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Experts and employees in many domains make multiple similar but independent decisions in sequence. Often, the serial position of the case in the sequence influences the decision. Explanations for these serial position effects focus on the role of decision-makers' fatigue, but these effects emerge also when fatigue is unlikely. Here, we suggest that serial position effects can emerge due to decision-makers' motivation to be or appear consistent. For example, to avoid having inconsistencies revealed, decisions may become more favorable toward the side that is more likely to put a decision under scrutiny. As a context, we focus on the legal domain in which many high-stakes decisions are made in sequence and in which there are clear institutional processes of decision scrutiny. We analyze two field data sets: 386,109 U.S. immigration judges' decisions on asylum requests and 20,796 jury decisions in 18th century London criminal court. We distinguish between five mechanisms that can drive serial position effects and examine their predictions in these settings. We find that consistent with motivation-based explanations of serial position effects, but inconsistent with fatigue-based explanations, decisions become more lenient as a function of serial position, and the effect persists over breaks. We further find, as is predicted by motivational accounts, that the leniency effect is stronger among more experienced decision-makers. By elucidating the different drivers of serial position effects, our investigation clarifies why they are common, when they are expected, and how to reduce them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Law and economics scholarship suggests that, in appropriate cases, the law can improve people’s behavior by changing their preferences. For example, the law can curb discriminatory hiring practices by providing employers with information that might change their discriminatory preference. Supposedly, if employers no longer prefer one class of employees to another, they will simply stop discriminating, with no need for further legal intervention. The current Article aims to add some depth to this familiar analysis by introducing the insights of behavioral ethics into the law and economics literature on preference change. Behavioral ethics research shows that wrongdoing often originates from semi-deliberative or non-deliberative cognitive processes. These findings suggest that the process of preference change through the use of the law is markedly more complicated and nuanced than previously appreciated. For instance, even if an employer’s explicit discriminatory stance is changed, and the employer no longer consciously prefers one class of employees over another, discriminatory behavior might persist if it originates from semi-conscious, habitual, or non-deliberative decision-making mechanisms. Therefore, actual change in behavior might necessitate a close engagement with people’s level of moral awareness. We discuss the institutional and normative implications of these insights and evaluate their significance for the attempt to improve preferences through the different functions of the legal system.

The field of behavioural ethics seeks to clarify how people behave when confronted with ethical dilemmas. It has identified and analysed numerous mechanisms by which people may engage in unethical and illegal behaviour without fully recognizing its implications. In the field of employment law, which focuses on the interaction between employers and employees, the subtle mechanisms which may underlie people’s decisions to behave unethically are especially relevant, but have not been the subject of significant study. The question examined here is how applying behavioural ethics to employment law can cast light on some current employment law issues, including compliance. To this end, the article identifies four contexts in which the law can be improved: ensuring protection for employees when they are under pressure to act in a manner contrary to their personal ethical standards; clarifying the measures to prevent workplace bullying; creating clear rules in the case of workplace changes such as working from home, which gives rise to expenses for the employee; and ensuring protection against small daily violations which are sometimes considered too negligible for enforcement purposes. The article argues that the development of employment law can benefit from taking behavioural ethics into account. Behavioural Ethics, Employment Law, Unnoticed Harms

Times of emergency often serve as triggers for the creation of new policy. Such policies may involve restriction of human rights, and various mechanisms can be used to mitigate the severity of such restrictions. One such mechanism is the temporary measure. A series of three experiments examined the potential of temporary measures for increasing the likelihood of approval of rights-restricting policy and the role of time – both prospectively and retrospectively – in the willingness to restrict human rights. We find that behavioural examination confirms the concerns expressed in the literature regarding temporary legislation. Participants asked to approve a rights-restricting policy were more willing to approve a temporary measure when it was presented as a compromise, and they were more willing to extend a rights-restricting policy when it had previously been implemented. These findings indicate a possible slippery slope effect in temporary legislation: policymakers might be persuaded to approve measures they would not otherwise approve when those measures are temporary or when they have been previously approved by others.

