My bad
What’s in a name? The toll e-signatures take on individual honesty
Eileen Chou
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2015, Pages 84–95
Abstract:
People cherish and embrace the symbolic value that their unique handwritten signature holds. Technological advances, however, have led organizations to reject traditional handwritten signatures in favor of the efficiency and convenience of e-signatures. This research directly investigates the possibility that while many common e-signatures may objectively perform the same function as signing by hand, they do not exert the same symbolic weight in subsequent decision making. Seven studies consistently demonstrate these e-signatures’ ineffectiveness for curbing individual dishonesty — one of the essential purposes of a signature. Furthermore, the effects are caused by their inadequate ability to evoke the signer’s self-presence. Results also identify one form of e-signature that can preserve this crucial psychological connection. Meta-analyses across studies conducted for this research establish the reliability and robustness of the associations between common forms of e-signatures, self-presence, and dishonesty. By systematically examining whether, why, and which e-signatures abet cheating, findings illuminate an unexplored — but critical — consequence of a practice that is prevalent worldwide.
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Hormones and Ethics: Understanding the Biological Basis of Unethical Conduct
Jooa Julia Lee et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Globally, fraud has been rising sharply over the last decade, with current estimates placing financial losses at greater than $3.7 trillion annually. Unfortunately, fraud prevention has been stymied by lack of a clear and comprehensive understanding of its underlying causes and mechanisms. In this paper, we focus on an important but neglected topic — the biological antecedents and consequences of unethical conduct — using salivary collection of hormones (testosterone and cortisol). We hypothesized that preperformance cortisol levels would interact with preperformance levels of testosterone to regulate cheating behavior in 2 studies. Further, based on the previously untested cheating-as-stress-reduction hypothesis, we predicted a dose–response relationship between cheating and reductions in cortisol and negative affect. Taken together, this research marks the first foray into the possibility that endocrine-system activity plays an important role in the regulation of unethical behavior.
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An Emotional-Freedom Defense of Schadenfreude
Earl Spurgin
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, August 2015, Pages 767-784
Abstract:
Schadenfreude is the emotion we experience when we obtain pleasure from others’ misfortunes. Typically, we are not proud of it and admit experiencing it only sheepishly or apologetically. Philosophers typically view it, and the disposition to experience it, as moral failings. Two recent defenders of Schadenfreude, however, argue that it is morally permissible because it stems from judgments about the just deserts of those who suffer misfortunes. I also defend Schadenfreude, but on different grounds that overcome two deficiencies of those recent defenses. First, my defense accounts for the wide range of circumstances in which we experience Schadenfreude. Those circumstances often involve feelings and judgments that are less noble and admirable than judgments regarding just deserts. Second, it accounts for the sheepish or apologetic feelings that commonly accompany Schadenfreude. The two recent defenses can account for those feelings only by holding that they are mistaken or misguided. In opposition to those who view Schadenfreude as a moral failing, I argue that it is morally permissible unless it is part of a causal chain that produces an immoral act. The moral permissibility of the emotion is necessary in order for individuals to have the emotional freedom that, in turn, is necessary for their well-being. Schadenfreude’s moral status is similar to a sexual fetish’s. Like a fetish, experiencing Schadenfreude is not immoral in itself, but sharing and discussing it with others is immoral in many contexts.
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The Enhancement of Children versus Circumcision: A Case of Double Moral Standards?
Tobias Hainz
Bioethics, September 2015, Pages 507–515
Abstract:
The application of enhancement technologies to children and non-medical infant male circumcision are both topics that enjoy the continuous attention of bioethical research but are usually discussed in isolation from each other. Yet one can show that three major arguments used by opponents of the enhancement of children are also applicable to circumcision. These arguments are based on the insecurity of these procedures, the child's right to an open future, and human nature as a foundation of human dignity. People who reject the enhancement of children because of these arguments but accept circumcision hold mutually inconsistent moral convictions or apply double moral standards to these cases. This is particularly important when legislative systems treat the enhancement of children and circumcision in a considerably different manner, which is true for many contemporary legislative systems. At least three strategies can be adopted in order to avoid such inconsistencies, two of which, however, fail for various reasons. According to a third, more promising strategy, circumcision should be subsumed under human enhancement and treated like other enhancement technologies. This strategy justifies restrictions on, but not the prohibition of circumcision. Furthermore, proponents of circumcision should be prepared for future technologies that provide similar benefits as circumcision but are not as contentious as this intervention, so that, in the future, circumcision could become more and more unacceptable.
