R Willer
Biographic Data
| ID | 4524 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Willer |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Willer |
| SIGNATURE | WILLER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3404-6472 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1310 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 19 |
A registered report megastudy on the persuasiveness of the most-cited climate messages
The Way Back After Backsliding
Abundant prior research has analyzed the mass public’s role in democratic backsliding. Comparatively little research has studied democratic restoration, the rehabilitation of democratic institutions following backsliding. We investigate this issue using the case of Poland, where the pro-democratic alliance led by Donald Tusk won the parliamentary election in 2023 after eight years of democratic backsliding under the Law and Justice party. A centr…
Power as a moral magnifier
Addressing climate change with behavioral science
Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interve…
Ironic effects of prosocial gossip in driving inaccurate social perceptions
Need for Chaos and Dehumanization are Robustly Associated with Support for Partisan Violence, While Political Measures are Not
How to design and conduct a megastudy
Incivility Is Rising Among American Politicians on Twitter
We provide the first systematic investigation of trends in the incivility of American politicians on Twitter, a dominant platform for political communication in the United States. Applying a validated artificial intelligence classifier to all 1.3 million tweets made by members of Congress since 2009, we observe a 23% increase in incivility over a decade on Twitter. Further analyses suggest that the rise was partly driven by reinforcement learning…
Reducing Explicit Blatant Dehumanization by Correcting Exaggerated Meta-Perceptions
If explicitly, blatantly dehumanizing a group of people—overtly characterizing them as less than human—facilitates harming them, then reversing this process is paramount. Addressing dehumanization among American political partisans appears especially crucial, given that it has been linked to their anti-democratic hostility. Perhaps because of its overt nature, partisans recognize—and greatly exaggerate—the extent to which out-partisans explicitly…
Endorsements from Republican politicians can increase confidence in U.S. elections
Since the 2020 U.S. presidential election, perceptions of the validity of the outcome and broader trust in the American electoral process have reached historically low levels among Republicans. While this trend has potentially harmful consequences for democratic stability, there is little research on how beliefs that an election was fair—and trust in the electoral process more generally—can be restored. In a preregistered survey experiment ( n = …
Supplemental Material for Pain Sensitivity Predicts Support for Moral and Political Views Across the Aisle
Amplification of emotion on social media
Correcting inaccurate metaperceptions reduces Americans’ support for partisan violence
Significance Prominent events, such as the 2021 US Capitol attack, have brought politically motivated violence to the forefront of Americans’ minds. Yet, the causes of support for partisan violence remain poorly understood. Across four studies, we found evidence that exaggerated perceptions of rival partisans’ support for violence are a major cause of partisans’ own support for partisan violence. Further, correcting these false beliefs reduces pa…
Did Ohio’s Vaccine Lottery Increase Vaccination Rates? A Pre-Registered, Synthetic Control Study
Overcoming vaccine hesitancy is critical to containing the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. To increase vaccination rates, the State of Ohio launched a million dollar lottery in May 2021. Following a pre-registered analysis, we estimate the effects of Ohio’s lottery program Vax-a-Million on COVID-19 vaccination rates by comparing it to a “synthetic control” composed of eight other states. We find a statistically insignificant 1.3% decrease…
Changing Americans' Attitudes about Immigration
Our tendency to interpret facts in ways that are consistent with our prior beliefs impedes evidence-based attempts to persuade partisans to change their views on pressing societal issues such as immigration. Accordingly, most prior work finds that favorable information about the impact of immigration has little or no influence on policy preferences. Here, we propose that appealing to individuals' moral values can bolster the persuasive power of i…
Homophily and acrophily as drivers of political segregation
Interventions to reduce partisan animosity
Interventions reducing affective polarization do not necessarily improve anti-democratic attitudes
Elite party cues increase vaccination intentions among Republicans
Overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic requires motivating the vast majority of Americans to get vaccinated. However, vaccination rates have become politically polarized, and a substantial proportion of Republicans have remained vaccine hesitant for months. Here, we explore how endorsements by party elites affect Republicans’ COVID-19 vaccination intentions and attitudes. In a preregistered survey experiment ( n = 1,480), we varied whether self-identif…
The Psychology of Entrenched Privilege
As rates of intergenerational social mobility decline, it is increasingly important to understand the psychological consequences of entrenched socioeconomic privilege. Here, we explore whether current and childhood socioeconomic status (SES) are interactively related to entitlement, such that among currently high SES individuals, those from affluent backgrounds are likely to feel uniquely high levels of entitlement, whereas currently low SES indi…
