Kristin Laurin

• Professor (Assistant) at University of British Columbia

The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology is an essential guide to the study of moral cognition and behavior. Originating as a philosophical exploration of values and virtues, moral psychology has evolved into a robust empirical science intersecting psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and neuroscience. Contributors to this interdiscip...

Gratitude expressions provide shared warmth benefits to both the thanker and the helper. Little work has explored how gratitude expressions shift how observers see these individuals on another important dimension: their relative rank. We consider how the magnitude of gratitude expressions shapes observers’ perceptions of the thanker’s and helper’s...

Children use school as a way to imagine and strive toward their futures. We analyzed thousands of essays written by children in Britain in the late 1960s about what their lives would be like as adults. We used a bottom‐up approach to explore naturally occurring topics in these essays and tested how these topics varied with children's social class c...

Recent evidence has shown that social-media platforms like Twitter (now X) reward politically divisive content, even though most people disapprove of interparty conflict and negativity. We document this discrepancy and provide the first evidence explaining it, using tweets by U.S. Senators and American adults’ responses to them. Studies 1a and 1b e...

Socioeconomic status (SES) predicts a large number of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; here, we build on these findings to try to paint a comprehensive picture of what people who occupy different SES ranks are like. Existing findings attribute a mixed set of psychological patterns to people who consider themselves near the top of the socioeconomi...

Recent evidence shows social media platforms like Twitter (now X) reward politically divisive content, even though most people disapprove of interparty conflict and negativity. We document this discrepancy, and provide the first evidence explaining it, using tweets by American Senators. Studies 1a-b examined 6135 Senators’ tweets, finding they rece...

Recent evidence shows social media platforms like Twitter (now X) reward politically divisive content, despite most people disapproving of interparty conflict and negativity. We document this discrepancy, and provide the first evidence explaining it, using American Senators’ tweets and American adults’ responses to them. Studies 1a-b examined 6135...

We expand Chater & Loewenstein's discussion of barriers to s-frames by highlighting moral psychological mechanisms. Systemic aspects of moralized social issues can be neglected because of (a) the individualistic frame through which we perceive moral transgressions; (b) the desire to punish elicited by moral emotions; and (c) the motivation to attri...

People’s political attitudes often reflect their fundamental moral beliefs about right and wrong; as such, these attitudes motivate political action and shape how people engage across political divides. In this chapter, we outline the deep moral rifts between liberals and conservatives, and how these conflicts relate to their diverging political st...

How does a person's socioeconomic status (SES) relate to how she thinks others see her? Seventeen studies (eight pre-registered; three reported in-text and 14 replications in supplemental online material [SOM], total N = 6,124) found that people with low SES believe others see them as colder and less competent than those with high SES. The SES diff...

Religion makes unique claims (e.g., the existence of supernatural agents) not found in other belief systems, but is religion itself psychologically special? Furthermore, religion is related to many domains of psychological interest, such as morality, health and well-being, self-control, meaning, and death anxiety. Does religion act on these domains...

Religion makes unique claims (e.g., the existence of supernatural agents) not found in other belief systems, but is religion itself psychologically special? Furthermore, religion is related to many domains of psychological interest, such as morality, health and well-being, self-control, meaning, and death anxiety. Does religion act on these domains...

Despite widespread support for the principles of democracy, democratic norms have been eroding globally for over a decade. We ask whether and how political ideology factors into people’s reactions to democratic decline. We offer hypotheses derived from two theoretical lenses, one considering ideologically relevant dispositions and another consideri...

Six preregistered studies ( N = 2,421) examined how people respond to copartisan political-perspective seekers: political allies who attempt to hear from shared opponents and better understand their views. We found that North American adults and students generally like copartisan seekers (meta-analytic Cohen’s d = 0.83 across 4,231 participants, re...

Although their implementation has inspired optimism in many domains, algorithms can both systematize discrimination and obscure its presence. In seven studies, we test the hypothesis that people instead tend to assume algorithms discriminate less than humans due to beliefs that algorithms tend to be both more accurate and less emotional evaluators....

