Test many theories in many ways.

Demonstrating the limitations of the one-at-a-time approach, crowd initiatives reveal the surprisingly powerful role of analytic and design choices in shaping scientific results. At the same time, cross-cultural variability in effects is far below the levels initially expected. This highlights the value of "medium" science, leveraging diverse stimulus sets and extensive robustness checks to achieve integrative tests of competing theories.

Are we all implicit puritans? New evidence that work and sex are intuitively moralized in both traditional and non-traditional cultures.

Contradicting our earlier claims of American moral exceptionalism, recent self-replication evidence from our laboratory indicates that implicit puritanism characterizes the judgments of people across cultures. Implicit cultural evolution may lag behind explicit change, such that differences between traditional and non-traditional cultures are greater at a deliberative than an intuitive level. Not too deep down, perhaps we are all implicit puritans.

Rebiasing: Managing automatic biases over time.

Automatic preferences can influence a decision maker's choice before any relevant or meaningful information is available. We account for this element of human cognition in a computational model of problem solving that involves active trial and error and show that automatic biases are not just a beneficial or detrimental property: they are a tool that, if properly managed over time, can give rise to superior performance. In particular, automatic preferences are beneficial early on and detrimental at later stages. What is more, additional value can be generated by a timely rebiasing, i.e., a calculated reversal of the initial automatic preference. Remarkably, rebiasing can dominate not only debiasing (i.e., eliminating the bias) but also continuously unbiased decision making. This research contributes to the debate on the adaptiveness of automatic and intuitive biases, which has centered primarily on one-shot controlled laboratory experiments, by simulating outcomes across extended time spans. We also illustrate the value of the novel intervention of adopting the opposite automatic preference-something organizations can readily achieve by changing key decision makers-as opposed to attempting to correct for or simply accepting the ubiquity of such biases.

Examining the generalizability of research findings from archival data.

This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching the original reports together with 55% of tests in different spans of years and 40% of tests in novel geographies. Some original findings were associated with multiple new tests. Reproducibility was the best predictor of generalizability-for the findings that proved directly reproducible, 84% emerged in other available time periods and 57% emerged in other geographies. Overall, only limited empirical evidence emerged for context sensitivity. In a forecasting survey, independent scientists were able to anticipate which effects would find support in tests in new samples.

Exposing and overcoming the fixed-effect fallacy through crowd science.

By organizing crowds of scientists to independently tackle the same research questions, we can collectively overcome the generalizability crisis. Strategies to draw inferences from a heterogeneous set of research approaches include aggregation, for instance, meta-analyzing the effect sizes obtained by different investigators, and parsing, attempting to identify theoretically meaningful moderators that explain the variability in results.

Quantifying the prevalence and adaptiveness of behavioral rationalizations.

Critical aspects of the "rationality of rationalizations" thesis are open empirical questions. These include the frequency with which past behavior determines attitudes (as opposed to attitudes causing future behaviors), the extent to which post hoc justifications take on a life of their own and shape future actions, and whether rationalizers experience benefits in well-being, social influence, performance, or other desirable outcomes.

Scientific Utopia III: Crowdsourcing Science.

Most scientific research is conducted by small teams of investigators who together formulate hypotheses, collect data, conduct analyses, and report novel findings. These teams operate independently as vertically integrated silos. Here we argue that scientific research that is horizontally distributed can provide substantial complementary value, aiming to maximize available resources, promote inclusiveness and transparency, and increase rigor and reliability. This alternative approach enables researchers to tackle ambitious projects that would not be possible under the standard model. Crowdsourced scientific initiatives vary in the degree of communication between project members from largely independent work curated by a coordination team to crowd collaboration on shared activities. The potential benefits and challenges of large-scale collaboration span the entire research process: ideation, study design, data collection, data analysis, reporting, and peer review. Complementing traditional small science with crowdsourced approaches can accelerate the progress of science and improve the quality of scientific research.

Why so serious? A laboratory and field investigation of the link between morality and humor.

