People update their injunctive norm and moral beliefs after receiving descriptive norm information.

How do descriptive norms shape injunctive norm beliefs, and what does this tell us about the cognitive processes underlying social norm cognition? Across six studies ( = 2,671), we examined whether people update their injunctive norm beliefs-as well as their moral judgments and behavioral intentions-after receiving descriptive norm information about how common (or uncommon) a behavior is. Specifically, we manipulated the descriptive normativity of behaviors, describing behaviors as uncommon (20% of people were doing the behavior) or common (80% of people were doing the behavior), and the type of behavior across studies (fairness, conventional, harm, preference). To measure belief updating, we assessed beliefs prior to and after receiving information about the descriptive norm.

Responsibility to future generations: A strategy for combatting climate change across political divides.

Individuals and governments often fail to take action to address climate change owing largely to widespread politicization of the issue and related discourse. In response to recent appeals for non-partisan approaches to pro-environmentalism, we propose that highlighting one's responsibility to future generations (RFG) could offer promise across the political spectrum. We argue that RFG may be effective because it is widely endorsed, uncorrelated with demographic indicators and less tied to political ideology compared to other forms of responsibility, such as personal responsibility for climate change mitigation.

Virtue Discounting: Observability Reduces Moral Actors' Perceived Virtue.

Performing prosociality in public presents a paradox: only by doing so can people demonstrate their virtue and also influence others through their example, yet observers may derogate actors' behavior as mere "virtue signaling." Here we investigate the role of of actors' behavior as one reason that people engage in such "virtue discounting." Further, we investigate observers' motivational inferences as a mechanism of this effect, using the comparison of and as a case study among virtues.

Scaling Up Change: A Critical Review and Practical Guide to Harnessing Social Norms for Climate Action.

Anthropogenic carbon emissions have the potential to trigger changes in climate and ecosystems that would be catastrophic for the well-being of humans and other species. Widespread shifts in production and consumption patterns are urgently needed to address climate change. Although transnational agreements and national policy are necessary for a transition to a fully decarbonized global economy, fluctuating political priorities and lobbying by vested interests have slowed these efforts.

Global Behaviors, Perceptions, and the Emergence of Social Norms at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens' and governments' responses at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reported holding normative beliefs in support of COVID-19 containment measures, as well as high rates of adherence to these measures. They also believed that their government and their country's citizens were not doing enough and underestimated the degree to which others in their country supported strong behavioral and policy responses to the pandemic.

Emergency Physicians and Personal Narratives Improve the Perceived Effectiveness of COVID-19 Public Health Recommendations on Social Media: A Randomized Experiment.

Background: Containment of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic requires the public to change behavior under social distancing mandates. Social media are important information dissemination platforms that can augment traditional channels communicating public health recommendations. The objective of the study was to assess the effectiveness of COVID-19 public health messaging on Twitter when delivered by emergency physicians and containing personal narratives.

Effect of Physician Gender and Race on Simulated Patients' Ratings and Confidence in Their Physicians: A Randomized Trial.

Importance: Women and black physicians encounter workplace challenges because of their gender and race. It is unclear whether these individuals are assessed with lower patient satisfaction or confidence ratings compared with white male physicians.

Objective: To examine whether physician gender and race affect participant ratings in scenarios in which physician competence is challenged.

Rare and Costly Prosocial Behaviors Are Perceived as Heroic.

Heroism has only recently become a topic of empirical investigation. Existing research suggests a connection between heroism and four well-documented dimensions of human social behavior: (1) the cost incurred by the actor; (2) the benefit provided to the recipient; (3) the perceived frequency (i.e.

Credibility-enhancing displays promote the provision of non-normative public goods.

Promoting the adoption of public goods that are not yet widely accepted is particularly challenging. This is because most tools for increasing cooperation-such as reputation concerns and information about social norms-are typically effective only for behaviours that are commonly practiced, or at least generally agreed upon as being desirable. Here we examine how advocates can successfully promote non-normative (that is, rare or unpopular) public goods.

Turking Overtime: How Participant Characteristics and Behavior Vary Over Time and Day on Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Online experiments allow researchers to collect datasets at times not typical of laboratory studies. We recruit 2,336 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk to examine if participant characteristics and behaviors differ depending on whether the experiment is conducted during the day versus night, and on weekdays versus weekends. Participants make incentivized decisions involving prosociality, punishment, and discounting, and complete a demographic and personality survey.

Empathic nonverbal behavior increases ratings of both warmth and competence in a medical context.

In medicine, it is critical that clinicians demonstrate both empathy (perceived as warmth) and competence. Perceptions of these qualities are often intuitive and are based on nonverbal behavior. Emphasizing both warmth and competence may prove problematic, however, because there is evidence that they are inversely related in other settings.

The collective benefits of feeling good and letting go: positive emotion and (dis)inhibition interact to predict cooperative behavior.

Cooperation is central to human existence, forming the bedrock of everyday social relationships and larger societal structures. Thus, understanding the psychological underpinnings of cooperation is of both scientific and practical importance. Recent work using a dual-process framework suggests that intuitive processing can promote cooperation while deliberative processing can undermine it.

Reflection does not undermine self-interested prosociality.

The cognitive basis of prosocial behavior has received considerable recent attention. Previous work using economic games has found that in social dilemmas, intuitive decisions are more prosocial on average. The Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH) explains this result by contending that strategies which are successful in daily life become automatized as intuitions.

E.M.P.A.T.H.Y.: a tool to enhance nonverbal communication between clinicians and their patients.

There is a gap in the medical education literature on teaching nonverbal detection and expression of empathy. Many articles do not address nonverbal interactions, instead focusing on "what to say" rather than "how to be." This focus on verbal communication overlooks the essential role nonverbal signals play in the communication of emotions, which has significant effects on patient satisfaction, health outcomes, and malpractice claims.

Social heuristics shape intuitive cooperation.

Cooperation is central to human societies. Yet relatively little is known about the cognitive underpinnings of cooperative decision making. Does cooperation require deliberate self-restraint? Or is spontaneous prosociality reined in by calculating self-interest? Here we present a theory of why (and for whom) intuition favors cooperation: cooperation is typically advantageous in everyday life, leading to the formation of generalized cooperative intuitions.

The influence of the patient-clinician relationship on healthcare outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.

Objective: To determine whether the patient-clinician relationship has a beneficial effect on either objective or validated subjective healthcare outcomes.

Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis.

Data Sources: Electronic databases EMBASE and MEDLINE and the reference sections of previous reviews.