Fairly right
Andrew Franks & Kyle Scherr
Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, December 2015, Pages 213–232
Abstract:
The current research examined the ability of moral foundations to predict candidate choice in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election across three studies. Results indicated that endorsement of moral foundations predicted voting outcomes beyond that predicted by important demographic variables that are traditionally included in election forecasts and research. When moral foundations were collapsed into two variables (individualizing and binding foundations), increased endorsement of the individualizing foundations consistently predicted support for Barack Obama, and increased endorsement of the binding foundations consistently predicted support for Mitt Romney. The most reliable unique predictor of candidate choice among the five separate foundations was purity, which strongly motivated support for Mitt Romney. Additionally, increased endorsement of the fairness foundation uniquely predicted support for Barack Obama. The effects observed across the three studies demonstrate a direct relationship between moral foundations endorsements and candidate choice. Implications for those using moral appeals in their political influence strategies are discussed.
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Violence, Aggression, and Ethics: The Link between Exposure to Human Violence and Unethical Behavior
Joshua Gubler et al.
Journal of Business Ethics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Can exposure to media portrayals of human violence impact an individual’s ethical decision making at work? Ethical business failures can result in enormous financial losses to individuals, businesses, and society. We study how exposure to human violence — especially through media — can cause individuals to make less ethical decisions. We present three experiments, each showing a causal link between exposure to human violence and unethical business behavior, and show this relationship is mediated by an increase in individual hostility levels as a result of exposure to violence. Using observational data, we then provide evidence suggesting that this relationship extends beyond the context of our experiments, showing that companies headquartered in locations marked by greater human violence are more likely to fraudulently misstate their financial statements and exhibit more aggressive financial reporting. Combined, our results suggest that exposure to human violence has significant and real effects on an individual’s ethical decision making.
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Why we forgive what can’t be controlled
Justin Martin & Fiery Cushman
Cognition, February 2016, Pages 133–143
Abstract:
Volitional control matters greatly for moral judgment: Coerced agents receive less condemnation for outcomes they cause. Less well understood is the psychological basis of this effect. Control may influence perceptions of intent for the outcome that occurs or perceptions of causal role in that outcome. Here, we show that an agent who chooses to do the right thing but accidentally causes a bad outcome receives relatively more punishment than an agent who is forced to do the “right” thing but causes a bad outcome. Thus, having good intentions ironically leads to greater condemnation. This surprising effect does not depend upon perceptions of increased intent for harm to occur, but rather upon perceptions of causal role in the obtained outcome. Further, this effect is specific to punishment: An agent who chooses to do the right thing is rated as having better moral character than a forced agent, even though they cause the same bad outcome. These results clarify how, when and why control influences moral judgment.
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Linguistic Obfuscation in Fraudulent Science
David Markowitz & Jeffrey Hancock
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The rise of scientific fraud has drawn significant attention to research misconduct across disciplines. Documented cases of fraud provide an opportunity to examine whether scientists write differently when reporting on fraudulent research. In an analysis of over two million words, we evaluated 253 publications retracted for fraudulent data and compared the linguistic style of each paper to a corpus of 253 unretracted publications and 62 publications retracted for reasons other than fraud (e.g., ethics violations). Fraudulent papers were written with significantly higher levels of linguistic obfuscation, including lower readability and higher rates of jargon than unretracted and nonfraudulent papers. We also observed a positive association between obfuscation and the number of references per paper, suggesting that fraudulent authors obfuscate their reports to mask their deception by making them more costly to analyze and evaluate. This is the first large-scale analysis of fraudulent papers across authors and disciplines to reveal how changes in writing style are related to fraudulent data reporting.
