Do moral values change with the seasons?

Moral values guide consequential attitudes and actions. Here, we report evidence of seasonal variation in Americans' endorsement of some-but not all-moral values. Studies 1 and 2 examined a decade of data from the United States (total N = 232,975) and produced consistent evidence of a biannual seasonal cycle in values pertaining to loyalty, authority, and purity ("binding" moral values)-with strongest endorsement in spring and autumn and weakest endorsement in summer and winter-but not in values pertaining to care and fairness ("individualizing" moral values). Study 2 also provided some evidence that the summer decrease, but not the winter decrease, in binding moral value endorsement was stronger in regions with greater seasonal extremity. Analyses on an additional year of US data (study 3; n = 24,199) provided further replication and showed that this biannual seasonal cycle cannot be easily dismissed as a sampling artifact. Study 4 provided a partial explanation for the biannual seasonal cycle in Americans' endorsement of binding moral values by showing that it was predicted by an analogous seasonal cycle in Americans' experience of anxiety. Study 5 tested the generalizability of the primary findings and found similar seasonal cycles in endorsement of binding moral values in Canada and Australia (but not in the United Kingdom). Collectively, results from these five studies provide evidence that moral values change with the seasons, with intriguing implications for additional outcomes that can be affected by those values (e.g., intergroup prejudices, political attitudes, legal judgments).

High economic inequality is linked to greater moralization.

Throughout the 21st century, economic inequality is predicted to increase as we face new challenges, from changes in the technological landscape to the growing climate crisis. It is crucial we understand how these changes in inequality may affect how people think and behave. We propose that economic inequality threatens the social fabric of society, in turn increasing moralization-that is, the greater tendency to employ or emphasize morality in everyday life-as an attempt to restore order and control. Using longitudinal data from X, formerly known as Twitter, our first study demonstrates that high economic inequality is associated with greater use of moral language online (e.g. the use of words such as "disgust", "hurt", and "respect'). Study 2 then examined data from 41 regions around the world, generally showing that higher inequality has a small association with harsher moral judgments of people's everyday actions. Together these findings demonstrate that economic inequality is linked to the tendency to see the world through a moral lens.

Homo temporus: Seasonal Cycles as a Fundamental Source of Variation in Human Psychology.

Many animal species exhibit seasonal changes in their physiology and behavior. Yet despite ample evidence that humans are also responsive to seasons, the impact of seasonal changes on human psychology is underappreciated relative to other sources of variation (e.g., personality, culture, development). This is unfortunate because seasonal variation has potentially profound conceptual, empirical, methodological, and practical implications. Here, we encourage a more systematic and comprehensive collective effort to document and understand the many ways in which seasons influence human psychology. We provide an illustrative summary of empirical evidence showing that seasons impact a wide range of affective, cognitive, and behavioral phenomena. We then articulate a conceptual framework that outlines a set of causal mechanisms through which seasons can influence human psychology-mechanisms that reflect seasonal changes not only in meteorological variables but also in ecological and sociocultural variables. This framework may be useful for integrating many different seasonal effects that have already been empirically documented and for generating new hypotheses about additional seasonal effects that have not yet received empirical attention. The article closes with a section that provides practical suggestions to facilitate greater appreciation for, and systematic study of, seasons as a fundamental source of variation in human psychology.

What Motives Do People Most Want to Know About When Meeting Another Person? An Investigation Into Prioritization of Information About Seven Fundamental Motives.

What information about a person's personality do people want to know? Prior research has focused on behavioral traits, but personality is also characterized in terms of motives. Four studies (N = 1,502) assessed participants' interest in information about seven fundamental social motives (self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate seeking, mate retention, kin care) across 12 experimental conditions that presented details about the person or situation. In the absence of details about specific situations, participants most highly prioritized learning about kin care and mate retention motives. There was some variability across conditions, but the kin care motive was consistently highly prioritized. Additional results from Studies 1 to 4 and Study 5 (N = 174) showed the most highly prioritized motives were perceived to be stable across time and to be especially diagnostic of a person's trustworthiness, warmth, competence, and dependability. Findings are discussed in relation to research on fundamental social motives and pragmatic perspectives on person perception.

Social mindfulness predicts concern for nature and immigrants across 36 nations.

