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The present research investigated event-related, contextual, demographic, and dispositional predictors of the desire to punish perpetrators of immoral deeds in daily life, as well as connections among the desire to punish, moral emotions, and momentary well-being. The desire to punish was reliably predicted by linear gradients of social closeness to both the perpetrator (negative relationship) and the victim (positive relationship). Older rather than younger adults, conservatives rather than people with other political orientations, and individuals high rather than low in moral identity desired to punish perpetrators more harshly. The desire to punish was related to state anger, disgust, and embarrassment, and these were linked to lower momentary well-being. However, the negative effect of these emotions on well-being was partially compensated by a positive indirect pathway via heightened feelings of moral self-worth. Implications of the present field data for moral punishment research and the connection between morality and well-being are discussed.

Several studies have documented ethnic and gender discrimination in a variety markets, including the housing market. Discrimination in the housing market is associated with decreased social integration and is costly both at social and individual levels. In the current pre-registered field experiment, we sent inquires to advertisements for rentals in England and Poland. Inquires were signed with Arabic, English, or Polish sounding male and female names. Contrary to our expectation, we found no evidence of discrimination in the English housing market. We, however, found evidence of discrimination of Arabic males in the Polish housing market. The probability of receiving a response was generally lower in England compared to Poland. The results are discussed against current social and political situations in both countries.

A field experiment was conducted to test whether the likelihood of receiving help is affected by the valence of the person in need’s first name. It was expected that people bearing devalued names would receive less help compared to individuals with liked first names. It was further tested if the proposed effect was driven by a general devaluation of stigmatized names or the application of name-associated stereotypes.Participants (N = 631) received e-mails containing an ostensibly missent reply to another person’s job application. The applicant’s first name was either positive or negative and the job offered was either a low-status or a high-status position. Participants could help the alleged applicant by informing the sender that the e-mail was sent to the wrong address.For low-status job applicants, name valence had no effect on participants’ helping behavior. By contrast, for high status positions, applicants with negative names received less help compared to participants with a positive name.

Mimicry, the tendency to spontaneously and unconsciously copy others’ behaviour, plays an important role in social interactions. It facilitates rapport between strangers, and is flexibly modulated by social signals, such as eye contact. However, little is known about the development of this phenomenon in infancy, and it is unknown whether mimicry is modulated by social signals from early in life. Here we addressed this question by presenting 4-month-old infants with videos of models performing facial actions (e.g. mouth opening, eyebrow raising) and hand actions (e.g. hand opening and closing, finger actions) accompanied by direct or averted gaze, while we measured their facial and hand muscle responses using electromyography to obtain an index of mimicry (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2 the infants observed the same stimuli while we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate the brain regions involved in modulating mimicry by eye contact. We found that 4-month-olds only showed evidence of mimicry when they observed facial actions accompanied by direct gaze. Experiment 2 suggests that this selective facial mimicry may have been associated with activation over posterior superior temporal sulcus. These findings provide the first demonstration of modulation of mimicry by social signals in young human infants, and suggest that mimicry plays an important role in social interactions from early in life.

Interpersonal responses to social rejection vary widely in form and function. Existing theories of social rejection have exclusively focused on organizing these responses on a single antisocial–prosocial dimension. Accumulating evidence suggests a gap in this approach: variability in social responses to rejection cannot solely be explained by the antisocial–prosocial dimension alone. To fill this gap, we propose the bi-dimensional rejection taxonomy, consisting of the antisocial–prosocial x-axis and engaged-disengaged y-axis, a novel contribution to the literature. We demonstrate that both the x- and y-axes are necessary for understanding interpersonal responses to rejection and avoiding erroneous conclusions. We also show how this new framework allows researchers to generate more nuanced and accurate hypotheses about how people respond when rejected. We further demonstrate how existing research about individual differences and situational factors that predict responses to rejection can be viewed in a new light within the bi-dimensional rejection taxonomy. We conclude by suggesting how the taxonomy inspires innovative questions for future research, including understanding spontaneous responses and neurophysiological markers.

Theoretical works in social psychology have proposed that social rewards such as status and prestige have intrinsic value. Neuroscientific evidence of social rewards processing has supported this view, predicting that people would spend material and social capital to promote their capabilities and gain influence. To test this hypothesis, we asked whether, and under what conditions, people are willing to forgo monetary reward purely for the sake of influencing others’ decisions. In four experiments, participants competed with a rival for influence over a client. We examined participants’ willingness to pay for influence on a trial-by-trial basis. Most participants sacrificed some of their real-life financial reward to increase their chance of being selected over their rival within the experiment. Participants did not pay to gloss over inaccurate advice; instead they paid to promote their competence after having given good advice that was ignored by the client.

