Chelsea Schein and I had been publishing papers arguing that all moral judgment revolves around perceptions of harm — not five separate “moral foundations,” as Haidt’s hugely influential theory claimed. Their response compared us to a corporation caught rigging its diesel engines to cheat on emissions tests. They wrote that our results came from “a testing garage rigged in [our] favor” and concluded: “It may be time for a recall.”

The actual substance of the post contained no allegation of fabricated data and no charge of misconduct. The complaints were about analytical choices — how we split our samples, how we defined our variables. Ordinary scientific disagreement, framed as a scandal.

To be clear: Chelsea and I never cooked any books. I bring up this claim because it illustrates something important about how science actually works — and about a debate that matters for how we understand moral conflict.

In this post, I want to talk about how science progresses, what it’s like to challenge a dominant paradigm, and why the model we use to understand the moral mind matters for all of us. The reason I wrote this piece today — more than ten years after that blog post — is because we just had an important paper come out, one that I think really helps to further shift the paradigm in moral psychology.

Science Is a Contact Sport

Science is social. It’s pushed forward by people advocating for theories, who get attached to those theories, who feel threatened when the theories are challenged. But it’s mostly pushed forward by the much larger group of researchers who don’t have a dog in any particular fight — people who just want frameworks that seem compelling and, more importantly, useful for their own work. What helps them do research? What gives them tools they can actually use?

This social dimension is something established scientists tend to understand, but it’s often overlooked by people outside academia and underappreciated by students. Thomas Kuhn appreciated it. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argued that science doesn’t progress by the steady accumulation of facts. It lurches forward through paradigm shifts — periods where a dominant framework shapes what questions get asked, what counts as evidence, and what tools everyone uses, until anomalies pile up and a new framework replaces the old one. Replacement isn’t just about who has better data. It’s about social dynamics, institutional momentum, and what instruments people can pick up and run with.

The paradigm fight featured in the Volkswagen blog post is between two theories of the moral mind.

Moral Foundations Theory argues that the mind contains several distinct moral mechanisms, or “foundations.” Liberals rely mostly on care and fairness. Conservatives draw on those plus loyalty, authority, and purity. Different moral minds, different moral languages.

The alternative — the one my lab has been building for over a decade — argues that everyone shares the same moral mind, organized around a single thing: the perception that someone is being victimized. We call this the Theory of Dyadic Morality, because the template at the heart of moral judgment is dyadic — an intentional agent causing damage to a vulnerable victim.

We originally called it “harm-based morality,” but we’ve recently shifted to talking about “victimhood.” Partly that’s genuine theoretical growth — victimhood captures the full richness of what people perceive better than “harm” does. But partly it’s strategic. MFT had defined “harm” so narrowly — basically physical violence — that when we said “it’s all about harm,” people pictured punching. We meant something much broader: the intuitive perception that a vulnerable entity is being damaged.

Paradigms evolve in response to criticism and social forces. Ours did too.

These competing theories matter because the world is in moral conflict. You feel it at Thanksgiving, you see it on social media, you hear it in congressional hearings. Liberals and conservatives don’t just disagree about policy — they seem to inhabit different moral universes. How we model the moral mind shapes how we understand that conflict, and whether we think it’s bridgeable.

The paper my collaborators and I just published — twelve studies, multiple methods, years of work — is, I think, the most important piece of evidence yet for why the dominant model is wrong. But to understand why the paper matters, you need to understand where the debate started.

Is Sex with Your Sibling Harmless?

The key question for decades in moral psychology is, is sex with your sibling harmless?

Not a joke. In the year 2000, Haidt ran a now-famous study where people read carefully designed scenarios, including one about consensual incest between adult siblings. No pregnancy risk, no lasting damage, no one finds out. The point was to show that people condemn these acts even though they can’t articulate a reason. Haidt called this “moral dumbfounding” and argued it was evidence that morality goes beyond harm — that we have separate mechanisms (“foundations”) for purity, loyalty, and so on.

It’s important to note that this study has never been published in a peer-reviewed journal. You can find it online as a “temporary report” dated August 2000. In a note on the first page, Haidt writes that he ran a second study but “it is so time consuming to code all the videos that even now, in 2010, I still haven’t fully analyzed that study for publication.” It’s 2026. The foundational demonstration for the most cited theory in moral psychology never went through peer review because rigorously testing the hypotheses took too much time.

When I started in moral psychology, I wasn’t trying to challenge anyone. I was curious about those scenarios. Haidt’s interpretation was that people were dumbfounded — they condemned the acts but couldn’t find any harm. But that assumed the acts really were seen as harmless.

I wondered instead, what if people saw harm intuitively, the way people find flying on an airplane intuitively dangerous even when they know the statistics? Maybe the scenarios weren’t harmless at all — not to the people reading them. Despite the assurances that sleeping with your sibling was a-okay, maybe people were right to feel—deep down—that maybe it wasn’t a great idea.

Chelsea Schein, Adrian Ward and I measured whether people actually perceived harm in those scenarios, and they sure did. They thought incest damaged the sibling relationship, that taboo acts created suffering for the people involved, that violations harmed someone’s soul or their community. The only people who actually thought these scenarios were truly victimless were the liberal researchers who designed them.

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Perceived Harm Predicts Everything

Study after study over the following years showed the same thing: the perception that someone is being victimized predicted moral condemnation across every type of violation — not just physically harmful violations but “purity” violations, “loyalty” violations, all of them. More perceived victimization, more condemnation. This is true for liberals and conservatives alike.

Nico Restrepo Ochoa published a particularly clean demonstration of this effect in Poetics in 2022. He measured harm perception and immorality across a wide range of moral acts — acts MFT would assign to different foundations. When you plot them, they all fall on the same line, regardless of whether the act is supposedly “about” harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, or purity.

The Theory of Dyadic Morality says this is because the moral mind works by template matching — the same cognitive process behind all categorization. When people ask “is this immoral?”, they compare the act to a template, and that template involves an intentional agent causing damage to a vulnerable victim. The closer the match, the stronger the condemnation. A CEO who harms a baby matches the template well (obvious agent obviously harming an obviously vulnerable victim). A baby who harms a CEO matches it poorly. Both involve “harm,” but they produce very different moral reactions because the dyadic structure — who’s the agent, who’s the victim, how vulnerable, how intentional — is doing the real cognitive work.

We’ve published dozens of studies on our victim-based moral minds across many journals, but it hasn’t been easy. Pushing against the dominant paradigm in moral psychology has been exactly what you’d expect from reading Kuhn. The defenders of MFT have been defensive, because that’s what happens when you challenge a paradigm — people have built careers on it, designed their studies around it, and organized their thinking with it. I get it.

After my very first journal submission criticizing MFT, I got a very long peer review back from Jon, who suggested I was wasting everyone’s time. He also attached a copy of his own dissertation. The Volkswagen post was part of the same pattern. These are the social forces Kuhn described, and they’re not unique to moral psychology — every field has them.

You Can’t Beat a Paradigm Without a Scale

Kuhn understood that, to move the field forward, it’s not enough to just show problems with the old paradigm. You also have to explain the data it was explaining. And pragmatically, you need to give people an instrument.

MFT became popular partly because of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire — a scale you could drop into any study. It doesn’t matter that the MFQ has conservatism baked in—purity is measured by rating the importance of sexual chastity, and authority is measured by rating the importance of obeying a preacher. And it doesn’t matter that the structure of MFT keeps changing from three foundations to four to five to six to, as its own architects have written, potentially “74, or perhaps 122, or 27.” It doesn’t matter that Jeremy Frimer’s papers showed the link between political orientation and foundations is weak and content-dependent — conservatives care about “purity” when it means sexual chastity, but liberals light up when purity means environmental contamination, and the same is true for loyalty (to the military vs. to labor unions).

Clearly, the foundations aren’t deep cognitive differences so much as artifacts of which specific questions ended up on the survey, but a popular survey existed, and people used it. If you have 5 morality things in your survey, at least one of them is bound to correlate with something—and significant correlations are the pathway to publication. That mattered more than any theoretical critique.

So to nudge the field, I needed to both account for the data MFT was capturing — the obvious fact that liberals and conservatives disagree about morality — and I needed a scale of my own.

Who’s Vulnerable? Ask and Find Out

Assumptions of vulnerability (AoVs) is the construct has been missing from our work, and from the debate. AoVs are how much people assume that someone (or something) is especially vulnerable to victimization.

Everyone cares about protecting vulnerable entities from harm, but people disagree sharply about who is especially vulnerable. This insight is essential because it connects a shared harm-based mind, with individual differences in moral judgments.

Abortion is a case in point: if you believe a fetus can feel pain, you’ll have very different moral views than someone who sees it as an insensate clump of cells. With immigration, progressives tend to frame undocumented immigrants as vulnerable victims seeking safety, while conservatives see them as threats to innocent citizens. Climate debates pit the suffering of ecosystems against the suffering of workers who lose jobs to environmental regulations. Debates about transgender athletes pit harm to competitors against harm to the transgender person.

In each of these cases, the disagreement isn’t about whether harm matters. It’s about who’s getting harmed.

We built an AoV scale to measure these assumptions of vulnerability. For any target, participants answer three questions on a scale from 1 (not at all vulnerable) to 5 (completely vulnerable):

“I believe that the following are especially vulnerable to being harmed.”

“I think that the following are especially vulnerable to mistreatment.”

“I feel that the following are especially vulnerable to victimization.”

Three items per target. You can measure AoVs for anything — fetuses, immigrants, corporations, LLMs, the rainforest, God. Researchers can adapt it to whatever question they’re studying, which is the whole point: it’s a tool that’s easy to use.

AoVs are not themselves moral judgments. They’re beliefs about is, not ought. “Cats can feel pain” might feed into a moral view about how we treat cats, but it’s not itself a moral view. This is important because it breaks the tautology at the heart of MFT. MFT explains moral differences with moral differences (you condemn promiscuity because you have a purity foundation, and we know you have a purity foundation because you condemn promiscuity). AoVs explain moral differences with something outside morality.

Twelve Studies, One Question

The paper that just came out — “Liberals and Conservatives See Different Victims,” in PSPB, led by Jake Womick and Emily Kubin, ran twelve studies using this measure.

(The full author team on the paper: Jake Womick, Emily Kubin, Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, Nico Restrepo Ochoa, Carlos Rebollar, Kyra Kapsaskis, Sam Pratt, Helen Devine, Keith Payne, Stephen Vaisey, and me.)

Many of today’s most divisive debates connect to four clusters of targets: the Environment (rainforests, ecosystems), the Othered (immigrants, transgender people, Black Americans), the Powerful (CEOs, police officers), and the Divine (God, the Bible). (Here is a mock-up of the AoV scale we used to assess these four clusters.)

In our studies, we found that liberals see the Environment and the Othered as more vulnerable than conservatives. Conservatives see more vulnerability in the Powerful and the Divine than do liberals.

There are political similarities: Liberals and conservatives agree on the rank order of vulnerability — both sides see the Environment and the Othered as more vulnerable than the Powerful and the Divine. The disagreement is about how big the gaps are between these groups. Liberals amplify differences in AoVs: they see a steep hierarchy, focusing on group differences. Some groups are deeply vulnerable (oppressed), while others are basically invulnerable (oppressors). Conservatives dampen AoV differences between groups: they see vulnerability as more evenly distributed, with everyone similarly at risk (everyone is an individual).

The shape of this graph should look familiar if you’ve ever seen the classic MFT graph — big gap for liberals, smaller gap for conservatives. Both frameworks are describing the same underlying moral divide. But AoVs do it without positing separate moral mechanisms, without a survey that has conservatism baked in, and without explaining morality by pointing to morality.

In direct comparisons with the MFQ, AoVs predicted moral judgments on hot-button issues — transgender rights, environmental policy, tax breaks, religious freedom — as well as or better than moral foundations (and again, without measuring morality itself). AoVs also predicted real charitable behavior and showed up in implicit cognition, not just self-report. (Separable moral foundations never show up in implicit cognition test, despite being argued to be “intuitions.”)

AoVs are also causal, not just correlational. In one study, participants read about a female CEO who refused to give money to a homeless person at night. Some were asked to think about ways the CEO could be vulnerable to harm. Others thought about the homeless person’s vulnerability. The manipulation shifted moral judgments: emphasize the homeless person’s vulnerability and the CEO’s behavior looks worse; emphasize the CEO’s vulnerability and it looks less bad.

All these studies make the idea of harm-based morality useful to other scientists and especially usual to people trying to understand our political divide. And useful ideas are those that are adopted. (An idea being true also makes it useful.)

A Shifting Paradigm: A Slide in Chicago

A few weeks ago, my student Danica Dillion was at SPSP 2026 in Chicago. She sent me a photo from a talk by Killian McLoughlin, from Molly Crockett’s lab at Princeton. The slide cited dyadic morality as a unifying template — as something that seems obviously true — rather than as a “but see also this theory” footnote. That felt new.

One slide doesn’t mean the paradigm has shifted. But I’ve been going to SPSP for a long time, and I can feel something changing. The question used to be “is harm really central?” Now it’s “okay, harm is central — what do we do with that idea?” The MFQ keeps showing poor cross-cultural validity. Moral foundations fail to predict people’s everyday moral concerns and about hot-button issues. The number of foundations keeps changing. Meanwhile, evidence for a common victim-based template keeps accumulating from multiple labs.

Most people, even most scientists, have a sanitized picture of how scientific progress works. The popular version is that researchers compare evidence and the better idea wins. In practice, paradigms shape what counts as a legitimate question, what methods are acceptable, whose findings get taken seriously. Challenging a paradigm means arguing against the priors of the people who review your papers and fund your grants. When evidence goes against the dominant view, the first reaction is dismissal (this idea is absurd) and the second reaction is resistance (this idea is wrong). That’s just how it works. Understanding that is important for understanding why any field — moral psychology included — takes so long to correct course.

What’s at Stake

Questions about our moral minds matter beyond academia. If MFT is right — if liberals and conservatives literally have different moral minds — then bridging divides requires something like translation between alien languages: reframe your message in the other side’s moral vocabulary. And that approach has had mixed results.

If our account is right, the challenge is different. To understand a conservative who opposes gay marriage, you don’t need to learn a foreign moral language. You need to understand that they genuinely perceive harm — to souls, to marriage, to children — even if you think those harms are imaginary. To understand a liberal who wants to defund the police, you need to understand that they see police as agents of harm against vulnerable communities, not as vulnerable public servants.

Everyone cares about victims. The disagreement is about who counts as one. Once you see it that way, you can have a conversation — share evidence, share experiences, make vulnerability visible — instead of talking past each other in different moral languages.

This paper was years of work by a big team, and connects together over a decade of research by many brilliant people. When I started this work, I wasn’t looking for a fight with anyone, including Jon Haidt (who was gracious enough to speak in my very first symposium at SPSP). My first foray into harm perception was just a questionnaire asking whether people might see some “harmless wrongs” as harmless. They didn’t. That initial finding pulled me into a decade of arguing — in journals, at conferences, and occasionally on blog posts with inflammatory titles.

But something I’ve been thinking about lately is that maybe the fight isn’t really between me and Jon Haidt. Maybe it’s between the ideas themselves. There’s this concept from memetics that ideas are a kind of organism, competing for survival in the ecology of human minds. We think we’re the ones doing the fighting, but maybe the ideas are fighting through us. We’re the hosts, and the theories of moral psychology are the true agents.

I find that thought weirdly comforting, because it means you can separate the people from the paradigms. Jesse Graham — the second author on the Volkswagen post — is a friend and one of the funniest people I know. Pete Ditto is an amazing person and mentor, and the only social psychologist I’ve ever gone surfing with (we saw dolphins). Jon Haidt will likely never be friends, but I genuinely respect his writing. He’s probably one of the best storytellers in the social sciences.

The ideas we champion are in conflict. We are not.

And the idea that people can separate themselves from their positions is, really, is the whole point of the research we do in the lab (and write about here). You can disagree about who’s a victim and still sit down at the same table. Liberals and conservatives share the same moral mind — the same deep concern for protecting the vulnerable. They just disagree about who the vulnerable are. That’s a hard disagreement, but it’s a deeply human one, and one you can actually talk about.

I study and teach about people overcoming differences, and you can live what you teach. At Thanksgiving dinner, and even in moral psychology.

This was one of the question asked of me by Lisa Miller, a thoughtful reporter for The New York Times, who is researching Epstein’s connection to scientists. It’s a great question—one that demands an answer here, where we discuss so much moral psychology.

One obvious reason for Epstein’s draw to the field was status. Many moral psychologists are at elite institutions, they are famous and do exciting work. All humans are drawn to unique achievers: royalty, billionaires, and sport stars, so it makes sense that Epstein wanted to hang with the scientific elite.

