Mariola Paruzel-Czachura

University of Silesia in Katowice · Institute of Psychology

The article is an attempt to describe the ontological basics of Gestalt psychotherapy, both known to authors of Gestalt and unknown, to insight into the problem. Gestalt is inspired by the ancient, the modern and the contemporary philosophy. The ontological principles underlying Gestalt are holism, monism, harmony of opposites, process, cyclicality...

The studies presented attempt to outline a relationship between a feeling of success, the perception of economic crisis and the form of occupational activity. The article shows the results of empirical research conducted among 341 economically active people and concerns the psychological differences between them in Poland. The theoretical basis of...

Ideal partner preferences (i.e., ratings of the desirability of attributes like attractiveness or intelligence) are the source of numerous foundational findings in the interdisciplinary literature on human mating. Recently, research on the predictive validity of ideal partner preference matching (i.e., Do people positively evaluate partners who mat...

The replication crisis in psychology and related sciences contributed to the adoption of large-scale research initiatives known as Big Team Science (BTS). BTS has made significant advances in addressing issues of replication, statistical power, and diversity through the use of larger samples and more representative cross-cultural data. However, whi...

Cultural logic is a set of cultural scripts and patterns organized around a central theme. The cultural logics of dignity, honor, and face describe different ways of evaluating a person’s worth and maintaining cooperation. These cultural logics vary in prevalence across cultures. In this study, we collaboratively develop and validate a measure capt...

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...

The self-importance of moral identity is about being moral for yourself (internalization) and for others (symbolization). We tested sex, age, and cultural differences in participants from 67 counties. We used Uz’s cultural tightness and looseness index and Hofstede’s dimensions. We found women had higher internalization and symbolization than men....

In psychological science, replicability—repeating a study with a new sample achieving consistent results (Parsons et al., 2022)—is critical for affirming the validity of scientific findings. Despite its importance, replication efforts are few and far between in psychological science with many attempts failing to corroborate past findings. This scar...

Prisoners, those who probably engaged in criminal activities, might possess different perceptions and notions of moral foundations than non-prisoners. Thus, assessing such foundations among the population without testing the validity of the measure may produce biased outcomes. To address the potential methodological issue, we examined the validity...

A glance is enough to assign psychological attributes to others. Attractiveness is associated with positive attributes (‘beauty‐is‐good’ stereotype). Here, we raise the question of a similar but negative bias. Are people with facial anomalies associated with negative personal characteristics? We hypothesized that biases against faces with anomalies...

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...

In psychological science, replicability—repeating a study with a new sampleachieving consistent results (Parsons et al., 2022)—is critical for affirming the validity of scientific findings. Despite its importance, replication efforts are few and far between in psychological science with many attempts failing to corroborate past findings. This scarc...

This paper presents sociodemographic data derived from an empirical study conducted on a sample of n=2118 workers engaged in flexible forms of employment, within a broader research endeavor titled “Occupational challenges among individuals working under flexible employment arrangements – a psychological perspective”. The decision to focus on this s...

Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic 1,2. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low pub...

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...

Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment may challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science society nexus across different cultural contexts,...

Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public...

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...

Recent psychological research finds that U.S. American children have a weaker tendency than U.S. American adults to value humans more than animals. We aimed to conceptually replicate and extend this finding in a preregistered study ( N = 412). We investigated whether 6- to 9-year-old Polish children (Study 1a) are less likely to prioritize humans o...

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...

We aimed to analyze whether the individualizing moral foundations play a protective role against moral disengagement in a sample of 367 women and men in prison, and whether, in addition, moral foundations promote the intention to change the behaviors that led them to prison. Controlling for gender differences, we found support for the hypothesized...

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions Using a foreign language is suggested to affect how we think, even reducing bias. However, the exact mechanisms of its influence are still unknown. In this project, we tested two variants of the “thinking more” mechanism driving the foreign language effect: increased cognitive reflection and greater ta...

The penitence congruity effect observed in adults suggests that people may assess wrongdoers more leniently when they exhibit guilt and deontological beliefs. It means that judgments about one’s morality are influenced not only by their actions but also by their expressed moral emotions and beliefs. To determine whether children also exhibit this e...

