Being Good
Locus of Control and Prosocial Behavior
Mark Andor et al.
NBER Working Paper, August 2022
Abstract:
We investigate how locus of control beliefs - the extent to which individuals attribute control over events in their life to themselves as opposed to outside factors - affect prosocial behavior and the private provision of public goods. We begin by developing a conceptual framework showing how locus of control beliefs serve as a weight placed on the returns from one's own contributions (impure altruism) and others' contributions (pure altruism). Using multiple data sets from Germany and the U.S., we show that individuals who relate consequences to their own behavior are more likely to contribute to climate change mitigation, to donate money and in-kind gifts to charitable causes, to share money with others, to cast a vote in parliamentary elections, and to donate blood. Our results provide comprehensive evidence that locus of control beliefs affect prosocial behavior.
Sleep loss leads to the withdrawal of human helping across individuals, groups, and large-scale societies
Eti Ben Simon et al.
PLoS Biology, August 2022
Abstract:
Humans help each other. This fundamental feature of homo sapiens has been one of the most powerful forces sculpting the advent of modern civilizations. But what determines whether humans choose to help one another? Across 3 replicating studies, here, we demonstrate that sleep loss represents one previously unrecognized factor dictating whether humans choose to help each other, observed at 3 different scales (within individuals, across individuals, and across societies). First, at an individual level, 1 night of sleep loss triggers the withdrawal of help from one individual to another. Moreover, fMRI findings revealed that the withdrawal of human helping is associated with deactivation of key nodes within the social cognition brain network that facilitates prosociality. Second, at a group level, ecological night-to-night reductions in sleep across several nights predict corresponding next-day reductions in the choice to help others during day-to-day interactions. Third, at a large-scale national level, we demonstrate that 1 h of lost sleep opportunity, inflicted by the transition to Daylight Saving Time, reduces real-world altruistic helping through the act of donation giving, established through the analysis of over 3 million charitable donations. Therefore, inadequate sleep represents a significant influential force determining whether humans choose to help one another, observable across micro- and macroscopic levels of civilized interaction. The implications of this effect may be non-trivial when considering the essentiality of human helping in the maintenance of cooperative, civil society, combined with the reported decline in sufficient sleep in many first-world nations.
The moralization of effort
Jared Celniker et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
People believe that effort is valuable, but what kind of value does it confer? We find that displays of effort signal moral character. Eight studies (N = 5,502) demonstrate the nature of these effects in the domains of paid employment, personal fitness, and charitable fundraising. The exertion of effort is deemed morally admirable (Studies 1-6) and is monetarily rewarded (Studies 2-6), even in situations where effort does not directly generate additional product, quality, or economic value. Convergent patterns of results emerged in South Korean and French cross-cultural replications (Studies 2b and 2c). We contend that the seeming irrationality of valuing effort for its own sake, such as in situations where one's efforts do not directly increase economic output (Studies 3-6), reveals a "deeply rational" social heuristic for evaluating potential cooperation partners. Specifically, effort cues engender broad moral trait ascriptions, and this moralization of effort influences donation behaviors (Study 5) and cooperative partner choice decision-making (Studies 4 and 6). In situating our account of effort moralization into past research and theorizing, we also consider the implications of these effects for social welfare policy and the future of work.
When utilitarianism dominates justice as fairness: An economic defence of utilitarianism from the original position
Hun Chung
Economics & Philosophy, forthcoming
Abstract:
The original position together with the veil of ignorance have served as one of the main methodological devices to justify principles of distributive justice. Most approaches to this topic have primarily focused on the single person decision-theoretic aspect of the original position. This paper, in contrast, will directly model the basic structure and the economic agents therein to project the economic consequences and social outcomes generated either by utilitarianism or Rawls's two principles of justice. It will be shown that when the differences in people's productive abilities are sufficiently great, utilitarianism dominates Rawls's two principles of justice by providing a higher level of overall well-being to every member of society. Whenever this is the case, the parties can rely on the Principle of Dominance (which is a direct implication of instrumental rationality) to choose utilitarianism over Rawls's two principles of justice. Furthermore, when this is so, utilitarianism is free from one of its most fundamental criticisms that it 'does not take seriously the distinction between persons' (Rawls 1971 [1999]: 24).