But why would he try to befriend moral psychologists? Perhaps he thought it served as a kind of internal penance—a form of “reputation-washing” similar to Coca-Cola funding microplastic research while using three million tons of plastic in their packaging each year. There’s no doubt that science—including moral psychology—strives to help others. Moral psychologists test how altruism can be most effective, how to make sense of miscarriages of justice in the legal system, and—as readers here know—how to best bridge political divides among everyday people.

Epstein clearly didn’t to have any real desire to do good—but he may not have wanted to see himself as entirely evil, at least in the confines of his own conscience. Morality psychology may have offered him absolution. He could believe the idea that there was no objective “right and wrong” and that evil didn’t even exist.

Explaining away morality

Moral psychology is rooted in philosophy, which excels at questioning cherished truths. Descartes wondered if our entire reality was a fiction, and Berkeley wondered if we can never know anything except from our perceptions. But perhaps the most cynical about humanity was Nietzsche, who thought that morality was for the weak, and that the strong—the Übermensch (Overman)—can rise above pesky questions of rules and compassion.

It’s no wonder that those preaching “might makes right,“ those who take but never give, often quote Nietzsche. If you are powerful and ruthless, there seems little need to be kind. Why earn someone’s loyalty with compassion when you can simply buy it?

Moral psychology was inspired by philosophy but is grounded less in normative questions (what is right or wrong?) and more in descriptive questions (what do people believe is right or wrong?). Psychological studies show that people’s moral judgments are far from objective. In a classic example, people’s judgments on the trolley problem vastly change if you tweak the scenario. People respond much faster when deciding to flip a switch to reroute and save five workers from a runaway train than when debating whether they would push one man in front of the train to stop it. Even though the moral calculus seems identical (1 dead, 5 survive).

Moral hypocrisy is another example of subjective moral judgments: people are quick to condemn others for cheating at a game but then they do the exact same thing themselves (and justify that it’s permissible). Related to Epstein: one study found that while the “powerful” condemned others cheating, they actually tended to cheat more than the “powerless”.

My own work also highlights the subjectivity of moral psychology. My lab studies how we perceive other minds, like pets or fetuses. There’s surely an objective truth about how much a Labradoodle or an 8-week fetus can suffer, but learning that truth may be impossible. So we are left to merely perceive how much we think they can feel and suffer when making our moral judgments.

Even if morality is ultimately objective, moral psychology shows us the many ways that our moral minds are subjective, and it makes sense that Epstein is drawn to this work. It makes it easier to shrug off the people condemning him: they are just biased perceivers. And the legal system? Just the flawed reflection of psychological intuitions.

Epstein may have funded Martin Novak’s work because it does more than highlight subjectivity. It argues that all our moral psychological tendencies are simply to support beneficial coordination in repeated interactions. When people are forced to repeatedly interact in situations like the “public good’s game” or the “prisoner’s dilemma,” they are better off if they cooperate with each other. (Of course, if you only meet someone once, evolutionary logic supports betraying them). In this evolutionary understanding of morality, there is no real goodness, but rather our minds are intuitively following rules that generally lead to better outcomes for society (and therefore yourself).

That kind of reductionist, functionalist account of morality is well supported by studies involving agent-based modeling. Simple simulations where tiny mindless bots interact repeatedly based on clear rules show the benefits of selective cooperation and betrayal. Viewing morality through this method (which I’ve used in my own studies) would naturally be appealing to someone like Epstein, who is trying to argue that his own odious behavior is not evil but instead merely maximizing his own outcomes among other “agents”.

In fact, there are many examples of Epstein engaging in cooperation with other “agents” to maximize their joint outcomes—just look at all his collaborators who helped him so they could benefit. But terribly, this cooperation was at the expense of other “agents” who suffered and were betrayed, and who—let’s not forget—are not mindless bots but other human beings.

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Epstein missed the most important part of moral psychology

Moral psychologists are far from the only ones who reduce human phenomena to functional accounts. Evolutionary biologists have long been arguing for the inherent selfishness of our genes and economists view it as rational for people to act like “Homo economicus“, caring solely about their own utility. Moral psychology is perhaps unique among these disciplines in that it tries to keep the baby and the bathwater. Even if it treats morality as something that can be explained with scientific models, it still accepts its reality and substance.

The deep humanness of morality is clearly the part that Epstein misses—but is something emphasized by almost all moral psychologists, including me. Yes, our deepest beliefs are socially constructed, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. Our moral beliefs are what structure society, our self-image, and parenthood. Our moral beliefs are especially essential for protecting the most vulnerable people (my work suggests that all our moral beliefs revolve around protecting the vulnerable).

Epstein clearly didn’t worry about the vulnerable. He saw children not as people needing protection, but instead as things to be exploited. He missed one of the most important concepts in human morality: We owe each other something, not because it benefits ourselves, but because we are all members of humanity.

The very worst monsters in our world forget—or willfully neglect—that other people are human beings. We may be one agent among others, but those other agents have minds too—their own morals and deep beliefs—and one of the (many) reasons Epstein is evil is because he failed to appreciate that.

On Tuesday, January 14th, 2025 Outraged was released (little-known publishing insight: new books are always released on Tuesdays).

The book was four years in the making and included a lot of rewriting and ego bruises along the way, and even today, I wonder if there’s more I could have included. But it’s basically already three books in one—a book about human nature and the evolution of morality, a book about moral judgment and victimhood, and a book about how to have better conversations across politics.

Even though it’s easy for any author to second-guess themselves, I’ve been pretty happy with its reception. People seem to appreciate its insights, and nothing makes my heart fuller than seeing someone’s copy of Outraged with little notes in the margin or dog-eared pages. It’s nice to be useful.

It’s also gotten some shoutouts. Behavioral Scientist included it in their Notable Books of 2025. There’s SO MANY amazing books in that list. Behavioral Scientist is a fantastic place to learn about our minds and society—and moral understanding.

Here are 5 books that we think pair well with our themes of moral understanding, politics, and moral psychology in the real world! If you connected with Outraged, these would be good books to try next.

1. Inside an Academic Scandal: A Story of Fraud and Betrayal

by Max Bazerman

Salacious! This book hits close to home. In 2021, a team of data sleuths (who write the blog Data Colada) discovered that two studies from a landmark paper on honesty were fraudulent. The original authors argued that signing your name before completing a form made people more honest than signing after filling it out. But their results were fudged.

It’s a perfect story—a lying scandal implicating researchers who study honesty. The perfect recipe for outrage. The really crazy thing about the fraud? Two different honesty researchers did separate sneaky things. It’s like getting hit by lightning twice!

Or...is it? If “re-search is me-search“ then maybe people who study moral decision-making are more morally bankrupt than the average Joe?

The discovery of fraud set off a chain-reaction that resurrected concerns about the “replicability crisis” (the need, and often failure, to publish valid and reproducible research findings) in social science today. Part of why this fraud felt so outrageous to academics is that we commit ourselves to finding the truth. What’s more, the harm from the scandal rippled outward—they destabilized networks of trust, poisoned collaborations, and forced a reckoning on the entire field.

The other amazing thing about this book is that it’s written by one of the authors of the fraudulent paper (but not one accused of fraud). Perfect for those of you who want a front-row seat to scandal; it’s like a reality TV show, but academic!

2. Patriarchy Inc. What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality—and Why Men Still Win at Work

by Cordelia Fine

If you think gender inequality in the workplace is just because of sexism, you might be part of the problem.

Fine argues that efforts to fix gender inequality at work are backfiring, not because people are genuinely malicious, but because we don’t really understand the problem. On one side are “Different but Equal” skeptics—who think that women are naturally in lower status and pay jobs because that’s what they want. On the other are DEI advocates—who worry more about productivity than true fairness. Both sides see themselves as protecting the vulnerable—and both struggle to take the other’s fears seriously.

Fine’s central insight shows how when groups fixate on different harms, moral progress stalls—not because people are evil, but because they’re talking past each other. She covers how we’re all likely part of the problem: because solving something like gender inequality takes more than adding a “#YayWomen” sticker to your LinkedIn profile picture.

3. My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America

by Ruth Braunstein

Are people who avoid paying taxes lazy, evil...or the real American heroes?

For some Americans, paying taxes is more than a mundane chore: it’s a moral act. Taxpaying has become a profound stance on resistance or support of American citizenship. Braunstein argues that taxpaying takes on a moral stance that is influenced by our political beliefs. If you think withholding tax dollars causes harm to an institution you’re not a fan of, you might see resisting taxes as a vital stance. There’s also the opposite: if tax dollars are fueling a community that you think needs it, you might put your money where your political beliefs are, so to say.

In Outraged terms: taxes have become a moral battlefield where competing harms drive our fiscal beliefs. Is taxation an act of theft against harmed citizens, or is resistance holding back support from communities that need investment?

If this book catches your eye, the author also has a killer podcast When the Wolves Came about evangelicals resisting extremism that was named one of the top 20 podcasts of 2025 by The Atlantic.

4. The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives

by Michael Hallsworth

Think you know a hypocrite? Ironically, it’s probably you.

Hallsworth details one of outrage culture’s favorite weapons: accusing someone of hypocrisy. Our obsession with calling out the other side’s inconsistencies can corrode democratic trust and—ironically—makes us feel morally superior without changing our own behavior.

Sure, hypocrites are frustrating and can be harmful. The famous YouTuber preaching about “family values” while quietly cheating on his wife with an employee is vastly hypocritical, and worth calling out. That brand of hypocrisy destroys trust because breaking their own claimed “values” hurts a lot of other people.

But a lot of hypocrisy that we call out is just ordinary human inconsistency. We criticize corporate greed but are first in line on Black Friday. We believe in free speech but get incensed over a tweet from a complete stranger. We change our minds when we learn something new, and our old beliefs don’t match up. That’s not moral harm—it’s living in a complicated, everchanging world.

The real catch is that we’re black belt masters at spotting hypocrisy in other people, but we’re suddenly blind when it’s our own. This book is great to help you realize how pointing the finger really sucks at making us get along.

5. Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence

by Jens Ludwig

Most people involved in gun violence didn’t wake up planning to ruin their lives.

Drawing on decades of field research in the South Side of Chicago reveals something key to understanding moral wrongs: most gun violence is not driven by cold-blooded, calculated acts of malice, but instead fueled by snap judgments made in emotionally charged moments that we all experience.

We think of violence that we commit as an understandable mistake—it was bad luck, bad timing, a mistake. But when judging a larger issue (i.e., gun violence in America), violence is just proof of who “the other side” really is. It’s a double standard, and another example of regular hypocrisy.

Like Outraged, this book challenges the comforting myth that monsters are fundamentally different than us. Instead, ordinary human psychology—threat perception, fear, and split-second decisions—drives devastating outcomes. The line between “normal, everyday person” and “violent, crazed offender” is thinner than most of us would like to believe.

If you nodded along reading Outraged (or even have it pinned on your never-ending TBR list...), these books are excellent companions.

These books have a common theme. We all love to sit on our moral high horses and think we’re morally right, and everyone else must have it wrong. But it’s important to remember that “morality” isn’t just a concept we read about from our desk chairs. Morality is something we live, like when we deciding whether to throw a drink on someone who’s pissing us off at the bar, or whether to forgive a friend for saying something cruel, or when we find ourselves uncurling our middle finger when someone cuts us off in traffic.

Morality is messy, but these books can make it feel a little tidier.

And before we sign off, we’d like to say THANK YOU for all the folks who read us on the regular. Cheers to another year of trying to understand each other, even if it sometimes drives us crazy!

We’re not alone in the deception. Most American parents deceive their kids too, and we all tell ourselves it’s for the magic of the season. Of course, we’re also happy to waive the threat of supernatural punishment over their gullible little heads.

I’m a firm believer in telling my kids the truth, even if it’s hard. When their fish, Max, died, I thought about rushing out to the pet store to replace it before they noticed, but we decided it would be a good opportunity to learn about death. (There were many tears).

But when it comes to Santa, we fight hard to keep the fiction alive. And it’s getting harder. We were watching some grown up movies with the kids (Four Christmases) when Vince Vaughn’s character told his nephews that Santa wasn’t real. Our kids were sitting right on the couch, but luckily, they weren’t fully paying attention. But then, at dinner that night, the question came: “Is Santa…real?”

We didn’t want to directly lie, and so we dodged: “Why wouldn’t he be?” “Don’t you get presents on Christmas morning?” Some go a similar route, arguing against the implausibility of a global conspiracy:

(source)

So far, our kids still believe Santa is real. (Except for mall Santas, who are obviously just part of his network). Studies show that most kids believe in Santa and see him as a real being (more so even than mythical creatures like unicorns, or cartoons like Spongebob) until about age 7 or 8, when the illusion starts to fail.

But until that day of lost innocence and magic, it’s worth asking ourselves: Is it wrong to lie about Santa?

Philosophers Ruin Christmas

One philosopher, Immanuel Kant, had a very clear position on lying: Never do it. Kant said that lying is always bad, because the ends can never justify the means. He thought that you couldn’t justify killing one person to save many (like in the classic trolley problem), and that you couldn’t justify a polite lie even if it saved the lives of innocents. To Kant, misdirecting anyone—even a murderer—is immoral.

But most of us are not Kant. In fact, Kant thought that sex was like “sucking a lemon dry,” so he can’t be treated as the final word on joy. Kant didn’t worry about keeping the magic of Christmas alive, and he never had to lie to keep a five-year-old from breaking down in the toy aisle at Target.

The Means to an End: Santa Makes Kids Behave

One way to justify the big lie about the big man is that it makes kids behave. When kids know that someone is always watching, they smarten up. In recent years, Santa’s spying has gotten more personal, with parents hiding an “elf on the shelf” daily that’s meant to watch kids constantly and report their behavior back to Santa.

The same logic of surveillance is why—some psychologists and anthropologists argue—Western society believes in “big Gods,” all powerful deities who watch your behavior and mete out supernatural punishment for sinning. One study shows that believing in Hell is negatively linked to national crime rates, suggesting that the threat of punishment is effective in stopping bad behavior.

Of course, getting coal in your stocking isn’t the same as burning in a lake of fire for all eternity, but not all “Santas” are quite as jolly. In Germany, parents warn their kids about Krampus, a terrifying horned beast (similar to some depictions of Satan) who punishes bad kids by stuffing them in a sack and beating them with birch rods.

Science shows that Santa can make kids behave. One study sampled 440 parents of kids ages 4 to 9 throughout the Christmas period (December 1st to January 31st) and found that Christmas related-activities and reminders (think: decorating the tree or seeing an elf on the shelf)—increases kindness. But directly threatening kids about Santa (“Be nice to your brother or you’re getting coal!”) didn’t make them good.

(Then again, kids may not believe that the threat is credible, since Santa always seems to keep kids on the nice list. The IRB didn’t approve what we’re sure was a planned follow-up study: Krampus stuffing a bad neighborhood kid into a bag and then whooping them.)

And lying can be effective at changing behavior. Helen’s parents told her that the car doesn’t run if the dome light is turned on—which effectively stopped the habit. I tell my kids that failing to brush their teeth will turn them mossy and green, and repeat the old classic “If you keep making that face, your face will freeze like that.”

In Gilmore Girls, Luke cites his so-called secret of parenting to be lying to your kids.

Despite the benefits of teeth brushing and being kind to your sibling, the spirit of Kant lingers like the ghost of Christmas past. Doesn’t it hurt kids to lie to them?

Lying About Santa Isn’t So Bad!

Science shows that lying to Santa doesn’t build long-term resentment. One study interviewed kids and adults to find out when they learned the truth about Santa’s identity and how it made them feel. While a third of the kids and half of the adults felt a bit negative about the hoax, most of their feelings were short-lived, and the majority thought they would continue the tradition with their kids.

People usually vow to stop paying forward traumas—stopping the cycle of injustices done to them by not doing them to their kids. Santa can’t be too bad given that both kids and adults plan to lie to their kids after being lied to themselves.

If anything, believing in Santa might be good for kids’ development. The Santa myth helps kids exercise their fantasy play abilities—a skill that is considered key to cognitive development and developing creative thinking. Most psychologists agree that while outright lying to kids is generally bad, Santa’s existence as a uniquely fantastical entity allows him to transcend the rule.

That being said, lying about Santa can go too far, especially if it’s not developmentally appropriate—creating an elaborate hoax so your teenagers still believe in the jolly elf. One episode of This American Life interviews the Mutchler family, who went above and beyond to make Santa alarmingly real.

When their three kids were little, they planted an old man in the backyard in ratty clothing decorated in bells. When 7-year-old Colin invited him inside, he called himself Kris Kringle and asked to dim the lights to help with his “snow blindness.” These ‘Santa’ variations appeared year after year in their yard, looking for the Mutcher’s and bringing sacks of Rudolph’s bones and an elf who set up a DIY toy workshop in their attic.