We aimed to understand if alcohol intoxication affects the willingness to violate moral foundations (care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and purity). We conducted a laboratory study (N = 387) with three randomized groups: alcohol intoxication, placebo, and control, measuring the sacralization of moral foundations via the Moral Foundations Sacrednes...

The “scarred villain” trope, where facial differences like scars signify moral corruption, is ubiquitous in film (e.g., Batman’s The Joker). Strides by advocacy groups to undermine the trope, however, suggest cinematic representations of facial differences could be improving with time. This preregistered study characterized facial differences in fi...

People generally perceive themselves as moral but does this tendency change after alcohol consumption? In the current research, we tested whether alcoholic intoxication affects self-assessments of morality (i.e., the self-importance of moral identity and the moral self-concept), and we also tested self-assessment of aggressiveness and intelligence....

Objectives Meditation practices, mindfulness, and self-compassion have been found to affect our physical and mental well-being in many ways. However, can they also affect our moral judgment, for example, what we think about right and wrong? This study aims to explore the potential influence of meditation, mindfulness and self-compassion on utilitar...

Unlabelled: People make moral decisions every day. When making such decisions, they may be influenced by their companions (a so-called moral conformity effect). Increasingly, people make decisions in online environments, like video meetings. In the current preregistered experiment, we studied the moral conformity effect in an online context. We ap...

Opinions on abortion are more polarized than opinions on most other moral issues. Why are some people pro-choice and some pro-life? Religious and political preferences play a role here, but pro-choice and pro-life people may also differ in other aspects. In the current preregistered study (N = 479), we investigated how pro-choice women differ in th...

I agree with Dahl’s proposal, with minor modifications, which I proposed (“Morality is obligatory concerns with others’ and our own welfare, rights, fairness, or justice, as well as the reasoning, judgment, emotions, or actions that spring from those concerns.”). But at the same time, I feel the need to have a broader definition of morality (“Moral...

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...

To provide deeper insights into the relationships between psychopathic traits and utilitarian moral judgment, we studied N = 702 adults using three psychopathy scales: (a) the Levenson's Self-report Psychopathy Scale; (b) the Psychopathic Personality Inventory; and (c) the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure; and three measures of utilitarian moral judgm...

According to the primacy of morality hypothesis, moral traits are the most substantial contributor to – and when positive, always contribute positively to – global impressions of others. In three experiments (N = 413), we asked participants to form global impressions of the financial advisor (Study 1a), car mechanic (Study 1b), and physician (Study...

Recent psychological research finds that US American children have a weaker tendency than US American adults to value humans more than animals. We aimed to conceptually replicate and extend this finding in a preregistered study (N = 412). We investigated whether 6-9-year-old Polish children (Study 1a) are less likely to prioritize humans over anima...

Moral foundations (i.e., care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity) are systems that help people make important decisions. We propose a new approach to the scoring of moral foundations by measuring their relative importance (i.e., how important the foundation is compared to others). In Study 1 (N = 1283), we observed that absolute and relative...

A glance is enough for people to assign psychological attributes to another person. Attractiveness is associated with positive attributes contributing to the “beauty-is-good” stereotype. Here, we aimed to study the possibility of a similar but negative bias. Specifically, we asked if people with facial anomalies are associated with negative charact...

Objectives: Meditation practices, mindfulness, and self-compassion have been found to impact our bodies and souls in many ways. However, can they also influence our morality, for example, what we think about right and wrong? We aimed to answer this question by focusing on utilitarian moral judgments. Methods: In Study 1, we measured participants’ f...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures...

How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing the accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment...

Ideal partner preferences (i.e., ratings of the desirability of attributes like attractiveness or intelligence) are the source of numerous foundational findings in the interdisciplinary literature on human mating. Recently, research on the predictive validity of ideal partner preference-matching (i.e., do people positively evaluate partners who mat...

The "drunk utilitarian" phenomenon suggests that people are more likely to accept harm for the greater good when they are under the influence of alcohol. This phenomenon conflicts with the ideas that (1) acceptance of pro-sacrificial harm requires inhibitory control of automatic emotional responses to the idea of causing harm and (2) alcohol impair...

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research QuestionsUsing a foreign language is suggested to affect how we think, even reducing bias. However, the exact mechanisms of its influence are still unknown. In this project, we tested two variants of the “thinking more” mechanism driving the foreign language effect: increased cognitive reflection and greater tas...

