2022, Döhne, Malte

When and for whom does it pay to make high-quality products? In this paper, I address this question through the lens of Harrison White’s socioeconomic models of production. The socioeconomic models relate economist incentives of cost-efficiency to sociological insights into the construction of quality on markets. Differences in firm size and quality sustain distinct market niches whose appeal to producers vary. The ordering of niches by quality and associated implications for profitability establish the incentive structure of the market. As illustration, I trace the evolution of the Californian wine industry from its nadir under prohibition to today. The account motivates a productive reading of the socio-economic models that tempers their analytical focus and broadens their scope of application.

2019, Herfeld, Catherine, Döhne, Malte

How do scientific innovations spread within and across scientific communities? In this paper, we propose a general account of the diffusion of scientific innovations. This account acknowledges that novel ideas must be elaborated on and conceptually translated before they can be adopted and applied to field-specific problems. We motivate our account by examining an exemplary case of knowledge diffusion, namely, the early spread of theories of rational decision-making. These theories were grounded in a set of novel mathematical tools and concepts that originated in John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944/1947) and subsequently spread widely across the social and behavioral sciences. Introducing a network-based diffusion measure, we trace the spread of those tools and concepts into distinct research areas. We furthermore present an analytically tractable typology for classifying publications according to their roles in the diffusion process. The proposed framework allows for a systematic examination of the conditions under which scientific innovations spread within and across preexisting and newly emerging scientific communities.

2021-03, Aidenberger, Amelie, Döhne, Malte

In recent years-particularly since the beginning of the refugee crisis in 2015-the political debate about issues of Islamophobia and resentment of Muslims has gained new momentum. Our research contributes to the growing experimental literature focusing on these phenomena. Unlike most previous empirical investigations, the present study does not examine "large scale" discrimination against Muslim minorities in situations which occur only periodically throughout an individual's life (e.g., on the rental-, labor-, or partner market); rather, it sheds light on (minor) discrimination events that occur on a day-to-day basis. Such "everyday discrimination" has been shown to be particularly detrimental to physical and psychological health. Specifically, our research examines the effect of open displays of religious identification-wearing a Muslim headscarf-on everyday discrimination against female Muslims. We report the results of two natural field experiments in Switzerland designed to examine such forms of day-to-day discrimination. Study 1 focuses on differential sanctioning, whereas study 2 investigates differences regarding helping behavior. We found pronounced discrimination against women wearing a headscarf in two distinctly different types of everyday interactions. In both scenarios, headscarf-wearing confederates were treated less favorably than bare-headed ones: they were sanctioned more often for violating the "stand right, walk left"-norm on escalators and received less help when asking for a favor (borrowing a mobile phone for an urgent call).

2021-02, Mojzisch, Andreas, Frisch, Johanna Ute, Döhne, Malte, Reder, Maren, Häusser, Jan Alexander

The present study aimed to integrate the social identity approach to health and well-being with social network analysis. Previous research on the effects of social network centrality on stress has yielded mixed results. Building on the social identity approach, we argued that these mixed results can be explained, in part, by taking into account the degree to which individuals identify with the social network. We hence hypothesized that the effects of social network centrality on stress are moderated by social identification. Using a full roster method, we assessed the social network of first-year psychology students right after the start of their study programme and three months later. The effects of network centrality (betweenness, closeness, eigenvector centrality) and social identification on stress were examined using structural equation models. As predicted, our results revealed a significant interaction between network centrality and social identification on stress: For weakly or moderately identified students, network centrality was positively related to stress. By contrast, for strongly identified students, network centrality was unrelated to stress. In conclusion, our results point to the perils of being well-connected yet not feeling like one belongs to a group.