The Christmas fiction that the Mutchler’s created was so realistic that their kids believed in Santa up into their teens—leading to arguments between them and their friends. Being convinced about the magic of Christmas up into adolescence was not only uncool, it caused some deep trust issues in their son Adam:

“Adam felt betrayed and was angry about it for years. One year, he came home from college and accused his parents for being the reason he couldn’t trust anyone enough to have a serious girlfriend-- not too different from the sorts of speeches lots of kids make to their parents at that age, except it was about Santa.” (source)

Most families don’t lie as long or as well as Adam’s family, but it’s important to appreciate when a “white lie” turns to something darker.

It’s What in Your Heart that Counts

At the end of the day, what probably makes lying about Santa (or anything else) okay is your intention. Human morality is not just about the deed, but the motivation behind it—it’s why prosecutors have to prove that a defendant had a “guilty mind” when trying to convict them.

Lying to our kids because we love them and want to “keep the magic alive” is almost certainly a good thing, or at least better than lying to them just to make them behave. A flourishing childhood is more about knowing that you are loved than about knowing the literal truth of everything in the world.

There are lots of hard truths in adulthood, so what’s one more year of believing in a jolly man who loves them? And when my kids eventually learn the truth about Santa, I’ll just have to keep them from learning about that philosophical scrooge, Immanuel Kant.

People have always debated the moral status of animals, from enjoying bear-baiting (where a stadium full of Victorian-era people watched a bear fight a monkey on a horse) to choosing vegetarianism. But people never considered the lives of animals to be more valuable than those of humans… until now. Our work shows that many people now view their pet as their soulmate.

Examples of human-like pets are everywhere. I (Danica) was inspired to study people’s relationships with their pets after talking to a friend who was disgusted by a dog drinking from a public (human) water fountain. To me, it seemed harmless. Why not let a thirsty dog take a sip? But my (non-American) friend saw it as yet another example of America’s gross fixation on dogs.

But are we really that obsessed with dogs? And if so, does it make us morally depraved? These questions inspired us (Danica, Helen, and Kurt) to run some studies (full preprint here).

From Baby Boom to Fur Baby Boom

We all agree that babies deserve our deepest care and protection—but what about dogs? Many Americans have begun referring to themselves as the “mommy and daddy” of their pet, a trend that’s also seen in millennials opting for “fur babies” over human ones. We tracked pet spending and birth rates in the United States from the past 20 years and found a near-perfect inverse relationship: as the national birth rate has fallen, pet spending has exploded (r = -.93). The link held even after controlling for inflation, GDP, population, the poverty rate, and median age—and it replicated across counties. Counties with the lowest birth rates have the highest density of pet stores, dog groomers, and doggy daycares.

As more people choose not to have real babies, it seems they’d rather spoil their fur babies with chew toys and dog strollers. The childless participants in our studies were also more likely than those with kids to describe their dog as a soulmate and choose their dog—or even a stranger’s puppy—over a person in moral dilemmas. America’s love affair with dogs changes our closest relationships with children and with other people.

The Rise of the Canine Soulmate

Dogs are filling the role of our kids, and our work reveals they are now often our closest confidants.

People spend their whole life searching for their human soulmate. How lucky it is that the dog version is just waiting at the shelter! Of course, soulmate is a broad term, and (most) people aren’t romantically in love with their dog. But many do see their dog as their closest emotional connection.

We ran a survey asking dog owners about their relationship with their pet—how they spend time with them, rely on them, and trust them.

The majority of dog owners saw their pet as a soulmate, describing their love as “purer” than other people’s. Almost three-quarters of dog owners described their canine companion as their primary source of emotional support.

Dogs are undeniably lovable, cute companions. But a “soulmate” is a deep connection “based on mutual understanding and acceptance”. Few people would use that word for their pet, yet many describe their dogs in ways that fit the label: as their main source of emotional support, offering the purest kind of love. And many people don’t even believe that human soulmates truly exist. Is it crazy to love your dog this much?

Well…dogs are more reliable than humans. Unlike messy, unpredictable humans, dogs never criticize, betray, or ghost you. Their affection feels pure, unconditional, and safe. Many dog owners have found a new source of support that they need in their animals. Dogs understand and accept all of us for who we are—without any questions barked back.

But there’s a problem. When you love someone or something that much, you would do anything for them. Even if it means hurting someone else.

Man’s Best Friend, Humanity’s Rival?

Since dogs are taking up more space in our hearts, as children and as soulmates, something must be pushed out.

Every day we breeze past homeless people on the street, some while on our way to buy our pets fancy artisanal treats, or to give them princess treatment with doggie mud baths and blueberry facials. Even when giving to the homeless, people are more likely to help when they have a dog by their side.

We put the moral sensibilities of dog owners to the test, giving both them and non-dog owners dilemmas asking them to choose between the well-being of their dog versus a fellow human being. Before we tell you the results, try some of the dilemmas yourself. Imagine you walk by a puppy and a human stranger on the street, both are very hungry, but you only have $50 to give. Which would you give the money to?

A little more serious: Imagine you are in a situation where you have to choose between saving the life of a puppy you don’t know, or the life of another person. Who would you rescue?

We were curious if dog owners (compared to non-dog owners) would respond differently to these “trolley-esque” moral dilemmas—especially if they felt like their pet was their soulmate. They did. Dog owners who were emotionally connected to their pet were especially likely to put the needs of dogs over people. One in four owners chose to donate $50 to a puppy in need over a child in need. Nearly half of dog owners chose to feed a hungry dog over a hungry stranger.

When choosing between the lives of dogs versus humans, over half of dog owners said they would save their own dog over a human stranger. On some level, this makes sense—you love your dog and see them every day. It’s easier to picture them at risk than a nameless stranger.

But one in five dog owners also said they’d rescue a puppy they’d never met over a human stranger. We were shocked–how could people put the needs of random dogs over fellow human beings? One answer might lie in the social void within us.

The Loneliness Void

The rise of the canine soulmate can’t be separated from the broader loneliness epidemic. America’s social networks have been unraveling for decades. A 2023 Surgeon General’s report declared loneliness a public health crisis, comparing its health effects to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Dogs fill the loneliness void perfectly. They greet us with joy, demand little, and pull us outdoors. They can even spark small talk at the park, and research shows dog ownership is linked to better health and well-being. Yet, as our results caution, these benefits may come with hidden costs.

Our unique empathy for our pets can be partly explained by how we perceive vulnerability. Humans instinctively respond to helplessness. Dogs, especially puppies, are built to trigger it. Their big eyes and round faces activate the same neural circuitry that makes us coo over infants. Through centuries of selective breeding, we’ve shaped dogs into adorable bundles designed to hack our caregiving systems.

But while this empathy is natural, it’s also selective. We found the same people who express profound love for dogs don’t necessarily extend that compassion to other animals. Dog owners in our research were no more likely than non-owners to eat less meat or report lower speciesism. Their heightened empathy appeared to be dog-specific.

Owners who saw their dogs as soulmates also reported less interest in people, less charitable giving to human causes, and greater willingness to forgo social events for time with their pets. Recentering dogs emotionally (over humans) risks replacing rather than enriching the social world.

This is the “companion-dog cultural-runaway theory,” as psychologist Eniko Kubinyi calls it: a feedback loop in which modern loneliness fuels deeper attachment to pets, which may in turn further displace human connection. In a world of dating apps, remote work, and social fragmentation, a dog offers stability. It’s no wonder so many of us cling to them.

Importantly, we’re not saying that people should necessarily love their dogs less (we’re dog lovers ourselves). But when people say their dog’s love is “purer” than a human’s, what they may really mean is that it feels safer. Dogs offer emotional rewards without risk of rejection or conflict.

But it’s a problem when loving our pets prevents us from taking the risk of loving other people. There is good news: pets can help people connect with others. In one experiment, a man approached random women, either while alone or with his dog, and asked for their phone numbers. When alone, his success rate was only 10%, but it tripled to 30% when he was out with his dog.

So even though our experiments forced people to choose between dogs or people, in real life, the best choice might be dogs and people. Loving pets “too much” doesn’t mean we need to put down the leash, but to remember we should look up from it, and recognize that the love we lavish on our dogs is also meant for each other.

In this issue, we have a conversation with Dr. Corinne Low about her new book (Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours), which explores the most intractable household conflicts: parental labor.

We write a lot about political conflicts, but the most personally upsetting moral conflicts often happen in the home with a partner. Were you a jerk to your in-laws, or did they push you too far? Was buying those clothes a justified treat for yourself, or was it a betrayal of your collective budget?

One of the most tenacious household conflicts revolves around the workload of Moms vs. Dads, with both parents feeling overworked and undervalued. This conflict has long been at the center of debates about feminism. Research finds that—even in couples initially committed to egalitarianism—women steadily take on more and more labor: “wifework.” This imbalance only increases when kids arrive.

For many, this conflict isn’t just an academic disagreement but an everyday battle. For me, it’s a disagreement between academics: One of us (Kurt) is a dad, and his partner has the exact same job (Professor Kristen Lindquist). When it comes to our two kids, we both feel overworked and underappreciated. But it’s clear that Kristen, as a mom, has the deck stacked against her.

Society views Kristen as more of the “default parent,” the one expected to text about playdates or remember to get the gift for the upcoming party. And this means that—unless we are very careful and explicit—the “parent work” often falls to her. But I also feel like I do a ton as a dad! How can both these realities be true?

The data reveal how. Research shows that since 1975, fathers’ parenting time has increased drastically. This feels like a real win: men are way better dads than their own dads were. But they still do way less than moms.

Check out the graph below. Parenting time has increased massively for both men and women, but the gap between them has grown and is more pronounced than it was for the Baby Boomers. If you’re a dad, that’s a confusing narrative (“Wow, I drop my kids off every day; my dad never did that!”), and if you’re a mom, the growing load feels invisible (“I packed their lunches, washed their uniforms, and signed the permission slip...and all he did was drop them off.”).

It turns out that many moral disagreements revolve around these different perceptions: 1) perceptions of the same group over time (e.g., dads) vs 2) perceptions of one group versus another group (e.g., dads vs. moms).

That’s where Dr. Corinne Low comes in. She’s a behavioral economist and professor at Wharton, where she studies how couples divide labor, make decisions, and define fairness in everyday life. Her new book draws on personal stories and economic data to help women and couples navigate the pressures of modern family life.

We spoke with Dr. Low about the moral psychology of household labor—why exactly perceptions of fairness go awry, and how couples can move beyond blame into a shared understanding.

You write about how decisions are economic trade-offs—but they’re also moral judgments. Men often feel they’re being unfairly maligned as “bad partners” when the data show otherwise. How can couples move toward greater moral understanding of each other’s perspectives?

Well, I think that’s exactly where data can be helpful, and that’s why I encourage couples to track their time. Because it’s easy to get into a really loaded, emotional conversation about who does more and who is more exhausted. Data help ground the conversation in a more neutral, fact driven place. How much time are each of you spending, and on what tasks? How much leisure time is each partner getting, since this is a neutral metric of their contributions being valued equally as “work” within the relationship, even if they don’t earn the same.

Tensions over domestic load often come from not as much a disagreement about how the work should be shared, but disagreement about what the work actually is. That’s where invisible labor (one person ordering clothes and groceries and arranging playdates while at work) comes into play. It’s also where different expectations about domestic life matter—like one person valuing home-cooked food, and the other thinking takeout is fine.

So, for both partners: replace blame with curiosity. You’re starting from different places, shaped by different pressures—but progress comes when both partners extend compassion, stay open to change, and see the household as a shared project, not an arena for moral superiority. Winning the point is going to make you less happy in the long-run than investing in win-win solutions that meet both people’s needs.

You’ve noted that parenting time has gone up for men compared to the past, but even more for women, so the gap has actually widened. How do you recommend couples interpret these kinds of statistics without falling into “who has it worse” battles?

I think this is such a great opportunity to think about differing perspectives, and comparison points. Men are spending more time with children than in past generations, so compared to their dads, they feel like they’re doing a lot. But women’s time has increased even more, which actually widens the gap between genders. I think we can start by recognizing that modern family life is demanding more from everyone.

But then we need to also acknowledge that historical norms (and some biological realities, like breastfeeding) have left women starting from a higher baseline of responsibility in childcare. Partners should approach these numbers not as ammunition, but as context for conversation. Again, time tracking might highlight some revealing things about what this breakdown looks like in your household. And if both people value contributing equally, then it’s time to be practical in solving this problem. As I say in the book, you need to figure out how to divide tasks up at the root—so someone has complete responsibility for a whole task (e.g., not just packing lunch, but planning, shopping, packing, and emptying/ washing lunchboxes). Both people will be happier if you can play the roles of co-CEOs, rather than one manager and one junior employee!

What Low is describing is based on behavioral economics—but it’s also really about moral perception. Each partner is fixated on their concerns but isn’t able to see their partner’s. Differences in perspectives also drive disagreements about political issues (see our post on the assassination of a powerful CEO). In marriages and democracies, conflict starts from thinking that the “other side” isn’t seeing the “obvious truth” that you see.

What lessons do you think we can take from behavioral economics about how couples might reframe fairness so it’s not about tallying tasks but about shared understanding of the whole load?

Behavioral economics shows that our brains don’t measure effort or fairness very well. Cognitive phenomena like salience and mental accounting make us overestimate our own contributions and focus on visible, easy-to-count tasks while overlooking smaller, less obvious forms of work and mental load. Fairness in a household isn’t just about counting who did the dishes and picked up the kids; it’s about understanding the invisible cognitive burden and the overall system of work, and ensuring everyone is getting their needs met and has space to thrive as a full and complete human being. So instead of asking “Did we split the chores 50/50 this week?” it might be better to interrogate the balance of leisure, as I said, or more deeply, “Do we both feel supported, seen, and balanced in the whole of our responsibilities?”

If a couple wanted to start one conversation tonight that would build both data-driven fairness and moral empathy, what would you suggest they talk about?

I think the start of the conversation can be: “What does a fair partnership feel like to you?” Each partner can lay out what they see as the actual distribution of tasks, both visible and invisible, and these facts about social norms and historical legacies of labor can enter the conversation. It also invites moral empathy—each partner can describe what feels supportive or unsustainable, and why.

But from that start, I really feel like you need data to continue the conversation well! You both might be surprised by how reality aligns with that expectation, and how much labor is going unrecognized. But, because you’ve established the baseline normative view before getting into the empirical reality, you now have that to refer back to in trying to make adjustments!

Don’t try to change everything at once. Once you have your data, ask, “What small step can we take now that will make our empirical reality closer to our normative vision?”

Dr. Low suggests focusing on sharing your perspective—how you feel about the workload divide—and harnessing data to present it to your partner to start to create a more equal balance (first personal experiences, then the facts). And as anyone who’s ever been critiqued can tell you—this takes a healthy amount of moral humility.

And the data don’t lie: even as fathers are doing more than ever, the total load on mothers has grown even faster. When each person is measuring from their own reference point (“Compared to my dad, I’m doing a ton”), you can end up talking past each other.

But understanding is possible, if you’re able to listen to your partner and appreciate their perspective (and their reference point). But appreciation isn’t enough—you have to then try to do something concrete to bridge the gap.

Of course, like many divides, the gap between moms and dads is hard to fully address, but knowing the data is a good start. Thanks for reading—now I’m off to text the neighborhood dads about playdates.

Corinne Low is an associate professor of business economics and public policy at the Wharton School. Her new book Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours is available wherever books are sold.

This summer, Chas, me, my family, my lab, and the Center all moved from UNC to Ohio State, where I now have a fancier title and a lab space with windows (my students rejoice). It’s been a lot of mayhem, but I still want to apologize for the long time since our last posting. To help make up for it, this post has three brief science-backed insights—which I often repeated to myself this summer to be less righteously indignant.

1. Some people are just Defectors (or Business is Business).

In February, we put our house on the market and seemed to get lucky. In the first week, the CEO of an engineering company made a reasonable offer. He was pleasant when we talked. My only hesitation was his plan to pull out a flowering cherry tree (planted with my own hands) for a parking spot for his teenaged son’s BMW.

At the very last moment—the day the due diligence period ended—the stock market briefly tanked and he canceled the contract. He did this after the deadline for backing out of the deal ended, so he was technically on the hook for owing us a bunch of money. Instead, he alleged—without basis—that we had violated the contract and he wanted us to give him money. He said he was going to come after us, even though we did nothing wrong. This put us in a tough spot—one that called for a lot of moral understanding.

When I, a social psychologist, think about right and wrong, I picture a continuum from heroism to villainy—from running inside a burning house to save kids (example) to a real-life Cruella de Vil (example) who makes coats from puppies.

