The “Equal-Opportunity Jerk” Defense: Rudeness Can Obfuscate Gender Bias

Belmi, P., Jun, S., & Adams, G. S. (2022). 

Psychological Science, 33(3), 397–411.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211040495

Abstract

To address sexism, people must first recognize it. In this research, we identified a barrier that makes sexism hard to recognize: rudeness toward men. We found that observers judge a sexist perpetrator as less sexist if he is rude toward men. This occurs because rudeness toward men creates the illusion of gender blindness. We documented this phenomenon in five preregistered studies consisting of online adult participants and adult students from professional schools (total N = 4,663). These attributions are problematic because sexism and rudeness are not mutually exclusive. Men who hold sexist beliefs about women can be—and often are—rude toward other men. These attributions also discourage observers from holding perpetrators accountable for gender bias. Thus, rudeness toward men gives sexist perpetrators plausible deniability. It protects them and prevents the first perceptual step necessary to address sexism.

Statement of Relevance

Sexism can be challenging to identify and eventually root out. However, we contend that even blatant forms of sexism are sometimes difficult to recognize. In this research, we demonstrated how rudeness can makes blatant forms of sexism harder to identify. We found that a man does not seem sexist if he treats everyone—both men and women—poorly. This is problematic because sexism and rudeness are not mutually exclusive.  Men who are sexist can be—and often are—rude toward other men. We found that rudeness obscures the recognition of sexism by creating the perception that the sexist perpetrator does not

notice or pay attention to gender when dealing with other people. This misleads observers into thinking that an intervention such as gender-bias training is less necessary. Rudeness can therefore protect sexist perpetrators, making their prejudice harder to recognize and correct.

From the Discussion

It has been noted that overtly discriminatory conduct—characterized by blatant antipathy, antiquated

beliefs about women, and endorsement of pejorative stereotypes—is becoming less common because of

sweeping changes in antidiscrimination laws, practices, and ideologies in the United States (Brief et al., 1997; Dovidio & Gaertner, 1998; Swim et al., 1995). However, blatant, unambiguous, and obvious forms of sexist conduct continue to exist in society (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1998) and within organizations in particular (e.g., Cortina, 2008). Our findings suggest that one reason for their persistence is that observers may not recognize that everyday acts of rudeness can serve as a convenient mask for bias against women (Cortina, 2008). This has an important practical implication: When a sexist manager is rude toward men, it may appear as though he is not sexist. Thus, women victimized by his behavior will have a more difficult time proving that he is sexist. Rudeness can therefore protect perpetrators.

The research is here.

Copy the In-group: Group Membership Trumps Perceived Reliability, Warmth, and Competence in a Social-Learning Task

Montrey, M., & Shultz, T. R. (2022). 

Psychological Science, 33(1), 165–174.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211032224

Abstract

Surprisingly little is known about how social groups influence social learning. Although several studies have shown that people prefer to copy in-group members, these studies have failed to resolve whether group membership genuinely affects who is copied or whether group membership merely correlates with other known factors, such as similarity and familiarity. Using the minimal-group paradigm, we disentangled these effects in an online social-learning game. In a sample of 540 adults, we found a robust in-group-copying bias that (a) was bolstered by a preference for observing in-group members; (b) overrode perceived reliability, warmth, and competence; (c) grew stronger when social information was scarce; and (d) even caused cultural divergence between intermixed groups. These results suggest that people genuinely employ a copy-the-in-group social-learning strategy, which could help explain how inefficient behaviors spread through social learning and how humans maintain the cultural diversity needed for cumulative cultural evolution.

Discussion

Although previous studies have found an apparent in-group bias in social learning, they have failed to resolve whether this constitutes a genuine social-learning strategy or a mere confluence of other factors (Buttelmann et al., 2013; Howard et al., 2015). Our study disentangled group membership from similarity and familiarity by assigning group membership at random. We found that rather than eliminating the preference for in-group members, this approach resulted in a robust in-group-copying bias, which (a) was bolstered by a tendency to observe in-group members, (b) overrode participants’ stated beliefs, (c) grew stronger when social information was scarce, and (d) even caused cultural divergence between intermixed groups. Taken together, our findings suggest that people genuinely employ a copy-the-in-group strategy and that group membership has both a direct and indirect effect on copying.

