The consequences of heroization for exploitation.

The hero label has become a pervasive positive stereotype applied to many different groups and occupations, such as nurses, teachers, and members of the military. Although meant to show support, appreciation, and even admiration, we suggest that attaching this label to groups and occupations may actually have problematic consequences. Specifically, we theorize that the hero label may affect beliefs about the internal motivations of these group members that make them more vulnerable to exploitation. These ideas are tested and supported across nine preregistered studies using complementary materials and experimental paradigms. In these studies, we find that: (a) heroization strengthens expectations that teachers, nurses, and military personnel would willingly volunteer for their own exploitation; (b) the hero label and its consequences follow workers even after they transition to a new career (e.g., participants expected a military veteran-relative to a matched nonveteran-to be more willing to volunteer for his own exploitation at his subsequent civilian job, because the veteran was perceived to be more heroic than the matched nonveteran); and (c) occupational heroization-likely because of its impact on beliefs regarding what heroized workers would freely choose to do-reduces opposition to exploitative policies. In short, our studies show that heroization ultimately promotes worse treatment of the very groups that it is meant to venerate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Heroization and ironic funneling effects.

In recent years, much of the American public has venerated military veterans as heroes. Despite overwhelmingly positive public attitudes toward veterans, veterans have experienced higher rates of unemployment and underemployment than their nonveteran peers. The current research leverages theory and research on positive stereotypes to shed light on this seeming inconsistency between the heroization of veterans and their heightened rates of unemployment and underemployment. We conceptualize the hero label as a pervasive positive stereotype, and we employ complementary methods and designs (correlational, quasi-experimental, experimental, and mediational) to investigate the consequences and implications of attaching this label to military veterans. We then extend our theorizing to other heroized groups (e.g., firefighters, paramedics, teachers, and social workers). The results across studies suggest that heroization leads the American public to funnel heroized individuals and groups into a limited set of lower paying jobs, organizations, and careers associated with selflessness. This research not only offers insights into an important real-world problem but also offers a first experimental investigation of the consequences and implications of labeling a group of people as heroes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Prior exposure increases judged truth even during periods of mind wandering.

Much of our day is spent mind-wandering-periods of inattention characterized by a lack of awareness of external stimuli and information. Whether we are paying attention or not, information surrounds us constantly-some true and some false. The proliferation of false information in news and social media highlights the critical need to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying our beliefs about what is true. People often rely on heuristics to judge the truth of information. For example, repeated information is more likely to be judged as true than new information (i.e., the illusory truth effect). However, despite the prevalence of mind wandering in our daily lives, current research on the contributing factors to the illusory truth effect have largely ignored periods of inattention as experimentally informative. Here, we aim to address this gap in our knowledge, investigating whether mind wandering during initial exposure to information has an effect on later belief in the truth of that information. That is, does the illusory truth effect occur even when people report not paying attention to the information at hand. Across three studies we demonstrate that even during periods of mind wandering, the repetition of information increases truth judgments. Further, our results suggest that the severity of mind wandering moderated truth ratings, such that greater levels of mind wandering decreased truth judgements for previously presented information.

Pairing facts with imagined consequences improves pandemic-related risk perception.

The COVID-19 pandemic reached staggering new peaks during a global resurgence more than a year after the crisis began. Although public health guidelines initially helped to slow the spread of disease, widespread pandemic fatigue and prolonged harm to financial stability and mental well-being contributed to this resurgence. In the late stage of the pandemic, it became clear that new interventions were needed to support long-term behavior change. Here, we examined subjective perceived risk about COVID-19 and the relationship between perceived risk and engagement in risky behaviors. In study 1 (n = 303), we found that subjective perceived risk was likely inaccurate but predicted compliance with public health guidelines. In study 2 (n = 735), we developed a multifaceted intervention designed to realign perceived risk with actual risk. Participants completed an episodic simulation task; we expected that imagining a COVID-related scenario would increase the salience of risk information and enhance behavior change. Immediately following the episodic simulation, participants completed a risk estimation task with individualized feedback about local viral prevalence. We found that information prediction error, a measure of surprise, drove beneficial change in perceived risk and willingness to engage in risky activities. Imagining a COVID-related scenario beforehand enhanced the effect of prediction error on learning. Importantly, our intervention produced lasting effects that persisted after a 1- to 3-wk delay. Overall, we describe a fast and feasible online intervention that effectively changed beliefs and intentions about risky behaviors.

Memory and Counterfactual Simulations for Past Wrongdoings Foster Moral Learning and Improvement.

