• May 2025
• Article

The desire to appear virtuous can motivate people to punish wrongdoers, a desirable outcome when punishment is clearly deserved. Yet claims that “virtue signaling” is fueling a culture of outrage suggest that reputation concerns may inspire even potentially unmerited punishment. Moreover, might reputation do more to drive punishment in ambiguous situations, where punishment is less clearly deserved, eroding punishers’ sensitivity to moral nuance? Across eight studies focused on the U.S. political context (total n = 15,472 Americans from MTurk and Prolific), we show that reputation can drive ambiguously-deserved punishment. In situations involving politicized moral transgressions, including those where the case for punishing the transgressor is judged to be relatively ambiguous, subjects expect punishers to be perceived positively by co-partisans, and punish at higher rates when punishing is observable to a co-partisan audience. Moreover, reputation can drive punishment in ambiguous situations even among individuals who personally question the morality of punishment, highlighting the power of reputation to push people away from their values. Yet we find no evidence that reputation erodes sensitivity to nuance by doing more to drive punishment in more ambiguous situations. Instead, subjects expect punishment to look better when more unambiguously deserved, and making punishment observable does as much or more to drive punishment in unambiguous than ambiguous situations—even when the co-partisan audience is strongly ideological (and so might have been expected to encourage undiscerning punishment). We thus suggest that reputation can make people more punitive, even in ambiguous situations, but does not diminish sensitivity to nuance.

• June 4, 2025
• Editorial

Workplace stress, on the rise for decades, has been treated by many organizations as a personal issue instead of a business-critical risk that merits executive oversight. This is likely due in part to the fact that companies have not effectively quantified and tracked the cost stress poses to integral business outcomes. Companies can take charge of the avoidable costs of stress by surveying their workforce and mapping the stress they report onto quantifiable outcomes like revenue, customer satisfaction, and performance evaluations. Understanding how fluctuations in stress impact these outcomes can help businesses come up with and initiate targeted solutions to reduce the likelihood of disruption, protect workforce health, and unlock long-term competitive advantage.

• 2025
• Chapter

We study the introduction of a choice architecture design intended to increase short-term savings among employees at five U.K. firms. Employees were offered the opportunity to opt into a payroll deduction program that auto-deposits funds from each paycheck into a short-term savings account from which withdrawals are possible at any time. We find that employees who opted into the program kept using it. Among employees whose accounts were created early enough to be observed over the first 12 months after their account activation and who did not separate from employment during this period, 96% still had a balance greater than £1 and 87% received an automatic payroll contribution in month 12. However, product take-up was very low: no more than 0.7% of eligible employees ever activated an account. Opt-in access to short-term savings programs does not elicit widespread participation.