The impact of group membership on punishment versus partner rejection.

People often display ingroup bias in punishment, punishing outgroup members more harshly than ingroup members. However, the impact of group membership may be less pronounced when people are choosing whether to stop interacting with someone (i.e.

Signaling benefits of partner choice decisions.

When deciding whom to choose for a cooperative interaction, two features of prospective partners are especially relevant: ability to provide benefits, and willingness to provide those benefits. Often, these traits are correlated. But, when ability and willingness are in conflict, people often indicate that they value willingness over ability, even when doing so results in immediate losses.

They should have known better: The roles of negligence and outcome in moral judgements of accidental actions.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the relative influence of agents' negligence and their actions' unintended outcomes on moral judgements. In Study 1, 343 participants were asked in an online questionnaire about a driver whose level of negligence, and the severity of the outcome, were varied systematically. Each judged how much punishment and blame the driver deserved, and rated her negligence, causal responsibility, and intentionality.

An earlier role for intent in children's partner choice versus punishment.

Among the many factors that influence our moral judgments, two are especially important: whether the person caused a bad outcome and whether they intended for it to happen. Notably, the weight accorded to these factors in adulthood varies by the type of judgment being made. For punishment decisions, intentions and outcomes carry relatively equal weight; for partner choice decisions (i.

Third-party punishment promotes fairness in children.

Third-party punishment can promote fair behavior. However, the mechanisms by which this happens are unclear. Third-party punishment may increase fair behavior by providing direct feedback, helping shape the behavior of those punished, or through an influence on reputation, by encouraging the transgressor to behave appropriately before a third-party audience.

"Internally Wicked": Investigating How and Why Essentialism Influences Punitiveness and Moral Condemnation.

Kant argued that individuals should be punished "proportional to their internal wickedness," and recent work has demonstrated that essentialism-the notion that observable characteristics reflect internal, biological, unchanging "essences"-influences moral judgment. However, these efforts have yielded conflicting results: essentialism sometimes increases and sometimes decreases moral condemnation. To resolve these discrepancies, we investigated the mechanisms by which essentialism influences moral judgment, focusing on perceptions of actors' control over their behavior, the target of essentialism (particular behaviors vs.

The Effect of Cognitive Load on Intent-Based Moral Judgment.

When making a moral judgment, people largely care about two factors: Who did it (causal responsibility), and did they intend to (intention)? Since Piaget's seminal studies, we have known that as children mature, they gradually place greater emphasis on intention, and less on mere bad outcomes, when making moral judgments. Today, we know that this developmental shift has several signature properties. Recently, it has been shown that when adults make moral judgments under cognitive load, they exhibit a pattern similar to young children; that is, their judgments become notably more outcome based.

Punishment is Organized around Principles of Communicative Inference.

Humans use punishment to influence each other's behavior. Many current theories presume that this operates as a simple form of incentive. In contrast, we show that people infer the communicative intent behind punishment, which can sometimes diverge sharply from its immediate incentive value.

Why do children punish? Fair outcomes matter more than intent in children's second- and third-party punishment.

Humans punish fairness violations both as victims and as impartial third parties, which can maintain cooperative behavior. However, it is unknown whether similar motivations underlie punishment of unfairness in these two contexts. Here we approached this question by focusing on how both types of punishment develop in children, asking the question: What motivates young children to punish in response to fairness norm violations? We explored two potential factors: the direct experience of unfair outcomes and a partner's fair versus unfair intentions.

When do we punish people who don't?

People often punish norm violations. In what cases is such punishment viewed as normative-a behavior that we "should" or even "must" engage in? We approach this question by asking when people who fail to punish a norm violator are, themselves, punished. (For instance, a boss who fails to punish transgressive employees might, herself, be fired.

Why we forgive what can't be controlled.

Volitional control matters greatly for moral judgment: Coerced agents receive less condemnation for outcomes they cause. Less well understood is the psychological basis of this effect. Control may influence perceptions of intent for the outcome that occurs or perceptions of causal role in that outcome.

From Blame to Punishment: Disrupting Prefrontal Cortex Activity Reveals Norm Enforcement Mechanisms.

The social welfare provided by cooperation depends on the enforcement of social norms. Determining blameworthiness and assigning a deserved punishment are two cognitive cornerstones of norm enforcement. Although prior work has implicated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in norm-based judgments, the relative contribution of this region to blameworthiness and punishment decisions remains poorly understood.

To punish or to leave: distinct cognitive processes underlie partner control and partner choice behaviors.

When a cooperative partner defects, at least two types of response are available: Punishment, aimed at modifying behavior, and ostracism, aimed at avoiding further social interaction with the partner. These options, termed partner control and partner choice, have been distinguished at behavioral and evolutionary levels. However, little work has compared their cognitive bases.

Corticolimbic gating of emotion-driven punishment.

Determining the appropriate punishment for a norm violation requires consideration of both the perpetrator's state of mind (for example, purposeful or blameless) and the strong emotions elicited by the harm caused by their actions. It has been hypothesized that such affective responses serve as a heuristic that determines appropriate punishment. However, an actor's mental state often trumps the effect of emotions, as unintended harms may go unpunished, regardless of their magnitude.

The attentional blink reveals the probabilistic nature of discrete conscious perception.

Attention and awareness are two tightly coupled processes that have been the subject of the same enduring debate: Are they allocated in a discrete or in a graded fashion? Using the attentional blink paradigm and mixture-modeling analysis, we show that awareness arises at central stages of information processing in an all-or-none manner. Manipulating the temporal delay between two targets affected subjects' likelihood of consciously perceiving the second target, but did not affect the precision of its representation. Furthermore, these results held across stimulus categories and paradigms, and they were dependent on attention having been allocated to the first target.

A Unified attentional bottleneck in the human brain.

Human information processing is characterized by bottlenecks that constrain throughput. These bottlenecks limit both what we can perceive and what we can act on in multitask settings. Although perceptual and response limitations are often attributed to independent information processing bottlenecks, it has recently been suggested that a common attentional limitation may be responsible for both.