People are more likely to be insincere when they are more likely to accidentally tell the truth

Although people lie often, and mostly for self-serving reasons, they do not lie as much as they could. The “fudge factor” hypothesis suggests that one reason for people not to lie is that they do not wish to self-identify as liars. Accordingly, self-serving lies should be more likely when they are less obvious to the liars themselves. Here we show that the likelihood of self-serving lies increases with the probability of accidentally telling the truth. Players in our game could transmit sincere or insincere recommendations to their competitors. In line with the fudge factor hypothesis, players lied when their beliefs were based on flimsy evidence and did not lie when their beliefs were based on solid evidence. This is the first demonstration of a new moral hypocrisy paradox: People are more likely to be insincere when they are more likely to accidentally tell the truth.     

Combinatorics and probability: six- to ten-year-olds reliably predict whether a relation will occur

Young children are able to judge which of two possibilities is more likely to occur when these possibilities are characterized by a simple property, like color (“Is it more likely to draw a red chip or a blue chip?”). Here we ask whether they can do so when the possibilities concern a relation between simple properties (“Is it more likely to draw two chips of the same color or two different colored chips?”). Three studies show that from the age of six children are able to predict the occurrence of a relation on the basis of its probability, and that from the age of nine their performance reaches adult levels. These results corroborate the theory of naive extensional reasoning, and are inconsistent with the hypothesis that children need the help of instruction to reason correctly about relations.     

The Good,the Bad,and the Uncertain: Intentional Action under Normative Uncertainty

My focus in this paper is on a type of bad actions, namely actions that appear to be done for reasons that are not good reasons. I take such bad actions to be ubiquitous. But their ubiquity gives rise to a puzzle, especially if we assume that intentional actions are performed for what one believes or takes to be good reasons. The puzzle I aim to solve in this paper is: why do we seem to be getting it wrong so much of the time? I will argue that we can explain the ubiquity of bad action in light of the practical uncertainties that we face. My claim is not just that the more uncertainty we face as agents, the more likely we are to make a mistake about what counts as a good reason for action, although that is certainly one possible effect of practical uncertainty. My main claim is, rather, that practical uncertainty can have an impact on what counts as acting for a good reason for the agent.     

The Putt and the Pendulum: Ironic Effects of the Mental Control of Action

People sometimes find themselves making movement errors that represent the ironic opposite of what they intended to do. These studies examined this tendency in the case of putting a golf ball and swinging a handheld pendulum, and found that ironic errors were particularly likely when participants who were instructed to avoid them tried to do so under mental load or physical load. The idea that such errors may be prompted by a monitoring process that increases sensitivity to the most undesirable outcome of an intention was supported by the finding of a tendency for ironic errors to be more evident when participants were allowed to monitor their action visually than when they could not.     

Procedural justice and the hedonic principle: how approach versus avoidance motivation influences the psychology of voice

The authors investigate the relation between the hedonic principle (people's motivations to approach pleasure and to avoid pain) and procedural justice. They explore whether approach or avoidance motivation increases the effect that people feel they were treated more fairly following procedures that do versus do not allow them an opportunity to voice their opinion. Experiments 1 and 2 reveal that these procedures influence procedural justice judgments more strongly when people conduct approach motor action (arm flexion) than when they conduct avoidance motor action (arm extension). Experiment 3 indicates that individual-difference measures of participants' approach motivations predicted procedural justice judgments following voice versus no-voice procedures. The authors conclude that people's motivational orientations stimulate their fairness-based reactions to voice procedures.     

