Past research has uncovered actions that would seem to undermine but in fact frequently enhance persuasion. For example, expressing doubt about one’s view or presenting arguments against it would seem to weaken one’s case, but can sometimes promote it. We propose a framework for understanding these findings. We posit that these actions constitute acts of receptiveness—behaviors that signal openness

A theory of political belief system dynamics should incorporate causal connections between elements of the belief system and the possibility that belief systems are influenced by exogenous factors. These necessary components can be satisfied by conceptualizing an individual’s belief system as a network of causally connected attitudes and identities which, via the interactions between the elements and

Historically, the study of multiple goals has focused on the dynamics between two goals as the prototypical example of multiple goals. This focus on dyadic relations means that many issues central to the psychology of more than two goals are still unexplored. We argue that a deeper understanding of multiple-goal issues involves moving beyond two goals. Doing so not only reveals new insights about goal

Researchers have long assumed that complex thinking is determined by both situational factors and stable, trait-based differences. However, although situational influences on complexity have been discussed at length in the literature, there is still no comprehensive integration of evidence regarding the theorized trait component of cognitive complexity. To fill this gap, we evaluate the degree that

Choosing a mate is perhaps the most important decision a sexually reproducing organism makes in its lifetime. And yet, psychologists lack a precise description of human mate choice, despite sustained attention from several theoretical perspectives. Here, I argue this limited progress owes to the complexity of mate choice and describe a new modeling approach, called “couple simulation,” designed to

Despite the broad importance of humor, psychologists do not agree on the basic elements that cause people to experience laughter, amusement, and the perception that something is funny. There are more than 20 distinct psychological theories that propose appraisals that characterize humor appreciation. Most of these theories leverage a subset of five potential antecedents of humor appreciation: surprise

Prosociality is an ideal context to begin shifting traditional gender role stereotypes and promoting equality. Men and women both help others frequently, but assistance often follows traditional gender role expectations, which further reinforces restrictive gender stereotypes in other domains. We propose an integrative process model of gender roles inhibiting prosociality (GRIP) to explain why and

Garnering support for distressing experiences is highly important, yet notoriously challenging. We examine whether expressing positive thoughts and feelings when seeking support for negative events can help people elicit support, and we present a theoretical process model that explains why it might do so. The model includes three support-eliciting pathways through which expressing positivity could

Gender gaps in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) participation are larger in societies where women have greater freedom of choice. We provide a cultural psychological model to explain this pattern. We consider how individualistic/post-materialistic cultural patterns in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic) settings foster a self-expressive construction of

In recent years, psychology has wrestled with the broader implications of disappointing rates of replication of previously demonstrated effects. This article proposes that many aspects of this pattern of results can be understood within the classic framework of four proposed forms of validity: statistical conclusion validity, internal validity, construct validity, and external validity. The article

Researchers have used social dominance, system justification, authoritarianism, and social identity theories to understand how monoracial perceivers' sociopolitical motives influence their categorization of multiracial people. The result has been a growing understanding of how particular sociopolitical motives and contexts affect categorization, without a unifying perspective to integrate these insights

White Americans who participate in the Black Lives Matter movement, men who attended the Women's March, and people from the Global North who work to reduce poverty in the Global South-advantaged group members (sometimes referred to as allies) often engage in action for disadvantaged groups. Tensions can arise, however, over the inclusion of advantaged group members in these movements, which we argue

Research during the 1960s found that observers could be moved enough by an innocent victim's suffering to derogate their character. However, recent research has produced inconsistent evidence for this effect. We conducted the first meta-analysis (k = 55) of the experimental literature on the victim derogation effect to test the hypothesis that it varies as a function of the emotional impactfulness

This article provides a comprehensive review of divergent conceptualizations of the “implicit” construct that have emerged in attitude research over the past two decades. In doing so, our goal is to raise awareness of the harmful consequences of conceptual ambiguities associated with this terminology. We identify three main conceptualizations of the “implicitness” construct: the procedural conceptualization

What are the consequences of lay beliefs about how things are made? In this article, we describe a Western folk theory of artifact creation, highlighting how intuitive dualism regarding mental and physical labor (i.e., folk psychology) can lead to the perceived transmission of properties from makers to material artifacts (i.e., folk physics), and affect people's interactions with material artifacts

