Naughty and nice
Chimpanzees help others with what they want; children help them with what they need
Robert Hepach, Leïla Benziad & Michael Tomasello
Developmental Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Humans, including young children, are strongly motivated to help others, even paying a cost to do so. Humans’ nearest primate relatives, great apes, are likewise motivated to help others, raising the question of whether the motivations of humans and apes are the same. Here we compared the underlying motivation to help of human children and chimpanzees. Both species understood the situation and helped a conspecific in a straightforward situation. However, when they knew that what the other was requesting would not actually help her, only the children gave her not what she wanted but what she needed. These results suggest that both chimpanzees and human children help others but the underlying motivation for why they help differs. In comparison to chimpanzees, young children help in a paternalistic manner. The evolutionary hypothesis is that uniquely human socio‐ecologies based on interdependent cooperation gave rise to uniquely human prosocial motivations to help others paternalistically.
Trick for a Treat: The Effect of Costume, Identity, and Peers on Norm Violations
Shanshan Zhang et al.
Claremont Graduate University Working Paper, October 2019
Abstract:
We hypothesize that clothes can affect the behavior of the wearer by influencing the person’s identity. We test this hypothesis by recruiting trick-or-treaters during Halloween, a time of year when people wear salient and extreme clothing. Because the tradition of costume-wear for Halloween evolved, in part, to hide one’s identity during “tricks” (i.e. norm violations), it is particularly relevant to measure the effect of Halloween costumes on ethical behavior. We use the dice-rolling lying game as our experimental paradigm with 2×3×2 conditions. First, we vary the stakes to price lying behavior. Second, we run three conditions with different beneficiaries of the report (self, other, and both) to test whether lying for others is perceived to be normative. Third, we prime subjects about their costume to test the effect of costume and identity on ethical behavior. Surprisingly, priming had the opposite effect that we predicted. Rather than behaving consistently with the identity of one’s costume, primed “good guys” lied more and primed “bad guys” lied less. We interpret this as a moral licensing/self-conscience effect. We also find that stakes had no effect, people lied more for themselves than for others, and although there were no direct effects of gender, we found that children lie more when children of the same gender near them lie more. Lying has an inverted-U pattern with age, peaking at age 12.
Choosing and enjoying violence in narratives
Victoria Lagrange et al.
PLoS ONE, December 2019
Abstract:
We use an interactive story design in which participants read short stories and make two consecutive plot choices about whether protagonists commit low- or high-violence actions. Our study has four main findings. 1) People who choose high violence report greater satisfaction with the story, while those switching to or staying with no violence show lower satisfaction. 2) However, when participants encounter these stories without choices, they reliably rate higher-violence stories as less satisfying than lower-violence stories. 3) Regret seems to account for the low satisfaction of those who choose or switch to low violence. 4) There is a large segment of people (up to 66%) who can be persuaded by different story contexts (genre, perspective) to choose extreme violence in interactive fiction and as a consequence of their choice feel satisfaction. We hypothesize that people who opt for high violence enjoy the story as a result of their choice. Overall, we suggest that choosing violence serves as a gateway for enjoyment by creating an aesthetic zone of control detached from morality.
Morality is relative: Anger, disgust, and aggression as contingent responses to sibling versus acquaintance harm
Lukas Lopez et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Angry reactions to moral violations should be heightened when wrongs befall oneself in comparison with when wrongs befall acquaintances, as prior research by Molho, Tybur, Güler, Balliet, and Hofmann (2017) demonstrates, because aggressive confrontation is inherently risky and therefore only incentivized by natural selection to curtail significant fitness costs. Here, in 3 preregistered studies, we extend this sociofunctional perspective to cases of wrongs inflicted on siblings. We observed equivalently heightened anger in response to transgressions against either oneself or one’s sibling relative to transgressions against acquaintances across studies, whereas transgressions against acquaintances evoked greater disgust and/or fear (both associated with social avoidance) in 2 of the 3 studies. Studies 2 and 3, which incorporated measures of tendencies to confront the transgressor, confirmed that the elevated anger elicited by self or sibling harm partially mediated heightened inclinations toward direct aggression. Finally, in Study 3 we compared tendencies to experience anger and to directly aggress on behalf of siblings and close friends. Despite reporting greater affiliative closeness for friends than for siblings, harm to friends failed to evoke heightened anger relative to acquaintance harm, and participants were inclined to directly aggress against those who had harmed their sibling to a significantly greater extent than when the harm befell their friend. These overall results broadly replicate Molho et al.’s (2017) findings and theoretically extend the sociofunctionalist account of moral emotions to kinship.
