"It's Not Literally True, But You Get the Gist:" How nuanced understandings of truth encourage people to condone and spread misinformation.

People have a more-nuanced view of misinformation than the binary distinction between "fake news" and "real news" implies. We distinguish between the truth of a statement's verbatim details (i.e., the specific, literal information) and its gist (i.e., the general, overarching meaning), and suggest that people tolerate and intentionally spread misinformation in part because they believe its gist. That is, even when they recognize a claim as literally false, they may judge it as morally acceptable to spread because they believe it is true "in spirit." Prior knowledge, partisanship, and imagination increase belief in the gist. We argue that partisan conflict about the morality of spreading misinformation hinges on disagreements not only about facts but also about gists.

Repeatedly Encountered Descriptions of Wrongdoing Seem More True but Less Unethical: Evidence in a Naturalistic Setting.

When news about moral transgressions goes viral on social media, the same person may repeatedly encounter identical reports about a wrongdoing. In a longitudinal experiment (N = 607 U.S. adults from Mechanical Turk), we found that these repeated encounters can affect moral judgments. As participants went about their lives, we text-messaged them news headlines describing corporate wrongdoings (e.g., a cosmetics company harming animals). After 15 days, they rated these wrongdoings as less unethical than new wrongdoings. Extending prior laboratory research, these findings reveal that repetition can have a lasting effect on moral judgments in naturalistic settings, that affect plays a key role, and that increasing the number of repetitions generally makes moral judgments more lenient. Repetition also made fictitious descriptions of wrongdoing seem truer, connecting this moral-repetition effect with past work on the illusory-truth effect. The more times we hear about a wrongdoing, the more we may believe it-but the less we may care.

Can Self-affirmation Encourage HIV-Prevention? Evidence from Female Sex Workers in Senegal.

We test an intervention aiming to increase condom usage and HIV testing in a stigmatized population at high risk of contracting HIV: female sex workers (FSWs) in Senegal. Some sex work is legal in Senegal, and condoms and HIV tests are freely available to registered FSWs-but FSWs may be reluctant to get tested and use condoms, in part because doing so would entail acknowledging their risk of contracting HIV and potentially expose them to stigma. Drawing on self-affirmation theory, we hypothesized that reflecting on a source of personal pride would help participants acknowledge their risk of HIV, intend to use condoms more frequently, and take an HIV test. Prior research suggests that similar self-affirmation interventions can help people acknowledge their health risks and improve their health behavior, especially when paired with information about effectively managing their health (i.e., self-efficacy information). However, such interventions have primarily been tested in the United States and United Kingdom, and their generalizability outside of these contexts is unclear. Our high-powered experiment randomly assigned participants (N = 592 FSWs; N = 563 in the final analysis) to a self-affirmation condition or a control condition and measured their risk perceptions, whether they took condoms offered to them, and whether (after randomly receiving or not receiving self-efficacy information) they took an HIV test. We found no support for any of our hypotheses. We discuss several explanations for these null results based on the stigma attached to sex work and HIV, cross-cultural generalizability of self-affirmation interventions, and robustness of previous findings.

Polarized imagination: partisanship influences the direction and consequences of counterfactual thinking.

Four studies examine how political partisanship qualifies previously documented regularities in people's counterfactual thinking (n = 1186 Democrats and Republicans). First, whereas prior work finds that people generally prefer to think about how things could have been better instead of worse (i.e. entertain counterfactuals in an upward versus downward direction), studies 1a-2 find that partisans are more likely to generate and endorse counterfactuals in whichever direction best aligns with their political views. Second, previous research finds that the closer someone comes to causing a negative event, the more blame that person receives; study 3 finds that this effect is more pronounced among partisans who oppose (versus support) a leader who 'almost' caused a negative event. Thus, partisan reasoning may influence which alternatives to reality people will find most plausible, will be most likely to imagine spontaneously, and will view as sufficient grounds for blame. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

The moral psychology of misinformation: Why we excuse dishonesty in a post-truth world.

