Good or Bad
Overestimation in the aggregation of emotional intensity of social media content
Jonas Paul Schöne et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Users on social media are regularly presented with sequences of emotional content in their newsfeeds, which affects their viewpoints and emotions. Could the way users aggregate and remember emotional content from their feeds contribute to the fact emotions are amplified on social platforms? Across five studies (N = 1,051), using experimentally manipulated social media feeds, we found that participants consistently overestimated the average emotional intensity of the individual responses expressed by other users in a sequence (Study 1a). This overestimation led to stronger emotional reactions to the news content that these responses were reacting to (Study 1b). Investigating the mechanism suggested that while there was stronger memory for more emotional responses within a response sequence, we could not find a direct link between memory and overestimation (Study 2). We showed that overestimation was driven mainly by the salience of emotional intensity of different items in the sequence, by replicating the effect using sequences of emotional words (Study 3). We then turned to the consequences of overestimation, showing that overestimation of emotional sequences was uniquely associated with perceiving more intense emotional responses as more representative of how other people would react (Study 4) and with overestimation of the emotionality of the newsfeed as a whole (Study 5). Overestimation of the average individual emotional intensity ratings of a sequence was also predictive of willingness to share articles. This set of findings sheds light on how sampling from newsfeeds amplifies the perception of emotionality.
An exploration of basic human values in 38 million obituaries over 30 years
David Markowitz et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2 September 2025
Abstract:
How societies remember the dead can reveal what people value in life. We analyzed 38 million obituaries from the United States to examine how personal values are encoded in individual and collective legacies. Using Schwartz’s theory of basic human values, we found that tradition and benevolence dominated legacy reflections, while values like power and stimulation appeared less frequently. Major cultural events -- the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic -- were systematically linked to changes in legacy reflections about personal values, with security declining after 9/11, achievement declining after the financial crisis, and benevolence declining for years after COVID-19 began and, to date, not yet returning to baseline. Gender and age of the deceased were also linked to differences in legacy: Men were remembered more for achievement, power, and conformity, while women were remembered more for benevolence and hedonism. Older people were remembered more for tradition and conformity than younger people. These patterns shifted dynamically across the lifespan, with obituaries for men showing more age-related variation than legacies for women. Our findings reveal how obituaries serve as psychological and cultural time capsules, preserving not just individual legacies, but also indicating what US society values collectively regarding a life well lived.
The Moral Dilution Effect: Irrelevant Information Influences Judgments of Moral Character
Cillian McHugh & Eric Igou
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, October 2025
Abstract:
It is reasonable to expect that when making a judgment, we only consider the relevant (or diagnostic) information and that nonrelevant (nondiagnostic) information should not, and thus does not, influence our judgments. Previous research has shown that this is not always the case and that the inclusion of nondiagnostic information can reduce the impact of diagnostic information in judgments. This phenomenon is known as the dilution effect, and it has been observed for a range of judgments, including product evaluations, probability judgments, and predictions relating to people's behavior. The dilution effect has been explained as a consequence of the representativeness heuristic, such that the inclusion of nondiagnostic information reduces the match between the target and a typical member of the category. Consistent with this notion and recent approaches to moral decision making, we predict that the dilution effect should be observed for judgments about morality. Across four studies (total N = 2535), we tested for the dilution effect on judgments of morally bad actors and morally good actors. Overall, our results showed a dilution effect for judgments of both good and bad actors. People's moral evaluations of both good and bad actors were less extreme when the descriptions included nondiagnostic information. We showed that this effect is not the result of humanization, and we found that the robustness of the effect appears to be moderated by valence, with a more robust effect for bad actors. Our results highlight avenues for future research.
The freedom to believe in free will: Evidence from an adoption study against the first law of behavioral genetics
Emily Willoughby et al.
Philosophical Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Philosophers and psychologists alike have long debated the etiology of beliefs about human agency. Recently, empirical investigations have shown that lay beliefs about free will and determinism represent stable and important individual differences. Despite a perennial interest in the sources of agentic belief, genetic and environmental influences on such beliefs have never been studied. We administered a battery of items assessing these beliefs to a unique sample of 394 adoptive and biological families with adult offspring to investigate the origins of agentic beliefs and their relationships. We found significant differences between adopted and biological offspring and between the parents of such children, particularly in beliefs about determinism. Biometric modeling revealed especially surprising results: unlike the vast majority of traits studied in family designs, agentic beliefs appear to be weakly or not at all heritable. Since genetic factors might be regarded as typical of the “initial conditions” in philosophical thought experiments about free will and determinism, it is especially ironic that beliefs about free will and determinism may be among the traits least influenced by genetic differences.