Do appeals to moral values promote charitable donation during natural disasters? Using Distributed Dictionary Representation, we analyze tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy to explore associations between moral values and charitable donation sentiment. We then derive hypotheses from the observed associations and test these hypotheses across a series of preregistered experiments that investigate the effects of moral framing on perceived donation motivation (Studies 2 & 3), hypothetical donation (Study 4), and real donation behavior (Study 5). Overall, we find consistent positive associations between moral care and loyalty framing with donation sentiment and donation motivation. However, in contrast with people’s perceptions, we also find that moral frames may not actually have reliable effects on charitable donation, as measured by hypothetical indications of donation and real donation behavior. Overall, this work demonstrates that theoretically constrained, exploratory social media analyses can be used to generate viable hypotheses, but also that such approaches should be paired with rigorous controlled experiments.

In this research we examine how normative expressions of prejudice shape university communities. Across four studies, we examine the prevalence of a former university mascot depicting harmful stereotypes about Native Americans and how exposure to that mascot influences people's attitudes and behaviors. In Study 1, images of the mascot persist on >10% of university apparel worn by students, in 50% of campus spaces, and in 5% of images searched online. Surveying students on this campus, we find that students with lower (higher) reported explicit prejudice also tended to have lower (higher) belonging at the university (Study 2). In two final experimental studies (N = 683), when compared to stereotype free university advertisements exposure to the stereotypic mascot reduced donations to the university by 5.5%, and in particular, among people low versus high in explicit prejudice (Studies 3 and 4). Overall, these findings suggest that institutional norms play an important role in expressions of prejudice and experiences of belonging.

In recent years, diminished belief in free will or increased belief in determinism have been associated with a range of antisocial or otherwise negative outcomes: unjustified aggression, cheating, prejudice, less helping behavior, and so on. Only a few studies have entertained the possibility of prosocial or otherwise positive outcomes, such as greater willingness to forgive and less motivation to punish retributively. Here, five studies (open data, materials, and pre-print at https://osf.io/hmy39/) explore the relationship between belief in determinism and another positive outcome or attribute, namely, humility. The reported findings suggest that relative disbelief in free will is reliably associated in our samples with at least one type of humility—what we call ‘Einsteinian’ humility—but is not associated with, or even negatively associated with, other types of humility described in the literature.

we test the hypothesis that naming an object depicted in a picture, and reading aloud an object’s name, are affected by the object’s speed. We contend that the mental representations of everyday objects and situations include their speed, and that the latter influences behavior in instantaneous and systematic ways. An important corollary is that high-speed objects are named faster than low-speed objects despite the fact that object speed is irrelevant to the naming task at hand. The results of a series of 7 studies with pictures and words support these predictions.

BackgroundThe ability to understand others’ mental states carries profound consequences for mental and physical health, making efforts at validly and reliably assessing mental state understanding (MSU) of utmost importance. However, the most widely used and current NIMH-recommended task for assessing MSU – the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task (RMET) – suffers from potential assessment issues, including reliance on a participant's vocabulary/intelligence and the use of culturally biased stimuli. Here, we evaluate the impact of demographic and sociocultural factors (age, gender, education, ethnicity, race) on the RMET and other social and non-social cognitive tasks in an effort to determine the extent to which the RMET may be unduly influenced by participant characteristics.MethodsIn total, 40 248 international, native-/primarily English-speaking participants between the ages of 10 and 70 completed one of five measures on TestMyBrain.org: RMET, a shortened version of RMET, a multiracial emotion identification task, an emotion discrimination task, and a non-social/non-verbal processing speed task (digit symbol matching).ResultsContrary to other tasks, performance on the RMET increased across the lifespan. Education, race, and ethnicity explained more variance in RMET performance than the other tasks, and differences between levels of education, race, and ethnicity were more pronounced for the RMET than the other tasks such that more highly educated, non-Hispanic, and White/Caucasian individuals performed best.ConclusionsThese data suggest that the RMET may be unduly influenced by social class and culture, posing a serious challenge to assessing MSU in clinical populations given shared variance between social status and psychiatric illness.

In contrast to the centrality of “coming out” in the gay rights movement, transgender people may be less likely to disclose their transgender status due to the severity of anti-transgender stigma, structural factors, and differences in how transgender status and sexual identity are expressed. As a consequence, intergroup contact with transgender people may be less common than gay contact, which may limit its effectiveness. In Study 1 (N = 174), transgender contact was much less frequent than gay contact, and transgender contact frequency was not associated with anti-transgender bias, although more positive transgender contact was associated with lower anti-transgender bias, and gay contact frequency was also independently associated with lower anti-transgender bias. In Study 2 (N = 277), greater transgender “media contact” was associated with increased empathy for transgender people and decreased anti-transgender bias. In addition, several participants left unsolicited anti-transgender comments at the end of the study, and these participants tended to have less transgender contact and were higher in Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation. Our results suggest that increasing contact with the LGBT community and increasing media representations of transgender people may decrease anti-transgender bias. Future directions building on these results are discussed.

