Good Examples
The Institutional Stance
Julian Jara-Ettinger & Yarrow Dunham
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Human success in navigating the social world is typically attributed to our capacity to represent other minds — a mentalistic stance. We argue that humans are endowed with a second equally powerful intuitive theory: an institutional stance. In contrast to the mentalistic stance, which helps us predict and explain unconstrained behavior via unobservable mental states, the institutional stance interprets social interactions in terms of role-based structures that constrain and regulate behavior via rule-like behavioral expectations. We argue that this stance is supported by a generative grammar that builds structured models of social collectives, enabling people to rapidly infer, track, and manipulate the social world. The institutional stance emerges early in development and its precursors can be traced across social species, but its full-fledged generative capacity is uniquely human. Once in place, the ability to reason about institutional structures takes on a causal role, allowing people to create and modify social structures, supporting new forms of institutional life. Human social cognition is best understood as an interplay between a system for representing the unconstrained behavior of individuals in terms of minds and a system for representing the constrained behavior of social collectives in terms of institutional structures composed of interlocking sets of roles.
Love of Status
Ryan Davis
Philosophy & Public Affairs, forthcoming
Abstract:
Status is a positional good constituted by the positive approval of others on some evaluative dimension. Skeptics say that pursuing status is ultimately unfulfilling, that it mistakes what we want now for our own final good, that it confuses the approval of others with objectively valuable achievement, and that it puts us into relations of enmity with other humans. I believe these objections are mistaken, and that interrogating them turns up some meaningful virtues of status. Achieving status can confer narrative value. A moment of triumph can change the evaluative valence of the struggles and failures that preceded it. It can also alleviate pressure on future uses of one's agency. With security against sources of identity threat, agents have more latitude for exploration and risk-taking. Status can thereby help redeem the past as well as open up the future.
Why Don’t People Lie More? Truth Is (Wrongly) Believed To Be More Persuasive
Uri Gneezy & Marta Serra-Garcia
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Is truth believed to be more persuasive than falsehood? This paper explores this question using a series of experiments. First, a survey experiment reveals that participants consistently believe the persuasive power of truthful messages is higher than that of lies. Second, two laboratory experiments, in which senders record truthful and false video messages about news events, show that senders mistakenly believe their truthful messages will be more believable. Even when incentivized to lie, most senders choose to tell the truth -- if tasked with persuading receivers. If not, however, most senders follow the incentives and lie.
Offloading punishment to karma: Thinking about karma reduces the punishment of transgressors
Kai Wen Zhou, Adam Baimel & Cindel White
Evolution and Human Behavior, November 2025
Abstract:
Punishment and the threat thereof can help enforce social norms, but enacting punishment is often costly. To avoid these costs, individuals may prefer to offload the responsibility of punishment to others or to cultural institutions. We propose that shared beliefs about supernatural punishment contribute to minimizing the costs of interpersonal punishment by allowing people to offload punishment to supernatural entities. In a Third Party Punishment Game, we specifically test in a pre-registered experiment (N = 1603 Americans and Singaporeans adults, recruited through Qualtrics' online panels) whether thinking about karma (a supernatural force that punishes misdeeds) reduces punishment. Results confirm that being prompted to consider karma reduces inclinations to punish selfishness in a Third Party Punishment Game. A second pre-registered study using a subtler prime of karma replicated this effect. These findings suggest that karma beliefs may have played a role in the cultural evolution of human cooperation by reducing the costs of human norm enforcement while maintaining incentives for prosocial behaviour through the threat of supernatural punishment.
Women or Fetuses First? An Experimental Study of the Effectiveness of the Pro-Life Movement’s Use of the “Pro-Woman” Frame
Amanda Roberti, Kyle Morgan & Katie Krumbholz
Politics & Gender, forthcoming
Abstract:
While abortion has been a contentious and salient political issue in the United States for decades, the debate around abortion has evolved in terms of the rhetorical frames employed by advocates on both sides. Using vignettes of statements made by hypothetical lawmakers, we evaluate responsiveness to some of these emergent frames. Specifically, we evaluate “pro-woman” framing employed by pro-life advocates, which positions abortion restrictions as being in the interests of women. The experiment also manipulates to whom the frame is attributed in two ways, the gender and the partisanship of the lawmaker. This 2 × 2 × 2 experiment explores the intersection of how abortion restrictions are framed, including the roles gender and partisanship in the persuasiveness of the frames. We find that voters are more receptive to the pro-woman frame compared to the classic fetal rights framing. Importantly, this holds even among supporters of abortion rights, casting substantial light on persuadable groups.