Good and evil
The Paradox of Viral Outrage
Takuya Sawaoka & Benoît Monin
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Moral outrage has traditionally served a valuable social function, expressing group values and inhibiting deviant behavior, but the exponential dynamics of Internet postings make this expression of legitimate individual outrage appear excessive and unjust. The same individual outrage that would be praised in isolation is more likely to be viewed as bullying when echoed online by a multitude of similar responses, as it then seems to contribute to disproportionate group condemnation. Participants (N = 3,377) saw racist, sexist, or unpatriotic posts with accompanying expressions of outrage and formed impressions of a single commenter. The same commenter was viewed more negatively when accompanied by a greater number of commenters (i.e., when outrage was viral vs. nonviral), and this was because viral outrage elicited greater sympathy toward the initial offender. We examined this effect and its underlying processes across six studies.
Learning to deceive has cognitive benefits
Xiao Pan Ding et al.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, December 2018, Pages 26-38
Abstract:
Recent evolutionary, cultural, and economic theories have postulated strong connections between human sociality and complex cognition. One prediction derived from this work is that deception should confer cognitive benefits on children. The current research tests this possibility by examining whether learning to deceive during early childhood promotes more advanced theory of mind and executive function skills during a time when these skills are undergoing rapid development. A total of 42 children (Mage = 40.45 months; 22 boys and 20 girls) who showed no initial ability to deceive were randomly assigned to an experimental condition or a control condition. In both conditions, they played a hide-and-seek game against an adult opponent on 4 consecutive days, but only the children in the experimental condition were taught how to deceive the opponent in order to win the game. Unlike children in the control condition, children in the experimental condition significantly improved their executive function and theory of mind skills, providing the first evidence that learning to deceive causally enhances cognitive skills in young children.
Capital and punishment: Resource scarcity increases endorsement of the death penalty
Keelah Williams et al.
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Faced with punishing serious offenders, why do some prefer imprisonment whereas others impose death? Previous research exploring death penalty attitudes has primarily focused on individual and cultural factors. Adopting a functional perspective, we propose that environmental features may also shape our punishment strategies. Individuals are attuned to the availability of resources within their environments. Due to heightened concerns with the costliness of repeated offending, we hypothesize that individuals tend towards elimination-focused punishments during times of perceived scarcity. Using global and United States data sets (studies 1 and 2), we find that indicators of resource scarcity predict the presence of capital punishment. In two experiments (studies 3 and 4), we find that activating concerns about scarcity causes people to increase their endorsement for capital punishment, and this effect is statistically mediated by a reduced willingness to risk repeated offenses. Perceived resource scarcity shapes our punishment preferences, with important policy implications.
Cogs in the machine: The prioritization of money and self-dehumanization
Rachel Ruttan & Brian Lucas
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, November 2018, Pages 47-58
Abstract:
The dehumanization of other people is an unfortunately common occurrence that drives discrimination and conflict. We examined when and why the self can also be dehumanized. Across six studies, we found a reciprocal relationship between self-dehumanization and the prioritization of money. Participants who prioritized money (vs. control participants) attributed less humanness to themselves (Studies 1–4), and in turn, chose to socially distance themselves from a coworker (Study 4). Participants led to self-humanize (vs. control participants) were less likely to prioritize money over other goals (Studies 5A-6). The human nature dimension of humanness, which refers to attributes that separate humans from inanimate objects, was more sensitive to money-prioritization than was the human uniqueness dimension, which refers to attributes that separate humans from non-human animals. Alternative explanations based on affect and self-esteem were ruled out. These results suggest that the prioritization of money is at odds with our perceptions of human nature.
When do circumstances excuse? Moral prejudices and beliefs about the true self drive preferences for agency-minimizing explanations
Simon Cullen
Cognition, November 2018, Pages 165-181
Abstract:
When explaining human actions, people usually focus on a small subset of potential causes. What leads us to prefer certain explanations for valenced actions over others? The present studies indicate that our moral attitudes often predict our explanatory preferences far better than our beliefs about how causally sensitive actions are to features of the actor’s environment. Study 1 found that high-prejudice participants were much more likely to endorse non-agential explanations of an erotic same-sex encounter, such as that one of the men endured a stressful event earlier that day. Study 2 manipulated participants’ beliefs about how the agent’s behavior depended on features of his environment, finding that such beliefs played no clear role in modeling participants’ explanatory preferences. This result emerged both with low- and high-prejudice, US and Indian participants, suggesting that these findings probably reflect a species-typical feature of human psychology. Study 3 found that moral attitudes also predicted explanations for a woman’s decision to abort her pregnancy (3a) and a person’s decision to convert to Islam (3b). Study 4 found that luck in an action’s etiology tends to undermine perceptions of blame more readily than perceptions of praise. Finally, Study 5 found that when explaining support for a rival ideology, both Liberals and Conservatives downplay agential causes while emphasizing environmental ones. Taken together, these studies indicate that our explanatory preferences often reflect a powerful tendency to represent agents as possessing virtuous true selves. Consequently, situation-focused explanations often appear salient because people resist attributing negatively valenced actions to the true self. There is a person/situation distinction, but it is normative.
Choosing victims: Human fungibility in moral decision-making
Michał Białek, Jonathan Fugelsang & Ori Friedman
Judgment and Decision Making, September 2018, Pages 451–457
Abstract:
In considering moral dilemmas, people often judge the acceptability of exchanging individuals’ interests, rights, and even lives. Here we investigate the related, but often overlooked, question of how people decide who to sacrifice in a moral dilemma. In three experiments (total N = 558), we provide evidence that these decisions often depend on the feeling that certain people are fungible and interchangeable with one another, and that one factor that leads people to be viewed this way is shared nationality. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read vignettes in which three individuals’ lives could be saved by sacrificing another person. When the individuals were characterized by their nationalities, participants chose to save the three endangered people by sacrificing someone who shared their nationality, rather than sacrificing someone from a different nationality. Participants do not show similar preferences, though, when individuals were characterized by their age or month of birth. In Experiment 3, we replicated the effect of nationality on participant’s decisions about who to sacrifice, and also found that they did not show a comparable preference in a closely matched vignette in which lives were not exchanged. This suggests that the effect of nationality on decisions of who to sacrifice may be specific to judgments about exchanges of lives.