Abstract. Ego depletion is under scrutiny for low replicability, possibly reflecting the limited statistical power available in between-subject designs. In response, we created a within-subject, repeated-measures ego-depletion paradigm that repeatedly alternated depletion and recovery manipulations. Each manipulation was followed by measuring subjective fatigue, mood, and self-control performance. Across 12 studies (N = 754), participants reliably reported having lower energy and mood after depleting manipulations compared to after recovery manipulations. Depletion manipulations did not consistently affect behavioral self-control, although the depletion effect was meta-analytically significant (d = .045). Furthermore, unintended fatigue and practice effects occurred over the course of the paradigm, systematically interfering with the intended depletion effects. We recommend that depletion research takes advantage of within-subject designs across multiple sessions to avoid spillover effects between measurements.

Goel et al. (2016) examined diffusion data from Twitter to conclude that online petitions are shared more virally than other types of content. Their definition of structural virality, which measures the extent to which diffusion follows a broadcast model or is spread person to person (virally), depends on knowing the topology of the diffusion cascade. But often the diffusion structure cannot be observed directly. We examined time-stamped signature data from the Obama White House's We the People petition platform. We developed measures based on temporal dynamics that, we argue, can be used to infer diffusion structure as well as the more intrinsic notion of virality sometimes known as infectiousness. These measures indicate that successful petitions are likely to be higher in both intrinsic and structural virality than unsuccessful petitions are. We also investigate threshold effects on petition signing that challenge simple contagion models, and report simulations for a theoretical model that are consistent with our data., Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables, to appear in Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Afra J. Mashhadi, and Taha Yasseri (Editors), Social Informatics: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference, SocInfo 2017 (Oxford, UK, September 13-15), Springer LNCS, 2017

Evolutionarily minded researchers have hypothesized that women advertise their ovulatory status by wearing red or pink. Many of these studies have been based on samples of women who have self-reported their clothing choices, a practice that raises questions about accuracy . In two studies, we evaluated the relationship between women’s fertility and self-reports of clothing choices, in addition to three a purely non-self-reports including trained raters’ judgments of garment colouration in outfits that women drew onto mannequins to represent what they would wear to a party with attractive men in attendance; automated colour coding of the mannequins; and trained raters’ judgments of garment colouration as evinced in photographs that participants took of themselves. We found no evidence that women are particularly inclined to wear red or pink during peak fertility using these measures and a binary measure of women’s fertility. However, we discuss issues of statistical power in our interpretation of null effects and report exploratory analyses using these measures and a continuous measure of women’s fertility (in which found tentative evidence that women are wear red or pink during peak fertility).

We investigated the latent structure of narcissistic personality disorder by comparing dimensional, hybrid, and categorical latent variable models, using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), nonparametric and semiparametric factor analysis, and latent class analysis, respectively. We first explored these models in a clinical sample and then preregistered replication analyses in 4 additional data sets (with national, undergraduate, community, and mixed community/clinical samples) to test whether the best-fitting model would generalize across different data sets with different sample compositions. A 1-factor CFA outperformed categorical models in fit and reliability, suggesting the criteria do not serve to distinguish a narcissist class or subtypes; rather, a narcissistic dimension underlies the narcissistic personality disorder construct. The CFA also outperformed hybrid models, indicating that people fall within the same continuous distribution, rather than composing homogenous groups of relative severity (nonparametric factor analysis) or pulling apart into mixtures of discrete distributions (semiparametric factor analysis) along that spectrum. (PsycINFO Database Record

One can never know the internal workings of another person – one can only infer others’ mental states based on external cues. In contrast, each person has direct access to the contents of their own mind. Here we test the hypothesis that this privileged access shapes the way people represent internal mental experiences, such that they represent their own mental states more distinctly than the states of others. Across four studies, participants considered their own and others’ mental states; analyses measured the distinctiveness of mental state representations. Two neuroimaging studies used representational similarity analyses to demonstrate that the social brain manifests more distinct activity patterns when thinking about one’s own states versus others’. Two behavioral studies support these findings. Further, they demonstrate that people differentiate between states less as social distance increases. Together these results suggest that we represent our own mind with greater granularity than the minds of others.

Past research on the relation between hostility in intimate relationships and adiposity has yielded mixed findings. The present study investigated whether the association between relationship hostility and adiposity is moderated by people's biological reactions to couple conflict. Cohabiting adult couples (N = 117 couples) engaged in two conflict interactions, before and after which salivary cortisol levels were measured. Results revealed an association between relationship hostility and adiposity, but this association was concentrated among people with relatively low levels of cortisol reactivity to couple conflict. Results are interpreted in light of research demonstrating that cortisol reactivity can become blunted over time in response to repeated stressors. These results provide precision to etiological models of obesity by identifying cortisol reactivity as a factor that moderates the association between relationship hostility and adiposity. (PsycINFO Database Record

The current article investigates decisions where people are not causing harm to others, but only benefit from the harm. Specifically, we assessed people's willingness to benefit from other's chance‐caused misfortunes. In 5 studies, examining real behavior of individuals in a television game show (Study 1) and using experimental betting tasks (Studies 2–5), we show that people are reluctant to benefit from the misfortunes of others. Although in all studies participants' decisions were objectively unrelated to the likelihood of misfortune befalling others, subsequent analyses indicate that people erroneously feel that benefitting from others' misfortune increases the likelihood that such harm will actually occur. The results are discussed in relation to the literature on moral decision‐making and magical thinking.

