Kimmo Eriksson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3590466 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kimmo Eriksson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kimmo |
| FAMILY NAME | Eriksson |
| SIGNATURE | ERIKSSON K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stockholm University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7164-0924 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 334 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
How Norms Depend on the Presence and Status of Observers
Norms are fundamental to social life, but basic questions about how they are affected by social context remain. Specifically, how do normative constraints depend on the presence and status of observers, and how do such relational contingencies vary across cultures? Using data from more than 25,000 individuals across 90 societies, we test several hypotheses linking normative constraints on everyday behaviors (like arguing, laughing, cursing, kissi…
Trends in the acceptability and prevalence of intimate partner violence
Intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) is a major global public health problem. Social norms that accept IPVAW are a key correlate of its prevalence, and recent research has documented a widespread, long-term global decline in such acceptability. What societal changes underlie this normative shift and whether it is associated with a reduction in violence are not yet well understood. We analyzed Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data f…
The price of accountability
Introduction While corruption exists in both democracies and autocracies, its social consequences may differ fundamentally across regime types. Democratic norms of equality and impartiality make trust highly sensitive to institutional failure. We theorize two mechanisms—normative amplification and representative contagion—by which corruption erodes trust more in democracies. In democracies, corruption violates core fairness norms and implicates t…
Does the duration of professional development programs influence effects on instruction? An analysis of 174 lessons during a national-scale program
We examine the effects of a year-long national-scale professional development (PD) program on mathematics instructional quality. In contrast to previous studies examining the effects of this program on instruction by comparing before and after participation or participants and non-participants, we examine whether instructional quality changed during the program. More specifically, we conduct an analysis of 174 video-recorded mathematics lessons g…
Finding John Smith
Is the Welfare State Bad for Citizens’ Moral Character? Beliefs and Evidence
Conservative thinkers have long warned that the welfare state may weaken society’s moral fiber. But this claim has not been empirically examined. The authors link publicly available data on the sizes of welfare states with behavioral data from a recent study in which thousands of lost wallets were distributed in 40 countries to measure how often they were returned to their owners. A preregistered study ( n = 194) confirmed that U.S. Republicans p…
Who Approves of Gossip, Ostracism, and Confrontation Following Norm Violations? A Cross-Cultural Test of Gender Stereotypes
Existing research and popular culture suggest that women are more approving of gossip. But are they? This research note uses two studies to ask whether gender stereotypes about gossip and other key responses to norm violations are wrong. The first study (N = 133) confirms that people stereotype women as more approving of gossip and that they hold gender stereotypes about other key responses to those who violate social norms, namely, ostracism and…
School Closures during the 1918 Flu Pandemic
During the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, many local authorities made the controversial decision to close schools. We use newly digitized data from newspaper archives on the length of school closures for 165 large U.S. cities during the 1918–1919 flu pandemic to assess the long-run consequences of closing schools on children. We find that the closures had no detectable impact on children's school attendance in 1920, nor on their educational attain…
A cultural evolution theory for contemporary polarization trends in moral opinions
While existing theories of political polarization tend to suggest that the opinions of liberals and conservatives move in opposite directions, available data indicate that opinions on a wide range of moral issues move in the liberal direction among both liberals and conservatives. Moreover, some political scientists have hypothesized that this movement follows an S-shaped curve among liberals and a similar, but later, S-shaped curve among conserv…
Person-Culture Personality Fit
In general, people are influenced by the standards set forth by groups of others; however, the levels of such conformity vary between people and across cultures. Here, we investigated factors related to country-level personality profile conformity (i.e., person-culture personality fit) across ∼5.9 million participants, residing in 57 different countries. We examined how each of the Big Five personality traits and cultural tightness are associated…
Immigrants and cities during the age of mass migration
Global sex differences in hygiene norms and their relation to sex equality
Strict norms about hygiene may sometimes have health benefits but may also be a burden. Based on research in the United States, it has been suggested that women traditionally shoulder responsibility for hygiene standards and therefore tend to have stricter views on hygiene. However, there is little systematic research on sex differences in hygiene norms at the global scale. We set up two hypotheses: (1) Stricter hygiene norms among women than amo…
