Matthew Feinberg

• University of Toronto

Morality is central to social well-being and cognition, and moral lexicon is a key device for human communication of moral concepts and experiences. How was the moral lexicon formed? We explore this open question and hypothesize that words evolved to take on abstract moral meanings from concrete and grounded experiences. We test this hypothesis by...

Morality is central to social well-being and cognition, and moral lexicon is a key device for human communication of moral concepts and experiences. How was the moral lexicon formed? We explore this open question and hypothesize that words evolved to take on abstract moral meanings from concrete and grounded experiences. We test this hypothesis by...

Careful bias management and data fidelity are key.

Politics and its controversies have permeated everyday life, but the daily impact of politics on the general public is largely unknown. Here, we apply an affective science framework to understand how the public experiences daily politics in a two-part examination. We first used longitudinal, daily diary methods to track two samples of U.S. particip...

Incivility is prevalent in society suggesting a potential benefit. Within politics, theorists and strategists often claim incivility grabs attention and stokes interest in what a politician has to say. In contrast, we propose incivility diminishes overall interest in what a politician has to say because people find the incivility morally distastefu...

Many objects are viewed as sacred even though few people have a strong personal connection to them. To explain this phenomenon, we used art as a case study to develop and test a theory wherein collective transcendence beliefs-beliefs that an object links the collective to something larger and more important than the self, spanning space and time-ar...

Social movements are critical agents of social change, but are rarely monolithic. Instead, movements are often made up of distinct factions with unique agendas and tactics, and there is little scientific consensus on when these factions may complement – or impede – one another's influence. One central debate concerns whether radical flanks within a...

Social movements are critical agents of social change, but are rarely monolithic. Instead, movements are often made up of distinct factions with unique agendas and tactics, and there is little scientific consensus on when these factions may complement – or impede – one another’s influence. One central debate concerns whether radical flanks within a...

We provide the first systematic investigation of trends in the incivility of American politicians on Twitter, a dominant platform for political communication in the United States. Applying a validated artificial intelligence classifier to all 1.3 million tweets made by members of Congress since 2009, we observe a 23% increase in incivility over a d...

We provide the first systematic investigation of trends in the incivility of American politicians on Twitter, a dominant platform for political communication in the U.S. Applying a validated artificial intelligence classifier to all 1.3 million tweets made by members of Congress since 2009, we observe a 23% increase in incivility over a decade on T...

Transient affect can be tightly linked with people's global life satisfaction (i.e., affect globalizing). This volatile judgment style leaves life satisfaction vulnerable to the inevitable highs and lows of everyday life, and has been associated with lower psychological health. The present study examines a potentially fundamental but untested regul...

It is well-recognized that increasingly polarized American partisans subscribe to sharply diverging worldviews. Can partisanship influence Americans to view the world around them differently from one another? In the current research, we explored partisans’ recollections of objective events that occurred during identical footage of a real protest. A...

Compassion is multifaceted in both expression and motivation. It is influenced by a range of contextual and situational factors. This study aims to investigate how positive and negative attitudes towards compassion are associated with the presentation of compassionate outcomes. In particular, we examined how positive attitudes towards compassion (c...

Americans’ hostility toward political opponents has intensified to a degree not fully explained by actual ideological polarization. We propose that political animosity may be based particularly on partisans’ overestimation of the prevalence of extreme, egregious views held by only a minority of opponents but imagined to be widespread. Across five s...

The objective of this study is to determine the effects of framing of greenhouse gas emissions information on people’s willingness-to-pay for transportation emissions reductions. Six different framing techniques were developed following goal framing theory and applied to the current Natural Resources Canada vehicle labels for gasoline, plug-in hybr...

How people respond to health threats can influence their own health and, when people are facing communal risks, even their community’s health. We propose that people commonly respond to health threats by managing their emotions with cognitive strategies such as reappraisal, which can reduce fear and protect mental health. However, because fear can...

Transient affect can be tightly linked with people’s global life satisfaction (i.e., affect globalizing). This volatile judgment style leaves life satisfaction vulnerable to the inevitable highs and lows of everyday life, and has been associated with lower psychological health. The present study examines a potentially fundamental but untested regul...

Skepticism about global warming persists in the general public. Psychologists disagree on whether dire messages (emphasizing negative consequences) and solution-oriented messages (emphasizing negative consequences and potential solutions) increase or reduce skepticism about global warming, or whether the effects depend on recipients’ psychological...

How people respond to health threats can influence their own health and, when facing communal risks, even their community's health. We propose that people commonly respond to health threats by managing their emotions with cognitive strategies like reappraisal, which can reduce fear and protect mental health. However, because fear can also motivate...

Politics and its controversies have permeated everyday life, but the daily impact of politics is largely unknown. Here, we conceptualize politics as a chronic stressor with important consequences for people’s daily lives. We used longitudinal, daily-diary methods to track U.S. participants as they experienced daily political events across two weeks...

