Topic: Salivary cortisol

Adaptively navigating an uncertain social world often requires individuals to infer other people’s moral character based on their observed behavior. Recently, this inferential process has been elucidated through the lens of Bayesian learning, wherein beliefs about others’ character are dynamically updated in proportion to the uncertainty of those beliefs. This theoretical framework suggests that stress, a psychophysiological state intricately tied to uncertainty, may influence moral inference. Specifically, we hypothesized that acute stress would increase belief uncertainty and, consequently,