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In this experiment we investigate whether participants will strategically choose to divulge information about the costs and benefits of a given piece of information in order to maximize gratitude and expect others to do so.

Study of participants' willingness to contribute to help people who brought misfortune on themselves by their own negligence.

Study people's judgments about the victims of misfortune

In a previous experiment, we found that people expect the protagonist to relay the information about the benefits of their advice to those whose benefit is larger. However, the previous set of vignettes and the question were ambiguous, such that they could’ve been interpreted as the protagonist choosing whom to impart the benefits to, not only whom to communicate them. In this experiment, we nevertheless again expect to replicate this finding, i.e. that participants will predict that the protagonist will choose to divulge information about high benefits of a given piece of information (vs. a low benefit).

In this experiment, we investigate whether participants are more likely to choose the high cost of a given piece of information to be known by the interlocutor (in a choice against the low cost) in the indirect compared to the direct condition.

Study of people's judgments on a victim of own negligence.

In this experiment, we investigate: 1) Whether participants are more likely to strategically divulge information without asking for immediate reciprocity. 2) Whether people will predict that others will be more likely to disclose information without waiting for confirmation under time pressure conditions compared to a control condition, in order to be first and elicit more gratitude.

Participants read story about person who experienced misfortune as a result of their own negligence. Participants are asked if they would be willling to give part of their bonus to charity to help such people. Participants are asked to judge the victim's character. We expect that people who donate very little, even in an mimaginary scenario, will derogate the victim's character to excuse their lack of contribution.

This pre-test consists in a survey, in which participants rate the extent to which they judge some behaviors to be examples of negligence, e.g., smoking a cigarette while refueling one's car. Data will be used to create stimuli for further studies of perceptions of negligence.

Investigate the degree people in certain scenarios are deemed negligent by a reader

In this experiment, we investigate whether one can attribute gratitude retroactively, when a piece of information that was initially rejected (due to lack of epistemic authority from the source) turns out to be correct and beneficial.

Rationale of the study This study uses vignettes to evaluate whether people attribute more responsibility to the victim of an accident (what is sometimes called victim-blame), when the participants feel that they might have to pay a cost to help that victim. The vignettes describe a person who was victim of an accident because of their neg-ligence. As a result, their family will have to pay a heavy cost. The participants are then asked whether they would like to contribute some of their possible bonus payment for the study, to help victims like the one described in the vi-gnette.

Blame31 study. Pascal Boyer Rationale In this study, we try to investigate whether people generally associate the idea of an unfortunate event (like illness, accidents, etc.) with the idea that some person was re-sponsible for that event. We present participants with vignettes that include cues as to whether the victim of the accident had been negligent, or had taken reasonable precau-tions to avoid some mishap.

We test how the possibility of passing on information that one has received can influence the intensity of gratitude.

We test how beneficiary audience size influences the intensity of gratitude.

Study of the perception of victims of accidents

Supplementary materials for Are Multiple Minimal Outgroup Males Readily Associated with Threat?

This study will document people’s reactions to vignettes, presented as news stories, depicting a person who is the victim of an accident, e.g., a bear attack or a car crash. We evaluate the extent to which the victim is judged to be ‘responsible’ for what happened to them, and whether participants think that, in order to understand what happened, it would be relevant to find out more about the circumstances of the accident or the personality of the victim.