The greater good
Worth Keeping but Not Exceeding: Asymmetric Consequences of Breaking Versus Exceeding Promises
Ayelet Gneezy & Nicholas Epley
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Promises are social contracts that can be broken, kept, or exceeded. Breaking one’s promise is evaluated more negatively than keeping one’s promise. Does expending more effort to exceed a promise lead to equivalently more positive evaluations? Although linear in their outcomes, we expected an asymmetry in evaluations of broken, kept, and exceeded promises. Whereas breaking one’s promise is obviously negative compared to keeping a promise, we predicted that exceeding one’s promise would not be evaluated more positively than merely keeping a promise. Three sets of experiments involving hypothetical, recalled, and actual promises support these predictions. A final experiment suggests this asymmetry comes from overvaluing kept promises rather than undervaluing exceeded promises. We suggest this pattern may reflect a general tendency in social systems to discourage selfishness and reward cooperation. Breaking one’s promise is costly, but exceeding it does not appear worth the effort.
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Your Morals Depend on Language
Albert Costa et al.
PLoS ONE, April 2014
Abstract:
Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the question in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently reducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.
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When enemies go viral (or not) — a real-time experiment during the “Stop Kony” campaign
Daniel Sullivan, Mark Landau & Aaron Kay
Psychology of Popular Media Culture, forthcoming
Abstract:
In March–April 2012, using 2 online videos, nonprofit organization Invisible Children initiated a “Stop Kony” campaign to turn Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony into an international enemy. Although the first video was the fastest viral video of all time, interest in the campaign eventually faded away. Might individual-level psychological processes help explain why the campaign was initially successful, and ultimately failed? To test this possibility, we used a combination of experimental manipulations and real-time data tracking responses to the “Stop Kony” videos as they appeared. Integrating and advancing beyond prior theory on enemyship and idea contagion, our findings suggest that when a complex adverse situation is reduced to the actions of a clear enemy, this inspires moral outrage against the enemy. However, if the complexity of the situation becomes clearer, the enemy inspires less moral outrage and determination to act.
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The Myth of Harmless Wrongs in Moral Cognition: Automatic Dyadic Completion From Sin to Suffering
Kurt Gray, Chelsea Schein & Adrian Ward
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
When something is wrong, someone is harmed. This hypothesis derives from the theory of dyadic morality, which suggests a moral cognitive template of wrongdoing agent and suffering patient (i.e., victim). This dyadic template means that victimless wrongs (e.g., masturbation) are psychologically incomplete, compelling the mind to perceive victims even when they are objectively absent. Five studies reveal that dyadic completion occurs automatically and implicitly: Ostensibly harmless wrongs are perceived to have victims (Study 1), activate concepts of harm (Studies 2 and 3), and increase perceptions of suffering (Studies 4 and 5). These results suggest that perceiving harm in immorality is intuitive and does not require effortful rationalization. This interpretation argues against both standard interpretations of moral dumbfounding and domain-specific theories of morality that assume the psychological existence of harmless wrongs. Dyadic completion also suggests that moral dilemmas in which wrongness (deontology) and harm (utilitarianism) conflict are unrepresentative of typical moral cognition.
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Trait physical disgust is related to moral judgments outside of the purity domain
Hanah Chapman & Adam Anderson
Emotion, April 2014, Pages 341-348
Abstract:
Although there is an emerging consensus that disgust plays a role in human morality, it remains unclear whether this role is limited to transgressions that contain elements of physical disgust (e.g., gory murders, sexual crimes), or whether disgust is also involved in “pure” forms of morality. To address this issue, we examined the relationship between individual differences in the tendency to experience disgust toward physical stimuli (i.e., trait physical disgust) and reactions to pure moral transgressions. Across two studies, individuals higher in trait physical disgust judged moral transgressions to be more wrong than did their low-disgust counterparts, and were also more likely to moralize violations of social convention. Controlling for gender, trait anxiety, trait anger, and social conservatism did not eliminate trait disgust effects. These results suggest that disgust’s role in morality is not limited to issues of purity or bodily norms, and that disgust may play a role in setting the boundaries of the moral domain.
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Daniel Effron
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Seven studies demonstrate that threats to moral identity can increase how definitively people think they have previously proven their morality. When White participants were made to worry that their future behavior could seem racist, they overestimated how much a prior decision of theirs would convince an observer of their non-prejudiced character (Studies 1a-3). Ironically, such overestimation made participants appear more prejudiced to observers (Study 4). Studies 5 to 6 demonstrated a similar effect of threat in the domain of charitable giving — an effect driven by individuals for whom maintaining a moral identity is particularly important. Threatened participants only enhanced their beliefs that they had proven their morality when there was at least some supporting evidence, but these beliefs were insensitive to whether the evidence was weak or strong (Study 2). Discussion considers the role of motivated reasoning, and implications for ethical decision making and moral licensing.
