Ever fascinated by how people make sense of and engage with their world, I spent a decade conducting quantitative research in psychology. I started off at University of Waterloo researching time-space synaesthesia, a condition where people experience units of time as occupying locations in space. I then moved into neuroimaging research at the University of British Columbia, where I examined how the brain responds during real-time fMRI. At Duke University, I explored dishonest decision-making. I earned my Ph.D. from Duke University in 2015.
At Duke, I was fortunate to be advised by Dan Ariely, the brilliant behavioural economist dedicated to understanding why it is that people make "predictably irrational" decisions. As a member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight (CAH), my doctoral research explored when, how and to what extent social and cultural factors influence our decisions about whether to be honest. I worked with terrific research collaborators, and together we found:
- Evidence that lying tendencies are related among friends and family members.
- Evidence that, in contrast to predictions, people’s basic tendencies toward dishonesty are quite similar across countries that differ in corruption and cultural values.
- Evidence that dishonesty is expressed differently in different domains of life (such as work, relationships, religion, etc.)
- Evidence that feelings of guilt are stronger deterrents of dishonest behavior than legal penalties.
- Evidence that we hold members of our own social group to lower moral standards than members of an opposing social group (although we believe our moral standards are consistent).
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Research publications:
Mann, H., Garcia-Rada, X., Hornuf, L., Tafurt, J., & Ariely, D. (2016). Cut From the Same Cloth: Similarly Dishonest Individuals Across Countries. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 47(6), 858-874. Mann, H., Garcia-Rada, X., Hornuf, L., & Tafurt, J. (2016). What Deters Crime? Comparing the Effectiveness of Legal, Social, and Internal Sanctions Across Countries. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 85. Ariely, D., Garcia-Rada, X., Hornuf, L., & Mann, H. (2015). The (true) legacy of two really existing economic systems. Munich Discussion Paper No. 2014-26. Proudfoot, D., Kay, A. C., & Mann, H. (2015) Motivated Employee Blindness: The effect of economic instability on judgment of organizational inefficiencies. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 130, 108-122. Mann, H., Garcia-Rada, X., Houser, D., & Ariely, D. (2014). Everybody else is doing it: Exploring social transmission of lying behavior. PLOS ONE, 9(10), e109591. Ariely, D. & Mann, H. (2013). A Bird’s Eye View of Unethical Behavior: Commentary on Trautmann et al. (2013). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8, 498-500. Mann, H., Korzenko, J., Carriere, J., & Dixon, M. (2009). Time-space synaesthesia – A cognitive advantage?. Consciousness and Cognition, 18, 619-627 |
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