Molly J Crockett
Biographic Data
| ID | 916902 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Molly J Crockett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Molly J |
| FAMILY NAME | Crockett |
| SIGNATURE | CROCKETT M J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8800-410X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 283 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Cultural Differences in Vicarious Optimism
Prosocial behavior is affected by the beliefs people have about others. The maintenance of these beliefs is biased: people are vicariously optimistic when updating beliefs about the future of others they care about. This vicarious optimism influences prosocial behavior and might be shaped by the culture people live in. We investigated this question by measuring learning from good and bad news for oneself, friends, and strangers in a pre-registere…
How to show that a cruel prank is worse than a war crime
Impartial Beneficence Predicts Greater and More Uniform Concern for Others Across Social Relationships
The principle of impartial beneficence (IB) holds that we should strive to maximize others’ well-being regardless of their relationship to us. But does endorsement of IB in principle translate to more uniform concern for others irrespective of relationship type? Three pre-registered studies in online samples of U.S. participants (total N =1,716) found IB endorsement predicts greater and more uniform concern for others across social relationships …
Disagreements About Threats to Electoral Integrity
Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research
Norm Psychology in the Digital Age
Goal inference in moral narratives
How the evaluability bias shapes transformative decisions
Science communication with generative AI
Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility
Psychological Selfishness
Selfishness is central to many theories of human morality, yet its psychological nature remains largely overlooked. Psychologists often draw on classical conceptions of selfishness from evolutionary biology (i.e., selfish gene theory), economics (i.e., rational self-interest), and philosophy (i.e., psychological egoism), but such characterizations offer limited insight into the psychology of selfishness. To address this gap, we propose a novel fr…
Explaining Individual Differences in Advantageous Inequity Aversion by Social-Affective Trait Dimensions and Family Environment
Humans are averse to both having less (i.e., disadvantageous inequity aversion [IA]) and having more than others (i.e., advantageous IA). However, the social-affective traits that drive individual differences in IA are not well understood. Here, by combining a modified dictator game and a computational model, we found in a sample of incarcerated adolescents ( N = 67) that callous-unemotional traits were specifically associated with low advantageo…
How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks
Social reinforcement and norm learning interact with social media design to amplify moral outrage in online social networks.
How peer influence shapes value computation in moral decision-making
Moral behavior is susceptible to peer influence. How does information from peers influence moral preferences? We used drift-diffusion modeling to show that peer influence changes the value of moral behavior by prioritizing the choice attributes that align with peers' goals. Study 1 (N = 100; preregistered) showed that participants accurately inferred the goals of prosocial and antisocial peers when observing their moral decisions. In Study 2 (N =…
Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis
Trust in leaders is central to citizen compliance with public policies. One potential determinant of trust is how leaders resolve conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles in moral dilemmas. Past research suggests that utilitarian responses to dilemmas can both erode and enhance trust in leaders: sacrificing some people to save many others ('instrumental harm') reduces trust, while maximizing the welfare of everyone equ…
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…
The effectiveness of moral messages on public health behavioral intentions during the Covid-19 pandemic
With the COVID-19 pandemic threatening millions of lives, changing our behaviors to prevent the spread of the disease is a moral imperative. Here, we investigated the persuasiveness of messages inspired by three major moral traditions. A sample of US participants representative for age, sex and race/ethnicity (N=1032) viewed messages from either a leader or citizen containing deontological, virtue-based, utilitarian, or non-moral justifications f…
The MAD Model of Moral Contagion
With more than 3 billion users, online social networks represent an important venue for moral and political discourse and have been used to organize political revolutions, influence elections, and raise awareness of social issues. These examples rely on a common process to be effective: the ability to engage users and spread moralized content through online networks. Here, we review evidence that expressions of moral emotion play an important rol…
Prosocial behavior is associated with transdiagnostic markers of affective sensitivity in multiple domains
