Yuval Feldman

Yuval Feldman
Bar Ilan University | BIU · Faculty of Law

PhD

About

129
Publications
44,758
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1,289
Citations
Introduction
Feldman is the Mori Lazarof Professor of Legal Research at Bar-Ilan University and he studies behavioral and empirical perspectives of regulation, enforcement and compliance. His Ph.D in Jurisprudence and Social Policy is from UC Berkeley 2004. He has co-authored 50+ papers in some of the top journals of the field and won more than 20 research grants (ISF, GIF. EU ABA) His forthcoming book in Cambridge University Press 2018 on the Law of Good People. From 2011-2013, he was a fellow in the. Safra Lab at Harvard Law School and the Implicit Social Cognition Lab in Harvard Psychology). In 2016 he was elected to Israel's Young Academy of Sciences. in 2019 he has received the Chehiin award for excellence in Legal Research and the Bruno Award for ground breaking research.
Additional affiliations
October 2004 - present
Bar Ilan University
Position
  • Professor (Full)
July 2011 - August 2013
Harvard University
Position
  • Lab Fellow - Implicit Social Cognition Lab

Publications

Publications (129)
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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...
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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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
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People vary in the extent to which they generally feel obligated to obey the law. The Obligation to Obey the Law (OOL) plays a major role in how people respond to legal rules and whether they comply or violate such rules. Most existing research on OOL has been non-comparative. The present paper explores national differences in OOL by analyzing data...
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Regulators who aim to reduce administrative burdens often promote trust‐based policy instruments, such as legal affidavits or honesty pledges, as substitutes to traditional bureaucratic procedures. However, little is known on how the general public view such instruments, and whether people would actually comply with them, and under what circumstanc...
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To understand the question why people obey or break rules, different approaches have focused on different theories and subsets of variables. The present research develops a cross-theoretical approach that integrates these perspectives. We apply this in a survey of compliance with COVID-19 pandemic mitigation rules in Israel. The data reveal that co...
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Experts and employees in many domains make multiple similar but independent decisions in sequence. Often, the serial position of the case in the sequence influences the decision. Explanations for these serial position effects focus on the role of decision-makers' fatigue, but these effects emerge also when fatigue is unlikely. Here, we suggest that...
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Law and economics scholarship suggests that, in appropriate cases, the law can improve people’s behavior by changing their preferences. For example, the law can curb discriminatory hiring practices by providing employers with information that might change their discriminatory preference. Supposedly, if employers no longer prefer one class of employ...
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In this project, we use an experimental approach to investigate whether all types of discrimination are created equal, disentangling the different mechanisms that generate discrimination. In our study, a large random sample of Jewish Israelis played four economic games with partners belonging to a disadvantaged social group, identified by gender (w...
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The field of behavioural ethics seeks to clarify how people behave when confronted with ethical dilemmas. It has identified and analysed numerous mechanisms by which people may engage in unethical and illegal behaviour without fully recognizing its implications. In the field of employment law, which focuses on the interaction between employers and...
Article
A common regulatory dilemma is determining how much trust authorities can place in people’s self-reports, especially in contexts with an incentive to cheat. In such contexts, regulators are typically risk averse and do not readily confer trust, resulting in excessive requirements when applying for permits, licenses, etc. Studies in behavioral ethic...
Chapter
Illegal and unethical conduct often proliferates around ethical blind spots—scenarios and situations in which ordinary law-abiding people find it difficult to identify the harmfulness of their own actions. Ideally, regulators should act to diffuse ethical blind spots by trying to improve ethical awareness of potential perpetrators, in order to redu...
Preprint
Experts and workers in many domains make multiple similar but independent decisions in sequence. Previous research has shown that the serial position of the case in the sequence, an irrelevant factor, often influences the decision. Yet, the conditions under which serial position effects emerge remain unclear. Explanations for these effects tend to...
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(Forthcoming The Journal of Legal Studies 2022) Western societies are increasingly enacting majority nationalism laws to strengthen majority culture. We propose that these laws may alter public attitudes about minorities’ equal citizenship with varied impact on majorities and minorities. To explore this issue, we examine the impact of Israel’s rec...
