People can experience great distress when a group to which they belong (in-group) is perceived to have committed an immoral act. We hypothesised that people would direct hostility toward a transgressing in-group whose actions threaten their self-image and evoke collective shame. Consistent with this theorising, three studies found that reminders of in-group transgression provoked several expres...

Previous research has shown that age is positively related to a dispositional tendency to forgive others. The present investigation tested the hypothesis that agreeableness and neuroticism partially mediate the association between age and forgivingness. Data from two representative cross-sectional samples of adults were used to test this hypothesis. Results from Study 1 (N = 962, age range: 19-...

Hypocrisy occurs when people fail to practice what they preach. Four experiments document the hypocrisy-by-association effect, whereby failing to practice what an organization preaches can make an employee seem hypocritical and invite moral condemnation. Participants judged employees more harshly for the same transgression when it was inconsistent with ethical values the employees’ organization...

The aim of this article is to explore the development of theories on transsexualism with a view to advancing a typology of theories of transsexualism.This typology exposes a general shift from concerns with ‘authenticity’ (the transsexual as a ‘real’ woman or man) to issues of ‘performativity’ (the transsexual as hyperbolic enactment of gender). I will argue it is through a displacement of psyc...

By three years of age, children are skilled at assessing under which circumstances others can see things. However, nothing is known about whether they can use this knowledge to guide their own deceptive behaviour. Here we investigated 3-year-olds' ability to strategically inhibit or conceal forbidden actions that a nearby adult experimenter could see or hear. In the first experiment, children w...

This study contributes to the criminological transgression literature with an in-depth ethnographic analysis of Reed’s narrative transgression, stigma, self and resistance. includes two intertwined perspectives on rule breaking, 1) concept within cultural criminology 2) deviance studies its focus labeling stigma. combination creates academic that empowering disempowering qualities breaking. Lou...

It has been consistently demonstrated that deceivers generally can be discriminated from truth tellers by monitoring an increase in their physiological response. But is this still the case when deceivers interact with a virtual avatar? The present research investigated whether the mere "belief" that the virtual avatar is computer or human operated forms a crucial factor for eliciting physiologi...

In two studies, the authors investigated the associations between interpersonal forgiveness and psychological well-being. Cross-sectional and prospective multilevel analyses demonstrated that increases in forgiveness (measured as fluctuations in individuals' avoidance, revenge, and benevolence motivations toward their transgressors) were related to within-persons increases in psychological well...