Threat from a distance: More intense threats fade away quicker
Luc Vieira et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
People continuously scan their environment for potential threats to ensure survival. To make safe decisions, individuals assess their affective responses at various distances from potential dangers. This evaluation of anticipated feelings informs their decision-making process and subsequent behavior. Threat intensity is a key feature of this assessment. However, there is a lack of consensus on how threat-related anticipated negative affect decreases with distance as a function of threat intensity. Here, we propose the steeper gradient hypothesis: a faster decrease in negative anticipated affective responses with distance for more intense as compared to milder threats. To test this hypothesis, we conducted six experiments in which we examined the interaction effect between threat intensity and distance from the threat on various anticipated affective responses, by using different threats inductions (e.g., level of criminality; Experiments 1–4) and different spatial contexts (e.g., bird’s eye views; Experiments 1 and 2). Our results consistently support the steeper gradient hypothesis, regardless of time perspectives (renting an apartment vs. temporarily occupying a spot) or samples (French vs. Americans; convenience vs. selection from a broader national sample). The present contribution, at the intersection of affective, social, and spatial cognition, advances our understanding of how one perceives and anticipates to respond to environmental threats.
Learning from outcomes shapes reliance on moral rules versus cost–benefit reasoning
Maximilian Maier, Vanessa Cheung & Falk Lieder
Nature Human Behaviour, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many controversies arise from disagreements between moral rules and ‘utilitarian’ cost–benefit reasoning (CBR). Here we show how moral learning from consequences can produce individual differences in people’s reliance on rules versus CBR. In a new paradigm, participants (total N = 2,328) faced realistic dilemmas between one choice prescribed by a moral rule and one by CBR. The participants observed the consequences of their decision before the next dilemma. Across four experiments, we found adaptive changes in decision-making over 13 choices: participants adjusted their decisions according to which decision strategy (rules or CBR) produced better consequences. Using computational modelling, we showed that many participants learned about decision strategies in general (metacognitive learning) rather than specific actions. Their learning transferred to incentive-compatible donation decisions and moral convictions beyond the experiment. We conclude that metacognitive learning from consequences shapes moral decision-making and that individual differences in morality may be surprisingly malleable to learning from experience.
Victims of Conspiracies? An Examination of the Relationship Between Conspiracy Beliefs and Dispositional Individual Victimhood
Daniel Toribio-Flórez et al.
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Conspiracy beliefs have been linked to perceptions of collective victimhood. We adopt an individual perspective on victimhood by investigating the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and the individual disposition to perceive and react to injustice as a victim, i.e., victim justice sensitivity (VJS). Data from two German samples (Ns = 370, 373) indicated a positive association between VJS and conspiracy mentality beyond conceptually related covariates (e.g., mistrust). In a multinational sample from 15 countries (N = 14,978), VJS was positively associated with both general and specific conspiracy beliefs (about vaccines and climate change) within countries, though these associations varied across countries. However, economic, sociopolitical and cultural country-level factors that might explain the cross-country variability (e.g., GDP, Human Freedom Index, individualism–collectivism), including indices of collective exposure to direct violence, did not moderate the studied associations. Future research should investigate the relationship between victimhood and conspiracy beliefs, considering both intraindividual and intergroup perspectives.
Distinguishing between individual and societal socioeconomic mobility beliefs: Understanding attitudes toward those in poverty
Crystal Hoyt, Jeni Burnette & Nathan Kyler
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated two related mindsets about the malleable or fixed nature of socioeconomic mobility and their distinct influences on stigma toward those in poverty. Across four studies, conducted in the United States (N = 1,057), we explored mindsets about individual potential to change social class, what we called individual mobility mindsets (I_MM), and mindsets about societal opportunities for socioeconomic mobility, or societal mobility mindsets (S_MM). Although the mindsets were positively correlated, they had distinct focal points and, importantly, they differentially predicted outcomes. For example, I_MM was positively linked to individual-level attributes like grit, whereas S_MM was negatively linked to systemic attributions for social class and to beliefs that inequality is unjust. Additionally, I_MM was negatively related to stigma toward those in poverty, whereas S_MM was positively linked to it. This was largely due to the differential links to essentialism -- that is, to the view that poverty is an inherent and defining characteristic. Although both types of mindsets were positively linked to blame, which is a known driver of stigma, I_MM was negatively linked to essentialism and S_MM was positively linked to it. We discuss different models of mindsets and stigma.
From decay to delight: Disgust processing among extreme metal enthusiasts
Albert Wabnegger & Anne Schienle
Personality and Individual Differences, October 2025
Abstract:
Disgust is a basic emotion that likely evolved as a protective mechanism to steer humans away from potential sources of disease. This study investigated the relationship between an inclination toward the music genre ‘extreme metal’ (EM), which is associated with themes of core disgust (death and decay) -- and the evaluation of disgust elicitors across various domains and modalities. We compared emotional responses to generally disgusting and EM-related stimuli across three different paradigms (songs/sounds, album covers/images, written lyrics) between 116 extreme metal fans and 116 fans of other music genres matched for sex, age, and education (68 male, mean age = 32 years, mean years of education = 13 years). EM fans consistently rated both general and EM-specific disgust stimuli lower than other music fans across all paradigms. Moreover, they reported lower overall disgust propensity. This finding suggests that lower disgust propensity may predispose individuals to EM music or that repeated exposure to such content leads to desensitization. Additionally, the presentation of disgust in an artistic format may offer unconventional aesthetics, allowing fans to connect with the music on a deeper level. Ultimately, this study enhances our understanding of how music preferences correlate with emotional processing, particularly in the context of disgust.