Kurt Gray
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 770037 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Kurt Gray |
| PRENOMES | Kurt |
| SOBRENOME | Gray |
| ASSINATURA | GRAY K |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5816-2676 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 74 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 291 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 74 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2007 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
The cost of an expanding moral circle
the simultaneous expansion of moral concern toward societal outcasts and contraction away from loved ones, effectively "compressing" the outermost and innermost anchors of the moral circle closer toward each other. Specifically, we find that greater breadth of living abroad experiences can compress the moral circle through heightened identification with all humanity, an association strengthened by cultural distance between home and host countries…
Authority or autonomy? Philosophical and psychological perspectives on deference to experts
Several decades of work in both philosophy and psychology acutely highlights our limitations as individual inquirers. One way to recognize these limitations is to defer to experts: roughly, to form one’s beliefs on the basis of expert testimony. Yet, as has become salient in the age of Brexit, Trumpist politics, and climate change denial, people are often mistrustful of experts, and unwilling to defer to them. It’s a trope of highbrow public disc…
Liberals and Conservatives See Different Victims
Moral disagreement across politics revolves around the key question, “Who is a victim?” Twelve studies explain moral conflict with assumptions of vulnerability (AoVs) : liberals and conservatives disagree about who is especially vulnerable to victimization, harm, and mistreatment. AoVs predict moral judgments, implicit attitudes, and charitable behavior—and explain the link between ideology and moral judgment (usually better than moral foundation…
The Psychology of Victimhood in the Law
Questions of legal blame and punishment hinge on judgments of victimhood: who is a victim and who is a victimizer? The law presumes that we judge victimhood objectively, but science shows that victimhood relies more on biased perceptions than impartial facts. The disconnect between victimhood in the law versus victimhood in our minds undermines the quest for justice. Here, we review three key psychological principles of victimhood and how they ca…
God mostly forgives cruel intentions
People Reject Free Money and Cheap Deals Because They Infer Phantom Costs
If money is good, then shouldn’t more money always be better? Perhaps not. Traditional economic theories suggest that money is an ever-increasing incentivizer. If someone will accept a job for US$20/hr, they should be more likely to accept the same job for US$30/hr and especially for US$250/hr. However, 10 preregistered, high-powered studies ( N = 4,205, in the United States and Iran) reveal how increasing incentives can backfire. Overly generous…
Health Behaviors Are Moralized When Perceived to Cause Harm
People readily moralize health, whether by criticizing smokers or treating exercise as noble. Drawing from the theory of dyadic morality, we theorized that people moralize health most strongly when they perceive poor health as a source of suffering. Through five studies (total N = 2,055), we show that perceived harm can drive the moralization of health. We identified three types of harm—personal, interpersonal, and collective—that people perceive…
Religious people view both science and religion as less epistemically valuable than non-religious people view science
Seeing Religious Faith as Essential to Morality Predicts Deconversion Guilt
Vicarious kin derogation—when and why people mock the innocent family members of political leaders
Political censorship feels acceptable when ideas seem harmful and false
People seem willing to censor disagreeable political and moral ideas. Five studies explore why people engage in political censorship and test a potential route to decreasing censorship. While Americans report being generally supportive of free speech and against censorship (Study 1), we find that people censor material that seems harmful and false (Study 2), which are often ideas from political opponents (Study 3). Building on work demonstrating …
Perceiving opponents as self-disclosing bridges partisan divides
Political polarization is driving disconnection and animosity between opponents in the United States. We propose perceiving opponents as self-disclosing helps foster connection and reduce animosity. Building on research demonstrating that self-disclosure fosters interpersonal relationships, we test whether vignettes expressing political views that seem self-disclosing increase connection, respect, and willingness to interact among opponents. Acro…
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…
Understanding news-related user comments and their effects
There has been growing interest in research on news-related user comments. Here we conduct the first systematic review of this literature—quantitatively and qualitatively (248 studies)—that covers the entire communication process (content analyses, surveys, experiments). Results indicate a focus on online news articles ( vs videos) and little consideration for major social media platforms (Instagram, TikTok). Research often assesses incivility in…
Machine Replacement
Here we review work examining reactions to machines replacing humans in both professional and personal domains. Using a mind-role fit perspective, we synthesize findings across several decades of research spanning multiple disciplines to suggest the types and trends for how people will respond to machines replacing humans. We propose that as intelligent machines have evolved to possess “minds,” their range of replacement and the scope of people's…
Moral panics on social media are fueled by signals of virality
Moral panics have regularly erupted in society, but they appear almost daily on social media. We propose that social media helps fuel moral panics by combining perceived societal threats with a powerful signal of social amplification-virality. Eight studies with multiple methods test a social amplification model of moral panics in which virality amplifies perceptions of threats posed by deviant behavior and ideas, prompting moral outrage expressi…
The rise of robots increases job insecurity and maladaptive workplace behaviors
threatened by robots. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
Can AI language models replace human participants?
