The relationship between the "Big Two" dimensions of social perception – Agency and Communion – is a topic of ongoing debate. In some studies, these dimensions seem independent; in others, they are positively, negatively, or curvilinearly related. In the current paper, we aimed to explain these seemingly contradictory findings through a model of individual differences in the cognitive representations of the Big Two, i.e., lay personality theories of Agency and Communion. We represent the relationship between these two dimensions as an associative network and apply connectionist modeling to simulate impression formation processes. In simulation study 1, we recreated various relationships between Communion and Agency found in the literature. In an experimental study, we proved the model’s predictive validity. In a following simulation study 2, we checked the degree to which the relationship between Agency and Communion can depend on the specific sample of participants.

Source characteristics are a key determinant of preferences and choice in the interpersonal influence process. Extant literature documents the positive impact of similarity between oneself and an opinion provider on advice taking, but much less is known about how dissimilarity affects choice. While earlier research assumed that people ignore or discount the opinions of dissimilar others, we argue that dissimilarity can lead to preference and choice contrast. We posit that perceptions of dissimilarity trigger a more general hypothesis of dissimilarity. As a result, a preference contrast is observed, driven by people's tendency to interpret the provided opinion in a way that confirms their dissimilarity hypothesis. Five studies confirm the emergence of preference and choice contrast due to dissimilarity, and support the proposed mechanism. We discuss the relevance of proper baseline conditions for (dis)similarity research, as well as implications for research within the domain of interpersonal influence.

Most research on emotion recognition focuses on facial expressions. However, people communicate emotional information through bodily cues as well. Prior research on facial expressions has demonstrated that emotion recognition is modulated by top-down processes. Here, we tested whether this top-down modulation generalizes to the recognition of emotions from body postures. We report three studies demonstrating that stereotypes and prejudice about men and women may affect how fast people classify various emotional body postures. Our results suggest that gender cues activate gender associations, which affect the recognition of emotions from body postures in a top-down fashion.

We present a conceptual integration of two major types of social perception models. First, according to social categorization models, perceivers can employ two processes: they either treat other people as individuals (individuation) or as members of social groups (social categorization). Second, according to connectionist models, person perception is driven by a single process of spreading activation between mental representations in a learned associative network. We suggest that social categorization and individuation can be conceptualized as different types of inputs to a single (connectionist) process. Furthermore, we implement this idea in computer simulations and show that it can account for an empirical dissociation between social categorization and individuation despite being a single process model. Overall, this work aims to contribute to the coherence and integration of the theoretical and empirical literature on social cognition.

The present contribution highlights the importance of context while investigating dishonesty in collaborative settings.

Recent findings show that typical faces are judged as more trustworthy than atypical faces. However, it is not clear whether employment of typicality cues in trustworthiness judgment happens across cultures and if these cues are culture specific. In two studies, conducted in Japan and Israel, participants judged trustworthiness and attractiveness of faces. In Study 1, faces varied along a cross-cultural dimension ranging from a Japanese to an Israeli typical face. Own-culture typical faces were perceived as more trustworthy than other-culture typical faces, suggesting that people in both cultures employ typicality cues when judging trustworthiness, but that the cues, indicative of typicality, are culture dependent. Because perceivers may be less familiar with other-culture typicality cues, Study 2 tested the extent to which they rely on available facial information other than typicality, when judging other-culture faces. In Study 2, Japanese and Israeli faces varied from either Japanese or Israeli attractive to unattractive with the respective typical face at the midpoint. For own-culture faces, trustworthiness judgments peaked around own-culture typical face. However, when judging other-culture faces, both cultures also employed attractiveness cues, but this effect was more apparent for Japanese participants. Our findings highlight the importance of culture when considering the effect of typicality on trustworthiness judgments.

It is widely assumed that people tend to “categorize” other people. However, the term “categorization” has been used with qualitatively different underlying definitions in the person perception literature. We present a conceptual analysis in which we disentangle four existing definitions: (a) categorization as representing, (b) categorization as dichotomizing, (c) categorization as organizing, and (d) categorization as grouping. Subsequently, we show that seemingly antagonistic viewpoints in the literature may be reconciled by disentangling these definitions. Furthermore, we argue that disentangling these definitions is vital for theoretical interpretations of (past and future) empirical findings. Overall, our work aims to contribute to the clarity of person perception theories, provide novel perspectives on existing debates, and serve as a stepping stone for more differentiated models of person perception.

Waarom zijn er zo weinig vrouwen in topposities? En waarom vinden mensen vrouwelijke leiders vaak onaardig? In dit artikel wordt onderzoek besproken dat een antwoord probeert te geven op deze vragen. Voor vrouwelijke leidinggevenden kan het lastig zijn om zowel aardig als competent gevonden te worden, maar ook bescheiden mannen hebben het niet altijd even gemakkelijk!

