilitating bribery. Herein, we ask (i) whether emphasizing the cooperative aspect of bribery (i.e., using cooperation framing) increases bribery, and (ii) who is most likely to be corrupted by cooperation framing, considering people’s personality. We suggest...

Does the basic trait Honesty-Humility predict the type of moral concerns people express in language? We explore whether Honesty-Humility relates to the expression of five moral concerns in language—namely, care/harm, justice/fairness, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation—as conceptualized by the Moral Foundations Theory....

Does the basic prosocial trait of Honesty-Humility predict crime? We test whether Honesty-Humility (1) differentiates between prisoners and the national population, (2) predicts the frequency of criminal behavior (the number of reported crimes), and (3) predicts the type of crime leading to imprisonment (violent, non-violent, and sexual). We found...

People differ fundamentally in their propensity to engage in bribery. Herein, we tested the effects of inequality of (monetary) resources between bribers (individuals who can offer bribes) and bribees (individuals who might receive bribes) on bribery. We implemented a bribery game where bribers and bribees could engage in bribery to benefit themsel...

Combating global crises like climate change requires large-scale cooperation among actors with different amounts of resources. The present investigation examines how signals of cooperativeness from a first-mover influence subsequent cooperation depending on the resources of the first-mover and the followers. In two studies, participants (total N =...

Terror management theory postulates that mortality salience (MS) increases the motivation to defend one’s cultural worldviews. How that motivation is expressed may depend on the social norm that is momentarily salient. Meta-analyses were conducted on studies that manipulated MS and social norm salience. Results based on 64 effect sizes for the hypo...

Terror management theory postulates that mortality salience (MS) increases the motivation to defend one’s cultural worldviews. How that motivation is expressed may depend on the social norm that is momentarily salient. Meta-analyses were conducted on studies that manipulated MS and social norm salience. Results based on 64 effect sizes for the hypo...

Prosocial behavior is crucial for the flourishing of human societies and it comes along in a beautiful variety of expressions. Humans help strangers they will never meet again, they volunteer and donate for a good cause, and they care intensively about their friends and family. The richness of theories, perspectives, and methodological approaches d...

This letter comments on the relation between social mindfulness and concern with environmental protection. In particular, the individual-level relationship between the constructs is found to be much smaller (rs < .111) than the country-level relationship (r = .617) reported by Van Doesum et al. (2021).

This letter comments on the relation between social mindfulness and concern with environmental protection. In particular, the individual-level relationship between the constructs is found to be much smaller (rs < .111) than the country-level relationship (r = .617) reported by Van Doesum et al. (2021).

We investigated whether individuals’ punishment behavior aims at compensating for inflicted harm (i.e., retribution) or at deterring the offender from committing the offense again (i.e., deterrence) and whether punishment motives depend on the punishment system. Participants (N = 149) assigned punishment for selfish decisions in a group resource al...

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has strongly affected individuals and societies worldwide. In this review and meta-analysis, we investigated how aversive personality traits – that is, relatively stable antisocial personality characteristics – related to how individuals perceived, evaluated, and responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 34...

Constructing personal life stories carries benefits for psychological adjustment. We examined whether writing about the life stories of parents (i.e., vicarious life stories) hold similar advantages. In Study 1, we adapted an established experimental paradigm to an online format. Participants wrote either about personal life story chapters or about...

Does giving behavior in economic games reflect true prosocial preferences or is it due to confusion? Research showing that trait Honesty-Humility accounts for giving behavior suggests the former, whereas research showing that participants give money to a computer might suggest the latter. In three preregistered, well-powered studies, we examined th...

Semantic priming has been studied for nearly 50 years across various experimental manipulations and theoretical frameworks. These studies provide insight into the cognitive underpinnings of semantic representations in both healthy and clinical populations; however, they have suffered from several issues including generally low sample sizes and a la...

Semantic priming has been studied for nearly 50 years across various experimental manipulations and theoretical frameworks. Although previous studies provide insight into the cognitive underpinnings of semantic representations, they have suffered from several methodological issues including small sample sizes and a lack of linguistic and cultural d...

The development of partially and highly autonomous vehicles that take over parts of the driving task will result in changes in e.g. the responsibilities, interface and system design, task allocation and communication between driver and automated vehicle. To support this change and the increasing space of cooperative possibilities between driver and...

