Sebastian Grüneisen has been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council

Sebastian Grüneisen, Postdoc at the Center for Adaptive Rationality has been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). With the ERC Starting Grant, the European Union is supporting promising scientist at the beginning of an independent career with up to 1.5 million euros.

Sebastian Grüneisen will use the grant to investigate the developmental origins of corruption from a cooperation perspective. For this purpose, he will conduct cross-sectional and cross-cultural experiments with young children examining their tendency to engage in a range of paradigmatic corrupt behaviors and how it relates to their developing cooperative psychology. The project seeks to understand if the development of core cooperative capacities (e.g., a sense of obligation, reciprocity motives), in addition to generating socially beneficial outcomes, also promotes the emergence of specific ethical transgressions.