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A growing literature shows that music increases prosocial behavior. Why does this occur? We propose a novel hypothesis, informed by moral psychology: evidence of others’ musicality may promote prosociality by leading us to judge musical individuals as having enhanced moral standing. This effect may be largely indirect, by increasing perceptions of how intelligent and emotionally sensitive musical individuals are. If so, simply knowing about others’ musicality should affect moral evaluations, such as wrongness to harm. Across four experiments (total N = 550), we found supportive evidence. Information that an animal or person had the capacity and motivation to engage with music led participants to judge these entities as more wrong to harm than matched neutral or non-musical counterparts. Similarly, knowing that a person was not musical made people judge them as less wrong to harm than neutral or musical counterparts. As predicted, musicality was positively associated with perceptions of capacities for emotionality and intelligence, and these broader factors partially mediated the relationship between musicality and wrongness to harm. These effects were not influenced by participants’ own musicality. Thus, non-moral attributes like musicality can impact moral consideration, carrying implications for social behavior and for interventions to promote prosociality.

When people who are generally loyal or fair have a momentary lapse in their moral behavior, how does that impact whether we continue to perceive them as loyal or fair people––and how is this shaped by our relative valuation of loyalty and fairness? Reasoning from an error-management perspective suggests the Moral Stringency Hypothesis: Upon witnessing a moral lapse, we should be especially prone to discount category membership for our most deeply valued moral categories, given the potential costs of affiliating with people who do not reliably adhere to our core moral values. However, another line of research on conceptions of the "true self" suggests the opposite. Specifically, the True Self Hypothesis predicts that we should reliably project our most strongly held moral values onto others, even after a lapse. Across two studies (N = 720), we found consistent evidence favoring the Moral Stringency Hypothesis over the True Self Hypothesis.

The status of disgust as a sociomoral emotion is debated. We conducted a stringent test of whether social stimuli (specifically, political outgroup members) can elicit physical disgust, as distinct from moral or metaphorical disgust. We employed stimuli (male faces) matched on baseline disgustingness, provided other ways for participants to express negativity toward outgroup members, and used concrete self-report measures of disgust, as well as a nonverbal measure (participants' facial expressions). Across three preregistered studies (total N = 915), we found that political outgroup members are judged to be "disgusting," although this effect is generally weaker for concrete self-report measures and absent for the nonverbal measure. This suggests that social stimuli are capable of eliciting genuine physical disgust, although it is not always outwardly expressed, and the strength of this result depends on the measures employed. We discuss implications of these results for research on sociomoral emotions and American politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morally convicted attitudes—attitudes grounded in core beliefs about fundamental right and wrong—play an important role in political psychology, public opinion, and political behavior. Extant research suggests that these attitudes are intensely held, likely to evoke strong emotional responses, more stable and less amenable to compromise, and perceived to be universally true. Despite a large body of research on how morally convicted attitudes affect behavior and choice, several open questions remain about their antecedents. There are two questions central to this article: First, can the news media effectively communicate a sense of moral conviction to the mass public? Second, if so, what are the factors that cause these attitudes to become morally convicted? Drawing on framing theory, appraisal theory, and research in political communication, we hypothesize that moral conviction can be effectively communicated using episodic (as opposed to thematic) frames, and also, that emotional reactions to such frames contribute to the development of moral conviction. Using four survey experiments and two replications, we find some support for our hypotheses, but we also find that treatment effects are likely context dependent. We close with a discussion about avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the data reported in the paper "Being in the know: Social network analysis of gossip and friendship on college campuses" (Yucel et al. 2021). Data were collected from a Men's and Women's collegiate crew team members from a small liberal arts college. Participants ( N  = 44) reported information about how often they gossip about members of the team (positively, negatively), who they have had hooked-up with on the team, who they consider to be friends with on the team, whether they have to sabotaged or been sabotaged by any teammates, their well-being and feelings of loneliness. This data brief provides detailed information about data preparation and participants responses to all survey items., Competing Interests: This work was supported by Psi Chi, The International Honor Society in Psychology and the Franklin & Marshall College Committee on Grants. The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships which have, or could be perceived to have, influenced the work reported in this article., (© 2021 Published by Elsevier Inc.)