(Hetero)sexual double standards (SDS) entail that different sexual behaviors are appropriate for men and women. This meta-analysis (k = 99; N = 123,343) tested predictions of evolutionary and biosocial theories regarding the existence of SDS in social cognitions. Databases were searched for studies examining attitudes or stereotypes regarding the sexual behaviors of men versus women. Studies assessing

We conducted a series of meta-analytic tests on experiments in which participants read perspective-taking instructions-that is, written instructions to imagine a distressed persons' point of view ("imagine-self" and "imagine-other" instructions), or to inhibit such actions ("remain-objective" instructions)-and afterwards reported how much empathic concern they experienced upon learning about the distressed

In this article, we synthesize existing literatures across numerous domains to introduce a novel model-the Relationship Problem Solving (RePS) model-for understanding the process through which romantic partners influence one another to resolve relationship problems. The first section briefly describes the key constructs and stages of the model. The second section details the interpersonal behaviors

Mimicry-based emotion contagion and social appraisal currently provide the most popular explanations for interpersonal emotional convergence. However, neither process fully accounts for intragroup effects involving dynamic calibration of people’s orientations during communal activities. When group members are engaged in shared tasks, they simultaneously attend to the same unfolding events and arrive

The mainstream epistemology of social psychology is markedly ahistorical, prioritizing the quantification of processes assumed to be lawful and generalizable. Social psychologists often consider theory to be either a practical tool for summarizing what is known about a problem area and making predictions or a torch that illuminates the counterintuitive causal force underlying a variety of disparate

Societies differ in susceptibility to social influence and in the social network structure through which individuals influence each other. What implications might these cultural differences have for changes in cultural norms over time? Using parameters informed by empirical evidence, we computationally modeled these cross-cultural differences to predict two forms of cultural change: consolidation of

When an attachment relationship is severed, so is homeostatic maintenance, leading to dysregulation of multiple physiological systems. Expanding upon Sbarra and Hazan’s original model, we suggest that the degree to which an individual’s physiological systems remain dysregulated depends on the state of one’s attachment hierarchy—namely, whether an individual continues to seek a lost partner for support

Individuals experience loneliness when they perceive a deficiency in the quality or quantity of their social relationships. In the present meta-analysis, we compiled data from 75 longitudinal studies conducted in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America (N = 83, 679) to examine the rank-order and mean-level development of loneliness across the life span. Data were analyzed using two- and three-level

Recent trends in social psychology point to increased interest in extending current theories by better incorporating the body (e.g., embodied cognition) and the broader interpersonal context (e.g., situations). However, despite being a critical component in early social theorizing, the physical environment remains in large part underdeveloped in most research programs. In this article, I outline an

This review aims to examine the “psychology of morality” by considering the research questions and empirical approaches of 1,278 empirical studies published from 1940 through 2017. We subjected these studies to expert content analysis and standardized bibliometric analysis to characterize relevant trends in this body of research. We first identify key features that characterize theoretical approaches

Over 25 years of research suggests an important link between perfectionism and personality traits included in the five-factor model (FFM). However, inconsistent findings, underpowered studies, and a plethora of perfectionism scales have obscured understanding of how perfectionism fits within the FFM. We addressed these limitations by conducting the first meta-analytic review of the relationships between

Self-affirmation—a theory-based technique to affirm the adaptive adequacy of the self—can promote positive behavior change and adaptive outcomes, although effects are variable. We extend a novel framework (Trigger and Channel), proposing three conditions that facilitate self-affirmation-induced behavior change: (a) presence of psychological threat, (b) presence of resources to foster change, and (c)

Over the past decade, an increasing number of studies have shown that the performance of specific actions (e.g., approach and avoidance) in response to a stimulus can lead to changes in how that stimulus is evaluated. In contrast to the reigning idea that these effects are mediated by the automatic formation and activation of associations in memory, we describe an inferential account that specifies

Evaluation is central to human experience, and multiple literatures have studied it. This article pulls from research on attitudes, human and nonhuman mating preferences, consumer behavior, and beyond to build a more comprehensive framework for studying evaluation. First, we distinguish between evaluations of objects (persons, places, things) and evaluations of attributes (dimensions, traits, characteristics)

Benjamin, A. J., Jr., Kepes, S., & Bushman, B. J. (2017). Effects of weapons on aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, hostile appraisals, and aggressive behavior: A meta-analytic review of the weapons effect literature. Personality and Social Psychology Review. (Original DOI: 10.1177/1088868317725419)