In four studies, we investigated the role of remembering, reflecting on, and mutating personal past moral transgressions to learn from those moral mistakes and to form intentions for moral improvement. Participants reported having ruminated on their past wrongdoings, particularly their more severe transgressions, and they reported having frequently thought about morally better ways in which they could have acted instead (i.e., morally upward counterfactuals; Studies 1-3). The more that participants reported having mentally simulated morally better ways in which they could have acted, the stronger their intentions were to improve in the future (Studies 2 and 3). Implementing an experimental manipulation, we then found that making accessible a morally upward counterfactual after committing a moral transgression strengthened reported intentions for moral improvement-relative to resimulating the remembered event and considering morally worse ways in which they could have acted instead (Study 4). We discuss the implications of these results for competing theoretical views on the relationship between memory and morality and for functional theories of counterfactual thinking.

Making moral principles suit yourself.

Normative ethical theories and religious traditions offer general moral principles for people to follow. These moral principles are typically meant to be fixed and rigid, offering reliable guides for moral judgment and decision-making. In two preregistered studies, we found consistent evidence that agreement with general moral principles shifted depending upon events recently accessed in memory. After recalling their own personal violations of moral principles, participants agreed less strongly with those very principles-relative to participants who recalled events in which other people violated the principles. This shift in agreement was explained, in part, by people's willingness to excuse their own moral transgressions, but not the transgressions of others. These results have important implications for understanding the roles memory and personal identity in moral judgment. People's commitment to moral principles may be maintained when they recall others' past violations, but their commitment may wane when they recall their own violations.

Perceived similarity of imagined possible worlds affects judgments of counterfactual plausibility.

People frequently entertain counterfactual thoughts, or mental simulations about alternative ways the world could have been. But the perceived plausibility of those counterfactual thoughts varies widely. The current article interfaces research in the philosophy and semantics of counterfactual statements with the psychology of mental simulations, and it explores the role of perceived similarity in judgments of counterfactual plausibility. We report results from seven studies (N = 6405) jointly supporting three interconnected claims. First, the perceived plausibility of a counterfactual event is predicted by the perceived similarity between the possible world in which the imagined situation is thought to occur and the actual world. Second, when people attend to differences between imagined possible worlds and the actual world, they think of the imagined possible worlds as less similar to the actual world and tend to judge counterfactuals in such worlds as less plausible. Lastly, when people attend to what is identical between imagined possible worlds and the actual world, they think of the imagined possible worlds as more similar to the actual world and tend to judge counterfactuals in such worlds as more plausible. We discuss these results in light of philosophical, semantic, and psychological theories of counterfactual thinking.

Imagining a Personalized Scenario Selectively Increases Perceived Risk of Viral Transmission for Older Adults.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a serious and prolonged public-health emergency. Older adults have been at substantially greater risk of hospitalization, ICU admission, and death due to COVID-19; as of February 2021, over 81% of COVID-19-related deaths in the U.S. occurred for people over the age of 651,2. Converging evidence from around the world suggests that age is the greatest risk factor for severe COVID-19 illness and for the experience of adverse health outcomes3,4. Therefore, effectively communicating health-related risk information requires tailoring interventions to older adults' needs5. Using a novel informational intervention with a nationally-representative sample of 546 U.S. residents, we found that older adults reported increased perceived risk of COVID-19 transmission after imagining a personalized scenario with social consequences. Although older adults tended to forget numerical information over time, the personalized simulations elicited increases in perceived risk that persisted over a 1-3 week delay. Overall, our results bear broad implications for communicating information about health risks to older adults, and they suggest new strategies to combat annual influenza outbreaks.

Cheaters claim they knew the answers all along.

Cheating has become commonplace in academia and beyond. Yet, almost everyone views themselves favorably, believing that they are honest, trustworthy, and of high integrity. We investigate one possible explanation for this apparent discrepancy between people's actions and their favorable self-concepts: People who cheat on tests believe that they knew the answers all along. We found consistent correlational evidence across three studies that, for those particular cases in which participants likely cheated, they were more likely to report that they knew the answers all along. Experimentally, we then found that participants were more likely to later claim that they knew the answers all along after having the opportunity to cheat to find the correct answers - relative to exposure to the correct answers without the opportunity to cheat. These findings provide new insights into relationships between memory, metacognition, and the self-concept.

Closed-minded cognition: Right-wing authoritarianism is negatively related to belief updating following prediction error.