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Noa Schori-Eyal et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2015, Pages 79–83
Abstract:
Group-based guilt and acknowledging responsibility for collective moral transgressions are an important part of conflict resolution. However, they are not a common phenomenon. This is particularly true during intergroup conflict, and among those group members who glorify their group and see it as superior to others. In the current research we investigated ways to increase group-based guilt among group members who tend to glorify their group. We reasoned that satisfying the motivation behind group glorification may counteract its negative association with group-based guilt. In two studies, conducted during the 2014 Gaza war, we demonstrated that inducing conflict-related group-based pride among high glorifiers can increase group-based guilt for group actions during the same conflict; effectively regulating one group-based emotion by regulating another. The possible mechanism and implications are discussed.
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Melissa McDonald et al.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Creating a sense of interpersonal similarity of attitudes and values is associated with increased attraction and liking. Applying these findings in an intergroup setting, though, has yielded mixed support. Theorizing from a social identity perspective suggests that highlighting intergroup similarity may lead to increased antipathy to the extent that it is perceived as a threat to one’s unique social identity. To circumvent this process, we examine the influence of emotional similarity, rather than attitudinal or value similarity, with the expectation that the short-term nature of emotions may evoke less threat to one’s social identity. Moreover, given the importance of emotions in intergroup humanization processes, we expected that emotional similarity would be associated with greater conciliatory attitudes due to an increase in humanization of the outgroup. We report results from two studies supporting these predictions. Following exposure to an anger-eliciting news story, Jewish Israeli participants were given information that their own emotional reaction to the story was similar (or not) to an individual member of the outgroup (Study 1: Palestinian citizen of Israel) or the outgroup as a whole (Study 2: Palestinians of the West Bank). As predicted, emotional similarity was associated with increased humanization of the outgroup, and a subsequent increase in one’s willingness to support conciliatory political policies toward the outgroup. We conclude that emotional similarity may be a productive avenue for future intergroup interventions, particularly between groups where differences in attitudes and values are foundational to the intergroup conflict.
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Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior
Paul Piff et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, June 2015, Pages 883-899
Abstract:
Awe is an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that transcend current frames of reference. Guided by conceptual analyses of awe as a collective emotion, across 5 studies (N = 2,078) we tested the hypothesis that awe can result in a diminishment of the individual self and its concerns, and increase prosocial behavior. In a representative national sample (Study 1), dispositional tendencies to experience awe predicted greater generosity in an economic game above and beyond other prosocial emotions (e.g., compassion). In follow-up experiments, inductions of awe (relative to various control states) increased ethical decision-making (Study 2), generosity (Study 3), and prosocial values (Study 4). Finally, a naturalistic induction of awe in which participants stood in a grove of towering trees enhanced prosocial helping behavior and decreased entitlement compared to participants in a control condition (Study 5). Mediational data demonstrate that the effects of awe on prosociality are explained, in part, by feelings of a small self. These findings indicate that awe may help situate individuals within broader social contexts and enhance collective concern.
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Moral parochialism and contextual contingency across seven societies
Daniel Fessler et al.
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 22 August 2015
Abstract:
Human moral judgement may have evolved to maximize the individual's welfare given parochial culturally constructed moral systems. If so, then moral condemnation should be more severe when transgressions are recent and local, and should be sensitive to the pronouncements of authority figures (who are often arbiters of moral norms), as the fitness pay-offs of moral disapproval will primarily derive from the ramifications of condemning actions that occur within the immediate social arena. Correspondingly, moral transgressions should be viewed as less objectionable if they occur in other places or times, or if local authorities deem them acceptable. These predictions contrast markedly with those derived from prevailing non-evolutionary perspectives on moral judgement. Both classes of theories predict purportedly species-typical patterns, yet to our knowledge, no study to date has investigated moral judgement across a diverse set of societies, including a range of small-scale communities that differ substantially from large highly urbanized nations. We tested these predictions in five small-scale societies and two large-scale societies, finding substantial evidence of moral parochialism and contextual contingency in adults' moral judgements. Results reveal an overarching pattern in which moral condemnation reflects a concern with immediate local considerations, a pattern consistent with a variety of evolutionary accounts of moral judgement.
