Objectives: Crime control theater refers to intuitively appealing laws that appear to address crime while lacking any evidence that they actually do so (e.g., sex offender registration and residence restriction laws, which do not reduce recidivism). Despite their ineffectiveness, public support for such laws tends to be high. Hypotheses: We predicted that making people aware of these laws' failure to reduce crime would lower support for them. Method: Participants (recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk; Study 1: N ϭ 298, mean age ϭ 35.60, 47.7% self-identified as women and 75.8% as White; Study 2: N ϭ 147, mean age ϭ 35.03, 40.1% self-identified as women and 85.0% as White; Study 3: N ϭ 552, mean age ϭ 35.86, 42.9% self-identified as women and 76.4% as White) read about sex offender registration and residence restriction policies and rated their support for these laws, confidence in their opinions about them, and perceptions of their efficacy before and after reading counterevidence highlighting these laws' failure to reduce sex crimes. Results: Although exposure to counterevidence somewhat lowered support (average within-subjects d ϭ Ϫ0.69), general attitudes remained positive even at the postcounterevidence phase (average d ϭ 0.46 against the scale midpoint). This pattern held when manipulating the criminal population being targeted (sex offenders vs. white-collar offenders; Study 1), when tailoring counterevidence to people's self-stated justifications for supporting these laws (Studies 2-3), and despite favorable ratings of the counterevidence's strength and credibility. Conclusion: Support for crime control theater policies persists despite explicit knowledge that they do not reduce crime, highlighting the need for alternative methods of dissuading people from their support for these ineffective laws. Public Significance StatementDespite their popularity, sex offender registration and residence restriction laws have failed to reduce crime and carry a number of negative consequences for offenders and the general public. We found that, even directly after learning about these facts, people continued to hold positive attitudes toward sex offender laws. Thus, people's support for some laws relies on factors beyond whether these laws actually achieve their intended crime control goals.

Is altruism always morally good, or is the morality of altruism fundamentally shaped by the social opportunity costs that often accompany helping decisions? Across four studies, we reveal that in cases of realistic tradeoffs in social distance for gains in welfare where helping socially distant others necessitates not helping socially closer others with the same resources, helping is deemed as less morally acceptable. Making helping decisions at a cost to socially closer others also negatively affects judgments of relationship quality (Study 2) and in turn, decreases cooperative behavior with the helper (Study 3). Ruling out an alternative explanation of physical distance accounting for the effects in Studies 1 to 3, social distance continued to impact moral acceptability when physical distance across social targets was matched (Study 4). These findings reveal that attempts to decrease biases in helping may have previously unconsidered consequences for moral judgments, relationships, and cooperation.

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Research shows that people often do not intervene to stop immoral action from happening.However, limited information is available on why people fail to intervene. Two preregistered studies (Ns = 248, 131) explored this gap in the literature by staging a theft in front of participants and immediately interviewing them to inquire about their reasons for intervening or not intervening. Across both studies, most participants did not try to stop the theft or even report it to the experimenter afterwards. Furthermore, many participants reported confusion and inattention as precursors to non-intervention, yielding insight into what inhibits moral courage.

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Experimental psychology’s recent shift toward low-effort, high-volume methods (e.g.,self-reports, online studies) and away from the more effortful study of naturalistic behavior raises concerns about the ecological validity of findings from these fields, concerns that have become particularly apparent in the field of moral psychology. To help address these concerns, we introduce a paradigm allowing researchers to investigate an important, widespread form of altruistic behavior – charitable donations – in a manner balancing competing concerns about internal validity, ecological validity, and ease of implementation: relief registries, which leverage existing online gift registry platforms to allow research subjects to choose among highly neededdonation items to ship directly to charitable organizations. Here, we demonstrate the use of relief registries in two experiments exploring the ecological validity of the finding from our own research that people are more willing to help others after having imagined themselves doing so. In this way, we sought to provide a blueprint for researchers seeking to enhance the ecological validity of their own research in a narrow sense (i.e., by using the relief registry paradigm we introduce) and in broader terms by adapting paradigms that take advantage of modern technology to directly impact others’ lives outside the lab.

Prior work suggests that imagining helping others increases prosocial intentions and behavior towards those individuals. But is this true for everyone, or only for those who tend towards – or away from – helping more generally? The current study (N=283) used an imagined helping paradigm and a battery of behavioral and self-report measures of trait prosociality to determine whether the prosocial benefits of imagination depend upon an individual’s general tendency to help others. Replicating prior work, we found links between imagination and prosociality and support for a three-factor model of prosociality comprising altruistically, norm-motivated, and self-reported prosocial behaviors. Centrally, the effects of imagination on prosociality were slightly larger for less altruistic individuals but independent of norm-motivated and self-reported prosociality. These results suggest leveraging people’s abilities for episodic simulation as a promising strategy for increasing prosociality in general, and perhaps particularly for those least likely to help otherwise.