Perceiving intraorganizational mobility ameliorates the effects of low-level position on detrimental workplace attitudes and behaviors.

How do the perceived chances to get a better position in a company affect how individuals feel and behave towards their employer? Confirming the theory of relative deprivation, recent research showed that social mobility belief has attenuating effects on anger about one's relative social standing. When an individual believes they can change their current social status, negative affect about one's disadvantaged standing is appeased compared to when people believe the present hierarchy is fixed. We tested this model in a workplace context, examining whether perceived intraorganizational mobility ameliorates the effects of a low position at work on negative workplace attitudes (Study 1) and behavior (Study 2). Study 1 (n = 498) found that indeed, perceiving chances of promotion weakened the association of position at work with hostile affect towards the employer. Expanding this model to provide a direct test of the theory of relative deprivation, we designed a moderated mediation model testing whether the effect of workplace position on counterproductive work behaviors was mediated by relative deprivation, and whether this indirect effect was moderated by perceived chances of promotion. As hypothesized, Study 2 (n = 408) found that perceiving chances of promotion attenuated the detrimental effect of workplace position via relative deprivation on counterproductive work behaviors. Effects in both studies occurred independently of company hierarchy, salary, educational attainment, sex, and job sector. Overall, the results suggest that perceiving potential for individual promotion is linked to lower levels of negative workplace attitudes and counterproductive work behaviors.

Among psychedelic-experienced users, only past use of psilocybin reliably predicts nature relatedness.

BACKGROUND: Past research reports a positive relationship between experience with classic serotonergic psychedelics and nature relatedness (NR). However, these studies typically do not distinguish between different psychedelic compounds, which have a unique psychopharmacology and may be used in specific contexts and with different intentions. Likewise, it is not clear whether these findings can be attributed to substance use per se or unrelated variables that differentiate psychedelic users from nonusers. AIMS: The present study was designed to determine the relative degree to which lifetime experience with different psychedelic substances is predictive of self-reported NR among psychedelic-experienced users. METHODS: We conducted a combined reanalysis of five independent datasets (N = 3817). Using standard and regularized regression analyses, we tested the relationship between degree of experience with various psychedelic substances (binary and continuous) and NR, both within a subsample of psychedelic-experienced participants as well as the complete sample including psychedelic-naïve participants. RESULTS/OUTCOMES: Among people experienced with psychedelics, only past use of psilocybin (versus LSD, mescaline, Salvia divinorum, ketamine, and ibogaine) was a reliable predictor of NR and its subdimensions. Weaker, less reliable results were obtained for the pharmacologically similar N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Results replicate when including psychedelic-naïve participants. In addition, among people exclusively experience with psilocybin, use frequency positively predicted NR. CONCLUSIONS/INTERPRETATION: Results suggest that experience with psilocybin is the only reliable (and strongest) predictor of NR. Future research should focus on psilocybin when investigating effects of psychedelic on NR and determine whether pharmacological attributes or differences in user expectations/use settings are responsible for this observation.

The cartesian folk theater: People conceptualize consciousness as a spatio-temporally localized process in the human brain.

The present research (total N = 2,057) tested whether people's folk conception of consciousness aligns with the notion of a "Cartesian Theater" (Dennett, 1991). More precisely, we tested the hypotheses that people believe that consciousness happens in a single, confined area (vs. multiple dispersed areas) in the human brain, and that it (partly) happens after the brain finished analyzing all available information. Further, we investigated how these beliefs are related to participants' neuroscientific knowledge as well as their reliance on intuition, and which rationale they use to explain their responses. Using a computer-administered drawing task, we found that participants located consciousness, but not unrelated neurological processes (Studies 1a and 1b) or unconscious thinking (Study 2) in a single, confined area in the prefrontal cortex, and that they considered most of the brain not involved in consciousness. Participants mostly relied on their intuitions when responding, and they were not affected by prior knowledge about the brain. Additionally, they considered the conscious experience of sensory stimuli to happen in a spatially more confined area than the corresponding computational analysis of these stimuli (Study 3). Furthermore, participants' explicit beliefs about spatial and temporal localization of consciousness (i.e., consciousness happening after the computational analysis of sensory information is completed) are independent, yet positively correlated beliefs (Study 4). Using a more elaborate measure for temporal localization of conscious experience, our final study confirmed that people believe consciousness to partly happen even after information processing is done (Study 5). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Moralizing mental states: The role of trait self-control and control perceptions.

