Joël van der Weele
Joël van der Weele is a co-author, with Peter Schwardmann, of "Deception and self-deception" (Nature Human Behaviour, 2019). He studies motivated cognition: the idea that people do not form opinions solely from logic and evidence, and that self-interest and personal preferences also shape their views.
Who they are
This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.
The Amsterdam School of Economics announced on 17 January 2023 that the Executive Board of the University of Amsterdam had appointed him Professor of Economic Psychology, from 1 January 2022, in the Microeconomics section. The announcement records that he studied Economics and Philosophy at the University of Groningen, took a Master's in Economics there in 2005 and received his PhD in Economics from the European University Institute in 2009. He was a researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt from 2009 to 2013 and has worked at the Center for Research in Experimental Economics (CREED) since 2013. At the time of the 2019 paper he was at the University of Amsterdam and the Tinbergen Institute.
Nothing else about his career was checked for this page.
Key papers
Schwardmann, P., & van der Weele, J. (2019). Deception and self-deception. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(10), 1055-1061. doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0666-7.
In the paper's two experiments, with 688 participants combined, people told they could earn money by persuading a partner were more overconfident in private than a control group, and raising confidence made participants more persuasive later.
Key ideas
The institutional announcement describes his work as sitting at the intersection of economics and psychology, with motivated cognition at its centre. The 2019 paper applies that frame to a long-standing evolutionary claim. If people deceive themselves in order to persuade, an incentive to persuade should raise private confidence. The experiments found that it did.
The paper does not claim to show why a mind would work this way. It treats overconfidence as possibly adaptive, with social benefits, and reports the incentive effect on beliefs and the later effect on persuasion.
Sources
- Schwardmann, P., & van der Weele, J. (2019). Nature Human Behaviour, 3(10), 1055-1061. Abstract via the RePEc record.
- Amsterdam School of Economics, University of Amsterdam (17 January 2023). Announcement of his appointment as Professor of Economic Psychology.