OBJECTIVE: What do people see as distinguishing the morally exceptional from others? To handle the problem that people may disagree about who qualifies as morally exceptional, we asked subjects to select and rate their own examples of morally exceptional, morally average, and immoral people.
METHODS: Subjects rated each selected exemplar on several enablers of moral action and several directions of moral action. By applying the logic underlying stimulus sampling in experimental design, we evaluated perceivers\' level of agreement about the characteristics of the morally exceptional, even though perceivers rated different targets.
RESULTS: Across three studies, there was strong subjective consensus on who is morally exceptional: those who are empathetic and prone to guilt, those who reflect on moral issues and identify with morality, those who have self-control and actually enact moral behaviors, and those who care about harm, compassion, fairness, and honesty. Deep controversies also existed about the moral directions pursued by those seen as morally exceptional: People evaluated those who pursued similar values and made similar decisions more favorably.
CONCLUSIONS: Strong consensus suggests characteristics that may push a person to go beyond normal expectations, that the study of moral exceptionality is not overly hindered by disagreement over who is morally exceptional, and that there is some common ground between disagreeing camps.

Global policy documents for the promotion of physical activity (PA) play an important role in the measurement, evaluation, and monitoring of population PA levels. The World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines include, for the first time, recommendations for specific populations, including individuals living with a range of non-communicable diseases. Of note, is the absence of any chronic respiratory diseases (CRDs) within the recommendations. Globally, CRDs are highly prevalent, are attributable to significant individual and societal burdens, and are characterised by low PA. As a community, there is a need to come together to understand how to increase CRD representation within global PA policy documents, including where the evidence gaps are and how we can align with PA research in other contexts. In this commentary, the potential for synergy between evidence into the relationships between PA in CRDs globally and the relevance to current policies, guidelines and action plans on population levels of PA are discussed. Furthermore, actions and considerations for future research, including the need to harmonize and promote PA assessment (particularly in low- and middle-income countries) and encompass the synergistic influences of PA, sedentary behaviour and sleep on health outcomes in CRD populations are presented.

We aimed to generate evidence on patients\' values and preferences to inform the development of the German national Evidence-based Anal Cancer Guideline.
We developed a list of health outcomes based on a systematic search. We then asked anal cancer patients and experts of the guideline development group in an online survey to (a) rate the relative importance of the outcomes in different clinical situations using a nine-point, three-category scale, and (b) select seven outcomes they considered most important for decision-making in each situation.
Participants rated almost half of the outcomes (45%) as critical for decision-making, and more than half (53%) as important. Only two outcomes (2%) were rated as low in importance. Agreement between expert and patient ratings was low to fair, and we found important discrepancies in how the relative importance of the outcomes was perceived. However, the rankings of outcomes were highly correlated.
Determining the relative importance placed by anal cancer patients on outcomes provided useful information for developing guideline recommendations. Our approach may be useful for guideline developers who aim to include the patient perspective. Moreover, our findings may help health professionals caring for anal cancer patients in joint decision-making.

Purpose. \"False consensus\" refers to individuals with (v. without) an experience judging that experience as more (v. less) prevalent in the population. We examined the role of people\'s perceptions of their social circles (family, friends, and acquaintances) in shaping their population estimates, false consensus patterns, and vaccination intentions. Methods. In a national online flu survey, 351 participants indicated their personal vaccination and flu experiences, assessed the percentage of individuals with those experiences in their social circles and the population, and reported their vaccination intentions. Results. Participants\' population estimates of vaccination coverage and flu prevalence were associated with their perceptions of their social circles\' experiences, independent of their own experiences. Participants reporting less social circle \"homophily\" (or fewer social contacts sharing their experience) showed less false consensus and even \"false uniqueness.\" Vaccination intentions were greater among nonvaccinators reporting greater social circle vaccine coverage. Discussion. Social circle perceptions play a role in population estimates and, among individuals who do not vaccinate, vaccination intentions. We discuss implications for the literature on false consensus, false uniqueness, and social norms interventions.

Consensus has both social and epistemic value. Children conform to consensus judgments in ways that suggest they are sensitive to the social value of consensus. Here we report two experiments providing evidence that 4-year-old children also are sensitive to the epistemic value of consensus. When multiple informants gave the same judgment concerning the hidden contents of a container, based on the observation of one of their members, children\'s own judgments tended to align with the consensus judgment over the judgment of a lone character, whose observation received no endorsements. This tendency was reduced, however, when children were shown that the group consensus lacked epistemic warrant. Together, the findings provide evidence that young children are sensitive to the epistemic basis of consensus reports.

