Socially evaluative contexts facilitate mentalizing

Woo, B. M., Tan, E., Yuen, F. L, & Hamlin, J. K.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Month 2022, 

Vol. xx, No. xx

Abstract

Our ability to understand others’ minds stands at the foundation of human learning, communication, cooperation, and social life more broadly. Although humans’ ability to mentalize has been well-studied throughout the cognitive sciences, little attention has been paid to whether and how mentalizing differs across contexts. Classic developmental studies have examined mentalizing within minimally social contexts, in which a single agent seeks a neutral inanimate object. Such object-directed acts may be common, but they are typically consequential only to the object-seeking agent themselves. Here, we review a host of indirect evidence suggesting that contexts providing the opportunity to evaluate prospective social partners may facilitate mentalizing across development. Our article calls on cognitive scientists to study mentalizing in contexts where it counts.

Highlights

Cognitive scientists have long studied the origins of our ability to mentalize. Remarkably little is known, however, about whether there are particular contexts where humans are more likely to mentalize.

We propose that mentalizing is facilitated in contexts where others’ actions shed light on their status as a good or bad social partner. Mentalizing within socially evaluative contexts supports effective partner choice.

Our proposal is based on three lines of evidence. First, infants leverage their understanding of others’ mental states to evaluate others’ social actions. Second, infants, children, and adults demonstrate enhanced mentalizing within socially evaluative contexts. Third, infants, children, and adults are especially likely to mentalize when agents cause negative outcomes.  Direct tests of this proposal will contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of human mentalizing.

Concluding remarks

Mental state reasoning is not only used for social evaluation, but may be facilitated, and even overactivated, when humans engage in social evaluation. Human infants begin mentalizing in socially evaluative contexts as soon as they do so in nonevaluative contexts, if not earlier, and mental state representations across human development may be stronger in socially evaluative contexts, particularly when there are negative outcomes. This opinion article supports the possibility that mentalizing is privileged within socially evaluative contexts, perhaps due to its key role in facilitating the selection of appropriate cooperative partners. Effective partner choice may provide a strong foundation upon which humans’ intensely interdependent and cooperative nature can flourish.

The work cited herein is highly suggestive, and more work is clearly needed to further explore this possibility (see Outstanding questions). We have mostly reviewed and compared data across experiments that have studied mentalizing in either socially evaluative or nonevaluative contexts, pulling from a wide range of ages and methods; to our knowledge, no research has directly compared both socially evaluative and nonevaluative contexts within the same experiment.  Experiments using stringent minimal contrast designs would provide stronger tests of our central claims. In addition to such experiments, in the same way that meta-analyses have explored other predictors of mentalizing, we call on future researchers to conduct meta-analyses of findings that come from socially evaluative and nonevaluative contexts. We look forward to such research, which together will move us towards a more comprehensive understanding of humans’ early mentalizing.

A pdf is here.

The moralization of effort

Celniker, J. B., et al. (2022).

Journal of Experimental Psychology:

General. Advance online publication.

https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001259

Abstract

People believe that effort is valuable, but what kind of value does it confer? We find that displays of effort signal moral character. Eight studies (N = 5,502) demonstrate the nature of these effects in the domains of paid employment, personal fitness, and charitable fundraising. The exertion of effort is deemed morally admirable (Studies 1–6) and is monetarily rewarded (Studies 2–6), even in situations where effort does not directly generate additional product, quality, or economic value. Convergent patterns of results emerged in South Korean and French cross-cultural replications (Studies 2b and 2c). We contend that the seeming irrationality of valuing effort for its own sake, such as in situations where one’s efforts do not directly increase economic output (Studies 3–6), reveals a “deeply rational” social heuristic for evaluating potential cooperation partners. Specifically, effort cues engender broad moral trait ascriptions, and this moralization of effort influences donation behaviors (Study 5) and cooperative partner choice decision-making (Studies 4 and 6). In situating our account of effort moralization into past research and theorizing, we also consider the implications of these effects for social welfare policy and the future of work.

