Geänderte Inhalte

A constructive, highly professional relationship between tax authorities and taxpayers is essential for tax compliance. The aim of the present paper was to explore systematically the determinants of this relationship and related tax compliance behaviors based on the extended slippery slope framework. We used in-depth qualitative interviews with 33 self-employed taxpayers and 30 tax auditors. Interviewees described the relationship along the extended slippery slope framework concepts of power and trust. However, also novel sub-categories of power (e.g., setting deadlines) and trust (e.g., personal assistance) were mentioned. Furthermore, also little-studied categories of tax behavior emerged, such as accepting tax behavior, e.g., being available to the tax authorities, or stalling tax behavior, e.g., the intentional creation of complexity. The results comprehensively summarize the determinants of the tax relationship and tax compliance behaviors. Additionally, results highlight future research topics and provide insights for policy strategies.

Economic psychology studies the fundamentals of perception and understanding of economic phenomena, economic thought and behaviour. It is an interdisciplinary field of research, strongly overlapping with behavioural economics. Scholars in the field laid the foundations more than a century ago, studying work and organizational behaviour, consumer decision making and selected topics of public economics. Today, economic psychology deals with cognitive dynamics and decision making in general, lay theories of economics, marketing and consumer behaviour, household financial decisions, labour markets, entrepreneurship, work and unemployment, shadow economy and tax behaviour, and wealth and wellbeing. Focusing on the cognitive drivers of decision making, economic psychology also considers emotions related to economic behaviour, such as greed and envy, fear and anger, and positive feelings, such as satisfaction and well-being. We have selected contributions to these topics and provide in the introduction a short overview of the history of economic psychology. The selected papers are briefly introduced, emphasizing future directions of research and potential contributions to contemporary societal challenges.

Misconduct in organizations (such as fraud, stealing, deception, and harming others) is not only a matter of some “bad apples” but also related to the organizational context (“bad barrels”), which can facilitate either ethical or unethical behaviors. Given the financial crisis and recurring corporate ethics scandals, policymakers, regulators and organizations are interested in how to change their organizational cultures to enhance ethical behavior and to prevent further disasters. For this purpose, organizations need to better understand what strategies and factors of the organizational environment can affect (un)ethical behavior. However, to assess the corporate ethical culture, solid measures are required. Since there is an urgent need to have a German measure to promote research in German-speaking countries, this research developed and tested the German Ethical Culture Scale (GECS). Drawing on a prominent approach that has received much attention from scholars and practitioners alike, the GECS attempts to integrate the notion of compliance- and integrity-based ethics programs (with its focus on how to steer organizations) with the notion of ethical culture (with its focus on what factors inhibit or foster ethical behavior). Three studies with heterogeneous samples of German and Swiss employees and managers were conducted to develop, test and validate the multidimensional scale (total N > 2000). Overall, the studies provide first evidence of the measure’s construct, criteria-related and incremental validity. The paper concludes with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the GECS and implications for future research.

This book presents state of the art reviews on classical and novel research fields in economic psychology. Internationally acknowledged experts and the next generation of younger researchers summarize the knowledge in their fields and outline promising avenues of future research. Chapters include fundamental as well as applied research topics such as the psychology of money, experience-based product design and the enhancement of financial capabilities. The book is targeted particularly towards researchers and advanced students looking to update their knowledge and refresh their thinking on future research developments.

Carver and Scheier’s (1990) account of goal striving predicts that unexpectedly fast goal progress leads to reduced effort at that goal (coasting) and to shifting focus toward other goals (shifting). Although these hypotheses are key to this goal-striving account, empirical evidence of coasting and shifting is scarce. Here we demonstrate coasting and shifting in two experiments: Participants performed a lexical decision task and were promised a bonus if they delivered a specific number of correct responses (accuracy goal) and a specific number of fast responses (speed goal). After half of the trials, participants received (randomly allocated) feedback on their progress regarding the two goals, in which progress toward one goal was either above or below the target. In line with hypotheses, better-than-needed progress toward one goal led to (a) reduced subsequent progress toward that goal (as reflected in lower goal-related performance; coasting) and (b) a shift of resources toward the alternative goal (as reflected in higher goal-related performance on the alternative goal; shifting). Experiment 1 further demonstrated that positive feedback led to positive affect, and Experiment 2 demonstrated the causal role of affect in coasting and shifting. The implications of the present findings for future research on goal striving are discussed.

