Robert Böhm

It‘s ball season in Vienna. We had a great time at the Science Ball #Wissenschaftsball @schneali.bsky.social @anneic.bsky.social @riangross.bsky.social and many more

New paper led by @leonhardreiter.bsky.social titled "Country-level differences in socio-economic development and cultural dimensions are associated with workers' economic expectations of AI" out now in Computers in Human Behavior Reports 👇

BTW, we explicitly mention the potential risks you refer to in the discussion section.

Open AI‘s GPT 4o

No, we use a standard llm but feed it with information for the user interactions. So, we cannot exclude certain bias, but haven’t observed it in our study.

Our AI communication is embedded in a gamified set-up via avatars speaking to users. We prompted it with specific evidence-based information, so the risk of misinformation spreading is very low.

We hope that the findings will help to improve and tailor climate-related communication for the public. Thanks for the financial support @undp.org & Tryg Fonden (5/5)

💡 Takeaway: One-size-fits-all climate communication doesn’t work. AI isn’t a magic bullet, but it can help reach people who would otherwise disengage from climate information altogether. If we want broader impact, we need smarter, audience-sensitive communication strategies. (4/5)

📊 Findings: Both communication formats can promote behavioral intentions and engagement. However, people who are less curious and less concerned about climate change are more likely to engage when information is delivered through interactive, AI-based formats (e.g., smartphone apps). (3/5)

🔍Aim: Across two preregistered studies, we examined how different communication formats—relying either on information-based or experience-based communication—affect climate-friendly behavior and engagement with climate information. (2/5)

🎄 New paper in the Journal of Environmental Psychology (early Christmas gift!) 🎄
"Engaging the unengaged: Differential effects of AI-driven climate communication across audiences"
together with Adéla Plechatá and Guido Makransky.
doi.org/10.1016/j.je... (1/5) 🧵👇

Text reads: About synthetic panels Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels. Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey. Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away.

Text reads: Question-writing best practices To get the most reliable and actionable results from synthetic audiences, consider these question-writing best practices: Ask forward-looking and attitudinal questions. Synthetic panels perform best with perceptions, preferences, and intent-based questions. For example, “How likely are you to try…?” Synthetic panels are less applicable for studies on past behaviors, detailed recall, brand recall, or awareness questions. For example, “When did you last visit…?”

Text reads: Discussion The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002) of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?

Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

Ich sehe das anders. Anwendungsnahe Forschung inkl. Feldforschung ist sehr populär in der Ökonomie. Und sie machen es oftmals besser als (viele) Psycholog*innen: gute kausale Identifikationsstrategien + formale Prozesstheorien. Wir müssen uns methodisch weiterentwickeln um hier dran zu bleiben.

Representation in science and trust in scientists in the USA - Nature Human Behaviour Druckman et al. document gaps in trust in scientists in the USA. People from groups less represented among scientists (for example, women and those with lower economic status) are less trusting. Incre...

Paper out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com:

1) those groups (women, African Americans, lower SES, rural) that are underrepresented in science have been less trusting of science.

2) If you improve representation in science, you improve trust among those groups.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨NEW PUBLICATION🚨 together with @schildchristoph.bsky.social, @laulilleholt.bsky.social, and Ingo Zettler: "Testing the effectiveness and endorsement of collective punishment." Published in the European Journal of Personality, find it here: doi.org/10.1177/0890...

🚨NEW PAPER🚨 led by @qinyuxiao.bsky.social, with @simoncolumbus.bsky.social and me: "Self-serving intergroup aggression escalates and prevails over parochial cooperation." It's now published in Evolution and Human Behavior by @humbehevosoc.bsky.social. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

How Parochialism and Altruism Shape Our Conflict Behavior Discover how a novel instrument developed by researchers measures altruism and parochialism, shedding light on intergroup conflict behavior.

Here is a summary report of the paper: csl.mpg.de/892188/how-p... (7/7)

Taken together, we present a new toolkit for measuring individual- and group-level social preferences, show that both are shaped by conflict experiences and perceptions, and demonstrate that they predict conflict engagement across diverse samples and group memberships. (6/7)

In a quasi-experimental Study 5 among US participants, we show that parochialism is elevated in high- relative to low-conflict group pairings, whereas altruism appears comparatively less depended on perceived conflict intensity. (5/7)

Study 4 employed a lab-in-the-field approach with members of the Nyangatom, a small-scale society in Ethiopia engaging in cross-border conflicts. We find that higher conflict experience is related to higher levels of altruism, particularly among participants with higher levels of parochialism. (4/7)

In Study 1, we validate our measurement toolkit, showing that altruism and parochialism are separate social preferences. In Studies 2-3, we find that individual-and group-level preferences independently predict participation in real-world conflict (football derby fans and political camps). (3/7)

Classic “parochial altruism” models assume two distinct preferences drive conflict participation:
𝗔𝗹𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗶𝘀𝗺: helping one’s ingroup at a personal cost,
𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗺: favoring ingroups over outgroups.
We develop a toolkit for measuring these individual- and group-level social preferences. (2/7)

🚨NEW PUBLICATION🚨 in @cp-iscience.bsky.social l together with @lukeglowacki.bsky.social, @hannesrusch.bsky.social and Isabel Thielmann: “Untangling altruism and parochialism in human intergroup conflict” doi.org/10.1016/j.is... (1/7)

Thank you all for your interest in our research. We hope this week's posts helped to raise some awareness for AMR and what we can do about it using social and behavioral science. #AMR #WorldAMRAwarenessWeek #WAAW2025 Join us in future research efforts: www.a-bc.network

Promoting prosociality toward future generations in antibiotic intake - Ana Paula Santana, Lars Korn, Cornelia Betsch, Robert Böhm, 2023 Understanding individuals’ preferences for antibiotics can help mitigate the acceleration of antibiotic resistance. Similar to the climate crisis, individuals “...

The paper is available here: doi.org/10.1177/1359... (4)

However, when we induced empathy for future generations in the between-generations condition, antibiotic overuse in case of mild infections dropped. This suggests that how we frame the dilemma—and empathy-based interventions—can help promote more responsible antibiotic use. (3)

Santana et al. (2023) ran a preregistered study (N=996) using a behavioral game to test how people use antibiotics when the costs of resistance fall on their own vs. a future generation. Overuse in case of mild infections increased when the consequences were pushed onto future generations. (2)

Antibiotic use is a social and temporal dilemma: the benefits are immediate, but the costs—antibiotic resistance—arrive later. Today’s choices shape the effectiveness of antibiotics for future generations, so we have to use them wisely. (1)

I'm closing this week's joint thread of selected work on #AMR with a summary of a study conducted by my former PhD student Ana Santana.

@corneliabetsch.bsky.social @riangross.bsky.social @schneali.bsky.social @elisie.bsky.social @miroslavsirota.bsky.social @athorpe8.bsky.social @mariejuanchich.bsky.social @evakrockow.bsky.social @anicabuckel.bsky.social @cortneyprice.bsky.social @gerrymolloy.bsky.social @luciebd.bsky.social