Being nice by choice: The effect of counterfactual reasoning on children's social evaluations

The ability to engage in counterfactual thinking (reason about what else could have happened) is critical to learning, agency, and social evaluation. However, not much is known about how individual differences in counterfactual reasoning may play a role in children's social evaluations. In the current study, we investigate how prompting children to engage in counterfactual thinking about positive moral actions impacts children's social evaluations. Eighty-seven 4-8-year-olds were introduced to a character who engaged in a positive moral action (shared a sticker with a friend) and asked about what else the character could have done with the sticker (counterfactual simulation). Children were asked to generate either a high number of counterfactuals (five alternative actions) or a low number of counterfactuals (one alternative action). Children were then asked a series of social evaluation questions contrasting that character with one who did not have a choice and had no alternatives (was told to give away the sticker to his friend). Results show that children who generated selfish counterfactuals were more likely to positively evaluate the character with choice than children who did not generate selfish counterfactuals, suggesting that generating counterfactuals most distant from the chosen action (prosociality) leads children to view prosocial actions more positively. We also found age-related changes: as children got older, regardless of the type of counterfactuals generated, they were more likely to evaluate the character with choice more positively. These results highlight the importance of counterfactual reasoning in the development of moral evaluations.

Research Highlights

• Older children were more likely to endorse agents who choose to share over those who do not have a choice.
• Children who were prompted to generate more counterfactuals were more likely to allocate resources to characters with choice.
• Children who generated selfish counterfactuals more positively evaluated agents with choice.
• Comparable to theories suggesting children punish willful transgressors more than accidental transgressors, we propose children also consider free will when making positive moral evaluations.

     

The norm of self-interest and its effects on social action

Four studies investigated whether people feel inhibited from engaging in social action incongruent with their apparent self-interest. Participants in Study 1 predicted that they would be evaluated negatively were they to take action on behalf of a cause in which they had no stake or in which they had a stake but held stake-incongruent attitudes. Participants in Study 2 reported both surprise and anger when a target person took action on behalf of a cause in which he or she had no stake or in which he or she held stake-incongruent attitudes. In Study 3, individuals felt more comfortable engaging in social action and expected others to respond more favorably toward their actions if the issue was described as more relevant to their own sex than to the opposite sex. In Study 4, the authors found that providing nonvested individuals with psychological standing rendered them as likely as vested individuals to undertake social action. The authors discuss the implications of these results for the relationship between vested interest, social action, and attitude-behavior consistency.     

Whatever is willed will be: a temporal asymmetry in attributions to will

Why do people neglect or underweight their past failures when thinking about their prospects of future success? One reason may be that people think of the past and future as guided by different causal forces. In seven studies, the authors demonstrate that people hold asymmetric beliefs about the impact of an individual's will on past versus future events. People consider the will to be a more potent determinant of future events than events that happened in the past. This asymmetry holds between- and within-subjects, and generalizes beyond undergraduate populations. The authors contend that this asymmetry contributes to the tendency for people to remain confident about their future performance in domains in which they have largely failed in the past. This research thus contributes to a growing body of literature exploring how thoughts about events in the past differ from thoughts about the same events set in the future.     

Two‐year‐olds are vigilant of others’ non‐verbal cues to credibility

Data from three experiments provide the first evidence that children, at least as young as age two, are vigilant of others’ non‐verbal cues to credibility, and flexibly use these cues to facilitate learning. Experiment 1 revealed that 2‐ and 3‐year‐olds prefer to learn about objects from someone who appears, through non‐verbal cues, to be confident in performing actions on those objects than from someone who appears uncertain when performing actions on those objects. Experiment 2 revealed that when 2‐year‐olds observe only one model perform a single action, either confidently or unconfidently, they do not use the model’s level of confidence in this single instance to influence their learning. Experiment 3 revealed that 2‐year‐olds will use a single model’s level of confidence to guide their learning if they have observed that the model has a history of being either consistently confident or consistently uncertain. These findings reveal that young children selectively alter their learning based on others’ non‐verbal cues of credibility, and underscore the importance of an early sensitivity to socio‐cognitive cues for human learning and development.     