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When Size Justifies: Intergroup Attitudes and Subjective Size Judgments of "Sacred Space"
Scott Leith & Anne Wilson
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Four studies demonstrate that people’s representations of an area’s size are subjective and shaped by context and relevant attitudes. Americans expressing greater anti-Muslim sentiment desired a Muslim or Arab structure to be further away from Ground Zero, and in turn enlarge the subjective size of Ground Zero. This spontaneous expansion of area occurs relative to those expressing less anti-Muslim sentiment (Studies 1-4), to people considering an desired ingroup structure (Study 2), and to those considering neutral outgroup (Studies 3-4) and ingroup (Study 4) structures. People subjectively enlarged Ground Zero by expanding the "inclusion criteria" for their definition of the space. Attitudes and desires concerning an encroaching structure can cause people to perceive a symbolically meaningful space as larger, allowing them to justify their opposition: if an unwanted structure must be outside a “sacred” ingroup space, enlarging the subjective size of the protected space justifies opposition to the encroachment.
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Follow the liar: The effects of adult lies on children's honesty
Chelsea Hays & Leslie Carver
Developmental Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research shows that most adults admit they lie to children. We also know that children learn through modeling and imitation. To date there are no published studies that examine whether lying to children has an effect on children's honesty. We aimed to bridge the gap in this literature by examining the effects of adults' lies on elementary and preschool-aged children's behavior using a modified temptation resistance paradigm, in which children are tempted to peek at a toy they have been told not to look at, and later given a chance to either admit peeking, or try to conceal their transgression by lying. Prior to being tested, half of the children were told a lie and half were not. We then measured both cheating (peeking) and lie-telling behaviors. We hypothesized that lying to a child would increase the likelihood that they would both peek at the toy and lie about having done so. Results showed that school-age children were more likely to peek if they had been lied to, and were also more likely to lie about peeking. In contrast with the school-age children, there was no difference in peeking or lying for preschoolers who were and were not lied to. These results have important implications for parenting and educational settings.
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Oxytocin promotes group-serving dishonesty
Shaul Shalvi & Carsten De Dreu
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 15 April 2014, Pages 5503-5507
Abstract:
To protect and promote the well-being of others, humans may bend the truth and behave unethically. Here we link such tendencies to oxytocin, a neuropeptide known to promote affiliation and cooperation with others. Using a simple coin-toss prediction task in which participants could dishonestly report their performance levels to benefit their group’s outcome, we tested the prediction that oxytocin increases group-serving dishonesty. A double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment allowing individuals to lie privately and anonymously to benefit themselves and fellow group members showed that healthy males (n = 60) receiving intranasal oxytocin, rather than placebo, lied more to benefit their group, and did so faster, yet did not necessarily do so because they expected reciprocal dishonesty from fellow group members. Treatment effects emerged when lying had financial consequences and money could be gained; when losses were at stake, individuals in placebo and oxytocin conditions lied to similar degrees. In a control condition (n = 60) in which dishonesty only benefited participants themselves, but not fellow group members, oxytocin did not influence lying. Together, these findings fit a functional perspective on morality revealing dishonesty to be plastic and rooted in evolved neurobiological circuitries, and align with work showing that oxytocin shifts the decision-maker’s focus from self to group interests. These findings highlight the role of bonding and cooperation in shaping dishonesty, providing insight into when and why collaboration turns into corruption.
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Anne Joosten et al.
Journal of Business Ethics, April 2014, Pages 1-14
Abstract:
In the present article, we argue that the constant pressure that leaders face may limit the willpower required to behave according to ethical norms and standards and may therefore lead to unethical behavior. Drawing upon the ego depletion and moral self-regulation literatures, we examined whether self-regulatory depletion that is contingent upon the moral identity of leaders may promote unethical leadership behavior. A laboratory experiment and a multisource field study revealed that regulatory resource depletion promotes unethical leader behaviors among leaders who are low in moral identity. No such effect was found among leaders with a high moral identity. This study extends our knowledge on why organizational leaders do not always conform to organizational goals. Specifically, we argue that the hectic and fragmented workdays of leaders may increase the likelihood that they violate ethical norms. This highlights the necessity to carefully schedule tasks that may have ethical implications. Similarly, organizations should be aware that overloading their managers with work may increase the likelihood of their leaders transgressing ethical norms.
