
C. Daryl CameronUniversity of Iowa | UI · Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
C. Daryl Cameron
PhD
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41
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (41)
Although mind perception is a basic part of social interaction, people often dehumanize others by denying them mental states. Many theories suggest that dehumanization happens in order to facilitate aggression or account for past immorality. We suggest a novel motivation for dehumanization: to avoid affective costs. We show that dehumanization of s...
Morality and emotions are linked, but what is the nature of their correspondence? Many "whole number" accounts posit specific correspondences between moral content and discrete emotions, such that harm is linked to anger, and purity is linked to disgust. A review of the literature provides little support for these specific morality-emotion links. M...
In a comprehensive meta-analysis of 167 studies, the authors found that sequential priming tasks were significantly associated with behavioral measures (r = .28) and with explicit attitude measures (r = .20). Priming tasks continued to predict behavior after controlling for the effects of explicit attitudes. These results generalized across a varie...
As the number of people in need of help increases, the degree of compassion people feel for them ironically tends to decrease. This phenomenon is termed the collapse of compassion. Some researchers have suggested that this effect happens because emotions are not triggered by aggregates. We provide evidence for an alternative account. People expect...
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...
Sharing in the experiences of others often feels like a natural inclination, yet several groups have converged on the idea that empathy reflects motivated choices. Although sometimes criticized for being unreliable, many studies suggest that empathy depends on motivated emotion regulation: people appraise the costs and benefits of empathizing, and...
Adversity experiences have been linked to empathy and prosocial behavior. Here, we argue for unique additional advantages of such experiences, namely, the identity memberships that arise and their links to collective action and harmonious intergroup relations. We discuss challenges and future directions for the study of adversity as a source of ide...
To what extent are ideological differences in compassion real or exaggerated, and who is more likely to engage in stereotyping about such differences? In five studies, including three online studies and two field studies of voters at the Iowa Caucus and U.S. Presidential Election in 2016, we found evidence for political stereotyping about compassio...
Traditional theories about moral judgments adopt one side of a dichotomy between beliefs and desires, emotions, or attitudes, but neither side seems adequate. New intermediate possibilities are opened up if implicit moral attitudes are distinguished from explicit moral beliefs. This chapter summarizes some recent empirical work on implicit moral at...
Moral psychology is the study of how human minds make and are made by human morality. This state of the art volume covers contemporary philosophical and psychological work on moral psychology, as well as notable historical theories and figures in the field of moral psychology, such as Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Buddha. The volume’s 50 chap...
Across nine studies (N = 1672), we assessed the link between cognitive costs and the choice to express outrage by blaming. We developed the Blame Selection Task, a binary free-choice paradigm that examines individuals’ propensity to blame transgressors (versus an alternative choice)—either before or after reading vignettes and viewing images of mor...
People appear to empathize with cases of animal suffering yet to disregard such suffering when it conflicts with human needs. In three studies, we used an empathy regulation measure – the empathy selection task – to test whether people choose or avoid sharing in experiences of animals versus humans. In Study 1, when choosing between sharing experie...
In this review, we examine relationships between empathy, prosocial behavior, and moral judgment. We focus on recent evidence for these relationships, with a focus on motivated empathy regulation as an important process that shapes empathic and moral outcomes. In particular, we highlight tradeoffs in contexts that involve competing victims with dif...
Compassion—the warm, caregiving emotion that emerges from witnessing the suffering of others—has long been considered an important moral emotion for motivating and sustaining prosocial behavior. Some suggest that compassion draws from empathic feelings to motivate prosocial behavior, while others try to disentangle these processes to examine their...
Does tracking another agent’s visual perspective depend on having a goal—albeit a remote one—to do so? In 5 experiments using indirect measures of visual perspective taking with a cartoon avatar, we
examined whether and how adult perceivers’ processing goals shape the incidental tracking of what objects the avatar sees (Level-1 perspective taking)...
Empathy often feels automatic, but variations in empathic responding suggest that, at least some of the time, empathy is affected by one's motivation to empathize in any particular circumstance. Here, we show that people can be motivated to engage in (or avoid) empathy-eliciting situations with strangers, and that these decisions are driven by subj...
