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In moral dilemmas, decision-making can be based on more utilitarian or deontological reasoning. In two experimental studies, we manipulated the number of people to be sacrificed (1 to save 5 vs. 3 to save 5) and whether personalizing information about them was presented. Results provide the first evidence of how the effects of kill-save ratios and identifiability of the potential victims are contingent on one another. Specifically, this research shows that when individuating information about the potential victims is present in a trolley dilemma, participants are more reluctant to sacrifice three persons to save five than to sacrifice one person to save five. When such individuating information is not present, the acceptability of sacrificing the victims does not depend on their number. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on problem-solving, judgement, and decision making documents systematic reasoning errors. Such errors are often attributed to reasoning shortcomings, an inability to think properly. However, recent research suggests another cause for those errors: insufficient attention to the critical premises in a problem, resulting in miscomprehension, such that, even if a person is capable of reasoning properly, she will fail to solve the problem correctly if she is operating on wrong premises. The first study in this article provided further evidence for this comprehension account of reasoning errors: Performance on reasoning problems was found to relate to verbal comprehension on a separate task. This suggests that reasoning errors are in part due to lack of comprehension. The upside of this account is that it should be possible to improve reasoning performance by drawing attention to the critical premises. Three additional studies provided consistent evidence for this hypothesis, showing that the same participants who at first proved unable to solve certain problems correctly were able to overcome this inability and performed better when simple attention-capturing devices drew their attention to the critical premises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across six studies, this research found consistent evidence for motivated implicit theories about personality malleability: People perceive their weaknesses as more malleable than their strengths. Moreover, motivation also influences how people see themselves in the future, such that they expect their present strengths to remain constant, but they expect their present weaknesses to improve in the future. Several additional findings suggest the motivational nature of these effects: The difference in perceived malleability for strengths versus weaknesses was only observed for the self, not for other people. When the desirability of possessing a certain trait was manipulated, that trait was perceived to be more malleable when it was depicted as undesirable. And these different beliefs that people have about how malleable their traits are, and how they will develop in the future, were associated with their desire for change, which is higher for weaknesses versus strengths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]