Androcentrism refers to the propensity to center society around men and men’s needs, priorities, and values and to relegate women to the periphery. Androcentrism also positions men as the gender-neutral standard while marking women as gender-specific. Examples of androcentrism include the use of male terms (e.g., he), images, and research participants to represent everyone. Androcentrism has been shown

Machine learning has led to important advances in society. One of the most exciting applications of machine learning in psychological science has been the development of assessment tools that can powerfully predict human behavior and personality traits. Thus far, machine learning approaches to personality assessment have focused on the associations between social media and other digital records with

Situation perception represents the fulcrum of a “psychology of situations” because situation ratings are ubiquitous. However, no systematic research program exists so far, particularly because two competing traditions have not been integrated: Objectivist views stress situations’ consensually shared meanings (social reality), and subjectivist views idiosyncratic meanings (personal reality). A componential

The Journal Editors hereby issue this note of an expression of concern for the following publication: Benjamin, A. J., Jr., Kepes, S., & Bushman, B. J. (2017). Effects of weapons on aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, hostile appraisals, and aggressive behavior: A meta-analytic review of the weapons effect literature. Personality and Social Psychology Review. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/1088868317725419

Habits are largely absent from modern social and personality psychology. This is due to outdated perspectives that placed habits in conflict with goals. In modern theorizing, habits are represented in memory as implicit context-response associations, and they guide responding in conjunction with goals. Habits thus have important implications for our field. Emerging research shows that habits are an

Social interactions are characterized by distinct forms of interdependence, each of which has unique effects on how behavior unfolds within the interaction. Despite this, little is known about the psychological mechanisms that allow people to detect and respond to the nature of interdependence in any given interaction. We propose that interdependence theory provides clues regarding the structure of

Race powerfully affects perceivers' responses to faces, promoting biases in attention, classification, and memory. To account for these diverse effects, we propose a model that integrates social cognitive work with two prominent accounts of visual processing: perceptual learning and predictive coding. Our argument is that differential experience with a racial ingroup promotes both (a) perceptual enrichment

We provide a meta-analytical review examining two decades of work on the relationship between individuals' social identifications and health in organizations (102 effect sizes, k = 58, N = 19,799). Results reveal a mean-weighted positive association between organizational identification and health ( r = .21, T = .14). Analysis identified a positive relationship for both workgroup ( r = .21) and organizational

The current article presents a theoretical framework of the short- and long-term processes underlying personality development throughout adulthood. The newly developed TESSERA framework posits that long-term personality development occurs due to repeated short-term, situational processes. These short-term processes can be generalized as recursive sequence of Triggering situations, Expectancy, States/State

Recognition has grown that moral behavior (e.g., generosity) plays a role in status attainment, yet it remains unclear how, why, and when demonstrating moral characteristics enhances status. Drawing on philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and organizational behavior, I critically review a third route to attaining status: virtue, and propose a moral virtue theory of status attainment to provide a generalized

Throughout the life span, individuals engage in affectionate touch with close others. Touch receipt promotes well-being in infancy, but the impacts of touch in adult close relationships have been largely unexplored. In this article, we propose that affectionate touch receipt promotes relational, psychological, and physical well-being in adulthood, and we present a theoretical mechanistic model to explain

A majority of people the world over eat meat, yet many of these same people experience discomfort when the meat on their plate is linked to the death of animals. We draw on this common form of moral conflict-the meat-paradox-to develop insights into the ways in which morally troublesome behaviors vanish into the commonplace and every day. Drawing on a motivational analysis, we show how societies may

Who takes risks, and why? Does risk-taking in one context predict risk-taking in other contexts? We seek to address these questions by considering two non-independent pathways to risk: need-based and ability-based. The need-based pathway suggests that risk-taking is a product of competitive disadvantage consistent with risk-sensitivity theory. The ability-based pathway suggests that people engage in

The global increase in cultural and religious diversity has led to calls for toleration of group differences to achieve intergroup harmony. Although much social-psychological research has examined the nature of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, and its impact on targets of these biases, little research has examined the nature and impact of toleration for intergroup relations. Toleration

The goal congruity perspective provides a theoretical framework to understand how motivational processes influence and are influenced by social roles. In particular, we invoke this framework to understand communal goal processes as proximal motivators of decisions to engage in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). STEM fields are not perceived as affording communal opportunities

