An extant debate in the morality literature centers on whether honesty is a stable and generalizable trait or whether honest behavior in one situation is independent from honest behavior in another situation. However, a third possibility is that tendencies toward dishonesty vary according to...

By running an experiment among Germans collecting their passports or ID cards in the citizen centers of Berlin, we find that individuals with an East German family background cheat significantly more on an abstract task than those with a West German family background. The longer individuals were...

First experiences are highly influential. Here, the authors show that non-first experiences can be made to seem like firsts and consequently to have a disproportionate influence on judgment. In six experiments, one piece of a series of information was framed to appear to have “first” status:...

Funeral rituals perform important social functions for families and communities, but little is known about the motives of people planning funerals. Using mixed methods, we examine funeral planning as end-of-life relational spending. We identify how relational motives drive and manifest in...

By running an experiment among Germans collecting their passports or ID cards in the citizen centers of Berlin, we find that individuals with an East German family background cheat significantly more on an abstract task than those with a West German family background. The longer individuals were...

People repeatedly fail to bring about desired outcomes, and yet they also fail to learn from their own and others’ mistakes. One potential cause for this failure to learn is that people believe that they will have more control over the future than they had over the past. Across several...