A growing body of work suggests that religiosity is typically associated with deontological or non-utilitarian moral judgments. However, recent conceptualizations of utilitarian psychology show that instrumental harm is just one (negative) dimension of utilitarianism. In the new twodimensional model of utilitarian psychology, impartial beneficence...

cAlohol affects how people think, feel, and behave, and how they perceive the physical and social world around them. But does alcohol also influence how people perceive themselves? Past work points to a number of possibilities, suggesting intoxication could lead to positive biases, to negative biases, or have no effects on self-assessments at all....

How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment on s...

The COVID-19 pandemic (and its aftermath) highlights a critical need to communicate health information effectively to the global public. Given that subtle differences in information framing can have meaningful effects on behavior, behavioral science research highlights a pressing question: Is it more effective to frame COVID-19 health messages in t...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching...

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...

Using a foreign language is suggested to affect how we think and decide. However, the exact mechanisms of its influence are still unknown. In this project, we tested one of the potential mechanisms: increased cognitive engagement in a foreign language. If so, we would expect increased performance in cognitive ability tests, e.g., in numeracy, when...

The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychol...

Semantic priming has been studied for nearly 50 years across various experimental manipulations and theoretical frameworks. These studies provide insight into the cognitive underpinnings of semantic representations in both healthy and clinical populations; however, they have suffered from several issues including generally low sample sizes and a la...

Significance Communicating in ways that motivate engagement in social distancing remains a critical global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study tested motivational qualities of messages about social distancing (those that promoted choice and agency vs. those that were forceful and shaming) in 25,718 people in 89 countries...

In five experiments with a total N = 1558, we studied to which extent the perception of wrongdoers’ morality depends on wrongdoers’ cognitive and emotional penitence on the example of deontological beliefs and guilt. Both types of penitence improved the target’s moral impressions to a similar degree. We established a penitence congruity effect, whe...

We provide deeper insights into the relationships between psychopathic traits and utilitarian moral judgment by distinguishing three psychopathy constructs: (1) primary and secondary psychopathy measured by Levenson’s Self-report Psychopathy Scale; (2) self-centered impulsivity, fearless dominance, and coldheartedness measured by Psychopathic Perso...

Opinions on abortion are more polarized than opinions on most other moral issues. Why are some people pro-life and some are pro-choice? Religious and political preferences play a role here, but it is only one part of the story. People make moral judgments every day, based not only on religious or political preferences, but also on moral foundations...

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...

Previous studies showed that children mainly focus on wrongdoer’s behavior when assessing their morality. However, according to the penitence congruity effect, the wrongdoer may be assessed even neutrally when they expresses guilt and deontological beliefs. Simply put, not only behavior matters when judging someone’s morality, but also their moral...

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...

The “drunk utilitarian” phenomenon suggests that people are more likely to accept harm for the greater good when they are under the influence of alcohol. This phenomenon conflicts with the ideas that (1) acceptance of pro-sacrificial harm requires inhibitory control of automatic emotional responses to the idea of causing harm and (2) alcohol impair...

Objective The Self-Importance of Moral Identity Scale (SMIS) was developed by Aquino and Reeds with the purpose of measuring how people evaluate their private (Internalization subscale) and public (Symbolization subscale) moral identity. SMIS has become commonly and broadly used in many studies. The aim of this paper is to validate the Polish versi...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

Intertemporal choice requires one to decide between smaller sooner and larger later payoffs and is captured by discount rates. Across two preregistered experiments testing three language pairs (Experiment 1) and with incentivized participants (Experiment 2), we found no evidence that using a foreign language benefited intertemporal choices. On the...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

How can we maximize what is learned from a replication study? In the creative destruction approach to replication, the original hypothesis is compared not only to the null hypothesis, but also to predictions derived from multiple alternative theoretical accounts of the phenomenon. To this end, new populations and measures are included in the design...

In four experiments with N = 1178, we study the impact of wrongdoers’ moral beliefs and emotions on their morality judgments. We establish a moral superadditivity effect, whereby jointly signaling socially desirable deontological beliefs (“What I did is unacceptable”) and socially desirable moral emotions (“I feel guilty”) made that participants ev...