From Science Daily Imagine a runaway boxcar heading toward five people who can't escape its path. Now imagine you had the power to reroute the boxcar onto different tracks with only one person along that route. Would you do it? That's the moral dilemma posed by a team of Michigan State University...

By MacGregor Campbell, New Scientist Does free will actually exist? Or are we all just biological robots? In this video, see why modern neuroscience claims free will is an illusion and why psychology experiments suggest we may be better off believing the lie. Controlling our own destiny is so ingrained...

By David Brooks, The New York Times The story of evolution, we have been told, is the story of the survival of the fittest. The strong eat the weak. The creatures that adapt to the environment pass on their selfish genes. Those that do not become extinct. In this telling, we humans are like all other...

By Meghan Clyne, Wall Street Journal An excerpt: If you've already ditched your New Year's resolution, you are not alone: These days, self-control isn't exactly America's strong suit. Our economy is hobbled because too many of us bought homes we couldn't afford. Obesity is rampant...

By Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Washington Post. "Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century...

by Mike Barrowcliffe in Times Online "Professor Gail Heyman, of the University of California, questioned 130 students and their parents about parental lying. She was surprised to find that more than 80 per cent of parents lied at some point, even those who insisted to their children that it was...

Culture, Altruism, and Conflict Between Ancestors and Descendants By Mary Kathryn Coe, Amber Palmer, Craig T. Palmer, and Carl L. DeVito Abstract: Anthropologists often recorded the typical amount of kinship altruism – that is, the altruism between individuals who identify one another as kin -- they...

By Shanda Traiser and Myron A. Eighmy Abstract: In this study, researchers examined the assumption that senior-level undergraduate students from private colleges universities possess higher levels of moral and ethical development than students from public institutions. In addition, the researchers sought...

By Eugene Caruso & Francesca Gino Abstract: Four experiments demonstrate that closing one's eyes affects ethical judgment and behavior because it induces people to mentally simulate events more extensively. People who considered situations with their eyes closed rather than open judged immoral...

By Robert Sparrow "Since the first sex reassignment operations were performed, individual sex has come to be, to some extent at least, a technological artifact. The existence of sperm sorting technology, and of prenatal determination of fetal sex via ultrasound along with the option of termination...

Russell E. Johnson , Kyle W. Groff , Meng U. Taing Although organizational commitment is a multidimensional construct, researchers have tended to examine the independent effects of its different forms. However, doing so creates potential problems of model misspecification and under-prediction if interactions...

Keith R. Brown Moral boundaries are often conceptualized as an expression of an individual's identity or belief system. However, social forces greatly influence how and when consumers activate moral boundaries. Utilizing a dramaturgical perspective, this article shows that the activation of moral...

Nancy E. Snow Abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq confront us with the question of how seemingly ordinary soldiers could have perpetrated harms against prisoners. In this essay I argue that a Stoic approach to the virtues can provide a bulwark against the social and personal forces that can lead to abusive...

Previous research has documented that attributional information contained in causal accounts for success induce impressions of arrogance and modesty. The research further examined the role of accounts as well as level of success when perceivers know the real reason for success. Two studies of university...

Two factors are assumed to induce impressions of arrogance and modesty in reaction to others' accounts for success: the dimensions underlying the cause for success and the perceived desirability of the cause. Guided by Weiner's attribution theory (B. Weiner, 1986), it was proposed that accounts...