People cooperate every day in ways that range from largescale contributions that mitigate climate change to simple actions such as leaving another individual with choice - known as social mindfulness. It is not yet clear whether and how these complex and more simple forms of cooperation relate. Prior work has found that countries with individuals who made more socially mindful choices were linked to a higher country environmental performance - a proxy for complex cooperation. Here we replicated this initial finding in 41 samples around the world, demonstrating the robustness of the association between social mindfulness and environmental performance, and substantially built on it to show this relationship extended to a wide range of complex cooperative indices, tied closely to many current societal issues. We found that greater social mindfulness expressed by an individual was related to living in countries with more social capital, more community participation and reduced prejudice towards immigrants. Our findings speak to the symbiotic relationship between simple and more complex forms of cooperation in societies.

Perceiving societal pressure to be happy is linked to poor well-being, especially in happy nations.

Happiness is a valuable experience, and societies want their citizens to be happy. Although this societal commitment seems laudable, overly emphasizing positivity (versus negativity) may create an unattainable emotion norm that ironically compromises individual well-being. In this multi-national study (40 countries; 7443 participants), we investigate how societal pressure to be happy and not sad predicts emotional, cognitive and clinical indicators of well-being around the world, and examine how these relations differ as a function of countries' national happiness levels (collected from the World Happiness Report). Although detrimental well-being associations manifest for an average country, the strength of these relations varies across countries. People's felt societal pressure to be happy and not sad is particularly linked to poor well-being in countries with a higher World Happiness Index. Although the cross-sectional nature of our work prohibits causal conclusions, our findings highlight the correlational link between social emotion valuation and individual well-being, and suggest that high national happiness levels may have downsides for some.

Navigating between punishment, avoidance, and instruction: The form and function of responses to moral violations varies across adult and child transgressors.

Immoral actions can elicit a wide array of responses, ranging from pugnacious confrontation to passive distancing. What leads onlookers to react so differently to various violations? Across four studies (N = 2085), we investigated how responses vary depending on whether moral transgressions are committed by adults or by children. Findings reliably demonstrated that adult participants were more likely to avoid adult transgressors, and more likely to instruct child transgressors about why their actions were wrong. These patterns arose from varying cost-benefit structures, derived in part from asymmetries in interpersonal power between adults and children, rendering adults' direct confrontation of children both less costly and more beneficial. Although adults' transgressions were judged to be relatively more wrong, participants had greater anxiety about the negative consequences of confronting adults, and they viewed adults' personalities as less malleable, thus diminishing the effectiveness of confrontation. In contrast, 4- to 9-year-old children did not differ in their willingness to avoid or instruct adult and child transgressors. Across studies, the content of transgressions (e.g., being harmful or impure) mattered little for determining the nature of responses. Overall, diverse responses to moral transgressions were uniquely tailored to the different costs and benefits associated with confronting adult and child transgressors.

Psychological Science in the Wake of COVID-19: Social, Methodological, and Metascientific Considerations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic's wake. Because this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon-an event that hinges on human-to-human contact-we focus on socially relevant subfields of psychology. We highlight specific psychological phenomena that have likely shifted as a result of the pandemic and discuss theoretical, methodological, and practical considerations of conducting research on these phenomena. After this discussion, we evaluate metascientific issues that have been amplified by the pandemic. We aim to demonstrate how theoretically grounded views on the COVID-19 pandemic can help make psychological science stronger-not weaker-in its wake.

Modeling cultural change: Computational models of interpersonal influence dynamics can yield new insights about how cultures change, which cultures change more rapidly than others, and why.

Cultural change can occur as an emergent consequence of social influence dynamics within cultural populations. These influence dynamics are complex, and formal modeling methods-such as agent-based models-are a useful means of predicting implications for cultural change. These models may be especially useful if they not only model the psychological outcomes of interpersonal influence, but also model social network structures within a culture. When combined, these components provide a flexible modeling framework that allows other variables to also be modeled for the purposes of predicting plausible implications for cultural change. The article illustrates this approach by summarizing recent research that used these methods to model cross-cultural differences in the pace of cultural change. The article then identifies additional variables that could potentially be modeled within this conceptual framework, to produce additional insights-and additional new hypotheses-about different circumstances associated with different patterns of cultural change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Anatomy of a Psychological Theory: Integrating Construct-Validation and Computational-Modeling Methods to Advance Theorizing.

