Azim and Stephanie have just had their paper with collaborator Jared Piazza, Morality and the Religious Mind: Why theists and non-theists differ, accepted at Trends in Cognitive Sciences. The short review paper details and explains the differences between religious believers and non-believers on issues of moral decision-making and behavior. The abstract is appended below, and you can read the in press version of the paper here.    ...

Our latest paper, Free Will and Punishment: Diminished Belief in Free Will Reduces Retribution, co-authored with a long list of collaborators (Joshua Greene, Johan Karremans, Jamie Luguri, Cory Clark, Jonathan Schooler, Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs) was just accepted at Psychological Science. In four studies, the paper shows that diminishing people’s beliefs about free will reduces the amount of retributive punishment they seek for...

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...

Following up on an earlier paper with Mijke Rhemtulla on the connections between crime and national rates of heaven and hell belief, Lara Aknin and I have been looking at how the balance of these religious beliefs predict national happiness rates. Our new paper, recently published in PLoS One shows a very similar connection to the one we see with crime rates. Here’s a link to the paper, titled The Emotional Toll of Hell: Cross-National...

Azim Shariff and Kathleen Vohs have won a Big Questions in Free Will essay prize for their article, “What would you do if you didn’t have free will?” forthcoming in Scientific American.