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Although loneliness has been associated with negative perceptions of social life in past research, little is known about the implications of loneliness for interpersonal perception within close relationships. The current research includes three studies (total N = 1,197) suggesting that loneliness is associated with a negative bias in perceiving relationship partners' regard and care and that this bias partially accounts for the effects of loneliness on lower relationship quality and problematic interpersonal behaviors. Loneliness was associated with perceiving family members (Study 1), friends (Studies 1 and 2), and romantic partners (Studies 1–3) as less admiring and caring, and these effects were independent of a variety of accuracy benchmarks, including partners' self-reports (Studies 1–3), reports from informants (Study 2), and objective observers' assessments of partners' responsive behavior (Study 3). Loneliness also predicted changes in perceptions of partners' regard over time (Study 3) and indirectly predicted lower relationship satisfaction, commitment, self-disclosure, and support provision through negative perceptions of relationship partners' regard and care (Studies 1–3). Studies 2 and 3 replicated these results in terms of day-to-day experiences (total daily observations = 16,064). The negative perceptions of partners' regard and care associated with loneliness predicted subsequent loneliness (Studies 2–3). Loneliness effects were statistically independent of self-esteem and attachment insecurity in all studies. Taken together, these findings suggest that, due to negative biases in perceiving relationship partners' regard and care, loneliness may compromise the quality of close relationships, motivate interpersonally problematic behaviors, and become persistent. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the primacy of the face in social perception research, people often base their impressions on whole persons (i.e., faces and bodies). Yet, perceptions of whole persons remain critically underresearched. We address this knowledge gap by testing the relative contributions of faces and bodies to various fundamental social judgments. Results show that faces and bodies contribute different amounts to particular social judgments on orthogonal axes of social perception: Bodies primarily influence status and ability judgments, whereas faces primarily influence warmth-related evaluations. One possible reason for this may be differences in signal that bodies and faces provide for judgments along these two axes. To test this, we extended our investigation to social judgment accuracy, given that signal is a precondition to accuracy. Focusing on one kind of status/ability judgment—impressions of social class standing—we found that perceivers can discern individuals' social class standing from faces, bodies, and whole persons. Conditions that included bodies returned higher accuracy, indicating that bodies may contain more signal to individuals' social class than faces do. Within bodies, shape cued social class more than details of individuals' clothing. Altogether, these findings highlight the importance of the body for fully understanding processes and outcomes in person perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical accounts of narcissism emphasize the dynamic shifting of self-states in response to social feedback. Status threats are thought to set narcissism's dynamics in motion. Naturalistic ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies have characterized dynamics of narcissistic grandiosity and vulnerability in relation to perceptions of the interpersonal environment. Experimental studies have emphasized the behavioral responses of narcissistic individuals to putative threats to status. Naturalistic and experimental studies suffer from opposing limitations, namely, a potential for confounding variables to impact results versus ambiguous generalizability to real-life and longer time scales, respectively. Integrating naturalistic and experimental studies has the potential to provide a comprehensive model of how dynamics within narcissism unfold in response to status threat. The present study examined shifts in grandiosity and vulnerability in both naturalistic EMA and experimentally controlled (rigged tournament game) social interactions (N = 437). Grandiosity decreased and vulnerability increased in response to both naturalistic and experimental status threats. Further, the same people who responded with decreased grandiosity in response to status threat in daily life responded with similar decreases in grandiosity to experimental defeat. Trait narcissistic agency amplified many of the observed links between narcissism and status threat experimentally and naturalistically. Given that warmth (in addition to dominance) emerged as an important predictor of shifts in narcissism, implications for status-threatening environments are discussed. The present study elucidates important differences with respect to expressions of grandiosity and vulnerability across naturalistic and experimental methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White people confuse Black faces more than their own-race faces. This is an example of the other-race effect, commonly measured by the other-race face recognition task. Like this task, the "Who said what?" paradigm uses within-race confusions in memory, but to measure social categorization strength. The former finds a strongly asymmetrical pattern of interrace perception, the other-race effect, yet the latter usually finds symmetrical patterns (equally strong categorization of own-race and other-race faces). In a "Who said what?" meta-analysis, racial categorization and individuation across races were only weakly asymmetrical (Study 1, n = 2,669). We aimed to resolve this empirical misalignment. As tested in other-race face recognition tasks, the weak asymmetry was not due to the limited number of portrait stimuli (Study 2, N = 99) nor to the longer duration of stimulus presentation in the "Who said what?" task (Study 4, n = 358). Pairing portraits with statements reduced the other-race effect (Study 3, n = 126). Showing each portrait repeatedly also reduced the other-race effect (Study 4, n = 358; Study 5, n = 470) but did not decrease infrahumanization of Black portraits (Study 6, n = 487). Consequently, presenting portraits only once in the "Who said what?" paradigm (Study 7, N = 112) resulted in strong interrace categorization and individuation asymmetries. This finding bridges a central conceptual gap between the other-race effect and social categorization strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the cognitive–ecological model of social perception, biases toward individuals can arise as by-products of cognitive principles that interact with the information ecology. The present work tested whether negatively biased person descriptions occur as by-products of cognitive differentiation. Later-encountered persons are described by their distinct attributes that differentiate them from earlier-encountered persons. Because distinct attributes tend to be negative, serial person descriptions should become increasingly negative. We found our predictions confirmed in six studies. In Study 1, descriptions of representatively sampled persons became increasingly distinct and negative with increasing serial positions of the target person. Study 2 eliminated this pattern of results by instructing perceivers to assimilate rather than differentiate a series of targets. Study 3 generalized the pattern from one-word descriptions of still photos of targets to multisentence descriptions of videos of targets. In line with the cognitive–ecological model, Studies 4–5b found that the relation between serial position and negativity was amplified among targets with similar positive attributes, zero among targets with distinct positive or negative attributes, and reversed among similar negative targets. Study 6 returned to representatively sampled targets and generalized the serial position–negativity effect from descriptions of the targets to overall evaluations of them. In sum, the present research provides strong evidence for the explanatory power of the cognitive–ecological model of social perception. We discuss theoretical and practical implications. It may pay off to appear early in an evaluation sequence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keeping negative interpersonal secrets can diminish well-being, yet people nevertheless keep negative information secret from friends, family, and loved ones to protect their own reputations. Twelve experiments suggest these reputational concerns are systematically miscalibrated, creating a misplaced barrier to honesty in relationships. In hypothetical scenarios (Experiments 1, S1, and S2), laboratory experiments (Experiments 2 and 6), and field settings (Experiments 3 and 4), those who imagined revealing, or who actually revealed, negative information they were keeping secret expected to be judged significantly more harshly than recipients expected to judge, or actually judged, them. We theorized that revealers' pessimistic expectations stem not only from the cognitive accessibility of negative information (Experiment S3) but also from a perspective gap such that the negative outcomes of disclosing this information, compared to positive outcomes, are more accessible for prospective revealers than for recipients. Consistent with this mechanism, revealers' expectations were better calibrated when directed to focus on positive thoughts or when they considered revealing positive information (Experiments 5, 6, and S4). Revealers' miscalibrated expectations matter because they can guide decisions about whether to reveal information or conceal it as a secret (Experiment S5). As predicted, calibrating revealers' expectations