Prosocial behaviors-actions that benefit others-fundamentally shape our interpersonal interactions. Psychiatric disorders have been suggested to be related to prosocial disturbances, which may underlie many of their social impairments. However, broader affective traits, present to different degrees in both psychiatric and healthy populations, also have been linked to variability in prosociality. Therefore, it is unclear to what extent prosocial v…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
Children punish third parties to satisfy both consequentialist and retributive motives
Social uncertainty is heterogeneous and sometimes valuable
Beyond sacrificial harm
(see record 2018-15704-001). The copyright attribution was incorrectly listed, and the Creative Commons CC-BY license disclaimer was incorrectly omitted from the author note. The correct copyright is "© 2017 The Author(s)" and the omitted disclaimer is found in the erratum. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Recent research has relied on trolley-type sacrificial moral dilemmas to study utilitarian versus nonutilitarian modes of mo…
Actions speak louder than outcomes in judgments of prosocial behavior
Recently proposed models of moral cognition suggest that people's judgments of harmful acts are influenced by their consideration both of those acts' consequences ("outcome value"), and of the feeling associated with their enactment ("action value"). Here we apply this framework to judgments of prosocial behavior, suggesting that people's judgments of the praiseworthiness of good deeds are determined both by the benefit those deeds confer to othe…
The costs of being consequentialist
Previous work has demonstrated that people are more likely to trust "deontological" agents who reject harming one person to save many others than "consequentialist" agents who endorse such instrumental harms, which could explain the higher prevalence of non-consequentialist moral intuitions. Yet consequentialism involves endorsing not just instrumental harm, but also impartial beneficence, treating the well-being of every individual as equally im…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
Moral outrage in the digital age
The costs of being consequentialist
Previous work has demonstrated that people are more likely to trust "deontological" agents who reject harming one person to save many others than "consequentialist" agents who endorse such instrumental harms, which could explain the higher prevalence of non-consequentialist moral intuitions. Yet consequentialism involves endorsing not just instrumental harm, but also impartial beneficence, treating the well-being of every individual as equally im…
Beliefs about bad people are volatile
Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility
Uncertainty about the impact of social decisions increases prosocial behaviour
Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis
Trust in leaders is central to citizen compliance with public policies. One potential determinant of trust is how leaders resolve conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles in moral dilemmas. Past research suggests that utilitarian responses to dilemmas can both erode and enhance trust in leaders: sacrificing some people to save many others ('instrumental harm') reduces trust, while maximizing the welfare of everyone equ…
Children punish third parties to satisfy both consequentialist and retributive motives
Science communication with generative AI
Disagreements About Threats to Electoral Integrity
Putting Feelings Into Words
Putting feelings into words (affect labeling) has long been thought to help manage negative emotional experiences; however, the mechanisms by which affect labeling produces this benefit remain largely unknown. Recent neuroimaging studies suggest a possible neurocognitive pathway for this process, but methodological limitations of previous studies have prevented strong inferences from being drawn. A functional magnetic resonance imaging study of a…
Impulsive choice and altruistic punishment are correlated and increase in tandem with serotonin depletion
Human cooperation may partly depend on the presence of individuals willing to incur personal costs to punish noncooperators. The psychological factors that motivate such 'altruistic punishment' are not fully understood; some have argued that altruistic punishment is a deliberate act of norm enforcement that requires self-control, while others claim that it is an impulsive act driven primarily by emotion. In the current study, we addressed this qu…
Subjective responses to emotional stimuli during labeling, reappraisal, and distraction
Although multiple neuroimaging studies suggest that affect labeling (i.e., putting feelings into words) can dampen affect-related responses in the amygdala, the consequences of affect labeling have not been examined in other channels of emotional responding. We conducted four studies examining the effect of affect labeling on self-reported emotional experience. In study one, self-reported distress was lower during affect labeling, compared to pas…
Preferences and beliefs in ingroup favoritism
Ingroup favoritism-the tendency to favor members of one's own group over those in other groups-is well documented, but the mechanisms driving this behavior are not well understood. In particular, it is unclear to what extent ingroup favoritism is driven by preferences concerning the welfare of ingroup over outgroup members, vs. beliefs about the behavior of ingroup and outgroup members. In this review we analyze research on ingroup favoritism in …
Inference of trustworthiness from intuitive moral judgments.
