The Wise Mind Balances the Abstract and the Concrete.

We explored how individuals' mental representations of complex and uncertain situations impact their ability to reason wisely. To this end, we introduce situated methods to capture abstract and concrete mental representations and the switching between them when reflecting on social challenges. Using these methods, we evaluated the alignment of abstractness and concreteness with four integral facets of wisdom: intellectual humility, open-mindedness, perspective-taking, and compromise-seeking.

Moral obligation, autonomous motivation and vaccine hesitancy: Highlighting moral obligation increases reactance in hesitant individuals.

Vaccine hesitancy is widespread, and developing effective communication strategies that encourage hesitant individuals to choose vaccination is essential. This pre-registered research aimed to examine associations among moral obligation, autonomous motivation, vaccination intentions and reactance, and to test messages highlighting moral obligation and autonomy support. In Study 1, participants who had not received a Covid-19 vaccine (N = 1036) completed measures of autonomous motivation, moral obligation, reactance, intentions to vaccinate and vaccine hesitancy.

On the accuracy, media representation, and public perception of psychological scientists' judgments of societal change.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychological scientists frequently made on-the-record predictions in public media about how individuals and society would change. Such predictions were often made outside these scientists' areas of expertise, with justifications based on intuition, heuristics, and analogical reasoning (Study 1; = 719 statements). How accurate are these kinds of judgments regarding societal change? In Study 2, we obtained predictions from scientists (N = 717) and lay Americans ( = 394) in Spring 2020 regarding the direction of change for a range of social and psychological phenomena.

Increasing population densities predict decreasing fertility rates over time: A 174-nation investigation.

Fertility rates have been declining worldwide over the past 50 years, part of a phenomenon known as "the demographic transition." Prior work suggests that this decline is related to population density. In the present study, we draw on life history theory to examine the relationship between population density and fertility across 174 countries over 69 years (1950 to 2019).

No effect of 'watching eyes': An attempted replication and extension investigating individual differences.

Some evidence suggests that people behave more cooperatively and generously when observed or in the presence of images of eyes (termed the 'watching eyes' effect). Eye images are thought to trigger feelings of observation, which in turn motivate people to behave more cooperatively to earn a good reputation. However, several recent studies have failed to find evidence of the eyes effect.

Men's Mate Value Correlates with a Less Restricted Sociosexual Orientation: A Meta-Analysis.

Men, relative to women, can benefit their total reproductive success by engaging in short-term pluralistic mating. Yet not all men enact such a mating strategy. It has previously been hypothesized that high mate value men should be most likely to adopt a short-term mating strategy, with this prediction being firmly grounded in some important mid-level evolutionary psychological theories.

Feelings of obligation are valuations of signaling-mediated social payoffs.

We extend Tomasello's framework by addressing the functional challenge of obligation. If the long-run social consequences of a decision are sufficiently costly, obligation motivates the actor to forgo potential immediate benefits in favor of long-term social interests. Thus, obligation psychology balances the downstream socially-mediated payoffs from a decision.

Measuring delay discounting in a crowdsourced sample: An exploratory study.

Delay discounting is a measure of preferences for smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards. Discounting has been assessed in many ways; these methods have variably and inconsistently involved measures of different lengths (single vs. multiple items), forced-choice methods, self-report methods, online and laboratory assessments, monetary and non-monetary compensation.

Broadening the role of "self-interest" in folk-economic beliefs.

We extend Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) model of folk-economic beliefs (FEBs) by suggesting FEBs serve self-interest (broadly defined), which includes indirect benefits such as creating alliances, advancing self-beneficial ideologies, and signaling one's traits. By expanding the definition of self-interest, the model can predict who will hold what FEBs, which FEBs will propagate, when they will change, why, and in which direction.