Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe. In these experiments, we turned in more than 17,000 lost wallets containing varying amounts of money at public and private institutions and measured whether recipients contacted the owners to return the wallets. In virtually all countries, citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money. Neither nonexperts nor professional economists were able to predict this result. Additional data suggest that our main findings can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief, both of which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty.

Would you kill one person to save five? People are more willing to accept such utilitarian action when using a foreign language than when using their native language. In six experiments, we investigated why foreign-language use affects moral choice in this way. On the one hand, the difficulty of using a foreign language might slow people down and increase deliberation, amplifying utilitarian considerations of maximizing welfare. On the other hand, use of a foreign language might stunt emotional processing, attenuating considerations of deontological rules, such as the prohibition against killing. Using a process-dissociation technique, we found that foreign-language use decreases deontological responding but does not increase utilitarian responding. This suggests that using a foreign language affects moral choice not through increased deliberation but by blunting emotional reactions associated with the violation of deontological rules.

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Human beings are deeply moral creatures. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the stories we tell. Literature, cinema, and television are replete with tales that (either literally or metaphorically) describe the battle between good and evil and tell the stories of the heroes and villains fighting for each side. But although we may root for the heroes, it is the villains who often capture most of our attention. Like audiences in the silent movie era, who would boo and hiss loudly when the villain appeared on screen, we are motivated to condemn the villains for their immoral actions; in fact, we seem to take great pleasure in doing so. For those of us of a certain age, there was one villain who allowed us this pleasure more than any other: Darth Vader, the antagonist of the original Star Wars films. From the moment he stepped onto the screen, there could be no doubt in the audience's mind that he was the bad guy. Vader exuded all of the cues used by moviemakers to communicate "evil": He was clad entirely in black; spoke with a deep, ominous voice; and was as much a machine as a human being. To be sure, if we ever encountered him in real life, we would have been very motivated to keep a safe distance.The motivation to identify and condemn villains is not limited to our role as audience members, however. Few tasks are as important to our social

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