Screenshot of the email announcing Visilisa's talk, "Destructive Communication" with headshot, affiliation, title and abstract. The abstract reads: "Does communication always promote socially efficient behavior? We challenge this common proposition by showing that communication becomes destructive in polarized contexts. In an online experiment, we investigate what happens when participants who fundamentally disagree communicate. We exogenously vary the degree of polarization and the participants’ ability to communicate. When participants are sufficiently polarized, communication no longer improves trust and significantly reduces trustworthiness. Using natural language processing and supervised machine learning, we document that a substantial fraction of participants focus their communication on being polarized, leading to a destructive effect on both trust and trustworthiness. Our findings challenge the universality of contact theory, highlighting that communication may backfire in settings where parties hold opposing views."
Screenshort from the seminar announcement email with title "Individual Preferences for Truth-Telling", abstract and headshot of Lisa. The abstract reads: "Contrary to the traditional economic view that individuals misreport private information to maximize material payoffs, recent evidence highlights robust preferences for truth-telling among many decision-makers. Theoretical models that align with aggregate behavioral patterns posit that these preferences arise from both an intrinsic motivation to be honest and a desire to be perceived as honest. We propose a novel incentivized measure to independently capture these two motives at the individual level for the first time. We validate the measure’s properties experimentally and show that it predicts behavior in other commonly studied situations that allow for (dis)honesty. The measure enables the classification of individual preference types, revealing systematic heterogeneity and fairly stable type distributions across different samples. Additionally, we propose an experimentally validated 2-minute survey module that proxies both motives and predicts behavior in a typical reporting task. Including this module in a large panel, we offer first insights into how early-life experiences may shape preferences for being and being seen as honest."
How strong are contrast effects?
Join us at the U Penn seminar and find out:
After @vasilisawerner.bsky.social presents her super-polished (former JM) paper, "Destructive Communication", I will present "Individual Preferences for Truth-Telling".
Tomorrow, 7 pm CET. Registration: shorturl.at/mD1qe
