The target article describes social cognitive mechanisms that enable people to make reasonable decisions in situations of interdependent choice where parties have divergent interests. We highlight the need for an integrative program of research on the social-cognitive mechanisms that people use to approximate the reasonableness standard of sound judgment via self-distancing and "inner dialogue" in a variety of decision-making contexts.

Social environments that stigmatize concealable identities increase observers' suspicion that an individual's claimed identity is not their "true" identity. Identity-stigmatizing environments incentivize "closeting" (i.e., concealing) targeted identities, rendering claims to contrasting non-stigmatized identities ambiguous (e.g., selfprotective? self-expressive?). Such ambiguity fosters identity suspicion. In three experimental studies with nine adult American samples (N = 3148), participants expressed more suspicion about an individual's claim to a nonstigmatized concealable identity within an environment that stigmatized (vs. affirmed) the contrasting concealable sexual (d = 0.40) or religious (d = 0.70) identity. Identity suspicion was strongest for individuals with attributes stereotypically associated with the stigmatized identity but persisted even for individuals with attributes stereotypically associated with the non-stigmatized identity (Study 2). Observers' perceived likelihood of identity suspicion predicted their perceived incentive for individuals to conceal attributes stereotypically associated with the stigmatized identity, even to the point of incurring personal costs (Study 1f).

Judgment is often described in terms of an intuitive (System 1) versus deliberative (System 2) dichotomy, yet sound deliberation itself can take more than one form. Building on philosophical traditions and distinctions in treatment of sound judgment in economics and law, we propose that lay conceptions revolve around two distinct types of deliberate judgment: rational, emphasizing rule-based and utility-focused reasoning for well-defined problems, and reasonable, prioritizing context-sensitive and socially conscious reasoning for ill-defined problems. Across four studies in English-speaking Western samples (Studies 1–4; N = 2,130) and a Mandarin-speaking Chinese sample (Study 4; N = 697), participants described their notions of “sound” and “good” judgment, evaluated social scenarios, chose between candidates with distinct judgmental profiles, and categorized non-social objects. Results consistently showed that people view both rationality and reasonableness as common forms of deliberate sound judgment, while treating them as distinct. Participants preferred rational deliberation for algorithmic social roles linked to well-defined tasks and reasonable deliberation for interpretive roles linked to ill-defined tasks. Moreover, framing decisions as rational vs. reasonable influenced whether participants relied on rule-based vs. overall-similarity strategies in classification tasks. These findings suggest that lay understanding of sound judgment does not rely on a single standard of judgmental competence. Instead, people recognize that both rationality and reasonableness are critical for competent deliberation on different types of problems in life.

Systemic racism—the institutional and structural exclusion of and bias against people of color—negatively affects Black Americans. The present research seeks to address how beliefs about the permanence of systemic racism impact Black Americans' intentions to engage in collective action. In Study 1 we validate a scale measuring perceptions of the permanence of systemic racism (PSR). In Study 2, we found that the more that Black Americans perceive systemic racism to be permanent, the lower their intentions to engage in collective action. In Study 3, Black Americans attention to current events during a period when antiracist movement related to their beliefs in the permanence of systemic racism and their intentions to engage in collective action. In Study 4 we find that Black Americans who believe systemic racism is more permanent are more likely to perceive social justice actions and policies as ineffective and therefore indicate lesser intentions to support these efforts, suggesting that believing that systemic racism is permanent may undermine intentions to engage in anti-racist activities through undermining beliefs in their effectiveness.

When photographing moments in their lives, people can use a first-person (capturing the scene as they saw it) or third-person (capturing the scene with themselves in it) perspective. Past research suggests third-person (vs. first-person) images better depict the meaning (vs. physical experience) of events. The current work suggests the use and impact of perspective in personal photography follow this representational function. Across six studies (N = 2,113), we find that the goal to capture meaning (vs. physical experience) causes people to be more likely to use third-person (vs. first-person) photos, that people are reminded more of the meaning (vs. physical experience) when viewing their own actual third-person (vs. first-person) photos, and that people like their photos better when the perspective matched (vs. mismatched) their goal for taking the photo. Discussion focuses on theoretical and practical implications of extending the representational function of imagery perspective to everyday uses of photographic imagery.

Human lives are radically uncertain. Making sense of such uncertainties is the hallmark of wisdom. Sense-making requires narratives, putting them in the centerstage of human everyday decision-making. Yet, what if radical uncertainty is a narrative itself? Moreover, do laypeople always consider such narratives irrational? Here, we pose these questions to enrich a theory of choice under uncertainty.

