Amanda Rotella

Kingston University · Department of Psychology

We explored how individuals’ mental representations of complex and uncertain situations impact their ability to reason wisely. To this end, we introduce situated methods to capture abstract and concrete mental representations and the switching between them when reflecting on social challenges. Using these methods, we evaluated the alignment of abst...

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychological scientists frequently made on-the-record predictions in public media about how individuals and society would change. Such predictions were often made outside these scientists’ areas of expertise, with justifications based on intuition, heuristics, and analogical reasoning (Study 1; N = 719 statem...

Moral licensing occurs when someone who initially behaved morally subsequently acts less morally. We apply reputation-based theories to predict when and why moral licensing would occur. Specifically, our pre-registered predictions were that (1) participants observed during the licensing manipulation would have larger licensing effects, and (2) unam...

How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing the accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment...

Men, relative to women, can benefit their total reproductive success by engaging in short-term pluralistic mating. Yet not all men enact such a mating strategy. It has previously been hypothesized that high mate value men should be most likely to adopt a short-term mating strategy, with this prediction being firmly grounded in some important mid-le...

Some evidence suggests that people behave more cooperatively and generously when observed or in the presence of images of eyes (termed the ‘watching eyes’ effect). Eye images are thought to trigger feelings of observation, which in turn motivate people to behave more cooperatively to earn a good reputation. However, several recent studies have fail...

Fertility rates have been declining worldwide over the past fifty years, part of a phenomenon known as “the demographic transition.” Prior work suggests that this decline is related to population density. In the present study, we draw on life history theory to examine the relationship between population density and fertility across 174 countries ov...

Fertility rates have been declining worldwide over the past fifty years, part of a phenomenon known as “the demographic transition.” Prior work suggests that this decline is related to population density. In the present study, we draw on life history theory to examine the relationship between population density and fertility across 174 countries ov...

Effective management of global crises relies on expert judgment of their societal effects. How accurate are such judgments? In the spring of 2020, we asked social scientists (N = 717) and lay Americans (N = 394) to make predictions about COVID-19 pandemic-related societal change across social and psychological domains. Six months later we obtained...

Wisdom has been a central theme in the philosophical inquiry of the human experience for centuries, with the earliest written teachings dating back to the ancient Egyptian vizier, Ptahhotep 25-24 century BCE. The virtue of wisdom has been attributed to the great deities of various cultures and mythologies (e.g., Anahit of Armenia, Athena of Greece)...

Moral licensing occurs when someone who initially behaved morally or cooperatively, later behaves less morally, as if they had a “license” to act badly. On the flipside, moral cleansing occurs when someone first behaves immorally, which prompts them to later behaves more morally. To-date, few studies have investigated individual differences in the...

We extend Tomasello's framework by addressing the functional challenge of obligation. If the long-run social consequences of a decision are sufficiently costly, obligation motivates the actor to forgo potential immediate benefits in favor of long-term social interests. Thus, obligation psychology balances the downstream socially-mediated payoffs fr...

Inequality has been linked with numerous negative consequences at the societal and individual levels. The detrimental effects of inequality are proposed to operate at the individual level through social comparisons, where perceived unfair disadvantage leads to the experience of personal relative deprivation (i.e., subjective feelings of anger and r...

We extend Boyer & Petersen's (B&P's) model of folk-economic beliefs (FEBs) by suggesting FEBs serve self-interest (broadly defined), which includes indirect benefits such as creating alliances, advancing self-beneficial ideologies, and signaling one's traits. By expanding the definition of self-interest, the model can predict who will hold what FEB...

Sweat bees are one of the most socially polymorphic lineages on the planet. In obligately eusocial species, newly enclosed females may become either queens or workers, depending on the environmental and social circumstances of the nest into which they emerge. In socially polymorphic species, females also have the option of nesting solitarily, found...