Reaching Out As A Scientist

I firmly believe that scientists have the obligation to reach out to society, and do so in an agile and timely way (at least as much as publication delays allow us). Putting my time and effort where my mouth is, I have just joined Psychology Today as a contributor. The first post in my blog “Decisions and the Brain” there is on “Why We Are All Crooked Bankers.” I have also just covered the same research in a post in the Spanish blog Nada es Gratis, “Egoísmo eres tú: robando a las masas.“

Both posts cover my research article “Generous with individuals and Selfish to the Masses,” published in Nature Human Behaviour this year. It humbled me to see the impact that this article had beyond academic circles. It was covered in a large number of newspapers after acceptance, including newspapers as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Le Temps, and popular-science magazines as New Scientist, Spektrum, or QUO. It was also covered in Nature as a Research Highlight, and I wrote about it in “Behind the Paper” at Nature: Behavioral and Social Sciences.

An Open Letter to Prospective JoEP Authors, Part I: The Checklist

So you want to submit to the Journal of Economic Psychology. Great!

Before you do, though, there are a few things you should consider. Your time is valuable, and we do not want to waste it. And we hope you agree that the editors’ and reviewers’ time is also valuable. You might be able to save some of it by following a few simple steps. By doing so, you will also show that you do value our journal and are familiar with it, and, let’s be honest, that is not unimportant for the evaluation of your paper.

In four upcoming posts, I will elaborate on the steps that, as an Editor in Chief, I would really like authors to follow before submitting. But here is a brief summary already. I will link the step titles to the more detailed posts as I work my way through them (Hint: There is a “Follow” button on the right-hand-side which will warn you of new posts).

Editor in Chief of the Journal of Economic Psychology

On January 1^st, 2019, I became the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Economic Psychology (JoEP), an interdisciplinary journal which publishes research both on Economic Psychology and on Behavioral Economics. I have succeeded Martin Kocher and Stefan Schulz-Hardt, who in turn succeeded Erik Hoelzl and Eric Kirchler a couple of years ago. There will eventually be a second Co-Editor, but for the moment being I am alone at the helm, and I have committed to be a Co-Editor until at least end of 2022. I know the journal well, as I have been in the board as an Associate Editor for some years now (since the times of Erik and Eric).

Economic Decisions and the EEG: An Example

Many neuroeconomics studies use fMRI machines. In my group, we currently concentrate on the electroencephalograph (EEG). The main reason is that we are interested in the analysis of decision processes in the brain, and the EEG has an excellent time resolution, while the fMRI is better for questions requiring a fine spatial resolution, e.g. brain localization.

An example of what the EEG can do for economic research, and in particular decision theory, is in a paper from my lab (Achtziger, Alós-Ferrer, Hügelschäfer, and Steinhauser, 2014), published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (with the lovely acronym SCAN). In case you are wondering, authors are in alphabetical order as per econ conventions; unlike neuroscientists, economists do not quibble about who has contributed more to a given paper.

Fairness is a Thin Layer

A quote attributed to Werner Herzog reads that “civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.” Some of my recent work together with Anja Achtziger and Alexander K. Wagner points out that the same might be true about fairness and pro-social behavior.

Take our 2015 article “Money, Depletion, and Prosociality in the Dictator Game,” published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics. Merely days after publication, it found some echo in the press, for instance here.

Multitasking or Multi-Wasting?

So you are a multitasker. SMSing, what’s-apping or whatever while you check your email while typing on that document you really have to finish today, or studying for an exam. But it’s all fine, because you are a multitasker. Duh.

Better think that over again.

Consider the work of Ophir, Nass, and Wagner (2009) in the prestigious journal PNAS. Using well-established performance tests from cognitive psychology, they compared “heavy media multitaskers,” that is, people used to work with lots of distractions, with “light” ones. The result? Heavy multitaskers think they are more productive. But they are completely wrong: they are actually less productive.