Being ignored and excluded is a painful experience that impacts crucial higher-order cognitive processes. We report two experiments examining the effect of ostracism on risk-related decision-making, peer conformity, and the moderating role of individual differences in rejection sensitivity. In Experiment 1, participants recalled being ostracized or included before completing a health risk-perception peer-influence task. Ostracized participants showed a significant decrease in risk perception but conformed more to risk-averse peers. In Experiment 2, participants completed a social gambling task, with ostracized participants exhibiting riskier behavior than included participants. Unlike Experiment 1, ostracized participants were more influenced by peers displaying moderately risky behaviors, rather than highly risk-averse ones. These effects were moderated by participants’ level of sensitivity to rejection. Together, these findings provide further evidence that ostracism alters risky decision-making and offers insight into how the peer environment shapes risk-taking.
Research has shown that differences in external contexts can affect the perception of interpersonal traits and social threats. Adverse environments in early childhood may thus influence the development of threat detection cues. Across two studies, we examine how these trait judgments are impacted by adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). In Study A, 120 subjects rated face images for both dominance and trustworthiness. An ACE score of 4 or above predicted reduced reliance upon attributions of dominance when making trustworthiness judgments about faces, and attachment style had differing impacts on this effect dependent upon early exposure to adversity. In Study B, 180 participants evaluated the trustworthiness of faces, which were manipulated in dominance. High-ACE subjects rated high-dominance faces as more trustworthy than the low-ACE group. Results suggest that exposure to early adversity reduces sensitivity to cues of dominance in faces. The plasticity of relationships between trust and dominance attributions is discussed, INSEAD.
People evaluate individual actions more positively than inactions, but the scientific literature is silent on the evaluations of group actions and inactions. Across five experiments (total N = 2,684; three preregistered), American adult participants reported the desirability of and intentions to engage in mundane actions (e.g., walking) and inactions (e.g., standing) carried out either individually or with others. Across these experiments, group actions were evaluated less positively than individual ones, which in turn led to weaker intentions to engage in them. The mechanism underlying these differences was that group behaviors (actions and inactions) were generally associated with a lower sense of personal agency than individual ones. The lower sense of agency undermined evaluations and intentions, but this path was significantly stronger for actions than inactions. Implications and limitations of these findings are discussed.
Although social cues such as perceived facial trustworthiness influence people’s ongoing decision-making progress in a dynamic world, the ecological validity of facial appearance is limited or nonexistent. We conducted two experiments (N total = 258) to investigate the impact of the valence-defining but task-irrelevant social dimension of facial trustworthiness on learning dynamics. In a multiple-cue probability learning task, (in) congruence was manipulated by associating (less) trustworthy faces with the binary valenced outcome. In the Incongruence conditions, participants performed worse and showed a slower learning rate initially. As demonstrated by a rolling regression approach, they utilized the facial trustworthiness information across a greater number of trials, as opposed to basing probabilistic predictions on learning experience. The effect was driven by valence matching rather than by a prevailing semantic relationship between cues and outcome. We discuss the perception of cues based on preformed associations versus associated behavior and the generalizability of the congruence-incongruence effect.
In this article, we report a multicomponent battery of behavioral tasks and self-report measures that examined developmental differences in prosociality between UK-based adolescents (N = 100, aged 11-15) and young adults (N = 1 00, aged 1 8-36). We also assessed how sociocognitive mechanisms—including perspective-taking, working memory, inhibitory control, and social network characteristics—contribute to prosociality, and whether these contributions vary by age. Analyses distinguished between cognitive and social components of working memory and inhibition, identifying their unique predictive roles. Young adults showed significantly greater prosociality and outperformed adolescents across all sociocognitive measures. Multigroup analyses revealed that cognitive and social working memory, and social inhibition predicted prosociality across both groups. However, social networks were more strongly linked to prosociality in adolescents, while perspective-taking played a greater role in young adults. These findings underscore the distinct roles of cognitive and social factors across different developmental stages.
Watching contact sports, third parties accept and enjoy that one adult intentionally harms another. Despite the popularity of contact sports, their moral psychology is not easily explained by leading theories of moral intuitions and moral disengagement. Here, we offer the Coordination View, which proposes that people evaluate acts of force by balancing their general prohibition against force against concerns about the rules, harm caused, and entertainingness. Participants watched videos of forceful acts in sports and provided perceptions, evaluations, and reasoning. In three studies, participants evaluated forceful acts more positively when the acts aligned with the rules, were perceived as less harmful, and were rated as more entertaining. In Study 3, participants with more positive attitudes toward violence gave more positive evaluations of force acts they saw as harmful. The findings validated a paradigm for studying the widespread judgments that some acts of force, while harmful, are both entertaining and okay.