Scholars have often characterized wisdom as a trait—a stable and invariable individual disposition. However, recent advances in behavioral sciences suggest that many features of wisdom can be viewed as situation-specific states—concrete instances of wise and not so wise behavior. We critically examine the evidence concerning the trait vs. state aspects of wisdom. First, we review the common individual qualities attributed to wisdom. The extent to which these qualities are seen as stable traits vs. variable states varies among both laypeople and scientists, and new evidence shows that pertinent folk theories about wisdom vary substantially across cultures as well. Next, we present empirical research on wisdom in everyday situations which demonstrates the systematic variability of wisdom-related characteristics as a function of situational demands and induced mindsets. To resolve the trait vs. state debate in wisdom, we argue for a whole trait theoretical framework, conceptualizing traits as a density distribution of states. Based on theoretical and empirical insights, we conclude by providing recommendations for best practices when measuring trait- and state-components of wisdom.

Though there are many views on the nature of wisdom, a common thread emerging in philosophical, folk, and scientific discourse is the importance of wise reflection or “reasoning” for sound judgment. In this chapter, we briefly highlight this common thread in historical perspectives on wisdom before moving on to discuss its further development through contemporary personality- and performance-oriented traditions in the empirical study of wisdom. These empirical traditions serve as forerunners to the recent methodological and experimental innovations in the study of wise reasoning. We detail the strengths and weaknesses of existing measures of wisdom, and the subsequent development and validation of the Situated Wise Reasoning Scale to address the limitations of previous approaches. We highlight work demonstrating the importance of the situation for measuring wise reasoning. Further, we address cultural differences in wise reasoning, and highlight ways to boost people’s propensity to reason wisely. Finally, we outline some of the theoretical and practical implications of wise reasoning for wisdom writ large.

People feel motivated to maintain consistency across many domains in life. When it comes to climate change, many find themselves motivated to maintain consistency with others, e.g., by doubting climate change to cohere with friends' and neighbors' beliefs. The resulting climate skepticism has derailed discussions to address the issue collectively in the United States. To counteract these social consistency pressures, we developed a cognitive consistency intervention for climate skeptics. We first demonstrated that most people share substantial faith in a variety of scientific findings, across disciplines ranging from medicine to astronomy. Next, we showed that conservative participants who first acknowledged several general contributions of science subsequently reported significantly stronger beliefs in climate science (as compared to conservatives who were asked only about their climate science beliefs). These findings provide an encouraging proof-of-concept for how an inclusive climate conversation might be initiated across the political divide.

As the debate over best statistical practices continues in academic journals, conferences, and the blogosphere, working researchers (e.g., psychologists) need to figure out how much time and effort to invest in attending to experts’ arguments, how to design their next project, and how to craft a sustainable long-term strategy for data analysis and inference. The present special issue of the American Statistician promises help. In this article, we offer a modest proposal for a continued and informed use of the conventional p value without the pitfalls of statistical rituals. Other statistical indices should complement reporting, and extra-statistical (e.g., theoretical) judgments ought to be made with care and clarity.

Pluralistic ignorance occurs when individuals misperceive a group norm and attempt to match the perceived—rather than actual—norm. Little is currently known about its role in the undergraduate classroom. The present research examined the pluralistic ignorance of studying behavior and its relationship with examination performance across four studies. Results suggested that students underestimate the amount of time their peers spend studying (Study 1), the extent of their estimation error is related to exam performance (Study 2), and that the relationship is mediated by a perceived lack of preparation (Study 3). Finally, a brief classroom intervention (Study 4) may be able to eliminate the pluralistic ignorance. Implications for the theory of pluralistic ignorance, and college teaching, are discussed.

Through practice, erratic behaviors become consistent. However, considerable variability exists in the time it takes for newly learned relations between cues and behaviors to become automatic. The present research investigated whether construing action abstractly vs. concretely moderates the development of automaticity. In combination with a construal-level manipulation, participants completed a speeded response-time task in which they repeatedly chose between two possible choices (e.g., “business” or “visitors”) as descriptors of a target word (e.g., “company”). We tested two pre-registered hypotheses that participants in the concrete (vs. abstract) group would (1) show a greater speed-up in response times across repetitions; (2) more quickly settle on a consistent preference. Despite strong evidence of the efficacy of our construal-level manipulation, neither hypothesis was supported

Research into ‘first impressions’ frequently uses photographs of faces as representations of unknown others. This is the case for legitimate concerns about standardisation, sample size and experimental control. However, there is little work investigating the robustness of these first impressions through first interactions. A sample of 97 pairs of stranger participants (N= 194) completed personality measures (of Big Five and Triarchic Model of Psychopathy), made personality and social judgments of a photograph of the face of their to-be partner, then engaged in five minutes (maximum) of unstructured interaction with their partner and then made their judgments again. The behaviour of the participants in the interaction was coded using 76 criteria. Generally, before and after judgments were correlated, but significantly different at Time 2. Personality judgment accuracy at Time 1 was poor overall but at Time 2 participants showed self-other agreement on Neuroticism, Extraversion and psychopathic Boldness. At Time 1 participant ratings of confidence were more similar to negative valence but at Time 2 confidence was a positive attribute. Coded behaviours related to ‘engagement’ were those that influenced the person judgments the most, and these were related to Extraversion, Agreeableness and Boldness of participants. Overall, the results of this study show that first personality and person judgments change from photographs to face-to-face interaction. Person judgment research should be aware of the extent to which judgments of photographs relate to first interaction.

