Anti-work refers to a contentious rejection of work as a determinant of one’s self-worth or worth to society. The most central principle is that work requires the submission of the individual’s free will for the benefit of the organization and that this has negative consequences for workers’ well-being. Even though the anti-work movement has grown rapidly in recent years, research on this phenomenon is scarce. This preregistered study (N = 2595) aimed to examine the relation between anti-work orientation and a range of socio-political attitudes, as well as its prevalence among different demographic groups in Sweden. The results revealed that anti-democratic attitudes and anti-hierarchical aggression were the strongest socio-political predictors of anti-work attitudes, followed by support for censorship and partisanship. Furthermore, voters of both the left party and the right-wing populist party were overrepresented among individuals scoring high on anti-work orientation, suggesting an “extremism” effect at both ends of the political spectrum. The strongest demographic predictors were young age and low income. Interestingly, latent class analysis revealed that men were strongly overrepresented in both the class of anti-work-supporters and the class with low anti-work orientation. These findings add new insights into the growing political discourse around the nature of work.

Time theft – time that employees waste or spend not working during their scheduled work hours – poses serious costs to many employers. Although previous research has suggested the importance of social norms for understanding time theft behavior, experimental studies are lacking. This paper presents the results of two preregistered experiments that examined if information about whether most people engage in time theft or not (descriptive norms) has effects on intentions and attitudes to steal time at work. The results confirmed that people are less willing to conduct time theft if they are led to believe that others avoid such behaviors (Experiment 1, N = 170). However, the same norm information did not alter people’s moral judgments of coworkers who engage in time theft (Experiment 2, N = 183). The findings tentatively suggest that the less time theft employees see, the less time theft they will commit. 

The need for more people to register as organ donors is a pressing concern. This preregistered experiment examined whether portraying a patient in need of an organ transplant as leading a healthy lifestyle (an “innocent victim”) can serve to increase people's intentions to register as post-mortem organ donors. Participants not previously registered as organ donors (N = 348) were randomly assigned to an innocent identified victim, non-innocent identified victim, or statistical victims condition. The identified victim was a 42 year-old woman in need of a liver transplant. The experimental manipulation produced marginally significant effects on self-reported intentions to register as an organ donor. Moreover, participants in the innocent victim condition were more likely relative to those in the non-innocent victim condition to sign up on an e-mail list to receive additional information about organ donation.

Prejudice and discrimination against minorities can be a powerful tool for populistic and reactionary political movements, and it is therefore crucial to study its determinants. The aim of this research is to develop the understanding of a possible mechanism of such discrimination: cultural distance. In a pre-registered survey experiment with a between-subjects design, we draw on the large increase in intra-European refugee migration from Ukraine, to test whether refugees from another ongoing conflict in (culturally distant) Yemen are treated differently than (culturally similar) Ukrainian refugees by British participants (N = 1545). We measured stated willingness to help and to hire refugees. Moreover, the participants were offered the chance to donate their own earnings from survey participation to real charity drives aimed at the respective refugee groups. Thus, we are able to examine both stated and actual helping behaviours that captured both autonomy- and dependency-oriented forms of helping. As expected, participants were more willing to help, hire and donate money to Ukrainian refugees, and these effects were mediated by higher perceived similarity and lower perceived threat from Ukrainians compared with Yemenis.

We examined whether employees (N = 710) who experience low levels of political fit and who self-censor their political opinions at work, are more likely to display lower job satisfaction and perceived social community, and higher turnover intentions, burnout, and fear of social isolation. The results largely confirmed these associations and showed that the associations between perceived political fit and job satisfaction, social community, turnover intentions, and burnout were statistically mediated by willingness to self-censor. This suggests that employees who experience lower levels of person-organization fit with regards to their political ideology have a higher tendency to censure themselves, which is negatively related to their well-being, perceived social belonging, and job satisfaction. Furthermore, we found that the willingness to self-censor political opinions at work was slightly higher on average among those who were politically to the left, female, younger, and less educated. The findings point to the complexity of navigating political ideologies in the workplace.

We aimed to identify effect sizes of age discrimination in recruitment based on evidencefrom correspondence studies and scenario experiments conducted between 2010 and2019. To differentiate our results, we separated outcomes (i.e., call-back rates and hiring/invitation to interview likelihood) by age groups (40-49, 50-59, 60-65, 66+) and assessedage discrimination by comparing older applicants to a control group (29-35 year-olds).We conducted searches in PsycInfo, Web of Science, ERIC, BASE, and Google Scholar,along with backward reference searching. Study bias was assessed with a tool developedfor this review, and publication bias by calculating R-index, p-curve, and funnel plots. Wecalculated odds ratios for callback rates, pooled the results using a random-effectsmeta-analysis and calculated 95% confidence intervals. We included 13 studies from 11articles in our review, and conducted meta-analyses on the eight studies that we wereable to extract data from. The majority of studies were correspondence studies (k=10) andcame largely from European countries (k=9), with the rest being from the U.S. (k=3) andAustralia (k=1). Seven studies had a between-participants design, and the remaining sixstudies had a within-participants design. We conducted six random-effectsmeta-analyses, one for each age category and type of study design and found an averageeffect of age discrimination against all age groups in both study designs, with varyingeffect sizes (ranging from OR = 0.38, CI [0.25, 0.59] to OR = 0.89, CI [0.81, 0.97]). Therewas moderate to high risk of bias on certain factors, e.g., age randomization, problemswith application heterogeneity. Generally, there’s an effect of age discrimination and ittends to increase with age. This has important implications regarding the future of theworld’s workforce, given the increase in the older workforce and later retirement.

The unstructured employment interview is one of the most popular selection tools among employers and applicants alike. Although past research have shed light on some explanations for practitioners’ preferences for unstructured methods, less is known about the reasons for their popularity among applicants. One reason might be that applicants overestimate recruiters’ intuitive abilities to make judgments about applicant characteristics based on resumes and interviews. The results of this study (N = 345) suggest that recruiters are perceived as much better than laypeople at making judgments about applicants based on resume screening and interviews, and that faith in recruiters’ intuition predicts process favorability for unstructured employment interviews. Moreover, this association remained significant when accounting for attitudes to structured interviews, perceived recruiter expertise, and attitudes to holistic versus mechanic methods in general. The results thus suggest that overestimation of recruiters’ intuitive expertise may help explain why many people prefer unstructured selection methods. 

Although young adults are not at great risk of becoming severely ill with COVID-19, their willingness to get vaccinated affects the whole community. Vaccine hesitancy has increased during recent years, and more research is needed on its situational determinants. This paper reports a preregistered experiment (N = 654) that examined whether communicating descriptive social norms – information about what most people do – is an effective way of influencing young people’s intentions and reducing their hesitancy to take the COVID-19 vaccine. We found weak support for our main hypothesis that conveying strong (compared to weak) norms leads to reduced hesitancy and stronger intentions. Furthermore, norms did not produce significantly different effects compared to standard vaccine information from the authorities. Moreover, no support was found for the hypothesis that young people are more strongly influenced by norms when the norm reference group consists of other young individuals rather than people in general. These findings suggest that the practical usefulness of signaling descriptive norms is rather limited, and may not be more effective than standard appeals in the quest of encouraging young adults to trust and accept a new vaccine.