Niels van de Ven’s research while affiliated with Tilburg University and other places

Creating effective nudges, or interventions that encourage people to make choices that increase their welfare, is difficult to execute well. Recent work on megastudies, massive field experiments that test many interventions simultaneously, reveals that nudge effectiveness both varies widely and is difficult for experts to predict. We propose an Iterative Crowdsourcing Procedure, which uses insights from members of the target population to generate and preselect nudges prior to testing them in a field experiment. This technique can supplement existing methods or stand alone as a way to generate conditions for testing in a high-quality field experiment. We test the effectiveness of this method in addressing a challenge to effective financial management: consumer oversubscription. We first document that people have more subscriptions than they think they have and that enhancing subscription awareness makes people want to cancel some subscriptions. We then use our crowdsourcing procedure to motivate people toward subscription awareness in a field experiment (N = 4,412,113) with a large bank. We find that the crowdsourced nudges outperform those generated by the bank, demonstrating that the Iterative Crowdsourcing Procedure is a useful way to generate effective nudges.

A key observation in coalition formation is that bargainers who control many resources are often excluded from coalitions by bargainers who control few resources, the Strength‐is‐Weakness effect. We argue that this effect is contingent on whether resources provide a legitimate claim to be included in a coalition. Across three incentivized coalition experiments (n = 2745; 915 triads), three participants (player A had four resources, player B had three resources, player C had two resources) negotiated about a payoff of 90 monetary units. Depending on condition, these resources were obtained randomly, earned, or earned and proportionally linked to the payoff. Results showed player As were less included when resources were obtained randomly and more often included in coalitions when resources were earned and/or proportionally linked to the payoff. This provides evidence that the Strength‐is‐Weakness is contingent on the legitimacy of the resources.

In this paper, we present the Online Coalition Game (OCG): an open-source tool written for the open-access research platform oTree that enables high-powered interactive coalition formation experiments. Besides containing a tutorial on conducting and configuring studies using the OCG, we discuss two previous implementations. With these examples, we demonstrate that online use of the OCG provides the benefits of large sample sizes and fast data collection, while leading to convergent and robust findings. Moreover, we show that small changes in the experimental setup offer interesting opportunities to expand coalition formation theory by including insights from, amongst others, literature on bargaining, ostracism, and communication, and vice versa.

Research on the effect of emotional tears on perceived competence has yielded an inconsistent pattern of findings, with some studies showing that tearful individuals may be perceived as less competent, while others report no such effect. These mixed results point to the likely existence of third variables influencing the link between tears and perceived competence and suggest that crying may affect competence only in specific circumstances. In the current project, we reexamine this link using a large, openly available dataset of responses to tearful faces collected across 41 countries and 7,007 participants (Zickfeld et al., 2021). Our results show that tears have no general effect on perceptions of competence but do reduce competence when crying is regarded as inappropriate (e.g., there is no clear reason for shedding tears) or when the target is perceived as helpless. Moreover, shedding tears increases competence when the target is perceived as honest. As emotional tears have been found to signal both helplessness and honesty, the interplay of these effects might result in no overall effect of tears on perceptions of competence. The present findings suggest that the link between emotional tears and perceived competence is highly context-dependent.

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively on participants from North America and Europe, resulting in limited generalizability. This project examined the tears-social support intentions effect and possible mediating and moderating variables in a fully pre-registered study across 7007 participants (24,886 ratings) and 41 countries spanning all populated continents. Participants were presented with four pictures out of 100 possible targets with or without digitally-added tears. We confirmed the main prediction that seeing a tearful individual elicits the intention to support, d = 0.49 [0.43, 0.55]. Our data suggest that this effect could be mediated by perceiving the crying target as warmer and more helpless, feeling more connected, as well as feeling more empathic concern for the crier, but not by an increase in personal distress of the observer. The effect was moderated by the situational valence, identifying the target as part of one's group, and trait empathic concern. A neutral situation, high trait empathic concern, and low identification increased the effect. We observed high heterogeneity across countries that was, via split-half validation, best explained by country-level GDP per capita and subjective well-being with stronger effects for higher-scoring countries. These findings suggest that tears can function as social glue, providing one possible explanation why emotional crying persists into adulthood.

