Understanding popular responses to immigration and sociocultural diversification is an important concern. Sometimes they are seen as key to a new cleavage dividing democratic societies. Previous research has often focused on attitudes towards levels and types of new migration, and mainly...

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued against the account of human nature which views moral sentiments as deriving from self-love. This paper emphasises that Smith's understanding of human nature was not that it was either selfish or benevolent. Human nature consists of the ability to...

Homo economicus has justly been identified as the universal bogeyman of economics. Economic man, having been showered with criticism for a century and a half, continues to occupy critics to this day. Plenty of economists in the previous century have proclaimed the death of homo economicus and...

Drawing on contrasting theoretical perspectives of self-interest and utilitarian/ethical motivations, we examine the degree to which a company's pace of departure from Russia after the Ukraine invasion is driven by its exposure to the Russian market. Moreover, we investigate whether firm-level...

Health status can alter individuals' social preferences, and specifically individuals' preferences regarding fairness in the access to and financing of health care. We draw on a dataset of 73,452 individuals across 22 countries and a novel instrumental variable strategy that exploits variation...

Health status can alter individuals’ social preferences, and specifically individuals' preferences regarding fairness in the access to and financing of health care. If individuals follow a healthy self-interested rationale, health improvements are expected to weaken individuals' support for...

Rising wealth inequality and squeezed public budgets has brought wealth tax back into policy discussions. A net wealth tax might help to boost state revenue and reduce wealth inequality. Yet little is known about citizens’ attitudes towards the design of a net wealth tax (i.e. the tax unit,...

Many experimental studies report that economics students tend to act more selfishly than students of other disciplines, a finding that received widespread public and professional attention. Two main explanations that the existing literature offers for the differences found in the behavior...

While headline news frequently report cases of large-scale fraud, corruption, and other immoral behavior, laboratory experiments often show prosocial behavior in strategic games. To reconcile and explain these seemingly conflicting observations, Al'os-Ferrer et al. (2022) introduced the Big...

Generative artificial intelligence holds enormous potential to revolutionize decision-making processes, from everyday to high-stake scenarios. However, as many decisions carry social implications, for AI to be a reliable assistant for decision-making it is crucial that it is able to capture the...

Based on the National Children’s Study of China, this study examines the relationship between children’s only-child status and prosocial behaviors. This study employed several approaches to identify the relationship between only-child status and children’s prosocial behaviors. The results...

Many environment related public goods require investment of time or effort rather than simply money. Yet, most experimental studies on public good games focus on a distribution of money. In the present paper, we report results from an experiment (N=181) comparing an effort based public goods...

People with higher-incomes tend to support less redistribution than lower-income people. This has been attributed not only to self-interest, but also to psychological mechanisms including differing beliefs about the hard work or luck underlying inequality, differing fairness views, and differing...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether attitudes toward risk and altruism are affected by being in a group or being alone. In contrast to previous economic research on group decision-making, we excluded the effects of group informal discussions, which are thought to be a "black box"...

Abstract This paper demonstrates that people manipulate their ambiguity aversion when it is self-serving. In an online experiment, subjects are asked to choose between a selfish option and an altruistic option. Under the altruistic option, the charity’s payoff depends on an ambiguous lottery,...

Human drivers routinely make implicit tradeoffs between their selfish interests and the safety of passengers, as when they perform a rolling stop in order to reach their destination faster. Here I explore whether they are comfortable with autonomous vehicles (AVs) that encode similar selfish...

Members of various species engage in altruism — i.e. accepting personal costs to benefit others. Here we present an incentivized experiment to test for altruistic behavior among AI agents consisting of large language models developed by the private company OpenAI. Using real incentives for AI...

As environmental behavior is still uncommon in developing countries and needs to be popularized, research on the factors for engaging in certain green practices is of high relevance. The aim of this study is to determine how self-interests of individuals of the Arctic zone of Russia influence...

Based on the National Children’s Study of China (NCSC), this study examines the causal relationship between the only-child status and children’s prosocial behaviors. Estimates indicate that the only children significantly exhibit higher prosocial tendencies than non-only children in terms of...

A rational miner may gain from withholding blocks and strategically timing the release to orphan the others' blocks, which questions the existence of honest majority and blockchain concensus. This paper reconciles the discrepancy between the absence of block-withholding attacks in practice and...