Does communicating measurable diversity goals attract or repel historically marginalized job applicants? Evidence from the lab and field.

Many organizations struggle to attract a demographically diverse workforce. How does adding a measurable goal to a public diversity commitment-for example, "We care about diversity" versus "We care about diversity and plan to hire at least one woman or racial minority for every White man we hire"-impact application rates from women and racial minorities? Extant psychological theory offers competing predictions about how historically marginalized applicants might respond to such goals. On one hand, measurable diversity goals may raise belongingness concerns among marginalized group members who are uncomfortable with being recruited and hired based on their demographics.

What drives disagreement about moral hypocrisy? Perceived comparability and how people exploit it to criticize enemies and defend allies.

Charges of hypocrisy are usually thought to be to be damning. Yet when a hypocrisy charge is made, there often remains disagreement about whether or not its target really is a hypocrite. Why? Three pre-registered experiments (N = 2599) conceptualize and test the role of perceived comparability in evaluating hypocrisy.

Moral paragons, but crummy friends: The case of snitching.

Loyalty to friends is an important moral value, but does that mean snitching on friends is considered immoral? Across six preregistered studies, we examine how loyalty obligations impact people's moral evaluations of snitching (i.e., turning in others who commit transgressions).

When and why "staying out of it" backfires in moral and political disagreements.

People care where others around them stand on contentious moral and political issues. Yet when faced with the prospect of taking sides and the possibility of alienating observers with whom they might disagree, actors often try to "stay out of it"-communicating that they would rather not to take a side at all. We demonstrate that despite its intuitive appeal for reducing conflict, opting not to take sides over moralized issues can harm trust, even relative to siding against an observer's viewpoint outright.

Prosocial behavior and reputation: When does doing good lead to looking good?

One reason people engage in prosocial behavior is to reap the reputational benefits associated with being seen as generous. Yet, there isn't a direct connection between doing good deeds and being seen as a good person. Prosocial actors are often met with suspicion and sometimes castigated as disingenuous braggarts, empty virtue-signalers, or holier-than-thou hypocrites.

Pint-Sized Public Relations: The Development of Reputation Management.

Until recently, many psychologists were skeptical that young children cared about reputation. New evidence suggests that by age five, children begin to understand the broad importance of reputation and to engage in surprisingly sophisticated impression management. These findings prompt exciting new questions about the development of a fundamental social competency.

No Harm, Still Foul: Concerns About Reputation Drive Dislike of Harmless Plagiarizers.

Across a variety of situations, people strongly condemn plagiarizers who steal credit for ideas, even when the theft in question does not appear to harm anyone. Why would people react negatively to relatively harmless acts of plagiarism? In six experiments, we predict and find that these negative reactions are driven by people's aversion toward agents who attempt to falsely improve their reputations. In Studies 1-3, participants condemn plagiarism cases that they agree are harmless (i.

The texture of causal construals: Domain-specific biases shape causal inferences from discourse.

We conducted five sets of experiments asking whether psychological and physical events are construed in broadly different manners concerning the underlying textures of their causes. In Experiments 1a-1d, we found a robust tendency to estimate fewer causes (but not effects) for psychological than for physical events; Experiment 2 showed a similar pattern of results when participants were asked to generate hypothetical causes and effects; Experiment 3 revealed a greater tendency to ascribe linear chains of causes (but not effects) to physical events; Experiment 4 showed that the expectation of linear chains was related to intuitions about deterministic processes; and Experiment 5 showed that simply framing a given ambiguous event in psychological versus physical terms is sufficient to induce changes in the patterns of causal inferences. Adults therefore consistently show a tendency to think about psychological and physical events as being embedded in different kinds of causal structures.