Wind energy is widely supported, yet specific projects encounter local contestation. Moving beyond NIMBY-based interpretations, this research examined social acceptance of wind energy as a place-based and socially situated judgment. Across two Italian experimental studies, we tested whether making place attachment salient reduces acceptance of a proposed wind farm and whether environmental, economic, and social motivations relate to acceptance under different place and normative conditions. In Study 1 (N = 491), participants evaluated a wind farm near either a personally meaningful natural place or a non-meaningful place. Place attachment salience reduced local acceptability and support, whereas general support for wind energy did not differ between conditions. Economic motivation was positively associated with acceptance in the low-salience condition, whereas the association between social motivation and acceptance did not differ significantly between conditions. In Study 2 (N = 509), all participants evaluated a project in a high place-attachment context and received local descriptive norm information indicating low or high local support. The manipulation changed perceived local support but did not increase acceptance. More importantly, social motivation interacted with the local descriptive norm: it predicted acceptance when local support was low, but not when support was high, suggesting that community-oriented reasons may sustain acceptance when local consensus is absent. Together, the findings show that local acceptability of wind energy is not a simple application of general support for renewables to a specific site. Acceptance depends on how renewable energy projects are interpreted in relation to place meaning, motivational reasons, and local social legitimacy.
Digital technologies shape how people think, learn and act, yet evidence on neural mechanisms supporting their use remains fragmented across research domains. Here, we make the case for a Cognitive Neuroscience of Technology: a mechanistic research programme that examines how technologies recruit, extend and reshape cognition across the lifespan. By situating digital interaction within the broader domain of human tool use, we synthesise behavioural and neuroimaging evidence using the recently proposed hub-and-processors model of technological cognition as an organising framework. This model links modality-sensitive neural systems (processors) to three integrative hubs: the area PF of the left inferior parietal lobule, which supports causal–mechanical inference; the anterior temporal lobe, which supports cross-modal conceptual knowledge; and the precuneus, which supports visuospatial processing. Flexible scheduling and executive control in the left inferior frontal gyrus coordinate the operation of these hubs. The programme also places social cognition at the centre of digital interaction. Technologies that communicate, personalise their responses or conceal their causal mechanisms—including recommender systems and conversational artificial intelligence (AI)—may engage processes involved in social learning, intention attribution and communication, prompting users to treat digital artefacts as partly agent-like. We set out a research agenda that integrates the physical and social dimensions of technological cognition and generates testable predictions for cognitive assessment, technological reserve across the lifespan, digital markers of neurodegeneration, neurorehabilitation and human–AI interaction.
Moral psychology has largely treated moral violations as features of behaviour that observers detect and then evaluate. This paper introduces Motivated Violation Construction (MVC): the proposal that observers may classify ambiguous behaviour as morally wrong when that classification supports a prior negative evaluation. MVC shifts whether behaviour enters the moral domain, rather than merely intensifying evaluation after entry. Factors such as threat, dislike, envy/status resentment, or group allegiance are proposed to lower the classification threshold under negative motivation. Positive stances raise it. The paper focuses on violation construction under negative motivation, where moral content is added rather than withheld. MVC concerns the point at which behaviour is classified as wrong, before its severity is evaluated. MVC is distinct from motivated reasoning, which shapes how people judge behaviour already seen as wrong, and from moralisation, which concerns shifts in what a society treats as moral issues. Four predictions are advanced. Negative motivation increases, and positive motivation decreases, the frequency with which identical behaviour is classified as a violation. When the behaviour is genuinely ambiguous, this effect is strongest. It weakens where moral consensus is clear. Differences in classification track the observer's motives rather than the behaviour. Motivation affects classification more strongly than severity, and this asymmetry is moderated by ambiguity. Each prediction has operationalisations and procedural falsifiability conditions, with a registered manipulation check on the evaluative-stance induction.
Dual inheritance theory posits that human behavior is shaped by the interplay of two distinct inheritance systems, genetic and cultural evolution. This framework has become a theoretical cornerstone for a range of disciplines seeking to understand the unique evolutionary trajectory of Homo sapiens, emphasising that cumulative culture has co-evolved with species-specific psychological mechanisms that facilitate its transmission. The burgeoning field of evolutionary psychiatry seeks to bring the powerful theoretical insights of evolutionary biology to bear in the study of mental disorder, yet no existing accounts draw explicitly upon the principles of dual inheritance theory. This paper aims to address this gap, breaking new ground theoretically. The significance of dual inheritance theory for evolutionary psychiatry is discussed, then its practical utility is demonstrated through presentation of the Extended Sexual Competition Hypothesis of eating disorders and muscle dysmorphia. By integrating cultural and biological evolution, this novel hypothesis offers a unified perspective on these debilitating and often treatment-refractory conditions, pointing to testable predictions that, if validated, could inform early interventions and targeted public health strategies.
Games engage more than three billion players worldwide, and the interventions that seek to harness them for behavioral change, from gamification to serious games, produce strikingly heterogeneous results: meta-analytic syntheses report effects ranging from negligible to moderate, with a dispersion that the game elements treated as active ingredients by design-centered accounts explain poorly. We take this heterogeneity to be the phenomenon that a theory of behavioral change through games must explain. Our proposed hypothesis is that the relevant explanatory variable is controlling regulation, understood as the degree to which a design displaces the player's own reasons for acting, whereas instrumental purpose as such, which many effective interventions openly declare, carries no comparable explanatory weight. Drawing on motivational psychology, cultural economics, and game studies, we develop a four-pole framework that reconceptualizes gameplay as cultural meaning-making, identifying games as designed artifacts, play as evolved behavioral disposition, gameplay as situated experience, and re-play as reflective cultural practice, whose dynamic interaction generates behavioral transformation across extended temporal scales. Central to our analysis is the ludic dilemma, which we locate in the metacommunicative frame that constitutes an activity as play rather than in reward contingency alone, and which therefore predicts a discontinuity where accounts grounded in the overjustification effect predict a gradient. We specify what the framework adds to meaningful gamification, situated motivational affordances, Self-Determination Theory, and the debriefing tradition in simulation research, and we derive predictions, each with operational indicators and falsification conditions, that discriminate cultural meaning-making from these alternatives.
