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In four methodologically diverse studies (N = 644), we found correlational (Study 1), longitudinal (Study 2), and experimental (Studies 3 and 4) evidence that a sense of belonging predicts how meaningful life is perceived to be. In Study 1 (n = 126), we found a strong positive correlation between sense of belonging and meaningfulness. In Study 2 (n = 248), we found that initial levels of sense of belonging predicted perceived meaningfulness of life, obtained 3 weeks later. Furthermore, initial sense of belonging predicted independent evaluations of participants essays on meaning in life. In Studies 3 (n = 105) and 4 (n = 165), we primed participants with belongingness, social support, or social value and found that those primed with belongingness (Study 3) or who increased in belongingness (Study 4) reported the highest levels of perceived meaning. In Study 4, belonging mediated the relationship between experimental condition and meaning.

Does the cue of money lead to selfish, greedy, exploitative behaviors or to fairness, exchange, and reciprocity? We found evidence for both, suggesting that people have both sets of meaningful associations, which can be differentially activated by exposure to clean versus dirty money. In a field experiment at a farmers' market, vendors who handled dirty money subsequently cheated customers, whereas those who handled clean money gave fair value (Experiment 1). In laboratory studies with economic games, participants who had previously handled and counted dirty money tended toward selfish, unfair practices-unlike those who had counted clean money or dirty paper, both of which led to fairness and reciprocity. These patterns were found with the trust game (Experiment 2), the prisoner's dilemma (Experiment 4), the ultimatum game (Experiment 5), and the dictator game (Experiment 6). Cognitive measures indicated that exposure to dirty money lowered moral standards (Experiment 3) and reduced positive attitudes toward fairness and reciprocity (Experiments 6-7), whereas exposure to clean money had the opposite effects. Thus, people apparently have 2 contradictory sets of associations (including behavioral tendencies) to money, which is a complex, powerful, and ubiquitous aspect of human social life and cultural organization., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)

Five empirically based critiques have undermined the standard assumption that conscious thought is primarily for input (obtaining information from the natural environment) or output (the direct control of action). Instead, we propose that conscious thought is for internal processing, to facilitate downstream interaction with the social and cultural environment. Human consciousness enables the construction of meaningful, sequential thought, as in sentences and narratives, logical reasoning, counting and quantification, causal understanding, narratives, and the simulation of events (including nonpresent ones). Conscious thought sequences resemble short films that the brain makes for itself, thereby enabling different parts of brain and mind to share information. The production of conscious thoughts is closely linked to the production of speech because the human mind evolved to facilitate social communication and information sharing, as culture became humankind's biological strategy. The influence of conscious thought on behavior can be vitally helpful but is mostly indirect. Conscious simulation processes are useful for understanding the perspectives of social interaction partners, for exploring options in complex decisions, for replaying past events (both literally and counterfactually) so as to learn, and for facilitating participation in culture in other ways., ((c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved.)

Recent field studies have revived the hypothesis that low self-esteem causes aggression. Accordingly, we reanalyzed the data from a previous experiment and conducted a new experiment to study direct physical aggression in the form of blasting a fellow participant with aversive noise. We also conducted a field study using a measure of indirect aggression in the form of a consequential negative evaluation. High narcissists were more aggressive than others but only when provoked by insult or humiliation and only toward the source of criticism. The combination of high self-esteem and high narcissism produced the highest levels of aggression. These results support the view of aggression as stemming from threatened egotism and are inconsistent with the hypothesis that low self-esteem causes either direct or indirect aggression.

People are more forgiving toward transgressors if they see themselves as capable of committing similar offenses, as demonstrated in 7 studies. Methods included hypothetical scenarios, actual recalled offenses, individual and group processes, and correlational and experimental designs. Three factors mediated the link between personal capability and forgiveness: seeing the other's offense as less severe, greater empathic understanding, and perceiving oneself as similar to the transgressor. In terms of predicting forgiveness, it was important that people's own offenses were similar to the target offense in terms of both severity and type. The personal capability effect was independent of other established predictors of forgiveness and was more pronounced among men than women.