The effects of racial status threat on White Americans’ support for Donald Trump
Prior theory and research suggest that threats to the status of White Americans may increase support for Donald Trump. Consistent with this, one previous experiment conducted in early 2016 documented this effect (Major et al., 2018), finding that making salient the declining White majority in the United States increased support for Trump’s presidential candidacy among White participants with high levels of ethnic identification. We report the res…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on nav…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
The activist’s dilemma
How do protest actions impact public support for social movements? Here we test the claim that extreme protest actions-protest behaviors perceived to be harmful to others, highly disruptive, or both-typically reduce support for social movements. Across 6 experiments, including 3 that were preregistered, participants indicated less support for social movements that used more extreme protest actions. This result obtained across a variety of movemen…
Judgments of Economic Fairness Are Based More on Perceived Economic Mobility Than Perceived Inequality
Are judgments of the fairness of the American economy based on perceptions of economic inequality, mobility, or both? In two experiments, the authors varied information on levels of U.S. inequality and mobility, measuring effects on individuals' judgments of economic fairness and meritocracy. Although both treatments influenced perceptions of economic fairness and meritocracy, the mobility effect was generally larger. The two treatments did not i…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
Groups Reward Individual Sacrifice
One of sociology's classic puzzles is how groups motivate their members to set aside self-interest and contribute to collective action. This article presents a solution to the problem based on status as a selective incentive motivating contribution. Contributors to collective action signal their motivation to help the group and consequently earn diverse benefits from group members-in particular, higher status-and these rewards encourage greater g…
The Social Structure of Political Echo Chambers
We predict that people with different political orientations will exhibit systematically different levels of political homophily, the tendency to associate with others similar to oneself in political ideology. Research on personality differences across the political spectrum finds that both more conservative and more politically extreme individuals tend to exhibit greater orientations towards cognitive stability, clarity, and familiarity. We reas…
The Emperor's Dilemma
The authors demonstrate the uses of agent‐based computational models in an application to a social enigma they call the “emperor’s dilemma,” based on the Hans Christian Andersen fable. In this model, agents must decide whether to comply with and enforce a norm that is supported by a few fanatics and opposed by the vast majority. They find that cascades of self‐reinforcing support for a highly unpopular norm cannot occur in a fully connected socia…
Beyond Altruism
In explaining the sources of cooperation and prosocial behavior, psychologists, behavioral economists, and biologists often focus on factors internal to the individual, such as altruistic motivations, other-regarding preferences, and prosocial emotions. By contrast, sociologists typically emphasize social forces external to the individual, including norms, reputation systems, and social networks. Here we review evidence for these rules, reputatio…
Overdoing Gender
American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 4 (January 2013): 980-1022. ?? 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved
Does Violent Protest Backfire? Testing a Theory of Public Reactions to Activist Violence
How do people respond to violent political protest? The authors present a theory proposing that the use of violence leads the general public to view a protest group as less reasonable, a perception that reduces identification with the group. This reduced identification in turn reduces public support for the violent group. Furthermore, the authors argue that violence also leads to more support for groups that are perceived as opposing the violent …
A Sense of Powerlessness Fosters System Justification
In an attempt to explain the stability of hierarchy, we focus on the perspective of the powerless and how a subjective sense of dependence leads them to imbue the system and its authorities with legitimacy. In Study 1, we found in a nationally representative sample of U.S. employees that financial dependence on one's job was positively associated with the perceived legitimacy of one's supervisor. In Study 2, we observed that a general sense of po…
Interventions reducing affective polarization do not necessarily improve anti-democratic attitudes
The activist’s dilemma
How do protest actions impact public support for social movements? Here we test the claim that extreme protest actions-protest behaviors perceived to be harmful to others, highly disruptive, or both-typically reduce support for social movements. Across 6 experiments, including 3 that were preregistered, participants indicated less support for social movements that used more extreme protest actions. This result obtained across a variety of movemen…
The False Enforcement of Unpopular Norms
Prevailing theory assumes that people enforce norms in order to pressure others to act in ways that they approve. Yet there are numerous examples of "unpopular norms" in which people compel each other to do things that they privately disapprove. While peer sanctioning suggests a ready explanation for why people conform to unpopular norms, it is harder to understand why they would enforce a norm they privately oppose. The authors argue that people…
