Traditional trait-based leadership research relies on generic personality models, overlooking the context-specific nature of personality. We used the lexical approach to develop a leadership-focused personality taxonomy. We identified 199 adjectives for describing leaders (Study 1) and factor analyzed leaders’ (Study 2, N = 402) and followers’ (Study 3, N = 421) ratings of these adjectives. Analyses revealed five dimensions shared across groups, closely related to, yet distinct from the Big Five and HEXACO factors: Energy, Psychopathy, Organization, Irritability, and Intellect. Two follower-specific dimensions—Supportiveness and Weakness—also emerged. Relationships with the Big Five, HEXACO, and leadership criteria supported construct and concurrent validity. Study 4 replicated the structure in samples of military (N = 226) and religious (N = 202) leaders.

As the performance of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled algorithms to improve, so too increases the potential for them to be used to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of human resource management (HRM) decisions. Yet, public distrust in AI algorithms could keep organizations from using this technology to improve HRM decision-making. Here, we examine one factor that may influence the perceived trustworthiness of AI algorithms used in HRM, specifically those used in personnel selection decisions. Drawing from organizational justice and trust theories, we posit that knowledge of how the algorithm compares with human recruiters in terms of hiring members of traditionally discriminated demographic groups serves as a fairness heuristic that affects the algorithm's perceived trustworthiness by increasing its perceived ability, benevolence, and integrity. In three experimental studies (N = 1382), we show that when people are informed that an algorithm used in personnel selection results in more women or racial minorities being hired, as compared to selection decisions made by human recruiters, they perceive it as having higher ability, benevolence and integrity, and are more willing to adopt it and to follow its recommendations. The opposite is true when the algorithm is said to decrease the number of women and racial minorities being hired. Our research suggests that auditing personnel selection decisions made using AI algorithms and communicating how they compare with human recruiters in terms of their diversity, equity, and inclusion outcomes is important for the perceived trustworthiness and public acceptance of this technology.

Moral foundations theory proposes that there are two types of moral domains: the individualizing domain, which relates to individual welfare (comprising harm and fairness foundations), and the binding domain, which relates to communal and spiritual welfare (comprising loyalty, authority, and purity foundations). In this investigation, we demonstrate that this distinction is not universal. Specifically, across five studies (total N = 1,211) conducted among Jews in Israel and Christians in the United States, we show that the core religious belief that people are created in the image of God is associated not only with purity/divinity values that are typically considered to be part of the binding domain but also with the individualizing moral domain. In two correlational studies, we find that this belief is highly correlated with religiosity but that it predicts greater endorsement of the individualizing moral domain (Studies 1-2). Two experimental studies further establish that this belief is associated with endorsing the individualizing moral domain and the moral foundation of purity, but not the communal foundations (Studies 3-4). Finally, in Study 5, we demonstrate that these experimental findings are not driven by belief in God. We conclude that the distinction between individualizing and binding moral domains is more culturally contingent than previously believed. We discuss the broader implications of the belief in creation in the image of God for understanding moral judgments pertaining to human dignity.

We human beings are naturally inclined to characterize the morality of others. Whereas some actions lead us to immediate moral characterization of the agent, others can be more difficult to evaluate. Prior research suggests that when judging ambiguous actions, we rely upon our perception of the agent's motivation. Yet we are often not privy to the reasons behind agents' actions, making us search for cues of their moral motivation. Building on research on motivation attribution and person perception, we suggest here that self-sacrifice, the willingness to incur a personal cost, is a powerful cue that judges use to infer an agent's motivation. We hypothesize that people will be more likely to judge an agent positively when their action involves self-sacrifice, as it is perceived as a reflection of moral motivation. However, when the agent's motivation is clearly immoral, self-sacrifice will not affect moral judgment. Six vignette studies (N = 3,931) each manipulating the actor's self-sacrifice, supported this hypothesis across various domains, including views of political policies, assessment of risky military decisions, and monetary decisions.

