Dries Bostyn

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Developmental, Personal, and Social Psychology

Freedom of speech and political correctness are recurrent and contentious topics in contemporary society. The present study ( N = 300 North-American adults) aimed to advance empirical knowledge on these issues by investigating how cognitive ability and trait emotional intelligence predict individuals’ support for freedom of speech and concern for p...

People make moral decisions every day, and when making them, they may be influenced by their companions (the so-called moral conformity effect). Nowadays, people make many decisions in online environments like video meetings. In the current preregistered experiment, we studied the online moral conformity effect. We applied an Asch conformity paradi...

When are sacrificial harms morally appropriate? Traditionally, research within moral psychology has investigated this issue by asking participants to render moral judgments on batteries of single-shot, sacrificial dilemmas. Each of these dilemmas has its own set of targets and describes a situation independent from those described in the other dile...

When facing sacrificial dilemmas in which harm maximizes outcomes, people appear sensitive to three moral principles: They are more averse to actively causing harm than passively allowing it ( action principle), causing harm directly than indirectly ( contact principle), and causing harm as a means than as a by-product of helping others ( intention...

When facing sacrificial dilemmas in which harm maximizes outcomes, people appear sensitive to three moral principles: They are more averse to actively causing harm than passively allowing it (action principle), more averse to causing harm directly than indirectly (contact principle), and more averse to causing harm as a means than as a by-product o...

In the study of utilitarian morality, the sacrificial dilemma paradigm has been the dominant approach for years. However, to address some of the most pressing issues in the current research literature, the present studies adopt an alternative approach by using a minimal group paradigm in which participants have to make decisions about the allocatio...

Is it morally appropriate to actively harm someone if doing so can ensure a better overall outcome? To explain how people approach such moral dilemmas, the dual process model for moral cognition states that peoples’ judgments of sacrificial harm are driven by two competing processes: a fast, automatic process leading to deontological “do not harm”...

For many types of behaviors, whether a specific instance of that behavior is either blame or praiseworthy depends on how much of the behavior is done or how people go about doing it. For instance, for a behavior such as “replying quickly to emails”, whether a specific reply is blame or praiseworthy will depend on the timeliness of that reply. Such...

Freedom of speech for all citizens is often considered as a cornerstone of democratic societies. In three studies, we examined the relationship between cognitive ability and support for freedom of speech for a variety of social groups across the ideological spectrum ( N 1 varies between 1,373 and 18,719, N 2 = 298, N 3 = 395). Corroborating our the...

This research concurrently investigated the effectiveness of three established bias-reducing interventions (i.e., positive affirmation, secure attachment, and cognitive dissonance) in the wake of the Paris and Brussels terror attacks. Using frequentist and Bayesian analyses, Study 1 ( N = 1,676), launched within days of the attacks, found that comp...

Freedom of speech for all citizens is often considered as a cornerstone of democratic societies. In three studies, we examined the relationship between cognitive ability and support for freedom of speech for a variety of social groups across the ideological spectrum (N1 varies between 1373 and 18719, N2 = 298, N3 = 395). Corroborating our theoretic...

The dual-process model of moral cognition suggests that outcome-focused, consequentialist moral judgment in sacrificial moral dilemmas is driven by a deliberative, reasoned, cognitive process. Although many studies have demonstrated a positive association of consequentialist judgment with measures of cognitive engagement, no work has investigated w...

Many studies have investigated the relationship between ideological attitudes and aggressive tendencies. The present meta-analytic integration of research on this relationship included data of 177 samples (total N = 47,933 participants). The results revealed that this relationship was substantial, r =.31, 95% CI [.27 to.35], p <.001. Such a relatio...

This research concurrently investigated the effectiveness of three established bias-reducing interventions (i.e., positive affirmation, secure attachment, and cognitive dissonance) in the wake of the Paris and Brussels terror attacks. Using frequentist and Bayesian analyses, Study 1 (N = 1676), launched within days of the attacks, found that compar...

Surprisingly little research has investigated the particular motives that underlie choice behavior in social dilemma situations. The main aim of the present research was to ask whether behavior in take-some games (such as the multiple-person Commons Dilemma Game and the two-person Bandit Game) and give-some games (such as the multiple-person Public...

Recently, scholars have argued that people may sometimes ‘strategically’ endorse ingroup-stereotypes to explain their own underperformance on stereotypic tasks. In the present study (N = 453), after receiving bogus negative feedback on their individual performance on a math/special ability test, women showed higher agreement with statements about m...

When is it appropriate to harm a single person to help multiple others? Psychologists have investigated this question through the study of hypothetical “trolley” dilemmas involving extreme physical harm life-or-death situations that contrast outcome-focussed, consequentialist moral reasoning with principle-focussed, deontological moral reasoning. T...

The prisoner's dilemma game is a mixed‐motive game that offers two players the simultaneous choice between a cooperative and a defective alternative. An often neglected aspect of such a binary‐choice game, however, is that in many real‐life encounters, people can choose not only to cooperate or defect, but they also have a third option: to exit the...

Mixed‐motive games represent situations that confront people with a conflict between cooperative and non‐cooperative alternatives. Despite this common basis, recent research has shown that the consistency of people's choices across different mixed‐motive games is rather low. The present research examined behavioural consistency within the same mixe...

The present study investigated the relationship between level of education and liberalization values in large, representative samples administered in 96 countries around the world (total N = 139,991). These countries show meaningful variation in terms of the Human Development Index (HDI), ranging from very poor, developing countries to prosperous,...

Scholars have been using hypothetical dilemmas to investigate moral decision making for decades. However, whether people’s responses to these dilemmas truly reflect the decisions they would make in real life is unclear. In the current study, participants had to make the real-life decision to administer an electroshock (that they did not know was bo...

Testifying to the gap in fundamental research on positive intergroup outcomes, we investigated reconciliation attitudes in a non-violent intergroup context (i.e., the linguistic conflict in Belgium). By incorporating both important predictors of negative outgroup attitudes (i.e., individual differences in rigid cognitive styles and authoritarian id...

Both ability and motivation aspects of cognition have been shown to relate to ethnic prejudice. In line with recent theorizing, the present study advances an integrated cognition perspective on ethnic prejudice by examining the interplay between cognitive ability (measured with the Kaufman Adolescent and Adult Intelligence Test) and cognitive motiv...

Studies: Overall, the present studies clearly confirmed the main finding of Everett et al., that deontologists are more trusted than consequentialists in social dilemma games. Study 1 replicates Everett et al.'s effect in the context of trust games. Study 2 generalizes the effect to public goods games, thus demonstrating that it is not specific to...

The present paper examines the effectiveness of financial overcompensation as a means to enhance customer loyalty after a product failure. Overcompensation implies that customers are entitled to a refund that is larger than the purchase price. It is, however, still unclear whether large overcompensations entail saturation effects, or alternatively,...

The present study investigated whether and to what extent people’s judgments on trolley-type moral dilemmas are subject to conformity pressures. Trolley dilemmas contrast deontological (principled) moral concerns with consequentialist (outcome based) moral reasoning. Subjects were asked to respond to trolley dilemmas in a forced choice format and e...

The present study investigated whether and to what extent ideological attitudes relate to moral reasoning. Specifically, in three studies we tested if Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) are associated with a general tendency to make either utilitarian (outcome-based) or deontological (principle-based) decisions...

Actions leading to negative outcomes (i.e., harm) are seen as more blameworthy than omissions of actions leading to the same negative outcomes. However, whether a similar action–omission effect applies to judgments of praiseworthiness of positive outcomes is still an open question. Drawing on positive–negative asymmetries found in other domains, we...