Commentators say we have entered a "post-truth" era. As political lies and "fake news" flourish, citizens appear not only to believe misinformation, but also to condone misinformation they do not believe. The present article reviews recent research on three psychological factors that encourage people to condone misinformation: partisanship, imagination, and repetition. Each factor relates to a hallmark of "post-truth" society: political polarization, leaders who push "alterative facts," and technology that amplifies disinformation. By lowering moral standards, convincing people that a lie's "gist" is true, or dulling affective reactions, these factors not only reduce moral condemnation of misinformation, but can also amplify partisan disagreement. We discuss implications for reducing the spread of misinformation.

The moral repetition effect: Bad deeds seem less unethical when repeatedly encountered.

Reports of moral transgressions can "go viral" through gossip, continuous news coverage, and social media. When they do, the same person is likely to hear about the same transgression multiple times. The present research demonstrates that people will judge the same transgression less severely after repeatedly encountering an identical description of it. I present seven experiments (six of which were preregistered; 73,265 observations from 3,301 online participants and urban residents holding 55 nationalities). Participants rated fake-news sharing, real and hypothetical business transgressions, violations of fundamental "moral foundations," and various everyday wrongdoings as less unethical and less deserving of punishment if they had been shown descriptions of these behaviors previously. Results suggest that affect plays an important role in this moral repetition effect. Repeated exposure to a description of a transgression reduced the negative affect that the transgression elicited, and less-negative affect meant less-harsh moral judgments. Moreover, instructing participants to base their moral judgments on reason, rather than emotion, eliminated the moral repetition effect. An alternative explanation based on perceptions of social norms received only mixed support. The results extend understanding of when and how repetition influences judgment, and they reveal a new way in which moral judgments are biased by reliance on affect. The more people who hear about a transgression, the wider moral outrage will spread; but the more times an individual hears about it, the less outraged that person may be. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

It might become true: How prefactual thinking licenses dishonesty.

In our "post-truth" era, misinformation spreads not only because people believe falsehoods, but also because people sometimes give dishonesty a moral pass. The present research examines how the moral judgments that people form about dishonesty depend not only on what they know to be true, but also on what they imagine might become true. In six studies (N = 3,607), people judged a falsehood as less unethical to tell in the present when we randomly assigned them to entertain prefactual thoughts about how it might become true in the future. This effect emerged with participants from 59 nations judging falsehoods about consumer products, professional skills, and controversial political issues-and the effect was particularly pronounced when participants were inclined to accept that the falsehood might become true. Moreover, thinking prefactually about how a falsehood might become true made people more inclined to share the falsehood on social media. We theorized that, even when people recognize a falsehood as factually incorrect, these prefactual thoughts reduce how unethical the falsehood seems by making the broader meaning that the statement communicates, its gist, seem truer. Mediational evidence was consistent with this theorizing. We argue that prefactual thinking offers people a degree of freedom they can use to excuse lies, and we discuss implications for theories of mental simulation and moral judgment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Consequences of perceiving organization members as a unified entity: Stronger attraction, but greater blame for member transgressions.

Are Uber drivers just a collection of independent workers, or a meaningful part of Uber's workforce? Do the owners of Holiday Inn franchises around the world seem more like a loosely knit group, or more like a cohesive whole? These questions examine perceptions of organization members' entitativity, the extent to which individuals appear to comprise a single, unified entity. We propose that the public's perception that an organization's members are highly entitative can be a double-edged sword for the organization. On the one hand, perceiving an organization's members as highly entitative makes the public more attracted to the organization because people associate entitativity with competence. On the other hand, perceiving members as highly entitative leads the public to blame the organization and its leadership for an individual member's wrongdoing because the public infers that the organization and its leadership tacitly condoned the wrongdoing. Two experiments and a field survey, plus thee supplemental studies, support these propositions. Moving beyond academic debates about whether theories should treat an organization as a unified entity, these results demonstrate the importance of understanding how much the public does perceive an organization as a unified entity. As the changing nature of work enables loosely knit collections of individuals to hold membership in the same organization, entitativity perceptions may become increasingly consequential. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Moral cleansing as hypocrisy: When private acts of charity make you feel better than you deserve.