People See Political Opponents as More Stupid Than Evil
Affective polarization is a rising threat to political discourse and democracy. Public figures have expressed that “conservatives think liberals are stupid, and liberals think conservatives are evil.” However, four studies ( N = 1,660)—including a representative sample—reveal evidence that both sides view political opponents as more unintelligent than immoral. Perceiving the other side as “more stupid than evil” occurs both in general judgments (…
Threat Rejection Fuels Political Dehumanization
Americans disagree about many things, including what threats are most pressing. We suggest people morally condemn and dehumanize opponents when they are perceived as rejecting the existence or severity of important perceived threats. We explore perceived “threat rejection” across five studies ( N = 2,404) both in the real-world COVID-19 pandemic and in novel contexts. Americans morally condemned and dehumanized policy opponents when they seemed t…
Pay-it-forward gonorrhea and chlamydia testing among men who have sex with men and male STD patients in China
The study with identification number NCT05723263 has been registered on clinicaltrials.gov
Generalized morality culturally evolves as an adaptive heuristic in large social networks
Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like "moral" and "immoral"? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent to which they perceive moral character as "localized" (varying along many contextually embedded dimensions) versus "generalized" (varying along a single dimension from morally bad to morally good). This v…
Negative multicultural experiences can increase intergroup bias
Reducing Political Dehumanization by Pairing Facts With Personal Experiences
The media is increasingly blamed for inflaming political animosity, but it may also bridge partisan divides—with the right strategies. Past research highlights the outgroup‐experience effect: Sharing personal experiences (and not facts) helps to reduce partisan animosity. However, sharing facts is a pillar of good journalism and is essential for mediated political communication. Across four studies in two countries, we show that journalists, and …
Seeing your life story as a Hero’s Journey increases meaning in life
). Eight studies reveal that the Hero's Journey predicts and can causally increase people's experience of meaning in life. We first distill the Hero's Journey into seven key elements-protagonist, shift, quest, allies, challenge, transformation, legacy-and then develop a new measure that assesses the perceived presence of the Hero's Journey narrative in people's life stories: the Hero's Journey Scale. Using this scale, we find a positive relations…
Moral typecasting
Moral agency is the capacity to do right or wrong, whereas moral patiency is the capacity to be a target of right or wrong. Through 7 studies, the authors explored moral typecasting-an inverse relation between perceptions of moral agency and moral patiency. Across a range of targets and situations, good- and evil-doers (moral agents) were perceived to be less vulnerable to having good and evil done to them. The recipients of good and evil (moral …
More than a body
According to models of objectification, viewing someone as a body induces de-mentalization, stripping away their psychological traits. Here evidence is presented for an alternative account, where a body focus does not diminish the attribution of all mental capacities but, instead, leads perceivers to infer a different kind of mind. Drawing on the distinction in mind perception between agency and experience, it is found that focusing on someone's …
Interventions to reduce partisan animosity
The Structure of Online Activism
Despite the tremendous amount of attention that has been paid to the internet as a tool for civic engagement, we still have little idea how "active" is the average online activist or how social networks matter in facilitating electronic protest. In this paper, we use complete records on the donation and recruitment activity of 1.2 million members of the Save Darfur "Cause" on Facebook to provide a detailed first look at a massive online social mo…
The Moral Dyad
The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety. -Felix Mendelssohn Felix Mendelssohn, the famous Romantic composer, sought to take the unique experiences of each human life-distinctive sorrows an
To escape blame, don't be a hero—Be a victim
CEOs imbue organizations with feelings, increasing punishment satisfaction and apology effectiveness
Reducing Political Dehumanization by Pairing Facts With Personal Experiences
The media is increasingly blamed for inflaming political animosity, but it may also bridge partisan divides—with the right strategies. Past research highlights the outgroup‐experience effect: Sharing personal experiences (and not facts) helps to reduce partisan animosity. However, sharing facts is a pillar of good journalism and is essential for mediated political communication. Across four studies in two countries, we show that journalists, and …
Reducing the uncanny valley by dehumanizing humanoid robots
When your boss is a robot
The affective harm account (AHA) of moral judgment
