Shifting evaluative construal: Common and distinct neural components of moral, pragmatic, and hedonic evaluations.

People generate evaluations of different attitude objects based on their goals and aspects of the social context. Prior research suggests that people can shift between at least three types of evaluations to judge whether something is good or bad: (how costly or beneficial it is), (whether it is aligned with moral norms), and (whether it feels good; Van Bavel et al., 2012).

National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic.

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g.

Bring out your experts: The relationship between perceived expert causal understanding and pandemic behaviors.

In the complex modern world, people's understanding of how things work is often outsourced to other people. We explore how people's perceptions of expert causal understanding of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic predicted their pandemic-related behaviors. As part of a larger longitudinal study, we collected data at four time points that measured participants' perceptions of experts' causal understanding of COVID-19, along with those participants' self-reported pandemic-related health behaviors.

Of Pandemics and Zombies: The Influence of Prior Concepts on COVID-19 Pandemic-Related Behaviors.

We use a concepts and categories research perspective to explore how prior conceptual knowledge influences thinking about a novel disease, namely COVID-19. We collected measures of how similar people thought COVID-19 was to several existing concepts that may have served as other possible comparison points for the pandemic. We also collected participants' self-reported engagement in pandemic-related behaviors.

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behaviour with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping.

In Defense of Tradition: Religiosity, Conservatism, and Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage in North America.

Arguments opposing same-sex marriage are often made on religious grounds. In five studies conducted in the United States and Canada (combined N = 1,673), we observed that religious opposition to same-sex marriage was explained, at least in part, by conservative ideology and linked to sexual prejudice. In Studies 1 and 2, we discovered that the relationship between religiosity and opposition to same-sex marriage was mediated by explicit sexual prejudice.

We agree and we disagree, which is exactly what most people do most of the time.

Humans are continually diverging and converging with respect to each other. Research across many domains suggests that differentiation and integration are aspects of a more complex set of dynamics, and are not step-wise but interdependent and continuous. Research on conformity in particular reveals that divergence and dissent are forms of cooperation, reflecting concerns for both individual and group integrity.

More to morality than mutualism: consistent contributors exist and they can inspire costly generosity in others.

Studies of economic decision-making have revealed the existence of consistent contributors, who always make contributions to the collective good. It is difficult to understand such behavior in terms of mutualistic motives. Furthermore, consistent contributors can elicit apparently altruistic behavior from others.

The importance of moral construal: moral versus non-moral construal elicits faster, more extreme, universal evaluations of the same actions.

Over the past decade, intuitionist models of morality have challenged the view that moral reasoning is the sole or even primary means by which moral judgments are made. Rather, intuitionist models posit that certain situations automatically elicit moral intuitions, which guide moral judgments. We present three experiments showing that evaluations are also susceptible to the influence of moral versus non-moral construal.

On not airing our dirty laundry: Intergroup contexts suppress ingroup criticism among strongly identified group members.

Not every situation affords the appropriate setting to articulate group problems, and I predicted that strongly identified members would be particularly sensitive to the intergroup context in which ingroup criticism is expressed. In Study 1, strongly but not weakly identified members reduced criticism of their ingroup when communicating with an outgroup (vs. ingroup) audience, and this effect was mediated by concerns for the reputation of the group.

Rapid social perception is flexible: approach and avoidance motivational states shape P100 responses to other-race faces.

Research on person categorization suggests that people automatically and inflexibly categorize others according to group memberships, such as race. Consistent with this view, research using electroencephalography (EEG) has found that White participants tend to show an early difference in processing Black versus White faces. Yet, new research has shown that these ostensibly automatic biases may not be as inevitable as once thought and that motivational influences may be able to eliminate these biases.

Facing social identity change: interactive effects of current and projected collective identification on expectations regarding future self-esteem and psychological well-being.

We hypothesized that prospective changes in social identity that involve transitioning out of a currently valued group would be associated with negative expectations regarding future states, but that this effect would be mitigated among individuals who expect to belong to a future in-group of similar importance. Consistent with predictions, strongly identified young adults in two studies projected significantly lower self-esteem/psychological well-being in old age than weakly identified young adults. Critically, however, this effect was fully attenuated if they expected to identify with their future aged in-group when they were old.

