Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Economics

Revisiting evidence for an attentional tunneling effect caused by scarcity

Abstract People in poverty sometimes behave in ways that perpetuate their socioeconomic condition. By one influential account, these behaviors arise from psychological effects of scarcity on attention that create greater focus toward managing scarce resources, at the cost of atte...

How Norms Depend on the Presence and Status of Observers: The Relational Contingency of Everyday Behaviors in 90 Societies

Norms are fundamental to social life, but basic questions about how they are affected by social context remain. Specifically, how do normative constraints depend on the presence and status of observers, and how do such relational contingencies vary across cultures? Using data fro...

Prosociality in times of war: Shared moral positions foster prosociality across national borders

In times of severe intergroup conflict, cross-national interactions are shaped by social categorization along national and moral dimensions. Yet, little is known about how these co-occurring identities jointly shape prosocial behavior. Across three studies (total N = 1178), we ex...