The present research argues that common messages and beliefs about the controllability of health problems, individual responsibility for health, and the societal harm caused by preventable health conditions, have left many health behaviors and chronic conditions susceptible to moral judgment. Although individual health behaviors are important for well-being and chronic disease prevention, there may be unintended consequences of an ideology of individual responsibility for health, particularly when moralized health attitudes develop. Just as research has found individual differences in related constructs, such as obesity moralization and protestant work ethic values, the present studies examined health moralization as an individual difference. An instrument was developed to measure health moralization and, separately, the personal importance a person places on health, so that the moral component of health attitudes was isolated as a predictor. The instrument was validated across four studies. Studies 1 and 2 focused on scale development and establishing discriminant and convergent validity. Study 2 confirmed that health moralization is associated with a conservative worldview characterized by a strong endorsement of the Protestant work ethic and belief in a just world. Correlations across the four studies suggest that, compared to low moralizers, high moralizers are more likely to be politically conservative and religious, and they report having slightly better self-rated health and engagement in healthy behaviors. The predictive validity of health moralization was demonstrated through the confirmation of multiple hypotheses across Studies 2 – 4. The more a person endorses a moral view of health, the more they perceive common health conditions to be preventable (Study 2), assign greater personal responsibility for common health conditions (Study 3), expect individuals with preventable conditions or poor health behavior to pay more than others for their healthcare (Study 3), and attribute greater control, negligence, and blame to an individual described as failing to prevent heart disease or skin cancer (Study 4). The results suggest that health moralization has important motivational and interpersonal implications, and that future research should investigate its causes and continue to evaluate its consequences in a number of domains, including employment and healthcare contexts.

Research shows that negative attitudes toward obese people are pervasive and difficult to change (Puhl & Heuer, 2009). The present research was designed to expand our understanding of why obesity attitudes are so entrenched by investigating the extent to which people make moral judgments about obesity. Negative moral evaluations about obesity were hypothesized to positively predict greater control attributions for obesity and disgust reactions toward obese people. It was also hypothesized that moralization of obesity is associated with downstream consequences such as endorsement of discrimination against obese people, inflated estimation of health risks associated with obesity, and the perception of general moral weakness in obese persons. Two studies were conducted, each with samples from YourMorals.org and a college student population. Study 1 supported the hypotheses and found that, across both samples, greater moralization was positively associated with control attributions, disgust, and the proposed consequences of moralization. Study 2 tested the hypothesis that moralization of obesity is in part caused by the belief that obesity is controllable. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions in which they read a brief introduction to the survey that emphasized that obesity is largely controllable or uncontrollable. The results from both samples indicated that the manipulation failed to significantly decrease control attributions and thus Study 2 did not provide an adequate test of the causal link between control attributions and moralization. The implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.

Do political partisans evaluate new information in a biased way? Despite decades of research, this question has been difficult for psychologists to resolve. Proponents of rationalist accounts claim that ostensible biases can be solely explained by impartial, accuracy-motivated processes; in contrast, proponents of motivated accounts contend that partisans’ evaluations are often influenced by biased, directionally-motivated processes. Embracing the logic of blinding that underlies many scientific practices, I designed and deployed a novel experimental paradigm across four preregistered experiments (N = 4010) to critically test these two accounts. Participants were randomly assigned to evaluate the methodological quality of scientific evidence either before they knew its results (blinded evaluations) or after they knew its results (unblinded evaluations). The critical assumption underlying this design was that blinded participants provided purely impartial, accuracy-motivated evaluations. Unblinded participants, on the other hand, may or may not have been biased by their prior political beliefs when evaluating the new information. Indeed, in every study, unblinded participants were unduly influenced by their prior beliefs compared to their attitudinally-similar counterparts who made blinded evaluations. Partisans’ feelings and expectations produced independent, yet highly intertwined, biasing effects on their evaluations. These biases were most evident in unblinded participants’ denigration of politically-unfriendly information, rather than their veneration of politically-friendly information. Additionally, I found that blinding partisans’ quality evaluations influenced how credible they found politically-unfriendly information and how they updated their beliefs in response to that information. I discuss how these findings can be integrated into existing theoretical models—including Bayesian models of belief updating—to provide more accurate descriptions of political cognition. Ultimately, these results disconfirmed strong rationalist accounts of partisan evaluations and supported the existence of partisan biases.

