More guilty if woman: The role of gender and causal attribution in political scandals' impact

Self-serving beliefs about science: Science justifies my weaknesses (but not other people's)

This research explored the strategic beliefs that people have about science and the extent to which it can explain moral and immoral behaviors. Although people do not believe that science is able to explain certain aspects of their mind, they might nevertheless accept a scientific explanation for their immoral behaviors if that explanation is exculpatory. In a first study, participants reflected on moral and immoral deeds that they performed or that other people performed. Participants were somewhat skeptic that science can account for people's behavior-except for when they reflected on the wrongdoings that they committed. Two further studies suggest that strategic belief in science arises because it enables external attributions for the behavior, outside of the wrongdoers' control. Implications are discussed for science understanding and communication.

Could your candidate shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose votes? Identifying “lines in the sand” in ingroup candidate transgressions

How severely must a political candidate transgress in order to lose votes from supporters? What characteristics motivate people to vote for highly transgressive political candidates? By parametrically varying our novel, ecologically-valid scale of transgression severity across 70 voter-choice trials, the current study modeled the relationship between ingroup candidate transgression severity and voter choice to identify 1) The point of severity at which people abandon political ingroup members and vote for the outgroup, and 2) Ideological differences in this relationship. Across 70 trials, 493 Mturk participants chose to vote for an ingroup candidate or outgroup candidate after learning the ingroup candidate transgressed. A multilevel logistic model revealed the hypothesized relationships: people were more likely to abandon ingroup candidates as transgression severity increased, and participants with a stronger ideological identity were more likely to vote for transgressive ingroup candidates than less-identified individuals. Further, Republicans possessed a higher severity threshold than Democrats, such that they voted for the ingroup candidate for more severe transgressions than Democrats.