Many religious people deny any conflict between religion and science, but nevertheless report less trust in science than non-religious people. We address this puzzle using insights from goal systems theory. Goal systems theory suggests that, when people have more means of achieving a goal, they perceive each individual means as less instrumental. We translate this "instrumentality hypothesis" to differences in how religious and non-religious people perceive science and religion. Religious people-who use both science and religion as means to gain knowledge-may perceive both as moderately instrumental, and as less instrumental than non-religious people view science. We support the instrumentality hypothesis in studies where participants evaluate the capacity of science and religion to explain extraordinary phenomena (Study 1), fill gaps in knowledge (Study 2), answer life's big questions (Study 3), and to help avoid COVID-19 infection (Study 4). We also find that non-religious people overperceive religious people's trust in religion and underperceive religious people's trust in science as sources of knowledge (Study 5). Non-religious people think that religion deters trust in science at the expense of high trust in religion, but instead, the typical religious person avoids extreme epistemic reliance on any single source of knowledge.

For group discussions about fraught racial topics between Black and White Americans to be beneficial, conversation participants must view the person who facilitates as effective at communicating both the perspectives of Black and White Americans. We identify a biracial advantage in this domain. In three studies (total N = 710), we tested how a facilitator’s race affects their perceived effectiveness in communicating with both Black and White Americans. Both Black and White participants expected Black and White monoracial facilitators to more effectively engage with racial in-group than racial out-group members. However, they expected biracial facilitators to be equally effective in communicating with both Black and White groups. Both Black and White participants also expected biracial facilitators to use productive learning strategies (perspective taking, showing empathy) more than White facilitators, and either more than or equally to Black facilitators, suggesting one reason why people expect biracial facilitators to perform well in these moments.

Moral psychology has long debated whether moral judgment is rooted in harm versus affect. We reconcile this debate with the affective harm account (AHA) of moral judgment. The AHA understands harm as an intuitive perception (i.e., perceived harm), and divides "affect" into two: embodied visceral arousal (i.e., gut feelings) and stimulus-directed affective appraisals (e.g., ratings of disgustingness). The AHA was tested in a randomized, double-blind pharmacological experiment with healthy young adults judging the immorality, harmfulness, and disgustingness of everyday moral scenarios (e.g., lying) and unusual purity scenarios (e.g., sex with a corpse) after receiving either a placebo or the β-blocker propranolol (a drug that dampens visceral arousal). Results confirmed the three key hypotheses of the AHA. First, perceived harm and affective appraisals are neither competing nor independent but intertwined. Second, although both perceived harm and affective appraisals predict moral judgment, perceived harm is consistently relevant across all scenarios (in line with the theory of dyadic morality), whereas affective appraisals are especially relevant in unusual purity scenarios (in line with affect-as-information theory). Third, the "gut feelings" of visceral arousal are not as important to morality as often believed. Dampening visceral arousal (via propranolol) did not directly impact moral judgment, but instead changed the relative contribution of affective appraisals to moral judgment-and only in unusual purity scenarios. By embracing a constructionist view of the mind that blurs traditional dichotomies, the AHA reconciles historic harm-centric and current affect-centric theories, parsimoniously explaining judgment differences across various moral scenarios without requiring any "moral foundations." (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Does religion make people good or bad? We suggest that there are at least three distinct profiles of religious morality: the Cooperator, the Crusader, and the Complicit. Cooperators forego selfishness to benefit others, crusaders harm outgroups to bolster their own religious community, and the complicit use religion to justify selfish behavior and reduce blame. Different aspects of religion motivate each character: religious reverence makes people cooperators, religious tribalism makes people crusaders, and religious absolution makes people complicit. This framework makes sense of previous research by explaining when and how religion can make people more or less moral.

Transgender individuals experience stigmatization through the application of gender stereotypes. In Study 1, cisgender individuals (N = 212) produced unique stereotypes, such as "mentally ill" and "confused," about transgender, but not cisgender, populations. Stereotypes for transgender individuals also included stereotypes related to both cisgender men and cisgender women. In Study 2, transgender people (N = 330) rated the unique stereotypes about their group more negatively than cisgender people (N = 193) rated the same stereotypes. These data highlight distinct ways that transgender people, who represent one of the most stigmatized social groups, experience stigma through stereotype application. Discussion includes how research including nontraditional gender identities broadens and advances diversity and identity science.

Billions of people from around the world believe in vengeful gods who punish immoral behavior. These punitive religious beliefs may foster prosociality and contribute to large-scale cooperation, but little is known about how these beliefs emerge and why people adopt them in the first place. We present a cultural-psychological model suggesting that cultural tightness-the strictness of cultural norms and normative punishment-helps to catalyze punitive religious beliefs by increasing people's motivation to punish norm violators. Our model also suggests that tightness mediates the impact of ecological threat on punitive belief, explaining why punitive religious beliefs are most common in regions with high levels of ecological threat. Five multimethod studies support these predictions. Studies 1-3 focus on the effect of cultural tightness on punitive religious beliefs. Historical increases in cultural tightness precede and predict historical increases in punitive beliefs (Study 1), and both manipulating people's support for tightness (Study 2) and placing people in a simulated tight society (Study 3) increase punitive religious beliefs via the personal motivation to punish norm violators. Studies 4-5 focus on whether cultural tightness mediates the link between ecological threat and punitive religious beliefs. Cultural tightness helps explain why U.S. states with high ecological threat (e.g., natural hazards, scarcity) have the highest levels of punitive religious beliefs (Study 4) and why experimental manipulations of threat increase punitive religious beliefs (Study 5). Past research has shown how religion impacts culture, but our studies show how culture can shape religion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Religion is an enduring part of human culture, but religious belief is declining in some societies. What explains which regions secularize and which individuals leave their faiths? We propose that secularization is inversely related to the “moralization of religion:” the belief that religion is essential to morality. Moralization of religiosity likely emerged as a by-product of the historical rise of prosocial religions, but we propose that it has an additional side-effect—it discourages deconversion due to perceived reputational costs. We further suggest that cultural differences in the moralization of religiosity foreshadow patterns of nation-level secularization and individual-level deconversion. Our model is supported by historical cross-cultural, retrospective longitudinal, survey, and experimental studies (N = 221,202), which show that the moralization of religiosity inhibits both secularization across nations and deconversion across individuals, and also fosters prejudice against nonbelievers.