Many episodes of political repression focus on policing ideological authenticity to distinguish true believers from mere pretenders. For insight into this phenomenon, we review a model wherein concerns about ideological inauthenticity and awareness of external incentives to feign ideological allegiances function to activate a suspicious mindset that leads perceivers to selectively attend to and police inauthenticity in their ideological comrades. We review dispositional and situational factors that amplify authenticity concerns as well as cues perceivers attend to when policing authenticity.

In the opening scene of Angels in America: Perestroika, Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, “the world’s oldest living Bolshevik,” delivers a speech to the Kremlin shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Empire (Kushner, 1996). His speech glorifies the Bolshevik cause and voices disappointment with the Perestroika reformers. At first glance, Prelapsarianov seems like the very caricature of the irrational ideologue; his middle name (“before the Flood”) and last name (“before the Fall”) highlight how he is stubbornly clinging to the founding ideology of a dying system. Yet when we listen to his monologue we can see past the surface appearance of irrationality to find a compelling account of the human need for ideology. Surprisingly for a Marxist-Leninist, the character does not emphasize the value of ideology for advancing class-based material interests; rather, he focuses on how ideology can satisfy deeper cravings for things like meaning, structure, and purpose: “You can’t imagine, when we first read the Classic Texts, when in the dark vexed night of our ignorance and terror the seedwords sprouted and shoved incomprehension aside, when the incredible bloody vegetable struggle up and through into Red Blooming gave us Praxis, True Praxis, True Theory married to Actual Life” (Kushner, 1996, p. 14). He even gives a vivid analogy to suggest how lost we would be without an ideology to shield us from a threatening world: “If the snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos” (p. 14). Prelapsarianov indicates that he is open to changing his mind if only the Perestroika reformers were able to offer a better ideological product to satisfy his needs: “[O]nly show me the Theory, and I will be at the barricades, show me the book of the next Beautiful Theory, and I promise you these blind eyes will see again, just to read it, to devour that text. Show me the words that will reorder the world, or else keep silent” (Kushner, 1996, p. 14). It is just that he is not very impressed by the ideological options that the reformers are offering: “What have you to offer in its place? Market Incentives? American Cheeseburgers? Watered-down Bukharinite stopgap makeshift Capitalism! NEPmen!” (p. 14). So, what on the surface may look like a stubborn, irrational rigidity may actually reflect commitment to the only ideological option that the individual finds reasonably satisfying. Although it is certainly ironic to depict a Bolshevik talking as if he is a customer shopping for the best available ideological product, this scenario has an intriguing resemblance to the rational choice model of ideological selection that Gries, M€ uller, and Jost (this issue) present in the target article. Their model takes seriously the familiar metaphor of a “marketplace of ideas” and combines the tools of rational choice modeling from economics with insights from theory and research on motivated social cognition to provide a formal account of how individuals select an ideological position from whatever options are available to them.

Ideology is a recurrent feature of human societies. Ideologies provide people with frameworks to evaluate the relative legitimacy of different approaches to social order. Such ideologies often involve an opposition between right-leaning ideologies, which tend to justify and maintain the traditional order, and left-leaning ideologies, which advocate for systemic reforms to reduce hierarchies. Social psychological investigations of ideology explore the root motivations and moral foundations of people’s attraction to left versus right ideologies. In particular, such work focuses on understanding the motivational dynamics of ideologies that justify the status quo, promote authoritarian control, and rationalize social dominance hierarchies. Social psychological research also investigates information-processing biases that increase the polarization between left and right. These insights can be applied to bridge divides within ideologically polarized communities.

We explore folk theories of sound judgment across two cultures, with a particular focus on the distinction between rationality and reasonableness and how people apply these concepts in a range of social and non-social contexts. Four studies using English-speaking samples in North America (Studies 1-3; N=1,826) and a Mandarin-speaking sample in China (Study 4; N=659) examine spontaneous descriptions of characteristics of sound judgment, preferences for and perception of agents in different social contexts (varying in demands for rule-based vs. holistic approaches to decision-making), and categorization of non-social objects. People spontaneously considered both rationality and reasonableness as central features of sound judgment and yet assigned unique attributes to these standards when mapping concept networks. In experiments, people favored rational agents for contexts demanding analytic reasoning and reasonable agents for contexts demanding interpretive/holistic reasoning. Moreover, across cultures, people used rule-based categorization for rational judgment and overall-similarity categorization for reasonable judgment of non-social objects.

