John Michael

How do organizational decision structures shape diffusion and displacement of responsibility in unethical leader-follower collaboration? Across four experiments (N = 2,976), we investigated how decision structures and leader influence shape responsibility attribution and unethical conduct in teams. Using a novel approach to measure responsibility attribution across roles, Study 1 showed from an observer perspective that flat structures foster responsibility diffusion, whereas hierarchical structures more often elicit displacement of responsibility. Studies 2 and 3 extended these findings to repeated real-time leader-follower interactions, demonstrating that hierarchical structures increase coordinated dishonesty while enabling leaders and followers to displace and diffuse responsibility. Study 4 examined how different forms of leader influence shape responsibility attribution, showing that leaders tend to displace responsibility downward, whereas followers frequently diffused responsibility among themselves. Leaders who encouraged unethical behavior through verbal directives, rather than incentive-based cues, generated the highest levels of unethical collaboration, yet often diffused or displaced responsibility onto followers. By integrating moral disengagement theory with organizational decision structures, this work advances ethical leadership research by identifying structural mechanisms through which leaders and followers assign moral responsibility. The findings position decision structures as central levers for shaping responsibility attribution and ethical behavior in leader-follower interactions.

This feature reports on the Epistemology, Reasoning, and Logic session of the first Milan Logic and Philosophy of Science Network workshop (12th March 2025). The session brought together six contributions addressing diverse aspects of scientific reasoning: the psychology of extreme beliefs, analogical reasoning in contemporary physics, joint commitment across species, the epistemology of pseudoscience and disinformation, logical reasoning with data, and modal logic for truth-maker semantics.

Dunbar’s emphasis on dyadic relationships in group formation overlooks the roles of interdependence and joint commitment in social cohesion. We challenge his premise by highlighting the importance of group-level processes, particularly where top-down group pressures like cooperative breeding and out-group threat can induce joint commitment as an alternate means to sustain group cohesion.

Previous research involving American and Western European participants provides evidence that, in the context of joint action, individuals’ sense of commitment sustains their motivation to persist in performing actions which their joint action partners are expecting and relying on them to perform. In the current study, we extend this research by implementing two web-based experiments comparing participants in two separate cultures: India and the UK, the former being characterized by a higher degree of collectivism and interpersonal interdependence. Participants viewed video clips of two agents making contributions to a joint action, and responded to a battery of questions about how they perceived the scenarios in the video clips, as well as the 30-item self-construal questionnaire. Across the two experiments, we found evidence that the sense of commitment to persisting in a joint action is boosted by the degree of intertemporal coordination and by the perception of a joint action partner’s reliance. We do not find consistent evidence of any difference in how long participants in the two cultures indicate that they would persist. Strikingly, however, participants in India were far more likely to judge there to be an obligation to persist in helping.

Dishonest behaviours such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as interventions to counteract dishonest behaviour, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a baseline oath)—proposed, evaluated and selected by 44 expert researchers—and a no-oath condition in a megastudy involving 21,506 UK and US participants from Prolific.com who played an incentivized tax evasion game online. Of the 21 interventions, 10 significantly improved tax compliance by 4.5 to 8.5 percentage points, with the most successful nearly halving tax evasion. Limited evidence for moderators was found. Experts and laypeople failed to predict the most effective interventions, though experts’ predictions were more accurate. In conclusion, honesty oaths were effective in curbing dishonesty, but their effectiveness varied depending on content. These findings can help design impactful interventions to curb dishonesty.

Background: Caloric restriction (CR) promotes health and longevity in diverse species and has been successful in ameliorating Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology in mouse models and non‐human primates. However, CR may be difficult to adhere to, which makes the reduction of specific macronutrients without restricting calories an attractive alternative. Low protein intake is associated with healthy aging and reduced mortality in humans, and protein restriction (PR) extends the lifespan and healthspan of many mouse models. In this study, we examined the effects of PR on metabolic health and AD pathology in the 3xTg mouse model of AD.Method: We placed male and female 3xTg mice as well as non‐transgenic (NTg) controls on either a Control diet (21% of calories from protein) or a PR diet (7% of calories from protein) starting at 6 months of age. We assessed the effect of PR on metabolic health, cognition, and AD neuropathology along with targeted metabolomics on plasma samples to identify the abundance of metabolites and dysregulated metabolic pathways.Result: We found that a long‐term PR diet had substantial metabolic benefits for both male and female 3xTg and NTg mice, promoting leanness and glycemic control. We also found that consumption of low protein diet significantly improved cognitive performance and reduced multiple aspects of AD neuropathology including tau phosphorylation, Aß plaques and gliosis. Phosphorylation of the mTORC1 substrate S6K1 was decreased and the major autophagy cargo receptor P62 was increased in PR‐fed 3xTg mice, which suggests that reduced mTORC1 signaling may mediate the beneficial effects of PR on AD pathology. Targeted metabolomics revealed that several metabolites involved in nucleic acid metabolism and amino acid metabolism were altered between control fed and PR fed mice in a sex specific manner.Conclusion: Our findings suggest that lowering dietary protein may be a novel way to slow or even prevent AD. In addition, drugs that mimic the effects of PR may be an effective pharmaceutical approach to combat AD pathology.

Social commitment influences our behavior in various ways. Recent studies suggest that social commitment to other individuals or groups can increase dishonest behavior while feeling commitment to moral norms might decrease it. Here we show in a pre-registered series of 7 studies investigating the influence of social commitment on dishonest behavior by sampling 7566 participants across three countries (the UK, the US, and Mexico) that commitment to moral norms via honesty oaths might decrease dishonesty (OR = 0.79 [0.72, 0.88]). To the contrary, we found no credible evidence that social commitment to other individuals increases dishonesty (OR = 1.08 [0.97, 1.20]). Finally, we observed that commitment to moral norms was less effective if participants were committed to another individual at the same time (OR = 0.95 [0.86, 1.06]). Our findings point at the potential effectiveness of honesty oaths, while the observed effect sizes were small compared to previous studies.

De Neys's incisive critique of empirical and theoretical research on the exclusivity feature underscores the depth of the challenge of explaining the interplay of fast and slow processes. We argue that a closer look at research on mindreading reveals abundant evidence for the exclusivity feature – as well as methodological and theoretical perspectives that could inform research on fast and slow thinking.