Negotiations are often settled near the mid-point between a seller’s asking price and buyer’s counteroffer. Precise, rather than round asking prices are stronger anchors, resulting in agreements closer to the asking price. Because setting precise asking prices tends to favor sellers, real-estate agents frequently advise doing so. While the advice is beneficial in a buyer’s market where supply exceeds demand, in a seller’s market where demand exceeds supply, it can backfire. Three pre-registered studies demonstrate the backfiring precision effect. Study 1 reveals that a substantial amount of Dutch real-estate agents advise sellers to set precise asking prices, regardless of the market they operate in. Studies 2 and 3 show that in a seller’s market, setting precise prices is suboptimal as it leads to lower counteroffers. The estimated negative impact of precise asking prices in a heated housing markets such as Amsterdam, is estimated at thousands of Euros per deal.

Touch is central to mammalian communication, socialization, and wellbeing. Despite this prominence, interpersonal touch is relatively understudied. In this preregistered investigation, we assessed the influence of interpersonal touch on the subjective, neural, and behavioral correlates of cognitive control. Forty-five romantic couples were recruited (N = 90; dating >6 months), and one partner performed an inhibitory control task while electroencephalography was recorded to assess neural performance monitoring. Interpersonal touch was provided by the second partner and was manipulated between experimental blocks. A within-subject repeated-measures design was used to maximize statistical power, with our sample size providing 80% power for even small effect sizes (ds > .25). Results indicated that participants were not only happier when receiving touch, but also showed increased neural processing of mistakes. Further exploratory cognitive modeling using indirect effects tests and drift diffusion models of decision making revealed that touch was indirectly associated with both improved inhibitory control and increased rates of evidence accumulation (drift rate) through its influence on neural monitoring. Thus, beyond regulating emotion and stress, interpersonal touch appears to enhance the neurocognitive processes underling flexible goal-directed behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record

In social interactions, we rely on nonverbal cues like gaze direction to understand the behavior of others. How we react to these cues is determined by the degree to which we believe that they originate from an entity with a mind capable of having internal states and showing intentional behavior, a process called mind perception. While prior work has established a set of neural regions linked to mind perception, research has just begun to examine how mind perception affects social-cognitive mechanisms like gaze processing on a neuronal level. In the current experiment, participants performed a social attention task (i.e., attentional orienting to gaze cues) with either a human or a robot agent (i.e., variation of mind perception), while transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) was applied either to prefrontal or temporo-parietal areas, both regions that have been linked to mind perception in previous studies. The results show that stimulation to temporo-parietal areas did not modulate social attention, neither in response to the human nor the robot agent. In contrast, stimulation to prefrontal areas enhanced attentional orienting in response to hu-man gaze cues and attenuated attentional orienting in response to robot gaze cues. Post-hoc analyses revealed that prefrontal stimulation particularly affected those participants who have followed human gaze more strongly than robot gaze at baseline. These findings suggest that mind perception modulates low-level mechanisms of social cognition via pre-frontal structures, and that a certain degree of mind perception is essential in order to benefit from active stimulation to prefrontal areas.

Knowing the internal states of others is essential to predicting behavior in social interactions and requires that the general characteristic of ‘having a mind’ is granted to our interaction partners. Mind perception is a highly automatic process and can potentially cause a cognitive conflict when interacting with agents whose mind status is ambiguous, such as artificial agents. We investigate whether mind perception negatively impacts performance on tasks involving artificial agents due to cognitive conflict processing caused by a potentially increased difficulty to categorize them as human versus non-human. Experiment 1 shows that an ambiguous humanoid stimulus negatively impacts performance on a vigilance task that is known to be sensitive to the drainage of cognitive resources. This negative effect on performance vanishes when participants are pre-exposed to the stimulus be-fore the vigilance task (Experiment 2 and 3). The effect of pre-exposure on performance recovery is independent of whether participants explicitly resolve the cognitive conflict by answering mind-related questions (Experiment 2) or implicitly by judging the stimuli on a set of physical features (Experiment 3). Together, the findings suggest that mind perception is so automatic that it cannot be suppressed even if it has negative effects on cognitive performance.

