Scholars@Duke
Julia Smith

Selected Publications

The Privileges We Do and Do Not See: The Relative Salience of Interpersonal and Circumstantial Benefits.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · November 2025 People attend more to disadvantages in their lives than to advantages, a phenomenon known as the Headwinds/Tailwinds Asymmetry. In seven studies (N = 1,526), we present an important caveat to this pattern: When people do notice and acknowledg ... Full text Cite

No Developmental Differences in Preferences for Epistemic Versus Physical Uncertainty Across Three Diverse Cultures.

Journal Article Developmental science · November 2025 We regularly make decisions under uncertainty, but the same decision can feel different when made under physical uncertainty, where a decision maker must guess at an outcome that has not yet occurred, and epistemic uncertainty, where the outcome has occurr ... Full text Cite

Thinking About God Encourages Prosociality Toward Religious Outgroups: A Cross-Cultural Investigation.

Journal Article Psychological science · June 2023 Most humans believe in a god or gods, a belief that may promote prosociality toward coreligionists. A critical question is whether such enhanced prosociality is primarily parochial and confined to the religious ingroup or whether it extends to members of r ... Full text Cite

Thinking about God discourages dehumanization of religious outgroups.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · October 2022 In seven studies, six with American Christians and one with Israeli Jews (total N = 2,323), we examine how and when belief in moralizing gods influences dehumanization of ethno-religious outgroups. We focus on dehumanization because it is a key feat ... Full text Cite

God Values the Lives of My Out-Group More Than I Do: Evidence From Fiji and Israel

Journal Article Social Psychological and Personality Science · September 2020 Does God want people to favor coreligionists or to treat in-group and out-group members equally? To test people’s beliefs about God’s moral preferences, we conducted three preregistered studies. Study 1 was a field study with Christian and Muslim F ... Full text Cite