What counts as hypocrisy? Current theorizing emphasizes that people see hypocrisy when an individual sends them "false signals" about his or her morality (Jordan, Sommers, Bloom, & Rand, 2017); indeed, the canonical hypocrite acts more virtuously in public than in private. An alternative theory posits that people see hypocrisy when an individual enjoys "undeserved moral benefits," such as feeling more virtuous than his or her behavior merits, even when the individual has not sent false signals to others (Effron, O'Connor, Leroy, & Lucas, 2018). This theory predicts that acting less virtuously in public than in private can seem hypocritical by indicating that individuals have used good deeds to feel less guilty about their public sins than they should. Seven experiments (N = 3,468 representing 64 nationalities) supported this prediction. Participants read about a worker in a "sin industry" who secretly performed good deeds. When the individual's public work (e.g., selling tobacco) was inconsistent with, versus unrelated to, the good deeds (e.g., anonymous donations to an antismoking cause vs. an antiobesity cause), participants perceived him as more hypocritical, which in turn predicted less praise for his good deeds. Participants also inferred that the individual was using the inconsistent good deeds to cleanse his conscience for his public work, and such moral cleansing appeared hypocritical when it successfully alleviated his guilt. These results broaden and deepen understanding about how lay people conceptualize hypocrisy. Hypocrisy does not require appearing more virtuous than you are; it suffices to feel more virtuous than you deserve. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Misinformation and Morality: Encountering Fake-News Headlines Makes Them Seem Less Unethical to Publish and Share.

People may repeatedly encounter the same misinformation when it "goes viral." The results of four main experiments (two preregistered) and a pilot experiment (total N = 2,587) suggest that repeatedly encountering misinformation makes it seem less unethical to spread-regardless of whether one believes it. Seeing a fake-news headline one or four times reduced how unethical participants thought it was to publish and share that headline when they saw it again-even when it was clearly labeled as false and participants disbelieved it, and even after we statistically accounted for judgments of how likeable and popular it was. In turn, perceiving the headline as less unethical predicted stronger inclinations to express approval of it online. People were also more likely to actually share repeated headlines than to share new headlines in an experimental setting. We speculate that repeating blatant misinformation may reduce the moral condemnation it receives by making it feel intuitively true, and we discuss other potential mechanisms that might explain this effect.

It Could Have Been True: How Counterfactual Thoughts Reduce Condemnation of Falsehoods and Increase Political Polarization.

This research demonstrates how counterfactual thoughts can lead people to excuse others for telling falsehoods. When a falsehood aligned with participants' political preferences, reflecting on how it could have been true led them to judge it as less unethical to tell, which in turn led them to judge a politician who told it as having a more moral character and deserving less punishment. When a falsehood did not align with political preferences, this effect was significantly smaller and less reliable, in part because people doubted the plausibility of the relevant counterfactual thoughts. These results emerged independently in three studies (two preregistered; total N = 2,783) and in meta- and Bayesian analyses, regardless of whether participants considered the same counterfactuals or generated their own. The results reveal how counterfactual thoughts can amplify partisan differences in judgments of alleged dishonesty. I discuss implications for theories of counterfactual thinking and motivated moral reasoning.

Cheating at the end to avoid regret.

