Empirische Rechtswissenschaft im Fokus: Dieses Buch bietet einen fundierten Überblick über Stand und Perspektiven interdisziplinärer Rechtswissenschaften. Von Verfassungs-, Europa-, Kartell- und Strafrecht über richterliches Entscheidungsverhalten bis hin zu Fragen von Politikberatung, Arbeitsmärkten und Gemeinschaftsgütern entfalten die Beiträge ein breites thematisches Spektrum. Zugleich zeigen sie, wie Verhaltenswissenschaften, datengetriebene Methoden und Künstliche Intelligenz unser Verständnis des Rechts vertiefen und verändern. Sie zeichnen dabei auch das Wirken von Christoph Engel, Direktor am Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung von Gemeinschaftsgütern, nach. 

What characterizes individuals who stand up and take action against violations of fundamental moral principles, even in the face of personal risk and adversity? Due to methodological and ethical challenges, we are limited in our understanding of personality dispositions that predict who acts morally courageously in situations of severe wrongdoings and considerable risk. In Germany and Austria, we recruited recipients of public awards for outstanding moral courage (n = 54) and individuals who nominated themselves to have acted morally courageously (n = 48). We contrasted these morally courageous individuals with a demographically matched reference group of people who reported not to have acted morally courageously before (n = 323), and with normative samples of the German population. Results showed three key patterns: First, among the HEXACO personality factors, heightened extraversion consistently distinguished the morally courageous groups from the reference group. Second, membership in the morally courageous groups was predicted by heightened moral attentiveness and anger proneness, and lowered endorsement of loyalty and authority, indicating exceptional moral functioning of the morally courageous. Third, the morally courageous were characterized by diminished risk avoidance and social anxiety, suggesting that they encounter a lower psychological barrier posed by fear of negative social evaluation.

Sexist content is widespread on social media and can reduce women's psychological well-being and their willingness to participate in online discourse, making it a societal issue. To counter these effects, social media platforms employ moderators. To date, little is known about the effectiveness of different forms of moderation in creating a safe space and their acceptance, in particular from the perspective of women as members of the targeted group and users in general (rather than perpetrators). In this research, we propose that some common forms of moderation can be systematized along two facets of visibility, namely visibility of sexist content and of counterspeech. In an online experiment (N = 839), we manipulated these two facets and tested how they shaped social norms, feelings of safety, and intent to participate, as well as fairness, trustworthiness, and efficacy evaluations. In line with our predictions, deletion of sexist content - i.e., its invisibility - and (public) counterspeech - i.e., its visibility - against visible sexist content contributed to creating a safe space. Looking at the underlying psychological mechanism, we found that these effects were largely driven by changes in what was perceived normative in the presented context. Interestingly, deletion of sexist content was judged as less fair than counterspeech against visible sexist content. Our research contributes to a growing body of literature that highlights the importance of norms in creating safer online environments and provides practical implications for moderators for selecting actions that can be effective and accepted.

Individuals and groups are frequently targets of bullying, sexual harassment, and hate speech on online platforms. Such norm violations can have detrimental negative consequences, for instance by causing psychological harm and damaging social cohesion. Finding ways to reduce and prevent online norm violations is hence crucial. Online users may play an important role in this context. We argue that it can be considered morally courageous if users decide to take a stand against perceived violations of their own moral beliefs and endorsed norms, as it may imply substantial risks for themselves. With this chapter, we aim to advance our understanding of online moral courage as a relatively new phenomenon. First, we provide an examination of critical characteristics of online environments that may facilitate or hinder moral courage. Second, we discuss consequences of online moral courage by considering its effects on perpetrators, further online users, and the general tonality of the online discourse. Last, we integrate insights on the facilitators and obstacles of online moral courage and its consequences to provide practical recommendations for the design and management of online platforms and user education and training.

Introduction: Moral courage manifests in acts intended to intervene to stopor redress witnessed moral norm violations, despite the risk of negative conse-quences for the intervener. We investigate moral courage in everyday life and askwhat personality processes are involved. Based on an extended process modelof moral courage, we derived hypotheses on cognitive and emotional processesthat should facilitate or hinder intervention. Further, we identified candidate per-sonality dispositions that should shape these processes and thereby predict whotends to intervene against others' norm violations and who does not.Methods: Using a quota-based sample of the German population (N = 1108), weconducted a personality assessment, followed by a 7-day experience samplingduring which participants reported norm violations witnessed in their daily lifeas well as their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral reactions.Results: In total, 678 participants reported 1965 norm violations and intervenedagainst 32% of them. Dispositional self-efficacy facilitated intervention by increas-ing a sense of efficacy when confronted with others' norm violations. Conversely,dispositional moral disengagement hindered intervention by reducing perceivedown responsibility.Discussion: Our findings provide novel insights into the situations affordingmoral courage in everyday life, and the personality processes that uniquely guidethis behavior.