Of preferences and priors: Motivated reasoning in partisans' evaluations of scientific evidence.

Despite decades of research, it has been difficult to resolve debates about the existence and nature of partisan bias-the tendency to evaluate information more positively when it supports, rather than challenges, one's political views. Whether partisans display partisan biases, and whether any such biases reflect motivated reasoning, remains contested. We conducted four studies (total N = 4,010) in which participants who made unblinded evaluations of politically relevant science were compared to participants who made blinded evaluations of the same study.

Partisan Bias in Political Judgment.

This article reviews empirical data demonstrating robust ingroup favoritism in political judgment. Partisans display systematic tendencies to seek out, believe, and remember information that supports their political beliefs and affinities. However, the psychological drivers of partisan favoritism have been vigorously debated, as has its consistency with rational inference.

Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda.

Science is among humanity's greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality). Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance.

Signals of discipline and puritanical challenges to liberty.

We extend the target authors' moral disciplining theory (MDT) by discussing signaling, proscriptive and prescriptive morality, and the dynamics by which signaling may operate in tandem with proscriptive and prescriptive forms of moral disciplining. We also suggest that MDT can help explain challenges to economic and social progress by revealing fundamental tensions between puritanical intuitions and liberal ideals.

The moralization of effort.

People believe that effort is valuable, but what kind of value does it confer? We find that displays of effort signal moral character. Eight studies ( = 5,502) demonstrate the nature of these effects in the domains of paid employment, personal fitness, and charitable fundraising. The exertion of effort is deemed morally admirable (Studies 1-6) and is monetarily rewarded (Studies 2-6), even in situations where effort does not directly generate additional product, quality, or economic value.

Nevertheless, partisanship persisted: fake news warnings help briefly, but bias returns with time.

Politically oriented "fake news"-false stories or headlines created to support or attack a political position or person-is increasingly being shared and believed on social media. Many online platforms have taken steps to address this by adding a warning label to articles identified as false, but past research has shown mixed evidence for the effectiveness of such labels, and many prior studies have looked only at either short-term impacts or non-political information. This study tested three versions of fake news labels with 541 online participants in a two-wave study.

Political differences in free will belief are associated with differences in moralization.

In 14 studies, we tested whether political conservatives' stronger free will beliefs were linked to stronger and broader tendencies to moralize and, thus, a greater motivation to assign blame. In Study 1 (meta-analysis of 5 studies, = 308,499) we show that conservatives have stronger tendencies to moralize than liberals, even for moralization measures containing zero political content (e.g.

The moralization of obesity.

Rationale: Weight stigma is prevalent in Western society and has numerous negative effects on people with obesity. There remains a strong and currently unmet need to understand why anti-fat attitudes are tenacious and what intervention strategies might best produce lasting attitude change.

Objective: Many negative effects of weight stigma can be integrated by noting that people differ in the extent to which they see obesity as a moral failing.

Partisan Bias and Its Discontents.

Baron and Jost (this issue, p. 292) present three critiques of our meta-analysis demonstrating similar levels of partisan bias in liberals and conservatives: (a) that the studies we examined were biased toward finding symmetrical bias among liberals and conservatives, (b) that the studies we examined do not measure partisan bias but rather rational Bayesian updating, and (c) that social psychology is not biased in favor of liberals but rather toward creating false equivalencies. We respond in turn that (a) the included studies covered a wide variety of issues at the core of contemporary political conflict and fairly compared bias by establishing conditions under which both liberals and conservatives would have similar motivations and opportunities to demonstrate bias; (b) we carefully selected studies that were least vulnerable to Bayesian counterexplanation, and most scientists and laypeople consider these studies demonstrations of bias; and (c) there is reason to be vigilant about liberal bias in social psychology, but this does not preclude concerns about other possible biases, all of which threaten good science.

At Least Bias Is Bipartisan: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Partisan Bias in Liberals and Conservatives.

Both liberals and conservatives accuse their political opponents of partisan bias, but is there empirical evidence that one side of the political aisle is indeed more biased than the other? To address this question, we meta-analyzed the results of 51 experimental studies, involving over 18,000 participants, that examined one form of partisan bias-the tendency to evaluate otherwise identical information more favorably when it supports one's political beliefs or allegiances than when it challenges those beliefs or allegiances. Two hypotheses based on previous literature were tested: an asymmetry hypothesis (predicting greater partisan bias in conservatives than in liberals) and a symmetry hypothesis (predicting equal levels of partisan bias in liberals and conservatives). Mean overall partisan bias was robust ( r = .

Are morally good actions ever free?

Research has shown that people ascribe more responsibility to morally bad actions than both morally good and neutral ones, suggesting that people do not attribute responsibility to morally good actions. The present work demonstrates that this is not so: People ascribe more free will to morally good than neutral actions (Studies 1a-1b, Mini Meta). Studies 2a-2b distinguished the underlying motives for ascribing freedom to morally good and bad actions.

Making punishment palatable: Belief in free will alleviates punitive distress.