Social rejection is a painful event that often increases aggression. However, the neural mechanisms of this rejection-aggression link remain unclear. A potential clue may be that rejected people often recruit the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex’s (VLPFC) self-regulatory processes to manage the pain of rejection. Using functional MRI, we replicated previous links between rejection and activity in the brain’s mentalizing network, social pain network, and VLPFC. VLPFC recruitment during rejection was associated with greater activity in the brain’s reward network (i.e., the ventral striatum) when individuals were given an opportunity to retaliate. This retaliation-related striatal response was associated with greater levels of retaliatory aggression. Dispositionally aggressive individuals exhibited less functional connectivity between the ventral striatum and the right VLPFC during aggression. This connectivity exerted a suppressing effect on dispositionally aggressive individuals’ greater aggressive responses to rejection. These results help explain how the pain of rejection and reward of revenge motivate rejected people to behave aggressively.

In close relationships, people’s outcomes become highly intertwined, or interdependent, over time and across contexts (Clark & Mills 2011; Kelley & Thibaut 1978; Rusbult & Van Lange 2003). For example, young children rely on care from their parents as they grow and develop, and as they become older themselves, they often provide care and companionship to their aging parents. Friends provide emotional support to one another in times of need and share in one another’s joys in times of accomplishment. Romantic partners provide affection and physical intimacy to each other in ways unmatched by other relationship partners. Given that people rely on their relationship partners to meet many of their needs and desires, communal motivation, or care for the welfare of others, is an important component of personal well-being and satisfying relationships (Le, Impett, Lemay, Muise, & Tskhay 2018). Here, the history of communal motivation research is reviewed; the role of communal motivation in building and maintaining relationships described; and the emotional expressions and reactions linked to communal motivation explained.

This piece challenges the interpretation of the findings in Wilson et al.'s paper "The challenges of the disengaged mind are not uniquely human and may have nothing todo with thinking: Comment on Wilson et al. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345, 75-77.

Reviews "The Human Instinct" by K. R. Miller. Agrees with Miller in his rejection of creationism and adaptationist evolutionary psychology. Disagrees with Miller's suggestion that evolution has created the capacity of free will, as there is no such thing.

In a volunteer’s dilemma (VoD), one person must make a material sacrifice so that others benefit. If no one makes a sacrifice, everyone is worse off than a volunteer. How do people make the decision to volunteer? We explore 4 a priori strategies in a 2-person 1-shot VoD. Two strategies focus a person’s attention on either his or her own (egocentrism) or the other’s (allocentrism) highest potential payoff. The third strategy (collectivism) directs attention to both players’ payoffs and thereby maximizes joint outcomes. The fourth strategy (classic rationality) also directs attention to the other’s payoffs to enable a mixed-motive Nash equilibrium. The results of 2 experiments with a set of asymmetric games show a pattern consistent with egocentrism, yet all 4 strategies yield similar degrees of volunteering overall. Also consistent with egocentrism, respondents project their own preferred decisions onto others. We discuss the contributions of egocentric reasoning to the provision of public goods.

Social sensing techniques were designed for analyzing unreliable data, but not explicitly built for adversarial generated and manipulated data. The adversarial use of social media to spread deceptive or misleading information poses a social, economic, and political threat. Deceptive information spreads quickly and inexpensively online relative to traditional methods of dissemination (e.g., print, radio, and television). For example, bots (i.e., dedicated software for sharing text information) can distribute information faster than humans. Such deceptive information is commonly referred to as fake (fabricated) news, which can be a form of propaganda (i.e., manipulation to advance a particular view or agenda). Information spread is particularly effective if the content resonates with the preconceptions and biases of social groups or communities because the spread will be reinforced by implied trust in information coming from other members (echo chambers and filter bubbles). We conjecture that the future of online deception, including fake news, will extend beyond text to high-quality, mass-produced machine-generated and manipulated images, video, and audio

Brandt (2017) demonstrated that a simple model using the perceived ideology of a target group can predict the size and direction of the association between political ideology and prejudice. A meta-analysis of four studies showed that this simple ideology only model performs better than a null model and models using the perceived conventionalism, status, and choice of being a member of the target groups. This report describes a preregistered replication which uses data from the American National Election Study’s 2016 Time Series (N = 2616), archival data that was only made available after the study was preregistered. The findings of Brandt (2017) were replicated and the meta-analysis reported in Brandt (2017) is updated with these new data.

The present study aimed to replicate and extend findings by Mehl, Vazire, Holleran and Clark (2010) that individuals with higher well-being tend to spend less time alone and more time interacting with others (e.g., greater conversation quantity), and engage in less small talk and more substantive conversations (e.g., greater conversation quality). To test the robustness of these effects in a larger and more diverse sample, we used Bayesian integrative data analysis to pool data on subjective life satisfaction and observed daily conversations from three heterogeneous adult samples, in addition to the original sample (N = 486). We found moderate associations between life satisfaction and amount of alone time, conversation time, and substantive conversations, but no reliable association with small talk. Personality did not substantially moderate these associations. The failure to replicate the original small talk effect is theoretically and practically important as it has garnered considerable scientific and lay interest.

