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People judge repeated information as truer than new information, a “truth-by-repetition” effect. Because repetition increases processing fluency, which is assumed to elicit positive affect, participants may match their positive experience associated with repeated information with a positive (“true”) rather than negative (“false”) response. We tested this valence-matching hypothesis in a preregistered experiment by manipulating the affective congruency of the response format. Specifically, in the congruent condition, participants had to select a positive (negative) picture to respond “true” (“false”). In the incongruent condition, we reversed these associations. In line with the valence matching hypothesis, the truth-by-repetition effect was larger in the congruent than incongruent condition. However, the effect was small, and Bayesian analyses were inconclusive. In addition, the truth-by-repetition effect was significant in both response format conditions. The results suggest a possible contribution of a valence matching process to the truth-by-repetition effect, but one that does not challenge extant models.

A key challenge for social psychology is to identify unifying principles that account for the complex dynamics of social behaviour. We propose psychological relativity and its core mechanism of comparison as one such unifying principle. Social cognition is relative in that it is shaped by comparative thinking. If comparative thinking is indeed a central mechanism in social psychology, then it should be affected by, and affect itself, a wide variety of phenomena. To support our proposal, we review recent evidence investigating basic processes underlying and novel applications of social comparisons. Specifically, we clarify determinants of assimilation and contrast, evaluative consequences of comparing similarities vs. differences, attitudinal effects of spatial relativity, and how spatial arrangements determine perceived similarity, one of the antecedents of social comparisons. We then move to behavioural relativity effects on motivation and self-regulation, as well as imitation behaviour. Finally, we address relativity within the more applied areas of morality and political psychology. The reviewed research thereby illustrates how unifying principles of social cognition may be instrumental in answering old questions and discovering new phenomena and explanations.

People judge repeated statements as more true than new statements: a truth effect. In three preregistered experiments (N = 463), we examined whether people predict others’ truth judgments to be more biased by repetition than their own: a bias blind spot for the truth effect. In Experiment 1, using uncertain but moderately plausible statements, participants predicted repetition to increase truth judgments in general. There was no significant difference between predictions for the self and others. Experiment 2 used implausible statements and found a significant bias blind spot: participants predicted a larger effect of repetition for others than for themselves. Experiment 3 considered again moderately plausible statements, but this time in a larger sample of participants. Critically, we compared actual performance after a two-day delay with participants’ predictions for the self and others. This experiment replicated the bias blind spot. Importantly, participants underestimated the magnitude of the truth effect. Finally, predictions and actual truth effect scores were not significantly related to each other. Overall, the results highlight that although people assume repetition to influence their truth judgments, they generally underestimate the effect’s magnitude, particularly for themselves.

The metalation of N,N-dimethylaminomethylferrocene in THF by the superbasic mixture of

When judging whether someone is trustworthy, people rely on the perceptual typicality of a person’s face. We tested whether a more general typical-is-trustworthy heuristic exists based on the descriptive typicality of a person. In four experiments, we provided participants with descriptive information about the typicality of target persons’ attributes (i.e., population prevalence) and measured perceived trustworthiness. Participants consistently expected descriptively typical targets to be more trustworthy than descriptively atypical targets. These findings show that typicality-based trustworthiness inferences are not only confided to perceptual typicality but also apply to descriptive typicality, suggesting a general typical-is-trustworthiness heuristic. This implies a human tendency to trust typical individuals more and, conversely, a disadvantage for atypical individuals such as minorities.

Past research indicates that people judge repeated statements as more true than new ones. An experiential consequence of repetition that may underly this “truth effect” is processing fluency: Processing statements feels easier following their repetition. In three preregistered experiments (N = 684), we examined the effect of merely instructed repetition (i.e., not experienced) on truth judgments. Experiments 1–2 instructed participants that some statements were present (vs. absent) in an exposure phase allegedly undergone by other individuals. We then asked them to rate such statements based on how they thought those individuals would have done. Overall, participants rated repeated statements as more true than new statements. The instruction-based repetition effects were significant but also significantly weaker than those elicited by the experience of repetition (Experiments 1 and 2). Additionally, Experiment 2 clarified that adding a repetition status tag in the experienced repetition condition did not impact truth judgments. Experiment 3 further showed that the instruction-based effect was still detectable when participants provided truth judgments for themselves rather than estimating other people’s judgments. We discuss the mechanisms that can explain these effects and their implications for advancing our understanding of the truth effect.

