About

Reuben Kline is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stony Brook University, a position he has held since 2018 after joining the department in 2011. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science with a concentration in Political Economy/Public Choice from the University of California, Irvine. His academic background also includes a Master of Arts in Mathematical Behavioral Science and a Master of Science in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, as well as a Master of Arts in International Trade and Investment Policy from George Washington University. Kline is the Director of the Behavioral Political Economy Lab at Stony Brook University and serves as the editor of the newsletter for the American Political Science Association’s organize section on Experimental Research. His research employs behavioral game theory, experiments, and survey research to investigate social dilemmas, climate change mitigation behavior, behavioral ethics, public opinion, and voting. He is currently studying the effects of moral hazard related to geoengineering solutions and using climate games to experiment on disaster prevention strategies. His work has been published in prominent journals such as Nature Climate Change, Nature Human Behaviour, and the Journal of Politics, among others.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Ecology
• Psychology
• Microeconomics
• Economics
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Public relations
• Law and economics
• Social psychology
• Law
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Business

Selected publications

• Meritocracy or malfeasance: violations of meritocracy erode civic rule following

  Frontiers in Behavioral Economics · 2025-02-21 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The perceived legitimacy of institutions, along with the voluntary compliance with authority that it undergirds, is crucial for stable governance and economic development. Legitimacy varies greatly across individuals and societies. We introduce a simple model of meritocratic equity—the notion that in a social exchange, individuals should receive greater compensation if their contributions exceed those of others. We argue that violations of meritocratic equity undermine the legitimacy of authority, leading to breaking rules, laws and civic norms—behaviors we refer to as justified malfeasance—in an effort to reduce perceived inequity. Using data from an incentivized laboratory experiment conducted in the United States and Italy and complemented by data from the World Values Survey, we investigate the effect of meritocratic violations on malfeasance. We find convergent evidence that meritocratic inequity explains variation in justified malfeasance across individuals and across countries. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for multiple equilibria in societal levels of malfeasance and voluntary compliance with authority.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Deservingness heuristics drive redistributive choices, but weights on recipient effort vary

  Humanities and Social Sciences Communications · 2025-07-04

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Building on the deservingness heuristic—evaluating recipients based on need and effort—from evolutionary psychology, we develop a simple model of altruism conditional on deservingness to explain individuals’ redistributive preferences. We test the model’s predictions using an incentivized experiment where participants could directly transfer their earned money to a recipient with varying levels of income and effort. When recipients’ effort is clearly signaled, most participants’ choices align with the model’s predicted need and effort effect. Using finite mixture regressions, we identify three types of redistributive preferences: highly responsive to effort, less responsive, and self-interested. These categories reflect varying weightings of recipients’ efforts within the model. Moreover, we find that redistributive patterns are associated with political ideology and economic values commonly assessed in surveys. However, when recipients’ effort is absent or ambiguous, income becomes the primary determinant of resource allocation, even when effort may be partially inferred.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Climate Games

  University of Michigan Press eBooks · 2023-07-19 · 2 citations

  bookSenior author

  Can humanity work together to mitigate the effects of climate change?<I> Climate Games</I> argues we can. This book brings together a decade and a half of experimentation, conducted by researchers around the world, which shows that people can and will work together to prevent disasters like climate change. These experiments, called <I>economic games</I>, put money on the line to create laboratory disasters. Participants must work together by spending a bit of money now to prevent themselves from losing even more money in the future. Will people sacrifice their own money to prevent disaster? Can people make wise decisions? And can people decide wisely on behalf of others? The answer is a resounding yes. <BR /><BR /> Yet real climate change is a complex social dilemma involving the world's nearly eight billion inhabitants. In the real world, the worst effects of climate change are likely to be felt by developing countries, while most of the decisions will be made by rich, industrialized countries. And while the world as a whole would be better off if all nations reduced their greenhouse gas emissions, any given nation could decide it would be even better off if it continued emitting and let other nations take care of the problem. These disaster experiments test how real people respond to climate change's unique constellation of challenges and deliver a positive message: People will prevent disaster.

