Analyzing reactions to moral threat with social psychological experiments using actual behavior and physiological indices in immersive behavioral paradigms

Classical social psychological experiments often used immersive behavioral paradigms, where
participants were submerged in an engaging situation. However, in recent years, experiments
using "actual behavior" have declined tremendously. I will describe two research projects where
participants were put in relatively immersive behavioral paradigms and where several different
behavioral measures were used. In the first project, I assessed whether meat-eating
participants would experience more threat when confronted with a moral vegetarian rather than
a non-moral vegetarian. In the second project, I investigated whether beer-drinking participants
would show more negative behavior (i.e., allocating beer to an explicit non-drinker) when
exposed to a moral non-drinker rather than a non-moral non-drinker. These projects can be
difficult to execute, require new skills and equipment, and take a lot of time and resources.
However, studies with immersive behavioral paradigms are also rewarding. Besides being fun to
do, they also contribute to the long-standing social psychological tradition that leads to strong
insights about human behavior in situations that closely resemble reality.