Sensitivity to ingroup and outgroup norms in the association between commonality and morality

The common effect of value on prioritized memory and category representation

The way we represent categories depends on both the frequency and value of the members of that category. Thus, for instance, prototype representations can be impacted by both information about what is statistically frequent and judgments about what is valuable. Notably, recent research on memory suggests that prioritized memory is also influenced by both statistical frequency and value judgments. Although work on conceptual representation and work on prioritized memory have so far proceeded almost entirely independently, the patterns of existing findings provide evidence for a link between these two phenomena. In particular, these patterns provide evidence for the hypothesis that the impact of value on conceptual representation arises from its co-dependent relationship with prioritized memory.

Social Expectations are Primarily Rooted in Reciprocity: An Investigation of Fairness, Cooperation, and Trustworthiness

Social expectations guide people's evaluations of others' behaviors, but the origins of these expectations remain unclear. It is traditionally thought that people's expectations depend on their past observations of others' behavior, and people harshly judge atypical behavior. Here, we considered that social expectations are also influenced by a drive for reciprocity, and people evaluate others' actions by reflecting on their own decisions. To compare these views, we performed four studies. Study 1 used an Ultimatum Game task where participants alternated Responder and Proposer roles. Modeling participants' expectations suggested they evaluated the fairness of received offers via comparisons to their own offers. Study 2 replicated these findings and showed that observing selfish behavior (lowball offers) only promoted acceptance of selfishness if observers started acting selfishly themselves. Study 3 generalized the findings, demonstrating that they also arise in the Public Goods Game, emerge cross-culturally, and apply to antisocial punishment whereby selfish players punish generosity. Finally, Study 4 introduced the Trust Game and showed that participants trusted players who reciprocated their behavior, even if it was selfish, as much as they trusted generous players. Overall, this research shows that social expectations and evaluations are rooted in drives for reciprocity. This carries theoretical implications, speaking to a parallel in the mechanisms driving both decision-making and social evaluations, along with practical importance for understanding and promoting cooperation.

Google is Free: Moral Evaluations of Intergroup Curiosity

Two experiments investigated how evaluations of intergroup curiosity differed depending on whether people placed responsibility for their learning on themselves or on outgroup members. In Study 1, participants (n = 340; 51% White-American, 49% Black-American) evaluated White actors who were curious about Black culture and placed responsibility on outgroup members to teach versus on themselves to learn. Both Black and White participants rated the latter actors as more moral, and perceptions of effort mediated this effect. A follow-up preregistered study (n = 513; 75% White-American) asked whether perceptions of greater effort cause greater perceptions of moral goodness. Replicating Study 1, participants rated actors as more moral when they placed responsibility on themselves versus others. Participants also rated actors as more moral when they exerted high versus low effort. These results clarify when and why participants view curiosity as morally good and help to strengthen bridges between work on curiosity, moral cognition, and intergroup relations.

Do Social Norms Influence Young People's Willingness to Take the COVID-19 Vaccine?

Although young adults are not at great risk of becoming severely ill with COVID-19, their willingness to get vaccinated affects the whole community. Vaccine hesitancy has increased during recent years, and more research is needed on its situational determinants. This paper reports a preregistered experiment (N = 654) that examined whether communicating descriptive social norms - information about what most people do - is an effective way of influencing young people's intentions and reducing their hesitancy to take the COVID-19 vaccine. We found weak support for our main hypothesis that conveying strong (compared to weak) norms leads to reduced hesitancy and stronger intentions. Furthermore, norms did not produce significantly different effects compared to standard vaccine information from the authorities. Moreover, no support was found for the hypothesis that young people are more strongly influenced by norms when the norm reference group consists of other young individuals rather than people in general. These findings suggest that the practical usefulness of signaling descriptive norms is rather limited, and may not be more effective than standard appeals in the quest of encouraging young adults to trust and accept a new vaccine.

Face beauty or soul beauty? The influence of facial attractiveness and moral judgment on pain empathy

Previous studies indicated that both facial attractiveness (face beauty) and moral judgment (soul beauty) would impact the responses to others’ pain, however, the effects from facial attractiveness were in controversial. Furthermore, whether facial attractiveness would increase or decrease the effects of moral judgment on pain empathy were still unknown. Based on the videos in which actors with high versus low facial attractiveness under pain or non-pain conditions, study 1 recruited 26 undergraduates to assess the effects of facial attractiveness on participants’ pain intensity rating scores. Then study 2 recruited 85 undergraduates to examine the effects of facial attractiveness and moral judgment on pain empathy by assessing pain intensity and self-uncomfortableness rating scores. Study 1 found that participants rated higher pain intensity scores to actors with high facial attractiveness compared to low facial attractive actors under pain condition. Study 2 found that participants showed higher pain empathic responses for actors with high moral judgment, no matter their facial attractiveness were high or low. For actors with low moral judgment under pain condition, participants showed higher pain empathy to those with high facial attractiveness compared to those with low facial attractiveness. In conclusion, facial attractiveness could facilitate the empathy responses for other’s pain. High facial attractiveness would increase the pain empathic responses to individuals with low moral judgment, however, low facial attractiveness would not decrease the pain empathic responses to individuals with high moral judgment.

