Political ideology, cooperation and national parochialism across 42 nations.

Political ideology has been hypothesized to be associated with cooperation and national parochialism (i.e. greater cooperation with members of one's nation), with liberals thought to have more cooperation with strangers and less national parochialism, compared to conservatives.

Positivity effect and decision making in ageing.

Across various contexts, older adults demonstrate a positivity effect - an age-related increase in a relative bias toward positive emotional stimuli as compared to negative stimuli. Previous research has demonstrated how this effect can influence decision making processes, specifically information search and choice satisfaction. However, the potential impact of the positivity effect and resulting age differences in information acquisition on decision quality has not been conclusively determined.

The functions of anger in moral courage-Insights from a behavioral study.

Moral courage is manifested when bystanders intervene to stop or prevent others' norm transgressions, despite potential costs to themselves. Although theoretical models propose a key role of emotions, in particular anger, in the psychological processes underlying moral courage, to date this role is underexplored. In a behavioral study, we proposed a conceptual differentiation between experienced and expressed anger in response to a witnessed moral transgression.

Exposition to xenophobic content and support for right-wing populism: The asymmetric role of gender.

This paper studies whether exposure to anti-immigrant sentiment in the online context affects the willingness to support an openly anti-immigration party, and shows how gender moderates the effect. We designed an online experiment in which participants were invited to an online forum to discuss immigration issues. We manipulate the social acceptability of xenophobic views by exposing participants to an increasing proportion of comments with anti-immigrant content.

Ambivalence and Interpersonal Liking: The Expression of Ambivalence as Social Validation of Attitudinal Conflict.

Literature on attitude similarity suggests that sharing similar attitudes enhances interpersonal liking, but it remains unanswered whether this effect also holds for ambivalent attitudes. In the present research, we shed light on the role attitudinal ambivalence plays in interpersonal liking. Specifically, we examine whether people express ambivalence strategically to generate a positive or negative social image, and whether this is dependent on the attitudinal ambivalence of their perceiver.

The breakdown of antiracist norms: A natural experiment on hate speech after terrorist attacks.

Terrorist attacks often fuel online hate and increase the expression of xenophobic and antiminority messages. Previous research has focused on the impact of terrorist attacks on prejudiced attitudes toward groups linked to the perpetrators as the cause of this increase. We argue that social norms can contain the expression of prejudice after the attacks.

Providing personal information to the benefit of others.

Personal information is a precious resource, not only for commercial interests but also for the public benefit. Reporting personal location data, for example, may aid efficient traffic flows and sharing one's health status may be a crucial instrument of disease management. We experimentally study individuals' willingness to contribute personal information to information-based public goods.

The stability of conditional cooperation: beliefs alone cannot explain the decline of cooperation in social dilemmas.

An often-replicated result in the experimental literature on social dilemmas is that a large share of subjects choose conditionally cooperative strategies. Cooperation generated by such choices is notoriously unstable, as individuals reduce their contributions to the public good in reaction to other subjects' free-riding. This has led to the widely-held conclusion that cooperation observed in experiments (and its decline) is mostly driven by imperfect reciprocity.

Close or Distant Past? The Role of Temporal Distance in Responses to Intergroup Violence From Victim and Perpetrator Perspectives.

In two different intergroup contexts, three studies investigated the role of temporal distance in responses to intergroup violence from both victim and perpetrator perspectives. In the context of the conflict between Serbs and Bosniaks, Study 1 showed that whereas increased subjective temporal distance predicted less support for justice-restoring efforts and less outgroup empathy among the perpetrator group (Serbs), it predicted more conciliatory, pro-outgroup attitudes among the victim group (Bosniaks). Furthermore, Bosniaks perceived the war as temporally closer than did Serbs.

Paranormal beliefs and individual differences: story seeking without reasoned review.

In a sample of 599 participants (60% female, 18-81 years), we tested the hypotheses that cognitive ability and the big-six personality traits suffice to explain the individual-difference component of paranormal beliefs (belief in magic, astrology, esoterism, supernatural beings, and spirituality). Additionally, we measured 14 other potential predictors that were found to correlate with paranormal beliefs in prior research (e.g.

Prosocial Preferences Condition Decision Effort and Ingroup Biased Generosity in Intergroup Decision-Making.

Ingroup favoritism and discrimination against outgroups are pervasive in social interactions. To uncover the cognitive processes underlying generosity towards in- and outgroup members, we employ eye-tracking in two pre registered studies. We replicate the well-established ingroup favoritism effect and uncover that ingroup compared to outgroup decision settings are characterized by systematic differences in information search effort (i.

Cooperation in Groups of Different Sizes: The Effects of Punishment and Reputation-Based Partner Choice.

Reputation and punishment are two distinct mechanisms that facilitate cooperation among strangers. However, empirical research on their effectiveness is mainly limited to relatively small groups and does not address how they enhance cooperation in relatively larger groups. We address this gap in the literature by testing hypotheses from competing perspectives about the extent to which reputation-based partner choice and punishment enhance cooperation in both small and large groups.