Despite widespread support for the principles of democracy, democratic norms have been eroding globally for over a decade. We ask whether and how political ideology factors into people’s reactions to democratic decline. We offer hypotheses derived from two theoretical lenses, one considering ideologically-relevant dispositions, and another consider...

Despite widespread support for the principles of democracy, democratic norms have been eroding globally for over a decade. We ask whether and how political ideology factors into people’s reactions to democratic decline. We offer hypotheses derived from two theoretical lenses, one considering ideologically-relevant dispositions, and another consider...

Six pre-registered studies (N = 2421) examine how people respond to co-partisan political perspective-seekers: political allies who attempt to hear from shared opponents and better understand their views. We find North American adults and students generally like co-partisan seekers (meta-analytic Cohen’s d = .83 across 4231 participants, including...

Six pre-registered studies (N = 2421) examine how people respond to co-partisan political perspective-seekers: political allies who attempt to hear from shared opponents and better understand their views. We find North American adults and students generally like co-partisan seekers (meta-analytic Cohen’s d = .83 across 4231 participants, including...

The rise of polarization over the past 25 years has many Americans worried about the state of politics. This worry is understandable: up to a point, polarization can help democracies, but when it becomes too vast, such that entire swaths of the population refuse to consider each other’s views, this thwarts democratic methods for solving societal pr...

Cushman uses rationalization to refer to people's explanations for their own actions. In system justification theory, scholars use the same term to refer to people's efforts to cast their current status quo in an exaggeratedly positive light. We try to reconcile these two meanings, positing that system justification could result from people trying...

The rise of polarization over the past 25 years has many Americans worried about the state of politics. This worry is understandable: Up to a point, polarization can help democracies, but when it becomes too vast, such that entire swaths of the population refuse to consider each other’s views, this thwarts democratic methods for solving societal pr...

The rise of polarization over the past 25 years has many Americans worried about the state of politics. This worry is understandable: Up to a point, polarization can help democracies, but when it becomes too vast, such that entire swaths of the population refuse to consider each other’s views, this thwarts democratic methods for solving societal pr...

Our world is often chaotic, confusing, and unpredictable. In this chapter, we outline psychological theory and empirical research on how and why this aversive feeling of uncertainty can motivate people to turn to religion. We explore how uncertainty influences religious belief from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including uncertainty-identi...

Cushman uses rationalization to refer to people’s explanations for their own actions. In system justification theory, scholars use the same term to refer to people’s efforts to cast their current status quo in an exaggeratedly positive light. We try to reconcile these two meanings, positing that system justification could result from people trying...

Why are some people poor, and why does poverty persist? One popular explanation blames society for blocking the advancement of lower socioeconomic status (SES) individuals. A second accuses the poor of being lazy. Here, we argue that both perspectives are missing a critical point. It is true that the material, social, and cultural context of low SE...

Organizations often benefit from signaling moral values. Across 5 studies, we explore how people attribute moral conviction to different organizational agents. We find that people believe collectives (e.g., groups; entire organizations) have less moral conviction than individuals, even when both agents behave identically (Studies 1 and 2). We test...

Social mobility is limited in most industrialized countries, and especially in the United States: Children born to relatively poor parents are less likely to prosper than other children. This observation has multiple explanations; in the current article, we focus on emerging motivational perspectives, synthesizing them into a novel integrative fram...

We review conceptual and empirical contributions to system justification theory over the last fifteen years, emphasizing the importance of an experimental approach and consideration of context. First, we review the indirect evidence of the system justification motive via complimentary stereotyping. Second, we describe injunctification as direct evi...

Prior research, using correlational and self-report methodologies, suggests that religion and public welfare function as alternate security/insurance systems. Consequently in countries with more expansive public welfare systems people report less religiosity. The present studies expand this field by utilizing experimental methodology and by replica...

Organizations often implement changes that can signal their values. However, the most objectively efficient changes do not necessarily serve as the best signals. Across seven experiments, we investigate how different rates of transition influence people’s perceptions of how committed organizations are to the values underlying changes or improvement...