Much of the research on grit has examined its predictive validity toward academic success; however, little research has treated grit as an outcome. This study uses multilevel modeling to examine how student-level demographics, school-level demographics, and students’ experiences in school predict grit. Results demonstrate that students’ experiences in school—including school engagement, relationships with adults and peers, and school culture—and self-reported GPA were most strongly related to grit, ethnicity was weakly related to grit, and gender and school demographics did not significantly relate to grit. Implications of this research on the potential malleability of grit are discussed.

From the 1980’s onwards, neoliberal governance in the US, Canada, and the UK has emphasized competitive individualism and people have seemingly responded, in kind, by agitating to perfect themselves and their lifestyles. In this study, we examine whether cultural changes have coincided with an increase in multidimensional perfectionism in college students over the last 27 years. Our analyses are based on 164 samples and 41,641 American, Canadian, and British college students, who completed the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (Hewitt & Flett, 1991) between 1989 and 2016 (70.92% female, Mage = 20.66). Cross-temporal meta-analysis revealed that levels of self-oriented perfectionism, socially prescribed perfectionism, and other-oriented perfectionism have linearly increased. These trends remained when controlling for gender and between-country differences in perfectionism scores. Overall, in order of magnitude of the observed increase, our findings indicate that recent generations of young people perceive that others are more demanding of them, are more demanding of others, and are more demanding of themselves.

Across many diverse areas of research, it is common to average a series of observations, and to use these averages in subsequent analyses. Research using this approach faces the challenge of knowing when these averages are stable. Meaning, to what extent do these averages change when additional observations are included? Using averages that are not stable introduces a great deal of error into any analysis. The current research develops a tool, implemented in R, to assess when averages are stable. Using a sequential sampling approach, it determines how many observations are needed before additional observations would no longer meaningfully change an average. The utility of this tool is illustrated in the context of impression formation, demonstrating that averages of some perceived traits (e.g., happy) stabilize with fewer observations than others (e.g., assertive). A tutorial regarding how to utilize this tool in researchers’ own data is provided.

We investigated whether motivated reasoning rooted in partisanship affects the attributions individuals make about violent attackers’ underlying motives and group memberships. Study 1 demonstrated that on the day of the Brexit referendum pro-leavers (vs. pro-remainers) attributed an exculpatory (i.e., mental health) versus condemnatory (i.e., terrorism) motive to the killing of a pro-remain politician. Study 2 demonstrated that pro-immigration (vs. anti-immigration) perceivers in Germany ascribed a mental health (vs. terrorism) motive to a suicide attack by a Syrian refugee, predicting lower endorsement of punitiveness against his group (i.e., refugees) as a whole. Study 3 experimentally manipulated target motives, showing that Americans distanced a politically motivated (vs. mentally ill) violent individual from their in-group and assigned him harsher punishment—patterns most pronounced among high-group identifiers.

The neuroscience of imagination has revealed extensive parallels between the brain correlates of creative cognition and those of social cognition. There is, however, scarcely any exchange of ideas between the different research communities that is aimed at understanding what such commonalities reveal. The evidence indicates that there are some fundamental similarities in very nature of the information processing mechanisms that underlie cognitive and social aspects of mental life that are customarily viewed to be quite distinct from one another. This chapter features reflections on these similarities by generating cross-connections between current knowledge on creative cognition and social cognition. Themes that are explored include candidate mechanisms of correspondences between creativity and social behaviour, such as the ‘intention to communicate’ (by means of expression), the ‘intention to understand’ (by means of inference and discovery), and the ‘personal relevance bias’ (by means of alertness to self-related salience and significance).

We report a replication and extension of a finding from Studies 1 and 2 of Van Lange et al .'s influential paper (Van Lange et al. 1997 J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 73 , 733–746. ( doi:10.1037/0022-3514.73.4.733 )), which showed an association between Social Value Orientation (SVO) and attachment security. We report a close replication but with measures of attachment that are considered superior in comparison to measures used by Van Lange et al ., due to subsequent psychometric improvements. Psychometric analyses indeed showed that our attachment measures were reliable and valid, demonstrating theoretically predicted associations with other outcomes. With a sample ( N = 879) sufficiently large to detect d = 0.19 (and larger than the original N = 573), we failed to replicate the effect. Based on the available evidence, we interpret as there being no evidence for the link between attachment security and Social Value Orientation, but further replication research that uses solid measures and large samples can provide more definite conclusions about the association between attachment and SVO.

