Sustaining Livelihoods or Saving Lives? Economic System Justification in the Time of COVID-19.

Unlabelled: An ongoing debate in the United States relating to COVID-19 features the purported tension between containing the coronavirus to save lives or opening the economy to sustain livelihoods, with ethical overtones on both sides. Proponents of opening the economy argue that sustaining livelihoods should be prioritized over virus containment, with ethicists asking, "What about the risk to human life?" Defendants of restricting the spread of the virus endorse saving lives through virus containment but contend with the ethical concern "What about people's livelihoods and individual freedoms?" A commonly held belief is that political ideology drives these differential preferences: liberals are more focused on saving lives, whereas conservatives favor sustaining livelihoods with no additional government intervention in the free-market economy. We examine these lay beliefs among US residents in four studies and find that economic system justification (ESJ), an ideology that defends the prevailing economic system when under threat, is a reliable psychological predictor beyond political ideology.

Context matters for attractiveness bias.

To fully understand the attractiveness bias, we propose that contextual factors or affordances should be integrated into the mating-based evolutionary account of Maestripieri et al. We review examples highlighting the role of contextual factors in the perception of attractiveness and in attractiveness bias. These suggest contextual factors differentially afford the development of preference for attractive others into observed habits of mind.

Putting all your eggs in one basket: life-history strategies, bet hedging, and diversification.

Diversification of resources is a strategy found everywhere from the level of microorganisms to that of giant Wall Street investment firms. We examine the functional nature of diversification using life-history theory-a framework for understanding how organisms navigate resource-allocation trade-offs. This framework suggests that diversification may be adaptive or maladaptive depending on one's life-history strategy and that these differences should be observed under conditions of threat.

When nasty breeds nice: threats of violence amplify agreeableness at national, individual, and situational levels.

Humans have perennially faced threats of violence from other humans and have developed functional strategies for surviving those threats. Five studies examined the relation between threats of violence and agreeableness at the level of nations, individuals, and situations. People living in countries with higher military spending (Study 1) and those who chronically perceive threats from others (Study 2) were more agreeable.

Fundamental(ist) attribution error: Protestants are dispositionally focused.

Attribution theory has long enjoyed a prominent role in social psychological research, yet religious influences on attribution have not been well studied. We theorized and tested the hypothesis that Protestants would endorse internal attributions to a greater extent than would Catholics, because Protestantism focuses on the inward condition of the soul. In Study 1, Protestants made more internal, but not external, attributions than did Catholics.

Economic decision biases and fundamental motivations: how mating and self-protection alter loss aversion.

Much research shows that people are loss averse, meaning that they weigh losses more heavily than gains. Drawing on an evolutionary perspective, we propose that although loss aversion might have been adaptive for solving challenges in the domain of self-protection, this may not be true for men in the domain of mating. Three experiments examine how loss aversion is influenced by mating and self-protection motives.

Deep Rationality: The Evolutionary Economics of Decision Making.

What is a "rational" decision? Economists traditionally viewed rationality as maximizing expected satisfaction. This view has been useful in modeling basic microeconomic concepts, but falls short in accounting for many everyday human decisions. It leaves unanswered why some things reliably make people more satisfied than others, and why people frequently act to make others happy at a cost to themselves.

"My way or mom's way?" The bilingual and bicultural self in Hong Kong Chinese children and adolescents.

This study examined the relation of language to the development of a cultural self. Bilingual children ages 8-14 from Hong Kong (N = 125) were interviewed in either English or Chinese. They recalled autobiographical events and described themselves, and indicated their agreement with Chinese interdependent versus Western independent values.

Mating Competitors Increase Religious Beliefs.

It has been presumed that religiosity has an influence on mating behavior, but here we experimentally investigate the possibility that mating behavior might also influence religiosity. In Experiment 1, people reported higher religiosity after looking at mating pools consisting of attractive people of their own sex compared to attractive opposite sex targets. Experiment 2 replicated the effect with an added control group, and suggested that both men and women become more religious when seeing same sex competitors.