Effort is valued in human societies, but is it valued beyond what one’s efforts produce? In two experiments, I tested whether or not effort serves as a signal of one’s moral character, even in situations where greater effort did not lead to greater productivity. Participants read short vignettes about a high-effort and low-effort worker in randomized order and evaluated each target on a variety of person perception measures. In both studies, and in both between- and within-subjects analyses, participants perceived the high-effort worker as more moral than the low-effort worker, even when controlling for perceived warmth, competence, and productivity. In the second experiment, participants were also willing to pay the high-effort worker around $1000 more per year than the low-effort worker doing the exact same amount of work. These effects were not moderated by participants’ political orientation or Protestant Work Ethic scores. These results support a cognitive evolutionary account of effort valorization that may transcend cultural boundaries. Future directions and implications for research on effort valorization are discussed.

While male supremacist ideology has existed for many centuries, online communities and digital platforms have contributed new concepts and aided in its reconfiguration. This mixed-methods dissertation uses online ethnographic research, a key informant interview, and an iterative process of factor analytic scale construction and validation across four studies (n = 3,116), in order to define, operationalize, and develop a measure of contemporary male supremacy - the Male Supremacy Scale (MSS). Online ethnographic research was conducted, data were collected and coded, and items were generated from this qualitative research. These codes and underlying concepts were then validated by way of a semi-structured interview, and the qualitative research was used to inform the factor analytic scale construction procedure. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was used to create, refine, and test the MSS for reliability and validity, ultimately arriving at a 15-item scale, comprised of three 5-item subscales – Anti-Feminism, Female Dishonesty in Relationships, and ‘Women Like Alphas’. The MSS was tested alongside other construct-relevant instruments to evaluate contemporary male supremacy’s relationship to political orientation, racism, sexism, feelings towards grievance-based groups, and various personality assessments. Results suggest that contemporary male supremacy is strongly related to support for Donald Trump, hostile sexism, racial resentment, conspiratorial thinking, psychological entitlement, in-group dominance, and preference for authoritarian leaders. Using the MSS, this dissertation proffers a psychological profile of male supremacists, theorizes a potential pathway to online radicalization, and examines the contribution of digital media platforms in the creation and dissemination of male supremacy in contemporary culture.

“Is that racist?” While sometimes the answer may seem obvious, other times it may be more controversial. Heated debate in the U.S. about the extent that racism is still a problem may be partially due to disagreements about what counts as racism, an underexplored topic in social psychology. These two online studies asked U.S. adults to judge behaviors and scenarios on whether or not they were racist. In Study 1, I found large, significant differences between liberals and conservatives in both the number and content of behaviors judged to be racist. In Study 2, I investigated liberals and conservatives’ definitions of racism, both by explicitly asking about their definitions of racism and in judging scenarios that were structured to investigate definitional differences. I found that conservatives favored individual-focused definitions and liberals leaned more towards a systemic/structural definition of racism. When judging scenarios, conservatives placed more importance on whether an act treated people differently based on race, while liberals were relatively more open to judging an act racist that affected people differently, as well as one that treated people differently. In all, liberals and conservatives do not see racism the same way, which likely makes it harder for them to understand each other’s viewpoints. Further exploration of these differences may help show why what one side calls “racism” the other calls “playing the race-card.”

Objective: We test whether prejudice can influence lay attributions of mental illness to perpetrators of violence. Specifically, we examine whether people with negative attitudes towards Muslims perceive Muslim mass shooters as less mentally ill than non-Muslim shooters. Method: Study 1 compares attributions of mental illness to Muslim and non-Muslim perpetrators of recent mass shootings. Studies 2 and 3 experimentally test whether a mass shooter described in a news article is seen as less mentally ill when described as being a Muslim, compared to when described as a Christian (Study 2) and to when religion is not mentioned (Study 3). Study 4 tests whether a Muslim shooter is seen as less mentally ill than a Christian shooter, even when both shooters have symptoms of mental illness. Results: In all studies, Muslim shooters were seen as less mentally ill than non-Muslim shooters, but only by those with negative views towards Muslims. Conclusion: Those with anti-Muslim prejudices perceive Muslim mass shooters as less mentally ill, likely to maintain culpability and fit narratives about terrorism. This may reinforce anti-Muslim attitudes by leading those with anti-Muslim prejudice to overestimate the amount of violence inspired by groups like ISIS relative to extremist groups from other ideologies.