Capacity for up-regulation of emotional processing in psychopathy: All you have to do is ask
Matthew Shane & Lindsay Groat
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Historically, psychopathic individuals have been described as suffering a chronic hyporesponsivity to negatively-valent stimuli. While a wide body of empirical work indicates that the psychopath does not manifest normal reactivity to emotional stimuli, it does not similarly indicate that they cannot do so. The current fMRI study evaluated voluntary control of emotional reactivity by examining the extent to which offenders with low- medium- and high-psychopathy scores could up-(and down-) regulate their neural activity to negatively-valent stimuli. Participants were asked to increase, decrease or maintain their emotional response while viewing negatively-valent and neutral images. During passive-processing, high-psychopathy offenders showed reduced activity compared to both low- and mid-psychopathic offenders through a majority of emotion-relevant regions. However, these differences disappeared when participants were instructed to try to increase their emotional responses to the presented pictures, evidenced by all groups showing increased activity within bilateral insula, OFC and ACC/mFC. Furthermore, all groups showed symmetry of neural/subjective emotion metrics, with the high-psychopathy group showing the greatest symmetry within bilateral insula, thalamus/caudate and dACC/mFC. Findings suggest that psychopathic individuals may be capable of manifesting emotional reactivity to negatively-valent stimuli, at least under certain conditions. Relevance for traditional and developing models of psychopathy are discussed in turn.
Implicit self-criminal cognition and its relation to criminal behavior
Luis Rivera & Bonita Veysey
Law and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Three studies adopted implicit social cognition theory and methodology to understand criminal cognition outside of conscious awareness or control, specifically by testing whether individual differences in implicit associations between the self and the group criminals are related to criminal behavior. A Single Category Implicit Association Test measured self-criminal associations across 3 adult samples—2 from Newark, New Jersey, a high-crime United States city, and an adult national sample from the United States. Then, all participants reported their criminal behavior in 2 cross-sectional design studies and 1 longitudinal design study. Consistent with an additive model of implicit and explicit cognition, studies generally demonstrated that strong implicit self-criminal associations increased the odds of committing a criminal act, even after accounting for explicit self-criminal cognition, past criminal behavior, and/or criminal-related demographics. This research suggests that implicit self-criminal associations serve as a cognitive marker for criminal behavior. Furthermore, the present research calls into question criminal justice policies and practices that assume that criminal behavior is exclusively driven by criminal intent.
People are averse to machines making moral decisions
Yochanan Bigman & Kurt Gray
Cognition, December 2018, Pages 21-34
Abstract:
Do people want autonomous machines making moral decisions? Nine studies suggest that that the answer is ‘no’ — in part because machines lack a complete mind. Studies 1–6 find that people are averse to machines making morally-relevant driving, legal, medical, and military decisions, and that this aversion is mediated by the perception that machines can neither fully think nor feel. Studies 5–6 find that this aversion exists even when moral decisions have positive outcomes. Studies 7–9 briefly investigate three potential routes to increasing the acceptability of machine moral decision-making: limiting the machine to an advisory role (Study 7), increasing machines’ perceived experience (Study 8), and increasing machines’ perceived expertise (Study 9). Although some of these routes show promise, the aversion to machine moral decision-making is difficult to eliminate. This aversion may prove challenging for the integration of autonomous technology in moral domains including medicine, the law, the military, and self-driving vehicles.
A World of Blame to Go Around: Cross-Cultural Determinants of Responsibility and Punishment Judgments
Matthew Feinberg et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research finds collectivists make external attributions for others’ behavior, whereas individualists make internal attributions. By focusing on external causes, collectivists should be less punitive toward those who harm others. Yet, many collectivistic cultures are known for strict retributive justice systems. How can collectivists simultaneously make external attributions and punish so harshly? We hypothesized that unlike individualists whose analytic tendencies engender a focus on mental states where judgments of accountability stem from perceptions of a harm-doer’s agency, collectivists’ holistic cognitive tendencies engender a focus on social harmony where judgments of accountability stem from perceived social consequences of the harmful act. Thus, what leads collectivists to make external attributions for behavior also leads to harsh punishment of those harming the collective welfare. Four cross-cultural studies found evidence that perceptions of a target’s agency more strongly predicted responsibility and punishment judgments for individualists, whereas perceived severity of the harm was stronger for collectivists.
Biased sequential sampling underlies the effects of time pressure and delay in social decision making
Fadong Chen & Ian Krajbich
Nature Communications, September 2018
Abstract:
Social decision making involves balancing conflicts between selfishness and pro-sociality. The cognitive processes underlying such decisions are not well understood, with some arguing for a single comparison process, while others argue for dual processes (one intuitive and one deliberative). Here, we propose a way to reconcile these two opposing frameworks. We argue that behavior attributed to intuition can instead be seen as a starting point bias of a sequential sampling model (SSM) process, analogous to a prior in a Bayesian framework. Using mini-dictator games in which subjects make binary decisions about how to allocate money between themselves and another participant, we find that pro-social subjects become more pro-social under time pressure and less pro-social under time delay, while selfish subjects do the opposite. Our findings help reconcile the conflicting results concerning the cognitive processes of social decision making and highlight the importance of modeling the dynamics of the choice process.