There is no psychology without inferential statistics.

Quantification has been constitutive of psychology since its inception and is core to its scientific status. The adoption of qualitative methods eschewing inferential statistics is therefore unlikely to obtain. Rather than discarding useful tools because of improper use, we recommend highlighting how inferential statistics can be more thoughtfully applied.

Crowdsourcing hypothesis tests: Making transparent how design choices shape research results.

To what extent are research results influenced by subjective decisions that scientists make as they design studies? Fifteen research teams independently designed studies to answer five original research questions related to moral judgments, negotiations, and implicit cognition. Participants from 2 separate large samples (total N > 15,000) were then randomly assigned to complete 1 version of each study. Effect sizes varied dramatically across different sets of materials designed to test the same hypothesis: Materials from different teams rendered statistically significant effects in opposite directions for 4 of 5 hypotheses, with the narrowest range in estimates being d = -0.37 to + 0.26. Meta-analysis and a Bayesian perspective on the results revealed overall support for 2 hypotheses and a lack of support for 3 hypotheses. Overall, practically none of the variability in effect sizes was attributable to the skill of the research team in designing materials, whereas considerable variability was attributable to the hypothesis being tested. In a forecasting survey, predictions of other scientists were significantly correlated with study results, both across and within hypotheses. Crowdsourced testing of research hypotheses helps reveal the true consistency of empirical support for a scientific claim. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The Paradox of Viral Outrage.

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.

Healthier than thou? "Practicing what you preach" backfires by increasing anticipated devaluation.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 112(5) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2017-17124-001). In the article, the beginning phrase of the second paragraph of the Internal Meta-Analysis of Studies 3 Through 5 section is incorrect. It should instead begin as follows: Across the three studies. The Monin et al. (2014) reference in both the References list and in text is included in error. The correct citation should read as follows: Monin, B., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The limits of direct replications and the virtues of stimulus sampling: Commentary on Klein et al., 2014. Social Psychology, 45, 299-300.] Should experts always practice what they preach? When an expert displays exemplary behavior, individuals who fear negative devaluation sometimes anticipate that this expert will look down on them. As a result, displays of excellence can paradoxically turn off the very people they are trying to inspire. Five studies document this in the medical domain, showing that individuals who are overweight or obese and concerned about their weight avoid physicians who advertise their fitness, for fear that these doctors will judge them negatively. People (erroneously) believe that doctors have healthier habits than other individuals (Study 1), doctors advertise healthy habits (Study 2), and overweight individuals anticipate devaluation from, and thus avoid and feel less comfortable with, doctors who portray themselves as fitness-focused (Study 3). Studies 4 and 5 test strategies for physicians to emphasize their own fitness without turning off weight-sensitive patients. This work demonstrates that it is critical to take into account ego-defensive processes when attempting to lead by example. (PsycINFO Database Record

Consistency Versus Licensing Effects of Past Moral Behavior.

Why does past moral behavior sometimes lead people to do more of the same (consistency), whereas sometimes it liberates them to do the opposite (licensing)? We organize the literature on moderators of moral consistency versus licensing effects using five conceptual themes: construal level, progress versus commitment, identification, value reflection, and ambiguity. Our review reveals that individuals are more likely to exhibit consistency when they focus abstractly on the connection between their initial behavior and their values, whereas they are more likely to exhibit licensing when they think concretely about what they have accomplished with their initial behavior-as long as the second behavior does not blatantly threaten a cherished identity. Moreover, many studies lacked baseline conditions ("donut" designs), leaving it ambiguous whether licensing was observed. And although many proposed moderators yielded significant interactions, evidence for both significant consistency and balancing simple effects in the same study was nearly nonexistent.

Core values versus common sense: consequentialist views appear less rooted in morality.

When a speaker presents an opinion, an important factor in audiences' reactions is whether the speaker seems to be basing his or her decision on ethical (as opposed to more pragmatic) concerns. We argue that, despite a consequentialist philosophical tradition that views utilitarian consequences as the basis for moral reasoning, lay perceivers think that speakers using arguments based on consequences do not construe the issue as a moral one. Five experiments show that, for both political views (including real State of the Union quotations) and organizational policies, consequentialist views are seen to express less moralization than deontological views, and even sometimes than views presented with no explicit justification. We also demonstrate that perceived moralization in turn affects speakers' perceived commitment to the issue and authenticity. These findings shed light on lay conceptions of morality and have practical implications for people considering how to express moral opinions publicly.

When cheating would make you a cheater: implicating the self prevents unethical behavior.

In 3 experiments using 2 different paradigms, people were less likely to cheat for personal gain when a subtle change in phrasing framed such behavior as diagnostic of an undesirable identity. Participants were given the opportunity to claim money they were not entitled to at the experimenters' expense; instructions referred to cheating with either language that was designed to highlight the implications of cheating for the actor's identity (e.g., "Please don't be a cheater") or language that focused on the action (e.g., "Please don't cheat"). Participants in the "cheating" condition claimed significantly more money than did participants in the "cheater" condition, who showed no evidence of having cheated at all. This difference occurred both in a face-to-face interaction (Experiment 1) and in a private online setting (Experiments 2 and 3). These results demonstrate the power of a subtle linguistic difference to prevent even private unethical behavior by invoking people's desire to maintain a self-image as good and honest.

