Arathy Puthillam

Arathy Puthillam
University of California, San Diego | UCSD · Rady School of Management

Master of Arts

About

45
Publications
17,214
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467
Citations
Introduction
Arathy Puthillam currently works at the Department of Psychology, Monk Prayogshala. Arathy does research in social, moral, and political psychology.

Publications

Publications (45)
Preprint
The checkered history of false knowledge, deliberate (disinformation) or otherwise(misinformation), has been long and varied, ranging from propaganda to memes. In recent times,the crisis of misinformation has been amplified owing to multiple agents on social media, usuallycomprising user-driven platforms where unchecked “facts” can be posted. This...
Chapter
Full-text available
The checkered history of false knowledge, deliberate (disinformation) or otherwise (misinformation), has been long and varied, ranging from propaganda to memes. In recent times, the crisis of misinformation has been amplified owing to multiple agents on social media, usually comprising user-driven platforms where unchecked “facts” can be posted. Th...
Preprint
Full-text available
This study advances the exploration of food disgust by examining its relationship with political ideology and moral attitudes towards non-vegetarianism in India. Our non-experimental research delves into the influence of political ideology, vote preference, and trait disgust on aversion towards non-vegetarian food and its consumers, predicting thei...
Preprint
Research on social and personality psychology of political ideology has focused largely on Western democracies. To understand the extent to which this work can generalize beyond the social and political contexts in which they are studied, we conducted two studies in India (total N = 2836). First, we developed and validated a scale to measure ideolo...
Preprint
Full-text available
Do people in different societies experience morality differently in everyday life? Using experience sampling methods, we investigate everyday moral experiences in a sample from 20 countries across 6 continents, thereby replicating and extending a large-scale study originally conducted in the United States and Canada. We aim to replicate key finding...
Preprint
Do people in different societies experience morality differently in everyday life? Using experience sampling methods, we investigate everyday moral experiences in a sample from 20 countries across 6 continents, thereby replicating and extending a large-scale study originally conducted in the United States and Canada. We aim to replicate key finding...
Article
Rumors, conspiracies, and health‐related misinformation have gone hand‐in‐hand with the global COVID‐19 pandemic, making it hard to obtain reliable and accurate information. Against this background, this study examined the different psychosocial predictors of believing in conspiratorial information related to general health in India. Indian partici...
Article
Full-text available
In an online experiment in India, incentives for sharing factual posts increased sharing compared to no incentivization. However, the type of incentive (monetary or social) did not influence sharing behavior in a custom social media simulation. Curbing misinformation may not require substantial monetary resources; in fact, social media platforms ca...
Article
Conversations about the internationalization of psychological sciences have occurred over a few decades with very little progress. Previous work shows up to 95% of participants in the studies published in mainstream journals are from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic nations. Similarly, a large proportion of authors are based in N...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the nationally mandated lockdown has resulted in facility closures, decreased laboratory activities, and shifting to remote working. The effects of the pandemic have spread across all professions, including academia. Hence, the present study aims to understand the extent of the impact...
Article
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public...
Article
Full-text available
That behavioral sciences are overrepresented by some countries, in terms of samples and authors, is a well-documented finding. Considering the immediate policy implications, the present study explored whether this bias also exists for research on the coronavirus pandemic. Preprints posted on PsyArXiv between two time periods in 2020 (March-April an...
Preprint
Rumors, conspiracies, and health-related misinformation have gone hand-in-hand with the global COVID-19 pandemic and made accessing reliable and accurate information difficult. Against this background, the present study examined the different psychosocial predictors of believing in conspiratorial information related to general health in India. Indi...
Preprint
Information sharing is often driven by social, legal, and financial incentives. To understand online information-sharing behaviour, the present study assessed whether incentivizing people to share “good” and factual content and disincentivizing the sharing of misinformation influenced information sharing. A mock social media platform was created wh...
Preprint
The Dark Triad (DT) is associated with maladaptive interactions in their social and interpersonal relationships as well as defection in social situations. However, it is unclear how DT traits perceive helpfulness. We conducted a two part study to understand whether individuals high on DT traits are able to perceive help from others. DT traits were...
Preprint
Full-text available
Conversations about the internationalization of psychological science have occurred over a few decades with very little progress. Previous work shows up to 95% of participants in mainstream journal studies are from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) nations. Similarly, a large proportion of authors are based in North Americ...
Article
Full-text available
At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied ma...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the nationally mandated lockdown has resulted in facility closures, decreased laboratory activities, and shifting to remote working. The effects of the pandemic have spread across all professions, including academia. Hence, the present study aims to understand the extent of the impact...
Preprint
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behavior change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public h...
Preprint
