People often look to what most others are doing for guidance, yet the same majority can be informative in one setting and misleading in another. We examined how people interpret social frequency information when group membership and payoff alignment vary. In an incentivized experiment, demonstrators first learned through private feedback which option maximized their own payoff. Social learners received no outcome feedback and decided only after observing demonstrators' choices. This separation ensured that the social signal reflected demonstrators' private learning rather than mutual influence among simultaneously observing learners. We varied whether demonstrators were ingroup or outgroup members and whether their incentives were aligned or misaligned with the social learner's. The same majority could therefore point to the best option in one context and to the worst option in another. The design thus tested whether people interpreted the same signal differently across contexts. Performance was highest when demonstrators were aligned with the learner's incentives, especially when those demonstrators were also ingroup members, even though group membership was induced by minimal cues. Cognitive load reduced memory performance but did not measurably alter the use of social information. We repeated the design in Switzerland and Kenya to study how findings extend across distinct participant pools. Individual strategies were heterogeneous in both sites but more dispersed in Kenya. These findings show that people do not treat the same social frequency signal as interchangeable across contexts defined by group membership and incentive alignment, and they highlight the value of studying social learning across distinct participant pools. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
The present experiments aim to identify the contexts and constraints that give rise to effective social coordination in a novel division-of-labor task, a gamified model of honey bee nectar processing. Experiment 1 investigated the interaction of task demand and individual effectivities on task efficiency and deterministic movement behavior in dyads. Experiment 2 replicated and extended Experiment 1 by adding a condition related to communicative abilities. Results showed that increasing task demand often resulted in increased coordination and synchronization, regardless of task-switching abilities or communicative abilities. Additionally, restricting individuals' abilities to switch roles during more difficult tasks improved performance. Hypotheses relating to communication were largely unsupported; however, trends suggested that restricting communication could be beneficial for coordination and efficiency if the system were given more time to adjust to their communicative abilities. Together, these constraints and contextual factors provide a starting point for investigating coordination in goal-oriented, division-of-labor settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Dominance and prestige are two key strategies through which people attain rank and influence within groups. Across three studies, we focus on how the deployment of these strategies shapes follower experiences-an important yet less well-understood question-by addressing how dominant and prestigious leaders satisfy the basic psychological needs of followers as outlined by self-determination theory. Using both observational (N₁ = 250) and experimental designs (N₂ = 277; N₃ = 299), we find that dominant leaders undermine followers' need satisfaction (i.e., their need for competence, relatedness, and autonomy), while prestigious leaders enhance it. Moreover, mediation analyses show that these differential patterns of need fulfillment in turn contribute to followers reporting higher leader-directed turnover intentions with dominant leaders but lower turnover intentions with prestigious leaders. Interestingly, when dominance was directed toward outgroup members-rather than ingroup members-followers report greater need satisfaction and lower desire to quit the leader. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Major political events that happen suddenly and are beyond the scope of day-to-day politics-political shocks-capture the attention of millions, but little is known about how they affect people. We examine political shocks from an affective science lens, considering people's emotions, how they regulate those emotions, and the motivations those emotions drive. We apply this lens to two political shocks in the United States: the Supreme Court confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh (Study 1; initial N = 430; September-October 2018) and the impeachments and acquittals of President Donald Trump (Study 2; initial N = 979; November 2019-February 2021). We documented how affective processes changed as the events unfolded. As expected, Democrats and Republicans experienced divergent emotional peaks and valleys across time that tracked party "wins" and "losses." Then, we examined how people regulated these emotions and the collective implications of that regulation. Both Republicans' and Democrats' use of the emotion regulation strategy cognitive reappraisal predicted greater positive emotion about these political shocks, which in turn was associated with greater motivation for political action. Compared to Republicans, however, Democrats' use of reappraisal more strongly predicted lower negative emotion about these events, with lower negative emotion in turn predicting lower motivation for action. This party difference suggests that regulating emotion during these shocks may have more strongly impaired Democrats' (vs. Republicans') motivations to act. By examining the consequences of political shocks through an affective science lens, we highlight powerful processes that may shape people's psychologies as well as political landscapes at the national level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Frequency of occurrence is one of the main drivers of children's early vocabularies. However, multiple authors have concluded that it fails to account for one of the most important phenomena in word learning-the order in which children acquire nouns and verbs. Across many languages, there is an early noun bias despite nouns occurring far less frequently than verbs in caregiver speech. In this study we use large-scale caregiver-child corpora and a computational model to reexamine noun and verb learning in English, German, Spanish, and Mandarin. Our results show clear evidence for variations in the strength of the noun bias across languages that can be directly explained by a combination of the number of different nouns and verbs used by caregivers and their sufficient frequency: how often most nouns and verbs need to occur in caregiver speech to be learned. Our findings provide further evidence for frequency shaping early children's language development, in this case mapping onto the relative distributions of nouns and verbs in their mental lexicons. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
