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Gender
This paper examines the interaction between vocational and soft skills training on labor market outcomes and expectations of youth in the Dominican Republic. Applicants to a training program were randomly assigned to one of three modalities: a full treatment consisting of vocational and soft skills training plus an internship, a partial treatment consisting of soft skills training plus an internship, or a control group with no training or internship. We find strong and lasting effects of the program on personal skills acquisition and expectations, but results are markedly different for men and women. Shortly after completing the program, all participants reported increased expectations for improved employment and livelihoods. This result is reversed for male participants after three and a half years, potentially explained by the program’s negative short-run labor market effects for that group. On the other hand, female participants experience improved labor market outcomes in the short run and exhibit substantially higher levels of personal skills after three and a half years; the women in the study became more optimistic and reported higher self-esteem. Men experienced no such benefits. Our results suggest that job-training programs of this type can be transformative – for women, life skills mattered and made a difference. But they can also have a downside if, as was the case for men in this study, training creates expectations that are not met. Although, overall, impacts are similar for the full treatment and the partial treatment, the positive impacts on soft skills for women, and the adverse impacts on labor outcomes and expectations for men are stronger for the full treatment. Read more.
Where social norms favor gender segregation, firms may find it costly to employ both men and women. If the costs of integration are largely fixed, firms will integrate only if their expected number of female employees under integration exceeds some threshold. Motivated by a simple model of firm hiring, we develop a methodology that uses the distribution of female employment across firms to estimate the share of firms with binding integration costs and counterfactual female employment at all-male firms. We validate our approach using administrative data and unique policy variation from Saudi Arabia. We provide suggestive evidence that integration costs reduce aggregate female employment. Using survey data on manufacturing firms in 65 countries, we find significant integration costs in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia but not in other regions. Read more.
We show the math gender gap is correlated with women’s career outcomes using international geographic data on the investment profession, a math-intensive and 80% male profession. The math gender gap predicts the proportion of investment professionals who are women across countries and across states. Our results do not establish a causal relationship between the math gender gap and women’s career outcomes. However, the math gender gap as a correlate of women’s career outcomes is not mitigated by the inclusion of control variables related to female labor force participation, gender inequality measures, competition attitudes, and gender preferences. These results suggest there are societal factors that vary geographically, (e.g., a widespread belief that women have weaker math ability) and affect both the math performance of middle school girls and women’s career choices. Addressing these societal factors can decrease the math gender gap and increase the representation of women in highly quantitative fields like finance, which might help to reduce the gender pay gap since quantitative fields like finance tend to be highly paid. Read more.
The current research examines whether women’s personal ethics are compromised when representing others in strategic interactions. Across five studies (n = 1337), we demonstrate that women’s ethical choices are more sensitive to whether they are representing themselves versus advocating for others compared to men’s ethical choices. We find that other-advocating women are more deceptive than self-advocating women, whereas men are just as likely to engage in morally questionable behaviors when representing themselves or others. We further show that women’s unethical behavior is driven by their anticipatory guilt as they seek to not let their constituents down in an advocacy role. Relative to men, women’s ethical behavior when advocating on behalf of others is especially likely to reflect the presumed ethical preferences of their constituents rather than solely a reflection of their own ethical preferences. Given women’s relatively high personal ethics, these results establish a risk to adopting an advocacy role for women: the social considerations inherent to advocacy put pressure on women to engage in deceptive behaviors that compromise their personal ethics. Read more.
Four studies (n 1199) tested support for the idea that implicit theories about the fixedness versus malleability of gender roles (entity vs. incremental theories) predict differences in the degree of gender system justification, that is, support for the status quo in relations between women and men in society. Relative to an incremental theory, the holding of an entity theory correlated with more system-justifying attitudes and self-perceptions (Study 1) for men and women alike. We also found that strength of identification with one’s gender in-group was a stronger predictor of system justification for men than it was for women, suggesting men’s defense of the status quo may be motivated by their membership in a high status group in the social hierarchy. In 3 experiments, we then tested whether exposure to a fixed gender role theory would lead men to identify more with masculine characteristics and their male gender group, thus increasing their defense of the gender system as fair and just. We did not expect a fixed gender role theory to trigger these identity-motivated responses in women. Overall, we found that, by increasing the degree of psychological investment in their masculine identity, adopting a fixed gender role theory increased men’s rationalization of the gender status quo compared with when gender roles were perceived to be changeable. This suggests that, when men are motivated to align with their masculine identity, they are more likely to endorse the persistence of gender inequality as a way of affirming their status as “real men.” Read more.
