Ernst Fehr

In this registered report, we investigate (i) whether incentives affect subjects’ willingness to pay to increase and to decrease the payoff of others, (ii) whether they affect the distribution of social preference types, and (iii) whether they affect the strength and the precision of individuals’ structurally estimated social preference parameters. Using an online experiment with a general population sample, we show that the use of monetary incentives, as well as the size of the stakes, have little impact on subjects’ modal choices (descriptive analysis), as well as for the distribution of qualitatively distinct preference types in the population (clustering analysis). However, monetary incentives affect quantitative measures of the strength and the precision of social preferences. Indeed, a structural analysis reveals that the preference elicitation with merely hypothetical stakes leads to an overestimation and a less precise measurement of social preferences. Together, these results highlight that incentivizing the elicitation of social preferences is most useful when interested in quantitative estimates. For researchers interested in identifying merely qualitative preference types, however, hypothetical stakes might suffice.

Fairness concerns shape how people judge wages, institutions, taxes, transfers and social conflict. Decades of research show that people care not only about their own outcomes but also about how outcomes are distributed across others. The key question is now how these concerns operate outside simple laboratory settings, in real social and institutional environments. We argue that fairness concerns are shaped by comparison groups, beliefs about what outcomes are deserved, social norms, early-life experience and the institutions that make some comparisons more visible than others. This means that policies and organizations do not merely respond to fairness preferences; they can also activate, redirect and reshape them. Progress requires methods that connect experiments with field data, institutional variation and richer measures of how people evaluate whole income distributions. Such work can improve the design of workplaces, welfare policies and public institutions that are both effective and seen as legitimate.

In recent years, increasing skepticism regarding oxytocin’s (OT) influence on social behavior arose. Low power, HARKing (hypothesizing after the results are known), and replication failures have clouded the field. Here, we directly address these concerns with a high-powered, preregistered study that offers robust evidence for a causal effect of OT on trust among males with a low disposition to trust. We recruited 359 low-trusting men who participated in a trust game with complete anonymity. Results show that OT administration significantly increased trusting behavior by roughly 15%, with consistent effects across regression models with and without controls for personality traits. A pooled data analysis incorporating a previous sample (n = 219) of low-trusting individuals further strengthens this conclusion, yielding a statistically significant 16.9% increase in trust. No interaction effect was found between OT and the degree of dispositional trust, suggesting OT’s effect may be uniform across the low-trusting spectrum. These findings present a strong case for OT’s selective trust-enhancing role. By isolating OT’s impact within a well-defined subpopulation and experimental context, this study resolves a key question in the debate over neurobiological determinants of trust.

We examine whether individual preferences predict higher-education choices. According to standard human capital theory, differences in individuals’ time and risk preferences lead to differences in educational investments. Testing this hypothesis is challenging, as it requires measuring individuals’ preferences, doing so before they make educational investments, and subsequently observing their educational choices. We combine incentivized, experimentally elicited measures of time and risk preferences for a large, representative sample of 18- to 19-y-old Danes with administrative data on subsequent higher-education choices, program-specific earnings trajectories, prior school performance, and family background. In line with theory, we find that more patient individuals choose longer education programs and programs with steeper early-career earnings profiles, while more risk-averse individuals select programs with lower earnings dispersion and reduced downside risk. These relationships remain strong after controlling for cognitive ability, prior academic performance, and family background. Our findings suggest that preferences have a substantial impact on real-world educational investments and have implications for educational sorting.

In this registered report, we investigate (i) whether incentives affect subjects' willingness to pay to increase, and to decrease the payoff of others, (ii) whether they affect the distribution of social preference types, and (iii) whether they affect the strength and the precision of individuals' structurally estimated social preference parameters. Using an online experiment with a general population sample, we show that the use of monetary incentives, as well as the size of the stakes, have little impact on subjects' modal choices (descriptive analysis), as well as for the distribution of qualitatively distinct preference types in the population (clustering analysis). However, monetary incentives affect quantitative measures of the strength and the precision of social preferences. Indeed, a structural analysis reveals that the preference elicitation with merely hypothetical stakes leads to an overestimation and a less precise measurement of social preferences. Together, these results highlight that incentivizing the elicitation of social preferences is most useful when interested in quantitative estimates.For researchers interested in identifying merely qualitative preferences types, however, hypothetical stakes might suffice.

