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Although much of human morality evolved in an environment of small group living, almost 6 billion people use the internet in the modern era. We argue that the technological transformation has created an entirely new ecosystem that is often mismatched with our evolved adaptations for social living. We discuss how evolved responses to moral transgressions, such as compassion for victims of transgressions and punishment of transgressors, are disrupted by two main features of the online context. First, the scale of the internet exposes us to an unnaturally large quantity of extreme moral content, causing compassion fatigue and increasing public shaming. Second, the physical and psychological distance between moral actors online can lead to ineffective collective action and virtue signaling. We discuss practical implications of these mismatches and suggest directions for future research on morality in the internet era.
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Does believing that "effort doesn't pay" in society shape how people view dishonest-illegal transgressions? Across five studies, we show that when people view societal success as non-meritocratic-that is, more dependent on luck and circumstances than on hard work-they are more lenient in their moral judgements of dishonest-illegal transgressions. Perceiving society as non-meritocratic predicted greater justifiability of dishonest-illegal transgressions in the United States (Study 2), and across 42 countries (N = 49,574; Study 1). And inducing participants to view society as non-meritocratic increased justifiability of others' dishonest-illegal transgressions, via greater feelings of sympathy (Studies 3 and 4). Next, we investigated the contours of these effects. Perceiving societal success as non-meritocratic rather than based on hard work causes people to view dishonest-illegal transgressions as more justifiable if they are perpetrated by the poor, but not the rich (Study 4), and if the dishonest-illegal transgressions are related to economic striving, such as money laundering and dealing illegal drugs (Study 5). In sum, when people see a social system as unfair, they show greater tolerance for dishonest-illegal transgressions perpetrated to circumvent the system.
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This meta-analysis explores the long-standing and heavily debated question of whether religiosity is associated with prosocial and antisocial behavior at the individual level. In an analysis of 701 effects across 237 samples, encompassing 811,663 participants, a significant relationship of r = .13 was found between religiosity and prosociality (and antisociality, which was treated as its inverse). Nevertheless, there was substantial heterogeneity of effect sizes, and several potential moderators were explored. The effect was most heavily moderated by the type of measurement used to assess prosocial or antisocial behavior. Religiosity correlated more strongly with self-reported prosociality (r = .15) than with directly measured prosocial behavior (r = .06). Three possible interpretations of this moderation are discussed, namely, that (a) lab-based methods do not accurately or fully capture actual religious prosociality; (b) the self-report effect is explained by religious self-enhancement and overreports actual prosociality; or (c) both religiosity and self-reported prosociality are explained by self-enhancement. The question of whether religiosity more strongly positively predicts prosociality or negatively predicts antisociality is also explored. This moderation is, at most, weak. We test additional potential moderators, including the aspect of religiosity and type of behavior measured, the ingroup or outgroup nature of the recipient, and study characteristics. Finally, we recommend a shift in how researchers investigate questions of religiosity and prosociality in the future. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
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Princípios Morais , Comportamento Social , Humanos , Autorrelato , Religião , AltruísmoRESUMO
Moral psychology was shaped around three categories of agents and patients: humans, other animals, and supernatural beings. Rapid progress in artificial intelligence has introduced a fourth category for our moral psychology to deal with: intelligent machines. Machines can perform as moral agents, making decisions that affect the outcomes of human patients or solving moral dilemmas without human supervision. Machines can be perceived as moral patients, whose outcomes can be affected by human decisions, with important consequences for human-machine cooperation. Machines can be moral proxies that human agents and patients send as their delegates to moral interactions or use as a disguise in these interactions. Here we review the experimental literature on machines as moral agents, moral patients, and moral proxies, with a focus on recent findings and the open questions that they suggest.