Does giving behavior in economic games reflect true prosocial preferences or is it due to confusion? Research showing that trait Honesty-Humility accounts for giving behavior suggests the former, whereas research showing that participants give money to a computer might suggest the latter. In three preregistered, well-powered studies, we examined th...

Objective: An effective vaccine against COVID-19 is a desired solution to curb the spread of the disease. However, vaccine hesitancy might hinder high uptake rates and thus undermine efforts to eliminate COVID-19 once an effective vaccine became available. The present contribution addresses this issue by examining two ways of increasing the intenti...

Building on the Computers Are Social Actors framework, we provide an overview of research demonstrating that humans behave prosocially towards machines. In doing so, we outline that similar motivational and cognitive processes play a role when people act in prosocial ways towards humans and machines. These include perceiving the machine as somewhat...

The field of prosociality is flourishing, yet researchers disagree about how to define prosocial behavior and often neglect defining it altogether. In this review, we provide an overview about the breadth of definitions of prosocial behavior and the related concept of altruism. Common to almost all definitions is an emphasis on the promotion of wel...

The field of prosociality is flourishing, yet researchers disagree about how to define prosocial behavior and often neglect defining it altogether. In this review, we provide an overview about the breadth of definitions of prosocial behavior and the related concept of altruism. Common to almost all definitions is an emphasis on the promotion of wel...

Building on the Computers Are Social Actors framework, we provide an overview of research demonstrating that humans behave prosocially towards machines. In doing so, we outline that similar motivational and cognitive processes play a role when people act in prosocial ways towards humans and machines. These include perceiving the machine as somewhat...

Global challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the impending climate change require each and every one of us to perform long-term self-restrictive behaviours, implying personal costs, for the sake of vulnerable others and future generations. We argue that empathy – conceptualised as other-oriented moral emotional process – can impact how we thi...

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has strongly affected individuals and societies worldwide. In this review and meta-analysis, we investigated how aversive personality traits—i.e., relatively stable antisocial personality characteristics—related to how individuals perceived, evaluated, and responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 34 studies...

Meta-analytical findings suggested a positive link between trait mindfulness and prosociality. However, most correlational studies on mindfulness and prosociality have relied on self-report measures. The present work aimed to address this serious limitation by investigating actual prosocial behavior. We further focused on mindfulness as a multi-dim...

Schools can be a place of both love and of cruelty. We examine one particular type of cruelty that occurs in the school context: sadism, that is, harming others for pleasure. Primarily, we propose and test whether boredom plays a crucial role in the emergence of sadistic actions at school. In two well-powered studies (total N = 1,038) using both se...

Punishment has been shown to increase cooperation in public goods dilemmas when resources to contribute are distributed symmetrically. The present investigation examines which punishment system (peer punishment, democratic punishment, and central punishment) in comparison to a system without punishment fosters cooperation in a social dilemma when r...

People's perceived susceptibility to illnesses plays a key role in determining whether or not to take protective measures. However, self-enhancing biases hinder accurate susceptibility perceptions, leaving some individuals to feel invulnerable in the face of acute health risks. Since such biases are prominent characteristics of individuals with nar...

Objective: An effective vaccine against COVID-19 is a desired solution to curb the spread of the disease. However, vaccine hesitancy might hinder high uptake rates and thus undermine efforts to eliminate COVID-19 once an effective vaccine became available. The present contribution addresses this issue by examining two ways of increasing the intenti...

In light of the recent rise of right-wing populist parties across Europe, it is an intriguing question under which conditions people agree with right-wing political statements. The present study investigates whether mere labelling of political statements as endorsed by a right-wing populist party influences people’s agreement with such statements....

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a major challenge to societies all over the globe. To curb the spread of the disease, two measures implemented in many countries are minimizing close contact between people (“physical distancing”) and wearing face masks. In the present research, we tested the idea that physical distancing and wearing face masks can be...

The present research examined lie detection abilities of a rarely investigated group, namely offenders. Results of the studies conducted thus far indicated a better performance of offenders compared to non‐offenders when discriminating between true and false messages. With two new studies, we aimed at replicating offenders' superior abilities in th...

Although past research has convincingly shown that rewarding prosocial individuals helps to establish high levels of cooperation, research investigating factors that promote rewarding others has been surprisingly rare. The present research addresses this gap and examines two factors that were shown in past research to play a role in prosocial behav...