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Each of these four insightful critiques of my book contributes to its attempt to create a framework for the interaction of behavioral ethics and law. Because each one addresses different issues, I respond separately to the arguments raised in each. Differences between behavioral law and economics and behavioral ethics: comments by Oren Bar-Gil It...
Chapter
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This concluding chapter provides some of the normative implications of the “Law of Good People” paradigm I have attempted to articulate in the book. The chapter focuses on few strategies that legal policy makers can adopt to create a behaviorally “responsive regulation” which will be sensitive to the variation among people and situations. The first...
Preprint
Full-text available
Law and economics scholarship suggests that, in appropriate cases, the law can improve people’s behavior by changing their preferences. For instance, the law can curb discriminatory hiring practices by providing employers with information that might change their preferences towards discriminatory hiring. Supposedly, if employers no longer prefer on...
Preprint
Full-text available
This paper investigates why Israeli citizens complied with measures taken to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 virus in early April. At the time, Israel had relatively stringent mitigation measures that encouraged people to stay at home and keep a safe social distance. The data of 411 adult participants, gathered using survey research, showed tha...
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Times of emergency often serve as triggers for the creation of new policy. Such policies may involve restriction of human rights, and various mechanisms can be used to mitigate the severity of such restrictions. One such mechanism is the temporary measure. A series of three experiments examined the potential of temporary measures for increasing the...
Article
Full-text available
Times of emergency often serve as triggers for the creation of new policy. Such policies may involve restriction of human rights, and various mechanisms can be used to mitigate the severity of such restrictions. One such mechanism is the temporary measure. A series of three experiments examined the potential of temporary measures for increasing the...
Preprint
A common dilemma in regulation is determining how much trust authorities can place in people’s self-reports, especially in regulatory contexts where the incentive to cheat is very high. In such contexts, regulators, who are typically risk averse, do not readily confer trust, resulting worldwide in excessive requirements when applying for permits, l...
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Full-text available
This paper seeks to explore whether the interpretation of legal standards is influenced by decision-makers’ substantive decision. Prior literature on motivated reasoning has shown that decision-makers “shift” their perception of evidence in their desired direction. To the extent this logic applies to legal-standards, we should expect decision-maker...
Article
Behaviorally informed interventions are growingly used to nudge consumers for various goals. While consumers are usually the target of nudges, businesses are involved in nudges in two manners: either they are the target of the nudges (i.e., government-to-business, or G2B nudges), or they serve as “nudging agents" on behalf of government regulation...
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Most companies use codes of conduct, ethical training and regular communication to assure employees know about rules to follow to avoid misconduct. This paper focuses on the type of language used in codes of conduct, and shows that impersonal language (“employees/members”) and personal, communal language (“we”) lead to different behaviors because t...
Chapter
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This chapter studies the implications of behavioral ethics research to questions of legal compliance. Behavioral ethics emphasizes the concept of bounded ethicality, referring to a long list of biases and cognitive limitations that prevent people from making a full and candid evaluation of the ethicality of their own actions. In other words, people...
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Many legal decisions, such as whether to set bail or release on parole, are made as part of a sequence of similar but independent decisions. Does the serial position of a case within a sequence influence the decision? Previous research in non-legal domains mostly suggests that cases appearing later in the sequence are likely to be judged more favor...
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The study of criminology has mostly focused on understanding criminal behavior, including the processes of criminalization as well as why people engage in criminal conduct. Here criminology has a particular focus that (while not always present) has been dominant. The focus has been on behavior that is in violation of criminal law (and thus legally...
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Growing recognition in both the psychological and management literature of the concept of “good people” has caused a paradigm shift in our understanding of wrongful behavior: wrongdoings that were previously assumed to be based on conscious choice – that is, deliberate decisions – are often the product of intuitive processes that prevent people fro...
Chapter