Evaluative conditioning is one of the most widely studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance task is a highly cited evaluative-conditioning paradigm and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for evaluative-conditioning effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretical, and applied developments. Yet few published studies have used this task, and most are characterized by small samples and small effect sizes. We conducted a high-powered ( N = 1,478 adult participants), preregistered close replication of the original surveillance-task study (Olson & Fazio, 2001). We obtained evidence for a small evaluative-conditioning effect when “aware” participants were excluded using the original criterion—therefore replicating the original effect. However, no such effect emerged when three other awareness criteria were used. We suggest that there is a need for caution when using evidence from the surveillance-task effect to make theoretical and practical claims about “unaware” evaluative-conditioning effects.

Implicit measures are diagnostic tools to assess attitudes and evaluations that people cannot or may not want to report. Diagnostic inferences from such tools are subject to asymmetries. We argue that (causal) conditional probabilities p(AM+|A+) of implicitly measured attitudes AM+ given the causal influence of existing attitudes A+ is typically higher than the reverse (diagnostic) conditional probability p(A+|AM+), due to non-evaluative influences on implicit measures. We substantiate this argument with evidence for non-evaluative influences on evaluative priming—specifically, similarity effects reflecting the higher similarity of positive than negative prime-target pairs; integrativity effects based on primes and targets’ potential to form meaningful semantic compounds; and congruity proportion effects that originate in individuals’ decisional strategies. We also cursorily discuss non-evaluative influences in the Implicit Association Test (IAT). These influences not only have implications for the evaluative priming paradigm in particular, but also highlight the intricacies of diagnostic inferences from implicit measures in general.

Insights gained from a comparison of aminometalation reactions with lithium amides, potassium amides and mixed lithium/potassium amides are presented. A combination of structural characterization, DFT calculations and electrophile reactions of aminometalated intermediates has shown the advantages of using a mixed metal strategy. While potassium amides fail to add, the lithium amides are uncontrollable and eliminated, yet the mixed K/Li amides deliver the best of both systems. Aminopotassiation proceeds to form the alkylpotassium species which has enhanced stability over its lithium counterpart allowing for its isolation and thereby its further characterization., The use of a mixed‐metal system consisting of LiNR2/KOR increases the selectivity of the aminometalation of styrene derivatives in favour of a potassiated intermediate over a polymerization product. Crystal structures along with quantum chemical calculations and experimental investigations demonstrate the additional advantages of potassium over lithium or sodium for the stability of metalated phenylethylamines.

In attribute conditioning (AC), neutral stimuli (CSs) acquire specific attributes through mere pairings with other stimuli possessing that attribute (USs). For example, if a neutral person “Neal” is paired with athletic “Wade,” participants judge Neal as more athletic compared with when Wade would be unathletic. Building on Evaluative Conditioning research, we introduced relational qualifiers between CS and US to probe the contribution of propositional processes to the AC effect. Concretely, CSs either liked or disliked USs. Four experiments (total n = 1,002) showed that these relations moderate AC effects for athleticism (“athletic” vs. “unathletic”; Experiments 1–3) and relationship status (“single” vs. “in a relationship”; Experiment 4); for example, when Neal disliked athletic Wade, he was judged as unathletic. We discuss how these findings constrain process theories of AC.

