Suicide and sleep: Is it a bad thing to be awake when reason sleeps?

When it takes a bad person to do the right thing.

Three studies demonstrate that morally praiseworthy behavior can signal negative information about an agent's character. In particular, consequentialist decisions such as sacrificing one life to save an even greater number of lives can lead to unfavorable character evaluations, even when they are viewed as the preferred course of action. In Study 1, throwing a dying man overboard to prevent a l...

Can it be a good thing to be deaf?

Increasingly, Deaf activists claim that it can be good to be Deaf. Still, much of the hearing world remains unconvinced, and continues to think of deafness in negative terms. I examine this debate and argue that to determine whether it can be good to be deaf it is necessary to examine each claimed advantage or disadvantage of being deaf, and then to make an overall judgment regarding the net co...

Negative self-synchronization: will I change to be like you when it is bad for me?

The current research examined whether people will attempt to modify internal aspects of the self to make them congruent with others, even when those modifications have negative implications for the self, a phenomenon we refer to as negative self-synchronization. We proposed that negative self-synchronization will occur only for individuals who are securely attached. Across 4 experiments, partic...

Regulation is no bad thing.

Is Guilt by Association a Bad Thing?

In this paper we study a classification model that mimics guilt by association. We consider a population consisting of known adversaries, covert adversaries, and benign individuals. In our model we associate a suspicion score with each individual. The scores for the covert and benign populations are initially set to 0, while the known adversaries have a fixed score of 1. The scores change dynam...