The reasons for women’s relatively slow ascension in the workplace have been a matter of considerable debate. This article explores why so much remains misunderstood about the challenges women face and why negative stereotypes—specifically, the view that women are innately poor advocates for themselves—persist. In fact, women possess unique advantages as negotiators, including greater cooperativeness and stronger ethics. But often those strengths are overlooked or severely undervalued. This article presents practical strategies for managers and negotiators of both genders to close the performance gaps and calls for changing the narrative on what it means to be a successful negotiator. Read more.
We show parental careers differentially affect the future career choices of girls and boys using survey data from CFA Institute members. Among CFA Institute members, women are more likely to have a STEM parent (particularly a STEM mother) than men. Relative to the base rates at which girls and boys become CFA Institute members, STEM mothers increase the girls’ rate by 48% more than the boys’ rate; STEM fathers increase the girls’ rate 29% more than the boys’ rate. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that early role models, particularly female role models, influence women’s choice of finance careers. Read more.
About 18% of Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) members are women, which is well below the percentage of workers who are women around the world. To gain insights into why women represent a relatively low percentage of investment professionals, we survey the 2016 CFA membership, which consists of about 135,000 members in 151 countries. We document that female CFA members are less tradition and conformity-oriented and more achievement oriented than both male CFA members and women in the general population. This suggests that gender-specific barriers discourage women from entering the CFA professions. One possible barrier is that finance is a profession that disproportionately rewards those who work long and inflexible hours. Women face greater time obligations outside of work. Thus female CFA members express a stronger desire to recapture time from work than male CFA members. Woman CFA members desire more time outside of work when they are married, have children, or are older and value tradition. In sharp contrast to these results, family circumstances and valuing tradition do not affect male CFA members’ desire for more time. Read more.
Despite the importance of trust for efficient social and organizational functioning, transgressions that betray trust are common. We know little about the personal characteristics that affect the extent to which transgressions actually harm trust. In this research, we examine how gender moderates responses to trust violations. Across three studies, we demonstrate that following a violation, women are both less likely to lose trust and more likely to restore trust in a transgressor than men. Women care more about maintaining relationships than men, and this greater relational investment mediates the relationship between gender and trust dynamics. Read more.
Do female managers act in ways that narrow or instead act in ways that preserve or even widen the gender wage gap? Although conceptual arguments exist on both sides of this debate, the empirical evidence to date has favored the former view. Yet this evidence comes primarily from cross-establishment surveys, which do not provide visibility into individual managers’ choices. Using longitudinal personnel records from an information services firm in which managers had considerable discretion over employee salaries, we estimate multilevel models that indicate no support for the proposition that female managers reduce the gender wage gap among their subordinates. Consistent with the theory of value threat, we instead find conditional support for the cogs-in-the-machine perspective: in the subsample of high-performing supervisors and low-performing employees, women who switched from a male to a female supervisor had a lower salary in the following year than men who made the same switch. Read more.
This article assesses the effects of formal mentoring on workplace networks. It also provides conceptual clarity and empirical evidence on expected gender differences in the effects of such programs. Qualitative interviews with 40 past participants in a formal mentoring program at a software laboratory in Beijing, China, provide insight into the core mechanisms by which such programs produce network change: access to organizational elites, participation in semiformal foci, enhanced social skills, and legitimacy-enhancing signals. These mechanisms are theorized to lead to an expansion in protégés’ networks, relative to those of non-participants in formal mentoring. Legitimacy enhancing signals are theorized to enable female protégés to derive greater network benefit from formal mentoring than their male counterparts. Empirical support for these propositions comes from a longitudinal quasi-experiment involving 75 employees who experienced the treatment of formal mentoring and 64 employees in a matched control group. A second empirical strategy, which exploits exogenous variation in the timing of treatment and enables a comparison of the post-program networks of one treated group to the pre-program networks of another treated group, provides corroborating support. These findings contribute to research on the efficacy of formal mentoring, gender and workplace networks, and the cumulative advantage or disadvantage that can arise from network change. Read more.
We examined whether gender differences in the perceived ease of being misled predict the likelihood of being deceived in distributive negotiations. Study 1 (N = 131) confirmed that female negotiators are perceived as more easily misled than male negotiators. This perception corresponded with perceptions of women’s relatively low competence. Study 2 (N = 328) manipulated negotiator gender, competence and warmth and found that being perceived as easily misled via low competence affected expectations about the negotiating process, including less deception scrutiny among easily misled negotiators and lower ethical standards among their negotiating counterparts. This pattern held true regardless of buyer and seller gender. Study 3 (N = 298) examined whether patterns of deception in face-to-face negotiations were consistent with this gender stereotype. As expected, negotiators deceived women more so than men, thus leading women into more deals under false pretenses than men. Read more.