Measuring the similarity of stimuli is of great interest to a variety of social scientists. Spatial arrangement by dragging and dropping “more similar” targets closer together on the computer screen is a precise and efficient method to measure stimulus similarity. We present Qualtrics-spatial arrangement method (Q-SpAM), a feature-rich and user-friendly online version of spatial arrangement. Combined with crowdsourcing platforms, Q-SpAM provides fast and affordable access to similarity data even for large stimulus sets. Participants may spatially arrange up to 100 words or images, randomly selected targets, self-selected targets, self-generated targets, and targets self-marked in different colors. These and other Q-SpAM features can be combined. We exemplify how to collect, process, and visualize similarity data with Q-SpAM and provide R and Excel scripts to do so. We then illustrate Q-SpAM’s versatility for social science, concluding that Q-SpAM is a reliable and valid method to measure the similarity of lots of stimuli with little effort.

We predicted and found in three experiments that psychological distance increases conceptual generalization. We manipulated psychological distance by describing a medicine as being either domestic (proximal) or foreign (distal) and examined generalization by testing how information about initial experience (positive vs. negative) with this medicine influences evaluations of similar products. In all three experiments, and across both Israeli and German participants, we found that people generalized from experience with products that are distal (foreign) more than from proximal (domestic) products. We explain the relation between distance and generalization in terms of the accuracy–applicability trade-off inherent in generalization and discuss how it aligns with construal-level theory.

This paper tested how comparisons impact the motivation to maintain as compared to the motivation to reach better outcomes. Comparisons have an important role in motivation: They encourage people to strive for more and reach better outcomes. But can comparison also motivate people to maintain current states? From health and personal relationships, to households, jobs, and the biological environment, maintenance goals are a fundamental aspect of human motivation. We hypothesized that maintenance goals are primarily energized by appreciation of the current state, and are therefore motivated by upward self-comparisons, which lead to greater appreciation, but not upward social comparisons, which reduce appreciation. Our pre-registered predictions were robustly confirmed in seven studies and four goal domains, combining controlled settings with everyday life experience sampling (N = 3,499): The motivation to maintain was facilitated by upward (vs. downward) self-comparisons, but not by upward comparisons to others, and this influence was consistently mediated by appreciation. Approach motivation, in contrast, was facilitated by both self and other upward comparisons, independently of appreciation. Altogether, the current research shows a distinct influence of comparisons on maintenance motivation, thus revealing the unique nature of maintenance goals and providing a profound contribution to the field of motivation.

Corneille et al. (2020) found that repetition increases judgments that statements have been used as fake news on social media. They also found that repetition increases truth judgments and decreases falsehood judgments (i.e., two instantiations of the truth-by-repetition effect). These results supported an ecological explanation of the truth-by-repetition effect better than two alternative accounts. However, the first author of the present article found unsuspected programming issues in Corneille et al.’s experiments. These programming issues introduced confounds that may have been responsible for the results. To estimate whether Corneille et al.’s main findings and claims hold when correcting these issues, the current team agreed on two high-powered preregistered replications of Corneille et al.’s experiments (Ntotal = 540). The results replicate Corneille et al.’s findings, which are more consistent with an ecological account of repetition effects on judgment than the alternative accounts tested in the original publication.

Corneille et al. (2020) found that repetition increases judgments that statements have been used as fake news on social media, a result that is consistent with an ecological theorization. They also found that repetition increases truth judgments and decreases falsehood judgments (i.e., two instantiations of the Truth-by-Repetition effect), which is more compatible with the ecological account than with competing accounts. However, the first author of the present article found unsuspected programming issues in Corneille et al.’s experiments. These programming issues introduced confounds that may have been responsible for the results. To estimate whether Corneille et al.’s results and main claims hold when correcting these issues, the current team agreed on two high-powered preregistered replications of Corneille et al.’s experiments (N total = 540). The findings strongly support Corneille et al.’s predictions, which substantiates and generalizes an ecological account of repetition effects on judgment.

