First impressions: Do faces with scars and palsies influence warmth, competence and humanization?

A glance is enough to assign psychological attributes to others. Attractiveness is associated with positive attributes ('beauty-is-good' stereotype). Here, we raise the question of a similar but negative bias. Are people with facial anomalies associated with negative personal characteristics? We hypothesized that biases against faces with anomalies arise because of negative stereotypes (less warmth and competence) and forms of dehumanization (animalistic and mechanistic). We enrolled 1493 mTurk participants (N = 1306 after exclusion) to assess 31 traits of photographed people using 60 pairs of photographs of the same person before and after plastic surgery. Half anomalous faces had a scar and the other half had a palsy. To calculate warmth and competence, we conducted a principal components analysis of the 31 attributes. Animalistic dehumanization was assessed by averaging reverse-scored ratings corresponding to moral sensibility and rationality/logic, and mechanistic dehumanization by averaging across reverse-scored ratings corresponding to emotional responsiveness and interpersonal warmth. We found that both kinds of anomalous faces were seen as less warm, competent and were dehumanized. Our findings suggest that an 'anomalous-is-bad' stereotype generalizes regardless of the aetiology of the anomaly. This effect may be related to a reverse halo effect, that is, the horn effect.

Children Value Animals More Than Adults Do: A Conceptual Replication and Extension.

Recent psychological research finds that U.S. American children have a weaker tendency than U.S. American adults to value humans more than animals. We aimed to conceptually replicate and extend this finding in a preregistered study (N = 412). We investigated whether 6- to 9-year-old Polish children (Study 1a) are less likely to prioritize humans over animals than Polish adults are (Studies 1b and 1c). We presented participants with moral dilemmas where they had to prioritize either humans or animals (dogs or chimpanzees) in situations that involved harming (i.e., a trolley problem) or benefiting (i.e., giving a snack). We found that Polish children prioritized humans over animals less than Polish adults did. This was the case both in dilemmas that involved preventing harm and in dilemmas that involved providing snacks. Both children and adults prioritized humans over chimpanzees more than humans over dogs.

Drinking alcohol appears to have no impact on self-perceptions of morality, aggressiveness, or intelligence.

People generally perceive themselves as moral but does this tendency change after alcohol consumption? In the current research, we tested whether alcoholic intoxication affects self-assessments of morality (i.e., the self-importance of moral identity and the moral self-concept), and we also tested self-assessment of aggressiveness and intelligence. We conducted a preregistered laboratory experiment with participants divided into three groups: alcohol intoxication (n = 106), placebo (n = 114), and control condition (n = 109). We did not detect statistically significant differences in self-assessments across conditions. These data are consistent with the conclusion that self-assessments of morality, aggressiveness, and intelligence may be too stable to be affected by the momentary changes in self-perception caused by alcoholic intoxication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Alcohol and morality: one alcoholic drink is enough to make people declare to harm others and behave impurely.

We aimed to understand if alcohol intoxication affects the willingness to violate moral foundations (care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and purity). We conducted a laboratory study (N = 387) with three randomized groups: alcohol intoxication, placebo, and control, measuring the sacralization of moral foundations via the Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale. The study showed intoxicated participants sacralized moral foundations of care and purity more often than participants from control and placebo groups. It means participants declared more willing to physically harm other people and animals and behave impurely, e.g., doing deviant sexual behaviors or selling their souls. No differences related to fairness, authority, and loyalty were found. Our study helps to understand the decision processes underlying immoral behaviors, including crimes. We showed that even one drink makes people change their judgments about what is right and wrong (in the cases of harmful and impure behaviors), and because this kind of judgment precedes immoral behaviors, our results may help explain why some people under the influence of alcohol break the rules by doing things which they would never do when sober.

Online Moral Conformity: how powerful is a Group of Strangers when influencing an Individual's Moral Judgments during a video meeting?

People make moral decisions every day. When making such decisions, they may be influenced by their companions (a so-called moral conformity effect). Increasingly, people make decisions in online environments, like video meetings. In the current preregistered experiment, we studied the moral conformity effect in an online context. We applied an Asch conformity paradigm by asking participants (N = 120) to reply to sacrificial moral dilemmas through the online video communication tool Zoom either when sitting in a "virtual" room with strangers (confederates instructed on how to answer; experimental condition) or when sitting alone (control condition). We found that people displayed a moral conformity effect on half the dilemmas included in our study as well as in the aggregate. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-023-04765-0.

Moral foundations of pro-choice and pro-life women.

Opinions on abortion are more polarized than opinions on most other moral issues. Why are some people pro-choice and some pro-life? Religious and political preferences play a role here, but pro-choice and pro-life people may also differ in other aspects. In the current preregistered study (N = 479), we investigated how pro-choice women differ in their moral foundations from pro-life women. When the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) was applied (i.e., when declared moral principles were measured), pro-life women scored higher than pro-choice women in loyalty, authority, and purity. However, when women were asked about moral judgments indirectly via more real-life problems from the Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFV), pro-choice women scored higher than pro-life women in emotional and physical care and liberty but lower in loyalty. When we additionally controlled for religious practice and political views, we found no differences between groups in declaring moral foundations (MFQ). However, in the case of real-life moral judgments (MFV), we observed higher care, fairness, and liberty among pro-choice and higher authority and purity among pro-life. Our results show intriguing nuances between women pro-choice and pro-life as we found a different pattern of moral foundations in those groups depending on whether we measured their declared abstract moral principles or moral judgment about real-life situations. We also showed how religious practice and political views might play a role in such differences. We conclude that attitudes to abortion "go beyond" abstract moral principles, and the real-life context matters in moral judgments. Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-023-04800-0.

