Is helping always morally good? Study with toddlers and preschool children

Young children from a very early age not only prefer those who help others but also those who engage in altruistic helping. This study aims to test how children assess helping when the goal of the helping behavior is immoral. We argue that younger children consider only the helping versus hindering behavior, but older children distinguish their judgments depending on the goal to which the helping leads. In the study involving 727 European children aged 2-7 years (354 girls, M = 53.82 months, SD = 18.76), we found that children aged 2-4 years assessed helping as always morally good and hindering as morally bad, no matter the recipient's intention. Only children aged 4.5-7 years assessed helping in an immoral act as immoral and hindering in an immoral act as moral. We also found that younger children liked the helper regardless of the goal that their helping behavior led to, but from the age of 5, children preferred characters who hindered in an immoral act rather than those who helped. Our study extends the previous research, showing how children's moral judgments of helping behavior develop and become more complex as children get older. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Moderators of the Liking Bias in Judgments of Moral Character

Previous research found evidence for a liking bias in moral character judgments because judgments of liked people are higher than those of disliked or neutral ones. This article sought conditions moderating this effect. In Study 1 (N = 792), the impact of the liking bias on moral character judgments was strongly attenuated when participants were educated that attitudes bias moral judgments. In Study 2 (N = 376), the influence of liking on moral character attributions was eliminated when participants were accountable for the justification of their moral judgments. Overall, these results suggest that although liking biases moral character attributions, this bias might be reduced or eliminated when deeper information processing is required to generate judgments of others’ moral character.

Universality of the Triangular Theory of Love: Adaptation and Psychometric Properties of the Triangular Love Scale in 25 Countries

The Triangular Theory of Love (measured with Sternberg's Triangular Love Scale - STLS) is a prominent theoretical concept in empirical research on love. To expand the culturally homogeneous body of previous psychometric research regarding the STLS, we conducted a large-scale cross-cultural study with the use of this scale. In total, we examined more than 11,000 respondents, but as a result of applied exclusion criteria, the final analyses were based on a sample of 7332 participants from 25 countries (from all inhabited continents). We tested configural invariance, metric invariance, and scalar invariance, all of which confirmed the cultural universality of the theoretical construct of love analyzed in our study. We also observed that levels of love components differ depending on relationship duration, following the dynamics suggested in the Triangular Theory of Love. Supplementary files with all our data, including results on love intensity across different countries along with STLS versions adapted in a few dozen languages, will further enable more extensive research on the Triangular Theory of Love.

Partner in crime: Beneficial cooperation overcomes children's aversion to antisocial others

Young children display strong aversion toward antisocial individuals, but also feel responsible for joint activities and express a strong sense of group loyalty. This paper aims to understand how beneficial cooperation with an antisocial partner shapes preschoolers' attitudes, preferences, and moral judgments concerning antisocial individuals. We argue that although young children display a strong aversion to antisocial characters, children may overcome this aversion when they stand to personally benefit. In Study 1a (N = 62), beneficial cooperation with an antisocial partner resulted in the children's later preference for the antisocial partner over the neutral partner. Study 1b (N = 91) replicated this effect with discrete measurement of liking (resource distribution) and showed that children rewarded more and punished less the antisocial partner in the beneficial cooperation setting. In Study 2, (N = 58), children's aversion to an antisocial in-group member decreased when the cooperation benefited other in-group members. Finally, in Study 3 (N = 62), when children passively observed the antisocial individual, personal benefits from the antisocial behavior did not change their negative attitude toward the antisocial individual. Overall, beneficial cooperation with the antisocial partner increased the children's liking and preference for the antisocial partner, but did not affect the children's moral judgments. Presented evidence suggests that by the age of 4, children develop a strong obligation to collaborate with partners who help them to acquire resources-even when these partners harm third parties, which children recognize as immoral.

Success Leads to Agentic Cognition: Two Field Studies

Not much is known about the cognitive consequences of success and failure, and there is no comprehensive theory explaining their aftermath. Building on a dual-perspective model of social cognition, we offer such a preliminary theory that assumes that experiencing success induces an agentic perspective, whereas experiencing failure induces a recipient perspective. We present two field studies of persons failing or succeeding at their naturally occurring goals. The studies found that the experience of success was accompanied by heightened accessibility and use of agentic content. The experience of failure resulted in lowered mood and self-esteem.

