Selected Research
Whoever is Not With Me is Against Me:
The 'Moderate As Out-Group' Effect
Common intuition suggests that expressing moderate views would allow people to appeal to the broadest audience possible. But is that really the case? Do moderates please all sides or please no side? Across five preregistered studies (N = 3,272), we show that people holding a partisan view on a sociopolitical issue perceive moderates (i.e., people disclosing a genuinely non-extreme position on such issue) as belonging to the out-group ideology. We find that the ‘moderate as out-group’ effect occurs when sociopolitical issues are moralized and at the same time the opposing side is perceived to be a threat to oneself, close ones, or society at large. We also present evidence that the effect is due to partisans’ perception that moderates lack ‘out-group hate’ motive, rather than lack ‘in-group love’ motive. In other words, partisans perceive that moderates agree with—or simply don’t condemn—the opposing (immoral and threatening) ideology, rather than disagree with their own. Consistent with this, the ‘moderate as out-group’ effect occurs when the moderate view is framed as ‘pro-both’ sides, but it is attenuated when it is framed as ‘pro-neither’ side.
Maimone G, & McKenzie CRM
Citation Penalties Following Sexual versus Scientific Misconduct Allegations
Maimone G, Appel G, McKenzie CRM, & Gneezy A (2025) Citation Penalties Following Sexual versus Scientific Misconduct Allegations,
PLoS ONE 20(3): e0317736. 10.1371/journal.pone.0317736
[PDF manuscript, PDF supplementary information]
Citations in academia have long been regarded as a fundamental means of acknowledging the contribution of past work and promoting scientific advancement. However, our analysis of data encompassing 31,941 publications across 18 diverse academic disciplines reveals that citations may also serve as a currency to reward and punish scientists’ morality. In particular, we find that the citation rates of scholars accused of sexual misconduct decrease in the three years after the accusations become public, while we do not find a significant citation penalty in the same time frame for scholars accused of scientific fraud. These findings add a new dimension to a body of research showing that citation decisions are sensitive to factors unrelated to a publication's scientific merit.
Not All Attributions Are Self-Serving: Reconciling the Preferences for Assuming and Conceding Agency over Negative Outcomes
Two of the most established theories in the literature on causal attributions predict opposing attributional preferences over negative outcomes. According to self-enhancement and the self-serving bias, people prefer to attribute negative outcomes externally (i.e., concede personal agency) to protect their self-image. By contrast, self-determination theory argues that people prefer to attribute all outcomes—including negative ones—internally (i.e., assume personal agency), as they strive for control over their lives and environments. Empirical evidence has been reported for both theories, but the obvious inconsistency of these findings has never been addressed. This paper is the first to reconcile these (seemingly) contradictory findings by identifying the boundary conditions under which self-enhancement and self-determination shape attributional preferences over negative outcomes. We test this theory across four preregistered experiments (N = 2,247), demonstrating that attributional preferences reverse depending on whether outcomes are attributed to single or multiple agents—also replicating and reversing the classic self-serving attribution finding by Larson (1977).
Maimone G, Vosgerau J, & Gneezy A
How Word Reversibility Impacts Judgment Confidence
Maimone G, Karmarkar UR, & Amir O
From interpersonal conversations to commercial and political messaging, our world revolves around people making sense of communications. In the present research, we illustrate how specific lexical choices systematically shape recipients’ confidence in their judgment of a message’s truthfulness. Prior work has shown that words can differ in their “reversibility,” that is, how easily their antonyms can be retrieved. We propose a novel theoretical framework that predicts when and how statements containing concepts with different levels of reversibility engage distinct psychological processes, which in turn differentially affect downstream confidence judgments. We test this model across two experiments (N = 1,067) using truthfulness judgments arising from both participants’ existing beliefs and experimentally manipulated beliefs. We further demonstrate the practical implications of our framework in a large-scale field study (N = 20,118) examining the efficacy of a non-profit’s persuasive messaging on a social media platform.