Perceptions of Emotional Functionality
Emotions are linked to wide sets of action tendencies, and it can be difficult to predict which specific action tendency will be motivated or indulged in response to individual experiences of emotion. Building on a functional perspective of emotion, we investigate whether anger and shame connect to different behavioral intentions in dignity, face, and honor cultures. Using simple animations that showed perpetrators taking resources from victims, …
Opinion Trends on Moral Issues in the United States and the United Kingdom Explained by the Applicability of Generally Accepted Arguments
According to a recent theory, public opinion on moral issues will trend toward opinions that are justified by generally acceptable kinds of arguments. Both in the United States and the United Kingdom, generally acceptable kinds of arguments include concerns about harm, violence, fairness, and liberty. The theory therefore predicts that these countries will exhibit similar opinion trends on moral issues. We test this prediction using polling data …
Automated Linking of Historical Data
The recent digitization of complete count census data is an extraordinary opportunity for social scientists to create large longitudinal datasets by linking individuals from one census to another or from other sources to the census. We evaluate different automated methods for record linkage, performing a series of comparisons across methods and against hand linking. We have three main findings that lead us to conclude that automated methods perfo…
The common-is-moral association is stronger among less religious people
Questionable behaviours that are perceived as more common also tend to be judged as more morally justified. Here we explore this phenomenon in survey data from 31 countries in the European Values Study, allowing us to examine the universality of the common-is-moral association. More than 35,000 participants rated eight questionable behaviours (e.g., cheating on taxes, having casual sex) on how frequent they are and how justified they are. We esti…
Socioeconomic Status as a Multidimensional Predictor of Student Achievement in 77 Societies
We reassess the relation between students’ socioeconomic status (SES) and their achievement by treating SES as multidimensional instead of unidimensional. We use data from almost 600,000 students in 77 countries participating in the 2018 PISA assessment of student achievement in math, science, and reading. The composite measure of SES that PISA uses can be broken down into six component variables that we here use as simultaneous predictors of ach…
How the 1906 San Francisco earthquake shaped economic activity in the American West
Generosity pays
Does selfishness pay in the long term? Previous research has indicated that being prosocial (or otherish) rather than selfish has positive consequences for psychological well-being, physical health, and relationships. Here we instead examine the consequences for individuals' incomes and number of children, as these are the currencies that matter most in theories that emphasize the power of self-interest, namely economics and evolutionary thinking…
Long-Run Impacts of Agricultural Shocks on Educational Attainment
The boll weevil spread across the South from 1892 to 1922 with devastating effect on cotton cultivation. The resulting shift away from this child labor-intensive crop lowered the opportunity cost of school attendance. We investigate the insect's long-run effect on educational attainment using a sample of adults from the 1940 census linked back to their childhood census records. Both white and black children who were young (ages 4 to 9) when the w…
The Residential Segregation of Immigrants in the United States from 1850 to 1940
We provide the first estimates of immigrant residential segregation between 1850 and 1940 that cover the entire United States and are consistent across time and space. To do so, we adapt the Logan-Parman method to immigrants by measuring segregation based on the nativity of the next-door neighbor. In addition to providing a consistent measure of segregation, we also document new patterns such as high levels of segregation in rural areas, in small…
The connection between moral positions and moral arguments drives opinion change
Liberals and conservatives often take opposing positions on moral issues. But what makes a moral position liberal or conservative? Why does public opinion tend to become more liberal over time? And why does public opinion change especially fast on certain issues, such as gay rights? We offer an explanation based on how different positions connect with different kinds of moral arguments. Based on a formal model of opinion dynamics, we predicted th…
To the New World and Back Again
The authors compile large data sets from Norwegian and US historical censuses to study return migration during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913). Norwegian immigrants who returned to Norway held lower-paid occupations than did Norwegian immigrants who stayed in the United States, both before and after their first transatlantic migration, suggesting they were negatively selected from the migrant pool. Upon returning to Norway, return migrants …
Republicans Value Agency, Democrats Value Communion
