indeed we find that the idea that aesthetic pursuits provide unique access to autonomy, rule-breaking, and authenticity, is partly how they provide us a feeling of nearness to our true selves. they provide an escape from the principles, rules, and conventions that define the moral domain

and when asked to imagine the very same person, at a crossroads in life, contributing moral or artistic value to society, we find that sometimes people judge those who take the aesthetic path to have found greater feelings of nearness to their true selves & freedom from rules and conventions

despite much research pointing to a "moral primacy" view where pursuing moral goodness will bring people closest to feelings of nearness to the true self, and win you friends and a good reputation--people want to see a plurality of values in an ideal society and an ideal life

you're having a sliding doors moment--you can either become a great artist or a great philanthropist. what path will make you feel like you've found your true self? @jowylie.bsky.social & @mattlindauer.bsky.social and i find that arts provide a unique one static1.squarespace.com/static/679ee...

Finally, we use a novel impression updating task to explore a potential consequence of this phenomenon. Specifically, we find that immoral behavior is more diagnostic for women than men because it is seen as less statistically normative.

Further, using a large database of 1,864 normed behaviors, we find that behaviors associated with moral goodness are also stereotyped as feminine.

Next, using a novel profile-generation task, we find that people are more likely to ascribe more morally good traits to women than to men, both when they are spontaneously thinking of a woman (vs. a man) and when they are assigned to do so.

Using reverse-correlation methods, we show that mental representations of the face of “a morally good person” is a woman’s face.

rereading Wegner's 2004 precis on conscious will, one of the paper's that got me into psychology, and still finding new gems. he argues that our intentions are more like previews than causes of our actions, and he asks "does the compass steer the ship?" will be thinking about that for a while!

been thinking a lot in my lab about what it means to use the state to go after your enemies (for no reason at all). the beginnings of that thinking are in our paper on what makes state punishment unique (now in press at EJSP)
#psychscisky #cognition #socpsyc #philsky

osf.io/preprints/ps...

what counts as breaking a rule? you might think this q is easy, but people actually integrate signals from morality, legality, punishability, and normativity to figure it out, new preprint w/ @jowylie.bsky.social & dries bostyn osf.io/preprints/ps... #psychscisky #cognition #socpsyc #philsky

we find that people who endorse existing group hierarchy (i.e., are high in social dominance orientation), are more likely to route the call to the police for Black but not White rule breakers

we validated that rule violations that people call 311 for are indeed phantom rules--frequently broken and rarely enforced and that people do not think should end in arrest, especially compared to more prototypical legal violations

we examined 21,400,433 calls to NYC's 311 service for non-emergency issues like graffiti and illegal vending. 6,200,314 went to the NYPD, 2,237 ended in arrest. we merged this with census data, and found that 311 calls are 65% less likely to end in arrest in majority white neighborhoods

found this on the street today!