Greater traditionalism predicts COVID-19 precautionary behaviors across 27 societies.

People vary both in their embrace of their society's traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents connections between traditionalism and threat responsivity, including pathogen-avoidance motivations.

Animal culture: But of which kind?

Is animal culture a real entity or is it rather just in the eye of the beholder? The concept of culture began to be increasingly used in the context of animal behaviour research around the 1960s. Despite its success, it is not clear that it represents what philosophers have traditionally thought to be a natural kind. In this article I will show, however, how conceiving of animal culture in this fashion has played a role in the "culture wars", and what lessons we can draw from this.

Absolutely Right and Relatively Good: Consequentialists See Bioethical Disagreement in a Relativist Light.

Background: Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth?

Methods: To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory studies, with both a convenience and a nationally representative sample (total  = 1501), investigating the link between people's beliefs about moral truth (their metaethics) and their beliefs about moral value (their normative ethics).

Results: Across various bioethical issues (e.

The dual nature of partisan prejudice: Morality and identity in a multiparty system.

Rising hostility between members of opposing political factions has gained considerable attention in both academic and popular press. The adverse effects of this phenomenon are widely recognized, but its psychological antecedents remain the focus of ongoing debate in political psychology. Past research has honed in on two conflicting explanations: one highlights the extent to which people self-define as supporters of particular parties or candidates (the identity view), and another points toward the intensity with which they disagree on substantive matters of policy (the issues view).

Hot utilitarianism and cold deontology: Insights from a response patterns approach to sacrificial and real world dilemmas.

Research on moral judgment with moral dilemmas suggests that "utilitarian" responses (UR) to sacrificial high-conflict dilemmas are due to decreased harm aversion, not only in individuals with clinical conditions, but also in healthy participants with high scores in antisocial personality traits. We investigated the patterns of responses to different dilemma types in healthy participants and present evidence that some URs to sacrificial dilemmas are morally motivated, as indicated by their empathic concern (EC) or primary psychopathy (PP) scores. In study 1 (N = 230) we tested students with four categories of sacrificial dilemmas featuring innocent victims.

To kill a bee: The aptness and moralistic heuristics of reactive attitudes.

Although we are sensitive to the advantages of reactive attitudes as a starting point, we are concerned that confusion on the level of analysis can easily plague this type of account. We argue that what is needed here is a serious appraisal of the effects on the promotion of values of moralistic responses toward different types of agency.

Cold Side-Effect Effect: Affect Does Not Mediate the Influence of Moral Considerations in Intentionality Judgments.

Research has consistently shown that people consider harmful side effects of an action more intentional than helpful side effects. This phenomenon is known as the side-effect effect (SEE), which refers to the influence of moral considerations in judgments of intentionality and other non-moral concepts. There is an ongoing debate about how to explain this asymmetric pattern of judgment and the psychological factors involved in it.

Credibility, credulity, and redistribution.

After raising some doubts for cultural group selection as an explanation of prosocial religiosity, we propose an alternative that views it as a "greenbeard effect." We combine the dynamic constraints on the evolution of greenbeard effects with Iannaccone's (1994) account of strict sects. Our model shows that certain social conditions may foster credulity and prosociality.

The use of supernatural entities in moral conversations as a cultural-psychological attractor.

Social behavior in most human societies is characterized by the following of moral rules explicitly justified by religious belief systems. These systems constitute the diverse domain of human sacred values. Supernatural entities as founders or warranty of moral principles may be seen as a form of "conversation stoppers," considerations that can be dropped into a moral decision process in order to prevent endlessly reconsidering and endlessly asking for further justification.