No Time to Die
From variability to vulnerability: People exposed to greater variability judge wrongdoers more harshly
Yu Ding & Krishna Savani
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent decades have seen increased variability in diverse domains, such as the climate and asset prices. As more resources are required to cope with greater variability in the outside world, exposure to greater variability can make people feel that society is more vulnerable. This sense of vulnerability, in turn, can lead people to judge and punish wrongdoers more harshly. Studies 1a-2c found that people who were exposed to graphs representing greater variability were more willing to punish wrongdoers, both in domains that were related to the source of variability and those that were unrelated. Studies 3 and 4 found that people who experienced more variable dice rolls were more likely to punish unethical behaviors in hypothetical scenarios and in experimental games, even at a financial cost to themselves. Studies 5a and 5b provided evidence for the underlying mechanism - sense of vulnerability - using correlational designs. Study 6 provided experimental evidence for the underlying mechanism. These findings suggest that increasing variability in diverse domains can have unexpected psychological consequences.
Do People Want to Be More Moral?
Jessie Sun & Geoffrey Goodwin
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Most people want to change some aspects of their personality, but does this phenomenon extend to moral character and to close others? Targets (n = 800) rated their personality traits and reported how much they wanted to change on each trait; well-acquainted informants (n = 958) rated targets' personality traits and how much they wanted the targets to change on those same traits. Targets and informants reported a lower desire to change on more morally relevant traits (e.g., honesty, compassion, fairness) compared with less morally relevant traits (e.g., anxiety, sociability, productiveness) - even after we controlled for current trait levels. Moreover, although targets generally wanted to improve more on traits that they had less desirable levels of, and informants wanted their targets to improve more on those traits as well, targets' moral change goals were less calibrated to their current trait levels. Finally, informants wanted targets to change in similar ways, but to a lesser extent, than targets themselves did. These findings suggest that moral considerations take a back seat when it comes to self-improvement.
Lying to appear honest
Shoham Choshen-Hillel, Alex Shaw & Eugene Caruso
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
People try to avoid appearing dishonest. Although efforts to avoid appearing dishonest can often reduce lying, we argue that, at times, the desire to appear honest can actually lead people to lie. We hypothesize that people may lie to appear honest in cases where the truth is highly favorable to them, such that telling the truth might make them appear dishonest to others. A series of studies provided robust evidence for our hypothesis. Lawyers, university students, and MTurk and Prolific participants said that they would have underreported extremely favorable outcomes in real-world scenarios (Studies 1a-1d). They did so to avoid appearing dishonest. Furthermore, in a novel behavioral paradigm involving a chance game with monetary prizes, participants who received in private a very large number of wins reported fewer wins than they received; they lied and incurred a monetary cost to avoid looking like liars (Studies 2a-2c). Finally, we show that people's concern that others would think that they have overreported is valid (Studies 3a-3b). We discuss our findings in relation to the literatures on dishonesty and on reputation.
The morality of organization versus organized members: Organizations are attributed more control and responsibility for negative outcomes than are equivalent members
Simone Tang et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Seven experiments demonstrate that framing an organizational entity (the target) as an organization ("an organization comprised of its constituent members") versus its members ("constituent members comprising an organization") increases attribution of responsibility to the target following a negative outcome, despite identical information conveyed. Specifically, the target in the organization (vs. members) frame was perceived to have more control over a negative outcome, which led to an increased attribution of responsibility (Studies 1-3). This effect surfaced for both for-profits and nonprofits (Study 5). However, when the target in the members frame had explicit control over the outcome (Study 3), or when participants held strong beliefs in individual free will (Study 4), the effect of frame on responsibility attenuated. To the extent that framing increased perceptions of control, punishment for the target also increased (Studies 6a and 6b). By demonstrating how a subtle shift in framing can impact people's perceptions and judgments of organizations, we reveal important knowledge about how people understand organizations and the psychological nature of organizational and group perception.
Wait, There's Torture in Zootopia? Examining the Prevalence of Torture in Popular Movies
Casey Delehanty & Erin Kearns
Perspectives on Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Roughly half of the U.S. public thinks that torture can be acceptable in counterterrorism. According to recent research, dramatic depictions of torture increase public support for the practice. Yet we do not know how frequently - and in what context - torture is depicted across popular media. What messages about the acceptability and effectiveness of torture do Americans receive when they watch popular films? To address this question, we coded each incident of torture in the twenty top-grossing films each year from 2008 to 2017 to analyze how torture is portrayed in terms of its frequency, efficacy, and social acceptability. Results show that the majority of popular films - including films aimed toward children - have at least one torture scene. Across films, the messages sent about torture are fairly consistent. As expected, movies tend to depict torture as effective. Further, how movies portray torture is also a function of who is perpetrating it. Specifically, protagonists are more likely to torture for instrumental reasons or in response to threats and are more likely to do so effectively. In contrast, antagonists are more likely to use torture as punishment and to torture women. The frequency and nature of torture's depiction in popular films may help explain why many in the public support torture in counterterrorism.
