Joey Reiff

I am grateful to everyone who helped make this project happen, and especially to Sam, whose legacy will continue to ripple through academia and beyond.

This work was the product of a wonderful, interdisciplinary collaboration with @hal-hershfield.bsky.social (social psychologist), Scott Sundby (criminal law scholar), and Aaron Rudkin (political scientist & statistician).

We share more patterns in the data and discuss the legal implications in the full article.

2) Perspective-taking is not applied evenly: Jurors were more likely to take the perspective of White victims than Black victims — evidence of racial disparity in empathy activation.

1) Perspective-taking predicts sentencing: Jurors who took victims’ perspectives were more likely to vote for the death penalty. Evidence that perspective-taking for defendants predicts leniency was less robust.

We analyzed data from 1,198 jurors across 353 capital trials, providing a rare glimpse into how people actually make real life-and-death decisions. Here is what we found:

Our paper explores two simple questions: when we put ourselves in others’ shoes, are we harsher or more forgiving? And do we offer that same empathy to everyone, or only to some?

Generalizability of choice architecture interventions - Nature Reviews Psychology Choice architecture interventions (or ‘nudges’) aim to guide behaviour by changing the proximal physical, social or psychological environment. In this Review, Szaszi and colleagues show that the avera...

New paper just dropped:

Szaszi, Barnabas, Daniel G. Goldstein, Dilip Soman, Susan Michie. (2025). Generalizability of Choice Architecture Interventions. Nature Reviews Psychology.

Thanks to @szaszibarnabas.bsky.social for doing the lion's share!

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Nice article summarizing new research by Sherry He on the impact of sustainability labels on Amazon on product demand.

💢New paper alert💢

Dishonesty is everywhere — but it’s not all the same. My new solo-authored paper in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General disentangles cheating and lying as distinct forms of dishonesty.

Link to paper: doi.org/10.1037/xge0...

A thread 🧵👇

1/10. Today was challenging. We were scheduled to kick off a new project that Sam, Liz, and I were supposed to start together—a project we’ve been laying the groundwork for since last year when we dreamed it up at a conference. He was still excited about it just last week when we were messaging.

In such a noisy world, it can be difficult to remember who said what. In a new paper at @jcrnews.bsky.social, @spillersas.bsky.social and I find that source memory - the attribution of claims to their original sources - is more accurate for opinions than for facts.

academic.oup.com/jcr/advance-...

Are you running AB testing studies on Facebook or Google? Or reviewing papers using them?
Check out our open access paper, On the Persistent Mischaracterization of Google and Facebook A/B Tests: How to Conduct and Report Online Platform Studies at doi.org/10.1016/j.ij...
@boegershausen.bsky.social

Behaviorally designed training leads to more diverse hiring A field experiment provides a promising proof of concept

Congrats to the fantastic team behind this new paper in @science.org. This field experiment shows that reminding employees a firm values diversity right before they make hiring decisions can shift said decisions. Proud, in particular, of Edward Chang's role in this!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Double digit drops in crimes like murder, robbery, and sex offenses (-9.9% for that last one, but we can round).

There should be dozens of breathless above-the-fold articles on “OMG! What is Going Right? Why Do We See Such Improvement?!”

But that isn’t what we will see.

Why do people distrust government agencies, even when they provide vital info (e.g., health, environment)? Can low-cost interventions restore trust & promote welfare-enhancing behaviors? Our study provides novel experimental evidence on these key questions (1/5) 👇 #EconSky

I've created a Starter Pack for academics in Behavioral Marketing.

Feel free to nominate anyone whom I might have missed.

go.bsky.app/8mGBELg