December 2024
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Publications (75)
October 2024
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268 Reads
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3 Citations
Nature Human Behaviour
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 baseline oath)—proposed, evaluated and selected by 44 expert researchers—and a no-oath condition in a megastudy involving 21,506 UK and US participants from Prolific.com who played an incentivized tax evasion game online. Of the 21 interventions, 10 significantly improved tax compliance by 4.5 to 8.5 percentage points, with the most successful nearly halving tax evasion. Limited evidence for moderators was found. Experts and laypeople failed to predict the most effective interventions, though experts’ predictions were more accurate. In conclusion, honesty oaths were effective in curbing dishonesty, but their effectiveness varied depending on content. These findings can help design impactful interventions to curb dishonesty.
July 2024
Journal of Health Economics
July 2024
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16 Reads
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3 Citations
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
June 2024
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7 Reads
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
June 2024
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654 Reads
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1 Citation
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 a baseline oath)—proposed, evaluated, and selected by 44 expert researchers—and a no-oath condition in a megastudy in which 21,506 UK and US participants played an incentivized tax evasion game. Of the 21 interventions, 10 significantly improved tax compliance by 4.5 to 8.5 percentage points, with the most successful nearly halving tax evasion. Limited evidence for moderators was found. Experts and laypeople failed to predict the most effective interventions, but experts’ predictions were more accurate. In conclusion, honesty oaths can be effective in curbing dishonesty but their effectiveness varies depending on content. These findings can help design impactful interventions to curb dishonesty.
May 2024
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10 Reads
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
March 2024
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55 Reads
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2 Citations
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
What predicts a neighborhood’s adaptability to essential public health policies and shelter-in-place regulations that prevent the harmful spread of COVID-19? To answer this question, we present a novel application of human mobility patterns and human behavior in a network setting. We analyze 2 years of mobility data (January 2019 to December 2020) from New York City and construct weekly mobility networks between census block groups based on aggregated point-of-interest visit patterns. Our results indicate that neighborhoods’ socioeconomic and geographic characteristics play a significant role in predicting their adaptability to active shelter-in-place policies. Our simulation outcomes reveal that, alongside factors such as race, education, and income, the geographical attributes of neighborhoods, such as access to amenities that satisfy community needs are equally important factors in predicting neighborhood adaptability to public health policies. These findings offer valuable insights that can enhance urban planning strategies, thereby aiding pandemic mitigation efforts and fostering increased adaptability of urban areas in the face of exogenous shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic.
December 2023
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14 Reads
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2 Citations
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
April 2023
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30 Reads
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14 Citations
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Over the past decade, governments and organizations around the world have established behavioral insights teams advocating for randomized experiments. However, recent findings by M. N. Meyer et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116, 10723-10728 (2019) and P. R. Heck, C. F. Chabris, D. J. Watts, M. N. Meyer, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 18948-18950 (2020) suggest that people often rate randomized experiments as less appropriate than the policies they contain even when approving the implementation of either policy untested and when none of the individual policies is clearly superior. The authors warn that this could cause policymakers to avoid running large-scale field experiments or being transparent about running them and might contribute to an adverse heterogeneity bias in terms of who is participating in experiments. In one direct and six conceptual preregistered replications (total N = 5,200) of the previously published larger-effect studies, using the same main dependent variable but with variations in scenario wordings, recruitment platforms, and countries, and the addition of further measures to assess people's views, we test the generalizability and robustness of these findings. Together, we find that the original results do not appear to generalize. That is, our triangulation reveals insufficient evidence to conclude that people exhibit a common pattern of behavior that would be consistent with relative experiment aversion, thereby supporting recent findings by R. Mislavsky, B. Dietvorst, U. Simonsohn, Mark. Sci. 39, 1092-1104 (2020). Thus, policymakers may not need to be concerned about employing evidence-based practices more so than about universally implementing policies.
Citations (52)
... First, we study whether the web portal was effectively used by women to reschedule appointments. This is not a trivial question, given that the uptake of digital services is rather low, and governments struggle to make citizens use these services (Castelo et al., 2015). For example, according to Eurostat, only 55% of the EU population used online interfaces for interacting with the public authorities in 2019. ...