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Ego depletion and its paradoxical effects on ethical decision making
Kai Chi Yam, Xiao-Ping Chen & Scott Reynolds
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, July 2014, Pages 204–214
Abstract:
Whereas previous research has shown that ego depletion can lead to an increase in unethical behavior, we suggest that this effect hinges on the social consensus of the unethical behavior. Drawing from theories on social consensus and dual-process decision-making, we hypothesize and confirm that ego depletion is associated with increased unethical behavior of comparatively low social consensus. We then find that, as hypothesized, ego depletion is associated with decreased unethical behavior of high social consensus (Studies 1 and 2). Results further suggest that, controlling for state self-control resources, depleted participants are less likely to engage in unethical behavior of high social consensus as a result of increased subjective fatigue (Study 3). Taken together, our findings challenge a widely-held assumption about the negative effects of ego depletion on ethical decision making.
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Experimentally distinguishing elevation from gratitude: Oh, the morality
Jason Siegel, Andrew Thomson & Mario Navarro
Journal of Positive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Elevation has garnered empirical support as the emotional response to witnessing moral beauty. The current studies investigated elevation’s construct validity by experimentally testing whether feelings of elevation are distinct from gratitude, another moral and ‘other-praising’ emotion. Study 1 demonstrated that feelings of elevation are distinct from gratitude, serenity (i.e. a secondary comparison condition), and boredom (i.e. a control condition). Study 2 added a behavioral outcome measure in the form of monetary donations to a moral charity. The third study expanded on Study 2 by randomly assigning participants to an elevation or gratitude mood induction and then randomly assigning them to have the opportunity to donate to either a moral or an amoral charity. Together, these studies support Haidt’s conceptualization of elevation, clarify Algoe and Haidt’s qualitative assessment of the emotional differences between elevation and gratitude, and reveal that elevation results in different behavioral responses than gratitude.
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Karina Schumann
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Comprehensive apologies are powerful tools that transgressors can use to promote reconciliation with the people they have hurt. However, because many apology elements require transgressors to admit fault, express shameful emotions and promise change, transgressors often avoid these threatening elements and instead choose to use more perfunctory apologies or even defensive strategies, such as justifications or attempts to blame the person they hurt. In two studies, I aimed to increase apology comprehensiveness and reduce defensiveness using self-affirmation. I predicted that self-affirmation would help transgressors maintain their self-integrity, consequently allowing them to offer more comprehensive apologies and bypass defensive strategies. Participants received a values affirmation, recalled an unresolved conflict, and indicated what they would say to the person they had hurt. As predicted, affirmed participants offered more comprehensive apologies and used fewer defensive strategies than control participants. These studies thus identify a simple method for promoting responses that facilitate conflict resolution and demonstrate the successful application of self-affirmation to the domain of interpersonal conflict.
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Self-Interest Bias in Moral Judgments of Others’ Actions
Konrad Bocian & Bogdan Wojciszke
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The automatic and affective nature of moral judgments leads to the expectation that these judgments are biased by an observer’s own interests. Although the idea of self-interest bias is old, it has never been directly tested with respect to the moral judgments of other individuals’ behaviors. The participants of three experiments observed other individuals’ counternormative behavior (breaking a rule or cheating for gain), which was judged as immoral. However, this judgment became much more lenient when the observers gained from the observed behavior. All three studies showed that the influence of self-interest on moral judgments was completely mediated by the observer’s increased liking for the perpetrator of the immoral acts but not by changes in mood. When the participants were induced to dislike the perpetrator (in a moderation-of-process design), the self-interest bias disappeared. Implications for the intuitionist approach to moral judgment are discussed.
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Forgiving You Is Hard, but Forgetting Seems Easy: Can Forgiveness Facilitate Forgetting?
Saima Noreen, Raynette Bierman & Malcolm MacLeod
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Forgiveness is considered to play a key role in the maintenance of social relationships, the avoidance of unnecessary conflict, and the ability to move forward with one’s life. But why is it that some people find it easier to forgive and forget than others? In the current study, we explored the supposed relationship between forgiveness and forgetting. In an initial session, 30 participants imagined that they were the victim in a series of hypothetical incidents and indicated whether or not they would forgive the transgressor. Following a standard think/no-think procedure, in which participants were trained to think or not to think about some of these incidents, more forgetting was observed for incidents that had been forgiven following no-think instructions compared with either think or baseline instructions. In contrast, no such forgetting effects emerged for incidents that had not previously been forgiven. These findings have implications for goal-directed forgetting and the relationship between forgiveness and memory.
