Mengchen Dong

Mengchen Dong
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Mengchen verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Verified
Mengchen verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Max Planck Institute for Human Development | MPIB · Center for Humans and Machines

Doctor of Psychology

About

34
Publications
8,559
Reads
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180
Citations
Introduction
My research concerns moral behavior and moral judgment, especially in the contexts of Artificial Intelligence, social hierarchy, and culture.
Additional affiliations
September 2016 - February 2021
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Position
  • PhD
September 2013 - June 2016
Beijing Normal University
Position
  • Master's Student
September 2009 - June 2013
South China Normal University
Position
  • Bachelor

Publications

Publications (34)
Article
Full-text available
Moral character is widely expected to lead to moral judgments and practices. However, such expectations are often breached, especially when moral character is measured by self-report. We propose that because self-reported moral character partly reflects a desire to appear good, people who self-report a strong moral character will show moral harshne...
Article
Full-text available
In the last decade, the ambiguity and difficulty of responsibility attribution to AI and human stakeholders (i.e., responsibility gaps) has been increasingly relevant and discussed in extreme cases (e.g., autonomous weapons). On top of related philosophical debates, the current research provides empirical evidence on the importance of bridging resp...
Preprint
Full-text available
The deployment of AI systems for welfare benefit allocation allows for accelerated decision-making and faster provision of critical help, but has already led to an increase in unfair benefit denials and false fraud accusations. Collecting data in the US and the UK (N = 2 449), we explore the public acceptability of such speed-accuracy trade-offs in...
Article
Full-text available
The frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) is constantly moving, raising fears and concerns whenever AI is deployed in a new occupation. Some of these fears are legitimate and should be addressed by AI developers—but others may result from psychological barriers, suppressing the uptake of a beneficial technology. Here, we show that country-level...
Article
Full-text available
As algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are increasingly involved in the management of organizations , it becomes imperative to conduct human-centered AI management research and understand people's feelings and behaviors when machines gain power over humans. The two mainstream methods-vignette studies and case studies-reveal important...
Preprint
The growing integration of AI tools in communication promises enhanced efficiency and productivity. However, concerns about the erosion of trust and authenticity have fueled debates over the disclosure and regulation ofAI-mediated communication. It remains unclear a) how AI mediation influences trust, b) whether the efficiency gains outweigh potent...
Article
Artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance human communication, for example, by improving the quality of our writing, voice or appearance. However, AI mediated communication also has risks—it may increase deception, compromise authenticity or yield widespread mistrust. As a result, both policymakers and technology firms are developing approaches to p...
Preprint
Full-text available
The deployment of AI systems for welfare benefit allocation allows for accelerated decision-making and faster provision of critical help, but has already led to an increase in unfair benefit denials and false fraud accusations. Collecting data in the US and the UK (N = 2449), we explore the public acceptability of such speed-accuracy trade-offs in...
Article
Full-text available
Status-related impressions influence important interpersonal dynamics, including moral judgments of good or bad, and right or wrong, whereas these impressions can be formed based on subtle cues (e.g., formal versus casual attire of transgressors). The current research examined how attire influences moral judgments in transgressive contexts and for...
Conference Paper
The deployment of AI systems for welfare benefit allocation allows for accelerated decision-making and faster provision of critical help, but has already led to an increase in unfair benefit denials and false fraud accusations. Collecting data in the US and the UK (N = 2449), we explore the public acceptability of such speed-accuracy trade-offs in...
Preprint
Full-text available
Artificial Intelligence (AI) often raises fears when deployed in new occupations, in a way that varies substantially across countries. Here we show that these country-level variations across occupations can be predicted by a psychological model at the individual level. Individuals fear AI in a given occupation as a function of the mismatch between...
Chapter
Full-text available
False moral superiority refers to the phenomenon that people inflate their moral traits or behaviors, and falsely believe that they are more likely to possess moral traits or enact moral behaviors than most other people.
Preprint
Full-text available
In the last decade, the ambiguity and difficulty of responsibility attribution to AI and human stakeholders (i.e., responsibility gaps) has been increasingly relevant and discussed in extreme cases (e.g., autonomous weapons). On top of related philosophical debates, the current research provides empirical evidence on the importance of bridging resp...
Preprint
Full-text available
As algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are increasingly involved in the management of organizations, it becomes imperative to understand people’s feelings and behaviors when machines gain power over humans. There are two mainstream methods for doing so, vignette studies and case studies. Both can reveal important insights into human-...
Preprint
Full-text available
