You're heartless, I'm less: self-image and social norms in moral judgment.

Are moral judgments to sacrificial dilemmas shaped by a latent social norm? The present research addresses this issue. We report a set of six studies (plus a supplementary one) which question the existence of a social norm in the longstanding deontism/utilitarian debate by relying on two original tools, namely substitution technique and self-presentation paradigm. Study 1 showed that American participants asked to answer like most Americans would do gave more utilitarian responses than control participants who answered in their own name (Study 1). Study 2 showed that participants instructed to answer in a disapproval fashion were more utilitarian than both participants instructed to answer in an approval fashion and control participants. Importantly, no difference was observed between the approval and control conditions, suggesting that participants naturally align their moral judgments with a latent norm they think is the most socially desirable. Studies 3-5 explored in addition the effect of the activation of a deontism-skewed norm using the substitution instruction on subsequent impression formation. For the latter task, participants were instructed to evaluate a random participant selected from a previous study who gave utilitarian-like responses (Studies 3a-3b), or to evaluate a fictitious politician who endorsed either a deontic or utilitarian orientation (Studies 4-5). Although we consistently replicated the effect of substitution instruction, we failed to show that attempts to activate a norm in a given individual shaped their evaluation of other people who do not align with this norm. Finally, we report a mini meta-analysis targeting the pooled effect and homogeneity among our studies.

Association of sleep with moral severity to accidental harm transgressions: A cross-sectional study.

Based on the assumptions that moral judgement activities require cognitive control, a capacity impaired by low sleep quality or a lack of sleep, several studies have explored the association between sleep and moral judgements. However, even if some studies support the association between sleep and both moral awareness and unethical behaviours, others failed to find a robust association between sleep and moral utilitarianism. In the present well-powered preregistered cross-sectional study, we explored the role of sleep in another class of moral judgement, namely third-party punishment (in which people have to assess the morality of an agent who transgressed a moral rule). Specifically, we targeted the association of sleep with judgements of accidental harm transgressions, which are assumed to be especially cognitively costly. Our main analysis showed no association of overall sleep quality during the past month with moral severity in these transgressions. This result was confirmed for other sleep indexes (sleep quantity in the past month, and sleep quantity and quality in the past night). Lastly, we exhaustively explored the associations of all sleep indexes with all classes of moral judgement (accidental, intentional, attempted transgressions and control scenarios). These additional results revealed associations between sleep and moral severity, but none survived correction for multiple testing. Equivalence tests confirmed that the effect sizes of all these associations were relatively low (|r < 0.25|). We ensured that the lack of robust association between natural sleep and third-party punishment could not be explained by a low quality of the data collected.

Judging accidental harm: Reasoning style modulates the weight of intention and harm severity.

When judging a perpetrator who harmed someone accidentally, humans rely on distinct information pertaining to the perpetrator and victim. The present study investigates how reasoning style modulates the contribution of the victim's harm and the perpetrator's intention to third-party judgement of accidental harm. In two pre-registered online experiments, we simultaneously manipulated harm severity and the perpetrator's intention. Participants completed reasoning measures as well as a moral judgement task consisting of short narratives which depicted the interaction between a perpetrator and a victim. In experiment 1, we manipulated the perpetrator's intent to harm (accidental versus intentional harm) and the victim's harm (mild versus severe harm). In experiment 2, we aimed to manipulate intent in accidental harm scenarios exclusively, using positive or neutral intents and manipulating harm severity (mild versus severe harm). As expected, intent and harm severity moderated participants' moral judgement of acceptability, punishment, and blame. Most importantly, in both experiments, the perpetrator's intent not only interacted with the outcome severity but also polarised moral judgements in participants with a more deliberative reasoning style. While moral judgements of more intuitive reasoners were less sensitive to intent, more deliberative reasoners were more forgiving of accidental harm, especially following mild harm. These findings extend previous studies by showing that reasoning style interacts with intent and harm severity to shape moral judgement of accidents.

