Projects

The functioning of societies and the quality of social relationships heavily de­pend on moral behaviors such as fair­ness, cooperation, and honesty, whereas immoral behaviors such as exploitation, dishonesty, and fraud come at tremen­dous societal cost. A long-standing issue in the social and behavioral sciences thus pertains to the ques­tion: how can we promote moral and… more

Why are some people willing to help others but other people are (rather) not? Why do some people prefer to coop­er­ate with others whereas others are willing to exploit their interaction partners for personal gain? The project “The core tendencies underlying in­di­vid­ual differences in prosocial behavior,” which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), addresses… more

Individuals select who they want to be prosocial towards. This is backed up by a longstanding literature showing that humans have the tendency to be prosocial towards certain people or groups rather than others. Yet, sur­pris­ingly, up until this point, no research has systematically investigated individual differences in selective proso­cial­ity. Why are some individuals more… more