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Prominent social psychologists and major media outlets have put forward the notion that people of high socioeconomic status (SES) are more selfish and behave more unethically than people of low SES. In contrast, other research in economics and sociology has hypothesized and found a positive relationship between SES and prosocial and ethical behavior. We review the empirical evidence for these contradictory findings and conduct two direct, well-powered, and preregistered replications of the field studies by Piff and colleagues (2012) to test the relationship between SES and unethical/selfish behavior. Unlike the original findings, we find no evidence of a positive relationship between SES and unethical/selfish behavior in the two field replication studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Inspired by theoretical and empirical work on emotion, psychological distance, moral psychology, and people's tendency to overgeneralize ecologically valid relationships, 3 studies explore whether, why, and for whom responsibility amplifies empathic forecasts (RAEF)-the perception that an intentional agent's social actions will produce stronger affective responses in others than if those same outcomes were to occur randomly or unintentionally. In Study 1, participants thought that pleasant or aversive videos would elicit stronger reactions when participants themselves (instead of the random determination of a computer) would select the video another would watch. This was explained by responsible agents' own stronger reactions to the stimuli. Study 2 identified what about agents' responsibility amplifies empathic forecasts: the combination of clearly causing and intending the other's outcome. Study 3 demonstrated that RAEF need not extend to all responsible agents equally. Participants considered how to divide (vs. how another participant would divide or how a computer would randomly split) $10 with a recipient. In this context, we found the weight of causal responsibility looms larger in the self's mind when the self is responsible for the recipient's fate than when another responsible agent is. Furthermore, the self thought that the recipient's emotional reaction would be more strongly influenced by the size of the self's own (compared to another's or a computer's) allocation decision. The Discussion focuses on how RAEF relates to other models connecting agency and experience, provides initial evidence that RAEF need not be egocentric, and identifies open questions that remain for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

People often make judgments about their own and others' valuations and preferences. Across 12 studies ( N = 17,594), we find a robust bias in these judgments such that people overestimate the valuations and preferences of others. This overestimation arises because, when making predictions about others, people rely on their intuitive core representation of the experience (e.g., is the experience generally positive?) in lieu of a more complex representation that might also include countervailing aspects (e.g., is any of the experience negative?). We first demonstrate that the overestimation bias is pervasive for a wide range of positive (Studies 1-5) and negative experiences (Study 6). Furthermore, the bias is not merely an artifact of how preferences are measured (Study 7). Consistent with judgments based on core representations, the bias significantly reduces when the core representation is uniformly positive (Studies 8A-8B). Such judgments lead to a paradox in how people see others trade off between valuation and utility (Studies 9A-9B). Specifically, relative to themselves, people believe that an identically paying other will get more enjoyment from the same experience, but paradoxically, that an identically enjoying other will pay more for the same experience. Finally, consistent with a core representation explanation, explicitly prompting people to consider the entire distribution of others' preferences significantly reduced or eliminated the bias (Study 10). These findings suggest that social judgments of others' preferences are not only largely biased, but they also ignore how others make trade-offs between evaluative metrics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).