Bayesianism and wishful thinking are compatible.

Bayesian principles show up across many domains of human cognition, but wishful thinking-where beliefs are updated in the direction of desired outcomes rather than what the evidence implies-seems to threaten the universality of Bayesian approaches to the mind. In this Article, we show that Bayesian optimality and wishful thinking are, despite first appearances, compatible. The setting of opposing goals can cause two groups of people with identical prior beliefs to reach opposite conclusions about the same evidence through fully Bayesian calculations. We show that this is possible because, when people set goals, they receive privileged information in the form of affective experiences, and this information systematically supports goal-consistent conclusions. We ground this idea in a formal, Bayesian model in which affective prediction errors drive wishful thinking. We obtain empirical support for our model across five studies.

Structural problems require structural solutions.

Chater & Loewenstein criticize behavioral scientists' reliance on individual-level ("i-frame") analysis, observing that this impoverishes policy interventions and stymies scientific progress. We extend their analysis to argue that structural factors bias and perpetuate behavioral science toward the i-frame. Addressing this problem fully will require structural changes to the training, peer review, and granting structures that confront research scientists.

Do Obligations Follow the Mind or Body?

Do you persist as the same person over time because you keep the same mind or because you keep the same body? Philosophers have long investigated this question of personal identity with thought experiments. Cognitive scientists have joined this tradition by assessing lay intuitions about those cases. Much of this work has focused on judgments of identity continuity. But identity also has practical significance: obligations are tagged to one's identity over time. Understanding how someone persists as the same person over time could provide insight into how and why moral and legal obligations persist. In this paper, we investigate judgments of obligations in hypothetical cases where a person's mind and body diverge (e.g., brain transplant cases). We find a striking pattern of results: In assigning obligations in these identity test cases, people are divided among three groups: "body-followers," "mind-followers," and "splitters"-people who say that the obligation is split between the mind and the body. Across studies, responses are predicted by a variety of factors, including mind/body dualism, essentialism, education, and professional training. When we give this task to professional lawyers, accountants, and bankers, we find they are more inclined to rely on bodily continuity in tracking obligations. These findings reveal not only the heterogeneity of intuitions about identity but how these intuitions relate to the legal standing of an individual's obligations.

Which kind of sameness? Disambiguating two senses of identity with a novel linguistic task.

When people report that a person's identity has changed, what do they mean by this? Recent research has often assumed that participants are indicating a change in numerical, rather than qualitative, identity. Investigations into this matter have been hampered by the fact that English has no clear way to demarcate one type of identity from the other. To resolve this matter, we develop and test a novel task in Lithuanian, which has lexical markers for numerical and qualitative identity. We apply this task to intuitions about changes in moral capacities, which has previously shown to lead to high ratings in identity change. We discover that, when people say that a morally altered person is dramatically different, they mean the person is qualitatively transformed, but numerically intact. We conclude that this methodology is a valuable tool not only for illuminating the specific phenomenon of the moral self, but for general use in studying folk ascriptions of identity persistence.

Corporate insecthood.

Whether the corporation should be considered a person is a matter of active academic and public debate. Here, we examine whether, and in what ways, ordinary citizens conceptualize the corporation as a person. We present evidence that corporations are anthropomorphized, but only to a certain degree. Compared with other entities, the average corporation is considered about as similar to a person as an ant. Corporations differ in the extent to which people are willing to grant them personhood however, and this pattern is predicted by how salient the organization's mental and moral traits are. This process of anthropomorphization has important downstream consequences, increasing support for granting legal rights and responsibilities to corporations. Because our studies show that this relationship also obtains for animals, we conclude that perceptions of corporate personhood draw on a more general set of rules for assessing an entity's personhood.

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.

The automatic influence of advocacy on lawyers and novices.

It has long been known that advocating for a cause can alter the advocate's beliefs. Yet a guiding assumption of many advocates is that the biasing effect of advocacy is controllable. Lawyers, for instance, are taught that they can retain unbiased beliefs while advocating for their clients and that they must do so to secure just outcomes. Across ten experiments (six preregistered; N = 3,104) we show that the biasing effect of advocacy is not controllable but automatic. Merely incentivizing people to advocate altered a range of beliefs about character, guilt and punishment. This bias appeared even in beliefs that are highly stable, when people were financially incentivized to form true beliefs and among professional lawyers, who are trained to prevent advocacy from biasing their judgements.

Death and the Self.

It is an old philosophical idea that if the future self is literally different from the current self, one should be less concerned with the death of the future self (Parfit, ). This paper examines the relation between attitudes about death and the self among Hindus, Westerners, and three Buddhist populations (Lay Tibetan, Lay Bhutanese, and monastic Tibetans). Compared with other groups, monastic Tibetans gave particularly strong denials of the continuity of self, across several measures. We predicted that the denial of self would be associated with a lower fear of death and greater generosity toward others. To our surprise, we found the opposite. Monastic Tibetan Buddhists showed significantly greater fear of death than any other group. The monastics were also less generous than any other group about the prospect of giving up a slightly longer life in order to extend the life of another.

The True Self: A Psychological Concept Distinct From the Self.

A long tradition of psychological research has explored the distinction between characteristics that are part of the self and those that lie outside of it. Recently, a surge of research has begun examining a further distinction. Even among characteristics that are internal to the self, people pick out a subset as belonging to the true self. These factors are judged as making people who they really are, deep down. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the true self and identify features that distinguish people's understanding of the true self from their understanding of the self more generally. In particular, we consider recent findings that the true self is perceived as positive and moral and that this tendency is actor-observer invariant and cross-culturally stable. We then explore possible explanations for these findings and discuss their implications for a variety of issues in psychology.