Discussions about the replicability of psychological studies have primarily focused on improving research methods and practices, with less attention paid to the role of well-specified theories in facilitating the production of reliable empirical results. The field is currently in need of clearly articulated steps to theory specification and development, particularly regarding frameworks that may generalize across different fields of psychology. Here we focus on two approaches to theory specification and development that are typically associated with distinct research traditions: computational modeling and construct validation. We outline the points of convergence and divergence between them to illuminate the anatomy of a scientific theory in psychology-what a well-specified theory should contain and how it should be interrogated and revised through iterative theory-development processes. We propose how these two approaches can be used in complementary ways to increase the quality of explanations and the precision of predictions offered by psychological theories.

How strongly do moral character inferences predict forecasts of the future? Testing the moderating roles of transgressor age, implicit personality theories, and belief in karma.

Three studies (total N = 1486) investigated how inferences about a person's current moral character guide forecasts about that person's future moral character and future misfortunes, and tested several plausible moderating variables. Inferences about current moral character related (very strongly) to forecasts about future moral character and also (less strongly) to forecasts about future misfortunes. These relationships were moderated by two variables: Relations between inferences and forecasts were somewhat weaker when perceivers made judgments about children, compared to judgments about adults, and relations between character inferences and forecasts about misfortunes were somewhat stronger among perceivers who more strongly believed in karma. In contrast, results provided no evidence of any moderating effects due to perceivers' beliefs about the stability of moral dispositions (i.e., implicit personality theories). These results show how dispositional inferences, moral judgments, and beliefs about karmic justice interact to shape forecasts about the future.

"Parental" responses to human infants (and puppy dogs): Evidence that the perception of eyes is especially influential, but eye contact is not.

The present investigation tests: (i) whether the perception of an human infant's eyes, relative to other facial features, especially strongly elicits "parental" responses (e.g., appraisals of cuteness and vulnerability); (ii) if, so, whether effects of the visual perception of eyes may be partially attributable to eye contact; (iii) whether the perception of non-human animals' (puppy dogs') eyes also especially strongly influence appraisals of their cuteness and vulnerability; and (iv) whether individual differences in caregiving motives moderate effects. Results from 5 experiments (total N = 1458 parents and non-parents) provided empirical evidence to evaluate these hypotheses: Appraisals of human infants were influenced especially strongly by the visual perception of human infants' eyes (compared to other facial features); these effects do not appear to be attributable to eye contact; the visual perception of eyes influenced appraisals of puppy dogs, but not exactly in the same way that it influenced appraisals of human infants; and there was no consistent evidence of moderation by individual differences in caregiving motives. These results make novel contributions to several psychological literatures, including literatures on the motivational psychology of parental care and on person perception.

Evolutionary psychology meets socio-ecological psychology: the motivational psychologies of disease-avoidance and parental care.

Specific features of ancestral ecologies had implications for the evolution of psychological mechanisms that regulate specific aspects of human cognition and behavior within contemporary ecologies. These mechanisms produce predictably different attitudes, judgments and behavioral dispositions under different circumstances. This article summarizes two illustrative programs of research-one that focuses on the evolved psychology of disease-avoidance and its many implications, and the other that focuses on the evolved psychology of parental care-giving and its many implications. These programs of research exemplify the generative utility of evolutionary psychological conceptual methods within the domain of socio-ecological psychology.

Are Collectivistic Cultures More Prone to Rapid Transformation? Computational Models of Cross-Cultural Differences, Social Network Structure, Dynamic Social Influence, and Cultural Change.

Societies differ in susceptibility to social influence and in the social network structure through which individuals influence each other. What implications might these cultural differences have for changes in cultural norms over time? Using parameters informed by empirical evidence, we computationally modeled these cross-cultural differences to predict two forms of cultural change: consolidation of opinion majorities into stronger majorities, and the spread of initially unpopular beliefs. Results obtained from more than 300,000 computer simulations showed that in populations characterized by greater susceptibility to social influence, there was more rapid consolidation of majority opinion and also more successful spread of initially unpopular beliefs. Initially unpopular beliefs also spread more readily in populations characterized by less densely connected social networks. These computational outputs highlight the value of computational modeling methods as a means to specify hypotheses about specific ways in which cross-cultural differences may have long-term consequences for cultural stability and cultural change.