Drawing on the theory of the “Big Two” content dimensions of social judgment—agency and communion—the author proposes that several findings about partisan differences in the United States can be integrated into one hypothesis: Republicans tend to put greater value on agency, while Democrats put greater value on communion. Moreover, on the basis of these values, Republicans and Democrats should judge their own groups as particularly superior on ag…
Revising Infant Mortality Rates for the Early Twentieth Century United States
Accurate vital statistics are required to understand the evolution of racial disparities in infant health and the causes of rapid secular decline in infant mortality during the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, U.S. infant mortality rates prior to 1950 suffer from an upward bias stemming from a severe underregistration of births. At one extreme, African American births in southern states went unregistered at the rate of 15 % to 25 %. In thi…
A Nation of Immigrants
During the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), the United States maintained an open border, absorbing 30 million European immigrants. Prior cross-sectional work finds that immigrants initially held lower-paid occupations than natives but converged over time. In newly assembled panel data, we show that, in fact, the average immigrant did not face a substantial occupation-based earnings penalty upon first arrival and experienced occupational advance…
Have the poor always been less likely to migrate? Evidence from inheritance practices during the age of mass migration
Critical Social Learning
Alan Rogers (1988) presented a game theory model of the evolution of social learning, yielding the paradoxical conclusion that social learning does not increase the fitness of a population. We expand on this model, allowing for imperfections in individual and social learning as well as incorporating a "critical social learning" strategy that tries to solve an adaptive problem first by social learning, and then by individual learning if socially a…
To the New World and Back Again
The authors compile large data sets from Norwegian and US historical censuses to study return migration during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913). Norwegian immigrants who returned to Norway held lower-paid occupations than did Norwegian immigrants who stayed in the United States, both before and after their first transatlantic migration, suggesting they were negatively selected from the migrant pool. Upon returning to Norway, return migrants …
The Residential Segregation of Immigrants in the United States from 1850 to 1940
We provide the first estimates of immigrant residential segregation between 1850 and 1940 that cover the entire United States and are consistent across time and space. To do so, we adapt the Logan-Parman method to immigrants by measuring segregation based on the nativity of the next-door neighbor. In addition to providing a consistent measure of segregation, we also document new patterns such as high levels of segregation in rural areas, in small…
The Dynamics of Contracts and Generalized Trustworthiness
Generalized trust, or trust in strangers, has been traced to a wide range of societal benefits. But generalized trust is not sustainable in the absence of widespread generalized trustworthiness, that is, the tendency for strangers to honor trust extended to them. While there has been much work on the origins and consequences of generalized trust, surprisingly little research has addressed the antecedents of generalized trustworthiness. We argue t…
Republicans Value Agency, Democrats Value Communion
Drawing on the theory of the “Big Two” content dimensions of social judgment—agency and communion—the author proposes that several findings about partisan differences in the United States can be integrated into one hypothesis: Republicans tend to put greater value on agency, while Democrats put greater value on communion. Moreover, on the basis of these values, Republicans and Democrats should judge their own groups as particularly superior on ag…
A Below‐Average Effect with Respect to American Political Stereotypes on Warmth and Competence
The “above‐average effect” is the phenomenon that people tend to judge themselves above average on desirable traits. Based on social identity theory, we propose that a “below‐average effect” may arise when individuals rate themselves and the average ingroup member on traits stereotypically associated with the ingroup. In two studies, Republican and Democrat participants rated themselves and the average political ingroup member on possession of de…
Corpses, Maggots, Poodles and Rats
In one conception of cultural evolution, the evolutionary success of cultural units that are transmitted from individual to individual is determined by forces of cultural selection. Here we argue that it is helpful to distinguish between several distinct phases of the transmission process in which cultural selection can operate, such as a choose-to-receive phase, an encode-and-retrieve phase, and a choose-to-transmit phase. Here we focus on emoti…
Revising Infant Mortality Rates for the Early Twentieth Century United States
Accurate vital statistics are required to understand the evolution of racial disparities in infant health and the causes of rapid secular decline in infant mortality during the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, U.S. infant mortality rates prior to 1950 suffer from an upward bias stemming from a severe underregistration of births. At one extreme, African American births in southern states went unregistered at the rate of 15 % to 25 %. In thi…
Moderators of the disapproval of peer punishment