Research on the effect of emotional tears on perceived competence has yielded an inconsistent pattern of findings, with some studies showing that tearful individuals may be perceived as less competent, while others report no such effect. These mixed results point to the likely existence of third variables influencing the link between tears and perceived competence and suggest that crying may affect competence only in specific circumstances. In the current project, we re-examine this link using a large, openly available dataset of responses to tearful faces collected across 41 countries and 7,007 participants (Zickfeld et al., 2021). Our results show that tears have no general effect on perceptions of competence, but do reduce competence when crying is regarded as inappropriate (e.g., there is no clear reason for shedding tears) or when the target is perceived as helpless. Moreover, shedding tears increases competence when the target is perceived as honest. As emotional tears have been found to signal both helplessness and honesty, the interplay of these effects might result in no overall effect of tears on perceptions of competence. The present findings suggest that the link between emotional tears and perceived competence is highly context dependent.

In recent years, different scales have been developed to assess individual differences in dispositional greed. We report two studies (N1 = 300, N2 = 1,000) on the comparative psychometric properties of these scales. We find that all scales are reliable and that they correlate highly, suggesting that all can be used to assess dispositional greed. Exploratory factor analyses, using the Empirical Kaiser Criterion, the Hull method, and Parallel Analysis as extraction methods, were done on the separate scales and all items together. These analyses reveal that there is quite some consistency in the scales, as in both studies a one-factor solution seems to describe the data best. These results imply that these different scales all assess dispositional greed, although the results also suggest that some items may be deleted from the scales.

A key observation in coalition formation is that bargainers with most resources are often excluded from coalitions: the Strength-is-Weakness effect. Previous studies have suffered from low sample sizes and lack of (appropriate) incentives and have rarely focused on underlying processes. To address these issues, we conducted a cross-platform replication using the Online Coalition Game. We replicated the Strength-is-Weakness effect in a psychology laboratory, on Amazon Mechanical Turk, and on Prolific. Moreover, our results showed that the equity norm shapes the Strength-is-Weakness effect in two ways. First, strong bargainers claim a higher larger of the payoffs than weak bargainers do, making them less attractive coalition partners. Second, weak bargainers expect strong bargainers to make these larger claims, directing weak bargainers to each other from the outset. Finally, the studies suggest that the Online Coalition Game is a viable tool for conducting high-powered coalition formation research.

In coalition formation, bargainers with many resources are often excluded from coalitions (the Strength‐is‐Weakness effect). Literature suggests this effect is driven by high‐resource bargainers using self‐serving allocation rules that backfire, as they prefer equity over equality (while low‐resource bargainers prefer the opposite). Four studies test 1) whether this is actually the case and 2) whether high‐resource bargainers solely consider equitable allocations or whether they consider both equity and equality but actively choose equity as an allocation rule. We find the Strength‐is‐Weakness effect even when equality rules are made salient, strengthening the idea that the high‐resource bargainers actively select equity as their framework for fairness to attempt to maximize their outcomes. The studies, also suggest an additional reason for the exclusion of high‐resource bargainers. We find that high‐resource bargainers are likely avoided because they are expected to bargain self‐servingly, making the low‐resource bargainers seek out each other.

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. The persistence of this behavior throughout adulthood has fascinated and puzzled many researchers. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by triggering social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were typically conducted almost exclusively on participants from North America and Europe, resulting in limited generalizability. The present research examined the tears-social support intentions effect and possible mediating and moderating variables in a fully pre-registered study across 7,007 participants (24,886 ratings) and 41 countries spanning all populated continents. Each participant was presented with four pictures out of 100 possible targets with or without tears digitally added. We confirmed our main prediction, with an overall effect size of d = .49 [.43, .55] for the intention to support tearful individuals. This effect was mediated by perceiving the crying target as warmer and more helpless, feeling more connected, as well as feeling more empathic concern for the crier, but not by an increase in personal distress. The effect was moderated by the situational valence, identifying the target as part of one’s group, and trait empathic concern. A neutral situation, high trait empathic concern, and low identification increased the effect. We observed a high amount of heterogeneity across countries that was, via split-half validation, best explained by country-level GDP per capita and subjective well-being with stronger effect sizes for countries scoring high on these measures.