Minimization of Male Suffering: Social Perception of Victims and Perpetrators of Opposite-Sex Sexual Coercion.

Studies show equal impact of sexual harassment (SH) on men and women, whereas lay perceptions are that women suffer more. We identify the phenomenon of minimization of male suffering (MMS), which occurs when people assume that SH has less effect on men's well-being and which results in the perpetrators of SH on men being evaluated less harshly. To verify whether these effects occur, we conducted two studies in which we presented stories describing acts of sexual coercion (SC, study 1) and SC or financial coercion (FC, study 2) and measured the perceived suffering of victims and the perception of the perpetrators. Both studies showed that female victims were perceived to suffer more from SC and FC and that perpetrators of both acts on women were evaluated more negatively. The results support our hypothesis that the suffering of male victims is minimized as they are perceived to suffer less than women.

Confronting the meat paradox in different cultural contexts: Reactions among Chinese and French participants.

As a well-known source of nutrition and pleasure, meat plays an important role in most people's diet. However, awareness of the "meat paradox"-the association of liking to eat meat but not wanting to kill animals-often implies the experience of cognitive dissonance. In two studies, focusing on meat production and meat consumption respectively, we examined whether participants used reduction of willingness to eat meat and reduction of mind attribution to food animals as strategies to reduce cognitive dissonance from the meat paradox in the Chinese and French cultural contexts. Focusing on meat production (slaughtering of an animal to produce meat; Study 1, n = 520), participants reported lower willingness to eat beef in a condition that emphasized the slaughter of a cow compared to a condition that presented a diagram of a cow as meat. In addition, French but not Chinese participants attributed less mind to cows when the relation between meat and its animal origin was made salient. Focusing on meat consumption (the transformation of meat into food; Study 2, n = 518), participants reported lower willingness to eat beef and attributed less mind to cows in a condition that emphasized the animal origin of meat compared to a condition that presented a recipe. These results suggest that the use of different strategies to resolve cognitive dissonance from the meat paradox depends on different contexts of the meat-animal link as well as on cultural context.

Causal Conceptions in Social Explanation and Moral Evaluation: A Historical Tour.

Understanding the causes of human behavior is essential for advancing one's interests and for coordinating social relations. The scientific study of how people arrive at such understandings or explanations has unfolded in four distinguishable epochs in psychology, each characterized by a different metaphor that researchers have used to represent how people think as they attribute causality and blame to other individuals. The first epoch was guided by an "intuitive scientist" metaphor, which emphasized whether observers perceived behavior to be caused by the unique tendencies of the actor or by common reactions to the requirements of the situation. This metaphor was displaced in the second epoch by an "intuitive lawyer" depiction that focused on the need to hold people responsible for their misdeeds. The third epoch was dominated by theories of counterfactual thinking, which conveyed a "person as reconstructor" approach that emphasized the antecedents and consequences of imagining alternatives to events, especially harmful ones. With the current upsurge in moral psychology, the fourth epoch emphasizes the moral-evaluative aspect of causal judgment, reflected in a "person as moralist" metaphor. By tracing the progression from the person-environment distinction in early attribution theories to present concerns with moral judgment, our goal is to clarify how causal constructs have been used, how they relate to one another, and what unique attributional problems each addresses.

"Heroes" and "villains" of world history across cultures.

Emergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest consensus across cultures involved scientific innovators, with Einstein having the most positive evaluation overall. Peaceful humanitarians like Mother Theresa and Gandhi followed. There was much less cross-cultural consistency in the evaluation of negative figures, led by Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein. After more traditional empirical methods (e.g., factor analysis) failed to identify meaningful cross-cultural patterns, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to identify four global representational profiles: Secular and Religious Idealists were overwhelmingly prevalent in Christian countries, and Political Realists were common in Muslim and Asian countries. We discuss possible consequences and interpretations of these different representational profiles.

Making the illusory correlation effect appear and then disappear: the effects of increased learning.

