Lukasz Walasek
Biographic Data
| ID | 352441 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lukasz Walasek |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lukasz |
| FAMILY NAME | Walasek |
| SIGNATURE | WALASEK L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warwick |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7360-0037 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Multiple Reputations: Selective Attention to Competence and Character
Reputation is multidimensional, with some traits being more relevant than others in particular contexts. Can people selectively respond to reputational cues relevant to the task at hand? Across three studies, we examined how people weigh cues about helpfulness and competence when forming expectations about strangers’ behavior. Using adapted investment games, we varied whether a stranger’s helpfulness or competence predicted participants’ future p…
Incomparability and Incommensurability in Choice: No Common Currency of Value
Models of decision-making typically assume the existence of some common currency of value, such as utility, happiness, or inclusive fitness. This common currency is taken to allow comparison of options and to underpin everyday choice. Here we suggest instead that there is no universal value scale, that incommensurable values pervade everyday choice, and hence that most existing models of decision-making in both economics and psychology are fundam…
Political Attitudes and Disease Threat: Regional Pathogen Stress Is Associated With Conservative Ideology Only for Older Individuals
What environmental factors are associated with individual differences in political ideology, and do such associations change over time? We examine whether reductions in pathogen prevalence in U.S. states over the past 60 years are associated with reduced associations between parasite stress and conservatism. We report a positive association between infection levels and conservative ideology in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. However…
The active foundations of the illusion of control: An experimental test of the Henslin effect
The mistaken belief that personal control can affect the outcomes of random events is seen as a core part of disordered gamblers’ irrational beliefs via the ‘illusion of control’. The present study tests the extent of action-based manifestation of the illusion of control in a dice-rolling game, which provides a novel controlled test of a claim first made by Henslin that craps gamblers tend to shake their dice harder when aiming for higher numbers…
A meta-analysis of loss aversion in risky contexts
Loss aversion is widely regarded as the most robust and ubiquitous finding in behavioural economics. According to the loss aversion hypothesis, the subjective value of losses exceeds the subjective value of equivalent gains. One common assumption in the literature is that this asymmetry represents a fundamental and stable feature of people’s preferences. In cumulative prospect theory, loss aversion is captured by the lambda (λ) parameter, which c…
The Evolution of Polarization in Online Conversation: Twitter Users’ Opinions about the Covid-19 Pandemic Become More Politicized over Time
Political polarization on social media has been extensively studied. However, most research has examined polarization about topics that have preexisting associations with ideology, while few studies have tracked the onset of polarization about novel topics or the evolution of polarization over a prolonged period. The occurrence of COVID-19 provides a unique opportunity to study whether social media discourse about a novel event becomes increasing…
Sampling in Judgment and Decision Making
Sampling approaches to judgment and decision making are distinct from traditional accounts in psychology and neuroscience. While these traditional accounts focus on limitations of the human mind as a major source of bounded rationality, the sampling approach originates in a broader cognitive-ecological perspective. It starts from the fundamental assumption that in order to understand intra-psychic cognitive processes one first has to understand t…
Evaluation of the ‘take time to think’ safer gambling message: A randomised, online experimental study
In October 2021, a majority of the UK gambling industry implemented a new UK safer gambling message, ‘take time to think’, which features on gambling advertising and websites. An effective safer gambling message could plausibly affect several relevant gambling behaviours, with previous research suggesting that message effectiveness is maximised via messages that are displayed prominently immediately prior to gambling. We experimentally tested thi…
Content and Validity of Claims Made about Food Parenting Practices in United Kingdom Online News Articles
The objective of this study was to qualitatively summarise the content of online news articles pertaining to food parenting practices and determine whether this content is substantiated by the scientific literature. News article data were identified and collected from United Kingdom online news published during 2010-2017 period using the News on the Web corpus. A coding framework was used to categorise the content of news articles to identify inf…
Contributions to reducing online gender harassment: Social re-norming and appealing to empathy as tried-and-failed techniques
Inspired by similar methods shown to be effective in reducing online racist harassment, we designed two tweets aimed at reducing online gender harassment. Our interventions were based on the principles of social re-norming and appealing to harassers’ empathy. In a sample of 666 Twitter users engaging in sexist or misogynist tweeting, we found that our intervention tweets did not reduce the number of sexist slurs or sexist users, either 7 days or …
Exploring reference group composition when ranking weight with others
Risk perception, illusory superiority and personal responsibility during Covid‐19: An experimental study of attitudes to staying home
