Sean Laurent

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Psychology, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Co-authors

Public Views

I am a social psychologist who primarily studies topics related to social cognition and moral judgment and decision making. Put another way, I'm most interested in how people think about people.
Address: Department of Psychology
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
603 E. Daniel St.
Champaign, IL 61820

less

Daniel D. Hutto

University of Wollongong

Yale University

Harvard University

Princeton University

University of Waterloo

John Johnson

Pennsylvania State University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Matthew Ratcliffe

University of York

Bertram Malle

Brown University

Justin Caouette

Bridgewater State University

InterestsView All (8)

Uploads

Papers by Sean Laurent

People who seem disgusting seem more immoral

Frontiers in psychology, May 23, 2024

Supplemental Material, Disgust_Toward_IR_Couples_OSM_R2_Submitted-05.28.20 - Disgust Toward Interracial Couples: Mixed Feelings About Black–White Race Mixing

Supplemental Material, Disgust_Toward_IR_Couples_OSM_R2_Submitted-05.28.20 for Disgust Toward Int... more

Empathic merging of selves: Perspective taking and self-other overlap

Beautiful seems good, but perhaps not in every way: Linking attractiveness to moral evaluation through perceived vanity

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Feb 1, 2023

Do Injustice and Mortality Salience Impact Secondary Victimization Through the Need to Believe in a Just World?

Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Jan 2, 2023

You ought to know: Why consumers think companies can foresee bad (but not good) side effects

Psychology & Marketing, Oct 27, 2022

Disgust Toward Interracial Couples

No one is an island: Awe encourages global citizenship identification

Emotion

Schadenfreude for undeserved misfortunes: The unexpected consequences of endorsing a strong belief in a just world

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

Unintended, but still blameworthy: the roles of awareness, desire, and anger in negligence, restitution, and punishment

Cognition & Emotion, Jul 28, 2015

Download

Vaccine Hesitancy Study 1.2

A survey research examining vaccine hesitancy/intention with emphasis on COVID-19.

The (income-adjusted) price of good behavior: Documenting the counter-intuitive, wealth-based moral judgment gap

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2021

Download

Psychological predictors of vaccination intentions among U.S. undergraduates and online panel workers during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic

PLoS ONE, 2021

Objective Availability of safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19 is critical for controllin... more Objective Availability of safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19 is critical for controlling the pandemic, but herd immunity can only be achieved with high vaccination coverage. The present research examined psychological factors associated with intentions to receive COVID-19 vaccination and whether reluctance towards novel pandemic vaccines are similar to vaccine hesitancy captured by a hypothetical measure used in previous research. Method Study 1 was administered to undergraduate students when COVID-19 was spreading exponentially (February-April 2020). Study 2 was conducted with online panel workers toward the end of the first U.S. wave (July 2020) as a pre-registered replication and extension of Study 1. In both studies, participants (total N = 1,022) rated their willingness to receive the COVID-19 vaccination and to vaccinate a hypothetical child for a fictitious disease, and then responded to various psychological measures. Results In both studies, vaccination intentions...

Download

Volition Speaks Louder Than Action

Offender Atonement, Forgivability, and Victim Valuation in the Minds of Perceivers

What Makes Hypocrisy?

For Worse or for Better, the Richer or Poorer: Documenting the (Counter-Intuitive) Wealth-Based Moral Judgment Gap

Disgust Toward Interracial Couples: Mixed Feelings About Black–White Race Mixing

Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2020

Three studies further explored Skinner and Hudac's (2017) hypothesis that interracial couples... more Three studies further explored Skinner and Hudac's (2017) hypothesis that interracial couples elicit disgust. Using verbal and face emotion measures (Study 1), some participants reported more disgust toward interracial couples than same-race White and Black couples. In Study 2, only people higher in disgust sensitivity tended to “guess” that rapidly presented images of interracial (vs. White) couples were disgusting. Study 3 used a novel image classification paradigm that presented couples side-by-side with neutral or disgusting images. Participants took longer to decide whether target images were disgusting only when interracial (vs. White) couples appeared next to neutral images. Greater sexual disgust heightened this difference. Mixed evidence suggesting an association of disgust with Black couples also emerged in Studies 2 and 3. Thus, the disgust–interracial romance association may only emerge under certain conditions, and the current research offers limited support for the...