Is status a zero-sum game? Zero-sum beliefs increase people's preference for dominance but not prestige
Patricia Andrews-Fearon & Shai Davidai
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why do some people often pursue social rank using coercive and potentially costly dominance-oriented strategies (grounded in fear and intimidation) rather than noncoercive prestige-oriented strategies (grounded in respect and admiration)? In 10 studies (N = 3,372, including a high-powered preregistered replication), we propose that people's beliefs about the nature of social hierarchies shape their preference for dominance strategies. Specifically, we find that zero-sum beliefs about social hierarchies - beliefs that one person's rise in social rank inevitably comes at others' expense - drive the preference for dominance-oriented, but not prestige-oriented, approaches to status. The more participants viewed social hierarchies as zero-sum, the more they were willing to use dominance tactics and the more interested they were in reading books about how to use such tactics. Moreover, we find evidence that zero-sum beliefs about social hierarchies causally increase the preference for dominance-oriented, but not prestige-oriented, strategies for gaining rank, and that both objective factors in the organizational environment and people's subjective interpretations of these environments can trigger this effect. We discuss implications for the intragroup and intergroup dynamics of attaining and retaining high social rank.
Swear word fluency, verbal fluency, vocabulary, personality, and drug involvement
Anna-Kaisa Reiman & Mitchell Earleywine
Journal of Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Swearing is stereotypically associated with socially undesirable traits and behaviors, including limited verbal ability, disagreeable personality, and alcohol use. We sought to demonstrate that, contrary to such stereotypes, swear word fluency (i.e., ability to generate swear words) does not arise from a lack of verbal skills. We also explored whether swear word fluency might serve as an index of personality traits related to drug use. Accordingly, we conducted a preregistered study in which 266 undergraduates at a US university (Mage = 19.36; 66.9% self-identified as women and 49.6% as White) completed measures of swear word fluency, verbal fluency (i.e., overall ability to generate words), vocabulary, Big Five traits, sensation seeking, and drug use. We observed positive associations between swear word fluency and verbal fluency, vocabulary, Openness, and Extraversion, and a negative association with Agreeableness. Moreover, swear word fluency accounted for unique variance in self-reported drug use over and above that accounted for by personality and general verbal ability. Swear word fluency might serve as one of few tasks where higher scores predict more drug involvement, justifying further work linking this measure with other aspects of personality and drug use.
Is purity a distinct and homogeneous domain in moral psychology?
Dolichan Kollareth et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
"No" is our answer to the question in our title. In moral psychology, a purity violation (defined as an immoral act committed against one's own body or soul) was theorized to be a homogeneous moral domain qualitatively distinct from other moral domains. In contrast, we hypothesized heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, overlapping rather than distinct domains, and quantitative rather than qualitative differences from other hypothesized domains (specifically, autonomy, which is harm to others). Purity has been said to consist of norms violations of which elicit disgust and taint the soul. Here we empirically examined homogeneity: whether violations of body (e.g., eating putrid food) belong in the same moral domain as violations of the soul unrelated to bodily health (e.g., selling one's soul, desecrating sacred books). We examined distinctness: whether reactions to purity violations differ in predicted ways from those to violations of autonomy. In four studies (the last preregistered), American Internet users (in Studies 2 and 4, classified as politically conservative or liberal; Ns = 80, 96, 1,312, 376) were given stories about violations based on prior studies. Nonhealth purity violations were rated as relatively more disgusting, but less gross (the lay term for the reaction to putrid things) and more likely to taint the soul than were health-related ones. Surprisingly, both health and nonhealth purity violations were typically judged as only slightly immoral if at all. Autonomy violations were rated as more disgusting and tainting of the soul than were purity violations.
Breakdown of utilitarian moral judgement after basolateral amygdala damage
Jack van Honk et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2 August 2022
Abstract:
Most of us would regard killing another person as morally wrong, but when the death of one saves multiple others, it can be morally permitted. According to a prominent computational dual-systems framework, in these life-and-death dilemmas, deontological (nonsacrificial) moral judgments stem from a model-free algorithm that emphasizes the intrinsic value of the sacrificial action, while utilitarian (sacrificial) moral judgments are derived from a model-based algorithm that emphasizes the outcome of the sacrificial action. Rodent decision-making research suggests that the model-based algorithm depends on the basolateral amygdala (BLA), but these findings have not yet been translated to human moral decision-making. Here, in five humans with selective, bilateral BLA damage, we show a breakdown of utilitarian sacrificial moral judgments, pointing at deficient model-based moral decision-making. Across an established set of moral dilemmas, healthy controls frequently sacrifice one person to save numerous others, but BLA-damaged humans withhold such sacrificial judgments even at the cost of thousands of lives. Our translational research confirms a neurocomputational hypothesis drawn from rodent decision-making research by indicating that the model-based algorithm which underlies outcome-based, utilitarian moral judgements in humans critically depends on the BLA.