I discuss the "predicament of the flawed evaluator” in judgments of expertise in self and others. People are often left to their own devices when evaluating a person's knowledge and reasoning, but how can they do so accurately when they inevitably suffer from gaps and defects in their own expertise? I note problems this predicament creates for self-judgment (e.g., the Dunning-Kruger effect), as well as difficulties it suggests for evaluations of others—in particular, that people often fail to recognize high competence or genius in the people and ideas surrounding them. The talk will touch upon problems the flawed evaluator predicament produces for social comparison, the marketplace of ideas, the wisdom of crowds, advice-taking, as well as political debate and civic engagement. The underlying theme of the talk is that Karl Popper was right when he observed that the scope of our ignorance greatly outstrips that of our knowledge. But the real problem is that we are paradoxically unaware of how frequently that ignorance visits us in everyday life.

Researchers often assume that in their close relationships, as in the rest of their lives, people are fundamentally self-centered and self-serving. Although this view surely describes many relationships at least some of the time, I will argue that it is at best incomplete and at worst wildly misleading as a depiction of the self in relationships. I will present evidence from longitudinal studies of romantic relationships that illustrate how relationships work in the egosystem and in the ecosystem.

Impulsive behavior is considered to be stimulus driven, a primitive hedonic reaction, oriented toward immediate gratification despite potential negative consequences, characterized by lack of deliberation and poor executive functioning. It has been typically associated with negative outcomes such as poor self-control and decision-making, psychopathology, risk taking, etc. The current research takes another look at impulsivity and examines the extent to which what may typically appear as impulsive, could be in fact strategic behavior initiated to fulfill individual’s chronic and/or momentarily accessible motivations. Across different studies and samples we examined what would be traditionally taken as an indication of impulsive behavior (e.g. delay discounting, risk taking propensity, actual risk taking) as a function of individuals’ motivation and cognitive resources (capacity for executive control). Our results suggest that 1) such behaviors are initiated when relevant motivations are accessible; 2) the presence of cognitive resources (i.e. capacity for executive control) augments rather than decreases “impulsive” behavior.

The psychology of moral judgment is influenced by both automatic emotional and deliberative reasoning systems. Expressed as aversive emotional arousal, psychological conflict arises when these systems produce competing intuitions about right and wrong in moral dilemmas. In this talk I describe an approach to studying the role of emotional arousal in modulating moral judgment and action using findings from behavioral studies where participants were immersed in a three-dimensional digital simulation of classic “trolley” scenarios. Participants chose whether or not to act as moral utilitarians— causing the death of one person in order to save the lives of five, while autonomic arousal was measured in real time. The results showed that emotional arousal is elevated when anticipating harming another person using personal force to achieve a utilitarian outcome, relative to when achieving a similar outcome via impersonal action, and this response differential is linked to a reduction in the likelihood of using harmful action. Demonstrating an “omission bias” in moral judgment, participants were more aroused in situations requiring action to produce a utilitarian outcome, compared to situations requiring no action to produce an equivalent outcome. Moreover, when the use of personal harm was required to save lives, emotional arousal was higher pre-action relative to post-action, suggesting that arousal may function as the output of the affective system working to inhibit harmful behavior. Implications for dual-process theory and harm-avoidance mechanisms are discussed.

Work on ego depletion has illustrated the negative consequences of prior exertion of self-control for subsequent performance, suggesting that depletion is a major limiting factor to the pursuit of important goals in everyday life (Vohs, Kaikati, Kerkhof, & Schmeichel, 2009; Hofmann, Vohs, & Baumeister, 2012). We suggest that people have adaptive mechanisms in place to deal with depletion, and highlight both proactive and counteractive efforts that individuals employ in response to the threat of depletion.

Self-control refers to the mental processes that allow people to override thoughts and emotions, thus enabling behavior to vary adaptively from moment to moment. According to the resource model of self-control, overriding one’s predominant response tendencies consumes and temporarily depletes a limited inner resource and undermines subsequent attempts at control in a state known as “ego depletion.” Nearly 200 separate studies are consistent with the resource model, with repeated demonstrations of effortful control at Time 1 reducing performance on subsequent self-control tasks at Time 2. Despite this apparent robust support, ego depletion is being challenged on two fronts. First is the very serious claim that ego depletion is not replicable, that past support has benefited from publication bias and perhaps the use of questionable research practices. Second is the claim that the resource model is internally inconsistent, with many studies directly contradicting the claim of a physical resource that is depleted or with the claim that self-control failures are due to a lack of capacity. Addressing the first claim, I provide statistical evidence that the ego depletion effect is indeed robust, with self-control indeed having a refractory period; I also detail how claims of non-robustness only arise from the use of statistical techniques that are themselves biased and imprecise. Addressing the second claim, I advance an alternative to the resource model, suggesting that self-control is not dependent on limited resources. Rather self-control failures reflect the motivated switching of task priorities as people strive to strike an optimal balance between engaging cognitive labor to pursue “have-to” goals versus preferring cognitive leisure in the pursuit of “want-to” goals.

Persistent racial disparities in health represent a significant social and moral dilemma, as well as a serious public health concern. Racism is a fundamental cause of disease, and is physically embodied through social and psychobiological mechanisms. A social toxin, racism can be experienced environmentally at the area-level, as well as interpersonally through inter-personal experiences of racism, which impact biological processes underlying multiple disease pathways including via accelerated aging at the cellular level.

I start with two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: 1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers in the last twelve millennia, and 2) the spread of world religions with prosocial norms during the same period. I argue that these two developments were importantly linked. A package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted large-scale cooperation, trust, and high fertility rates, often leading to success in intergroup competition, but also creating the potential for large-scale conflict between increasingly expanding and hierarchically organized groups. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, so that the overwhelming majority of humanity today are cultural descendants of world religions.