Recent studies have found disapproval of peer punishment of norm violations. This seems puzzling, given the potential benefits peer punishers contribute to the group. We suggest part of the answer is that peer punishers tend to come across as aggressive and as such may be viewed as more problematic than beneficial to have around. We used simple computer animations of geometric shapes to enact 15 precise variations of social sanctions against a no…
Comparing Direct and Indirect Measures of Just Rewards
We offer the first comparison between 'direct' and 'indirect' methods for measuring perceptions of distributive justice in reward allocations. The direct method simply asks respondents what they would consider to be a fair salary for a particular person in a given set of circumstances. In contrast, the indirect method infers fair salaries from respondents' judgments about the relative unfairness of hypothetical salaries. The particular indirect m…
Ubiquity and efficiency of restrictions on informal punishment rights
Over-punishment often occurs in anonymous peer-to-peer punishment in public goods game experiments where punishment is free for all. We report a public goods game experiment in which a condition where punishment rights were restricted to one other player per player yielded higher total welfare than a condition with unrestricted punishment. In the restricted punishment condition, there was much less punishment but high levels of cooperation were a…
Critical points in current theory of conformist social learning
Existing mathematical models suggest that gene-culture coevolution favours a conformist bias in social learning, that is, a psychological mechanism to preferentially acquire the most common cultural variants. Here we show that this conclusion relies on specific assumptions that seem unrealistic, such as that all cultural variants are known to every individual. We present two models that remove these assumptions, showing that: 1) the rate of cultu…
Does the language of instruction in primary school affect later labour market outcomes? Evidence from South Africa
This paper uses a change in the language of instruction in South African schools in 1955 to examine the effect of mother-tongue instead of English or Afrikaans instruction on long-term educational and economic outcomes. Using the 1980 South African census, a difference-in-difference framework allows me to estimate the effect of increasing mother-tongue instruction for black students from four to six years. I find positive effects on wages which I…
Long-Run Impacts of Agricultural Shocks on Educational Attainment
The boll weevil spread across the South from 1892 to 1922 with devastating effect on cotton cultivation. The resulting shift away from this child labor-intensive crop lowered the opportunity cost of school attendance. We investigate the insect's long-run effect on educational attainment using a sample of adults from the 1940 census linked back to their childhood census records. Both white and black children who were young (ages 4 to 9) when the w…
Costly punishment in the ultimatum game evokes moral concern, in particular when framed as payoff reduction
Group differences in broadness of values may drive dynamics of public opinion on moral issues
How the 1906 San Francisco earthquake shaped economic activity in the American West
Generosity pays
Does selfishness pay in the long term? Previous research has indicated that being prosocial (or otherish) rather than selfish has positive consequences for psychological well-being, physical health, and relationships. Here we instead examine the consequences for individuals' incomes and number of children, as these are the currencies that matter most in theories that emphasize the power of self-interest, namely economics and evolutionary thinking…
The connection between moral positions and moral arguments drives opinion change
Liberals and conservatives often take opposing positions on moral issues. But what makes a moral position liberal or conservative? Why does public opinion tend to become more liberal over time? And why does public opinion change especially fast on certain issues, such as gay rights? We offer an explanation based on how different positions connect with different kinds of moral arguments. Based on a formal model of opinion dynamics, we predicted th…
Asymmetries in punishment propensity may drive the civilizing process
Injunctive Versus Functional Inferences From Descriptive Norms
Injunctive Versus Functional Inferences From Descriptive Norms : Comment on Gelfand and Harrington
Comparing Direct and Indirect Measures of Just Rewards
We offer the first comparison between 'direct' and 'indirect' methods for measuring perceptions of distributive justice in reward allocations. The direct method simply asks respondents what they would consider to be a fair salary for a particular person in a given set of circumstances. In contrast, the indirect method infers fair salaries from respondents' judgments about the relative unfairness of hypothetical salaries. The particular indirect m…
Are people really conformist-biased? An empirical test and a new mathematical model
According to an influential theory in cultural evolution, within-group similarity of culture is explained by a human ‘conformist-bias’, which is a hypothesized evolved predisposition to preferentially follow a member of the majority when acquiring ideas and behaviours. However, this notion has little support from social psychological research. In fact, a major theory in social psychology (Latané and Wolf (1981) argues for what is in effect a ‘non…
Becker’s assortative assignments
Three-dimensional stable matching with cyclic preferences
Critical points in current theory of conformist social learning