Moral psychology has long debated whether moral judgment is rooted in harm versus affect. We reconcile this debate with the affective harm account (AHA) of moral judgment. The AHA understands harm as an intuitive perception (i.e., perceived harm), and divides "affect" into two: embodied visceral arousal (i.e., gut feelings) and stimulus-directed affective appraisals (e.g., ratings of disgustingness). The AHA was tested in a randomized, double-bli…
The Emergence of “Us and Them” in 80 Lines of Code
Psychological explanations of group genesis often require population heterogeneity in identity or other characteristics, whether deep (e.g., religion) or superficial (e.g., eye color). We used agent-based models to explore group genesis in homogeneous populations and found robust group formation with just two basic principles: reciprocity and transitivity. These emergent groups demonstrated in-group cooperation and out-group defection, even thoug…
Supernatural explanations across 114 societies are more common for natural than social phenomena
Moral panics on social media are fueled by signals of virality
Moral panics have regularly erupted in society, but they appear almost daily on social media. We propose that social media helps fuel moral panics by combining perceived societal threats with a powerful signal of social amplification-virality. Eight studies with multiple methods test a social amplification model of moral panics in which virality amplifies perceptions of threats posed by deviant behavior and ideas, prompting moral outrage expressi…
Could a rising robot workforce make humans less prejudiced
Automation is becoming ever more prevalent, with robot workers replacing many human employees. Many perspectives have examined the economic impact of a robot workforce, but here we consider its social impact: How will the rise of robot workers affect intergroup relations? Whereas some past research has suggested that more robots will lead to more intergroup prejudice, we suggest that robots could also reduce prejudice by highlighting commonalitie…
When a good god makes bad people
When might religious belief lower ethical standards? We propose a theory of religion and immorality that makes 3 central predictions. First, people will judge immoral acts as more permissible when they make divine attributions for these acts, seeing them as enabled by an intervening God. Second, people will be more likely to make divine attributions when evaluating passive immorality (e.g., keeping a lost wallet) than active immorality (e.g., pic…
Torture and judgments of guilt
Political censorship feels acceptable when ideas seem harmful and false
People seem willing to censor disagreeable political and moral ideas. Five studies explore why people engage in political censorship and test a potential route to decreasing censorship. While Americans report being generally supportive of free speech and against censorship (Study 1), we find that people censor material that seems harmful and false (Study 2), which are often ideas from political opponents (Study 3). Building on work demonstrating …
Negative multicultural experiences can increase intergroup bias
Forward flow”
When the human mind is free to roam, its subjective experience is characterized by a continuously evolving stream of thought. Although there is a technique that captures people's streams of free thought-free association-its utility for scientific research is undermined by two open questions: (a) How can streams of thought be quantified? (b) Do such streams predict psychological phenomena? We resolve the first issue-quantification-by presenting a …
Functional intimacy
Intimacy is often motivated by love, but sometimes it is merely functional. For example, disrobing and being touched at an airport security check serves the goal of catching a flight, not building a relationship. We propose that this functional intimacy induces discomfort, making people prefer greater social distance from their interaction partner. Supporting this prediction, participants who considered (Experiments 1 and 2) or experienced (Exper…
Equating silence with violence
The new science of religious change
Humans have believed in gods and spirits since the earliest days of the Holocene, and many people still believe in them today. Although the existence of religious belief has been a human constant, the nature and prevalence of religion has changed dramatically throughout human history. Here we describe the emerging science of religious change. We first outline a multilevel framework for studying religious change drawn from theories of socioecologi…
It’s a Match
Robots are becoming more available for workplace collaboration, but many questions remain. Are people actually willing to assign collaborative tasks to robots? And if so, exactly which tasks will they assign to what kinds of robots? Here we leverage psychological theories on person-job fit and mind perception to investigate task assignment in human–robot collaborative work. We propose that people will assign robots to jobs based on their “perceiv…
Doctors are seen as Godlike
Dimensions of Mind Perception
Participants compared the mental capacities of various human and nonhuman characters via online surveys. Factor analysis revealed two dimensions of mind perception, Experience (for example, capacity for hunger) and Agency (for example, capacity for self-control). The dimensions predicted different moral judgments but were both related to valuing of mind.