Children's imitation of causal action sequences is influenced by statistical and pedagogical evidence

Children are ubiquitous imitators, but how do they decide which actions to imitate? One possibility is that children rationally combine multiple sources of information about which actions are necessary to cause a particular outcome. For instance, children might learn from contingencies between action sequences and outcomes across repeated demonstrations, and they might also use information about the actor’s knowledge state and pedagogical intentions. We define a Bayesian model that predicts children will decide whether to imitate part or all of an action sequence based on both the pattern of statistical evidence and the demonstrator’s pedagogical stance. To test this prediction, we conducted an experiment in which preschool children watched an experimenter repeatedly perform sequences of varying actions followed by an outcome. Children’s imitation of sequences that produced the outcome increased, in some cases resulting in production of shorter sequences of actions that the children had never seen performed in isolation. A second experiment established that children interpret the same statistical evidence differently when it comes from a knowledgeable teacher versus a naïve demonstrator. In particular, in the pedagogical case children are more likely to “overimitate” by reproducing the entire demonstrated sequence. This behavior is consistent with our model’s predictions, and suggests that children attend to both statistical and pedagogical evidence in deciding which actions to imitate, rather than obligately imitating successful action sequences.     

Copying actions and copying outcomes: social learning through the second year

The present work documents how the logic of a model's demonstration and the communicative cues that the model provides interact with age to influence how children engage in social learning. Children at ages 12, 18, and 24 months (n=204) watched a model open a series of boxes. Twelve-month-old subjects only copied the specific actions of the model when they were given a logical reason to do so--otherwise, they focused on reproducing the outcome of the demonstrated actions. Eighteen-month-old subjects focused on copying the outcome when the model was aloof. When the model acted socially, the subjects were as likely to focus on copying actions as outcomes, irrespective of the apparent logic of the model's behavior. Finally, 24-month-old subjects predominantly focused on copying the model's specific actions. However, they were less likely to produce the modeled outcome when the model acted non-socially.     

Thinking about the unknown

A long tradition of research suggests that children and adults with no formal education are prone to reason only on the basis of their first-hand experience, and do not encode and reason from novel generalizations supplied by other people. However, recent research reveals that when given simple prompts, even pre-school children can reason from adults’ unfamiliar claims. A radical implication of these findings is that young children arrive at school with a pre-existing capacity for thinking and reasoning about the unknown. The assumption that early learning should be rooted in children's own empirical experience could be mistaken.     

How people think “if only …” about reasons for actions

When people think about how a situation might have turned out differently, they tend to imagine counterfactual alternatives to their actions. We report the results of three experiments which show that people imagine alternatives to actions differently when they know about a reason for the action. The first experiment (n = 36) compared reason – action sequences to cause – effect sequences. It showed that people do not imagine alternatives to reasons in the way they imagine alternatives to causes: they imagine an alternative to an action more than an effect, and to a cause more than a reason. The second experiment (n = 214) and the third experiment (n = 190) both show that different sorts of reasons have different sorts of effects on how people imagine alternatives to actions. People imagine an alternative to an action (the protagonist went to a ball) less often when they know the reason for the action was an obligation (he had to participate in fundraising) compared to when they know about a weaker reason (he wanted to meet a famous violinist) or no reason. The second experiment shows the effect for a social obligation and the third experiment replicates and extends it to a health obligation. We interpret the results in terms of the possibilities that people keep in mind about actions and their reasons.     

Children's theories of intelligence: beliefs, goals, and motivation in the elementary years

The authors tested a developmental model of children's theories about intelligence in kindergarten, second grade, and fourth grade children by using paper-and-pencil maze tasks. Older children were more likely than younger children to espouse learning goals (e.g., that they preferred difficult mazes to improve their skill), and less likely to espouse performance goals (e.g., that they preferred easy mazes to be successful). Children in all 3 age groups reported stronger beliefs in the malleability of intelligence than the stability of intelligence. In general, the results supported the authors' hypotheses about developmental change in children's theory-like conceptions of intelligence: Beliefs, goals, and motivation were related in expected ways for second and fourth graders more than for kindergartners. The authors discussed contextual influences on children's beliefs and the development of children's conceptualizations of intelligence.     