Behaviorally informed interventions are growingly used to nudge consumers for various goals. While consumers are usually the target of nudges, businesses are involved in nudges in two manners: either they are the target of the nudges (i.e., government-to-business, or G2B nudges), or they serve as “nudging agents" on behalf of government regulation (i.e., government-to-business-to-consumer, or G2B2C nudges). Businesses’ support of nudges might be critical for nudges' success, but the perceptions of managers towards nudges have never been directly assessed. We surveyed owners and senior managers of small to medium-sized businesses and discovered an overall high level of support for nudges, and in particular for G2B nudges, as compared to G2B2C nudges. We also find variations between types of nudges and their domain. Specifically, the highest levels of support were found for reminders and for nudges that provide information, and for nudges that promote self-regulation. Lower levels of support were found for nudges that involve incentive design or enhanced consumer protections. Policy makers should thus consider the perceptions of business leaders (both as targets of nudges and as nudging agents) to ensure nudges' success.

Background and objectives Stressors related to the COVID-19 pandemic are risk factors for psychopathology, but psychosocial protective factors might play a crucial role in buffering the pathogenic effects of the outbreak. Design In the current study, we examined the association of inner resources and potential external sources of support for coping with the pandemic and related lockdowns to mental health during the pandemic, while controlling for sociodemographic variables as covariates. Methods We tested the model in a probability-based internet survey of a representative sample of the Israeli adult population (N = 812) conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results Perceived support in close relationships was negatively associated with the intensity of depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Larger rings of potential support such as perceived belongingness to a community and trust in government were also negatively related to anxiety and depression but were positively associated with the intensity of OCD and PTSD. Conclusions Findings support the "tend and befriend" theory in the social distancing era and highlight the importance of keeping personal relationships alive when facing a mass trauma.

Most companies use codes of conduct, ethics training, and regular communication to ensure that employees know about rules to follow to avoid misconduct. In the present research, we focused on the type of language used in codes of conduct and showed that impersonal language (e.g., “employees” or “members”) and personal, communal language (e.g., “we”) lead to different behaviors because they change how people perceive the group or organization of which they are a part. Using multiple methods, including lab- and field-based experiments (total N = 1,443), and a large data set of S&P 500 firms (i.e., publicly traded, large U.S. companies that are part of the S&P 500 stock market index), we robustly demonstrated that personal, communal language (compared with impersonal language) influences perceptions of a group’s warmth, which, in turn, increases levels of dishonesty among its members.

A common dilemma in regulation is determining how much trust authorities can place in people’s self-reports, especially in regulatory contexts where the incentive to cheat is very high. In such contexts, regulators, who are typically risk averse, do not readily confer trust, resulting worldwide in excessive requirements when applying for permits, licenses, and the like. Studies in behavioral ethics have suggested that asking people to ex-ante pledge to behave ethically can reduce their level of dishonesty and noncompliance. However, pledges might also backfire by allowing more people to cheat with no real sanctions. Additionally, pledges’ effects have only been studied in one-shot decision making, and they may only have a short-term effect that could decay in the long run, leading to an overall erosion of trust. We explored the interaction of pledges with sanctions and the decay of their effects on people’s honesty by manipulating whether pledges were accompanied by sanctions (fines) and testing their impact on sequential, repeated ethical decisions. We found that pledges considerably and consistently reduced dishonesty, and this effect was not crowded out by the presence of fines. Furthermore, pledges seem to exert an effect on most people, including those who are relatively less inclined to follow rules and norms. We conclude that pledges could be an effective tool for the behavioral regulation of dishonesty, reduce the regulatory burden, and build a more trusting relationship between government and the public, even in areas where incentives and opportunities to cheat are high.

Illegal and unethical conduct often proliferates around ethical blind spots—scenarios and situations in which ordinary law-abiding people find it difficult to identify the harmfulness of their own actions. Ideally, regulators should act to diffuse ethical blind spots by trying to improve ethical awareness of potential perpetrators, in order to reduce wrongdoing. In practice, however, regulators might have a distorted incentive to conserve ethical blind spots rather than diffuse them. Regulators seek to bolster their perceived effectiveness by demonstrating intensive and rapid enforcement activity. To do so, regulators might prefer to ignore the underlying cognitive causes of unethicality, and instead constantly sanction those wrongdoers who repeatedly fall into the same trap of unintentional wrongdoing. We explore the origins of this problem in common regulatory incentive structures and in the standard design of legal norms.

Western societies are increasingly enacting majority nationalism laws, intended to strengthen majority culture. We propose that majority nationalism laws alter public attitudes about the equal protection of minorities and that their impact varies between majorities and minorities. To explore this issue, we examine the impact of Israel’s recently enacted Nation Law on both the Jewish Majority and Arab minority. Experimental evidence from before the law’s passage reveals that, when the Nation Law is presented as likely to pass, both minority and majority respondents perceive the law as permitting minority discrimination in housing, voting rights, and the labor market. Yet panel and cross-sectional data show that only minority respondents changed their perceptions after enactment of the Nation Law: they came to believe that its passage eroded their legal status. These findings expose the troubling political effects of majority nationalism laws, particularly on minorities, and highlight the law’s heterogenous expressive effects.