Why might a copy-the-in-group strategy have evolved in the first place? One reason could be that it allowed humans to rapidly adopt and vigorously maintain group norms that enhance coordination (McElreath et al., 2003) or promote cooperation (Boyd & Richerson, 2009). Another reason could be that social learning is useful only to the extent that adopting other people’s behavior yields similar payoffs (Laland, 2004). For example, copying out-group members could be less efficient or even counterproductive if groups differ in terms of what behavior is punished or rewarded. Finally, such a strategy could also have evolved because it minimized the risk of deception. Because social learning is essentially information scrounging (Kameda & Nakanishi, 2002), in which the copier benefits from other people’s knowledge without incurring the same costs, knowledgeable individuals have an incentive to mislead others. However, this incentive is minimized when observed individuals have a vested interest in the copier’s success. This holds true in kin relationships (Laland, 2004) and likely generalizes to other settings, such as intergroup competition.

The research is here.

Human Vision Reconstructs Time to Satisfy Causal Constraints

Bechlivanidis, C., Buehner, M. J., et al.

(2022).

Psychological Science, 33(2), 224–235.

Abstract

The goal of perception is to infer the most plausible source of sensory stimulation. Unisensory perception of temporal order, however, appears to require no inference, because the order of events can be uniquely determined from the order in which sensory signals arrive. Here, we demonstrate a novel perceptual illusion that casts doubt on this intuition: In three experiments (N = 607), the experienced event timings were determined by causality in real time. Adult participants viewed a simple three-item sequence, ACB, which is typically remembered as ABC in line with principles of causality. When asked to indicate the time at which events B and C occurred, participants’ points of subjective simultaneity shifted so that the assumed cause B appeared earlier and the assumed effect C later, despite participants’ full attention and repeated viewings. This first demonstration of causality reversing perceived temporal order cannot be explained by postperceptual distortion, lapsed attention, or saccades.

Statement of Relevance

There are two sources of information on the temporal order of events: the order in which we experience them and their causal relationships, because causes precede their effects. Intuitively, direct experience of order is far more dependable than causal inference. Here, we showed participants events that looked like collisions, but the collided-on object started moving before the collision occurred. Surprisingly, participants indicated in real time that they saw events happening significantly earlier or later than they actually did, at timings compatible with causal interpretations (as if there were indeed a collision). This is evidence that perceived order is not the passive registration of the sequence of signals arriving at the observer but an active interpretation informed by rich assumptions.

General Discussion

Collectively, our findings constitute the first demonstration of a unisensory perceptual illusion of temporal order induced by causal impressions, indicating that the visual system generates the experienced order through a process of interpretation (Grush, 2016; Holcombe, 2015).  Participants were given precise instructions and sufficient time to repeatedly view the sequences, they attended to the critical events using the same modality, and they synchronized object motion with a nonlocalized flash.  We can thus confidently rule out alternative explanations based on inattentional blindness, multimodal integration, flash lag, and motion aftereffects. Because stimulus presentation was free and unconstrained relative to the time of saccades, our results cannot be accounted for by transient perisaccadic mislocalization, either (Kresevic et al., 2016; Morrone et al., 2005). Although in this case we examined the effect only with an adult population recruited from a crowdsourcing platform, previous research suggests that children as young as 4 years old are also susceptible to causal reordering, at least when asked to make post hoc reports (Tecwyn et al., 2020).  More research needs to be carried out to study the degree of perceptual shift and, more broadly, the generalizability of the current results.

A pdf is here.

Generating Options and Choosing Between Them Depend on Distinct Forms of Value Representation

Morris, A., Phillips, J., Huang, K., & 

Cushman, F. (2021). 

Psychological Science. 

https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211005702

Abstract

Humans have a remarkable capacity for flexible decision-making, deliberating among actions by modeling their likely outcomes. This capacity allows us to adapt to the specific features of diverse circumstances. In real-world decision-making, however, people face an important challenge: There are often an enormous number of possibilities to choose among, far too many for exhaustive consideration. There is a crucial, understudied prechoice step in which, among myriad possibilities, a few good candidates come quickly to mind. How do people accomplish this? We show across nine experiments (N = 3,972 U.S. residents) that people use computationally frugal cached value estimates to propose a few candidate actions on the basis of their success in past contexts (even when irrelevant for the current context). Deliberative planning is then deployed just within this set, allowing people to compute more accurate values on the basis of context-specific criteria. This hybrid architecture illuminates how typically valuable thoughts come quickly to mind during decision-making.

