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When asked whether to sacrifice oneself or another person to save others, one might think that people would consider sacrificing themselves rather than someone else as the right and appropriate course of action—thus showing an other-serving bias. So far however, most studies found instances of a self-serving bias—people say they would rather sacrifice others. In three experiments using trolley-like dilemmas, we tested whether an other-serving bias might appear as a function of judgment type. That is, participants were asked to make a prescriptive judgment (whether the described action should or should not be done) or a normative judgment (whether the action is right or wrong). We found that participants exhibited an other-serving bias only when asked whether self- or other-sacrifice is wrong. That is, when the judgment was normative and in a negative frame (in contrast to the positive frame asking whether the sacrifice is right). Otherwise, participants tended to exhibit a self-serving bias; that is, they approved sacrificing others more. The results underscore the importance of question wording and suggest that some effects on moral judgment might depend on the type of judgment.

The consideration of laypeople's views of conditions under which euthanasia is justifiable is important for policy decisions. In an online survey of US respondents, we examined how patient's symptoms influence justifiability of euthanasia. Euthanasia was judged more justifiable for conditions associated with physical suffering and negative impact on other people. The weight given to physical suffering and negative impact on others in evaluation of justifiability of euthanasia also differed based on personal characteristics. The results suggest that public discourse about medical assistance in dying should take into account differences in its perceived justifiability for patients with different conditions.

International audience; The attentional spatial-numerical association of response codes (Att-SNARC) effect (Fischer, Castel, Dodd, & Pratt, 2003)-the finding that participants are quicker to detect left-side targets when the targets are preceded by small numbers and quicker to detect right-side targets when they are preceded by large numbers-has been used as evidence for embodied number representations and to support strong claims about the link between number and space (e.g., a mental number line). We attempted to replicate Experiment 2 of Fischer et al. by collecting data from 1,105 participants at 17 labs. Across all 1,105 participants and four interstimulus-interval conditions, the proportion of times the effect we observed was positive (i.e., directionally consistent with the original effect) was .50. Further, the effects we observed both within and across labs were minuscule and incompatible with those observed by Fischer et al. Given this, we conclude that we failed to replicate the effect reported by Fischer et al. In addition, our analysis of several participantlevel moderators (finger-counting habits, reading and writing direction, handedness, and mathematics fluency and mathematics anxiety) revealed no substantial moderating effects. Our results indicate that the Att-SNARC effect cannot be used as evidence to support strong claims about the link between number and space.

Providing people with more information and more options may seem as a good policy. However, because of limited attention and cognitive resources, people are not able to use all available information and freedom of choice effectively to achieve their own best interests. When cognitive resources and attention are depleted, decision making becomes shallow and intuitive, often unable to take important aspects of given situations into account – even though this information is readily available. An intuitive decision making may lead to suboptimal outcomes by overestimating the importance of the most salient cues and disregarding the less obvious future consequences. Although this creates a demand for decision making aides that could be satisfied by markets, policy regulation may be necessary in some areas. We provide specific examples of problems arising from limited attention together with solutions based on behavioral economics approach to policy making known as nudging.

We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variation in effect magnitudes across samples and settings. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples that comprised 15,305 participants from 36 countries and territories. Using the conventional criterion of statistical significance (p < .05), we found that 15 (54%) of the replications provided evidence of a statistically significant effect in the same direction as the original finding. With a strict significance criterion (p < .0001), 14 (50%) of the replications still provided such evidence, a reflection of the extremely highpowered design. Seven (25%) of the replications yielded effect sizes larger than the original ones, and 21 (75%) yielded effect sizes smaller than the original ones. The median comparable Cohen’s ds were 0.60 for the original findings and 0.15 for the replications. The effect sizes were small (< 0.20) in 16 of the replications (57%), and 9 effects (32%) were in the direction opposite the direction of the original effect. Across settings, the Q statistic indicated significant heterogeneity in 11 (39%) of the replication effects, and most of those were among the findings with the largest overall effect sizes; only 1 effect that was near zero in the aggregate showed significant heterogeneity according to this measure. Only 1 effect had a tau value greater than .20, an indication of moderate heterogeneity. Eight others had tau values near or slightly above .10, an indication of slight heterogeneity. Moderation tests indicated that very little heterogeneity was attributable to the order in which the tasks were performed or whether the tasks were administered in lab versus online. Exploratory comparisons revealed little heterogeneity between Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) cultures and less WEIRD cultures (i.e., cultures with relatively high and low WEIRDness scores, respectively). Cumulatively, variability in the observed effect sizes was attributable more to the effect being studied than to the sample or setting in which it was studied. UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas (IIP)