Little is known about how different government communication strategies may systematically affect people’s attitudes to staying home or going out during the COVID‐19 pandemic, nor how people perceive and process the risk of viral transmission in different scenarios. In this study, we report results from two experiments that examine the degree to which people’s attitudes regarding the permissibility of leaving one’s home are (1) sensitive to diffe…
The stock market as a casino: Associations between stock market trading frequency and problem gambling
Request-a-bet sports betting products indicate patterns of bettor preference and bookmaker profits
Can a ‘rewards-for-exercise app’ increase physical activity, subjective well-being and sleep quality? An open-label single-arm trial among university staff with low to moderate physical activity level…
The study suggests that mobile incentives-for-exercise applications might increase physical activity levels, positive affect, and sleep quality, at least in the short term. The observed changes were not sustained 12 months after the end of the trial
Social ranking effects on personal judgements of weight
Associations between recalled use of legal UK youth gambling products and adult disordered gambling
Background and aims : The UK allows a number of gambling products to be legally used by people under the age of 18. The aim of this study was to explore associations between recalled legal usage of five youth gambling products and adult disordered gambling. Methods : A retrospective cross-sectional study of 1,057 adult UK gamblers, aged 18–40. Recalled legal use of five youth gambling products (category D fruit machines, coin push machines, crane…
Psychological mechanisms of loss aversion: A drift-diffusion decomposition
Percentage and Currency Framing of House-Edge Gambling Warning Labels
Who uses custom sports betting products
Background The expansion of online gambling in the UK has been accompanied by an increase in the number of novel betting products, particularly for soccer. The present research investigates which types of sports bettors are the most likely to use novel gambling products called ‘custom sports bets’ (CSBs), which allow gamblers to create their own unique bets.Method A large-scale, cross-sectional survey of online sports/horse racing bettors (n = 78…
Statistical risk warnings in gambling
Gambling is considered a public health issue by many researchers, similarly to alcohol or obesity. Statistical risk warnings on gambling products can be considered a public health intervention that encourages safer gambling while preserving freedom of consumer choice. Statistical risk warnings may be useful to gamblers, given that net gambling losses are the primary driver of harm and that gambling products vary greatly in the degree to which the…
Voting patterns, revoking article 50 and antidepressant trends in England following the Brexit referendum
Decision‐makers use social information to update their preferences but choose for others as they do for themselves
People's risky decisions are susceptible to the social context in which they take place. Across three experiments using different paradigms, we investigated the influence of three social factors upon participants' decisions: the recipient of the decision‐making outcome (self, other, or joint), the nature of the relationship with the other agent (friend, stranger, or teammate), and the type of information that participants received about others' p…
Adaptive cooperation in the face of social exclusion
Trait Associations for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in News Media: A Computational Analysis
We study media representations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In particular, we train models of semantic memory on a large number of news media outlets that published online articles during the course of the election. Based on the structure of word co-occurrence in these media outlets, our models learn semantic representations for the two presidential candidates as well as for widely studied personalit…
Income Inequality, Income, and Internet Searches for Status Goods: A Cross-National Study of the Association Between Inequality and Well-Being
Is there a positive association between a nation's income inequality and concerns with status competition within that nation? Here we use Google Correlate and Google Trends to examine frequency of internet search terms and find that people in countries in which income inequality is high search relatively more frequently for positional brand names such as Prada, Louis Vuitton, or Chanel. This tendency is stronger among well-developed countries. We…
Voting patterns, revoking article 50 and antidepressant trends in England following the Brexit referendum
Ownership Status and the Representation of Assets of Uncertain Value: The Balloon Endowment Risk Task (Bert)
Owners tend to overvalue possessions relative to non‐owners: a phenomenon known as the endowment effect. In three experiments, using markets for goods of uncertain value, we investigated whether this can be partly attributed to misperceiving an asset's profitability or to uncertainty about a good's utility. To test our hypotheses, we devised the Balloon Endowment Risk Task, in which participants can sell or buy their right to participate in the B…
A meta-analysis of loss aversion in risky contexts
Loss aversion is widely regarded as the most robust and ubiquitous finding in behavioural economics. According to the loss aversion hypothesis, the subjective value of losses exceeds the subjective value of equivalent gains. One common assumption in the literature is that this asymmetry represents a fundamental and stable feature of people’s preferences. In cumulative prospect theory, loss aversion is captured by the lambda (λ) parameter, which c…
Evaluation of the ‘take time to think’ safer gambling message: A randomised, online experimental study
