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2025
Rips, S. Waner, Motro, M., Motro, U., Kolodny, O., & Harari, A. . (2025). Human-induced pheromone pollution leads to changes in alternative mating tactics of moths. Behavioral Ecology. Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract
Environmental changes driven by anthropogenic activities often disrupt animal communication and mating behavior. Consequently, these changes may force animals to adopt alternative mating tactics and strategies to find a mate. The mating disruption technique is an environmentally friendly tactic often used to control the pink-bollworm moth population in cotton fields. Though mating disruption is eco-friendly, it represents a Human-Induced Rapid Environmental Change for the targeted moths. Mating disruption involves spreading a synthetic version of the species-specific sex pheromone in the field, creating a pheromone-polluted environment, making it difficult for male moths to locate females and thereby reducing mating rates. We hypothesized that the intense sexual selection and environmental changes affecting communication would lead moths to increase their use of alternative mating strategies. An observed alternative mating behavior in male pink bollworm moths is disturbing mating pairs to displace the male and mate with the female. We compared this behavior between two populations and found that males long exposed to mating disruption disturbed mating pairs more frequently than those never exposed to it. In addition, males with a prolonged history of exposure to mating disruption showed reduced choosiness of females and increased their mating rate with small females of lower reproductive potential. The success rate of the observed couple disturbance was low. Nonetheless, this strategy, alongside other strategies, may contribute to the males’ reproductive success when facing the additional challenge of locating females due to the pheromone-polluted environment.
Peled, O., Greenbaum, G., & Bloch, G. . (2025). Diversification of social complexity following a major evolutionary transition in bees . Current Biology. Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract
How social complexity evolved remains a long-standing enigma. In most animal groups, social complexity is typically classified into a few discrete classes. This approach is oversimplified and constrains our inference of social evolution to a narrow trajectory consisting of transitions between classes. Such categorical classifications also limit quantitative studies on the molecular and environmental drivers of social complexity. The recent accumulation of relevant quantitative data has set the stage to overcome these limitations. Here, we propose a data-driven, high-dimensional approach for studying the full diversity of social phenotypes. We curated and analyzed a comprehensive dataset encompassing 17 social traits across 80 species and studied the evolution of social complexity in bees. We found that honey bees, stingless bees, and bumble bees underwent a major evolutionary transition ∼80 mya, inconsistent with the stepwise progression of the social ladder conceptual framework. This major evolutionary transition was followed by a phase of substantial phenotypic diversification of social complexity. Other bee lineages display a continuum of social complexity, ranging from solitary to simple societies, but do not reach the levels of social complexity seen in honey bees, stingless bees, and bumble bees. Bee evolution, therefore, provides a remarkable demonstration of a macroevolutionary process in which a major transition removed biological constraints and opened novel evolutionary opportunities, driving the exploration of the landscape of social phenotypes. Our approach can be extended to incorporate additional data types and readily applied to illuminate the evolution of social complexity in other animal groups.
Gordon-Hecker, T., Choshen-Hillel, S., Ben-Simon, E., Walker, M. P., Perry, A., & Gileles-Hillel, A. . (2025). Restless nights, cold hearts: Poor sleep causally blunts empathy. International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, 25(1). Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract

Poor sleep is pervasive in modern society. Poor sleep is associated with major physical and mental health consequences, as well as with impaired cognitive function. Less is known about the relationship between sleep and emotional and interpersonal behavior. In this work, we investigate whether poor sleep impairs empathy, an important building block of human interaction and prosocial behavior. We aimed to capture the effects of poor sleep on the various aspects of empathy: trait and state, affect and cognition.

Study 1 (n = 155) assessed daily habitual sleep over several days, and global sleep quality in the past month. Participants who reported worse sleep quality exhibited lower empathic caring and perspective-taking traits. Study 2 (n = 347) induced a one-night disruption of sleep continuity to test a causal relationship between sleep and empathy. Participants in the sleep disrupted condition had to briefly wake up five times over the night, whereas the sleep-rested controls slept normally. In the next morning, participants’ empathy and prosocial intentions were assessed. Participants in the sleep disruption condition exhibited lower empathic sensitivity and less prosocial decision-making than sleep-rested controls.

The main contribution of this work is in providing a robust demonstration of the multi-faceted detrimental effects of poor sleep on trait and state empathy. Our findings demonstrate that poor sleep causally impairs empathic response to the suffering of others. These findings highlight the need for greater public attention to adequate sleep, which may impact empathy on a societal level.