The rapid development of AI-mediated communication technologies (AICTs), which are digital tools that use AI to augment interpersonal messages, has raised concerns about the future of interpersonal trust and prompted discussions about disclosure and uptake. This paper contributes to this discussion by assessing perceptions about the acceptability a...
Article
Full-text available
It is widely documented that third parties punish norm violations, even at a substantial cost to themselves. However, little is known about how third-party punishment occurs in groups consisting of members who differ in status. Having a higher-status member promotes norm enforcement and group efficiency but also poses threats to collective goods wh...
Article
Full-text available
People often say one thing while doing another, and are therefore criticized as hypocrites. Despite the widespread criticism of hypocrites, relatively less is known about factors that influence moral judgment of hypocrisy. In particular, why are some word-deed inconsistencies condemned more harshly than others? The current research focuses on word-...
Article
Full-text available
Although easy names are known to help gain the trust of others, the underlying links between names and trust remain understudied, especially in non-alphabetic languages (e.g., Chinese). Drawing on the stereotype content model framework, the current research revealed that Chinese names’ recognizability had asymmetrical effects on warmth and competen...
Article
Full-text available
In the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries attempt to enforce new social norms to prevent the further spread of the coronavirus. A key to the success of these measures is the individual adherence to norms that are collectively beneficial to contain the spread of the pandemic. However, individuals’ self-interest bias (i.e., the pr...
Article
Full-text available
Status holders across societies often take moral initiatives to navigate group practices toward collective goods; however, little is known about how different societies (e.g., the US versus China) evaluate high- (vs. low-) status holders’ transgressions of preached morals. Two pre-registered studies (total N = 1,374) examined how status information...
Article
Full-text available
Environmental issues are some of the most pressing threats the world is facing nowadays. In this context, motivating individual pro-environmental behavior becomes highly relevant. One strategy is to harness people's pro-environmental dispositions (e.g., biospheric values, pro-environmental attitudes). Although acknowledging the need to behave pro-e...
Preprint
Full-text available
Moral character is widely believed to guide a moral and prosocial life, navigating individuals through decisions about right or wrong. People with a strong moral character therefore may not be expected to behave hypocritically, by imposing stringent moral standards on others but not on themselves. But from an evolutionary perspective, moral charact...
Preprint
In the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries attempt to enforce new social norms to prevent the further spread of the coronavirus. A key to the success of these measures is the individual adherence to norms that are collectively beneficial to contain the spread of the pandemic. However, individuals’ self-interest bias (i.e., the pr...
Article
Full-text available
N ames can play an important role in forming first impressions. While much of the literature has demonstrated how alphabet-based names influence impression formation, little is known about how character-based names (e.g., Chinese names) affect interpersonal trust. Across six studies, we demonstrated that a difficult-to-recognise Chinese name with l...
Article
Full-text available
People often consider themselves as more moral than average others (i.e., moral superiority) and present themselves as more moral than they actually are (i.e., moral hypocrisy). We examined whether feelings of moral superiority—as a manifestation of self-enhancement motives—motivates people’s hypocritical behavior, that is, their discrepant moral p...
Article
Full-text available
Based on Terror Management Theory (TMT), we suggest that spirituality and prosocial attitudes toward money have a similar defensive function in resisting existential anxiety. In mortality salient (MS) situations, both spirituality and prosocial money attitudes afford symbolic immortality by self-transcendent connections. In four studies, we found t...
Article
Full-text available
Acting prosocially can be quite challenging in one of the most salient intergroup contexts in contemporary society: Soccer. When winning is the ultimate goal, balancing self-interest with helping a fellow player in distress can be a tough decision; yet it happens. To date, we know little about what motivates soccer players to offer such help in the...
Article
Full-text available
Religious beliefs in Chinese cultural background, especially in Chinese secular society, have rarely been systematically investigated. The nonreligious-based population in China endorses certain supernatural beliefs or has related transcendent experience, even though they usually claim themselves as non-believers. Therefore, the current research ex...
Article
Full-text available
The current study surveyed 3,911 students from grades 5 to 6 with primary school and 7 to 9 with secondary school from 13 cities in China,with the adoption of three questionnaires,namely Social Support Questionnaire on Youth,Adolescents’Self - concept Questionnaire,and Adolescents’Social Networking Preference. It was aimed to explore the relationsh...
Article
Full-text available
Previous research has identified the positive correlation between religion and prosocial behavior. Accordingly, the “religious prosociality hypothesis” was proposed to further examine if there was a causal relation. In this paper, progress of current researches concerning the religious prosociality hypothesis would be introduced and reviewed, from...
Article
The current study investigated the effect of earlier attention processing on later spatial attention allocation using a prime stimulus followed by a dot-probe task. Here we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) respectively when picture primes and face pairs were displayed at the two successive stages. For negative primes, participants showed sm...

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