The present research was aimed at investigating whether human-robot interaction (HRI) can be improved by a robot's nonverbal warning signals. Ideally, when a robot signals that it cannot guarantee good performance, people could take preventive actions to ensure the successful completion of the robot's task. In two experiments, participants learned either that a robot's gestures predicted subsequent poor performance, or they did not. Participants evaluated a robot that uses predictive gestures as more trustworthy, understandable, and reliable compared to a robot that uses gestures that are not predictive of their performance. Finally, participants who learned the relation between gestures and performance improved collaboration with the robot through prevention behavior immediately after a predictive gesture. This limits the negative consequences of the robot's mistakes, thus improving the interaction.

Not so long ago, in the early days of experimental psychology, researchers performed their data analyses by hand (or paid people to do these calculations for them).No wonder, they took ample time beforehand to think through which analyses to perform (and especially which not).Exploring data was not really an option.The t value or F value that resulted from the calculations provided a more or less definitive answer.H0 could be rejected or not.During the past decades, we have quickly moved from punch cards, via expensive mainframes, to relatively cheap but powerful personal computers that are fulltime available to individual researchers and students.Nowadays, SPSS and other user-friendly statistical packages make it easy to run all types of analyses, which encourage analyzing your data in every possible way.It is stunningly easy to (re-)run analyses with or without a specific group of participants, with or without an additional between-subject condition, with or without an extra variable in a scale.Indeed, it may be a waste of resources to leave a dataset partly unexplored when SPSS offers all the tools to do so.In many research labs, analyzing results has shifted from spending days to do confirmatory analyses by hand, to spending days engaging in all kinds of data analyses to see "what's in the data."Is this a bad thing?We do not think so, necessarily.Given that you know what you are doing in SPSS, you can learn a lot from exploring a dataset.However, there clearly are risks (see Simmons, Nelson & Simonsohn, 2011), which we will revisit later.This contribution is a commentary on "Playing with Data-Or How to Discourage Questionable Research Practices and Stimulate Researchers to Do Things Right" by Sijtsma (2015).In his paper, Klaas Sijtsma makes the important point that prevention of questionable research practices may be more important than detection.He suggests two policy measures.First, make research data and research materials publicly available.Second, encourage researchers to consult methodologists or statisticians for help and a second opinion.In this commentary, we will not reiterate the points made by Klaas Sijtsma.We support his analysis and his policy recommendations.Making research data and research materials publicly available and consulting methodologists and statisticians will help in increasing the transparency of the data analysis phase of the empirical research cycle within psychology.Currently, in too many cases, this phase is the exclusive domain of (small groups of) individual researchers and their personal computers.However, making the data analysis phase transparent to others will not prevent scientific fraud.A person who willingly aims to fool others always will be able to do so, also when sharing (well-faked) data.Nevertheless, it will help in reducing the errors researchers

It is widely assumed among psychologists that people spontaneously form trustworthiness impressions of newly encountered people from their facial appearance. However, most existing studies directly or indirectly induced an impression formation goal, which means that the existing empirical support for spontaneous facial trustworthiness impressions remains insufficient. In particular, it remains an open question whether trustworthiness from facial appearance is encoded in memory. Using the 'who said what' paradigm, we indirectly measured to what extent people encoded the trustworthiness of observed faces. The results of 4 studies demonstrated a reliable tendency toward trustworthiness encoding. This was shown under conditions of varying context-relevance, and salience of trustworthiness. Moreover, evidence for this tendency was obtained using both (experimentally controlled) artificial and (naturalistic varying) real faces. Taken together, these results suggest that there is a spontaneous tendency to form relatively stable trustworthiness impressions from facial appearance, which is relatively independent of the context. As such, our results further underline how widespread influences of facial trustworthiness may be in our everyday life. (PsycINFO Database Record