Ensenberg-Diamant, N., Hassin, R. R., & Aviezer, H. . (2025). Profound individual differences in contextualized emotion perception . Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract
Emotion perception is a fundamental aspect of our lives because others’ emotions may provide important information about their reactions, attitudes, intentions, and behavior. Following the seminal work of Ekman, much of the research on emotion perception has focused on facial expressions. Recent evidence suggests, however, that facial expressions may be more ambiguous than previously assumed and that context also plays an important role in deciphering the emotional states of others. Here, we adopt a novel approach, breaking down the means and documenting a robust trait in emotion perception. In six experiments with 671 participants, we find evidence for striking individual differences in emotion perception, with different people presenting profound differences in weighting the face versus the extrafacial context. Importantly, these differences are stable over time, stimuli, and paradigms. Our data show that individuals are interpreting identical emotional displays as communicating different emotions. Implications of these robust differences are discussed.
Ben-Oren, Y., Hovers, E., Kolodny, O., & Creanza, N. . (2025). Cultural innovation is not only a product of cognition but also of cultural context. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract
Innovations, such as symbolic artifacts, are a product of cognitive abilities but also of cultural context. Factors that may determine the emergence and retention of an innovation include the population's pre-existing cultural repertoire, exposure to relevant ways of thinking, and the invention's utility. Thus, we suggest that the production of symbolic artifacts is not guaranteed even in cognitively advanced societies.
Jha, S., Shayo, M., & Weiss, C. M. . (2025). Financial market exposure increases generalized trust . Journal of Public Economics. Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract
How can we build trust, especially in polarized societies? We propose that exposure to broad financial markets—where individuals place their assets in the hands of large groups of unfamiliar agents who nonetheless have the incentive and ability to promote their interests—can contribute to generalized trust. In a randomized controlled trial, we encourage Israelis to hold or trade stocks for up to seven weeks. We find that participation in financial markets increases the probability of expressing generalized trust by about 6 percentage points, equivalent to a quarter of the control group mean. The effects seem to be driven by political partisans along the left–right spectrum in Israel, and are robust to negative price changes. Thus, trust is not only a cause but can also be an effect of participation in financial markets.
2024
Principles of Macroeconomics
Frank, R., Bernanke, B., Antonovics, K., & Heffetz, O. . (2024). Principles of Macroeconomics. McGraw Hill. Retrieved from Publisher's Version
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Embark on an exploration of macroeconomics with its 2024 release, unfolding against the backdrop of unprecedented economic transformations. As the world grapples with challenges, this product’s focused approach equips you to decipher the complexities of macroeconomics in a rapidly evolving environment. This product’s philosophy stands strong: strip away the unnecessary and intensify focus on central concepts. Our goal is to produce macroeconomic naturalists who see each economic event because of a cost-benefit calculation. From understanding the reasons behind holding U.S. dollars to unraveling the impact of inflation, this textbook actively engages students, making macroeconomics a language they speak fluently.  With heavy emphasis on globalization, this text navigates real wage inequality, costs and benefits of trade, protectionism, and the link between exchange rates and monetary policy. Frank, Nobel-Prize winner: Bernanke, Antonovics, and Heffetz bring expertise to every chapter keeping the learning fresh, engaging, and always up-to-date. 
Bar-Hillel, M. . (2024). Daniel Kahneman: The psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for replacing Homo economicus with flesh-and-blood humans . Retrieved from Publisher's Version dp_763_text.pdf
Karlinsky, A. . (2024). International Completeness of Death Registration. Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract

BACKGROUND

Death registration completeness, the share of deaths captured by countries’ vital registration systems, vary substantially across countries. Estimates of completeness, even recent ones, are outdated or contradictory for many countries.

OBJECTIVE

We derive the most up-to-date and consistent estimates of death registration completeness in as many countries as possible.

RESULTS

Death registration is complete in Europe, North America, and other developed countries. In developing countries, completeness varies by region. While some have complete death registration, many countries completeness ranges from 40% to 75%. Regionally, Africa has lowest death registration completeness, and in many countries no registration data was located. In Latin America and Asia, several countries have improved their registration compared to previously available estimates.

CONTRIBUTION

This paper presents the publicly available International Completeness of Death Registration (ICDR) dataset: https://github.com/akarlinsky/death registration ICDR contains the annual amount of deaths registered and death registration completeness in 193 countries from 2015 to 2019.