From the General Discussion

Salience effects, such as recency, frequency of consideration, and extremity, likely also contribute to consideration (Kahneman, 2003; Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Our results supported at least one salience effect: In Studies 4 through 6, in addition to our primary effect of high cached value, options with more extreme cached values relative to the mean also tended to come to mind (see the checkmark shape in Fig. 3d). Salience effects such as this may have a functional basis, such as conserving scarce cognitive resources (Lieder et al., 2018). An ideal general theory would specify how these diverse factors—including many others, such as personality traits, social roles, and cultural norms (Smaldino & Richerson, 2012)—form a coherent, adaptive design for option generation.

A growing body of work suggests that value influences what comes to mind not only during decision-making but also in many other contexts, such as causal reasoning, moral judgment, and memory recall (Bear & Knobe, 2017; Braun et al., 2018; Hitchcock & Knobe, 2009; Mattar & Daw, 2018; Phillips et al., 2019). A key inquiry going forward will be the role of cached versus context-specific value estimation in these cases.

The research is here.

Using Machine Learning to Generate Novel Hypotheses: Increasing Optimism About COVID-19 Makes People Less Willing to Justify Unethical Behaviors

Sheetal A, Feng Z, Savani K. 

Psychological Science. 2020;31(10):

1222-1235. 

doi:10.1177/0956797620959594

Abstract

How can we nudge people to not engage in unethical behaviors, such as hoarding and violating social-distancing guidelines, during the COVID-19 pandemic? Because past research on antecedents of unethical behavior has not provided a clear answer, we turned to machine learning to generate novel hypotheses. We trained a deep-learning model to predict whether or not World Values Survey respondents perceived unethical behaviors as justifiable, on the basis of their responses to 708 other items. The model identified optimism about the future of humanity as one of the top predictors of unethicality. A preregistered correlational study (N = 218 U.S. residents) conceptually replicated this finding. A preregistered experiment (N = 294 U.S. residents) provided causal support: Participants who read a scenario conveying optimism about the COVID-19 pandemic were less willing to justify hoarding and violating social-distancing guidelines than participants who read a scenario conveying pessimism. The findings suggest that optimism can help reduce unethicality, and they document the utility of machine-learning methods for generating novel hypotheses.

Here is how the research article begins:

Unethical behaviors can have substantial consequences in times of crisis. For example, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people hoarded face masks and hand sanitizers; this hoarding deprived those who needed protective supplies most (e.g., medical workers and the elderly) and, therefore, put them at risk. Despite escalating deaths, more than 50,000 people were caught violating quarantine orders in Italy, putting themselves and others at risk. Governments covered up the scale of the pandemic in that country, thereby allowing the infection to spread in an uncontrolled manner. Thus, understanding antecedents of unethical behavior and identifying nudges to reduce unethical behaviors are particularly important in times of crisis.

Here is part of the Discussion

We formulated a novel hypothesis—that optimism reduces unethicality—on the basis of the deep-learning model’s finding that whether people think that the future of humanity is bleak or bright is a strong predictor of unethicality. This variable was not flagged as a top predictor either by the correlational analysis or by the lasso regression. Consistent with this idea, the results of a correlational study showed that people higher on dispositional optimism were less willing to engage in unethical behaviors. A following experiment found that increasing participants’ optimism about the COVID-19 epidemic reduced the extent to which they justified unethical behaviors related to the epidemic. The behavioral studies were conducted with U.S. American participants; thus, the cultural generalizability of the present findings is unclear. Future research needs to test whether optimism reduces unethical behavior in other cultural contexts.

The Link Between Self-Dehumanization and Immoral Behavior

Association for Psychological Science

Here is an excerpt:

After establishing that unethical behavior can increase self-dehumanization, the researchers then carried out a second set of studies designed to test whether self-dehumanization may also lead to unethical behavior. Across all three studies, participants completed the writing assignment described above before deliberating over a moral choice. Those in the self-dehumanization condition were found both to cheat more when asked to self-report the results of a coin flip in exchange for cash, and to assign partners to the more difficult of two available tasks.