The present research examined the hypothesis that supernatural agency attributions underlie the relation between religion and forgiveness. In two experiments a priming procedure was used to make religious concepts temporarily more salient. In Experiment 1, a religion prime marginaly enhanced forgiveness but did not enhance supernatural attributions, compared to a control group. However, correlational support was found for the hypothesis that supernatural attributions were associated with more forgiveness, less punishment and less responsibility of the offender. In Experiment 2, it was attempted to enhance supernatural attributions by first manipulating participants’ sense of control (high vs. low) before presenting a religion prime. As expected, in the low control condition, religious priming enhanced the perceived likelihood that a higher power had an influence on violent situations, and enhanced participants’ forgiveness toward the offenders. Importantly, mediation analysis further supported the existence of a relation between supernatural agency attributions and participants’ ability to forgive.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES:Most blood donors stop donating blood at the beginning of their donor career. This intervention study aims to increase first-time return behaviour of newly registered donors using implementation intentions and explicit commitment techniques.MATERIALS AND METHODS:Newly registered donors (N = 937) received an extra information sheet during their medical check-up wherein implementation intentions and explicit commitment techniques were tested. Donors were randomly assigned to either the control condition, information sheet only condition, information sheet with implementation intentions condition, information sheet with explicit commitment condition, or information sheet with both implementation intentions and explicit commitment condition. Logistic regression analyses examined actual first-time return behaviour after an appeal to donate blood.RESULTS:Donors in the information sheet with both implementation intentions and explicit commitment condition had an 11.5% higher return rate than donors in the control condition. Logistic regression analyses revealed that the information sheet with both implementation intentions and explicit commitment condition significantly increased the odds on return behaviour compared with the control condition (OR = 1.65, 95%CI = 1.08-2.50).CONCLUSION:This study successfully increased actual first-time return behaviour of newly registered donors by using both implementation intentions and explicit commitment techniques.

A central idea in social psychology is that people can construe other people in terms of two types of mental representations: social categories (e.g. male) and attributes (e.g. intelligent). It is assumed that assigning a person to a social category (i.e. social categorization) is one of the most important causes of stereotyping. However, no theory has yet successfully explicated the properties that distinguish social categories from attributes and how those distinct properties may cause stereotyping. We show that an interpretation of social categories as mental representations that strongly exclude other mental representations (i.e. ’excluders’) can explain how social categories may cause stereotyping. In addition, we present computer simulations that implement the assumed principles in a connectionist model where social categories are interpreted as nodes with strong inhibitory links. We argue that our model solves fundamental ambiguities in social categorization theories and unifies these theories with connectionist models of person perception.

The role of face typicality in face recognition is well established, but it is unclear whether face typicality is important for face evaluation. Prior studies have focused mainly on typicality's influence on attractiveness, although recent studies have cast doubt on its importance for attractiveness judgments. Here, we argue that face typicality is an important factor for social perception because it affects trustworthiness judgments, which approximate the basic evaluation of faces. This effect has been overlooked because trustworthiness and attractiveness judgments have a high level of shared variance for most face samples. We show that for a continuum of faces that vary on a typicality-attractiveness dimension, trustworthiness judgments peak around the typical face. In contrast, perceived attractiveness increases monotonically past the typical face, as faces become more like the most attractive face. These findings suggest that face typicality is an important determinant of face evaluation.

People living with HIV are a stigmatized group in our society, especially homosexual people living with HIV. One of the behavioural manifestations of stigmatization is an increased interpersonal distance kept during social interactions. Immersive virtual environment technology enables the experimental study of social interactions in an accurate and relatively unobtrusive manner. Using a virtual hospital room, we measured to what extent diagnosis (HIV, cancer or broken leg) and sexual orientation (homosexual or heterosexual) were related to approach behaviour (based on the interpersonal distance and the speed of approach), and the degree patients were looked at (as was obtained from an additional exploration of our head orientation data). Moreover, implicit and explicit attitudes were predicted to moderate this relationship. Participants (N=50) were healthy, heterosexual students. A main effect of diagnosis revealed larger interpersonal distances from patients with HIV than from patients with cancer. Also, an interaction effect demonstrated that distances were largest when the HIV patient was homosexual. Furthermore, a main effect of diagnosis showed that HIV and cancer patients were approached more slowly than broken leg patients, an effect that was larger for HIV than for cancer patients. In addition, head orientation analyses revealed that patients with HIV were relatively looked at' more often as well as relatively looked away from' less often than patients with cancer and patients with a broken leg. None of these effects however were found to be moderated by implicit and explicit attitudes. These findings provide behavioural evidence for the stigmatization of people living with HIV and homosexuals with HIV in particular. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cognitive theories of religion suggest that belief in supernatural agents finds a basis in the human tendency to (over) detect agency in the environment. The present research investigated whether activation of religious concepts enhances the attribution of agency in natural phenomena. In two experiments we administered a religion prime (a religion questionnaire in Experiment 1; a subliminal God prime in Experiment 2) and measured the amount of intentionality and free will that participants ascribed to images of natural phenomena and agents. In both experiments participants ascribed more agency to natural phenomena if they had been presented with a religion prime. Item analyses for both experiments furthermore revealed that the effect of religious priming was most pronounced for items of natural phenomena that were perceived as beyond personal control. These findings provide empirical support for the hypothesized relation between religion and agency detection.