Using television news coverage of American mass shootings, I examine how Muslim perpetrators of violence are covered differently in liberal and conservative media. Furthermore, I examine the consequences of this coverage, including its effects on prejudice towards Muslims and beliefs about the extent to which Muslims are responsible for acts of violence. In Study 1, I show that between 2010 and 2020, television news networks allocated more coverage to Muslim than non-Muslim mass shooters, even when statistically controlling for other factors influencing coverage (e.g. fatalities, location). The increase in coverage for Muslim shooters was larger for more politically conservative news networks. In Study 2, I test whether news coverage of Muslim mass shootings can increase negative attitudes towards Muslims. Across five different experiments with a total of 3331 participants, I did not find evidence that this is the case. The remaining studies examine whether media coverage can impact beliefs about the role Muslims play in mass shootings. In Study 3, I find that public beliefs about mass shootings mirror the picture presented in television news: people overestimate the percentage of mass shooters who are Muslim, and this overestimation is largest among frequent viewers of news networks that allocate more coverage to Muslim shooters. Study 4 used an experiment to demonstrate that exposure to news coverage of a Muslim mass shooter increases the extent to which people overestimate the percentage of mass shooters who are Muslim. Study 5 replicates this finding by comparing responses to media coverage of the 2021 shootings in Boulder, Colorado and Atlanta, Georgia, two contemporaneous mass shootings with Muslim and Christian perpetrators. Finally, Study 6A and 6B find that, because many people assume an unidentified mass shooter is likely to be Muslim, exposure to news coverage of an unidentified shooter also increases the extent to which people overestimate of the percentage of mass shooters who are Muslim. Overall, I demonstrate that major news networks provide systematically different media coverage of mass shootings when the perpetrator is Muslim. This coverage fuels misperceptions about the role Muslims play in causing mass shootings and may misdirect efforts to effectively address mass violence.

This meta-analysis explores the longstanding and heavily debated question of whether religiosity is associated with prosocial and antisocial behavior. In an analysis of 179 effects across 89 samples, encompassing 167,508 participants, a significant relationship of r = .10 was found between religiosity and prosociality. However, substantial heterogeneity of methods was identified, and several potential moderators of this relationship were explored. The effect was most powerfully moderated by the type of measurement used to assess prosocial or antisocial behavior. Religiosity significantly correlated with self-report measures of prosociality at r = .15, but among samples using a behavioral measure of prosociality, the effect was only a marginally significant r = .04. Three possible explanations of this moderation are discussed, namely that 1) lab-based methods do not accurately capture religious prosociality; 2) the self-report effect is explained by religious self-enhancement; or 3) both religiosity and self-reported prosociality are explained by self-enhancement. Recommendations for future research are discussed that may help resolve these possible explanations. Other potential moderators are analyzed, including whether religiosity is differently related to prosocial and antisocial behavior.

Although ideology is widely studied, less is known about how it varies across sociocultural contexts. Ideology is an organizing structure for political attitudes in that positions on a core set of political attitudes have been found to be aligned along a liberal-conservative ideological dimension. Some personality-based approaches to political psychology suggest that, because ideology arises from low-level psychological features, the political attitudinal structure of ideology is likely to be consistent across sociocultural contexts. However, the cultural psychology perspective suggests that both low-level psychological features and their higher-level political attitudinal manifestations may differ across cultures. The five studies in this dissertation examined this tension using eight datasets from the General Social Survey, applying linear and logistic regression and lasso regression, and the machine learning techniques of random forest classification and regression and support vector machine classification. Across these studies, the importance of ideology as an organizing structure varied across sociocultural contexts, especially across race, education, and income lines. The associations between ideological self-placement and measures of political attitudes were weaker for those with lower incomes and with no college education, and the associations were almost entirely absent for Black Americans. In addition, this dissertation examined other ways that political concerns are prioritized, beyond ideology.