Which attributes of a person contribute to their tendency to moralize others' thoughts? Adopting an individual-difference approach to moral cognition, eight studies (N = 2,033) investigated how people's ability for self-control shapes their moral reactions to others' mental states. Specifically, Studies 1a-2b found positive predictive effects of trait self-control (TSC) on the moralization (e.g., blaming) of another person's fantasies about different immoral behaviors. While ruling out alternative explanations, they furthermore supported the mediating role of ascribing targets control over their mental states. Studies 3a-3b provided correlational evidence of the perceived ability to control one's own mental states as a mechanism in the relationship between TSC and ascriptions of control to others. Studies 4a-4b followed a causal-chain experimental approach: A manipulation of participants' self-perceived ability to control their emotions impacted their control ascriptions to others over their immoral mental states (Study 4a), and targets perceived as high (vs. low) in control over their immoral mental states elicited stronger moralizing reactions. Taken together, the present studies elucidate why people moralize others' purely mental states, even in the absence of overt behavior. More broadly, they advance our knowledge about the role of individual differences, particularly in self-control, in moral cognition.

How psychedelic researchers' self-admitted substance use and their association with psychedelic culture affect people's perceptions of their scientific integrity and the quality of their research.

Across three studies (total N = 952), we tested how self-admitted use of psychedelics and association with psychedelic culture affects the public's evaluation of researchers' scientific integrity and of the quality of their research. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that self-admitted substance use negatively affected people's assessment of a fictitious researcher's integrity (i.e. being unbiased, professional, and honest), but not of the quality of his research, or how much value and significance they ascribed to the findings. Study 3, however, found that an association with psychedelic culture (i.e. presenting work at a scientific conference that includes social activities stereotypically associated with psychedelic culture) negatively affected perceived research quality (e.g. less valid, true, unbiased). We further found that the latter effect was moderated by participants' personal experience with psychedelic substances: only participants without such experience evaluated research quality more negatively when it was presented in a stereotyped context.

The potential synergistic effects between psychedelic administration and nature contact for the improvement of mental health.

Therapeutic psychedelic administration and contact with nature have been associated with the same psychological mechanisms: decreased rumination and negative affect, enhanced psychological connectedness and mindfulness-related capacities, and heightened states of awe and transcendent experiences, all processes linked to improvements in mental health amongst clinical and healthy populations. Nature-based settings can have inherently psychologically soothing properties which may complement all stages of psychedelic therapy (mainly preparation and integration) whilst potentiating increases in nature relatedness, with associated psychological benefits. Maximising enhancement of nature relatedness through therapeutic psychedelic administration may constitute an independent and complementary pathway towards improvements in mental health that can be elicited by psychedelics.

Transformative experience and social connectedness mediate the mood-enhancing effects of psychedelic use in naturalistic settings.

Past research suggests that use of psychedelic substances such as LSD or psilocybin may have positive effects on mood and feelings of social connectedness. These psychological effects are thought to be highly sensitive to context, but robust and direct evidence for them in a naturalistic setting is scarce. In a series of field studies involving over 1,200 participants across six multiday mass gatherings in the United States and the United Kingdom, we investigated the effects of psychedelic substance use on transformative experience, social connectedness, and positive mood. This approach allowed us to test preregistered hypotheses with high ecological validity and statistical precision. Controlling for a host of demographic variables and the use of other psychoactive substances, we found that psychedelic substance use was significantly associated with positive mood-an effect sequentially mediated by self-reported transformative experience and increased social connectedness. These effects were particularly pronounced for those who had taken psychedelic substances within the last 24 h (compared to the last week). Overall, this research provides robust evidence for positive affective and social consequences of psychedelic substance use in naturalistic settings.

Religious concept activation attenuates cognitive dissonance reduction in free-choice and induced compliance paradigms.

