According to some person perception theories, when people perceive an individual member of a social group, the information about the group is activated more spontaneously and easily than information specific to the individual. Therefore, the judgment of individual group members might be more sensitive to group information (relatively to individuating information) the more automatic (fast, unintentional

Interventions that confront men with male privilege can threaten their social identity. Past research on White privilege confrontations has suggested group-image threat is a positive predictor of positive privilege attitudes. However, research on emotional appraisals of ingroup transgressions demonstrates that feelings of shame elicited by the ingroup's negative image lead to less constructive responses

Cultural appropriation refers to an action whereby an individual makes use of, imitates, or takes possession of cultural products of an outgroup or source community. Compared to Black Americans, many White Americans do not differentiate between high (i.e., White) and low (i.e., Black) status actors when making judgments of cultural appropriation (Mosley & Biernat, 2021). The goal of the current research

When voters in political elections intend to vote for a candidate who represents their political interests, they cannot avoid being influenced by the visual appearance of the candidates. In fact, many political campaigns are dominated by billboard advertising that mainly focuses on politicians' face portraits. While extant research already showed that a candidate's visual appearance has an impact on

In many domains of social life, people risk wrongly accusing an innocent person (i.e., false alarm error) or failing to catch a guilty person (i.e., miss error). Do liberals and conservatives differ in their concern about these types of errors? Across six studies, we found that conservatives were more bothered by miss errors than liberals, whereas liberals were more bothered by false alarm errors than

The present work examines whether the variability of attitude objects at attitude acquisition increases the generalization of likes and dislikes. In particular, variability might enhance the discriminative learning of cues, resulting in attitudes towards abstract entities rather than concrete instances. Using evaluative conditioning as an experimental paradigm to study attitude acquisition, we manipulated

Group markers, such as the group's name, banner, or other symbols that are associated with a group oftentimes arbitrarily relate to group characteristics, and hence, they do not provide much information about the attributes of the group or its members. However, here we show that when reasoning about novel social groups people sometimes use such markers as cues to the characteristics of the groups that

People tend to perceive others' prosocial behavior as valuable and genuine when it is costly. Given that money (vs. time) is relatively scarcer for lower-class (vs. upper-class) people, we propose that the effect of target social class on others' prosocial intentions would vary across the donation and volunteering contexts. Specifically, we hypothesized that people would exhibit greater motivation

Reappraisal, the act of reframing a situation differently, is associated with affective benefits. Preliminary correlational evidence suggests that successfully down-regulating negative affect is associated with lower motivation to engage in political action, although experimental studies could not find such negative impact. We hypothesized that reappraisal may impact threat mitigation behavior differently

Despite experiencing gender-based violence more frequently and more severely, victims of sexual harassment and domestic abuse from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds are disproportionately neglected and mistreated. Across four studies (total N = 3052), we show that people incorrectly believe that harassment and abuse are less harmful for women in poverty than for women in affluence. This

As news reports describing Artificial Intelligence (AI) proliferate, will people's perceptions of human nature change such that they rate distinctively human attributes as more essential? Five studies (N = 5111) demonstrate this “AI Effect.” Study 1 first establishes a two-part classification of human attributes used in subsequent studies, distinguishing human attributes that AI are perceived as capable

Prior research suggests that having power makes individuals more creative, because the powerful are more willing to break with convention. We investigate the possibility that lower power individuals can also be creative when given the opportunity to warm up by completing a creative task more than once. In Study 1 (N = 153), we divided a creative ideation session into two consecutive rounds and found

Reverse correlation is an influential method for assessing mental representations. One benefit of reverse correlation is that the method may capture psychological content that individuals are unwilling to self-report due to social desirability concerns, particularly in domains like person perception or intergroup processes. To investigate the degree to which reverse correlation and self-report findings

The cumulative redundancy bias (CRB) refers to people's difficulty in ignoring the redundancy in cumulatively presented information. When people consider which of two competing agents is better, they are influenced by the sequence of events that led to their accumulative total performance. If one agent was ahead most of the time, people consider this agent better – even if the agents are tied eventually

Although past research has offered important insights into how people seek to maintain their moral standing, it has generally portrayed this process as a matter of aggregating essentially static interpretations of a target's discrete acts. The present research reveals, however, that such interpretations are often far from static, and that they can change more than targets realize as new events unfold

Past research has established that people whose identities are deeply aligned (“fused’) with a group endorse hostility toward distant outgroups (e.g., foreigners). We propose that identity fusion can have the opposite effect under certain conditions. Specifically, when the outgroup is familiar and non-threatening, strongly fused persons may be positively disposed toward its members. Four studies tested

