Kurt Gray

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC · Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

Scholars warn that partisan divisions in the mass public threaten the health of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy ( n = 32,059 participants) testing 25 treatments designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes. We find that many treatments reduced partisan animosity, most stro...

There is considerable debate over whether and how social media contributes to polarization. In a correlational study (n1 = 1,447) and two digital field experiments (n2 = 494, n3 = 1,133), we examined whether (un)following hyperpartisan social media influencers contributes to polarization and misinformation sharing. We found that incentivizing Twitt...

Climate change is currently one of humanity’s greatest threats. To help scholars understand the psychology of climate change, we conducted an online quasi-experimental survey on 59,508 participants from 63 countries (collected between July 2022 and July 2023). In a between-subjects design, we tested 11 interventions designed to promote climate chan...

Politics and the media in the United States are increasingly nationalized, and this changes how we talk about politics. Instead of reading the local news and discussing local events, people are more often consuming national media and discussing national issues. Unlike local politics, which can rely on shared concrete knowledge about the region, nat...

Here we review work examining reactions to machines replacing humans in both professional and personal domains. Using a mind-role fit perspective, we synthesize findings across several decades of research spanning multiple disciplines to suggest the types and trends for how people will respond to machines replacing humans. We propose that as intell...

Efforts to bridge political divides often focus on navigating complex and divisive issues, but eight studies reveal that we should also focus on a more basic misperception: that political opponents are willing to accept basic moral wrongs. In the United States, Democrats, and Republicans overestimate the number of political outgroup members who app...

People readily moralize health, whether by denigrating smokers or treating exercise as noble. Drawing from the theory of dyadic morality, we theorized that people moralize health most strongly when they perceive poor health as a source of harm and suffering. Through four studies (total N = 1,694), we document a positive relationship between perceiv...

People seem willing to censor disagreeable political and moral ideas. Five studies explore why people engage in political censorship and test a potential route to decreasing censorship. While Americans report being generally supportive of free speech and against censorship (Study 1), we find that people censor material that seems harmful and false...

An excerpt of a comprehensive review of the psychology of artificial intelligence and robots. Focuses on the idea that they are "agents of replacement."

If money is good, then shouldn’t more money always be better? Perhaps not. Traditional economic theories suggest that money is an ever-increasing incentivizer. If someone will accept a job for US$20/hr, they should be more likely to accept the same job for US$30/hr and especially for US$250/hr. However, 10 preregistered, high-powered studies ( N =...

Liberals and conservatives disagree about morality, but explaining this disagreement does not require different moral foundations. All people share a common harm-based mind, making moral judgments based on what seems to cause harm—but people make different assumptions of who or what is especially vulnerable to harm. Liberals and conservatives empha...

Can the AI interface, GPT-4.0, predict adolescents' receptiveness to vaping-prevention messages? Two studies indicated that GPT-4.0 could simulate responses with considerable accuracy.

Synthesizing research on wisdom and a real-world practitioner intervention, we develop and test a strategy for presenting political views that fosters cross-partisan respect. This strategy of balanced pragmatism combines two aspects of “wise reasoning”: balancing multiple interests and seeking pragmatic solutions. Studies 1–5 (N = 2,846) demonstrat...

Moral panics have regularly erupted in society, but they appear almost daily on social media. We propose that social media helps fuel moral panics by combining perceived societal threats with a powerful signal of social amplification—virality. Eight studies with multiple methods test a social amplification model of moral panics in which virality am...

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and a...

Victimhood drives morality and politics. Morality evolved to protect from victimization, and today morality still revolves around concerns about victimhood and harm. Unfortunately, liberals and conservatives often identify different victims, creating political division. In this review of the psychology of perceived victimhood, we demonstrate its po...

Imagine that a spacecraft lands on Earth. World leaders assemble to greet the visitors, but when the aliens step out of their craft, they are not interested in discussing politics. Instead, they want to answer one question: what is the psychological nature of human morality? The aliens journey to many academic psychology conferences—they may be the...

Effectively reducing climate change requires dramatic, global behavior change. Yet it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an e...

Multicultural experiences – such as living, traveling, or working abroad – can have many psychological benefits, including decreasing intergroup bias. However, unlike the intergroup contact literature, research on multicul- tural experiences has yet to examine whether the valence of these experiences may moderate such outcomes. So, could multicultu...

Our recent review demonstrates that “purity” is a messy construct with at least nine popular scientific understandings. Cultural beliefs about self-control help unify some of these understandings, but much messiness remains. The harm-centric theory of dyadic morality suggests that purity violations can be comprehensively understood as abstract harm...

Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like “moral” and “immoral”? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent to which they perceive moral character as “localized” (varying along many contextually embedded dimensio...

Although research in cultural psychology has established that virtually all human behaviors and cognitions are in some ways shaped by culture, culture has been surprisingly absent from the emerging literature on the psychology of technology. In this perspective article, we first review recent findings on machine aversion versus appreciation. We the...