Past research suggests that religion imbues people with a sense of certainty - via an increase in personal control, by providing meaning in life, or by activating associated norms. Based on findings suggesting that uncertainty and cognitive dissonance share many underlying features, we investigated whether thinking about religion, either situationally or chronically, buffers against cognitive dissonance. In four methodically diverse studies, we found converging support for this hypothesis. Semantically or symbolically activating Christian religious concepts, as well as being a self-reported believer, attenuated participants' need to reduce post-decisional dissonance via a spreading of alternatives in a free-choice paradigm (Studies 1, 2, & 4) as well as after counterattitudinal advocacy in an induced compliance paradigm (Study 3). The attenuation of post-decisional dissonance was found for a US American online sample (Studies 1 & 4) and for German university students in a laboratory setting, where the dissonance-inducing decision had factual consequences (Study 2).

Belief in Social Mobility Mitigates Hostility Resulting From Disadvantaged Social Standing.

Comparing economically unfavorably with similar others has detrimental consequences for an individual, ultimately resulting in low physical health, delinquency, and hostility. In four studies ( N = 2,032), we examined whether believing in a mobile society-one offering fair chances and opportunity-mitigates hostile emotions resulting from disadvantaged social standing. We find that with increasing mobility belief, negative comparisons have gradually less impact on hostility. Specifically, measured (Studies 1 and 4) and manipulated (Studies 2 and 3) social mobility belief moderated the link between induced high versus low social status, experiencing relative deprivation, and hostile affect. A positive outcome on the surface, social mobility belief may indirectly contribute to the maintenance of social inequality by appeasing anger about perceived injustice.

Ideas are cheap: When and why adults value labor over ideas.

What do people value about a creation: the idea behind it or the labor needed for its implementation? Recent developmental research suggests that children by the age of 6 begin to value ideas over labor. Yet, much less is known about whether adults similarly attribute a higher value to ideas and idea givers than to labor and idea executors. In seven studies (N = 1,463), we explored the relative valuation of ideas versus labor in adults, its mechanisms and boundary conditions. Participants learned about an idea giver and a laborer who collaborated to create a product and indicated who deserves ownership and monetary compensation for the product. Contrary to what has been reported for children, Studies 1a-1c found that participants valued the contribution of the laborer more than the contribution of the idea giver. This labor-valuation effect emerged even when participants themselves were idea givers (Study 1b), and it was replicated across different populations (including legal professionals, Study 1c) and contexts (e.g., art works and businesses, Study 2). Studies 3a and 3b established perceived effort as a central psychological process behind the labor-valuation effect. Finally, Study 4 extended the effect to the realm of praise and blame judgments, showing that laborers receive more praise for positive outcomes, but less blame for negative outcomes, relative to idea givers. The current findings may provide a useful framework for understanding the role of effort in lay people's valuation of ideas and labor, thereby bridging research on creativity, effort, and valuation judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

A free will needs a free mind: Belief in substance dualism and reductive physicalism differentially predict belief in free will and determinism.

In this article, we show that lay people's beliefs about how minds relate to bodies are more complex than past research suggests, and that treating them as a multidimensional construct helps explain inconclusive findings from the literature regarding their relation to beliefs about whether humans possess a free will. In two studies, we found that items previously used to assess a unidimensional belief in how minds relate to bodies indeed capture two distinguishable constructs (belief in substance dualism and reductive physicalism) that differently predict belief in free will and two types of determinism (Studies 1 and 2). Additionally, we found that two fundamental personality traits pertaining to people's preference for experiential versus rational information processing predict those metaphysical beliefs that were theorized to be based on subjective phenomenological experience and rational deliberation, respectively (Study 2). In sum, beliefs about mind-body relations are a multidimensional construct with unique predictive abilities.

The mind of the market: Lay beliefs about the economy as a willful, goal-oriented agent.

We propose an extension to Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) framework for folk-economic beliefs, suggesting that certain evolutionarily acquired cognitive inference systems can cause modern humans to perceive abstract systems such as the economy as willful, goal-oriented agents. Such an anthropomorphized view, we argue, can have meaningful effects on people's moral evaluations of these agents, as well as on their political and economic behavior.

Lifetime experience with (classic) psychedelics predicts pro-environmental behavior through an increase in nature relatedness.