Continuous traumatic stress has wide-ranging implications for important life outcomes across multiple domains. We present the design protocol from the first waves of one of the most comprehensive studies of the impact of one pervasive continuous traumatic stress context— war—on individuals. In this ongoing project we have been collecting quantitative and qualitative data on psychological function, risk, and resilience at different levels of influence and at various junctures during the ongoing 2023-2025 Hamas-Israel war from three samples (total N=16,330). We present this large-scale, multi-sample, multivariate, mixed-method, longitudinal study, and showcase select, preliminary findings at different levels of analysis and in different samples (e.g., concerning war exposure, trust in institutions, and well-being). We document the design, scope, and future trajectory of the project, encouraging interdisciplinary, cross-border collaborations among researchers across diverse fields. This is important not only for understanding responses to the current conflict, but also for understanding risk and resilience in other conflict-affected regions and among populations facing continuous traumatic stress more broadly.

The global pervasiveness of agriculture and its profound effects on biodiversity increasingly mandate developing sustainable agricultural methods to support healthy ecosystems within agricultural landscapes. However, increasing the attractiveness of agricultural landscapes for wildlife may negatively impact biodiversity if animals or their reproduction are adversely affected in such habitats. While the effects of agricultural practices were investigated across various crop types and wildlife species, reptiles remain largely overlooked. Additionally, although reptiles in croplands were monitored throughout the farming season, little attention has been directed towards the effects of harvest at the season’s end. To illustrate the potential impacts of mechanical harvest on wildlife in permanent crops, we present a case-study concerning reptiles in vineyards. We scanned the waste of a medium-sized winery over four nights and found 105 reptiles, 69 % of them chameleons. Though chameleons are considered carnivorous, approximately half had consumed grapes, potentially attracted by them. Vineyards, like many crops, offer resources including sugar, moisture, and shelter, likely attracting many wildlife species. However, mortality during mechanical harvest may be high, potentially rendering such crops an ecological trap. For chameleons the effects may be particularly devastating, as harvest closely precedes the egg-laying season. While our case study focuses on reptiles in vineyards, its implications extend to many species in croplands. Ultimately, ecological traps affect biodiversity by attracting animals to habitats in which their fitness is impaired.

Human values inform behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs, but what shapes the human value system? Here, we employ Pareto analysis on the European Social Survey data (N = 411,904). Pareto analysis relies on an optimization framework to extract the drivers that shape people’s individual variations. We found that individual differences in values are linked to balancing trade-offs between three adaptive tasks: Self-enhancement, Growth, and Conservation. Notably, value combinations that represent non-adaptive trade-off solutions, though considered theoretically possible, are absent from the data. These adaptive tasks are robust across two global samples, multiple countries, different religiosity levels, and age groups. Beyond identifying adaptive tasks, Pareto analysis provided a framework for assessing trade-off shifts across development and religiosity levels. This work paves the way for investigating the tasks’ etiology and their underlying mechanisms. More broadly, Pareto analysis offers a principled approach to understanding individual differences in humans, revealing the adaptive tasks and trade-offs that drive complex psychological systems.

Robert Aumann was awarded (jointly with Thomas C Schelling) the 2005 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel "for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis". This book contains ten of his most important contributions to game theory, as selected by Eric Maskin, also a Nobel laureate.

Twenty years ago Dan Rudolph gave a seminar talk at the University of Maryland in which he discussed his discovery that if one restricts the shift invariant measures on a finite alphabet shift space to have entropy greater than or equal to c > 0, then the generic measure there defines a process that has entropy c and is isomorphic to a Bernoulli shift. He never published a proof of this theorem. In the following note we will present a proof of this result.

