Watch Dr. Shariff’s TED talk on the moralization of effort: does working hard really make you a good person?

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We have a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General on the Moralization of Effort. The research is led by recent UCI PhD graduate Jared Celniker. Eight studies, across multiple countries and domains, show that people find the expenditure of effort morally good, even if the effort produces nothing of value. This is a sensible heuristic at the individual, interpersonal level. But when scaled up to the societal level, the...

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Susan Pinker writes about our new paper If I Could Do It, So Can They: Among the Rich, Those With Humbler Origins are Less Sensitive to the Difficulties of the Poor for the Wall Street Journal. The writeup is here (paywalled). You can read the original research (open access), led by Hyunjin Koo, here.

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Joe Green and Azim Shariff have a new article in Psyche titled Our evolved privacy intuitions aren’t made for this era. The article is based on a paper they wrote with Will Jettinghoff in Current Directions in Psychological Science titled The Privacy Mismatch: Evolved Intuitions in a Digital World. 

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A new lab paper called How safe is safe enough? Psychological mechanisms underlying extreme safety demands for self-driving cars by Azim Shariff, Jean-François Bonnefon, and Iyad Rahwan has just been published in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies. A free preprint is available here on ResearchGate: And here’s the abstract: Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) promise of a multi-trillion-dollar industry that revolutionizes...

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For those who are interested, a set of 19 lectures from Dr. Shariff’s undergraduate evolutionary psychology course is available here:    ...

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