Good versus Bad
Harm Hypervigilance in Public Reactions to Scientific Evidence
Cory Clark et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two preregistered studies from two different platforms with representative U.S. adult samples (N = 1,865) tested the harm-hypervigilance hypothesis in risk assessments of controversial behavioral science. As expected, across six sets of scientific findings, people consistently overestimated others’ harmful reactions (medium to large average effect sizes) and underestimated helpful ones, even when incentivized for accuracy. Additional analyses found that (a) harm overestimations were associated with support for censoring science, (b) people who were more offended by scientific findings reported greater difficulty understanding them, and (c) evidence was moderately consistent for an association between more conservative ideology and harm overestimations. These findings are particularly relevant because journals have begun evaluating potential downstream harms of scientific findings. We discuss implications of our work and invite scholars to develop rigorous tests of (a) the social pressures that lead science astray and (b) the actual costs and benefits of publishing or not publishing potentially controversial conclusions.
The illusion of moral decline
Adam Mastroianni & Daniel Gilbert
Nature, 22 June 2023, Pages 782-789
Abstract:
Anecdotal evidence indicates that people believe that morality is declining. In a series of studies using both archival and original data (n = 12,492,983), we show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline, and we report studies that confirm two of its predictions about the circumstances under which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated or reversed (that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born). Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. This illusion has implications for research on the misallocation of scarce resources, the underuse of social support and social influence.
Doing Good or Feeling Good? Justice Concerns Predict Online Shaming Via Deservingness and Schadenfreude
Anna Barron et al.
Princeton Working Paper, February 2023
Abstract:
Public shaming has moved from the village square and is now an established online phenomenon. The current paper explores whether online shaming is motivated by a person’s desire to do good (a justice motive); and/or, because it feels good (a hedonic motive), specifically, as a form of malicious pleasure at another’s misfortune (schadenfreude). We examine two key aspects of social media that may moderate these processes: anonymity (Study 1) and social norms (the responses of other users; Studies 2-3). Across three experiments (N = 225, 198, 202) participants were presented with a fabricated news article featuring an instance of Islamophobia and given the opportunity to respond. Participants’ concerns about social justice were not directly positively associated with online shaming and had few consistent indirect effects on shaming via moral outrage. Rather, justice concerns were primarily associated with shaming via participants’ perception that the offender was deserving of negative consequences, and their feelings of schadenfreude regarding these consequences. Anonymity did not moderate this process and there was mixed evidence for the qualifying effect of social norms. Overall, the current studies point to the hedonic motive in general and schadenfreude specifically as a key moral emotion associated with people’s shaming behaviour.
Does resource scarcity increase self-serving dishonesty? Most people wrongly believe so
Lau Lilleholt, Karolina Aleksandra Ścigała & Ingo Zettler
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Does resource scarcity increase people's inclination to engage in self-serving dishonesty? Whereas some theories suggest so, we found no evidence for this across four studies, but a fifth study revealed that most people (wrongly) believe that it does. More precisely, based on three well-powered preregistered online experiments (overall N = 4,193), complemented by two pilot studies (N = 51 and N = 49, respectively) and one manipulation check study (N = 424), we provide evidence that neither exogenously induced resource scarcity nor priming people into a scarcity mindset influences people's inclination to engage in self-serving dishonesty. Furthermore, by linking country-level poverty data to a country-level indicator of self-serving dishonesty based on a recent meta-analysis comprising 47 countries and more than 44,000 participants, we found that people living in poorer countries are no more inclined to engage in self-serving dishonesty than people living in richer countries. Finally, we found that most people -- and especially men and people low in Agreeableness versus Anger -- wrongly believe that people living in poorer countries are more willing to engage in self-serving dishonesty (N = 658). Overall, our investigation adds new evidence to the burgeoning literature on the link between resource scarcity (in the form of poverty) and unethical behavior (in the form of self-serving dishonesty).
Content warnings reduce aesthetic appreciation of visual art
Payton Jones, Victoria Bridgland & Benjamin Bellet
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, forthcoming
Abstract:
Content warnings are alerts about upcoming content that might be related to upsetting or traumatic experiences. Such warnings are increasingly used by artists and art curators around the world. Though the psychological literature on content warnings suggests they are typically functionally inert, warnings have not yet been studied in the context of art or aesthetics. In this preregistered, within-person, randomized controlled experiment, we showed diverse art pieces to 213 participants (six trials each). By random assignment, some art was prefaced with a content warning matching its specific content (e.g., “content warning: sexual assault” for Gérôme’s Phryne before the Areopagus). We found that content warnings decreased aesthetic appreciation (Cohen’s d = −0.22, Bayes factor = 54, N = 1,278). Content warnings also substantially increased negative emotional responses and decreased positive emotional responses (Cohen’s d = 0.44, Bayes factor = 9.6 × 10⁹, N = 1,278). Though we planned to test the effect of warnings on opting out of viewing art, we were surprised to find that none of the participants avoided viewing any of the art pieces regardless of whether they were prefaced with a warning.