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Inteligência Artificial , Princípios Morais , Animais , Humanos , InteligênciaRESUMO
Scientific evidence regularly guides policy decisions1, with behavioural science increasingly part of this process2. In April 2020, an influential paper3 proposed 19 policy recommendations ('claims') detailing how evidence from behavioural science could contribute to efforts to reduce impacts and end the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we assess 747 pandemic-related research articles that empirically investigated those claims. We report the scale of evidence and whether evidence supports them to indicate applicability for policymaking. Two independent teams, involving 72 reviewers, found evidence for 18 of 19 claims, with both teams finding evidence supporting 16 (89%) of those 18 claims. The strongest evidence supported claims that anticipated culture, polarization and misinformation would be associated with policy effectiveness. Claims suggesting trusted leaders and positive social norms increased adherence to behavioural interventions also had strong empirical support, as did appealing to social consensus or bipartisan agreement. Targeted language in messaging yielded mixed effects and there were no effects for highlighting individual benefits or protecting others. No available evidence existed to assess any distinct differences in effects between using the terms 'physical distancing' and 'social distancing'. Analysis of 463 papers containing data showed generally large samples; 418 involved human participants with a mean of 16,848 (median of 1,699). That statistical power underscored improved suitability of behavioural science research for informing policy decisions. Furthermore, by implementing a standardized approach to evidence selection and synthesis, we amplify broader implications for advancing scientific evidence in policy formulation and prioritization.
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Ciências do Comportamento , COVID-19 , Prática Clínica Baseada em Evidências , Política de Saúde , Pandemias , Formulação de Políticas , Humanos , Ciências do Comportamento/métodos , Ciências do Comportamento/tendências , Comunicação , COVID-19/epidemiologia , COVID-19/etnologia , COVID-19/prevenção & controle , Cultura , Prática Clínica Baseada em Evidências/métodos , Liderança , Pandemias/prevenção & controle , Saúde Pública/métodos , Saúde Pública/tendências , Normas SociaisRESUMO
We extend the target authors' moral disciplining theory (MDT) by discussing signaling, proscriptive and prescriptive morality, and the dynamics by which signaling may operate in tandem with proscriptive and prescriptive forms of moral disciplining. We also suggest that MDT can help explain challenges to economic and social progress by revealing fundamental tensions between puritanical intuitions and liberal ideals.
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Liberdade , Princípios Morais , HumanosRESUMO
Over the last decade, robots continue to infiltrate the workforce, permeating occupations that once seemed immune to automation. This process seems to be inevitable because robots have ever-expanding capabilities. However, drawing from theories of cultural evolution and social learning, we propose that robots may have limited influence in domains that require high degrees of "credibility"; here we focus on the automation of religious preachers as one such domain. Using a natural experiment in a recently automated Buddhist temple (Study 1) and a fully randomized experiment in a Taoist temple (Study 2), we consistently show that religious adherents perceive robot preachers-and the institutions which employ them-as less credible than human preachers. This lack of credibility explains reductions in religious commitment after people listen to robot (vs. human) preachers deliver sermons. Study 3 conceptually replicates this finding in an online experiment and suggests that religious elites require perceived minds (agency and patiency) to be credible, which is partly why robot preachers inspire less credibility than humans. Our studies support cultural evolutionary theories of religion and suggest that escalating religious automation may induce religious decline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
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Robótica , Humanos , ReligiãoRESUMO
Most humans believe in a god or gods, a belief that may promote prosociality toward coreligionists. A critical question is whether such enhanced prosociality is primarily parochial and confined to the religious ingroup or whether it extends to members of religious outgroups. To address this question, we conducted field and online experiments with Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish adults in the Middle East, Fiji, and the United States (N = 4,753). Participants were given the opportunity to share money with anonymous strangers from different ethno-religious groups. We manipulated whether they were asked to think about their god before making their choice. Thinking about God increased giving by 11% (4.17% of the total stake), an increase that was extended equally to ingroup and outgroup members. This suggests that belief in a god or gods may facilitate intergroup cooperation, particularly in economic transactions, even in contexts with heightened intergroup tension.
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Comparação Transcultural , Islamismo , Adulto , HumanosRESUMO
Americans venerate rags-to-riches stories. Here we show that people view those who became rich more positively than those born rich and expect the Became Rich to be more sympathetic toward social welfare (Studies 1a and b). However, we also find that these intuitions are misguided. Surveys of wealthy individuals (Studies 2a and b) reveal that, compared with the Born Rich, the Became Rich perceive improving one's socioeconomic conditions as less difficult, which, in turn, predicts less empathy for the poor, less perceived sacrifices by the poor, more internal attributions for poverty, and less support for redistribution. Corroborating this, imagining having experienced upward mobility (vs. beginning and staying at the top) causes people to view such mobility as less difficult, reducing empathy and support for those failing to move up (Study 3). These findings suggest that becoming rich may shift views about the poor in ways that run counter to common intuitions and cultural assumptions.