Karlinsky, A., & Shayo, M. . (2024). On the Manipulation of Information by Governments . Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract
Governmental information manipulation has been hard to measure and study systematically. We hand-collect data from official and unofficial sources in 134 countries to estimate misreporting of Covid mortality during 2020-21. We find that between 45%–55% of governments misreported the number of deaths. The lion's share of misreporting cannot be attributed to a country's capacity to accurately diagnose and report deaths. Contrary to some theoretical expectations, there is little evidence of governments exaggerating the severity of the pandemic. Misreporting is higher where governments face few social and institutional constraints, in countries holding elections, and in countries with a communist legacy.
Reclaiming the Public
Dorfman, A., & Harel, A. . (2024). Reclaiming the Public. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from Publisher's Version
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Reclaiming the Public defines and defends the intrinsic value of “the public” that resides in our public institutions and the officials that run them. The book argues that public institutions do not simply act for us but instead speak and act in our name; i.e., they represent us. Representation requires that decisions made by public institutions or officials are consistent with the perspectives of citizens. If the decisions satisfy this requirement, these decisions are attributable to citizens, and citizens can be held responsible for them. This theory of political authority accounts for major features of our legal system, such as the non-instrumental grounds for the separation of law-making powers, the non-instrumental value of constitutions, the limits of privatization, the nature and value of public property, and the impermissibility of using artificial intelligence in setting certain policies and making certain decisions.
2023
מודלים חישוביים במדעי הקוגניציה
Loewenstein, Y., & Shental, N. . (2023). מודלים חישוביים במדעי הקוגניציה (p. 370). Retrieved from Publisher's Version
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חוקר אמריקני נהג לטייל עם כלבו על קו המים בחוף אגם מישיגן ולזרוק כדור למרחק רב. הכלב, כך הבחין, חזר שוב ושוב על אותו דפוס פעולה: הוא רץ על החוף עד נקודה מסוימת, ואז קפץ לאגם ושחה עד הכדור. כיצד יודע הכלב לבחור פעם אחר פעם את המסלול היעיל ביותר מבחינתו?
התשובה לשאלה זו ולשאלות נוספות הנוגעות לתהליכי חשיבה טמונה במערך סבוך של רשתות נוירונים שכדי להבין אותם, אנו נדרשים לחישובים מורכבים. הספר מודלים חישוביים במדעי הקוגניציה משתמש בכלים מתמטיים כדי להסביר מהלכים קוגניטיביים, והניסויים והתופעות המתוארים בו מלווים בהסברים בהירים.

נעם שנטל הוא פרופסור במחלקה למדעי המחשב באוניברסיטה הפתוחה. מחקריו עוסקים בביולוגיה חישובית.
יונתן לוינשטיין הוא פרופסור במחלקות לנוירוביולוגיה ולמדעי הקוגניציה והמוח, וחבר במרכז אדמונד ולילי ספרא למדעי המוח ובמרכז פדרמן לחקר הרציונליות באוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים. מחקריו עוסקים באספקטים חישוביים במדעי המוח והקוגניציה.

Interactive Epistemology
Aumann, R. J. . (2023). Interactive Epistemology (p. 484). World Scientific. Retrieved from Publisher's Version
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Robert J Aumann has received numerous prizes, including the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 2005.

With his 1976 paper, "Agreeing to Disagree", Robert Aumann pioneered the subject of interactive epistemology: the study of what people know, and what they know about what others know. Since then, the discipline has burgeoned enormously. This book documents Aumann's work leading to the 1976 paper and his subsequent contributions to the discipline. The scientific controversies emanating from his work are also included.

Karlinsky, A., & Torrisi, O. . (2023). The Casualties of War: An Excess Mortality Estimate of Lives Lost in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict. Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract
Who and how many died in the 2020 Karabakh War? With limited evidence provided by authorities, media outlets, and human rights organizations, still little is known about the death toll caused by the 44-day conflict in and around Nagorno-Karabakh. This paper provides a first assessment of the human cost of the war. Using age–sex vital registration data from Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the de facto Republic of Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh, we difference the 2020 observed mortality values from expected deaths based on trends in mortality between 2015 and 2019 to offer sensible estimates of excess mortality resulting from the conflict. We compare and contrast our findings with neighboring peaceful countries with similar mortality patterns and socio-cultural background and discuss them against the backdrop of the concurrent first wave of Covid-19. We estimate that the war led to almost 6,500 excess deaths among people aged 15–49. Nearly 2,800 excess losses occurred in Armenia, 3,400 in Azerbaijan, and 310 in de facto Artsakh. Deaths were highly concentrated among late adolescent and young adult males, suggesting that most excess mortality was directly related to combat. Beyond the human tragedy, for small countries like Armenia and Azerbaijan, such loss of young men represents a considerable long-term cost for future demographic, economic, and social development.
Msemburi, W., Karlinsky, A., Knutson, V., Aleshin-Guendel, S., Chatterji, S., & Wakefield, J. . (2023). The WHO Estimates of Excess Mortality Associated With the COVID-19 Pandemic. Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract

The World Health Organization has a mandate to compile and disseminate statistics on mortality, and we have been tracking the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic since the beginning of 2020. Reported statistics on COVID-19 mortality are problematic for many countries owing to variations in testing access, differential diagnostic capacity and inconsistent certification of COVID-19 as cause of death. Beyond what is directly attributable to it, the pandemic has caused extensive collateral damage that has led to losses of lives and livelihoods. Here we report a comprehensive and consistent measurement of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by estimating excess deaths, by month, for 2020 and 2021. We predict the pandemic period all-cause deaths in locations lacking complete reported data using an overdispersed Poisson count framework that applies Bayesian inference techniques to quantify uncertainty. We estimate 14.83 million excess deaths globally, 2.74 times more deaths than the 5.42 million reported as due to COVID-19 for the period. There are wide variations in the excess death estimates across the six World Health Organization regions. We describe the data and methods used to generate these estimates and highlight the need for better reporting where gaps persist. We discuss various summary measures, and the hazards of ranking countries’ epidemic responses.

Heffetz, O., O’Donoghue, T., & Schneider, H. S. . (2023). A Note on the Identification of Present Bias and Forgetting from Task-Completion Data.Abstract

Recent work highlights that identification of present bias using task-completion data is problematic. In this note, we add to the literature in two ways. First, whereas prior work considers single-deadline tasks, we consider tasks for which there is a series of deadlines, with incremental penalties for missing each deadline. Second, we also consider identification of forgetting from the same type of data. Using numerical examples, we demonstrate that identification of present bias is still problematic even when there are multiple deadlines. Identification of forgetting perhaps holds more promise theoretically, although in practice we suspect it too is problematic.

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Gonczarowski, Y. A., Heffetz, O., & Thomas, C. . (2023). Strategyproofness-Exposing Mechanism Descriptions. Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract

A menu description defines a mechanism to player i in two steps. Step (1) uses the reports of other players to describe i's menu: the set of i's potential outcomes. Step (2) uses i's report to select i's favorite outcome from her menu. Can menu descriptions better expose strategyproofness, without sacrificing simplicity? We propose a new, simple menu description of Deferred Acceptance. We prove that—in contrast with other common matching mechanisms—this menu description must differ substantially from the corresponding traditional description. We demonstrate, with a lab experiment on two simple mechanisms, the promise and challenges of menu descriptions.

Dreyfuss, B., Glicksohn, O., Heffetz, O., & Romm, A. . (2023). Deferred Acceptance with News Utility. Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract

Can incorporating expectations-based-reference-dependence (EBRD) considerations reduce seemingly dominated choices in the Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism? We run two experiments (total N = 500) where participants are randomly assigned into one of four DA variants—{static, dynamic} × {student proposing, student receiving}—and play ten simulated large-market school assignment problems. While a standard, reference-independent model predicts the same straightforward behavior across all problems and variants, a news-utility EBRD model predicts stark differences across variants and problems. As the EBRD model predicts, we find that (i) across variants, dynamic student receiving leads to significantly fewer deviations from straightforward behavior, (ii) across problems, deviations increase with competitiveness, and (iii) within specific problems, the specific deviations predicted by the EBRD model are indeed those commonly observed in the data.

Dekel, I., Cummings, R., Heffetz, O., & Ligett, K. . (2023). The Privacy Elasticity of Behavior: Conceptualization and Application. Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract

We propose and initiate the study of privacy elasticity—the responsiveness of economic variables to small changes in the level of privacy given to participants in an economic system. Individuals rarely experience either full privacy or a complete lack of privacy; we propose to use differential privacy—a computer-science theory increasingly adopted by industry and government—as a standardized means of quantifying continuous privacy changes. The resulting privacy measure implies a privacy-elasticity notion that is portable and comparable across contexts. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by estimating the privacy elasticity of public-good contributions in a lab experiment.

Heffetz, O., & Ishai, G. . (2023). Which Beliefs? Behavior-Predictive Beliefs are Inconsistent with Information-Based Beliefs: Evidence from Covid-19. Retrieved from Publisher's VersionAbstract

We investigate the relationship between (a) official information on COVID-19 infection and death case counts; (b) beliefs about such case counts, at present and in the future; (c) beliefs about average infection chance—in principle, directly calculable from (b); and (d) self-reported health-protective behavior. We elicit (b), (c), and (d) with a daily online survey in the US from March to August 2020 (N =~ 13,900). Beliefs about future infection cases are closely related to official information, but are inconsistent with beliefs about infection chances—risk perceptions—which are better predictors of reported behavior. We discuss potential implications for public communication of health-risk information.