Inferences are ubiquitous in social cognition, governing everything from first impressions to the communication of meaning itself. Social cognitive inferences are typically varieties of diagnostic reasoning or, more properly, “abductive” reasoning, in which people infer simple but plausible—although not deductively certain—underlying causes for observable social behaviors. Abductive inference and its relationship to inductive and deductive inference are first introduced. A description of how abductive inference operates on a continuum between those that arise rapidly and automatically (and appear like deductions) and those that inspire more deliberative efforts (and thus often recruit more inductive information gathering and testing) is then given. Next, many classic findings in social cognition, and social psychology more broadly, that reveal how widespread this type of inference is explored. Indeed, both judgements under uncertainty and dual-process theories can be illuminated by incorporating the abductive frame. What then follows is a discussion on the work in ecological and evolutionary approaches that suggest that, although these inferences often go beyond the information given and are prone to predictable errors, people are good enough at social inference to qualify as being “ecologically rational.” The conclusion explores emerging themes in social cognition that only heighten the need for this broader understanding of inference processes.

People rate and judge repeated information more true than novel information. This truth-by-repetition effect is of relevance for explaining belief in fake news, conspiracy theories, or misinformation effects. To ascertain whether increased motivation could reduce this effect, we tested the influence of monetary incentives on participants’ truth judgments. We used a standard truth paradigm, consisting of a presentation and judgment phase with factually true and false information, and incentivized every truth judgment. Monetary incentives may influence truth judgments in two ways. First, participants may rely more on relevant knowledge, leading to better discrimination between true and false statements. Second, participants may rely less on repetition, leading to a lower bias to respond “true.” We tested these predictions in a preregistered and high-powered experiment. However, incentives did not influence the percentage of “true” judgments or correct responses in general, despite participants’ longer response times in the incentivized conditions and evidence for knowledge about the statements. Our findings show that even monetary consequences do not protect against the truth-by-repetition effect, further substantiating its robustness and relevance and highlighting its potential hazardous effects when used in purposeful misinformation.

The incorporation of heavy alkali metals into substrates is both challenging and essential for many reactions. Here, we report the formation of THF-solvated alkali metal benzyl compounds [PhCH2M ��� (thf)n] (M=Na, Rb, Cs). The synthesis was carried out by deprotonation of toluene with the bimetallic mixture n-butyllithium/alkali metal tert-butoxide and selective crystallization from THF of the defined benzyl compounds. Insights into the molecular structure in the solid as well as in solution state are gained by single crystal X-ray experiments and NMR spectroscopic studies. The compounds could be successfully used as alkali metal mediating reagents. The example of caesium showed the convenient use by deprotonating acidic C���H as well as N���H compounds to gain insight into the aminometalation using these reagents., Chemistry - a European journal;27(71)

When a celebrity (e.g., George Clooney) endorses a brand (e.g., a coffee type), people’s assessment of this brand typically changes. We suggest that the mere repeated pairing of celebrities with brands imbues brands with the celebrities’ attributes. We call this effect attribute conditioning, which is, more generally, the phenomenon that people assess a stimulus’s attributes differently as a results of its pairing with another stimulus possessing that attribute. We review evidence showing that this effect goes beyond evaluative-conditioning effects, that it is not a demand effect, and that it is easily shown with many attributes (e.g., sexy, athletic, healthy) and many different stimuli (e.g., faces, shapes, brand logos). In addition, we review process evidence supporting the hypothesis that the effect is based on a memory structure that links the mental representations of the paired stimuli. We conclude with a brief outline of possible applied (e.g., marketing) and theoretical avenues for further research.

Generalisation in learning means that learning with one particular stimulus influences responding to other novel stimuli. Such generalisation effects have largely been overlooked within research on attitude acquisition via Evaluative Conditioning (i.e. EC effects). In five experiments, we investigated whether and when generalisation of EC effects is based on similarity or on abstract rules. Experiments 1, 2a, 2b and 3 showed that participants who abstracted a rule during the learning phase used that rule for category judgments of novel stimuli. However, evaluative ratings of the same stimuli were unaffected by the learned rule but followed the similarity to learned stimuli. Experiment 4 showed that this similarity-based pattern of generalisation is not specific to evaluative ratings. Rather, resemblance between judgment task and learning task seems to determine whether acquired rules are taken into account. We discuss how dual-process and single-process models of EC may account for the obtained generalisation results.