Past Its Prime? A Methodological Overview and Critique of Religious Priming Research in Social Psychology

Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 2020

Social psychologists have frequently used priming methodologies to explore how religion can impac... more Social psychologists have frequently used priming methodologies to explore how religion can impact behaviour. Despite this, no consensus currently exists on whether religious priming effects are replicable or consistently observed across a range of spiritual beliefs. Moreover, mixed evidence highlights possible methodological shortcomings within the priming literature as well as theoretical ambiguity regarding the contents of different primes. The current article examines four types of religious priming methodologies that are frequently used in social-psychological research (explicit, implicit, subliminal, and con-textual) and critically inspects the current landscape of the religious priming literature. We highlight theoretical issues and suggest meth-odological improvements that should facilitate a clearer understanding of when and how religion influences human behaviour. With the birth and development of religious priming studies over the past few decades, psychologists have sought to understand and clarify the role of religion in human behaviour-a challenging endeavor previously reserved for philosophers and theologians. Regrettably, however, the current state of the field concerning priming research in general is quite chaotic. Recent replica-tion failures of &quot;classic&quot; behavioural priming effects (e.g., Chabris et al. 2019; Doyen et al. 2012; O&#39;Donnell et al. 2018; Shanks et al. 2013) and highly publicized discussions regarding &quot;Questionable Research Practices&quot; (John et al. 2012; Kerr 1998) have understandably cast doubts on many conclusions derived from published priming research, especially in social psychology. Germane to the present discussion, although a series of meta-analyses of religious priming studies yielded small-to-moderate effects (Shariff et al. 2016), other analyses using alternative methods for correcting publication bias (van Elk et al. 2015) and recent replication attempts that did not find significant priming effects (e.g., Gomes and McCullough 2015; Verschuere et al. 2018)

Feeling Bad and Doing Good

Social Psychology, 2019

Previous forgiveness research has mostly focused on victims' forgiveness of transgressors, and of... more Previous forgiveness research has mostly focused on victims' forgiveness of transgressors, and offenders' post-transgression efforts intended to promote victim forgiveness have been collectively branded as apology. However, decisions concerning forgiveness frequently occur outside of dyadic contexts, and the unique roles of repentance and atonement in determining forgivability of offenders, despite their preeminence in theology and law, have received little empirical attention. Across five experiments (N = 938), we show that repentance and atonement independently influence third-party perception of forgivability for a variety of harms, even in disinterested contexts. Our findings provide a systematic examination of decisions about forgivability disentangled from direct personal involvement, demonstrating that components of apology known to facilitate forgiveness in victims also increase perceived forgivability from unharmed observers.

Download

Reconstructing the side-effect effect: A new way of understanding how moral considerations drive intentionality asymmetries

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2019

People typically apply the concept of intentionality to actions directed at achieving desired out... more People typically apply the concept of intentionality to actions directed at achieving desired outcomes. For example, a businessperson might intentionally start a program aimed at increasing company profits. However, if starting the program leads to a foreknown and harmful side effect (e.g., to the environment), the side effect is frequently labeled as intentional even though it was not specifically intended or desired. In contrast, positive side effects (e.g., helping the environment) are rarely labeled as intentional. One explanation of this side-effect effect-that harmful (but not helpful) side effects are labeled as intentional-is that moral considerations influence whether people view actions as intentional or not, implying that bad outcomes are perceived as more intentional than good outcomes. The present research, however, shows that people redefine questions about intentionality to focus on agents' foreknowledge in harming cases and on their lack of desire or intention in helpful cases, suggesting that the same intentionality question is being interpreted differently as a function of side effect valence. Consistent with this, removing foreknowledge lowers the frequency of labeling harming as intentional without affecting whether people label helping as intentional. Likewise, increasing agents' desire to help or avoid harming increases rates of labeling helping as intentional without affecting rates of labeling harming as intentional. In summary, divergent decisions to label side effects as intentional or not appear to reflect differences in the criteria people use to evaluate each case, resulting in different interpretations of what questions about intentionality are asking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

People who seem disgusting seem more immoral

Frontiers in psychology, May 23, 2024

Supplemental Material, Disgust_Toward_IR_Couples_OSM_R2_Submitted-05.28.20 - Disgust Toward Interracial Couples: Mixed Feelings About Black–White Race Mixing

Supplemental Material, Disgust_Toward_IR_Couples_OSM_R2_Submitted-05.28.20 for Disgust Toward Int... more

Empathic merging of selves: Perspective taking and self-other overlap

Beautiful seems good, but perhaps not in every way: Linking attractiveness to moral evaluation through perceived vanity

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Feb 1, 2023

Do Injustice and Mortality Salience Impact Secondary Victimization Through the Need to Believe in a Just World?

Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Jan 2, 2023

You ought to know: Why consumers think companies can foresee bad (but not good) side effects

Psychology & Marketing, Oct 27, 2022

Disgust Toward Interracial Couples