Law and economics scholarship suggests that, in appropriate cases, the law can improve people’s behavior by changing their preferences. For instance, the law can curb discriminatory hiring practices by providing employers with information that might change their preferences towards discriminatory hiring. Supposedly, if employers no longer prefer one class of employees to another, they will simply stop discriminating, with no need for further legal intervention. The current paper adds some depth to this familiar analysis by introducing the insights of behavioral ethics into the law and economics literature on preference change. Behavioral ethics research shows that wrongdoing often originates with semi-deliberative or non-deliberative cognitive processes. These findings suggest that the process of preference change, through the use of the law, is markedly more complicated and nuanced than previously appreciated. Thus, for instance, even if an employer’s explicit discriminatory stance is changed, and the employer no longer consciously prefers one class of employees over another, discriminatory behavior might still surface if it originates with semi-conscious, habitual, or non-deliberative decision-making mechanisms. Therefore, actual change in behavior might necessitate a close engagement with people’s level of moral awareness. We discuss the institutional and normative implications of these insights and evaluate their significance for the attempt to improve preferences through the different functions of the legal system.

Legal scholars have devoted considerable attention to contractual design that exploits consumers’ vulnerabilities (“the paper deal”). For example, scholars have cautioned against the inclusion of one-sided, exploitative, or unenforceable terms in standard form contracts, and proposed solutions to address these problems. However, scant attention has been given to the role of pre-contractual promises that are disclaimed or qualified in the fine print (“the oral deal”). This Article uncovers the seductive power of misleading oral deals. Weaving together insights from behavioral ethics and social psychology, we argue that current approaches to such deals are undertheorized and develop a more nuanced approach. We show that the law underestimates, and thus does not properly respond to, the harm of seductive oral deals. Seductive oral deals are both more potent and more ubiquitous than previously assumed. They are more potent because consumers’ contracting reality and tendency to trust others lead them to rely on salespeople’s oral assertions even when they are false. They are ubiquitous because even ordinary, law-abiding people, when operating as salespeople, find ways to justify mundane unethical behavior, such as lying to customers. Seductive oral deals can harm both consumers and scrupulous competitors, erode important societal values, and undermine market efficiency. At the same time, consumers face substantial psychological, financial, evidentiary, and doctrinal hurdles should they wish to rely on precontractual oral interactions when the written contract disclaims what they were told. Against this background, the Article makes several recommendations that tackle the root causes that facilitate seductive oral deals.

This article offers a novel analysis of the field of corporate governance by viewing it through the lens of behavioral ethics. It calls for both shifting the focus of corporate governance to a new set of loci of potential corporate wrongdoing and adding new tools to the corporate governance arsenal. The behavioral ethics scholarship emphasizes the large share of wrongdoing generated by "good people" whose intention is to act ethically. Their wrongdoing stems from "bounded ethicality" -- various cognitive and motivational processes that lead to biased decisions that seem legitimate. In the legal domain, corporate law provides the most fertile ground for the application of behavioral ethics since it encapsulates many of the features that the behavioral ethics literature found to confound the ethical judgment of good people, such as agency, group decisions, victim remoteness, vague directives and subtle conflict of interests. Bounded ethicality suggests a view of corporate law that is dramatically different than that portrayed by traditional legal and economic theorists. Not only does it suggest that wrongdoing can be committed by well-intentioned people who wish to do right, but also that the biases they display call for a radically different set of legal interventions than those advocated by standard economic theory. If standard theorizing views corporate agents as self-interest maximizers, bounded rationality perceives them as actors with varied and nuanced motivations that could benefit from subtle legal reforms. This Article's assessment of corporate governance through the behavioral ethical lens proceeds in three stages. First, it exposes potential wrongdoing by good people that conventional corporate governance does not address. Second, it suggests novel corporate governance interventions supported by behavioral ethics to address wrongdoing by good people. Third, it identifies existing interventions that according to behavioral ethics analysis may generate unintended adverse effects on the behavior of well-meaning corporate officers and exacerbate wrongdoing instead of mitigating it. As we will show bounded ethicality has important implications for a wide range of topics in corporate governance, such as board structure, independent directors, regulation of institutional investors and proxy advisory firms, the business judgment rule, and corporate and intra-board liability.