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Teaching moral reasoning through gesture
Leanne Beaudoin-Ryan & Susan Goldin-Meadow
Developmental Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Stem-cell research. Euthanasia. Personhood. Marriage equality. School shootings. Gun control. Death penalty. Ethical dilemmas regularly spark fierce debate about the underlying moral fabric of societies. How do we prepare today's children to be fully informed and thoughtful citizens, capable of moral and ethical decisions? Current approaches to moral education are controversial, requiring adults to serve as either direct (‘top-down’) or indirect (‘bottom-up’) conduits of information about morality. A common thread weaving throughout these two educational initiatives is the ability to take multiple perspectives – increases in perspective taking ability have been found to precede advances in moral reasoning. We propose gesture as a behavior uniquely situated to augment perspective taking ability. Requiring gesture during spatial tasks has been shown to catalyze the production of more sophisticated problem-solving strategies, allowing children to profit from instruction. Our data demonstrate that requiring gesture during moral reasoning tasks has similar effects, resulting in increased perspective taking ability subsequent to instruction.
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The moral pop-out effect: Enhanced perceptual awareness of morally relevant stimuli
Ana Gantman & Jay Van Bavel
Cognition, July 2014, Pages 22–29
Abstract:
People perceive religious and moral iconography in ambiguous objects, ranging from grilled cheese to bird feces. In the current research, we examined whether moral concerns can shape awareness of perceptually ambiguous stimuli. In three experiments, we presented masked moral and non-moral words around the threshold for conscious awareness as part of a lexical decision task. Participants correctly identified moral words more frequently than non-moral words — a phenomenon we term the moral pop-out effect. The moral pop-out effect was only evident when stimuli were presented at durations that made them perceptually ambiguous, but not when the stimuli were presented too quickly to perceive or slowly enough to easily perceive. The moral pop-out effect was not moderated by exposure to harm and cannot be explained by differences in arousal, valence, or extremity. Although most models of moral psychology assume the initial perception of moral stimuli, our research suggests that moral beliefs and values may shape perceptual awareness.
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Alin Coman et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
A burgeoning literature has established that exposure to atrocities committed by in-group members triggers moral-disengagement strategies. There is little research, however, on how such moral disengagement affects the degree to which conversations shape people’s memories of the atrocities and subsequent justifications for those atrocities. We built on the finding that a speaker’s selective recounting of past events can result in retrieval-induced forgetting of related, unretrieved memories for both the speaker and the listener. In the present study, we investigated whether American participants listening to the selective remembering of atrocities committed by American soldiers (in-group condition) or Afghan soldiers (out-group condition) resulted in the retrieval-induced forgetting of unmentioned justifications. Consistent with a motivated-recall account, results showed that the way people’s memories are shaped by selective discussions of atrocities depends on group-membership status.
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Birth order and conservatism: A multilevel test of Sulloway’s “Born to rebel” thesis
Daniela Barni et al.
Personality and Individual Differences, August 2014, Pages 58–63
Abstract:
We analysed differences in conservative values between firstborn and secondborn siblings, in the context of Sulloway’s (1996) idea that firstborns favour the status quo more than secondborns do. Using multilevel analysis to predict siblings’ conservatism, we tested two hypotheses from Sulloway’s theory: (a) firstborns are more conservative than are secondborns; and (b) firstborns internalize their parents’ conservative values stronger than secondborns do, independent from the degree of their parents’ conservatism. Ninety-six Italian families (composed of both parents, the firstborn and the secondborn, total N = 384) filled out the Portrait Values Questionnaire (Schwartz et al., 2001). Results supported Sulloway’s first, but not his second prediction: Birth order fostered children’s conservatism directly, but not in interaction with parents’ conservatism. Implications of the results for the children’s socialization and their possible developments are discussed.
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Tipping the scales: Conciliatory behavior and the morality of self-forgiveness
Thomas Carpenter, Robert Carlisle & Jo-Ann Tsang
Journal of Positive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two studies examined whether conciliatory behavior aids self-forgiveness and whether it does so in part by making it seem more morally appropriate. Participants in Study 1 (n = 269) completed an offense-recall procedure; participants in Study 2 (n = 208) imagined a social transgression under conciliatory behavior (yes, no) and receipt of forgiveness (no, ambiguous, yes) conditions. Conciliatory behavior predicted (Study 1) and caused (Study 2) elevated self-forgiveness and increased perceptions of the moral appropriateness of self-forgiveness. Perceived morality consistently mediated the effect of conciliatory behavior on self-forgiveness. Received forgiveness and guilt were considered as additional mechanisms, but received mixed support. Results suggest that conciliatory behavior may influence self-forgiveness in part by satisfying moral prerequisites for self-forgiveness.