increased their willingness to reveal negative information to others (Experiment 7), suggesting that miscalibrated fears of others' judgment create a misplaced barrier to honesty in relationships. Overestimating the reputational costs of disclosing negative information might leave people carrying a heavier burden of secrecy than would be optimal for their own well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosocial behavior is fundamental to societies. But when and toward whom do humans act generously? We investigate the impact of a listeners' gaze direction and the emotional context of the story heard on (a) perceptions of their social cognition skills and (b) prosocial decisions toward them. In three experiments (two preregistered, N = 486), human participants witnessed prerecorded video encounters between a listener (visible) and a speaker (audible, not visible). The listener either established eye contact, averted gaze, or showed a mixed gaze pattern (gaze direction), while the speaker told a neutral or negatively valenced autobiographic episode (emotional context). Participants rated the listeners' empathy and perspective-taking after each video and played the trust game (Study 1) or the dictator game (Study 2) with the listener. Replicating previous findings, occasional gaze avoidance, especially during negative narrations, increased attributions of social understanding to the listener. Critically, mediation analyses revealed that listeners perceived as empathic and taking perspective were ultimately treated with more trust and generosity in strategic and nonstrategic economic games, suggesting that social signals and contextual cues can serve as an indication of another's reputation, thereby promoting indirect reciprocity. Last, in Study 3, we show that emotional context, but not listeners' gaze behavior, promoted the spread of generosity toward anonymous, previously unobserved individuals in a dictator game, driven by social cognition skills attributed to the listener. We conclude that social signals and contextual cues can be important drivers of cooperation in societies via mechanisms such as indirect reciprocity and social contagion of generosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research over the past 2 decades has repeatedly shown that the evaluation of one's own worth—trait self-esteem—is closely linked to the quality of social relationships and perceptions of social inclusion. However, there is limited evidence on the dynamics between momentary self-esteem and perceptions of social inclusion in everyday life, as well as on their possible long-term (bottom-up) effects on the development of trait self-esteem. We addressed this research gap using longitudinal data from a German multimethodological study (N = 324) in which N = 235 late adolescents (Mage = 17.7; 76% female) and N = 89 older adults (Mage = 63.8; 64% female) were followed over 1 year. Based on three trait questionnaires with 6-month intervals and a 7-day experience-sampling burst at the first measurement point, we investigated momentary dynamics in self-esteem and longitudinal change by using multilevel and latent growth modeling. Results confirmed the positive association between momentary self-esteem and perceptions of social inclusion in everyday life, that is, self-esteem reactivity in both age groups. In addition, both self- and other-reports showed a consistent increase in trait self-esteem over 1 year. However, because the slope parameters did not indicate substantial interindividual variance, we were unable to test for bottom-up effects of self-esteem reactivity. We discuss the importance of daily social experiences for momentary self-esteem in late adolescence and late adulthood but also point to the need for further multimethodological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is an acknowledgment from the Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, thanking the ad hoc reviewers who reviewed manuscripts for the journal in the previous year. The document lists the names of the reviewers, categorized by the specific areas they reviewed, such as Attitudes and Social Cognition, Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes, and Personality Processes and Individual Differences. The purpose of this document is to recognize and appreciate the contributions of these reviewers to the journal's publication process. The given text is a list of names of individuals who have contributed to a document or article. The names are listed alphabetically and include researchers from various fields. The purpose of the list is to acknowledge the individuals who have participated in the research or writing process. [Extracted from the article]

To what extent do individuals differ in understanding how others see them and who is particularly good at it? Answering these questions about the "good metaperceiver" is relevant given the beneficial outcomes of meta-accuracy. However, there likely is more than one type of the good metaperceiver: One who knows the specific impressions they make more than others do (dyadic meta-accuracy) and one who knows their reputation more than others do (generalized meta-accuracy). To identify and understand these good metaperceivers, we introduce the social meta-accuracy model (SMAM) as a statistical and conceptual framework and apply the SMAM to four samples of first impression interactions. As part of our demonstration, we also investigated the routes to and the correlates of both types of good metaperceivers. Results from SMAM show that, overall, people were able to detect the unique and general first impressions they made, but there was little evidence for individual differences in dyadic meta-accuracy in a first impression. In contrast, there were substantial individual differences in generalized meta-accuracy, and this ability was largely explained by being transparent (i.e., good metaperceivers were seen as they saw themselves). We also observed some evidence that good generalized metaperceivers in a first impression tend to be extraverted and popular. This work demonstrated that the SMAM is a useful tool for identifying and understanding both types of good metaperceivers and paves the way for future work on individual differences in meta-accuracy in other contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 1–6). These perceptions do not appear to reflect reality (pilot study), and those who are strongly motivated to justify inequality show the bias to a greater extent (Studies 5 and 6), suggesting a motivated pathway. We also explore implications of the bias, finding that Americans tend to offer better opportunities to, and prefer to collaborate with, higher class than lower class others, revealing discriminatory outcomes that are partially driven by perceived goal value (Studies 2, 3, 4, 6). Results suggest that Americans expect higher class individuals to value achieving goals more than their lower class counterparts, fueling increased support for those who are already ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 (SRM). We introduce and formally define the interpersonal concept of achievement goal perception, present a formal methodological approach to studying this novel concept using a Bayesian implementation of the multivariate SRM (MSRM), and put the proposed integrative approach to the test with an in-depth empirical study that directly addresses fundamental questions of achievement goal perception. In this empirical study, we measured four types of achievement goal perceptions—mastery-approach (MAP), mastery-avoidance (MAV), performance-approach (PAP), performance-avoidance (PAV)—across 1,809 student–classmate dyads from 42 small discussion-based undergraduate classes. Results indicated a predominantly perceiver-driven process consisting of self-other agreement for MAP, MAV, and PAV goals but not PAP goals, assumed similarity for each achievement goal, and greater assumed similarity among closer classmates. Achievement goal perception provided incremental predictive utility for two gold-standard educational outcomes—academic performance and intrinsic motivation—among both perceivers and targets, and four additional educationally relevant constructs—perceived class value, perceived effort investment, perceived competence, and peer help-seeking—among perceivers. Having laid the theoretical, methodological, and empirical foundations, we discuss this new interpersonal approach to achievement goals alongside contemporary research on achievement motivation and interpersonal judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From whom do people seek what type of support? Although people regularly seek support from close and distant others, little work has systematically investigated when and why people approach different people in their support network for different types of support. The present research introduces a novel distinction of social support and explores its relationship to the scope or range of support providers people would consider asking for support. Based on a recent extension of construal level theory (Trope et al., 2021), five experiments tested the bidirectional relation between levels of support and scope—the latter assessed by the social distance of potential support providers. Experiment 1 demonstrated that people can categorize supportive behaviors into low-level support (i.e., addressing the effect of a problem) and high-level support (i.e., addressing the cause of a problem). Experiments 2 and 4 showed that being prompted to seek low-level (vs. high-level) support-oriented people toward support providers who are socially proximal (vs. distal). In Experiment 3, thinking about interacting with a socially proximal (vs. distal) support provider led to a greater focus on receiving low-level (vs. high-level) support. Testing the implication of the link between levels of support and scope, Experiment 5 