People sometimes criticize others for feeling sad, especially when they judge that person's sadness to be irrational. According to canonical models of blame, these reactions reflect attributions of control over the negative emotion. However, some scholars have recently suggested that blame reactions towards other's emotions ignore attributions of control, and instead, reflect negative reactions to the emotion itself. We present a study that adjudicates between these two competing views. Our results support control-based models of blame and criticism. We also identify two cues that people rely on when attributing control over emotions; namely, how well calibrated the emotion is to its eliciting circumstances and the sufferer’s capacity to think rationally. In sum: People will criticize others for their emotional suffering when they judge both that the suffering is irrational, and that the sufferer is sufficiently rational to recognize this fact, and so can choose to stop feeling upset.

A great deal of work argues that people demand impartial,evidence-based reasoning from others. However, recentfindings show that moral values occupy a cardinal position inpeople’s evaluation of others, raising the possibility that peoplesometimes prescribe morally-good but evidentially-poorbeliefs. We report two studies investigating how peopleevaluate beliefs when these two ideals conflict and find thatpeople regularly endorse motivated reasoning when it can bemorally justified. Furthermore, we document two ways thatmoral considerations result in prescribed motivated reasoning.First, morality can provide an alternative justification forbelief, leading people to prescribe evidentially unsupportedbeliefs to others. And, second, morality can affect how peopleevaluate the way evidence is weighed by lowering or raisingthe threshold of required evidence for morally good and badbeliefs, respectively. These results illuminate longstandingquestions about the nature of motivated reasoning and thesocial regulation of belief.

Influential theories in social psychology, philosophy, andlinguistics assume that ordinary people judge many mentalstates as outside voluntary control, yet few studies have directlyinvestigated these claims. We report four studies suggestingthat, contrary to several prominent models, ordinary peopleattribute at least moderate intentional control to others over awide variety of mental states. Furthermore, it appears thatperceived control may vary systematically according to mentalstate type (e.g. emotions vs. desires vs. beliefs). These resultspoint to several important directions for future research inbehavior explanation and moral judgment.

Visual perspective taking (VPT) – people’s ability to represent the physical world from another person’s viewpoint – plays a fundamental role in social cognition. However, little is known about whether and when VPT can be triggered spontaneously without any explicit verbal prompting. In six studies, we measured spontaneous VPT as the tendency to read an ambiguous number from another agent’s imagined perspective (“6”) rather than from one’s own default visual perspective (“9”). We found that the likelihood of spontaneous VPT varied systematically with the target agent’s behavior. The strongest trigger for spontaneous VPT was the agent’s goal-directed reaching, followed by object-directed gaze, and lastly the agent’s mere presence in the scene. Furthermore, observing an agent’s reaching or gaze toward an object triggered viewers’ spontaneous VPT even for objects with which the agent was currently not engaged.

In the face of strong evidence that a coin landed heads, can someone simply choose to believe it landed tails? Knowing that a large earthquake could result in personal tragedy, can someone simply choose to desire that it occur? We propose that in the face of strong reasons to adopt a given belief or desire, people are perceived to lack control: they cannot simply believe or desire otherwise. We test this “reason-based constraint” account of mental state change, and find that people reliably judge that evidence constrains belief formation, and utility constrains desire formation, in others. These results were not explained by a heuristic that simply treats irrational mental states as impossible to adopt intentionally. Rather, constraint results from the perceived influence of reasons on reasoning: people judge others as free to adopt irrational attitudes through actions that eliminate their awareness of strong reasons. These findings fill an important gap in our understanding of folk psychological reasoning, with implications for attributions of autonomy and moral responsibility.

Theories about the role of emotions in moral cognition makedifferent predictions about the relative speed of moral andaffective judgments: those that argue that felt emotions arecausal inputs to moral judgments predict that recognition ofaffective states should precede moral judgments; theoriesthat posit emotional states as the output of moral judgmentpredict the opposite. Across four studies, using a speededreaction time task, we found that self-reports of felt emotionwere delayed relative to reports of event-directed moraljudgments (e.g. badness) and were no faster than person-directed moral judgments (e.g. blame). These results pose achallenge to prominent theories arguing that moraljudgments are made on the basis of reflecting on affectivestates.