Interpersonal autonomic physiology is defined as the relationship between people's physiological dynamics, as indexed by continuous measures of the autonomic nervous system. Findings from this field of study indicate that physiological activity between two or more people can become associated or interdependent, often referred to as physiological synchrony. Physiological synchrony has been found in

Social interaction is pivotal to the formation of social relationships and groups. Much is known about the importance of interaction content (e.g., the transfer of information). The present review concentrates on the influence of the act of conversing on the emergence of a sense of solidarity, more or less independently of the content. Micro-characteristics of the conversation (e.g., brief silences

According to the extended contact hypothesis, knowing that in-group members have cross-group friends improves attitudes toward this out-group. This meta-analysis covers the 20 years of research that currently exists on the extended contact hypothesis, and consists of 248 effect sizes from 115 studies. The aggregate relationship between extended contact and intergroup attitudes was r = .25, 95% confidence

This meta-analysis summarizes the results of research on the relationships of majority group members’ endorsement of assimilation, colorblindness, multiculturalism, and the relative relationships of colorblindness and multiculturalism to ethnic prejudice. Random effects analyses found that assimilation was positively related to explicit prejudice (g. = 0.80), multiculturalism was negatively related

An influential line of research suggests that initial bouts of self-control increase the susceptibility to self-control failure (ego depletion effect). Despite seemingly abundant evidence, some researchers have suggested that evidence for ego depletion was the sole result of publication bias and p-hacking, with the true effect being indistinguishable from zero. Here, we examine (a) whether the evidence

Associative attitude learning is typically viewed as a low-level process that automatically registers mere co-occurrences between stimuli, independent of their validity and relational meaning. This view invites to critically examine how attitude formation conforms to four operating conditions (i.e., unawareness, efficiency, goal independence, and uncontrollability) and two operating principles (i.e

This article advances the debate about costs and benefits of self-enhancement (the tendency to maintain unrealistically positive self-views) with a comprehensive meta-analytic review (299 samples, N = 126,916). The review considers relations between self-enhancement and personal adjustment (life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect, depression), and between self-enhancement and interpersonal

Self-esteem promises to serve as the nexus of social experiences ranging from social acceptance, interpersonal traits, interpersonal behavior, relationship quality, and relationship stability. Yet previous researchers have questioned the utility of self-esteem for understanding relational outcomes. To examine the importance of self-esteem for understanding interpersonal experiences, we conducted systematic

Theories of risk aversion, epistemic defense, and ingroup enhancement converge in predicting greater impact of negative (vs. positive) experiences with outgroup members on generalized evaluations of stigmatized outgroups. However, they diverge in predictions for admired outgroups. Past tests have focused on negative outgroups using correlational designs without a control group. Consequently, they have

Terror management theory outlines how humans seek self-esteem and worldview validation to manage death-related anxiety. Accumulating evidence reveals that close relationships serve a similar role. However, to date, there has been no synthesis of the literature that delineates when close relationships buffer mortality concerns, under what conditions, on which specific outcomes, and for whom. This systematic

During the 21 years of Personality and Social Psychology Review (PSPR), the journal has established itself as one of the most important outlets for theoretical innovation in psychological science. PSPR was created to be a forum within social and personality psychology where authors could advance new ideas that enrich, intrigue, and alter the field. The data suggest that PSPR is achieving this mission

Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, this article provides an organizing

We present a theory of communal coping that describes an optimal pathway to patient adjustment among couples in which one person faces a chronic illness. Communal coping consists of a shared illness appraisal (i.e., person perceives illness as a joint rather than individual problem) and collaboration with a partner to manage the illness. We present a model of the communal coping process that links

Epidemiological studies consistently reveal lower prevalence rates of affective disorder in people from East Asian cultures compared with those from Western cultures. Reasons for these differences have been the focus of continued debate, and they remain particularly curious given that people from East Asian cultures also tend to report higher levels of negative emotion compared with those from Western

People seek out situations that “fit,” but the concept of fit is not well understood. We introduce State Authenticity as Fit to the Environment (SAFE), a conceptual framework for understanding how social identities motivate the situations that people approach or avoid. Drawing from but expanding the authenticity literature, we first outline three types of person–environment fit: self-concept fit, goal