Previous research has identified many positive outcomes resulting from a deeply held moral identity, while overlooking potential negative social consequences for the moral individual. Drawing from Benign Violation Theory, we explore the tension between moral identity and humor, and the downstream workplace consequence of such tension. Consistent with our hypotheses, compared with participants in the control condition, participants whose moral identities were situationally activated (Study 1a) or chronically accessible (Study 1b) were less likely to appreciate humor and generate jokes others found funny (Study 2), especially humor that involved benign moral violations. We also found that participants with a strong moral identity do not generally compensate for their lack of humor by telling more jokes that do not involve moral violations (Study 3). Additional field studies demonstrated that employees (Study 4) and leaders (Study 5) with strong moral identities and who display ethical leadership are perceived as less humorous by their coworkers and subordinates, and to the extent that this is the case are less liked in the workplace. Study 5 further demonstrated two competing mediating pathways-leaders with strong moral identities are perceived as less humorous but also as more trustworthy, with differentiated effects on interpersonal liking. Although having moral employees and leaders can come with many benefits, our research shows that there can be offsetting costs associated with an internalized moral identity: reduced humor and subsequent likability in the workplace. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Datasets from a research project examining the role of politics in social psychological research.

We present four datasets from a project examining the role of politics in social psychological research. These include thousands of independent raters who coded scientific abstracts for political relevance and for whether conservatives or liberals were treated as targets of explanation and characterized in a negative light. Further included are predictions about the empirical results by scientists participating in a forecasting survey, and coded publication outcomes for unpublished research projects varying in political overtones. Future researchers can leverage this corpus to test further hypotheses regarding political values and scientific research, perceptions of political bias, publication histories, and forecasting accuracy.

Initial prejudices create cross-generational intergroup mistrust.

The present investigation modeled the emergence and persistence of intergroup bias and discrimination in artificial societies. Initial unfair prejudices held by members of a dominant group elicit confirmatory behavior (diminished cooperation) from members of a subordinate group via a self-fulfilling prophecy. Further, when individual learning is tempered by conformity to peers, inaccurate beliefs about the stigmatized subordinate group persist long-term. Even completely replacing dominant group members with enlightened individuals through generational change is inadequate to break the cycle of intergroup distrust and non-collaboration. The longer the enlightenment of a society is delayed, the more intergroup trust is irretrievably lost.

Making prepublication independent replication mainstream.

The widespread replication of research findings in independent laboratories prior to publication is suggested as a complement to traditional replication approaches. The pre-publication independent replication approach further addresses three key concerns from replication skeptics by systematically taking context into account, reducing reputational costs for original authors and replicators, and increasing the theoretical value of failed replications.

A person-centered approach to moral judgment.

Both normative theories of ethics in philosophy and contemporary models of moral judgment in psychology have focused almost exclusively on the permissibility of acts, in particular whether acts should be judged on the basis of their material outcomes (consequentialist ethics) or on the basis of rules, duties, and obligations (deontological ethics). However, a longstanding third perspective on morality, virtue ethics, may offer a richer descriptive account of a wide range of lay moral judgments. Building on this ethical tradition, we offer a person-centered account of moral judgment, which focuses on individuals as the unit of analysis for moral evaluations rather than on acts. Because social perceivers are fundamentally motivated to acquire information about the moral character of others, features of an act that seem most informative of character often hold more weight than either the consequences of the act or whether a moral rule has been broken. This approach, we argue, can account for numerous empirical findings that are either not predicted by current theories of moral psychology or are simply categorized as biases or irrational quirks in the way individuals make moral judgments.

System-justifying motives can lead to both the acceptance and the rejection of innate explanations for group differences.

Recent experimental evidence indicates that intuitions about inherence and system justification are distinct psychological processes, and that the inherence heuristic supplies important explanatory frameworks that are accepted or rejected based on their consistency with one's motivation to justify the system.

Selfish play increases during high-stakes NBA games and is rewarded with more lucrative contracts.