The Stranger effect: the rejection of affective deviants.

What happens when affective displays deviate from normative expectations? In this study, participants evaluated target individuals displaying flat, incongruent, or congruent expressions seemingly in response to pictures eliciting positive, neutral, or negative affect. Relative to targets who displayed normative reactions, those who violated affective norms (affective deviants) were rated more negatively on various dimensions of social judgment. Participants also preferred greater social distance from affective deviants, reported more moral outrage in response to them, and inferred that these targets did not share their moral values. Incongruent affect resulted in more negative social judgment than did flat affect, and this relationship was moderated by stimulus valence. Finally, the relationship between targets' affective expressions and participants' avoidant intentions was mediated by the extent to which participants thought the targets shared their moral values. These findings demonstrate the interpersonal costs of affective deviance, revealing the pervasiveness and force of affective norms.

Inventing racist roads not taken: the licensing effect of immoral counterfactual behaviors.

Six experiments examined how people strategically use thoughts of foregone misdeeds to regulate their moral behavior. We tested 2 hypotheses: 1st, that people will feel licensed to act in morally dubious ways when they can point to immoral alternatives to their prior behavior, and 2nd, that people made to feel insecure about their morality will exaggerate the extent to which such alternatives existed. Supporting the 1st hypothesis, when White participants could point to racist alternatives to their past actions, they felt they had obtained more evidence of their own virtue (Study 1), they expressed less racial sensitivity (Study 2), and they were more likely to express preferences about employment and allocating money that favored Whites at the expense of Blacks (Study 3). Supporting the 2nd hypothesis, White participants whose security in their identity as nonracists had been threatened remembered a prior task as having afforded more racist alternatives to their behavior than did those who were not threatened. This distortion of the past involved overestimating the number of Black individuals they had encountered on the prior task (Study 4) and exaggerating how stereotypically Black specific individuals had looked (Studies 5 and 6). We discuss implications for moral behavior, the motivated rewriting of one's moral history, and how the life unlived can liberate people to lead the life they want.

Fitting in but getting fat: identity threat and dietary choices among U.S. immigrant groups.

In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that pressure felt by U.S. immigrant groups to prove they belong in America causes them to consume more prototypically American, and consequently less healthy, foods. Asian Americans were three times more likely to report a prototypically American food as their favorite after being asked whether they spoke English than when they had not been asked; in contrast, questioning the English abilities of White Americans had no effect on their reports (Experiment 1). Also, Asian Americans ordered and ate dishes that were more American and contained an average of 182 additional calories and 12 extra grams of fat when their American identity was directly challenged than when their American identity was not challenged (Experiment 2). Identity-based psychological processes may help explain why the diets of U.S. immigrant groups tend to decline in nutritional value with longer residence in the United States and over generations.

Misery has more company than people think: underestimating the prevalence of others' negative emotions.

Four studies document underestimations of the prevalence of others' negative emotions and suggest causes and correlates of these erroneous perceptions. In Study 1a, participants reported that their negative emotions were more private or hidden than were their positive emotions; in Study 1b, participants underestimated the peer prevalence of common negative, but not positive, experiences described in Study 1a. In Study 2, people underestimated negative emotions and overestimated positive emotions even for well-known peers, and this effect was partially mediated by the degree to which those peers reported suppression of negative (vs. positive) emotions. Study 3 showed that lower estimations of the prevalence of negative emotional experiences predicted greater loneliness and rumination and lower life satisfaction and that higher estimations for positive emotional experiences predicted lower life satisfaction. Taken together, these studies suggest that people may think they are more alone in their emotional difficulties than they really are.

Letting people off the hook: when do good deeds excuse transgressions?

Three studies examined when and why an actor's prior good deeds make observers more willing to excuse--or license--his or her subsequent, morally dubious behavior. In a pilot study, actors' good deeds made participants more forgiving of the actors' subsequent transgressions. In Study 1, participants only licensed blatant transgressions that were in a different domain than actors' good deeds; blatant transgressions in the same domain appeared hypocritical and suppressed licensing (e.g., fighting adolescent drug use excused sexual harassment, but fighting sexual harassment did not). Study 2 replicated these effects and showed that good deeds made observers license ambiguous transgressions (e.g., behavior that might or might not represent sexual harassment) regardless of whether the good deeds and the transgression were in the same or in a different domain--but only same-domain good deeds did so by changing participants' construal of the transgressions. Discussion integrates two models of why licensing occurs.

Victim entitlement to behave selfishly.