In recent years, increasing skepticism regarding oxytocin’s (OT) influence on social behavior arose. Low power, HARKing (hypothesizing after the results are known), and replication failures have clouded the field. Here, we directly address these concerns with a high-powered, preregistered study that offers robust evidence for a causal effect of OT on trust among individuals with a low disposition to trust. We recruited 359 low-trusting individuals who participated in a trust game under strict anonymity conditions. Results show that OT administration significantly increased trusting behavior by roughly 15%, with consistent effects across regression models with and without controls for personality traits. A pooled data analysis incorporating a previous sample (n=219) of low-trusting individuals further strengthens this conclusion, yielding a statistically significant 16.9% increase in trust. Crucially, no interaction effect was found between OT and the degree of dispositional trust, suggesting OT’s effect is uniform across the low-trusting spectrum. These findings present a strong case for OT’s selective trust-enhancing role. By isolating OT’s impact within a well-defined subpopulation and experimental context, this study provides a critical pivot in the debate over neurobiological mechanisms of trust.

Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Other-regarding preferences may also affect support for redistribution, but knowledge about their distribution in the broader population and how they are associated with political support for redistributive policies is still scarce. In this paper, we take advantage of Swiss direct democracy, where people voted several times on strongly redistributive policies in national plebiscites, to study the link between other-regarding preferences and support for redistribution in a broad sample of the Swiss population. We document that inequality aversion and altruistic concerns play a quantitatively large positive role in the support for redistribution, in particular for more affluent individuals. In addition, previously identified key motives underlying opposition to redistribution-such as the belief that effort is an important driver of individual success-play no role for selfish individuals but are highly relevant for altruistic and egalitarian individuals. Finally, while inequality averse individuals display strong support for policies that primarily aim at reducing the incomes of the rich, altruistic individuals are considerably less supportive of such policies. Thus, knowledge about the fundamental properties and the distribution of individuals' other-regarding preferences provides a deeper understanding about who is likely to support specific redistributive policies.

Rising inequality has brought redistribution back on the political agenda. In theory, inequality aversion drives people’s support for redistribution. People can dislike both advantageous inequality (comparison relative to those worse off) and disadvantageous inequality (comparison relative to those better off). Existing experimental evidence reveals substantial variation across people in these preferences. However, evidence is scarce on the broader role of these two distinct forms of inequality aversion for redistribution in society. We provide evidence by exploiting a unique combination of data. We use an incentivized experiment to measure inequality aversion in a large population sample (≈9,000 among 20- to 64-y-old Danes). We link the elicited inequality aversion to survey information on individuals’ support for public redistribution (policies that reduce income differences) and administrative records revealing their private redistribution (real-life donations to charity). In addition, the link to administrative data enables us to include a large battery of controls in the empirical analysis. Theory predicts that support for public redistribution increases with both types of inequality aversion, while private redistribution should increase with advantageous inequality aversion, but decrease with disadvantageous inequality aversion. A strong dislike for disadvantageous inequality makes people willing to sacrifice own income to reduce the income of people who are better off, thereby reducing the distance to people with more income than themselves. Public redistribution schemes achieve this but private donations to charity do not. Our empirical results provide strong support for these predictions and with quantitatively large effects compared to other predictors.

Research on the personality of scientific creativity is revisited using the Neo-Socioanalytic model of personality psychology as an organizing framework. Past research shows that creative scientists, largely from the 20th century, were distinguished by high levels of openness to experience, dominance, ambition, intelligence, and low levels of agreeableness. Contradictory findings for environmental influences highlighted the potential importance of both supportive and adverse diversifying experiences. Developmental trends also run contrary to the likelihood of scientific creativity occurring later in life, which is consistent with the life span models of creativity. Based on this review, we highlight much needed updating to the basic science of scientific creativity, including the need to test these findings in populations other than older white men, and the testing of both environmental experiences and individual differences simultaneously. An agenda for identifying and developing the 21st century creative scientist is provided.