Growing recognition in both the psychological and management literature of the concept of “good people” has caused a paradigm shift in our understanding of wrongful behavior: Wrongdoings that were previously assumed to be based on conscious choice—that is, deliberate decisions—are often the product of intuitive processes that prevent people from recognizing the wrongfulness of their behavior. Several leading scholars have dubbed this process as an ethical “blind spot.” This study explores the main implications of the good people paradigm on the regulation of employees’ conflicts of interest. In two experiments, we examined the efficacy of traditional deterrence- and morality-based interventions in encouraging people to maintain their professional integrity and objectivity at the cost of their own self-interest. Results demonstrate that while the manipulated conflict was likely to “corrupt” people under intuitive/automatic mindset (Experiment 1), explicit/deliberative mechanisms (both deterrence- and morality-based) had a much larger constraining effect overall on participants’ judgment than did implicit measures, with no differences between deterrence and morality (Experiment 2). The findings demonstrate how little is needed to compromise the employees’ ethical integrity, but they also suggest that a modest explicit/deliberative intervention can easily prevent much of the wrongdoing that may otherwise result.

This chapter studies the implications of behavioral ethics research to questions of legal compliance. Behavioral ethics emphasizes the concept of bounded ethicality, referring to a long list of biases and cognitive limitations that prevent people from making a full and candid evaluation of the ethicality of their own actions. In other words, people often act unethically not because they made a conscious choice to behave badly, but because they were able to ignore, downplay, or justify their own misconduct. This chapter explores the meaning of behavioral ethics findings for questions of compliance with the law. That is, if people often ignore or downplay their own unethical choices, how can law-makers and regulators act to improve compliance with the law? The chapter describes the central relevant findings of behavioral ethics research, the challenges these findings pose for legal compliance, and outlines possible solutions. In particular, we advocate a novel regulatory approach utilizing ethical nudges: regulatory interventions that are designed to improve ethical deliberations by potential wrongdoers.

Experts in many domains, from education and finances to sports and entertainment, make multiple similar but independent decisions in sequence. Does the mere serial position of a case in a sequence influence the decision? We focus on the legal domain in which many high-stakes decisions are made in a sequence and justice considerations imply irrelevant factors like serial position of a case must not impact decision making. We identify four mechanisms that can drive serial position effects and note each can have different predictions, hence existence and direction of such effects are empirical questions. Indeed, most empirical evidence from non-legal settings suggests decisions become more favorable with serial position, but a previous study of sequences of parole hearings finds the opposite effect. We analyze two field datasets, 386,109 US immigration judges’ decisions on asylum requests and 20,796 jury decisions in 18th century London criminal court, and find decisions become more favorable (lenient) the later a decision is made in a sequence of decisions. To complement the analysis, we run three controlled experiments with laypeople and find similar results. We conclude that while serial position effects may be context-specific, from the point of view of the individual involved, it is often best to be last.

Behaviorally informed policies of interventions in choice architecture are growingly used to nudge people towards socially desirable behaviors. While consumers are usually the target of those nudges, businesses often serve as “nudging agents" on behalf of government regulation, or may be the target of governmental nudges themselves. Businesses’ support of such behavioral policies might be critical for their implementation, but the perceptions of managers towards nudges has never been directly assessed. We distinguish between government-to-business (G2B) nudges vs. government-to-business-to-consumer (G2B2C) nudges and provide first evidence of business managers’ attitudes towards such interventions. We discover an overall high level of support for nudges, and in particular for G2B nudges, with variations between types of nudges, the domain that they operate in, and whether they benefit the business or the consumer.

Social enforcement of norms governing appropriate business practices, through online and social networks, is regarded as an effective alternative to formal, state‐sponsored enforcement. However, recent research finds that such norms are interpreted differently when applied to individual actors than when applied to corporations. This article finds that this difference transcends to enforcement, and that willingness to actively respond to a transgression depends on both the transgressor's identity and the type of violation. Three studies found that people are reluctant to substitute social enforcement for state‐sponsored action, and that the preference for formal over social action was generally more pronounced when the target of the action was an individual than when the action targeted a corporation. Furthermore, individuals were judged more severely for intentional harms, whereas corporations received higher levels of critique for violations caused by negligent behavior. Our findings suggest that the state may need to exercise caution in outsourcing norm enforcement in commercial relationships.

