Does it always feel good to get what you want? Young children differentiate between material and wicked desires

One line of research on children's attributions of guilt suggests that 3‐year‐olds attribute negative emotion to self‐serving victimizers, slightly older children attribute happiness, and with increasing age, attributions become negative again (i.e., a three‐step model; Yuill et al., 1996, Br. J. Dev. Psychol., 14, 457). Another line of research provides reason to expect that 3‐year‐olds may be predisposed to view self‐serving moral transgression as leading to positive emotion; this is a linear developmental model in which emotion attributions to transgressors become increasingly negative over the course of childhood (e.g., Nunner‐Winkler & Sodian, 1988, Child Dev., 59, 1323). However, key differences in methodology make it difficult to compare across these findings. The present study was designed to address this problem. We asked how 3‐ to 9‐year‐old children (n = 111) reason about transgression scenarios that involve satisfying wicked desires (wanting to cause harm and doing so successfully) versus material desires (wanting an object and getting it successfully via harmful behaviour). Three‐year‐old children reasoned differently about desire and emotion across these two types of transgressions, attributing negative emotion in the case of wicked desires and positive emotion in the case of material desires. This pattern of emotion attribution by young children provides new information about how young children process information about desires and emotions in the moral domain, and it bridges a gap in the existing literature on this topic.     

How pills undermine skills: Moralization of cognitive enhancement and causal selection

Despite the promise to boost human potential and wellbeing, enhancement drugs face recurring ethical scrutiny. The present studies examined attitudes toward cognitive enhancement in order to learn more about these ethical concerns, who has them, and the circumstances in which they arise. Fairness-based concerns underlay opposition to competitive use—even though enhancement drugs were described as legal, accessible and affordable. Moral values also influenced how subsequent rewards were causally explained: Opposition to competitive use reduced the causal contribution of the enhanced winner’s skill, particularly among fairness-minded individuals. In a follow-up study, we asked: Would the normalization of enhancement practices alleviate concerns about their unfairness? Indeed, proliferation of competitive cognitive enhancement eradicated fairness-based concerns, and boosted the perceived causal role of the winner’s skill. In contrast, purity-based concerns emerged in both recreational and competitive contexts, and were not assuaged by normalization.     

Integrating values and cognitive style in a model of right-wing radicalism

Research has shown that multi-factorial models of ideology not only account for political orientation but also highlight its core aspects (Feldman & Johnston, 2014). Recently, Montuori (2005) argued that reasoning according to a “logic of disjunction that creates binary opposition” exacerbates what is termed the “totalitarian mindset” (p. 26). In this study we examined this hypothesis by testing a model in which a disjunctive binary logic mediates values and proxies for right-wing radicalism. Methods: 425 participants completed a survey on political orientation that included measures of social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism. Personal values, egalitarianism, and beliefs in a free society were also assessed as they are motives typically associated with ideology. Lastly, we assessed disjunctive logic based on a scale derived from a comprehensive study of ambiguity intolerance markers. Results: A structural equation model in which beliefs in free society, egalitarianism, security, universalism and traditionalism predicted right-wing radicalism was tested with or without interposing a disjunctive logic factor. Our findings show that disjunctive logic played a major role in predicting behaviors associated with right-wing radicalism.