The Content and Correlates of Belief in Karma Across Cultures.

Karmic beliefs, centered on the expectation of ethical causation within and across lifetimes, appear in major world religions as well as spiritual movements around the world, yet they remain an underexplored topic in psychology. In three studies, we assessed the psychological predictors of Karmic beliefs among participants from culturally and religiously diverse backgrounds, including ethnically and religiously diverse students in Canada, and broad national samples of adults from Canada, India, and the United States (total N = 8,996). Belief in Karma is associated with, but not reducible to, theoretically related constructs including belief in a just world, belief in a moralizing God, religious participation, and cultural context. Belief in Karma also uniquely predicts causal attributions for misfortune. Together, these results show the value of measuring explicit belief in Karma in cross-cultural studies of justice, religion, and social cognition.

Are Children Perceived to Be Morally Exceptional? Different Sets of Psychological Variables Predict Adults' Moral Judgments About Adults and Young Children.

Conceptual analyses of moral cognition suggest that different variables may influence moral judgments depending upon the target's age. Five experiments (total N = 1,733) tested the implications for moral judgments about adults and young children. Results show that adults who were perceived to be more cognitively capable were judged to have greater moral rights and their transgressions were judged less harshly, but young children who were perceived to be more cognitively capable were judged to have fewer moral rights and their transgressions were judged more harshly. In addition, the perceived intentionality and disgustingness of transgressions had weaker effects on judgments about child transgressors than about adult transgressors. Perceivers' care-giving motives also had diverging effects on moral judgments, predicting more lenient judgments about children's transgressions and harsher judgments about adults' transgressions. These results have novel implications-both conceptual and practical-for moral judgments regarding adults and children.

Sentiments and the motivational psychology of parental care.

Beyond its implications for contempt, it remains to be determined whether the sentiment concept might be applied usefully to other domains of social affect. This commentary considers its applicability to the domain of parental caregiving. Characteristic features of sentiments are considered in conjunction with empirical research on the motivational psychology of parental care.

Infections and Elections: Did an Ebola Outbreak Influence the 2014 U.S. Federal Elections (and if so, How)?

In the studies reported here, we conducted longitudinal analyses of preelection polling data to test whether an Ebola outbreak predicted voting intentions preceding the 2014 U.S. federal elections. Analyses were conducted on nationwide polls pertaining to 435 House of Representatives elections and on state-specific polls pertaining to 34 Senate elections. Analyses compared voting intentions before and after the initial Ebola outbreak and assessed correlations between Internet search activity for the term "Ebola" and voting intentions. Results revealed that (a) the psychological salience of Ebola was associated with increased intention to vote for Republican candidates and (b) this effect occurred primarily in states characterized by norms favoring Republican Party candidates (the effect did not occur in states with norms favoring Democratic Party candidates). Ancillary analyses addressed several interpretational issues. Overall, these results suggest that disease outbreaks may influence voter behavior in two psychologically distinct ways: increased inclination to vote for politically conservative candidates and increased inclination to conform to popular opinion.

Implications of the behavioural immune system for social behaviour and human health in the modern world.

The 'behavioural immune system' is composed of mechanisms that evolved as a means of facilitating behaviours that minimized infection risk and enhanced fitness. Recent empirical research on human populations suggests that these mechanisms have unique consequences for many aspects of human sociality--including sexual attitudes, gregariousness, xenophobia, conformity to majority opinion and conservative sociopolitical attitudes. Throughout much of human evolutionary history, these consequences may have had beneficial health implications; but health implications in modern human societies remain unclear. This article summarizes pertinent ways in which modern human societies are similar to and different from the ecologies within which the behavioural immune system evolved. By attending to these similarities and differences, we identify a set of plausible implications-both positive and negative-that the behavioural immune system may have on health outcomes in contemporary human contexts. We discuss both individual-level infection risk and population-level epidemiological outcomes. We also discuss a variety of additional implications, including compliance with public health policies, the adoption of novel therapeutic interventions and actual immunological functioning. Research on the behavioural immune system, and its implications in contemporary human societies, can provide unique insights into relationships between fitness, sociality and health.