The "Equal-Opportunity Jerk" Defense: Rudeness Can Obfuscate Gender Bias.

To address sexism, people must first recognize it. In this research, we identified a barrier that makes sexism hard to recognize: rudeness toward men. We found that observers judge a sexist perpetrator as less sexist if he is rude toward men. This occurs because rudeness toward men creates the illusion of gender blindness. We documented this phenomenon in five preregistered studies consisting of online adult participants and adult students from professional schools (total N = 4,663). These attributions are problematic because sexism and rudeness are not mutually exclusive. Men who hold sexist beliefs about women can be-and often are-rude toward other men. These attributions also discourage observers from holding perpetrators accountable for gender bias. Thus, rudeness toward men gives sexist perpetrators plausible deniability. It protects them and prevents the first perceptual step necessary to address sexism.

Social perception in moral judgments of interpersonal transgressions.

Moral judgments about interpersonal transgressions are shaped by attributions about the actor's mental state (intent), responsibility, and harmful consequences. Curiously, most research has investigated these judgments from a third-party perspective, often overlooking perceptions of the individuals directly involved in the transgression. We address this by reviewing research on how victims and transgressors involved in interpersonal transgressions form judgments about the transgressor's intent, responsibility, and how much harm was caused, and the ways in which victims' and transgressors' judgments diverge from one another. Our review indicates that both cognitive biases and motivation-based differences give rise to asymmetries. We argue that future research could investigate not only social perceptions but also meta-perceptions and that a better understanding of the content and causes of divergent interpersonal perceptions in this domain will lead to a more complete understanding of how to resolve conflicts.

Anger Damns the Innocent.

False accusations of wrongdoing are common and can have grave consequences. In six studies, we document a worrisome paradox in perceivers' subjective judgments of a suspect's guilt. Specifically, we found that people (including online panelists, n = 4,983, and working professionals such as fraud investigators and auditors, n = 136) use suspects' angry responses to accusations as cues of guilt. However, we found that such anger is an invalid cue of guilt and is instead a valid cue of innocence; accused individuals (university students, n = 230) and online panelists (n = 401) were angrier when they are falsely relative to accurately accused. Moreover, we found that individuals who remain silent are perceived to be at least as guilty as those who angrily deny an accusation.

People systematically overlook subtractive changes.

Improving objects, ideas or situations-whether a designer seeks to advance technology, a writer seeks to strengthen an argument or a manager seeks to encourage desired behaviour-requires a mental search for possible changes1-3. We investigated whether people are as likely to consider changes that subtract components from an object, idea or situation as they are to consider changes that add new components. People typically consider a limited number of promising ideas in order to manage the cognitive burden of searching through all possible ideas, but this can lead them to accept adequate solutions without considering potentially superior alternatives4-10. Here we show that people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations. Across eight experiments, participants were less likely to identify advantageous subtractive changes when the task did not (versus did) cue them to consider subtraction, when they had only one opportunity (versus several) to recognize the shortcomings of an additive search strategy or when they were under a higher (versus lower) cognitive load. Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle to mitigate overburdened schedules11, institutional red tape12 and damaging effects on the planet13,14.

If humans design the planet: A call for psychological scientists to engage with climate engineering.

As efforts to control climate change gain momentum, so too does the possibility that some global actor(s) will deploy one or more forms of climate engineering. Climate engineering refers to large-scale and deliberate activities intended to change either the carbon-balance or energy-balance of the planet. Climate engineering approaches are untested, involve deep uncertainty, and have far-reaching consequences. Nevertheless, many scientists expect that, relative to conventional mitigation approaches, some climate-engineering approaches will prove less expensive and will require less coordination. They will also have more potential for unilateral deployment. Decisions to pursue climate engineering involve several psychosocial dimensions related to attitude and preference formation, decision making under uncertainty, interpersonal coordination, and health and well-being. Even the prospect of climate engineering could affect norms, goals, and beliefs. The field of psychological science should prepare to help society responsibly consider climate engineering alongside more conventional climate-change responses. This article lays out some initial questions and issues a call to action. It aims to provide common ground for a conversation between climatologists, policymakers, psychological scientists, and members of the public on the important behavioral touchpoints of climate engineering. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The social costs of forgiving following multiple-victim transgressions.

A single transgressor sometimes harms more than just 1 victim. We examine a previously undocumented social cost of forgiving following these multiple-victim transgressions. We find that nonforgiving victims believe that other victims who forgive the common transgressor make their decisions to withhold forgiveness appear ungenerous. Faced with this threat, nonforgiving victims report that other forgiving (vs. nonforgiving) victims have overclaimed their standing to forgive the common transgressor and consequently perceive these forgiving victims as demonstrating a lack of benevolence toward them. Nonforgiving victims also perceive forgiving victims to have relatively little integrity. We test these social costs of forgiving in the field and in the lab across 7 studies plus a meta-analysis of 5 of those studies. We also identify 1 route by which forgiving victims can attenuate the social costs they face: they can affirm other victims' decisions to withhold forgiveness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Impediments to forgiveness: Victim and transgressor attributions of intent and guilt.

We investigate the possibility that victims and transgressors are predictably miscalibrated in their interpretation of a transgression, and that this has important implications for the process of forgiveness. Across 5 studies, we find that victims underestimate how much transgressors desire forgiveness. This is driven by a 2-part mediating mechanism: First, victims are more likely than transgressors to see the transgression as intentional, and second, this causes victims to believe transgressors feel less guilty than transgressors report feeling. Ultimately, this chain of asymmetries stymies the processes of forgiveness because victims tend to withhold forgiveness from those who actually desire it. The predicted effect emerged in the context of scenario studies (Studies 3 and 5), a real transgression that occurred in the lab (Study 4), transgressions from participants' pasts (Study 1), and transgressions from the same day (Study 2). In Study 4, we describe a new procedure in which 1 participant commits a real transgression against another participant, providing an effective means for researchers to study real-time transgressions from the perspective of both parties involved. Furthermore, in Study 5, we found that when victims were encouraged to empathize with the transgressor, the asymmetries were attenuated, suggesting a means of overcoming this impediment to forgiveness. (PsycINFO Database Record

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.

Affective antecedents of revenge.

We propose that revenge responses are often influenced more by affective reactions than by deliberate decision making as McCullough et al. suggest. We review social psychological evidence suggesting that justice judgments and reactions may be determined more by emotions than by cognitions.

The gifts we keep on giving: documenting and destigmatizing the regifting taboo.

Five studies examined whether the practice of regifting--a social taboo--is as offensive to the original givers as potential regifters assume. Participants who imagined regifting a gift (receivers) thought that the original giver would be more offended than participants who imagined that their gifts were regifted (givers) reported feeling. Specifically, receivers viewed regifting as similar in offensiveness to throwing gifts away, yet givers clearly preferred the former. This asymmetry in emotional reactions to regifting was driven by an asymmetry in beliefs about entitlement. Givers believed that the act of gift giving passed title to the gift on to receivers, so that receivers were free to decide what to do with the gift; in contrast, receivers believed that givers retained some say in how their gifts were used. Finally, an intervention designed to destigmatize regifting by introducing a different normative standard (i.e., National Regifting Day) corrected the asymmetry in beliefs about entitlement and increased regifting.

The social and psychological costs of punishing.

We review evidence of the psychological and social costs associated with punishing. We propose that these psychological and social costs should be considered (in addition to material costs) when searching for evidence of costly punishment "in the wild."