Prior work finds that symbol-person pairings influence impressions of individuals. We hypothesized that flying the American flag could signal conservativism and Trump support, consequently affecting impressions. Across four experiments, an American flag overlay in a social media profile caused a target person to be seen as more prejudiced, aggressive, and intolerant, particularly by liberals, Trump opposers, and those lower in American pride. Perceptions of Trump support consistently mediated the American flag’s effect on negative impressions, with perceived conservativism emerging as a mediator only in more recent data. Findings from a moderated mediation model suggested that the mediational effect of conservativism grew stronger over the course of our seven years of data collection, primarily among liberal perceivers. In addition, the flag itself was evaluated less favorably as the years progressed, especially by liberals. We discuss interpretational limitations and implications for discrimination and national unity.
People often show a response bias when categorizing others as members of perceptually ambiguous groups. Specifically, perceivers are more likely to categorize individuals into a nonstigmatized group (e.g., straight) than a stigmatized group (e.g., gay). Previous work suggests that both perceived base rates and benevolent reasoning underlie this bias. However, no research has simultaneously examined both accounts to investigate their relative and combined effects. Across four studies, participants categorized unknown targets based solely on visual information. Studies 1A-2 used fictitious groups to manipulate perceived stigma and population base rates. These studies showed that base rates consistently biased categorizations, while group stigma did not. Study 3 conceptually replicated these effects with a group stigmatized in the real world. These findings suggest that population base rates play a robust role in category utilization for perceptually ambiguous groups.
People are vigilant to how the groups around them facilitate or inhibit their goals, but we know little about how they appraise the relevance of a particularly important type of group: their ingroups. We test whether the Relevance Appraisal Matrix-a model of person perception structured around goal-contingent threat and opportunity appraisals-captures the structure of people's ingroup perceptions. We find it does (Study 1, n = 463; Study 2, n = 285), meaning that appraisals of the threats and opportunities people's ingroups pose to their goal pursuit are orthogona and goal-specific. We also characterize ingroup relevance appraisals and explore the relationships between them and people's ingroup attitudes and identification (Study 2), finding that people generally rate their ingroups as relatively high-opportunity and low-threat across goals and that relevance appraisals of ingroups are variably and modestly associated with attitudes towards, and identification with, people's ingroups.
Mental representations of other people are informed by their intersecting social identities. In two experiments (Ntotal = 1,592 participants), we tested whether ethnicity and binarized gender interact to shape how Middle Eastern (vs. ethnically unspecified) women and men are mentally represented. Results revealed that spontaneously generated character and facial appearance representations of Middle Eastern women differed from those of Middle Eastern men (i.e., more trustworthy and less dominant in character and facial appearance) and ethnically unspecified women (i.e., less trustworthy in character and facial appearance, less dominant in character but more dominant in facial appearance). Notably, these results differed somewhat from self-reported impressions, suggesting some, but not complete, correspondence between spontaneous and deliberate reactions to these groups. This work complements growing evidence that mental representations of ethnicity and gender constrain each other.
Fairness is typically assumed to be in the moral domain, yet recent work shows that young children may not view unfairness as a moral transgression. We investigated whether this may be because the harm caused by unfairness is less salient than the harm caused by more prototypical moral transgressions. We found that both 4-year-olds and adults rated unfairness more seriously when the harm caused by the unfairness was emphasized rather than not emphasized. When asked to categorize unfairness as either moral or conventional, 4-year-olds did not systematically choose either category. Most adults, on the other hand, categorized unfairness with conventional transgressions. These findings suggest that perceptions of unfairness exist along a continuum and are influenced by the salience of the harm caused by unfairness. Highlighting the harm inflicted by unfairness may be an important way to move people, from an early age, to notice and correct it.
The objective of the present study was to test the impact of the motivational state on the information integration process, as understood through information integration theory and reversal theory. Participants were confronted with four sets of 12 cards built according to a within-subject design and three factors: Reimbursement, Medical Follow-up, and the Environment. Each set of cards corresponded to one of four somatic metamotivational states: telic, paratelic, conformist, or negativistic. For each card, the participants indicated their degree of adherence to an adapted physical activity program. Four separate repeated-measures analyses of variance were conducted on the data from each motivational condition. The effect of motivation on judgment appears to be contingent upon the factors and the pair of metamotivational states. Our investigation extended previous research on the effect of purposiveness on judgment. Our novel results open up a vast field for further fundamental research in several areas of social cognition.
When a prosocial actor helps someone, how do observers perceive their motives? Prior work has largely focused on two kinds of helping motives: selfish and selfless. We add nuance by examining perceptions of motives that fall somewhere in the middle: relationship-based motives (e.g., showing care, strengthening the helper-recipient relationship). We examine relationship-based motives across different social relationships and helping formats (e.g., anonymous, public). Across four studies (three preregistered, N = 1,882), we found that relationship-based motives are judged as less morally good than selfless motives (e.g., virtue) but more morally good than selfish motives (e.g., reputation-signaling). A selfish motive was ascribed more often, and a selfless motive less often, to agents who helped family versus strangers. Relationship-based motives were ascribed more often to agents who helped family versus strangers and to agents who revealed their identity only to the recipient versus to no one (anonymous) or to everyone (public).
