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- 2022
- Working Paper
Moral Thin-Slicing: How Snap Judgments Affect Online Sharing of Moral Content
By: Julian De Freitas and Alon Hafri
Consumers are exposed to a range of provocative moral transgressions online, as when consuming viral videos on social media or morally charged advertisements. Given limits on time and attention, consumers increasingly make moral evaluations in a few seconds or less,...
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Keywords:
Moral Judgement;
Thin Slices;
Social Media;
Fake News;
Misinformation;
Moral Sensibility;
Behavior;
News
- April 2022 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Conflicts of Interest at Uptown Bank
By: Jonas Heese
In 2013, two employees debated whether to blow the whistle on their employer, Bell Bank, after completing an internal review that revealed undisclosed conflicts of interest. Bell Bank’s Asset Management business disproportionately invested clients’ money in Bell Bank’s...
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Keywords:
Whistleblower;
Whistleblowing;
Mutual Funds;
Conflicts Of Interest;
Decision Making;
Decisions;
Judgments;
Ethics;
Moral Sensibility;
Values and Beliefs;
Finance;
Financial Institutions;
Banks and Banking;
Financial Management;
Investment;
Investment Funds;
Governance;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Disclosure;
Corporate Governance;
Governance Compliance;
Governance Controls;
Policy;
Law;
Legal Liability;
Social Psychology;
Motivation and Incentives;
Perception;
Perspective;
Trust;
Financial Services Industry;
North and Central America;
United States
- October 15, 2021
- Article
Virtuous Victims
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Maryam Kouchaki
How do people perceive the moral character of victims? We find, across a range of transgressions, that people frequently see victims of wrongdoing as more moral than non-victims who have behaved identically. Across 15 experiments (total n = 9,355), we document this...
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- August 2021
- Article
Anger Damns the Innocent
By: Katherine DeCelles, Gabrielle Adams, Holly S. Howe and Leslie K. John
False accusations of wrongdoing are common and can have grave consequences. In six studies, we document a worrisome paradox in perceivers’ subjective judgments of a suspect’s guilt. Specifically, we find that laypeople (online panelists; N = 4,983) use suspects’ angry...
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Keywords:
Morality;
Accusations;
Deception;
Guilt;
Affect;
Emotions;
Behavior;
Perception;
Judgments;
Decision Making
- March 2021
- Article
Deliberately Prejudiced Self-driving Vehicles Elicit the Most Outrage
By: Julian De Freitas and Mina Cikara
Should self-driving vehicles be prejudiced, e.g., deliberately harm the elderly over young children? When people make such forced-choices on the vehicle’s behalf, they exhibit systematic preferences (e.g., favor young children), yet when their options are unconstrained...
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- February 2021
- Case
The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations
By: Mihir Desai, Ruth Page, Suzanne Antoniou and Leanne Fan
How should historic social injustices be addressed? Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and their descendants, including Representative Regina Goodwin of Tulsa, believe they should be addressed through reparations and have consequently continued to push the government...
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Keywords:
Costs And Consequences;
Decisions;
Judgment And Decision-making;
Lawsuit;
Leading Change;
Conflict Resolution;
Perspective Taking;
Prejudice;
Bias;
Reparations;
Decision Making;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Cost vs Benefits;
Judgments;
Race;
Ethics;
Fairness;
Moral Sensibility;
Values and Beliefs;
Conflict Management;
Governance;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Governance;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Policy;
Government and Politics;
Government Legislation;
History;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Legal Liability;
Mission and Purpose;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Motivation and Incentives;
Civil Society or Community;
Social Issues;
Oklahoma;
Tulsa;
United States
- 2021
- Working Paper
False Signaling and Personal Moral Failings: Two Distinct Pathways to Hypocrisy with Unequal Moral Weight
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Roseanna Sommers
Moral engagement is a key feature of human nature: we hold moral values, condemn those who violate those values, and attempt to adhere to them ourselves. Yet moral engagement can make us appear hypocritical if we fail to behave morally. When does moral engagement risk...
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- December 2020 (Revised February 2021)
- Supplement
The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations
By: Mihir A. Desai and Suzanne Antoniou
How should historic social injustices be addressed? Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and their descendants, including Representative Regina Goodwin of Tulsa, believe they should be addressed through reparations and have consequently continued to push the government...
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Keywords:
Cost vs Benefits;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Decisions;
Judgments;
Race;
Fairness;
Moral Sensibility;
Values and Beliefs;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Governance;
Policy;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Government Legislation;
Government and Politics;
Government Administration;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Legal Liability;
Leading Change;
Mission and Purpose;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Conflict and Resolution;
Conflict Management;
Loss;
Motivation and Incentives;
Perspective;
Prejudice and Bias;
Civil Society or Community;
Social Issues;
Welfare;
Tulsa;
Oklahoma;
United States
- December 2020 (Revised February 2021)
- Teaching Note
The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations
By: Mihir A. Desai and Suzanne Antoniou
How should historic social injustices be addressed? Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and their descendants, including Representative Regina Goodwin of Tulsa, believe they should be addressed through reparations and have consequently continued to push the government...