Punishing wrongdoers is beneficial for group functioning, but can harm individual well-being. Building on research demonstrating that punitive motives underlie free will beliefs, we propose that free will beliefs help justify punitive impulses, thus alleviating the associated distress. In Study 1, trait-level punitiveness predicted heightened levels of anxiety only for free will skeptics.

Data from a pre-publication independent replication initiative examining ten moral judgement effects.

We present the data from a crowdsourced project seeking to replicate findings in independent laboratories before (rather than after) they are published. In this Pre-Publication Independent Replication (PPIR) initiative, 25 research groups attempted to replicate 10 moral judgment effects from a single laboratory's research pipeline of unpublished findings. The 10 effects were investigated using online/lab surveys containing psychological manipulations (vignettes) followed by questionnaires.

Political bias is tenacious.

Duarte et al. are right to worry about political bias in social psychology but they underestimate the ease of correcting it. Both liberals and conservatives show partisan bias that often worsens with cognitive sophistication.

Conservatives report, but liberals display, greater happiness.

Research suggesting that political conservatives are happier than political liberals has relied exclusively on self-report measures of subjective well-being. We show that this finding is fully mediated by conservatives' self-enhancing style of self-report (study 1; N = 1433) and then describe three studies drawing from "big data" sources to assess liberal-conservative differences in happiness-related behavior (studies 2 to 4; N = 4936). Relative to conservatives, liberals more frequently used positive emotional language in their speech and smiled more intensely and genuinely in photographs.

Free to punish: a motivated account of free will belief.

Belief in free will is a pervasive phenomenon that has important consequences for prosocial actions and punitive judgments, but little research has investigated why free will beliefs are so widespread. Across 5 studies using experimental, survey, and archival data and multiple measures of free will belief, we tested the hypothesis that a key factor promoting belief in free will is a fundamental desire to hold others morally responsible for their wrongful behaviors. In Study 1, participants reported greater belief in free will after considering an immoral action than a morally neutral one.

Predicting end-of-life treatment preferences: perils and practicalities.

Rid and Wendler propose the development of a Patient Preference Predictor (PPP), an actuarial model for predicting incapacitated patient's life-sustaining treatment preferences across a wide range of end-of-life scenarios. An actuarial approach to end-of-life decision making has enormous potential, but transferring the logic of actuarial prediction to end-of-life decision making raises several conceptual complexities and logistical problems that need further consideration. Actuarial models have proven effective in targeted prediction tasks, but no evidence supports their effectiveness in the kind of broad spectrum prediction task that is the proposed goal of the PPP.

Incentivizing wellness in the workplace: sticks (not carrots) send stigmatizing signals.

Companies often provide incentives for employees to maintain healthy lifestyles. These incentives can take the form of either discounted premiums for healthy-weight employees ("carrot" policies) or increased premiums for overweight employees ("stick" policies). In the three studies reported here, we demonstrated that even when stick and carrot policies are formally equivalent, they do not necessarily convey the same information to employees.

The effects of culture and self-construal on responses to threatening health information.

Objective: The current studies examined if cultural and self-construal differences in self-enhancement extended to defensive responses to health threats.

Design: Responses to fictitious medical diagnoses were compared between Asian-Americans and European-North Americans in experiment 1 and between Canadians primed with an interdependent versus an independent self-construal in experiment 3. In experiment 2, the responses of Chinese and Canadians who were either heavy or light soft drink consumers were assessed after reading an article linking soft drink consumption to insulin resistance.

Mapping the moral domain.

The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally available (but variably developed) sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. We present evidence for the internal and external validity of the scale and the model, and in doing so we present new findings about morality: (a) Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a 5-factor structure of moral concerns; (b) convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant; and (c) we establish pragmatic validity of the measure in providing new knowledge and research opportunities concerning demographic and cultural differences in moral intuitions.

Actual and perceived gender differences in the accuracy of surrogate decisions about life-sustaining medical treatment among older spouses.

This study examined the influence of surrogate gender on the accuracy of substituted judgments about the use of life-sustaining treatment in a sample of 249 older adults and their self-selected surrogate decision-makers. Overall, wives were more accurate than husbands at predicting their spouses' treatment wishes. Surrogates' perceptions of their own abilities did not differ by gender but, among patients, husbands had more confidence than wives in their spouses' accuracy as, and comfort being, a surrogate.

False memories for end-of-life decisions.

Objective: To examine people's false memories for end-of-life decisions.

Design: In Study 1, older adults decided which life-sustaining treatments they would want if they were seriously ill. They made these judgments twice, approximately 12 months apart.

Context changes choices: a prospective study of the effects of hospitalization on life-sustaining treatment preferences.

Objective: Policy and law encouraging individuals to document their wishes for life-sustaining medical treatment in advance of serious illness assumes that these wishes are unaffected by changes in health condition. To test this assumption, the authors examine the life-sustaining treatment preferences of a sample of elderly adults prior to, soon after, and several months after a hospitalization experience.

Subjects And Methods: As part of the Advance Directives, Values Assessment, and Communication Enhancement (ADVANCE) project, 401 individuals older than age 65 participated in 3 annual interviews.