Promises and Lies: Restoring Violated Trust

Trust is critical for organizations, effective management, and efficient negotiations, yet trust violations are common. Prior work has often assumed trust to be fragile—easily broken and difficult to repair. We investigate this proposition in a laboratory study and find that trust harmed by untrustworthy behavior can be effectively restored when individuals observe a consistent series of trustworthy actions. Trust harmed by the same untrustworthy actions and deception, however, never fully recovers—even when deceived participants receive a promise, an apology, and observe a consistent series of trustworthy actions. We also find that a promise to change behaviour can significantly speed the trust recovery process, but prior deception harms the effectiveness of a promise in accelerating trust recovery

Silicon pore optics mirror modules for inner and outer radii

Athena (Advanced Telescope for High Energy Astrophysics) is an x-ray observatory using a Silicon Pore Optics telescope and was selected as ESA's second L-class science mission for a launch in 2028. The x-ray telescope consists of several hundreds of mirror modules distributed over about 15-20 radial rings. The radius of curvature and the module sizes vary among the different radial positions of the rings resulting in different technical challenges for mirror modules for inner and outer radii. We present first results of demonstrating Silicon Pore Optics for the extreme radial positions of the Athena telescope. For the inner most radii (0.25 m) a new mirror plate design is shown which overcomes the challenges of larger curvatures, higher stress values and bigger plates. Preliminary designs for the mounting system and its mechanical properties are discussed for mirror modules covering all other radial positions up to the most outer radius of the Athena telescope

Consequences of Asking Sensitive Questions

Data and analyses materials for "The (Better than Expected) Consequences of Asking Sensitive Questions

Scaling up experimental social, behavioral, and economic science

The standard experimental paradigm in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences is extremely limited. Although recent advances in digital technologies and crowdsourcing services allow individual experiments to be deployed and run faster than in traditional physical labs, a majority of experiments still focus on one-off results that do not generalize easily to real-world contexts or even to other variations of the same experiment. As a result, there exist few universally acknowledged findings, and even those are occasionally overturned by new data. We argue that to achieve replicable, generalizable, scalable and ultimately useful social and behavioral science, a fundamental rethinking of the model of virtual-laboratory style experiments is required. Not only is it possible to design and run experiments that are radically different in scale and scope than was possible in an era of physical labs; this ability allows us to ask fundamentally different types of questions than have been asked historically of lab studies. We posit, however, that taking full advantage of this new and exciting potential will require four major changes to the infrastructure, methodology, and culture of experimental science: (1) significant investments in software design and participant recruitment, (2) innovations in experimental design and analysis of experimental data, (3) adoption of new models of collaboration, and (4) a new understanding of the nature and role of theory in experimental social and behavioral science. We conclude that the path we outline, although ambitious, is well within the power of current technology and has the potential to facilitate a new class of scientific advances in social, behavioral and economic studies. This paper emerged from discussions at a workshop held by the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Pennsylvania in January 2020. The work was supported by James and Jane Manzi Analytics Fund and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation