6/ Link here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @vsecz.bsky.social

5/ The broader point for management education: average effects can hide meaningful heterogeneity. A low-cost intervention may do little overall, yet still help the students who need it most.

4/ Importantly, the improvement was not just a shift toward safer, more conservative 50/50 forecasts. The improvement appears to reflect better probabilistic accuracy.

3/ But the exploratory analyses showed that the nudge helped the lower-performing students. Among stronger students, it had no effect.

2/ Overall, the preregistered result was null as the nudge did not significantly improve forecasting accuracy across the full sample.

1/ New paper out: Nicolas Say, Lucie Vrbová, and I tested whether a very simple nudge can improve the forecasting performance of business students. The prompt asked students to consider multiple future scenarios and credible evidence sources before making predictions.

How to React in the Case of Powerful Transgressors: Kill Them With Kindness or Punishment? When wrongdoing is committed by a powerful superior, victims face a strategic dilemma: punish (e.g., confront and report), avoid or forgive. Moral-repair and restorative-justice perspectives suggest ...

11/ All of us co-authors, @bahniks.bsky.social @mvranka.bsky.social and Martin Zielina, are happy that this one found a wonderful home at EJSP: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

10/ This matters for research on abusive supervision, moral repair, retaliation, and employee voice.
A response can be justified and still ineffective.
A response can be emotionally appealing and still strategically weak.

9/ The broader - and unfortunately cynical - point is that once the wrongdoer is insulated by power, the usual assumptions about deterrence and moral repair become much less reliable.

8/ The field data also showed that punishment came with costs.
Punishment was associated with greater supervisor retaliation and lower reconciliation.
So the most morally satisfying response was not the one most associated with relational repair.

7/ The field study points in the same direction.
In recalled incidents of supervisor misconduct, avoidance was the most common response.
That is not hard to understand, as in hierarchies, self-protection is often the dominant strategy.

6/ So there is a clear gap between what people think should work and what actually changes behavior.
Retribution looks normatively compelling.
Forgiveness looks relationally attractive.
Neither reliably produced moral repair in these power-asymmetric settings.

5/ We then tested this in incentivized lab studies with asymmetric power. We found that powerful transgressors were largely unresponsive to whether targets punished or forgave them.
Punishment did not reliably correct them.
Forgiveness did not reliably reform them.

4/ But people were not naïve about the costs. In the vignette study, participants expected punished superiors to behave more unkindly than forgiven superiors. In other words, punishment was seen as justified, but risky.

3/ When the transgression looked more severe, people expected and chose punishment more often. They also forgave less often. Severity moves people toward punishment.

2/ In 4 studies, the paper studies both sides of the interaction:
(1) how victims respond to a powerful wrongdoer, and
(2) how that wrongdoer reacts afterward.

1/N After 5 years in the making, this paper is finally out. “How to React in the Case of Powerful Transgressors: Kill Them With Kindness or Punishment?” We study situations in which a superior acts unethically and what actually follows from punishing, forgiving, or avoiding them.

A conservative one-point estimate implies ~3.3% of grades enhanced, with a rough overall rate ~5–10% when accounting for pass/fail stakes and >1-point adjustments.

Frequencies just below cut points are systematically lower than just above, and the “above–below” gap is especially pronounced at grade thresholds. We found no robust teacher-gender effect; a small student-gender interaction favors females near thresholds.

In the points distribution, scores cluster immediately above the key thresholds, consistent with borderline “rounding up.” To separate generic round-number preferences from grade-improving discretion, we compared adjacent non-round values straddling thresholds (e.g., 74 vs 76; 89 vs 91).

We analyzed 10+ years of administrative records (winter 2008/09 to summer 2020/21), starting from 2,006,928 evaluations. Institutional cutoffs enable a clear detection strategy (A: 90–100; B: 75–89; C: 60–74; below 60 results in failure; 50–59 triggers a “retake” outcome).

Are teachers objective and impartial when grading (business school) students? Our new (with @bahniks.bsky.social and Simon Senčar) mixed-methods paper examines “grade enhancement”: the practice of raising grades without corresponding improvements in performance. authors.elsevier.com/a/1mNHq38nsw...

In a new short conceptual/review paper with @petrhoudek.bsky.social, we describe how groups or organizations can become corrupt due to selection and sorting effects, socialisation, institutional capture, and norm entrenchment: authors.elsevier.com/c/1ltb3,rU~O...

Only a one week left left to register to the Brno Replication Games on Sept 7th. Virtual participation is possible and coauthorship to a meta paper is granted.

Register here: www.surveymonkey.ca/r/Replicatio...

Our new paper on self-selection effects in dishonesty with @petrhoudek.bsky.social, @marekhudik.bsky.social, and Nicolas Say is out now: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lMN67tbfH...

Last week to apply for a postdoctoral position to work with me, @lubomircingl.bsky.social, and @petrhoudek.bsky.social: bsky.app/profile/bahn...
Salary is competitive, position potentially for up to 3 years, projects are interesting, Prague is great to live in, and application process is easy.

We are hiring! The Faculty of Business Administration, Prague University of Economics and Business is inviting applications for the following positions: Up to 3 positions of Postdoctoral Researchers in the fields of...

We are hiring up to 3 postdoctoral researchers in economics, psychology, or organizational studies to join our interdisciplinary group at the Prague University of Economics and Business: im.vse.cz/cevyz/englis...

Check out our latest working paper, "Understanding Appointment Decisions: Do Material Interests Trump the Ethical Imperatives?" with @bahniks.bsky.social @petrhoudek.bsky.social and Nicolas Say. 1/5

Hi, Ryan, I would love to be added; thanks.

Hi, Seraphin, I would love to be added; thanks.