Search

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.

Investigating folk conceptions of choice and constraints havebeen problematic given that human actions are rarelyconsidered constrained. In this paper, we utilize humanoidrobots (more clearly influenced by determined programming)to empirically test children’s developing concepts of choiceand action. Using a series of agency attribution and choiceprediction tasks, we examined whether children differentiatefree will abilities between robots and humans. Resultsindicated that 5–7-year-old children similarly attributed theability to choose to both a robot and human child. However,for moral scenarios, participants considered the robot’s actionsto be more constrained than the human. These findingsdemonstrate that children appear to hold a nuancedunderstanding of choice across agents and across context.

How can social learning influence children’s inclinationstoward equality-based or merit-based fairness? To investigatethis question, six- and seven-year-olds were first presentedwith a pre-test distribution task in which they divided eightstickers between two hypothetical children, one of whom wasa more productive worker. Participants were then given brief,direct testimony that advocated either equality- or merit-basedfairness (whichever was not preferred at pre-test), and thatappealed either to emotions or reason. A novel experimenterthen presented participants with a post-test distribution task.The results indicated that a majority of children changed theirdistribution patterns from pre-test to post-test after beingprovided with direct testimony. These changes in resourcedistribution were accompanied by marked changes in thekinds of explanations that children provided. This researchindicates that children’s preferences for different forms of justresource distribution can be heavily influenced by socialcommunication.