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An Offer You Can’t Refuse? Incentives Change How We Think
Sandro Ambuehl
Stanford Working Paper, November 2015
Abstract:
Around the world there are laws that severely restrict incentives for many transactions, such as living kidney donation, even though altruistic participation is applauded. Proponents of such legislation fear that undue inducements would be coercive; opponents maintain that it merely prevents mutually beneficial transactions. Despite the substantial economic consequences of such laws, empirical evidence on the proponents’ argument is scarce. I present a simple model of costly information acquisition in which incentives skew information demand and thus expectations about the consequences of participation. In a laboratory experiment, I test whether monetary incentives can alter subjects’ expectations about a highly visceral aversive experience (eating whole insects). Indeed, higher incentives make subjects more willing to participate in this experience at any price. A second experiment explicitly shows in a more stylized setting that incentives cause subjects to perceive the same information differently. They make subjects systematically more optimistic about the consequences of the transaction in a way that is inconsistent with Bayesian rationality. Broadly, I show that important concerns by proponents of the current legislation can be understood using the toolkit of economics, and thus can be included in cost-benefit analysis. My work helps bridge a gap between economists on the one hand, and policy makers and ethicists on the other.
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Social Samaritan Justice: When and Why Needy Fellow Citizens Have a Right to Assistance
Laura Valentini
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In late 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of the U.S., causing much suffering and devastation. Those who could have easily helped Sandy's victims had a duty to do so. But was this a rightfully enforceable duty of justice, or a nonenforceable duty of beneficence? The answer to this question is often thought to depend on the kind of help offered: the provision of immediate bodily services is not enforceable; the transfer of material resources is. I argue that this double standard is unjustified, and defend a version of what I call “social samaritanism.” On this view, within political communities, the duty to help the needy — whether via bodily services or resource transfers — is always an enforceable demand of justice, except when the needy are reckless; across independent political communities, it is always a matter of beneficence. I defend this alternative double standard, and consider its implications for the case of Sandy.
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Interacting with dehumanized others? Only if they are objectified
Rocío Martínez et al.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Members of dehumanized groups are somehow accepted in a variety of menial roles. Three studies verified when and why people might approach members of animalistically and mechanistically dehumanized groups. In Studies 1 and 2, participants showed a greater intention to interact with (Study 1) and attributed higher ratings of success (Study 2) to members of an animalistically dehumanized group in a social context. On the contrary, participants expected that members of a mechanistically dehumanized group would be more successful and were preferred to interact with in a professional context. In Study 3, the psychological process underlying these preferences was investigated. Interestingly, results showed that the objectification of dehumanized group members led participants to interact with them. Taken together these studies show that people approach dehumanized others not because they are liked, but because they are objectified.
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Does telling white lies signal pro-social preferences?
Laura Biziou-van-Pol et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, November 2015, Pages 538–548
Abstract:
The opportunity to tell a white lie (i.e., a lie that benefits another person) generates a moral conflict between two opposite moral dictates, one pushing towards telling the truth always and the other pushing towards helping others. Here we study how people resolve this moral conflict. What does telling a white lie signal about a person’s pro-social tendencies? To answer this question, we conducted a two-stage 2x2 experiment. In the first stage, we used a Deception Game to measure aversion to telling a Pareto white lie (i.e., a lie that helps both the liar and the listener), and aversion to telling an altruistic white lie (i.e., a lie that helps the listener at the expense of the liar). In the second stage we measured altruistic tendencies using a Dictator Game and cooperative tendencies using a Prisoner’s dilemma. We found three major results: (i) both altruism and cooperation are positively correlated with aversion to telling a Pareto white lie; (ii) both altruism and cooperation are negatively correlated with aversion to telling an altruistic white lie; (iii) men are more likely than women to tell an altruistic white lie, but not to tell a Pareto white lie. Our results shed light on the moral conflict between prosociality and truth-telling. In particular, the first finding suggests that a significant proportion of people have non-distributional notions of what the right thing to do is, irrespective of the economic consequences, they tell the truth, they cooperate, they share their money.
