Attachment to one's phone may be an important but overlooked risk factor for the engagement of potentially health-risking driving behaviors. Understanding that phone attachment may adversely affect driving behaviors has the potential to inform prevention and intervention efforts designed to reduce distracted driving behaviors, especially in young drivers.

Does God want people to favor coreligionists or to treat in-group and out-group members equally? To test people’s beliefs about God’s moral preferences, we conducted three preregistered studies. Study 1 was a field study with Christian and Muslim Fijians ( N = 188). Study 2 was an online study with Jewish Israelis ( N = 384). Study 3 was a field study with Christian and Hindu Fijians ( N = 539). Across studies, participants indicated whether an in-group member should sacrifice his life to save five in-group members (in one dilemma) or out-group members (in a second dilemma). For each dilemma, they then indicated what God would prefer. Participants believed that, compared with themselves, God would more strongly approve of an in-group member saving out-group members. Results generalize results from previous studies with Muslim Palestinians, providing cross-cultural evidence that religious believers think God prefers more universal moral reasoning than they do themselves.

Although past research has suggested a link between chronic stress and both physical and mental well-being in older adults, less is known about the degree to which neuroendocrine markers of stress are associated with higher-order cognitive processes such as decision-making. In a sample of healthy older adults (55–85 years), we tested the degree to which variation in the diurnal cortisol rhythm, an index of hypothalamic-adrenal-pituitary axis dynamics, was related to differences in risky decision making. We found that diurnal cortisol fall predicted performance on the Cups Task, a risky decision making task that independently tests risk taking to achieve gains and risk taking to avoid losses. For potential gains, we found that greater risk-taking was associated with lower diurnal cortisol fall, independent of age or sex of the participant. For risks to avoid potential losses, we found that lower diurnal fall selectively was associated with suboptimal decision-making for men only. Compared to males with more typical diurnal fall, those who displayed lower diurnal fall made more risky choices and demonstrated lower sensitivity to the expected value of the risky choice. We integrate these results with the extant literature on the effects of stress on cognitive aging.

Transgender rights and discrimination against transgender people are growing public policy issues. Theorizing from social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology suggests that beyond attitudes, discrimination against transgender people may derive from folk theories about what gender is and where it comes from. Transgender identity is met with hostility, in part, because it poses a challenge to the lay view that gender is determined at birth, and based on observable physical and behavioral characteristics. Here, in two pre-registered studies (N = 1323), we asked American adults to indicate the gender of a transgender target who either altered their biology through surgical interventions or altered their outward appearance: to what extent is it their birth-assigned gender or their self-identified gender? Responses correlate strongly with affect toward transgender people, measured by feeling thermometers, yet predict views on transgender people’s right to use their preferred bathrooms above and beyond feelings. Compared to male participants, female participants judge the person’s gender more in line with the self-identified gender than the birth-assigned gender. This is consistent with social and psychological theories that posit high status (e.g., men) and low status (e.g., women) members of social classification systems view group hierarchies in more and less essentialist ways respectively. Gender differences in gender category beliefs decrease with religiosity and conservatism, and are smaller in higher age groups. These results suggest that folk theories of gender, or beliefs about what gender is and how it is determined have a unique role in how transgender people are viewed and treated. Moreover, as evident by the demographic variability of gender category beliefs, folk theories are shaped by social and cultural forces and are amenable to interventions. They offer an alternative pathway to measure policy support and possibly change attitude toward transgender people.

In seven studies, six with American Christians and one with Israeli Jews (total N = 2,323), we examine how and when belief in moralizing gods influences dehumanization of ethno-religious outgroups. We focus on dehumanization because it is a key feature of intergroup conflict. In Studies 1-6, participants completed measures of dehumanization from their own perspectives and also from the perspective of God, rating the groups' humanity as they thought God would rate it, or wish for them to rate it. When participants completed measures from both their own and God's perspectives, they reported believing that, compared with their own views, God would see (or prefer for them to see) outgroup members as more human. In Study 7, we extend these findings by demonstrating that thinking about God's views reduces the extent to which religious believers personally dehumanize outgroup members. Collectively, results demonstrate that religious believers attribute universalizing moral attitudes to God, compared to themselves, and document how thinking about God's views can promote more positive intergroup attitudes.