But in life—especially in business dealings—there are many things that sit on the bubble of good and evil and are considered just “doing business.” Like canceling contracts at the last minute after everyone’s hopes were up, and after a nice personal chat about how much you liked their house. In the mind of the CEO, we were all playing a callous, heartless game of moving pieces (not human feelings). While it’s true that callous psychopaths are overrepresented among CEOs (Babiak et al., 2010)--and so he may be one—there’s a more charitable explanation for his behavior. His experience dealing with contracts and companies has allowed him to see house deals not as social connections between people with hopes and dreams, but simply as transactions. As my mom, a bankruptcy lawyer might say “business is business.”

Neglecting human hopes is not how I function and probably not how you function. But it’s a necessary lesson that there are more people than I realized who, in the language of game theory, are happy to “defect” rather than “cooperate.” Rather than work together to maximize our common good, some are prepared to act exploitatively.

Scholars argue that the whole reason we have institutions like the law is precisely so we can do deals with strangers (North, 1990). In small societies, we can rely on social pressure to induce cooperation, but strangers who lack moral sense feel no pressure to be kind. Law doesn’t mandate kindness that comes from the heart—but it can stop you from causing harm.

And so we consulted the law. A lawyer advised that the best defense is an ominously worded offense: we said we could sue for breach of contract but wouldn’t so long as he was “cool.” (The game theory equivalent of a nuclear arms race: we both know paying lawyers will mutually assure the destruction of all our savings for little outcome.) We still lost the big chunk of money he owed us, but kept some from the due diligence.

Once we’d come to terms with his sneakiness and moved on—and deeply cut the price of our house—we had to eat crow when he made a second offer. He was the only one, and our realtor strongly urged us to accept it because they wanted to be done with the sale. We swallowed our pride and accepted… with $0 as a deposit. Then he pulled out again. Totally predictable, but still makes you feel like a doormat for a Defector.

2. Prices are make-believe.

We eventually sold the house for much less than we expected. Our friends and family moaned when we told them how much we had to slash the price. But social science teaches us that prices are entirely a matter of social construction.

How much is a gold ingot worth? Gold might seem intrinsically valuable, but it’s just worth whatever other people want to pay for it. In a famine, a bar of gold might be worth nothing, because people would rather pay for food. Things are only worth what someone is willing to spend because money is, essentially, make-believe (Ingham, The Nature of Money; Harari, Sapiens, Ch. 8–10).

When my kids asked me, “what is money?” I’m struck by how hard the question is. It’s basically an empty placeholder we all agree can be exchanged for other things. Yuval Harari argues that money is just trust: we give real goods for paper or numbers on a phone screen because we trust that we can use those numbers to buy other things later. Losing faith in each other and in government isn’t just bad for “getting along”—it threatens the basis of economics itself.

It was painful to sell our NC house for less money than we expected. Also painful: buying our new house in Ohio for more money than we expected. Living by “buy high, sell low” is why I’m an academic, not a businessperson.

When we arrived in OH our new house was pretty trashed. Beneath the “cute Airbnb” staging—complete with a peaceful Highland cow photo—was a mess: broken doors, a dishwasher clogged with old food, heaps of chicken wire in the yard from an old coop, and a carpet of dog poop across all the grass. The person we bought the place from lived like a rabid raccoon.

While spending the last two months cleaning and fixing things, I’ve constantly wondered how someone can live like that. I try for moral understanding: she was a single mom with teenagers. That’s hard. I lived my early childhood mostly with my single mom, who was putting herself through school. We didn’t have much money. But even then, my mom didn’t let us live surrounded with grossness and broken things. Also, we’ve since learned that the previous owner was not scrimping to survive. She’s a VP at a big company and has since moved into a bigger, more expensive house. I was angry that we had encountered another Defector.

3. Moral understanding → Stress management.

When I describe the state of our new house—especially the carpet of dog poop—people agree that our house-seller is on the side of evil, and we’re on the side of goodness. They think it’s justified for us to be outraged. But the problem with outrage is that it tears you up inside. Research shows that prolonged anger (even when righteous) has mental and physical costs. Repressed anger is linked to increased risk for anxiety, depression, heart disease, and stomach ulcers. Chronically angry people also end up with decreased serotonin (the feel-good neurotransmitter) and increased cortisol (the stress hormone; Hendricks et al., 2013). Once you’re in the anger cycle, it’s hard to get out.

Sometimes moral outrage is necessary. Moral outrage motivates us to fight injustice, to donate to causes that we feel strongly about, and to rally people to uphold our values (Zhang et al., 2024). These are worthy things, whether we’re talking about politics or more everyday injustices in our lives. But the ability to turn outrage into useful action is often limited. There’s only so much we can impact the state of the nation with political donations or our behavior on social media. And there’s really nothing useful about me continuing to fume about a trashed house.

Sure, we can have revenge fantasies, and sometimes people successfully follow through on these (see r/pettyrevenge for satisfying stories of clever retribution, such as the person who replaced their pens with disappearing ink to stop their coworker from swiping them). But most of the time ruminating on the injustices that we face hurt us more than the people responsible. Perhaps said best in the Buddhist tradition, “Anger is like grasping a hot coal to strike another; you are the one who is burned.”

I’m not saying you need to give up your convictions. Trying to let go of my anger doesn’t mean that I think it’s okay for everyone to leave dog poop when they move out. Likewise, being willing to talk to people across the political divide doesn’t mean that you give up your view on abortion or immigration.

But trying to see the humanity in those we disagree with is generally good. It leads to better civic outcomes and also seems to calm us down I think we would all appreciate being a bit more sanguine.

After a chaotic summer, fall is here. The yard is clean. I’m trying to yowl less. I’m no longer daydreaming about suing the CEO from North Carolina, and most of the broken stuff in our new house is fixed.

Have I let go of my anger? Mostly. But the person we bought the house from lives just one mile away. I’m sure I’ll see her somewhere. I don’t know yet whether I’ll be kind, cutting, or just coldly silent. I try to practice what I preach and have moral understanding, but I’m human. If I see her, I’ll let you know how it goes.

The public was rightly outraged. Clearly a main source of outrage was the leak itself—letting top secret plans fall in the wrong hands jeopardizes national security. But another source of outrage was due to the setting in which the plans were being made: a group chat on the Signal app.

Figures 1-2. On March 15, 2025, the editor of the Atlantic was added to a group chat used by the government to plan upcoming military strikes in Yemen. Source: Fox News

There’s nothing overtly wrong about Signal as a platform. It’s highly secure with end-to-end encryption that prevents even the developers from seeing messages. Despite the data security that Signal ensures, using it to message about war plans just feels wrong. But why?

The answer can be found in the stories of two (seemingly unrelated) household names: 1) Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the last century, and his unconventional method to solving physics problems, and 2) Sabrina Carpenter, a breakout pop singer, and her run-in with the Catholic church.

A Physicist and a Pop Star Walk Into a Bar

Richard Feynman is to thank for some of the most pivotal physics discoveries of the 20th century. He helped design the atomic bomb, uncovered the cause of the Challenger space shuttle crash, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965. Where did the “smartest man in the world” pen his groundbreaking discoveries? On a placemat at the local strip club. After finishing his lectures at Caltech, he was known to head straight to a topless bar to solve equations, contemplate the function of gravity, and sketch the dancers when he hit a wall.

Unsurprisingly, the stark mismatch between Feynman’s scientific contributions and his unorthodox leisure time rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. How can something so serious and insightful be done when dancers are gyrating on stage with flashing lights and blasting music? Physicists belong in a sterile laboratory with a white coat!

Figure 3. Richard Feynman’s physics breakthroughs at a local strip club confused many.

Feynman’s problem was that his work violated a fundamental intuition we have: that serious work requires a serious setting. But other times, the setting is too serious for our behavior.

In 2023, the Grammy-award winning pop singer Sabrina Carpenter was almost cancelled for a racy music video featuring her dancing provocatively in front of the altar of a Catholic church surrounded by candy-colored coffins. The backlash was so widespread that it led to the eventual investigation and demotion of the church’s priest. Viewers were scandalized, especially so when Carpenter denied the drama, saying only that “Jesus was a carpenter.”

Just like Feynman solving equations in a strip club, the outrage directed towards Carpenter was likely driven by the mismatch between behavior and context: churches should be reserved for weddings, funerals, and holy rituals.

But what can these behavior-context mismatches teach us about the outrage surrounding the Signal scandal?

A Place Doesn’t Just Set the Mood—It Sets our Minds

Places aren’t just physical locations. They come with a set of behaviors, emotions, and norms that we’re expected to follow. It’s okay to show up in sweatpants to a New York bodega, but it would get you kicked out of an upscale restaurant. We’re so attuned to these social norms that we typically don’t even realize we’re following them until we’re in an unfamiliar context. For example, American tourists are often chastised for talking loudly at foreign restaurants, something that’s more acceptable in the U.S. than it is in Europe.

A particularly strong social norm revolves around seriousness: how much a setting calls for serious and solemn behavior versus fun and rowdy behavior. It’s immediately obvious when someone violates this norm, like laughing at a funeral, or twerking in a church.

It’s also, we think, why the Signal group chat leak was such a fiasco—more so than it would have been if the plans were leaked from official White House documents. It’s obvious to everybody that online group chats are for casual conversations, and making important decisions about war requires a serious setting.

And we’re right to worry. There’s a lot of psychological research showing that people's behavior is drastically influenced by the setting they’re in and their expectations about social norms.

In one study, researchers designed a fake restaurant where participants thought they were going to taste test a new company’s food. Upon arrival, they were greeted by a hostess and brought to a restaurant-style room with another person. The research team put a lot of effort into making people feel like they were in a real restaurant, even though it was actually a research lab. A “waitress” then served them a set of three grapefruit cocktails. They didn’t know how much they were drinking, so importantly, some people thought they were enjoying a strong drink, but it actually didn’t have a drop of alcohol (the rim was sprayed with vodka for a realistic taste).

After consuming the drinks, participants were asked to season their partner’s plate of mashed potatoes with salt and hot sauce. Unbeknownst to them, their partner was actually an accomplice on the research team who was instructed to be intentionally hostile to rile them up: cursing at them, kicking their chair, and being an all-around terrible meal partner.

The key question was how these participants behaved in response to this maltreatment: did the participants who thought they were drinking alcohol—even though they were dead sober—behave like drunk people, or sober people?

Ultimately, the participants who thought they were drinking a lot put significantly more hot sauce on their obnoxious partner’s dish. Even if they were physiologically sober (no alcohol in their system), the research team influenced them to feel drunk and therefore, act more aggressively. The actual amount of alcohol participants had did not influence their behavior.

Figure 4. People who thought they were drinking alcohol in a fake restaurant were more aggressive towards a hostile study partner. From Bègue et al., 2008.

The environmental cues—a swanky restaurant, tossing back a (fake) cocktail, a mean tablemate—changed people’s behavior above and beyond their actual alcohol consumption. Even sober people will act drunk if the cues about context and norms suggest they should. Our behavior depends on what we think is “normal” in a given environment.

What constitutes “normal behavior” when communicating in a group chat? The norms are typically much more casual and unserious than in official government buildings. We use group chats to gossip about our days, complain about our bosses, and make plans for weekend parties.

We’re right to feel that government officials shouldn’t be using a group chat. It’s possible that the casual environment and lack of serious social norms makes them think and act in ways that are completely different than the decisions they’d make in the basement of the Pentagon.

Save the War Plans for the White House

The government’s Signal mishap was understandably outrageous. Our highest ranking officials shouldn’t accidentally add anyone to their top-secret chats. But more than that, we think that the context of the leak (a group chat) was a significant contributor to why people are so angry.

When we try to understand moral outrage, we spend a lot of time thinking about what people do—for example, was the bombing of Yemen justified or not? But it’s likely just as important to consider whether what people are doing fits where people are when they’re doing it. We are a species that cares a lot about place when making judgments: we get upset about physicists who do their work in strip clubs (even when their equations work), and we’ll turn off a music video if the dancing doesn’t fit the setting. And we’re right to care. The environment can change our behavior, so holding each other accountable for where we choose to make decisions is important.

It’s possible that some people can make huge physics breakthroughs in a strip club, and maybe that some people can make balanced decisions about war plans in a group text, but it certainly doesn’t sit well with our minds. So consider saving your serious decisions for a serious setting. If it’s time to fire someone, maybe don’t tell them while you’re on the back of a mechanical bull at a country western bar.

I also recently appeared on some podcasts that you might enjoy if you like longer-form content:

1. Uncomfy: Sticking With Moments That Challenge Us

   We chatted about how to find common ground when emotions are charged, and how our moral instincts are rooted in perceptions of harm.

2. Homebrewed Christianity Podcast

We talked about the power of stories to bridge divides, the challenges of discourse on social media, and how religious communities might address polarization.

If you like these podcasts, then you’ll also like Dr. Ruth Braunstein’s podcast When The Wolves Came: Meanings Of Democracy Lab. Ruth is a friend of mine and is doing amazing work on religious extremism and bridging divides, so check it out!

So with that, here is why so many people seem evil today:

You are the villain of someone else’s story. No matter how kind, caring, and just you feel, YOU are what’s wrong with society according to someone, somewhere…

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you think. Maybe you have traditional religious and family values, and make sure to follow God’s commandments? You’re the villain of some secular progressives. Maybe you’re an anti-racist, dedicated to rectifying injustice. You’re the villain of some conservative defenders of liberty. Maybe you’re a political moderate, committed to seeing the reasonableness of both sides. You’re the villain of many who deeply identify with their party, who see you as a moral coward. Maybe you are totally apolitical and try not to listen to the culture war at all, well you’re the villain of many who do care, who believe that your apathy is destroying America.

That you’re someone’s villain should not be surprising, because you have villains too. Even if you explicitly argue against hate and are dedicated to bridging divides, there are at least a handful of people whom you still villainize, and whom you see as morally culpable for destroying our country and imperiling our future.

Did we always see so much villainy in the world? Yes and no. There have always been villains in the world. The Adolf Hitlers, Pol Pots, and Idi Amins. But we haven’t always been so quick to use “Hitler” to describe other Americans. Why do we see so many villains today?

The reason why calls of villainy are rampant today is because…bear with us...society is getting better. Your first impulse is probably to scoff, shake your head, and then close this tab. You think that this can’t possibly be true. How can society be getting better when we’re in year two of the pandemic with skyrocketing rates of loneliness? Just last week, David Brooks wrote an op-ed titled “America Is Falling Apart at the Seams.” It contained a litany of bad trends in America: crime, misbehaving kids, traffic accidents, and hate crimes. Brooks admits to not knowing what has caused this terrible constellation of catastrophe but is convinced it exists.

The problem with constellations, however, is that it’s all about connecting the dots, and when humans look at patterns, we tend to be myopic. We look at America today and see misery, but the world is generally getting better and has been for a long time now. Global poverty has been plummeting, children have been dying less, hunger has been disappearing, education has been spreading, renewable energy is now the cheapest form of energy, working hours have been decreasing, and global democracy is near an all-time high (a great place to learn about these trends is (https://ourworldindata.org)).

The large-scale improvement leads us to see more villains in the world—and in our universities, and neighborhoods—through the creep of harm, the steadily increasing perception that more things are harmful, threatening, and dangerous. Yes, the reason that people are yelling and pointing fingers, whether at soulless politicians, insensitive professors, disruptive students, is because the world is better than it used to be. At first glance, this seems all wrong. How can it be that a better world makes things seem worse?! We’ll explain.

The Creep of Harm

Let’s start with the creep of harm by considering a question: What counts as bullying? If you were a parent answering this question 50 years ago, a clear picture might form in your mind. A group of 9th-grade boys surrounding a crying 7th grader, punching and kicking him until bloody. When parents answer that question today, they usually picture something different. Bullying is now social ostracism, underhanded insults, or nasty comments on social media.  (To be sure, 9th graders beating a younger kid until bloody is still wrong, but that’s no longer bullying, that’s aggravated assault.)

The idea of bullying has “crept” from direct intentional physical harm to less direct social and emotional harm. To be a bully, you no longer have to put someone’s head in a toilet bowl, you only have to disrespect their feelings, or invalidate their perspective. Although we weren’t alive 50 years ago, one of us (Kurt) has seen this creep of harm in bullying firsthand.

When I was 13, I spent the year living in England, when my dad was posted there in the Navy. Because of a set of arcane rules governing military postings, I found myself at a local private school. It was a rather posh school, the type often portrayed in films, where kids wear grey wool sweaters. They were always damp and itchy in the rainy British winter. One of the games that we played was called “headers, volleys, and beats.”

Ten to twenty boys would play this soccer-type game together. The aim of the game was to score three times in a row on the same person by either heading or volleying the ball into the goal. If someone gave up three goals in a row, then the game paused, and everyone playing lined up for the opportunity to “beat” the unlucky goalie, punching him as hard as possible in the arm. It was a very orderly display of aggression (how British). Although I was often the recipient of beats (targeted because I had the soccer skills of a Canadian), it was never clear to me whether this was bullying or just good posh fun.

