Principles of karmic accounting: How our intuitive moral sense balances rights and wrongs

We are all saints and sinners: Some of our actions benefit other people, while other actions harm people. How do people balance moral rights against moral wrongs when evaluating others’ actions? Across 9 studies, we contrast the predictions of three conceptions of intuitive morality—outcome- based (utilitarian), act-based (deontologist), and person-based (virtue ethics) approaches. Although good acts can partly offset bad acts—consistent with utilitarianism—they do so incompletely and in a manner relatively insensitive to magnitude, but sensitive to temporal order and the match between who is helped and harmed. Inferences about personal moral character best predicted blame judgments, explaining variance across items and across participants. However, there was modest evidence for both deontological and utilitarian processes too. These findings contribute to conversations about moral psychology and person perception, and may have policy implications

Usage of Message Framing to Promote Stress Management Between U.S. and International Students

Faculty advisor: Dr. Traci MannMessage framing has been utilized to generate behavioral change based on its emphasis on the costs or benefits of enacting a health behavior. Effective application of framing may help increase mental health help-seeking behavior among international and U.S. students. Framed messages about stress management were exposed to students to encourage seeking help for stress management. A total of 253 undergraduate participants were presented information promoting stress management in either the gain- or loss-frame and were asked to indicate specific mental health services they would consider using. Participants were also assessed on the likelihood they would seek help and their perceived effectiveness of the message. The type of frame that students were exposed to did not show a resulting change. Findings suggest that more research is required to determine the effect of message framing mental health to international and domestic students. Results contribute to a growing literature about international students’ mental health help-seeking attitudes and behaviors.This research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)

Principles of karmic accounting: How our intuitive moral sense balances rights and wrongs

We are all saints and sinners: Some of our actions benefit others, while other actions lead to harm. How do people balance moral rights against moral wrongs when evaluating others’ actions? Across 9 studies, we contrast the predictions of three conceptions of intuitive morality—outcome-based (utilitarian), act-based (deontologist), and person-based (virtue ethics) approaches. These experiments establish four principles: Partial offsetting (good acts can partly offset bad acts), diminishing sensitivity (the extent of the good act has minimal impact on its offsetting power), temporal asymmetry (good acts are more praiseworthy when they come after harms), and act congruency (good acts are more praiseworthy to the extent they offset a similar harm). These principles are difficult to square with utilitarian or deontological approaches, but sit well within person-based approaches to moral psychology. Inferences about personal character mediated many of these effects (Studies 1–4), explained differences across items and across individuals (Studies 5–6), and could be manipulated to produce downstream consequences on blame (Studies 7–9); however, there was some evidence for more modest roles of utilitarian and deontological processing too. These findings contribute to conversations about moral psychology and person perception, and may have policy and marketing implications