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Recent evidence has shown that social-media platforms like Twitter (now X) reward politically divisive content, even though most people disapprove of interparty conflict and negativity. We document this discrepancy and provide the first evidence explaining it, using tweets by U.S. Senators and American adults' responses to them. Studies 1a and 1b examined 6,135 such tweets, finding that dismissing tweets received more Likes and Retweets than tweets that engaged constructively with opponents. In contrast, Studies 2a and 2b ( N = 856; 1,968 observations) revealed that the broader public, if anything, prefers politicians' engaging tweets. Studies 3 ( N = 323; 4,571 observations) and 4 ( N = 261; 2,610 observations) supported two distinct explanations for this disconnect. First, users who frequently react to politicians' tweets are an influential yet unrepresentative minority, rewarding dismissing posts because, unlike most people, they prefer them. Second, the silent majority admit that they too would reward dismissing posts more, despite disapproving of them. These findings help explain why popular online content sometimes distorts true public opinion.

Religion makes unique claims (e.g., the existence of supernatural agents) not found in other belief systems, but is religion itself psychologically special? Furthermore, religion is related to many domains of psychological interest, such as morality, health and well-being, self-control, meaning, and death anxiety. Does religion act on these domains via special mechanisms that are unlike secular mechanisms? These could include mechanisms such as beliefs in supernatural agents, providing ultimate meaning, and providing literal immortality. We apply a critical eye to these questions of specialness and conclude that although it is clear that religion is psychologically important, there is not yet strong evidence that it is psychologically special, with the possible exception of its effects on health. We highlight what would be required of future research aimed at convincingly demonstrating that religion is indeed psychologically special, including careful definitions of religion and careful attention to experimental design and causal inference.

Six preregistered studies ( N = 2,421) examined how people respond to copartisan political-perspective seekers: political allies who attempt to hear from shared opponents and better understand their views. We found that North American adults and students generally like copartisan seekers (meta-analytic Cohen's d = 0.83 across 4,231 participants, representing all available data points). People like copartisan perspective seekers because they seem tolerant, cooperative, and rational, but this liking is diminished because seekers seem to validate-and may even adopt-opponents' illegitimate views. Participants liked copartisan seekers across a range of different motivations guiding these seekers' actions but, consistent with our theorizing, their liking decreased (though rarely disappeared entirely) when seekers lacked partisan commitments or when they sought especially illegitimate beliefs. Despite evidence of rising political intolerance in recent decades, these findings suggest that people nonetheless celebrate political allies who tolerate and seriously consider their opponents' views.

Social mobility is limited in most industrialized countries, and especially in the United States: Children born to relatively poor parents are less likely to prosper than other children. This observation has multiple explanations; in the current article, we focus on emerging motivational perspectives, synthesizing them into a novel integrative framework grounded in a classic theory of motivation: expectancy-value theory. Together, these findings indicate that individuals with lower socioeconomic status (SES) may be less motivated to achieve status relative to individuals with higher SES-not because of their own personal failings, but as a result of their material, social and cultural contexts. We then consider the significant theoretical advantages of this integrative framework, most notably that it enables us to consider how the disparate perspectives linking motivation to SES are linked and may at times compound or offset each other. In turn, this enables us to make sophisticated predictions concerning the conditions that will enable individuals with low SES to escape the vicious cycle of low motivation. Moreover, our account helps bridge the gap between explanations that locate the cause for low social mobility within individuals and those that locate it in the broader system. We end by addressing implications for the psychological understanding of low status and implications for social policy.

People will often rationalize the status quo, reconstruing it in an exaggeratedly positive light. They will even rationalize the status quo they anticipate, emphasizing the upsides and minimizing the downsides of sociopolitical realities they expect to take effect. Drawing on recent findings on the psychological triggers of rationalization, I present results from three field studies, one of which was preregistered, testing the hypothesis that an anticipated reality becoming current triggers an observable boost in people's rationalizations. San Franciscans rationalized a ban on plastic water bottles, Ontarians rationalized a targeted smoking ban, and Americans rationalized the presidency of Donald Trump, more in the days immediately after these realities became current compared with the days immediately before. Additional findings show evidence for a mechanism underlying these behaviors and rule out alternative accounts. These findings carry implications for scholarship on rationalization, for understanding protest behavior, and for policymakers.

Religiosity and participation in religious activities have been linked with decreased risky behavior. In the current research, we hypothesized that exposure to the concept of God can actually increase people's willingness to engage in certain types of risks. Across seven studies, reminders of God increased risk taking in nonmoral domains. This effect was mediated by the perceived danger of a risky option and emerged more strongly among individuals who perceive God as a reliable source of safety and protection than among those who do not. Moreover, in an eighth study, when participants were first reminded of God and then took a risk that produced negative consequences (i.e., when divine protection failed to materialize), participants reported feeling more negatively toward God than did participants in the same situation who were not first reminded of God. This research contributes to an understanding of the divergent effects that distinct components of religion can exert on behavior., (© The Author(s) 2015.)

People often become evangelists for their own lifestyles. When it comes to relational status, people are rarely content to simply say "being single works for me" or "being in a relationship suits my disposition." Results from four studies suggested that this tendency to view one's own relational status as the universal ideal emerges in part from a desire to rationalize one's own relational status. Building on existing evidence that people are motivated to rationalize circumstances they perceive as likely to persist, we predicted that participants' perceptions of the stability of their own relational status would lead them to rationalize that status. In Studies 1 and 2, we found evidence for an association between perceptions of stability and idealizations and ruled out an alternative explanation. In Studies 3 and 4, we found evidence of the effect of stability on people's judgments of same- and different-status others in contexts in which relational status should carry little objective weight.

How do people respond to government policies and work environments that place restrictions on their personal freedoms? The psychological literature offers two contradictory answers to this question. Here, we attempt to resolve this apparent discrepancy. Specifically, we identify the absoluteness of a restriction as one factor that determines how people respond to it. Across two studies, participants responded to absolute restrictions (i.e., restrictions that were sure to come into effect) with rationalization: They viewed the restrictions more favorably, and valued the restricted freedoms less, compared with control participants. Participants responded in the opposite way to identical restrictions that were described as nonabsolute (i.e., as having a small chance of not coming into effect): In this case, participants displayed reactance, viewing the restrictions less favorably, and valuing the restricted freedoms more, compared with control participants. We end by discussing future research directions.

The freedom to emigrate at will from a geographic location is an internationally recognized human right. However, this right is systematically violated by restrictive migration policies. In three experiments, we explored the psychological consequences of violating the right to mobility. Our results suggest that, ironically, restricted freedom of movement can lead to increased system justification (i.e., increased support of the status quo). In Study 1, we found that participants who read that their country was difficult to leave became stronger defenders of their system's legitimacy than before, even in domains unrelated to emigration policy (e.g., gender relations). In Study 2, we demonstrated that this increased system defense was the result of a motivated process. In Study 3, we broadened the scope of this psychological phenomenon by conceptually replicating it using a different system (participants' university) and measure of system defense. The importance of these two findings-the first experimental demonstration of the psychological consequences of restrictive emigration policies and the introduction of a novel psychological phenomenon-is discussed.