Simon Gächter
YOU?
Author Swipe
View article: Why people follow rules
Why people follow rules Open
Why people follow rules, especially laws and social norms, is debated across the human sciences. The importance of intrinsic respect for rules is particularly controversial. To reveal the behavioural principles of rule-following, we develo…
View article: Incentives crowd out voluntary cooperation: evidence from gift-exchange experiments
Incentives crowd out voluntary cooperation: evidence from gift-exchange experiments Open
Explicit and implicit incentives and opportunities for mutually beneficial voluntary cooperation coexist in many economic relationships. In a series of eight laboratory gift-exchange experiments, we show that incentives can lead to crowdin…
View article: Wherefore art thou competitors? How situational affordances help differentiate among prosociality, individualism, and competition
Wherefore art thou competitors? How situational affordances help differentiate among prosociality, individualism, and competition Open
The Triple Dominance Measure (choosing between prosocial, individualistic, and competitive options) and the Slider Measure (“sliding” between various orientations, for example, from individualistic to prosocial) are two widely used techniq…
View article: Social preferences and the variability of conditional cooperation
Social preferences and the variability of conditional cooperation Open
We experimentally examine how incentives affect conditional cooperation (i.e., cooperating in response to cooperation and defecting in response to defection) in social dilemmas. In our first study, subjects play eight Sequential Prisoner’s…
View article: The role of payoff parameters for cooperation in the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma
The role of payoff parameters for cooperation in the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma Open
The Prisoner's Dilemma is arguably the most important model of social dilemmas, but our knowledge about how its material payoff structure affects cooperation is incomplete. We investigate the effect of variation in material payoffs on coop…
View article: 'IOS11': A new, extended, interactive version of the ‘Inclusion of Other in the Self’ scale
'IOS11': A new, extended, interactive version of the ‘Inclusion of Other in the Self’ scale Open
We introduce and test a new tool designed to measure “relationship closeness”. Studying relationship closeness has a long history in psychology and is currently expanding in other fields including economics. Our new measurement tool is a r…
View article: The behavioral mechanisms of voluntary cooperation across culturally diverse societies: Evidence from the US, the UK, Morocco, and Turkey
The behavioral mechanisms of voluntary cooperation across culturally diverse societies: Evidence from the US, the UK, Morocco, and Turkey Open
We examine the role of cooperative preferences, beliefs, and punishments to uncover potential cross-societal differences in voluntary cooperation. Using one-shot public goods experiments in four comparable subject pools from the US and the…
View article: Measuring Group Cohesion to Reveal the Power of Social Relationships in Team Production
Measuring Group Cohesion to Reveal the Power of Social Relationships in Team Production Open
We introduce group cohesion to study the economic relevance of social relationships in team production. We operationalize measurement of group cohesion, adapting the “oneness scale” from psychology. A series of experiments, including a pre…
View article: Reply to Nielsen et al.: Social mindfulness is associated with countries’ environmental performance and individual environmental concern
Reply to Nielsen et al.: Social mindfulness is associated with countries’ environmental performance and individual environmental concern Open
Nielsen et al. (1) argue that Van Doesum et al. (2) need to consider three points for their interpretation of a positive association between individual-level social mindfulness (SoMi) and environmental performance (EPI) at the country leve…
View article: Reply to Komatsu et al.: From local social mindfulness to global sustainability efforts?
Reply to Komatsu et al.: From local social mindfulness to global sustainability efforts? Open
Komatsu et al. (1) argue that Van Doesum et al. (2) may have overlooked the role of GDP in reporting a positive association between social mindfulness (SoMi) and the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) at country level. Although the rela…
View article: Social mindfulness and prosociality vary across the globe
Social mindfulness and prosociality vary across the globe Open
Significance Cooperation is key to well-functioning groups and societies. Rather than addressing high-cost cooperation involving giving money or time and effort, we examine social mindfulness—a form of interpersonal benevolence that requir…
View article: LIONESS Lab: a free web-based platform for conducting interactive experiments online
LIONESS Lab: a free web-based platform for conducting interactive experiments online Open
LIONESS Lab is a free web-based platform for interactive online experiments. An intuitive, user-friendly graphical interface enables researchers to develop, test, and share experiments online, with minimal need for programming experience. …
View article: Working too much for too little: stochastic rewards cause work addiction
Working too much for too little: stochastic rewards cause work addiction Open
People are generally assumed to shy away from activities generating stochastic rewards, thus requiring extra compensation for handling any additional risk. In contrast with this view, neurosci-ence research with animals has shown that stoc…
View article: Moderating Loss Aversion: Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports of its Death are Greatly Exaggerated
Moderating Loss Aversion: Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports of its Death are Greatly Exaggerated Open
Loss aversion, the principle that losses impact decision making more than equivalent gains, is a fundamental idea in consumer behavior and decision making, though its existence has recently been called into question. Across five unique sam…