Academic Summary: In the realm of innovation studies, examining innovation responses-encompassing both adoption and resistance-has been a central focus for more than six decades. However, most innovation studies only focus on the behavioral dimension of these responses and simply equate resistance with non-adoption. We suggest that seeing resistance as the absence of adoption results in a flawed understanding of innovation responses, neglecting important negative aspects. Using insights from two psychological theories, we provide a theoretically advanced and more comprehensive conceptualization of innovation adoption and innovation resistance. More specifically, we suggest that resistance and adoption involve emotions and cognitions alongside behaviors and explain why adoption and resistance are distinct phenomena. Based on our new conceptualization, we present a typology of innovation responses that provides a more nuanced insight into how actors, such as citizens or consumers, respond to innovation. Finally, we explain the consequences of this perspective for innovation theory development, future research, and innovation practitioners. Managerial Summary: Innovation resistance is a persistent challenge, frequently hampering successful innovation introduction and causing significant financial and operational difficulties for companies. Understanding resistance is therefore critical for innovation managers. This article clarifies what resistance is, helps managers identify it, and distinguish it from other innovation responses. First, we argue that managers need to not only focus on behavioral resistance to innovation, but also consider the cognitive and emotional dimensions of resistance. Failing to do so may create blind spots, because the emotional and cognitive dimensions of resistance can signal underlying problems that actors have with the innovations and that later on may have behavioral consequences. Second, and importantly, we argue that managers need to distinguish resistance from the absence of adoption, as preventing resistance requires a distinct approach from stimulating adoption (or preventing non-adoption). We provide a practical 2 & times; 2 typology that helps practitioners to recognize the four distinct innovation response types: pure adoption, pure resistance, indifference, and ambivalence. Finally, we offer actionable strategies for addressing each response type, enabling managers to manage innovation processes more effectively.

Enabling people to reduce their consumption of unhealthy appetitive products can improve their health. Over the last decades, progress has been made by uncovering new ways to change behavior toward appetitive products without feedback incentives (e.g., reward or punishment, as in feedback-driven reinforcement learning), but instead by cueing motor responses (e.g., go vs. no go) toward these products in cognitive training tasks. However, it is unclear how this nonreinforced learning compares to reinforcement learning. Moreover, recent work on reinforcement learning has uncovered a basic learning mechanism, the action-valence asymmetry, which points to the possibility that reward and punishment learning may not always outperform learning without any external reinforcement. Here, we report two well-powered preregistered experiments (experiment 1a: N = 72; experiment 1b: N = 81) that examined when reinforcement learning outperforms nonreinforced learning in modifying people's preferences for food. Our findings show that reinforcement learning notably surpasses nonreinforced learning, but only when active responses (go) are rewarded, and inactions (no-go) are reinforced by avoiding punishments. These results shed light on interventions that combine rewards and punishments to facilitate changes in food preferences.

People hold their opinions and evaluations of objects with varying degrees of certainty. Understanding the nature of evaluation certainty is important, as it is a strong predictor of behavior. Several factors that impact certainty have been identified in past research, including value positivity, value extremity, and consistency in value-relevant evidence. However, whether these factors contribute uniquely to certainty or are statistically confounded remains unknown. The present work discusses four experiments (total N = 372) to disentangle these factors by leveraging the phenomenon of ensemble perception. We created pairs of ensembles (food baskets and retail good bundles) that are experimentally equalized on value positivity, value extremity, or evidence consistency, while systematically varying in evaluation certainty or evidence consistency. The results show independent contributions of value positivity and value extremity, but not evidence consistency, on ensemble evaluation certainty. Neither of the equalized factors fully accounts for evaluation certainty in the created ensembles, suggesting that it is a complex construct influenced by multiple independent factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Every year, billions of people celebrate Christmas all over the world—a religious event that is characterized by transient yet considerable changes in people’s direct social, cultural, and demographic environment. Drawing upon situational models, the present research investigated change in implicit bias towards racial, religious, and sexual minority groups over the Christmas period in a sample of 4,046,637 White US Americans. We find that Christmas acts as an ambiguous prime, increasing implicit bias towards Blacks, Arabs, and people with darker skin tone and decreasing it towards Muslims, Jews, gays, and lesbians. We propose a tolerance-priming based Christmas spirit hypothesis to explain the observed decreases and argue that threat-based associations with racial out-groups are responsible for the observed increases. Our findings provide evidence for a situation-dominated interactionist model of implicit bias.

Recognising emotional expressions is important for successful social interactions. Prior research has demonstrated that emotion recognition is influenced by evaluative associations people have with different social categories. Here, we systematically investigate whether reinforcement learning can modify social category biases in emotion recognition. Previous research has shown that reinforcement learning is a promising method for altering evaluative associations. In Experiment 1 (N = 40), we replicated that the Happy Face Advantage is influenced by social category membership. People were faster at recognising happiness as happiness than anger as anger⁠ for White - Dutch faces, while no difference was found for Moroccan - