Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) can transport people to new, artificially generated environments and situations that are otherwise difficult to reproduce due to logistical and ethical constraints. Crucially, IVR has proven extremely effective in shaping attitudes and promoting desirable outcomes. Leveraging this feature, we utilized IVR to counteract the influence of mafias, one of the most detrimental phenomena in our society, by strengthening participants’ opposing attitudes and exploring their behavioral intentions. In a between-subject design study, 100 participants were exposed to either a scenario depicting typical mafia-related activities (experimental condition) or a scenario showing non-mafia-related crime (control condition). We recorded participants’ explicit and implicit attitudes one week before and immediately after the IVR exposure. Explicit attitudes were measured using the Attitudes towards Italian Mafias Scale, implicit attitudes with an ad-hoc Single Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT), and behavioral intentions by asking participants whether they would intervene, report, and testify against the crime witnessed in the virtual scenario. Participants in the experimental condition displayed more negative explicit attitudes towards mafias after experiencing the virtual scenario. However, they were also less certain about testifying against the crime, reflecting the well-known phenomenon of omertà, or the law of silence. Our findings confirm IVR as a valuable tool for changing attitudes by providing experiences that individuals might not otherwise encounter. This paves the way for exploring more sophisticated strategies to encourage individual and collective anti-mafia actions.

The term Proteus effect refers to the changes in attitudes and behavior induced by the characteristics of an embodied virtual agent. Whether the effect can extend to the moral sphere is currently unknown. To deal with this issue, we investigated if embodying virtual agents (i.e., avatars) with different characteristics modulate people's moral standards differentially. Participants were requested to embody an avatar resembling the Christian God in His anthropomorphic appearance or a control human avatar and to perform a text-based version of incidental and instrumental dilemmas in a virtual environment. For each participant, we recorded (1) chosen options (deontological vs. utilitarian), (2) decision times, (3) postdecision feelings, and (4) physiological reactions (skin conductance response and heart rate). We found that embodying God vs. a control avatar did not change the performance in the moral dilemma task, indicating that no strong Proteus effect was at play in our experimental conditions. We interpreted this result by examining the constraints and limitations of our task, reasoning about the necessary conditions for eliciting the Proteus effect, and discussing future developments and advances in the field. Moreover, we presented compelling effects concerning dilemma type, chosen option, personality traits, and religion affiliation, thus supporting and extending literature on decision making in moral dilemmas.

Human attention is naturally directed where others are looking. Primate research indicates that this phenomenon is influenced by the social rank of the gazer. Whether this applies to human societies remains underexplored. Diverging from the typical approach based on transient social rank manipulations in convenience samples, we tested low- and high-rank individuals permanently working in a large-scale organization. Participants executed saccades toward positions matching or not the gaze direction of distractor faces varying in dominance level (low, neutral, and high). The analysis of saccadic reaction time revealed that high-rank participants were more interfered by face distractors, regardless of dominance. Our results suggest that an important feature of leadership is related to the fine-tuning of social attention. These findings not only contribute to understanding how hierarchical rank shapes social cognition but also have implications for organizational behavior and leadership training strategies.

In this preregistered study, we tested the hypothesis that how people acquired their social status can influence others’ tendency to behave dishonestly towards them. Participants (N = 151) had the opportunity to lie for self-gain or be truthful to opponents with varying social status levels (i.e., high, middle, or low) which they had achieved through different strategies (i.e., competence, dominance, or virtue). Self-gain lies were significantly fewer when dealing with virtuous high-status opponents than dominant and competent ones. Moreover, opponents who gained high status through dominance elicited negative emotions (i.e., anger, disgust, pity), while virtuous and competent opponents elicited admiration and respect. This work highlights that it is the strategy used to attain high status, rather than the status itself, that significantly influences people's moral behaviors and attitudes toward others.

To believe in conspiracy theories is to suspect that (powerful) others are plotting behind one's back. Conspiracy beliefs might be therefore an issue of (dis)trust. In this study, we sought to explore whether this association is modulated by the way trust is operationalised and by the specific target to whom trust is directed. In doing so, we used two proxies of trust: (i) money investment within a hypothetical version of the trust game and (ii) the likelihood of disclosing a personal digital information (i.e. password). Then we presented participants with a set of trustees representing different social categories and having different degrees of closeness to the participants. Our results showed that when trust was expressed as money investment, higher levels of conspiracy mentality were associated to less trust towards powerful categories, such as ingroup politicians, scientists, public organisations, pharmaceutical and textile CEOs. Conversely, when trust was expressed as the likelihood of disclosing one's own password, this association was observed only when the trustee was an ingroup politician. Here, we demonstrated that the negative association between conspiracy mentality and trust is not a uniform phenomenon, rather is subject to the expression of trust and to its specific targets.

