When powerful people cause harm, they often do so indirectly through other people. Are harmful actions carried out through others evaluated less negatively than harmful actions carried out directly? Four experiments examine the moral psychology of indirect agency. Experiments 1A, 1B, and 1C...

Policies that would create net benefits for society but would also involve costs frequently lack the necessary support to be enacted because losses loom larger than gains psychologically. To reduce the harmful consequence of loss aversion, we propose a new type of policy bundling technique in...

What is the relationship between economic development and environmental protection? Mirroring the negotiations field of 15 years ago, the debate over this question has polarized into the opposing perspectives of win-lose (distributive bargaining) or win-win (integrative bargaining) outcomes. We...

We report on a field study demonstrating systematic differences between the preferences people anticipate they will have over a series of options in the future and their subsequent revealed preferences over those options. Using a novel panel data set, we analyze the film rental and return...

Human ingenuity offers the best hope for tackling a whole range of environmental problems currently threatening global welfare, yet the human mind also creates cognitive barriers to wise environmental agreements. In this paper, we focus on a set of systematic cognitive barriers that are...

People often make judgments about the ethicality of others' behaviors and then decide how harshly to punish such behaviors. When they make these judgments and decisions, sometimes the victims of the unethical behavior are identifiable, and sometimes they are not. In addition, in our uncertain...