Given the adage “older and wiser,” it seems justified to assume that older people may be stereotyped as more moral than younger people. We aimed to study whether assessments of a person’s morality differ depending on their age. We asked 661 individuals from seven societies (Australians, Britons, Burusho of Pakistan, Canadians, Dani of Papua, New Zealanders, and Poles) whether younger (~20-year-old), middle-aged (~40-year-old), or older (~60-year-old) people were more likely to behave morally and have a sense of right and wrong. (...) We observed that older people were perceived as more moral than younger people. The effect was particularly salient when comparing 20-year-olds to either 40- or 60-year-olds and was culturally universal, as we found it in both WEIRD (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) and non-WEIRD societies. (shrink)

According to a view widely held in the media and in public discourse more generally, online hating is a social problem on a global scale. However, thus far there has been little scientific literature on the subject, and, to our best knowledge, there is even no established scholarly definition of online hating and online haters in the first place. The purpose of this manuscript is to provide a new perspective on online hating by, first, distinguishing online hating from the phenomena (...) it is often confused with, such as trolling, cyberstalking, and online hate speech, and, second, by proposing an operational definition of online hating and online haters based on ethnographic interviews and surveys of the existing scholarly literature. (shrink)

Although reasoning has been characterized as the essence of our being, it is often prone to cognitive biases. Decades of research in the reasoning and decision making fields have shown that when fa...