People believe repeated information more than novel information; they show a repetition-induced truth effect. In a world of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” and strategic information management, understanding this effect is highly important. We first review explanations of the effect based on frequency, recognition, familiarity, and coherent references. On the basis of the latter explanation, we discuss the relations of these explanations. We then discuss implications of truth by repetition for the maintenance of false beliefs and ways to change potentially harmful false beliefs (e.g., “Vaccination causes autism”), illustrating that the truth-by-repetition phenomenon not only is of theoretical interest but also has immediate practical relevance.

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Fluency is the experienced ease of ongoing mental operations, which increases the subjective positivity of stimuli attributes. This may happen because fluency is inherently positive. Alternatively, people may learn the meaning of fluency from contingencies within judgment-contexts. We test pseudocontingencies (PCs) as a mechanism through which fluency's meaning is learned. PCs are inferred correlations between two attributes due to the observation of their jointly skewed base rates – people relate what is frequent in one attribute to what is frequent in the other. Using online seller evaluations as the dependent variable, we manipulated base rates of seller name-fluency and seller reputation, creating conditions where name-fluency aligned positively or negatively with reputation. However, participants evaluated high-fluency name sellers more positively across base-rate conditions, although we observed negative PCs between seller reputation and a fluency-neutral dimension in a follow-up study. We discuss the implications for the debate regarding fluency's positive vs. malleable nature. info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

When people answer the question “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?”, they usually respond with “two,” although Moses does not appear in the biblical story of the Ark. We investigated this “Moses illusion” in a multiple-choice format and tested the influence of monetary incentives on the illusion’s strength. Thereby, we addressed the role of a cooperative communication context for the illusion’s emergence, as well as the role of participants’ motivation. In four experiments (total N = 914), we found that the Moses illusion persists in a multiple-choice format. As the multiple-choice format realizes a cooperative context in which the correct answer is always available, we exclude a cooperative context explanation for the illusion. Monetary incentives reduced the strength of the illusion. However, the reduction was numerically and statistically small. We thereby show that the illusion is not due to violations of cooperative communications, and not due to a lack of motivation. The multiple-choice approach will facilitate further research on the Moses illusion and the data provide additional evidence for the Moses illusion’s empirical robustness and constrain its theoretical explanations.

We propose the Evaluative Information Ecology (EvIE) model as a model of the social environment. It makes two assumptions: Positive “good” information is more frequent compared to negative ...

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is one of the most widely-studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance-task (Olson & Fazio, 2001) is a highly cited EC paradigm, and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for EC effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretical, and applied developments. Yet few published studies have used this task, and most are characterized by small samples and small effect sizes. We conducted a high-powered (N = 1478 adult participants), preregistered close replication of the original surveillance-task study. We obtained evidence for a small EC effect when ‘aware’ participants were excluded using the original criterion – therefore replicating the original effect. However, no such effect emerged when three other awareness criteria were used. We suggest that there is a need for caution when using evidence from the surveillance task effect to make theoretical and practical claims about ‘unaware’ EC effects.

People believe repeated statements more compared to new statements - they show a truth by repetition effect. In three pre-registered experiments, we show that repetition may also increase perceptions that statements are used as fake news on social media, irrespective of the factual truth or falsehood of the statements (Experiment 1 & 2), but that repetition reduces perceptions of falsehood when the context of judgment is left unspecified (Experiment 3). On a theoretical level, the findings support an ecological account of repetition effects, as opposed to either a fluency-as-positivity or to an amplification account of these effects. On a practical level, they qualify the influence of repetition on the perception of fake news.

Processing fluency, the experienced ease of ongoing mental operations, influences judgments such as frequency, monetary value, or truth. Most experiments keep to-be-judged stimuli ambiguous with regards to these judgment dimensions. In real life, however, people usually have declarative information about these stimuli beyond the experiential processing information. Here, we address how experiential fluency information may inform truth judgments in the presence of declarative advice information. Four experiments show that fluency influences judged truth even when advice about the statements' truth is continuously available and labelled as highly valid; the influence follows a linear cue integration pattern for two orthogonal cues (i.e., experiential and declarative information). These data underline the importance of processing fluency as an explanatory construct in real-life judgements and support a cue integration framework to understand fluency effects in judgment and decision making.

