The portrait of a hedonist: The personality and ethics behind the value and maladaptive pursuit of pleasure

Hedonism is the prioritizing of pleasure over other life values and is theorized to be independent of well-being. However, popular culture depicts hedonists as unhappy, as well as selfishly unconcerned with others’ well-being. Because the current literature has not differentiated between people’s value of pleasure and their maladaptive pursuit of it, we examined if these related, but not equivalent, dispositions had different personality and morality profiles. We found that value-based hedonists have a distinct moral profile (i.e., they are less likely to endorse moral foundations associated with social conservatism) and, yet, they differ little from others in regard to personality traits. We also found that people’s maladaptive hedonism (i.e., excessive pleasure-seeking) was best predicted by their personality traits (i.e., being less agreeable, less conscientious, and more neurotic) rather than by their conceptions of right and wrong. We discuss how these results contribute to our understanding of hedonism and why some people pursue their value of pleasure into over-indulgence.     

Cruel nature: Harmfulness as an important,overlooked dimension in judgments of moral standing

Entities that possess moral standing can be wronged and deserve our moral consideration. Past perspectives on the folk psychology of moral standing have focused exclusively on the role of “patiency” (the capacity to experience pain or pleasure) and “agency” (usually defined and operationalized in terms of intelligence or cognitive ability). We contend that harmfulness (i.e., having a harmful vs. benevolent disposition) is an equally if not more important determinant of moral standing. We provide support for this hypothesis across four studies using non-human animals as targets. We show that the effect of harmfulness on attributions of moral standing is independent from patiency and intelligence (Studies 1–2), that this effect pertains specifically to an animal’s harmful disposition rather than its capacity to act upon this disposition (Study 3), and that it primarily reflects a parochial concern for human welfare in particular (Study 4). Our findings highlight an important, overlooked dimension in the psychology of moral standing that has implications for real-world decisions that affect non-human animals. Our findings also help clarify the conditions under which people perceive patiency and agency as related versus truly independent dimensions.     

Desire for a positive moral self-regard exacerbates escalation of commitment to initiatives with prosocial aims

Across three experiments, people escalated commitment more frequently to a failing prosocial initiative (i.e., an initiative that had the primary aim of improving the outcomes of others in need) than they did to a failing egoistic initiative (i.e., an initiative that had the primary aim of improving the outcomes of the decision-maker). A test of mediation (Study 1b) and a test of moderation (Study 2) each provided evidence that a desire for a positive moral self-regard underlies people’s tendency to escalate commitment more frequently to failing prosocial initiatives than to failing egoistic initiatives. We discuss the implications of these findings for the resource-allocation decisions that people and organizations face when undertaking initiatives with prosocial aims.     

Unfairness begets unfairness: Victim derogation bias in employee ratings

This research investigated criterion contamination in human resource evaluations, specifically victim derogation in which third parties (e.g., managers, co-workers) systematically undervalue the performance and potential of individuals who have previously suffered organizational injustices. A policy capturing design (Study 1) found that managers rated job applicants who had been treated unfairly by their previous employers as less suitable than fairly treated applicants, after objective performance information was controlled. In Study 2, the effect of unfair treatment on job applicant ratings was found to be moderated by managers’ just world beliefs, with applicant ratings reflecting more derogation among managers with higher (vs. lower) Belief in a Just World. In Study 3, the pattern of results from Study 2 was replicated in a performance evaluation context using peers as raters. Moreover, in Study 3 an intervention that activated raters’ moral identity was found to attenuate victim derogation bias.     

Children's Sensitivity to Ulterior Motives When Evaluating Prosocial Behavior

Reasoning about ulterior motives was investigated among children ages 6–10 years (total N = 119). In each of two studies, participants were told about children who offered gifts to peers who needed help. Each giver chose to present a gift in either a public setting, which is consistent with having an ulterior motive to enhance one's reputation, or in a private setting, which is not consistent with having an ulterior motive. In each study, the 6‐ to 7‐year olds showed no evidence of understanding that the public givers might have ulterior motives, but the 8‐ to 10‐year olds rated the private givers more favorably. In 3. , the older children were more likely than the younger children to refer to impression management when explaining their judgments of the givers. The younger children who mentioned impression management did so to justify a preference for public givers (e.g., by explaining that public givers are nicer because more of their peers will know that they are nice). Results from 4. suggest that developmental change in children's reasoning about intentions and social outcomes contributes to their understanding of ulterior motives.     

Gettier made ESEE

Previous research in experimental philosophy has suggested that moral judgments can influence the ordinary application of a number of different concepts, including attributions of knowledge. But should epistemologists care? The present set of studies demonstrate that this basic effect can be extended to overturn intuitions in some of the most theoretically central thought experiments in contemporary epistemology: Gettier cases. Furthermore, experiment 3 shows that this effect is unlikely to be mediated by a simple desire to blame, suggesting that a correct psychological account of ordinary knowledge attribution may include moral judgment.     

When psychology undermines beliefs

This paper attempts to specify the conditions under which a psychological explanation can undermine or debunk a set of beliefs. The focus will be on moral and religious beliefs, where a growing debate has emerged about the epistemic implications of cognitive science. Recent proposals by Joshua Greene and Paul Bloom will be taken as paradigmatic attempts to undermine beliefs with psychology. I will argue that a belief p may be undermined whenever: (i) p is evidentially based on an intuition which (ii) can be explained by a psychological mechanism that is (iii) unreliable for the task of believing p; and (iv) any other evidence for belief p is based on rationalization. I will also consider and defend two equally valid arguments for establishing unreliability: the redundancy argument and the argument from irrelevant factors. With this more specific understanding of debunking arguments, it is possible to develop new replies to some objections to psychological debunking arguments from both ethics and philosophy of religion.     

Why people fail to bike the talk: Car dependence as a barrier to cycling

Antecedent conditions of cycling have been extensively studied, yet barriers that prevent individuals from choosing bicycle transportation are less known. The present study, conducted on a sample of individuals who were both cyclists and drivers (N = 280), investigated whether dependence on car transportation significantly reduces cycling frequency. It also assessed the predictive validity of a larger set of cycling determinants that included moral, objective environmental, demographic and car-related variables. Responses were analyzed using a structural equation modeling approach. Results show that moral considerations do little to predict cycling frequency and that car-related factors such as perceived behavioral control to reduce car use (β = 0.28) and car use habits (β = -0.27) have the strongest predictive power. Objective environmental factors such as temperature (β = -0.13) and altitude (β = -0.15) or demographic factors such as gender (β = 0.19) were also significant predictors of cycling frequency. The present study highlights a new perspective of understanding cycling behavior and pleads for the inclusion of car-related factors in its future conceptualizations and interventions to encourage it.     

Unable to resist temptation: How self-control depletion promotes unethical behavior

Across four experimental studies, individuals who were depleted of their self-regulatory resources by an initial act of self-control were more likely to “impulsively cheat” than individuals whose self-regulatory resources were intact. Our results demonstrate that individuals depleted of self-control resources were more likely to behave dishonestly (Study 1). Depletion reduced people’s moral awareness when they faced the opportunity to cheat, which, in turn, was responsible for heightened cheating (Study 2). Individuals high in moral identity, however, did not show elevated levels of cheating when they were depleted (Study 3), supporting our hypothesis that self-control depletion increases cheating when it robs people of the executive resources necessary to identify an act as immoral or unethical. Our results also show that resisting unethical behavior both requires and depletes self-control resources (Study 4). Taken together, our findings help to explain how otherwise ethical individuals predictably engage in unethical behavior.