Honorable mention
Does "Science" Make You Moral? The Effects of Priming Science on Moral Judgments and Behavior
Christine Ma-Kellams & Jim Blascovich
PLoS ONE, March 2013
Background: Previous work has noted that science stands as an ideological force insofar as the answers it offers to a variety of fundamental questions and concerns; as such, those who pursue scientific inquiry have been shown to be concerned with the moral and social ramifications of their scientific endeavors. No studies to date have directly investigated the links between exposure to science and moral or prosocial behaviors.
Methodology/Principal Findings: Across four studies, both naturalistic measures of science exposure and experimental primes of science led to increased adherence to moral norms and more morally normative behaviors across domains. Study 1 (n = 36) tested the natural correlation between exposure to science and likelihood of enforcing moral norms. Studies 2 (n = 49), 3 (n = 52), and 4 (n = 43) manipulated thoughts about science and examined the causal impact of such thoughts on imagined and actual moral behavior. Across studies, thinking about science had a moralizing effect on a broad array of domains, including interpersonal violations (Studies 1, 2), prosocial intentions (Study 3), and economic exploitation (Study 4).
Conclusions/Significance: These studies demonstrated the morally normative effects of lay notions of science. Thinking about science leads individuals to endorse more stringent moral norms and exhibit more morally normative behavior. These studies are the first of their kind to systematically and empirically test the relationship between science and morality. The present findings speak to this question and elucidate the value-laden outcomes of the notion of science.
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The Allure of the Forbidden: Breaking Taboos, Frustration, and Attraction to Violent Video Games
Jodi Whitaker et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although people typically avoid engaging in antisocial or taboo behaviors, such as cheating and stealing, they may succumb in order to maximize their personal benefit. Moreover, they may be frustrated when the chance to commit a taboo behavior is withdrawn. The present study tested whether the desire to commit a taboo behavior, and the frustration from being denied such an opportunity, increases attraction to violent video games. Playing violent games allegedly offers an outlet for aggression prompted by frustration. In two experiments, some participants had no chance to commit a taboo behavior (cheating in Experiment 1, stealing in Experiment 2), others had a chance to commit a taboo behavior, and others had a withdrawn chance to commit a taboo behavior. Those in the latter group were most attracted to violent video games. Withdrawing the chance for participants to commit a taboo behavior increased their frustration, which in turn increased their attraction to violent video games.
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Motivated to "Forget": The Effects of In-Group Wrongdoing on Memory and Collective Guilt
Katie Rotella & Jennifer Richeson
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Reminders of in-group wrongdoing can prompt defensive responses that affect intergroup relations. Across two studies, American participants were randomly assigned to have their American identity increased (or not), then read a passage describing the negative treatment of Native American Indians by perpetrators described as either early Americans (i.e., in-group members) or European settlers (i.e., out-group members). Memory for the content of the passage and feelings of collective guilt were assessed. Participants demonstrated poorer memory when the perpetrators were framed as in-group (Americans), rather than out-group (Europeans), members. Further, participants in the in-group perpetrator condition whose American identification was primed experienced less collective guilt compared with participants in the in-group perpetrator condition whose American identification was not primed. Implications for intergroup relations and the understanding of collective memory are discussed.
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Selling the War? System-Justifying Effects of Commercial Advertising on Civilian Casualty Tolerance
Ronald Friedman & Barbara Sutton
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In times of war, news media coverage of the plight of civilian casualties plays a critical role in shaping attitudes regarding war's human costs. We proposed that these attitudes may also be surreptitiously influenced by the commercial advertisements that often accompany this coverage. Specifically, we hypothesized that when newspaper articles pertaining to civilian victims of war are flanked by luxury ads, conservatives, relative to liberals, will subsequently exhibit less concern for these victims. This proposition was based on the notion that commercial ads, particularly those promoting luxury items, make salient the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" and thereby, at least implicitly, threaten the legitimacy of the current socioeconomic system. Drawing upon system justification theory, we posited that this threat would lead individuals with stronger system-justification tendencies (conservatives), relative to those more open to challenging the current system (liberals), to show greater tolerance for civilian war casualties in order to defend the system's integrity. Evidence consistent with this hypothesis was found in a quasi-experimental study (n = 329).
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Nobody likes a rat: On the willingness to report lies and the consequences thereof
Ernesto Reuben & Matt Stephenson
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the intrinsic motivation of individuals to report, and thereby sanction, fellow group members who lie for personal gain. We further explore the changes in lying and reporting behavior that result from giving individuals a say in who joins their group. We find that enough individuals are willing to report lies such that in fixed groups lying is unprofitable. However, we also find that when groups can select their members, individuals who report lies are generally shunned, even by groups where lying is absent. This facilitates the formation of dishonest groups where lying is prevalent and reporting is nonexistent.