People have a fascinating capacity to picture their actions from an external vantage point. Much of the research on this third-person imagery has focused on the specific effects it has on cognition due to the elements of episodic experience that it lacks relative to first-person imagery. Other research focuses on the information that the third-person provides that first-person imagery lacks. We propose a more systematic approach that conceptualises how third-person imagery's various effects interrelate due to a common underlying social-cognitive function. Specifically, we outline an integrative model proposing that third-person and first-person imagery cause people to adopt qualitatively distinct processing styles. This model explains many of the diverse effects that have been documented in the literature and helps reconcile seemingly discrepant findings. We conclude with recommendations for strategies to more systematically investigate the functions of visual perspective in mental imagery to build more comprehensive understanding of this phenomenological variable.

Previous theory and research on bounded rationality has emphasized how limited cognitive resources constrain people from making utility maximizing choices. This paper expands the concept of bounded rationality to consider how people’s rationality may be constrained by their internalization of a qualitatively distinct standard for sound judgment, which is commonly labeled reasonableness. In contrast to rationality, the standard of reasonableness provides guidance for making choices in situations that involve balancing incommensurable values and interests or reconciling conflicting points-of-view. We review recent evidence showing that laypeople readily recognize the distinctions between rationality and reasonableness and thus are able to utilize these as distinct standards to inform their everyday decision-making. The fact that people appear to have internalized rationality and reasonableness as distinct standards of sound judgment supports the notion that people’s pursuit of rationality may be bounded by their determination to also be reasonable.

Normative theories of judgment either focus on rationality (decontextualized preference maximization) or reasonableness (pragmatic balance of preferences and socially conscious norms). Despite centuries of work on these concepts, a critical question appears overlooked: How do people's intuitions and behavior align with the concepts of rationality from game theory and reasonableness from legal scholarship? We show that laypeople view rationality as abstract and preference maximizing, simultaneously viewing reasonableness as sensitive to social context, as evidenced in spontaneous descriptions, social perceptions, and linguistic analyses of cultural products (news, soap operas, legal opinions, and Google books). Further, experiments among North Americans and Pakistani bankers, street merchants, and samples engaging in exchange (versus market) economy show that rationality and reasonableness lead people to different conclusions about what constitutes good judgment in Dictator Games, Commons Dilemma, and Prisoner's Dilemma: Lay rationality is reductionist and instrumental, whereas reasonableness integrates preferences with particulars and moral concerns.

People experience life satisfaction when pursuing activities that genuinely interest them. Unfortunately, cultural stereotypes (e.g., "science is not for girls") and preexisting self-beliefs can bias people's memories, thereby hindering their ability to identify the domains that they actually experience as interesting. The current experiments tested a novel method for circumventing this problem by manipulating visual imagery perspective as people recalled their experiences. Four experiments measured (or manipulated) participants' actual experience of interest as they completed a task; the experiments also measured (or manipulated) participants' self-beliefs about their interest in the domain. The experiments then manipulated imagery perspective as participants recalled their interest in the task. Prior research suggests that imagery from an actor's first-person perspective facilitates a bottom-up processing style, whereas imagery from an external third-person facilitates a top-down processing style (Libby & Eibach, 2011). Consistent with this account, across all 4 experiments, first-person imagery (vs. third-person) caused people's recall to be less biased by the top-down influence of their self-beliefs and better aligned with their past experienced interest. The final experiment demonstrated downstream consequences of these effects on female undergraduates' intentions to pursue future activities in a domain (STEM) that negative stereotypes typically might dissuade them from pursuing. Thus, the present results suggest that first-person imagery can be a useful tool to reduce the influence of biased self-beliefs, while increasing sensitivity to past bottom-up experiences during recall. Further, these results hold practical implications for reducing psychological barriers that can keep underrepresented individuals from pursuing interests in counterstereotypical domains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

This study examined the effects of subjective age and attitudes about aging on frequency of sex and interest in sexual activity among middle-aged and older adults. Data were drawn from two waves of the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study (n = 1,170 adults, mean age Time 1 = 53.70 years, SD = 9.08). Regression analyses were used to investigate the effects of subjective age and attitudes about aging on three measures of sexuality: frequency of sex, perceived quality of sexual activity, and interest in sexual activity, over 10 years. The older participants felt and the less positive their views of aging, the less they rated sexual activity as enjoyable over time. Feeling older (though not attitudes about aging) also predicted less interest in sex. Subjective age and beliefs about aging did not have an impact on frequency of sex. Although frequency of sex was not predicted by subjective aging and aging attitudes, the results suggested that subjective age and stereotypic views on aging may shape the experience of sex in later life.