Altruism and Indirect Reciprocity
A persistent puzzle in the social and biological sciences is the existence of prosocial behavior, actions that benefit others, often at a cost to oneself. Recent theoretical models and empirical studies of indirect reciprocity show that actors behave prosocially in order to develop an altruistic reputation and receive future benefits from third parties. Accordingly, individuals should stop investing in reputations via prosocial behavior when a fu…
Interventions to reduce partisan animosity
The Role of Gender Identity Threat in Perceptions of Date Rape and Sexual Coercion
We experimentally investigated the effects of gender identity threat on men's and women's perceptions of date rape and sexual coercion. Results showed that men whose masculinity was threatened responded by blaming the victim and exonerating the perpetrator more, while threatened women respond by blaming male perpetrators more and placing less blame on female victims. Men's response to threats was more pronounced than women's, an asymmetry we attr…
Who Is Called by the Dog Whistle? Experimental Evidence That Racial Resentment and Political Ideology Condition Responses to Racially Encoded Messages
Do appeals that subtly invoke negative racial stereotypes shift whites’ political attitudes by harnessing their racial prejudice? Though widely cited in academic and popular discourse, prior work finds conflicting evidence for this “dog-whistle hypothesis.” Here we test the hypothesis in two experiments (total N = 1,797) in which white Americans’ racial attitudes were measured two weeks before they read political messages in which references to r…
The virtues of gossip
Reputation systems promote cooperation and deter antisocial behavior in groups. Little is known, however, about how and why people share reputational information. Here, we seek to establish the existence and dynamics of prosocial gossip, the sharing of negative evaluative information about a target in a way that protects others from antisocial or exploitative behavior. We present a model of prosocial gossip and the results of 4 studies testing th…
Status Hierarchies and the Organization of Collective Action
Most work on collective action assumes that group members are undifferentiated by status, or standing, in the group. Yet such undifferentiated groups are rare, if they exist at all. Here we extend an existing sociological research program to address how extant status hierarchies help organize collective actions by coordinating how much and when group members should contribute to group efforts. We outline three theoretically derived predictions of…
Culture, Identity, and Structure in Social Exchange
Cross-cultural trust and cooperation are important concerns for international markets, political cooperation, and cultural exchange. Until recently, this problem was difficult to study under controlled conditions due to the inability to conduct experiments involving interaction between participants located in physically distant locations. We report results of an experiment using a Web-based “virtual lab” to study trust and trustworthiness between…
Judgments of Economic Fairness Are Based More on Perceived Economic Mobility Than Perceived Inequality
Are judgments of the fairness of the American economy based on perceptions of economic inequality, mobility, or both? In two experiments, the authors varied information on levels of U.S. inequality and mobility, measuring effects on individuals' judgments of economic fairness and meritocracy. Although both treatments influenced perceptions of economic fairness and meritocracy, the mobility effect was generally larger. The two treatments did not i…
The origins of deference
Although the desire for high status is considered universal, prior research suggests individuals often opt for lower status positions. Why would anyone favor a position of apparent disadvantage? In 5 studies, we found that the broad construct of status striving can be broken up into two conceptions: one based on rank, the other on respect. While individuals might universally desire high levels of respect, we find that they vary widely in the exte…
Endorsements from Republican politicians can increase confidence in U.S. elections
Since the 2020 U.S. presidential election, perceptions of the validity of the outcome and broader trust in the American electoral process have reached historically low levels among Republicans. While this trend has potentially harmful consequences for democratic stability, there is little research on how beliefs that an election was fair—and trust in the electoral process more generally—can be restored. In a preregistered survey experiment ( n = …
Flustered and faithful
Although individuals experience embarrassment as an unpleasant, negative emotion, the authors argue that expressions of embarrassment serve vital social functions, signaling the embarrassed individual's prosociality and fostering trust. Extending past research on embarrassment as a nonverbal apology and appeasement gesture, the authors demonstrate that observers recognize the expression of embarrassment as a signal of prosociality and commitment …
Men's Overpersistence and the Gender Gap in Science and Mathematics
Large and long-standing gaps exist in the gender composition of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Abundant research has sought to explain these gaps, typically focusing on women, though these gaps result from the decisions of men as well as women. Here we study gender differences in STEM persistence with a focus on men's choices, finding that men persist in these domains even where opting out could lead to greater m…
For whom do the ends justify the means? Social class and utilitarian moral judgment