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Miroslaw Kofta & Patrycja Slawuta
Journal of Social Issues, March 2013, Pages 54-73
Abstract:
This paper addresses the role of collective memory of post-Holocaust crimes in contemporary Polish-Jewish relations. We examined how reminding Polish participants of ingroup atrocities affects constructive as well as destructive attitudes and behavioral intentions toward the Jewish victim group. We address the question of how experimentally induced feelings of cultural closeness between the outgroup and the ingroup modify the effects of these reminders on intergroup relations. Our two experiments suggest that perceived sharing of culture is a crucial factor in dealing constructively with the "problematic past" in intergroup relations. In the baseline condition (where cultural closeness of Jews and Poles was not made salient), reminders of ingroup atrocities activated group-defensive strategies, resulting in more negative intergroup attitudes and dehumanization of Jews. In stark contrast, in the "culturally close" condition (where feelings of shared culture were induced), reminders of ingroup atrocities actually resulted in more positive intergroup attitudes and humanization of Jews.
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Rules or Consequences? The Role of Ethical Mind-Sets in Moral Dynamics
Gert Cornelissen et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research on the dynamics of moral behavior has documented two contrasting phenomena - moral consistency and moral balancing. Moral balancing refers to the phenomenon whereby behaving ethically or unethically decreases the likelihood of engaging in the same type of behavior again later. Moral consistency describes the opposite pattern - engaging in ethical or unethical behavior increases the likelihood of engaging in the same type of behavior later on. The three studies reported here supported the hypothesis that individuals' ethical mind-set (i.e., outcome-based vs. rule-based) moderates the impact of an initial ethical or unethical act on the likelihood of behaving ethically on a subsequent occasion. More specifically, an outcome-based mind-set facilitated moral balancing, and a rule-based mind-set facilitated moral consistency.
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Surveying the Moral Landscape: Moral Motives and Group-Based Moralities
Ronnie Janoff-Bulman & Nate Carnes
Personality and Social Psychology Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We present a new six-cell Model of Moral Motives that applies a fundamental motivational distinction in psychology to the moral domain. In addition to moral motives focused on the self or another, we propose two group-based moralities, both communal in orientation, but reflecting distinct moral motives (Social Order/Communal Solidarity vs. Social Justice/Communal Responsibility) as well as differences in construals of group entitativity. The two group-based moralities have implications for intragroup homogeneity as well as intergroup conflict. Our model challenges the conclusions of Haidt and colleagues that only conservatives (not liberals) are group oriented and embrace a binding morality. We explore the implications of this new model for politics in particular and for the self-regulation versus social regulation of morality more generally.
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Overlooking the Obvious: Incentives to Lie
Charles Bond et al.
Basic and Applied Social Psychology, March/April 2013, Pages 212-221
Abstract:
Over the years, people have searched for deception cues in the liar's behavior. However, the sender's incentives to lie might be more revealing than behavior. In Experiment 1, an incentive was developed that was predictive of lying. Judges with access to incentive information in addition to behavior achieved almost perfect lie/truth detection. This was not a result of the speakers' behavior being transparent (Experiment 2) but because incentive information was useful to separate lies from truths (Experiments 2 and 3). Experiment 3 revealed that people may forego perfectly diagnostic contextual cues to base their judgments on illusory behavioral cues.
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Separating Will from Grace: An Experiment on Conformity and Awareness in Cheating
Toke Fosgaard, Lars Gaarn Hansen & Marco Piovesan
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper we investigate if people cheat more when they observe their peers cheating because they conform or because they become aware that cheating is something to actively consider. In our experiment subjects toss a coin in private and report the outcome (white or black). We reward only those who report white and leave them the possibility to cheat without being discovered. In our 2x2 experimental design, we manipulated subjects' report sheet to i) suggest (or not) that cheating is an option; ii) suggest that their peers were honest (or dishonest). We find that increasing awareness of cheating as an option significantly increases the probability that women cheat; whereas men - who are already aware that cheating is an option - are not affected. When we suggest that peers have cheated, men cheat significantly more, whereas women do not.