People will often rationalize the status quo, reconstruing it in an exaggeratedly positive light. They will even rationalize the status quo they anticipate, emphasizing the upsides and minimizing the downsides of sociopolitical realities they expect to take effect. Drawing on recent findings on the psychological triggers of rationalization, I prese...

Across four experiments, we explored how reminders of powerful external agents—interventionist Gods and reliable corporate institutions—influence people’s motivation in the realm of financial goals. We found evidence that when people receive specific financial advice, they feel demotivated by the overwhelming flow of concrete instructions for achie...

This article integrates a recent spate of findings regarding beliefs in or thoughts about God and how they influence behavior. I first describe a fast-emerging cultural evolutionary perspective on why people believe in powerful, watchful, and morally invested Gods. I then apply this perspective to the recent spate of findings, arguing that those th...

In this chapter I provide a cultural evolutionary perspective on one of the most prevalent kind of lay beliefs: Religion, and more specifically the belief in Big Gods: powerful, watchful, morally concerned deities. In the first part of the chapter, I summarize current thinking about the cultural evolutionary origins of these beliefs. According to t...

How do audiences react to leaders who change their opinion after taking moral stances? We propose that people believe moral stances are stronger commitments, compared with pragmatic stances; we therefore explore whether and when audiences believe those commitments can be broken. We find that audiences believe moral commitments should not be broken,...

Beliefs in powerful Gods are prevalent across time and across societies. In this chapter, we explore the motivated underpinnings of this phenomenon. After describing two popular theories that help account for some of this prevalence—one focused on byproducts of normal human cognition and the other focused on the cultural benefit conferred by shared...

People regularly set goals, but often fail to remain committed to them. In particular, people's commitment to their goals flags when their self-efficacy is low—when they doubt their ability to bring about their desired outcomes through their actions. We propose that when people feel low self-efficacy, reminders of external forces that ensure contin...

Modern conceptions of corporate personhood have spurred considerable debate about the rights that society should afford business organizations. Across eight experiments, we compare lay perceptions of how corporations and people use rights, and also explore the with consequences of these judgments. We find that people believe corporations, compared...

A growing body of research documents goal contagion, a phenomenon whereby people are likely to catch—to adopt and pursue for themselves—the goals they see others pursuing. Here, I situate goal contagion relative to other ideas about where goals come from and then review existing scholarship on the phenomenon itself and the processes that underlie i...

We investigated class-based differences in the propensity to seek positions of power. We first proposed that people's lay theories suggest that acquiring power requires playing politics-manipulating one's way through the social world, relying on a pragmatic and Machiavellian approach to impression management and social relationships to get ahead. T...

We investigated how power dynamics in close relationships influence the tendency to devote resources to the pursuit of goals valued by relationship partners, hypothesizing that low (vs. high) power in relationships would lead individuals to center their individual goal pursuit around the goals of their partners. We study 2 related phenomena: partne...

We investigated how power dynamics in close relationships influence the tendency to devote resources to the pursuit of goals valued by relationship partners, hypothesizing that low (vs. high) power in relationships would lead individuals to center their individual goal pursuit around the goals of their partners. We study 2 related phenomena: partne...

Religiosity and participation in religious activities have been linked with decreased risky behavior. In the current research, we hypothesized that exposure to the concept of God can actually increase people's willingness to engage in certain types of risks. Across seven studies, reminders of God increased risk taking in nonmoral domains. This effe...

Members of historically disadvantaged groups -- such as women, ethnic minorities and low-income individuals -- face considerable challenges in many social and organizational settings. In line with this year's theme, this symposium presents social psychological research and theoretically-driven interventions that harness the “power of words to help...

We hypothesize that two distinct facets of religiosity—orthodoxy (an emphasis on belief) and orthopraxy (an emphasis on behavior)—predict differential sensitivity to an actor’s intent when making moral judgments. Participants judged actors who performed misdeeds intentionally or unintentionally. In Study 1, high orthopraxy predicted harsher judgmen...

We examine the possibility that people can leverage their “relationship” with God as a stand-in for interpersonal relationships. More specifically, we hypothesize that people will seek closeness with the divine when facing the threat of interpersonal rejection and that conversely, they will seek interpersonal closeness when facing the threat of div...