People regularly form expectations about their future, and whether those expectations are positive or negative can have important consequences. So, what determines the valence of people's expectations? Research seeking to answer this question by using an individual-differences approach has established that trait biases in optimistic/pessimistic self-beliefs and, more recently, trait biases in behavioral tendencies to weight one's past positive versus negative experiences more heavily each predict the valence of people's typical expectations. However, these two biases do not correlate, suggesting limits on a purely individual-differences approach to predicting people's expectations. We hypothesize that, because these two biases appear to operate via distinct processes (with self-beliefs operating top-down and valence weighting bias operating bottom-up), to predict a person's expectations on a given occasion, it is also critical to consider situational factors influencing processing style. To test this hypothesis, we investigated how an integral part of future thinking that influences processing style-mental imagery-determines each bias's influence. Two experiments measured valence weighting biases and optimistic/pessimistic self-beliefs, then manipulated whether participants formed expectations using their own first-person visual perspective (which facilitates bottom-up processes) or an external third-person visual perspective (which facilitates top-down processes). Expectations corresponded more with valence weighting biases from the first-person (vs. third-person) but more with self-beliefs from the third-person (vs. first-person). Two additional experiments manipulated valence weighting bias, demonstrating its causal role in shaping expectations (and behaviors) with first-person, but not third-person, imagery. These results suggest the two biases operate via distinct processes, holding implications for interventions to increase optimism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

One way that relationship partners express positive regard — a key variable in relationship success — is through compliments. However, some people are unable to perceive positive regard through compliments. We hypothesized that low self-esteem (LSE) individuals' relatively negative self-theories conflict with the positive information conveyed in compliments. Hence, LSEs' self-verification motives (e.g., Swann, 1997, 2012) may lead LSEs to reject the positive implications of compliments. In an initial study, we demonstrated that LSEs (vs. high self-esteem individuals; HSEs) feel greater self-related concerns and negative affect after receiving compliments, which leads them to devalue those compliments. Drawing on theories of mental construal (e.g., Libby, Valenti, Pfent, & Eibach, 2011), we reasoned that the remedy for such self-theory-driven processes is to adopt a concrete (vs. abstract) mindset: LSEs should be less likely to apply their relatively negative self-theories when they process compliments in a concrete mindset. Across three studies, we used diverse methods to induce participants to experience either a concrete or abstract mindset, and asked them to recall (Studies 2 and 3) or imagine (Study 4) a partner's compliment. We then assessed their perceptions of their partners' regard. Results confirmed that the discrepancy in LSEs' and HSEs' perceptions of positive regard following a compliment from their romantic partners was significantly reduced when a concrete mindset was induced compared to when an abstract mindset (or no mindset, Study 4) was induced.

The more similar the members of a group are to one another, the less reliable their collective judgments are likely to be. One way for individuals to respond to negative feedback from a group may thus be to adjust their perceptions of the group's homogeneity, enabling them to dismiss the feedback as unreliable. We show that individuals appreciate this logic (Study 1) and that they put it to strategic use by regarding the members of a group as more homogenous when the group judges them negatively than when it judges them positively (Studies 2, 3, and 4). We underscore the self-protective nature of this tendency by showing that individuals adjust their perceptions of a group's homogeneity more when they themselves are the target of the group's judgment than when the group judges someone else (Study 4).

Personal identity continuity has been a focus of much philosophical inquiry, yet lay perceptions of identity continuity and their psychological bases are not well understood. We hypothesize that cultural differences in lay beliefs about the fixedness of the world promote different intuitions about identity continuity: People from a society with rigid social systems should perceive more identity discontinuity when a person’s social relationships (vs. internal traits) change, whereas those from a society with more flexible social systems should perceive the reverse. We tested this hypothesis by comparing fixed-world beliefs and perceptions of identity discontinuity in India and the United States. Results of two studies ( N = 863) showed that Indians perceived more identity discontinuity than Americans when relationships (vs. internal traits) changed, which was explained by Indians’ stronger fixed-world beliefs. Moreover, in Study 2, cultural differences in perceived identity discontinuity mediated cultural differences in trust when a target’s relationships (vs. internal traits) changed.