How do people perceive the minds of organizations? Existing work on organizational mind perception highlights two key debates: whether organizational groups are ascribed more agency than experience, and whether people are really perceiving minds in organizational groups at all. Our current paper and its data weigh in on these debates and suggest th...

Questions of right and wrong form a central aspect of daily life, yet how people experience and evaluate everyday moral dilemmas remains unclear. We combined state-of-the-art tools from machine learning with survey-based methods in psychology to explore a large, naturally-occurring repository of moral dilemmas: the Am I the Asshole? (AITA) forum on...

Background Gonorrhea and chlamydia are the most common sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among men who have sex with men (MSM) in China. Previous studies have shown pay-it-forward (PIF) interventions to be associated with a substantial increase in gonorrhea and chlamydia test uptake compared to standard-of-care. We propose a 'pay-it-forward' gon...

Most people in the United States agree they want some income inequality but debate exactly how much is fair. High-status people generally prefer more inequality than low-status individuals. Here we examine how much preferences for inequality are (or are not) driven by self-interest. Past work has generally investigated this idea in two ways: The fi...

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...

Recent work suggests that language models such as GPT can make human-like judgments across a number of domains. We explore whether and when language models might replace human participants in psychological science. We review nascent research, provide a theoretical model, and outline caveats of using AI as a participant.

When people interact with social robots, they treat them as real social agents. How people depict robots is fun to consider, but when people are confronted with embodied entities that move and talk - whether humans or robots - they interact with them as authentic social agents with minds, and not as mere representations.

Humans across the globe use supernatural beliefs to explain the world around them. This article explores whether cultural groups invoke the supernatural more to explain natural phenomena (for example, storms, disease outbreaks) or social phenomena (for example, murder, warfare). Quantitative analysis of ethnographic text across 114 geographically a...

Meaning in life is tied to the stories people tell about their lives. We explore whether one timeless story—the Hero’s Journey—might make people’s lives feel more meaningful. This enduring story appears across history and cultures and provides a template for ancient myths (e.g., Beowulf) and blockbuster books and movies (e.g., Harry Potter). Eight...

Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like “moral” and “immoral”? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent that they perceive moral character as “localized” (varying along many contextually embedded dimensions)...

Deep partisan conflict in the mass public threatens the stability of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy (n=32,059) testing 25 interventions designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and anti-democratic attitudes. We find nearly every intervention reduced partisan animosity, most strongly by highlighti...

The media is increasingly blamed for inflaming political animosity, but it may also bridge partisan divides—with the right strategies. Past research highlights the outgroup‐experience effect: Sharing personal experiences (and not facts) helps to reduce partisan animosity. However, sharing facts is a pillar of good journalism and is essential for me...

If money is good, then is more money better? Perhaps not. Traditional theories suggest that money is a monotonic incentivizer within economic exchanges. If someone will accept a job for 20 dollars an hour, they should be more likely to accept the exact same job for 30 dollars an hour—and even more likely to take it for $250/hr. However, we present...

The media is increasingly blamed for inflaming political animosity, but it may also bridge partisan divides—with the right strategies. Past research highlights the outgroup experience effect: sharing personal experiences (and not facts) helps to reduce partisan animosity. However, sharing facts is a pillar of good journalism, and is essential for m...

Why has fiction been so successful over time? We make the case that fiction may have properties that enhance both individual and group-level fitness by (a) allowing risk-free simulation of important scenarios, (b) effectively transmitting solutions to common problems, and (c) enhancing group cohesion through shared consumption of fictive worlds.

Moral panics have regularly erupted in society, but they appear almost daily on social media. We propose that social media helps fuel moral panics by combining perceived societal threats with a powerful signal of social amplification—virality. Eight studies with multiple methods test a social amplification model of moral panics, in which virality a...

Robots are transforming the nature of human work. Although human-robot collaborations can create new jobs and increase productivity, pundits often warn about how robots might replace humans at work and create mass unemployment. Despite these warnings, relatively little research has directly assessed how laypeople react to robots in the workplace. D...

Robots are transforming the nature of human work. Although human–robot collaborations can create newjobs and increase productivity, pundits often warn about how robots might replace humans at work andcreate mass unemployment. Despite these warnings, relatively little research has directly assessed howlaypeople react to robots in the workplace. Draw...

Rising partisan animosity is associated with a reduction in support for democracy and an increase in support for political violence. Here we provide a multi-level review of interventions designed to reduce partisan animosity, which we define as negative thoughts, feelings and behaviours towards a political outgroup. We introduce the TRI framework t...

Synthesizing research on wisdom and a real-world practitioner intervention, we develop and test a strategy for presenting political views that fosters cross-partisan respect. This strategy of balanced pragmatism combines two aspects of “wise reasoning:” balancing multiple interests and seeking pragmatic solutions. Studies 1-5 (N = 2,846) demonstrat...

