When in time do people stop judging past actions by today's moral standards? Across two experiments, we tested whether and how time—ranging from today to medieval times—affects moral condemnation across a range of actions. In Experiment 1, we found that as temporal distance increased, participants were less likely to apply modern moral standards. However, highly harmful transgresions (e.g., sexual assault) showed attenuated discounting. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings—testing whether perceived knowledge of someone in the past explains why temporal discounting occurs. We find evidence that belief that a transgressor had knowledge of the action being a moral wrong partially explains whether people apply their current moral standards. These results suggest that people stop applying their own moral standards when evaluating the past and do so based on both harm and inferences that a person should have known the action was wrong.

Moral curiosity is shaped by both informational considerations (e.g., how surprising or informative a target is) and self-relevant considerations (e.g., perceived similarity). Across three preregistered studies (total N = 1,184), we examine how these drivers operate for targets of differing moral valence (good vs. bad) and typicality (typical vs. atypical) and use social identity complexity (SIC) to illustrate how differences in self-concept relate to these patterns. Studies 1–2 show that curiosity about morally good targets is grounded in perceived similarity: people are more curious about morally good others to the extent that they feel similar to them. Consistent with this account, SIC predicts reduced perceived similarity to morally good targets and, in turn, reduced curiosity. In contrast, curiosity about morally bad targets does not reliably track with perceived similarity, nor is it significantly associated with SIC. Study 3 further clarifies the similarity-curiosity link. Perceived similarity continues to predict curiosity about morally good targets, but for morally bad targets, this association only emerges when they are atypical (not typical). SIC was linked to lower perceived similarity to morally good targets overall, but lower curiosity only about typical (not atypical) moral good targets. Together, these findings suggest that curiosity about morally good others is primarily driven by self-relevance, whereas curiosity about morally bad others depends more on informational value. SIC serves to illustrate how variation in self-concept is associated with these distinct patterns of moral curiosity.

We propose a state-centered, behavioral view of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is often incompletely understood at the nation-state level, categorizing particular regimes as authoritarian, or at the individual level, as a set of tendencies or worldviews. We reposition behavior—specifically, person-state interaction—as the main unit of analysis, putting the “authority” back into authoritarianism. We argue that only behaviors that use state rules and state punishments to consolidate ruling class power should be considered authoritarian. In doing so, we achieve three main aims. First, we describe authoritarianism as a fundamentally motivational process, in which the state is used as a means to self- or group-serving ends. Second, we identify a set of behaviors that are rightly understood as authoritarian (e.g., punishing dissidents), as well as behaviors that should not be (e.g., interpersonal forms of punishment). Third, we identify previously overlooked behaviors that fit our definition of authoritarianism (e.g., administrative burden). Finally, we call for the exploration of situations where people might prefer state (to interpersonal) punishment, and prefer the enforcement of official rules (over social norms). Crucially, our view stands in sharp contrast to the prevailing understanding of punishment as cooperative, by centering the uniquely oppressive capacity of state power—with its monopoly on legitimate violence and its last word on legality in the courts. In sum, our state-centered behavioral view bridges individual- and regime-level interpretations of authoritarianism, to capture the unique opportunities available to satisfy self- or group-serving ends by use of the modern state.

People spend a lot of time at work, and increasingly look to their careers as a place to express their true, authentic selves. We examine two career pathways to the true self at work: moral careers (e.g., those in healthcare, social work), which should foster authenticity because morality is central to identity and the true self, and aesthetic careers (e.g., those in artistic and creative fields), which should foster authenticity through the freedom and autonomy they afford. Across three experiments (N = 1,232) and one archival study using the General Social Survey (GSS; N = 72,390), we compare these pathways from both third- and first-person perspectives. Study 1 shows that job seekers value the freedom and autonomy we theorize aesthetic careers provide. Study 2 shows that third-party observers expect aesthetic careers to afford greater freedom, access to the true self, happiness, and life satisfaction than moral careers. Study 3 uses the GSS and reveals the opposite pattern: people in moral careers report greater happiness and job satisfaction than those in aesthetic or control careers. Study 4 reconciles this discrepancy by directly comparing third- and first-person judgments about the true self. We find that expectations about aesthetic careers largely match reality, but that observers systematically underestimate the psychological benefits of moral careers. Together, these findings suggest that aesthetic careers offer a path to the true self and happiness at work, while the comparable, and sometimes greater, benefits of moral careers go underappreciated.

Decades of scholarship on gender have shown that women are judged to be more caring and more communal than men. Here we use multiple methods (N = 5,376) to test an intriguing claim entailed by this work: People think that women are morally superior to men. Using reverse-correlation methods, we show that mental representations of the face of “a morally good person” is a woman’s face. Next, using a novel profile-generation task, we find that people are more likely to ascribe more morally good traits to women than to men, both when they are spontaneously thinking of a woman (vs. a man) and when they are assigned to do so. Further, using a large database of 1,864 normed behaviors, we find that behaviors associated with moral goodness are also stereotyped as feminine. Finally, we use a novel impression updating task to explore a potential consequence of this phenomenon. Specifically, we find that immoral behavior is more diagnostic for women than men. As a result, equivalent moral transgressions lead to larger negative character updating for women than for men. In sum, these findings reveal that moral goodness is closely linked to gender concepts: people think women are morally superior to men.

Pursuing a life of moral excellence is often seen as allowing a person not only to live by good and just principles but also to live an authentic life that brings them closest to their true self. This view is taken to reflect the priority that people should place on moral pursuits or “moral primacy.” The results of four preregistered studies (N = 2,911) suggest that people do not always hold this view and highlight a tension within it: how can morality both constrain human behavior and afford the freedom to be one’s truest self? We find that people resolve this conflict with ‘value pluralism,’ preferring a balance of life pursuits across several value domains, where aesthetic pursuits are viewed as affording freedom from convention. We then adapt a personal change paradigm from prior work and develop a novel paradigm to examine whether people’s intuitions about the true self also reveal that a broader set of values—not just moral ones—inform judgments of the true self. We find no differences in true self judgments following the loss of an aesthetic versus moral quality. However, when directly comparing life paths, the pursuit of aesthetic excellence is sometimes viewed as offering greater access to one’s true self compared with moral excellence, in part because aesthetic pursuits are seen as less rule bound. These findings offer insights into the myriad paths a person can take in life while pursuing autonomy, authenticity, and closeness to their true self.

Public acts of virtue can promote prosocial norms yet are often met with moral scepticism - a phenomenon known as virtue discounting. What psychological processes might underlie people's propensity to both discount others' public virtue and also engage in it themselves? We examine one possible explanation: whether people expect their own public virtuous behaviour to be judged more favourably than others' similar actions. Across four pre-registered studies (N = 2511), we tested for self-serving asymmetries in moral expectations. In three between-subjects experiments, participants either anticipated how others would evaluate their own actions (meta-perceptions) or judged the actions of another person (third-party judgements). Study 1 found no asymmetry in moral goodness. But in Studies 2 and 3, participants expected their own public virtue to be judged as more principled (and more morally good, in Study 2), less reputation-driven, and more trustworthy. Study 3 showed these asymmetries held across multiple perspectives. In contrast, Study 4 used a within-subjects design and found that self-serving asymmetries disappeared when judgements were made side by side. Together, these findings clarify how self-enhancement shapes moral expectations under naturalistic conditions and extend research on moral self-enhancement beyond trait judgements to public virtue and its perceived motivation.

Women are consistently judged to be more caring and communal than men. We find that moral goodness itself is feminine at the level of faces, traits, behaviors, and impressions (N = 5,376). Using reverse-correlation methods, we show that mental representations of the face of “a morally good person” is a woman’s face. When completing a novel profile-generation task, people ascribe more morally good traits to women than to men, both when they spontaneously think of a woman (vs. a man) and when assigned. Across 1,864 previously normed behaviors, we find that actions associated with moral goodness are stereotyped as feminine. Finally, in a novel impression updating task, we find that immoral behavior is more diagnostic for women than men; equivalent moral transgressions lead to larger negative character updating for women than for men. In sum, moral goodness is gendered: people think women are morally superior to men.

