Intentions vs. efficiency in policy evaluations

Marie, Antoine; Trad, Hugo; Strickland, Brent

doi:10.31219/osf.io/sed4w

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 24 publications

(30 reference statements)

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“…On the other hand, U.S. and U.K. citizens frequently get exposed to the discourse, nowadays, that women do not get equal professional opportunities as men, a narrative which is both still largely true (James et al, 2019;Shen, 2013;Begeny et al, 2020;Moss-Racusin et al, 2012;Régner et al, 2019;Reuben et al, 2014) and which people are reputationally incentivized to endorse (Kuran, 1997;Kurzban & Aktipis, 2007). Moreover, the mind is evolutionarily ill-prepared to engage in explicit reasoning about base rates, counterfactuals, and statistics (Kahneman et al, 1982;Marie et al, 2020;Marie et al, 2021). Given this, one should perhaps not be too harsh on people's brains for using deeply entrenched and socially encouraged beliefs when quickly assessing a report that has all the appearances of scientific probity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral commitment to gender equality increases (mis)perceptions of gender bias in hiring

Marie¹,

Xiao²,

Strickland³

2022

Preprint

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In a context of increasing expectations of gender equality in Western societies, exploring what may modulate people’s trust in evidence of gender discrimination against women is crucial to the deployment of corrective policies. Here, we explore one potentially powerful source of variation in how people evaluate such evidence: their level of moral commitment to gender equality. Across six experiments (N = 2861), we focus on perceptions of scientific reports of discriminatory hiring practices in academic settings. We find that people more morally committed to gender equality are more likely to trust experimental evidence of gender discrimination against women. This relationship cannot be explained by participants’ prior beliefs about the likelihood of gender bias in hiring practices in academia. Moreover, contrary to previous findings, women do not trust those results more than men. However, in addition to finding that moralization of gender equality is associated with greater trust in strong evidence of hiring bias against women, we find that it also predicts a higher likelihood of fallaciously inferring discrimination against women from contradictory evidence. These results paint a new picture of the origins of systematic differences in people’s appreciation of scientific evidence—strong but also weak—of gender bias in hiring, and show that issue moralization yields both costs and benefits in the public consumption of science.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral commitment to gender equality increases (mis)perceptions of gender bias in hiring

Marie¹,

Xiao²,

Strickland³

2022

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…Achieving a good outcome based on bad intentions is often perceived as much worse than achieving a bad outcome based on good intentions 63 . Indeed, as consequences are the product of many factors, intentions may be a more reliable cue than impact for someone's value as a cooperation partner.…”

Section: Intentionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leveraging social cognition to promote effective climate change mitigation

et al. 2022

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Effective climate change mitigation is a social dilemma: the benefits are shared collectively while the costs are often private. To solve this dilemma, we argue that we must first understand the nature of human cooperation. This constitutes a shift in the field of psychology and climate change, which has traditionally focused more intensely on risk-perception, miscommunication or time discounting, to explain the lack of climate action. We review three social cognition mechanisms that regulate cooperation: norm detection, reputation management, and fairness computation. We show that these cognitive mechanisms can prevent behavioral change and lead to ineffective policies. At the same time, the very same mechanisms can be leveraged as powerful solutions for effective climate change mitigation.

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When Goliath sells to David: explaining price gouging perceptions through power

Jauernig,

Uhl,

Pies

2024

Public Choice

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External shocks (e.g., due to a pandemic) may lead to price jumps in the short term. Rather than being read as a signal of increased scarcity, the resulting “price gouging” is often ascribed to sellers’ selfish exploitation of the crisis. In our experimental study, we investigate the drivers of fairness perceptions regarding voluntary transactions in situations of increased scarcity and explore how they pertain to the economic policy debate on price gouging restrictions. Departing from previous research, our results show that perceptions of power, not of the seller as the profiteer (mercantilism), drive fairness perceptions. The more powerful a transaction partner is assumed to be, the less the respective transaction is regarded as fair. In line with the literature, we also find that fairness perceptions are correlated with zero-sum thinking (i.e., a denial of the mutuality of benefits implied by voluntary transactions). Our study helps to better understand why some market regulations appear attractive despite suboptimal outcomes, thus revealing a mixing of the micro and the macro cosmos, against which Hayek warned. By casting a light on the psychological mechanisms behind attitudes toward markets, we aim to improve the assessment of legitimacy issues and contribute to explaining (and overcoming) the moral paradox of modernity.

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Intentions vs. efficiency in policy evaluations

Cited by 3 publications

References 24 publications

Moral commitment to gender equality increases (mis)perceptions of gender bias in hiring

Moral commitment to gender equality increases (mis)perceptions of gender bias in hiring

Leveraging social cognition to promote effective climate change mitigation

When Goliath sells to David: explaining price gouging perceptions through power

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