In October 2021, a majority of the UK gambling industry implemented a new UK safer gambling message, ‘take time to think’, which features on gambling advertising and websites. An effective safer gambling message could plausibly affect several relevant gambling behaviours, with previous research suggesting that message effectiveness is maximised via messages that are displayed prominently immediately prior to gambling. We experimentally tested thi…
Contributions to reducing online gender harassment: Social re-norming and appealing to empathy as tried-and-failed techniques
Inspired by similar methods shown to be effective in reducing online racist harassment, we designed two tweets aimed at reducing online gender harassment. Our interventions were based on the principles of social re-norming and appealing to harassers’ empathy. In a sample of 666 Twitter users engaging in sexist or misogynist tweeting, we found that our intervention tweets did not reduce the number of sexist slurs or sexist users, either 7 days or …
Statistical risk warnings in gambling
Gambling is considered a public health issue by many researchers, similarly to alcohol or obesity. Statistical risk warnings on gambling products can be considered a public health intervention that encourages safer gambling while preserving freedom of consumer choice. Statistical risk warnings may be useful to gamblers, given that net gambling losses are the primary driver of harm and that gambling products vary greatly in the degree to which the…
Decision-makers are resilient in the face of social exclusion
A growing body of evidence suggests that social exclusion impairs people's capacity for active deliberation and logical reasoning. Building on this finding and on the postulate from the dual-process theory that analytical thinking is essential in order to make good judgements and decisions, we hypothesized that social exclusion will alter judgement and choice behaviour. We tested this hypothesis in three experiments in which social exclusion was …
Ownership Status and the Representation of Assets of Uncertain Value: The Balloon Endowment Risk Task (Bert)
Owners tend to overvalue possessions relative to non‐owners: a phenomenon known as the endowment effect. In three experiments, using markets for goods of uncertain value, we investigated whether this can be partly attributed to misperceiving an asset's profitability or to uncertainty about a good's utility. To test our hypotheses, we devised the Balloon Endowment Risk Task, in which participants can sell or buy their right to participate in the B…
Income Inequality and Status Seeking: Searching for Positional Goods in Unequal U.S. States
It is well established that income inequality is associated with lower societal well-being, but the psychosocial causes of this relationship are poorly understood. A social-rank hypothesis predicts that members of unequal societies are likely to devote more of their resources to status-seeking behaviors such as acquiring positional goods. We used Google Correlate to find search terms that correlated with our measure of income inequality, and we c…
Income Inequality, Income, and Internet Searches for Status Goods: A Cross-National Study of the Association Between Inequality and Well-Being
Is there a positive association between a nation's income inequality and concerns with status competition within that nation? Here we use Google Correlate and Google Trends to examine frequency of internet search terms and find that people in countries in which income inequality is high search relatively more frequently for positional brand names such as Prada, Louis Vuitton, or Chanel. This tendency is stronger among well-developed countries. We…
Trait Associations for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in News Media: A Computational Analysis
We study media representations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In particular, we train models of semantic memory on a large number of news media outlets that published online articles during the course of the election. Based on the structure of word co-occurrence in these media outlets, our models learn semantic representations for the two presidential candidates as well as for widely studied personalit…
Decision-makers are resilient in the face of social exclusion
A growing body of evidence suggests that social exclusion impairs people's capacity for active deliberation and logical reasoning. Building on this finding and on the postulate from the dual-process theory that analytical thinking is essential in order to make good judgements and decisions, we hypothesized that social exclusion will alter judgement and choice behaviour. We tested this hypothesis in three experiments in which social exclusion was …
Decision‐makers use social information to update their preferences but choose for others as they do for themselves
People's risky decisions are susceptible to the social context in which they take place. Across three experiments using different paradigms, we investigated the influence of three social factors upon participants' decisions: the recipient of the decision‐making outcome (self, other, or joint), the nature of the relationship with the other agent (friend, stranger, or teammate), and the type of information that participants received about others' p…
Adaptive cooperation in the face of social exclusion
Associations between recalled use of legal UK youth gambling products and adult disordered gambling
Background and aims : The UK allows a number of gambling products to be legally used by people under the age of 18. The aim of this study was to explore associations between recalled legal usage of five youth gambling products and adult disordered gambling. Methods : A retrospective cross-sectional study of 1,057 adult UK gamblers, aged 18–40. Recalled legal use of five youth gambling products (category D fruit machines, coin push machines, crane…
Psychological mechanisms of loss aversion: A drift-diffusion decomposition
Percentage and Currency Framing of House-Edge Gambling Warning Labels