Moral judgments play a critical role in motivating and enforcing human cooperation, and research on the proximate mechanisms of moral judgments highlights the importance of intuitive, automatic processes in forming such judgments. Intuitive moral judgments often share characteristics with deontological theories in normative ethics, which argue that certain acts (such as killing) are absolutely wrong, regardless of their consequences. Why do moral…
Moral outrage in the digital age
Beyond sacrificial harm
(see record 2018-15704-001). The copyright attribution was incorrectly listed, and the Creative Commons CC-BY license disclaimer was incorrectly omitted from the author note. The correct copyright is "© 2017 The Author(s)" and the omitted disclaimer is found in the erratum. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Recent research has relied on trolley-type sacrificial moral dilemmas to study utilitarian versus nonutilitarian modes of mo…
Actions speak louder than outcomes in judgments of prosocial behavior
Recently proposed models of moral cognition suggest that people's judgments of harmful acts are influenced by their consideration both of those acts' consequences ("outcome value"), and of the feeling associated with their enactment ("action value"). Here we apply this framework to judgments of prosocial behavior, suggesting that people's judgments of the praiseworthiness of good deeds are determined both by the benefit those deeds confer to othe…
The costs of being consequentialist
Previous work has demonstrated that people are more likely to trust "deontological" agents who reject harming one person to save many others than "consequentialist" agents who endorse such instrumental harms, which could explain the higher prevalence of non-consequentialist moral intuitions. Yet consequentialism involves endorsing not just instrumental harm, but also impartial beneficence, treating the well-being of every individual as equally im…
Uncertainty about the impact of social decisions increases prosocial behaviour
Beliefs about bad people are volatile
Social uncertainty is heterogeneous and sometimes valuable
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…
The effectiveness of moral messages on public health behavioral intentions during the Covid-19 pandemic
With the COVID-19 pandemic threatening millions of lives, changing our behaviors to prevent the spread of the disease is a moral imperative. Here, we investigated the persuasiveness of messages inspired by three major moral traditions. A sample of US participants representative for age, sex and race/ethnicity (N=1032) viewed messages from either a leader or citizen containing deontological, virtue-based, utilitarian, or non-moral justifications f…
The MAD Model of Moral Contagion
With more than 3 billion users, online social networks represent an important venue for moral and political discourse and have been used to organize political revolutions, influence elections, and raise awareness of social issues. These examples rely on a common process to be effective: the ability to engage users and spread moralized content through online networks. Here, we review evidence that expressions of moral emotion play an important rol…
Prosocial behavior is associated with transdiagnostic markers of affective sensitivity in multiple domains
Prosocial behaviors-actions that benefit others-fundamentally shape our interpersonal interactions. Psychiatric disorders have been suggested to be related to prosocial disturbances, which may underlie many of their social impairments. However, broader affective traits, present to different degrees in both psychiatric and healthy populations, also have been linked to variability in prosociality. Therefore, it is unclear to what extent prosocial v…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
Children punish third parties to satisfy both consequentialist and retributive motives
How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks
Social reinforcement and norm learning interact with social media design to amplify moral outrage in online social networks.
How peer influence shapes value computation in moral decision-making
Moral behavior is susceptible to peer influence. How does information from peers influence moral preferences? We used drift-diffusion modeling to show that peer influence changes the value of moral behavior by prioritizing the choice attributes that align with peers' goals. Study 1 (N = 100; preregistered) showed that participants accurately inferred the goals of prosocial and antisocial peers when observing their moral decisions. In Study 2 (N =…
Moral dilemmas and trust in leaders during a global health crisis
Trust in leaders is central to citizen compliance with public policies. One potential determinant of trust is how leaders resolve conflicts between utilitarian and non-utilitarian ethical principles in moral dilemmas. Past research suggests that utilitarian responses to dilemmas can both erode and enhance trust in leaders: sacrificing some people to save many others ('instrumental harm') reduces trust, while maximizing the welfare of everyone equ…
Psychological Selfishness
Selfishness is central to many theories of human morality, yet its psychological nature remains largely overlooked. Psychologists often draw on classical conceptions of selfishness from evolutionary biology (i.e., selfish gene theory), economics (i.e., rational self-interest), and philosophy (i.e., psychological egoism), but such characterizations offer limited insight into the psychology of selfishness. To address this gap, we propose a novel fr…
Explaining Individual Differences in Advantageous Inequity Aversion by Social-Affective Trait Dimensions and Family Environment
Humans are averse to both having less (i.e., disadvantageous inequity aversion [IA]) and having more than others (i.e., advantageous IA). However, the social-affective traits that drive individual differences in IA are not well understood. Here, by combining a modified dictator game and a computational model, we found in a sample of incarcerated adolescents ( N = 67) that callous-unemotional traits were specifically associated with low advantageo…
Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility
Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research
Psychology (30 works) · Social Psychology (25 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (20 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Cognitive psychology (6 works) · Prosocial behavior (6 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (5 works)