An ongoing debate in the United States relating to COVID-19 features the purported tension between containing the coronavirus to save lives or opening the economy to sustain livelihoods, with ethical overtones on both sides. Proponents of opening the economy argue that sustaining livelihoods should be prioritized over virus containment, with ethicists asking, “What about the risk to human life?” Defendants of restricting the spread of the virus endorse saving lives through virus containment but contend with the ethical concern “What about (...) people’s livelihoods and individual freedoms?” A commonly held belief is that political ideology drives these differential preferences: liberals are more focused on saving lives, whereas conservatives favor sustaining livelihoods with no additional government intervention in the free-market economy. We examine these lay beliefs among US residents in four studies and find that economic system justification (ESJ), an ideology that defends the prevailing economic system when under threat, is a reliable psychological predictor beyond political ideology. Specifically, compared to those who scored low on ESJ, people who scored high on ESJ judged China as more justified in downplaying the spread of virus to protect its interest in the global free-market economy, supported in-person over online learning, viewed shelter in place as less desirable, and perceived the opening of the Texas economy as more legitimate. We also find that multiple psychological mechanisms might be at work—resistance to market interventions, perceived legitimacy of opening the economy, perceived seriousness of the health crisis, and violation of human rights. (shrink)

The effect of authentic leadership and leader competency on employee job performance has received growing attention in the past decades; however, few studies have simultaneously integrated these two leadership perspectives. We have thus developed a mediated moderation model to test the interactive effect of authentic leadership and competency on followers’ job performance through work engagement. Based on a sample of 248 subordinate–supervisor pairs, hierarchical regression analyses reveal that authentic leadership positively relates to followers’ task performance and organizational citizenship behavior ; (...) leader competency moderates the relationship between authentic leadership and OCB; and followers’ work engagement mediates the main effect of authentic leadership and the interactive effect of authentic leadership and competency on followers’ task performance and OCB. All the three results are consistent with our hypotheses. (shrink)

Statements that share an explanation tend to lend inductive support to one another. For example, being told that Many furniture movers have a hard time financing a house increases the judged probability that Secretaries have a hard time financing a house. In contrast, statements with different explanations reduce one another s judged probability. Being told that Many furniture movers have bad backs decreases the judged probability that Secretaries have bad backs. I pose two questions concerning such discounting effects. First, does (...) the reduction depend on explanations being mutually incompatible or does it occur when explanations are deemed irrelevant to one another? I found that a small discounting effect occurred with statements that were blatantly unrelated. However, the discounting effect also depended on a factor external to the argument being judged; the composition of the argument set. Second, are explanation effects attributable to changes in the belief afforded statements or to response-specific changes resulting from misunderstanding of the probability rating task or response bias? The results implicate changes in belief. Prior belief influenced conditional probability more than argument strength judgements, as it would if participants understood the tasks in the same way as the experimenter. Also, conditional probability true and false judgements were complementary, suggesting no response bias. (shrink)

The method of strong inference, wherein multiple hypotheses are constructed and a crucial experiment is carried out, is said to have special status in science because it guarantees falsifying results. However, the proposition that strong inference is in any way superior to the method of constructing and testing a single hypothesis is contradicted both by close rational analysis and by the empirical evidence. An experiment is reviewed in which subjects who conduct strong tests are much less likely to discover or (...) approximate the truth than subjects who conduct simple tests of a false hypothesis. It is concluded that a potential to falsify is necessary for a test to have corroborative value; however, arguments as to the general superiority of one type of potentially falsifying test over another have no logical basis. Any claim as to a general superiority of strong tests over simple tests would require access to information about the probability of each strategy to produce various relationships between the truth and whatever explanations are most accessible, and such information is not knowable, even in principle. (shrink)

A conditional survey establishes a preliminary case for believing that policy differences are to some extent driven by fundamental beliefs about empirical aspects of society and economics. The survey shows willingness in about a third of all respondents to shift their expressed policy preferences when asked a hypothetical question positing negative consequences of their initial preferences. This suggests that assumptions about the consequences of public policies may play as important a role in policy preferences, or a more important role, than (...) do values, personality traits, or motivation. However, roughly a third of those with the strongest initial attitudes expressed even stronger attitudes—but in the same direction—when confronted with counterattitudinal hypotheticals. This may reflect attitude polarization of the sort encountered by previous researchers, such as Lord et al. (1979) and Taber and Lodge (2006). Or it may indicate a tacit objection to the very idea of basing policy preferences on policy consequences. (shrink)