High-stakes team competitions can present a social dilemma in which participants must choose between concentrating on their personal performance and assisting teammates as a means of achieving group objectives. We find that despite the seemingly strong group incentive to win the NBA title, cooperative play actually diminishes during playoff games, negatively affecting team performance. Thus team cooperation decreases in the very high stakes contexts in which it is most important to perform well together. Highlighting the mixed incentives that underlie selfish play, personal scoring is rewarded with more lucrative future contracts, whereas assisting teammates to score is associated with reduced pay due to lost opportunities for personal scoring. A combination of misaligned incentives and psychological biases in performance evaluation bring out the "I" in "team" when cooperation is most critical.

Conformity under uncertainty: reliance on gender stereotypes in online hiring decisions.

We apply Bentley et al.'s theoretical framework to better understand gender discrimination in online labor markets. Although such settings are designed to encourage employer behavior in the northwest corner of Homo economicus, actual online hiring decisions tend to drift southeast into a "confirmation bias plus weak feedback loops" pattern of discrimination based on inaccurate social stereotypes.

The problem of the null in the verification of unconscious cognition.

Newell & Shanks (N&S) argue that when awareness measures are more reliable and valid, greater evidence of awareness of supposedly unconscious influences is revealed. A related issue is that unconsciousness is typically the null hypothesis that evidence of awareness will not emerge. As it is difficult to conclude the null, it is also difficult to conclude a lack of conscious awareness.

The effects of system-justifying motives on endorsement of essentialist explanations for gender differences.

People have a fundamental motive to view their social system as just, fair, and good and will engage in a number of strategies to rationalize the status quo (Jost & Banaji, 1994). We propose that one way in which individuals may "justify the system" is through endorsement of essentialist explanations, which attribute group differences to deep, essential causes. We suggest that system-justifying motives lead to greater endorsement of essentialist explanations because those explanations portray group differences as immutable. Study 1 employed an established system threat manipulation. We found that activating system-justifying motives increases both male and female participants' endorsement of essentialist explanations for gender differences and that this effect is mediated by beliefs in immutability. In Study 2, we used a goal contagion manipulation and found that both male and female participants primed with a system-justifying goal are significantly more likely to agree with essentialist explanations for gender differences. Study 3 demonstrated that providing an opportunity to explicitly reject a system threat (an alternative means of satisfying the goal to defend the system) attenuates system threat effects on endorsement of essentialist explanations, further suggesting that this process is motivated. Finally, Studies 4a and 4b dissociated the type of cause (biological vs. social) from whether group differences are portrayed as mutable versus immutable and found that system threat increases endorsement of immutable explanations, independent of the type of cause.

It pays to be Herr Kaiser: Germans with noble-sounding surnames more often work as managers than as employees.

In the field study reported here (N = 222,924), we found that Germans with noble-sounding surnames, such as Kaiser ("emperor"), König ("king"), and Fürst ("prince"), more frequently hold managerial positions than Germans with last names that either refer to common everyday occupations, such as Koch ("cook"), Bauer ("farmer"), and Becker/Bäcker ("baker"), or do not refer to any social role. This phenomenon occurs despite the fact that noble-sounding surnames never indicated that the person actually held a noble title. Because of basic properties of associative cognition, the status linked to a name may spill over to its bearer and influence his or her occupational outcomes.

Money is essential: ownership intuitions are linked to physical currency.

Due to basic processes of psychological essentialism and contagion, one particular token of monetary currency is not always interchangeable with another piece of currency of equal economic value. When money loses its physical form it is perceived as "not quite the same" money (i.e., to have partly lost the original essence that distinguished it from other monetary tokens), diminishing its intuitive link with its original owner. Participants were less likely to recommend stolen or lost money be returned when it had been subsequently deposited in an electronic bank account, as opposed to retaining its original physical form (Studies 1a and 1b). Conversely, an intuitive sense of ownership is enhanced through physical contact with a piece of hard currency. Participants felt the piece of currency a person had originally lost should be returned to him rather than another piece of currency of equivalent value, even when they did not believe he would be able to tell the difference and considered distinguishing it from other money illogical. This effect was reduced when the currency had been sterilized, wiping it clean of all physical traces of its previous owner (Studies 2a, 2b, and 3).