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Diminishing parochialism in intergroup conflict by disrupting the right temporo-parietal junction
Thomas Baumgartner et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Individuals react to violation of social norms by outgroup members differently than to transgressions of those same norms by ingroup members: namely outgroup perpetrators are punished much more harshly than ingroup perpetrators. This parochial punishment pattern has been observed and extensively studied in social psychology and behavioral economics. Despite progress in recent years, however, little is known about the neural underpinnings of this socially highly relevant phenomenon. Here we demonstrate by means of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) that the transient disruption of the right, but not the left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) reduces parochial punishment in a third-party punishment paradigm with real social groups. Moreover, we show that this observed TMS effect on parochial punishment is mediated by a classical punishment motive, i.e., retaliation. These findings provide the first causal evidence that the right TPJ plays a pivotal role in the implementation of parochial behaviors.
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Katie Rotella & Jennifer Richeson
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research demonstrates that people are sensitive to information that portrays either themselves or their ingroups in a negative light. Indeed, confronting individuals with their own past misdeeds or those committed by important ingroups can result in victim-blaming and refusals to apologize or make amends. Studies suggest that one reason why people demonstrate these backlash effects is that they immediately blunt the experience of guilt when confronted with either their own or group misdeeds from the past. The more individuals actually experience guilt, however, the more likely they are to respond to information about past wrongdoing with prosocial behavior (e.g., apologies, reparations, etc.). The present research sought to examine how subtle inductions of guilt shape responses to personal and group wrongdoing; namely, by manipulating individuals' body postures. Consistent with predictions, results suggest that embodiment-induced guilt reduces negative backlash and increases prosocial interpersonal and intergroup intentions.
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Stretching the Moral Gray Zone: Positive Affect, Moral Disengagement, and Dishonesty
Lynne Vincent, Kyle Emich & Jack Goncalo
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose that positive affect promotes dishonest behavior by providing the cognitive flexibility necessary to reframe and to rationalize dishonest acts. This hypothesis was tested in two studies. The results of Study 1 showed that individuals experiencing positive affect morally disengage to a greater extent than do individuals experiencing neutral affect. Study 2 built on this finding by demonstrating that the ability to morally disengage can lead individuals who experience positive affect to behave dishonestly. Specifically, the results of Study 2 showed that people experiencing positive affect are more likely to steal than individuals experiencing neutral affect, particularly when self-awareness is low. Furthermore, moral disengagement fully mediated this effect. Taken together, the results suggest that positive affect paves the way for the commission of dishonest acts by altering how individuals evaluate the moral implications of their own behavior.
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Motivation, Money, Prestige and Cheats
David Pascual-Ezama, Drazen Prelec & Derek Dunfield
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates the effects of supervision and incentives on subjects' performance and cheating behavior in a real effort task. With a sample of 540 participants in three different experiments, we investigated the interaction between motivation and monetary and social rewards, with and without supervision. Our results suggest: 1) lack of supervision promotes cheating, though workers tend to cheat moderately; 2) both economic and social incentives increase motivation but only when workers like their jobs; 3) workers do not increase their band of acceptable dishonest behavior for possible economic rewards, but they do increase dishonest behavior for possible social rewards, like prestige.
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Luke (Lei) Zhu, Aaron Kay & Richard Eibach
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We hypothesize that the system justification motive increases individuals' susceptibility to ideological priming effects. We tested this hypothesis in a sample of 308 participants in which system justification, accessibility of meritocratic or egalitarian ideology, and judgment of a meritocratic or equal funding system were manipulated. As predicted, when the system justifying motive was activated, participants primed with meritocracy (egalitarianism) judged a meritocratic (equal) funding system as relatively more fair. The same pattern was not found when system justification motives were not activated. Theoretical implications are discussed.
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Bribery, blackmail, and the double standard for leader transgressions
Georgina Randsley de Moura & Dominic Abrams
Group Dynamics, March 2013, Pages 43-52
Abstract:
How does a person's leadership or membership role within a group affect how others judge that person's transgressions? Participants evaluated either a leader or a regular member of either an ingroup or an outgroup who transgressed by engaging in either bribery (Experiment 1) or blackmail (Experiment 2). In both experiments, transgressors were judged less punitively if they were ingroup leaders than ingroup members, outgroup members, or outgroup leaders. The severity of the transgression and whether it served group interests did not alter this effect, which shows that people may apply a double standard to an ingroup leader's transgressions. Implications are discussed for the spread of corruption among leaders and followers.
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How luck and performance affect stealing
Christina Gravert
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper investigates how the way of earning payoff affects the probability of stealing. The participants who earned their payoff according to performance were three times more likely to take the (undeserved) maximum payoff than participants with randomly allocated payoff. Conditional on stealing something, most subjects steal the full amount available.
