human behavior

Sin stocks

Sin stocks are stocks issued by companies that engage in socially or morally objectionable activities, which in the narrowest sense are companies involved in the production of alcohol, tobacco, or gambling. We investigate the attitudes people have towards them.


Publications

Summary: In two studies, we show that people are fairly reluctant to increase investment in sin stocks when the expected rewards from doing so increase. This resembles partial resilience to "sweetening the pot" from unethical investments. 21-33% show full resilience to higher returns, not willing to increase investment even if returns are increased (by as much as 16 percentage points). People with deontological inclinations are less resilient, while people with "dark" personalities are less resilient.

Summary: In five experiments (N = 3,828), we investigate whether people prefer investment decisions to be made by human investment managers rather than by algorithms (“robos”). In all of the studies, we investigate morally controversial companies, as it is plausible that a preference for humans as investment managers becomes exacerbated in areas where machines are less competent, such as morality. Overall, our findings show a considerable mean effect size for robo-investment aversion (d = –0.39 [–0.45, –0.32]).

Daughter effects in judgment and decision making

Studies from sociology and social psychology show that men can adopt some of the preferences of their daughters. We look at how parenting daughters affects economic behavior.


Publications

Summary: In this paper we complement earlier research by looking whether parenting children decreases lying behavior. Over 2,000 participants performed a private die-rolling task. Similarly to the Dictator Game, our findings suggest no daughter (or son) effect.

Foreign language effect

Much research now suggests that people make different judgments in decisions if they use a foreign (second) language (L2). Findings suggest that people can become less biased in L2, yet there are many null findings or findings suggesting adverse effects of L2. This makes it all the more interesting to study this field, as we are still unsure about the mechanisms at play when using L2 in judgment and decision making.


Publications

Risk-taking and decisions made under conflicting information

In the past, we have also conducted studies dealing with risk-taking, and how people behave when they receive conflicting information from two sources.


Publications

This research was supported by grants 2018/31/D/HS4/01814 (SONATA) and 2018/02/X/HS4/01703 (MINIATURA)
from the National Science Centre, Poland (Narodowe Centrum Nauki).