In a recent study, Shin and Niv explain both negativity and positivity biases in social evaluations as a function of the diversity and low frequency of events. We discuss why negative information is indeed more diverse and less frequent, and highlight the implications beyond social evaluations.

Described herein is a selective way to control the reaction of allylic amines with metalorganic bases depending on the amine handle as well as the metalorganic base is used. Depending on the number of coordinating groups within the amine handle either a selective carbometalation or deprotonation reaction can be performed. By changing the alkali metal within the base from lithium to either sodium or potassium, a change of chemoselectivity takes place and the reaction of piperidinoallylamine can be controlled.

People quickly form impressions about moral character; for example, if people learn that someone cheated, they form a negative impression about that person’s character and expect that person to cheat in the future. Four studies show that the formation of such moral character impressions depends on the degree of valence homogeneity in the target’s context. We argue that this is the case because the degree of homogeneity in the context (the evaluative ecology) informs perceivers about the reliability of signals. Experiments 1 and 2 found that people form less strong impressions about moral character when a person’s behavior occurred in a heterogeneous context, that is, if unrelated positive and negative context information cooccurred. Experiment 3 demonstrated that nonmoral valence homogeneity produces similar effects. In Experiment 4, this effect also influenced strategic decisions in economic games. Together, these studies demonstrate the evaluative ecology plays a critical role in shaping moral character impressions.

Distinguishing between “good” and “bad” is a fundamental task for all organisms. However, people seem to process positive and negative information differentially, described in the literature as instances of negativity bias, positivity bias, or valence asymmetries. We provide an overview of these processing differences and their explanations. First, we review negativity advantages: People attend more to negative information, recall it more, and weigh it more heavily, relative to positive information. Second, we review positivity advantages: People process positive information faster, have broader associations from it, and show stronger congruency effects, relative to negative information. We then discuss existing explanations for these differential effects in terms of phylogenetic pressures, correlates of valence, diagnosticity, mobilization-minimization, and top-down vs. bottom-up processing. Finally, we suggest the differential similarity of positive and negative information as a unifying explanation. We delineate why positive information should be more alike relative to negative information, and how differential similarity translates to the observed processing differences. Then we show how the similarity explanation leads to novel predictions and how it solves old puzzles. Similarity thereby provides an explanatory construct for both positivity and negativity advantages, allowing precise quantitative predictions for valence asymmetries beyond the mere classification of “good” and “bad.”

Gullibility, whether we like it or not, is a fundamental characteristic of human beings. In The Social Psychology of Gullibility, Forgas and Baumeister explore what we know about the causes, functions, and consequences of gullibility, and the social psychological processes that promote or inhibit it. With contributions from leading international researchers, the book reveals what social and cognitive psychology contribute to our understanding of how human judgments and decisions can be distorted and undermined. The chapters discuss the nature and functions of gullibility, the role of cognitive processes in gullibility, the influence of emotion and motivation on gullibility, and social and cultural aspects of gullibility. Underpinned by a wealth of empirical research, contributors explore captivating issues such as the psychology of conspiracy theories, the role of political gullibility, gullibility in science, the role of the internet in fostering gullibility, and the failures of reasoning that contribute to human credulity. Gullibility has become a dominant topic of interest in public discourse. The Social Psychology of Gullibility is essential reading for researchers, social science students, professionals and practitioners and all those interested in understanding human credulity and the role of gullibility in contemporary public affairs.