Evidence from 6 experiments supports the social reconnection hypothesis, which posits that the experience of social exclusion increases the motivation to forge social bonds with new sources of potential affiliation. Threat of social exclusion led participants to express greater interest in making new friends, to increase their desire to work with others, to form more positive impressions of novel social targets, and to assign greater rewards to new interaction partners. Findings also suggest potential boundary conditions to the social reconnection hypothesis. Excluded individuals did not seem to seek reconnection with the specific perpetrators of exclusion or with novel partners with whom no face-to-face interaction was anticipated. Furthermore, fear of negative evaluation moderated responses to exclusion such that participants low in fear of negative evaluation responded to new interaction partners in an affiliative fashion, whereas participants high in fear of negative evaluation did not., (2007 APA, all rights reserved)

What good is self-control? We incorporated a new measure of individual differences in self-control into two large investigations of a broad spectrum of behaviors. The new scale showed good internal consistency and retest reliability. Higher scores on self-control correlated with a higher grade point average, better adjustment (fewer reports of psychopathology, higher self-esteem), less binge eating and alcohol abuse, better relationships and interpersonal skills, secure attachment, and more optimal emotional responses. Tests for curvilinearity failed to indicate any drawbacks of so-called overcontrol, and the positive effects remained after controlling for social desirability. Low self-control is thus a significant risk factor for a broad range of personal and interpersonal problems.

A heterosexual community can be analyzed as a marketplace in which men seek to acquire sex from women by offering other resources in exchange. Societies will therefore define gender roles as if women are sellers and men buyers of sex. Societies will endow female sexuality, but not male sexuality, with value (as in virginity, fidelity, chastity). The sexual activities of different couples are loosely interrelated by a marketplace, instead of being fully separate or private, and each couple's decisions may be influenced by market conditions. Economic principles suggest that the price of sex will depend on supply and demand, competition among sellers, variations in product, collusion among sellers, and other factors. Research findings show gender asymmetries (reflecting the complementary economic roles) in prostitution, courtship, infidelity and divorce, female competition, the sexual revolution and changing norms, unequal status between partners, cultural suppression of female sexuality, abusive relationships, rape, and sexual attitudes.

