New paper in Nature Human behaviour

1 July 2021 16:28

New paper in Nature Human behaviour

Together with a team of international researchers, Associate Professor Hallgeir Sjåstad has published a new paper in the leading journal Nature Human Behaviour. The paper is entitled “Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis”.

The research is based on a multi-site experiment spanning 22 countries on 6 continents, with 22,000 participants from representative samples. By comparing two different types of utilitarian morality, the results show that most people report lower trust in leaders who endorse instrumental sacrifices for the greater good, but at the same time, report higher trust in leaders who advocate maximizing welfare equally. The experiment used a combination of self-reported and behavioral measures of trust, which gave similar results.

The study was conducted as a “registered report”, which means that peer review is conducted prior to the data collection to support transparent research methods and counteract publication bias. The paper is part of an international collaboration led by Jim Everett (Kent Universty), Clara Colombatto (Yale) and Molly Crockett (Yale).

Hallgeir has been an affiliated researcher at FAIR since 2017, and was hired as Associate Professor at the Department of Strategy and Mangement (NHH) in 2020.

Read the press release from Yale

Read the full paper