Paige Amormino

Huge thanks to co-authors Drs. Abigail Marsh, Bryan Jones, and @kendraseaman.bsky.social for your helpful mentorship and continued belief in this project!

Social discounting and anti-/pro-sociality: A meta-analysis and (short-form) replication Early research in behavioral sciences emphasized situational and contextual factors as key drivers of prosocial behavior, with individual differences …

This paper grew out of my undergrad seminar: students collaborated on the replication project (Study2) & all earned co-authorship—it was a rare opportunity for undergrads to engage in journal-quality empirical work in the classroom & it’s a win for open science www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Social discounting and anti-/pro-sociality: A meta-analysis and (short-form) replication Early research in behavioral sciences emphasized situational and contextual factors as key drivers of prosocial behavior, with individual differences …

This paper grew out of my undergrad seminar: students collaborated on the replication project (Study 2) & all earned co-authorship—it was a rare opportunity for undergrads to engage in journal-quality empirical work in the classroom & it’s a win for open science www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

smiling young woman wearing a blue cardigan sweater

We are excited to welcome @amormino.bsky.social to the Prevention Research Center as a postdoctoral scholar in our Prevention and Methodology Training program! Her PAMT mentors will be @dcameron.bsky.social and Joel Segel. For more about PAMT for pre- and postdoctoral scholars, visit pamt.psu.edu.

It's been great to welcome @amormino.bsky.social here to Penn State, she's already brought wonderful energy to the EMP Lab, the social psych area, and to @rockethics.bsky.social. Looking forward to her working with us as part of our team!

@prcpennstate.bsky.social @psuliberalarts.bsky.social

Picture of members of the Empathy & Moral Psychology (EMP) Lab

A snapshot of our last summer meeting of the EMP Lab. A Happy Valley welcome to new members, graduate student
@jokretz.bsky.social & post-doc @amormino.bsky.social, & farewell to alum @rachelbuterbaugh.bsky.social, who's off to grad school. With @jdweng.bsky.social @farvk.bsky.social, a great team!

Welcome, Paige! 💙

Paige Amormino Hi, I'm Paige Amormino. I am currently in the fifth and final year of my Psychology Ph.D. program working with Dr. Abigail Marsh in the Laboratory on Social...

Excited to announce that @amormino.bsky.social has joined the EMP Lab as a post-doctoral fellow through @prcpennstate.bsky.social Prevention and Methodology Training Program! Excited to work with her on prosociality, moral judgments, & prevention science. Check out her work below, cheers to Paige!

We asked over 8,700 people in 6 countries to think about future generations in decision-making, and this is what we found When people reflect on how their actions shape the future, they are more likely to support solutions to present-day issues like poverty and inequality.

We asked over 8,700 people in 6 countries to think about future generations in decision-making, and this is what we found theconversation.com/we-asked-ove... @stysyropoulos.bsky.social

Excited to share
@seoyeonbae211.bsky.social's first preprint—an ambitious global study of human motivation!

Using data from 900,000+ people in 100+ countries, we find altruistic motives consistently outweigh egoistic ones across cultures.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

The Pope Intuitively Understood Aspects of Moral Psychology J.D. Vance has promoted a parochial view of moral obligations. Pope Francis provided a corrective that also receives support from psychological science.

Inspired by research from @mattiwilks.bsky.social @amormino.bsky.social @shawnrhoadsphd.bsky.social @eranhalperin75.bsky.social and others: www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mora...

ggplot graph depicting social discounting curves for the short form and classic social discounting tasks

Hoping that the Social Discounting Task - Short Form (SDT-SF) Resource Page on osf will be an accessible implementation & analysis guide for all levels of researchers, from professors to undergrads.

osf.io/nsv3k/files/...

New preprint! Do people who care about future generations actually do less to help others today?
Across 3 studies—including both deceased and non-directed living organ donors—we find the opposite:
Concern for the distant future predicts altruism now. 🌍🫀
👉 tinyurl.com/23r4cakh

Figure 2: A ggplot-generated graph depicting social discounting’s hyperbolic decline using behavioral data from the classic Social Discounting Task (slightly higher blue trend line) and the short form Social Discounting Task (slightly lower red line). Proportion of $ willing to forgo (y-axis) decreases as social distance (x-axis) increases.