Psychopathic Traits and Utilitarian Moral Judgment Revisited.

To provide deeper insights into the relationships between psychopathic traits and utilitarian moral judgment, we studied N = 702 adults using three psychopathy scales: (a) the Levenson's Self-report Psychopathy Scale; (b) the Psychopathic Personality Inventory; and (c) the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure; and three measures of utilitarian moral judgment: (a) trolley dilemmas; (b) the Consequences, Norms, and Inaction (CNI) model of moral decision-making; and (c) the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale. When using the traditional approach to moral judgment (i.e., trolley dilemmas, instrumental harm, traditional score from the CNI model), we found that higher levels of psychopathic traits were associated with a higher utilitarian tendency. When using the modeling approach, we found that a higher level of psychopathic traits was related to weaker sensitivity to moral norms and less action averse in morally problematic situations. In addition, we found negative associations between impartial beneficence and all psychopathy scores.

The Psychological Science Accelerator's COVID-19 rapid-response dataset.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures for each experimental study, a general questionnaire examining health prevention behaviors and COVID-19 experience, geographical and cultural context characterization, and demographic information for each participant. Each participant started the study with the same general questions and then was randomized to complete either one longer experiment or two shorter experiments. Data were provided by 73,223 participants with varying completion rates. Participants completed the survey from 111 geopolitical regions in 44 unique languages/dialects. The anonymized dataset described here is provided in both raw and processed formats to facilitate re-use and further analyses. The dataset offers secondary analytic opportunities to explore coping, framing, and self-determination across a diverse, global sample obtained at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can be merged with other time-sampled or geographic data.

The Drunk Utilitarian Revisited: Does Alcohol Really Increase Utilitarianism in Moral Judgment?

The "drunk utilitarian" phenomenon suggests that people are more likely to accept harm for the greater good when they are under the influence of alcohol. This phenomenon conflicts with the ideas that (a) acceptance of pro-sacrificial harm requires inhibitory control of automatic emotional responses to the idea of causing harm and (b) alcohol impairs inhibitory control. This preregistered experiment aimed to provide deeper insights into the effects of alcohol on moral judgments by using a formal modeling approach to disentangle three factors in moral dilemma judgments and by distinguishing between instrumental harm and impartial beneficence as two distinct dimensions of utilitarian psychology. Despite the use of a substantially larger sample and higher doses of alcohol compared with the ones in prior studies, alcohol had no significant effect on moral judgments. The results pose a challenge to the idea that alcohol increases utilitarianism in moral judgments.

How relevant for you is to be a moral person? Polish validation of the Self-Importance of Moral Identity Scale.

OBJECTIVE: The Self-Importance of Moral Identity Scale (SMIS) was developed by Aquino and Reeds with the purpose of measuring how people evaluate their private (Internalization subscale) and public (Symbolization subscale) moral identity. SMIS has become commonly and broadly used in many studies. The aim of this paper is to validate the Polish version of SMIS by analyzing its structure and relation to similar measures (such as The Moral Self-Concept Scale developed by Stake and The Moral Self-Image Scale created by Jordan, Leliveld and Tenbrunsel), declared past prosocial behaviors and readiness to donate money. METHODS: The translation-back-translation procedure was used to maintain semantic, idiomatic, and conceptual equivalence of the original scale. Throughout four separate studies the psychometric properties of the Polish version of the scale were assessed: Study 1 (N = 529) was carried out to derive the factor structure using the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and cross-validate it; Study 2 (N = 602) and Study 3 (N = 899) were performed to confirm and replicate the structure with the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA); gender-balanced Study 4 (N = 862) was conducted to assess measurement invariance over gender using multigroup CFA, and to normalize the scale. Validity of the scale was assessed based on each study. RESULTS: A stable two-factor structure using 10 items was replicated in four different samples. The results showed that reliability (α) was between 0.71 and 0.81 for Internalization, and 0.76 and 0.81 for Symbolization. Validity was confirmed in terms of the expected pattern of correlations with morality measures and factorial structure. Metric invariance across gender was confirmed with possible exception of factor loadings on two items regarding communication of values. Polish normalization for men and women was constructed. CONCLUSIONS: Polish validation of SMIS proved to be a structurally consistent and valid measure.

Judgment of the morality of an individual responsible for a fatal workplace accident involving subordinates

Background: The aim of the study was to verify the hypothesis that additional information about the perpetrator responsible for the death of subordinates at the workplace may influence the assessment of morality. The article contains the results of an empirical study conducted among young adult working Silesians (N = 262), who were asked to evaluate the morality of the person responsible for the decision, in line with which miners had started working on 6th October 2014. On that day miners died following an explosion in the "Myslowice-Wesola" methane mine in the Polish Silesia region. Material and Methods: The study explored the stories' method (from the moral psychology domain) as well as a short questionnaire. The respondents received information about the behavior of the perpetrator as well as emotions (socially desirable and undesirable) and (socially desirable and undesirable) views in the form of brief descriptions (stories). They were asked to evaluate the perpetrator's morality. Results: The socially desirable views of the evaluated perpetrator (lack of acceptance for the situation) and the socially desirable emotions (guilt) significantly increased the level of morality according to participants. A single piece of information about the socially desirable emotions didn't significantly increase the perceived level of perpetrator's morality; neither did a single piece of information about socially desirable views. Conclusions: Results indicate the important role of additional information about emotions and views of the perpetrator in the process of assessing morality. It is worthwhile to implement the practical implications of this study in similar crisis situations at the workplace. Med Pr 2018;69(3):261­267.