Kyle Fiore Law, PhD

The politics of well-being during democratic backsliding: How partisan affiliation and support for government actions relate to happiness and life satisfaction Do politics shape happiness? Evidence from 5-week tracking links policy support to well-being amid democratic backsliding in the U.S.

📰 New Research: The Politics of Well-Being during Democratic Backsliding

@djwu.bsky.social ky.social, @kyleflaw.com, @stysyropoulos.bsky.social y.social, and @sylviapperry.bsky.social show striking partisan differences in well-being during Trump’s second term.

advances.in/psychology/1...

Grateful to co-authors David Markowitz, @stysyropoulos.bsky.social, Thomas Mazzuchi, and @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social!

Taken together, obituaries reflect what families choose to highlight in remembrance and, in the aggregate, offer a window into what society values as a life well lived.

Empirical article here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Cultural scripts around gender and age were also reflected in these memorializations.

Obituaries for men more often referenced achievement and power, while those for women emphasized benevolence and enjoyment of life; older and younger adults were remembered using different value language as well.

Across time, obituaries emphasized tradition and benevolence far more than achievement or power.

But around major disruptions like 9/11 and COVID-19, families tended to foreground different values when remembering loved ones, reflecting subtle shifts in what it means to have lived well.

What 38 million obituaries reveal about how Americans define a ‘life well lived’ Obituaries reveal shifting cultural values across time and place. Here’s a glimpse into how the moral vocabulary has evolved over several decades.

Our new @theconversation.com piece distills findings from our recent @pnas.org paper analyzing 38m U.S. obituaries (1998-2024).

We examine which values families highlight when remembering loved ones and how those values shift over time and major events.

theconversation.com/what-38-mill...

The hidden costs of human cooperation Cooperation enables humans to reshape entire environments and build complex societies. Although often celebrated, cooperation also has hidden costs. By presenting core mechanisms behind its emergence,...

Really good read: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

With @jowylie.bsky.social, Gordon Kraft-Todd, @nathanliang.bsky.social, @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social, and @stysyropoulos.bsky.social!

Practically, if people expect their own virtue to be judged more favorably, this could (potentially) make them more willing to act publicly, which may support norm setting. Still, the consistent discounting of public relative to private virtue suggests those acts may carry a credibility cost.

Yet these asymmetries vanish when judgments are made side by side. Moreover, across studies, public virtue was judged as less morally good than private virtue (i.e., virtue discounting), a difference most consistently accounted for by lower attributions of principled motivation for public actions.

Across 4 preregistered studies (N=2,511), we find self-serving asymmetries. On average, people expect their own public acts of virtue to appear more principled, less reputation driven, and more trustworthy than people tend to rate identical public actions performed by others.

<em>British Journal of Social Psychology</em> | Wiley Online Library Public acts of virtue can promote prosocial norms yet are often met with moral scepticism – a phenomenon known as virtue discounting. What psychological processes might underlie people's propensity t....

Public displays of virtue like donating or speaking up can set norms, but they’re often met with skepticism (“virtue discounting”). Our new paper asks: do people expect their own public virtue to be judged differently than others’ similar actions?
bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Exactly! Obituaries are usually written positively rather than neutrally. But that’s the point. They reveal what a society values as living well, and how those values differ depending on who is being remembered, and how they shift across time and in response to collectively shared events.

The (stellar) team behind this work: David Markowitz, Thomas Mazzuchi, @stysyropoulos.bsky.social, me, and @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social

Taken together, obituaries show how societies remember the dead by encoding values, responding to cultural upheavals, and reinforcing scripts of age and gender. They are cultural time capsules that reveal what we believe makes a life well lived.

Reflecting cultural scripts:

Men’s legacies were more dynamic across the lifespan, often tied to achievement & power.

Women’s were steadier, more often tied to benevolence & hedonism.

Older people were remembered more for tradition & conformity than younger people.

Legacies shifted with major events:
• Security declined after 9/11
• Achievement fell after the 2008 crash
• Benevolence collapsed during COVID and has not recovered four years later

The most common values across obituaries were tradition and benevolence.

Values like power and stimulation appeared less often.

An exploration of basic human values in 38 million obituaries over 30 years | PNAS How societies remember the dead can reveal what people value in life. We analyzed 38 million obituaries from the United States to examine how perso...

🪦 New in @pnas.org: we analyzed 38 million U.S. obituaries to ask what signals a life well lived:

What values are people most remembered for?

How do legacies shift with cultural events?

How do age and gender shape what it means to have lived well?

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Across 6 European countries, people feel more responsible to protect future generations than to directly reduce climate change. Both forms of responsibility predict climate policy support.

🔗 authors.elsevier.com/a/1lcgHzzKDP...

New paper w/ Zhaoquan Wang, @stysyropoulos.bsky.social, & many others.

The team: @stysyropoulos.bsky.social, Bren O’Connor, @amormino.bsky.social, @drcharlie.bsky.social, Brock Bastian, Abigail Marsh & @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social

@seoyeonbae211.bsky.social and I spoke with @drjimdavies.bsky.social about our new preprint on altruistic motivation.

Grateful for his thoughtful write-up in @nautil.us and the outstanding team behind this work (see below)!

@lianeleeyoung.bsky.social @stysyropoulos.bsky.social @amormino.bsky.social @drcharlie.bsky.social @realmoralitylab.bsky.social

Excited to share
@seoyeonbae211.bsky.social's first preprint—an ambitious global study of human motivation!

Using data from 900,000+ people in 100+ countries, we find altruistic motives consistently outweigh egoistic ones across cultures.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

We asked over 8,700 people in 6 countries to think about future generations in decision-making, and this is what we found When people reflect on how their actions shape the future, they are more likely to support solutions to present-day issues like poverty and inequality.

We asked over 8,700 people in 6 countries to think about future generations in decision-making, and this is what we found theconversation.com/we-asked-ove... @stysyropoulos.bsky.social

Across 3 studies, we find that valuing future lives equally—regardless of their distance in time—predicts stronger interest in long-term oriented, high-impact careers.

Preprint here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

@stysyropoulos.bsky.social @amormino.bsky.social @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social

Asking participants to roleplay as a leader of a committee protecting future generations & having them partake in a philosophical thought exercise emphasizing reduction of intergenerational harm increased moral concern felt towards future generations. @kyleflaw.com

doi.org/10.1111/bjso...

Mapping the Moral Architecture of Effective and Extraordinary Altruism While global challenges demand both impartiality and effectiveness, people often prioritize those nearby and overlook the impact of their prosocial actions. Here, we examined what moral values…

PsyArXiv Preprints | Mapping the Moral Architecture of Effective and Extraordinary Altruism

<em>British Journal of Social Psychology</em> | Wiley Online Library In three studies (N = 8775) including two pre-registered experiments and a pre-registered cross-national replication across five countries, we tested whether intergenerational appeals that emphasize ...

Hey y’all! New paper with @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social & @stysyropoulos.bsky.social is out in BJSP!

We test ways to expand moral concern to future generations, with spillover benefits for distant others today.

#socialpsych #PsychSciSky #psychology

bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

🚨 New preprint! What drives truly selfless giving?

Led by @kyleflaw.bsky.social! We studied effective altruists (EAs) and organ donors to strangers (ODs) comparing them to controls.

EAs & ODs ⬆️ moral expansiveness
EAs ⬆️utilitarianism

Notably, loyalty isn’t always parochial. 👀
🔗 in comments!