Human prosociality is a fascinating and complex phenomenon. The present research takes this complexity into account by examining the interplay of three prominent factors that past research has shown to promote prosocial behavior. In two studies (total N = 1,799), we tested the impact of (a) a basic prosocial personality trait (the Honesty-Humility...

What gives rise to sadism? While sadistic behavior (i.e., harming others for pleasure) is well-documented, past empirical research is nearly silent regarding the psychological factors behind it. We help close this gap by suggesting that boredom plays a crucial role in the emergence of sadistic tendencies. Across nine diverse studies, we provide cor...

Uncertainty, perceived threats, and a generally insecure life attachment have been associated with endorsement of extremism. Furthermore, salient identification with a group can influence radicalized ways of addressing insecure life attachment through an established and sometimes extreme worldview and ideology. In the present study, we replicated t...

Uncertainty, perceived threats, and a generally insecure life attachment have been associated with endorsement of extremism. Furthermore, salient identification with a group can influence radicalized ways of addressing insecure life attachment through an established and sometimes extreme worldview and ideology. In the present study, we replicated t...

Asymmetric distribution of opportunities among actors can reinforce the conflict between individual and collective interests in social dilemma situations. The present study investigates the interplay of asymmetric distribution of opportunities to consume resources and three choice systems: individual choice, median choice, and majority voting. Part...

Findings from previous literature suggest that taking the perspective of a suffering victim is an important factor for a sadistic individual to experience pleasure. In the present study (N = 387, with a priori preregistered hypotheses, analyses, and sample size), we examined the impact of perspective taking in everyday (non-clinical) sadists from t...

This study tested the idea that faith in intuition (people’s reliance on their intuition when making judgments or decisions) is negatively associated with vaccination attitudes in the U.S. populace. Intuition is an implicit, affective information processing mode based on prior experiences. U.S. citizens have few threatening experiences with vaccine...

According to terror management theory, in a first study (N = 80), we tested the hypothesis that heroic perceptions of historic heroes would become more positive under mortality salience. Results, however, showed the opposite effect – heroic perceptions were less positive. To explain this unexpected finding, we referred to a social comparison perspe...

Background: The present contribution tests the main ideas that (a) hand hygiene behavior is associated with habit, and (b) this association is robust when deliberative constructs (i.e. knowledge and intention) are controlled for, indicating an automatic component in hand hygiene behavior. Methods: Two correlational studies using different operat...

The implementation of punishment has proven a prominent solution to prevent the breakdown of cooperation in social dilemma situations. In fact, numerous studies show that punishment possibilities are effective in maintaining cooperative behavior. However, punishment is often not efficient in terms (a) of monetary benefits and in light of the fact (...

Many (elite) universities emphasize ‘excellence’. In doing so, universities may communicate excellence norms—that is, highest performance standards that students should achieve. For some students, such norms might be motivating, but for others, these norms may create external pressure to perform. Stress research suggests that excellence norms can p...

Mindfulness is a state of paying conscious and nonjudgmental attention to present‐moment experiences. Previous research relates this state to more effective emotion regulation and less emotion reactivity. We therefore hypothesized an attenuating effect of a mindfulness exercise on moral reactions that usually results from a bad conscience when havi...

In social dilemma situations, individuals benefit from uncooperative behavior while exploiting resources of the collective. One prominent solution to prevent uncooperative behavior and to increase cooperation is to establish a system of costly peer punishment, that is, the possibility for every individual involved in the dilemma to impose costly pu...

The Big Five taxonomy describes basic aspects of human personality. Nevertheless, it seems necessary to extend the Big Five as there is new empirical evidence supporting the existence of a continuous distribution of psychotic-like experiences in the general population. Particularly, the lexical approach, which is constitutive for the Big Five tax...

The present contribution examines two factors, as well as their interplay, prominently discussed in the literature on cheating: The basic personality trait of Honesty-Humility from the HEXACO personality model and cues of being watched when given the possibility to cheat. In two studies (Study 1 N = 192, Study 2 N = 957), we applied economically in...

Vandalism, the intentional act to destruct or to deface a property not one's own, has received surprisingly little attention in psychological research so far. The present contribution addresses this gap and applies a basic personality perspective to vandalism. Here, we focused on one specific manifestation of vandalism, that is, destroying things f...