In this paper, we sought to better understand people who identify politically as Leftists in the United States. We combined quantitative and qualitative methods to compare identification and beliefs of U.S. Leftists and Liberals. We recruited from online political spaces and Prolific (N = 621). Rather than identifying as more extreme Liberals, people recruited from Leftist spaces see Leftists as a distinct group, defined by their anti-capitalist ideology, and desire for radical societal change. This is part of a general moral opposition to the status quo – by committed Leftists but not convenience-sampled Liberals–which negatively predicted support for Joe Biden right before the 2020 election. In sum, committed Leftists see themselves as a distinct and meaningful political identity group that lies outside the liberal-conservative ideology spectrum.

A significant amount of punishment that happens in society is state punishment, that is, third-party punishment carried out by an organized political community in response to a rule violation. We argue that a complete psychology of punishment must consider state punishment as a distinct form. State punishment is a unique type of punishment because it is a special case of third-party punishment, pre-specified to occur after the violation of official rules and policies, carried out by people acting on behalf of a nation or government. State punishment, especially as compared to interpersonal punishment, is regarded as a legitimate form of violence, which communicates not just disapproval but information about procedures and power. Moreover, state punishment is made possible by state rules, which, unlike norms, are formalized, can be fully articulated and are perfectly transmissible across generations. We end the paper with implications for the psychology of punishment more broadly and future directions for better understanding the unique psychology of state punishment.

Rules are essential for the successful coordination of large-scale societies, with official, codified rules (e.g., laws) proscribing behaviors for everyone in their jurisdiction. These rules ostensibly provide a clear signal about what is permitted or prohibited, making it straightforward to identify when they have been broken. However, signals from descriptive norms, moral prohibition, and (lack of) legitimacy of enforcement can sometimes provide conflicting accounts of what behaviors really violate rules, possibly shaping whether someone thinks a rule has been broken at all. Across three experiments (N = 2,264), we examined how each of these signals affect rule violation judgments. In Study 1, we used a variety of real rules in the US and found that all four signals—descriptive norms, codification, moral wrongness, and legitimacy of punishment—are associated with judgments of whether a rule was broken, but to varying degrees. Study 2 replicated these findings in a preregistered study. Study 3 experimentally manipulated these four signals in a novel context using a conjoint design. We found that codification and moral wrongness most strongly influence rule concepts. This work goes beyond purely legalistic or formalist accounts of rules, showing that people’s intuitions about rule violations are shaped not only by codification but also by descriptive normativity, moral wrongness, and perceived legitimacy of enforcement.

Why is there so much diversity in fictional plots? Why are some fictional stories more popular in certain countries or during specific historical periods? In this paper, we propose an evolutionary psychological framework to address these questions. Fictional stories trigger a range of evolved psychological mechanisms—such as finding mates (romance fiction), exploring the world (adventure fiction), or avoiding threats (horror fiction). While these mechanisms are universal in human cognition, they vary in intensity across individuals and contexts. We leverage insights from personality psychology, behavioral ecology, and developmental psychology to explore how and why the sensitivity of these mechanisms varies. Then, by systematically identifying which story features activate which mechanism, we generate predictions about the diversity and variability of fiction preferences. This framework provides a new lens for understanding why certain stories become popular, how and when they emerged and spread, and how different story elements cluster together. It offers a theory-driven foundation for empirically studying the psychological drivers of storytelling.

