Open Research Repository
The Open Research Repository (ORR) is the official institutional repository of the Central European University. The repository provides access to the research output of the CEU community by collecting open access versions of scholarly works authored or co-authored by CEU faculty and students.
For more information, please contact us at: scholcom@ceu.edu
Recent Submissions
Item Dyads use heuristics to minimise time costs during joint action(2025-05-07)Research on joint action planning has demonstrated that, when acting with others, individuals will choose more effortful actions if it improves co-efficiency by reducing the overall effort exerted by the group. However, because these studies use actions for which time and effort costs are confounded, it is unclear which costs participants sought to minimise and what processes underlie decision-making about individual contributions to joint actions. Across three experiments, we tested (1) whether dyads aim to minimise effort vs. time costs (Experiments 1–2) and (2) whether individuals choose actions based on a rational, deliberative process or a heuristic (Experiment 3). Data from a joint object-dragging computer task revealed that participants chose to drag objects to the closer of two goals even when it required more effort from the dyad (Experiments 1–2). Participants preferred closer goals when time and effort costs were equal (Experiment 3a), but only when the objects’ locations were salient (Experiment 3b). Together, these results suggest that: (1) individuals minimise time, rather than effort, when sharing object-moving tasks, and (2) they do so – at least in part - by using distance as a heuristic. Our findings also replicate and extend earlier work showing that people prefer acting together versus alone, even when this is less efficient.Item Mobilizing Rural Support: Targeted Government Spending and Democratic Backsliding in Hungary(2025-05-14)The spread of democratic backsliding has drawn scholarly attention to the strategies and approaches characteristic of these regimes. However, our understanding of targeted government spending programs designed to favor specific segments of society to build and reinforce a loyal support base remains largely limited. We explore a major targeted government spending initiative directed at rural settlements in Hungary, one of the most notable cases of democratic backsliding today. In particular, we analyze the electoral and mobilization effects of targeted policies and the government’s resource allocation strategy, focusing on two initiatives: the Rural Family Housing Allowance Program (Rural CSOK), which provides housing subsidies to individuals in eligible settlements, and the Hungarian Village Program, which funds local governments in eligible settlements to invest in essential infrastructure, public services, and community spaces. Using highly detailed observational data and leveraging the quasi-random assignment of program eligibility, we show that the government directs Hungarian Village Program funds to reward electorally strong core settlements. We also find that both eligibility and subsidy amounts increase government vote share by mobilizing core and inactive voters while discouraging opposition participation.Item The role of science in the climate change discussions on Reddit(2025-05-07)Well-informed collective and individual action necessary to address climate change hinges on the public’s understanding of the relevant scientific findings. Social media has been a popular platform for the deliberation around climate change and the policies aimed at addressing it. Whether such deliberation is informed by scientific findings is an important step in gauging the public’s awareness of scientific resources and their latest findings. In this study, we examine the use of scientific sources in the course of 14 years of public deliberation around climate change on one of the largest social media platforms, Reddit. We find that only 4.0% of the links in the Reddit posts, and 6.5% in the comments, point to domains of scientific sources, although these rates have been increasing in the past decades. These links are dwarfed, however, by the citations of mass media, newspapers, and social media, the latter of which peaked especially during 2019–2020. Further, scientific sources are more likely to be posted by users who also post links to sources having central-left political leaning, and less so by those posting more polarized sources. Scientific sources are not often used in response to links to unreliable sources, instead, other such sources are likely to appear in their comments. This study provides the quantitative evidence of the dearth of scientific basis of the online public debate and puts it in the context of other, potentially unreliable, sources of information.Item Intergroup contact buffers influence of objective and perceived peer norms on prejudice among adolescents(2025-07)While previous research has shown that intergroup contact can serve as a buffer moderating the effect of country-level social norms on intergroup attitudes, there is limited research on proximal norms in this dynamic. During adolescence, proximal norms, i.e. peer norms, become important sources of information and guide intergroup attitudes and behavior. It is an open question whether intergroup contact may also buffer the effect of peer norms. We conducted a two-wave panel study with adolescents testing the buffering effect of objective and perceived peer norms on prejudice. Results showed that the influence of both objective and perceived peer norms only affected prejudice significantly among adolescents who have not made new outgroup contacts, while it was non-significant among those whose contact numbers increased. Overall, findings suggest that intergroup contact might play a crucial role by shielding individuals from peer norms that support prejudice.
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