The roles of dispositional optimism and pessimism in hiv disease progression

Relationships between dispositional optimism and pessimism and the course of HIV infection, determined by changes in viral load and CD4 counts, were studied in a longitudinal cohort of 412 patients on antiretroviral therapy (ART). Multiple regression analyses controlling for baseline levels of disease status, ethnicity, and depressive symptoms demonstrated that higher pessimism at baseline was associated with higher viral load at follow-up (average of 18 months later). Optimism at baseline had a curvilinear relationship with CD4 counts at follow-up. Moderate levels of optimism at baseline predicted the highest CD4 counts at follow-up. Although optimism and pessimism were associated with specific health behaviors (e.g., ART adherence, cigarette use, drug use, dietary practices), none of these behaviors mediated the optimism/pessimism effects. The biologic and behavioral mediators of associations of personality variables with the course of treated HIV infection deserve continued investigation.     

Priming virtue: Forgiveness and justice elicit divergent moral judgments among religious individuals

Forgiveness and justice are related virtues but they may exert divergent effects on moral judgments. Participants were primed with either forgiveness or retributive justice and made moral judgments of individuals. Experiment 1 demonstrated that religious participants recalling an experience of forgiveness reported more favorable attitudes toward moral transgressors than did those recalling an experience of retributive justice. Experiment 2 replicated the priming effect on moral judgments using a subtle prime of either forgiveness or justice (word search) and a different dependent measure. Experiment 3 employed a more religiously diverse sample and revealed the moderating role of religious commitment. These results suggest that salience of forgiveness leads to more favorable evaluations of moral transgressors compared to retributive justice for religious individuals.     

Visuo-Proprioceptive Matching Errors Are Consistent with Biases in Distance Judgments

People make systematic errors when matching the location of an unseen index finger with that of a visual target. These errors are consistent over time, but idiosyncratic and surprisingly task-specific. The errors that are made when moving the unseen index finger to a visual target are not consistent with the errors when moving a visual target to the unseen index finger. To test whether such inconsistencies arise because a large part of the matching errors originate during movement execution, we compared errors in moving the unseen finger to a target with biases in deciding which of two visual targets was closer to the index finger before the movement. We found that the judgment as to which is the closest target was consistent with the matching errors. This means that inconsistencies in visuo-proprioceptive matching errors are not caused by systematic errors in movement execution, but are likely to be related to biases in sensory transformations.     

Individual Differences in the Moralization of Everyday Life

We report on the development and initial validation of the Moralization of Everyday Life Scale (MELS), designed to measure variations in people's assignment of moral weight to commonplace behaviors. In Study 1, participants reported their judgments for a large number of potential moral infractions in everyday life; principal components analysis revealed 6 main dimensions of these judgments. In Study 2, scores on the 30-item MELS showed high reliability and distinctness from the Big 5 personality traits. In Study 3, scores on the MELS were strongly correlated with scores on an early scale of moral judgments, suggesting convergent validity.     

Moral Instincts and the Problem with Reductionism: A Critical Look at the Work of Marc Hauser

In his most recent book Moral Minds, Marc Hauser argues that many foundational moral instincts have clear biological explanations. To make this argument, Hauser focuses on the similarities between the acquisition of morality and the acquisition of language. Similar to language, one learns a particular moral framework from one's environment, but the biological components necessary for moral development are universal. While I agree with Hauser's overall conclusion regarding moral instincts, I reject the notion that a purely biological analysis of morality can provide an adequate framework for justification. The problem, as I see it, is Hauser acknowledges the bottom-up influences taking place between biology and moral formation, but he refuses to account for the top-down influences that occur between metaphysical assumptions, moral beliefs, and biological conclusions. Thus, the current critique will focus on the connection between Hauser's failure to account for top-down influence and the subsequent shortcoming related to moral justification.     

To escape blame, don't be a hero—Be a victim

In situations where people (or their lawyers) seek to escape blame for wrongdoing, they often use one of two strategies: frame themselves as a hero (hero strategy) or as a victim (victim strategy). The hero strategy acknowledges wrongdoing, but highlights previous good deeds to offset blame. The victim strategy also acknowledges wrongdoing, but highlights the harms suffered by the perpetrator to deflect blame. Although commonsense suggests that past good deeds can offset blame from transgressions, moral typecasting (Gray & Wegner, 2009) suggests otherwise. Despite past good deeds, heroes remain blameworthy as moral agents. On the other hand, victims are moral patients and thus incapable of blame. Three studies found that victim strategy consistently reduced blame, while the hero strategy was at best ineffectual and at worst harmful. This effect appeared to stem from how the minds of victims and heroes are perceived.     