Language framing shapes dehumanization of groups: A successful replication and extension of Cooley et al. (2017)
Gordon Hodson & Claire Doucher
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this journal, Cooley et al. (2017, Study 3) showed that presenting a social target as a group, as opposed to a group composite (i.e., people in a group) or as an individual, lowered perceptions that the target had a sense of mind (perceived capacity for experience and agency), both of which subsequently predicted lower sympathy for the target. In a direct replication but using double the sample size and preregistered hypotheses and methods, we found results strikingly supportive of the target article. We also expanded their findings, showing the effects (particularly of perceived experience) on willingness to help a target in need. The implications for using short communications to promote social change, particularly in a viral social media world, are discussed.
Wronging past rights: The sunk cost bias distorts moral judgment
Ethan Meyers et al.
Judgment and Decision Making, November 2019, Pages 721–727
Abstract:
When people have invested resources into an endeavor, they typically persist in it, even when it becomes obvious that it will fail. Here we show this bias extends to people’s moral decision-making. Across two preregistered experiments (N = 1592) we show that people are more willing to proceed with a futile, immoral action when costs have been sunk (Experiment 1A and 1B). Moreover, we show that sunk costs distort people’s perception of morality by increasing how acceptable they find actions that have received past investment (Experiment 2). We find these results in contexts where continuing would lead to no obvious benefit and only further harm. We also find initial evidence that the bias has a larger impact on judgment in immoral compared to non-moral contexts. Our findings illustrate a novel way that the past can affect moral judgment. Implications for rational moral judgment and models of moral cognition are discussed.
Promiscuous condemnation: People assume ambiguous actions are immoral
Neil Hester, Keith Payne & Kurt Gray
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do people view others as good or evil? Although people generally cooperate with others and view others' “true selves” as intrinsically good, we suggest that they are likely to assume that the actions of others are evil — at least when they are ambiguous. Nine experiments provide support for promiscuous condemnation: the general tendency to assume that ambiguous actions are immoral. Both cognitive and functional arguments support the idea of promiscuous condemnation. Cognitively, dyadic completion suggests that when the mind perceives some elements of immorality (or harm), it cannot help but perceive other elements of immorality. Functionally, assuming that ambiguous actions are immoral helps people quickly identify potential harm and provide aid to others. In the first seven experiments, participants often judged neutral nonsense actions (e.g., “John pelled”) as immoral, especially when the context surrounding these nonsense actions included elements of immorality (e.g., intentionality and suffering). In the last two experiments, participants showed greater promiscuous condemnation under time pressure, suggesting an automatic tendency to assume immorality that people must effortfully control.
When and Why Do Third Parties Punish Outside of the Lab? A Cross-Cultural Recall Study
Eric Pedersen et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Punishment can reform uncooperative behavior and hence could have contributed to humans’ ability to live in large-scale societies. Punishment by unaffected third parties has received extensive scientific scrutiny because third parties punish transgressors in laboratory experiments on behalf of strangers that they will never interact with again. Often overlooked in this research are interactions involving people who are not strangers, which constitute many interactions beyond the laboratory. Across three samples in two countries (United States and Japan; N = 1,294), we found that third parties’ anger at transgressors, and their intervention and punishment on behalf of victims, varied in real-life conflicts as a function of how much third parties valued the welfare of the disputants. Punishment was rare (1–2%) when third parties did not value the welfare of the victim, suggesting that previous economic game results have overestimated third parties’ willingness to punish transgressors on behalf of strangers.