Building on evidence that authenticity reflects both self-congruence and self-enhancement, this account predicts that these influences are interdependent, such that positive outcomes feel most authentic when they are experienced as realistically achievable given one’s domain-specific beliefs. Across three within-person experiments ( N s = 97, 143, 146), participants imagined successful or unsuccessful behavior in domains varying in self-relevance and evaluated its authenticity. In all studies, imagining successful behavior increased perceived authenticity, but the magnitude of this effect reflected alignment with domain-specific self-beliefs; success felt more authentic in domains where participant perceived higher standing. This pattern generalized across multiple operationalizations of self-beliefs (self-potential, anticipated others’ evaluations, and personality traits) and was not explained by social desirability. Alignment effects were associated with perceived behavioral difficulty, consistent with a feasibility-based account. Together, the findings suggest that authenticity judgments reflect whether anticipated behavior plausibly originates from oneself.
Terrorism aims to fray the moral fabric of society. We conducted the first preregistered study to assess the impact of real terror threats by combining pre–post comparisons with an experimental threat reminder, examining moral judgments and behaviors of 222 participants before and after the 2022 Istanbul bombing. Endorsement of binding moral foundations increased following the attack, yet this rise in group-oriented moral concerns did not translate into greater prosocial behavior. Generosity decreased from pre to post, and experimentally heightening the threat reduced cooperation. Changes in individualizing foundations followed an ideology-related pattern, with larger declines among conservative individuals, revealing a culture-specific ideological asymmetry in reactions to threat. Our study challenges the generalizability of terror-response models developed in Western societies and highlights the need for cross-cultural research on morality and behavior.
Research suggests that affective polarization stems from social categorization processes: People sort themselves and others into political categories and perceive each other as either ingroup or outgroup members. This categorization forms the basis for intergroup conflict, producing dislike and distrust between groups. However, the consequences of categorization are not uniform but scale with a group's perceived entitativity-the degree to which it is perceived as coherent and unified. Research on novel groups suggests that perceived entitativity is driven by how others label these groups. Using fine-tuned transformer models to automatically classify Facebook posts (N = 45,780) and comments (N = 769,684), we show that this effect also holds for established political groups. Specifically, posts containing noun labels (e.g., "Senate Republicans") rather than adjective labels (e.g., "Republican senators") and using these labels generically (e.g., "Democrats want") rather than non-generically (e.g., "some Democrats want") receive higher proportions of comments expressing partisan prejudice.
Parenthood is associated with both psychological rewards and costs, and prior research has identified conditions under which it relates to higher or lower well-being. This study examines whether the relationship between parenthood and subjective well-being is moderated by uncertainty avoidance, a cultural dimension reflecting the extent to which societies respond to uncertainty. Using data from 331,480 individuals across 82 countries, we found that in countries with high uncertainty avoidance, parents reported lower subjective well-being than nonparents, whereas this association was not significant in countries with low uncertainty avoidance; a similar moderation pattern was observed when the number of children was examined. These effects persisted after controlling for individual-level factors (e.g., income), country-level socioeconomic indicators (e.g., gross domestic product [GDP] per capita), and other cultural dimensions (e.g., individualism). Although the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, the findings suggest that the association between parenthood and subjective well-being varies across cultures and is moderated by uncertainty avoidance.
Autonomy is an important contextual antecedent for leaders to appear charismatic. However, leaders differ in how productively they can use autonomy. This research examines whether the relationship between leader autonomy and followers' charisma attributions depends on leader characteristics involving their responses to autonomy. Drawing from theories of Machiavellianism, we suggest autonomy alternately reduces (increases) strain for leaders who are higher (lower) in Machiavellianism (H1). More strained leaders are then less able to enact behaviors that appear charismatic (H2). We conducted a preregistered experiment with random assignment of autonomy (Study 1), and a two-wave field survey of leader-follower dyads (Study 2). H1 was preregistered; H2 was not preregistered. Results suggest, conditional on the assumption that strain mediates the relationship between autonomy and charisma, strain accounts for a significant portion of their shared variance, and the relationship between autonomy and strain depends on leaders' Machiavellianism. However, other causal models cannot be excluded.