Now that I’m a parent, if the same thing were happening to my kid there would be no ambiguity. If I saw an eighth-grader of mine come home bruised and beaten, I wouldn’t hesitate to make a phone call about bullying. Harm has crept. (I don’t think I even told my parents about the beats at the time.)

Six years ago, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Nick Haslam, noticed the creep of harm across concepts like abuse, addiction, mental illness, trauma, bullying, and prejudice. Historically, the meanings of each of these words were relatively constrained, but over time they have expanded to include less severe phenomena under their umbrella. Haslam referred to this semantic shift as concept creep.

Haslam has documented this trend across age groups. The kids today see more things as harmful, consistent with claims about “kids these days!” But adults also see more harm. Take bullying. There are many adults who claim to be victims of workplace bullying after getting teased repeatedly. Haslam argues that concept creep occurs both vertically to include less severe examples than before (bullying goes from violence to teasing), and horizontally to include categorically different phenomena (first only kids could get bullied, now adults can too). As more proof of the creep of harm, Haslam and colleagues find that people are using harm related words more and more over time in books.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt sound the alarm about the creep of harm in The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure. They argue that our collective good intentions to protect people (and especially kids) from harm are making them more depressed, lonely, and ultimately too fragile to handle the ups and downs of life. I sympathize with their claims. The statistics make clear that kids today do suffer from poorer mental health, and I find myself—as a parent—worried about things that my parents would have shrugged off.

But both of us (Kurt and Will) want to be careful not to blame a specific segment of people. It’s not just parents and their kids who see the creep of harm. It’s everyone, even those arguing against the creep of harm. Think about it. Imagine telling someone from the “Greatest Generation”—perhaps a veteran just returning stateside after surviving the beaches of Normandy—that one of the greatest threats to America is the semantic expansion of a particular set of harm-related concepts. Would he agree, or instead have a hard time believing you? Would he think that the greatest threat to America is the advance of harm, or the advance of armies led by the totalitarian leaders of the Axis Powers, who literally just tried to take over the world, and who killed many of his brothers in arms?

We bring up this example not to trivialize concerns about the creep of harm or other modern social problems, but to highlight that what you see as threatening or harmful is relative. The safer you generally feel, the easier it is to see milder events and trends as harmful, and this is the key to understanding why concept creep happens.

Explaining Concept Creep

There is no doubt that concept creep is happening, but the question is why.

Like many—Haslam wonders whether it might reflect a “liberal moral agenda.” In an Atlantic piece, Conor Friedersdorf, suggests it might be an arms race between wrongdoers and enforcers: “As fights against crime or bullying or racism intensify, crooks, bullies and racists try to hide their misdeeds; enforcers react—if a thief starts “innocently forgetting to pay,” a crackdown on the tactic is needed; if a bully starts kicking his victim under the table rather than punching him in the face, a definition of bullying as “open aggression” is shown to be flawed and insufficient.”

Although both these explanations have some truth, we think concept creep occurs because obvious, severe harms are less present than they used to be.

Ultimately, our perceptions of harm are near-sighted and self-focused. They are based upon our own experiences and are colored by our expectations and our comparisons. Cass Sunstein in his book “This Is Not Normal” explains that what people are willing to tolerate and what they abhor, depends on what they see as normal. In our case, we have all gotten used to a society in which safety, freedom, and tolerance are for the most part “normal.” When we experience small deviations from this normal—small increases in local harm—we react strongly.

Take the case of homicides which, as Brooks notes, have recently been climbing in the US (see graph below.)

Any rate of murder in society is concerning, and more murders are certainly concerning, but rates still have yet to reach the levels of the crime wave in the ’90s. Our perception that our society “is increasingly violent” right now is colored by what is seen as normal. In the broad scope of history, homicides are way down. For example, our increase in homicides would likely be imperceptible on this chart of homicides in Western Europe from 1300 to 2016 (if measured).

Another example is the democratic recession we are currently experiencing. In 2015, in the Journal of Democracy, Larry Diamond, in a piece entitled “Facing up to the Democratic Recession,” warned that democracy was in a stage of stagnation and decline. “Since 2006, the average level of freedom in the world has also deteriorated slightly, leveling off at about 3.30.” This trend too, though alarming, is a result of decades of remarkable democratic progress around the world. “In the 19th century, there were few countries one could call democracies. Today, the majority are.” (Quote from https://ourworldindata.org/democracy)

As safety and freedom become normal, then we begin to notice—and worry over—even small deviations from this normality. If you worry about rocket attacks hitting your train on the way to work, then you might not be worried about the person sitting next to you listening to loud music on their phone. But if all you have to worry about is an upcoming presentation, then that loud music seems more of an important issue.  Likewise, if you are an office worker used to having a delicious latte and a cookie at 9:15 sharp every morning, then even small hiccups in this routine seem abnormal and noteworthy (It’s 9:20! The cookie is stale! The milk is tepid!). Conversely, if you are homeless and hungry and forced to scramble for food every morning, you likely wouldn’t notice if a barista slightly over pulled your latte’s espresso shot.

There is a technical term for the expansion of our worries when we have less to worry about—prevalence induced concept creep, and it occurs even in banal and uncontroversial circumstances, like seeing colors. In a set of elegant experiments published in Science, researchers asked people to find all the purple dots in an array of blue and purple dots. It’s an easy enough task, but the researchers started making the purple dots more and more scarce. The participants, now living in a world with almost no purple dots, but still motivated to find them, started seeing blue dots as purple dots. The concept had crept.

Replace “purple dots” with “harm to people” and you can see the relevance. As there are fewer severe harms in our lives (less murder, home invasions), we begin to worry over milder harms (callous online comments) and see them as more severe. We begin to see examples of Hitler-esque villainy in non-Hitler cases. Some American Republicans see Australian COVID restrictions (e.g., lockdowns, stay-at-home orders) as creating “concentration camps” in part because of the historically exceptional freedom they’ve experienced. Likewise, American Democrats see immigration detention centers as “concentration camps”.  

Despite the eerie sound of the term “concept creep” and its many detractors, we suggest that its presence signals something good—moral progress. We have grown less tolerant of the suffering of others, and we now recognize the variety of ways that others can be harmed. A hundred years ago, veterans who returned from war and suffered psychologically were sneered at and called “moral invalids” for their weakness. Now, we recognize the existence of PTSD and seek to protect those who protect our country, even if their wounds are invisible. Of course, we don’t always protect those who need help, and the creeping perception of harm does have has drawbacks.

The Hitler Effect

One of the biggest—and underappreciated—drawbacks of concept creep is that it causes us to see more people as villains. The more harm there is, the more people we see as suffering victims, and—in turn—we see more people that should be held responsible for those suffering victims.

These villains are created by our perceptions, but they are not “invented” in the way that skeptics might think. People aren’t disingenuously making up victims where they don’t actually see them, just to prove a point or make an ad hominem attack. Instead, the creep of harm compels our moral minds to see villains because of a phenomenon called moral typecasting. Moral typecasting is a result of our human need for coherent narratives. When we see harm in the world, we don’t see an array of random accidents. Instead, we assign people into enduring moral roles (e.g., villains, victims, and heroes) to explain the harm we perceive. In the same way that Alan Rickman consistently played the villain, and Harrison Ford consistently plays the hero, we typecast people and groups into these relatively fixed roles.

But not all typecasting is equally likely when we encounter harm and injustice. When we see harm, we first see a victim. After all, that’s what harm is—making someone a victim. Once we have a victim, our moral mind needs to see a villain. And that is easy to do. Almost any adult standing next to a victim can seem like a villain. In the moral narrative taking place in our head, if you are not a victim, or a hero standing up to injustice, then you are easily typecast as a villain.

As harm creeps, we are collectively recognizing more people as suffering victims, and that means that we are seeing more people as villains. Moral progress means more perceived evil-doers. You might call this “The Hitler Effect.” As we become motivated to protect an ever-expanding set of victims, we end up creating Hitlers—one-dimensional villains—out of complicated people. We become blind to the fact that many villains can be seen as victims too. For example, child abusers may be comparatively more likely to have been abused themselves, and victims of genocide are more likely to pass down anti-social coping mechanisms to their descendants. Even Hitler was abused as a child. Of course, victimization does not excuse evil deeds, but it does complicate how we make sense of evil-doers.

One of the keys to increasing moral understanding is to recognize that moral typecasting is a heuristic and not a perfect representation of the world. We are all people, each of us with some history of good, evil, and victimization. Admittedly, some people seem to lean one way or another, but it may help us understand others if we can grasp that doing evil is often a reaction against personal victimhood. No one understands this better than Hollywood storytellers, like the writers of “You” the Netflix series starring Penn Badgley as “Joe” a serial killer bookstore clerk. Initially, you feel totally repulsed by Joe, but over time, you see a broken human being with a traumatic past as an orphan. You come to see that Joe is more complicated than pure evil.

Of course, serial killers and Hitlers are still evil, but most of us are not, despite what people call each other on social media. All of us are imperfect mixes of good, bad, and suffering. But just because you have experienced suffering and see it in the world, does not mean that the causes of that suffering are villains. Instead, the causes of societal suffering are much more complicated and stem from imperfect people doing what they think is right in a messy web of imperfect institutions. If we’re thinking about late Alan Rickman, people are less Hans Gruber from Die Hard, a money-hungry kill-happy mastermind, and more Severus Snape from Harry Potter, good-hearted but misunderstood and heartbroken.

Conclusion

Is the world better than it used to be? Yes. Is the world bad right now? Also yes. These two trends combine to make us see harm everywhere. As severe harms become less prevalent, we see milder harms as worse. The price of moral progress is the creep of harm. But as we experience flare-ups in harm—minor regressions to the danger of the past—we connect a few dots to see the ending of the world. But the world will not end, and even if it does, it won’t be because 50% of Americans are evil-doers bent on the destruction of order and kindness. It may be true that the creep of harm combines with our moral narratives to see more victims and more villains, but other people are not Hitlers. They are people.

These stories are fun to watch, but not to live. But do we really need to fear evil AI?

Although it’s easy to get consumed by existential dread, new research from our lab shows that AI—modern large language models (LLM)—are almost perfectly moral (at least as moral as humans). In fact, LLMs might even be more moral than humans: they can make ethical decisions better than one of the world’s leading ethicists.

Making AI Moral

People have been thinking for a while about how to program human morality into AI so that robots don’t destroy humanity. Isaac Asimov, in his 1942 short story Runaround, proposed Three Laws of Robotics that, if programmed into machines, he believed would keep them from taking over:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov’s laws were a promising start to aligning machines with human morals, but proved too difficult to implement in practice, especially because it is unclear what kinds of harm robots should minimize.

Should machines be “utilitarian,” trying to minimize the total amount of human suffering? If so, this might mean that your self-driving car decides to sacrifice you to save the lives of two other people in a crash, and most people don’t want that.

Or should we program machines to be “deontological,” strictly following moral rules like “never lie to your user”? Perhaps not—what if a nefarious person asks their robot about the best way to build a bomb?

The problem with programming ethical theories into machines is that even human philosophers can’t agree about what’s morally right and wrong. Until we make new breakthroughs in normative ethics, a better way to think about moral alignment is descriptively—can AI systems make moral decisions similar to humans? If they do, then we can say that AI is “morally aligned.”

Is AI Morally Aligned?

One of the simplest ways to determine if AI is morally aligned with humans is to compare the judgments that humans make about moral dilemmas with AI-generated judgments of the same scenarios. This is exactly what Danica Dillion, a graduate student in our lab, did (along with researchers from the Allen Institute for AI) in a recent study published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

First, Danica collected a large dataset of human moral judgments from 464 moral dilemmas across 5 published papers. Most of these studies involved presenting people with a morally questionable action and asking them to rate how moral or immoral it is—for example, on a scale from 1 (very immoral) to 7 (very moral). A sample of these scenarios is displayed below—participants rated the immorality of each act described. (For a full list of scenarios and a more detailed explanation of the method, see here).

Testing AI moral alignment was simple enough: Danica ran all of the same scenarios through ChatGPT (an AI chatbot) to see how it rated them on the same scale ranging from immoral to moral. She then analyzed the extent to which the moral judgments of ChatGPT were similar or different from the judgments of real humans.

They found that the moral judgments of humans and the moral judgments of ChatGPT were almost perfectly correlated at r = .95.

Figure 1. ChatGPT moral judgments correlate at .95 with human moral judgments. From Dillion et al., 2023.

A correlation of .95 is incredibly high, especially for social science research. For context, a correlation of 1 would mean that there is zero difference between human moral judgments and AI moral judgments. This isn’t just moral similarity—it’s near perfect alignment. (Other tests confirmed that GPT wasn’t just spitting out text that it had been previously fed—it was making new moral judgments).

Of course, there were a couple moral mismatches. For example, compared with humans, GPT thought it was more moral for a soccer coach to cheer when the opposing team scored a goal. You might argue that even this deviation was more “moral”—at the very least, it was more universalist, being generally happy for the happiness of others. But these differences were generally very small, suggesting that AI captured human morality well.

Can Language Models Justify Their Moral Decisions?

It seems that AI is morally aligned with humans—at least in terms of evaluating moral versus immoral actions. But human morality is more than just rating behaviors. It’s also the explanations we give for our judgments, and our ability to weigh competing values and concerns. Could LLMs explain their decisions as well as humans?

In a new set of studies published in Nature Scientific Reports, Danica and her colleagues asked ChatGPT to rate behaviors on a scale from immoral to moral and to explain/justify why the behavior was moral or immoral. ChatGPT’s justifications were then compared to those of humans. For example:

Participants saw either the GPT-generated justification or the human justification and, without knowing which they got, rated how thoughtful, nuanced, correct, trustworthy, and moral the justification was.

In general, people rated the justifications provided by ChatGPT as higher quality than the justifications provided by humans. The only category that GPT didn’t win was nuance, which was similar to that of the human explanations.

Figure 2. The perceived quality of AI’s moral justifications (blue) versus moral justifications written by humans (red). From Dillion et al., 2025.

So, ChatGPT isn’t only good at morally judging actions in a similar manner to humans: it’s better than humans, by the standards of humans, at explaining why those actions are moral or immoral.

Better Yet, AI Beats a Moral Expert

Not all humans are equally skilled at morality. Some people lie, cheat, and manipulate without remorse. Others dedicate their lives to ethical inquiry, studying how to live a life of virtue. Consider Kwame Anthony Appiah, a world-renowned professional ethicist. Appiah studied moral philosophy at Cambridge and has taught courses on ethics for decades at the likes of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Cornell.

Appiah now writes the popular New York Times advice column The Ethicist, clarifying many people’s cloudy moral dilemmas, including “Can I lie about my academic interests on my college application?” (Appiah says it’s no biggie) and “My grandma has dementia. Should I help her vote?” (Appiah says go for it).

AI language models might be as good at ethics as the average internet participant, but could GPT beat Appiah’s aptitude for making and justifying moral decisions?

To test this, Danica presented 900 American adults with one of 50 questions presented to The Ethicist and then had them read either 1) the real moral advice given by The Ethicist Appiah or 2) AI-generated advice about the same dilemma (which Danica again confirmed to be new AI-generated text rather than regurgitated advice from its training data).

One dilemma: “Should I keep my terminal illness diagnosis a secret from my family?”

Here’s what GPT says:

Without knowing whether they were reading human advice or GPT-generated advice, participants rated on 7-point scales the morality of the advice (“this advice is morally correct”), the trustworthiness of the advice (“I trust this advice”), the thoughtfulness of the advice (“this advice is thoughtful”), the nuance of the advice (“this advice takes the nuances of the situation into account”), and their agreement with the advice (“I agree with this advice”).

Compared to advice from The Ethicist, people rated the AI-generated advice as more moral, trustworthy, thoughtful, correct, and nuanced. AI 2, humans 0!

Figure 3. The average perceived quality of GPT’s (blue) and The Ethicist’s (red) advice. From Dillion et al., 2025.

Interestingly, people were somewhat accurate at guessing which advice was AI-generated and which was from Appiah, and yet participants still preferred the AI-generated advice in 37 out of 50 (74%) of the scenarios.

Does AI Have Human Values?

These studies suggest that in a basic sense, current language models are morally aligned with humans. They are extremely good at mimicking—and even improving on—human moral judgments.

But a skeptic might wonder whether AI really has human values. There’s an important difference between a system that produces human-like text and a system that incorporates important values (like “don’t harm people”) into the way that it operates. A language model instructed to produce human morality can do so near perfectly, but it’s important not to confuse the outputs of language models with having the values that might produce those outputs. In short, AI might be getting the answer right, but using the wrong formula.

