Do moral values change with the seasons?

Moral values guide consequential attitudes and actions. Here, we report evidence of seasonal variation in Americans' endorsement of some-but not all-moral values. Studies 1 and 2 examined a decade of data from the United States (total N = 232,975) and produced consistent evidence of a biannual seasonal cycle in values pertaining to loyalty, authority, and purity ("binding" moral values)-with strongest endorsement in spring and autumn and weakest endorsement in summer and winter-but not in values pertaining to care and fairness ("individualizing" moral values).

High economic inequality is linked to greater moralization.

Throughout the 21st century, economic inequality is predicted to increase as we face new challenges, from changes in the technological landscape to the growing climate crisis. It is crucial we understand how these changes in inequality may affect how people think and behave. We propose that economic inequality threatens the social fabric of society, in turn increasing moralization-that is, the greater tendency to employ or emphasize morality in everyday life-as an attempt to restore order and control.

: Seasonal Cycles as a Fundamental Source of Variation in Human Psychology.

Many animal species exhibit seasonal changes in their physiology and behavior. Yet despite ample evidence that humans are also responsive to seasons, the impact of seasonal changes on human psychology is underappreciated relative to other sources of variation (e.g.

Social mindfulness predicts concern for nature and immigrants across 36 nations.

People cooperate every day in ways that range from largescale contributions that mitigate climate change to simple actions such as leaving another individual with choice - known as social mindfulness. It is not yet clear whether and how these complex and more simple forms of cooperation relate. Prior work has found that countries with individuals who made more socially mindful choices were linked to a higher country environmental performance - a proxy for complex cooperation.

Perceiving societal pressure to be happy is linked to poor well-being, especially in happy nations.

Happiness is a valuable experience, and societies want their citizens to be happy. Although this societal commitment seems laudable, overly emphasizing positivity (versus negativity) may create an unattainable emotion norm that ironically compromises individual well-being. In this multi-national study (40 countries; 7443 participants), we investigate how societal pressure to be happy and not sad predicts emotional, cognitive and clinical indicators of well-being around the world, and examine how these relations differ as a function of countries' national happiness levels (collected from the World Happiness Report).

Navigating between punishment, avoidance, and instruction: The form and function of responses to moral violations varies across adult and child transgressors.

Immoral actions can elicit a wide array of responses, ranging from pugnacious confrontation to passive distancing. What leads onlookers to react so differently to various violations? Across four studies (N = 2085), we investigated how responses vary depending on whether moral transgressions are committed by adults or by children. Findings reliably demonstrated that adult participants were more likely to avoid adult transgressors, and more likely to instruct child transgressors about why their actions were wrong.

What Motives Do People Most Want to Know About When Meeting Another Person? An Investigation Into Prioritization of Information About Seven Fundamental Motives.

What information about a person's personality do people want to know? Prior research has focused on behavioral , but personality is also characterized in terms of . Four studies ( = 1,502) assessed participants' interest in information about seven fundamental social motives (self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate seeking, mate retention, kin care) across 12 experimental conditions that presented details about the person or situation. In the absence of details about specific situations, participants most highly prioritized learning about kin care and mate retention motives.

Modeling cultural change: Computational models of interpersonal influence dynamics can yield new insights about how cultures change, which cultures change more rapidly than others, and why.

Cultural change can occur as an emergent consequence of social influence dynamics within cultural populations. These influence dynamics are complex, and formal modeling methods-such as agent-based models-are a useful means of predicting implications for cultural change. These models may be especially useful if they not only model the psychological outcomes of interpersonal influence, but also model social network structures within a culture.

Anatomy of a Psychological Theory: Integrating Construct-Validation and Computational-Modeling Methods to Advance Theorizing.

Discussions about the replicability of psychological studies have primarily focused on improving research methods and practices, with less attention paid to the role of well-specified theories in facilitating the production of reliable empirical results. The field is currently in need of clearly articulated steps to theory specification and development, particularly regarding frameworks that may generalize across different fields of psychology. Here we focus on two approaches to theory specification and development that are typically associated with distinct research traditions: computational modeling and construct validation.

How strongly do moral character inferences predict forecasts of the future? Testing the moderating roles of transgressor age, implicit personality theories, and belief in karma.

Three studies (total N = 1486) investigated how inferences about a person's current moral character guide forecasts about that person's future moral character and future misfortunes, and tested several plausible moderating variables. Inferences about current moral character related (very strongly) to forecasts about future moral character and also (less strongly) to forecasts about future misfortunes. These relationships were moderated by two variables: Relations between inferences and forecasts were somewhat weaker when perceivers made judgments about children, compared to judgments about adults, and relations between character inferences and forecasts about misfortunes were somewhat stronger among perceivers who more strongly believed in karma.

"Parental" responses to human infants (and puppy dogs): Evidence that the perception of eyes is especially influential, but eye contact is not.

The present investigation tests: (i) whether the perception of an human infant's eyes, relative to other facial features, especially strongly elicits "parental" responses (e.g., appraisals of cuteness and vulnerability); (ii) if, so, whether effects of the visual perception of eyes may be partially attributable to eye contact; (iii) whether the perception of non-human animals' (puppy dogs') eyes also especially strongly influence appraisals of their cuteness and vulnerability; and (iv) whether individual differences in caregiving motives moderate effects.

Evolutionary psychology meets socio-ecological psychology: the motivational psychologies of disease-avoidance and parental care.