Chinese children's evaluations of white lies: weighing the consequences for recipients

This research examined how Chinese children make moral judgments about lie telling and truth telling when facing a “white lie” or “politeness” dilemma in which telling a blunt truth is likely to hurt the feelings of another. We examined the possibility that the judgments of participants (7-11 years of age, N = 240) would differ as a function of the social context in which communication takes place. The expected social consequences were manipulated systematically in two studies. In Study 1, participants rated truth telling more negatively and rated lie telling more positively in a public situation where telling a blunt truth is especially likely to have negative social consequences. In Study 2, participants rated truth telling more positively and rated lie telling more negatively in a situation where accurate information is likely to be helpful for the recipient to achieve future success. Both studies showed that with increased age, children’s evaluations became significantly influenced by the social context, with the strongest effects being seen among the 11-year-olds. These results suggest that Chinese children learn to take anticipated social consequences into account when making moral judgments about the appropriateness of telling a blunt truth versus lying to protect the feelings of another.     

Age-related changes in cognitive processing of moral and social conventional violations

Moral and conventional violations are usually judged differently: Only moral violations are treated as independent of social rules. To investigate the cognitive processing involved in the development of this distinction, undergraduates (N = 34), adolescents (N = 34), and children (N = 14) read scenarios presented on a computer that had 1 of 3 endings: moral violations, conventional violations, or neutral acts. Participants judged whether the act was acceptable or unacceptable in a condition in which social rules were assumed, or in a condition in which they imagined the absence of rules (rule-removed condition). At all ages reaction times (RTs) were faster for moral than conventional violations when a rule was assumed. RTs in the rule-removed condition were longer than in the rule-assumed condition, only for adults’ moral judgments. In addition to this age difference, adolescents made more normative judgments than children. These findings extend previous work by showing different time courses of processing conventional versus moral violations and revealing age-related differences in the tendency to make normative judgments.     

Lay personality knowledge and dispositionist thinking: A knowledge-activation framework

We explicate a knowledge-activation framework depicting the link between lay personality knowledge and dispositional judgments, building on work by [Dweck et al., 1995a] and [Dweck et al., 1995b]. According to this framework, most people possess knowledge consistent with an entity theory (personality is fixed) and incremental theory (personality is malleable), which operates according to knowledge-activation principles. Consistent with this claim, we find that people render more confident dispositional judgments when their entity knowledge is made relatively more accessible through priming manipulations that activate aspects of their existing knowledge. Findings also illustrate the usefulness of incorporating both specific and general knowledge in our analysis. The present framework enhances and complements the individual-differences approach to the study of person theories prevalent in the literature.     

On the law of Regular Minimality: Reply to Ennis

Ennis's critique touches on issues important for psychophysics, but the points he makes against the hypothesis that Regular Minimality is a basic property of sensory discrimination are not tenable.(1) Stimulus variability means that one and the same apparent stimulus value (as measured by experimenter) is a probabilistic mixture of true stimulus values. The notion of a true stimulus value is a logical necessity: variability and distribution presuppose the values that vary and are distributed (even if these values are represented by processes or sets rather than real numbers). Regular Minimality is formulated for true stimulus values. That a mixture of probabilities satisfying Regular Minimality does not satisfy this principle (unless it also satisfies Constant Self-Similarity) is an immediate consequence of my 2003 analysis. Stimulus variability can be controlled or estimated: the cases when observed violations of Regular Minimality can be accounted for by stimulus variability corroborate rather than falsify this principle. In this respect stimulus variability is no different from fatigue, perceptual learning, and other factors creating mixtures of discrimination probabilities in an experiment.(2) Could it be that well-behaved Thurstonian-type models are true models of discrimination but their parameters are so adjusted that the violations of Regular Minimality they lead to (due to my 2003 theorems) are too small to be detected experimentally? This is possible, but this amounts to admitting that Regular Minimality is a law after all, albeit only approximate: nothing in the logic of the Thurstonian-type representations per se prevents them from violating Regular Minimality grossly rather than slightly. Moreover, even very small violations predicted by a given class of Thurstonian-type models can be tested in specially designed experiments (perhaps under additional, independently testable assumptions). The results of one such experiment, in which observers were asked to alternately adjust to each other the values of stimuli in two observation areas, indicate that violations of Regular Minimality, if any, are far below limits of plausible interpretability.