Chair of Social & Economic Psychology

Project team

| Prof. Dr. Anja Achtziger (Zeppelin University)

| Prof. Dr. Xiaoge Dong (Zeppelin University)

Cooperation partner

| University Jaume I, Castellon, Spain

About the project

The RUTHLESS project explores a striking paradox in human behavior: while many individuals act generously in bilateral, low-stakes situations, the same people may choose to inflict significant harm on large groups. More specifically, prosocial behavior in the small is fully compatible with morally-outrageous behavior in high-stakes, high-impact decisions where a decision maker can obtain a large personal gain at the expense of significantly damaging a large number of other people. This phenomenon is studied through the innovative “Big Robber Game,” which simulates real-world scenarios where individuals can profit at the expense of others—mirroring behaviors seen in corporate scandals and financial misconduct.

Led by Prof. Dr. Anja Achtziger at Zeppelin Universität Friedrichshafen, in collaboration with Universidad Jaume I (Spain), the project investigates the psychological, motivational, and cultural factors that drive such socially harmful decisions. Through a combination of laboratory experiments, large-scale surveys, and cross-cultural comparisons, RUTHLESS aims to provide insights into the roots of antisocial economic behavior and inform the development of strategies to promote ethical decision-making in high-stakes environments.

Project team

| Prof. Dr. Anja Achtziger (Zeppelin University)

| Manuel Faraji (Zeppelin University)

| Dr. Dmitrii Galkin (Zeppelin University)

Cooperation partners

| German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence GmbH Kaiserslautern

| Rhineland-Palatinate University of Technology Kaiserslautern-Landau

About the project

TrADeMaS - Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) Laufzeit 2024-2027

The project ("Transparency of Algorithmic Decision Making Systems", TrADeMaS) investigates whether explanatory approaches for algorithmic decision making systems (ADM) actually create transparency or only generate a pseudo-transparency.

Although purely subjective satisfaction and emotional aspects are helpful in predicting whether people are motivated to work with ADM systems, they do not provide any information about the extent to which an ADM system has been understood cognitively and rationally - this is precisely what the project aims to investigate.
Furthermore, it will be investigated whether the characteristics of certain population groups also play a role here (e.g. their cognitive abilities, level of knowledge on the subject of AI, level of education, language skills, age, etc.).
The project is being carried out in close cooperation with the Department of Computer Science at the University Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU, Prof. Dr. Katharina Zweig). The computer scientists at RPTU are providing the ADM systems required for the experimental studies