Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, empirical evidence on the effect of large incentives – as present in relevant economic decisions – on cognitive biases is scant. This paper tests the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base rate neglect, anchoring,...

An influential body of psychological and anthropological theories holds that societies exhibit heterogeneous cooperation systems that differ both in their level of in-group favoritism and in the tools that they employ to enforce cooperative behavior. According to some of these theories, entire...

News reports and communication are inherently constrained by space, time, and attention. As a result, news sources often condition the decision of whether to share a piece of information on the similarity between the signal and the prior belief of the audience, which generates a sample selection...

Does relaxing strict school discipline improve student achievement, or lead to classroom disorder? We study a 2012 reform in New York City public middle schools that eliminated suspensions for non-violent, disorderly behavior. Math scores of students in more-affected schools rose by 0.05...

We develop interpretable, quantitative indices of the objective and subjective complexity of lottery choice problems that can be computed for any standard dataset. These indices capture the predicted error rate in identifying the lottery with the highest expected value, where the predictions are...

Many information structures generate correlated rather than mutually independent signals, the news media being a prime example. This paper shows experimentally that in such contexts many people neglect these correlations in the updating process and treat correlated information as independent. In...

This paper studies the relevance of cognitive uncertainty - subjective uncertainty over one’s utility-maximizing action - for understanding and predicting intertemporal choice. The main idea is that when people are cognitively noisy, such as when a decision is complex, they implicitly treat...

This paper experimentally studies the role of associative memory for belief formation. Realworld information signals are often embedded in memorable contexts. Thus, today’s news, and the contexts they are embedded in, may cue the selective retrieval of similar past news and hence contribute to...

This paper introduces a new set of simple experimentally-validated survey games to measure moral universalism: the extent to which people exhibit the same level of altruism and trust towards strangers as towards in-group members. In a representative sample of the U.S. population, an...

Throughout the Western world, people's policy preferences are correlated across domains in a strikingly similar fashion. Based on a simple model, we propose that what partly explains the particular internal structure of political ideology is heterogeneity in moral universalism: the extent to...