Companies increasingly characterize passionate employees as exemplary, seemingly for good reasons: passion for work predicts commitment, engagement, and persistence. However, evidence linking passion for work and job performance-especially as rated by supervisors-is surprisingly mixed: whereas some studies have found significant effects, other studies have not found a significant relationship. The current research aims to resolve this conflicting evidence by moving from an intrapersonal approach to an interpersonal perspective on passion. In doing so, we investigate how their supervisors' passion influences whether employees' passion for work predicts job performance ratings. We propose that a supervisor's own work passion moderates this relationship, such that passionate subordinates are more likely to obtain higher performance ratings when their supervisors themselves also attain desired levels of passion. We theorize this occurs because more passionate supervisors place a greater value on passion, whereas less passionate supervisors discount the importance of passion when conducting performance evaluations. To provide support for this proposition, we conducted a field study with a financial services company (N = 321) where we measured both subordinates' and supervisors' passion for work and combined this data with supervisor ratings of job performance. Analyses revealed the predicted interaction between subordinate and supervisor passion: Passionate subordinates only obtained higher performance ratings when their supervisors also experienced desired levels of passion. Organizations thus not only need to ignite the passion of their employees, but if they want to succeed, passionate employees may also need to kindle the passion of their supervisor.

The open-minded cognition (OMC) scale is a new measure of cognitive style (Price, Ottati, Wilson, & Kim, 2015). We identify both limitations to and important omissions in tests of its predictive validity. In five studies, we test two hypotheses derived from the conceptualization of OMC: the OMC outgroup attitude hypothesis and the OMC bias attenuation hypothesis. We find that whereas OMC is associated with less prejudice overall, evidence is mixed that it reduces prejudice towards attitudinally dissimilar groups, a key aspect of the OMC outgroup attitude hypothesis (Studies 1a and 1b). We also find mixed support for the OMC bias attenuation hypothesis: whereas OMC is associated with avoiding selective exposure (Study 3), it did not attenuate political biases across seven separate tests (Studies 2a, 2b, and 3). We recommend further tests of the OMC scale’s predictive validity before its use to assess genuine differences in cognitive style.

Meta-analyses show that low levels of Openness and Agreeableness correlate with generalized prejudice. However, previous studies narrowly assessed prejudice toward low status, disadvantaged groups. Using a broad operationalization of generalized prejudice towards a heterogeneous array of targets, we sought to answer two questions: a) Are some types of people prejudiced against most types of groups, and b) Are some types of people prejudiced against certain types of groups? Across four samples (N = 7,543), Openness was very weakly related to broad generalized prejudice, r = -.03, 95%CI [-.07, -.001], whereas low Agreeableness was reliably associated with broad generalized prejudice (r = -.23, 95%CI [-.31, -.16]). When target characteristics moderated relationships between Big Five traits and prejudice, they implied that perceiver-target dissimilarity on personality traits explain prejudice. Importantly, the relationship between Agreeableness and prejudice remained robust across target groups, suggesting it is the personality trait orienting people toward (dis)liking of others.

Humans create many apparently functionless artifacts such as paintings, novels, poems, films, and decorative blankets. From an evolutionary perspective, such creations appear somewhat puzzling. Why create artifacts that do not appear to contribute to survival? One recent explanation, the cultural courtship model, argued that such creations are used to signal genetic health to the other sex. In this way, cultural creators are potentially rewarded with higher quality mates. We propose an alternative (but not completely contradictory) model, the status competition model of cultural production, which argues that cultural displays often, but not exclusively, signal the possession of important cultural competencies to others in a coalition. Cultural creators are recompensed with prestige, which they can use to secure mates or invest in their kin and lineage. We examine evidence for and against these models, and conclude that the status competition model can better explain cultural production than current theory.

How do intraindividual changes in wisdom-related characteristics of cognitive broadening—open-minded reflection on challenging situations, consideration of change, and epistemic humility—relate to subjective well-being over time? To test this relationship, we performed cross-lagged panel analyses from three waves of the national U.S. sample taken across 20 years, utilizing a cross-validation approach: (i) conduct exploratory analyses on a random subset of data, (ii) preregister hypotheses and methods, and (iii) cross-validate preregistered hypotheses on the other random subset of the data. We found that broadening attitudes predicted greater affect balance and life satisfaction in later years, but not vice-versa. The effect was robust when controlling for trait-level broadening well-being associations, as well as sociodemographic characteristics, openness, and general cognitive abilities. The direction of the positive longitudinal relationship between broadening attitudes and subjective well-being has implications for major existing theories of adult development and subjective well-being.

International audience; Collective dance improvisation (e.g., traditional and social dancing, contact improvisation) is a participatory, relational and embodied art form which eschews standard concepts in aesthetics. We present our ongoing research into the mechanisms underlying the lived experience of "togetherness" associated with such practices. Togetherness in collective dance improvisation is kinaesthetic (based on movement and its perception), and so can be simultaneously addressed from the perspective of the performers and the spectators, and be measured. We utilise these multiple levels of description: the first-person, phenomenological level of personal experiences, the third-person description of brain and body activity, and the level of interpersonal dynamics. Here, we describe two of our protocols: a four-person mirror game and a 'rhythm battle' dance improvisation score. Using an interpersonal closeness measure after the practice, we correlate subjective sense of individual/group connectedness and observed levels of in-group temporal synchronization. We propose that kinaesthetic togetherness, or interpersonal resonance, is integral to the aesthetic pleasure of the participants and spectators, and that embodied feeling of togetherness might play a role more generally in aesthetic experience in the performing arts.