How do people behave when they face a finite series of opportunities to cheat with little or no risk of detection? In 4 experiments and a small meta-analysis, we analyzed over 25,000 cheating opportunities faced by over 2,500 people. The results suggested that the odds of cheating are almost 3 times higher at the end of a series than earlier. Participants could cheat in 1 of 2 ways: They could lie about the outcome of a private coin flip to get a payoff that they would otherwise not receive (Studies 1-3) or they could overbill for their work (Study 4). We manipulated the number of cheating opportunities they expected but held the actual number of opportunities constant. The data showed that the likelihood of cheating and the extent of dishonesty were both greater when people believed that they were facing a last choice. Mediation analyses suggested that anticipatory regret about passing up a chance to enrich oneself drove this cheat-at-the-end effect. We found no support for alternative explanations based on the possibility that multiple cheating opportunities depleted people's self-control, eroded their moral standards, or made them feel that they had earned the right to cheat. The data also suggested that the cheat-at-the-end effect may be limited to relatively short series of cheating opportunities (i.e., n < 20). Our discussion addresses the psychological and behavioral dynamics of repeated ethical choices.

Entitativity and intergroup bias: How belonging to a cohesive group allows people to express their prejudices.

We propose that people treat prejudice as more legitimate when it seems rationalistic-that is, linked to a group's pursuit of collective interests. Groups that appear to be coherent and unified wholes (entitative groups) are most likely to have such interests. We thus predicted that belonging to an entitative group licenses people to express prejudice against outgroups. Support for this idea came from 3 correlational studies and 5 experiments examining racial, national, and religious prejudice. The first 4 studies found that prejudice and discrimination seemed more socially acceptable to third parties when committed by members of highly entitative groups, because people could more easily explain entitative groups' biases as a defense of collective interests. Moreover, ingroup entitativity only lent legitimacy to outgroup prejudice when an interests-based explanation was plausible-namely, when the outgroup could possibly threaten the ingroup's interests. The last 4 studies found that people were more willing to express private prejudices when they perceived themselves as belonging to an entitative group. Participants' perceptions of their own race's entitativity were associated with a greater tendency to give explicit voice to their implicit prejudice against other races. Furthermore, experimentally raising participants' perceptions of ingroup entitativity increased explicit expressions of outgroup prejudice, particularly among people most likely to privately harbor such prejudices (i.e., highly identified group members). Together, these findings demonstrate that entitativity can lend a veneer of legitimacy to prejudice and disinhibit its expression. We discuss implications for intergroup relations and shifting national demographics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Making Mountains of Morality From Molehills of Virtue: Threat Causes People to Overestimate Their Moral Credentials.

Seven studies demonstrate that threats to moral identity can increase how definitively people think they have previously proven their morality. When White participants were made to worry that their future behavior could seem racist, they overestimated how much a prior decision of theirs would convince an observer of their non-prejudiced character (Studies 1a-3). Ironically, such overestimation made participants appear more prejudiced to observers (Study 4). Studies 5 to 6 demonstrated a similar effect of threat in the domain of charitable giving-an effect driven by individuals for whom maintaining a moral identity is particularly important. Threatened participants only enhanced their beliefs that they had proven their morality when there was at least some supporting evidence, but these beliefs were insensitive to whether the evidence was weak or strong (Study 2). Discussion considers the role of motivated reasoning, and implications for ethical decision making and moral licensing.

Inventing racist roads not taken: the licensing effect of immoral counterfactual behaviors.

Six experiments examined how people strategically use thoughts of foregone misdeeds to regulate their moral behavior. We tested 2 hypotheses: 1st, that people will feel licensed to act in morally dubious ways when they can point to immoral alternatives to their prior behavior, and 2nd, that people made to feel insecure about their morality will exaggerate the extent to which such alternatives existed. Supporting the 1st hypothesis, when White participants could point to racist alternatives to their past actions, they felt they had obtained more evidence of their own virtue (Study 1), they expressed less racial sensitivity (Study 2), and they were more likely to express preferences about employment and allocating money that favored Whites at the expense of Blacks (Study 3). Supporting the 2nd hypothesis, White participants whose security in their identity as nonracists had been threatened remembered a prior task as having afforded more racist alternatives to their behavior than did those who were not threatened. This distortion of the past involved overestimating the number of Black individuals they had encountered on the prior task (Study 4) and exaggerating how stereotypically Black specific individuals had looked (Studies 5 and 6). We discuss implications for moral behavior, the motivated rewriting of one's moral history, and how the life unlived can liberate people to lead the life they want.