demonstrated that support recipients reported they would feel more gratitude when they imagined receiving low-level (vs. high-level) support from socially proximal (vs. distal) support providers. Broader implications for social support, interpersonal relationships, and construal level theory research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to further our understanding of the processes of metaperception formation and meta-accuracy by introducing the positivity–specificity model to metaperception, which can be used to disentangle two components of trait metaperceptions: metapositivity (attitudes) and trait-specificity (substance). In two North American samples (Sample 1, N = 547; Sample 2, N = 553), we used the positivity–specificity model to investigate five important aspects of metaperceptions, namely the extent to which (a) metaperceptions reflect metapositivity versus trait-specificity, (b) metapositivity reflects attitudes about the self, (c) the effects of metapositivity and trait-specificity vary across traits and acquaintances, (d) metapositivity helps or hurts meta-accuracy, and (e) metapositivity and trait-specificity are accurate independent of self-perceptions. Overall, participants' ideas about how they were seen included attitudes and substance, but the relative contribution of each depended on the trait being judged and on how well they knew an acquaintance. Participants' ideas about how positively they were seen were related to how positively they saw themselves to varying degrees depending on how much they knew and liked their acquaintances. Participants were also accurate about how positively they were seen and about how they were seen on a given trait, independent of positivity and, with close acquaintances, independent of self-perceptions. The current work demonstrates how the positivity–specificity model can be used to investigate how people think about and have insight into the impressions they make on others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about implicit evaluations of complex, multiply categorizable social targets. Across five studies (N = 5,204), we investigated implicit evaluations of targets varying in race, gender, social class, and age. Overall, the largest and most consistent evaluative bias was pro-women/anti-men bias, followed by smaller but nonetheless consistent pro-upper-class/anti-lower-class biases. By contrast, we observed less consistent effects of targets' race, no effects of targets' age, and no consistent interactions between target-level categories. An integrative data analysis highlighted a number of moderating factors, but a stable pro-women/anti-men and pro-upper-class/anti-lower-class bias across demographic groups. Overall, these results suggest that implicit biases compound across multiple categories asymmetrically, with a dominant category (here, gender) largely driving evaluations, and ancillary categories (here, social class and race) exerting relatively smaller additional effects. We discuss potential implications of this work for understanding how implicit biases operate in real-world social settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of belief system structure and dynamics assume that belief systems are a person-level construct. However, measures of belief system structure do not measure the structure of person-level belief systems and instead measure aggregated belief system structure (e.g., the belief system in a particular country). In this paper, I show that a measure of conceptual similarity between attitudes and identities of a belief system works as a valid, reliable, flexible, and efficient measure of person-level belief system structure in the United States. In Studies 1 (N = 387), 2 (N = 389), and 3 (N = 598), I show conceptual similarity judgments are reliable and are related to measures of political engagement, political knowledge, attitude consistency, and preference congruence as predicted by computational models of belief system dynamics. In Studies 4 (N = 981) and 5 (N = 983), I show that conceptual similarity judgments are affected by partisan frames and that changes in conceptual similarity judgments are associated with attitude change as predicted by computational models of belief system dynamics. Conceptual similarity judgments can be used with a variety of attitudes and identities in easy to administer studies. It provides a tool to fill an empirical gap identified by theories of belief system dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Condition-based regression analysis (CRA) is a statistical method for testing self-enhancement effects. That is, CRA indicates whether, in a set of empirical data, people with higher values on the directed discrepancy self-view S minus reality criterion R (i.e., S-R) tend to have higher values on some outcome variable (e.g., happiness). In a critical comment, Fiedler (2021) claims that CRA yields inaccurate conclusions in data with a suppressor effect. Here, we show that Fiedler's critique is unwarranted. All data that are simulated in his comment show a positive association between S-R and H, which is accurately detected by CRA. By construction, CRA indicates an association between S-R and H only when it is present in the data. In contrast to Fiedler's claim, it also yields valid conclusions when the outcome variable is related only to the self-view or when there is a suppressor effect. Our clarifications provide guidance for evaluating Fiedler's comment, clear up with the common heuristic that suppressor effects are always problematic, and assist readers in fully understanding CRA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of scholarship documents the intersectional nature of social stereotyping, with stereotype content being shaped by a target person's multiple social identities. However, conflicting findings in this literature highlight the need for a broader theoretical integration. For example, although there are contexts in which perceivers stereotype gay Black men and heterosexual Black men in very different ways, so too are there contexts in which perceivers stereotype these men in very similar ways. We develop and test an explanation for contradictory findings of this sort. In particular, we argue that perceivers have a repertoire of lenses in their minds—identity-specific schemas for categorizing others—and that characteristics of the perceiver and the social context determine which one of these lenses will be used to organize social perception. Perceivers who are using the lens of race, for example, are expected to attend to targets' racial identities so strongly that they barely attend, in these moments, to targets' other identities (e.g., their sexual orientations). Across six experiments, we show (a) that perceivers tend to use just one lens at a time when thinking about others, (b) that the lenses perceivers use can be singular and simplistic (e.g., the lens of gender by itself) or intersectional and complex (e.g., a race-by-gender lens, specifically), and (c) that different lenses can prescribe categorically distinct sets of stereotypes that perceivers use as frameworks for thinking about others. This lens-based account can resolve apparent contradictions in the literature on intersectional stereotyping, and it can likewise be used to generate novel hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do humans learn, through social interaction, whom to depend on in different situations? We compared the extent to which inferred trait attributes—as opposed to learned reward associations previously examined as part of feedback-based learning—could adaptively inform cross-context social decision-making. In four experiments, participants completed a novel task in which they chose to "hire" other players to solve math and verbal questions for money. These players varied in their trait-level competence across these contexts and, independently, in the monetary rewards they offered to participants across contexts. Results revealed that participants chose partners primarily based on context-specific traits, as opposed to either global trait impressions or material rewards. When making choices in novel contexts—including determining who to choose for social and emotional support—participants generalized trait knowledge from past contexts that required similar traits. Reward-based learning, by contrast, demonstrated significantly weaker context-sensitivity and generalization. These findings suggest that people form context-dependent trait impressions from interactive feedback and use this knowledge to make flexible social decisions. These results support a novel theoretical account of how interaction-based social learning can support context-specific impression formation and adaptive decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People have characteristic ways of perceiving others' personalities. When judging others on several traits, some perceivers tend to form globally positive and others tend to form globally negative impressions. These differences, often termed perceiver effects, have mostly been conceptualized as a static construct that taps perceivers' personal stereotypes about the average other. Here, we assessed perceiver effects repeatedly in small groups of strangers who got to know each other over the course of 2–3 weeks and examined the degree to which positivity differences were stable versus developed systematically over time. Using second-order latent growth curve modeling, we tested whether initial positivity (i.e., random intercepts) could be explained by several personality variables and whether change (i.e., random slopes) could be explained by these personality variables and by perceivers' social experiences within the group. Across three studies (ns = 439, 257, and 311), personality variables characterized by specific beliefs about others, such as agreeableness and narcissistic rivalry, were