When confronted with information that challenges our beliefs, we must often learn from error in order to successfully navigate the world. Past studies in reinforcement learning and educational psychology have linked prediction error, a measure of surprise, to successful learning from feedback. However, there are substantial individual differences in belief-updating success, and the psychological factors that influence belief updating remain unclear. Here, we identify a novel factor that may predict belief updating: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), which is characterized by a desire for order, structure, and preservation of social norms. We hypothesized that because people who score high on RWA are motivated to preserve entrenched beliefs, they may often fail to successfully update their beliefs when confronted with new information. Using a novel paradigm, we challenged participants' false beliefs and misconceptions to elicit prediction error. In two studies, we found consistent evidence that high-RWA individuals were less successful at correcting their false beliefs. Relative to low-RWA individuals, high-RWA individuals were less likely to revise beliefs in response to prediction error. We argue that RWA is associated with a relatively closed-minded cognitive style that negatively influences belief updating.

Intellectual humility and perceptions of political opponents.

OBJECTIVE: Intellectual humility (IH) refers to the recognition that personal beliefs might be wrong. We investigate possible interpersonal implications of IH for how people perceive the intellectual capabilities and moral character of their sociopolitical opponents and for their willingness to associate with those opponents. METHOD: In four initial studies (N = 1,926, Mage  = 38, 880 females, 1,035 males), we measured IH, intellectual and moral derogation of opponents, and willingness to befriend opponents. In two additional studies (N = 568, Mage  = 40, 252 females, 314 males), we presented participants with a specific opponent on certain sociopolitical issues and several social media posts from that opponent in which he expressed his views on the issue. We then measured IH, intellectual, and moral derogation of the opponent, participants' willingness to befriend the opponent, participants' willingness to "friend" the opponent on social media, and participants' willingness to "follow" the opponent on social media. RESULTS: Low-IH relative to high-IH participants were more likely to derogate the intellectual capabilities and moral character of their opponents, less willing to befriend their opponents, and less willing to "friend" and "follow" an opponent on social media. CONCLUSIONS: IH may have important interpersonal implications for person perception, and for understanding social extremism and polarization.

Structure-seeking as a psychological antecedent of beliefs about morality.

People differ in their beliefs about the objectivity of moral claims. We investigated a possible psychological antecedent that might be associated with people's beliefs about the objectivity of moral claims. More specifically, we examined the relationship between the endorsement of moral objectivism and one's need to see the world as structured, ordered, and predictable. By believing that the world comprises objective facts about morality, a simple, rigid, and unambiguous structure is imposed on the moral landscape that is invariant to the whims and preferences of any particular person or group. Our results suggest that those more in need of personal structure and order in their lives are indeed more likely to endorse moral objectivism. We discuss the implications of these results for psychological theories of control and structure-seeking, and for cooperation, prosociality, social orderliness, and social goal pursuit. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The phenomenology of remembering our moral transgressions.

People tend to believe that they truly are morally good, and yet they commit moral transgressions with surprising frequency in their everyday lives. To explain this phenomenon, some theorists have suggested that people remember their moral transgressions with fewer details, lower vivacity, and less clarity, relative to their morally good deeds and other kinds of past events. These phenomenological differences are thought to help alleviate psychological discomfort and to help people maintain a morally good self-concept. Given these motivations to alleviate discomfort and to maintain a morally good self-concept, we might expect our more egregious moral transgressions, relative to our more minor transgressions, to be remembered less frequently, with fewer details, with lower vivacity, and with a reduced sense of reliving. More severe moral transgressions might also be less central to constructions of personal identity. In contrast to these expectations, our results suggest that participants' more severe moral transgressions are actually remembered more frequently, more vividly, and with more detail. More severe moral transgressions also tend to be more central to personal identity. We discuss the implications of these results for the motivation to maintain a morally good self-concept and for the functions of autobiographical memory.

The centrality of remembered moral and immoral actions in constructing personal identity.

There is a widespread belief that morally good traits and qualities are particularly central to psychological constructions of personal identity. People have a strong tendency to believe that they truly are morally good. We suggest that autobiographical memories of past events involving moral actions may inform how we come to believe that we are morally good. In two studies, we investigated the role of remembered past events involving moral and immoral actions in constructing perceived personal identity. For morally right actions only, we found that remembered actions judged to be more morally right relative to less morally right were more central to personal identity (Study 1). We then found that remembered morally right actions were more central to personal identity than remembered morally wrong actions (Study 2). We discuss these findings in relation to recent research on morality and personal identity.

Remembering moral and immoral actions in constructing the self.

