Abstract News reports and communication are inherently constrained by space, time, and attention. As a result, news sources often condition the decision of whether to share a piece of information on the similarity between the signal and the prior belief of the audience, which generates a sample selection problem. This article experimentally studies how people form beliefs in these contexts, in particular the mechanisms behind errors in statistical reasoning. I document that a substantial fraction of experimental participants follows a simple “what you see is all there is” heuristic, according to which participants exclusively consider information that is right in front of them, and directly use the sample mean to estimate the population mean. A series of treatments aimed at identifying mechanisms suggests that for many participants, unobserved signals do not even come to mind. I provide causal evidence that the frequency of such incorrect mental models is a function of the computational complexity of the decision problem. These results point to the context dependence of what comes to mind and the resulting errors in belief updating.

This paper studies the supply of and demand for moral values in recent US presidential elections. Using a combination of large-scale survey data and text analyses, I find support for the hypothesis that both voters and politicians exhibit heterogeneity in their emphasis on universalist relative to communal moral values and that politicians’ vote shares partly reflect the extent to which their moral appeal matches the values of the electorate. Over the last decade, Americans’ values have become increasingly communal—especially in rural areas—which generated increased moral polarization and is associated with changes in voting patterns across space.

Abstract This article documents the economic relevance of measuring cognitive uncertainty: people’s subjective uncertainty over their ex ante utility-maximizing decision. In a series of experiments on choice under risk, the formation of beliefs, and forecasts of economic variables, we show that cognitive uncertainty predicts various systematic biases in economic decisions. When people are cognitively uncertain—either endogenously or because the problem is designed to be complex—their decisions are heavily attenuated functions of objective probabilities, which gives rise to average behavior that is regressive to an intermediate option. This insight ties together a wide range of empirical regularities in behavioral economics that are typically viewed as distinct phenomena or even as reflecting preferences, including the probability weighting function in choice under risk; base rate insensitivity, conservatism, and sample size effects in belief updating; and predictable overoptimism and -pessimism in forecasts of economic variables. Our results offer a blueprint for how a simple measurement of cognitive uncertainty generates novel insights about what people find complex and how they respond to it.

Abstract Throughout the Western world, people’s policy views are correlated across domains in a strikingly similar fashion. This article proposes that what partly explains the structure of ideology is moral universalism: the extent to which people exhibit the same level of altruism and trust towards strangers as towards in-group members. In new large-scale multinational surveys, heterogeneity in universalism descriptively explains why some people support redistribution, health care, environmental protection, affirmative action, and foreign aid, while others advocate for spending on the military, law enforcement, and border protection. Universalism is a substantially stronger predictor of policy views and ideological constraints than variables such as income, wealth, education, religiosity, or beliefs about government efficiency. Consistent with the idea that universalism shapes policy views, we further document that the left–right divide on redistribution, environmental protection, or foreign aid strongly attenuates or even reverses when people evaluate less universalist implementations of these policies.

The influence of behavioral biases on aggregate outcomes depends in part on self-selection: whether rational people opt more strongly into aggregate interactions than biased individuals. In betting market, auction and committee experiments, we document that some errors are strongly reduced through self-selection, while others are not affected at all or even amplified. A large part of this variation is explained by differences in the relationship between confidence and performance. In some tasks, they are positively correlated, such that self-selection attenuates errors. In other tasks, rational and biased people are equally confident, such that self-selection has no effects on aggregate quantities. (JEL C91, D44, D91)

This paper leverages nationally representative surveys across 60 countries and 64,000 respondents to present novel stylized facts about the relationship-specific nature of altruism. Across individuals, universalist preferences systematically vary with demographics such as age and religiosity and are predictive of many left-wing political views, albeit in culturally highly heterogeneous ways. Across countries, universalism is strongly linked to a broader radius of trust. Looking at origins, universalism varies with the economic, political, and religious organization of societies in ways that are consistent with the idea that the scope of altruism is partly shaped by economic incentives and democracy. (JEL D12, D64, D72, Z12, Z13)