AlumniPsychologie – the Alumni network of the Faculty of Psychology, University of Basel – continues its interview series with former students of our faculty. What jobs do current alumni have? What challenges do they face in their professional development? How has a degree in psychology helped them prepare for work „in the wild“?
Check out the second interview with Regula Zahno on our AlumniPsychologie LinkedIn Group.
On the occasion of the failed negotiations with SpringerNature, swissuniversities published a factsheet on how to get papers without a campus license.
I would like to add point 9.
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Update: Tweet by SpringerNature from December 19:
We’re highly disappointed that thus far we’ve been unable to reach an agreement with
@CH_universities for 2020. We’re continuing discussions and Swiss researchers will still be able to access all our existing and newly published 2020 journal content until further notice.
The final speaker in this semester’s SWE colloquium series is Dr Jan Schmitz, ETH Zürich (Thursday 19 December).
Trustworthiness and new financial technologies
In most situations, economic agents have differing information about the quality of goods and services they exchange. In other words, there is asymmetric information and actors need to trust their trading partners to engage in exchange. In financial markets, trust plays a particularly important role. Consumer credit markets, for example, are plagued by uncertainty about the ability and willingness of borrowers to repay. Recent developments in financial technologies (Fintech) additionally change the classical bilateral borrower lender relationship and crowdlending platforms provide borrowers the possibility to borrow from many lenders at the same time. This paper examines how the number of people who trust (provide credit) affects trustworthiness (repayment). Data from peer to peer lending platforms indicate that there is a negative correlation between loan repayment and the number of investors involved. Laboratory and online experiments in which borrowers face the trade-of between repayment and strategically defaulting show that the number of lenders involved significantly increases default rates. Moral appeals highlighting the number of people who trust, however, significantly reduce default rates. The appeals impact the propensity to default more strongly if more people are affected by the borrowers’ repayment decisions.
Dr Dolores Albarracin, Professor of Psychology, Business, and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, visits Basel on 5 December to give a talk in the SWE colloquium series.
Action dominance: Action and inaction in a social world
My colleagues and I have proposed that behavior is often controlled by general goals to be active or inactive regardless of the specific behaviors meeting these goals (trivial and important behaviors, planned and impulsive behaviors). However, action is more likely to become a goal than is inaction. Action (vs. inaction) attracts more interest and attention, produces richer representations, and is idealized as positive and intentional. In many ways, this construal is adaptive; in many others, in produces more performance errors and likely decreases the closeness of our social connections.