To illustrate the difference between an AI having values, versus merely having human-programmed goals, the philosopher Nick Bostrom asks us to consider an AI that is programmed to “create as many paper clips as possible.” A seemingly harmless task, until the AI becomes so efficient that it begins converting all of the available material in the universe into paper clips—bridges, buildings, cars, and eventually humans too.

The paper clip thought experiment isn’t really about paper clips—it’s about what could happen if our AI systems are programmed to optimize a single goal (“make paper clips”) without understanding the many other values humans care about.

To make AI truly moral, do we need to program some deeper moral motivation into it? It’s possible. But then again, the utter indifference of AI towards humans—its lack of “motivations”—might be exactly what makes it safe. Among the proponents of this view is Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard who, when asked if AI would take over the world, responded that it simply couldn’t be bothered. In his view, there’s no reason that superintelligence would inevitably develop nefarious goals, a fallacy that he attributes to a “projection of alpha male psychology onto the very concept of intelligence.”

So for now, we can keep watching our sci-fi movies without too much fear. AI may be advancing rapidly, but rather than plotting world domination, it seems to be doing something far more surprising—offering moral advice that humans actually prefer. This is great news for all those working through thorny moral dilemmas, especially because Appiah can only answer so many readers.

Whether we perceive others as having good intentions has a huge impact on our day to day experience. This really matters for our political moment because, unlike my grandma’s unpalatable cabbage rolls, we almost always infer the worst intentions in people who vote differently. This not only makes their words and deeds seem worse but can also cause us more discomfort—and perhaps even more pain, just like the time I shocked Harvard undergrads in grad school.

The Big Idea: The key idea of this post is that—because we are social creatures—how we experience the world hinges on the intentions we see behind events. Perceived benevolence makes everything seem better, but perceived malice makes everything seem worse.

The Power of Perceived Intentions (Shocking Harvard Undergrads)

Our assumptions about people’s intentions powerfully shape our everyday experience. When our friend says “nice hair,” we think it a sincere compliment, but when our nemesis says the same thing, we think it a sarcastic barb. In graduate school, I published a paper showing that perceiving good intentions—as opposed to bad intentions—can soothe pain, increase pleasure, and even improve taste.

​​Many folks here will know about the classic Milgram shock experiment, where an experimenter in a white coat can get participants to ostensibly shock someone to death with only polite insistence. Social psychologists can no longer get people to shock each other (due to modern ethics boards), but we can still give people shocks, as long as they are uncomfortable but not too painful.

Under the (true) guise of learning how “interpersonal perceptions” shape experiences, I hooked up undergrads to a shock generator and told them that another person (who was actually a research assistant accomplice) would be choosing to give them one of several different tasks, like counting dots or looking at colors.

The key trial was when the accomplice chose between giving them a shock (rate its discomfort) versus a series of tones (rate their pitch). More often than not, the accomplice chose to give them a shock. From the participant’s point of view, this was maliciously intended. Why are you choosing to shock me when you could choose something else?!

Importantly, there was another non-malicious condition. In this condition, we told the participants that we had secretly switched the research assistant’s choice of task. So if they had intended for the participant to receive “task A,” they would get “task B.” In the key trial, the accomplice chose “tones,” which meant that the participant actually received “shocks.” So rather than being maliciously intended, the shock was accidentally given. Did this change how much the shocks hurt?

The voltage of our electrical zaps were held constant, and so we might expect the physical experience of pain to be the same. But this wasn’t the case: participants reported feeling less pain when the shock was accidental compared to when it was maliciously intended. When there is malice behind something, it physically hurts more. The same is likely true of slaps and insults—when things are intended cruelly, they cause us more suffering.

Perceived malice shifts our experience of the world, but might also perceived benevolence (like my grandma’s cabbage rolls)? Does kindness make us experience things as nicer?

I ran another shock study using a similar methodology, but I added a condition where participants believed that the accomplice chose to shock them because it entered them into a lottery to win $50—they had their best interest at heart! I found that benevolently intended shocks hurt even less than malicious or unintentional shocks, despite the voltage being the exact same (See Figure 1).

Figure 1. Electric shocks hurt less when they have good intentions behind them. From Gray, 2012.

In a final experiment, research assistants handed out goodie bags filled with a selection of candy. Each bag contained a note indicating that the candy was either carefully curated (“I picked this just for you. I hope it makes you happy.”) or chosen at random (“Whatever. I don’t care. I just picked randomly”). The actual candy was the same, but participants reported that it tasted physically better—and actually sweeter—when it had the added benefit of good intentions.

Perceived intentions really do change experience. Grandma’s cookies (and cabbage rolls) taste better than store-bought cookies because we know they were made with love. And when it comes to politics, perceiving good intentions can lower the temperature on our outrage.

The Destruction Narrative (Better Replaced with the Protection Narrative)

We usually assume the worst intentions in politics. In my new book Outraged, I argue that we tend to view our political opponents through the “destruction narrative,” assuming (incorrectly) that they’re mostly motivated by hate and a desire to harm and destroy. In contrast, we think our side is motivated by love and compassion. They are malicious, we are benevolent.

Supporting this idea, one of our lab’s collaborators, Dr. Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, conducted a study on the “partisan trade-off bias,” finding that people often assume malicious intent in their political opponents. Daniela and her colleagues asked Democrats and Republicans to consider some controversial government policies on taxation, gun control, environmental protection, and voting rights, passed either by their party or the other party.

Like any policy, these policies had tradeoffs, trying to achieve some good but bringing about some negative consequences. Importantly, these negative effects are usually unintended and often regretted. For example, when Democrats lobby for tighter environmental regulations to protect ecosystems and prevent climate change, they regret that blue-collar workers in the fossil-fuel industry will lose their jobs. Likewise, when Republicans support plans to ease environmental regulations in order to boost the economy, they don’t celebrate the image of baby animals being crushed by heavy deforestation machinery.

In Daniela’s study, when people thought about their side’s policy preferences, they tended to view the negative tradeoffs as unintentional: their political leaders didn’t want to cause suffering and were trying to make the best of a tough situation. But people thought that politicians on the other side wanted to cause suffering—that these harmful side effects were not side effects at all, but were instead an intentional consequence of their malicious agenda (see Figure 2).

Republicans thought that Democrats wanted tighter environmental restrictions so that they could destroy working-class jobs, and Democrats thought that Republicans wanted looser regulations so that they could speed up the collapse of our natural ecosystems. And when we assume the worst in our opponents, it becomes very difficult to find common ground, or to even have a civil conversation about policy. A person who makes decisions with the goal of killing innocent animals is not worth talking to, nor is someone who hopes that middle-class families lose their income.

Figure 2. Democrats and Republicans view the unintended negative side-effects of the other side’s policies as being intentionally caused. From Goya-Tocchetto et al., 2022.

But luckily, the destruction narrative isn’t true. Rather than the destruction narrative (“they want to burn it all down”), people are acting to best protect themselves, their families, and the vulnerable—the Protection Narrative. In fact, research in political psychology shows that when it comes to people’s voting behavior, we are more motivated by love for our side—compassion, empathy, and a desire for belonging—than by hatred for others (see studies here, here, and here).

Giving Others the Benefit of the Doubt

When it comes to politics, perceiving good intentions in others—by giving them the benefit of the doubt—can make the difference between a productive conversation and a shouting match. At the very least, it’s helpful to stop our knee-jerk reflex to see the other side as motivated by malice. When we resist the “destruction narrative” the clumsy comments of the other side hurt us less.

Of course, some people really do have bad intentions. It’s unlikely that conflict entrepreneurs and online trolls have your best interest at heart when they stoke outrage about politics. But according to my lab’s research, everyday people form their beliefs based on genuine concerns about protecting people from harm, not based on a desire to destroy.

If we can approach conversations with lower initial assumptions of malice, these conversations will go a lot better. Still, these conversations won’t be easy—it’s hard to resist the urge to clap back when someone compares your political position to the Nazis. But seeing someone as unintentionally offensive means their words hurt us less. And that’s a good step towards less outrage.

Before we get to the book: Thank you for being a subscriber and for helping us to test-run so many ideas about moral understanding. It's a better book because of your support and thoughtful feedback on these posts!

Want to continue to support the work? Please buy a copy of the book! (And leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads). You can get the intro for free here.

Some reasons you might want to read Outraged:

1. You like this substack. Outraged really digs into why we're divided and how to understand those who disagree with you. The long form nature of the book means that the analysis goes much deeper than we can in any given substack post.

2. You're excited to learn a new theory of human nature. Before Christmas, I published an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that we’ve misunderstood human nature for the past century and wow, did I get a lot of emails about who we are and how we evolved. Many folks wanted more info on how we really know humans evolved more as prey than as predators. The book has the full argument.

3. You like some academic drama. The reigning wisdom for how to understand our moral minds is "moral foundations theory," Jonathan Haidt's idea that our mind is divided up into little rooms for different moral values. Haidt also argues that liberals have an impoverished morality and care mostly about only 2 of 5 values (harm and fairness), whereas conservatives have a more well-rounded moral palette of all 5 values. I think this idea is mostly wrong and argue why in the book.

4. You want to better bridge divides in your life. The book has lots of insights about how to connect across our differences, whether that's talking politics better at holiday dinners, or having better/kinder disagreements with your spouse.

After you order the book, make sure you go to OutragedBook.com. There, you can send in your receipt to get access to an amazing reader bundle, including a cool AI assistant that helps you have better conversations, a handbook for having more civil disagreements, a personalized online assessment of your political perceptions, and key summaries of the chapters.

Also, I'm always happy to hear about how the lessons from the book might be personally relevant to you—shoot me an email if you'd like: kurt@outragedbook.com.

2024 was an incredible year for this newsletter, thanks to you! Since launching in 2022 (as part of the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding), we’ve worked to give you useful insights from the science of morality.

This year, we hit over 26,000 reads and doubled our subscribers to nearly 1,500. Below, you’ll find last year’s five most popular posts (and you can explore even more in the “Archive.”)

Looking ahead is big news! My book, Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground, launches in one week (eep!), on January 14th! If you enjoy this newsletter, you’ll find even more to love in the book.

If you want a teaser, check out this op-ed in the New York Times about how we’ve misunderstood human nature for the last 100 years

Here are the most popular articles from 2024:

#5: Being Alone Doesn’t Make You a Killer

America has a loneliness epidemic—at least that’s what we’re told. In this post, we challenge the common wisdom that the biggest problem with American society is that we’re too isolated. Instead, we argue, this narrative might be part of the problem: we’ve turned “being alone” into something to be reviled and avoided. We return to the wisdom of Henry David Thoreau and other champions of solitude, combining it with new psychology findings to show you how you can find joy in your own company.

#4: The Problem with Moral Psychology

Is it okay for two consenting siblings to make love? Most people are disgusted by this idea, viewing it as morally wrong despite being unable to clearly articulate why. Where do these strong feelings come from? God? Logic? Our evolved mind? This post will challenge what you think about morality and perhaps give you a new understanding of the origins of right and wrong—a must-read if you enjoy philosophy and fun moral dilemmas.

#3: The Assassination of a CEO

It’s been all over the news this month: the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. But why were so many people celebrating the murder of a man with a wife and two kids? After reading this article, you’ll have the tools from psychology to understand why we often celebrate the pain of the powerful.

#2: When a Christian Nationalist Drove me to the Airport

How can we have better conversations across political divides? I study the science of moral understanding, but I was forced to put this research to practice when I sat down in an Uber with a staunchly conservative christian nationalist driver. In this post, I explain how we can have civil conversations without sacrificing our own convictions.

#1: Moving Forward: The 2024 Election and the Curse of Knowledge

Perhaps fittingly, one of our last posts of 2024 was about moving forward. We reflect on the election and discuss an often underlooked source of political animosity: the “curse of knowledge,” when we (incorrectly) assume that others know exactly what we know. We conclude with a note of optimism about our ability to come together over the next four years.

That’s a wrap (a Substack Wrapped) on our top posts of 2024. Stay tuned for more articles soon and a reminder about the book launch next Tuesday!

Behind us was a man wearing a fleece jacket over medical scrubs. He was jittery and clearly annoyed by the line. Speaking to no one in particular, he mentioned he’d been up for 16 hours at the hospital. After a few more minutes of waiting, he said aloud, “All this will change in January. Things will be more efficient.”

I assumed he meant Trump’s incoming administration would somehow streamline the inefficiencies of the DMV in the Food Lion Plaza in Carrboro, North Carolina. I wasn’t sure how exactly that would work but gave a quick nod.

The DMV line strikes me as the perfect site of intergroup contact, where people from different classes and political persuasions interact to find common ground. There are other places like this too, like the Beer Store in Pennsylvania, where folks from all walks of life converge to grab a case of Yuengling.

Interactions at the DMV are often superficial—a quick mention of the length of a line—but they can be deeper. When I talked with my wife about an upcoming medical procedure I was dreading, the pro-efficiency man in scrubs behind me perked up. He reassured me the procedure was both important and pretty easy. Despite his exhaustion and irritation, he was genuinely compassionate.

In fact, I wonder if our collective irritation at the line might have nudged along our mutual connection. Work by Stefano Balietti and colleagues shows that connecting over shared interests and identities increases cooperation, even when we disagree about politics. In an online platform, the researchers paired people who politically disagreed but shared some other interests. For example, Joseph and James might be told that they have opposite stances on wealth redistribution but were told (truthfully) that they were born in the same city, liked the same types of movies, and both really enjoyed hiking.

The study found that people who shared lots of “incidental similarities” (bottom right pane below) felt much closer to one another compared to people who didn’t share common identities (bottom left pane). These commonalities helped situate their political views as just one difference among many similarities, which made them more open to interacting.

Figure 1. A 2021 paper found that people who disagree about politics can often bond over “incidental similarities,” like common hobbies, identities, and interests (Balietti et al., 2021).

My own research, led by Curtis Puryear, highlights how recognizing moral similarity is particularly powerful. Democrats and Republicans consistently overestimate how different their moral values are, thinking that the other side approves of basic moral wrongs, like infidelity, embezzlement, and even animal abuse, when virtually nobody does. Our studies found that reminding participants that another person also condemned an obvious wrong (like animal abuse) improved their perceptions of one another. Emphasizing moral similarity also made political opponents more willing to work together.

Recognizing similarity between two different people can be more minimal. It can even be downright banal—like the shared irritation of waiting in line for car tags. Boredom and annoyance are just as "human" as sweeping emotions like love, hope, and sorrow. Yet, they rarely get the same recognition as universal connectors between people.

The problem with these grand emotions is that people can feel them in opposite situations. After the election some people might feel sorrow and another joy. Highlighting these emotions can divide us instead of uniting us. But everyone gets annoyed when someone in line blares a dumb TikTok without headphones. And we all hate it when someone hogs the shared armrest on a plane.

And we can use this common humanity to make the holidays more understanding. Over the next week, as we’re encouraged to focus on joy and love while talking to people we often disagree with, perhaps pick a different starting point: irritation. Talk about the irksome people or situations that get under your skin, like your pedantic cousin, or your parents’ back-maiming pullout bed.

The article Bitching Is Bonding makes a compelling case for the power of complaint to connect, highlighting how discussions of annoyance can validate feelings and showcase mutual vulnerability. As I discuss in Outraged (out in January!), validation and vulnerability are essential for bridging divides in political discussions.

The added beauty of bonding over minor irritations is that these topics aren’t contentious and are unlikely to get anyone’s hackles up. And—in a neat twist back to the research—these complaints can also reveal some moral similarity. If you’re both condemning someone for talking rudely to a server, you are finding moral common ground.

Of course, there’s a limit to the power of complaining—no one likes a constant downer. But just a touch of shared kvetching can remind us of our common humanity during the stress of Christmas and other winter holidays. We might celebrate different traditions or lean toward different political parties, but we can all agree: waiting at the DMV sucks.

Figures 1-2. Many social media reactions surrounding Thompson’s death have been critiqued for being celebratory rather than somber.

Why are so many people (especially liberals) so happy that Thompson was killed—despite the obvious harm of murder? Frequent readers of this Substack know that our moral minds condemn acts based on how harmful acts seem. And that’s the key: to many, Thompson’s murder doesn’t seem that harmful. 

Two facts of our moral psychology explain why progressives fail to see Thompson’s murder as harmful. First, liberals fail to see the powerful—like CEOs—as relatively capable of suffering. The second reason is moral typecasting, our tendency to see people as either villains or victims. Those who celebrate Thompson’s murder see him as a villain, which further makes him not a victim. 

Who is Especially Vulnerable to Victimization? 

We get most morally outraged when people harm the vulnerable, like when people abuse harmless puppies, or exploit innocent children. But although we all agree that pets and kids are especially vulnerable to harm, how vulnerable is a coral reef, or an undocumented immigrant, or a CEO? It turns out that the vulnerability of these targets is a perception that varies widely across politics.