Structure-seeking as a psychological antecedent of beliefs about morality
Matthew Stanley, Elizabeth Marsh & Aaron Kay
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
People differ in their beliefs about the objectivity of moral claims. We investigated a possible psychological antecedent that might be associated with people's beliefs about the objectivity of moral claims. More specifically, we examined the relationship between the endorsement of moral objectivism and one's need to see the world as structured, ordered, and predictable. By believing that the world comprises objective facts about morality, a simple, rigid, and unambiguous structure is imposed on the moral landscape that is invariant to the whims and preferences of any particular person or group. Our results suggest that those more in need of personal structure and order in their lives are indeed more likely to endorse moral objectivism. We discuss the implications of these results for psychological theories of control and structure-seeking, and for cooperation, prosociality, social orderliness, and social goal pursuit.
Empathic and Numerate Giving: The Joint Effects of Victim Images and Charity Evaluations
Robin Bergh & David Reinstein
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Helping behaviors are often driven by emotional reactions to the suffering of particular individuals, but these behaviors do not seem to be upregulated when many people need help. In this article, we consider if these reactions are also "innumerate" to information about how charities spend their money. Across six experiments, we examined how images of identified victims interact with information about charity efficiency (money toward program) and effectiveness (program outcome). We further examined if the images primarily get people to donate (yes/no), while efficiency/effectiveness might provide a tuning mechanism for how much to give. Results showed that images influenced the propensity to donate and induced participants to donate their full bonuses, indicating heuristic effects. Efficiency and effectiveness information had no effects on donations.
Seeing the Whole Picture? Avoided Negative Affect and Processing of Others' Suffering
Birgit Koopmann-Holm et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Noticing someone's pain is the first step to a compassionate response. While past research suggests that the degree to which people want to avoid feeling negative ("avoided negative affect"; ANA) shapes how people respond to someone's suffering, the present research investigates whether ANA also predicts how people process others' suffering. In two studies, using complex photographs containing negative aspects (i.e., suffering), we found that the higher people's ANA, the fewer details of negative aspects they correctly recognized, and the fewer negative words they used in their image descriptions. However, when asked to process negative content, the higher people's ANA, the more negatively they rated that content. In Study 3, we report cultural differences in people's sensitivity to notice suffering in an ambiguous image. ANA mediated these cultural differences. Implications for research on compassion are discussed.
Immanent Justice Reasoning by Spatial Proximity
Mitchell Callan, Joshua Moreton & Gethin Hughes
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Immanent justice reasoning involves causally attributing someone's bad outcome to their prior immoral actions. Building on the idea that causality is mentally linked with spatial proximity, we investigated whether such reasoning might lead participants to spatially bind together immoral actions and bad outcomes. Across four experiments (N = 553, Mechanical Turk workers), participants positioned sentences describing other people's bad (vs. good) outcomes closer in space to previous immoral behaviors. This effect was observed both when the position of the initial action remained in a fixed location and when it "chased" the outcome across the screen. Importantly, we also found that this spatial positioning of immoral actions and bad outcomes is mediated by perceived deservingness of the outcome and is not merely due to perceived similarity of events. These findings suggest that perceived deservingness biases the spatial proximity of representations of others' random bad outcomes and their prior immoral actions.
Diffusion of Being Pivotal and Immoral Outcomes
Armin Falk, Thomas Neuber & Nora Szech
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study how the diffusion of being pivotal affects immoral outcomes. In our main experiment, subjects decide about agreeing to kill mice and receiving money versus objecting to the killing and foregoing the monetary amount. In a baseline condition, subjects decide individually about the life of one mouse. In the main treatment, subjects are organized into groups of eight and decide simultaneously. Eight mice are killed if at least one subject opts for killing. The fraction of subjects agreeing to kill is significantly higher in the main condition compared with the baseline condition. In a second experiment, we run the same baseline and main conditions but use a charity context and additionally study sequential decision-making. We replicate our finding from the mouse paradigm. We further show that the observed effects increase with experience, i.e., when we repeat the experiment for a second time. For both experiments, we elicit beliefs about being pivotal, which we validate in a treatment with non-involved observers. We show that beliefs are a main driver of our results.
Heroes Perceive Their Own Actions as Less Heroic Than Other People Do
Nadav Klein
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Heroic acts are prosocial actions that involve extreme sacrifice and risk. Such acts receive near-ubiquitous praise. However, the present article suggests that one group refrains from praising heroic acts-heroes themselves. Using self-reflections provided in news reports, Experiment 1 finds that people who actually saved others' lives do not view themselves as positively as they should according to outside observers. Experiment 2 measures participants' recollections of their own extreme prosocial acts and finds that self-evaluations are less positive than observers' evaluations. Experiment 3 finds that participants who imagine themselves performing a heroic act evaluate it less positively than participants who observe the same act. Experiments 2-3 identify differences in perceptions of personal burden as a mechanism-whereas observers believe that acting heroically involves extreme personal burden, actors view their personal burden as relatively unimportant. Being a hero is a distinctly less positive experience than observing one.