Isabel Thielmann, University of Koblenz-Landau Cognitive Psychology Lab, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 29 April).

Lying but still feeling moral: How individuals balance the costs and benefits of immoral action

Dishonesty constitutes a widespread aspect of human social interaction, ranging from private contexts (e.g., cheating in romantic relationships), over semi-public settings (e.g., tax evasion), to large public crises (e.g., cheating on pollution emissions tests). Despite the high prevalence of immoral behavior, however, most people feel moral and indeed more moral than others. In my talk, I will bring together evidence showing how people manage to act immorally but still feel moral. Specifically, I will present research using behavioral decision-making tasks (i.e., cheating paradigms) to illuminate how (i) the justifiability of lying, (ii) the magnitude of (objective and subjective) incentives, and (iii) personality influence dishonest behavior. Overall, these findings show that people are well-versed at balancing the psychological costs and the tangible benefits of lying – and yet, some individuals are just honest.

Background reading:

Shalvi, S., Gino, F., Barkan, R., & Ayal, S. (2015). Self-Serving Justifications: Doing wrong and feeling moral. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(2), 125–130.

Amber Gayle Thalmayer, University of Lausanne, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 22 April).

How universal is the Big Five? Lexical studies of personality in African languages complicate the story

The Big Five model of personality trait structure plays a central role in personality psychology, and Big Five inventories have been translated and exported around the globe. This model was established from initial cross-cultural evidence using lexical studies, a method uniquely well suited to inter-language comparisons. However, later lexical studies in European and Asian languages were equivocal about the Big Five, and recent work in African languages does not replicate the model. What does this mean about the Big Five? In what ways is it appropriate to use globally, and in what ways is it not? In this talk I will present our recent mixed-methods lexical study of personality in Khoekhoegowab, in press at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. I will share the approach we used to achieve the largest lexical study yet conducted in Africa, one of few anywhere to rely on community rather than student samples, and a first to incorporate qualitative interviews to supplement quantitative results. The results will be discussed in the context of other evidence from Africa and in Asia, and what this body of work suggests about the Big Five, a model that may reveal as much about the cultural conditions of the industrialized West as about universal human variation.

Supporting literature

Thalmayer, A. G., Job, S., Shino, E. N., Robinson, S. L., & Saucier, G. (2020, November 30). ǂŪsigu: A Mixed-Method Lexical Study of Character Description in Khoekhoegowab. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000372

Zhansheng Chen, Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 15 April).

When people permit the innocent to suffer: A generalized compensation belief hypothesis

The current research proposed a generalized compensation belief hypothesis that individuals, as observers, would grant moral permission to someone paying forward unfair treatment to an innocent person as a means to compensate for the perpetrator’s previously experienced mistreatment. Across nine studies, we showed that participants were more likely to morally permit and engage in the same negative act once they knew about previous maltreatment to which an actor was subjected. Required compensation acted as the mediator to account for the effect of previous treatment on moral permission. Besides, this belief was less pronounced when the maltreatment was received a long (versus short) time ago. When it comes to downstream consequences, such generalized compensation belief results in subsequent unethical behavior via moral relativism.

Franziska Ehrke, University Koblenz-Landau Department of Social, Environmental and Economic Psychology, will give a presentation via Zoom in this week’s Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology research seminar (Thursday 8 April).

Vicarious contact in media interventions: The role of ingroup perspective taking and outgroup empathy

Social and entertainment media provide the opportunity for indirect contact and have become an important tool for minorities to share tolerance-promoting messages via the internet. Thus, they could be powerful tools in reducing intergroup conflict and promoting tolerance towards diversity and marginalized groups. Despite being popular, wide-spread, and easily accessible for a diverse audience, there is a lack of research evaluating if and how vicarious contact succeeds. Therefore, this research evaluated the effectiveness of a YouTube campaign video that used vicarious contact to improve attitudes towards gay men. Extending previous research that demonstrated the positive impact of perspective-taking and empathy with outgroups, this research examined the mediating role of perspective-taking and empathy with both the outgroup as well as the ingroup protagonists in the video for improving outgroup attitudes with media interventions.

The pre-registered hypotheses were tested with heterosexual adult participants in two well-powered experiments: Experiment 1 used a German sample (N = 274, 53% employees, 24% students, 55% women, Age: M = 42, SD = 16) and Experiment 2 an Italian sample (N = 330, 27% employees, 41% students, 65% women, Age: M = 33, SD = 13). In both experiments, participants were randomly allocated to a control-group design (campaign vs. control video). Whereas the campaign video presents a gay couple asking by-passers to translate an email that confronted them with anti-gay discrimination, in the control condition the same video was presented muted with alternative subtitles about two brothers facing corruption.

As pre-registered, in Experiment 1 the campaign video improved heterosexuals’ explicit and implicit attitudes (IAT) towards gay men. Explorative analyses revealed that increased perspective-taking with the ingroup protagonists mediated increased empathy with the gay outgroup protagonists, and both ingroup perspective-taking and outgroup empathy sequentially mediated more positive outgroup attitudes. This serial indirect effect was then pre-registered for Experiment 2 which used a repeated-measures design. As pre-registered, repeated-measurement ANOVAs showed that watching the campaign video improved explicit outgroup attitudes. Path analyses replicated the pre-registered serial indirect effect on explicit outgroup attitudes found in Experiment 1. Nevertheless, there was no total effect of the video on explicit post-measure outgroup attitudes. This is consistent with the finding from the repeated-measures ANOVA that there was no significant difference between the experimental and the control group in post-measures of outgroup attitudes.

As previous research showed that contact as an intervention was most effective for people with less contact with sexual minorities, future research should test the effects targeting participants with little to no pre-existing contact. Additionally, future research should go beyond measuring empathy with the protagonists in the video and test whether the video also increases empathy with the outgroup in general.

Supporting literature:

Batson, C. D., & Ahmad, N. Y. (2009). Using empathy to improve intergroup attitudes and relations. Social Issues and Policy Review, 3(1), 141–177. doi: 10.1111/j.1751-2409.2009.01013.x