The Effect of Ingroup vs. Outgroup Members' Behavior on Charity Preference: A Drift-Diffusion Model Approach

Providing potential donors with information about the behavior of others (i.e., social information) is an increasingly used strategy to nudge prosocial decision-making. In the present study, we investigated the effect of ingroup vs. outgroup information on participants' charity preferences by applying a Drift Diffusion Model (DDM) approach. In a joint evaluation scenario, we manipulated different levels of ingroup/outgroup preference ratios for two charities within subjects. Every subject was presented with three stimulus types (i.e., high, medium, and low ingroup ratio) randomized in 294 trials divided into six blocks. We expected that for stimuli with a high ingroup/outgroup ratio, participants should more often and faster decide for the ingroup's most favored charity. We expected that the speed of evidence accumulation will be higher the larger the ingroup/outgroup ratio. Additionally, we investigated whether variations in model parameters can explain individual differences in participants' behaviors. Our results showed that people generally followed ingroup members' preferences when deciding for a charity. However, on finding an unexpected pattern in our results, we conducted post-hoc analyses which revealed two different behavioral strategies used by participants. Based on participants' decisions, we classified them into “equality driven” individuals who preferred stimuli with the least difference between ingroup and outgroup percentages or “ingroup driven” individuals who favored stimuli with the highest ingroup/outgroup ratio. Results are discussed in line with relevant literature, and implications for practitioners are given.

Testing the limits of structural thinking about gender

When seeking to explain social regularities (such as gender differences in the labor market) people often rely on internal features of the targets, frequently neglecting structural and systemic factors external to the targets. For example, people might think women leave the job market after childbirth because they are less competent or are better suited for child-rearing than men, thereby eliding socio-cultural and economic factors that disadvantage women. Across two studies (total N = 192) we probe 4- and 5-year-olds and 7- and 8-year-olds' internal versus structural reasoning about gender. We explore the evaluative and behavioral implications of this reasoning process with both novel gendered behaviors that were experimentally created and familiar gendered behaviors that exist outside of a lab context. We show that children generate more structural explanations, evaluate the structural explanation more positively, expect behaviors to be more mutable, and evaluate gender non-conforming behaviors more positively when structural cues are provided. However, we also show that such information may be of limited effectiveness at reducing pre-existing group-based discriminatory behaviors: children continue to report less willingness to affiliate with peers who display non-conforming behaviors even in the presence of structural cues. Taken together, these results provide evidence concerning children's structural reasoning about gender categories and shed new light on how such reasoning might affect social evaluations and behavioral intentions.

Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross-cultural principles of law? In a between-subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross-culturally and -linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice.

Following Your Group or Your Morals? The In-Group Promotes Immoral Behavior While the Out-Group Buffers Against It

People learn by observing others, albeit not uniformly. Witnessing an immoral behavior causes observers to commit immoral actions, especially when the perpetrator is part of the in-group. Does conformist behavior hold when observing the out-group? We conducted three experiments ( N = 1,358) exploring how observing an (im)moral in-/out-group member changed decisions relating to justice: punitive, selfish, or dishonest choices. Only immoral in-groups increased immoral actions, while the same immoral behavior from out-groups had no effect (Experiments 1 & 2). In contrast, a compassionate or generous individual did not make people more moral, regardless of group membership (Experiments 1 & 2). When there was a loophole to deny cheating (Experiment 3), neither an immoral in-/out-group member changed dishonest behavior. Compared to observing an honest in-group member, people become more honest themselves after observing an honest out-group member, revealing that out-groups can enhance morality. Depending on the severity of the moral action, the in-group licenses immoral behavior while the out-group buffers against it.

Moral Psychology as a Necessary Bridge Between Social Cognition and Law

Coordinating competing interests can be difficult. Because law regulates human behavior, it is a candidate mechanism for creating coordination in the face of societal disagreement. We argue that findings from moral psychology are necessary to understand why law can effectively resolve co-occurring conflicts related to punishment and group membership. First, we discuss heterogeneity in punitive thought, focusing on punishment within the United States legal system. Though the law exerts a weak influence on punitive ideologies before punishment occurs, we argue that it effectively coordinates perceptions of individuals who have already been punished. Next, we discuss intergroup conflict, which often co-occurs with disagreements related to punishment and represents a related domain where coordination can be difficult to achieve. Here, we underscore how insights from moral psychology can promote equality via the law. These examples demonstrate how contributions from moral psychology are necessary to understand the connection between social cognition and law.