People are often incorrect in their view of the social world, according to standards of logic, economics, or rationality. Prime examples are beliefs in “fake” news, conspiracy theories, and urban legends. Thus, human information processing seems to be gullible, prone to errors, and misjudgments. Yet, from a functional perspective, people may not be too deeply flawed; otherwise, they could not navigate their social world successfully. The chapter highlights the tension between people’s gullibility and their nevertheless high functioning for the case of information repetition in the formation of beliefs (i.e., the judged truth of presented information). It first summarizes explanations why information repetition increases the truth of this information. Second, it discusses consequences of this effect within a modern information environment (e.g., the phenomenon of “fake news”). Finally, the chapter argues that from a functional perspective, believing repeated information more than novel information has overall advantages within a complex social world, although sometimes, this effect may provide credentials for information that people might not and should not believe otherwise.

Humans process positive information and negative information differently. These valence asymmetries in processing are often summarized under the observation that 'bad is stronger than good', meaning that negative information has stronger psychological impact (e.g., in feedback, learning, or social interactions). This stronger impact is usually attributed to people's affective or motivational reactions to evaluative information. We present an alternative interpretation of valence asymmetries based on the observation that positive information is more similar than negative information. We explain this higher similarity based on the non-extremity of positive attributes, discuss how it accounts for observable valence asymmetries in cognitive processing, and show how it predicts hitherto undiscovered phenomena.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to changes in the evaluation of conditional stimuli (CSs; e.g., neutral faces) due to their repeated pairing with unconditional stimuli of positive or negative valence (USs; e.g., likeable or unlikeable faces). The standard EC finding is an assimilation effect; CS evaluations change in direction of US valence. In three experiments, we found systematic reversals of this standard assimilative EC effect. Neutral faces were liked more (less) after being paired with unlikable (likeable) faces when a judgment task called for contrastive CS-US relations. We found standard EC effects though when joint judgments of CS and US fostered assimilative relations. These results highlight the importance of encoding operations in EC that allow for different relational predicates between CS and US, as opposed to a purely stimulus-driven learning account. The robust standard EC effect suggests a default assimilative encoding when encoding operations are not manipulated.

Alcohol has been implicated in intergroup aggression and hostility. The effect of consuming alcohol relative to a placebo on hostile cognitive biases toward a social category typically stereotyped as threatening and hostile (i.e., Middle Eastern men) was tested. Undergraduates ( N = 81) consumed either an intoxicating dose of alcohol (BrAC = .05% by vol.) or placebo. Then, they played a shooter game in which they were asked to shoot at targets holding guns, but not at targets holding harmless objects. Half of the targets were White and half were Middle Eastern. As predicted, alcohol consumption, relative to a placebo, increased participants’ bias to shoot Middle Eastern targets, but did not affect the shooter bias against White targets. Findings suggest that alcohol may heighten aggressive biases toward outgroups stereotyped as threatening and hostile.

As proponents of two theories of social evaluation, we disagree whether people spontaneously differentiate societal groups' conservative-progressive beliefs (distinct claim of the agency-beliefs-communion or ABC model) or warmth/communion (distinct claim of the stereotype content model or SCM). Our adversarial collaboration provides one way to resolve this debate. Examining people from four continents who differentiated groups in their country (N = 2356), we found lower consensus on groups' warmth/communion compared to agency/~competence and beliefs (Studies 1–4). Consensus on groups' warmth/communion was lower because people differed in self-rated agency and beliefs, and they inferred groups' warmth/communion from perceived similarity in agency and beliefs between the groups and the self (Studies 5–8). Previous ABC studies only examined consensual differentiation of groups and thereby did not find evidence for spontaneous differentiation of groups' warmth/communion. Instead, we next examined non-consensual (personal) differentiation of groups: People spontaneously differentiated groups by their agency/~competence, beliefs, and also warmth/communion (Studies 7 and 8). Based on these data, the ABC model and SCM concede that people spontaneously differentiate groups' warmth/communion and beliefs, respectively, providing one way to resolve the models' debate.