In a large-scale ( N = 1487) general population online study, we investigated the relationship between past experience with classic psychedelic substances (e.g. LSD, psilocybin, mescaline), nature relatedness, and ecological behavior (e.g. saving water, recycling). Using structural equation modeling we found that experience with classic psychedelics uniquely predicted self-reported engagement in pro-environmental behaviors, and that this relationship was statistically explained by people's degree of self-identification with nature. Our model controlled for experiences with other classes of psychoactive substances (cannabis, dissociatives, empathogens, popular legal drugs) as well as common personality traits that usually predict drug consumption and/or nature relatedness (openness to experience, conscientiousness, conservatism). Although correlational in nature, results suggest that lifetime experience with psychedelics in particular may indeed contribute to people's pro-environmental behavior by changing their self-construal in terms of an incorporation of the natural world, regardless of core personality traits or general propensity to consume mind-altering substances. Thereby, the present research adds to the contemporary literature on the beneficial effects of psychedelic substance use on mental wellbeing, hinting at a novel area for future research investigating their potentially positive effects on a societal level. Limitations of the present research and future directions are discussed.

Anxious and egocentric: how specific emotions influence perspective taking.

People frequently feel anxious. Although prior research has extensively studied how feeling anxious shapes intrapsychic aspects of cognition, much less is known about how anxiety affects interpersonal aspects of cognition. Here, we examine the influence of incidental experiences of anxiety on perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective taking. Compared with participants experiencing other negative, high-arousal emotions (i.e., anger or disgust) or neutral feelings, anxious participants displayed greater egocentrism in their mental-state reasoning: They were more likely to describe an object using their own spatial perspective, had more difficulty resisting egocentric interference when identifying an object from others' spatial perspectives, and relied more heavily on privileged knowledge when inferring others' beliefs. Using both experimental-causal-chain and measurement-of-mediation approaches, we found that these effects were explained, in part, by uncertainty appraisal tendencies. Further supporting the role of uncertainty, a positive emotion associated with uncertainty (i.e., surprise) produced increases in egocentrism that were similar to anxiety. Collectively, the results suggest that incidentally experiencing emotions associated with uncertainty increase reliance on one's own egocentric perspective when reasoning about the mental states of others.

Adults are intuitive mind-body dualists.

In the present research, we tested the hypotheses that (a) adults are intuitive mind-body dualists, (b) that this belief can be considered a default, and (c) that it is partially explained by essentialistic reasoning about the nature of the mind. Over 8 studies, using various thought experiment paradigms, participants reliably ascribed to a physically duplicated being a greater retention of physical than of mental properties. This difference was unrelated to whether or not this being was given a proper name (Study 1b) and was only found for entities that were considered to actually possess a mind (Study 1c). Further, we found that an intuitive belief in mind-body dualism may in fact be considered a default: Taxing participants' cognitive resources (Study 2) or priming them with an intuitive (vs. analytical) thinking style (Studies 3a and 3b) both increased dualistic beliefs. In a last set of studies, we found that beliefs in mind-body dualism are indeed related to essentialistic reasoning about the mind. When a living being was reassembled from its original molecules rather than recreated from new molecules, dualistic beliefs were significantly reduced (Studies 4a and 4b). Thus, results of the present research indicate that, despite any acquired scientific knowledge about the neurological origins of mental life, most adults remain "essentialistic mind-body dualists" at heart.

"The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak": the effects of mind-body dualism on health behavior.

Beliefs in mind-body dualism--that is, perceiving one's mind and body as two distinct entities--are evident in virtually all human cultures. Despite their prevalence, surprisingly little is known about the psychological implications of holding such beliefs. In the research reported here, we investigated the relationship between dualistic beliefs and health behaviors. We theorized that holding dualistic beliefs leads people to perceive their body as a mere "shell" and, thus, to neglect it. Supporting this hypothesis, our results showed that participants who were primed with dualism reported less engagement in healthy behaviors and less positive attitudes toward such behaviors than did participants primed with physicalism. Additionally, we investigated the bidirectionality of this link. Activating health-related concepts affected participants' subsequently reported metaphysical beliefs in mind-body dualism. A final set of studies demonstrated that participants primed with dualism make real-life decisions that may ultimately compromise their physical health (e.g., consuming unhealthy food). These findings have potential implications for health interventions.