Research

In Progress

Moral hypocrisy and climate change mitigation support

Tamara Niella, Joaquin Navajas, Ophelia Deroy

In this project, we propose that climate inactivism is associated with different moral responses to the climate crisis. In particular, we hypothesize that people’s sensitivity to moral hypocrisy drives climate inactivism. Therefore we want to compare how different levels of environmental values and climate change mitigation policies’ support, predict people’s moral condemnation of environmental hipocrisy compared to condemnation of simple environmental transgression.

Cues to trustworthiness : The Expert/Laymen problem

Justin Sulik, Tamara Niella, Ophelia Deroy, Gloria Origgi

In this project, we aim to answer the following questions: What are the most relevant cues people use to assess expertise in a field they do not have any first-hand knowledge about? Can we test them? How should we display second-order information about experts to facilitate the acknowledgment of the appropriate expertise?

Polarizing conversations: Live versus imagined, and their effect on our willingness to communicate

Tamara Niella, Joaquin Navajas, Sara D. Hodges

We study participants (groups and dyads) having conversations on a polarizing topic and participants imagining such interactions. Study 1 found that agreement in live conversations was higher than expected when imagined. Study 2 (ongoing) aims to replicate this in polarized dyads and to test whether live interaction positively affects participants’ willingness to engage in such interactions in the future.

Sleep and Polarization

Joaquin Navajas, Diego Golombek, Horacio de la Iglesia, Leandro Casiraghi, Tamara Niella, Victoria Lescano Charreau

Research project to investigate the effects of partial sleep deprivation on political polarization and conversation receptiveness in the United States and Argentina.

Understanding how corruption and dishonesty affect the perception of reporting transgressions

Tamara Niella

Reporting a transgression of the norm to an authority figure can imply an act of disloyalty against one’s group, which constitutes a moral dilemma between maintaining loyalty to one’s peers vs. loyalty to other moral concerns. My goal is to study factors that explain the link between a negative perception of reporting transgressions and the prevalence of corruption within a society by conducting surveys on countries with different corruption-perception indexes.

Past

Collective decision-making: Deliberation in small groups vs. the Wisdom of the crowds

Joaquin Navajas, Tamara Niella, Gerry Garbulsky, Bahador Barhami, Mariano Sigman

In a crowd experiment on a 10,000 people audience at TEDxRiodelaPlata, we studied whether a crowd made better estimations when people made estimations individually vs. in small independent groups where deliberation and consensus took place.

See publication here

Cooperation and the zero-sum game fallacy

Tamara Niella, Nicolas Stier, Mariano Sigman

In a crowd experiment on a 10,000 people audience at TEDxRiodelaPlata, we studied why people do not engage in cooperation, even when it pays off, and how context and instructions can influence that behavior.

See publication here

Moral judgment of tattling in Argentina: the effect of different types of incetives and a person’s intrinsic corruption

Tamara Niella, Isabel Rocca, Mariano Sigman

Investigation on Argentinean adults’ moral judgment of tattling -the reporting of another person’s violation of a normative expectation to a third party- and the effect of two kinds of incentives on it. It is possible that in the decision making process, two opponent moral values come into play: the benefit of maintaining loyalty to an authority vs. the cost of breaking loyalty to a peer. We examine the hypothesis that there are certain variables that may alter this trade-off. Through an interactive questionnaire we found that loyalty to the authority may be perceived as a cost while maintaining loyalty to a peer seems to be more relevant. In different situations where the following factors varied: the seriousness of the transgression, the relationship between peers, and the existence or not of incentives to tattle; we found a generally negative insight towards tattling, and a resistance to like the “tattler” even when her action is well judged. This negative insight is intensified when there is friendship involved or when the transgression’s seriousness is low. We also found that a punishment-type incentive nudges willingness to tattle more efficiently than a prize-type one. In a second experiment, we identified “corrupt” participants from those who were not, and although there were no differences between their judgment on tattling, differences in their attitudes were found: corrupt participants would tattle less than non corrupt ones.

This was my Bachelor’s Honor’s Thesis. You can read it here (in Spanish).