Manipulated taking the agent versus the recipient perspective seems not to affect the relationship between agency-communion and self-esteem: A small-scale meta-analysis

There is a growing debate about the relationship between self-perceived agency-communion and self-esteem. One viewpoint for this debate is offered by the Dual Perspective Model, a novel theoretical framework that introduces the agent and the recipient as two fundamental perspectives in social perception. Building on this model, we expected higher importance of self-ascribed agency for self-esteem in the agent perspective than in the recipient perspective and a higher importance of self-ascribed communion for self-esteem in the recipient than in the agent perspective. However, the meta-analysis of six experiments (N = 659, 68% females) showed no interaction of the perspectives and self-ascribed agency and communion in predicting self-esteem. These findings demonstrate that the relationship between agency-communion and self-esteem seems to be fairly independent of one's temporary mindset.

Bad Methods Drive out Good: The Curse of Imagination in Social Psychology Research

We agree with Doliński (2018, this issue) that behavior is disappearing as an object of study of contemporary social psychology and it has been increasingly replaced by verbal declarations of imagined behaviors, which are analyzed as dependent variables. We read this as a case of a methodological version of Gresham’s law: “bad methods drive out good”. We notice a complementary trend on the side of manipulations of independent variables. Instead of manipulating real situations, researchers frequently instruct their participants to imagine these situations. In effect, social psychology drifts to studying imaginary behaviors in imagined situations and this poses a serious threat for the validity of our findings. We present one study comparing responses to imagined and actually experienced situations (concerning moral judgment and trust) and find that these two types of situation produce divergent responses. We conclude that imagined situations cannot be a source of knowledge about responses in situations that people really experience.

Love Influences Reproductive Success in Humans

As love seems to be universal, researchers have attempted to find its biological basis. However, no studies till date have shown its direct association with reproductive success, which is broadly known to be a good measure of fitness. Here, we show links between love, as defined by the Sternberg Triangular Theory of Love, and reproductive success among the Hadza-traditional hunter-gatherer population. We found that commitment and reproductive success were positively and consistently related in both sexes, with number of children showing negative and positive associations with intimacy and passion, respectively, only among women. Our study may shed new light on the meaning of love in humans' evolutionary past, especially in traditional hunter-gatherer societies in which individuals, not their parents, were responsible for partner choice. We suggest that passion and commitment may be the key factors that increase fitness, and therefore, that selection promoted love in human evolution. However, further studies in this area are recommended.

On the Dominance of Moral Categories in Impression Formation

Based on the notion that approach-avoidance underlies impression formation processes and that approach-avoidance is more directly based on appraisals of others' morality (M) than competence (C), we hypothesized that M-related information played a more important role at various phases of global impression formation than C-related information on target persons. In four studies (N = 342 university students), we predicted and found that (a) M traits showed a higher chronic accessibility than C traits; (b) when gathering information to formulate a global impression, perceivers were more interested in M traits than C traits; (c) global impressions of real persons were better predicted from M trait ascriptions than C trait ascriptions, and (d) positivity-negativity of impressions of fictitious persons was decided mainly by the M content of their behavior, whereas C information served as a weak modifier of impression intensity. The dominance of M traits over C traits was more pronounced for female perceivers than for male perceivers.

Belief in a Zero-Sum Game as a Social Axiom

This article introduces a novel concept, Belief in a Zero-Sum Game (BZSG), proposed as another belief dimension in the family of social axioms. We conceptualize BZSG as a belief system about the antagonistic nature of social relations—that one person’s gain is possible only at the expense of other persons. It appears on a level of personal convictions and as a cultural worldview ideology. We found that persons or nations who believe in a zero-sum game engage in win-lose social exchanges over limited resources. Psychometric evidence for the universality of the BZSG scale in a large pancultural project of 37 nations is presented, where individual and cultural-level predictors of BZSG were tested, followed by their multilevel analyses. BZSG, which shows a conceptual and empirical affinity with societal cynicism, is moderated by previously described cultural dimensions and by objective socio-economic indices.

Legitimization and Delegitimization of Social Hierarchy

Although status and wealth are related facets of social stratification, their association is only moderate. In this article, we demonstrate that justification of wealth versus status can be independent processes. To this end, we introduce a novel, nondeclarative measure of system justification. The measure is based on within-individual correlations between the judgments of how a group “is doing” and how it “should be doing.” Two studies demonstrated that the between-group differentiation in terms of material wealth was delegitimized—the more a group was perceived as wealthy, the less it was desired to be wealthy. However, the between-group differentiation in terms of status was generally legitimized—the more a group was perceived as influential, the more it was desired to be influential. We conclude by discussing the role of sociopolitical context in active legitimization and delegitimization of different aspects of the system.