Having positive moral traits is central to one's sense of self, and people generally are motivated to maintain a positive view of the self in the present. But it remains unclear how people foster a positive, morally good view of the self in the present. We suggest that recollecting and reflecting on moral and immoral actions from the personal past jointly help to construct a morally good view of the current self in complementary ways. More specifically, across four studies we investigated the extent to which people believe they have changed over time after recollecting their own moral or immoral behaviors from the personal past. Our results indicate that recollecting past immoral actions is associated with stronger impressions of dissimilarity and change in the sense of self over time than recollecting past moral actions. These effects held for diverse domains of morality (i.e., honesty/dishonesty, helping/harming, fairness/unfairness, and loyalty/disloyalty), and they remained even after accounting for objective, calendar time. Further supporting a motivational explanation, these effects held when people recollected their own past actions but not when they recollected the actions of other people.

Process-Specific Alliances (PSAs) in Cognitive Neuroscience.

Most cognitive neuroscience theories have focused on the functions of individual brain regions, but cognitive abilities depend also on functional interactions among multiple regions. Many recent studies on these interactions have examined large-scale, resting-state networks, but these networks are difficult to link to theories about specific cognitive processes. Cognitive theories are easier to link to the mini-networks we call process specific alliances (PSAs). A PSA is a small team of brain regions that rapidly assemble to mediate a cognitive process in response to task demands but quickly disassemble when the process is no longer needed. We compare PSAs to resting-state networks and to other connectivity-based, task-related networks, and we characterize the advantages and disadvantages of each type of network.

Functional networks underlying item and source memory: shared and distinct network components and age-related differences.

Although the medial temporal lobes (MTLs) are critical for both item memory (IM) and source memory (SM), the lateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex play a greater role during SM than IM. It is unclear, however, how these differences translate into shared and distinct IM versus SM network components and how these network components vary with age. Within a sample of younger adults (YAs; n = 15, Mage = 19.5 years) and older adults (OAs; n = 40, Mage = 68.6 years), we investigated the functional networks underlying IM and SM. Before functional MRI scanning, participants encoded nouns while making either pleasantness or size judgments. During functional MRI scanning, participants completed IM and SM retrieval tasks. We found that MTL nodes were similarly interconnected among each other during both IM and SM (shared network components) but maintained more intermodule connections during SM (distinct network components). Also, during SM, OAs (compared to YAs) had MTL nodes with more widespread connections. These findings provide a novel viewpoint on neural mechanism differences underlying IM versus SM in YAs and OAs.

No evidence for unethical amnesia for imagined actions: A failed replication and extension.

In a recent study, Kouchaki and Gino (2016) suggest that memory for unethical actions is impaired, regardless of whether such actions are real or imagined. However, as we argue in the current study, their claim that people develop "unethical amnesia" confuses two distinct and dissociable memory deficits: one affecting the phenomenology of remembering and another affecting memory accuracy. To further investigate whether unethical amnesia affects memory accuracy, we conducted three studies exploring unethical amnesia for imagined ethical violations. The first study (N = 228) attempts to directly replicate the only study from Kouchaki and Gino (2016) that includes a measure of memory accuracy. The second study (N = 232) attempts again to replicate these accuracy effects from Kouchaki and Gino (2016), while including several additional variables meant to potentially help in finding the effect. The third study (N = 228) is an attempted conceptual replication using the same paradigm as Kouchaki and Gino (2016), but with a new vignette describing a different moral violation. We did not find an unethical amnesia effect involving memory accuracy in any of our three studies. These results cast doubt upon the claim that memory accuracy is impaired for imagined unethical actions. Suggestions for further ways to study memory for moral and immoral actions are discussed.

Reasons probably won't change your mind: The role of reasons in revising moral decisions.

Although many philosophers argue that making and revising moral decisions ought to be a matter of deliberating over reasons, the extent to which the consideration of reasons informs people's moral decisions and prompts them to change their decisions remains unclear. Here, after making an initial decision in 2-option moral dilemmas, participants examined reasons for only the option initially chosen (affirming reasons), reasons for only the option not initially chosen (opposing reasons), or reasons for both options. Although participants were more likely to change their initial decisions when presented with only opposing reasons compared with only affirming reasons, these effect sizes were consistently small. After evaluating reasons, participants were significantly more likely not to change their initial decisions than to change them, regardless of the set of reasons they considered. The initial decision accounted for most of the variance in predicting the final decision, whereas the reasons evaluated accounted for a relatively small proportion of the variance in predicting the final decision. This resistance to changing moral decisions is at least partly attributable to a biased, motivated evaluation of the available reasons: participants rated the reasons supporting their initial decisions more favorably than the reasons opposing their initial decisions, regardless of the reported strategy used to make the initial decision. Overall, our results suggest that the consideration of reasons rarely induces people to change their initial decisions in moral dilemmas. (PsycINFO Database Record