Morality is a source of reasons for action, what philosophers call practical reasons. Kantians say that it ‘gives’ reasons to everyone. We can even think of moral requirements as amounting to particularly strong or stringent reasons, in an effort to demystify deontological views like Kant’s, with its insistence on inescapable or ‘binding’ moral requirements or ‘oughts.’1 When we say that someon...

Are possible selves and strategies to attain them universally helpful even among children with few resources? We test this question in rural China. Rural Chinese children are commonly "left behind" (LB) by parents seizing economic opportunities by migrating, hoping the family will "move forward" and their children will attain their predestined better future. Media, teachers, and peers negativel...

Puzzled by the gap between academic attainment and academic possible selves (APSs) among low-income and minority teens, the authors hypothesized that APSs alone are not enough unless linked with plausible strategies, made to feel like "true" selves and connected with social identity. A brief intervention to link APSs with strategies, create a context in which social and personal identities felt...

This research illustrates how risk domain moderates the effects of priming the interdependent self versus the independent self on consumers' risk-taking. Experiment 1 showed that individuals whose interdependent selves were activated were more risk-seeking in their financial choices and less risk-seeking in their social choices than were those whose independent selves were activated. The size o...