Though scholars have speculated for centuries on links between individuals' social class standing and approach to moral reasoning, little systematic research exists on how class and morality are associated. Here, we investigate whether the tendency of upper-class individuals to exhibit reduced empathy makes them more likely to resist intuitionist options in moral dilemmas, instead favoring utilitarian choices that maximize the greatest good for t…
What drives the gender gap in charitable giving? Lower empathy leads men to give less to poverty relief
Exploring dynamic networks
Influence Over Observers of Structural Power
Research in network exchange theory and status characteristics theory that distinguishes power from influence has proven productive, but leaves open the question of whether a causal relationship exists between these two central, sociological concepts. Past research has found that structural power in exchange increases expectations for competent performance of the power user on a subsequent cooperative task. However, once the power advantage has b…
The Emperor's Dilemma
The authors demonstrate the uses of agent‐based computational models in an application to a social enigma they call the “emperor’s dilemma,” based on the Hans Christian Andersen fable. In this model, agents must decide whether to comply with and enforce a norm that is supported by a few fanatics and opposed by the vast majority. They find that cascades of self‐reinforcing support for a highly unpopular norm cannot occur in a fully connected socia…
Culture, Identity, and Structure in Social Exchange
Cross-cultural trust and cooperation are important concerns for international markets, political cooperation, and cultural exchange. Until recently, this problem was difficult to study under controlled conditions due to the inability to conduct experiments involving interaction between participants located in physically distant locations. We report results of an experiment using a Web-based “virtual lab” to study trust and trustworthiness between…
A Wealth and Status-Based Model of Residential Segregation
We extend the classic "Schelling model" (Citation1971 Citation1978) to incorporate the wealth and status of agents and the desirability and affordability of residences. We analyze the effects of 1) the degree of the status-wealth correlation, and 2) the extent to which the wealth of residents shapes the affordability of residences, on levels of status and wealth segregation. Both factors generally exert a positive effect on both forms of segregat…
The Role of Metanetworks in Network Evolution
The question of what structures of relations between actors emerge in the evolution of social networks is of fundamental sociological interest. The present research proposes that processes of network evolution can be usefully conceptualized in terms of a network of networks, or “metanetwork,” wherein networks that are one link manipulation away from one another are connected. Moreover, the geography of metanetworks has real effects on the course …
Altruism and Indirect Reciprocity
A persistent puzzle in the social and biological sciences is the existence of prosocial behavior, actions that benefit others, often at a cost to oneself. Recent theoretical models and empirical studies of indirect reciprocity show that actors behave prosocially in order to develop an altruistic reputation and receive future benefits from third parties. Accordingly, individuals should stop investing in reputations via prosocial behavior when a fu…
Groups Reward Individual Sacrifice
One of sociology's classic puzzles is how groups motivate their members to set aside self-interest and contribute to collective action. This article presents a solution to the problem based on status as a selective incentive motivating contribution. Contributors to collective action signal their motivation to help the group and consequently earn diverse benefits from group members-in particular, higher status-and these rewards encourage greater g…
The False Enforcement of Unpopular Norms
Prevailing theory assumes that people enforce norms in order to pressure others to act in ways that they approve. Yet there are numerous examples of "unpopular norms" in which people compel each other to do things that they privately disapprove. While peer sanctioning suggests a ready explanation for why people conform to unpopular norms, it is harder to understand why they would enforce a norm they privately oppose. The authors argue that people…
The Trouble with Invisible Men
Apocalypse Soon
Though scientific evidence for the existence of global warming continues to mount, in the United States and other countries belief in global warming has stagnated or even decreased in recent years. One possible explanation for this pattern is that information about the potentially dire consequences of global warming threatens deeply held beliefs that the world is just, orderly, and stable. Individuals overcome this threat by denying or discountin…
The Moral Roots of Environmental Attitudes
Americans' attitudes about the environment are highly polarized, but it is unclear why this is the case. We conducted five studies to examine this issue. Studies 1a and 1b demonstrated that liberals, but not conservatives, view the environment in moral terms and that this tendency partially explains the relation between political ideology and environmental attitudes. Content analyses of newspaper op-eds (Study 2a) and public-service announcements…
The Role of Gender Identity Threat in Perceptions of Date Rape and Sexual Coercion
We experimentally investigated the effects of gender identity threat on men's and women's perceptions of date rape and sexual coercion. Results showed that men whose masculinity was threatened responded by blaming the victim and exonerating the perpetrator more, while threatened women respond by blaming male perpetrators more and placing less blame on female victims. Men's response to threats was more pronounced than women's, an asymmetry we attr…