Since 1970, women have made substantial inroads into management jobs. But most women are in lower- and middle-management jobs; few are in top-management jobs. Human capital theory uses three individual-level variables to explain this vertical gender gap: women acquire fewer of the necessary educational credentials than men, women prefer different kinds of jobs than men, and women accumulate less of the required work experience than men. The authors argue that cultural schemas, specifically gender roles and gender norms, explain most individual-level differences between men and women and that when cultural factors are ignored, any observed effects of these factors can be dismissed as spurious. This analysis is based on data on nationally representative samples and the results of published research. Read more.
This paper investigates the effects offounding, growth, decline, and merger on gender differences in managerial career mobility. These common events create and destroy many jobs, and so have big impacts on managers’ careers. We build on previous research to predict gender differences in job mobility after such events, and show that these gender differences are moderated by the positions managers occupy: level, firm size, and sex composition. We test our predictions using archival data on all 3.883 managerial employees in all 333 firms in the California savings and loan industry between 1975 and 1988. We conduct logistic-regression and event-history analyses. Female managers are less likely than male managers to be hired when the set ofjobs expands because offounding and growth, and more likely to exit when the set ofjobs contracts because of decline and merger. These gender differences exist because relative to men, women occupy lower-level jobs, work in smaller firms, and work in firms with more women at all managerial ranks. The effects ofall but one event (the growth of one’s own employer) are moderated by managers’ positions. Our paper is the first to offer a large-scale test of gender differences in career trajectories in the wake of common organizational events. By showing that these market shaping events affect male and female managers’ careers differently, and that these effects depend on the positions of male and female managers, we demonstrate economic sociology’s potential for studying inequality. Read more.
We study how organizational sex composition influences the intraorganizational mobility of male and female managers. We test hypotheses linking organizational sex composition to hiring and promotion using longitudinal data on all managers in the California savings and loan industry. We find that the impact of sex composition depends on hierarchical level: Not only does it matter what relative proportions of men and women are working in organizations, but it also matters at what levels in the managerial hierarchies they are working. Our findings demonstrate a catch-22 situation: Women are more likely to be hired and promoted into a particular job level when a higher proportion of women are already there. The question remains, how can women gain entry into these positions? We also find that women are more likely to be hired and promoted when there is a substantial minority of women above the focal job level, but not when women constitute the majority in those higher-level positions: Hence women in high ranks can sometimes be a force for demographic change. Finally, we find evidence that women are more likely to be hired and promoted when higher proportions of women hold positions below the focal job level, indicating that gains made by women are not entirely dissipated by endogenous organizational processes. Read more.
Theoretical models predict that overcofident investors trade excessively. We test this prediction by partitioning investors on gender. Psychological research demonstrates that, in areas such as finance, men are more overconfident than women. Thus, theory predicts that men will trade more excessively than women. Using account data for over 35,000 households from a large discount brokerage, we analyze the common stock investments of men and women from February 1991 through January 1997. We document that men trade 45 percent more than women. Trading reduces men’s net returns by 2.65 percentage points a year as opposed to 1.72 percentage points for women. Read more.
Race
Under U.S. fair-lending law, lenders can discriminate against minorities only for creditworthiness. Using an identification under this rule, afforded by the GSEs’ pricing of mortgage credit risk, we estimate discrimination in the largest consumer-lending market for traditional and FinTech lenders. We find that lenders charge otherwise-equivalent Latinx/African-American borrowers 7.9 (3.6) bps higher rates for purchase (refinance) mortgages, costing $765M yearly. FinTechs fail to eliminate impermissible discrimination, possibly because algorithms extract rents in weaker competitive environments and/or profile borrowers on low-shopping behavior. Yet algorithmic lenders do reduce rate disparities by more than a third and show no discrimination in rejection rates. Read more.
