Join us for the next Norms and Behavioral Change Talk on Thursday, June 18th, 2026 at 1:00pm EST with Dr. Ernesto Reuben of New York University!
Abstract: In a meritocratic society, people are rewarded based on their talents, skills, and effort rather than other factors such as demographic characteristics. The concept of meritocracy has a long-standing tradition in the social sciences and is widely believed to influence economic and social outcomes. However, empirically testing this relationship poses considerable challenges. In this paper, we use a direct measure of individual skill, their general cognitive ability, to examine how skills are financially rewarded across representative samples from 70 countries. We find that countries where cognitive ability is strongly associated with income—suggesting greater meritocracy—tend to have higher GDP per capita and lower income inequality. These relationships are robust to various controls, including the overall skill level and education.
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Prior to the talk, ECR speaker, Laura C. Hoenig from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam will also give a short presentation titled 'The Social Cost of Corruption: How Institutions shape Cooperation across 34 Societies'.
Abstract: Corruption undermines institutional integrity, erodes trust, and threatens cooperation—yet most evidence on its social consequences stems from correlational studies in WEIRD populations. This project introduces a global experimental framework to examine how institutional corruption shapes trust and cooperation across cultures. We used the adapted Prisoner’s Dilemma paradigm introduced by Spadaro and colleagues (2023) that operationalizes institutional representatives as third-party punishers (TPPs). Corruption was manipulated by varying (dis-)honesty levels of TPPs which were previously obtained in a Die Roll task that rewarded self-serving behavior at the expense of a charity donation. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, participants were exposed to four experimental conditions: In the absence of a TPP regulating the exchange, or in the presence of an anonymous TPP, honest TPP, or corrupt TPP. This study is pre-registered, incentivized, and free from deception. Data was collected from 13,536 participants across 34 societies selected to maximize their variation in institutional corruption levels, rule of law, and other relevant cultural dimensions. In this presentation, I will explain how the study integrates behavioral measures of cooperation, trust, and expectations toward both partners and institutions with relevant country-level indicators, such as government effectiveness and collectivism, and discuss how the integrity of TPPs systematically shaped those measures across 34 societies. This project can help to augment our understanding of how (corrupt) institutions globally affect cooperation and, as a further contribution, investigates the role of psychological mechanisms to better understand the relationship between institutional quality and social behavior across cultures.
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Zoom - Register here for Zoom Link.