Journal of Experimental Social Psychology最新文献

Do people judge those who overcome temptation as more virtuous than those who don't feel tempted in the first place? Because prior research provides conflicting answers to this question, the current paper uses an expanded set of methodological and statistical tools to solve this puzzle. First, we replicated results of prior research showing that agents who overcome temptation are seen as less virtuous than non-tempted agents, with 74–78% of people making this judgment. Second, we used participant-generated stimuli and one measure from each of two published papers to rule out stimulus and measurement sampling as explanations for the previous opposite effects. We replicated our original results: 72–75% of people judged agents who overcame temptation as less virtuous than non-tempted agents. Third, we investigated whether judgments were moderated by relationship context. Again, the majority of people judged agents who overcame temptation–that would harm strangers or close others–as less virtuous than non-tempted agents. Additionally, the following interaction effect was the most common (modal) pattern: While judging tempted agents as less virtuous than non-tempted agents within each relationship context, 39% of people judged agents who were tempted to act in a way that would harm close others as even less virtuous than those agents whose temptations would harm strangers. Together, these results provide a detailed moral psychological account of temptation by: resolving a puzzle in the literature, revealing moderation by relationship context, and documenting the pervasiveness of this effect across stimuli, measures, and persons.

When people accidentally harm others, some theory anticipates that expressing normatively unexpected (“false positive”) guilt is socially functional because it signals a positive moral character and likability. Although previous evidence shows anticipated effects of false positive guilt on these outcomes, it is possible these effects result from perceiving aspects specific to empathy (vs. guilt). We address this possibility in three preregistered studies. Participants answered questions regarding their perceptions of agents of accidental harm. In Experiment 1 (N = 299), agents that expressed guilt (vs. no guilt) received higher moral character and likability ratings; mediation evidence suggested these effects resulted via perceptions that the agent experienced empathy-specific (e.g., concern, understanding), not guilt-specific (e.g., self-blame) sentiments; if anything, guilt-specific sentiments reduced some moral character evaluations. Experiment 2 (N = 503) was a conceptual replication with more ecologically valid methods; it provided similar conclusions. Experiment 3 (N = 653) crossed an agent's expression of guilt-specific sentiments (present vs. absent) with empathy-specific sentiments (present vs. absent). Main effects of empathy-specific sentiments on moral character and likability judgments were at least seven times larger than those attributed to guilt-specific sentiments. Additionally, when empathy-specific sentiments were expressed, the expression of guilt-specific sentiments had no positive effects on moral character and likability judgments; however, when empathy-specific sentiments were not expressed, the expression of guilt-specific sentiments enhanced some but not all moral character judgments. We discuss how our findings contribute to understanding the social benefits of expressing false positive guilt and cohere with some impression formation perspectives.

Authorities and managers often rely on individuals and businesses' self-reports and employ various forms of honesty declarations to ensure that those individuals and businesses do not over-claim payments, benefits, or other resources. While previous work has found that honesty pledges have the potential to decrease dishonesty, effects have been mixed. We argue that understanding and predicting when honesty pledges are effective has been obstructed due to variations in experimental designs and operationalizations of honesty pledges in previous research. Specifically, we focus on the role of whether and how an ex-ante honesty pledge asks individuals to identify (by ID, name, initials) and how much involvement the pledge requires from the individual (low: just reading vs. high: re-typing the text of the pledge). In four pre-registered online studies (N > 5000), we systematically examine these two dimensions of a pledge to find that involvement is often more effective than identification. In addition, low involvement pledges, without any identification, are mostly ineffective. Finally, we find that the effect of a high (vs. low) involvement pledge is relatively more persistent across tasks. Yet, repeating a low involvement pledge across tasks increases its effectiveness and compensates for the lower persistency across tasks. Taken together, these results contribute both to theory by comparing some of the mechanisms possibly underlying honesty pledges as well as to practice by providing guidance to managers and policymakers on how to effectively design pledges to prevent or reduce dishonesty in self-reports.

The antagonistic relation between the two ways of reaching the top, i.e., dominance and prestige, has generally been accepted in recent decades. People perceive dominance as a “negative” trait that reduces the quantity of resources that should be allocated to individuals who exhibit such a trait. In contrast, prestige is viewed as a “positive” trait, that increases the appropriate amount of resources for such allocation. However, the situation is somewhat complicated because dominance and prestige can serve as different evaluative dimensions for the same person since that person could be esteemed for their expertise yet simultaneously critiqued to their assertive personality. This article first investigated how children aged 3- to 8-year-old weigh prestige and dominance when those traits coexist within individuals. The results of Study 1 revealed that children exhibited a developmental pattern of resource allocation, progressing from favoring the high-dominance to the low-dominance individual. Their theory of mind capacity predicted their preference for low-dominance individual. One professional prestige situation was also investigated which showed that children stably favor characters with high prestige. Children begin to distinguish between dominance and prestige in resource allocation at approximately 5 years. Study 2 further explored how 5- to 8-year-olds weigh the rewarding high-prestige individuals against compensating low-dominance individuals when these traits clash within the same person, which showed that children at this stage prioritize prestige rather than dominance. Taken together, these findings suggest that children are capable to differentiate between dominance and prestige as two distinct ways when perceiving social ranks.