Division of labor in reproduction in eusocial insects is governed by delicate and context- dependent mechanisms, yet the regulatory processes remain largely unclear. Here, we investigate social cues involved in the establishment of reproductive dominance in bumble bee (Bombus terrestris) workers. We reveal the roles of two alkenes, (Z)-9-nonacosene (Z9- C₂₉) and (Z)-9-hentriacontene (Z9- C₃₁) in the activation of ovarian development. These alkenes are found throughout the queenright bumble bee colony, including wax, workers, drones, and gynes, and their levels are positively correlated with colony size. They act as quorum-sensing pheromones that facilitate ovary maturation in a threshold-dependent manner under queenright conditions. A synergistic interaction between the perception of these two alkenes and the occurrence of dominance contests is essential for the ovary development of worker bumble bees, independent of temporal sequence. Artificial addition of these two alkenes into colonies confirms their stimulatory effects on the ovarian developmental potential of worker bees, even in the presence of a queen. Our findings highlight a quorum-sensing-like mechanism that primes the initiation of worker ovary development, providing insights into the complex regulation of context-dependent reproductive plasticity in social insects.

THE WORKPLACE is a complex and dynamic environment that mirrors societal relations and interactions. Given the inherent imbalance of power between employers and workers, as well as the lack of bargaining power of any individual worker, worker unions have emerged to provide workers with a collective voice and place them on more even footing with their employers, allowing them to achieve more than any single worker could on their own (Bok, 1971). Through the assertion of their members’ collective rights, worker unions have played a pivotal role in promoting rights such as fair wages, safe work conditions, health benefits, and insurance (Weil, 2005).

Conventional wisdom perceives patent protection as a necessary evil. Patent protection, the argument goes, raises the prices of patented products and processes, thus restricting access to innovation. But without it, not enough innovation will be produced. Hence, generations of scholars have sought ways to curb the market power of patentees via various legal interventions, such as prizes, compulsory licenses, and other forms of regulation. All have tacitly assumed that eroding the market power of patentees would result in a competitive market for innovation that would put an end to the allocative inefficiencies and distributional inequities that emanate from patent protection.

The present Article sets out to challenge the accepted understanding of innovation, showing that patentholders ordinarily operate in markets of monopsonistic nature, namely, markets characterized by a single purchaser or a highly concentrated demand side. Crucially, this finding involves the most prominent patent-inhabiting industries, including pharmaceuticals, agriculture and biotechnologies, defense technologies, infrastructural equipment and other sectors. The existence of monopsonies in markets for patented technologies implies that commentators have thus far overlooked the actual structure of the marketplace for patents, which routinely features a bilateral monopoly: a single seller along with a single buyer. After highlighting this phenomenon and assessing its pervasiveness, this Article introduces a blueprint for analyzing patent monopsonies. It shows that under extant market structure, the monopsonistic counterforces may reinstate competitive pricing of inventions, whereas in other cases, the presence of patent monopsonies might prove disadvantageous to society at large.

The new market picture this Article portrays gives rise to several important policy implications. First, it shows that the high prices consumers pay in some industrial sectors are due to the existence of monopsonies, not patents. Second, in contrast with conventional wisdom, it counsels against the use of compulsory licenses in monopsonistic industries because they reduce innovation without generating any real benefits to consumers. Third, it demonstrates that the existence of monopsonies is a core reason for suppression, non-commercialization, and distortion of innovation. It also discusses legal interventions that can help alleviate this problem.

The development of autonomous vehicles has stimulated research into preferences in sacrificial moral dilemmas. Studies such as the Moral Machine Experiment, which has attracted enormous attention in both philosophy and psychology, have been criticized for an important methodological flaw: forcing participants to choose between two options, like killing a man or a woman. It has been shown that many people actually prefer a third option, namely treating people “equally”. While this is an important improvement, we argue that “equal” treatment can be understood in different ways. Instead of “equality”, we propose to use the concept of impartiality and argue that impartiality needs to be complemented with action-guiding decision rules. To support this conceptual point, we conducted a vignette study. Our results suggest that impartiality is indeed the main preference and that the most attractive decision rule to complement impartiality is not random choice, as many papers suggest, but inaction.