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Consumers in general, and poor consumers in particular, often make counter-productive financial decisions that undermine their welfare. One key example is that poor people frequently use high-cost credit and loans with onerous interest rates. They are also disproportionally engaged in other types of sub-optimal borrowing, such as rent-to-own transa...
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Attitudes of public groups towards behavioral policy interventions (or nudges) can be important for both the policy makers who design and deploy nudges, and to researchers who try to understand when and why some nudges are supported while others are not. Until now, research on public attitudes towards nudges has focused on either state-or country-l...
Article
Western societies have experienced ethnic and religious diversification in recent decades. These demographic changes have been met by efforts to defend the local dominant culture using majority nationalism laws, intended to protect the cultural heritage of the majority. We empirically examine majority nationalism laws’ expressive effects on pattern...
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Western societies have been going through significant processes of racial, ethnic and religious diversification in recent decades that were met with a growing effort to defend majority culture using legal instruments. Majority nationalism laws have raised concerns regarding their potential impact on intergroup relations, and particularly minority d...
Book
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Cambridge Core - Macroeconomics - The Law of Good People - by Yuval Feldman
Preprint
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Wrongdoers often operate without being fully aware of the immorality of their own actions. Thus, much of the illegal activity plaguing society is committed by self-perceived "good people". This paper explores possibilities of utilizing big data analysis to regulate such "unaware misconduct". Unaware misconduct is situation driven; when moral pitfal...
Preprint
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Preface Plato 1 has famously argued about the law that: "Laws are made to instruct the good, and in the hope that there may be no need of them; also to control the bad, whose hardness of heart will not be hindered from crime." The premise of this book is for the laws to be able to operate effectively; it needs to understand the involvement of "good...
Article
Even people who think of themselves as being ethical (“good people”) may engage in corrupt actions. In fact, the situations that seem least problematic can sometimes cause good people to behave immorally. Behavioral ethics research has demonstrated that various unconscious and self-deceptive mental processes promote such behavior in those individua...
Chapter
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The focus of this book is on how governments may effectively use recent advances in the understanding of human behavior to guide their efforts to modify people’s behavior. To date, the insights of behavioral ethics that have completely revolutionized the business and management fields have yet to be applied in legal as well as governance research,...
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Even “good people”--who think of themselves as ethical--may engage in corrupt actions. Behavioral ethics (BE) research has demonstrated that various unconscious and self-deceptive mental processes promote such behavior in those individuals. To reduce the frequency of misbehavior by normally well-intentioned individuals, regulators should expand the...
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Legal directives, whether laws, regulations, or contractual provisions, can be written along a spectrum of specificity, about which behavioral and legal scholarship present conflicting views. We hypothesized that the combination of specificity and monitoring promotes compliance but harms performance and trust, whereas the combination of specificity...
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Many scholars have pointed to the inequality in household responsibilities as the major source for the gender inequality and inferiority of women in the job market. Conventionally, affirmative action is perceived as a tool for addressing this problem. We argue that a general equilibrium analysis of these policies on both the job market and the divi...
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Studies of corruption and conflicts of interest describe numerous situations in which “good people”, who usually act in ways consistent with professional and moral responsibility, allow their self-interest to prevail over fulfilling their professional duties. This paper describes the changes that regulators should implement to regulate corruption b...
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Consumers make purchasing decisions in various markets every day. Contrary to common belief, such decision-making is often not the result of deliberate analysis of information or of rational thinking. Rather, it is frequently based on feelings, sensations and intuition. Purchasing decisions are not made in a vacuum and are regularly influenced by s...
Chapter
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In legal scholarship, it is almost self-evident that “certainty” is an advantage for regulation. “Uncertainty,” on the other hand, is usually viewed as an inevitable by-product of vague legal standards that may be justified by the prohibitive cost of creating bright-line rules or by the inability of the legislature to account ex ante for the comple...