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Adopting the ritual stance: The role of opacity and context in ritual and everyday actions
Rohan Kapitány & Mark Nielsen
Cognition, December 2015, Pages 13–29
Abstract:
Rituals are a pervasive and ubiquitous aspect of human culture, but when we naïvely observe an opaque set of ritual actions, how do we come to understand its significance? To investigate this, across two experiments we manipulated the degree to which actions were ritualistic or ordinary, and whether or not they were accompanied with context. In Experiment 1, 474 adult participants were presented with videos of novel rituals (causally opaque actions) or control actions (causally transparent) performed on a set of objects accompanied with neutral-valance written context. Experiment 2 presented the same video stimuli but with negative and aversive written context. In both experiments ritualized objects were rated as physically unchanged, but more ‘special’ and more ‘desirable’ than objects subjected to control actions, with context amplifying this effect. Results are discussed with reference to the Ritual Stance and the Social-Action hypothesis. Implications for both theories are discussed, as are methodological concerns regarding the empirical investigation of ritual cognition. We argue that causally opaque ritual actions guide the behavior of naïve viewers because such actions are perceived as socially normative, rather than with reference to supernatural intervention or causation.
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Perceived moral responsibility for attitude-based discrimination
Liz Redford & Kate Ratliff
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research investigated judgements of moral responsibility for attitude-based discrimination, testing whether a wrongdoer's mental states – awareness and foresight – are central determinants of culpability. Participants read about and judged a target person who was described as consciously egalitarian, but harbouring negative attitudes that lead him to treat African Americans unfairly. Two studies showed that participants ascribed greater moral responsibility for discrimination when the target was aware of having negative attitudes than when he was unaware. Surprisingly, moral judgements were equally harsh towards a target who was explicitly aware that his bias could influence his behaviour as a target who was not. To explain this result, a second study showed that the path from awareness to moral responsibility was mediated by perceptions that the target had an obligation to foresee his discriminatory behaviour, but not by perceptions of the target's actual foresight. These results suggest that bias awareness influences moral judgements of those who engage in attitude-based discrimination because it obligates them to foresee harmful consequences. The current findings demonstrate that moral judges consider not just descriptive facts, but also normative standards regarding a wrongdoer's mental states.
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Inability and Obligation in Moral Judgment
Wesley Buckwalter & John Turri
PLoS ONE, August 2015
Abstract:
It is often thought that judgments about what we ought to do are limited by judgments about what we can do, or that “ought implies can.” We conducted eight experiments to test the link between a range of moral requirements and abilities in ordinary moral evaluations. Moral obligations were repeatedly attributed in tandem with inability, regardless of the type (Experiments 1–3), temporal duration (Experiment 5), or scope (Experiment 6) of inability. This pattern was consistently observed using a variety of moral vocabulary to probe moral judgments and was insensitive to different levels of seriousness for the consequences of inaction (Experiment 4). Judgments about moral obligation were no different for individuals who can or cannot perform physical actions, and these judgments differed from evaluations of a non-moral obligation (Experiment 7). Together these results demonstrate that commonsense morality rejects the “ought implies can” principle for moral requirements, and that judgments about moral obligation are made independently of considerations about ability. By contrast, judgments of blame were highly sensitive to considerations about ability (Experiment 8), which suggests that commonsense morality might accept a “blame implies can” principle.
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Lifting the veil of ignorance: An experiment on the contagiousness of norm violations
Andreas Diekmann, Wojtek Przepiorka & Heiko Rauhut
Rationality and Society, August 2015, Pages 309-333
Abstract:
Norm violations can be contagious. Previous research analyzed two mechanisms of why knowledge about others’ norm violations triggers its spread: (1) actors lower their subjective beliefs about the probability or severity of punishment or (2) they condition their compliance on others’ compliance. While earlier field studies could hardly disentangle both effects, we use a laboratory experiment which eliminates any punishment threat. Subjects (n = 466) can throw a die and are paid according to their reported number. Our design rules out any possibility of personal identification so that subjects can lie about their thrown number and claim inflated payoffs without risking detection. The aggregate distribution of reported payoffs allows the estimation of the extent to which the honesty norm is violated. We compare two treatment conditions in which subjects are informed about lying behavior of others with a control condition without information feedback. Observations from a subsequent die throw reveal that knowledge about liars triggers the spread of lying compared to the control condition. Results from a follow-up experiment show that this effect is moderated by subjects’ beliefs about the prevalence of norm violations of others. Our results demonstrate the contagiousness of norm violations, where actors imitate norm violations of others under the exclusion of strategic motives.
