We study anchoring effects in the elicitation of multidimensional beliefs within a single survey task using a representative sample of the German voting-age population. Respondents estimated governmentspending levels across several domains (e.g., education, defense, social security), with...

Using data from two representative and large-scale population surveys with more than 4000 participants, we investigate the effect of randomized priming interventions on attitudes towards immigrants. We document robust null effects of these interventions under two experimental settings, across...

Developing reliable and practicable measures of economic preferences is a crucial task for empirical economic research with high value for both theory and applications. Here, we present results from a first comprehensive “behavioral validation analysis” of the Global Preference Survey Module...

Unfair intentions provoke negative reciprocity from others, making their concealment potentially beneficial. This paper explores whether people hide their unfair intentions from others and how hiding intentions is itself perceived in fairness terms. Our experimental data show a high frequency of...

People's fairness preferences are an important constraint for what constitutes an acceptable economic transaction, yet little is known about how these preferences are formed. In this paper, we provide clean evidence that contrast effects arising from previous transactions play an important role...

Aggressive behavior against out-group members often rises during periods of economic hardship and health pandemics. Here we test the widespread concern that the Covid-19 crisis may fuel hostility against people from other nations or ethnic minorities. Using a controlled money-burning task, we...

Political polarization has ruptured the fabric of U.S. society. I quantify this phenomenon through the use of 5 pre-registered studies, comprising 15 behavioral experiments and a diverse set of over 8,600 participants. The focus of this paper is to examine various behavioral-, belief-, and...

What matters for individuals' preferences for redistribution? In this paper we show that consequentialist beliefs about inequality - beliefs about how economic inequality changes the crime rate or the quality of democratic institutions, for example - have a large causal impact on individuals'...