Perceptions of change over time
Perceptions of change over time
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If you think about yourself 10 years ago in the past, would you say your preferences, personality, or values have changed since then? Most people would answer yes. Looking back on our past selves, it's easy to acknowledge how much we've grown. However, when thinking about our future selves, we often believe we will stay the same. This cognitive bias is known as the end of history illusion (Quoidbach, Gilbert, & Wilson, 2013).
My dissertation work answers three open-ended questions of the end of history illusion: (1) When does it emerge? (2) What is its reach? (3) Does it extend to reasoning about close and distant others?
In one paper, I found that the end of history illusion is present in kids as young as 4 years old. However, when evaluating peers, children infer greater future change than past change, an opposite pattern termed the beginning-of-history illusion. Read the full paper here!
If we think about the self expanding across generations (i.e., parents as extensions of our past self, and children as our future self), I find a similar end of history illusion: adults report larger differences between themselves and their parents than between themselves and their children (Sacchi, Sah, & Starmans, In Prep). View the poster here!
Though for strangers, preliminary data show that the end of history illusion seems to dissipate entirely.
Taken together, these findings point towards the end of history illusion as a robust and general feature of human social cognition. Individuals not only systematically underestimate their own future change, but also those viewed as extensions of themselves.
In a separate line of work, I investigate how children view change in others. Specifically, which psychological traits do children believe are most likely to persist or change into adulthood? View the poster here!
Uncertainty monitoring in the moral domain
Uncertainty monitoring in the moral domain
Can children (aged 5–8) and adults detect uncertainty in morally ambiguous situations and accordingly withhold judgment? In one line of work, I've found that children are equally likely to attribute accidental or purposeful intent when presented with moral ambiguity, making punishment and character judgments based on the attributed intent. However, as children get older, they become better at reporting their uncertainty, marking a significant developmental transition period in children’s moral reasoning. This change develops toward observed adult behavior, where moral attributions, judgments, and punishments are appropriately withheld when faced with moral ambiguity (Sacchi, Ozkan, & Ronfard, In Prep). View the poster here!
Moral character change
Moral character change
If someone is considered immoral, can we ever see them as good? Previous work has found that, when revising their moral character beliefs, adults require more evidence to perceive improvement than decline (Klein & O'Brien, 2016). This phenomenon is the "Moral Tipping Point". In this line of work, I investigate whether children can use new behavior to revise their moral character judgments. View the poster here!
Extraordinary Altruism & Moral Vegetarians
Extraordinary Altruism & Moral Vegetarians
I've also explored the developmental origins of extraordinary altruism. This work was motivated by an interest in the personality and cognitive factors that may develop differently in individuals who later become extraordinary altruists, such as those who donate a kidney to a stranger.
Through leveraging specialized populations who make morally motivated decisions, we compared retrospective adults and current independent vegetarian children (i.e., 8–12-year-old children who become vegetarian in a meat-eating family) to family vegetarians and non-vegetarians.
While adult vegetarians had lower speciesism and social dominance orientation, and higher disgust sensitivity and empathy than non-vegetarians, vegetarian children do not display such distinct traits. Instead, vegetarian children only showed reduced speciesism relative to their non-vegetarian peers (Sacchi, Wilks, & Bloom, In Prep). This work offers insight into individual differences that may precede or emerge alongside developing altruistic tendencies. View the poster here!
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