found to explain initial positivity but personality was not reliably linked to changes in positivity over time. Instead, feeling liked and, to a lesser extent, being liked by one's peers partially explained changes in positivity. The results suggest that perceiver effects are best conceptualized as reflecting personal generalized stereotypes at an initial encounter but group-specific stereotypes that are fueled by social experiences as groups get acquainted. More generally, these findings suggest that perceiver effects might be a key variable to understanding reciprocal dynamics of small groups and interpersonal functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to be (seen as) human? Ten studies explore this age-old question and show that gender is a critical feature of perceiving humanness, being more central to conceptions of humanness than other social categories (race, age, sexual orientation, religion, disability). Our first six studies induce humanization (i.e., anthropomorphism) and measure social-category ascription. Across different manipulations (e.g., having participants recall experiences, observe moving shapes, imagine nonhuman entities as people, and create a human form), we find that gender is the most strongly ascribed social category and the one that uniquely predicts humanization. To provide further evidence that gender is central to conceptions of personhood, and to examine the consequences of withholding it, we then demonstrate that removing gender from virtual humans (Study 5), human groups (Study 6), alien species (Study 7), and individuals (Study 8) leads them to be seen as less human. The diminished humanness ascribed to nongendered and genderless targets is due, at least in part, to the lack of a gender schema to guide facile and efficient sensemaking. The relative difficulty perceivers had in making sense of nongendered targets predicted diminished humanness ratings. Finally, we demonstrate downstream consequences of stripping a target of gender: Perceivers consider them less relatable and more socially distant (Study 8). These results have theoretical implications for research on gender, (de)humanization, anthropomorphism, and social cognition, more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual harassment is pervasive and has adverse effects on its victims, yet perceiving sexual harassment is wrought with ambiguity, making harassment difficult to identify and understand. Eleven preregistered, multimethod experiments (total N = 4,065 participants) investigated the nature of perceiving sexual harassment by testing whether perceptions of sexual harassment and its impact are facilitated when harassing behaviors target those who fit with the prototype of women (e.g., those who have feminine features, interests, and characteristics) relative to those who fit less well with this prototype. Studies A1–A5 demonstrate that participants' mental representation of sexual harassment targets overlapped with the prototypes of women as assessed through participant-generated drawings, face selection tasks, reverse correlation, and self-report measures. In Studies B1–B4, participants were less likely to label incidents as sexual harassment when they targeted nonprototypical women compared with prototypical women. In Studies C1 and C2, participants perceived sexual harassment claims to be less credible and the harassment itself to be less psychologically harmful when the victims were nonprototypical women rather than prototypical women. This research offers theoretical and methodological advances to the study of sexual harassment through social cognition and prototypicality perspectives, and it has implications for harassment reporting and litigation as well as the realization of fundamental civil rights. For materials, data, and preregistrations of all studies, see https://osf.io/xehu9/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People gather information about others along a few fundamental dimensions; their current goals determine which dimensions they most need to know. As proponents of competing social-evaluation models, we sought to study the dimensions that perceivers spontaneously prioritize when gathering information about unknown social groups. Because priorities depend on functions, having relational goals (e.g., deciding whether and how to interact with a group) versus structural goals (e.g., getting an overview of society) should moderate dimensional priorities. Various candidate dimensions could differentiate perceivers' impressions of social groups. For example, the Stereotype Content model argues that people evaluate others in terms of their Warmth (i.e., their Sociability and Morality) and Competence (i.e., their Ability and Assertiveness). Alternatively, the Agency-Beliefs-Communion (ABC) model proposes conservative-progressive Beliefs. Five studies (N = 2,268) found that participants consistently prioritized learning about targets' Warmth. However, goal moderated priority: When participants had a relational goal, such as an unknown group increasing in their neighborhood, they showed more interest in targets' Sociability, a facet of Warmth. When participants had a structural goal, such as an unknown group increasing in their nation, they showed more interest in the groups' Beliefs, as well as increased interest in Competence-related facets. Diverse methods reveal interest in all dimensions, reconciling discrepancies among social-evaluation models by identifying how relational versus structural goals differentiate priorities of the fundamental dimensions proposed by current models. Results have implications for fundamental dimensions of social cognition, more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People may want deep and meaningful relationships with others, but may also be reluctant to engage in the deep and meaningful conversations with strangers that could create those relationships. We hypothesized that people systematically underestimate how caring and interested distant strangers are in one's own intimate revelations and that these miscalibrated expectations create a psychological barrier to deeper conversations. As predicted, conversations between strangers felt less awkward, and created more connectedness and happiness, than the participants themselves expected (Experiments 1a–5). Participants were especially prone to overestimate how awkward deep conversations would be compared with shallow conversations (Experiments 2–5). Notably, they also felt more connected to deep conversation partners than shallow conversation partners after having both types of conversations (Experiments 6a–b). Systematic differences between expectations and experiences arose because participants expected others to care less about their disclosures in conversation than others actually did (Experiments 1a, 1b, 4a, 4b, 5, and 6a). As a result, participants more accurately predicted the outcomes of their conversations when speaking with close friends, family, or partners whose care and interest is more clearly known (Experiment 5). Miscalibrated expectations about others matter because they guide decisions about which topics to discuss in conversation, such that more calibrated expectations encourage deeper conversation (Experiments 7a–7b). Misunderstanding others can encourage overly shallow interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People often find truth and meaning in claims that have no regard for truth or empirical evidence. We propose that one reason is that people value connecting and fitting in with others, motivating them to seek the common ground of communication and generate explanations for how claims might make sense. This increases the likelihood that people experience empty claims as truthful, meaningful, or even profound. Seven studies (N > 16,000 from the United States and China) support our prediction. People who score higher in collectivism (valuing connection and fitting in) are more likely to find fake news meaningful and believe in pseudoscience (Studies 1 to 3). China–U.S. cross-national comparisons show parallel effects. Relative to people from the United States, Chinese participants are more likely to see meaning in randomly generated vague claims (Study 4). People higher in collectivism are more likely to engage in meaning-making, generating explanations when faced with an empty claim, and having done so, are more likely to find meaning (Study 5). People who momentarily experience themselves as more collectivistic are more likely to see empty claims as meaningful (Study 6). People higher in collectivism are more likely to engage in meaning-making unless there is no common ground to seek (Study 7). We interpret our results as suggesting that conditions that trigger collectivism create fertile territory for the spread of empty claims, including fake news and misinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we react when our romantic partners, friends, or family members behave unethically? When close others misbehave, it generates a powerful conflict between observers' moral values and their cherished relationships. Previous research has almost exclusively studied moral perception in a social vacuum by investigating responses to the transgressions of strangers; therefore, little is known about how these responses unfold in the context of intimate bonds. Here we systematically examine the impact of having a close relationship with a transgressor on perceptions of that transgressor, the relationship, and the self. We predicted less negative emotional and evaluative responses to transgressors and smaller consequences for the relationship, yet more negative emotional and evaluative responses to the self when close others, compared with strangers or acquaintances, transgress. Participants read hypothetical wrongdoings (Study 1), recalled unethical events (Study 2), reported daily transgressions (Study 