Political polarization is on the rise in America. Although social psychologists frequently study the intergroup underpinnings of polarization, they have traditionally had less to say about macro societal processes that contribute to its rise and fall. Recent cross-disciplinary work on the contemporary political and media landscape provides these co...

Political polarization is on the rise in America. Although social psychologists frequently study the intergroup underpinnings of polarization, they have traditionally had less to say about macro societal processes that contribute to its rise and fall. Recent cross-disciplinary work on the contemporary political and media landscape provides these co...

Politics permeates everyday life, often evoking negative emotions among the public and affecting their well-being. Politics has, in essence, become a chronic stressor for many. Fortunately, people can protect themselves from politics: people commonly employ emotion regulation strategies to help reduce their negative emotional responses to politics...

This study will investigate how information on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG-E) is presented can significantly influence the response strength when choosing a new vehicle. Five different labels, based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) vehicle labels, are designed and tested in a discrete choice experiment considering the combining effe...

Political polarization is on the rise in America. Although social psychologists frequently study the intergroup underpinnings of polarization, they have traditionally had less to say about macro societal processes that contribute to its rise and fall. Recent cross-disciplinary work on the contemporary political and media landscape provides these co...

How do protest actions impact public support for social movements? Here we test the claim that extreme protest actions-protest behaviors perceived to be harmful to others, highly disruptive, or both-typically reduce support for social movements. Across 6 experiments, including 3 that were preregistered, participants indicated less support for socia...

The political landscape in the US and many other countries is characterized by policy impasses and animosity between rival political groups. Research finds that these divisions are fueled in part by disparate moral concerns and convictions that undermine communication and understanding between liberals and conservatives. This “moral empathy gap” is...

Individuals' political stances tend to place them into the conservative "right," the liberal "left," or the moderate "middle." What might explain this pattern of division? Moral Politics Theory (Lakoff, 1996) holds that political attitudes arise from moral worldviews that are conceptually anchored in contrasting family models-the strict-father and...

A large literature demonstrates that moral convictions guide many of our thoughts, behaviors, and social interactions. Yet, we know little about how these moral convictions come to exist. In the present research we explore moralization—the process by which something that was morally neutral takes on moral properties—examining what factors facilitat...

SPPS729408_suppl_mat - Morally Reframed Arguments Can Affect Support for Political Candidates

How do people respond to violent political protest? The authors present a theory proposing that the use of violence leads the general public to view a protest group as less reasonable, a perception that reduces identification with the group. This reduced identification in turn reduces public support for the violent group. Furthermore, the authors a...

Research finds collectivists make external attributions for others’ behavior, whereas individualists make internal attributions. By focusing on external causes, collectivists should be less punitive toward those who harm others. Yet, many collectivistic cultures are known for strict retributive justice systems. How can collectivists simultaneously...

Political action (volunteering, protesting) is central to functioning democracies, and action is often motivated by negative emotion. However, theories of emotion regulation suggest that people often strive to decrease such negative emotions. Thus, effective emotion regulation (e.g., reappraisal)—while helping people feel better—could have the unin...

People’s political attitudes tend to fall into two groups: progressive and conservative. Moral Politics Theory asserts that this ideological divide is the product of two contrasting moral worldviews, which are conceptually anchored in individuals’ cognitive models about ideal parenting and family life. These models, here labeled the strict and nurt...

Random assignment examination and ANCOVAs, including differences across age and gender (Study 3). (DOCX)

Random assignment examination and ANCOVAs, including differences across age and gender (Study 5). (DOCX)

Random assignment examination and ANCOVAs, including differences across age and gender (Study 1). (DOCX)

Random assignment examination and ANCOVAs, including differences across age and gender (Study 2). (DOCX)

Gender and the strict and nurturant parent models. (DOCX)

Participant exclusion. (DOCX)

Baby crying instructions and stimuli (Study 1). (DOCX)

Policy argument instructions and stimuli (Study 3). (DOCX)

Questionnaires used in Studies 1–5. (DOCX)

Twin sister instructions and stimuli (Study 2). (DOCX)

Metaphor increase and decrease instructions and stimuli (Study 5). (DOCX)

ANCOVAs including differences across age and gender (Study 4). (DOCX)

Morality is commonly held up as the pinnacle of goodness but can also be a source of significant problems, interfering with societal functioning and progress. We review the literature regarding how morality diverges from nonmoral attitudes, biases our cognitive processing, and the ways in which it can lead to negative interpersonal and intergroup c...

Moral reframing involves crafting persuasive arguments that appeal to the targets’ moral values but argue in favor of something they would typically oppose. Applying this technique to one of the most politically polarizing events—political campaigns—we hypothesized that messages criticizing one’s preferred political candidate that also appeal to th...

It is commonly assumed that how individuals identify on the political spectrum–whether liberal, conservative, or moderate–has a universal meaning when it comes to policy stances and voting behavior. But, does political identity mean the same thing from place to place? Using data collected from across the U.S. we find that even when people share the...