Existing mathematical models suggest that gene-culture coevolution favours a conformist bias in social learning, that is, a psychological mechanism to preferentially acquire the most common cultural variants. Here we show that this conclusion relies on specific assumptions that seem unrealistic, such as that all cultural variants are known to every individual. We present two models that remove these assumptions, showing that: 1) the rate of cultu…
Critical Social Learning
Alan Rogers (1988) presented a game theory model of the evolution of social learning, yielding the paradoxical conclusion that social learning does not increase the fitness of a population. We expand on this model, allowing for imperfections in individual and social learning as well as incorporating a "critical social learning" strategy that tries to solve an adaptive problem first by social learning, and then by individual learning if socially a…
Biases for acquiring information individually rather than socially
We discuss theoretical and empirical arguments for a human bias to acquire information individually rather than socially. In particular, we argue that when other people can be observed, information collection is a public good and hence some of the individual variation in the choice between individual and social learning can be explained by variation in social value orientation. We conducted two experimental studies, based on the game Explore & Co…
Are people really conformist-biased? An empirical test and a new mathematical model
According to an influential theory in cultural evolution, within-group similarity of culture is explained by a human ‘conformist-bias’, which is a hypothesized evolved predisposition to preferentially follow a member of the majority when acquiring ideas and behaviours. However, this notion has little support from social psychological research. In fact, a major theory in social psychology (Latané and Wolf (1981) argues for what is in effect a ‘non…
The Dynamics of Contracts and Generalized Trustworthiness
Generalized trust, or trust in strangers, has been traced to a wide range of societal benefits. But generalized trust is not sustainable in the absence of widespread generalized trustworthiness, that is, the tendency for strangers to honor trust extended to them. While there has been much work on the origins and consequences of generalized trust, surprisingly little research has addressed the antecedents of generalized trustworthiness. We argue t…
The advantage of multiple cultural parents in the cultural transmission of stories
What do Americans know about inequality? It depends on how you ask them
A recent survey of inequality (Norton and Ariely, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6 , 9–12) asked respondents to indicate what percent of the nation’s total wealth is—and should be—controlled by richer and poorer quintiles of the U.S. population. We show that such measures lead to powerful anchoring effects that account for the otherwise remarkable findings that respondents reported perceiving, and desiring, extremely low inequality in wea…
Europe's Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses
During the age of mass migration (1850-1913), one of the largest migration episodes in history, the United States maintained a nearly open border, allowing the study of migrant decisions unhindered by entry restrictions. We estimate the return to migration while accounting for migrant selection by comparing Norway-to-US migrants with their brothers who stayed in Norway in the late nineteenth century. We also compare fathers of migrants and nonmig…
Have the poor always been less likely to migrate? Evidence from inheritance practices during the age of mass migration
The Accuracy of Mathematical Models of Justice Evaluations
Jasso (1978) proposed a universal law of justice evaluations describing a logarithmic relationship between the perceived injustice of a reward and the ratio between this reward and the just reward. In applications this model is treated as if it were exact, whereas analogous models in psychophysics have empirically established degrees of uncertainty. In this article I make the first assessment of the magnitude of error in the logarithmic model of …
Comparing Direct and Indirect Measures of Just Rewards
We offer the first comparison between 'direct' and 'indirect' methods for measuring perceptions of distributive justice in reward allocations. The direct method simply asks respondents what they would consider to be a fair salary for a particular person in a given set of circumstances. In contrast, the indirect method infers fair salaries from respondents' judgments about the relative unfairness of hypothetical salaries. The particular indirect m…
Comparing Direct and Indirect Measures of Just Rewards
We offer the first comparison between 'direct' and 'indirect' methods for measuring perceptions of distributive justice in reward allocations. The direct method simply asks respondents what they would consider to be a fair salary for a particular person in a given set of circumstances. In contrast, the indirect method infers fair salaries from respondents' judgments about the relative unfairness of hypothetical salaries. The particular indirect m…
A lay-statistician explanation of minority discrimination
The available evidence suggests the percent measure should not be used to study inequality
In this reply, we reiterate the main point of our 2012 paper, which was that the measure of inequality used by Norton and Ariely (2011) was too difficult for it to yield meaningful results. We describe additional evidence for this conclusion, and we also challenge the conclusion that political differences in perceived and desired inequality are small.