Torture and judgments of guilt
Moral typecasting
Moral agency is the capacity to do right or wrong, whereas moral patiency is the capacity to be a target of right or wrong. Through 7 studies, the authors explored moral typecasting-an inverse relation between perceptions of moral agency and moral patiency. Across a range of targets and situations, good- and evil-doers (moral agents) were perceived to be less vulnerable to having good and evil done to them. The recipients of good and evil (moral …
Causes and consequences of mind perception
Blaming God for Our Pain
Believing in God requires not only a leap of faith but also an extension of people’s normal capacity to perceive the minds of others. Usually, people perceive minds of all kinds by trying to understand their conscious experience (what it is like to be them) and their agency (what they can do). Although humans are perceived to have both agency and experience, humans appear to see God as possessing agency, but not experience. God’s unique mind is d…
Moral Transformation
Moral transformation is the hypothesis that doing good or evil increases agency—the capacity for self-control, tenacity, and personal strength. Three experiments provide support for this hypothesis, finding that those who do good or evil become physically more powerful. In Experiment 1, people hold a 5 lb. weight longer after donating to charity. In Experiment 2, people hold a weight longer when writing about themselves helping or harming another…
To escape blame, don't be a hero—Be a victim
Simulating murder
Diverse lines of evidence point to a basic human aversion to physically harming others. First, we demonstrate that unwillingness to endorse harm in a moral dilemma is predicted by individual differences in aversive reactivity, as indexed by peripheral vasoconstriction. Next, we tested the specific factors that elicit the aversive response to harm. Participants performed actions such as discharging a fake gun into the face of the experimenter, ful…
More than a body
According to models of objectification, viewing someone as a body induces de-mentalization, stripping away their psychological traits. Here evidence is presented for an alternative account, where a body focus does not diminish the attribution of all mental capacities but, instead, leads perceivers to infer a different kind of mind. Drawing on the distinction in mind perception between agency and experience, it is found that focusing on someone's …
Feeling robots and human zombies
Mind Perception Is the Essence of Morality
Mind perception entails ascribing mental capacities to other entities, whereas moral judgment entails labeling entities as good or bad or actions as right or wrong. We suggest that mind perception is the essence of moral judgment. In particular, we suggest that moral judgment is rooted in a cognitive template of two perceived minds-a moral dyad of an intentional agent and a suffering moral patient. Diverse lines of research support dyadic moralit…
The Power of Good Intentions
The experience of physical stimuli would seem to depend primarily on their physical characteristics—chocolate tastes good, getting slapped hurts, and snuggling is pleasurable. This research examined, however, whether physical experience is influenced by the interpersonal context in which stimuli occur. Specifically, three studies examined whether perceiving benevolent intentions behind stimuli can improve their experience. Experiment 1 tested whe…
The Moral Dyad
The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety. -Felix Mendelssohn Felix Mendelssohn, the famous Romantic composer, sought to take the unique experiences of each human life-distinctive sorrows an
The myth of harmless wrongs in moral cognition
When something is wrong, someone is harmed. This hypothesis derives from the theory of dyadic morality, which suggests a moral cognitive template of wrongdoing agent and suffering patient (i.e., victim). This dyadic template means that victimless wrongs (e.g., masturbation) are psychologically incomplete, compelling the mind to perceive victims even when they are objectively absent. Five studies reveal that dyadic completion occurs automatically …
The Structure of Online Activism
Despite the tremendous amount of attention that has been paid to the internet as a tool for civic engagement, we still have little idea how "active" is the average online activist or how social networks matter in facilitating electronic protest. In this paper, we use complete records on the donation and recruitment activity of 1.2 million members of the Save Darfur "Cause" on Facebook to provide a detailed first look at a massive online social mo…