People routinely evaluate how useful objects are to themselves and to others. Seventeen experiments (with U.S. American and French participants, total N = 8016) show that people believe others find the same objects more useful than they themselves do. Using both mediation analysis and causal chain designs, the authors show that overestimating usefulness to others is caused by a self-serving bias in

People like to believe that misdeeds do not escape punishment. However, do people expect that some kinds of sins are particularly punished by “the universe,” not just by society? Five experiments (N = 1184) found that people expected more cosmic punishment for transgressions of sacred rules than transgressions of secular rules or conventions (Studies 1–3) and that this “sacred effect” holds even after

Abstract not available

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influences of outcome and negligence on moral judgments of accidental actions, and hence their roles in the explanation of moral luck. In Experiment 1 (N = 300), two previous studies were replicated in which an agent armed with either a bat or a gun (to manipulate negligence) unintentionally killed a suspected intruder who turned out, luckily, to be

Social targets' eyes are a rich source of information: partners with dilated and constricted pupils are perceived positively and negatively, respectively. Here, we tested whether observed pupil size influences the ascription of humanity. In Study 1 (n = 198) participants were asked to attribute positive uniquely human and non-uniquely human traits to ingroup (i.e., university students), derogated (i

People may suppress temptations with pure willpower or use strategies to reduce their pull. In this paper, we examine lay theories about self-control strategy use. A fictional person described as a high self-control individual was seen as more likely to use willpower than strategies (Experiment 1). In four other experiments, targets described as using strategies were perceived as relatively lower in

Disadvantaged groups use different means to protest inequality. Normative protest is more likely when the societal context of inter-group inequality signals that there is opportunity for status improvement. Non-normative protest is more likely to occur in systems in which status improvement is unlikely. However, little is known about how advantaged groups react to (normative vs. non-normative) protest

Power hierarchies are ubiquitous, emerging formally and informally, in both personal and professional contexts. When prosocial acts are offered within power hierarchies, there is a widespread belief that people who choose lower-power beneficiaries are altruistically motivated, and that those who choose higher-power beneficiaries hold a self-interested motive to ingratiate. In contrast, the current

Empathy can bridge the gap between self and other. Yet, people may not always be willing to cross this bridge: the motivation to view the self as moral may deter people from fostering self-other overlap with those they deem immoral. In Studies 1–3, participants selected between imagining the internal experiences of either immoral or morally neutral targets. In Studies 1–2, participants were randomly

Loyalty is often touted as a moral principle, or virtue, worth exemplifying in social and business relations. But is it always beneficial to be loyal? We investigate possible negative consequences of being a loyal employee in the workplace. Instead of protecting or rewarding them, loyal employees are selectively and ironically targeted by managers for exploitative practices (Studies 1–2). The targeting

In their pursuit of a moral ingroup identity, groups tend to flatter and deceive themselves, leading to predictable biases in their collective memory. Specifically, such memory biases are expected in the form of worse memory for morally problematic acts of historical perpetration. In five high-powered recall and recognition experiments (N = 3,424) using between- (Studies 1–4) and within-subjects designs

How can we foster habits of charitable giving? Here, we investigate the potential power of giving-by-proxy experiences, drawing inspiration from a growing trend in marketing and corporate social responsibility contexts in which organizations make charitable donations on behalf of employees or consumers. We create laboratory models of giving-by-proxy in workplace (Studies 1a-3) and consumer (Study 4)

Whereas actual attitudes represent people's evaluations of specific objects as being good or bad, desired attitudes represent the attitude positions that people wish they held. Previous work has established that desired attitudes can have psychological consequences, but has not yet tested the extent to which desired attitudes can predict actual attitude change. In five datasets involving a variety

Interpersonal coordination forms an integral part of successful social interaction. Yet for psychopathologies that impact social functioning (e.g., autism, social anxiety), disruptions to coordination are widely documented. Little research however has considered the underlying mechanisms by which this association is sustained. To address this shortcoming, the current registered report investigated

The discrepancy between ingroup favoritism and outgroup hostility is well established in social psychology. Under which conditions does “ingroup love” turn into “outgroup hate”? Studies with natural groups suggest that when group membership is based on (dis)similarity of moral beliefs, people are willing to not only help the ingroup, but also harm the outgroup. The key limitation of these studies is

