Virtue Signal
The co-occurrence of ingroup and outgroup prosociality across 121 societies
Kasper Otten
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 20 January 2026
Abstract:
In an increasingly interconnected world, prosociality across group boundaries becomes ever more important. Yet, a common premise in the behavioral and social sciences is that people are prosocial mainly toward their ingroup and not outgroups. So far, evidence for this premise comes mostly from studies in which people must choose between ingroup and outgroup prosociality, thereby precluding positive associations between the two types of prosociality. We study situations in which people make separate decisions regarding the ingroup and outgroup, allowing us to examine how ingroup and outgroup prosociality are related. Across six large-scale and cross-societal datasets spanning 743,402 individuals in 121 societies, we find a robust positive relationship between ingroup and outgroup prosociality. This relationship holds across societies, different group categorizations, and a diverse range of prosociality measures, including prisoner’s dilemmas, public good dilemmas, dictator games, and survey items on trust and tolerance. Although people are slightly more prosocial toward their ingroup than the outgroup, those who are prosocial toward the ingroup also tend to be prosocial toward the outgroup. The results offer an optimistic message for prosociality across group boundaries. When people are not made to choose between the ingroup and outgroup, they are generally prosocial toward both.
Moral Agreement With Punished Acts Decreases Perceptions of Punisher Legitimacy and Willingness to Obey the Law
Raihan Alam & Tage Rai
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Punishment is a critical mechanism through which society regulates behavior, yet its efficacy depends on how observers interpret the legitimacy of punishers. Across five experiments, we examine how moral agreement with punished acts shapes perceptions of punishers’ legitimacy and willingness to obey laws. Experiment 1 finds that when observers morally agree with punished acts, they perceive punishers as less legitimate and report lower willingness to obey laws. Experiment 2 shows that this effect extends to compliance with a new, specific law introduced by the punishing authority. Experiment 3 finds that when moral agreement and procedural justice are manipulated simultaneously, only moral agreement predicts willingness to obey laws. Experiment 4 replicates these effects among participants with criminal records. Experiment 5 shows that these patterns persist when addressing potential confounds and when moral preferences are weaker. Our findings challenge procedural justice models, highlighting the importance of addressing moral disagreement in policy contexts.
Talking about what we support versus oppose affects others’ openness to our views
Rhia Catapano & Zakary Tormala
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
People’s unwillingness to engage with others who hold views that differ from their own -- in other words, their lack of receptiveness to opposing views — is a growing problem globally. We explore the possibility that something as simple as how people frame their position can shape disagreeing others’ receptiveness to them. Specifically, we investigate the role of support-oppose framing — that is, whether people frame their position in terms of what they support or what they oppose. In five main studies spanning 5,971 participants, we find a disparity in how communicators and disagreeing others perceive support- versus oppose-framed messages. Communicators believe that disagreeing others will be more receptive to them if they use support rather than oppose framing. One contributor to this effect is value congruence: Communicators perceive a message articulating their own position in support terms to be more value congruent. However, disagreeing others are actually less receptive to support-framed messages than to oppose-framed messages. We find that disagreeing others perceive support framing as less congruent with their values, which predicts decreased receptiveness. This effect manifests in self-reported receptiveness and a variety of downstream consequences and predicts greater attitude change following oppose- rather than support-framed messages. Thus, by framing their positions in terms of what they oppose (rather than support), people can elicit greater receptiveness from disagreeing others. Consistent with a value-congruence account, this framing effect fully reverses for people with the same values as the communicator.
Intergenerational Hypocrisy: When an Organization’s Distant Past Limits Its Legitimacy to Practice or Preach in the Present
Brian Lucas et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Organizations often endure across multiple generations of members -- and what one generation preaches may not always align with what another generation practices. We demonstrate that people attribute such inconsistency to hypocrisy, even when over half a century separates the practicing and preaching. Five experiments and three supplemental studies demonstrate this intergenerational hypocrisy effect (N = 4,482). Organizations were perceived as more hypocritical, their actions seemed less legitimate, and people were more motivated to protest against them when the organization’s words and deeds were (vs. were not) misaligned across generations of members. We test several moderators, and find that to attenuate the intergenerational hypocrisy effect, organizations can attribute their word–deed inconsistency to moral principles that they paid a tangible cost to uphold. The results suggest that organizations risk reputational damage in a wider array of situations than previously appreciated.
