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Possibilities are deeply engrained in psychology's attempts to understand human behavior. This special issue offers diverse and novel insights into the role of possibilities. Two articles on morality show surprising links to mental illness and to counterfactual outcomes: People think doing immoral things is a sign of mental illness, and morally unwelcome outcomes stimulate retroactive imputation of more alternatives. Three articles address classic questions of determinism and choice: Possibilities are shaped by prior events, but pure determinism is useless for psychological theory, and meanwhile some perspectives in modern physics clash with psychological observations and experience. Imitation promotes prosociality but people are highly selective as to what they imitate.

With a large international sample (n = 8,317), the present study examined which beliefs and attitudes about COVID-19 predict 1) following government recommendations, 2) taking health precautions (including mask wearing, social distancing, handwashing, and staying at home), and 3) encouraging others to take health precautions. The results demonstrate the importance of believing that taking health precautions will be effective for avoiding COVID-19 and generally prioritizing one's health. These beliefs continued to be important predictors of health behaviors after controlling for demographic and personality variables. In contrast, we found that perceiving oneself as vulnerable to COVID-19, the perceived severity of catching COVID-19, and trust in government were of relatively little importance. We also found that women were somewhat more likely to engage in these health behaviors than men, but that age was generally unrelated to voluntary compliance behaviors. These findings may suggest avenues and dead ends for behavioral interventions during COVID-19 and beyond.

For a set of 10 conditions (e.g. homosexuality, obesity, drug addiction), we explored associations between moral judgments, agency evaluations, and perceptions that a condition is a mental illness. In a preregistered study ( n = 1,249 U.S. adults), we found that perceptions of lower agency were associated with decreased moral wrongness judgments, as well as increased perceptions of mental illness, yet perceived moral wrongness was the most robust predictor of perceived mental illness. In other words, although perceived mental illness was associated with evaluations that tend to be morally exonerating (such as less control and greater difficulty changing), we observed positive associations between wrongness judgments and perceived mental illness. We also found that—at least within our set of conditions—political conservatives tended to evaluate conditions as more controllable, more morally wrong, and more of a mental illness, yet on the whole, ideology was not a reliable predictor of perceived mental illness. Instead, liberals and conservatives with similar wrongness evaluations tended to similarly ascribe mental illness. These findings raise questions about potential causal relationships between mental illness perceptions and moral evaluations and the possibility that perceived moral wrongness might sometimes contribute to perceptions that a condition ought to be considered a mental illness.