View Details
Keywords:
Cost vs Benefits;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Decisions;
Judgments;
Race;
Fairness;
Moral Sensibility;
Values and Beliefs;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Governance;
Policy;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Government Legislation;
Government and Politics;
Government Administration;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Legal Liability;
Leading Change;
Mission and Purpose;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Conflict and Resolution;
Conflict Management;
Loss;
Motivation and Incentives;
Perspective;
Prejudice and Bias;
Civil Society or Community;
Social Issues;
Welfare;
Tulsa;
Oklahoma;
United States
- October 2020 (Revised February 2021)
- Case
The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations
By: Mihir A. Desai, Suzanne Antoniou and Leanne Fan
How should historic social injustices be addressed? Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and their descendants, including Representative Regina Goodwin of Tulsa, believe they should be addressed through reparations and have consequently continued to push the government...
View Details
Keywords:
Cost vs Benefits;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Decisions;
Judgments;
Race;
Fairness;
Moral Sensibility;
Values and Beliefs;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Governance;
Policy;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Government Legislation;
Government and Politics;
Government Administration;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Legal Liability;
Leading Change;
Mission and Purpose;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Conflict and Resolution;
Conflict Management;
Loss;
Motivation and Incentives;
Perspective;
Prejudice and Bias;
Civil Society or Community;
Social Issues;
Tulsa;
Oklahoma;
United States
- Article
Doubting Driverless Dilemmas
By: Julian De Freitas, Sam E. Anthony, Andrea Censi and George A. Alvarez
The alarm has been raised on so-called driverless dilemmas, in which autonomous vehicles will need to make high-stakes ethical decisions on the road. We argue that these arguments are too contrived to be of practical use, are an inappropriate method for making...
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Keywords:
Moral Judgment;
Autonomous Vehicles;
Driverless Policy;
Transportation;
Ethics;
Judgments;
Policy
- Article
Optimality Bias in Moral Judgment
By: Julian De Freitas and Samuel G.B. Johnson
We often make decisions with incomplete knowledge of their consequences. Might people nonetheless expect others to make optimal choices, despite this ignorance? Here, we show that people are sensitive to moral optimality: that people hold moral agents accountable...
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- April 2018
- Article
Compromised Ethics in Hiring Processes? How Referrers' Power Affects Employees' Reactions to Referral Practices
By: Rellie Derfler-Rozin, Bradford Baker and F. Gino
In this paper, we explore referral-based hiring practices and show how a referrer’s power (relative to the hiring manager) influences other organizational members’ support (or lack thereof) for who is hired through perceptions of the hiring manager’s motives and...
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- Article
If You're Going to Do Wrong, at Least Do It Right: Considering Two Moral Dilemmas at the Same Time Promotes Moral Consistency
By: Netta Barak-Corren, Chia-Jung Tsay, Fiery Cushman and Max Bazerman
We study how people reconcile conflicting moral intuitions by juxtaposing two versions of classic moral problems: the trolley problem and the footbridge problem. When viewed separately, most people favor action in the former and disapprove of action in the latter,...
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- 2018
- Chapter
In Search of Moral Equilibrium: Person, Situation, and Their Interplay in Behavioral Ethics
By: Julia J. Lee and F. Gino
Book Abstract: This comprehensive and cutting-edge volume maps out the terrain of moral psychology, a dynamic and evolving area of research. In 57 concise chapters, leading authorities and up-and-coming scholars explore fundamental issues and current controversies. The...
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- 2018
- Conference Presentation
Learning to Recognize Objects Provides Category-orthogonal Features for Social Inference and Moral Judgment
By: J. De Freitas, A. Hafri, G. A. Alvarez and D. L. K. Yamins
- Article
Your Visual System Provides All the Information You Need to Make Moral Judgments about Generic Visual Events
By: Julian De Freitas and George A. Alvarez
To what extent are people's moral judgments susceptible to subtle factors of which they are unaware? Here we show that we can change people’s moral judgments outside of their awareness by subtly biasing perceived causality. Specifically, we used subtle visual...
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- Article
Is the Moral Domain Unique?: A Social Influence Perspective for the Study of Moral Cognition
By: J. Lees and F. Gino
The nature of the cognitive processes that give rise to moral judgment and behavior has been a central question of psychology for decades. In this paper, we suggest that an often ignored yet fruitful stream of research for informing current debates on the nature of...
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- Article
Kill or Die: Moral Judgment Alters Linguistic Coding of Causality
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Jason Nemirow, Maxim Massenkoff and Steven Pinker
What is the relationship between the language people use to describe an event and their moral judgments?
We test the hypothesis that moral judgment and causative verbs rely on the same underlying mental
model of people’s actions. Experiment 1a finds that participants...
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- Article
Is Saving Lives Your Task or God's?: Religiosity, Belief in God, and Moral Judgment
By: Netta Barak-Corren and Max Bazerman
Should a Catholic hospital abort a life-threatening pregnancy or let a pregnant woman die? Should a religious employer allow his employees access to contraceptives or break with healthcare legislation? People and organizations of faith often face moral decisions that...
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