People judge positive information to be more alike than negative information. This good-bad asymmetry in similarity was argued to constitute a true property of the information ecology (Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2017). Why good is more alike than bad: Processing implications. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 69-79). Alternatively, the asymmetry may constitute a processing outcome itself, namely an influence of phasic affect on information processing. Because no research has yet tested whether phasic affect influences perceived similarity among stimuli, we conducted 5 Experiments that also tested whether phasic affect can account for the higher judged similarity among positive compared to negative stimuli. In three experiments, we affectively charged pictures of different Pokemon by pairing them with monetary gains and losses (Exp. 1a, 1b) as well as positive and negative trait words (Exp. 2); yet, the evaluative charge did not differentially influence perceived similarity among the Pokemon. Experiment 3 replicated the basic similarity asymmetry among positive and negative words, and found that it was unaffected by externally induced phasic affect. Experiment 4 showed that phasic affect had no influence on perceived similarity of non-evaluative words either. We conclude that albeit a weak influence of phasic affect on perceived similarity of stimuli cannot be ruled out entirely, it can most likely not account for the typically medium to large sized asymmetry in similarity among positive and negative stimuli.

We present a model of attribute conditioning, the phenomenon that people’s assessment of stimuli’s specific attributes (e.g., a person’s characteristics) changes due to pairings with other stimuli possessing these specific attributes (e.g., another "athletic" person). These changes in attribute assessments go beyond evaluation changes due to these pairings (i.e., evaluative conditioning effects). We provide a short historical overview of the phenomenon and the available data. Then we present a potential mental model of the effect: We assume attribute conditioning to be a form of stimulus-stimulus learning. CS-US pairings establish an enduring referential link between CS and US. We present an associative as well as a distributed memory variant of this referential link. Based on this model, we provide the answers to the specific questions that guide the present special issue. Finally, we discuss the relation of evaluative and attribute conditioning.

People often hold negative attitudes toward out-groups and minority groups. We argue that such intergroup biases may result from an interaction of basic cognitive processes and the structure of the information ecology. This cognitive-ecological model assumes that groups such as minorities and out-groups are often novel to a perceiver. At the level of cognition, novel groups are primarily associated with their unique attributes, that is, attributes that differentiate them from other groups. In the information ecology, however, unique attributes are likely to be negative. Thus, novel groups, and by proxy minorities and out-groups, tend to be associated with negative attributes, leading to an evaluative disadvantage. We demonstrated this disadvantage in three experiments in which participants successively formed impressions about two fictional groups associated with the same number of positive and negative attributes. Participants preferred the first group over the novel group as long as the groups’ unique attributes were negative.

Attribute Conditioning (AC) refers to people’s changed assessments of stimuli’s (CSs) attributes due to repeated pairing with stimuli (USs) possessing these attributes; for example, when an athletic person (US) is paired with a neutral person (CS), the neutral person is judged to be more athletic after the pairing. We hypothesize that this AC effect is due to CSs’ associations with USs rather than direct associations with attributes. Three experiments test this hypothesis by changing US attributes after CS-US pairings. Experiments 1 and 2 conditioned athleticism by pairing neutral men (CSs) with athletic and non-athletic USs. Post-conditioning, USs’ athleticism was reversed, which systematically influenced participants’ assessment of CS athleticism. Experiment 3 conditioned athleticism and changed USs’ musicality after CS-US pairings. This post-conditioning change affected musicality assessments of CSs but did not influence athleticism-assessments. The results indicate that AC effects are based on an associative CS-US-attribute structure.

We propose stronger halo effects in trait assessments from positive information relative to negative information. Due to positive information’s higher similarity, positive information should foster both indirect (from a global impression to traits) and direct halo effects (from traits to traits). Negative information’s relative distinctiveness should foster only direct halo effects, leading to weaker halo effects overall. Four experiments support these predictions using agency traits and communion traits and behaviors. Further supporting the predictions, halo effects from positive information were visible both within (i.e., from communion/agency information to communion/agency traits) and across (i.e., from agency/communion information to communion/agency traits) these fundamental dimensions of social perception. Halo effects from negative information were visible only within dimensions. The study thereby explains why halo effects from negative information are usually weaker; it supports different processes underlying halo effects; and it provides a case in person perception where positive information has more impact than negative information.