Effects of an online self-help intervention on university students' mental health during COVID-19: A non-randomized controlled pilot study.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on university students, particulary on their mental health. However, little is yet known about how to prevent and/or reduce this impact. Prior to COVID-19, some studies have shown that online stress management programs were successful enough to improve students' mental health and stress adjustment strategies, suggesting that these interventions should be further developed during the pandemic. Our study explored the effects on mental health of an online program that targeted stress management and learning. A total of 347 university students were initially recruited to take part in a non-randomized controlled study. After dropout, our final sample consisted of 114 participants, divided into two groups: an intervention group (participants who took part in the program) and the control group (participants who did not participate in the program). The variables measured were: anxiety and depressive symptoms, academic burnout, learned helplessness, and coping strategies. Means comparisons between baseline (T0) and an assessment at 8 weeks (T1) revealed reductions in anxiety symptoms and learned helplessness in the intervention group, but not in the control group. Our pilot study reports promising effects of an online program on students' psychological state.

A 21st century cognitive portrait of the Himba, a remote people of Namibia.

This research sketches the cognitive portrait of the Himba, a remote population from Northern Namibia living in a non-industrial society almost completely devoid of modern artefacts. We compared the Himba sample to a French sample, exploring cognitive reflection, moral judgement, cooperative behaviour, paranormal beliefs, and happiness. We looked for both differences and similarities across cultures, and for the way cognitive functioning is associated with a range of demographic variables. Results showed some important group differences, with the Himba being more intuitive, more religious, happier, and less utilitarian than the French participants. Further, the predictors of these beliefs and behaviours differed between the two groups. The present results provide additional support to the recent line of research targeting cultural variations and similarities, and call for the need to expand psychology research beyond the Western world.

The association between personality traits and third-party moral judgment: A preregistered study.

The present preregistered study investigated the relationship between personality traits and third-party moral judgment, with specific predictions about honesty-humility, emotionality, and conscientiousness. Participants (N = 405) completed the HEXACO personality questionnaire and read short narratives describing the interaction between an agent and a victim. We manipulated the intent of the agent (harmful or neutral) and the outcome for the victim (harmful or neutral) and participants judged the agent's behavior. While higher honesty-humility was associated with harsher judgment overall, higher emotionality was associated with harsher judgment of a malevolent agent, and higher conscientiousness was associated with harsher judgment of an agent who harmed intentionally. The results thus suggest that third-party moral judgment is selectively related to personality traits depending on the agent's intention.

Reasoning supports forgiving accidental harms.

People experience a strong conflict while evaluating actors who unintentionally harmed someone-her innocent intention exonerating her, while the harmful outcome incriminating her. Different people solve this conflict differently, suggesting the presence of dispositional moderators of the way the conflict is processed. In the present research, we explore how reasoning ability and cognitive style relate to how people choose to resolve this conflict and judge accidental harms. We conducted three studies in which we utilized varied reasoning measures and populations. The results showed that individual differences in reasoning ability and cognitive style predicted severity of judgments in fictitious accidental harms scenarios, with better reasoners being less harsh in their judgments. Internal meta-analysis confirmed that this effect was robust only for accidental harms. We discuss the importance of individual differences in reasoning ability in the assessment of accidental harms.

Association of natural sleep with moral utilitarianism: No evidence from 6 preregistered studies.

Recent research has shown that sleep is associated with moral judgment. Most of these studies have focused on moral awareness and unethical behaviors but far fewer have examined the impact of sleep on moral utilitarianism. We report a set of six preregistered cross-sectional studies which explore the association between moral utilitarianism and sleep quantity and quality at both the acute and chronic levels. A total of 582 participants drawn from diverse populations (USA, UK and France) addressed various measures of sleep quantity, sleep quality, and moral utilitarianism. We report a meta-analysis which showed only a weak association between sleep and moral utilitarianism. Despite the heterogeneity in the samples and methods employed, equivalence tests ruled out the possibility that we missed medium to strong effect sizes. We discuss the implication of these findings in the light of the moral judgment literature.

