Why are some people more successful than others? In addition to individual factors (e.g. self-control), research has recently suggested that the quality of people's interpersonal relationships is crucial for success. Successful people do not just like and feel close to instrumental objects (e.g., study material, the gym), they also like and feel close to instrumental others (IOs; people who make goal

Many real-life examples-from interpersonal rivalries to international conflicts-suggest that people actively engage in competitive behavior even when it is negative sum (benefiting the self at a greater cost to others). This often leads to loss spirals where everyone-including the winner-ends up losing. Our research seeks to understand the psychology of such negative-sum competition in a controlled

Daily life unfolds in a sequence of situational contexts, which are pivotal for explaining people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. While situational data were previously difficult to collect, the ubiquity of smartphones now opens up new opportunities for assessing situations in situ, that is, while they occur. Seizing this opportunity, the present study demonstrates how smartphones can help establish

This article explores the analysis and interpretation of wording effects associated with using direct and reverse items in psychological assessment. Previous research using bifactor models has suggested a substantive nature of this effect. The present study uses mixture modeling to systematically examine an alternative hypothesis and surpass recognized limitations in the bifactor modeling approach

The Big Five personality traits predict many important life outcomes. These traits, although relatively stable, are also open to change across time. However, whether these changes likewise predict a wide range of life outcomes has yet to be rigorously tested. This has implications for the types of processes linking trait levels and changes with future outcomes: distal, cumulative processes versus more

Social psychologists have struggled with the vexing problem of variability over time in implicit bias. While many treat such variability as unexplainable error, we posit that some temporal variability, whether within persons or across society at large, reflects meaningful and predictable fluctuation based on shifts in the social-cultural context. We first examined fluctuations at the group-level in

Adopting the customs of outgroup cultures (e.g., cultural appropriation) is controversial. Across six experiments, we examined perceptions of cultural appropriation from the perspective of Black Americans (N = 2,069), particularly focusing on the identity of the appropriator and its implications for theoretical understanding of appropriation. Participants expressed more negative emotion and considered

Academic fields exhibit substantial levels of gender segregation. Here, we investigated differences in field-specific ability beliefs (FABs) as an explanation for this phenomenon. FABs may contribute to gender segregation to the extent that they portray success as depending on "brilliance" (i.e., exceptional intellectual ability), which is a trait culturally associated with men more than women. Although

Do changes in religiosity beget changes in personality, or do changes in personality precede changes in religiosity? Existing evidence supports longitudinal associations between personality and religiosity at the between-person level, such that individual differences in personality predict subsequent individual differences in change in religiosity. However, no research to date has examined whether

Contact with members of one's own group (ingroup) and other groups (outgroups) shapes individuals' beliefs about the world, including perceptions of discrimination against one's ingroup. Research to date indicates that, among members of disadvantaged groups, contact with an advantaged outgroup is associated with less perceived discrimination, while contact with the disadvantaged ingroup is associated

Some people use health care services more than others. Identifying factors associated with health care use has the potential to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and equity of health care. In line with the Andersen behavioral model of health care utilization and initial empirical findings, personality traits may be key predisposing factors associated with health care use. Across 15 samples, the

Succeeding at a task often depends on the success or failure of component events. Such multicomponent risks can take one of two general forms. Disjunctive risks require the success of just one such component; conjunctive risks, all of them. Seven studies converge to show people prefer to consolidate disjunctive risks into fewer components and to spread conjunctive risks across more components, independent

This research examines whether the phenomenon of nominative determinism (a name-driven outcome) exists in the real world. Nominative determinism manifests as a preference for a profession or city to live in that begins with the same letter as a person's own name. The literature presents opposing views on this phenomenon, with one stream of research documenting the influence and another stream questioning

Although everyone strives toward valued goals, we suggest that not everyone will be perceived as doing so equally. In this research, we examine the tendency to use social class as a cue to understand the importance of others' goals. Six studies find evidence of a goal-value bias: Observers perceive goals across a variety of domains as more valuable to higher class than to lower class individuals (Studies

Age and gender differences in narcissism have been studied often. However, considering the rich history of narcissism research accompanied by its diverging conceptualizations, little is known about age and gender differences across various narcissism measures. The present study investigated age and gender differences and their interactions across eight widely used narcissism instruments (i.e., Narcissistic