Political ideology reflects the way people conduct themselves in the social world, affecting their decisions and actions, including those pertaining to health care. The current study aimed to understand whether district-level partisanship affects mobility during COVID-19 in India, a pluralistic and multi-party country. The study used secondary data...
Article
Full-text available
Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and str...
Preprint
Conspiracy theories about the origins and purpose of the coronavirus pandemic were rampant in the early period of the pandemic. Further, there was a partisan flavor to these theories, including the seriousness of the effect of the virus. In the present study, we assessed whether conspiratorial blame mediates the relationship between political ideol...
Preprint
That behavioral sciences are overrepresented by some countries, in terms of samples and authors, is a well-documented finding. Considering the immediate policy implications, the present study aimed to scope whether this is true in the context of understanding the effects of the coronavirus as well. We assessed relevant preprints with “coronavirus”...
Preprint
The relationship between ideology and partisanship is understudied in India. Using secondary data, we ask whether ideology predicts party preferences, and whether Indians can be clustered with respect to their ideological positions. To do so, we define ideology as differing along two dimensions: adherence to social norms and obedience to hierarchie...
Preprint
Disgust, as an emotional reaction to aversive stimuli, is thought to be universal; however, specific triggers of disgust may differ across cultures. Even though this has been acknowledged in previous studies, very little research has focused on measurement issues in cross-cultural assessment of disgust. The present study aimed to evaluate measureme...
Preprint
Full-text available
Conservatives are known to display smaller moral circles, have less empathy, and make utilitarian decisions. The present study aimed to understand the relationships between political ideology and empathetic concern (n = 513), and between ideology and moral decision-making (n = 210) in an inter-group setting, using an Indian sample. We measured trai...
Preprint
Full-text available
Given the high transmission rates of the COVID-19 virus, policies aim at the maximal adoption of preventative health behaviours (PHBs) such as mask-wearing and maintaining physical distance. Moral emotions, risk perception, and message frames have previously been shown to foster favourable PHBs during various pandemics. To investigate the factors a...
Article
Full-text available
The present study (N = 212; 150 females) examined the relationships between the Dark Triad, empathy, and emotion recognition in a cross-cultural sample. The Dark Triad, especially psychopathy, impeded cognitive empathy, which highlights their indifference towards others’ emotional states. Further, the Dark Triad and primary psychopathy, but not sec...
Article
The victim’s decision to report a crime is generally dependent on the advice received from a confidant. The effects of a confidant’s relationship to victims and perpetrators on the advice given to report rape were investigated. Indian participants ( N = 418) read one of the seven scenarios of acquaintance rape as a confidant; the scenarios depicted...
Preprint
Full-text available
Most work assessing political ideology and its underpinnings has used primarily western samples. Given India’s unique position as the world’s largest parliamentary democracy with a multiparty system, the present research aimed to develop a scale to measure political ideology in India. Pilot work indicated that the social and economic bifurcation of...
Preprint
Full-text available
The dark triad is associated with maladaptive interactions in their social and interpersonal relationships. Those with high levels of dark personality traits are also assumed to be defectors in social situations. However, it is unclear whether they are able to assess when others are being helpful to them. The present study aimed at understanding wh...
Article
Gratitude promotes prosociality and long-term reciprocal relationships. The Dark Triad is associated with maladaptive interactions in their social and interpersonal relationships. The present study aimed at understanding whether these individuals experience gratitude at state and trait levels, when presented with situations that differentially bene...
Article
The HBO show Game of Thrones is fascinating, because despite many of its plot points involving the elicitation of disgust, an emotion associated with avoidance behaviors, its viewership has only surged. We explore the relationship between disgust sensitivity and perception of scenes involving moral, sexual, and pathogen disgust in the show by provi...
Preprint
The HBO show Game of Thrones is fascinating, because despite many of its plot points involving the elicitation of disgust, an emotion associated with avoidance behaviors, its viewership has only surged. We explore the relationship between disgust sensitivity and perception of scenes involving moral, sexual, and pathogen disgust in the show by provi...
Preprint
Full-text available
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a devastating global health crisis. Without a vaccine or effective medication, the best hope for mitigating virus transmission is collective behavior change and support for public health interventions (e.g., physical distancing, physical hygiene, and endorsement of health policies). In a large-scale international co...
Preprint
Full-text available
Gratitude promotes prosociality and long-term reciprocal relationships. The Dark Triad is associated with maladaptive interactions in their social and interpersonal relationships. The present study aimed at understanding whether these individuals experience gratitude at state and trait levels, when presented with situations that differentially bene...
Preprint
That American and European participants are overrepresented in psychological studies has been previously established. In addition, researchers also often tend to be similarly homogenous. This continues to be alarming, especially given that this research is being used to inform policies across the world. In the face of a global pandemic where behavi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Reality television is a social experiment and interactions observed among contestants reflect a microcosm of real-life exchanges. In the present study, we inspected gossip in the eleventh season of Bigg Boss, an Indian reality show fashioned after UK’s Big Brother. Specifically, two independent raters coded the frequency of conversations, how many...

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