We test a novel framework for how ingroup members are perceived during intergroup interaction. Across three experiments, we found that, above and beyond egalitarian attitudes and motivations, White observers’ automatic responses to Blacks (i.e., their implicit anti-Black bias) shaped their affiliation toward ingroup targets who appeared comfortable engaging in interracial versus same-race interaction. White observers’ implicit anti-Black bias negatively correlated with liking of White targets who were comfortable with Blacks (Experiments 1-3). The relationship between implicit bias and liking varied as a function of targets’ nonverbal comfort in interracial interactions (Experiment 1). Specifically, implicit bias negatively correlated with liking of targets when targets’ nonverbal behaviors revealed observers felt comfortable with interracial contact, irrespective of the nature of those behaviors (Experiment 2). Finally, the relationship between implicit bias and target liking was mediated by perceived similarity (Experiment 3). Theoretical implications for stigma-by-association, social network homogeneity, and extended contact are discussed. Read more.
The US criminal justice system is exceptionally punitive. We test whether racial heterogeneity is one cause, exploiting cross-jurisdiction variation in punishment in four Southern states. We estimate the causal effect of jurisdiction on arrest charge outcome, validating our estimates using a quasi-experimental research design based on defendants charged in multiple jurisdictions. Consistent with a model of in-group bias in electorate preferences, the relationship between local punishment severity and black population share follows an inverted U-shape. Within states, defendants are 27%-54% more likely to be sentenced to incarceration in ‘peak’ heterogeneous jurisdictions than in homogeneous jurisdictions. Read more.
This paper presents evidence that job suburbanization caused significant declines in black employment from 1970 to 2000. I document that, conditional on detailed job characteristics, blacks are less likely than whites to work in suburban establishments, and this spatial segregation is stable over time despite widespread decentralization of population and jobs. This stable segregation suggests job suburbanization may have increased black-white labor market inequality. Exploiting variation across metropolitan areas, I find that job suburbanization is associated with substantial declines in black employment rates relative to white employment rates. Evidence from nationally planned highway infrastructure corroborates a causal interpretation. Read more.
I estimate the dynamic effects of federal affirmative action regulation, exploiting variation in the timing of regulation and deregulation across work establishments. Affirmative action increases the black share of employees over time: in 5 years after an establishment is first regulated, the black share of employees increases by an average of 0.8 percentage points. Strikingly, the black share continues to grow at a similar pace even after an establishment is deregulated. I argue that this persistence is driven in part by affirmative action inducing employers to improve their methods for screening potential hires. Read more.
We posit instructors’ implicit racial bias as a factor in racial disparities in academic achievement and test the relationship between this factor, instructor lesson quality, and learners’ subsequent test performance. In Study 1, white participants were assigned to the role of instructor and gave a short lesson to a learner who was either black or white. Instructors’ implicit bias predicted diminished test performance on the part of black, but not white, learners. Further, instructors’ anxiety and lesson quality, as rated by coders, mediated the relationship between their implicit bias and learners’ test performance. In Study 2, a separate sample of non-black participants watched videos of instructors from cross-race lessons from the first experiment. Once again, instructors’ implicit bias predicted diminished test performance by participants. These findings suggest that underperformance by minorities in academic domains may be driven by the effect implicit racial biases have on educators’ pedagogical effectiveness. Read more.
Socioeconomic Status
In the United States, the difference in academic achievement between higher- and lower-income students (i.e., the income-achievement gap) is substantial and growing. In the research reported here, we investigated neuroanatomical correlates of this gap in adolescents (N = 58) in whom academic achievement was measured by statewide standardized testing. Cortical gray-matter volume was significantly greater in students from higher-income backgrounds (n = 35) than in students from lower-income backgrounds (n = 23), but cortical white-matter volume and total cortical surface area did not differ significantly between groups. Cortical thickness in all lobes of the brain was greater in students from higher-income than lower-income backgrounds. Greater cortical thickness, particularly in temporal and occipital lobes, was associated with better test performance. These results represent the first evidence that cortical thickness in higher- and lower-income students differs across broad swaths of the brain and that cortical thickness is related to scores on academic-achievement tests. Read more.
The Institute for the Future (IFTF) has collaborated with the Rockefeller Foundation and its Searchlight function to create a framework for broad engagement in strategic thinking about ways to catalyze change in the lives of poor or vulnerable communities. This paper seeks to focus on this broad‐based approach. Starting from the top‐down horizon scan of the foundation’s Searchlight partners – a network of horizon scanning organizations – IFTF created a public database of signals of innovation and disruption in the domain of poverty and social change. This signals database was used to build a visual map of catalysts for change, creating a simple hierarchy of four catalyst types, each containing four action zones and a pivotal challenge. This map provided the language and framework for engaging a global community in a serious game to extend the vision of the Searchlight function and capture novel ideas for innovations that could improve the lives of those in marginalized communities. With an estimated global reach of 160,000 views and 1,600 game players from 79 countries, the game produced more than 18,000 ideas about catalysts for change. This framework of foresight (the signals database) to insight (the visual map of catalysts for change) to action (global strategic game) demonstrates a way to integrate top‐down expert foresight with bottom‐up strategic ideation on a global scale. Read more.
