Behavioral and Experimental Public Administration Lab (BEPAL)

Asmus Leth Olsen regularly writes articles for Berlingske based on his research. His research also appears in other media outlets. Find the latest media coverage here:

"Offentlige organisationer skal i dag være alting for alle mennesker" Berlingske, May 28th, 2023

"Velfærdssamfundets »skæbnestund« sætter regeringen i et dilemma" Berlingske, May 1st, 2023

"Et gys er gået gennem lærerværelserne i denne uge" Berlingske, December 12th, 2022

"Alle taler om de manglende hænder – bare ikke farven på dem" Berlingske, November 13th, 2022

"Ny undersøgelse er ikke rar læsning, hvis man drømmer om en velfungerende administration" Berlingske, October 17th, 2022

"Kvinder undersælger sig selv" Berlingske, June 23th, 2022

"DR-satire er god reklame for videnskab" Berlingske, May 24th, 2022

"Vi forsker for meget" Berlingske, April 4th, 2022

"Flere penge på forsvar har aldrig været en folkesag" Berlingske, March 4th, 2022

"Danmark kunne være hele verdens embedsmandsskole" Berlingske, February 7th, 2022

"Er det virkelig penge, som motiverer sygeplejersker?" Berlingske, December 12th, 2021

"Vil danskerne helst køre med H.C. Andersen-taxa i velfærdsstaten?" Berlingske, November 14th, 2021

"Nobelprisen i økonomi fortæller mere om, hvad der sker i livets store lotteri" Berlingske, October 18th, 2021

"Glem hjemmearbejde – Staten er ikke klar til at blive administreret fra privaten" Berlingske, September 18th, 2021

"Her er tre ønsker til den nye uddannelses- og forskningsminister" Berlingske, August 20th, 2021

"Forskere er uenige om aktivistisk forskning" Kristeligt Dagblad, June 9th, 2021

"Forsker spotter hykleri i egne rækker: Hvor var protesterne, da venstrefløjen krævede opgør med "neoliberal" økonomisk teori og lukning af DTUs Center for Olie og Gas?" Berlingske, June 9th, 2021

"Frivillige vacciner for papirnusserne" Berlingske, May 15th, 2021

"Forsker: Måske kan solnedgangsklausuler bremse den konstant malende lovgivningsmølle" Berlingske, April 17th, 2021

"Grønlændere opfatter deres land som korrupt" Kristeligt Dagblad, March 23th, 2021

"Myndighederne skal ride på ryggen af danskernes vaccinebegejstring" Berlingske, March 11th, 2021

"Den største konflikt mellem Jylland og Sjælland handler måske om pjæk" Berlingske, February 15th, 2021

"To nye studier dokumenterer diskrimination mod indvandrere i Danmark" Videnskab, February 3rd, 2021

"Det er svært for Mohammads søn at skifte skole" Berlingske, January 18th, 2021

"Det er nemmere for Peters søn at skifte skole end for Mohammads: 'Det er diskrimination'" DR, January 8th, 2021

"America's vaccine distribution needs a shot in the ar‪m‬" The Weeds, January 6th, 2021

"Vi har glemt forårets forsigtighedsprincip i covid-19-vaccinedebatten" Berlingske, December 15th, 2020

"Syv ting vi lærte i krydsfeltet mellem videnskab og politik under corona" Ræson, December 5th, 2020

"Vi er også selv lidt skyld i regeringens overiver i minksagen" Berlingske, November 13th, 2020

"Tænk, hvis cheferne i DR løste #metoo med samme iver, som de forskyder skylden" Berlingske, October 14th, 2020

"Når det kommer til #MeToo, kan vi lære meget af saudiarabiske mænd" Berlingske, September 17th, 2020

"En del af klimabevægelsen er villig til at se den globale pandemi i en frelserrolle" Berlingske, August 24th, 2020 

"Anti-diskriminationsgribbene lægger an til landing" Berlingske, July 27th, 2020

"Det er ikke farligt at give modstanderen lidt ret i racismedebatten" Berlingske, June 28th, 2020

"Politikere elsker eksperter - når eksperterne giver dem ret" Berlingske, May 30th, 2020

"Fra nu af skal politikerne være kreative og ikke kun villige til at bruge penge - her er nogle muligheder" Berlingske, May 2nd, 2020 

"Forskere: Alle siger, at verden aldrig bliver den samme - men måske er det netop det, den gør?" Berlingske, April 6th, 2020

"Corona-epidemien er de unge mod de gamle" Berlingske, March 29th, 2020 

"Undersøgelse tester danskerne: Skal vi redde menneskeliv eller økonomien? " Jyllands-Posten, March 25th, 2020 

"Politik er ikke en hobbysport" Berlingske, March 11th, 2020 

"Coronavirus viser, at autokratier som Kina mangler røgalarmer" Berlingske, February 6th, 2020

“Hvis en politiker mangler lige præcist 977 sygeplejersker, skal du tænde for dit alarmberedskab” Berlingske, October 5th, 2019.