General Discussion

Is effort deemed socially valuable, even in situations where one’s efforts have no direct economic utility? Eight studies using multiple methodologies and cross-cultural samples indicate that it is. We provided evidence of effort moralization—displays of effort increased the moral qualities ascribed to individuals (we did not, we should note, provide evidence of the specific process by which effort cues shift from having a nonmoral to moral status, a more limited definition of moralization; Rhee et al., 2019). Moreover, the moralization of effort guided participants’ allocations of monetary resources and selections of cooperation partners. These data support our argument that effort moralization is a “deeply rational” social heuristic for navigating cooperation markets (Barclay, 2013; Kenrick et al., 2009). Even in circumstances where effort was economically unnecessary, people believed such efforts reflected others’ inner virtues.

(cut)

This evolutionary perspective may provide a more parsimonious framework for integrating research on effort evaluations: the “effort heuristic” (Kruger et al., 2004) may be more functionally dynamic than previously recognized, with effort moralization constituting one of its social functions. Thus, rather than directly causing people to moralize effort, cultural beliefs like the PWE may be scaffolded on evolved psychological mechanisms such as shared intuitions about the value of effort. The PWE (and similar work ethics among other populations) may have emerged, then, because it benefited from a combination of being well fit to our psychology (in appealing to an underlying tendency for effort moralization) and culturally useful (in promoting cooperation and industriousness; Henrich, 2020; Henrich & Boyd, 2016).

A pdf of the research is here.

Note: Hardworking people are often seen as more moral than those perceived or believed as lazy. Yet people who work harder are not always more economically productive.  Capitalist fantasies play into these moral stereotypes.  Effort moralization plays right into misconceptions about poor people being lazy and rich people as hard workers.  Neither stereotype is accurate.

Ethical Free Riding: When Honest People Find Dishonest Partners

Jörg Gross, Margarita Leib, Theo Offerman, & Shaul Shalvi
Psychological Science
https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618796480

Abstract

Corruption is often the product of coordinated rule violations. Here, we investigated how such corrupt collaboration emerges and spreads when people can choose their partners versus when they cannot. Participants were assigned a partner and could increase their payoff by coordinated lying. After several interactions, they were either free to choose whether to stay with or switch their partner or forced to stay with or switch their partner. Results reveal that both dishonest and honest people exploit the freedom to choose a partner. Dishonest people seek a partner who will also lie—a “partner in crime.” Honest people, by contrast, engage in ethical free riding: They refrain from lying but also from leaving dishonest partners, taking advantage of their partners’ lies. We conclude that to curb collaborative corruption, relying on people’s honesty is insufficient. Encouraging honest individuals not to engage in ethical free riding is essential.

Conclusion
The freedom to select partners is important for the establishment of trust and cooperation. As we show here, however, it is also associated with potential moral hazards. For individuals who seek to keep the risk of collusion low, policies providing the freedom to choose one’s partners should be implemented with caution. Relying on people’s honesty may not always be sufficient because honest people may be willing to tolerate others’ rule violations if they stand to profit from them. Our results clarify yet again that people who are not willing to turn a blind eye and stand up to corruption should receive all praise.

The costs of being consequentialist: Social perceptions of those who harm and help for the greater good

Everett, J. A. C., Faber, N. S., Savulescu, J., & Crockett, M. (2017, December 15).
The Cost of Being Consequentialist. Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/a2kx6

Abstract

Previous work has demonstrated that people are more likely to trust “deontological” agents who reject instrumentally harming one person to save a greater number than “consequentialist” agents who endorse such harm in pursuit of the greater good. It has been argued that these differential social perceptions of deontological vs. consequentialist agents could explain the higher prevalence of deontological moral intuitions. Yet consequentialism involves much more than decisions to endorse instrumental harm: another critical dimension is impartial beneficence, defined as the impartial maximization of the greater good, treating the well-being of every individual as equally important. In three studies (total N = 1,634), we investigated preferences for deontological vs. consequentialist social partners in both the domains of instrumental harm and impartial beneficence, and consider how such preferences vary across different types of social relationships.  Our results demonstrate consistent preferences for deontological over consequentialist agents across both domains of instrumental harm and impartial beneficence: deontological agents were viewed as more moral and trustworthy, and were actually entrusted with more money in a resource distribution task. However, preferences for deontological agents were stronger when those preferences were revealed via aversion to instrumental harm than impartial beneficence. Finally, in the domain of instrumental harm, deontological agents were uniformly preferred across a variety of social roles, but in the domain of impartial beneficence, people prefer deontologists for roles requiring direct interaction (friend, spouse, boss) but not for more distant roles with little-to-no personal interaction (political leader).

The research is here.