Knocking on Hell’s door: Dismantling hate with cultural consumption
Daria Denti, Alessandro Crociata & Alessandra Faggian
Journal of Cultural Economics, June 2023, Pages 303–349
Abstract:
How local cultural activities influence development and human behaviour is gaining popularity. Experimental evidence shows that cultural consumption is effective in countering hate. This is crucial, as hate, in turn, has a negative influence on the socioeconomic performance of places. Still, little is known on this, outside few more qualitative case studies. This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the impact of cultural consumption on hate events in the Italian NUTS3 regions. IV estimation using a unique longitudinal database, with georeferenced hate manifestations and a population-based measure for cultural consumption, shows that cultural consumption determines a reduction in hate events. Our findings support the idea that cultural change acts as key enabling factor for people open-mindedness and place inclusiveness. Our results hold after various robustness checks, suggesting the need for policy interventions promoting cultural consumption also to accomplish more tolerant communities.
Preheating Prosocial Behaviour
Casey Wichman & Nathan Chan
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We provide new evidence on motivations for voluntary contributions to public goods in a natural setting. Using natural-language processing on users’ Twitter posts, we measure revealed sentiment changes before and after making a donation to Wikipedia. We find strong evidence that sentiment improves in the hour and minutes directly before contributing, which we call ‘preheating.’ Results are robust to alternative fixed effects and approaches to inference, and supported by a complementary online experiment with randomised mood inducement among Twitter users. Preheating suggests that affective states influence giving, in addition to reward-seeking, utility-maximising behaviour that has been documented in other contexts.
Does social capital matter? A study of hit-and-run in US counties
Stefano Castriota, Sandro Rondinella & Mirco Tonin
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the relationship between social capital and a decision that has dire health consequences: fleeing after a road accident. This event is unplanned, and the decision is taken under great emotional distress and time pressure, thus providing a test of whether social capital matters for behaviour in extreme conditions. We merge data from the universe of fatality accidents involving pedestrians in the US over the period 2000–2018 with a dataset on social capital measures at the county level. Using within-state-year variation, our results show that one standard deviation increase in social capital is associated with a reduction in the probability of hit-and-run of around 10.5%. Several falsification tests based on differences in social capital endowment between the county where the accident occurs and the county where the driver resides are suggestive of a causal interpretation of this evidence. Our findings show the importance of social capital in a new context, suggesting a broad impact on pro-social behaviour and adding to the positive returns of promoting civic norms.
Ideological values are parametrically associated with empathy neural response to vicarious suffering
Niloufar Zebarjadi et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, May 2023
Abstract:
Several studies in political psychology reported higher levels of empathy among political leftists (i.e., liberals) as compared to political rightists (i.e., conservatives). Yet, all those studies lean on self-reports, which are often limited by subjective bias and conformity to social norms. Here, we tested this putative asymmetry using neuroimaging: We recorded oscillatory neural activity using magnetoencephalography while fifty-five participants completed a well-validated neuroimaging paradigm for empathy to vicarious suffering. The findings revealed a typical rhythmic alpha-band “empathy response” in the temporal-parietal junction. This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group. In addition to this dichotomous division, the neural response was parametrically associated with both self-reported political inclination and with right-wing ideological values. This is the first study to reveal an asymmetry in the neural empathy response as a function of political ideology. The findings reported in this study are in line with the current literature in political psychology and provide a novel, neural perspective to support the ideological asymmetry in empathy. This study opens new vistas for addressing questions in political psychology by using neuroimaging.
Weird reactions to weird Twitter: How expectation and intention relate to appreciation for absurd humor
Joshua Quinlan, Rebecca Dunk & Raymond Mar
Psychology of Popular Media, forthcoming
Abstract:
Violations to our sense of meaning have traditionally been thought of as a source of anxiety and threat. However, meaning violations can also be a source of humor, as is evidenced by their abundant use within comedy in the form of absurd humor. This has recently been exemplified by Weird Twitter, a popular subculture organized around aggressively absurd comedic tweets. The present study investigated this apparent paradox by examining the effects of expecting absurdity and perceiving an intention to be funny on humor ratings of absurd jokes taken from Weird Twitter. Based on the Benign Violation Theory of Humor (McGraw & Warren, 2010), we predicted that experimentally manipulating the expectation of absurdity and an intention to be funny would increase humor ratings for these jokes, by rendering them “benign.” We found that expecting absurd jokes had a small positive effect on ratings of humor, whereas intentionality had no effect after accounting for expectations. In addition, individual differences in Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition did not seem to play a role in the appreciation of absurd humor.