The penitence congruity effect observed in adults suggests that people may assess wrongdoers more leniently when they exhibit guilt and deontological beliefs. It means that judgments about one’s ...morality are influenced not only by their actions but also by their expressed moral emotions and beliefs. To determine whether children also exhibit this effect, we studied
N
= 250 children aged 10 and 11. We presented them with six vignettes: four depicting morally questionable actions (cheating on an exam, lying about homework, fighting with another student, stealing money found in a school hallway) and two displaying socially undesirable behaviors (attending school in pajamas, being late to school). Children also received information about the wrongdoer’s emotions (presence or absence of guilt) and beliefs (deontological stance or its absence) or were provided with no additional information on emotions or beliefs. Participants were then asked to assess a wrongdoer’s morality for each story. Our findings not only confirm the presence of the penitence congruity effect in children but also demonstrate its applicability to non-conventional behaviors. Specifically, when a wrongdoer expresses guilt and acknowledges wrongdoing, children are more lenient in their evaluations than in the control condition when no insights into the wrongdoer’s emotions or beliefs are provided. The results align with the person-centered theory, which posits that individuals assess overall character rather than isolated actions, considering all available information about the person in question. The findings hold potential applications, e.g., in moral education.
Opinions on abortion are more polarized than opinions on most other moral issues. Why are some people pro-choice and some pro-life? Religious and political preferences play a role here, but ...pro-choice and pro-life people may also differ in other aspects. In the current preregistered study (
N
= 479), we investigated how pro-choice women differ in their moral foundations from pro-life women. When the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) was applied (i.e., when declared moral principles were measured), pro-life women scored higher than pro-choice women in loyalty, authority, and purity. However, when women were asked about moral judgments indirectly via more real-life problems from the Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFV), pro-choice women scored higher than pro-life women in emotional and physical care and liberty but lower in loyalty. When we additionally controlled for religious practice and political views, we found no differences between groups in declaring moral foundations (MFQ). However, in the case of real-life moral judgments (MFV), we observed higher care, fairness, and liberty among pro-choice and higher authority and purity among pro-life. Our results show intriguing nuances between women pro-choice and pro-life as we found a different pattern of moral foundations in those groups depending on whether we measured their declared abstract moral principles or moral judgment about real-life situations. We also showed how religious practice and political views might play a role in such differences. We conclude that attitudes to abortion “go beyond” abstract moral principles, and the real-life context matters in moral judgments.
Graphical abstract
Although the susceptibility to reasoning biases is often assumed to be a stable trait, the temporal stability of people's performance on popular heuristics-and-biases tasks has been rarely directly ...tested. The present study addressed this issue and examined a potential determinant for answer change. Participants solved the same set of "bias" tasks twice in two test sessions, two weeks apart. We used the two-response paradigm to test the stability of both initial (intuitive) and final (deliberate) responses. We hypothesized that participants who showed higher conflict detection in their initial intuitive responses at session 1 (as indexed by a relative confidence decrease compared to control problems), would be less stable in their responses between session 1 and 2. Results showed that performance on the reasoning tasks was highly, but not entirely, stable two weeks later. Notably, conflict detection in session 1 was significantly more pronounced in those cases that participants changed their answer between session 1 and 2 than when they did not change their answer between sessions. We discuss practical and theoretical implications.
Intertemporal choice requires one to decide between smaller sooner and larger later payoffs and is captured by discount rates. Across two preregistered experiments testing three language pairs ...(Polish vs. English, Spanish, and German; Experiment 1) and with incentivized participants (Experiment 2), we found no evidence that using a foreign language decreased the strength or increased the consistency of intertemporal choices. On the contrary, there was some evidence of stronger discounting when a foreign language was used. We confirmed prior findings that more reflective individuals discount less strongly but observed that they were just as (un)affected by using foreign language as less reflective individuals. Thus, we provide preliminary evidence that the foreign language effect is robust to individual differences in cognitive reflection.
ABSTRACT
In his recent paper, Duttle (2016) showed that individuals with higher cognitive abilities show less overconfidence. In these findings, cognitive abilities were equated with an analytic ...cognitive style (as measured by a cognitive reflection test, or CRT), although recent works in the field of cognitive psychology suggest separating these two constructs. In particular, it is argued that the analytic cognitive style, but not cognitive abilities, decreases susceptibility to cognitive biases. Analyses of data from Duttle's study support this assertion. Implications for cognitive psychology and behavioural economics are discussed.
In this research we investigated Confucian and Protestant work ethics (CWE and PWE) among 160 Polish and Korean respondents, distributed into balanced groups with regard to region, occupational ...status, and gender. We found that Koreans revealed higher levels of PWE than did Poles. CWE turned out to be not exclusive to Asian cultures, as Poles scored higher than did Koreans. The results support the necessity of reconciling cultural differences. We think that values, which are believed to support economic development, are not related to one particular work ethic.
This paper has two aims. First, we investigate how often people make choices conforming to Bayes' rule when natural sampling is applied. Second, we show that using Bayes' rule is not necessary to ...make choices satisfying Bayes' rule. Simpler methods, even fallacious heuristics, might prescribe correct choices reasonably often under specific circumstances. We considered elementary situations with binary sets of hypotheses and data. We adopted an ecological approach and prepared two-stage computer tasks resembling natural sampling. Probabilistic relations were inferred from a set of pictures, followed by a choice which was made to maximize the chance of a preferred outcome. Use of Bayes' rule was deduced indirectly from choices. Study 1 used a stratified sample of N = 60 participants equally distributed with regard to gender and type of education (humanities vs. pure sciences). Choices satisfying Bayes' rule were dominant. To investigate ways of making choices more directly, we replicated Study 1, adding a task with a verbal report. In Study 2 (N = 76) choices conforming to Bayes' rule dominated again. However, the verbal reports revealed use of a new, non-inverse rule, which always renders correct choices, but is easier than Bayes' rule to apply. It does not require inversion of conditions transforming P(H) and P(D|H) into P(H|D) when computing chances. Study 3 examined the efficiency of three fallacious heuristics (pre-Bayesian, representativeness, and evidence-only) in producing choices concordant with Bayes' rule. Computer-simulated scenarios revealed that the heuristics produced correct choices reasonably often under specific base rates and likelihood ratios. Summing up we conclude that natural sampling results in most choices conforming to Bayes' rule. However, people tend to replace Bayes' rule with simpler methods, and even use of fallacious heuristics may be satisfactorily efficient.
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