Fig A) State blueness indicates percentage of participant’s state voting democrat in the 2012 presidential election. Lines are linear trendlines calculated separately for each level of political identity. Data are from Study 1. Fig B) State blueness indicates percentage of participant’s state voting democrat in the 2008 presidential election. Data...

Scholars have proposed that the emergence of political movements is highly path-dependent, such that early mobilization successes may lead a movement to disproportionately greater eventual success. However, prior research on this claim has been primarily limited to longitudinal analysis of observational data. This paper replicates a unique field ex...

Four studies examined the relationship between political orientation and data selection. In each study participants were given the opportunity to select data from a large data set addressing a specific issue: the justness of the world (Pilot Study), the efficacy of social safety nets (Studies 1-3), and the benefits of social media (Study 3). Partic...

Since its rapid rise in early 2009, scholars have advanced a variety of explanations for popular support for the Tea Party movement. Here we argue that various political, economic, and demographic trends and events--e.g., the election of the first nonwhite president, the rising minority population--have been perceived as threatening the relative st...

Much of contemporary American political rhetoric is characterized by liberals and conservatives advancing arguments for the morality of their respective political positions. However, research suggests such moral rhetoric is largely ineffective for persuading those who do not already hold one's position because advocates advancing these arguments fa...

Awe is an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that transcend current frames of reference. Guided by conceptual analyses of awe as a collective emotion, across 5 studies (N = 2,078) we tested the hypothesis that awe can result in a diminishment of the individual self and its concerns, and increase prosocial behavior. In a representative...

In an attempt to explain the stability of hierarchy, we focus on the perspective of the powerless and how a subjective sense of dependence leads them to imbue the system and its authorities with legitimacy. In Study 1, we found in a nationally representative sample of U.S. employees that financial dependence on one's job was positively associated w...

The widespread existence of cooperation is difficult to explain because individuals face strong incentives to exploit the cooperative tendencies of others. In the research reported here, we examined how the spread of reputational information through gossip promotes cooperation in mixed-motive settings. Results showed that individuals readily commun...

Disgust plays an important role in conservatives' moral and political judgments, helping to explain why conservatives and liberals differ in their attitudes on issues related to purity. We examined the extent to which the emotion-regulation strategy reappraisal drives the disgust-conservatism relationship. We hypothesized that disgust has less infl...

In the current research we tested a comprehensive model of spirituality, religiosity, compassion, and altruism, investigating the independent effects of spirituality and religiosity on compassion and altruism. We hypothesized that, even though spirituality and religiosity are closely related, spirituality and religiosity would have different and un...

Past research argues that religious commitments shape individuals’ prosocial sentiments, including their generosity and solidarity. But what drives the prosociality of less religious people? Three studies tested the hypothesis that, with fewer religious expectations of prosociality, less religious individuals’ levels of compassion will play a large...

Prosociality is fundamental to social relationships, but providing it indiscriminately risks exploitation by egoists. Past work demonstrates that individuals avoid these risks through a more selective form of prosociality, cooperating less and sharing fewer resources with egoists (e.g. Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981). We extend this work to explore wheth...

Americans' attitudes about the environment are highly polarized, but it is unclear why this is the case. We conducted five studies to examine this issue. Studies 1a and 1b demonstrated that liberals, but not conservatives, view the environment in moral terms and that this tendency partially explains the relation between political ideology and envir...

A classic problem in moral psychology concerns whether and when moral judgments are driven by intuition versus deliberate reasoning. In this investigation, we explored the role of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that involves construing an emotion-eliciting situation in a way that diminishes the intensity of the emotional experience. We...

The spreading of reputational information about group members through gossip represents a widespread, efficient, and low-cost form of punishment. Research shows that negative arousal states motivate individuals to gossip about the transgressions of group members. By sharing information in this way groups are better able to promote cooperation and m...

Reputation systems promote cooperation and deter antisocial behavior in groups. Little is known, however, about how and why people share reputational information. Here, we seek to establish the existence and dynamics of prosocial gossip, the sharing of negative evaluative information about a target in a way that protects others from antisocial or e...

Although individuals experience embarrassment as an unpleasant, negative emotion, the authors argue that expressions of embarrassment serve vital social functions, signaling the embarrassed individual's prosociality and fostering trust. Extending past research on embarrassment as a nonverbal apology and appeasement gesture, the authors demonstrate...

Though scientific evidence for the existence of global warming continues to mount, in the United States and other countries belief in global warming has stagnated or even decreased in recent years. One possible explanation for this pattern is that information about the potentially dire consequences of global warming threatens deeply held beliefs th...

Traditionally, research on the causes of prosocial behavior – acts that benefit others, often at a cost to the self – has focused on the role of either material incentives or altruistic motivations in fostering generosity. Here, we review research on a third class of explanation based on reputation. In recent years, research on the interplay betwee...