  PublisherDOI

• Who Do You Trust? Institutions That Constrain Leaders Help People Prevent Disaster

  The Journal of Politics · 2022-05-17 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author

  We are vulnerable to disasters, yet citizens hesitate to spend on disaster prevention. Is this because the problem is too complex? Or are citizens concerned political elites will behave poorly? Using an experimental economic game that simulates disaster, we tested whether people can understand when an institution incentivizes elites to exaggerate the cost of disaster prevention. Citizen players could contribute money to prevent disaster. Leader players knew the cost of prevention and reported it to citizens, with the option to exaggerate. We manipulated whether the institution allowed leaders to personally benefit if citizens contributed too much. Citizens were sensitive to this, trusting the leader less and contributing less when leaders could benefit from exaggeration. Thus, players could discriminate between institutions that did and did not create incentives for inefficiency. This helps clarify why voters might oppose spending on disaster prevention and sheds light on the nature of voter rationality.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Who Do You Trust? Institutions that Constrain Leaders Help People Prevent Disaster

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-01-26

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  We are vulnerable to disasters, yet citizens hesitate to spend on disaster prevention. Is this because the problem is too complex? Or are citizens concerned political elites will behave poorly? Using an experimental economic game that simulates disaster, we tested if people can understand when an institution incentivizes elites to exaggerate the cost of disaster prevention. Citizen players could contribute money to prevent disaster. Leader players knew the cost of prevention and reported it to citizens, with the option to exaggerate. We manipulated whether the institution allowed leaders to personally benefit if citizens contributed too much. Citizens were sensitive to this, trusting the leader less and contributing less when leaders could benefit from exaggeration. Thus, players could discriminate between institutions that did and did not create incentives for inefficiency. This helps clarify why voters might oppose spending on disaster prevention and sheds light on the nature of voter rationality.

  PublisherDOI

• Anticipating moral hazard undermines climate mitigation in an experimental geoengineering game

  Ecological Economics · 2022 · 42 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Economics
  • Law and economics
  PublisherDOI

• Too many ways to help: How to promote climate change mitigation behaviors

  Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2022 · 19 citations

  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Collective Risk and Distributional Equity in Climate Change Bargaining

  Journal of Conflict Resolution · 2021-08-01 · 5 citations

  articleCorresponding

  International climate negotiations occur against the backdrop of increasing collective risk: the likelihood of catastrophic economic loss due to climate change will continue to increase unless and until global mitigation efforts are sufficient to prevent it. We introduce a novel alternating-offers bargaining model that incorporates this characteristic feature of climate change. We test the model using an incentivized experiment. We manipulate two important distributional equity principles: capacity to pay for mitigation of climate change and vulnerability to its potentially catastrophic effects. Our results show that less vulnerable parties do not exploit the greater vulnerability of their bargaining partners. They are, rather, more generous. Conversely, parties with greater capacity are less generous in their offers. Both collective risk itself and its importance in light of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report make it all the more urgent to better understand this crucial strategic feature of climate change bargaining.

  PublisherDOI

• Is a Rational Politics of Disaster Possible? Making Useful Decisions for Others in an Experimental Disaster Game

  Political Behavior · 2021 · 9 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Business
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for "Is a Rational Politics of Disaster Possible? Making Useful Decisions for Others in an Experimental Disaster Game"

  Harvard Dataverse · 2021-02-17

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Replication data for "Is a Rational Politics of Disaster Possible? Making Useful Decisions for Others in an Experimental Disaster Game," conditionally accepted at Political Behavior.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Talbot M. Andrews

  University of Connecticut

  8 shared

• Andrew W. Delton

  Stony Brook University

  8 shared

• Christopher Stout

  Oregon State University

  8 shared

• Fabio Galeotti

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  7 shared

• Raimondello Orsini

  6 shared

• Adam Seth Levine

  Johns Hopkins University

  3 shared

• Autumn Bynum

  University of Toronto

  3 shared

• Nicholas Seltzer

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of California, Irvine