Publications from the Behavioral Lab

Past research has assumed that social egalitarians reject group-based hierarchies and advocate for equal treatment of all groups. However, contrary to popular belief, we argue that egalitarian advocacy predicts greater likelihood to support…

How do the transaction costs of office holding affect congressional careers? These costs may influence the kinds of people who select into public office and therefore the representativeness of democratic institutions. Gaining causal leverage on…

What does it mean to be (seen as) human? Ten studies explore this age-old question and show that gender is a critical feature of perceiving humanness, being more central to conceptions of humanness than other social categories (race, age, sexual…

Dominant actors are neither liked nor respected, yet they are reliably deferred to. Extant explanations of why dominant actors are deferred to focus on deferrers’ first-order judgments (i.e., the deferrers’ own private assessment of the dominant…

Many people practiced COVID-19-related safety measures in the first year of the pandemic, but Republicans were less likely to engage in behaviors such as wearing masks or face coverings than Democrats, suggesting radical disparities in health…

Objective

We explore the personality of counties as assessed through linguistic patterns on social media. Such studies were previously limited by the cost and feasibility of large-scale surveys; however, language-based computational…

When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people…

Cooperation is essential for group survival and success. Inequality among group members can undermine voluntary cooperation in groups, and this problem is exacerbated when those with less power observe those with more power behave selfishly. We…

Objective: To understand the consequences of employee volunteering and possible psychological mechanisms that produce these effects.

Methods: Using data from more than 50,000 responses to Britain’s…

People vary on their desire for strict norms, and the moral underpinnings of these differences have yet to be explored. The current research examined whether and how moral beliefs held by individuals would affect the extent to which they want…

Do financial resources relate to how important meaning is for one’s happiness? Across three large-scale datasets spanning over 500,000 individuals across 123 countries, we examined the relationship between meaning and happiness for individuals…

The current research reveals that the pursuit of peace entails an inherent paradox. The urgent need to save lives and alleviate human suffering necessitates swift solutions to the problem of intergroup conflict. However, because the human mind…

COVID-19 accelerated a decade-long shift to remote work by normalizing working from home on a large scale. Indeed, 75% of US employees in a 2021 survey reported a personal preference for working remotely at least one day per week, and studies…

The proliferation of digital goods has led to an increased interest in how the digitization of products and services affects consumer behavior. In this article, the authors show that although consumers are willing to pay more for physical than…

Extraverts are often characterized as highly social individuals who are highly invested in their interpersonal interactions. We propose that extraverts’ interaction partners hold a different view—that extraverts are highly social, but not highly…

Do women and men differ in their brokering behavior? Integrating the literatures on gender, self-construal, and social networks, we theorize that gender differences in relational interdependence produce different patterns of helpful brokering…

In an increasing number of domains, people interact with automated agents (such as algorithms, robots, and computers) instead of humans. Across five studies, we explore the role of authenticity in shaping people’s reactions to automated agents’…

A growing body of research in economics focuses on whether cultural differences in social norms affect economic outcomes. Here we examine how differences in the strength of social norms — or tightness-looseness (TL) — across countries can explain…

Since humanity’s first steps, individuals have used nonverbal cues to communicate and infer leadership, such as walking ahead of others. Menon et al., (2010) showed that the use of spatial ordering as cue to leadership differs across cultures:…

Women continue to be underrepresented in leadership positions. This underrepresentation is at least partly driven by gender stereotypes that associate men, but not women, with achievement-oriented, agentic traits (e.g., assertive and decisive).…

Quantification has been constitutive of psychology since its inception and is core to its scientific status. The adoption of qualitative methods eschewing inferential statistics is therefore unlikely to obtain. Rather than discarding useful tools…

Understanding collective behavior is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in…

In today’s vast digital landscape, people are constantly exposed to threatening language, which attracts attention and activates the human brain’s fear circuitry. However, to date, we have lacked the tools needed to identify threatening language…

Allyship is a growing phenomenon in many organizational contexts, and the involvement of advantaged group allies in identity-oriented social movements (e.g., men in the feminist movement) is ubiquitous. However, the impression that these…