working papers
Looking bad or feeling guilty? The effects of intentions and outcomes on memory
Job market paper
[abstract]
The moral costs associated with selfish behavior are thought to explain in large part human prosociality, but recent experimental studies have shown that people can sometimes avoid the cost of remorse by selectively forgetting about an episode. This paper studies how two dimensions of moral costs, image concerns and concerns about harm, shape the selectivity of recall. In a preregistered two-session online experiment (N = 680), we use a modified dictator game involving risk to decorrelate the selfishness of actions from their outcomes for others. Our main finding is that harmful outcomes are especially memorable for participants who acted selfishly. The data rule out a number of purely cognitive explanations, but provide evidence for a guilt mechanism: the experience of guilt is sensitive to the actual harm caused to the third-party, and is associated with enhanced recall among selfish participants. We articulate these findings with the existing literature on selective forgetting based on image concerns.Impact investing and strategic uncertainty
(with Maël Lebreton and Olivier David Zerbib)
Draft available upon request.
[abstract]
Impact investing attracts a growing amount of capital, yet its efficiency seems to be lagging behind. In particular, sustainable investors may fail to have an impact because they focus on having a green portfolio, instead of internalizing the market externalities. This chapter studies the barriers to more efficient impact investing strategies at the levels of preferences and of implementation under strategic uncertainty. We introduce a novel experimental setting which allows us to estimate the pro-environmental preferences of a sample of retail investors, and test how well these preferences are expressed under strategic uncertainty. We find that a majority of investors express pro-environmental preferences, but fewer seem to really care about impact. Under strategic uncertainty, impact-seeking behavior vanishes, and we provide evidence that it is due to the conjunction of the efficient impact investing strategies having a heightened dependency on the behavior of the other investors, and a general insensitivity of behavior to beliefs about others among investors.publications
Explaining is not enough: Appealing explanations should also be surprising
(with Hugo Mercier)
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (2026)
[abstract]
Philosophers have attempted to define the features that make an explanation a good explanation, and psychologists have shown that people are sensitive to many of these features. Psychologists have also pointed out the importance of the phenomenology of explanations: the pleasure we derive from formulating or encountering good explanations would motivate us to seek more explanations. However, it seems that many good explanations do not trigger such positive feelings: they are good explanations, but they are not particularly appealing. We suggest that for an explanation to be appealing, it should not only explain the relevant phenomenon (be explanatory), but it should also be surprising. This is what we observe in three experiments, using both explanations from past studies, and more ecologically valid explanations gathered on the subreddit Explain Like I’m Five. We also find that the usefulness of the phenomenon being explained is another predictor of the appeal of the explanation. Finally, we show that surprisingness ratings do not depend only on whether the explanation was already known, and that their effect on appeal does not decrease when controlling for prior knowledge. Instead, explanations are judged more surprising when others do not know them, and we hypothesize that internal properties of explanations also play a role.selected work in progress
Pluralistic knowledge: large scale evidence on the accuracy of social norm perceptions
(with Adriana Gaviria, Anxo Sánchez, Nicolas Jacquemet, Antonio Alfonso, José Ignacio Rivero, Marcos Cardozo, Alejandra Vasquez, Enrico Osi, Hande Erkut and Filippos Exadaktylos)
Institutional embeddedness shapes cooperative norms
(with many authors from the DICE project)