Internet blogs have become an important platform for the discussion of many scientific issues, including climate change. Blogs, and in particular the comment sections of blogs, also play a major role in the dissemination of contrarian positions that question mainstream climate science. The effect of this content on people\'s attitudes is not fully understood. In particular, it is unknown how the interaction between the content of blog posts and blog comments affects readers\' attitudes. We report an experiment that orthogonally varied those two variables using blog posts and comments that either did, or did not, support the scientific consensus on climate change. We find that beliefs are partially shaped by readers\' perception of how widely an opinion expressed in a blog post appears to be shared by other readers. The perceived social consensus among readers, in turn, is determined by whether blog comments endorse or reject the contents of a post. When comments reject the content, perceived reader consensus is lower than when comments endorse the content. The results underscore the importance of perceived social consensus on opinion formation.

Background: Research suggests that blameworthy attributions towards individuals with anorexia nervosa are common, which in turn elicit more stigmatising attitudes towards those with the disorder. The social consensus approach has been found to reduce stigmatising attitudes in various domains and, as such, is a promising avenue to pursue for ameliorating stigma in anorexia nervosa.Aims: The present study primarily sought to investigate the effectiveness of a social consensus approach in reducing stigma towards individuals with anorexia nervosa. The study also examined if blameworthy attributions were associated with change in stigma.Method: An experimental design was employed, where female undergraduate students (N= 126) completed self-report measures that assessed anorexia nervosa stigma at baseline (Time 1) and 6-10 days after allocation to one of two conditions: social consensus and control (Time 2).Results: The social consensus intervention was more effective than the control condition in reducing stigmatising attitudes on measures assessing affective reactions (p= 0.025) and characteristics attributed to a target with anorexia nervosa (p < 0.001). Level of blame-based attributions did not moderate change in stigma.Conclusions: Results suggest that a social consensus intervention is promising irrespective of the endorsement of blameworthy attributions.

This special report is published in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the \"Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death,\" a landmark document that proposed a new way to define death, with implications that advanced the field of organ transplantation. This remarkable success notwithstanding, the concept has raised lasting questions about what it means to be dead. Is death defined in terms of the biological failure of the organism to maintain integrated functioning? Can death be declared on the basis of severe neurological injury even when biological functions remain intact? Is death essentially a social construct that can be defined in different ways, based on human judgment? These issues, and more, are discussed and debated in this report by leading experts in the field, many of whom have been engaged with this topic for decades.

The false consensus effect (FCE) - the tendency to (erroneously) project our attitudes and opinions onto others - is an enduring bias in social reasoning with important societal implications. In this fMRI investigation, we examine the neural correlates of within-subject variation in consensus bias on a variety of social and political issues. Bias demonstrated a strong association with activity in brain regions implicated in self-related cognition, mentalizing, and valuation. Importantly, however, recruitment of these regions predicted consensus bias only in the presence of social disconfirmation, in the form of feedback discrepant with participants\' own attitudes. These results suggest that the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the tendency to project attitudes onto others are crucially moderated by motivational factors, including the desire to affirm the normativity of one\'s own position. This research complements social psychological theorizing about the factors contributing to the FCE, and further emphasizes the role of motivated cognition in social reasoning.

BACKGROUND: Within-class consensus on mastery goal structures describes the extent to which students agree in their perceptions of mastery goal structures. Research on (work) teams suggests that higher levels of consensus within a group indicate a well-functioning social environment and are thus positively related to beneficial socio-emotional outcomes. However, the potential of within-class consensus to predict socio-emotional outcomes has not yet been explored in research on mastery goal structures.
OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to test whether within-class consensus on the three mastery goal structures dimensions of task, autonomy, and recognition/evaluation has predictive power for socio-emotional outcomes in terms of classroom climate, negative classmate reactions to errors, and cooperative learning.
METHODS: A total of 1,455 Austrian secondary school students (65.70% female) in 157 classrooms participated in this study.
METHODS: Students responded to items measuring their perceptions of mastery goal structures, classroom climate, error climate, and cooperative learning. Items assessing mastery goal structures, error climate, and cooperative learning referred to the subject of mathematics and items assessing classroom climate referred to positive classmate relations without focusing on a subject.
RESULTS: Results from multilevel structural equation models revealed that within-class consensus on all mastery goal structures dimensions predicted a less negative error climate. Additionally, consensus regarding task and autonomy predicted more frequent use of cooperative learning strategies, and consensus regarding task predicted a more positive classroom climate.
CONCLUSIONS: Our findings show that higher levels of within-class consensus on mastery goal structures enhance beneficial socio-emotional outcomes. Moreover, the results emphasize the value of expanding the scope of educational research to the study of within-class consensus.