Three experiments demonstrated that feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement and to selfish behavior. In Experiment 1, participants instructed to recall a time when their lives were unfair were more likely to refuse to help the experimenter with a supplementary task than were participants who recalled a time when they were bored. In Experiment 2, the same manipulation increased intentions to engage in a number of selfish behaviors, and this effect was mediated by self-reported entitlement to obtain positive (and avoid negative) outcomes. In Experiment 3, participants who lost at a computer game for an unfair reason (a glitch in the program) requested a more selfish money allocation for a future task than did participants who lost the game for a fair reason, and this effect was again mediated by entitlement.

Opt-out testing for stigmatized diseases: a social psychological approach to understanding the potential effect of recommendations for routine HIV testing.

OBJECTIVE: Little research has studied experimentally whether an opt-out policy will increase testing rates or whether this strategy is especially effective in the case of stigmatized diseases such as HIV. DESIGN AND MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: In Study 1, a 2 x 2 factorial design asked participants to make moral judgments about a person's decision to test for stigmatized diseases under an opt-in versus an opt-out policy. In Study 2, a 2 x 2 factorial design measuring testing rates explored whether opt-out methods reduce stigma and increase testing for stigmatized diseases. RESULTS: Study 1 results suggest that getting tested draws suspicion regarding moral conduct in an opt-in system, whereas not getting tested draws suspicion in an opt-out system. Study 2 results suggest that an opt-out policy may increase testing rates for stigmatized diseases and lessen the effects of stigma in people's reluctance to test. DISCUSSION: A social psychological approach to health services can be used to show how testing policies can influence both the stigmatization associated with testing and participation rates. An understanding of how testing policies may affect patient decision making and behavior is imperative for creating effective testing policies.

Investigations in spontaneous discounting.

Oppenheimer's (2004) demonstration that causal discounting (when the presence of one cause casts doubt on the presence of another) can happen spontaneously addressed the standing concern that discounting was an artifact of experimental demands, but these results could have resulted from memory inhibition. The present studies rule out this alternative using the same surname frequency estimation paradigm. In Study 1, individuals discounted surname familiarity even when it could be attributed to semantic meaning; in Study 2, participants under cognitive load discounted less; in Study 3, participants who were promised a prize for accuracy discounted more. All three results conform to a spontaneous causal discounting account better than to the inhibition alternative.

From sucker to saint: moralization in response to self-threat.

When people's rationality and agency are implicitly called into question by the more expedient behavior of others, they sometimes respond by feeling morally superior; this is referred to as the sucker-to-saint effect. In Experiment 1, participants who completed a tedious task and then saw a confederate quit the same task elevated their own morality over that of the confederate, whereas participants who simply completed the task or simply saw the confederate quit did not. In Experiment 2, this effect was eliminated by having participants contemplate a valued personal quality before encountering the rebellious confederate, a result suggesting a role for self-threat in producing moralization. These studies demonstrate that moral judgments can be more deeply embedded in judges' immediate social contexts-and driven more by motivations to maintain self-image-than is typically appreciated in contemporary moral-psychology research. Rather than uphold abstract principles of justice, moral judgment may sometimes just help people feel a little less foolish.

The rejection of moral rebels: resenting those who do the right thing.

Four studies document the rejection of moral rebels. In Study 1, participants who made a counterattitudinal speech disliked a person who refused on principle to do so, but uninvolved observers preferred this rebel to an obedient other. In Study 2, participants taking part in a racist task disliked a rebel who refused to go along, but mere observers did not. This rejection was mediated by the perception that rebels would reject obedient participants (Study 3), but did not occur when participants described an important trait or value beforehand (Study 4). Together, these studies suggest that rebels are resented when their implicit reproach threatens the positive self-image of individuals who did not rebel.

Potential moral stigma and reactions to sexually transmitted diseases: evidence for a disjunction fallacy.

Five experiments demonstrate how potential moral stigma leads people to underplay their susceptibility to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and dampens their interest in getting tested. After adding unprotected sex to a list of otherwise innocuous possible vectors for a disease, the authors found that infected people were perceived to be less moral (Experiment 1a), and individuals believed that if they had the disease, others would see them as less moral too (Experiment 1b). Adding this stigmatized vector also reduced reported testing intentions (Experiment 2) and perceived risk of exposure (Experiment 3)--a disjunction fallacy because adding a potential cause reduced estimated likelihood, in violation of basic probability rules. Finally, the authors replicated the effect in a computer virus analog (Experiment 4) and showed that it did not result from simply knowing that one has not engaged in the stigmatized behavior. Results suggest that avoidance of potential stigma can have dramatic health consequences, both for an individual's health decision and for health policy.

"Where are you really from?": Asian Americans and identity denial.

Five studies investigate identity denial, the situation in which an individual is not recognized as a member of an important in-group. Asian Americans are seen as less American than other Americans (Study 1) and realize this is the case, although they do not report being any less American than White Americans (Studies 2A and 2B). Identity denial is a common occurrence in Asian Americans' daily lives (Study 3). They react to instances of identity denial by presenting American cultural knowledge and claiming greater participation in American practices (Studies 4 & 5). Identity denial furthers the understanding of group dynamics by capturing the experience of less prototypical group members who desire to have their common in-group identity recognized by fellow group members.