3; preregistered), and learned of novel immoral behavior (Study 4) committed by close others or comparison groups. Participants reported less other-critical emotions, more lenient moral evaluations, a reduced desire to punish/criticize, and a smaller impact on the relationship (compared with acquaintances) when close others versus strangers or acquaintances transgressed. Simultaneously, participants reported more self-conscious emotions and showed some evidence of harsher moral self-evaluations when close others transgressed. Underlying mechanisms of this process were examined. Our findings demonstrate the deep ambivalence in reacting to close others' unethical behaviors, revealing a surprising irony—in protecting close others, the self may bear some of the burden of their misbehavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although theories of personality and human behavior have long assumed that the self is affectively complex, widely used indirect measures of implicit self-evaluations have largely focused on the robustness and cultural universality of the self's positivity. Such indirect measures assess evaluations on a single continuum, ranging from positive to negative. Thus, they focus on the self's relative positivity and are inherently incapable of assessing whether the self is associated with good and bad. Using the well-established evaluative priming task, the present work tested the hypothesis that positive implicit self-evaluations coexist with an inkling of negative implicit self-evaluations. Studies 1 and 2 empirically demonstrated that priming the self facilitated the classification of both positive and negative targets (bivalent-priming). In contrast, replicating classic findings, priming a personally significant, liked object facilitated the classification of positive targets and inhibited the classification of negative targets (univalent-priming). Study 3 showed that the bivalent-priming triggered by self-primes cannot be explained by alternative accounts (e.g., arousal, vigilance). Meta-analyses of all studies attests to the robustness and reproducibility of self-primes triggering both positive and negative implicit evaluations. Moreover, tests estimating heterogeneity in the strength of implicit self-evaluations indicated that individual differences in nonclinical, healthy individuals may be limited, possibly reflecting measurement limitations, the nature of implicit self-evaluations, or both. Overall, the present work shines a spotlight on a previously undocumented effect: Despite the self's robust net positivity, the self reliably triggers negative implicit self-evaluations. Implications for the conceptualization, assessment, and consequences of implicit self-evaluations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do routine police encounters build or undermine community trust, and how might they contribute to racial gaps in citizen perceptions of the police? Procedural justice theory posits that officers' interpersonal communication toward the public plays a formative role, but experimental tests of this hypothesis have been constrained by the difficulties of measuring and manipulating this dimension of officer-citizen interactions. Officer-worn body camera recordings provide a novel means to overcome both of these challenges. Across five studies with laboratory and community samples, we use footage from traffic stops to examine how officers communicate to drivers and whether racial disparities in officers' communication erode institutional trust in the police. Specifically, we consider the cumulative effects of one subtle interpersonal cue: an officer's tone of voice. In Studies 1A, 1B, and 1C, participants rated thin slices of officer speech. Participants were blind to the content of the officer's words and the race of their interlocutor, yet they evaluated officers' tone toward White (vs. Black) men more positively. By manipulating participants' exposure to repeated interactions, we demonstrate that even these paraverbal aspects of police interactions shape how citizens construe the police generally (Study 2), and that racial disparities in prosodic cues undermine trust in institutions such as police departments (Study 3). Participants' trust in the police, and personal experiences of fairness, in turn, correlated with their perceptions of officer prosody across studies. Taken together, these data illustrate a cycle through which interpersonal aspects of police encounters erode institutional trust across race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research tests how comparisons in the moral domain differ from other social comparisons in three ways. First, an initial experience-sampling study shows that people compare downward more strongly in the moral domain than in most other domains (Study 1, N = 454), because people like to feel moral and present themselves as moral. Second, the classic threat principle of social comparison holds that people choose downward comparisons to improve their well-being after a threat to their self-esteem. We propose that in the moral domain the threat principle is intensified because morality is a uniquely important and central comparison domain. Across seven experiments (Experiments 2a and 2b, 3a–3c, 4a and 4b), we find that people search for downward comparisons much more than in other domains. This effect is so strong that people are willing to forgo money and incur time costs to avoid upward moral comparisons when threatened. Third, another classic principle of social comparison holds that people only consider comparisons that are diagnostic (i.e., close or similar) and therefore self-relevant, while dismissing extreme or dissimilar comparisons as irrelevant. We propose that this diagnosticity principle is attenuated because morality is a binding code that applies equally to all humans. Across four experiments (Experiments 5a and 5b, 6a and 6b), we find that even the most extreme and dissimilar moral (but not other) comparisons are deemed relevant and potentially threatening. Together, these twelve studies (total N = 5,543) demonstrate how moral comparisons are a ubiquitous but fundamentally distinct form of social comparison with altered basic principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological research on empathy typically focuses on understanding its effects on empathizers and empathic targets. Little is known, however, about the effects of empathy beyond its dyadic context. Taking an extradyadic perspective, we examined how third-party observers evaluate empathizers. Seven experiments documented that observers' evaluations of empathizers depend on the target of empathy. Empathizers (vs. nonempathizers) of a stressful experience were respected/liked more when the empathic target was positive (e.g., children's hospital worker), but not when the target was negative (e.g., White supremacist; Experiments 1 and 2). Empathizers were respected/liked more when responding to a positive target who disclosed a positive experience (i.e., a personal accomplishment), but less when responding to a negative target who disclosed a positive experience (Experiment 3). These effects were partly, but not solely, attributable to the positivity of empathic responses (Experiment 4). Expressing empathy (vs. condemnation) toward a negative target resulted in less respect/liking when the disclosed experience was linked to the source of target valence (i.e., stress from White supremacist job; Experiments 5 through 7), but more respect/liking when the experience was unrelated to the source of target valence (i.e., stress from cancer; Experiment 7). Overall, empathizers were viewed as warmer, but to a lesser extent when responding to a negative target. These findings highlight the importance of considering the extradyadic impact of empathy and suggest that although people are often encouraged to empathize with disliked others, they are not always favored for doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceivers routinely draw inferences about others from their behavior in an attempt to make sense of the world. Previous research has established that spontaneous inferences include stable characteristics such as traits and a number of variable person-related concepts such as goals, intentions, and motivations. The current research investigated the occurrence of more general spontaneous state inferences. In a series of four preregistered studies (N = 883), we adapted two established experimental paradigms frequently used in spontaneous social inference research to the investigation of spontaneous trait and state inferences. In Studies 1 and 2, we observed evidence for the occurrence of spontaneous state inferences from state-implying statements. In Studies 3 and 4, we observed the simultaneous occurrence of spontaneous trait and state inferences from statements that allowed for both inferences. In a fifth study (N = 97), we provide evidence that people represent states and traits as functionally different: Participants judged the likelihood of behavioral repetition higher when the same behavior was related to a trait-inference than a state-inference. The observation of multiple simultaneous spontaneous inferences in the current research suggests that further theory building regarding the underlying mechanisms and processes of spontaneous impression formation in person perception from behavior is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consistent with sampling theories in judgment and decision research, impression judgments depend on the number of traits drawn randomly from a population of target person traits in distinct ways. When sample size is determined externally by the experimenter, the sensitivity of resulting impression judgments to the prevailing (positive or negative) valence increases with the number of traits. In contrast, sensitivity is negatively related to sample size (more extreme judgments