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Does Injustice Affect Your Sense of Taste and Smell? The Mediating Role of Moral Disgust
Daniel Skarlicki et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Unfair treatment can activate strong negative emotions among victims and third parties. Less is known about other innate and evolutionary-based reactions to unfairness, such as those that manifest themselves through our senses. In three experiments, we found that interpersonally unfair treatment at work, defined as treatment that violates individual's sense of dignity and respect, triggered disgust emotions over and above anger which subsequently related to stronger taste and smell reactions to gustatory and olfactory stimuli. This effect was observed for pleasant and unpleasant tasting products, for agreeable and malodorous scents, and among both mistreatment victims and third parties. Our findings suggest that violations of dignity and respect can trigger an evolutionary based reaction that activates a human alarm system, warning individuals of impending threats even when no oral threat is imminent.
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The Personality Profile of Brave Exemplars: A Person-Centered Analysis
William Dunlop & Lawrence Walker
Journal of Research in Personality, forthcoming
Abstract:
What accounts for the actions of people who exhibit exceptional bravery, voluntarily risking their lives to save others? Previous research on this topic has been restricted to the variable approach. Here, we examine this phenomenon via the person approach, by deriving a personality profile distinctive of exceptional bravery. A cluster analysis, based on a broadband assessment of 11 personality variables, revealed that awardees for bravery were distinguished from comparison participants on the basis of their personality composition, challenging a situational explanation for their actions. The cluster corresponding with exceptional bravery embodied an expanded worldview (epistemic development, early advantage), positivity (redemption), and efficacy (dominance and agency). These findings inform understanding regarding the psychological factors underlying brave action.
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Do customers return excessive change in a restaurant? A field experiment on dishonesty
Ofer Azar, Shira Yosef & Michael Bar-Eli
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
The article reports the results of a field experiment used to study dishonest behavior in a natural setting. Customers in a restaurant in tables of one or two diners who paid with cash received excessive change of either 10 or 40 Shekels (about $3 or $12). A majority of customers (128 out of 192) did not return the excessive change. Repeated customers returned the excessive change much more often than one-time customers. Women returned the extra change much more often than men, especially among repeated customers. Interestingly, a table with a woman and a man behaves similarly to one or two males and not to a female table. Surprisingly, tables with two diners were not significantly more likely to return the excessive change. Customers receiving 10 extra Shekels were much less likely to return them than those who received 40 extra Shekels, but it is hard to know to what extent this comes from intentional behavior versus lower likelihood to observe the extra change when it is lower. We also found evidence for variation in dishonesty as a function of the time during the day.
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Daryl Cameron, Keith Payne & John Doris
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Changing people's emotions can change their moral judgments, even when the emotions are incidental to the judgment and hence morally irrelevant. It has commonly been assumed that people lack the motivation or ability to correct against such incidental emotional influences. We provide evidence that the ability to make fine-grained distinctions between emotions is an important moderator of these effects. In two experiments, we found that measured (Experiment 1) and manipulated (Experiment 2) emotion differentiation calibrated the relationship between incidental disgust and moral judgments. Whereas unskilled emotion differentiators made stronger moral judgments after incidental disgust priming, skilled emotion differentiators did not. Emotion differentiation may sharpen moral perception, by enabling people to discount incidental emotions while making moral judgments.
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Belief about immutability of moral character and punitiveness toward criminal offenders
Kim-Pong Tam et al.
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, March 2013, Pages 603-611
Abstract:
The present research examined the association between belief about immutability of moral character and punitiveness toward criminal offenders. Overall, participants who believed that moral character is immutable (entity theorists) were more punitive than those who believed that it is changeable (incremental theorists). More important, the present research identified two mediational paths: Entity theorists made more internal attribution of criminal behavior and held stronger expectation of offenders' recidivism, both of which in turn led to stronger punitiveness. Also, contrary to some researchers' speculation, entity theorists did not perceive less controllability in criminal behavior. Implications for implicit theory research and criminal justice research are discussed.
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Unethical Behavior in the Field: Demographic Characteristics and Beliefs of the Cheater
Alessandro Bucciol, Fabio Landini & Marco Piovesan
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
What are the individual demographic characteristics that correlate with unethical behavior? To answer this question we randomly interviewed 541 passengers who used the bus in Reggio Emilia (Italy). Exploiting the high level of fare evasion (43% without a valid ticket) we find that young individuals, males and non-European immigrants in our sample are more likely to travel without a ticket. Interestingly, traveling with other people correlates with the probability of holding a valid ticket but its effect depends on who the passenger and the others are. Finally, we find that all passengers' beliefs on fine costs, ticket inspection frequency, and percentage of passengers without a ticket are surprisingly close to actual figures. However, cheaters perceive inspections as more frequent than those traveling with a valid ticket.