“Fremfor at tvangsflytte folk eller sprænge højhuse i luften, skulle vi måske prøve med en smule rådgivning” Berlingske, September 8th, 2019.

”USAs unikke samfundsproblem: Hvorfor dræber amerikanerne hinanden?” Berlingske, August 11th, 2019.

”Danskerne er tillidsfulde og ærlige” Berlingske, July 13th, 2019.

”Forhandlinger om regeringsdannelse skræmmer partierne” Berlingske, June 7th, 2019.

TrygFonden is working to improve conditions regarding 12 important societal issues. The research project "Raising Awareness without Raising Fears" showed that Danish citizens have limited knowledge about the prevalence of burglaries in Denmark, one of the 12 issues, even though there has been a dramatic decrease during the last six years. The project also showed how a simple flyer intervention with factual statistical information could improve the knowledge level of citizens.

That raises a bigger question about what the Danish citizens really know about the development in Trygfondens' 12 societal issues and how this knowledge can be heightened through campaigns designed to draw attention to and possibly help solve the problems in the future. The Danish citizens' level of knowledge regarding the issues can be crucial to solving them in the long run. Knowledge can affect the behavior of the citizen, their relation to other citizens, and maybe most importantly their ability to hold politicians and decision-makers accountable for solving the problems.

The aim of the project is to provide answers to fundamental questions, that will enable Trygfonden to navigate the public debate concerning the 12 societal issues. At the same time, the project connects to a broader scientific agenda, which places Trygfondens' understanding of the Danish citizens' knowledge of the 12 societal issues in line with research of great interest at the moment concerning trust, polarization, and correction of misperceptions and misinformation in the public sphere. 

Read the article "Correcting Crime Misperceptions with Statistics? Evidence from two Field Experiments in Online Local Media" here
Abstract: Decades of falling crime rates across the Western world are not reflected in public opinion: Citizens generally perceive crime to be on the rise. This decoupling of facts and perceptions of crime threatens effective problem-solving in democracies which relies on citizens’ factual beliefs to hold politicians accountable. Across two field experiments, we randomly assign approximately 1 million crime statistics ads in half of 91 online newspapers. With an unrelated follow-up survey to readers (n = 997), we find no meaningful or significant effect of factual statistical crime information on crime knowledge or subjective fear of crime. Across both studies, effects are small, insignificant, and well below a set of benchmark studies. Overall, the results are discouraging for the idea that more extensive media coverage of statistical facts will eliminate misperceptions among citizens on important societal issues.

Explaining variation in corruption across political systems is an important task. Recent research among developing countries finds that public employees are more willing to engage in corruption than their private sector counterparts. The project investigates the link between corruption behavior and public employment in a Danish setting. Denmark is an interesting case as it enjoys some of the lowest levels of corruption globally. This is done via a number of innovative experimental studies which can measure indirect corruption behavior. We expect public-private differences in corruption behavior to be very different in Denmark than found elsewhere.

Read the article "Sustaining Honesty In Public Service: The Role of Selection", published in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy here. 
Abstract: We study the role of self-selection in public service in sustaining honesty in the public sector. Focusing on the world’s least corrupt country, Denmark, we use a survey experiment to document a strong self-selection of more honest individuals into public service. This result differs sharply from existing findings from more corrupt settings. Differences in pro-social versus pecuniary motivation appear central to the observed selection pattern. Dishonest individuals are more pecuniarily motivated and self-select out of public service into higher-paying private sector jobs. Accordingly, we find that increasing public sector wages would attract more dishonest candidates to public service in Denmark.

Read the article "Behavioral Dishonesty in the Public Sector", published in Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory here.
Abstract: We investigate the usefulness of the dice game paradigm to public administration as a standardized way of measuring (dis)honesty among individuals, groups, and societies. Measures of dishonesty are key for the field’s progress in understanding individual, organizational, and societal differences in unethical behavior and corruption. We first describe the dice game paradigm and its advantages and then discuss a range of considerations for how to implement it. Next, we highlight the potential of the dice game paradigm across two diverse studies: prospective public employees in Denmark (n = 441) and prospective public employees in 10 different countries with very different levels of corruption (n = 1,091). In the first study, we show how individual-level behavioral dishonesty is very strongly negatively correlated with public service motivation. In the second study, we find that widely used country-level indicators of corruption are strongly correlated with the average behavioral dishonesty among prospective public employees. The results illustrate the importance of the validated dice game paradigm to shed light on core questions that link micro- and macro-level dynamics of dishonesty and corruption in the public sector.

Zeroing in on campaigns against burglaries, our project tries to understand whether raising awareness about how one can avoid being burglarized can have unintended consequences, and if so, how we can mitigate such consequences so that we can raise awareness without raising fears. In doing so, we hope to further our understanding of how public information and the public psyche interact and develop some general lessons for practitioners, who want to design awareness campaigns without imposing negative unintended consequences. We focus on burglaries, because it is one of the types of crime that Danes are the most concerned about, and a type of crime for which there have been many information campaigns in recent years. The goal of this project is both to solve a concrete problem, specifically how we can improve information campaigns, but it also tries to advance our understanding of how the public information environment might affect the public psyche in hitherto unexplored ways. In particular, we will be able to make inferences about how whether discussing and informing people about risky outcomes changes their view about the likelihood of these outcomes occurring, and in turn, their general sense of safety and trust.