There is individual variation in the extent to which individuals believe it is acceptable to violate legal rules. However, we lack a specific measure that assesses this key internal element of legal decision-making and offending. This article describes the development, validation, and testing of the Rule Orientation scale. At its core, the construct captures the extent to which one thinks about rules in a rigid, rule-oriented manner or in a manner that recognizes exceptions. In the first study, we develop the Rule Orientation scale, demonstrate its convergent and divergent validity with key legal and moral reasoning scales, and find that Rule Orientation relates to hypothetical offending behavior across a variety of low-level crimes. In the second study, we examine whether Rule Orientation predicts the propensity to engage in digital piracy both with and without the explicit threat of punishment. The results indicate that Rule Orientation plays a crucial role in predicting offending behavior and, importantly, does so across enforcement contexts. The findings suggest that an individual with low Rule Orientation may be able to justify offending regardless of whether a system explicitly declares an enforcement campaign, regardless of how the individual perceives the severity of the threatened sanction, and regardless of whether the individual believes social norms support law violation. In understanding ethical decision-making, criminal decision-making, and other strands of legal decision-making, identifying such individual variation is crucial.

This article presents the first empirical study on whether anchors influence the interpretation of vague legal standards. To test this question, the article presents a series of stylized experiments that measure and compare participants’ interpretation of a vague norm after they were exposed to anchors. Overall, the results suggest that the content of substantive legal rules might be altered by anchors. This effect is documented in numerous legal settings (e.g., torts, corporate, copyright) and across both expert (i.e., experienced lawyers) and nonexpert (i.e., students) populations. Furthermore, the effect is shown to exist both when participants express judgments on a numeric scale and when they make dichotomous judgments that are detached from that scale. Based on these findings, the article revisits several long-standing legal debates and reevaluates their conclusions.

This article draws on the behavioral science literature to offer empirically driven policy prescriptions that can reduce the effect of bias and ameliorate unequal treatment in policing, the criminal justice system, employment, and national security.

This paper seeks to explore whether the interpretation of legal standards is influenced by decision-makers’ substantive decision. Prior literature on motivated reasoning has shown that decision-makers “shift” their perception of evidence in their desired direction. To the extent this logic applies to legal-standards, we should expect decision-makers to adjust the perception of the legal standard accordingly — e.g., one’s decision to favor the plaintiff would induce a pro-plaintiff interpretation of the required threshold to win a case. We present the results of two experiments in which we asked subjects to report their interpretation of the applicable legal threshold after deciding a case, under different legal thresholds. Our participants, by and large, did not shift the legal standard to conform to their substantive decision, contrary to the theoretical expectations. We thus conclude that decision-makers treat the legal standard distinctly than regular evidence.

Wrongdoing is ubiquitous. Media outlets constantly report an endless stream of deleterious human behavior, from sexual harassment and fraud in financial markets to corporate and political corruption. Recent developments in behavioral ethics research suggest that these ills will forever accompany human interaction due to the phenomenon of “bounded ethicality,” or people’s limited ability to conduct an objective and candid moral examination of their own actions. When evaluating the ethical implications of their behavior, individuals have been shown to be biased and to systematically underestimate or ignore the magnitude and effect of their own misconduct. Such findings have troubling implications from a law enforcement perspective. That is, if wrongdoers are able to convince themselves they are doing nothing wrong, how can regulators and policy makers ever successfully reduce or prevent misconduct? Essentially, recognizing the power of bounded ethicality reinforces the idea that destructive human behavior may be unavoidable, and that it may never be possible to reduce the systematic wrongdoing currently observed throughout society. In response to the challenges that bounded ethicality poses, this Article explores how using big data analytics contributes to curbing both ethical bias and the results of bounded ethicality. The paper is breaking new ground in being the first to explore the intersections between the growing literature on behavioral ethics, highlighting the concept of bounded ethicality, and the scholarship and research on data-driven law enforcement. We suggest that to combat bounded ethicality, regulators should use ethical nudges, regulatory interventions designed to improve ethical deliberation by potential wrongdoers. We show that the use of big data analytics is crucial for the successful deployment of such regulatory interventions, for several reasons. First, ethical nudges must be deployed in real time, when potential perpetrators are making their decisions regarding possibly unethical actions. Big data analysis can facilitate this type of timely regulatory response in its shift from ex post inquiry to ex ante prediction. By collecting and analyzing data on the antecedents of wrongdoing, big data analytics can enable regulators to respond at opportune moments and situations, rather than engage perpetrators ex post facto. Second, ethical nudges must be targeted rather than general. If individuals are nudged constantly, ethical nudges will lose their effectiveness due to the phenomenon of ethical numbing. By identifying the situations that breed unethicality and limiting nudges to those situations, big data analysis can ensure that people are not overexposed to ethical nudges, thereby maintaining their efficacy. Third, ethical nudges must also be tailored to the characteristics of the specific bias that is causing unethical behavior in each specific case. Using big data analytic, together with behavioral ethics insights, regulators can collect information that will indicate the nature of the ethical bias operating in specific instances of wrongdoing, and thus be able to deploy the appropriate regulatory response. In addition to presenting several other advantages of using big data analytics as part of the efforts to reduce bounded ethicality, this paper suggests a full menu of regulatory tools designed to improve moral deliberation and discusses the importance of big data analytics as a basis for their use. Our analysis calls for a reorientation of existing practices of data-driven law enforcement, to make it more suited for the regulation of bounded ethicality. We show that this reorientation is also necessary for reasons related to the legitimacy of data-driven law enforcement. Data-driven law enforcement currently adopts a personalized focus, attempting to identify individuals who are more likely to commit crimes. This approach is highly problematic, raising privacy concerns and perpetuating discriminatory practices. Conversely, the approach we advocate calls for a focus on situations, not individuals, as behavioral ethics studies show that bounded ethicality is primarily situation driven. Therefore, big data analytics should be used to identify situations that breed unethicality, thus shifting the focus to individuals more likely to act badly. This use of big data analytics is less harmful to individuals’ privacy, as it does not focus on personalizing legal treatments.

