Does considering one’s past prosociality affect future behavior? Prior research has revealed instances in which adults engage in additional prosocial behavior––moral reinforcement––as well as instances in which adults engage in worse behavior––moral licensing. The current study examined the developmental origins of these effects by testing whether sixto eight-year-olds (N=225) are more or less ...

People ask questions in order to efficiently learn about the world. But do people ask good questions? In this work, we designed an intuitive, gamebased task that allowed people to ask natural language questions to resolve their uncertainty. Question quality was measured through Bayesian idealobserver models that considered large spaces of possible game states. During free-form question generati...

We examined whether people might distort and selectively remember the past in ways that enable them to sustain a belief in a just world (BJW; Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York: Plenum Press). In Study 1, recall of a lottery prize reflected participants’ justice concerns, such that the average lottery amount recalled was lowest when a ‘‘bad” versu...

While previous research has revealed several reasons why humans generally do good deeds, we explore a simple nudge that might get more of them done: the maybe favor. We first show conceptually that, compared to conventional favor, are willing grant favor stranger on which they eventually not have make good. Furthermore, conducted series fully incentivized experiments (total N = 3,475) where par...

Acting virtuously can subsequently free people to act less-than-virtuously. We review recent insights into this moral self-licensing effect: (a) It is reliable, though modestly-sized, and occurs in both real-world and laboratory contexts; (b) Planning to do good, reflecting on foregone bad deeds, or observing ingroup members’ good deeds is sufficient to license less virtuous behavior; (c) When ...