Watch Dr. Shariff’s TED talk on the moralization of effort
Watch Dr. Shariff’s TED talk on the moralization of effort: does working hard really make you a good person?
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The Moralization of Effort
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...
Read MoreWSJ article on our new paper about the attitudes the rich have for the poor
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.
Read MoreOur evolved privacy intuitions aren’t made for this era
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.
Read MoreNew paper on the safety demands of self-driving cars
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...
Read MoreNew paper on political differences in the motivated belief in free will
Our new paper on why conservatives tend to believe in free will more than do liberals, led by Drs. Jim Everett and Cory Clark, is now available at the Journal for Personality and Social Psychology. Preprint available here. Abstract: In 14 studies, we tested whether political conservatives’ stronger free will beliefs were linked to stronger and broader tendencies to moralize and, thus, a greater motivation to assign blame. In Study 1...
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