How the moralization of issues grants social legitimacy to act on one's attitudes.

Actions that do not have as their goal the advancement or protection of one's material interests are often seen as illegitimate. Four studies suggested that moral values can legitimate action in the absence of material interest. The more participants linked sociopolitical issues to moral values, the more comfortable they felt advocating on behalf of those issues and the less confused they were by others' advocacy (Studies 1 and 2). Crime victims were perceived as being more entitled to claim special privileges when the crime had violated their personal moral values (Studies 3 and 4). These effects were strongest when the legitimacy to act could not already be derived from one's material interests, suggesting that moral values and material interest can represent interchangeable justifications for behavior. No support was found for the possibility that attitude strength explained these effects. The power of moralization to disinhibit action is discussed.

Affirmation, acknowledgment of in-group responsibility, group-based guilt, and support for reparative measures.

Three studies, 2 conducted in Israel and 1 conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina, demonstrated that affirming a positive aspect of the self can increase one's willingness to acknowledge in-group responsibility for wrongdoing against others, express feelings of group-based guilt, and consequently provide greater support for reparation policies. By contrast, affirming one's group, although similarly boosting feelings of pride, failed to increase willingness to acknowledge and redress in-group wrongdoing. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated the mediating role of group-based guilt. That is, increased acknowledgment of in-group responsibility for out-group victimization produced increased feelings of guilt, which in turn increased support for reparation policies to the victimized group. Theoretical and applied implications are discussed.

Reducing exposure to trust-related risks to avoid self-blame.

Three studies demonstrated that anticipated self-blame elicits more conservative decisions about risks that require trust than about otherwise economically identical risks that do not. Participants were more reluctant to invest money in a company when it risked failure due to fraud versus low consumer demand (Study 1), and to risk points in an economic game when its outcome ostensibly depended on another participant versus chance (Studies 2 and 3). These effects were mediated by anticipated self-blame (Studies 1 and 2). Additionally, participants who actually experienced a loss felt more self-blame when the loss violated their trust and became even more conservative in subsequent risk decisions relative to participants whose loss did not violate their trust (Study 3). No support emerged for alternative explanations based on either the perceived probability of incurring a loss or an aversion to losses that profit others. The motivational power of trust violations is discussed.

Letting people off the hook: when do good deeds excuse transgressions?

Three studies examined when and why an actor's prior good deeds make observers more willing to excuse--or license--his or her subsequent, morally dubious behavior. In a pilot study, actors' good deeds made participants more forgiving of the actors' subsequent transgressions. In Study 1, participants only licensed blatant transgressions that were in a different domain than actors' good deeds; blatant transgressions in the same domain appeared hypocritical and suppressed licensing (e.g., fighting adolescent drug use excused sexual harassment, but fighting sexual harassment did not). Study 2 replicated these effects and showed that good deeds made observers license ambiguous transgressions (e.g., behavior that might or might not represent sexual harassment) regardless of whether the good deeds and the transgression were in the same or in a different domain--but only same-domain good deeds did so by changing participants' construal of the transgressions. Discussion integrates two models of why licensing occurs.

Embodied temporal perception of emotion.

The role of embodiment in the perception of the duration of emotional stimuli was investigated with a temporal bisection task. Previous research has shown that individuals overestimate the duration of emotional, compared with neutral, faces (S. Droit-Volet, S. Brunot, & P. M. Niedenthal, 2004). The authors tested a role for embodiment in this effect. Participants estimated the duration of angry, happy, and neutral faces by comparing them to 2 durations learned during a training phase. Experimental participants held a pen in their mouths so as to inhibit imitation of the faces, whereas control participants could imitate freely. Results revealed that participants overestimated the duration of emotional faces relative to the neutral faces only when imitation was possible. Implications for the role of embodiment in emotional perception are discussed.