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Information about the consequences of our consumption choices can be unwelcome, and people sometimes avoid it. We investigate a situation where one person possesses information that is inconvenient for another, and study why and when they decide to transmit that information. We introduce a simple and portable experimental game to analyze transmission of inconvenient information. In this game, a Sender can inform a Receiver at a small cost about a negative externality associated with a tempting and profitable action for the Receiver. The results from our online experiment (N = 1,512) show that Senders transmit more information for large negative externalities. Sender's decisions are largely driven by their own preferences for information. However, some Senders take the Receiver's feelings into account, by transmitting evidence of positive externalities or by suppressing negative information upon the Receiver's request. Understanding the decision to share inconvenient information matters, as it will affect the personal and political will to address important externalities and can inform strategies to encourage the transmission of inconvenient information within organizations.

Reorientation of attention to threatening stimuli is a fundamental part of human cognition. Such interaction between cogni-tive and affective processes is often associated with faster response times. In the present study, the role of the right angular gyrus (AG) in reorienting to threat is examined. An exogenous spatial cueing paradigm was adopted with threatening and nonthreatening targets. Threat was induced by means of differential fear conditioning of the target. Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was applied to the right AG at different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) after target onset (range 30–300 ms). Transcranial magnetic stimulation was predicted to interfere at an earlier SOA with reorienting (during invalidly cued trials) to threatening targets. Even though an overall decrement in performance to targets contralateral to TMS stimulation was found, TMS to right AG did not specifically affect reorienting, neither to safe nor to threatening targets. We suggest that detection of biologically significant stimuli outside the focus of attention may depend more on the ventral frontoparietal rather than dorsal frontoparietal network of attention.

Attitudes towards fairness and redistribution differ along socio-economic lines. To understand their formation, we conduct a large-scale experiment on attention to merit and luck and the effect of attention on fairness decisions. Randomly advantaged subjects pay less attention to information about true merit and retain more economic surplus, and this effect persists in subsequent impartial decisions. Attention also has a causal role: encouraging subjects to look at merit reduces the effect of an advantaged position on allocations. This suggests that attention-based policy interventions may be effective in reducing polarized views on inequality.

Using data from a large representative survey, we document that consumers are very uncertain about the emissions associated with various actions, which may affect their willingness to reduce their carbon footprint. We then experimentally test two channels for the behavioral impact of such uncertainty, namely risk aversion about the impact of mitigating actions and the formation of motivated beliefs about this impact. In two novel large online experiments (N=2,219), participants make incentivized trade-offs between personal gain and (uncertain) carbon impact. We find no evidence that uncertainty affects individual climate change mitigation efforts through risk aversion or motivated belief channels. The results suggest that reducing consumer uncertainty through information campaigns is not a policy panacea and that communicating scientific uncertainty around climate impact need not backfire.

We investigate the role of visual attention in risky choice in a rich experimental dataset that includes eye-tracking data. We first show that attention is not reducible to individual and contextual variables, which explain only 20% of attentional variation. We then decompose attentional variation into individual average attention and trial-wise deviations of attention to capture different cognitive processes. Individual average attention varies by individual, and can proxy for individual preferences or goals (as in models of “rational inattention” or goal-directed attention). Trial-wise deviations of attention vary within subjects and depend on contextual factors (as in models of “salience” or stimulus-driven attention). We find that both types of attention predict behavior: average individual attention patterns are correlated with individual levels of loss aversion and capture part of this individual heterogeneity. Adding trial-wise deviations of attention further improves model fit. Our results show that a decomposition of attention into individual average attention and trial-wise deviations of attention can capture separable cognitive components of decision making and provides a useful tool for economists and researchers from related fields interested in decision-making and attention.