The present research sought to address an intriguing yet heretofore unanswered question with the tools of experimental psychology: Do people today still subscribe to the outdated folk belief that the heart is a mental organ, governing certain, if not all, aspects of mental life—a belief we termed cardiopsychism? The results from multiple experiments provided converging evidence for the conclusion that cardiopsychism is still very much alive in the minds of modern people. Aside from demonstrating the continued presence of cardiopsychism, we explored both the antecedent and consequence of holding this misconception. Through cross-cultural comparison, we found evidence suggesting that the conventionalized heart-expressions people speak might be responsible for perpetuating cardiopsychism. In addition, our hypothetical scenario study indicated that the perseverance of cardiopsychism might be more than just an innocuous glitch but could have real-world impacts.

This research explored how social distance affects risk preference in the life-saving domain. We found that decisionmakers tend to be more risk-seeking when the lives of close others versus distant others are at stake. By analyzing the shape of value function, we showed that the underlying mechanism for this difference in risk attitude might be that decision-makers engage in feeling-based evaluation when close others’ lives are at stake but calculation-based evaluation when distant others’ lives are at stake