Empathy in medical care has been one of the focal points in the debate over the bright and dark sides of empathy. Whereas physician empathy is sometimes considered necessary for better physician–patient interactions, and is often desired by patients, it also has been described as a potential risk for exhaustion among physicians who must cope with t...
Empathy is considered a virtue, yet it fails in many situations, leading to a basic question: When given a choice, do people avoid empathy? And if so, why? Whereas past work has focused on material and emotional costs of empathy, here, we examined whether people experience empathy as cognitively taxing and costly, leading them to avoid it. We devel...
A debate has emerged across disciplines about why people engage in costly helping. Empathy is one mechanism. We highlight a second, more controversial motivator: moral outrage. Integrating findings from moral psychology and intergroup literatures, we suggest outrage is a critical force for collective action and highlight directions for future resea...
Empathy can be both beneficial and costly. This trade-off is pertinent for physicians who must care for patients while maintaining emotional distance to avoid burnout. Prior work using self-report and neurophysiological measures has found mixed evidence for differences in empathy between physicians and nonphysicians. We used implicit measurement an...
Implicit moral evaluations-spontaneous, unintentional assessments of the moral status of actions or persons-play a pivotal role in supporting moral behavior, yet little research has attempted to model variability in these moral evaluations across healthy and clinical populations. Prior research reveals that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC...
Emotion and morality are powerful conscious experiences. There are two ways to think about their psychological basis: arrows and circles. Arrows ground each experience in its own specialized mechanism (mechanism x causes phenomenon x; mechanism y causes phenomenon y). Examples of arrows include when feelings of disgust are attributed to a specializ...
Three studies examine how subtle shifts in framing can alter the mind perception of groups. Study 1 finds that people generally perceive groups to have less mind than individuals. However, Study 2 demonstrates that changing the framing of a group from "a group of people" to "people in a group," substantially increases mind perception-leading to com...
Implicit moral evaluations—i.e., immediate, unintentional assessments of the wrongness of actions or persons—play a central role in supporting moral behavior in everyday life. Yet little research has employed methods that rigorously measure individual differences in implicit moral evaluations. In five experiments, we develop a new sequential primin...
Empathy for pain is often described as automatic. Here, we used implicit measurement and
multinomial modeling to formally quantify unintentional empathy for pain: empathy that occurs
despite intentions to the contrary. We developed the pain identification task (PIT), a sequential
priming task wherein participants judge the painfulness of target...
Contemplative practices have long emphasized the development of mindfulness: a skill that involves present-focused attention and nonjudgmental acceptance of experiences. In the current study, we examine the relationship between these two facets of mindfulness—which are independent in novices—and helping behavior and its emotional correlates. Attent...
Changing people's emotions can change their moral judgments, even when the emotions are incidental to the judgment and hence morally irrelevant. It has commonly been assumed that people lack the motivation or ability to correct against such incidental emotional influences. We provide evidence that the ability to make fine-grained distinctions betwe...
A recent study of the affect misattribution procedure (AMP) found that participants who retrospectively reported that they intentionally rated the primes showed larger effect sizes and higher reliability. The study concluded that the AMP's validity depends on intentionally rating the primes. We evaluated this conclusion in three experiments. First,...
It has often been argued that compassion is fundamental to morality. Yet people often suppress compassion for self-interested reasons. We provide evidence that suppressing compassion is not cost free, as it creates dissonance between a person's moral identity and his or her moral principles. We instructed separate groups of participants to regulate...
Recent research in social psychology suggests that people harbor “implicit race biases,” biases which can be unconscious or
uncontrollable. Because awareness and control have traditionally been deemed necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility,
implicit biases present a unique challenge: do we pardon discrimination based on implicit biase...
People often misattribute the causes of their thoughts and feelings. The authors propose a multinomial process model of affect misattributions, which separates three component processes. The first is an affective response to the true cause of affect. The second is an affective response to the apparent cause. The third process is when the apparent s...
The authors assessed the degree to which schizotypal characteristics in a nonclinical population were associated with impairments in the ability to correctly identify emotions as expressed in facial, paralinguistic, and postural cues. Participants completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ; A. Raine, 2005), and the 3 receptive subtest...