Read the article “Reducing Bias in Citizens’ Perception of Crime Rates”, published in The Journal of Politics here.
Abstract: Citizens are, on average, too pessimistic when assessing the trajectory of current crime trends. In this study, we examine whether we can correct this perceptual bias with respect to burglaries. Using a field experiment coupled with a large panel survey (n=4,895), we explore whether a public information campaign can reduce misperceptions about the prevalence of burglaries. Embedding the correct information about burglary rates in a direct mail campaign, we find that it is possible to substantially reduce citizens’ misperceptions. Importantly, the effects are not short-lived: they are detectable several weeks after the mailer was sent, but they are temporary, and eventually, the perceptual bias re-emerges. Our results suggest that if citizens were continually supplied with correct information about crime rates, they would be less pessimistic. Reducing bias in citizens’ perception of crime rates might therefore be a matter of adjusting the supply of (dis)information about crime.

We hope that public officials will treat us fairly, offering equal access to public services whatever our background. Whether bureaucrats meet such ideals in practice is another question. The discretion inherent in their jobs gives them the opportunity to discriminate across groups. We offer evidence that school officials in Denmark are likely to engage in such discrimination: they are less likely to offer positions in schools to families with a Muslim name than to their Danish peers.  

To understand bureaucratic discrimination patterns, we distinguish between allocative exclusion and administrative burdens. Allocative exclusion refers to bureaucrats systematically providing resources to some groups more than others. We test if officials engage in discrimination via allocative exclusion by offering school places to families with a Muslim name less frequently than to their Danish peers. We, therefore, examine actual decisions to allocate public resources, not just responses to requests for information.  

Second, bureaucrats can apply more indirect forms of discrimination, by imposing administrative burdens differentially across groups. Administrators might decline to share information with, be less welcoming toward others, or demand more documentation from out-groups. The applicant might not receive a direct rejection, and still participate in the bureaucratic process, but under less favorable circumstances. We examine if bureaucrats impose greater compliance and psychological costs on Muslim families.  

We undertook a national field experiment where putative Muslim and Danish families sent an email requesting to transfer their child to a local school (n=1,698). School transfer requests are common in the Danish context. We examine access to primary education because it matters profoundly for later-life outcomes and is central to cultivating the civic skills needed for citizenship. Muslims in Europe often play a double out-group role, differentiated in both religion and ethnicity from predominantly Christian or non-religious natives. Muslim immigrants perform poorly in Danish elementary schools, contributing to later-life socio-economic disparities. Furthermore, the risk of anti-Muslim bias has been exacerbated by the refugee crisis, which has encouraged anti-immigrant politics across Europe. 

The large differences in responses we find – 25% of those with Danish names were directly offered a spot at the school, compared to 15% of those with Muslim names – provides unambiguous evidence of discrimination via allocative exclusion. We also find that Danish bureaucrats discriminate in how they impose administrative burdens, seeking more information and offering a less welcoming tone to Muslims.

Read the article “The Unequal Distribution of Opportunity: A National Audit Study of Bureaucratic Discrimination in Primary School Access”, published in the American Journal of Political Science here.

Abstract: Administrators can use their discretion to discriminate in the provision of public services via two mechanisms. They make decisions to allocate public services, allowing them to discriminate via allocative exclusion. They can also discriminate by targeting administrative burdens toward outgroups to make bureaucratic processes more onerous. While prior audit studies only examine the use of administrative burdens, we offer evidence of both mechanisms. We sent a request to all Danish primary schools (N = 1,698) from an ingroup (a typical Danish name) and outgroup (a Muslim name) father asking if it was possible to move his child to the school. While both groups received similar response rates, we find large differences in discrimination via allocative exclusion: Danes received a clear acceptance 25% of the time, compared to 15% for Muslims. Muslims also faced greater administrative burdens in the form of additional questions.

Read the article ”Moral Dilemmas and Trust in Leaders during a Global Health Crisis”, published in Nature Human Behaviour here.
Abstract: Trust in leaders is central to citizen compliance with public policies. One potential determinant of trust is how leaders resolve conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles in moral dilemmas. Past research suggests that utilitarian responses to dilemmas can both erode and enhance trust in leaders: sacrificing some people to save many others (‘instrumental harm’) reduces trust, while maximizing the welfare of everyone equally (‘impartial beneficence’) may increase trust. In a multi-site experiment spanning 22 countries on six continents, participants (N = 23,929) completed self-report (N = 17,591) and behavioural (N = 12,638) measures of trust in leaders who endorsed utilitarian or non-utilitarian principles in dilemmas concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. Across both the self-report and behavioural measures, endorsement of instrumental harm decreased trust, while endorsement of impartial beneficence increased trust. These results show how support for different ethical principles can impact trust in leaders and inform effective public communication during times of global crisis.