Abstract People are motivated to process threatening information in a defensive manner. For instance, in self-reports, group members consistently reject threatening outgroup criticism compared with the same criticism from the ingroup (intergroup sensitivity effect). Because self-reports are a poor proxy for actual behavior, it remains unknown whether this defensiveness motivates hostile actions. We fill this gap in the literature: Five experiments (total N = 787) show that group members pay to punish critical outgroup comments, exclude outgroup commenters from a subject pool, and reject ultimatum bargaining offers from outgroup commenters compared with ingroup commenters voicing the same criticism. These defensive behaviors represent hostile actions and are robust in a meta-analysis across our 5 studies. Intergroup sensitivity thus motivates hostile defensive actions. We discuss potential consequences for intergroup relations.

Successful sprint starts require self-control: Athletes need to avoid a false start (impulse control) and at the same time need to start as fast as possible (action initiation). Research from cognitive neuroscience shows that such self-control acts hinge on activity in areas in the lateral Prefrontal Cortex (lPFC). We are harnessing these findings in order to accurately analyze and better understand the neural basis of self-controlled sprint start Performance.

The execution of coercive and legitimate power by an authority assures cooperation and prohibits free-riding. While coercive power can be comprised of severe punishment and strict monitoring, legitimate power covers expert, and informative procedures. The perception of these powers wielded by authorities stimulates specific cognitions: trust, relational climates, and motives. With four experiments, the single and combined impact of coercive and legitimate power on these processes and on intended cooperation of n 1 = 120, n 2 = 130, n 3 = 368, and n 4 = 102 student participants is investigated within two exemplary contexts (tax contributions, insurance claims). Findings reveal that coercive power increases an antagonistic climate and enforced compliance, whereas legitimate power increases reason-based trust, a service climate, and voluntary cooperation. Unexpectedly, legitimate power is additionally having a negative effect on an antagonistic climate and a positive effect on enforced compliance; these findings lead to a modification of theoretical assumptions. However, solely reason-based trust, but not climate perceptions and motives, mediates the relationship between power and intended cooperation. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Cooperation in social systems such as tax honesty is of central importance in our modern societies. However, we know little about cognitive and neural processes driving decisions to evade or pay taxes. This study focuses on the impact of perceived tax authority and examines the mental chronometry mirrored in ERP data allowing a deeper understanding about why humans cooperate in tax systems. We experimentally manipulated coercive and legitimate authority and studied its impact on cooperation and underlying cognitive (experiment 1, 2) and neuronal (experiment 2) processes. Experiment 1 showed that in a condition of coercive authority, tax payments are lower, decisions are faster and participants report more rational reasoning and enforced compliance, however, less voluntary cooperation than in a condition of legitimate authority. Experiment 2 confirmed most results, but did not find a difference in payments or self-reported rational reasoning. Moreover, legitimate authority led to heightened cognitive control (expressed by increased MFN amplitudes) and disrupted attention processing (expressed by decreased P300 amplitudes) compared to coercive authority. To conclude, the neuronal data surprisingly revealed that legitimate authority may led to higher decision conflict and thus to higher cognitive demands in tax decisions than coercive authority.  

Considering advice from others is a pervasive element of human social life. We used the judge-advisor paradigm to investigate the neural correlates of advice evaluation and advice integration by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging. Our results demonstrate that evaluating advice recruits the "mentalizing network," brain regions activated when people think about others' mental states. Important activation differences exist, however, depending upon the perceived competence of the advisor. Consistently, additional analyses demonstrate that integrating others' advice, i.e., how much participants actually adjust their initial estimate, correlates with neural activity in the centromedial amygdala in the case of a competent and with activity in visual cortex in the case of an incompetent advisor. Taken together, our findings, therefore, demonstrate that advice evaluation and integration rely on dissociable neural mechanisms and that significant differences exist depending upon the advisor's reputation, which suggests different modes of processing advice depending upon the perceived competence of the advisor.