for smaller samples) when sampling is self-truncated. Building on previous findings by Prager et al. (2018), two new experiments corroborate the judgment pattern for self-truncated sampling and elaborate on the distinction of Brunswikian sampling (of stimuli in the environment) and Thurstonian sampling (of states within the judge's mind). Thurstonian sampling effects were evident in depolarized (regressive) judgments by yoked control participants provided with exactly the same trait samples as original judges, who could truncate sampling when they felt ready for a judgment. Experiment 1 included two kinds of yoked controls, receiving trait samples truncated in a previous stage either by themselves or by other judges, distinguishing between temporal and interpersonal sources of Thurstonian sampling variance. As expected, self-yoking yielded less regressive shrinkage than other-yoking. Experiment 2 provided convergent results with yoked controls manipulated within participants, dealing with higher dispersion of impressions on self-truncated samples (Thurstone, 1927). Across both experiments, individual impression judgments were highly predictable from theoretically meaningful parameters: expected valence in the population, sampling error, sample size, and different indices of trait diagnosticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People perceive similarity between their own personality characteristics and the personality characteristics of others. This association has sometimes been labeled "assumed similarity," reflecting the interpretation that it is a cognitive bias. Another possibility, however, is an interpersonal path to perceived similarity: personality traits that are manifested in behavior may elicit similar or dissimilar behavior from others, and people form perceptions based on what they have elicited. Drawing on theories of interpersonal perception and interpersonal theory, we proposed and tested for evidence of such perceiver-elicited similarity effects, as well as trait and state assumed similarity. Previously unacquainted participants (N = 322) completed personality assessments, interacted in dyads the next day, and then reported perceptions of each other's personalities. The results showed broad support for the expression and accurate perceptions of most Big Five domains and facets. The preregistered directional hypotheses for behavior elicitation and perceiver-elicited similarity were supported for 3 of 5 traits. Participants interpersonally elicited and then accurately perceived similarity in sociability and openness, and dissimilarity in assertiveness. We also found evidence for assumed similarity for agreeableness and energy level, but participants did not elicit similar behavior from their partners for those traits. We discuss implications for treating perceived similarity as a dynamic, multicomponent phenomenon, and the possibility that assumed similarity emerges from the repeated experience of interpersonally elicited and perceived similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reputations are critical in human social life: they allow people to share and act on information about one another, even when they have never met. Reputations can be conceptualized as information about a target person that is stored in networks of perceivers and transmitted through either direct interaction or hearsay. We present a novel paradigm that integrates the network approach with interpersonal perception research. We apply that paradigm to study the consensus, accuracy, positivity bias, and consequences of personality trait information in hearsay-based reputations. In 2 preregistered studies (N = 260 and 369), we created naturalistic micronetworks in the lab in which participants interacted and got to know one another, then later described each other to naïve third parties. Across studies, we use the extended Social Accuracy Model (Wessels, Zimmermann, Biesanz, & Leising, 2020) and an extension of the domain-wise correlational approach (Kenny, 1994). Hearsay-based reputations are about as positively biased as direct reputations. They showed strong consensus (agreement) with direct reputations and modest accuracy, suggesting that they can consolidate around an inaccurate representation. Perceivers' extraversion was associated with more biased hearsay reputations. Experimentally manipulating the context of the hearsay exchange had no detectable impact on hearsay consensus or accuracy. Hearsay reputations were consequential, affecting the extent to which perceivers thought targets would be good leaders or friends. These results provide initial insights into reputation networks and suggest several important future directions for the network approach to reputations. We also present open materials and data analysis software for others to extend the reputations-as-networks approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We theorized that from the perspective of U.S. Black Americans, a connection to Black ancestry—and the historical hardship associated with that ancestry—plays an important role in racial categorization. We found support for this across six studies. In Studies 1–3, participants categorized targets with Black ancestry and White experiences or targets with White ancestry and Black experiences. U.S. Black Americans' (more than non-Black Americans') racial categorizations were influenced by Black ancestry (more than by White ancestry). In Study 4, we replicated this effect under extreme conditions (e.g., even when targets had Black ancestry and were phenotypically, socially, culturally, self-identified, and advantaged as White for eighty years, U.S. Black Americans categorized them as Black). In Study 5, U.S. Black Americans were more likely than U.S. White Americans to associate their racial ancestry with hardship, and individual differences in those associations predicted the extent to which U.S. Black Americans categorized the target with Black ancestry and White experiences as Black. In Study 6, participants categorized a target with Black ancestry and ancestral hardship (i.e., their ancestors were kidnapped from Africa and experienced slavery) or a target with Black ancestry and ancestral success (i.e., their ancestors immigrated from Africa and experienced upward mobility). U.S. Black Americans (unlike U.S. White Americans) were more identified with the target with ancestral hardship. Collectively, our research suggests that from the perspective of U.S. Black Americans, the collective Black experiences of the past continue to shape the Black collective of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Race is fraught with meaning, but unequal status is central. Race–status associations (RSAs) link White Americans with high status and Black Americans with low status. RSAs could occur via observation of racially distributed jobs, perceived status-related stereotypic attributes, or simple ranking. Nine samples (N = 3,933) validate 3 novel measures of White = high status/Black = low status RSAs—based on jobs, rank, and attributes. First, RSA measures showed clear factor structure, internal validity, and test–retest reliability. Second, these measures differentially corresponded to White Americans' hierarchy-maintaining attitudes, beliefs, and preferences. Potentially based on observation, the more spontaneous Job-based RSAs predicted interracial bias, social dominance orientation, meritocracy beliefs, and hierarchy-maintaining hiring or policy preferences. Preference effects held after controlling for bias and support for the status quo. In contrast, the more deliberate Rank- and Attribute-based RSAs negatively predicted hierarchy-maintaining beliefs and policy preferences; direct inferences of racial inequality linked to preferences for undoing it. Third, Black = low status, rather than White = high status, associations largely drove these effects. Finally, Black Americans also held RSAs; Rank- or Attribute-based RSAs predicted increased perceived discrimination, reduced social dominance, and reduced meritocracy beliefs. Although individuals' RSAs vary, only White Americans' Job-based stratifying associations help maintain racial status hierarchies. Theory-guided evidence of race–status associations introduces powerful new assessment tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When judging others' personalities, perceivers differ in their general judgment tendencies. These perceiver effects partly reflect a response bias but are also stable and psychologically important individual differences. However, current insights into the basic structure of perceiver effects are ambiguous with previous research pointing to either a unidimensional structure (i.e., people see others as globally positive vs. negative) or a multidimensional structure (i.e., people see others as high or low on specific traits). Here we provide a large scale investigation of the structure of perceiver effects that spans more than 100,000 personality judgments across 10 studies in which a total of N = 2,199 perceivers judged others on several trait domains (i.e., the Big Five, agency & communion) and in different judgment contexts (i.e., level of involvement with targets, level of exposure to targets). Results suggest that perceiver effects are hierarchically structured such that they reflect both a global tendency to view others positively versus negativity and specific tendencies to view others as high or low with respect to trait content. The relative importance of these components varied considerably across trait domains and judgment contexts: Perceiver effects were more specific for traits higher in observability and lower in evaluativeness and in context with less personal involvement and higher exposure to targets. Overall, results provide strong evidence for the hierarchical structure of perceiver effects and suggest that their meaning systematically varies