Indirect goal priming is more powerful than explicit instruction in children.

This study examined the relative efficacy of explicit instruction and indirect priming on young children's behavior in a task that required a series of choices between a small immediate reward and a larger delayed reward. One hundread and six 4-year-old children were randomly assigned to one of four conditions involving one of two goals (maximize rewards or obtain immediate rewards) and one of two types of instruction (indirect priming using stories or explicit verbal instructions). Children were more likely to make goal-congruent choices as a result of indirect priming, but there was no effect of explicit instruction, suggesting that indirect approaches to changing young children's behavior may be more effective than direct approaches under some circumstances.

Modulation of the fusiform face area following minimal exposure to motivationally relevant faces: evidence of in-group enhancement (not out-group disregard).

Studies have shown that fusiform face area (FFA) activity increases with visual expertise. We present an fMRI study showing that faces from a social category made relevant by an experimental manipulation (members of an experimentally created in-group) preferentially recruited the FFA even when they were matched in exposure to face stimuli from a less significant social category (members of an experimentally created out-group). Faces were randomly assigned to groups and fully counterbalanced so that no perceptual cues allowed participants to visually distinguish category membership.

Loyal deviance: testing the normative conflict model of dissent in social groups.

The normative conflict model predicts that expressions of dissent within groups can be motivated by the collective interest and that strongly identified members may dissent from group norms if and when they are perceived to be harmful to the collective. We present convergent evidence from four studies in support of the model. Study 1 investigated retrospective reports of disagreements and found that strongly identified members reported collectively oriented motives for expressing disagreement within their groups.

Neural correlates of reflection on goal states: the role of regulatory focus and temporal distance.

Effective self-regulation requires the ability to consider alternate goal states in order to adapt to shifting circumstances. Previous research on goal reflection has identified goal-type dissociations in brain regions broadly associated with self-projection. Importantly, however, there is a need to distinguish activation differences due to recruitment of distinct processes from activations that reflect common processes with varying levels of recruitment.

The neural substrates of in-group bias: a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation.

Classic minimal-group studies found that people arbitrarily assigned to a novel group quickly display a range of perceptual, affective, and behavioral in-group biases. We randomly assigned participants to a mixed-race team and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify brain regions involved in processing novel in-group and out-group members independently of preexisting attitudes, stereotypes, or familiarity. Whereas previous research on intergroup perception found amygdala activity--typically interpreted as negativity--in response to stigmatized social groups, we found greater activity in the amygdala, fusiform gyri, orbitofrontal cortex, and dorsal striatum when participants viewed novel in-group faces than when they viewed novel out-group faces.

Identifying Systematic Disobedience in Milgram's Obedience Experiments: A Meta-Analytic Review.

A meta-analysis of data from eight of Mil-gram's obedience experiments reveals previously undocumented systematicity in the behavior of disobedient participants. In all studies, disobedience was most likely at 150 v, the point at which the shocked "learner" first requested to be released. Further illustrating the importance of the 150-v point, obedience rates across studies covaried with rates of disobedience at 150 v, but not at any other point; as obedience decreased, disobedience at 150 v increased.

On being both with us and against us: a normative conflict model of dissent in social groups.

Although past research has demonstrated a positive relationship between collective identification and normative conformity, there may be circumstances in which strongly identified members do not conform but instead choose to challenge group norms. This article proposes a normative conflict model, which distinguishes between nonconformity due to dissent (challenging norms to change them) and nonconformity due to disengagement (distancing oneself from the group). The normative conflict model predicts that strongly identified members are likely to challenge group norms when they experience conflict between norms and important alternate standards for behavior, in particular when they perceive norms as being harmful to the group.

Increasing implicit self-esteem through classical conditioning.

Implicit self-esteem is the automatic, nonconscious aspect of self-esteem. This study demonstrated that implicit self-esteem can be increased using a computer game that repeatedly pairs self-relevant information with smiling faces. These findings, which are consistent with principles of classical conditioning, establish the associative and interpersonal nature of implicit self-esteem and demonstrate the potential benefit of applying basic learning principles in this domain.