Here we propose a dual process model to reconcile two contradictory predictions about how people respond to restrictive policies imposed upon them by organizations and systems within which they operate. When participants’ attention was not drawn to the restrictive nature of the policy, or when it was, but their cognitive resources were restricted,...

A recurring observation of experimental psychologists is that people prefer, seek out, and even selectively "see" structure in their social and natural environments. Structure-seeking has been observed across a wide range of phenomena-from the detection of patterns in random arrays to affinities for order-providing political, religious, social, and...

People often become evangelists for their own lifestyles. When it comes to relational status, people are rarely content to simply say "being single works for me" or "being in a relationship suits my disposition." Results from four studies suggested that this tendency to view one's own relational status as the universal ideal emerges in part from a...

Modern society is rife with inequality. People's interpretations of these inequalities, however, vary considerably: Different people can interpret, for example, the existing gender gap in wages as being the result of systemic discrimination, or as being the fair and natural result of genuine differences between men and women. Here, we examine one f...

Empirical research supporting the contention that insecure attachment is related to internalizing behaviors has been inconsistent. Across 60 studies including 5,236 families, we found a significant, small to medium effect size linking insecure attachment and internalizing behavior (observed d = .37, 95% CI [0.27, 0.46]; adjusted d = .19, 95% CI [0....

The sanctioning of norm-transgressors is a necessary--though often costly--task for maintaining a well-functioning society. Prior to effective and reliable secular institutions for punishment, large-scale societies depended on individuals engaging in 'altruistic punishment'--bearing the costs of punishment individually, for the benefit of society....

How do people respond to government policies and work environments that place restrictions on their personal freedoms? The psychological literature offers two contradictory answers to this question. Here, we attempt to resolve this apparent discrepancy. Specifically, we identify the absoluteness of a restriction as one factor that determines how pe...

Despite the cultural ubiquity of ideas and images related to God, relatively little is known about the effects of exposure to God representations on behavior. Specific depictions of God differ across religions, but common to most is that God is (a) an omnipotent, controlling force and (b) an omniscient, all-knowing being. Given these 2 characterist...

Endorsing complementary stereotypes about others (i.e., stereotypes consisting of a balance of positive and negative characteristics) can function to satisfy the need to perceive one's social system as fair and balanced. To what extent might this also apply to self-perception, or self-stereotyping? The present research aimed to investigate the link...

Five studies support the hypothesis that beliefs in societal fairness offer a self-regulatory benefit for members of socially disadvantaged groups. Specifically, members of disadvantaged groups are more likely than members of advantaged groups to calibrate their pursuit of long-term goals to their beliefs about societal fairness. In Study 1, low so...

The freedom to emigrate at will from a geographic location is an internationally recognized human right. However, this right is systematically violated by restrictive migration policies. In three experiments, we explored the psychological consequences of violating the right to mobility. Our results suggest that, ironically, restricted freedom of mo...

How powerful is the status quo in determining people's social ideals? The authors propose (a) that people engage in injunctification, that is, a motivated tendency to construe the current status quo as the most desirable and reasonable state of affairs (i.e., as the most representative of how things should be); (b) that this tendency is driven, at...

We suggest that beliefs in a controlling God originate, at least in part, from the desire to avoid the emotionally uncomfortable experience of perceiving the world as random and chaotic. Forty-seven participants engaged in an anxiety-provoking visualization procedure. For half, the procedure included a manipulation designed to temporarily lower bel...

The authors propose that the high levels of support often observed for governmental and religious systems can be explained, in part, as a means of coping with the threat posed by chronically or situationally fluctuating levels of perceived personal control. Three experiments demonstrated a causal relation between lowered perceptions of personal con...

Concepts with defining features have sufficiently rigid boundaries that examples of one concept are rarely confused with another concept, whereas probabilistic concepts have vague boundaries, producing frequent misclassifications. It has been argued that, although neural learning might account for probabilistic (or fuzzy) concepts, it is incapable...