Robots are transforming organizations, with pundits forecasting that robots will increasingly perform managerial tasks. One such key managerial task is the evaluation and delivery of feedback regarding an employee's performance, including negative feedback. However, within this context of delivering negative feedback, we suggest that anthropomorphi...

Anti-racist messages educate people about structural racism and argue that indifference and inaction are the foundational building-blocks of race-based inequities. But these messages generate backlash, with several American states banning education about structural racism. We hypothesized that White Americans experience White identity threat and re...

The idea of “purity” transformed moral psychology. Here, we provide the first systematic review of this concept. Although often discussed as one construct, we reveal ~9 understandings of purity, ranging from respecting God to not eating gross things. This striking heterogeneity arises because purity—unlike other moral constructs—is not understood b...

Moral dilemmas are central to moral psychology, with hundreds of papers using variants of the trolley problem. The popular Dual Process Model (DPM) understands moral dilemmas as a conflict between two (natural) kinds of mind—an intuitive deontological mind, and a reasoned utilitarian mind. An alternative theory—the Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM)—m...

Robots are transforming organizations, with pundits forecasting that robots will increasingly perform managerial tasks. One such key managerial task is the evaluation and delivery of feedback regarding an employee’s performance, including negative feedback. However, within this context of delivering negative feedback, we suggest that anthropomorphi...

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...

Companies and governments are using algorithms to improve decision-making for hiring, medical treatments, and parole. The use of algorithms holds promise for overcoming human biases in decision-making, but they frequently make decisions that discriminate. Media coverage suggests that people are morally outraged by algorithmic discrimination, but he...

For as long as people have expressed ideas, others have tried to censor them. Questions of censorship sit at the center of legal and political debates but are relatively unstudied in psychology. Here we explore when—and why—people endorse censorship. Across 5 studies, using both qualitative and quantitative data, we find that people want to censor...

When people judge acts of kindness or cruelty, they often look beyond the act itself to infer the agent’s motives. These inferences, in turn, can powerfully influence moral judgements. The mere possibility of self-interested motives can taint otherwise helpful acts, whereas morally principled motives can exonerate those behind harmful acts. In this...

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...

Anti-racist messages educate people about structural racism and argue that indifference and inaction are the foundational building-blocks of race-based inequities. But these messages generate backlash, with several American states banning education about structural racism. We hypothesized that White Americans experience White identity threat and re...

Moral psychology has long debated whether moral judgment is rooted in harm vs. affect. We reconcile this debate with the Affective Harm Account (AHA) of moral judgment. The AHA understands harm as an intuitive perception (i.e., perceived harm), and divides "affect" into two: embodied visceral arousal (i.e., gut feelings) and stimulus-directed affec...

Rising partisan animosity is linked to less support for democracy and more support for political violence. Here we provide a multi-level review of interventions designed to improve partisan animosity, which we define as negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors towards a political outgroup. We introduce the TRI framework for the three levels of in...

Affective polarization is a rising threat to political discourse and democracy. Public figures have expressed that “conservatives think liberals are stupid, and liberals think conservatives are evil." However, four studies (N=1,660)—including a representative sample—reveal evidence that both sides view political opponents as more unintelligent than...

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...

Efforts to bridge political divides often focus on navigating complex and divisive issues. However, nine studies suggest that we should also focus on a more basic moral divide: the erroneous belief that political opponents lack a fundamental sense of right and wrong. This “basic morality bias” is tied to political dehumanization and is revealed by...

Robots are becoming more available for workplace collaboration, but many questions remain. Are people actually willing to assign collaborative tasks to robots? And if so, exactly which tasks will they assign to what kinds of robots? Here we leverage psychological theories on person-job fit and mind perception to investigate task assignment in human...

Americans disagree about many things, including what threats are most pressing. We suggest people morally condemn and dehumanize opponents when they are perceived as rejecting the existence or severity of important perceived threats. We explore perceived “threat rejection”across five studies (N=2,404) both in the real-world COVID-19 pandemic and in...

People experience “collective autonomy restriction” when they believe other groups want to restrict their own group from freely expressing its social identity and determining its behavior. We review emerging research on the negative consequences of collective autonomy restriction for well-being, as well as its implications for group members' motiva...

People experience “collective autonomy restriction” when they believe other groups want to restrict their own group from freely expressing its social identity and determining its behavior. We review emerging research on the negative consequences of collective autonomy restriction for well-being, as well as its implications for group members’ motiva...

Why has fiction been so successful over time? We make the case that fiction may have properties that enhance both individual and group level fitness by (a) allowing risk-free simulation of important scenarios, (b) effectively transmitting solutions to common problems, and (c) enhancing group cohesion through shared consumption of fictive worlds.

Morality is core to people’s identity. Existing moral identity scales measure good/moral vs. bad/immoral, but the Theory of Dyadic Morality highlights two-dimensions of morality: valence (good/moral vs. bad/immoral) and agency (high/agent vs. low/recipient). The Moral Identity Picture Scale (MIPS) measures this full space through 16 vivid pictures....

The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic’s wake. Because this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon—...