The Delaware Behavior Database: A set of social behaviors and corresponding norming data

People rapidly and robustly make social inferences based on descriptions of others’ behavior. Consequently, written behavioral stimuli are frequently deployed in psychological research in domains such as social cognition, impression formation, and moral psychology. That said, existing behavioral stimulus sets are somewhat limited in size and scope, and moreover, tend to lack characterization. We collected behaviors from several widely used sets, and then expanded on them by writing hundreds of new behaviors. Ultimately, this yielded a database of 2375 behaviors that is larger, broader in scope, and considerably more diverse than the previous sets that inspired this work. We then recruited a large set of participants (total N = 4792) to evaluate these behaviors across 18 dimensions central to person perception. It is our hope that this resource can support more rigorous, replicable research into the psychological and neural underpinnings of social learning.