Heeding growing calls to investigate the downstream consequences of being creative for psychological well-being, we propose that the consequences of creativity can be a double-edged sword—boosting feelings of autonomy while at the same time triggering a fear of judgment. In three pre-registered experiments (N = 740), participants were asked to generate either creative or non-creative ideas. Participants

Interpersonal transgressions are disruptive to relationships as they violate values presumed to be shared and threaten the integrity of victim and offender, and their shared identity. Forgiveness and self-forgiveness are understood to be important elements of the moral repair process, however commonly they are studied as intrapsychic phenomena without considering the dynamics between them. Here, we

Inequality and deep poverty have risen sharply in the US since the 1990s. Simultaneously, cash-based welfare policies have frayed, support for public assistance has fallen on the political right, and prejudice against recipients of welfare has remained high. Yet, in recent years Universal Basic Income (UBI) has gained traction, a policy proposing to give all citizens cash sufficient to meet basic needs

Conspiracy theories – which posit that secret groups cooperate to pursue malevolent goals – are a prominent feature in social and political discourse. Psychological research on conspiracy theories has boomed in the past 20 years, generating insights to the correlates and consequences of conspiracy beliefs. However, the literature suffers some limitations; the current editorial identifies five that

People evaluate their own wealth differently from how they evaluate the wealth of others. Across six experiments, we find evidence that people focus disproportionately on debt when thinking about their own (vs. another person's) wealth. In Experiments 1–3, participants predicted how wealthy they or someone else would be in one year, assuming they had the same amount in assets and debt today. While

People usually have less accurate memory for cross-race (CR) than for same-race (SR) faces, a robust and consequential phenomenon known as the Cross-Race Effect (CRE). In an influential paper, Hugenberg et al. (2007) showed that the CRE can be eliminated when participants are instructed to individuate CR faces in order to avoid displaying this effect. This finding has received widespread attention

Despite 70 years of research, there is no consensus about the effects of threat messages on behavior, partly because of publication bias. The lack of consensus concerns situations such as climate change where people tend to believe that they cannot easily make a major difference. Using a 2 × 2, (threat, neutral) × (efficacy, no efficacy) between-subjects design, we tested four hypotheses: the effect

Across a pilot study and three preregistered experiments (N = 4128), we demonstrated that people knowingly shared conspiracy theories to advance social motives (e.g., to receive “likes”). In addition to accuracy, people seemed to value social engagement (e.g., “likes” and reactions). Importantly, people not only expected most conspiracy theories to generate greater social engagement than factual news

The precarious nature of manhood, a hard-won and easily lost social status, has been linked to negative outcomes such as aggression in men, lower well-being for men and women, and more instances of workplace harassment. We posit that precarious manhood also influences men's perceptions of social sexual behavior (SSB) directed at them by a coworker of the opposite gender, shedding light on gender asymmetries

Social contexts can affect how people respond to feedback from others. We investigated how context information modulates the cognitive processing of feedback messages (i.e., external evaluations of one's character). We manipulated two aspects of (positive and negative) feedback messages: The identity of the sender (ingroup vs. outgroup member), and the dimension (one's competence vs. morality) as focal

How do people react to opinion conflict occurring within an ingroup? Whereas some work suggests that dissenting ingroup members evoke more negativity than equivalently dissenting outgroup members (termed the black sheep effect), other research instead finds that people are more receptive to dissent from within the group relative to the same opinion originating from outsiders (termed the intergroup

One strategy for decision-making involves the process known as case-based reasoning, where individuals retrieve past decisions in similar cases, compare the new and old situation, and adapt previous decisions to the new context. However, remembering past cases is a selective process. Research on retrieval-induced forgetting found that retrieving a subset of information about a certain topic causes

Rankings, hierarchies, and competitions are an integral part of peoples' personal and professional lives and knowing one's standing vis-à-vis others helps employees decide how to outdo higher-ranked colleagues and how to refrain from being outdone by lower-ranked others. But whom do people attend to when considering these rankings? In seven studies (and five supplementary studies; N = 4496) we document

Conspiracy theories are widely viewed as stigmatized beliefs, and it is often assumed that sharing them will therefore have negative reputational consequences for individuals. In six experiments (two pre-registered), we examined how sharing conspiracy theories can have important consequences for both impression-management and impression-formation. Experiment 1 (N = 354) highlighted people's awareness

Using an innovative variant of the response-priming paradigm, ten Brinke et al. (2014) seemingly found evidence for unconscious lie detection. In the present study, however, we conducted a reanalysis of this experiment showing that the data can be explained better by the assumption of a gender bias in facial trustworthiness evaluations than by the assumption of unconscious lie detection abilities.