Reliability of moral decision-making: Evidence from the trolley dilemma.

The application of framing effects in the field of moral judgement has offered a golden opportunity to assess the reliability of people's moral judgements and decisions. To date, however, these studies are still scarce and they suffer from multiple methodological issues. Therefore, this study aims to provide further insights into the reliability of moral judgements while fixing these methodological shortcomings. In this study, we employed the classic trolley dilemma moral decision-making paradigm to determine the extent to which moral decisions are susceptible to framing effects. A total of 1,040 participants were included in the study. The data revealed that choices of participants did not significantly differ between the two frames. Equivalence tests confirmed that the associated effect size was very small. Further exploratory analyses revealed an unplanned interaction between the framing effect and the target of the framing manipulation. This result became from marginally statistically significant to insignificant following different sensitivity analyses. The implications and limitations of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

The role of mothers' affiliate stigma and child's symptoms on the distress of mothers with ADHD children.

BACKGROUND: Mothers of ADHD children often display high levels of distress. Understanding the origin of such distress in a view to reducing it is an essential part of the clinical management of ADHD children. Studies have shown that children's symptoms are linked to mothers' stigma and that such stigma can cause mothers' distress. However, no study has explored the links between symptoms, stigma and distress. AIM: We tested (1) whether children's symptoms are sources of affiliate stigma, which in turn contributes to generating mothers' distress and (2) whether such relationship is stronger in mothers of male ADHD children. METHOD: 159 French mothers of an ADHD child were recruited. Four indices were used to assess mothers' distress: anxiety, depression, self-esteem and life satisfaction. Children's ADHD symptoms and mothers' affiliate stigma were also measured and contrasted with distress. RESULTS: Mothers' distress was positively related with both affiliate stigma and children's ADHD symptoms, but this was only true in mothers of male ADHD children. The relationship between children's symptoms and mothers' distress was mediated by affiliate stigma. CONCLUSIONS: Psychosocial interventions in mothers of ADHD children must integrate affiliate stigma and should be adjusted according to child's gender.

tDCS Stimulation of the dlPFC Selectively Moderates the Detrimental Impact of Emotion on Analytical Reasoning.

There is evidence of a detrimental effect of emotion on reasoning. Recent studies suggest that this relationship is mediated by working memory, a function closely associated with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). Relying on transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), the present research explores the possibility that anodal stimulation of the dlPFC has the potential to prevent the effect of emotion on analytical reasoning. Thirty-four participants took part in a lab experiment and were tested twice: one session using offline anodal stimulation (with a 2 mA current stimulation applied to the left dlPFC for 20 min), one session using a control (sham) stimulation. In each session, participants solved syllogistic reasoning problems featuring neutral and emotionally negative contents. Results showed that anodal stimulation diminished the deleterious effect of emotion on syllogistic reasoning, but only for a subclass of problems: problems where the conclusion was logically valid. We discuss our results in the light of the reasoning literature as well as the apparent variability of tDCS effects.

Reasoning strategies modulate gender differences in emotion processing.

The dual strategy model of reasoning has proposed that people's reasoning can be understood asa combination of two different ways of processing information related to problem premises: a counterexample strategy that examines information for explicit potential counterexamples and a statistical strategy that uses associative access to generate a likelihood estimate of putative conclusions. Previous studies have examined this model in the context of basic conditional reasoning tasks. However, the information processing distinction that underlies the dual strategy model can be seen asa basic description of differences in reasoning (similar to that described by many general dual process models of reasoning). In two studies, we examine how these differences in reasoning strategy may relate to processing very different information, specifically we focus on previously observed gender differences in processing negative emotions. Study 1 examined the intensity of emotional reactions to a film clip inducing primarily negative emotions. Study 2 examined the speed at which participants determine the emotional valence of sequences of negative images. In both studies, no gender differences were observed among participants using a counterexample strategy. Among participants using a statistical strategy, females produce significantly stronger emotional reactions than males (in Study 1) and were faster to recognize the valence of negative images than were males (in Study 2). Results show that the processing distinction underlying the dual strategy model of reasoning generalizes to the processing of emotions.