Ubiquity and efficiency of restrictions on informal punishment rights
Over-punishment often occurs in anonymous peer-to-peer punishment in public goods game experiments where punishment is free for all. We report a public goods game experiment in which a condition where punishment rights were restricted to one other player per player yielded higher total welfare than a condition with unrestricted punishment. In the restricted punishment condition, there was much less punishment but high levels of cooperation were a…
Autism-spectrum traits predict humor styles in the general population
Previous research shows that individuals with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism tend to have impaired processing of humor and laugh at things that are not commonly found funny. Here the relationship between humor styles and the broader autism phenotype was investigated in a sample of the general population. The autism-spectrum quotient (AQ) and the humor styles questionnaire (HSQ) were administered to six hundred US participants recrui…
Poverty Prefers Company
In three web-based experiments, we show that both actual poverty and experimentally induced (imagined) poverty create a preference for greater inequality. Study 1, a cross-national comparison between Americans and Swedes, showed that respondents who were actually poor and those who were experimentally induced to imagine that they were poor tended to express a heightened preference for greater inequality, and for a higher proportion of poor citize…
Humble Self-Enhancement
Prior research has linked religiosity to certain forms of self-enhancement. We extend this literature by three studies linking religiosity to the well-established better-than-average effect (BAE). First, a reanalysis of self-judgments of desirable characteristics in 15 nations showed that the BAE was stronger in more religious countries, even taking into account gross domestic product, interdependence, and economic inequality. Second, in two onli…
Does the language of instruction in primary school affect later labour market outcomes? Evidence from South Africa
This paper uses a change in the language of instruction in South African schools in 1955 to examine the effect of mother-tongue instead of English or Afrikaans instruction on long-term educational and economic outcomes. Using the 1980 South African census, a difference-in-difference framework allows me to estimate the effect of increasing mother-tongue instruction for black students from four to six years. I find positive effects on wages which I…
Corpses, Maggots, Poodles and Rats
In one conception of cultural evolution, the evolutionary success of cultural units that are transmitted from individual to individual is determined by forces of cultural selection. Here we argue that it is helpful to distinguish between several distinct phases of the transmission process in which cultural selection can operate, such as a choose-to-receive phase, an encode-and-retrieve phase, and a choose-to-transmit phase. Here we focus on emoti…
A Nation of Immigrants
During the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), the United States maintained an open border, absorbing 30 million European immigrants. Prior cross-sectional work finds that immigrants initially held lower-paid occupations than natives but converged over time. In newly assembled panel data, we show that, in fact, the average immigrant did not face a substantial occupation-based earnings penalty upon first arrival and experienced occupational advance…
Bidirectional associations between descriptive and injunctive norms
Moderators of the disapproval of peer punishment
Recent studies have found disapproval of peer punishment of norm violations. This seems puzzling, given the potential benefits peer punishers contribute to the group. We suggest part of the answer is that peer punishers tend to come across as aggressive and as such may be viewed as more problematic than beneficial to have around. We used simple computer animations of geometric shapes to enact 15 precise variations of social sanctions against a no…
Psychology (41 works) · Social Psychology (34 works) · Economics (28 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Computer Science (22 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (15 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Demography (13 works)