Flustered and faithful
Although individuals experience embarrassment as an unpleasant, negative emotion, the authors argue that expressions of embarrassment serve vital social functions, signaling the embarrassed individual's prosociality and fostering trust. Extending past research on embarrassment as a nonverbal apology and appeasement gesture, the authors demonstrate that observers recognize the expression of embarrassment as a signal of prosociality and commitment …
The origins of deference
Although the desire for high status is considered universal, prior research suggests individuals often opt for lower status positions. Why would anyone favor a position of apparent disadvantage? In 5 studies, we found that the broad construct of status striving can be broken up into two conceptions: one based on rank, the other on respect. While individuals might universally desire high levels of respect, we find that they vary widely in the exte…
The virtues of gossip
Reputation systems promote cooperation and deter antisocial behavior in groups. Little is known, however, about how and why people share reputational information. Here, we seek to establish the existence and dynamics of prosocial gossip, the sharing of negative evaluative information about a target in a way that protects others from antisocial or exploitative behavior. We present a model of prosocial gossip and the results of 4 studies testing th…
Status Hierarchies and the Organization of Collective Action
Most work on collective action assumes that group members are undifferentiated by status, or standing, in the group. Yet such undifferentiated groups are rare, if they exist at all. Here we extend an existing sociological research program to address how extant status hierarchies help organize collective actions by coordinating how much and when group members should contribute to group efforts. We outline three theoretically derived predictions of…
My Brother’s Keeper
Past research argues that religious commitments shape individuals’ prosocial sentiments, including their generosity and solidarity. But what drives the prosociality of less religious people? Three studies tested the hypothesis that, with fewer religious expectations of prosociality, less religious individuals’ levels of compassion will play a larger role in their prosocial tendencies. In Study 1, religiosity moderated the relationship between tra…
“Thou shalt not kill”
Moral judgments are highly influenced by religious and political ideologies. Here we propose that, in addition to shaping opinions on domain-specific issues, religious and political ideologies also entail distinct approaches to moral reasoning. Specifically, we argue that both Christian fundamentalism and political conservatism are associated with rule-based moral processing. This style of moral processing involves solving moral problems through …
The social significance of spirituality
How is spirituality, which refers to the emotional connection to the transcendent, related to compassion and to altruistic behavior towards strangers? Are the effects of spirituality different from those of religiosity, which refers to living according to the rules and rituals of religion? We hypothesized that, even though correlated, spirituality and religiosity would have different associations with compassion and altruistic behavior. The first…
Hidden Paths from Morality to Cooperation
Classic sociological solutions to cooperation problems were rooted in the moral judgments group members make about one another’s behaviors, but more recent research on prosocial behaviors has largely ignored this foundational work. Here, we extend theoretical accounts of the social effect of moral judgments. Where scholars have emphasized the roles of moral judgments in clarifying moral boundaries and punishing deviants, we present two less intui…
Gut check
Disgust plays an important role in conservatives' moral and political judgments, helping to explain why conservatives and liberals differ in their attitudes on issues related to purity. We examined the extent to which the emotion-regulation strategy reappraisal drives the disgust-conservatism relationship. We hypothesized that disgust has less influence on the political and moral judgments of liberals because they tend to regulate disgust reactio…
For whom do the ends justify the means? Social class and utilitarian moral judgment
Though scholars have speculated for centuries on links between individuals' social class standing and approach to moral reasoning, little systematic research exists on how class and morality are associated. Here, we investigate whether the tendency of upper-class individuals to exhibit reduced empathy makes them more likely to resist intuitionist options in moral dilemmas, instead favoring utilitarian choices that maximize the greatest good for t…
Overdoing Gender
American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 4 (January 2013): 980-1022. ?? 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved
The Corruption of Value
We investigate the possibility that negative moral associations can reduce the desirability and perceived value of money, and that they do so by threatening to contaminate individuals’ perceptions of their morality. In Study 1, participants filled out fewer raffle tickets to obtain a money prize with immoral associations and perceived it to have less purchasing power than a morally neutral prize. In Study 2, we experimentally manipulated particip…
Psychology (54 works) · Social Psychology (50 works) · Political science (39 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (31 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Law (29 works) · Politics (21 works) · Social Psychology (17 works) · Economics (16 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (16 works)