We presented subjects with pairs of hypothetical scenarios. The action in each scenario harmed some people in order to aid others. In one member of the pair, the harm was a direct result of the action. In the other member, it was an indirect byproduct. Subjects preferred the indirect harm to the direct harm. This result could not be fully explained in terms of di#erences in judgments about which option was more active, more intentional, more likely to cause harm, or more subject to the disapproval of others. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for a new bias in judgment, a tendency to favor indirectly harmful options over directly harmful alternatives, irrespective of the associated outcomes, intentions, or self-presentational concerns. We speculate that this bias could originate from the use of a typical but somewhat unreliable property of harmful acts, their directness, as a cue to moral evaluation. We discuss the implications of the bias for a range of social issues, including the distinction between passive and active euthanasia, legal deterrence, and the rhetoric of a#rmative action.

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Timing 2 A programming option for researchers wishing to develop web-delivered research experiments is Macromedia’s Authorware. As a first step in measuring the accuracy with which Authorware running under Windows can measure event times, keystroke pairs at precisely timed intervals of 150, 200, 250, and 1000 ms were sent via an external device to computers that used an Authorware program to detect the keystrokes and measure the interval between them. Measurement accuracy was compared among experimental conditions defined by the time interval, the mode of execution (in Netscape, in Internet Explorer, or as an executable file), and the CPU load. Results showed that accuracies were stable for typical CPU loads, but declined significantly in one extreme condition. Also, accuracies declined with time interval. Mode of execution was not a factor of importance. A comparison of an executable Authorware program with E-Prime, an experiment generator that is the gold standard for measurement precision, showed that Authorware’s accuracy was comparable to E-Prime’s except in the heavy CPU load condition.

The customizable PHP script Generic HTML Form Processor is intended to assist researchers and students in quickly setting up surveys and experiments that can be administered via the Web. This script relieves researchers from the burdens of writing new CGI scripts and building databases for each Web study. Generic HTML Form Processor processes any syntactically correct HTML form input and saves it into a dynamically created open-source database. We describe five modes for usage of the script that allow increasing functionality but require increasing levels of knowledge of PHP and Web servers: The first two modes require no previous knowledge, and the fifth requires PHP programming expertise. Use of Generic HTML Form Processor is free for academic purposes, and its Web address is www.goeritz.net/brmic. In the last decade, the execution of experiments and surveys via the World-Wide Web has become an established method (see Birnbaum, 2001, 2004a, 2004b; Kraut et al., 2004). Several reviews have concluded that the quality of data achieved in online studies can be comparable to, and sometimes better than, that obtained by more traditional methods involving a lab, paper questionnaires, or

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh Learning in virtual environments: Some discrepancies between laboratory- and