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Get the Message: Punishment Is Satisfying If the Transgressor Responds to Its Communicative Intent
Friederike Funk, Victoria McGeer & Mario Gollwitzer
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Results from three studies demonstrate that victims’ justice-related satisfaction with punishment is influenced by the kind of feedback they receive from offenders after punishment. In contrast to previous studies that found a discrepancy between anticipated and experienced satisfaction from punishment (Carlsmith, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008), participants were able to accurately predict their satisfaction when made aware of the presence or absence of offender feedback acknowledging the victim’s intent to punish. Results also indicate that victims were most satisfied when offender feedback not only acknowledged the victim’s intent to punish but also indicated a positive moral change in the offender’s attitude toward wrongdoing. These findings indicate that punishment per se is neither satisfying nor dissatisfying but that it is crucial to take its communicative functions and its effects on the offender into account. Implications for psychological and philosophical theories on punishment motives as well as implications for justice procedures are discussed.
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Ethics, welfare, and capital markets
George Kanatas & Christodoulos Stefanadis
Games and Economic Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examine implications of a society's cultural emphasis on moral sentiments. Entrepreneurs and investors interact in a game that entails both adverse selection and moral hazard; entrepreneurs may attempt to breach their contracts and expropriate investors. An agent is born into a particular culture but chooses whether to develop a moral conscience and thereby subject himself to moral sentiments. In equilibrium, societies that place less emphasis on guilt exhibit a lower risk of expropriation in contracts, a greater net price of capital, a larger size of firms, increased capital inflows and greater social welfare. The results of a greater emphasis on pride are in the same direction.
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Aiming for the stomach and hitting the heart: Dissociable triggers and sources for disgust reactions
Amitai Shenhav & Wendy Berry Mendes
Emotion, April 2014, Pages 301-309
Abstract:
Disgust reactions can be elicited using stimuli that engender orogastric rejection (e.g., pus and vomit; core disgust stimuli) but also using images of bloody injuries or medical procedures (e.g., surgeries; blood [body] boundary violation [B-BV] disgust stimuli). These two types of disgust reaction are presumed to be connected by a common evolutionary function of avoiding either food- or blood-borne contaminants. However, reactions to bloody injuries are typically conflated with reactions to the potential pain being experienced by the victim. This may explain why the two forms of “disgust”, although similarly communicated (through self-report and facial expressions), evince different patterns of physiological reactivity. Therefore, we tested whether the communicative similarities and physiological dissimilarities would hold when markers of potential contamination in the latter category are removed, leaving only painful injuries that lack blood or explicit body-envelope violations. Participants viewed films that depicted imagery associated with (a) core disgust, (b) painful injuries, or (c) neutral scenes while we measured facial, cardiovascular, and gastric reactivity. Whereas communicative measures (self-report and facial muscles) suggested that participants experienced increased disgust for core disgust and painful injuries, peripheral physiology dissociated the two: core disgust decreased normal gastric activity and painful-injury disgust decelerated heart rate and increased heart rate variability. These findings suggest that expressions of disgust toward bodily injuries may reflect a fundamentally different affective response than those evoked by core disgust and that this (cardiovascularly mediated) response may in fact be more closely tied to pain perceptions (or empathy) rather than contaminant-laden stimuli.
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Sex, Attractiveness, and Third-Party Punishment in Fairness Consideration
Jia Li & Xiaolin Zhou
PLoS ONE, April 2014
Abstract:
Social evaluation of others is often influenced by the physical attractiveness of the person being judged, leading to either a beauty premium or penalty depending on the circumstances. Here we asked Chinese participants to act as an interest-free third party in a dictator game and to evaluate the fairness level of monetary allocation by attractive and less attractive proposers of the same or opposite sex. We also instructed participants to express their willingness to punish the proposers by using a visual analogue scale. Results confirmed that the reasonableness evaluation was mainly affected by the reasonableness of offers. However, participants' intention to punish the proposers was affected by the level of reasonableness in the asset distribution and by both the sex and attractiveness of the proposers. Overall, male proposers were punished more severely than female proposers. Moreover, the same-sex proposers were punished more severely than opposite-sex proposers when they were physically attractive; this pattern was reversed when the proposers were less physically attractive. These results demonstrate social responses following an individual's unfair asset distribution can be affected by both social norms and the personal characteristics of the individual.