Many disciplines rely on economic games to measure prosocial behavior. However, there is a concern that participants may misunderstand these games, complicating interpretation of results. This study combines online and laboratory data (total n = 1568) to assess subject comprehension of five standard economic games: the Dictator Game, Ultimatum Game, Trust Game, Public Goods Game, and Prisoner's Dilemma. The online and lab data collections are carried out separately and for the online data collection we collect data for two separate platforms (Prolific and CloudResearch's MTurk Toolkit). Within each data collection participants carry out all five games, and are randomized to comprehension questions with or without incentives for correct answers. Results indicate that misunderstanding is common: the proportion of participants who misunderstood ranged from 22 % (Dictator Game) to 70 % (Trust Game) in the online samples and from 22 % (Dictator Game) to 53 % (Public Goods Game) in the lab sample. Incentivizing the comprehension questions had no significant impact on misunderstanding, but numeracy was associated with lower misunderstanding. Misunderstanding also predicted increased prosocial behavior in several of the games. Our findings suggest that misunderstanding may be important in explaining prosocial behavior, making it more complicated to draw clear inferences about social preferences from experimental data.

How can people lead fulfilling lives both thanks to and despite the constant use of digital media and artificial intelligence? While the prevailing narrative often portrays these technologies as generally harmful to well-being, the reality is of course more nuanced—some individuals benefit, while others do not. Existing research has predominantly focused on the general consequences of digital media on well-being, with less attention given to the individual-level antecedents of digital well-being. In the present study, we aimed to identify the traits and characteristics of individuals who use digital tools in ways that promote their well-being. Using a large representative sample from Sweden (N = 1999), we explore how digital self-control, digital literacy (objective and subjective), and digital information ignorance predict digital well-being, life satisfaction, and social anxiety. Digital self-control and subjective digital literacy positively predicted digital well-being. Digital self-control also predicted greater life satisfaction. Finally, digital information ignorance predicted increased life satisfaction and social anxiety. Overall, the current study contributes to a growing literature on digital well-being by exploring its antecedents.

Decision fatigue is the idea that making decisions is mentally demanding and eventually leads to deteriorated decision quality. Many studies report results that appear consistent with decision fatigue. However, most of this evidence comes from observed sequential patterns using retrospective designs, without preregistration or external validation and with low precision in how decision fatigue is operationalized. Here we conducted an empirical test of decision fatigue using large-scale, high-resolution data on healthcare professionals’ medical judgments at a national telephone triage and medical advice service. This is a suitable setting for testing decision fatigue because the work is both hard and repetitive, yet qualified, and the variation in scheduling produced a setting where level of fatigue could be regarded as near random for some segments of the data. We hypothesized increased use of heuristics, more specifically convergence toward personal defaults in case judgments, and higher assigned urgency ratings with fatigue. We tested these hypotheses using one-sided Bayes Factors computed from underlying Bayesian generalized mixed models with random intercepts. The results consistently showed relative support for the statistical null hypothesis of no difference in decision-making depending on fatigue (BF0+ > 22 for all main tests). We thus found no evidence for decision fatigue. Whereas these results don’t preclude the existence of a weaker or more nuanced version of decision fatigue or more context-specific effects, they cast serious doubt on the empirical relevance of decision fatigue as a domain general effect for sequential decisions in healthcare and elsewhere.

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

Introduction: Saving is a journey, beginning with the critical decision to initiate the process, take that pivotal first deposit step, and persistently commit to ongoing savings. However, a lot of saving plans fail already before any deposit is made, and even if the first deposit is made, long-run success of savings is far from guaranteed. In this study, we investigate both individual and saving-goal-specific determinants of successful savings.

Method: We use real-life savings data (N = 2,619 saving goals of 808 individuals) from a FinTech company in Sweden that helps individuals save for their goals. In addition, we collect a wide range of individual characteristics related to financial behavior: individuals' objective and subjective financial knowledge, self-control, and information avoidance.

Results and discussion: Our analysis uncovered distinctive patterns at different stages of the saving process. While objective financial knowledge didn't correlate with how much one saves, it was significantly related to the likelihood of making the first deposit. Furthermore, individuals with high self-control exhibited greater savings, though self-control was not related to the initiation of saving. Interestingly, subjective financial literacy and information avoidance showed no significant association with overall savings behavior. Additionally, our study indicated that the attainability of goals plays a crucial role in depositing funds, with more achievable goals having higher deposit likelihoods. Conversely, ambitious goals, despite their challenging nature, tended to attract more substantial savings. Our findings, grounded in real-life data, provide valuable insights into the intricate mechanisms influencing successful saving behaviors, shedding light on the complexities of financial decision-making and goal pursuit.

Bounded ethicality refers to people’s limited capacity to consistently behave in line with their ethical standards. Here, we present results from a pre-registered, large-scale (N = 11,050) survey of researchers in Sweden, suggesting that researchers too are boundedly ethical. Specifically, researchers on average rated themselves as better than other researchers in their field at following good research practice, and rated researchers in their own field as better than researchers in other fields at following good research practice. These effects were stable across all academic fields, but strongest among researchers in the medical sciences. Taken together, our findings illustrate inflated self-righteous beliefs among researchers and research disciplines when it comes to research ethics, which may contribute to academic polarization and moral blindspots regarding one’s own and one’s colleagues’ use of questionable research practices.

Both theory on motivational crowding and recent empirical evidence suggest that nudging may sometimes backfire and actually crowd out prosocial behavior, due to decreased intrinsic motivation and warm glow. In this study, we tested this claim by investigating the effects of three types of nudges (default nudge, social norm nudge, and moral nudge) on donations to charity in a preregistered online experiment (N = 1098). Furthermore, we manipulated the transparency of the nudges across conditions by explicitly informing subjects of the nudges that were used. Our results show no indication that nudges crowd out prosocial behavior; instead, all three nudges increased donations. The positive effects of the nudges were driven by the subjects who did not perceive the nudges as attempts to manipulate their behavior, while donations among subjects who felt that the nudges were manipulative remained unaffected. Subjects’ self-reported happiness with their choice also remained unaffected. Thus, we find no indication that nudges crowded out warm glow when acting altruistically. Generally, our results are good news for the proponents of nudges in public policy, since they suggest that concerns about unintended motivational crowding effects on prosocial behavior have been overstated.

Information ignorance refers to the act of deliberately avoiding, neglecting, or distorting information to uphold a positive self-image and protect our identity-based beliefs. We apply this framework to household finance and develop a concise 12-item questionnaire measuring individuals' receptiveness to financial information, or the lack thereof - the Financial Homo Ignorans (FHI) Scale. We conduct two studies with samples from the general population in Sweden (total N=2508) and show that the FHI scale has high reliability and distinct from other commonly used individual-difference measures in behavioral finance. We show that individual heterogeneity as assessed by the FHI scale explains a substantial variation in financial behaviors and financial well-being, also when controlling for demographics and financial literacy. These results unequivocally demonstrate the utility of the FHI scale as a valuable instrument for researchers and practitioners in comprehending and addressing the challenges posed by the omnipresence of financial information in today's world.

In this commentary, we expand on the special issue themes of applied affective science, ecologically valid data and application, and the need for transdisciplinary collaboration by discussing and exemplifying how affective science can inform behavioral public policy.