Finkel, Rusbult, Kumashiro, and Hannon (2002, Study 1) demonstrated a causal link between subjective commitment to a relationship and how people responded to hypothetical betrayals of that relationship. Participants primed to think about their commitment to their partner (high commitment) reacted to the betrayals with reduced exit and neglect responses relative to those primed to think about their independence from their partner (low commitment). The priming manipulation did not affect constructive voice and loyalty responses. Although other studies have demonstrated a correlation between subjective commitment and responses to betrayal, this study provides the only experimental evidence that inducing changes to subjective commitment can causally affect forgiveness responses. This Registered Replication Report (RRR) meta-analytically combines the results of 16 new direct replications of the original study, all of which followed a standardized, vetted, and preregistered protocol. The results showed little effect of the priming manipulation on the forgiveness outcome measures, but it also did not observe an effect of priming on subjective commitment, so the manipulation did not work as it had in the original study. We discuss possible explanations for the discrepancy between the findings from this RRR and the original study.

Abstract. Previous choice blindness studies showed that people sometimes fail to notice when their choice is changed. Subsequently, they are willing to provide reasons for the manipulated choice which is the opposite of the one they made just seconds ago. In the present study, participants first made binary judgments about the wrongness of described behaviors and then were shown an opposite answer during a second reading of some of the descriptions. Half of the participants saw the answer during the second presentation of the description and the other half saw it only after the presentation. Based on Haidt’s Social intuitionist model, we hypothesized that participants in the latter group would be less likely to reconcile their intuition with the presented answer and thus they would be more likely to reject it. However, we found no difference between the groups.

Processing fluency is used as a basis for various types of judgment. For example, previous research has shown that people judge food additives with names that are more difficult to pronounce (i.e., that are disfluent) to be more harmful. We explored the possibility that the association between disfluency and perceived harmfulness might be in the opposite direction for some categories of stimuli. Although we found some support for this hypothesis, an improved analysis and further studies indicated that the effect was strongly dependent on the stimuli used. We then used stimulus sampling and showed that the original association between fluency and perceived safety was not replicable with the newly constructed stimuli. We found the association between fluency and perceived safety using the newly constructed stimuli in a final study, but only when pronounceability was confounded with word length. The results cast doubt on generalizability of the association between pronounceability and perceived safety and underscore the importance of treating stimulus as a random factor.

Laboratory studies allow studying the predictors of bribe-taking in a controlled setting. However, presently used laboratory tasks often lack any connection to norm violation or invite participants to role-play. A new experimental task for studying the decision to take a bribe was designed in this study to overcome these problems by embedding the opportunity for bribe-taking in an unrelated task that participants perform. Using this new experimental task, we found that refraining from harming a third party by taking a bribe was associated with lower offered bribes and higher scores of the participants on the honesty-humility scale from the HEXACO personality inventory. A trial-level analysis showed that response times were longer for trials with bribes and even longer for trials in which bribes were accepted. These results suggest that taking a bribe may require overcoming automatic honest response and support the validity of the honesty-humility scale in predicting moral behavior.

Euthanasia is a highly controversial topic. One of the arguments against legalisation of euthanasia is that it would lead to an attitudinal slippery slope effect; that is, a shift in attitudes toward euthanasia even toward cases which were not legalised. The present study tested a possible mechanism which may lead to such shift in two experiments. Participants judged morality of euthanasia in two hypothetical scenarios describing patients requesting euthanasia. We found that participants who first evaluated a case of a non-terminally ill patient suffering from fatigue afterward considered euthanasia for a terminally ill patient suffering from pain more morally right than participants who evaluated euthanasia in the latter case first. Furthermore, we found that presenting the case of the patient suffering from fatigue before asking about attitudes toward legality of euthanasia led participants to oppose it more. The study suggests that public’s expressed attitudes toward legality of euthanasia might be easily influenced by a choice of illustrative examples. However, the change in attitudes predicted by the slippery slope effect was not observed.

The target article is built on an analogy between humans and ultrasocial insects. We argue that there are many important limitations to the analogy that make any possible inferences from the analogy questionable. We demonstrate the issue using an example of the difference between a loss of autonomy in humans and in social insects.