Greater traditionalism predicts COVID-19 precautionary behaviors across 27 societies

People vary both in their embrace of their society's traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents connections between traditionalism and threat responsivity, including pathogen-avoidance motivations. Additionally, because hazard-mitigating behaviors can conflict with competing priorities, associations between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance may hinge on contextually contingent tradeoffs. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a real-world test of the posited relationship between traditionalism and hazard avoidance. Across 27 societies (N = 7844), we find that, in a majority of countries, individuals' endorsement of tradition positively correlates with their adherence to costly COVID-19-avoidance behaviors; accounting for some of the conflicts that arise between public health precautions and other objectives further strengthens this evidence that traditionalism is associated with greater attention to hazards.

Merit Is Not Meritorious Everywhere: Fairness in First and Third Party Tasks among Kogi Children

Experimental research has studied the emergence of fairness criteria such as merit and equality at increasingly younger ages. How much does the recognition and practice of these principles depend on the influence of central aspects of Western educated and industrialized societies? In an attempt to answer these questions, this article provides evidence regarding the choices of children in the Kogi indigenous community of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a traditional society living in the mountains of Northern Colombia that practices swidden agriculture, cattle-raising, and enjoys a special cultural status granted by the Colombian Constitution. Two groups of 6–7 and 10–11 year olds (N = 104) were tested on a modified dictator game and several scenarios from a resource distribution task including different fairness criteria. Our results point to the lack of focality of the idea of merit among Kogi children at these ages when deciding on third-party allocation tasks, even when the design prevented equal distribution.

Animal culture: But of which kind?

Is animal culture a real entity or is it rather just in the eye of the beholder? The concept of culture began to be increasingly used in the context of animal behaviour research around the 1960s. Despite its success, it is not clear that it represents what philosophers have traditionally thought to be a natural kind. In this article I will show, however, how conceiving of animal culture in this fashion has played a role in the "culture wars", and what lessons we can draw from this. First, an analysis of the epistemological landscape of author keywords related to the concept of animal cultures is presented, thus vindicating the centrality of the concept in describing a broad range of findings. A minimal definition that encompasses the multiple strands of research incorporating the notion of culture is proposed. I then systematically enumerate the ways in which culture thus conceived cannot be considered a natural kind in the study of animal behaviour. This is accomplished by reviewing the efforts and possibilities of anchoring the elusive idea in specific mechanisms, homologies, selection pressures, homeostatic property clusters, or alternatively, its reduction or elimination. Finally, a plausible interpretation of the scientific status of the animal culture concept is suggested that is compatible with both its well established use in animal behaviour research and its inferential limitations. Culture plays the role of a well-established epistemic kind, a node that connects different areas of research on common themes.

Absolutely Right and Relatively Good: Consequentialists See Bioethical Disagreement in a Relativist Light

BACKGROUND

Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth?

METHODS

To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory studies, with both a convenience and a nationally representative sample (total N = 1501), investigating the link between people's beliefs about moral truth (their metaethics) and their beliefs about moral value (their normative ethics).

RESULTS

Across various bioethical issues (e.g., medically-assisted death, vaccine hesitancy, surrogacy, mandatory organ conscription, or genetically modified crops), consequentialist attitudes were associated with weaker beliefs in an objective moral truth. This association was not explained by domain-general reflectivity, theism, personality, normative uncertainty, or subjective knowledge.

CONCLUSIONS

We find a robust link between the way people characterize prescriptive disagreements and their sensibility to consequences. In addition, both societal consensus and personal conviction contribute to objectivist beliefs, but these effects appear to be asymmetric, i.e., stronger for opposition than for approval.

The dual nature of partisan prejudice: Morality and identity in a multiparty system

Rising hostility between members of opposing political factions has gained considerable attention in both academic and popular press. The adverse effects of this phenomenon are widely recognized, but its psychological antecedents remain the focus of ongoing debate in political psychology. Past research has honed in on two conflicting explanations: one highlights the extent to which people self-define as supporters of particular parties or candidates (the identity view), and another points toward the intensity with which they disagree on substantive matters of policy (the issues view). A nationally representative survey of 1051 eligible Spanish voters yielded support for both explanations. The perceived magnitude and nature of disagreement were associated with increased partisan prejudice, while controlling for partisan identification. Path analyses revealed that issue-based prejudice was more pronounced among ideologically extreme agents (β = 0.237, 95% CI [0.174, 0.300]) than toward extreme targets (β = 0.140, 95% CI [0.078, 0.201]), and replicated recent findings that identity-based prejudice is motivated primarily by non-instrumental factors (β = 0.286, 95% CI [0.230, 0.337]). Together, these results indicate that discrimination across party lines responds to two fundamentally distinct, though at times co-occurring, imperatives: to coalesce in ideologically homogeneous communities, and to protect one's sense of partisan identity.

Cold Side-Effect Effect: Affect Does Not Mediate the Influence of Moral Considerations in Intentionality Judgments

Research has consistently shown that people consider harmful side effects of an action more intentional than helpful side effects. This phenomenon is known as the side-effect effect (SEE), which refers to the influence of moral considerations in judgments of intentionality and other non-moral concepts. There is an ongoing debate about how to explain this asymmetric pattern of judgment and the psychological factors involved in it. It has been posited that affective reactions to agents that bring about harmful side-effects could bias intentionality attributions in these cases, explaining the asymmetric pattern of intentionality judgments that we observe in the SEE. We call this the affective bias hypothesis (ABH). Evidence for the ABH is mixed, with some findings suggesting a role for affective processes, while others suggesting that affective processes play no role in the SEE. A possible explanation for these apparently contradictory results points to affective processes involved in the SEE being confined to anger. In a series of empirical studies, we systematically measured and manipulated participants’ anger in order to test this possibility. Our findings suggest that anger play no role in intentionality judgments in SEE cases, while providing support for a non-emotional motivation to blame as a factor underlying the SEE.