Notwithstanding the appeal of the “one size fits all” approach that Baumeister et al. propose, we argue that there is no panacea for improving group performance. The concept of “differentiation of selves” constitutes an umbrella term for similar seeming but actually different constructs. Even the same type of “differentiation of selves” can be beneficial for some and harmful for other tasks.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article ``The Cost of Collaboration: Why Joint Decision Making Exacerbates Rejection of Outside Information'' by J. A. Minson and J. S. Mueller in the 2012 issue.

G-I transfer denotes an increase in individual performance due to group interaction, for example, because of acquiring certain skills or knowledge from the other group members. Whereas such G-I transfer has been successfully shown for problem-solving tasks, evidence for G-I transfer on quantitative estimation tasks is scarce. We address this research gap with a focus on how often a group has to interact in order to fully exploit the benefit of this learning effect. Results from two experiments support the idea that a single group interaction is sufficient to induce a stable G-I transfer, which reduces group members’ metric error. Smaller metric errors indicate that people improved their representation of the correct upper and lower boundaries, or what range of values is plausible. In contrast to nominal groups, both members of continuously interacting groups and members of groups with only one initial interaction exhibited stable G-I transfer, and the size of this transfer did not significantly differ between the latter two conditions. Furthermore, we found evidence for differential weighting of group members’ individual contributions that goes beyond sheer individual capability gains under certain circumstances, namely in tasks with a population bias.

During discussions, people typically introduce more information supporting their preferences as compared to information conflicting with these preferences, and they also repeat the former information more often than the latter. Although this preference-consistent discussion bias has been shown across several studies, its consequences for subsequent decisions have largely escaped attention. In particular, it is unclear whether selectively  repeating  preference-consistent information increases the likelihood that the recipient decides in accordance with the speaker's preference. From a rational point of view, information repetitions constitute redundancy and, hence, should not affect the recipient's decision. By contrast, in two experiments we demonstrate that selectively repeating information in favor of a particular decision alternative changes preference ratings in favor of this alternative (Experiment 1) and makes a decision for this alternative more likely (Experiment 2). This result is shown for written discussion protocols (Experiment 1) and for face-to-face discussions with a confederate (Experiment 2).

Across three studies (total N = 793), we investigated the link between two fundamental dimensions of personality, agency and communion, and advice taking in quantity estimation tasks. We complemented the analyses of the individual studies with meta-analyses across all three studies in order to gain insight into the robustness of our core results. In line with our expectations, agency was associated with less advice taking, and this effect was mediated by individuals’ perceptions of their own competence. Contrary to what we expected, we did not find consistent evidence that communion systematically relates to advice taking. Analyses of judges’ initial accuracy further suggested that agentic judges’ lower willingness to heed advice was justified by greater initial accuracy as compared with their less agentic peers. Our data, thus, provide evidence of individual differences in advice taking and shed some light on the question which individuals are more inclined to heed advice than others.

Following up on a recent debate, we examined advice taking in dyads compared to individuals in a set of three studies (total N = 303 dyads and 194 individuals). Our first aim was to test the replicability of an important previous finding, namely that dyads heed advice less than individuals because they feel more confident in the accuracy of their initial judgments. Second, we aimed to explain dyads’ behavior based on three premises: first, that dyads understand that the added value of an outside opinion diminishes when the initial pre-advice judgment is made by two judges rather than one judge (given that the dyad members’ opinions are independent of each other); second, that they fail to recognize when the assumption of independence of opinions does not hold; and third, that the resistance to advice commonly observed in individuals persists in groups but is neither aggravated nor ameliorated by the group context. The results of our studies show consistently that previous findings on advice taking in dyads are replicable. They also support our hypothesis that groups exhibit a general tendency to heed advice less than individuals, irrespective of whether the accuracy of their initial judgments warrants this behavior. Finally, based on the three assumptions mentioned above, we were able to make accurate predictions about advice taking in dyads, prompting us to postulate a general model of advice taking in groups of arbitrary size.