- Citing Article
October 2015
Behavioral Science & Policy
... First, considering the potential to report up to 12 successful guesses, whereas the expected number under perfect honesty is 2 and the actual mean number in the pooled sample is 5.97, 0.5 guesses is subjectively considered a reasonable SESOI. Alternatively, a recent, large-scale study of honest behavior used a SESOI of Cohen's d =.075, which in our data represents 0.2622 guesses (Zickfeld et al. 2024 To present the results of study 5 graphically, the three measures of honesty (no. there is no association between individual honest behavior and PSM in these data (controlling for experimental condition and country fixed effects) (see Supplementary Table 13 for details), nor between collaborative honest behavior and PSM (Supplementary Table 14). ...
- Citing Article
- Publisher preview available
October 2024
Nature Human Behaviour
... To strengthen this internal barrier, blocking the avenues of justification that reduce moral tension is essential (Ayal, 2020). Moral reminders, increased visibility, and fostering self-involvement and identification are all effective strategies for internal enforcement Peer et al., 2024). For example, Zickfeld et al. (2024) found honesty oaths-particularly those that specify unethical behavior and increase self-engagement-reduced dishonesty. ...
- Citing Article
July 2024
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
... This decline can be attributed to governmental interventions that imposed limitations on consumer choices as well as self-protective mindsets marked by perceived health risks that impacted customer decision process. Nevertheless, when evaluated on an annual basis, the performance of the proposed model in this paper remains reasonably comparable, if not superior, to that of the original model, particularly when considering essential retailers in NYC [107,123]. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
March 2024
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
... Les expériences en laboratoire permettent d'appor ter une réponse plus affirmative à cette question. Un certain nombre de travaux (Zickfeld et al., 2024 ;Jacquemet et al., 2020) confirment en effet l'efficacité d'une forme particulière d'engagement, qui prend concrètement la forme d'un serment sur l'honneur à dire la vérité. En matière de fraude fiscale, un tel serment conduit à une augmentation massive, de l'ordre de 50 %, du montant d'impôt collecté. ...
- Citing Preprint
- File available
June 2024
... However, we found that none of our debasing strategies mattered because we could not find the "common" EA pattern to begin with. At this point, we have run 21 A/B test conditions (6,7), 20 of which did not reveal relatively less favorable attitudes toward experimentation. Only our one direct replication-A/B test condition did. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
December 2023
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
... Our contributions to the literature are three-fold. First, through the survey experiment, we study the acceptance of different formats of an RCT, contributing to the small empirical literature on the acceptance of RCTs among farmers (Behaghel et al. 2019;Morawetz & Tribl 2020) and the overall literature on the acceptance of RCTs and randomization (Corduneanu-Huci et al. 2021DellaVigna et al. 2024;Dur et al. 2025;Haushofer et al. 2019;Heck et al. 2020;Mazar et al. 2023;Meyer et al. 2019;Mislavsky et al. 2020). We investigate how the eligibility to participate (full exclusion from participation vs. having either a randomly assigned high or low payment) and the respondents' outcome after randomization (being among the 'lucky' or 'unlucky' ones) affects acceptance. ...
- Citing Article
April 2023
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
... In response to the calls for leveraging both marketing (e.g., Chandy et al., 2021;Madan et al., 2023;Mende & Scott, 2021) and AI for social good and sustainable development (e.g., Cowls et al., 2021;Du & Sen, 2023;Floridi et al., 2018Floridi et al., , 2020Vinuesa et al., 2020), the current paper aims to explore the role of AI in enhancing services (and outcomes) for vulnerable consumers. It also seeks to offer guidance to businesses on best practices for utilizing AI in interactions with vulnerable consumers. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
September 2022
Marketing Letters
... Many of these abovementioned studies were conducted in the lab. Field experiments investigating factors influencing honesty and testing interventions for motivating honesty have been relatively few 16 . Building on the existing research, we intend to test and design interventions for motivating civic honesty behavior in China. ...
- Citing Article
July 2022
Current Opinion in Psychology
... Such projects may involve multiple labs that collect data from different sources to replicate a specific effect (e.g., Klein et al., 2014;Verschuere et al., 2018), investigate sources of heterogeneity between samples (e.g., Klein et al., 2018), or compare effects from multiple interventions on a predefined target outcome (megastudies; e.g., Milkman et al., 2021). Milkman et al. (2021Milkman et al. ( , 2022, for example, involved multiple research groups that designed 41 interventions in two megastudy field experiments that examined the effectiveness of text message-based nudges on vaccination uptake on more than 700,000 patients. Big-team science projects may also come in the form of many-analysts studies in which multiple researchers test the same model using the same data but different methods (e.g., Huntington- Klein et al., 2021;Menkveld et al., 2024;Sarstedt et al., 2024;Silberzahn et al., 2018). ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
February 2022
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