Debate abounds regarding the role that various technologies play in the reification of gender stereotypes and norms. We demonstrate that although assigning technology a male or female gender (i.e., gendering technology) increases gender stereotyping, it also increases attachment to anthropomorphized technologies. Across five studies, using archival (Amazon Reviews), correlational, and experimental

Successful ingroup members can act as identity-safety cues (i.e., cues suggesting one's identities are valued in an organization); however, Black women often lack opportunities to learn about employees matching their gender and race. Group level theories on stigma solidarity suggest Black women would expect a Latina employee to face similar discrimination and thus, would identify with her and believe

Conspiracy theories have accrued around recent world events, and many of them have been endorsed by leaders seeking to garner support. Drawing from compensatory control theory, we argue a reduced sense of control will increase support for leaders who use conspiratorial rhetoric. Moreover, we posit that the congruence between one's political identity and a leader's conspiratorial rhetoric is an important

Given the complexity of contrasting the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories, past research has started investigating some novel pre-emptive strategies, such as inoculation and prebunking. In the present research, we tested whether counterfactual thinking can be employed as a prebunking strategy to prompt critical consideration of fake news spread online. In two experiments, we asked participants

What do people think of those who respond to confrontation by acknowledging personally prejudiced behavior? In six experiments (N = 3344), people judged a man who made a prejudiced comment and responded to confrontation by acknowledging, denying, or, in some cases, saying nothing about his prejudice. Participants consistently evaluated someone who acknowledged prejudice as warmer, more moral, and ironically

Eight experiments reveal that observing success wields adverse effects on how people judge others' failures. We find that repeated exposure to successful performances leads people to perceive a task as not so difficult or complicated after all—and so they more harshly evaluate those who struggle to do it. Across various tasks—from completing a motor-skills test, to doing a dance move, to sketching

The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the vast amount of economic inequality in the U.S. Yet, has it influenced Americans' attitudes and behaviors toward equality? With a three-wave longitudinal survey, the current research provides evidence that experiencing personal harm (e.g., contracting Covid-19, losing jobs, or psychological distress) from the pandemic predicts an increase in people's attitudinal

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has triggered a strong sense of uncertainty worldwide, which may lead to short-sighted behaviors. This study aimed to examine the impact of uncertainty induced by COVID-19 on intertemporal choice, as well as its underlying mechanisms, by conducting four experiments. Study 1a verified the causal relationship between uncertainty and intertemporal choice by

What are the underlying cognitive mechanisms that support belief in conspiracies? Common dual-process perspectives suggest that deliberation helps people make more accurate decisions and decreases belief in conspiracy theories that have been proven wrong (therefore, bringing people closer to objective accuracy). However, evidence for this stance is i) mostly correlational and ii) existing causal evidence

Despite widespread recognition that conspiracy theories carry the potential for serious harm, relatively little research has investigated possible antidotes to conspiracy beliefs. Previous theorizing posits that belief in conspiracy theories is driven in part by existential motives related to a sense of control and social motives aimed at maintaining a positive image of oneself and one's ingroup. Using

Social group identity plays a central role in political polarization and inter-party conflict. Here, we use ambiguously valenced faces to measure bias in the processing of political ingroup and outgroup faces, while also accounting for inter-party differences in judgments of emotion at baseline. Participants identifying as Democrats and Republicans judged happy, angry, and surprised faces as positive

The theory that suicide violates the moral domain of purity, whereas homicide violates the qualitatively different domain of autonomy, rests in part on the hypothesis that suicide, but not homicide, elicits disgust in a witness, taints the perpetrator's soul, and is judged immoral in a way relatively insensitive to the perpetrator's intention. In six studies (N = 320; 640; 320; 417 [pre-registered];

The accurate and swift decoding of emotional expressions from faces is fundamental for social communication. Yet, emotion perception is prone to error. For example, the ease with which emotions are perceived is affected by stereotypes (Bijlstra, Holland, & Wigboldus, 2010). Moreover, the introduction of face masks mandates in response to the Covid-19 pandemic additionally impedes accurate emotion perception

Despite growing scientific attention for hate, little is known about how perceived threats may influence hate and aggression. In four preregistered online studies (Ntotal = 1422), we test a threat – hate – aggression model, examining the differential effects of symbolic and realistic threats on the emergence of hate, and the associations between hate and specific aggressive behaviors, across interpersonal