Moral Hazards
Disentangling dishonesty: An empirical investigation of the nature of lying and cheating
Samuel Skowronek
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, May 2025, Pages 1407-1427
Abstract:
When people lie, they knowingly misrepresent factual information. When people cheat, they create fraudulent information. Though these two types of unethical behavior are distinct, behavioral ethics scholarship has conflated lying with cheating. The canonical experimental paradigms used in behavioral ethics assess lying behavior. They do not assess cheating behavior. Scholars, however, have used findings from studies of lying to develop theories about cheating. This approach has limited our understanding of unethical behavior. Across one pilot study and 14 preregistered experiments using online panels (N = 7,684), I disentangle cheating from lying and demonstrate that cheating and lying are not only theoretically distinct but also meaningfully different behaviors. Specifically, I show that liars are less likely than cheaters to submit a profit-maximizing report and cheaters often feel more positive about themselves after cheating than liars feel after lying. Further, I show that feelings of comfort mediate cheaters’ increased willingness to submit a profit-maximizing report and that the decreased likelihood to submit a profit-maximizing report for lying behavior is attenuated when people know that they will not need evidence to corroborate their claims. By identifying these differences, this work reconciles conflicting findings in behavioral ethics scholarship and builds a clearer conceptual foundation for future research.
Are There Consequences of Expressing Intellectual Humility Toward Claims Perceived as Established or Moral Truths? Implications for Judgments of Expresser’s Competence and Warmth
Jonah Koetke & Karina Schumann
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research has found that people perceive intellectual humility (IH) -- the awareness of one’s intellectual limitations -- as a positive characteristic. Here, we investigated if these evaluations are context dependent by examining how perceivers respond to others who express IH toward established versus unfamiliar claims and high versus low moral conviction claims. In three preregistered experiments (N = 1,208), perceivers rated IH as less appropriate when they believed the truth was established (vs. unfamiliar) or felt high (vs. low) moral conviction toward a claim. Whereas participants imbued warmth, competence, and trustworthiness on people who expressed IH about unfamiliar or low moral conviction topics, these benefits were attenuated and often even reversed when claims were seen as established or moral truths.
Trust and Trust Funds: How Others’ Childhood and Current Social Class Context Influence Trust Behavior and Expectations
Kristin Laurin et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Trust is vital for success in all kinds of social interactions. But how do people decide whether an individual can be trusted? One factor people may consider is that individual’s social class. We hypothesize that people trust others from lower social class contexts more than others from higher class contexts; we also consider nuances between current and childhood class context and between trust as a behavior and trust as an expectation. Five preregistered studies (total N = 1,934, with three of five studies including a within-subjects component), and 12 preregistered replications summarized in the supplement, yielded two sets of findings. First, people consistently behaviorally trusted others whose childhoods were spent in low-class (compared to high-class) contexts and expected them to honor that trust. These effects were mediated by perceived morality. Second, people behaviorally trusted others currently in low-class (compared to high-class) contexts, but they did not expect these individuals to honor that trust or perceive them as moral. Instead, the effect of current class was linked to altruism. Our findings emerged in samples drawn from different populations, across varying manipulations of social class, in actual and hypothetical decisions, and with imaginary targets and real acquaintances. We consider implications for the psychology of trust and of social class.
Exact replication of Kozłowska et al. (2023) “The Napoleon complex, revisited”: Contrary evidence in a 2.6 times larger sample
Stina Øvstetun & Stefan Stieger
Personality and Individual Differences, September 2025
Abstract:
The present study (N = 943) aimed to exactly replicate the study of Kozłowska et al. (2023; N = 367), in which it was found that Dark Triad traits (i.e., psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism) were associated with shorter body height and wishing to be taller. The present study found an association between Dark Triad traits and wishing to be taller but no association between Dark Triad traits and a short body height. Contrarily, an association between tall body height and narcissism and psychopathy was found. Overall, the effect sizes were smaller than those reported by the original study. The results are discussed by comparing the replication and original study while considering the current knowledge of the relationship between Dark Triad traits and physical characteristics.
Achievement (not effort) makes people feel entitled to rewards
Corey Cusimano, Jin Kim & Jared Wong
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 13 May 2025
Abstract:
It is common to say that people feel entitled to rewards -- they think they have earned or deserve them -- based on their effort and achievement. However, effort and achievement draw on different principles to justify reward. They can also conflict over when people should feel entitled to rewards. These observations raise the question: In everyday settings, do people feel entitled to rewards because of their effort, achievement, or some combination of the two? To determine how effort and achievement contribute to feelings of entitlement, we hired online workers and varied the feelings of effort and achievement that their work induced. We then let those workers decide how large of a bonus we then paid them. Achievement strongly predicted how much participants paid themselves. Hard work, by contrast, played little-to-no detectable role.
How Individual Differences in Empathy Predict Moments of Empathy in Everyday Life
Gregory Depow & Michael Inzlicht
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do trait empathy measures predict how people experience empathy in daily life? Despite considerable research on empathy, we know surprisingly little about how trait measures relate to real-world empathic experiences. In this preregistered analysis of 7,343 experience sampling surveys from a near-representative sample of 246 U.S. adults, we map the connections between validated trait empathy measures and state experiences of empathy. Each component of state empathy -- including emotion sharing, perspective taking, and compassion -- was significantly predicted by theoretically relevant trait measures. However, trait empathy explained limited variance in daily experiences overall, ranging from just 3% for emotion sharing to 15% for perceived empathic efficacy. Adding emotional valence as a predictor improved model fit and variance explained for most state experiences, highlighting the crucial role of context. Our findings validate trait empathy measures while revealing their limitations in predicting real-world experiences.
Moral Outrage Predicts the Virality of Petitions for Change on Social Media, But Not the Number of Signatures They Receive
Stefan Leach et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Social media is a powerful tool for activists to share their perspectives, but concerns persist that the viral spread of online moral outrage may undermine collective causes in some ways. Analyzing posts on X (n = 1,286,442) with URLs to petitions on www.change.org (n = 24,785), we found that expressions of outrage were uniquely associated with the number of times posts were liked and reposted (virality). Mediation analyses showed that outrage was indirectly related to the number of signatures petitions received (via virality). However, outrage was associated with fewer signatures when controlling for virality. In contrast, expressions of agency, group identity, and prosociality were associated with more signatures but no more virality. The findings outline the factors linked to engagement with online petitions and describe how social media can amplify content which has no direct link to the sorts of effortful behaviors typically thought to be conducive to social change.
Conserved brain-wide emergence of emotional response from sensory experience in humans and mice
Isaac Kauvar et al.
Science, 29 May 2025
Abstract:
Emotional responses to sensory experience are central to the human condition in health and disease. We hypothesized that principles governing the emergence of emotion from sensation might be discoverable through their conservation across the mammalian lineage. We therefore designed a cross-species neural activity screen, applicable to humans and mice, combining precise affective behavioral measurements, clinical medication administration, and brain-wide intracranial electrophysiology. This screen revealed conserved biphasic dynamics in which emotionally salient sensory signals are swiftly broadcast throughout the brain and followed by a characteristic persistent activity pattern. Medication-based interventions that selectively blocked persistent dynamics while preserving fast broadcast selectively inhibited emotional responses in humans and mice. Mammalian emotion appears to emerge as a specifically distributed neural context, driven by persistent dynamics and shaped by a global intrinsic timescale.