Would you exchange your soul for immortality?-existential meaning and afterlife beliefs predict mind upload approval.

Mind upload, or the digital copying of an individual brain and mind, could theoretically allow one to "live forever." If such a technology became available, who would be most likely to approve of it or condemn it? Research has shown that fear of death positively predicts the moral approval of hypothetical mind upload technology, while religiosity may have the opposite effect. We build on these findings, drawing also from work on religiosity and existential mattering as predictors of perceived meaning in one's life.

Coordination and expertise foster legal textualism.

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule's letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across ( = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies.

Breaking the bonds of reinforcement: Effects of trial outcome, rule consistency and rule complexity against exploitable and unexploitable opponents.

In two experiments, we used the simple zero-sum game Rock, Paper and Scissors to study the common reinforcement-based rules of repeating choices after winning (win-stay) and shifting from previous choice options after losing (lose-shift). Participants played the game against both computer opponents who could not be exploited and computer opponents who could be exploited by making choices that would at times conflict with reinforcement. Against unexploitable opponents, participants achieved an approximation of random behavior, contrary to previous research commonly finding reinforcement biases.

National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic.

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g.

Challenges in Process Dissociation Measures for Moral Cognition.

The process dissociation procedure (PDP) for moral cognition was created to separately measure two dispositions of moral judgment based on the dual-process theory of moral reasoning: deontological and utilitarian inclinations. In this paper we raise some concerns from a psychometrics perspective regarding the structure, reliability, and validity of the moral PDP as a measure of individual differences. Using two simulation studies as well as a real sample of = 1,010, we investigate the psychometric properties of the moral PDP.

Failure generates impulsivity only when outcomes cannot be controlled.

Verbruggen, Chambers, Lawrence, and McLaren (2017) recently challenged the view that individuals act with greater caution following the experience of a negative outcome by showing that a gambled loss resulted in faster reaction time (RT) on the next trial. Over three experiments, we replicate and establish the boundary conditions of this effect in the context of a simple game (rock, paper, scissors [RPS]). Choice responding against unexploitable opponents replicated the link between failure and faster responding.

Does the Brain's Reward Response Occur Even Without Actual Reward? A Response to Fielding et al. (2017).

A recent paper by Fielding et al. (J Gamb Stud, 2017) argued that the brain's reward response could occur without the presentation of actual reward. We suggest that since (a) the event-related potentials reported in this paper are atypical of the previous literature, and, (b) a simpler account of the data in terms of sensitivity to outcome frequency cannot be ruled out, the extent to which the brain's reward response can occur without the presentation of actual reward should remain an open question.

Individual Differences in Moral Disgust Do Not Predict Utilitarian Judgments, Sexual and Pathogen Disgust Do.

The role of emotional disgust and disgust sensitivity in moral judgment and decision-making has been debated intensively for over 20 years. Until very recently, there were two main evolutionary narratives for this rather puzzling association. One of the models suggest that it was developed through some form of group selection mechanism, where the internal norms of the groups were acting as pathogen safety mechanisms.

Are Utilitarian/Deontological Preferences Unidimensional?

Utilitarian versus deontological inclinations have been studied extensively in the field of moral psychology. However, the field has been lacking a thorough psychometric evaluation of the most commonly used measures. In this paper, we examine the factorial structure of an often used set of 12 moral dilemmas purportedly measuring utilitarian/deontological moral inclinations.