Five preregistered studies (N = 1934) demonstrate that the prevalent U.S. ideology to "follow your passions" perpetuates academic and occupational gender disparities compared to some other cultural ideologies. Study 1 shows that the follow-your-passions ideology is commonly used by U.S. students in making academic choices. Studies 2-5 find that making the follow-your-passions ideology salient causes

Social science research has highlighted "honor" as a central value driving social behavior in Mediterranean societies, which requires individuals to develop and protect a sense of their personal self-worth and their social reputation, through assertiveness, competitiveness, and retaliation in the face of threats. We predicted that members of Mediterranean societies may exhibit a distinctive combination

Past research on determinants of victim blaming mainly concentrated on individuals' just-world beliefs as motivational process underlying this harsh reaction to others' suffering. The present work provides novel insights regarding underlying affective processes by showing how individuals prone to derive pleasure from others' suffering-individuals high in everyday sadism-engage in victim blaming due

We propose that self-essentialist reasoning is a foundational mechanism of the similarity-attraction effect. Our argument is that similarity breeds attraction in two steps: (a) people categorize someone with a shared attribute as a person like me based on the self-essentialist belief that one's attributes are caused by an underlying essence and (b) then apply their essence (and the other attributes

Self-concept clarity and self-esteem are powerful determinants of people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Yet, even after over 30 years of research, the conceptual and empirical ties between these two self-aspects remain understudied, and little is known about the nature and function of their relationship. The present study aimed at discerning the empirical similarities and differences between

Because trust is essential in relationships, scholars have sought to determine what causes people to trust each other. A burgeoning area of research on trust has focused on power dynamics. Yet, although successful trust development in relationships is a function of one individual initiating trust and another individual reciprocating this trust, research has focused exclusively on the impact of power

People often self-identify as allies to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. This research examined on what basis LGBT individuals perceive others to be allies and documents the consequences of perceived allyship. Studies 1a (n = 40) and 1b (n = 69) collected open-ended descriptions of allyship provided by LGBT participants. Coding of the responses suggested multiple components

Every research project has limitations. The limitations that authors acknowledge in their articles offer a glimpse into some of the concerns that occupy a field's attention. We examine the types of limitations authors discuss in their published articles by categorizing them according to the four validities framework and investigate whether the field's attention to each of the four validities has shifted

Meaning in life is tied to the stories people tell about their lives. We explore whether one timeless story-the Hero's Journey-might make people's lives feel more meaningful. This enduring story appears across history and cultures and provides a template for ancient myths (e.g., Beowulf) and blockbuster books and movies (e.g., Harry Potter). Eight studies reveal that the Hero's Journey predicts and

Research on achievement goals is voluminous but focused primarily on intrapersonal regulation. In the present article, we emphasize the integral role that achievement goals also play in the broader process of interpersonal judgment. We establish a new interpersonal approach to achievement goals that integrates the extensive achievement goal literature with the well-established social relations model

Research on ostracism has mostly focused on ostracized targets' reactions to being excluded and ignored. In contrast, the ostracizing sources' perspective and reasons for why individuals decide to ostracize others are still a largely unexplored frontier for empirical research. We propose two fundamental motives situated in the target's behavior that drive motivated ostracism decisions for the benefit

Despite the well-documented costs of word-deed misalignment, hypocrisy permeates our personal, professional, and political lives. Why? We explore one potential explanation: the costs of moral flexibility can outweigh the costs of hypocrisy, making hypocritical moral absolutism a preferred social strategy to admissions of moral nuance. We study this phenomenon in the context of honesty. Across six studies

The present study examines change in reports of daily, weekly, and monthly psychological distress over 20 years, and of negative and positive affect over 10 years, using data from the Midlife in the United States study. The study includes three waves of data collection on adults ranging from 22 to 95 years old. Cross-sectional findings reveal that older age is related to lower levels of psychological

Feeling loved (loved, cared for, accepted, valued, understood) is inherently dyadic, yet most prior theoretical perspectives and investigations have focused on how actors feeling (un)loved shapes actors' outcomes. Adopting a dyadic perspective, the present research tested whether the established links between actors feeling unloved and destructive (critical, hostile) behavior depended on partners'

The impact of COVID-19 on people's physical health is well documented. But how did COVID-19-with all the uncertainty and disruption of daily life it entailed-impact people's mental health? We used ecologically momentary assessments from 22,562 individuals (largely young adults) across the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom to study the impact of the early stages of COVID-19 on mental health

