The 5th HotFresh recommended paper is:
Kirgios, E. L., Silver, I., & Chang, E. H. (2025) Does communicating measurable diversity goals attract or repel historically marginalized job applicants? Evidence from the lab and field, J Experimental Psychology: General
psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
Do women feel some emotions more strongly than men do? Out today in Affective Science, I argue that claims like this make a notoriously subtle mistake. What is it? And what does it have to do with an astigmatic painter and thyroid medicine? A short thread...
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Sam is one of the most thoughtful scholars of dishonesty around. His latest on the topic - disentangling cheating from lying - is required reading!👇
this is a letter to the editor from a high school track runner who came in second to a trans girl in a race. her state house rep in maine started talking about it. so she wrote this: www.pressherald.com/2025/05/14/r...
What makes people feel entitled to rewards?
Check out Corey’s paper for a provocative new take…
We think a broader version of the hypothesis - that people avoid scaling down outrage from relevant reference points - is a big part of it. We are currently working on follow-ups that explore a preference for escalation from *others’* judgments and finding evidence for that prediction!
The paper contains a number of cool extensions that explore conditions under which people become more or less sensitive to harm and severity when making moral comparisons. Check it out (open access) here:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Direction of comparison matters because scaling down condemnation (saying B is less bad than A) leaves ambiguity as to whether one is “downplaying.” Does scaling down mean I am not taking this seriously enough? This moral character threat is not present when scaling up (saying A is worse than B).
While people readily say that bad act A is worse and deserves more punishment than bad act B, they are reluctant to say that B is less bad and deserves less punishment than A. When asked which of two acts is less bad, many opt to say both are equally bad (even when one is quite transparently worse!)