Yochanan E Bigman

Yale University | YU

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...

Humanoid robots are often experienced as unnerving, a psychological phenomenon called the “uncanny valley.” Past work reveals that humanlike robots are unnerving in part because they are ascribed humanlike feelings. We leverage this past work to provide a potential solution to the uncanny valley. Three studies reveal that “dehumanizing” humanoid ro...

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms hold promise to reduce inequalities across race and socioeconomic status. One of the most important domains of racial and economic inequalities is medical outcomes; Black and low-income people are more likely to die from many diseases. Algorithms can help reduce these inequalities because they are less likely...

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms hold promise to reduce inequalities across race and socioeconomic status. One of the most important domains of racial and economic inequalities is medical outcomes; Black and low-income people are more likely to die from many diseases. Algorithms can help reduce these inequalities because they are less likely...

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...

Organizations are increasingly relying on service robots to improve efficiency, but these robots often make mistakes, which can aggravate customers and negatively affect organizations. How can organizations mitigate the frontline impact of these robotic blunders? Drawing from theories of anthropomorphism and mind perception, we propose that people...

COVID-19 threatens lives, livelihoods, and civic institutions. Although restrictive public health behaviors such as social distancing help manage its impact, these behaviors can further sever our connections to people and institutions that affirm our identities. Three studies ( N = 1,195) validated a brief 10-item COVID-19 Threat Scale that assesse...

COVID-19 threatens lives, livelihoods, and civic institutions. Although public health initiatives (i.e., social distancing) help manage its impact, these initiatives can further sever our connections to people and institutions that affirm our identities. Three studies (N=1,195) validated a brief 10-item COVID-19 threat scale that assesses 1) realis...

The use of algorithms hold promise for overcoming human biases in decision making. Companies and governments are using algorithms to improve decision-making for hiring, medical treatments, and parole. Unfortunately, as with humans, some of these algorithms make persistently biased decisions, functionally discriminating people based on their race an...

As robots become more autonomous, people will see them as more responsible for wrongdoing. Moral psychology suggests that judgments of robot responsibility will hinge on perceived situational awareness, intentionality, and free will—plus anthropomorphism and the robot’s capacity for harm. We also consider questions of robot rights and moral decisio...

Emotion regulation involves activating an emotion goal (e.g., decrease negative emotions) and using an emotion regulation strategy (e.g., cognitive reappraisal) to pursue it. We propose that activating emotion goals and implementing means can independently affect emotion regulation. People are not always motivated to regulate emotions or to regulat...

Do people want autonomous machines making moral decisions? Nine studies suggest that that the answer is 'no'-in part because machines lack a complete mind. Studies 1-6 find that people are averse to machines making morally-relevant driving, legal, medical, and military decisions, and that this aversion is mediated by the perception that machines ca...

Emotions shape behavior, but there is some debate over the manner in which they do so. The authors propose that how emotions shape behavior depends, in part, on how people expect emotions to shape behavior. In Study 1, angry (vs. calm) participants made more money in a negotiation when they expected anger to be beneficial. In Study 2, angry (vs. ca...

To succeed in self-regulation, people need to believe that it is possible to change behavior and they also need to use effective means to enable such a change. We propose that this also applies to emotion regulation. In two studies, we found that people were most successful in emotion regulation, the more they believed emotions can be controlled an...

Research in several domains suggests that having strategic options is not always beneficial. In this paper, we tested whether having strategic options (vs. not) is helpful or harmful for regulating negative emotions. In 5 studies (N = 151) participants were presented with 1 or more strategic options prior to watching aversive images and using the s...

If good intentions pave the road to hell, what paves the road to heaven? We propose that moral judgments are based, in part, on the degree of effort exerted in performing the immoral or moral act. Because effort can serve as an index of goal importance, greater effort in performing immoral acts would lead to more negative judgments, whereas greater...

Although religiosity is often accompanied by more intense emotions, we propose that people who are more religious may be better at using 1 of the most effective emotion regulation strategies-namely, cognitive reappraisal. We argue that religion, which is a meaning-making system, is linked to better cognitive reappraisal, which involves changing the...

Emotion regulation involves attempts to change the experience and expression of emotions. People engage in such attempts to satisfy either hedonic motives (i.e., to feel good in the moment) or instrumental motives (i.e., to effectively achieve their goals). To change their emotions, people can engage in a variety of strategies. While some strategie...

People who expect to be successful in regulating their emotions tend to experience less frequent negative emotions and are less likely to suffer from depression. It is not clear, however, whether beliefs about the likelihood of success in emotion regulation can shape actual emotion regulation success. To test this possibility, we manipulated partic...

According to expectancy-value models of self-regulation, people are motivated to act in ways they expect to be useful to them. For instance, people are motivated to run when they believe running is useful, even when they have nothing to run away from. Similarly, we propose an expectancy-value model of emotion regulation, according to which people a...

Religion can influence multiple points in the process of emotion regulation, including setting emotional goals and influencing intrinsic and extrinsic emotion regulation. First, religion shapes desired emotional states by setting emotional goals which are instrumental to religious values. These include awe, gratitude, joy, guilt, and hatred. Second...