Recent findings suggest that exerting executive control influences responses to moral dilemmas. In our study, subjects judged how morally appropriate it would be for them to kill one person to save others. They made these judgments in 24 dilemmas that systematically varied physical directness of killing, personal risk to the subject, inevitability of the death, and intentionality of the action. All four of these variables demonstrated main effects. Executive control was indexed by scores on working-memory-capacity (WMC) tasks. People with higher WMC found certain types of killing more appropriate than did those with lower WMC and were more consistent in their judgments. We also report interactions between manipulated variables that implicate complex emotion-cognition integration processes not captured by current dual-process views of moral judgment.

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The power motive predicts influential social behaviour; however, its heterogeneous conceptualisations have produced inconsistent results. To overcome this problem, we developed and validated a unitary taxonomy of social power motives based on established delineations of social hierarchies: the dominance, prestige, and leadership account. While we could measure these motives both reliably and distinctively (study 1), we also showed they strongly related to a common power desire (study 2). Assessing their nomological networks (studies 3 and 4), we demonstrated distinct associations between the dominance motive (D: wanting to coerce others into adhering to one's will) and anger and verbal aggression; the prestige motive (P: wanting to obtain admiration and respect) and the fear of losing reputation and claiming to have higher moral concerns; the leadership motive (L: wanting to take responsibility in and for one's group) and emotional stability and helping behaviour. Furthermore, while D uniquely predicted agonistic/retaliatory behaviour in dictator games (study 5), L uniquely predicted the attainment of higher employment ranks in various professions (study 7). Finally, at least to some degree, P and L related positively, and D negatively to prosocial donating behaviour (study 6). This taxonomy represents a novel and powerful approach to predicting influential social behaviour. © 2018 European Association of Personality Psychology

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