Context effects on remembering and knowing: the expectancy heuristic

Three experiments are reported examining the effect of context on remember-know judgments. In Experiments 1 and 2, medium-frequency words were intermixed with high-frequency or low-frequency words at study or at test, respectively. Remember responses were greater for medium-frequency targets when they were studied or tested among high-frequency, as compared with low-frequency, words. The authors proposed a decision-based mechanism called "the expectancy heuristic" to explain why remember responses were more likely when items were studied or tested in the context of words that were relatively less distinct. According to the expectancy heuristic, when items on a recognition test exceed an expected level of memorability they will be given a remember judgment but when they do not, but are still more familiar than new words, they will be given a know judgment. Experiment 3, which varied expectancies about the strength of tested targets, demonstrated the use of the expectancy heuristic, indicating that it operates by selectively influencing the remember criterion rather than by influencing recollection of studied items.     

You can do it if you really try: The effects of motivation on thinking for pleasure

People find it difficult to enjoy their own thoughts when asked to do so, but what happens when they are asked to think about whatever they want? Do they find thinking more or less enjoyable? In the present studies, we show that people are more successful in enjoying their thoughts when instructed to do so. We present evidence in support of four reasons why this is: without instructions people do not realize how enjoyable it will be to think for pleasure, they do not realize how personally meaningful it will be to do so, they believe that thinking for pleasure will be effortful, and they believe it would be more worthwhile to engage in planning than to try to enjoy their thoughts. We discuss the practical implications of thinking for pleasure for promoting alternatives to the use of technology.     

Responsibility and the Brain Sciences

Some theorists think that the more we get to know about the neural underpinnings of our behaviors, the less likely we will be to hold people responsible for their actions. This intuition has driven some to suspect that as neuroscience gains insight into the neurological causes of our actions, people will cease to view others as morally responsible for their actions, thus creating a troubling quandary for our legal system. This paper provides empirical evidence against such intuitions. Particularly, our studies of folk intuitions suggest that (1) when the causes of an action are described in neurological terms, they are not found to be any more exculpatory than when described in psychological terms, and (2) agents are not held fully responsible even for actions that are fully neurologically caused.     

Seeking a Variable Standard of Individual Moral Responsibility in Organizations

Relatively few authors attempt to assess individuals’ moral responsibility for collective action within organizations. I draw on fairly technical recent work by Seamus Miller, Christopher Kutz, and Tracy Isaacs in the field of collective responsibility to see what normative lessons can be prepared for people considering entry into large hierarchical, compartmentalized organizations like businesses or the military. I will defend a view shared by Isaacs that group members’ responsibility for collective action depends on intentions to contribute to particular collective actions, against Miller and Kutz’s more inculpating standards. Miller and Kutz fail to achieve their goal of articulating a variable standard for measuring individual responsibility within organizations, for reasons suggesting we might not be able to do better with their theoretical commitments than a threshold warning for all potential entrants to be wary of the groups they enter. Isaacs sketches an approach that is more successful at creating a variable standard for assessing high echelon actors; I build on and refine her theory to argue that organization members can be held responsible for their unique interpretations of the organization mission and unique contributions to their role duties. High echelon actors may share personal responsibility for their subordinates’ behavior when they have created the conditions for those actions through their unique orders.     

Effect of task goals on the reaching patterns of children with cerebral palsy

The authors examined whether the intended task goal of the subsequent action affects the reaching patterns before the intended goal in 17 children with cerebral palsy (CP). The authors hypothesized that when the children with CP used their less affected hand, they would not be affected by the task goals and that their reaching pattern would deviate from those of 17 age-matched children without CP and 20 young healthy adult participants. All participants were instructed to reach and grasp a tennis ball and then to either fit or throw it. Kinematic variables (movement time, straightness ratio, peak velocity, percentage of time to peak velocity, and number of movement units) were used as outcome measures. Children with CP used slower, less straight, less forceful, and jerkier reaching patterns to approach the object than did children without CP and adults. Unlike in children and adults without CP, the intended goal of the subsequent action did not affect the reaching pattern before the intended goal in children with CP. Children with CP may therefore have difficulty in anticipatory planning and thus must segment the integrative action plan into sequential submovements.