New paper w Georgetown’s Abigail Marsh & Wharton’s Annie Wilson. We develop & validate a short form of the Social Discounting Task—a behavioral measure of generosity that reliably tracks w other forms of altruism. Perfect for tight surveys or large-scale studies
journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

New paper by @amormino.bsky.social and colleagues! They develop and validate a short form of the Social Discounting Task—a fast, reliable measure of how altruism declines with social distance. Perfect for tight surveys or large-scale studies.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

New Preprint: Social Discounting reliably predicts prosociality in meta-analysis & replication. Increased relational mobility (but not Ind-Col) predicts generosity toward distant others. All undergrads from our replication course are co-authors:

tinyurl.com/4acvnbrb
@kendraseaman.bsky.social

Check out our new preprint where we revisit ideological differences in the moral circle.

Big thanks to @spspnews.bsky.social and everyone who attended our symposium on barriers and pathways to altruistic equality! We appreciate the engaging discussion and insights. Special thanks to Stephanie Preston for providing stellar moderation—your expertise and guidance was outstanding!

We (@stysyropoulos.bsky.social, @jowylie.bsky.social, Gordon Kraft-Todd, @nathanliang.bsky.social, @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social) found striking self-serving asymmetries in how people judge others’ public virtue and how they expect their own to be judged. Check it out below!

In another preprint, we (@stysyropoulos.bsky.social & @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social) found that Americans underestimate how many future generations others see as worthy of consideration in policy and collective decisions, a form of pluralistic ignorance that may hinder long-term action.

New preprint!

When people have more resources, they allocate more to future generations—but not proportionally more.

SES also predicts greater willingness to sacrifice for future welfare. Tackling inequality and poverty might be key for longterm concern!

tinyurl.com/46kcst28

New Preprint! How do scientific journal endorsements of political candidates impact trust in science? We find declines in trust, especially among moderates & conservatives, supporting research on motivated reasoning.

Link: shorturl.at/76W4G

#psychology

Massive thanks are also in order for Bren O’Connor, @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social and Abigail Marsh as well as for the John Templeton Foundation!

Join us Saturday afternoon for a #SPSP2025 symposium on the real & perceived boundaries of altruistic equality—and how moral learning can help transcend them! Featuring talks by @amormino.bsky.social, @stysyropoulos.bsky.social, Falk Lieder, and me, with moderation by Stephanie Preston!

Moral Psychology Research Group 2024: Panel 2 Panel 2 Hosted by Daryl Cameron Sponsored by: Penn State College of the Liberal Arts Penn State Rock Ethics Institute Penn State Social Science Research Institute The McCourtney Institute for Democracy Penn State Department of Philosophy Penn State Department of Psychology Penn State University Libraries

Here's another short panel, between @drmeltemyucel.bsky.social @kyleflaw.bsky.social and Simone Tang, complementing one another after their talks on groups and morality. From the MPRG/Consortium conference

bit.ly/3PqPpgA

@ssripennstate.bsky.social @prcpennstate.bsky.social

Excited to share our new paper in PSPB! @stysyropoulos.bsky.social, Gordon Kraft-Todd, @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social and I validate a method for assessing impartial intergenerational beneficence––high levels of concern for ALL future generations.

Read here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Close relationship partners of impartial altruists do not report diminished relationship quality and are similarly altruistic - Communications Psychology Altruistic kidney donors and their closest relationship partners reported similar higher levels of impartial altruism as compared to control participants and their closest relationship partners. Partn...

Thank you to coauthors Adam Kagel, Joanna Li, and my PhD mentor Dr. Abigail Marsh! www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Impartial altruism theoretically undermines prioritizing close relationships. Yet we found that impartial altruists—who donated a kidney & performed impartially in lab tasks—had close others who reported high relationship quality & showed high impartiality in tasks (vs controls).

Moral Future-Thinking: Does the Moral Circle Stand the Test of Time? - Kyle Fiore Law, Stylianos Syropoulos, Matthew Coleman, Izzy Gainsburg, Brendan Bo O’Connor, 2024 Humanity’s long-term welfare may lie in the hands of those who are presently living, raising the question of whether people today hold the generations of tomorr...

Challenges like pandemics and climate change face the future of society. But present-oriented bias limits our moral concern for distant generations. Broadening our moral circles across time and space is therefore crucial for a better tomorrow — imagination may point the way. tinyurl.com/bdhrfuru

Blueksy! I will be recruiting a PhD student and a lab manager in the Fall of 2025. The lab will study rules and curiosity from a moral psychology lens—exploring how we judge rule-breakers, reason about rules, and what sparks our curiosity in the moral domain.