Azim’s new paper with Dylan Wiwad and Lara Aknin now published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. This paper looks at how the perception of income mobility makes people more tolerant of income inequality. Abstract below and paper available here. American politicians often justify income inequality by referencing the opportunities people have to move between economic stations. Though past research has shown associations...

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Our new research paper, Negative Stereotypes Cause Christians to Underperform in and Disidentify with Science, with collaborators Kimberly Rios and Rebecca Trotton, and CaML members Zhen Cheng and Azim Shariff  is now in press at Social and Personality Psychological Science. The paper shows how negative stereotypes about Christians’ performance in science can actually diminish their performance at analytical tasks and sap their interest...

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Azim’s paper with Aiyana Willard, Tess Andersen and Ara Norenzayan, Religious Priming: A meta-analysis with a focus on religious prosociality, has just been accepted at Personality and Social Psychology Review. The paper contains several effect size and p-curve analyses for 93 religious priming studies (n = 11, 653). The abstract is appended below, and the in press draft of the paper is available here. You can find a near comprehensive...

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In collaboration with Jared Piazza at the University of Pennsylvania, Azim and Stephanie have published a new brief review article attempting to explain the differences in moral behavior and decision-making between religious believers and non-believers. A pdf of the paper is available here. The abstract is appended below: Religions have come to be intimately tied to morality and much recent research has shown that theists and nontheists differ...

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In collaboration with an all-star list of researchers, Azim’s new article on how learning about the brain reduces people’s attitudes about blame and retributive punishment is now published in Psychological Science. A pdf of the paper is available here. The abstract is appended below: If free-will beliefs support attributions of moral responsibility, then reducing these beliefs should make people less retributive in their attitudes...

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Cory Clark leads our new JPSP paper presenting 5 studies showing how a desire for comeuppance increases individual’s belief in free will. Abstract: Belief in free will is a pervasive phenomenon that has important consequences for prosocial actions and punitive judgments, but little research has investigated why free will beliefs are so widespread. Across 5 studies using experimental, survey, and archival data and multiple measures of free...

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