The morality of killing in war, which has been the subject of debate among philosophers and legal scholars, focuses on two main approaches: the “traditional” and the “revisionist.” The traditional approach argues for symmetry: soldiers of both sides are liable to be killed, whether or not the war they fight is just; civilians are immune from being harmed whether or not they are responsible for the evil against which the just side fights. Recently this approach has been challenged by a revisionist viewpoint, which derives the morality of killing in war from facts concerning the responsibility of individuals for wrongful threats. Killing soldiers, who fight a just war, is morally impermissible, whereas in certain cases killing civilians who are involved in an unjust aggression is permissible. The present study uses an experimental survey to examine whether moral attitudes toward targeting individuals in war are shaped by the factors underlying this debate: the cause of the war, the status of the targeted individuals as soldiers or civilians, and their involvement in the war effort. Respondents comprised a representative sample of the Jewish population in Israel. Our findings reveal a complex interplay between the factors, demonstrating the relevance of each factor to moral judgments. Notably, participants did not consider decisions on the battlefield to be independent of the justification of the war, a result which is consistent with the revisionist approach. We discuss the potential consequences of our findings on the understanding of commonsense morality and on the law. We also suggest that concepts derived from the social-psychological literature concerning moral self-regulation may help explain some of our findings.

The paper highlights how our knowledge about the manner the human mind works and people behave in social interactions may contribute to our understanding of employment discrimination and provide effective ways to address it. It calls for a rigorous empirical study of the mechanisms generating different forms of discrimination against disadvantaged groups and the implications that follow for law and policy. The paper’s focus is theoretical, criticizing the current state of research on employment discrimination and calling for an integrative approach to the research in this area. In particular, the paper criticizes the lack of mutual communication among the various disciplines that study discrimination. Over-reliance on one type of methodology limits scholars’ ability to address nuances of most discriminatory settings. We criticize the “one policy fits all” approach, in which discrimination against all types of disadvantaged groups is viewed as capturing all types of discrimination as well as the lack of truly accounting for the interplay between deliberative and automatic modes of reasoning. The paper suggests that adopting an integrative perspective would raise awareness among policy-makers and employers to variations in the effects of social categories on hiring, promotion, and firing practices.

Western societies have experienced ethnic and religious diversification in recent decades. These demographic changes have been met by efforts to defend the local dominant culture using majority nationalism laws, intended to protect the cultural heritage of the majority. We empirically examine majority nationalism laws’ expressive effects on patterns of minority discrimination using the Israeli draft Nation Law (NL) as a case study. Drawing on two experimental surveys of a representative sample of the majority population of Israel (N = 602), our results lend weak support to the hypothesis that majority nationalism laws increase bias against minorities, and modest support to the hypothesis that such laws generate unintended spillover effects across different minority groups and from the public to the private sphere. Our main finding is that majority nationalism laws provoke a backlash reaction from those who oppose them. We define this as the provocative effect of law and discuss its relation to the expressive law theory. The results suggest that the effects of majority nationalism laws may vary systematically across ideological groups and spheres of discrimination.