This Norms and Behavioral Change Talk happened on Thursday, March 19th, 2026 at 1:00pm EST with Dr. Marta Serra-Garcia of The University of California, San Diego!
Abstract: In this talk I will present recent work that asks: How does information transmission change when it requires attracting the attention of receivers? I will focus on a recent paper that combines an experiment that varies freelance professionals’ incentives to attract attention about scientific findings, with several online experiments that exogenously expose receivers to the content created. We find that attention incentives lead to significantly less information being transmitted, but not more factually inaccurate content. These incentives increase information demand and the knowledge of interested receivers. However, among the majority of receivers who do not demand more information, attention incentives lower knowledge and increase biases in beliefs, revealing that missing information can be a channel through which misperceptions arise. I will discuss the implications of these findings, follow-up work, and open questions for future research.
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Prior to the talk, ECR speaker, Bianca Sanesi, from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca will also give a short presentation titled 'The Shape of Moral Satisfaction'.
Abstract: People differ in how their prosocial behavior evolves across repeated decisions: some increase their prosociality, while others decrease it after an initial good deed. We argue that these patterns are driven by the curvature of moral satisfaction, the hedonic utility from acting in line with one’s personal norms. The central question is whether individuals experience increasing or decreasing marginal moral satisfaction from good deeds, and how much this curvature varies across people. In our model, increasing marginal moral satisfaction generates moral consistency, whereas diminishing marginal moral satisfaction generates moral licensing. We study this mechanism in an online two-stage experiment that holds material incentives constant while varying moral framing. Combining behavioral choices with linguistic measures of moral engagement allows us to recover substantial heterogeneity in the shape of moral satisfaction. We find that participants with higher moral engagement exhibit diminishing marginal moral satisfaction, while less engaged participants display increasing marginal moral satisfaction. Finally, we show that moral satisfaction extends across domains: moral actions in different contexts appear to serve as substitutable sources of hedonic utility, helping explain when good deeds crowd in versus crowd out future prosocial behavior.
Visit her personal website here