The Role of Moral Beliefs, Memories, and Preferences in Representations of Identity.

People perceive that if their memories and moral beliefs changed, they would change. We investigated why individuals respond this way. In Study 1, participants judged that identity would change more after changes to memories and widely shared moral beliefs (e.g., about murder) versus preferences and controversial moral beliefs (e.g., about abortion). The extent to which participants judged that changes would affect their relationships predicted identity change (Study 2) and mediated the relationship between type of moral belief and perceived identity change (Study 3). We discuss the role that social relationships play in judgments of identity and highlight implications for psychology and philosophy.

Trickle-Down Preferences: Preferential Conformity to High Status Peers in Fashion Choices.

How much do our choices represent stable inner preferences versus social conformity? We examine conformity and consistency in sartorial choices surrounding a common life event of new norm exposure: relocation. A large-scale dataset of individual purchases of women's shoes (16,236 transactions) across five years and 2,007 women reveals a balance of conformity and consistency, moderated by changes in location socioeconomic status. Women conform to new local norms (i.e., average heel size) when moving to relatively higher status locations, but mostly ignore new local norms when moving to relatively lower status locations. In short, at periods of transition, it is the fashion norms of the rich that trickle down to consumers. These analyses provide the first naturalistic large-scale demonstration of the tension between psychological conformity and consistency, with real decisions in a highly visible context.

Response to Comment on "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science".

Gilbert et al. conclude that evidence from the Open Science Collaboration's Reproducibility Project: Psychology indicates high reproducibility, given the study methodology. Their very optimistic assessment is limited by statistical misconceptions and by causal inferences from selectively interpreted, correlational data. Using the Reproducibility Project: Psychology data, both optimistic and pessimistic conclusions about reproducibility are possible, and neither are yet warranted.

The MR2: A multi-racial, mega-resolution database of facial stimuli.

Faces impart exhaustive information about their bearers, and are widely used as stimuli in psychological research. Yet many extant facial stimulus sets have substantially less detail than faces encountered in real life. In this paper, we describe a new database of facial stimuli, the Multi-Racial Mega-Resolution database (MR2). The MR2 includes 74 extremely high resolution images of European, African, and East Asian faces. This database provides a high-quality, diverse, naturalistic, and well-controlled facial image set for use in research. The MR2 is available under a Creative Commons license, and may be accessed online.

Neurodegeneration and Identity.

There is a widespread notion, both within the sciences and among the general public, that mental deterioration can rob individuals of their identity. Yet there have been no systematic investigations of what types of cognitive damage lead people to appear to no longer be themselves. We measured perceived identity change in patients with three kinds of neurodegenerative disease: frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Structural equation models revealed that injury to the moral faculty plays the primary role in identity discontinuity. Other cognitive deficits, including amnesia, have no measurable impact on identity persistence. Accordingly, frontotemporal dementia has the greatest effect on perceived identity, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has the least. We further demonstrated that perceived identity change fully mediates the impact of neurodegenerative disease on relationship deterioration between patient and caregiver. Our results mark a departure from theories that ground personal identity in memory, distinctiveness, dispositional emotion, or global mental function.

The science of style: in fashion, colors should match only moderately.

Fashion is an essential part of human experience and an industry worth over $1.7 trillion. Important choices such as hiring or dating someone are often based on the clothing people wear, and yet we understand almost nothing about the objective features that make an outfit fashionable. In this study, we provide an empirical approach to this key aesthetic domain, examining the link between color coordination and fashionableness. Studies reveal a robust quadratic effect, such that that maximum fashionableness is attained when outfits are neither too coordinated nor too different. In other words, fashionable outfits are those that are moderately matched, not those that are ultra-matched ("matchy-matchy") or zero-matched ("clashing"). This balance of extremes supports a broader hypothesis regarding aesthetic preferences-the Goldilocks principle--that seeks to balance simplicity and complexity.

The essential moral self.

It has often been suggested that the mind is central to personal identity. But do all parts of the mind contribute equally? Across five experiments, we demonstrate that moral traits-more than any other mental faculty-are considered the most essential part of identity, the self, and the soul. Memory, especially emotional and autobiographical memory, is also fairly important. Lower-level cognition and perception have the most tenuous connection to identity, rivaling that of purely physical traits. These findings suggest that folk notions of personal identity are largely informed by the mental faculties affecting social relationships, with a particularly keen focus on moral traits.

Divergent effects of different positive emotions on moral judgment.

Positive emotions are often treated as relatively similar in their cognitive-behavioral effects, and as having unambiguously beneficial consequences. For example, Valdesolo and DeSteno (2006) reported that a humorous video made people more prone to choose a utilitarian solution to a moral dilemma. They attributed this finding to increased positive affect. To determine whether such results actually stem in general from positive affect or from other more specific properties of humor, we conducted an experiment with moral dilemmas presented during an interleaved emotion-induction procedure involving mirth and another positive emotion, elevation. Mirth increased permissiveness for deontological violations, whereas elevation had the opposite effect. Furthermore, affective valence had no apparent independent influence on these judgments. Our results suggest that mirth and elevation have distinct cognitive consequences whose properties reflect their respective social functions, not their shared positive valence.

Banishing the thought.

The first seven chapters of Doing without Concepts offer a perfectly reasonable view of current research on concepts. The last chapter, on which the central thesis of the book rests, provides little actual evidence that using the term "concept" impedes scientific progress. It thus fails to demonstrate that this term should be eliminated from the scientific vernacular.