General/Not Identity Focused
Despite the potential for machine learning and artificial intelligence to reduce face-to-face bias in decision-making, a growing chorus of scholars and policymakers have recently voiced concerns that if left unchecked, algorithmic decision-making can also lead to unintentional discrimination against members of historically marginalized groups. These concerns are being expressed through Congressional subpoenas, regulatory investigations, and an increasing number of algorithmic accountability bills pending in both state legislatures and Congress. To date, however, prominent efforts to define policies whereby an algorithm can be considered accountable have tended to focus on output-oriented policies and interventions that either may facilitate illegitimate discrimination or involve fairness corrections unlikely to be legally valid. We provide a workable definition of algorithmic accountability that is rooted in the caselaw addressing statistical discrimination in the context of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Using instruction from the burden-shifting framework, codified to implement Title VII, we formulate a simple statistical test to apply to the design and review of the inputs used in any algorithmic decision-making processes. Application of the test, which we label the input accountability test, constitutes a legally viable, deployable tool that can prevent an algorithmic model from systematically penalizing members of protected groups who are otherwise qualified in a target characteristic of interest. Read more.
How does cultural heterogeneity in an organization relate to its underlying capacity for execution and innovation? Existing literature often understands cultural diversity as presenting a tradeoff between task coordination and creative problem-solving. This work assumes that diversity arises primarily through cultural differences between individuals. In contrast, we propose that diversity can also exist within persons such that cultural heterogeneity can be unpacked into two distinct forms: interpersonal and intrapersonal. We argue that the former tends to undermine coordination and portends worsening firm profitability, while the latter facilitates creativity and supports greater patenting success and more positive market valuations. To evaluate these propositions, we use unsupervised learning to identify cultural content in employee reviews of nearly 500 publicly traded firms on a leading company review website and then develop novel, time-varying measures of cultural heterogeneity. Our empirical results lend support for our two core propositions, demonstrating that a diversity of cultural beliefs in an organization does not necessarily impose a trade-off between operational efficiency and creativity. Read more.
A person’s speech communicates his or her thoughts and feelings. We predicted that beyond conveying the contents of a person’s mind, a person’s speech also conveys mental capacity, such that hearing a person explain his or her beliefs makes the person seem more mentally capable—and therefore seem to possess more uniquely human mental traits—than reading the same content. We expected this effect to emerge when people are perceived as relatively mindless, such as when they disagree with the evaluator’s own beliefs. Three experiments involving polarizing attitudinal issues and political opinions supported these hypotheses. A fourth experiment identified paralinguistic cues in the human voice that convey basic mental capacities. These results suggest that the medium through which people communicate may systematically influence the impressions they form of each other. The tendency to denigrate the minds of the opposition may be tempered by giving them, quite literally, a voice. Read more.
How people choose to help each other can be just as important as how much people help. Help can come through relatively paternalistic or agentic aid. Paternalistic aid, such as banning certain foods to encourage weight loss or donating food to alleviate poverty, restricts recipients’ choices compared with agentic aid, such as providing calorie counts or donating cash. Nine experiments demonstrate that how people choose to help depends partly on their beliefs about the recipient’s mental capacities. People perceive paternalistic aid to be more effective for those who seem less mentally capable (Experiments 1 and 2), and people therefore give more paternalistically when others are described as relatively incompetent (Experiment 3). Because people tend to believe that they are more mentally capable than are others, people also believe that paternalistic aid will be more effective for others than for oneself, effectively treating other adults more like children (Experiments 4a–5b). Experiencing a personal mental shortcoming— overeating on Thanksgiving—therefore increased the perceived effectiveness of paternalism for oneself, such that participants thought paternalistic antiobesity policies would be more effective when surveyed the day after Thanksgiving than the day before (Experiment 6). A final experiment demonstrates that the link between perceived effectiveness of aid and mental capacity is bidirectional: Those receiving paternalistic aid were perceived as less mentally capable than those receiving relatively agentic aid (Experiment 7). Beliefs about how best to help someone in need are affected by subtle inferences about the mind of the person in need. Read more.