Who uses custom sports betting products
Background The expansion of online gambling in the UK has been accompanied by an increase in the number of novel betting products, particularly for soccer. The present research investigates which types of sports bettors are the most likely to use novel gambling products called ‘custom sports bets’ (CSBs), which allow gamblers to create their own unique bets.Method A large-scale, cross-sectional survey of online sports/horse racing bettors (n = 78…
Statistical risk warnings in gambling
Gambling is considered a public health issue by many researchers, similarly to alcohol or obesity. Statistical risk warnings on gambling products can be considered a public health intervention that encourages safer gambling while preserving freedom of consumer choice. Statistical risk warnings may be useful to gamblers, given that net gambling losses are the primary driver of harm and that gambling products vary greatly in the degree to which the…
Voting patterns, revoking article 50 and antidepressant trends in England following the Brexit referendum
The stock market as a casino: Associations between stock market trading frequency and problem gambling
Request-a-bet sports betting products indicate patterns of bettor preference and bookmaker profits
Can a ‘rewards-for-exercise app’ increase physical activity, subjective well-being and sleep quality? An open-label single-arm trial among university staff with low to moderate physical activity level…
The study suggests that mobile incentives-for-exercise applications might increase physical activity levels, positive affect, and sleep quality, at least in the short term. The observed changes were not sustained 12 months after the end of the trial
Social ranking effects on personal judgements of weight
Content and Validity of Claims Made about Food Parenting Practices in United Kingdom Online News Articles
The objective of this study was to qualitatively summarise the content of online news articles pertaining to food parenting practices and determine whether this content is substantiated by the scientific literature. News article data were identified and collected from United Kingdom online news published during 2010-2017 period using the News on the Web corpus. A coding framework was used to categorise the content of news articles to identify inf…
Contributions to reducing online gender harassment: Social re-norming and appealing to empathy as tried-and-failed techniques
Inspired by similar methods shown to be effective in reducing online racist harassment, we designed two tweets aimed at reducing online gender harassment. Our interventions were based on the principles of social re-norming and appealing to harassers’ empathy. In a sample of 666 Twitter users engaging in sexist or misogynist tweeting, we found that our intervention tweets did not reduce the number of sexist slurs or sexist users, either 7 days or …
Exploring reference group composition when ranking weight with others
Risk perception, illusory superiority and personal responsibility during Covid‐19: An experimental study of attitudes to staying home
Little is known about how different government communication strategies may systematically affect people’s attitudes to staying home or going out during the COVID‐19 pandemic, nor how people perceive and process the risk of viral transmission in different scenarios. In this study, we report results from two experiments that examine the degree to which people’s attitudes regarding the permissibility of leaving one’s home are (1) sensitive to diffe…
The Evolution of Polarization in Online Conversation: Twitter Users’ Opinions about the Covid-19 Pandemic Become More Politicized over Time
Political polarization on social media has been extensively studied. However, most research has examined polarization about topics that have preexisting associations with ideology, while few studies have tracked the onset of polarization about novel topics or the evolution of polarization over a prolonged period. The occurrence of COVID-19 provides a unique opportunity to study whether social media discourse about a novel event becomes increasing…
Sampling in Judgment and Decision Making
Sampling approaches to judgment and decision making are distinct from traditional accounts in psychology and neuroscience. While these traditional accounts focus on limitations of the human mind as a major source of bounded rationality, the sampling approach originates in a broader cognitive-ecological perspective. It starts from the fundamental assumption that in order to understand intra-psychic cognitive processes one first has to understand t…
Evaluation of the ‘take time to think’ safer gambling message: A randomised, online experimental study
In October 2021, a majority of the UK gambling industry implemented a new UK safer gambling message, ‘take time to think’, which features on gambling advertising and websites. An effective safer gambling message could plausibly affect several relevant gambling behaviours, with previous research suggesting that message effectiveness is maximised via messages that are displayed prominently immediately prior to gambling. We experimentally tested thi…
Incomparability and Incommensurability in Choice: No Common Currency of Value
Models of decision-making typically assume the existence of some common currency of value, such as utility, happiness, or inclusive fitness. This common currency is taken to allow comparison of options and to underpin everyday choice. Here we suggest instead that there is no universal value scale, that incommensurable values pervade everyday choice, and hence that most existing models of decision-making in both economics and psychology are fundam…
Psychology (24 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Economics (11 works) · Gambling Behavior and Treatments (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Business (7 works) · Cognitive psychology (7 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (7 works) · Political science (7 works)