People reward others based on their willingness to exert effort.

Individual contributors to a collaborative task are often rewarded for going above and beyond-salespeople earn commissions, athletes earn performance bonuses, and companies award special parking spots to their employee of the month. How do we decide when to reward collaborators, and are these decisions closely aligned with how responsible they were for the outcome of a collaboration? In Experiments 1a and 1b ( ), we tested how participants give bonuses, using stimuli and an experiment design that has previously been used to elicit responsibility judgments (Xiang et al., 2023a).

Moral preference reversals: Violations of procedure invariance in moral judgments of sacrificial dilemmas.

In this research, we examine whether moral judgments sometimes violate the normative principle of procedure invariance - that is, whether normatively equivalent elicitation tasks can result in different judgment patterns. Specifically, we show that the relative morality of two actions can reverse across evaluation modes and elicitation tasks, mirroring preference reversals in consumer behavior. Across six studies (five preregistered, total N = 719), we provide evidence of three reversals of moral judgments of sacrificial dilemmas.

Forming Evaluations of Moral Character: How Are Multiple Pieces of Information Prioritized and Integrated?

Evaluating other people's moral character is a crucial social cognitive task. However, the cognitive processes by which people seek out, prioritize, and integrate multiple pieces of character-relevant information have not been studied empirically. The first aim of this research was to examine which character traits are considered most important when forming an impression of a person's overall moral character.

Actual and counterfactual effort contribute to responsibility attributions in collaborative tasks.

How do people judge responsibility in collaborative tasks? Past work has proposed a number of metrics that people may use to attribute blame and credit to others, such as effort, competence, and force. Some theories consider only the actual effort or force (individuals are more responsible if they put forth more effort or force), whereas others consider counterfactuals (individuals are more responsible if some alternative behavior on their or their collaborator's part could have altered the outcome). Across four experiments (N=717), we found that participants' judgments are best described by a model that considers both actual and counterfactual effort.