Trust Games and Oxytocin: What Neurochemistry Reveals About Cooperation
Oxytocin modulates social attention, not trust itself—and that distinction reshapes behavioral intervention design
Social Image Concerns: The Hidden Tax on Anonymous Generosity
Why making generosity visible sometimes produces less of it, and how to design around that paradox
Default Effects Beyond Inertia: Active Decision Avoidance
Default adherence isn't inertia — it's a strategic retreat from the psychological costs of owning decisions
Temptation and Self-Control: The Gul-Pesendorfer Framework
How axiomatic choice theory finally made peace with the humans who prefer fewer options
Why Groups Punish Differently: The Behavioral Economics of Collective Sanctioning
Why punishment transforms when 'I' becomes 'we'—and how to design around it
Anchoring in Strategic Contexts: First Offers as Psychological Weapons
How first offers hijack cognitive processes and what experimental research reveals about defending against them
Strategic Ignorance: Why We Choose Not to Know
Why rational agents choose blindness, and what it means for disclosure policy design
Guilt Aversion in Strategic Interactions: The Hidden Force Behind Promise Keeping
Second-order beliefs shape strategic behavior when anticipated guilt from disappointing expectations enters the utility function.
Conditional Cooperation: The Behavioral Foundation of Public Goods Provision
Most people will cooperate—if they believe others will. Understanding conditional cooperation transforms how we design institutions for collective action.
Preference Reversals: Why Choice and Valuation Disagree
Choice and pricing reveal different preferences because preferences aren't revealed—they're constructed by the very process of asking.
Social Learning vs. Conformity: Separating Information from Image
Identical adoption patterns can mask fundamentally different mechanisms—one fragile, one persistent—and getting them confused means getting predictions wrong.
Framing Lives: Why Equivalent Statistics Feel Different
Same numbers, different neural responses—why mathematically identical statistics produce opposite medical and policy choices.
Probability Weighting: Why We Overweight the Unlikely
The mathematical architecture of why rare feels common and likely feels uncertain—and how markets exploit it.
Warm Glow Giving: The Neuroscience of Impure Altruism
Understanding why giving feels good reveals how to design systems that channel neural reward mechanisms toward sustained prosocial behavior.
The Endowment Effect's Social Dimension: Why Ownership Feels Different in Public
Ownership valuations shift dramatically based on who's watching—redesigning markets requires understanding the social architecture of the endowment effect.
Inequality Aversion's Neural Substrate: Why Your Brain Treats Unfairness Like Physical Pain
Neuroscience reveals fairness violations activate pain circuitry, transforming inequality aversion from cultural preference into biological imperative for institutional design
Why Reciprocity Collapses Under Observation: The Behavioral Mechanics of Surveillance
Understanding why monitoring destroys the cooperation it measures reveals design principles for accountability systems that preserve trust while maintaining oversight.
Betrayal Aversion: Why We Pay to Avoid Human Deceivers
Understanding why identical risks feel different when humans control them transforms how we design delegation, insurance, and institutional trust.
Second-Order Punishment: The Hidden Engine of Large-Scale Cooperation
Why punishing free-riders isn't enough—the self-sustaining enforcement architecture that enables cooperation at scales no other mechanism can achieve.
The Ultimatum Game's Hidden Variable: How Cognitive Load Transforms Fairness Judgments
Why the same unfair offer gets rejected at 9 AM but accepted at 4 PM—and what this means for negotiations, policy timing, and institutional design.
Why Punishment Backfires: The Paradox of Costly Sanction Systems
Discover why introducing punishment often decreases cooperation and how graduated enforcement systems preserve the intrinsic motivations that sanctions destroy.