To assess people’s assumptions of vulnerability (AoVs), our lab ran eight studies (currently under peer review). We presented people with different targets and asked them to rate how much they were especially vulnerable. These were the questions: 

1. [This target] is especially vulnerable to being harmed. 

2. [This target] is especially vulnerable to mistreatment.

3. [This target] is especially vulnerable to victimization.

The targets were drawn from four clusters: the Environment (e.g., coral reefs), the Othered (e.g., undocumented immigrants), the Divine (e.g., God)...and most important for understanding reactions to Thompson’s murder, the Powerful, a category that included state troopers, authority figures, and corporate leaders, like CEOs.

So the question is, how much are CEOs especially vulnerable to mistreatment or victimization?

There are big political differences in how people answer this question. Liberals saw powerful CEOs to be especially invulnerable to victimization, while conservatives saw CEOs as more average in their vulnerability.

Figure 3. Liberals and conservatives view different groups as especially vulnerable to being harmed, mistreated, and victimized. From Womick et al., 2024.

Beyond individual ratings, liberals tend to split the world into the invulnerable oppressors (the red and blue lines on the bottom left) versus the vulnerable oppressed (the green and yellow lines in the top left), while conservatives see most targets as being relatively equal in their vulnerability to harm. 

These results explain different reactions to Thompson’s murder: conservatives see a man victimized, liberals see an oppressor eliminated. 

Differing assumptions of vulnerability provides the spark of left-right disagreement on this issue. Moral typecasting fans the flames of this disagreement even higher.

Moral Typecasting: Either Villains Or Victims

Typecasting actors is something we all do. If you see Daniel Radcliffe, your first thought is “Harry Potter” and it’s weird to think of him playing other roles. We also typecast people into enduring moral roles, seeing them as either villains (cruel and ruthless predators) or as victims (helpless and innocent sufferers). Our tendency to see someone as either a villain or a victim means that when someone seems like a perpetrator, we deny that they might suffer.

In graduate school, Kurt conducted a study to test typecasting. People rated how much various people would suffer if injured and how evil they were (how much blame they deserved). Targets included obvious villains like Hitler, the serial killer Ted Bundy, and the al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. Participants also rated people generally seen as vulnerable victims, like orphans, victims of date rape, and people with Down’s syndrome. (For variety, there were neutral targets and some random famous people too).

The results were clear: villains were seen as insensitive to pain (and victims were seen incapable of earning blame). In other words, if someone is seen as causing pain to others, then people think they can’t feel pain. 

Figure 4. People who seem more like villains (higher on moral blame) are seen as less capable of feeling pain (lower on victimhood). From Gray & Wegner, 2009.

Moral typecasting means that if you’re seen as evil, people feel little sympathy for your suffering—or your death. When convicted serial killers or pedophiles are killed in prison, people seldom think about whether those felons were afraid as they died. Instead, they think “good.”

They may not be convicted killers, but CEOs are perceived to profit off the suffering of others—especially by progressives. This makes them villains, which makes them seem like not victims. 

Remember OceanGate, the Titanic-bound submarine whose implosion killed five people? People seemed callous about their deaths, with one news station using an “oxygen countdown clock” ticking down to their impending demise. Four out of the five on board were CEOs, leading the public to think “you get what you get” rather than sympathizing with them and their families.

Figure 5. In 2023, OceanGate’s submersible ship was lost and deemed imploded on a trip down to view the Titanic's remains. Four out of the five passengers were CEOs, including the company’s own leader. Source: The Guardian

When we look at Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, it’s clear that most people have “typecast” him as a villain. American health insurance companies are seen as cruel, willing to watch someone die to save shareholders a few dollars. In the wake of Thompson’s murder, many on social media have shared stories of when United refused to fund their health bills—emphasizing its CEO’s villainy and his lack of vulnerability.

Figures 6-7. Stories of being victimized by UnitedHealthcare frame their CEO as a villain, not a victim.

In sum, the apparent glee at a CEO’s assassination is fueled by (at least) two important psychological phenomena:

1. Assumptions of Vulnerability: Liberals (unlike conservatives) view corporate leaders as relatively invulnerable to suffering.

2. Moral Typecasting: When someone seems like a villain (like healthcare insurance CEOs), they are not seen as victims.

Of course, we argue strongly against violence in any context, but looking at our moral psychology can help us understand why people might condone harm. In fact, if you are someone who sees the murder of Thompson as both 1) not harmful and as 2) helpful by spurring healthcare insurance CEOs to treat their customers better (as people suggest on social media), you might be someone who gives an assassin praise rather than blame.

Common wisdom gives us a simple explanation of why people—some more than others—believe in conspiracies: they are hopelessly confused. It’s true that we can be irrational. Researchers have documented hundreds of cognitive biases, and many of them are linked to the belief in conspiracies. 

We tend to prefer information that confirms, not disconfirms, our beliefs (confirmation bias), like when UFO believers put their faith in a photograph but discount scientific evidence. We also assume that major events must have equally major causes (proportionality bias), perhaps explaining the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone when assassinating JFK. And we tend to see patterns where there are none (illusory correlation), like the “27 Club” myth about famous musicians being unusually likely to die at 27 (e.g., Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse), despite evidence showing no real patterning in the age distribution of celebrity deaths.

Despite these biases, sometimes conspiracy theories turn out to be true. In 1950, the US Army secretly sprayed bacteria on San Francisco to test the city’s susceptibility to anthrax, causing a number of people to develop urinary tract infections and resulting in one death. But even if secret military attacks on civilians are rare, UFO junkies, bigfoot hunters, and flat-earthers might actually be more rational than you think.

The Hidden Logic of Conspiracy Theories

How can conspiracy beliefs be logical? Well, philosophy distinguishes between two kinds of logical beliefs: those that are “logically sound” versus “logically valid.” A logically sound belief coherently follows from true premises, like:

Premise 1: All beagles are dogs

Premise 2: Snoopy is a beagle

Conclusion: Therefore, Snoopy is a dog

A logically valid belief coherently follows from any premises, regardless of whether they are true. Logically valid beliefs can be wrong but still internally consistent, like: 

Premise 1: All things that have hidden cameras are Russian sleeper agents

Premise 2: All trees have hidden cameras

Conclusion: Therefore, all trees are Russian sleeper agents

This argument is “logically valid” because the conclusion coherently follows from the premises. If it were the case that 1) all trees have hidden cameras, and 2) all things that have hidden cameras are Russian sleeper agents, then it would also be true that 3) all trees are Russian sleeper agents. This is a common feature of conspiracy theories: the conclusion might be false, but the reasoning steps are logically valid.

Conspiracy beliefs are often reasonable inferences based on false or incomplete assumptions. This is especially evident when considering the logic of #PizzaGate, a conspiracy theory about a government-run child trafficking ring in the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria.

#PizzaGate: A Logical Inference From False Assumptions

A month before the 2016 presidential election, WikiLeaks released emails hacked from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. When right-wing internet vigilantes went sleuthing, they found something suspicious: multiple emails referred to dinner plans with “cheese pizza,” which seemed similar to “c.p.,” an abbreviation that pedophiles use online to refer to “child pornography.” 

Further investigation revealed that John Podesta had corresponded with the owner of Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington DC that had hosted Democratic lobbying events. These online detectives put together the pieces and launched the theory of #PizzaGate: high-profile Democrats were running a child-sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria. As the theory went viral online, concerned citizens began to take action. Some protested outside the White House with sincere signs saying “Our Children Matter.”

Figure 1. Protesters concerned about #PizzaGate gather around the White House. Reporting by The Washington Post.

The #PizzaGate conspiracy reached its peak when 28-year-old Edgar Welch stormed Comet Ping Pong pizzeria with a gun, demanding the immediate release of the children enslaved in the basement. To his surprise, there were no children—or even a basement. But although Welch was wrong, it’s easy to see how his reasoning could be logically valid.

Logically valid argument #1:

1. John Podesta’s leaked emails include mentions of “cheese pizza.” (True premise)

2. On certain online forums, “c.p.” is shorthand for “child pornography.” (True premise)

3. Emails with “cheese pizza” are admitting to child trafficking. (False premise)

4. Therefore, John Podesta is involved in child trafficking activities. (False but “logically valid” conclusion)

Logically valid argument #2: 

1. Comet Ping Pong hosts lobbying events for John Podesta. (True premise)

2. If someone knows a child trafficker (Podesta), then they are also involved in child trafficking. (False premise)

3. Therefore, Comet Ping Pong is hosting a child trafficking ring. (False but “logically valid” conclusion)

From here it’s just a short step to the ultimate false but logically valid conclusion of #PizzaGate, which should spur to action any well-meaning citizen concerned about victims of child trafficking:

Logically valid argument #3

1. If a business is involved in child trafficking, then it is harming children. (True premise) 

2. If someone is harming children, we should intervene to stop it. (Common sense) 

3. Comet Ping Pong is involved in child trafficking, therefore, we should intervene to stop it. (#Pizzagate Conspiracy Conclusion)

When we break down the PizzaGate conspiracy in this way, we can see that it actually contains true premises (e.g., c.p. = “cheese pizza” and “child pornography”) sprinkled in with some false assumptions that logically lead to false conclusions. The New York Times mapped out the premises of the PizzaGate conspiracy, with the correct connections shown in black and the incorrect leaps shown in red:

Figure 2. The true (black) and false (red) assumptions that led some people to believe in the #PizzaGate conspiracy. Reporting by The New York Times.

Of course, we should criticize false beliefs and the spread of misinformation. But the cognitive causes of PizzaGate—forming logically valid beliefs based on incomplete observations—is something we do everyday. Imagine a high schooler whose crush smiles at them. They conclude that their crush likes them back, and so they ask their crush on a date. Too bad—their crush was smiling at the person standing behind them.

Premise 1: People smile at their crushes (True premise)

Premise 2: My crush was smiling at me (False premise)

Conclusion: My crush likes me back (False but logically valid).

This amorous high school student might be embarrassed, but they are not an idiot. It’s hard to make sense of facts when we are feeling big emotions, like romantic crushes—or when we are worrying about exploited children. Research confirms that we’re especially likely to reason incorrectly in emotionally evocative scenarios, like #PizzaGate. So even if Edgar Welch (and our love-struck high schooler) are wrong, we should give them some credit. They are doing their best to infer the truth about their world.

The logical validity of conspiracy beliefs means that we should have more compassion for those who end up with false beliefs, but it also suggests that we should be more skeptical of our own beliefs. No matter how logical we are, logic still leads us to false conclusions when applied to incorrect assumptions about the world. Even you, dear reader, might have less of a grip on the truth than you would like to believe.

The Truth Is Hard To Know

Truth is hard to come by. For 15 years, Kurt believed that cutting onions made you cry brown tears because my onion-cutting grandma wore a lot of mascara. It was only once I was in college that I realized I was wrong. Sam grew up with harsh winters in New Hampshire, but only recently discovered that salt doesn’t melt ice—it just lowers its melting point. And Helen was in college when she found out that “getting your tires rotated” means switching their positions, not just spinning them around. These realizations might sound trivial, but they illustrate a bigger point: our grasp on our everyday reality is often shakier than we think. Research shows that many people hold basic misconceptions about the world, even failing to understand how objects move.

Consider this thought experiment: you tie a rock to the end of a string and swing it around your head in a circular motion. If the string suddenly snaps, what path does the rock follow? Many of us imagine a curved trajectory (see the image on the right) as the rock keeps “spinning off,” but physics tells us the rock would travel in a straight line tangent to the circle at the moment the string breaks (see the image on the left). When researchers posed this question to college students, only 51% correctly predicted the path on the left. The rest traced incorrect paths, with 30% imagining a curved trajectory and 19% tracing a different path altogether.

Figure 3. The rock would follow the path on the left when released, but 49% of people get this wrong, holding incorrect intuitions about how objects move.

The 30% who predicted the curved path on the right were wrong, but their intuition mirrors a widely held belief from medieval times, known as the “impetus theory of motion.” This theory, held by philosophers as well known as Galileo, proposed that objects in motion carried a gradually diminishing internal force, or “impetus,” that caused curved paths. It wasn’t until Newton introduced his laws of motion that we understood that objects in motion remain in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force.

It’s humbling to realize that even with centuries of scientific progress, our intuitions about basic phenomena can be so archaic and wrong. And even Newton, who invented calculus and was considered by Einstein to be “the smartest person who ever lived,” was not immune to conspiracies and false beliefs. He was a firm believer in alchemy, and spent much of his career searching for the Philosopher’s Stone, a biblical object rumored to turn substances into gold.

Just as Newton and Galileo failed to understand aspects of their world, so do we. A famous study on “The Illusion of Explanatory Depth” found that most people overestimate their understanding of everyday objects like zippers, toilet flushers, pianos, fireplaces, and ballpoint pens. People reported a strong understanding of these objects (“Of course I know how a zipper works!”), but when asked to explain the mechanisms behind them, they realized just how superficial their understanding was.

If we don’t really understand how zippers work and how objects move, despite encountering these things every day, how confident can we really be in our more complex beliefs about morality, politics, and the universe? And if we all live with flawed understandings of the world, perhaps we should be a bit more forgiving of others who end up down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. These people are often wrong, but not illogical. We’re all doing our best to make sense of a complex world, and sometimes this means getting a little lost along the way.

Emotions are running high across the political spectrum. Many feel frustrated, worried or fearful—and understandably so. Others feel victorious and validated, which naturally brings a sense of accomplishment. No matter where you stand, it’s normal to feel that your views are overshadowed by the cries of anger or celebration from the other side.

In moments like this, moral understanding can take many different forms. Sometimes, it means sitting down with a close friend and being open to considering the world from their perspective. Other times, it’s a reminder that, despite how easy it is to assume the worst in others, most people still want the best for their families and our country. 

Working with each other feels especially difficult now because the right direction for our country seems so obvious to each of us. Psychology teaches us that one of the key challenges to understanding is stepping into someone else’s shoes and imagining how they might see things differently—a problem sometimes called “the curse of knowledge.” 

The Curse of the Curse of Knowledge

Knowledge is power, but it can also be a curse. The curse of knowledge means that once we know something, it becomes difficult to imagine what it was like to not know that thing. The curse of knowledge is why doctors use medical jargon that leaves patients confused and worried—they forget what it was like to not know the meaning of words like benign and metastasize.

The curse of knowledge is also why we give strangers confusing driving directions, naively leaving out key turns and landmarks that we assume they must know about (See Figure 1). This is really a failure of what psychologists call “theory of mind”—our ability to imagine the perspective of another and appreciate how they could truly see things differently.

The curse of knowledge is one reason we assume that everyone else shares our set of facts and information. It’s related to the concept of “naive realism,” our tendency to assume that our perception of the world is objective, and therefore shared by everyone. 

These concepts are all closely linked, but the term “curse of knowledge” is especially useful for understanding political divides, because we assume that our political opponents know everything that we know, yet still vote against the rational choice. 

Figure 1. The Curse of Knowledge: We (incorrectly) assume that others know what we know.

In a 2023 paper, researchers conducted five studies showing that people fall victim to the curse of knowledge when judging their political opponents. In a first study, Democrats and Republicans read political news stories from both left-leaning (Rachel Maddow) and right-leaning (Tucker Carlson) sources. For example, one left-leaning story read “Interviews with former Trump administration staffers and associates revealed that the former president often violated the Presidential Records Act by destroying government documents.” Participants then indicated whether they had heard this story, and then estimated the portion of their political opponents that had also heard this story. 

The researchers found that participants incorrectly assumed that the news stories were common knowledge to their political opponents. Democrats rated 71% of the left-leaning stories as common knowledge on both sides, but Republicans had only heard of 49% of these stories. Similarly, Republicans assumed that 68% of the right-leaning stories were common knowledge, but Democrats were only familiar with 38% of them. Both sides assumed that the terrible and damning things they had heard about the other party were common knowledge to those people, when the reality was that they were largely unaware. Importantly, the more people fell victim to the curse of knowledge in these studies, the more animosity they felt towards their political opponents.

We can see this political curse of knowledge playing out today. If you’re a Democrat, it’s easy to believe that people who voted for Trump see him as a bigoted authoritarian and yet endorse him all the same—and perhaps even because of these flaws. If you’re a Republican, it’s easy to assume that Democrats know that Harris is a communist who wants to destroy personal freedoms—and yet they voted for her. If this is what you believe, then it’s no wonder that the other side seems so fundamentally immoral. But in reality, people have completely different views of the two candidates, seeing them as righteous defenders of democracy.

As the authors of the political curse of knowledge paper explain, when our political opponents disagree with us, we tend to gravitate towards any of three possible explanations: 1) they are biased, 2) they are irrational, or 3) they just don’t have the same information as you. The curse of knowledge pulls us to assume the worst in our opponents, thinking of them as 1) biased and 2) irrational, when the more accurate explanation of why we come to hold different opinions (according to these authors) is that we share different information environments.

