Watch Dr. Shariff’s TED talk on the moralization of effort: does working hard really make you a good person?
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…
WSJ 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.
Our 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.
New 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…
Evolutionary Psychology lectures available for free on Youtube
For those who are interested, a set of 19 lectures from Dr. Shariff’s undergraduate evolutionary psychology course is available here:
New 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…
New paper on the Psychology of Inequality in Nature Human Behaviour
Our new paper, Shifting attributions for poverty motivates opposition to inequality and enhances egalitarianism, led by Drs. Paul Piff and Dylan Wiwad, is now available at Nature Human Behaviour: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0835-8 Abstract: Amidst rising economic inequality and mounting evidence of its pernicious social effects, what motivates opposition to inequality? Five studies (n = 34,442) show that attributing poverty…
Article in Nature: The Moral Machine experiment
Working together with Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim, Johnathan Friedemann Schulz, Joseph Henrich, Jean-François Bonnefon, and Iyad Rahwan, Azim published a paper in Nature in October 2018. It reports a worldwide study examining how people think about the moral decisions machines might make in the future. The link to the paper can be found…
New review paper on the Belief in God
Brett Mercier, Stephanie Kramer and Azim Shariff have a new paper out in Current Directions in Psychological Science that succinctly reviews the psychology literature on why people believe in God–and why some people don’t. The paper is available here (free preprint), and the abstract is pasted below: Belief in a god or gods is a…