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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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...

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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.    

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Graduating lab member Ezra Markowitz successfully defended his dissertation, Affective and moral roots of environmental stewardship: The role of obligation gratitude and compassion, to a packed crowd on August 8th. Ezra is currently finishing as a Scholar-in-Residence at American University, and will be starting a post-doc at Princeton University this fall.

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At this August’s annual APA convention in Orlando, Azim received the APA Division 36 (Psychology of Religion and Spirituality)’s Margaret Gorman Early Career Award. The slides for his award address, titled Religion Evolved, are available in here: (keynote (best)  powerpoint   pdf).

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With over 17,000 views, Azim and Mijke’s recent paper on the Divergent Effects of Beliefs in Heaven and Hell on National Crime Rates is currently the most read paper of the last 30 days on PLoS One’s open-access website.

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