Morality in minimally deceptive environments.

Psychologists, economists, and philosophers have long argued that in environments where deception is normative, moral behavior is harmed. In this article, we show that individuals making decisions within minimally deceptive environments do not behave more dishonestly than in nondeceptive environments. We demonstrate the latter using an example of experimental deception within established institutions, such as laboratories and institutional review boards. We experimentally manipulated whether participants received information about their deception. Across three well-powered studies, we empirically demonstrate that minimally deceptive environments do not affect downstream dishonest behavior. Only when participants were in a minimally deceptive environment and aware of being observed, their dishonest behavior decreased. Our results show that the relationship between deception and dishonesty might be more complicated than previous interpretations have suggested and expand the understanding of how deception might affect (im)moral behavior. We discuss possible limitations and future directions as well as the applied nature of these findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

How the minimalist model of ownership psychology can aid in explaining moral behaviors under resource constraints.

The model of ownership psychology as a cognitive adaptation proposes that people flexibly navigate cognitive systems of cooperation and competition, thus enabling them to justify unethical behavior. We discuss how this model captures previous accounts of unethical behavior and propose that a disengagement heuristic can help us understand recent findings in the interconnection between scarcity psychology and unethical behavior.

Subjective socioeconomic status and income inequality are associated with self-reported morality across 67 countries.

Individuals can experience a lack of economic resources compared to others, which we refer to as subjective experiences of economic scarcity. While such experiences have been shown to shift cognitive focus, attention, and decision-making, their association with human morality remains debated. We conduct a comprehensive investigation of the relationship between subjective experiences of economic scarcity, as indexed by low subjective socioeconomic status at the individual level, and income inequality at the national level, and various self-reported measures linked to morality. In a pre-registered study, we analyze data from a large, cross-national survey (N = 50,396 across 67 countries) allowing us to address limitations related to cross-cultural generalizability and measurement validity in prior research. Our findings demonstrate that low subjective socioeconomic status at the individual level, and income inequality at the national level, are associated with higher levels of moral identity, higher morality-as-cooperation, a larger moral circle, and increased prosocial intentions. These results appear robust to several advanced control analyses. Finally, exploratory analyses indicate that observed income inequality at the national level is not a statistically significant moderator of the associations between subjective socioeconomic status and the included measures of morality. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for understanding human morality under experiences of resource scarcity.

Social and moral psychology of COVID-19 across 69 countries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public health behaviour, we present a dataset comprising of 51,404 individuals from 69 countries. This dataset was collected for the International Collaboration on Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 project (ICSMP COVID-19). This social science survey invited participants around the world to complete a series of moral and psychological measures and public health attitudes about COVID-19 during an early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (between April and June 2020). The survey included seven broad categories of questions: COVID-19 beliefs and compliance behaviours; identity and social attitudes; ideology; health and well-being; moral beliefs and motivation; personality traits; and demographic variables. We report both raw and cleaned data, along with all survey materials, data visualisations, and psychometric evaluations of key variables.

Experiment aversion does not appear to generalize.

Over the past decade, governments and organizations around the world have established behavioral insights teams advocating for randomized experiments. However, recent findings by M. N. Meyer et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116, 10723-10728 (2019) and P. R. Heck, C. F. Chabris, D. J. Watts, M. N. Meyer, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 18948-18950 (2020) suggest that people often rate randomized experiments as less appropriate than the policies they contain even when approving the implementation of either policy untested and when none of the individual policies is clearly superior. The authors warn that this could cause policymakers to avoid running large-scale field experiments or being transparent about running them and might contribute to an adverse heterogeneity bias in terms of who is participating in experiments. In one direct and six conceptual preregistered replications (total N = 5,200) of the previously published larger-effect studies, using the same main dependent variable but with variations in scenario wordings, recruitment platforms, and countries, and the addition of further measures to assess people's views, we test the generalizability and robustness of these findings. Together, we find that the original results do not appear to generalize. That is, our triangulation reveals insufficient evidence to conclude that people exhibit a common pattern of behavior that would be consistent with relative experiment aversion, thereby supporting recent findings by R. Mislavsky, B. Dietvorst, U. Simonsohn, Mark. Sci. 39, 1092-1104 (2020). Thus, policymakers may not need to be concerned about employing evidence-based practices more so than about universally implementing policies.

Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multinational data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution-individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar results were found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, and collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-neglible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic.

Morality in the time of cognitive famine: The effects of memory load on cooperation and honesty.

Though human social interaction in general seems effortless at times, successful engagement in collaborative or exploitative social interaction requires the availability of cognitive resources. Research on Dual-Process suggests that two systems, the affective (non-reflective) and the cognitive (reflective), are responsible for different types of reasoning. Nevertheless, the evidence on which system leads to what type of behavioral outcome, in terms of prosociality, is at best contradicting and perplexing. In the present paper, we examined the role of the two systems, operationalized as working memory depletion, in prosocial decision-making. We hypothesize that the nature of the available cognitive resources could affect whether humans engage in collaborative or exploitative social interaction. Using Operation Span to manipulate the availability of working memory, we examined how taxing the cognitive system affects cooperation and cheating. In two experiments, we provide evidence that concurrent load, but not cumulative load is detrimental to cooperation, whereas neither concurrent nor cumulative load seems to affect cheating behavior. These findings are in contrast to several previous assumptions. We discuss limitations, possible explanations, and future directions.

Can Digit Ratio and Gender Identity Predict Preferences for Consumption Options With a Distinct Gender Image?

This study investigated whether individuals' preferences for masculine (vs. feminine) consumption options could be predicted by a biological sex cue (the 2D:4D digit ratio; a biomarker linked to prenatal testosterone exposure), and a psychological gender cue (self-perceived gender identity). Chinese participants (N = 216) indicated their preferences for a series of binary options that differed in their perceived gender image (e.g., romantic comedy vs. action thriller; pop music vs. hard rock), with one of the options evaluated as relatively more feminine and the other viewed as comparably more masculine. Participants also self-reported their gender identity and the length of their index and ring fingers, which was used to calculate their 2D:4D digit ratios. A low (male-typical) digit ratio and a masculine gender identity were both associated with more masculine preferences, regardless of participants' biological sex. However, a low digit ratio predicted preferences for masculine consumption options only in female participants with a masculine gender identity, but not in those with a feminine gender identity. These findings add to the literature on whether and when biological sex cues and psychological gender cues can predict preferences for options with a distinct gender image and suggest that the connection between these cues is more complex in women than in men.

National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic.

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). Respondents who reported identifying more strongly with their nation consistently reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies. Results were similar for representative and non-representative national samples. Study 2 (N = 42 countries) conceptually replicated the central finding using aggregate indices of national identity (obtained using the World Values Survey) and a measure of actual behaviour change during the pandemic (obtained from Google mobility reports). Higher levels of national identification prior to the pandemic predicted lower mobility during the early stage of the pandemic (r = -0.40). We discuss the potential implications of links between national identity, leadership, and public health for managing COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Drivers and social implications of Artificial Intelligence adoption in healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact people worldwide-steadily depleting scarce resources in healthcare. Medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises a much-needed relief but only if the technology gets adopted at scale. The present research investigates people's intention to adopt medical AI as well as the drivers of this adoption in a representative study of two European countries (Denmark and France, N = 1068) during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results reveal AI aversion; only 1 of 10 individuals choose medical AI over human physicians in a hypothetical triage-phase of COVID-19 pre-hospital entrance. Key predictors of medical AI adoption are people's trust in medical AI and, to a lesser extent, the trait of open-mindedness. More importantly, our results reveal that mistrust and perceived uniqueness neglect from human physicians, as well as a lack of social belonging significantly increase people's medical AI adoption. These results suggest that for medical AI to be widely adopted, people may need to express less confidence in human physicians and to even feel disconnected from humanity. We discuss the social implications of these findings and propose that successful medical AI adoption policy should focus on trust building measures-without eroding trust in human physicians.