In two studies we aimed at developing the Attitude towards Italian Mafias Scale (AIMS). In study 1 (N = 292) we used an Exploratory Factor Analysis to reduce the number of the items and explore their latent constructs. In study 2 (N = 393) we performed a Confirmatory Factor Analysis on the resulting 18-item questionnaire, whose latent structure was best identified by a general factor Mafia Attitude and three specific factors related to Behaviors, Cognitions and Emotions-Cognitions towards mafias. Moreover, we showed that the AIMS has (i) discriminant validity compared to a measure of attitudes towards crime, (ii) predictive validity of donation behavior to an association against mafias, (iii) internal consistency, and (iv) invariance for people of the five deep-rooted mafia regions of Southern Italy and those from the rest of Italy. Finally, we observed a difference between the participants from the five deep-rooted mafia regions (i.e., Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Sicily) and the rest of Italy, with the former having surprisingly more negative attitudes towards mafias compared to the latter. The AIMS might help to reliably survey people’s sentiment towards Italian mafias and promote targeted and effective law-related education interventions.

Immersive virtual reality can give people the illusion of owning artificial bodies (i.e., avatars) and controlling their actions. Tellingly, people appear to adhere to the newly embodied entities not just on the basis of physical traits but also behaving accordingly with the hallmarks of the represented characters. In two studies we pushed the limits of this process by testing if one’s own sense of power could be affected by embodying the anthropomorphic representation of the Christian God, that is considered an omnipotent entity. A human Muscled and a Normotype avatar were used as controls. Results showed that participants embodying the God-avatar: i) reacted to a threatening event compromising their physical safety by exhibiting a lower skin conductance response and heart rate deceleration compared to the Normotype-control avatar (Study 1); ii estimated they had more physical abilities compared to both the Normotype-control and the Muscled-control avatars (Study 2). Taken together, our findings suggest that embodying an omnipotent agent may exert an influence on people’s perception of their own limits and capabilities, nourishing feelings of physical invulnerability and strength. Our study indicates that effectively embodying virtual role models may boost achievements and have translational implications in the field of empowerment.

People differ in their general tendency to endorse conspiracy theories (that is, conspiracy mentality). Previous research yielded inconsistent findings on the relationship between conspiracy mentality and political orientation, showing a greater conspiracy mentality either among the political right (a linear relation) or amongst both the left and right extremes (a curvilinear relation). We revisited this relationship across two studies spanning 26 countries (combined N = 104,253) and found overall evidence for both linear and quadratic relations, albeit small and heterogeneous across countries. We also observed stronger support for conspiracy mentality among voters of opposition parties (that is, those deprived of political control). Nonetheless, the quadratic effect of political orientation remained significant when adjusting for political control deprivation. We conclude that conspiracy mentality is associated with extreme left- and especially extreme right-wing beliefs, and that this non-linear relation may be strengthened by, but is not reducible to, deprivation of political control.

Research suggests that belief in conspiracy theories (CT) stems from basic psychological mechanisms and is linked to other belief systems (e.g. religious beliefs). While previous research has extensively examined individual and contextual variables associated with CT beliefs, it has not yet investigated the role of culture. In the current research, we tested, based on a situated cultural cognition perspective, the extent to which culture predicts CT beliefs. Using Hofstede’s model of cultural values, three nation-level analyses of data from 25, 19 and 18 countries using different measures of CT beliefs (Study 1, N = 5,323; Study 2a, N = 12,255; Study 2b, N = 30,994) revealed positive associations between Masculinity, Collectivism and CT beliefs. A cross-sectional study among US citizens (Study 3, N = 350), using individual-level measures of Hofstede’s values, replicated these findings. A meta-analysis of correlations across studies corroborated the presence of positive links between CT beliefs, Collectivism, r = .31, 95%CI = [.15; .47] and Masculinity, , r = .39, 95%CI = [.18; .59]. Our results suggest that in addition to individual-differences and contextual variables, cultural factors also play an important role in shaping CT beliefs.

The decision to lie to another person involves a conflict between one’s own and others’ interest. Political ideology may foster self-promoting or self-transcending values and thus may balance or fuel self vs. other related conflicts. Here, we explored in politically non-aligned participants whether oculomotor behavior may index the influence on moral decision-making of prime stimuli related to left and right-wing ideologies. We presented pictures of Italian politicians and ideological words in a paradigm where participants could lie to opponents with high vs. low socio-economic status to obtain a monetary reward. Results show that left-wing words decreased self-gain lies and increased other-gain ones. Oculomotor behavior revealed that gazing longer at politicians’ pictures led participants to look longer at opponent’s status-related information than at game’s outcome-related information before the decision. This, in turn, caused participants to lie less to low status opponents. Moreover, after lying, participants averted their gaze from high status opponents and maintained it towards low status ones. Our results offer novel evidence that ideological priming influences moral decision-making and suggest that oculomotor behavior may provide crucial insights on how this process takes place.

Using different evaluation targets (i.e., politicians' pictures, ideological words, items referring to features attributed to political ingroup/outgroup) we characterized the intergroup bias among political groups in the Italian context (Study 1-2-3) and tested a model that may account for the bias itself (Study 3). For all evaluation targets, left-wing participants - compared to right-wing participants - showed a greater intergroup bias, expressing more negative emotions toward the outgroup. The process was influenced by a greater perceived threat of the outgroup. Conversely, right-wing participants expressed the bias only when presented with ideological words. Our results provide a detailed description of how intergroup bias in Italy is differently expressed by the two ideological groups depending on the targets used to represent the political counterpart. Moreover, the results show that the stronger bias expressed by left-wing participants is driven by perceived threat of the outgroup.