The acquisition of a negative evaluation of a fictitious minority social group in spite of the absence of any objective correlation between group membership and negative behaviours was described by Hamilton and Gifford (1976) as an instance of an illusory correlation. We studied the acquisition and attenuation through time of this correlation learning effect. In two experiments we asked for participants' judgements of two fictitious groups using an online version of a group membership belief paradigm. We tested how judgements of the two groups changed as a function of the amount of training they received. Results suggest that the perception of the illusory correlation effect is initially absent, emerges with intermediate amounts of absolute experience, but diminishes and is eliminated with increased experience. This illusory correlation effect can be considered to reflect incomplete learning rather than a bias due to information loss in judgements or distinctiveness.

An agent harms a victim: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study on specific moral emotions.

The statement: "An agent harms a victim," depicts a situation that triggers moral emotions. Depending on whether the agent and the victim are the self or someone else, it can lead to four different moral emotions: self-anger ("I harm myself"), guilt ("I harm someone"), other-anger ("someone harms me"), and compassion ("someone harms someone"). In order to investigate the neural correlates of these emotions, we examined brain activation patterns elicited by variations in the agent (self vs. other) and the victim (self vs. other) of a harmful action. Twenty-nine healthy participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while imagining being in situations in which they or someone else harmed themselves or someone else. Results indicated that the three emotional conditions associated with the involvement of other, either as agent or victim (guilt, other-anger, and compassion conditions), all activated structures that have been previously associated with the Theory of Mind (ToM, the attribution of mental states to others), namely, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, the precuneus, and the bilateral temporo-parietal junction. Moreover, the two conditions in which both the self and other were concerned by the harmful action (guilt and other-anger conditions) recruited emotional structures (i.e., the bilateral amygdala, anterior cingulate, and basal ganglia). These results suggest that specific moral emotions induce different neural activity depending on the extent to which they involve the self and other.

How the past weighs on the present: social representations of history and their role in identity politics.

Socially shared representations of history have been important in creating, maintaining and changing a people's identity. Their management and negotiation are central to interethnic and international relations. We present a narrative framework to represent how collectively significant events become (selectively) incorporated in social representations that enable positioning of ethnic, national and supranational identities. This perspective creates diachronic (temporal) links between the functional (e.g. realistic conflict theory), social identity, and cognitive perspectives on intergroup relations. The charters embedded in these representations condition nations with similar interests to adopt different political stances in dealing with current events, and can influence the perceived stability and legitimacy of social orders. They are also instrumental in determining social identity strategies for reacting to negative social comparisons, and can influence the relationships between national and ethnic identities.

Putting ifs to work: goal-based relevance in conditional directives.

Conditional directives are used by speakers to instruct hearers which actions are to be taken should certain events occur. The authors demonstrate that conditional directives are distinct from indicative conditionals in which speakers predict what is likely to be observed should certain events occur. The 1st set of experiments shows that goal structure determines what information speakers will select to test whether conditional directives have been followed but that these selections do not reflect their interpretations of the deontic necessity and sufficiency of the conditional relation. The 2nd set of experiments shows that formulations of conditional directives differ in how clearly speakers consider them to express their situation-specific intentions and that hearers accurately perceive what speakers intend them to do as a result of these formulations. The authors' findings illustrate a form of social rationality common in everyday interaction, which broadens normative conceptions of conditionals.

Consequential conditionals: invited and suppressed inferences from valued outcomes.

Consequential conditionals are defined as "if P then Q" statements, where P is an action, and Q a predicted outcome of this action, which is either desirable or undesirable to the agent. Experiment 1 shows that desirable (viz. undesirable) outcomes invite an inference to the truth (viz. falsity) of their antecedent. Experiment 2 shows that the more extreme the outcome is, the stronger the invited inference is. Experiment 3 shows that modus ponens from premises "If A then C, A" can be suppressed with the introduction of a consequential conditional, "If C then Q," where Q is an undesirable outcome. Experiment 4 shows that the more undesirable Q is, the larger the suppression is. The authors discuss how these results can enrich current approaches of conditional inference on the basis of mental models, complementary necessary conditions, and conditional probabilities.