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In an era in which people are bombarded by claims, often from unreliable sources (e.g., generative AI, click-bait headlines), understanding what leads people to believe such claims is imperative. Building on work demonstrating the role of explanation in learning, we test how the process of explaining a claim affects people's beliefs in it (3 studies; N=476, 17,580 observations). In Study 1, participants read 30 scientific news headlines. For each, participants either: generated an explanation for the reported phenomenon, wrote down any thoughts they had about it, or retyped it word-for-word. Participants rated the likelihood that the headline was true. In Study 2, participants also provided baseline ratings one week before the manipulation. Study 3 added a control condition where participants simply read the headline. Across studies, participants believed claims of fact were more likely to be true after trying to explain them compared to any control condition.

How can social learning influence children’s inclinationstoward equality-based or merit-based fairness? To investigatethis question, six- and seven-year-olds were first presentedwith a pre-test distribution task in which they divided eightstickers between two hypothetical children, one of whom wasa more productive worker. Participants were then given brief,direct testimony that advocated either equality- or merit-basedfairness (whichever was not preferred at pre-test), and thatappealed either to emotions or reason. A novel experimenterthen presented participants with a post-test distribution task.The results indicated that a majority of children changed theirdistribution patterns from pre-test to post-test after beingprovided with direct testimony. These changes in resourcedistribution were accompanied by marked changes in thekinds of explanations that children provided. This researchindicates that children’s preferences for different forms of justresource distribution can be heavily influenced by socialcommunication.

People sometimes report feeling “totally” different (complete affectedness) and that “they’ll never be the same again”(continual affectedness) after negative events. It’s been proposed that complete, and continual negative effects characterizecontamination or impurity. Meanwhile, whether impurity is a legitimate moral domain apart from harm has been debated inmoral psychology. We address these matters using novel approaches from cognitive linguistics. First, according to a prominenttheory of verb semantics, verbs that convey impurity (contaminate, taint) belong to a class that implies complete affectedness(the “fill” class), such that contaminated entities are seen as completely contaminated. Second, people rated perpetrators equally,and highly, “contaminated”, “contaminating”, and “injuring”, whereas victims were rated straightforwardly “injured” (Turk;n=126, replicated twice). For ”contaminated” perpetrators, the taint carried on – they were continually ”contaminating”. Insum, impurity is distinct from harm: the process underlying impurity, contamination, involves inferences of complete, continualnegative effects that spread.

People's moral values and social emotions play an important role in everyday interactions. We investigated moral values and social emotions in autistic people within in-person (N = 62) and online (N = 443) samples. Autistic adults and neurotypical adults rated their endorsement of "groupbinding" (versus individual-based) moral values (e.g., ingroup loyalty) and responded to vignettes designed to elicit social comparison emotions: envy and schadenfreude. Across studies, autistic participants reported reduced endorsement of binding moral values and reduced levels of social comparison emotions. These findings reveal important associations among social cognition, moral values, and social emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral judgment often involves pinning causation for harm toa particular person. Since it reveals “who one sides with”, ex-pression of moral judgment can be a costly social act that peo-ple may be motivated to conceal. Here, we demonstrate thata simple, well-studied psycholinguistic task (implicit causal-ity) can be leveraged as a novel implicit measure of morallyrelevant causal attributions. Participants decided whether tocontinue sentences like “Amy killed Bob because...” with ei-ther the pronoun he or she. We found that (1) implicit causal-ity selections predicted explicit causal judgments, (2) select-ing the object (victim) for harm/force events (e.g., kill, rape)predicted endorsement of moral values previously linked tovictim-blame, and (3) higher hostile sexism predicted select-ing the female as the cause in male-on-female harm/force. Theimplicit causality task is a new measure of morally motivatedcausal attribution that may circumvent social desirability con-cerns.

Humans, while not wholly altruistic, will often come together to selflessly support and provide aid to others in need. To date, little attention has been paid to how memory for such positive events in the aftermath of a traumatic event can influence subsequent behavior. The current study examined how the way in which people represent and remember helping events immediately following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing related to their tendency to support Boston-related charities in the following months. People who recalled helping-related events in greater detail reported engaging in more helping behaviors in the following months. The relation between memory narratives and reports of helping behavior six months later has important implications for future work investigating the role of memory-based mechanisms in citizens' decisions to provide aid in times of collective need.