• Children's peers may be less sympathetic than parents, making reputation management a prominent concern. • Modern parental protectiveness, smaller families, and increasing age segregation have weakened childhood peer culture. • Each generation of children thus has to invent its own culture rather than inherit it from older children. • Age segregation also removes some early experiences of social hierarchy. If children are socialized less by their parents than their peer group, psychology may fruitfully adapt social psychology's exploration of group processes for understanding how children develop. Concerns with self-presentation, reputation, and learning subtle norms may emerge earlier and more strongly than would be the case if children were primarily interacting with their parents. The peer group culture of childhood may be a self-perpetuating culture that is somewhat independent of and possibly in opposition to the adult culture and parents' attempts to prepare children for adulthood. Modern trends such as increasing age segregation and play-dates with adult supervision may hamper the transmission of children's and adolescents' peer culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need to belong in human motivation is relevant for all academic disciplines that study human behavior, with immense importance to educational psychology. The presence of belonging, specifically school belonging, has powerful long- and short-term implications for students' positive psychological and academic outcomes. This article presents a brief review of belonging research with specific relevance to educational psychology. Following this is an interview with Emeritus Professors Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, foundational pioneers in belonging research which reflects upon their influential 1995 paper, "The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation," to explore the value and relevance of belonging for understanding human behavior and promoting well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. In Study 1, participants who were asked to consider the possibility that our universe is deterministic were more compatibilist than those not asked to consider this possibility, suggesting that determinism poses a threat to moral responsibility, which increases compatibilist responding (thus reducing the threat). In Study 2, participants who considered concrete instances of moral behavior found compatibilist free will more sufficient for moral responsibility than participants who were asked about moral responsibility more generally. In Study 3a, the order in which participants read free will and determinism descriptions influenced their compatibilist judgments–and only when the descriptions had moral significance: Participants were more likely to report that determinism was compatible with free will than that free will was compatible with determinism. In Study 3b, participants who read the free will description first (the more compatibilist group) were particularly likely to confess that their beliefs in free will and moral responsibility and their disbelief in determinism influenced their conclusion. In Study 4, participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will. Participants also reported that immaterial souls were compatible with scientific determinism, most strongly among immaterial soul believers (Study 5), and evaluated information about the capacities of primates in a biased manner favoring the existence of human free will (Study 6). These results suggest that people do not have one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism. Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility. Recommendations for future work are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A neglected aspect of human selfhood is that people are information agents. That is, much human social activity involves communicating and discussing information. This occurs in the context of incompletely shared information--but also a group's store of collective knowledge and shared understanding. This article elucidates a preliminary theory of self as information agent, proposing that human evolution instilled both abilities and motivations for the various requisite functions. These basic functions include (a) seeking and acquiring information, (b) communicating one's thoughts to others, (c) circulating information through the group, (d) operating on information to improve it, such as by correcting mistakes, and (e) constructing a shared understanding of reality. Sophisticated information agents exhibit additional features, such as sometimes selectively withholding information or disseminating false information for self-serving reasons, cultivating a reputation as a credible source of information, and cooperating with others to shape the shared worldview in a way that favors one's subgroup. Meaningful information is thus more than a resource for individual action: It also provides the context, medium, and content within which the individual self interacts with its social environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviewing the literature of the past two decades, Orth and Robins (2022) conclude that high self-esteem yields reliable benefits. In this commentary, we caution that for objective outcome measures, these effects are variable- and domain-dependent. The allure of high self-esteem remains largely a matter of mind and memory, not behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being happy and finding life meaningful overlap, but there are important differences. A large survey revealed multiple differing predictors of happiness (controlling for meaning) and meaningfulness (controlling for happiness). Satisfying one’s needs and wants increased happiness but was largely irrelevant to meaningfulness. Happiness was largely present oriented, whereas meaningfulness involves integrating past, present, and future. For example, thinking about future and past was associated with high meaningfulness but low happiness. Happiness was linked to being a taker rather than a giver, whereas meaningfulness went with being a giver rather than a taker. Higher levels of worry, stress, and anxiety were linked to higher meaningfulness but lower happiness. Concerns with personal identity and expressing the self contributed to meaning but not happiness. We offer brief composite sketches of the unhappy but meaningful life and of the happy but meaningless life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Successful self-control has many benefits for individuals and society as a whole. Self-regulation relies on a limited resource. After one act of self-control, this resource is reduced, thereby impairing future acts of self-control. Self-control resources can be managed and conserved for future tasks. Recent research on perceived self-control (in the self and others), self-control in interpersonal interactions, and the physiological basis of the limited resource model point to promising areas for future self-control research. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012, 3:419-423. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1173 For further resources related to this article, please visit the . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much work has shown that planning facilitates goal attainment. The present work demonstrates that while plans generally make people more likely to act on a goal, they may sometimes lead to failure rather than to success, particularly when recognizing and seizing an alternative opportunity is essential for achieving the goal. Participants were assigned a goal in the lab, with sufficient or insufficient time and with a specific plan or broad intention to attain it. With sufficient (unlimited) time, a specific plan increased attainment, thus replicating the usual benefit of planning. Within the insufficient time condition, however, the specific plan impaired performance, because participants failed to capitalize on an alternative opportunity for achieving the goal. When openness to alternatives is crucial to success, plans can drastically decrease overall rates of attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the meta-analysis which used several approaches to examine the effects of social exclusion on emotion. As reported, the meta-analysis focused mainly on laboratory studies of ostracism, interpersonal rejection, and other forms of social exclusion. As cited, in this meta-analysis it was found that if the drive to maintain social connections and interpersonal relations is powerful then being excluded ought to evoke negative reactions and vice-versa.