Cognitive Load Mediates the Effect of Emotion on Analytical Thinking.

Although the detrimental effect of emotion on reasoning has been evidenced many times, the cognitive mechanism underlying this effect remains unclear. In the present paper, we explore the cognitive load hypothesis as a potential explanation. In an experiment, participants solved syllogistic reasoning problems with either neutral or emotional contents. Participants were also presented with a secondary task, for which the difficult version requires the mobilization of cognitive resources to be correctly solved. Participants performed overall worse and took longer on emotional problems than on neutral problems. Performance on the secondary task, in the difficult version, was poorer when participants were reasoning about emotional, compared to neutral contents, consistent with the idea that processing emotion requires more cognitive resources. Taken together, the findings afford evidence that the deleterious effect of emotion on reasoning is mediated by cognitive load.

The sadistic trait predicts minimization of intention and causal responsibility in moral judgment.

The present research tests the hypothesis that specific socially aversive traits-subclinical sadism in particular-are associated with an impaired judgment of moral wrongness, guilt, and punishment in various moral scenarios manipulating intent, cause and consequence of harm. In three online studies (total N=1069), participants completed a battery of tests scaled to assess sadism and the Dark Triad constructs, then faced different situations involving moral issues (attempted harm, intentional harm, accidental harm). Study 1 revealed that a sadistic personality trait was associated with minimization of the importance of harmful intent in moral judgment. Study 2 showed that a sadistic personality trait predicted minimization of the importance of causal mechanisms to harmful consequences in moral judgment. Study 3 showed that these effects were mediated by enjoyment of cruelty, a characteristic unique to sadists. In the light of Cushman's (2008) two-process model of moral judgment, this set of studies provides the first evidence that deficits in the integration of the theory of mind and causality can be observed in personality traits. The independent predictive value of sadism highlights that features other than emotional deficits are essential in explaining impaired moral evaluations.

Efficient Kill-Save Ratios Ease Up the Cognitive Demands on Counterintuitive Moral Utilitarianism.

The dual-process model of moral judgment postulates that utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas (e.g., accepting to kill one to save five) are demanding of cognitive resources. Here we show that utilitarian responses can become effortless, even when they involve to kill someone, as long as the kill-save ratio is efficient (e.g., 1 is killed to save 500). In Experiment 1, participants responded to moral dilemmas featuring different kill-save ratios under high or low cognitive load. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants responded at their own pace or under time pressure. Efficient kill-save ratios promoted utilitarian responding and neutered the effect of load or time pressure. We discuss whether this effect is more easily explained by a parallel-activation model or by a default-interventionist model.

Mortality salience and morality: thinking about death makes people less utilitarian.

According to the dual-process model of moral judgment, utilitarian responses to moral conflict draw on limited cognitive resources. Terror Management Theory, in parallel, postulates that mortality salience mobilizes these resources to suppress thoughts of death out of focal attention. Consequently, we predicted that individuals under mortality salience would be less likely to give utilitarian responses to moral conflicts. Two experiments corroborated this hypothesis. Experiment 1 showed that utilitarian responses to non-lethal harm conflicts were less frequent when participants were reminded of their mortality. Experiment 2 showed that the detrimental effect of mortality salience on utilitarian conflict judgments was comparable to that of an extreme concurrent cognitive load. These findings raise the question of whether private judgment and public debate about controversial moral issues might be shaped by mortality salience effects, since these issues (e.g., assisted suicide) often involve matters of life and death.