Are there optimal levels of showing one feels good? Examining four positive emotions (gratitude, interest, feeling moved, triumph), we demonstrate in two pre-registered experiments (n = 901) that even for pleasant feelings, showing too much – or too little – can lead to negative social consequences. Expressers who downplay their gratitude, and to a lesser degree interest, are deprived of social contact and power. Restrained displays of feeling moved are also met with reduced contact. For triumph, amplified expressers are socially avoided, yet at the same time, those who downplay their victory are seen to be less powerful. We demonstrate the role of person-perception mechanisms (warmth and competence) as underlying explanators for these effects. Taken together, our findings contribute to the growing literature on the social consequences of emotional expressions, by pointing to divergent outcomes for norm violations relating to different positive emotions.

Despite being a pivotal aspect of human cooperation, only a few studies within the field of collaborative dishonesty have included communication between participants, and none have yet experimentally compared this to non-communicative contexts. As a result, the impact of communication on unethical collaborations remains unclear. To address this gap, we conducted two well-powered studies (N_total = 1187), closely replicating and extending seminal research by Weisel and Shalvi (2015), introducing communication as a manipulated variable within a dyadic cheating task. Across both studies, we found evidence that communication increases the magnitude of cheating—even when coordination on the task is not allowed. Importantly, the effect of communication was linked to a stronger experienced collaboration among the communicating dyads, highlighting that communication is not only key to everyday ethically sound collaborations, but also to corrupt collaborations.

As humans, we are unique with respect to the flexibility and scope of our cooperative behavior. In recent years, considerable research has been devoted to investigating the psychological mechanisms which support this. One key finding is that people frequently calibrate their effort level to match a cooperation partner's effort costs - although little is known about exactly why they do so. We hypothesized that people calibrate with the ultimate goal of attracting and keeping good collaboration partners, with the proximal psychological motive being a preference for fairness. Across four lab-based, pre-registered experiments (N = 142), we found support for these hypotheses, and distinguished them from plausible alternative explanations, such as the conjecture that people may use their partner's effort costs as information to infer the value of opportunities afforded by their environment, and the conjecture that people may calibrate their effort investment in order to appear competent.

Statement of relevance

As humans, we have unique skills and motivations for acting together. Crucially, acting together requires effort and a growing body of empirical work on cooperation and joint action suggests that people calibrate their effort level to match that of a partner's effort costs - although little is known about the mechanisms leading them to do so. Our findings show that people calibrate their effort investment in joint action with the ultimate goal of attracting and keeping good collaboration partners and that the psychological mechanism that drives them to do so is a preference for fairness. These findings provide a valuable addition to existing research on the sense of fairness, providing evidence that the sense of fairness leads people not only to distribute resources according to individual effort costs but to distribute effort costs according to the expected reward distribution as well.

Pairing a neutral object with a valenced stimulus often results in the former acquiring the valence of the latter (i.e., the Evaluative Conditioning [EC] effect). However, the pairing of an object with an affective stimulus is not always indicative of valence similarity. Three preregistered experiments (total N = 1052) explored EC effects when people were explicitly informed that pairings do not reflect valence similarity. In Experiment 1, informing participants that the paired stimuli are unrelated and therefore irrelevant to each other, reduced but did not eliminate EC effects. In Experiment 2, exposure to pairings defined as irrelevant still produced an EC effect, even when participants were asked to resist being influenced by the pairings. In Experiment 3, irrelevant pairings still produced an EC effect, even when alternative diagnostic evaluative information was provided. The results constrain existing theoretical models of EC and suggest that EC effects are robust.

The indirect reciprocity theory suggested that the cues of reputational consequences determine the scope of indirect reciprocity and influence whether individuals decide to interact with others regardless of group identity. However, in more complex intergroup environments, there is no clear answer as to how indirect reciprocity guides intergroup cooperation. Based on this, the study used Intergroup Parochial and Universal-Cooperation (IPUC) to construct in-group interaction scenarios and explore the influence of reputation on different cooperative behaviors from both individual and group perspectives. The study found: (1) at the individual level, the influence of personal reputation on different cooperative behaviors is limited by group identity, and ingroup favoritism always exists, supporting the viewpoint of Bounded Generalized Reciprocity; (2) at the group level, group reputation promotes universal cooperation and suppresses parochial cooperation, regardless of group type, consistent with the Unbounded Indirect Reciprocity. The study supported and extended indirect reciprocity theory, providing a reference for understanding group relations.

Despite the modern rarity with which people are visual witness to moral transgressions involving physical harm, such transgressions are more accessible than ever thanks to their availability on social media and in the news. On one hand, the literature suggests that people form fast moral impressions once they already know what has transpired (i.e., who did what to whom, and whether there was harm involved). On the other hand, almost all research on the psychological bases for moral judgment has used verbal vignettes, leaving open the question of how people form moral impressions about observed visual events. Using a naturalistic but well-controlled image set depicting social interactions, we find that observers are capable of ‘moral thin-slicing’: they reliably identify moral transgressions from visual scenes presented in the blink of an eye (< 100 ms), in ways that are surprisingly consistent with judgments made under no viewing-time constraints. Across four studies, we show that this remarkable ability arises because observers independently and rapidly extract the ‘atoms’ of moral judgment (i.e., event roles, and the level of harm involved). Our work supports recent proposals that many moral judgments are fast and intuitive and opens up exciting new avenues for understanding how people form moral judgments from visual observation.