The Psychological Science Accelerator: Advancing Psychology through a Distributed Collaborative Network.

Concerns have been growing about the veracity of psychological research. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative samples, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowdsourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which one or more research projects are conducted across multiple lab sites, offers a pragmatic solution to these and other current methodological challenges.

What drives the (un)empathic bystander to intervene? Insights from eye tracking.

Norm violations (e.g., unfair transgressions) are often met with punishment even by people who are not directly affected.

Stepping into Perpetrators' Shoes: How Ingroup Transgressions and Victimization Shape Support for Retributive Justice through Perspective-Taking With Perpetrators.

Three experiments (total = 1,061) examined the morally disengaging function of perspective-taking with ingroup perpetrators in intergroup conflict. In the context of the Iran-U.S.

Causal underpinnings of working memory and Stroop interference control: Testing the effects of anodal and cathodal tDCS over the left DLPFC.

By means of transcranial direct current stimulation applied to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, we investigated the causal role of increased or decreased excitability of this brain region for two facets of executive functions: working memory and Stroop interference control. We tested 1) whether anodal tDCS of the left DLPFC enhances working memory 15 minutes after termination of stimulation and in the absence of direct task practice under stimulation; 2) whether anodal tDCS of the left DLPFC enhances interference control, as evidenced by Stroop performance and Stroop sequence effects; and 3) whether cathodal tDCS leads to compromised executive functioning compared to anodal stimulation. In a between-subject design with 88 healthy psychology students, we compared the impact of anodal and cathodal stimulation against a sham condition, on performance on a Stroop task (during active stimulation) and on an n-back task (completed 15 minutes after active stimulation ended).

Closing the gender gap in competitiveness through priming.

Men have been observed to have a greater willingness to compete compared to women, and it is possible that this contributes to gender differences in wages and career advancement. Policy interventions such as quotas are sometimes used to remedy this but these may cause unintended side-effects. Here, we present experimental evidence that a simple and practically costless tool-priming subjects with power-can close the gender gap in competitiveness.

A cross-national analysis of sex differences in prisoner's dilemma games.

In a comprehensive cross-national study involving samples from 12 different countries that were representative for the adult populations in terms of age and sex (N = 2,429), we found that women cooperate significantly less overall than men in fully incentivized one-shot prisoner's dilemma games. This gender gap in cooperation can be explained by the fact that women hold lower expectations regarding the cooperativeness of their anonymous interaction partners. These results contradict both the common stereotype that women are more communal, caring, emotionally expressive, and warm than men and substantial empirical evidence showing that women act more prosocially in many contexts.

The Power of Attention: Using Eye Gaze to Predict Other-Regarding and Moral Choices.

According to research studying the processes underlying decisions, a two-channel mechanism connects attention and choices: top-down and bottom-up processes. To identify the magnitude of each channel, we exogenously varied information intake by systematically interrupting participants' decision processes in Study 1 ( N = 116). Results showed that participants were more likely to choose a predetermined target option.

When to reveal what you feel: How emotions towards antagonistic out-group and third party audiences are expressed strategically.

In intergroup conflicts, expressed emotions influence how others see and react to those who express them. Here, we investigated whether this in turn implies that emotions may be expressed strategically. We tested whether emotion expression can differ from emotion experience, and whether emotion expression (more than emotion experience) is used to pursue specific goals.

The influence of episodic memory decline on value-based choice.

Recent studies suggest the involvement of episodic memory in value-based decisions as a source of information about subjective values of choice options. We therefore tested the link between age-related memory decline and inconsistencies in value-based decisions in 30 cognitively healthy older adults. Within the pre-registered experiment, the inconsistencies were measured in two ways: i) the consistency between stated preferences and revealed choices; ii) the amount of intransitivities in choice triplets, revealed in a forced paired choice task including all possible pairings of 20 food products.

Contagious yawning, empathy, and their relation to prosocial behavior.

Humans express facial mimicry across a variety of actions. This article explores a distinct example, contagious yawning, and the links to empathy and prosocial behavior. Prior studies have suggested that there is a positive link between empathy and the susceptibility to contagious yawning.

Social norm enforcement in ethnically diverse communities.

Recent waves of immigration to Western nations have fueled a debate over the consequences of ethnic diversity for social cohesion. One prominent argument in this debate holds that diversity is detrimental to trust and cooperation because individuals in heterogeneous communities face difficulties in enforcing social norms across ethnic lines. We examine this proposition in a field experiment involving real-life interactions among residents of multiethnic German neighborhoods.

The fire burns within: Individual motivations for self-sacrifice.

Extreme self-sacrifice in intergroup conflict may be driven not only by situational factors generating "fusion," but also by interindividual differences. Social value orientation is discussed as a potential contributor to self-harming behavior outside of intergroup conflicts and to the general propensity to participate in intergroup conflict. Social value orientation may therefore also be a person-specific determinant of extreme self-sacrifice in intergroup conflict.