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Social enforcement of norms governing appropriate business practices, through online and social networks, is regarded as an effective alternative to formal, state-sponsored enforcement. However, recent research finds that such norms are interpreted differently when applied to individual actors than when applied to corporations. This article finds t...
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This article draws on the behavioral science literature to offer empirically driven policy prescriptions that can reduce the effect of bias and ameliorate unequal treatment in policing, the criminal justice system, employment, and national security.
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There is individual variation in the extent to which individuals believe it is acceptable to violate legal rules. However, we lack a specific measure that assesses this key internal element of legal decision-making and offending. This paper describes the development, validation, and testing of the Rule Orientation scale. At its core, the construct...
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The morality of killing in war is subject to debate among philosophers and legal scholars. The debate is focused on two theories. The first is “contractarianism,” which argues for symmetry: soldiers of both sides are liable to be killed, whether or not the war they fight is just. Civilians are immune from being harmed whether or not they are respon...
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This article presents the first empirical study on whether anchors influence the interpretation of vague legal standards. To test this question, the article presents a series of stylized experiments that measure and compare participants' interpretation of a vague norm after they were exposed to anchors. Overall, the results suggest that the content...
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This Article presents the first empirical study on the way in which irrelevant anchors influence the interpretation of vague legal standards. A large body of psychological research demonstrates that when people make judgments on a continuum, they are often affected by meaningless anchors. Building on this body of work, legal scholars have shown tha...
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This article draws on the behavioral science literature to offer empirically driven policy prescriptions that can reduce the effect of bias and ameliorate unequal treatment in policing, the criminal justice system, employment, and national security.
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The paper highlights how our knowledge about the manner the human mind works and people behave in social interactions may contribute to our understanding of employment discrimination and provide effective ways to address it. It calls for a rigorous empirical study of the mechanisms generating different forms of discrimination against disadvantaged...
Article
Reviewing the literature on caregiving in various ethnic and racial cultures unveils a lack of information on caregiver needs, and a need for multiple new ways of approaching interventions.
Article
Full-text available
Consumers make purchasing decisions in various markets every day. Contrary to common belief, such decision-making is often not the result of deliberate analysis of information or of rational thinking. Rather, it is frequently based on feelings, sensations and intuition. Purchasing decisions are not made in a vacuum and are regularly influenced by s...
Chapter
Full-text available
The present chapter attempts to map the literature of ethical decision making in psychology and management and examine the ways in which it could shape behavioral law and economics. In the last ten years, research in the field of ethical decision making has grown exponentially, mainly in the area of behavioral ethics or bounded ethicality. The new...
Article
The past twenty years have witnessed a surge in behavioral studies of law and law-related issues. These studies have challenged the application of the rational-choice model to legal analysis and introduced a more accurate and empirically grounded model of human behavior. This integration of economics, psychology, and law is breaking exciting ground...
Chapter
The purpose of this chapter is to illuminate the breadth and potential of behaviorally informed legal policy. We argue that currently policy approaches that encompass behavioral insights often overlook a fuller picture of psychology. A narrow approach limits the successful integration of behavioural insights into the legal system. This chapter sugg...
Article
The growing recognition of the notion of ‘good people’ suggests that many ethically relevant behaviors that were previously assumed to be choice-based, conscious, and deliberate decisions, are in many cases the product of automatic/intuitive processes that prevent people from recognizing the wrongfulness of their behaviour – an idea dubbed by sever...
Article
Two insights of psychology on which we would like to draw are that people react to law in more complex ways than rational-choice models assume and that good people sometimes do bad things. With that starting point, this article provides a behavioral perspective on some of the factors that policymakers seeking to reduce the level of misconduct in th...
Article
The paper uses the findings of psychology, behavioral economics, and behavioral ethics to revisit three main related assumptions of the rational-choice approach to equity, by developing three main points: first, not only bad people try to circumvent the law; second, behavior depends on the relationship between specificity, trust, and the type of mo...

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