Biological invasions pose major ecological and economic threats, and extensive research has been dedicated to understanding and predicting their dynamics. Most studies focus on the biological invasion of single species, and only in recent years has it been realized that multi-species interactions that involve native and invasive host species and their microbial symbionts can play important roles in determining invasion outputs. A theoretical framework that treats these interactions and their impact is lacking. Here we offer such a framework and use it to explore possible dynamics that may emerge from the sharing of native and non-native symbionts among native and non-native host species. Thus, for example, invasive plants might benefit from native microbial communities in the soil, or might be particularly successful if they carry with them parasites to which competing native hosts are susceptible. On the other hand, invasion might be hindered by native parasites that spread from native to invasive individuals. The mathematical framework that we present in this study provides a new mechanistic, cohesive, and intuition-enhancing tool for theoretically exploring the ways by which the subtleties of host-microbe relationships can influence invasion dynamics. We identify multiple pathways through which microbes can facilitate (or prevent) host invasion, microbial invasion, and the invasion of both hosts and their co-introduced microbes. We disentangle invasion outcomes and suggest possible ecological dynamics that may be underexplored in current invasion biology literature. Our work sets the foundations for invasion theory that includes a community-level view of invasive and native hosts as well as their microbial symbionts.

Amphibians are the most endangered group of vertebrates, facing numerous threats, and detailed data are required to identify stressors and prioritize conservation efforts. While these data exist for many species, gaps remain, especially in understudied regions. Citizen science is an approach that can vastly increase the available data for informed decision-making. This study aims to use such an approach to investigate the population dynamics of two amphibian species in urban environments. We used the program MARK to perform a capture-mark-recapture analysis on two datasets: a large dataset collected in a multiyear citizen-science program, focused on two urban near eastern fire salamander (Salamandra infraimmaculata) populations, both found within a large city; and a second dataset, collected in a 1-year survey, focused on two green toad (Bufotes sitibundus) populations in an urban park and in a nearby nature reserve. Individuals of both species have unique patterns of dorsal spots, allowing for noninvasive recapture identification. Using repeated measurements of recaptured salamanders, we derived a species-specific growth curve that converts body length into an age estimate. Combined with a survival analysis of the capture–recapture dataset, this age estimate revealed a prolonged period of increased vulnerability during the salamanders' terrestrial phase, from metamorphosis until they reach full size. Additionally, the two case studies suggest that exotic fish introduction can have highly detrimental impacts on these amphibian species and should be the focus of future studies.

Introduction

Among the religious factors that significantly contribute to believers’ well-being, research on the personal experience of divine forgiveness (DF) remains in its infancy. The aim of this study was to investigate similarities and differences in the conceptualization of DF, its conditional/unconditional nature, and the understanding of sin across the three main monotheistic religions.

Methods

This was achieved by interviewing theologians (N = 3) through a focus group and having lay believers (N = 229, 63.8% female, Mage = 33.09 years, SD = 13.81) from Christianity, Islam, and Judaism complete a self-report questionnaire.

Results

The theologians’ and believers’ perspectives revealed that while there are shared aspects across religions (e.g., God’s mercy is greater than His justice), some differences are evident (e.g., the pathways to seek and achieve DF).

Discussion

These findings make a significant contribution to the psychology of religion, shedding light on universal and culturally specific dimensions of this multidimensional phenomenon.

As the performance of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled algorithms to improve, so too increases the potential for them to be used to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of human resource management (HRM) decisions. Yet, public distrust in AI algorithms could keep organizations from using this technology to improve HRM decision-making. Here, we examine one factor that may influence the perceived trustworthiness of AI algorithms used in HRM, specifically those used in personnel selection decisions. Drawing from organizational justice and trust theories, we posit that knowledge of how the algorithm compares with human recruiters in terms of hiring members of traditionally discriminated demographic groups serves as a fairness heuristic that affects the algorithm's perceived trustworthiness by increasing its perceived ability, benevolence, and integrity. In three experimental studies (N = 1382), we show that when people are informed that an algorithm used in personnel selection results in more women or racial minorities being hired, as compared to selection decisions made by human recruiters, they perceive it as having higher ability, benevolence and integrity, and are more willing to adopt it and to follow its recommendations. The opposite is true when the algorithm is said to decrease the number of women and racial minorities being hired. Our research suggests that auditing personnel selection decisions made using AI algorithms and communicating how they compare with human recruiters in terms of their diversity, equity, and inclusion outcomes is important for the perceived trustworthiness and public acceptance of this technology.