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People believe that effort is valuable, but what kind of value does it confer? We find that displays of effort signal moral character. Eight studies (N = 5,502) demonstrate the nature of these effects in the domains of paid employment, personal fitness, and charitable fundraising. The exertion of effort is deemed morally admirable (Studies 1-6) and is monetarily rewarded (Studies 2-6), even in situations where effort does not directly generate additional product, quality, or economic value. Convergent patterns of results emerged in South Korean and French cross-cultural replications (Studies 2b and 2c). We contend that the seeming irrationality of valuing effort for its own sake, such as in situations where one's efforts do not directly increase economic output (Studies 3-6), reveals a "deeply rational" social heuristic for evaluating potential cooperation partners. Specifically, effort cues engender broad moral trait ascriptions, and this moralization of effort influences donation behaviors (Study 5) and cooperative partner choice decision-making (Studies 4 and 6). In situating our account of effort moralization into past research and theorizing, we also consider the implications of these effects for social welfare policy and the future of work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
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Transtornos Mentais , Princípios Morais , Humanos , Sinais (Psicologia)RESUMO
Objective. When medical resources are scarce, clinicians must make difficult triage decisions. When these decisions affect public trust and morale, as was the case during the COVID-19 pandemic, experts will benefit from knowing which triage metrics have citizen support. Design. We conducted an online survey in 20 countries, comparing support for 5 common metrics (prognosis, age, quality of life, past and future contribution as a health care worker) to a benchmark consisting of support for 2 no-triage mechanisms (first-come-first-served and random allocation). Results. We surveyed nationally representative samples of 1000 citizens in each of Brazil, France, Japan, and the United States and also self-selected samples from 20 countries (total N = 7599) obtained through a citizen science website (the Moral Machine). We computed the support for each metric by comparing its usability to the usability of the 2 no-triage mechanisms. We further analyzed the polarizing nature of each metric by considering its usability among participants who had a preference for no triage. In all countries, preferences were polarized, with the 2 largest groups preferring either no triage or extensive triage using all metrics. Prognosis was the least controversial metric. There was little support for giving priority to healthcare workers. Conclusions. It will be difficult to define triage guidelines that elicit public trust and approval. Given the importance of prognosis in triage protocols, it is reassuring that it is the least controversial metric. Experts will need to prepare strong arguments for other metrics if they wish to preserve public trust and morale during health crises. Highlights: We collected citizen preferences regarding triage decisions about scarce medical resources from 20 countries.We find that citizen preferences are universally polarized.Citizens either prefer no triage (random allocation or first-come-first served) or extensive triage using all common triage metrics, with "prognosis" being the least controversial.Experts will need to prepare strong arguments to preserve or elicit public trust in triage decisions.
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Although people report grave concern over their data privacy, they take little care to protect it. We suggest that this privacy paradox can be understood in part as the consequence of an evolutionary mismatch: Privacy intuitions evolved in an environment that was radically different from the one found online. This evolved privacy psychology leaves people disconnected from the consequence of online privacy threats.
