Announcing the 2024 Thaler-Tversky Research Grant Winners
The Roman Family Center for Decision Research is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s Thaler-Tversky Independent Research Grant for Emerging Scholars: Youngjae Cha, Rui Sun, and Rebecca Wu.
This year’s winners demonstrate a diverse range of research interests and disciplines within behavioral science. Their respective projects explore information-seeking about climate change, the beliefs of emotional expressions across social classes, and unconscious biases about low-and high-paid job-seekers.
The Thaler-Tversky Research Grant is supported by the generosity of Professor Richard Thaler in honor of Amos Tversky, and provides grants up to $3,000 to support new behavioral science research led by University of Chicago PhD students and principal researchers.
Congratulations to all of this year’s winners! Learn more about their proposed research projects below.
Youngjae Cha
Third-year PhD student, UChicago Psychology Department
Advisor: Shigehiro Oishi
Researcher statement: In his seminal work, Adam Smith posits that as the division of labor advances, individuals may become habitually ignorant outside their specialized areas, impeding their comprehension of broader societal interests. Does the division of labor discourage information-seeking for broader topics, even important social issues like climate change? To test this question, the proposed research aims to investigate whether the division of labor makes people uninterested in information in general—not just a wide range of information, but also information related to important social issues.
Management and organizational psychologists have observed that specialization often entails a cognitive trade-off, necessitating a focus solely on domain-specific information (Dane, 2010). Expanding on this concept, Cha & Oishi (2024) devised a 3D simulation of a motorcycle assembly factory to test whether the division of labor engenders a general tendency to ignore new information. Their study found that individuals working on specialized tasks, such as wheel assembly, were later more inclined to bypass opportunities to acquire trivial knowledge compared to those working on the assembly of a whole bike. This suggests that division of labor within group tasks may dampen curiosity or non-task-related information-seeking behaviors, extending beyond the immediate task environment. However, the experiment lacked both mundane and experimental realism, as they used online factory tasks and trivia quizzes.
To address these limitations, the proposed study will run a group experiment with varying levels of division of labor at Mindworks. We predict that highly specialized team members will be less willing to learn both trivial and climate-related matters compared to less specialized ones. Given the pervasive ignorance surrounding climate change, this study seeks to understand socioecological factors that lead to the prevalence of climate disinterestedness across societies (Lewandowsky, 2021).
Rui Sun
Postdoctoral principal researcher, Roman Family CDR
Advisors: Nicholas Epley and Oleg Urminsky
Researcher statement: Our beliefs about others’ emotional expressions depend on their racial, gender, and occupational identities, but what about their social class? In a submitted manuscript (preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/69ryq), we conducted four studies in the UK, India, UAE, and the US. We investigated beliefs about others’ emotional expressions in relation to the targets’ social class, focusing on self-oriented (e.g., triumphant) versus other-oriented (e.g., gratitude) positive emotions. As predicted, we found that across cultures, people associate higher social class with expressing more self-oriented positive emotions, and lower social class with more other-oriented positive emotions. This finding aligns with previous studies showing that wealthier individuals exhibit more independence and self-focus, while those from lower social classes emphasize relationality and dependence on others (Kraus et al, 2010).
However, an unanswered question is: why is it the case? Where do these beliefs come from? In the next step, I aim to examine the underlying mechanisms. I plan to test two (potentially competing) mechanisms: the bottom-up and the top-down mechanism.
The bottom-up mechanism proposes that this belief is derived from experiences – the expression stereotype is conditioned on feelings (Piff and Moskowitz, 2018). Specifically, lower-class individuals may experience more other-oriented emotions (i.e. gratitude), whereas higher-class individuals may experience more individual-oriented emotions (i.e. triumphant) in life, thus people generate the corresponding emotional expression beliefs.
The top-down mechanism suggests that the beliefs are crafted through the mental simulation of life in different classes: individuals project emotional stereotypes onto those in hierarchical positions across various domains (such as elite athletes), not just social class, by imagining the emotional expressions associated with different levels of status.
These mechanisms may coexist and operate simultaneously.
Rebecca Wu
Fourth-year PhD student, UChicago Economics Department
Advisors: Joshua Dean, Rachel Glennerster, and Christina Brown
Researcher statement: Inexperienced workers often face a hard time landing the first job because employers need to incur additional costs to discover their ability. A natural response from high-ability novices is to lower their initial wages to attract employers and build a reputation for better jobs in the future. However, this strategy may not work if employers perceive low wages as a signal of poor ability. Consumers often apply a price-quality heuristic when judging new consumer goods (Rao and Monnroe 1989, Wathieu and Bertini 2007, Erdem et al. 2008). If firms apply this same price-quality heuristic to potential hires in the presence of information frictions, they may overlook high-ability novices’ incentive for reputation investment and underestimate their quality. I study whether this is the case in the context of hiring on online freelancing platforms.
This project connects the behavioral literature on the price-quality inference (Dodds et al. 1991, de Langhe et al. 2014, Gneezy et al. 2014) with the labor literature on inefficient hiring of inexperienced workers (Tervio 2009, Pallais 2014, Barach and Horton 2019). The existing behavioral literature focuses on the product market. I draw their insights to study how the non-Bayesian quality inference rule adopted by employers may result in a labor market trap where too few high-ability novices get hired. In addition, I test how this behavioral constraint interacts with the provision of credible quality signals.
- By
- June 26, 2024
- Roman Family Center for Decision Research