Psychology calls itself the science of behavior, and the American Psychological Association's current “Decade of Behavior” was intended to increase awareness and appreciation of this aspect of the science. Yet some psychological subdisciplines have never directly studied behavior, and studies on behavior are dwindling rapidly in other subdisciplines. We discuss the eclipse of behavior in personality and social psychology, in which direct observation of behavior has been increasingly supplanted by introspective self-reports, hypothetical scenarios, and questionnaire ratings. We advocate a renewed commitment to including direct observation of behavior whenever possible and in at least a healthy minority of research projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two studies tested the hypothesis that occupying a position of low power increases the likelihood of laughter, presumably as a means of gaining friends and sup porters. In Study 1, participants laughed more at an interviewer's jokes when the interviewer controlled their cash rewards than in the absence of monetary contingencies. Study 2 found that low-power participants (manipulated again by expecting that someone else would decide their cash rewards) laughed more than high-power participants even when they were alone. Low power also increased laughing at a fellow low-power coworker. These findings suggest that low power motivates interest in making friends and hence increases behaviors that promote social bonding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work suggests that self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source. Laboratory tests of self-control (i.e., the Stroop task, thought suppression, emotion regulation, attention control) and of social behaviors (i.e., helping behavior, coping with thoughts of death, stifling prejudice during an interracial interaction) showed that (a) acts of self-control reduced blood glucose levels, (b) low levels of blood glucose after an initial self-control task predicted poor performance on a subsequent self-control task, and (c) initial acts of self-control impaired performance on subsequent self-control tasks, but consuming a glucose drink eliminated these impairments. Self-control requires a certain amount of glucose to operate unimpaired. A single act of self-control causes glucose to drop below optimal levels, thereby impairing subsequent attempts al self-control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the findings of a study which concludes that interpersonal conflicts may arise when a victim initially stifles anger and then finally responds to an accumulated series of provocations, whereas the perpetrator perceives only the single incident and regards the angry response as an unjustified overreaction. One of the aims of the study was to explore and develop the autobiographical narrative as a potentially useful methodology. Autobiographical narratives are of interest both in their own right and as clues about behavioral processes. The study of autobiographical narratives has both strengths and weaknesses as a psychological methodology. In comparison with laboratory studies, for example, the autobiographical method has lower internal validity but higher external validity. It is quite difficult to know with certainty whether systematic biases in autobiographical stories arise from biased encoding, biased selection of what story to tell, distorted recall of particular facts, or outright fabrication and even deliberate lying. The cognitive processes that produce the stories are therefore difficult to fathom.

Two studies explored interpersonal and action-control aspects of guilt. Both spontaneous and partner-induced guilt were studied using first-person accounts of interpersonal transgressions and guilt manipulations. Guilt was associated with transgressions against valued partners in close relationships, especially involving interpersonal neglect, unfilled obligations, and selfish actions. Feeling guilty was associated with higher rates of learning lessons, changing subsequent behavior, apologizing, confessing the transgression, and recognizing how a relationship partner's standards and expectations differ from one's own. Inducing guilt also appears to be a costly but effective way of influencing the behavior of relationship partners. The results support the view of guilt as a mechanism that alters behavior in the service of maintaining good interpersonal relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subjects furnished public or private accounts of major recent success experiences. Public accounts contained many references to receiving help from other people, whereas private accounts were relatively devoid of such acknowledgements. Thus, expressions of gratitude and other references to external help may often be a superficial concession to self-presentational norms, expectations, and other interpersonal factors' that restrict the typical operation of self-serving biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article determines whether individual differences in "self-monitoring" tendencies condition the perceiver's evaluative reactions to ingratiating behavior. Subjects divided at the median on researcher M. Snyder's self-monitoring scale observed a videotaped interaction between two discussants who tended either to agree or to disagree with each other. They learned either before or after observing the tape that one discussant had been instructed to gain either affection or respect. In general, when the target person operated under the be-liked instructions the high self-monitoring individual liked him better when he was not slavishly agreeable. The low self-monitoring individual liked the agreeable target person better especially when the latter was trying to be liked. In general, the low self-monitoring individuals were additive in their evaluations, whereas high self-monitoring individuals were highly sensitive to behavior in its social context and viewed the same behavior very differently when the target person was operating under different incentive instructions. The high self-monitoring individuals' negative reaction to the ingratiator was unexpected in view of their own socially adaptive behavior and their readiness to acknowledge it.

Self-presentation may require self-regulation, especially when familiar or dispositional tendencies must be overridden in service of the desired impression. Studies 1-4 showed that self-presentation under challenging conditions or according to counternormative patterns (presenting oneself modestly to strangers, boastfully to friends, contrary to gender norms, to a skeptical audience, or while being a racial token) led to impaired self-regulation later, suggesting that those self-presentations depleted self- regulatory resources. When self-presentation conformed to familiar, normative, or dispositional patterns, self-regulation was less implicated. Studies 5-8 showed that when resources for self-regulation had been depleted by prior acts of self-control, self-presentation drifted toward less-effective patterns (talking too much, overly or insufficiently intimate disclosures, or egotistical arrogance). Thus, inner processes may serve interpersonal functions, although optimal interpersonal activity exacts a short-term cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]