depending on trait domain and possibly the judgment context. Implications for theory and assessment are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research examined accuracy and bias in racial metaperceptions—perceptions of others' attitudes toward one's racial group—within the context of interracial relationships, as well as implications of these metaperceptions for the quality of interracial relationships. Two dyadic studies of interracial relationships involving Black and White participants suggest that racial metaperceptions were partly accurate, related to relationship partners' racial attitudes. In addition, 3 distinct biases in racial metaperceptions were identified, including assumed reciprocity (i.e., perceivers assuming their attitudes toward their partners' racial group are reciprocated by those partners), projection (i.e., perceivers assuming their attitudes toward their own group are shared by partners), and confirmation bias (i.e., perceivers viewing partners' racial attitudes in ways that are consistent with their chronic expectations about being the target of prejudice). In turn, both accurate and biased racial metaperceptions appeared to have implications for the quality of interracial relationships, including relationship satisfaction, perceived regard, relationship commitment, and prosocial behavior. Implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For 70 years, the field of social perception has concluded that perceivers can determine others' social category memberships with remarkable accuracy. However, it has become increasingly clear that accuracy is only part of the story, as social category judgments are often systematically biased toward one category over another. For example, when categorizing sexual orientation, perceivers label others as straight more often than gay. This straight categorization bias is reliable, has an effect size larger than that for accuracy, and is not exclusively driven by the low base rate of sexual minorities in the population, yet we know little about its proximal causes. Here, we argue that one facet of this bias is a motivated reasoning process that avoids applying stigmatizing labels to unknown others. Specifically, we propose that perceivers ascribe heavy consequences to incorrect gay categorizations, compelling them to gather and integrate available information in a manner that favors straight categorizations. Studies 1 and 2 tested the dynamic nature of the bias, exploring decision ambivalence and the real-time accrual of visible evidence about a target throughout the perceptual process using mouse-tracking and diffusion modeling. Studies 3–5 tested motivational determinants for the bias, revealing that perceivers associate high costs with incorrect gay categorizations because those errors put other people in harm's way. Studies 6–9 tested the cognitive mechanisms perceivers engage as they search for information that allows them to avoid costly decision errors. Collectively, these studies provide a new framework for understanding a well-documented but poorly understood response bias in social categorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Receiving social support can entail both costs and benefits for recipients. Thus, theories of effective support have proposed that support should address recipients' needs to be beneficial. This paper proposes the importance of support that addresses recipients' self-regulatory needs. We present a novel construct—regulatory effectiveness of support (RES)—which posits that support that addresses recipients' needs to understand their situation (truth) and to feel capable of managing their situation (control) will engender support benefits. We hypothesized that receiving support higher on RES would predict beneficial support outcomes. We further hypothesized that these effects would be especially pronounced for self-regulation relevant outcomes, such as better mood and increased motivation, which, in turn, can be important for successful self-regulation. We established the construct validity of RES and then investigated its effects in daily life and in laboratory support discussions. In 8 studies and a meta-analysis pooling across studies, results showed that RES predicted self-regulation relevant support outcomes, and these effects of RES were stronger than the effects of perceived responsiveness, a construct that is known to enhance interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, RES was linked to self-regulatory success: Participants who received support higher on RES were more motivated to perform well on a stressful speech, which subsequently predicted better speech performance. These findings enhance knowledge of effective social support by underscoring the importance of addressing recipients' self-regulatory needs in the support process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, God is commonly conceptualized as the omnipotent and omniscient entity that created the universe, and as a White man. We questioned whether the extent to which God is conceptualized as a White man predicts the extent to which White men are perceived as particularly fit for leadership. We found support for this across 7 studies. In Study 1, we created 2 measures to examine the extent to which U.S. Christians conceptualized God as a White man, and in Study 2 we found that, controlling for multiple covariates (e.g., racist and sexist attitudes, religiosity, political attitudes), responses on these measures predicted perceiving White male job candidates as particularly fit for leadership, among both Black and White, male and female, Christians. In Study 3, we found that U.S. Christian children, both White and racial minority, conceptualized God as more White than Black (and more male than female), which predicted perceiving White people as particularly boss-like. We next found evidence to suggest that this phenomenon is rooted in broader intuitions that extend beyond Christianity. That is, in a novel context with novel groups and a novel god, U.S. Christian adults (Studies 4 and 6), atheist adults (Study 5), and agnostic preschoolers (Study 7), used a god's identity to infer which groups were best fit for leadership. Collectively, our data reveal a clear and consistent pattern: Attributing a social identity to God predicts perceiving individuals who share that identity as more fit for leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

C. J. Wakslak, Y. Trope, N. Liberman, and R. Alony (2006) examined the effect of manipulating the likelihood of future events on level of construal (i.e., mental abstraction). Over 7 experiments, they consistently found that subjectively unlikely (vs. likely) future events were more abstractly (vs. concretely) construed. This well-cited, but understudied finding has had a major influence on the construal level theory (CLT) literature: Likelihood is considered to be 1 of 4 psychological distances assumed to influence mental abstraction in similar ways (Trope & Liberman, 2010). Contrary to the original empirical findings, we present 2 close replication attempts (N = 115 and N = 120; the original studies had N = 20 and N = 34) that failed to find the effect of likelihood on construal level. Bayesian analyses provided diagnostic support for the absence of an effect. In light of the failed replications, we present a meta-analytic summary of the accumulated evidence on the effect. It suggests a strong trend of declining effect sizes as a function of larger samples. These results call into question the previous conclusion that likelihood has a reliable influence on construal level. We discuss the implications of these findings for CLT and advise against treating likelihood as a psychological distance until further tests have established the relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptions of physical attractiveness vary across cultural groups, particularly for female body size and shape. It has been hypothesized that visual media propagates Western "thin ideals." However, because cross-cultural studies typically consider groups highly differentiated on a number of factors, identifying the causal factors has thus far been impossible. In the present research, we conducted "naturalistic" and controlled experiments to test the influence of media access on female body ideals in a remote region of Nicaragua by sampling from villages with and without regular TV access. We found that greater TV consumption remained a significant predictor of preferences for slimmer, curvier female figures after controlling for a range of other factors in an ethnically balanced sample of 299 individuals (150 female, aged 15–79) across 7 villages. Within-individual analyses in 1 village over 3 years also showed an association between increased TV consumption and preferences for slimmer figures among some participants. Finally, an experimental study in 2 low-media locations demonstrates that exposure to media images of fashion models can directly impact participants' body size ideals. We provide the first converging cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental evidence from field-based research, that media exposure can drive changes in perceptions of female attractiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence of group bias based on race, ethnicity, nationality, and language emerges early in the life span. Although understanding the initial acquisition of group bias has critical theoretical and practical implications, precisely how group biases are acquired has been understudied. In two preregistered experiments, we tested the hypothesis that generalized social group biases can be acquired through exposure to positive nonverbal signals directed toward a novel adult from one group and more negative nonverbal signals directed toward a novel adult from another group. We sought to determine whether children would acquire global nonverbal