ABSTRACT Scientific interest in the consequences of unwanted celibacy, understood as frustration related to being unable to find a romantic or sexual partner, has increased in recent years in response to public debate surrounding incel communities. In this article, we integrate attachment theory, social role theory, and precarious manhood theory to examine the antecedents of unwanted celibacy. Across two correlational studies and one preregistered experiment conducted among young men (total N = 2341), we tested the hypothesis that masculine discrepancy stress statistically mediates the association between anxious attachment and unwanted celibacy. Consistent support for this indirect association was found across all studies. Importantly, the mediation held over and above social, romantic and family loneliness. In addition, masculine discrepancy stress was associated with unwanted celibacy but not with romantic loneliness. Together, these findings show the role of attachment‐related vulnerabilities and gendered self‐evaluations in shaping how young men experience romantic and sexual exclusion.
ABSTRACT The direct observation of social behaviour has almost completely vanished from socialpsychological research, in favour of studies of attitudes, identities and cognitions. Using crowd psychology as an illustration, this article argues for a renewed focus on observational research enabled by recent technological advances, including high‐resolution video, motion tracking, eye tracking and large‐scale crowd experiments. We review the historical development of crowd research in social psychology, sociology and physics, highlighting how dominant theories have focused on exceptional phenomena, such as riots, panic and crowd violence whilst relying heavily on self‐reports and retrospective accounts. Using recent observational research as an example, the article shows that everyday crowds are characterised by substantial behavioural heterogeneity, limited contagion effects and highly coordinated collective behaviour. These findings challenge established social psychological crowd theories, thereby demonstrating that using these methods is very worthwhile. We conclude that interdisciplinary observational approaches offer powerful opportunities for social psychology to study real‐world social interaction and to develop theories that better account for spatial, material and dynamic social processes.
ABSTRACT In the Weapon Identification Task (WIT), participants more often misclassify innocuous objects (e.g., tools) as weapons after seeing a Black compared to a White male face prime. Racially biased object discrimination (discrimination bias) and biased response tendencies (response bias) have been proposed as cognitive mechanisms underlying this weapon identification bias. In three experiments (total N = 1.015), we manipulated base‐rates of target objects in the WIT and used a generalized process dissociation model to disentangle discrimination bias and response bias. Our results show that response bias is the major source of racial bias in the WIT, while discrimination bias plays a role under specific circumstances only. Specifically, when participants are explicitly instructed to use racial profiling for responding, discrimination bias comes into play in addition to response bias. This suggests that object discrimination is systematically distorted in the WIT whenever racial profiling is used as a response strategy.
ABSTRACT The intergroup contact literature has traditionally examined interactions as being between clearly defined, mutually exclusive groups. Yet in Western societies, descendants of immigrants often identify both with their (grand)parents’ ethnicity and with the national majority in the country of residence. We examined whether contact through friendship with such dual identifiers is associated with more positive outgroup attitudes. We used cross‐sectional data from native Dutch adults ( N 1 = 598), longitudinal school data from native German and Turkish ethnic minority students ( N 2 = 1486) and cross‐sectional school data from native Dutch students ( N 3 = 890). Among natives, having dual identifier friends was associated with more positive attitudes towards ethnic minorities, whereas having mono‐identifying outgroup friends was not. The association was stronger when participants categorized their friends as dual identifiers than when friends self‐identified as such. As dual identifiers are widespread in Western societies, these findings are particularly promising for fostering more positive intergroup relations.
ABSTRACT This article explores how the mental states and processes of the living influence how they think of the dead. In two studies ( N = 300), we manipulated participants’ attitudes towards certain topics and tested whether they projected their attitudes onto the minds of dead people they knew. Indeed, participants who were prompted to think favourably or unfavourably about a certain topic imagined that the other (dead) person would share their attitude. Implications are discussed in terms of how people use similar social cognition tools to think about the living and the dead and of how people's mental representations of the dead are malleable and sensitive to context. Finally, possibilities are laid out for further research on the social psychology of thinking about dead people.