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In 14 studies, we tested whether political conservatives' stronger free will beliefs were linked to stronger and broader tendencies to moralize and, thus, a greater motivation to assign blame. In Study 1 (meta-analysis of 5 studies, n = 308,499) we show that conservatives have stronger tendencies to moralize than liberals, even for moralization measures containing zero political content (e.g., moral badness ratings of faces and personality traits). In Study 2, we show that conservatives report higher free will belief, and this is statistically mediated by the belief that people should be held morally responsible for their bad behavior (n = 14,707). In Study 3, we show that political conservatism is associated with higher attributions of free will for specific events. Turning to experimental manipulations to test our hypotheses, we show the following: when conservatives and liberals see an action as equally wrong there is no difference in free will attributions (Study 4); when conservatives see an action as less wrong than liberals, they attribute less free will (Study 5); and specific perceptions of wrongness account for the relation between political ideology and free will attributions (Study 6a and 6b). Finally, we show that political conservatives and liberals even differentially attribute free will for the same action depending on who performed it (Studies 7a-d). These results are consistent with our theory that political differences in free will belief are at least partly explicable by conservatives' tendency to moralize, which strengthens motivation to justify blame with stronger belief in free will and personal accountability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
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Princípios Morais , Autonomia Pessoal , Política , Adulto , Feminino , Humanos , Masculino , Pessoa de Meia-Idade , Motivação , Percepção Social , Estados Unidos , Adulto JovemRESUMO
The novel Coronavirus that spread around the world in early 2020 triggered a global pandemic and economic downturn that affected nearly everyone. Yet the crisis had a disproportionate impact on the poor and revealed how easily working-class individuals' financial security can be destabilised by factors beyond personal control. In a pre-registered longitudinal study of Americans (N = 233) spanning April 2019 to May 2020, we tested whether the pandemic altered beliefs about the extent to which poverty is caused by external forces and internal dispositions and support for economic inequality. Over this timespan, participants revealed a shift in their attributions for poverty, reporting that poverty is more strongly impacted by external-situational causes and less by internal-dispositional causes. However, we did not detect an overall mean-level change in opposition to inequality or support for government intervention. Instead, only for those who most strongly recognized the negative impact of COVID-19 did changes in poverty attributions translate to decreased support for inequality, and increased support for government intervention to help the poor.
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The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.
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Infecções por Coronavirus/prevenção & controle , Coronavirus , Conhecimentos, Atitudes e Prática em Saúde , Atividades Humanas , Pandemias/prevenção & controle , Pneumonia Viral/prevenção & controle , Quarentena , Adaptação Psicológica , Betacoronavirus , COVID-19 , Controle de Doenças Transmissíveis , Infecções por Coronavirus/diagnóstico , Infecções por Coronavirus/epidemiologia , Infecções por Coronavirus/transmissão , Tomada de Decisões , Monitoramento Epidemiológico , Saúde Global , Humanos , Liderança , Pneumonia Viral/epidemiologia , Pneumonia Viral/transmissão , Saúde Pública , SARS-CoV-2 , Mídias Sociais , Estresse PsicológicoRESUMO
Amidst rising economic inequality and mounting evidence of its pernicious social effects, what motivates opposition to inequality? Five studies (n = 34,442) show that attributing poverty to situational forces is associated with greater concern about inequality, preference for egalitarian policies and inequality-reducing behaviour. In Study 1, situational attributions for poverty were associated with reduced support for inequality across 34 countries. Study 2 replicated these findings with a nationally representative sample of Americans. Three experiments then tested whether situational attributions for poverty are malleable and motivate egalitarianism. Bolstering situational attributions for poverty through a writing exercise (Study 3) and a computer-based poverty simulation (Studies 4a and b) increased egalitarian action and reduced support for inequality immediately (Studies 3 and 4b), 1 d later and 155 d post-intervention (Study 4b). Causal attributions for poverty offer one accessible means of shaping inequality-reducing attitudes and actions. Situational attributions may be a potent psychological lever for lessening societal inequality.
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Motivação , Pobreza/psicologia , Fatores Socioeconômicos , Adulto , Atitude , Feminino , Humanos , Masculino , Pessoa de Meia-Idade , Política Pública , Adulto JovemRESUMO
Many scholars have argued that religion reduces violent behavior within human social groups. Here, we tested whether intelligence moderates this relationship. We hypothesized that religion would have greater utility for regulating violent behavior among societies with relatively lower average IQs than among societies with relatively more cognitively gifted citizens. Two studies supported this hypothesis. Study 1, a longitudinal analysis from 1945 to 2010 (with up to 176 countries and 1,046 observations), demonstrated that declines in religiosity were associated with increases in homicide rates-but only in countries with relatively low average IQs. Study 2, a multiverse analysis (171 models) using modern data (97-195 countries) and various controls, consistently confirmed that lower rates of religiosity were more strongly associated with higher homicide rates in countries with lower average IQ. These findings raise questions about how secularization might differentially affect groups of different mean cognitive ability.