signal-consistent social group biases that extended beyond their explicit social preferences, by measuring children's preferences, imitation, and behavioral intentions. Supporting our preregistered hypotheses, preschool-age participants favored small and large groups whose member received positive nonverbal signals, relative to groups whose member received more negative nonverbal signals. We also replicated prior work indicating that children will acquire individual target biases from the observation of biased nonverbal signals. Here we make the case that generalized social group biases can be rapidly and unintentionally transmitted on the basis of observational learning from nonverbal signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We document a tendency to demean others' needs: believing that psychological needs—those requiring mental capacity, and hence more uniquely human (e.g., need for meaning and autonomy)—are relatively less important to others compared with physical needs—those shared with other biological agents, and hence more animalistic (e.g., need for food and sleep). Because valuing psychological needs requires a sophisticated humanlike mind, agents presumed to have relatively weaker mental capacities should also be presumed to value psychological needs less compared with biological needs. Supporting this, our studies found that people demeaned the needs of nonhuman animals (e.g., chimpanzees) and historically dehumanized groups (e.g., drug addicts) more than the needs of close friends or oneself (Studies 1 and 3). Because mental capacities are more readily recognized through introspection than by external observation, people also demean peers' needs more than their own, inferring that one's own behavior is guided more strongly by psychological needs than identical behavior in others (Study 4). Two additional experiments suggest that demeaning could be a systematic error (Studies 5 and 6), as charity donors and students underestimated the importance of homeless people's psychological (vs. physical) needs compared with self-reports and choices from homeless people. Underestimating the importance of others' psychological needs could impair the ability to help others. These experiments indicate that demeaning is a unique facet of dehumanization reflecting a reliable, consequential, and potentially mistaken understanding of others' minds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research aims to explore how people construe objects when being observed (vs. in a private context). Using different manipulations of observation and measures of construal, we demonstrate that people are more likely to apply higher-level construals when observed than in a private context (Studies 1–3); this effect holds when controlling for arousal level (Study 2) and is obtained under conditions of observation but not the mere presence of others (Study 3). Studies 4–6 explore the underlying mechanism of this effect: adopting the perspectives of others in the presence of observers. Study 4 demonstrates that when observed, people align their own preferences to their inference of the preferences of others, but this effect is not present in a private context. In Study 5, a mediation analysis suggests that individuals prefer the high-level option when observed because they adopt the perspectives of others. In addition, the link between context and construal level is broken when participants are explicitly asked to focus on their own perspective when observed or to adopt the perspectives of others in a private context (Study 6). Finally, Study 7 examines implications for evaluation of gifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a person's language appears to be political—such as being politically correct or incorrect—it can influence fundamental impressions of him or her. Political correctness is "using language or behavior to seem sensitive to others' feelings, especially those others who seem socially disadvantaged." One pilot study, 6 experiments, and 3 supplemental experiments (N = 4,956) demonstrate that being politically incorrect makes communicators appear more authentic—specifically, less susceptible to external influence—albeit also less warm. These effects, however, are moderated by perceivers' political ideology and how sympathetic perceivers feel toward the target group being labeled politically correctly. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3 using politically incorrect language (e.g., calling undocumented immigrants illegals) made a communicator appear particularly authentic among conservative perceivers but particularly cold among liberal perceivers. However, in Experiment 4 these effects reversed when conservatives felt sympathetic toward the group that was being labeled politically correctly or incorrectly (e.g., calling poor Whites white trash). Experiment 5 tests why political incorrectness can boost authenticity, demonstrating that it makes communicators seem less strategic. Finally, Experiment 6 examines the use of political language in a meaningful field context: perceived persuasion in real political debates. Debaters instructed to be politically correct (vs. politically incorrect) were judged by their uninstructed conversation partners to be easier to persuade during the conversation, although they actually reported being similarly persuaded. Together, these findings demonstrate when and how using politically incorrect language can enhance a person's authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Status hierarchies are perhaps the single most important form of social structure within groups, ubiquitous and affecting groups' information flow, decision-making, and performance as well as the behavior and outcomes of individual members. The extent to which individuals are able to accurately perceive and navigate their groups' status hierarchies may thus be a critical determinant of their success. Research to date, however, has not yet fully examined the role of individuals' perceptions of status hierarchies. We introduce the concept of perceived status hierarchies, or individuals' mental representations of their groups' status hierarchies. Across four field studies, involving students in university cohorts and working adults, we find substantial variance in individuals' perceived status hierarchies, and that individuals with more accurate status perceptions exhibit higher performance. Analyses of individuals' networking behavior reveals that individuals with more accurate perceived status hierarchies seek out contact with higher status others on average, which mediates the positive association between accuracy and performance. This work makes important contributions by extending existing theories of status, connecting the literatures on status and social networks, and providing a thorough investigation into the consequences of accurate perceptions of social structure for individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That 2 individuals can look at the same stimulus and experience it differently speaks to the power of construal. People's construals are shaped by their idiosyncratic attitudes, belief systems, and personal histories. Eleven studies provide support for and explain the origin of a vicarious construal effect: Considering perspectives one once had but seemingly lost, one ordinarily would have only with more experience, or one would not have had spontaneously, all exerted an assimilative pull on one's ongoing experiences. This means habituation can be slowed or stalled by considering another's fresh perspective (Studies 1–6), desensitization can be preemptively achieved by considering another's stale perspective (Study 5), and the experience of a performance can change by considering how fans or nonfans would see it (Study 7). Blind to the power of construal in defining their experiences, participants believed they were learning about a stimulus's properties or their own underlying preferences, not simply the experience-distorting effects of the perspective manipulations (Studies 6–7). These effects emerged in examinations of positive emotions, negative emotions, interest, and perceptions of humor. The final 2 pairs of studies used causal chain designs to elucidate an underlying mechanism. Trying to understand another's perspective encouraged participants to approach a stimulus by posing different questions or directional hypotheses to themselves (Studies 8a and 9a), which caused participants' own experiences of the stimulus to shift (Studies 8b and 9b). The implications of this account for when considering another's perspective should change one's own experience are detailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a novel technique known as network meta-analysis, we synthesized evidence from 492 studies (87,418 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of procedures in changing implicit measures, which we define as response biases on implicit tasks. We also evaluated these procedures’ effects on explicit and behavioral measures. We found that implicit measures can be changed, but effects are often relatively weak (|ds| < .30). Most studies focused on producing short-term changes with brief, single-session manipulations. Procedures that associate sets of concepts, invoke goals or motivations, or tax mental resources changed implicit measures the most, whereas procedures that induced threat, affirmation, or specific moods/emotions changed implicit measures the least. Bias tests suggested that implicit effects could be inflated relative to their true population values. Procedures changed explicit measures less consistently and to a smaller degree than implicit measures and generally produced trivial changes in behavior. Finally, changes in implicit measures did not mediate changes in explicit measures or behavior. Our findings suggest that changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]