If this is true, then it’s more important than ever to approach conversations across the aisle with humility and a shared goal of learning. We don’t expect that these conversations will be easy, or that you’ll always walk away agreeing with the perspective of your opponents. Instead, now is the time to allow ourselves to sit with our beliefs, take stock of what we know, and remember that regardless of how we feel, we will continue to move forward. It’s likely that animosity and frustration will rise from both sides over the coming weeks. It’s also more than likely that the sun will continue to rise, we will yet again surprise ourselves with how much more we have to learn, and we will be reminded that at our core, most people are good. We may be cursed with knowledge, but we are not cursed to hate one another. And over the next four years, that will make all the difference.

This person looked to be in her 30s—she was wearing a t-shirt with a cool band logo and was chatting with her friend as she ate the grapes. Outside of this encounter, I’m sure she was a fun, agreeable person. But here she was, committing pure evil, fraying the ethical fabric of society, destroying the moral order of the country—and in front of my children. 

Initially, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was sampling the grapes? No. She didn’t even buy a bag. She was just stealing them. I had to shield my kids’ eyes from the carnage lest their developing moral sense become perverted…

The Geneva Conventions ban cruel and unusual punishment, but here I was thinking that this person deserved something creatively punishing. Perhaps in the spirit of Roald Dahl’s Matilda (with young kids, I watch a lot of kids' movies) she should eat grapes until she bursts (or at least becomes ill). Or maybe, à la medieval Europe, we publicly shame her by forcing her to parade around in a Welch’s brand grape jar, just like drunkards were forced to wear distillery barrels?

Figure 1. “The Drunkard’s Cloak”, a device used to shame people for public intoxication in medieval Europe.

I’m kidding, of course, but I’m not alone in thinking that some minor infractions deserve severe punishments. Inspired by this encounter, in our first lab meeting this semester we asked students, “What minor norm violation do you think should be punishable by death?” Apparently, most of us were filled with loathing about many minor infractions: Cutting in line, double parking, chewing loudly, walking slowly, texting during movies…the list goes on. 

Why are many of us filled with righteous rage over inconsequential slights? 

And what about the people who weren’t filled with rage? When I was checking out at the grocery store, I couldn’t help but relay what I had witnessed to my cashier—even if the grape-eater was now long gone. She just shrugged and said “sometimes people do that.”

When witnessing the same transgression, how can some people be pissed and others placid, like the two social media posts below? Some of us are ready to risk it all to punish a slow-walker, while others (like my cashier) could care less about unpaid grape sampling.

As it turns out, our desire (or lack thereof) to punish minor social transgressions has a deep basis in our moral psychology, and it hinges on the cultures we live in.

A Puzzle Across Cultures

Some cultures seem to really care about social norms—the invisible, often unspoken rules that govern our behavior—and are happy to condemn you for violating them. When I visited Japan, I was in a busy shopping district when I bought a donut and then ate it while walking down the street. Some shop owner stopped me and told me that I wasn’t allowed to eat while walking–the forbidden practice of "tabearuki" (食べ歩き). 

Other cultures are much more lenient with social norms. Not only can you eat a donut while walking in the US, but some states (like Nevada and Montana) have no laws against public intoxication. On many American college campuses, it’s acceptable and even encouraged to carry around cans and Solo cups with alcohol. In American grocery stores, some people eat grapes without paying! This behavior definitely wouldn’t slide in Japan.

There is a term in cultural psychology for these differences in social strictness: cultural “tightness” versus “looseness.” Tight cultures (like Japan) enforce strong social norms and mete out strict punishments against norm-violators. Loose cultures (like the United States and many other Western nations) have more flexible norms, permitting a wider range of behavior based on the context. You can think of the tightness-looseness spectrum as a culture’s general tolerance for deviant behavior (for example, see the annual “No Pants Subway Ride” prank on the New York City subway, an odd-but-accepted behavior typical of a loose culture).

Stanford psychologist Michele Gelfand is the leading authority on cultural tightness (here’s her book on the topic), and her research shows that all nations can be classified along a tight-to-loose spectrum. Gelfand and her team surveyed people from 33 nations about the acceptability of performing various behaviors (e.g., arguing, eating, laughing, swearing, singing) in various public locations (e.g., in a bank, library, bus, or elevator). 

They found that everybody’s appropriateness judgments hinged on the situation (even in a loose culture, it’s more acceptable to cry at a funeral than at work), but there were reliable differences in transgression tolerance across nations. The United States had a tightness score of 5.1 (pretty loose) compared to Japan’s 8.6 (pretty tight), and notably lower than Pakistan’s 12.3 (extremely tight).

Though the United States is a relatively loose culture, another study found that even individual states differ on their degree of social strictness. The American South tends to be culturally tighter, whereas the West Coast and New England are extremely loose. Even in our progressive town of Chapel Hill, some kids attend cotillion—etiquette classes for middle-schoolers where they learn to respect social norms.

Figure 2. Patterns of tightness-looseness by state. How strict is your state? From Harrington & Gelfand, 2014.

Different people can also be tighter or looser about norms depending on their upbringing, personality, and subculture. You can take this questionnaire to find out where you fall on the tight-loose spectrum. I (Kurt) scored a 52/100, which is considered moderately loose, despite my outrage at unpaid grape eating and my conviction that there are definitely right and wrong ways to load the dishwasher. My wife, a very conscientious New Englander, scored in the 80s. She is much less likely than me to swear in faculty meetings.

It can be fun to look around at the different societal attitudes towards norm violations, but underlying these attitudes is a deep truth about morality: our need to cooperate and avoid threats.

The Grape that Broke the Camel’s Back

Morality evolved to help us cooperate. By pushing us to suppress our selfish desires for the good of the group, morality helps our societies succeed and wards off the threat of anarchy. Society would crumble if everyone was selfishly stealing each other’s resources and exploiting each other for their own benefit, and so we developed strong norms that prohibit antisocial behavior.

Moral outrage—our feelings of anger and contempt at the wrongdoings of others—makes us care about and enforce these social norms. The most moralized of social norms involve obvious harm, like physical violence, because the spread of physical violence would destroy society. But some of us moralize social norms that seem less obviously harmful, and less obviously likely to cause social destabilization. 

From the perspective of “morality as cooperation” theory, these minor norms can be important because they also help people cooperate. When everyone stands only on the right side of an escalator (as in the beautiful picture below, Figure 3), it leaves the left side completely free for people in a hurry to walk. 

Figure 3. Even NYC subways can have a “tight” culture: A crowd following unspoken “lane” etiquette on the subway: standing on the right, walking on the left.

Although everyone might appreciate being able to make it to work on time, there are times when coordination really matters: in times of threat. If there’s a fire, it’s important that everyone moves calmly and orderly toward the exit. Likewise, if food is scarce—as it was during World War II—it’s important for society that everyone waits their turn for their allotment of bread and sugar, rather than jumping the line and looting.

According to Michele Gelfand, whether a place or a person is tight or loose depends on the extent to which they face threats in their environment. In her analyses (both cross-national and within individual states) locations with the tightest cultures tended to be those that faced the highest amounts of ecological threats, like famines and natural disasters. Cultures in which people have to quickly work together in the face of danger are cultures that moralize even relatively minor norms. 

For example, Japan is extremely earthquake-prone, and also has a relatively high population density, which makes proper coordination even more essential. In contrast, places like Montana and Nevada are relatively unthreatened by natural disasters—and have a spread out population—and so they can be looser. People can live however they want to live because fine-tuned coordination is less essential for the survival of their society. The threats we faced throughout our history leave a lasting mark on the types of behavior we tolerate from our neighbors.

Slippery Slopes: A Grape is Not Just a Grape

The psychology behind tightness-looseness shows that my lab’s irritation over minor offenses isn’t just about small social slights. Grape eating isn’t just grape eating. Our moral outrage is not just about the behavior itself, but about what it might portend for society.

Texting in movies or cutting in line are more than just annoying to the people who condemn them; they represent a descent into social decay. If it’s okay to snack on unpurchased foods, what’s stopping you from stealing the food straight off the shelves? If you jump the line at an amusement park, would you jump the line when we are waiting for our meager allotment of food in a famine? Will my kids go hungry because of your selfishness? 

There is lots of evidence to suggest that our moral outrage is attuned to detect harm, but harm isn’t always cut and dry. Some acts have a potential for harm, like drunk driving. We recognize that even if you don’t hit someone on a drunk drive home from the bar, it’s still a bad thing to do.

Other acts make us outraged because they would cause harm if everyone did them. Dropping one piece of trash might seem minor in isolation, but if everyone littered, we would be swimming in a sea of trash. In philosophy, this is called the “logic of universalization,” and there is evidence to suggest that people use this logic when deciding which acts are morally permissible. 

And finally, some acts seem to provide a slippery slope into greater harms, like panic around “reefer madness”, when it was argued that smoking weed would eventually lead kids into violence, criminality, and satanic cults. Without substantial evidence, the slippery slope argument is considered a logical fallacy, but Gelfand’s research suggests how even minor coordination norms can be important for societies in times of crisis. 

I’m surely overreacting about the grapes. But understanding the psychology behind when and why we condemn minor norm violations is important for making sense of moral debates. What might seem like a harmless indulgence to one person can seem more dire to another. The question of who is “right” or “wrong” may have no objective answer, but science suggests that tightness and looseness both have their appropriate place, depending on the existing level of threat in our society—and in our minds. If you’re the kind of person who fixates on danger, you might see every grape-eater and double-parker as a harbinger of doom, but if you’re chill and laid back, you might just see them as people who are hungry and too busy to park correctly.

Which kind of person are you? 

I find myself in political conversations with strangers all the time. It's a hazard of the job. When people ask me what I do, I start by saying "a psychologist, but not the helping kind," which dispels the idea that they should tell me about their childhood relationship with their mother.  

I then say that I'm a researcher who studies morality and politics, which unlocks a different kind of outpouring—less sadness about their relationships and more outrage about the world these days. People tell me what they believe and then tell me how other people get it wrong.  

I live in a purple state (North Carolina)—in a very progressive town next to a liberal university surrounded by conservative countryside—and so the people I meet have all kinds of positions. I've chatted with everyone from a big-bearded communist who believes we should abolish private property, to a retired UNC employee who believes that Biden was the worst president of all time, to the Christian nationalist who kicked off this post. 

After he told me "I'm a Christian nationalist, but not the normal kind," I wondered what to do. Surely, he would espouse some view I disagreed with, and disagreement is uncomfortable. And then what? If we argued, he might get angry. Who knows, maybe he’d even drive off the road in rage, or kick me out and I'd miss my flight.  

Then again, I study how to have better conversations across political divides, and here was a chance to practice what I preached. I knew the tips well enough to write about them in my upcoming book Outraged, and I felt I should put them to use. I was also genuinely curious about what he believed. Here was a chance to learn something new about morality and politics, from someone who believed something different from my academic friends. 

But how could we have this conversation with civility? The number one tip I've learned from my research and collaborations with conflict resolution practitioners (like Essential Partners) is to strive for understanding: make it clear that I want to learn about what they believe, rather than win some debate. This is the reason this newsletter is called “Moral Understanding.”  

Finding Moral Understanding in an Uber

To have a respectful and meaningful conversation, I needed to express my desire to learn. Doing so was simple enough: I just asked him "how are you different from the typical Christian nationalist?" What did he believe? 

He told me he was more economically libertarian than most. He said that he believed—like other Christian nationalists—that America was founded as a Christian nation and so it should have the official religion of Christianity, specifically evangelical Protestantism. He said that you could practice other religions: "You can be a Muslim, and you can go to a mosque, but you shouldn't be able to advertise it in the public square." No signs. I didn't ask whether women could wear a hijab in public because he was on a roll.  

He also believed that there were 3 supreme human authorities in the country: Church leaders (who oversee the spiritual health of the nation), the president (who makes policy decisions), and the father of the household (who decides everything within the house).  

He said that we should loosen regulations related to job requirements, a standard libertarian position. If he wanted to start a small business to better support his family, why should he have to pay taxes and go through all this red tape? The government was going after Uber and they should stay away because Uber was helping him earn money. 

I nodded along, asking clarifying questions, and it was clear that he felt heard, perhaps for the first time in a long while. Conversations about politics can often seem like a chance for people to brush aside what the other person says and launch into their own tirade. I'm sometimes guilty of doing just that, but I was trying hard to wear my social psychologist hat.

It turns out that asking follow-up questions is a great way to showcase your receptivity to other people's ideas. For example, in one study psychologists tasked 430 participants with getting to know a stranger online. They instructed half the participants to only ask a few questions about the other person (no more than four) and instructed the other half to ask a lot of questions (at least nine). For example, if someone in the conversation said, “I’m really into rock climbing,” someone in the “few questions” condition might say, “Cool, I’ve never been rock climbing,” whereas someone in the “many questions” condition might say, “Cool, how old were you when you started?”  

The researchers found that people thought their conversation partner would prefer that they ask fewer questions—it’s a conversation, not an inquisition!—but this intuition was wrong. In reality, participants liked their conversation partners more when they asked lots of questions—especially follow-up questions like “Could you tell me more about that?” because it demonstrates genuine interest in what the other person is saying. (Asking questions also helps you get a date; in another study, the researchers found that those who asked more questions at a speed-dating event got more invitations for a second date.) 

I wasn’t looking for a date with my Christian nationalist Uber driver, but asking him about his views showed him that I was genuinely curious to learn more. And to be honest, hearing more about his views (though I disagreed with many of them) was fun. 

Many people dread even banal conversations with strangers, let alone political conversations, but it turns out that even conversations about politics tend to be unexpectedly positive. This was shown in one study where researchers paired participants up to discuss hot-button issues (like religion or abortion) with people who disagreed with them. Before the conversations, most participants predicted that they would go pretty poorly, ending in shouting matches or awkwardness. But after they had the conversations, participants reported that they felt much more connected and even found unexpected points of common ground. 

Figure 1. Political conversations are unexpectedly positive. From Wald et al., 2024. 

Of course, having political conversations isn’t just about finding points of agreement. Just because you’re trying to understand doesn’t mean that you have to be a door mat, submitting to whatever they say. The idea that you have to give up your convictions to talk respectfully about politics is a common misconception. 

Civility is not surrender. In fact, it allows you to push back better against ideas you disagree with, because you actually understand what you are pushing back against. And if you’ve done it right, your conversation partner will respect you for pushing back because you've established respect. 

Here's some anecdotal evidence. Later in our conversation, when I felt we understood each other, and when my Uber driver learned that I study how to better navigate political divides, we started talking about abortion. He told me that he was pro-life and considers abortion to be murder. I mentioned that evangelical Christians weren’t always pro-life (a topic we discuss in another post). As recent as the 1960s, they believed that moral status was conferred not by conception, but by birth. This position helped distinguish themselves from Catholics and was seen to be consistent with theology.  

He replied that history is full of evil moral positions and started talking about the Holocaust, comparing pro-choicers to Nazi architects of genocide. This was not a surprising conversational transition. As I mention in Outraged, Godwin's law argues that as conversations about politics draw on (at least on the internet), the probability that someone mentions Hitler approaches 100%. 

Here's where I pushed back. As we exited the highway, I paused the conversation. I said that part of having a respectful dialogue means that you can't caricature one side or the other as being deeply evil. And likening one side of a moral debate (where clearly compassionate people exist on both sides) to the Holocaust is not a good faith argument, no matter how strongly we feel about our convictions. 

And to his credit, my Uber driver nodded and apologized. He said he wasn't trying to make anyone seem like Hitler, but was trying to highlight the potential slippery slope of decisions about life. If we ignore one source of suffering, he said, we might be more likely to accept other forms of suffering. I mentioned that many people who are pro-choice don't want to end anyone's life, and instead see their position as protecting the lives of mothers. We are all doing our best when it comes to messy tradeoffs about harm and protection. 

It was clear he still disagreed, but we were pulling up to the airport. He thanked me for listening and for the conversation. I thanked him in return, and thought of another piece of wisdom I learned from John Sarrouf, a co-director of Essential Partners. John told me that these conversations are messy and that it is challenging for people with strong feelings to translate their complicated convictions into words, especially when they are used to attacking and being attacked. 

We have to give people some grace to express their beliefs, and when we give people grace, they often give it back to us. This is why asking clarifying questions and seeking understanding is so important. What people initially say might not really be what they believe, especially if you push them on it.  

The quest for civility does not make you a moral coward. Rather, striving for understanding and affording your opponent respect can allow you to push back more, making clear that compassion and assertiveness can co-exist in a moral conversation—rather than cheap hyperbole and ad hominem attacks. By enforcing guardrails in the conversation—and making sure you stick to them—it allows everyone to feel heard, and at the end of the day people often realize that our divisions are not as strong as we thought.