Finally, the researchers tested their full model of self-dehumanization on a sample of 429 students. Participants first predicted a series of seemingly random coin flips. Unbeknownst to them, the results in the neutral condition were rigged so that the participants’ predictions always matched the coin flips. In the possibility-of-cheating condition, however, the results were rigged to always be inconsistent with the coin flips, followed by an erroneous message announcing that they had guessed correctly.

Participants in the cheating condition then had a choice: they could either click a box on the screen to report the “technical issue,” or they could collect their ill-begotten $2 reward for an accurate prediction. Of the 293 participants in this condition, 134 chose to take the money.

After reporting their levels of self-dehumanization and completing a filler task, participants then completed an anagram test in which those in the possibility-of-cheating condition had another chance to misreport their results. As the researchers suspected, people who chose to take money they did not deserve in the first task reported higher self-dehumanization, and were more likely to cheat in the final task as well.

The information is here.

Kouchaki, M., Dobson, K. S., Waytz, A., & Kteily, N. S. (2018). The Link Between Self-Dehumanization and Immoral Behavior. Psychological Science, 29(8), 1234-1246. doi:10.1177/0956797618760784

Of Mice, Men, and Trolleys: Hypothetical Judgment Versus Real-Life Behavior in Trolley-Style Moral Dilemmas

Dries H. Bostyn, Sybren Sevenhant, and Arne Roets
Psychological Science 
First Published May 9, 2018

Abstract

Scholars have been using hypothetical dilemmas to investigate moral decision making for decades. However, whether people’s responses to these dilemmas truly reflect the decisions they would make in real life is unclear. In the current study, participants had to make the real-life decision to administer an electroshock (that they did not know was bogus) to a single mouse or allow five other mice to receive the shock. Our results indicate that responses to hypothetical dilemmas are not predictive of real-life dilemma behavior, but they are predictive of affective and cognitive aspects of the real-life decision. Furthermore, participants were twice as likely to refrain from shocking the single mouse when confronted with a hypothetical versus the real version of the dilemma. We argue that hypothetical-dilemma research, while valuable for understanding moral cognition, has little predictive value for actual behavior and that future studies should investigate actual moral behavior along with the hypothetical scenarios dominating the field.

The research is here.

Concern for Others Leads to Vicarious Optimism

Andreas Kappes, Nadira S. Faber, Guy Kahane, Julian Savulescu, Molly J. Crockett
Psychological Science 
First Published January 30, 2018

Abstract

An optimistic learning bias leads people to update their beliefs in response to better-than-expected good news but neglect worse-than-expected bad news. Because evidence suggests that this bias arises from self-concern, we hypothesized that a similar bias may affect beliefs about other people’s futures, to the extent that people care about others. Here, we demonstrated the phenomenon of vicarious optimism and showed that it arises from concern for others. Participants predicted the likelihood of unpleasant future events that could happen to either themselves or others. In addition to showing an optimistic learning bias for events affecting themselves, people showed vicarious optimism when learning about events affecting friends and strangers. Vicarious optimism for strangers correlated with generosity toward strangers, and experimentally increasing concern for strangers amplified vicarious optimism for them. These findings suggest that concern for others can bias beliefs about their future welfare and that optimism in learning is not restricted to oneself.

From the Discussion section

Optimism is a self-centered phenomenon in which people underestimate the likelihood of negative future events for themselves compared with others (Weinstein, 1980). Usually, the “other” is defined as a group of average others—an anonymous mass. When past studies asked participants to estimate the likelihood of an event happening to either themselves or the average population, participants did not show a learning bias for the average population (Garrett & Sharot, 2014). These findings are unsurprising given that people typically feel little concern for anonymous groups or anonymous individual strangers (Kogut & Ritov, 2005; Loewenstein et al., 2005). Yet people do care about identifiable others, and we accordingly found that people exhibit an optimistic learning bias for identifiable strangers and, even more markedly, for friends. Our research thereby suggests that optimism in learning is not restricted to oneself. We see not only our own lives through rose-tinted glasses but also the lives of those we care about.

The research is here.