Pleasantness and meaningfulness are sometimes seen as opposing pursuits. Yet past research has found that the pursuit of meaning often leads to pleasure. In four longitudinal studies-three observational, one experimental, ranging from 5 weeks to 18 months-we investigated an inverse process, whereby specific kinds of pleasant states can foster a sense of meaning in life. We hypothesized that perceptions

Social and personality psychologists aim to "understand individuals in their social contexts for the benefit of all people" (Society for Personality and Social Psychology, n.d.). Though this mission is admirable, value statements do little, on their own, to create an inclusive, high-quality science that benefits humanity broadly. In this research, we evaluate relationship science, a major subfield

Twenty years after 9/11, the impact of terrorism on social and political attitudes remains unclear. Several large-scale surveys suggest that terrorism has no discernible effects on direct, self-report measures of prejudice toward Arab-Muslims. However, direct measures may lack the sensitivity to detect subtle underlying attitudes that are considered socially unacceptable to openly express. To tap these

Politics and its controversies have permeated everyday life, but the daily impact of politics on the general public is largely unknown. Here, we apply an affective science framework to understand how the public experiences daily politics in a two-part examination. We first used longitudinal, daily diary methods to track two samples of U.S. participants as they experienced daily political events across

In this study, we seek to understand how stress changes in dynamic social systems. Where prior work on the interpersonal transmission of stress focused on pairs of individuals and small groups, we adopt a network perspective to investigate how the distribution of stress in an individual's social environment influences their stress appraisal process. We conducted a 6-month longitudinal study of 315

The question of whether individuals are more prone to trust or to mistrust has increasingly interested economists and psychologists in recent years. To investigate whether people have an initial response tendency to trust versus mistrust, we developed a novel paradigm-the Dominant Behavior Measure (DBM). Capitalizing on decades of meticulous research in basic cognitive psychology (i.e., bilingual studies

Despite the clear existing theoretical links, ours is the first direct systematic series of studies investigating a potential negative association between Honesty-Humility and general dishonesty in romantic relationships. Eleven preregistered online studies with community samples were run (total N = 5,677). For a first test of our hypothesis, we conducted a series of seven cross-sectional studies based

Prayer is an important aspect of many people's daily lives, yet little is known about the relationships between prayer and daily experiences and well-being in ecologically valid settings. In three studies, participants (N = 350) completed questionnaires once a day for 2 weeks (4,437 daily reports) regarding the events they experienced each day, their emotions, well-being, and the prominence of the

In contrast to when members of marginalized groups choose to share their personal experiences on their own terms and in service of their own goals, when outside forces impose a focus on personal experiences in discussions of intergroup policies, there is instead the potential for disempowering implications: Being asked by someone else to approach intergroup issues through the specific lens of their

Despite the worldwide increase in unpartnered individuals (i.e., singles), little research exists to provide a comprehensive understanding of the heterogeneity within this population. In the present research (N = 3,195), we drew on the fundamental social motives framework to provide a theory-based description and understanding of different "types" of single individuals. Across two Western samples (primarily

We present a three-dimensional taxonomy of achievement emotions that considers valence, arousal, and object focus as core features of these emotions. By distinguishing between positive and negative emotions (valence), activating and deactivating emotions (arousal), and activity emotions, prospective outcome emotions, and retrospective outcome emotions (object focus), the taxonomy has a 2 × 2 × 3 structure

We live in a time of disappearing professions, pandemic-related upheaval, and growing social inequality. While recognizing that good opportunities are unequally distributed in society (an injustice that requires rectification), can beliefs about the nature and workings of opportunities help people see the door to their goals as more open than closed, and can these beliefs influence the likelihood of

Research on processing fluency and instrumental goal activation suggests people often perceive complex information positively when effort in a task is valued. The current article evaluates this idea in five online petition samples (total N = 1,047,655 petitions and over 200 million words), assessing how the linguistic fluency of a petition associates with support. Consistent with prior work, petitions

Lies often go undetected, and we know little about the psychological and relational consequences of successfully deceiving others. While the evidence to date indicates that undetected dishonesty induces positive affect in independent decision contexts, we propose that it may elicit guilt and undermine satisfaction in negotiations despite facilitating better deals for deceivers. Across four studies

Reports an error in "Disentangling stereotype activation and stereotype application in the stereotype misperception task" by Regina Krieglmeyer and Jeffrey W. Sherman (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012[Aug], Vol 103[2], 205-224). In the article (https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028764), there was an error in the data analysis of Experiment 4. The mean proportions of "more threatening" responses