Previous research in cultural psychology shows that cultures vary in the social orientations of independence and interdependence. To date, however, little is known about how people may acquire such global patterns of cultural behavior or cultural norms. Nor is it clear what genetic mechanisms may underlie the acquisition of cultural norms. Here, we draw on recent evidence for certain genetic variability in the susceptibility to environmental influences and propose the norm sensitivity hypothesis, which holds that people acquire culture, and rules of cultural behaviors, through reinforcement mediated social learning processes. One corollary of the hypothesis is that the degree of cultural acquisition should be influenced by polymorphic variants of genes involved in dopaminergic neural pathways, which have been widely implicated in reinforcement learning. We review initial evidence for these predictions and discuss challenges and directions for future research. Read more.
Egalitarian motives form a powerful force in promoting prosocial behavior and enabling large-scale cooperation in the human species. At the neural level, there is substantial, albeit correlational, evidence suggesting a link between dopamine and such behavior. However, important questions remain about the specific role of dopamine in setting or modulating behavioral sensitivity to prosocial concerns. Here, using a combination of pharmacological tools and economic games, we provide critical evidence for a causal involvement of dopamine in human egalitarian tendencies. Specifically, using the brain penetrant catechol-O-methyl transferase (COMT) inhibitor tolcapone, we investigated the causal relationship between dopaminergic mechanisms and two prosocial concerns at the core of a number of widely used economic games: (1) the extent to which individuals directly value the material payoffs of others, i.e., generosity, and (2) the extent to which they are averse to differences between their own payoffs and those of others, i.e., inequity. We found that dopaminergic augmentation via COMT inhibition increased egalitarian tendencies in participants who played an extended version of the dictator game. Strikingly, computational modeling of choice behavior revealed that tolcapone exerted selective effects on inequity aversion, and not on other computational components such as the extent to which individuals directly value the material payoffs of others. Together, these data shed light on the causal relationship between neurochemical systems and human prosocial behavior and have potential implications for our understanding of the complex array of social impairments accompanying neuropsychiatric disorders involving dopaminergic dysregulation. Read more.
Dehumanization, the denial of fundamentally human capacities to others, has contributed to large-scale intergroup conflict and violence, ranging from the Holocaust, to American slavery, to Rwandan warfare between the Hutus and Tutsis. The type of dehumanization that emerges in these contexts typically stems from the motives to represent others actively and overtly as subhuman (e.g., Jews as vermin, African Americans as apelike, Tutsis as cockroaches) and to justify and facilitate aggression toward that group. Representing others as subhuman denies them fundamental human rights for freedom and protection from harm. Although psychology has primarily focused on this active, aggressive, and intergroup-oriented form of dehumanization, which we call dehumanization by commission, a more common form of dehumanization exists in everyday life. We call this form dehumanization by omission, a passive process whereby people overlook, or fail to recognize, others’ fundamentally human mental capacities, as opposed to denying them these capacities actively. Here, we document the two forms of dehumanization— by commission and by omission—and describe their antecedents, psychological importance, and consequences. Read more.
The research we review in this chapter suggests a potentially general tendency to consider other minds to be less vivid and intense than one’s own, with other minds sharing similar but muted capacities. Not only might other minds seem less vivid, they may also be seen as being less varied and sophisticated as one’s own with a narrower range of emotion, intellect, preferences, motivation, and will. In this chapter, we suggest three routes through which the lesser minds phenomenon occurs and highlight illustrative examples for each potential route. These mechanisms apply not only to the minds of other people, but also to future and past versions of one’s own mind. Theoretically, we believe this existing evidence suggests that perceiving another mind in its full humanity is not an automatic tendency but rather requires mental effort. Despite having an impressive and phylogenetically unique capacity to reason about the minds of others (Herrmann et al., 2007; Saxe, 2006), people may routinely fail to use this capacity to its fullest extent. Read more.
Distributive justice concerns how individuals and societies distribute benefits and burdens in a just or moral manner. We combined distribution choices with functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the central problem of distributive justice: the trade-off between equity and efficiency. We found that the putamen responds to efficiency, whereas the insula encodes inequity, and the caudate/septal subgenual region encodes a unified measure of efficiency and inequity (utility). Notably, individual differences in inequity aversion correlate with activity in inequity and utility regions. Against utilitarianism, our results support the deontological intuition that a sense of fairness is fundamental to distributive justice but, as suggested by moral sentimentalists, is rooted in emotional processing. More generally, emotional responses related to norm violations may underlie individual differences in equity considerations and adherence to ethical rules. Read more.