Specific features of ancestral ecologies had implications for the evolution of psychological mechanisms that regulate specific aspects of human cognition and behavior within contemporary ecologies. These mechanisms produce predictably different attitudes, judgments and behavioral dispositions under different circumstances. This article summarizes two illustrative programs of research-one that focuses on the evolved psychology of disease-avoidance and its many implications, and the other that focuses on the evolved psychology of parental care-giving and its many implications.

Are Collectivistic Cultures More Prone to Rapid Transformation? Computational Models of Cross-Cultural Differences, Social Network Structure, Dynamic Social Influence, and Cultural Change.

Societies differ in susceptibility to social influence and in the social network structure through which individuals influence each other. What implications might these cultural differences have for changes in cultural norms over time? Using parameters informed by empirical evidence, we computationally modeled these cross-cultural differences to predict two forms of cultural change: consolidation of opinion majorities into stronger majorities, and the spread of initially unpopular beliefs. Results obtained from more than 300,000 computer simulations showed that in populations characterized by greater susceptibility to social influence, there was more rapid consolidation of majority opinion and also more successful spread of initially unpopular beliefs.

The Content and Correlates of Belief in Karma Across Cultures.

Karmic beliefs, centered on the expectation of ethical causation within and across lifetimes, appear in major world religions as well as spiritual movements around the world, yet they remain an underexplored topic in psychology. In three studies, we assessed the psychological predictors of Karmic beliefs among participants from culturally and religiously diverse backgrounds, including ethnically and religiously diverse students in Canada, and broad national samples of adults from Canada, India, and the United States (total = 8,996). Belief in Karma is associated with, but not reducible to, theoretically related constructs including belief in a just world, belief in a moralizing God, religious participation, and cultural context.

Are Children Perceived to Be Morally Exceptional? Different Sets of Psychological Variables Predict Adults' Moral Judgments About Adults and Young Children.

Conceptual analyses of moral cognition suggest that different variables may influence moral judgments depending upon the target's age. Five experiments (total N = 1,733) tested the implications for moral judgments about adults and young children. Results show that adults who were perceived to be more cognitively capable were judged to have greater moral rights and their transgressions were judged less harshly, but young children who were perceived to be more cognitively capable were judged to have fewer moral rights and their transgressions were judged more harshly.

Sentiments and the motivational psychology of parental care.

Beyond its implications for contempt, it remains to be determined whether the sentiment concept might be applied usefully to other domains of social affect. This commentary considers its applicability to the domain of parental caregiving. Characteristic features of sentiments are considered in conjunction with empirical research on the motivational psychology of parental care.

Infections and Elections: Did an Ebola Outbreak Influence the 2014 U.S. Federal Elections (and if so, How)?

In the studies reported here, we conducted longitudinal analyses of preelection polling data to test whether an Ebola outbreak predicted voting intentions preceding the 2014 U.S. federal elections.

The sociality-health-fitness nexus: synthesis, conclusions and future directions.

This theme issue has highlighted the links between sociality, health and fitness in a broad range of organisms, and with approaches that include field and captive studies of animals, comparative and meta-analyses, theoretical modelling and clinical and psychological studies of humans. In this concluding chapter, we synthesize the results of these diverse studies into some of the key concepts discussed in this issue, focusing on risks of infectious disease through social contact, the effects of competition in groups on susceptibility to disease, and the integration of sociality into research on life-history trade-offs. Interestingly, the studies in this issue both support pre-existing hypotheses, and in other ways challenge those hypotheses.

Implications of the behavioural immune system for social behaviour and human health in the modern world.

The 'behavioural immune system' is composed of mechanisms that evolved as a means of facilitating behaviours that minimized infection risk and enhanced fitness. Recent empirical research on human populations suggests that these mechanisms have unique consequences for many aspects of human sociality--including sexual attitudes, gregariousness, xenophobia, conformity to majority opinion and conservative sociopolitical attitudes. Throughout much of human evolutionary history, these consequences may have had beneficial health implications; but health implications in modern human societies remain unclear.

Individual differences in activation of the parental care motivational system: assessment, prediction, and implications.

We report on the development, validation, and utility of a measure assessing individual differences in activation of the parental care motivational system: The Parental Care and Tenderness (PCAT) questionnaire. Results from 1,608 adults (including parents and nonparents) show that the 25-item PCAT measure has high internal consistency, high test-retest reliability, high construct validity, and unique predictive utility. Among parents, it predicted self-child identity overlap and caring child-rearing attitudes; among nonparents, it predicted desire to have children.

Individual-level psychology and group-level traits.

Psychological research on social influence illuminates many mechanisms through which role differentiation and collaborative interdependence may affect cultural evolution. We focus here on psychological processes that produce specific patterns of asymmetric influence, which in turn can have predictable consequences for the emergence and transmission of group-level traits.

The selfish goal meets the selfish gene.

The connection between selfish genes and selfish goals is not merely metaphorical. Many goals that shape contemporary cognition and behavior are psychological products of evolutionarily fundamental motivational systems and thus are phenotypic manifestations of genes. An evolutionary perspective can add depth and nuance to our understanding of "selfish goals" and their implications for human cognition and behavior.

Pathogens and politics: further evidence that parasite prevalence predicts authoritarianism.

According to a "parasite stress" hypothesis, authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens. Recent cross-national evidence is consistent with this hypothesis, but there are inferential limitations associated with that evidence. We report two studies that address some of these limitations, and provide further tests of the hypothesis.