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Individual differences in physiological flexibility predict spontaneous avoidance
Amelia Aldao, Katherine Dixon-Gordon & Andres De Los Reyes
Cognition and Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
People often regulate their emotions by resorting to avoidance, a putatively maladaptive strategy. Prior work suggests that increased psychopathology symptoms predict greater spontaneous utilisation of this strategy. Extending this work, we examined whether heightened resting cardiac vagal tone (which reflects a general ability to regulate emotions in line with contextual demands) predicts decreased spontaneous avoidance. In Study 1, greater resting vagal tone was associated with reduced spontaneous avoidance in response to disgust-eliciting pictures, beyond anxiety and depression symptoms and emotional reactivity. In Study 2, resting vagal tone interacted with anxiety and depression symptoms to predict spontaneous avoidance in response to disgust-eliciting film clips. The positive association between symptoms and spontaneous avoidance was more pronounced among participants with reduced resting vagal tone. Thus, increased resting vagal tone might protect against the use of avoidance. Our findings highlight the importance of assessing both subjective and biological processes when studying individual differences in emotion regulation.
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Daniel Effron & Dale Miller
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, November 2015, Pages 16–32
Abstract:
Not everyone who has committed a misdeed and wants to warn others against committing it will feel entitled to do so. Six experiments, a replication, and a follow-up study examined how suffering for a misdeed grants people the legitimacy to advise against it. When advisors had suffered (vs. not suffered) for their misdeeds, observers thought advisors had more of a right to advise and perceived them as less hypocritical and self-righteous; advisees responded with less anger and derogation; and advisors themselves felt more comfortable offering strong advice. Advisors also strategically highlighted how they had suffered for their wrongdoing when they were motivated to establish their right to offer advice. Additional results illustrate how concerns about the legitimacy of advice-giving differ from concerns about persuasiveness. The findings shed light on what prevents good advice from being disseminated, and how to help people learn from others’ mistakes.
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The curious tale of Julie and Mark: Unraveling the moral dumbfounding effect
Edward Royzman, Kwanwoo Kim & Robert Leeman
Judgment and Decision Making, July 2015, Pages 296–313
Abstract:
The paper critically reexamines the well-known “Julie and Mark” vignette, a stylized account of two college-age siblings opting to engage in protected sex while vacationing abroad (e.g., Haidt, 2001). Since its inception, the story has been viewed as a rhetorically powerful validation of Hume’s “sentimentalist” dictum that moral judgments are not rationally deduced but arise directly from feelings of pleasure or displeasure (e.g., disgust). People’s typical reactions to the vignette are alleged to support this view by demonstrating that individuals are prone to become morally dumbfounded (Haidt, 2001; Haidt, Bjorklund, & Murphy, 2000), i.e., they tend to “stubbornly” maintain their disapproval of the act without supporting reasons. In what follows, we critically reassess the traditional account, predicated on the notion that, among other things, most subjects simply fail to be convinced that the siblings’ actions are truly harm-free, thus having excellent reasons to disapprove of these acts. In line with this critique, 3 studies found that subjects 1) tended not to believe that the siblings’ actions were in fact harmless; 2) notwithstanding that, and in spite of holding a number of “counterargument-immune” reasons, subjects could be effectively maneuvered into exhibiting all the trademark signs of a morally dumbfounded state (which they subsequently recanted), and 3) with subjects’ beliefs about harm and standards of normative evaluation properly factored in, a more rigorous assessment procedure yielded a dumbfounding estimate of about 0. Based on these and related results, we contend that subjects’ reactions are wholly in line with the rationalist model of moral judgment and that their use in support of claims of moral arationalism should be reevaluated.