The Emergence of “Us and Them” in 80 Lines of Code
Psychological explanations of group genesis often require population heterogeneity in identity or other characteristics, whether deep (e.g., religion) or superficial (e.g., eye color). We used agent-based models to explore group genesis in homogeneous populations and found robust group formation with just two basic principles: reciprocity and transitivity. These emergent groups demonstrated in-group cooperation and out-group defection, even thoug…
The Unifying Moral Dyad
Do moral disagreements regarding specific issues (e.g., patriotism, chastity) reflect deep cognitive differences (i.e., distinct cognitive mechanisms) between liberals and conservatives? Dyadic morality suggests that the answer is “no.” Despite moral diversity, we reveal that moral cognition—in both liberals and conservatives—is rooted in a harm-based template. A dyadic template suggests that harm should be central within moral cognition, an idea…
Disconfirming Moral Foundations Theory on Its Own Terms
People see immorality in sin and sex, but is “purity” a unique type of moral content, with unique cognition? Domain-general accounts—and parsimony—suggest that all moral content is processed similarly and that “purity” is merely a descriptive label. Conversely, domain-specific theories (e.g., moral foundations theory [MFT]) argue for a special purity module. Consistent with domain-general accounts, we demonstrated that purity concerns are not dis…
Impure or Just Weird? Scenario Sampling Bias Raises Questions About the Foundation of Morality
Moral psychologists have used scenarios of abuse and murder to operationalize harm and chicken-masturbation and dog-eating to operationalize impurity. These scenarios reveal different patterns of moral judgment across harm and purity, ostensibly supporting distinct moral mechanisms, modules, or “foundations.” However, these different patterns may stem not from differences in moral content per se but instead from biased sampling that confounds con…
Harm mediates the disgust-immorality link
Many acts are disgusting, but only some of these acts are immoral. Dyadic morality predicts that disgusting acts should be judged as immoral to the extent that they seem harmful. Consistent with this prediction, 3 studies reveal that perceived harm mediates the link between feelings of disgust and moral condemnation-even for ostensibly harmless "purity" violations. In many cases, accounting for perceived harm completely eliminates the link betwee…
Agent-Based Modeling
Agent-based modeling is a long-standing but underused method that allows researchers to simulate artificial worlds for hypothesis testing and theory building. Agent-based models (ABMs) offer unprecedented control and statistical power by allowing researchers to precisely specify the behavior of any number of agents and observe their interactions over time. ABMs are especially useful when investigating group behavior or evolutionary processes and …
Functional intimacy
Intimacy is often motivated by love, but sometimes it is merely functional. For example, disrobing and being touched at an airport security check serves the goal of catching a flight, not building a relationship. We propose that this functional intimacy induces discomfort, making people prefer greater social distance from their interaction partner. Supporting this prediction, participants who considered (Experiments 1 and 2) or experienced (Exper…
The Theory of Dyadic Morality
The nature of harm—and therefore moral judgment—may be misunderstood. Rather than an objective matter of reason, we argue that harm should be redefined as an intuitively perceived continuum. This redefinition provides a new understanding of moral content and mechanism—the constructionist Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM). TDM suggests that acts are condemned proportional to three elements: norm violations, negative affect, and—importantly—perceived…
People are averse to machines making moral decisions
CEOs imbue organizations with feelings, increasing punishment satisfaction and apology effectiveness
Psychology (64 obras) · Social Psychology (54 obras) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (39 obras) · Epistemology (28 obras) · Social Psychology (26 obras) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (22 obras) · Perception (18 obras) · Emotions and Moral Behavior (17 obras) · Morality (17 obras) · Political science (17 obras)