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Kristin Jay & Timothy Jay
Language Sciences, November 2015, Pages 251–259
Abstract:
A folk assumption about colloquial speech is that taboo words are used because speakers cannot find better words with which to express themselves: because speakers lack vocabulary. A competing possibility is that fluency is fluency regardless of subject matter — that there is no reason to propose a difference in lexicon size and ease of access for taboo as opposed to emotionally-neutral words. In order to test these hypotheses, we compared general verbal fluency via the Controlled Oral Word Association Test (COWAT) with taboo word fluency and animal word fluency in spoken and written formats. Both formats produced positive correlations between COWAT fluency, animal fluency, and taboo word fluency, supporting the fluency-is-fluency hypothesis. In each study, a set of 10 taboo words accounted for 55–60% of all taboo word data. Expressives were generated at higher rates than slurs. There was little sex-related variability in taboo word generation, and, consistent with findings that do not show a sex difference in taboo lexicon size, no overall sex difference in taboo word generation was obtained. Taboo fluency was positively correlated with the Big Five personality traits neuroticism and openness and negatively correlated with agreeableness and conscientiousness. Overall the findings suggest that, with the exception of female-sex-related slurs, taboo expressives and general pejoratives comprise the core of the category of taboo words while slurs tend to occupy the periphery, and the ability to generate taboo language is not an index of overall language poverty.
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Dries Bostyn & Arne Roets
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, March 2016, Pages 19–25
Abstract:
Actions leading to negative outcomes (i.e., harm) are seen as more blameworthy than omissions of actions leading to the same negative outcomes. However, whether a similar action–omission effect applies to judgments of praiseworthiness of positive outcomes is still an open question. Drawing on positive–negative asymmetries found in other domains, we hypothesized that positive events would not elicit an action–omission effect for judgments of praise, because such positive events do not by default trigger the causal appraisal processes that are central to the action–omission effect. Furthermore, we posited that when people are explicitly asked to consider causality before or during the judgment, an action–omission effect on judgments of praise could be obtained too. These hypotheses were verified in three independent studies and a meta-analytic analysis. As such, the present set of studies provides novel insights in the action–omission effect's asymmetry for negative and positive outcomes, as well as an increased understanding of the role of causality appraisal in this effect: judgments of praise are less reliant on causal reasoning than judgments of blame, and therefore also less susceptible to the action–omission bias.
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On having very long arms: How the availability of technological means affects moral cognition
Jonas Nagel & Michael Waldmann
Thinking & Reasoning, forthcoming
Abstract:
Modern technological means allow for meaningful interaction across arbitrary distances, while human morality evolved in environments in which individuals needed to be spatially close in order to interact. We investigate how people integrate knowledge about modern technology with their ancestral moral dispositions to help relieve nearby suffering. Our first study establishes that spatial proximity between an agent's means of helping and the victims increases people's judgment of helping obligations, even if the agent is constantly far personally. We then report and meta-analyse 20 experiments elucidating the cognitive mechanisms behind this effect, which include inferences of increased efficaciousness and personal involvement. Implications of our findings for the scientific understanding of ancestral moral dispositions in modern environments are discussed, as well as suggestions for how these insights might be exploited to increase charitable giving. Our meta-analysis provides a practical example for how aggregating across all available data, including failed replication attempts, allows conclusions that could not be supported in single experiments.
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Whatever it takes to win: Rivalry increases unethical behavior
Gavin Kilduff et al.
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research investigates the link between rivalry and unethical behavior. We propose that people will be more likely to engage in unethical behavior when competing against their rivals than when competing against non-rival competitors. Across an archival study and a series of experiments, we found that rivalry was associated with increased unsportsmanlike behavior, use of deception, and willingness to employ unethical negotiation tactics. We also explored the psychological underpinnings of rivalry, which help to illuminate how rivalry differs from general competition and why it increases unethical behavior. The data reveal a serial mediation pathway whereby rivalry heightens the psychological stakes of competition (by increasing actors' contingency of self-worth and status concerns), which leads them to adopt a stronger performance approach orientation, which then increases unethical behavior. These findings highlight the importance of rivalry as a widespread, powerful, yet largely unstudied phenomenon with significant organizational implications. They also help to inform when and why unethical behavior occurs within organizations, and demonstrate that the effects of competition are dependent upon relationships and prior interactions between actors.