The title of this chapter is deliberately provocative. Intuitively, many will be inclined to see conscious control of mental process as a good thing. Yet control comes at a high price. The consciously not directly controlled, automatic, parallel processing of information is not only much faster,...

This paper reports results of an incentivized laboratory experiment manipulating an extremely weak social cue in the Dictator Game. Prior to making their decision, we present dictators with a simple visual stimlulus: either three dots in a “watching-eyes” configuration, or three dots in a...

It has been suggested that players often produce simplified and/or misspecified mental representations of interactive decision problems (Kreps, 1990). We submit that the relational structure of players’ preferences in a game induces cognitive complexity, and may be an important driver of such...

We conduct a laboratory experiment with a constant-sum sender–receiver game and a sequential game of matching pennies with the same payoff structure to investigate the impact of individuals’ first- and second-order beliefs on truth-telling. While first-movers in matching pennies choose an...

The conflict between pro-self and pro-social behaviour is at the core of many key problems of our time, as, for example, the reduction of air pollution and the redistribution of scarce resources. For the well-being of our societies, it is thus crucial to find mechanisms to promote pro-social...

Prosociality is fundamental to human social life, and, accordingly, much research has attempted to explain human prosocial behavior. Capraro and Rand (Judgment and Decision Making, 13, 99-111, 2018) recently provided experimental evidence that prosociality in anonymous, one-shot interactions...

Costs and benefits of everyday actions are often not known beforehand. In such situations, people can either make a choice “without looking” at the payoffs, or they can “look” and learn the exact payoffs involved before making the actual choice. Recent studies suggest that the mere act...

The title of this chapter is deliberately provocative. Intuitively, many will be inclined to see conscious control of mental process as a good thing. Yet control comes at a high price. The consciously not directly controlled, automatic, parallel processing of information is not only much faster,...

We report three pre-registered studies (total N=1,799) exploring the effect of nudging personal and injunctive norms in decisions that involve a trade-off between objective equality and efficiency. The first two studies provide evidence that: (i) nudging the personal norm has a similar effect to...

Understanding whether preferences are sensitive to the frame has been a major topic of debate in the last decades. For example, several works have explored whether the dictator game in the give frame gives rise to a different rate of pro-sociality than the same game in the take frame, leading to...