Based on 660 effect sizes obtained from 23,255 adult participants across 51 reports of experimental studies, this meta-analysis investigates whether and when explicit (self-reported) and implicit (indirectly revealed) evaluations reflect relational information (how stimuli are related to each other) over and above co-occurrence information (the fact that stimuli have been paired with each other). Using

Most but not all adults become parents, yet it remains unclear which characteristics indicate an orientation toward parenting. The aims of this study were to (a) distinguish profiles of individual and interpersonal resources in young adults that may orient them toward parenthood and (b) investigate whether profiles predicted timing of entering parenthood, postpartum parenting behavior, and parent-infant

In the current increasingly complex environment, people often hold multiple social identities. For example, an Asian American may identify as both an American and an Asian descendant, and a mixed-race person may simultaneously identify with both races. Whenever the different identities are simultaneously activated and give conflicting behavioral direction, people experience social identity conflict

People who are happy with their romantic relationships report that their partners are particularly effective at meeting their everyday relational needs. However, the literature invites competing predictions about how people arrive at those evaluations. In pilot research, we validated a scale of concrete, specific relationship behaviors that can be performed by a romantic partner day-to-day. In Study

There have been long-standing debates on the relationships between values as important motivational goals and well-being. We used a longitudinal network perspective to examine how value states and well-being are related over time, separating within-person lagged, within-person contemporaneous, and between-person perspectives. A total of 227 young adults (1,007 observation points) participated in the

It is well known that norms influence behavior. Beyond simply shaping what people do, we argue that norms constrain what behaviors even come to mind as options, effectively excluding counternormative behaviors from consideration. We test this hypothesis across five primary and multiple supplementary studies using diverse methods (Ntotal = 5,488). In Study 1, people reported that behaviors that were

It is generally assumed that there is greater pressure to conform to social norms in collectivist cultures than in individualist cultures. However, most research on cultural differences in social norms has examined norms for behaviors. Here, we examine cultural differences in norms for emotions. Relative to members of collectivist cultures, members of individualist cultures are more attuned to internal

Extant research has demonstrated that higher mean (average) levels of social support often produce robust relational benefits. However, partners may not maintain the same level of support across time, resulting in potential fluctuations (i.e., within-person variations across time) in support. Despite the theorizing and initial research on fluctuations in relationship-relevant thoughts, feelings, and

The present meta-analysis tests the bottom-up and top-down models of self-esteem, by synthesizing the available longitudinal evidence on prospective effects between global and domain-specific self-esteem. The bottom-up model assumes that people's domain-specific self-esteem influences their global self-esteem, whereas the top-down model assumes the reverse direction of effects. Eight domains of self-esteem

The rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis (RRH), which posits that cognitive, motivational, and ideological rigidity resonate with political conservatism, is an influential but controversial psychological account of political ideology. Here, we leverage several methodological and theoretical sources of this controversy to conduct an extensive quantitative review with the dual aims of probing the RRH's basic

Leisure activities have been emphasized as an important predictor of well-being. However, little research has examined the effects of leisure activity enactment on well-being over time. Moreover, it is unknown which activities are most beneficial for whom. We integrate diverse theoretical accounts of person-environment relations and propose a generic Personality-Activity-Well-Being (PAW) framework

Previous research suggests that attachment avoidance is robustly linked to memory errors of omission-such as forgetting information or events that have occurred. Moreover, these avoidance-related errors of omission are the strongest for relational stimuli (e.g., avoidant people have trouble remembering relationship-related words, but not neutral ones). Conversely, an emerging body of studies has linked

The purpose of the present research was to test the level of agreement between targets and observers both at any given moment and as the targets' current behavior (assessed as personality states) change across moments. Ninety-seven target participants participated in 22 different activities across 20 1-hour long sessions in a laboratory setting while reporting their current behavior, and their behavior

We report the first investigation of whether observers draw information about mindsets from behavior, specifically prejudice confrontation. We tested two questions across 10 studies (N = 3,168). First, would people who observe someone confront a biased comment (vs. remain silent) see them as endorsing more growth (vs. fixed) mindsets about prejudice and bias? If so, would the growth mindset perceptions

Contingencies between situational variables and psychological states have been proposed as key individual difference variables by many theoretical approaches to personality. Despite their relevance, the basic properties, nomological correlates, and factor structure of individual differences in contingencies have not been examined so far. We address these fundamental questions in five studies with overall