Speakers
Overview
This MDM lunch focused on how communication shapes and is shaped by decision-making, with three speakers approaching the question from very different angles. One presented large-scale field experiments showing when and how different types of communication (moral nudges, loss framing, and deterrence) change behaviour in energy consumption and tax compliance. A second explored how the strength and malleability of language in social dilemmas affects both what people promise and how receivers interpret those promises. A third used virtual reality to test whether context, as in the language environment around you, changes how bilingual speakers switch between languages, with implications for moral decision-making research.
Key Points
Loss framing outperforms gain framing in promoting energy savings: households told their tree would be cancelled if they missed their goal reduced consumption more than those told a tree would be planted if they succeeded.
Moral nudges work even in low-trust contexts (i.e., in Bulgaria tax compliance increased across 170,000 firms), but deterrence (communicated audit probabilities) produced substantially larger and longer-lasting effects. The moral option is cheap, but the threat of punitive action seems to carry more weight.
Hidden action critically weakens the power of communication: when behaviour cannot be verified, promises lose much of their force, and this is a key constraint for any intervention relying on cheap talk.
Receivers of promises are systematically miscalibrated, they don't spontaneously distinguish “I will share” from “I want to share”, and actually reverse the credibility ranking when evaluating messages in isolation. Showing people what else could have been said (joint evaluation) corrects this bias.
In virtual reality, bilingual speakers respond faster and make fewer errors when the environment matches the language (i.e., English in London, French in Paris), suggesting that the social and physical context around us is itself a language cue, not just background noise.
Open question: Does the emotional distance created by using a non-native language make people more deliberate and less emotionally reactive in moral decisions, and can VR isolate this effect cleanly from other confounds?
Next Steps
Possible collaborations: connecting field-scale communication experiments with neuroscientific and psycholinguistic mechanisms, and using VR to test causal claims about language, context, and moral decision-making that are hard to isolate in traditional lab or field settings.
If you are interested in language and communication in decision-making and would like to connect with the speakers or suggest a speaker for another session, contact us (centerfordecisionscience@ru.nl).