Inhibition, an executive function, is critical for achieving goals that require suppressing unwanted behaviours, thoughts, or distractions. One hypothesis of the emotion and goal compatibility theory is that emotions of sadness and fear enhance inhibitory control. Across Experiments 1-4, we tested this hypothesis by inducing a happy, sad, fearful, and neutral emotional state prior to completing an inhibition task that indexed a specific facet of inhibition (oculomotor, resisting interference, behavioural, and cognitive). In Experiment 4, we included an anger induction to examine whether valence or motivational-orientation best-predicted performance. We found support that fear and sadness enhanced inhibition except when inhibition required resisting interference. We argue that sadness and fear enhance inhibitory control aiding the detection and analysis of problems (i.e. sadness) or threats (i.e. fear) within one's environment. In sum, this work highlights the importance of identifying how negative emotions can be beneficial for and interact with specific executive functions influencing down-stream processing including attention, cognition, and memory.

Rules serve many important functions in society. One such function is to codify, and make public and enforceable, a society’s desired prescriptions and proscriptions. This codification means that rules come with predefined punishments administered by third parties. We argue that when we look at how third parties punish rule violations, we see that rules and their punishments often serve dual functions. They support and help to maintain cooperation as it is usually theorized, but they also facilitate the domination of marginalized others. We begin by reviewing literature on rules and third-party punishment, arguing that a great deal of punishment research has neglected to consider the unique power of codified rules. We also argue that by focusing on codified rules, it becomes clear that the enforcement of such rules via third-party punishment is often used to exert control, punish retributively, and oppress outgroup members. By challenging idealized theory of rules as facilitators of social harmony, we highlight their role in satisfying personal punishment motives, and facilitating discrimination in a way that is uniquely justifiable to those who enforce them.

We examined whether the enforcement of phantom rules—frequently broken and rarely enforced codified rules—varies by the race of the rule breaker. First, we analyzed whether race affects when 311 calls, a nonemergency service, end in arrest in New York City. Across 10 years, we found that calls from census blocks of neighborhoods consisting of mostly White individuals were 65% less likely to escalate to arrest than those where White people were the numerical minority. Next, we experimentally manipulated transgressor race and found that participants ( N = 393) who were high in social dominance orientation were more likely to route 311 calls to 911 when the transgressor was Black (vs. White). We also explored the subjective experience of phantom rule enforcement; People of color report they are more likely to be punished for violating phantom rules compared to White people. Overall, we find evidence of racism in the enforcement of phantom rules.

Positive affect has been shown to promote task-switching performance in healthy young adults. Given the well-documented age-related decline in executive functioning, we asked whether induced positive affect also helps to improve task-switching performance in older adults. Sixty-eight younger and older adults performed a switching task before and after they had watched cartoon clips (positive affect group) or documentaries (neutral affect group). Positive affect was associated with reduced error rates across all trial types in both age groups. In older adults, the increase in accuracy came at the expense of slower response times for task-switch trials, resulting in greater switch costs. This pattern of findings is inconsistent with the popular notion that positive affect supports greater cognitive flexibility. Instead, positive affect may trigger adjustments in response control settings - such as a shift in the speed-accuracy trade-off toward more cautious responding - depending on the experienced level of task difficulty.

Looking to the popularity of superheroes, true crime stories, and anti-heroic characters like Tony Soprano, we investigated whether moral extremity, especially moral badness, piques curiosity. Across five experiments ( N = 2429), we examine moral curiosity, testing under what conditions the moral minds of others spark explanation-seeking behavior. In Experiment 1, we find that among the most widely watched Netflix shows in the US over a five-month period, the more immoral the protagonist, the more hours people spent watching. In Experiments 2a and 2b, we find that when given a choice to learn more about morally good, bad, ambiguous, or average others, people preferred to learn more about morally extreme people, both good and bad. Experiment 3 reveals that people are more curious for explanations about (vs. descriptions of) morally bad and ambiguous people compared to morally good ones. Finally, Experiment 4 tests the uniqueness of curiosity for moral ambiguity. We find that people are more drawn to moral rather than aesthetic ambiguity, suggesting that ambiguity, which is cognitively taxing and sometimes avoided, preferentially engenders information seeking in the moral domain. These findings suggest deviations from moral normativity, especially badness, spur curiosity. People are curious about immorality and agents who differ from the norm.