Weighty data: importance information influences estimated weight of digital information storage devices

Previous work suggests that perceived importance of an object influences estimates of its weight. Specifically, important books were estimated to be heavier than non-important books. However, the experimental set-up of these studies may have suffered from a potential confound and findings may be confined to books only. Addressing this, we investigate the effect of importance on weight estimates by examining whether the importance of information stored on a data storage device (USB-stick or portable hard drive) can alter weight estimates. Results show that people thinking a USB-stick holds important tax information (vs. expired tax information vs. no information) estimate it to be heavier (Experiment 1) compared to people who do not. Similarly, people who are told a portable hard drive holds personally relevant information (vs. irrelevant), also estimate the drive to be heavier (Experiments 2A,B).

Joy, Schadenfreude, Sorrow, and Resentment as Responses Restoring Balance in Cognitive Units

Based on Heider’s (1958) balance theory we hypothesize that emotional responses to other persons’ outcomes depend on attitudes toward these persons. Positive attitudes toward others lead to empathic responses to their outcomes – joy after a success and sorrow after a failure. Negative attitudes result in paradoxical responses – negative to a success (resentment) and positive to a failure (schadenfreude). These emotions function as responses restoring balance within cognitive units consisting of the perceiver, other persons, and their outcomes. Three studies supported these hypotheses and showed that deservingness considerations play a weaker role in shaping emotional responses of joy and sorrow to others’ outcomes when strong interpersonal attitudes are involved. However, deservingness plays an independent role in shaping the emotional response of resentment.

Self-Interest Bias in Moral Judgments of Others' Actions

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.

Warmer Hearts, Warmer Rooms

Conceptual representations of warmth have been shown to be related to people’s perceptions of ambient temperature. Based on this premise, we hypothesized that merely thinking about personality traits related to communion (but not agency) influences physical experience of warmth. Specifically, the three studies revealed that (a) perceptions of temperature are influenced by both positive and negative attributes within the communion but not agency dimension, (b) the effect is stronger when traits indicate sociability rather than morality subdimension of communion, and (c) communion activation affects temperature perceptions independently of target’s or self-perceptions.

Memory and Self-Esteem

The double perspective model (DPM) assumes that every social interaction involves two perspectives – that of the agent (a person who performs an action) and that of the recipient (a person toward whom the action is directed). Agency and communion constitute two basic dimensions of social cognition because they denote these two perspectives. In effect, interpersonal evaluations (made from the recipient perspective) are dominated by communal over agentic content. The present study experimentally showed that self-evaluations (made from the agentic perspective) are dominated by agentic over communal content. Participants were primed with negative or positive information involving agency or communion of the self or another person. Whereas the global evaluation of others was influenced by both agentic and communal primes, the global evaluation of self (self-esteem) was influenced by agentic but not communal primes. These findings are discussed as an evidence for DPM.

Agency and communion from the perspective of self versus others

On the basis of previous research, the authors hypothesize that (a) person descriptive terms can be organized into the broad dimensions of agency and communion of which communion is the primary one; (b) the main distinction between these dimensions pertains to their profitability for the self (agency) vs. for other persons (communion); hence, agency is more desirable and important in the self-perspective, and communion is more desirable and important in the other-perspective; (c) self-other outcome dependency increases importance of another person's agency. Study 1 showed that a large number of trait names can be reduced to these broad dimensions, that communion comprises more item variance, and that agency is predicted by self-profitability and communion by other-profitability. Studies 2 and 3 showed that agency is more relevant and desired for self, and communion is more relevant and desired for others. Study 4 showed that agency is more important in a close friend than an unrelated peer, and this difference is completely mediated by the perceived outcome dependency.

Affective Concomitants of Information on Morality and Competence

Abstract. A research program on the affective concomitants of information on morality (M) and competence (C) is reviewed. The program originated from the assumption that M and C are the most important categories of behavior construal and that both categories can be, and are, used in interpretation of the same behavioral acts. Whereas in the observer perspective (when interpreting the behavior of others) M is more relevant than C, in the actor perspective (when interpreting one's own behavior) C is more relevant than M. Based on these theses it was predicted and found that: (1) M-related acts of others (moral acts and transgressions) instigated stronger affective responses than C-related acts (successes and failures), (2) the opposite was true for the participant's own acts, (3) attitudes toward other persons were more strongly influenced by the M than C-related information, and (4) attitudes toward the self (self-esteem) were more strongly influenced by the C than M-related information. The findings were discussed in terms of M and C being differently relevant for social inclusion-exclusion processes.