The "Equal-Opportunity Jerk" Defense: Rudeness Can Obfuscate Gender Bias.

To address sexism, people must first recognize it. In this research, we identified a barrier that makes sexism hard to recognize: rudeness toward men. We found that observers judge a sexist perpetrator as less sexist if he is rude toward men.

Social perception in moral judgments of interpersonal transgressions.

Moral judgments about interpersonal transgressions are shaped by attributions about the actor's mental state (intent), responsibility, and harmful consequences. Curiously, most research has investigated these judgments from a third-party perspective, often overlooking perceptions of the individuals directly involved in the transgression. We address this by reviewing research on how victims and transgressors involved in interpersonal transgressions form judgments about the transgressor's intent, responsibility, and how much harm was caused, and the ways in which victims' and transgressors' judgments diverge from one another.

Anger Damns the Innocent.

False accusations of wrongdoing are common and can have grave consequences. In six studies, we document a worrisome paradox in perceivers' subjective judgments of a suspect's guilt. Specifically, we found that people (including online panelists, = 4,983, and working professionals such as fraud investigators and auditors, = 136) use suspects' angry responses to accusations as cues of guilt.

People systematically overlook subtractive changes.

Improving objects, ideas or situations-whether a designer seeks to advance technology, a writer seeks to strengthen an argument or a manager seeks to encourage desired behaviour-requires a mental search for possible changes. We investigated whether people are as likely to consider changes that subtract components from an object, idea or situation as they are to consider changes that add new components. People typically consider a limited number of promising ideas in order to manage the cognitive burden of searching through all possible ideas, but this can lead them to accept adequate solutions without considering potentially superior alternatives.

If humans design the planet: A call for psychological scientists to engage with climate engineering.

As efforts to control climate change gain momentum, so too does the possibility that some global actor(s) will deploy one or more forms of climate engineering. Climate engineering refers to large-scale and deliberate activities intended to change either the carbon-balance or energy-balance of the planet. Climate engineering approaches are untested, involve deep uncertainty, and have far-reaching consequences.

The social costs of forgiving following multiple-victim transgressions.

A single transgressor sometimes harms more than just 1 victim. We examine a previously undocumented social cost of forgiving following these multiple-victim transgressions. We find that nonforgiving victims believe that other victims who forgive the common transgressor make their decisions to withhold forgiveness appear ungenerous.

Impediments to forgiveness: Victim and transgressor attributions of intent and guilt.

We investigate the possibility that victims and transgressors are predictably miscalibrated in their interpretation of a transgression, and that this has important implications for the process of forgiveness. Across 5 studies, we find that victims underestimate how much transgressors desire forgiveness. This is driven by a 2-part mediating mechanism: First, victims are more likely than transgressors to see the transgression as intentional, and second, this causes victims to believe transgressors feel less guilty than transgressors report feeling.

Affective antecedents of revenge.

We propose that revenge responses are often influenced more by affective reactions than by deliberate decision making as McCullough et al. suggest. We review social psychological evidence suggesting that justice judgments and reactions may be determined more by emotions than by cognitions.

When cheating would make you a cheater: implicating the self prevents unethical behavior.

In 3 experiments using 2 different paradigms, people were less likely to cheat for personal gain when a subtle change in phrasing framed such behavior as diagnostic of an undesirable identity. Participants were given the opportunity to claim money they were not entitled to at the experimenters' expense; instructions referred to cheating with either language that was designed to highlight the implications of cheating for the actor's identity (e.g.

The gifts we keep on giving: documenting and destigmatizing the regifting taboo.

Five studies examined whether the practice of regifting--a social taboo--is as offensive to the original givers as potential regifters assume. Participants who imagined regifting a gift (receivers) thought that the original giver would be more offended than participants who imagined that their gifts were regifted (givers) reported feeling. Specifically, receivers viewed regifting as similar in offensiveness to throwing gifts away, yet givers clearly preferred the former.

The social and psychological costs of punishing.

We review evidence of the psychological and social costs associated with punishing. We propose that these psychological and social costs should be considered (in addition to material costs) when searching for evidence of costly punishment "in the wild."