The current studies investigated the relationship between bias based on skin tone and bias based on racial categorization. Across three studies (N = 1193), perceivers formed more favorable first impressions of faces with lighter versus darker skin tones, even in the absence of a categorical pro-White racial bias. This effect generalized across several outcome measures and across target gender. Further, racial bias and skin-tone bias displayed distinct relationships to participant-level individual differences. Specifically, a more conservative political ideology robustly predicted the magnitude of pro-White racial bias but did not tend to differentially predict favoritism shown toward relatively lighter- versus darker-skinned faces. A pooled analysis also showed that skin-tone bias was more pronounced among White than among Black perceivers. We conclude that race and skin tone can impart distinct biases in social perception and are differentially responsive to variables that might be expected to influence an individual's tendency to display racial bias.
Latine Americans, the largest racial minority group in the United States, exhibit significant intragroup diversity in physical appearance. Research shows that Latine people are perceived as racially ambiguous, with few facial features used to reliably identify them. Our research examines the role of skin tone in the implicit categorization and stereotyping of Latine Americans. Across three studies (N = 782), we found that Latine individuals with medium skin tones were more likely to be implicitly associated with the Latine category (Studies 1a and 1b) and perceived as foreigners compared to those with lighter skin tones (Study 2). Although all participants associated darker skin with being Latine and foreign, Latine participants did so to a lesser extent than non-Latine participants. These findings suggest that skin tone plays a key role in how both Latine and non-Latine individuals implicitly categorize someone as Latine, with prototypical targets more likely to be associated with negative stereotypes.
Information that is inconsistent with a stereotypical expectation, particularly if it is negative, tends to enhance recall. In this study, we investigate whether expectancy-inconsistent and negative behaviors, elicited by the ethnicity of a face, can improve the recognition of faces perceived as belonging to an other-ethnicity (Black), within the framework of the other-ethnicity recognition deficit (OERD). We conducted five experiments involving White participants, employing a recognition paradigm. The experiments incorporated minor yet significant methodological variations, including time constraints, stimulus presentation order, response scales, the number of inconsistent trials, and racial prototypicality judgments. Overall, the results did not consistently support our hypotheses. However, the behavioral information influenced racial prototypicality judgments as anticipated. Specifically, counterstereotypical behaviors led to Black faces being perceived as less prototypical, and this effect was also observed for negative behaviors. We discuss the findings and their implications for current explanations of the OERD.
People are motivated to feel effective in the domains of control (managing what happens in life) and truth (establishing what is real and right). However, previous research has not established whether individuals typically possess lay theories that either of these motives predominates over the other. Although major psychological theories have emphasized the primacy of control, converging evidence across five studies reveals that individuals tend to believe that truth predominates. Participants reported believing that truth-(versus control-) oriented motives and activities are more important. Furthermore, this prioritization of truth extended to participants' conceptualizations of God, whose omniscience (versus omnipotence) they saw as more central. These truth-dominant tendencies persisted even when assessed using implicit measures. Finally, a preregistered replication study found a consistent pattern of truth (versus control) motive predominance among U.S. and Indian adults. These findings provide new insight into lay theories about the relative importance of these two fundamental motives.
Studies on theory of mind (ToM) have traditionally focused on preschool age, neglecting preadolescence and adolescence. However, ToM skills are equally fundamental in these age groups given the continued development of mental abilities and their link to social success. The aim of this study is to measure any changes in ToM skills in a group of middle school students who participated in three intervention sessions that followed a conversational approach focused on perspective-taking and the inclusion of hospitalized children. This investigation is especially relevant after COVID-19 and its consequences among adolescents and preadolescents. The intervention had positive effects on students' ToM levels, improving their ability to understand intentions and attribute mental states to other people. Future studies could provide a more comprehensive picture of the results by examining other aspects of adolescent socio-cognitive functioning. Data are discussed in terms of promoting well-being during this developmental period.
Understanding socioeconomic status (SES)-based stereotyping and discrimination is imperative but is seldom focal to intergroup relations research in social psychology. In the present work, we examine how people differentially justify police force across civilians' SES. Across three experiments, we found that perceivers justify more police force to regulate the behavior of lower-SES than higher-SES men. These SES-based biases remain even when holding civilians' race constant. We also found that stereotypes of lower-SES men as both less sensitive to pain and more physically threatening relate to the belief that they are deserving of more police force than higher-SES men. The final study suggests that physical threat stereotypes may account for the SES-based biases better than pain sensitivity stereotypes. This research contributes to important social psychological theories by increasing understanding of class-based stereotypes and their outcomes and has practical implications for considering how lay impressions of police- civilian interactions could have real consequences.