Morbid curiosity as an adapted motivation to explore ambiguous but survival-relevant stimuli
David March
Psychological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Morbid curiosity, or the seemingly paradoxical drive to engage with aversive or grotesque stimuli, has long puzzled psychologists, who have traditionally framed it as either a form of sensation-seeking or a mechanism for unambiguous threat learning. The current article proposes a novel adaptationist model positioning morbid curiosity as an evolved cognitive mechanism specifically tuned to resolve ambiguity surrounding survival-relevant stimuli. Drawing on evolutionary theory, cognitive psychology, and neurobiological evidence, I argue that morbid curiosity functions primarily as an uncertainty-reduction strategy, motivating individuals to approach ambiguous stimuli to clarify their threat or benefit. Unlike basic emotions such as fear or disgust that typically trigger immediate avoidance, morbid curiosity fosters cautious approach behaviors aimed at gathering survival-critical information. The proposed model thereby reconceptualizes morbid curiosity as an adaptive, ambiguity-oriented cognitive system, offering novel insights into broader questions about human motivation, information-seeking, and adaptive cognition.
Vulnerability and the computational logic of fear: Insights from the horror genre
Edgar Dubourg & Coltan Scrivner
Evolution and Human Behavior, January 2026
Abstract:
Fear is a universal feature of storytelling, yet the structural conditions that make fictional threats compelling remain poorly understood. Here, we propose the Protagonist Vulnerability Index (PVI), an evolutionarily grounded computational approach to explain why some narratives evoke stronger fear responses than others. PVI quantifies protagonist vulnerability by assessing the imbalance in formidability between protagonists and antagonists and the risk of attack faced by the protagonist. Across 691 films, higher PVI values predicted classification as horror, the presence of fear-related keywords in non-horror films, and stronger physiological fear responses indexed by heart rate. Linking film preferences to psychological and demographic data from more than 3.5 million individuals on Facebook, we found that preference for high-PVI films was associated with lower agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion, and with higher openness. Openness moderated the negative association between neuroticism and engagement with fear-related content, indicating that curiosity can counteract threat avoidance in anxious individuals. These findings clarify the structural and psychological conditions that activate evolved threat-management systems. The results show how horror operates as a narrative simulation of extreme formidability asymmetry, and provide a framework for predicting, and potentially engineering, fear in fiction.
Social Rewards Protection Theory: Why People Morally Derogate Prosocial Actors for Undisclosed Personal Benefits
Sebastian Hafenbrädl
Psychological Science, January 2026, Pages 55-77
Abstract:
Prosocial behavior is common and often socially rewarded (e.g., via liking, status, and trust). Yet prior research has found that if actors themselves also benefit from their prosocial behavior, then they are morally derogated: They are evaluated as worse than purely selfish actors. This tainted-altruism effect has been explained by the use of different counterfactuals for the evaluation of prosocial and selfish actors. Here I propose social rewards protection theory, which explains why evaluators use these different counterfactuals in the first place: Social rewards are treated as being reserved for costly prosocial actions. Claiming such rewards without incurring costs seems like cheating and thus deserves moral derogation. Accordingly, being transparent about the action’s costs and benefits prevents such derogation. I conducted six experiments (five preregistered) with Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers in the United States and lab participants in Spain (total N = 4,732 adults). The findings provide support for the proposed functional explanation of tainted altruism, which also sheds light on related phenomena, such as overhead aversion and hypocrisy.
“Back off!” honor ideology and third-party perceptions of aggressive retaliation by White and Black men
Conor O'Dea & Keira Salt
Psychology of Men & Masculinities, forthcoming
Abstract:
Masculine honor ideology is associated with greater beliefs that men should respond aggressively if they, their partner, or their family are threatened. Previous research largely overlooks intersectionality and focuses on straight White cisgender men. In the present study, we examined whether this encouragement of aggression in response to threat extends to Black men evaluated by third-party individuals. We presented U.S.-based participants (N = 207), via virtual reality headset, with a Black or White man walking down the street with their female significant other who was bumped into and insulted by a male stranger. The male protagonist confronted this stranger verbally, physically, and by brandishing a gun. Participants’ encouragement of aggressive responses, perception of aggression, and perception of the protagonist as honorable were measured. Our findings showed support for all levels of aggression by those higher in honor ideology, with very little difference in the perception of White and Black protagonists (with the Black protagonist actually being more encouraged than the White protagonist). This suggests that White and Black men are both encouraged toward retaliatory aggression in response to threats by those higher in honor ideology. Our findings highlight the need for more intersectional work in this area.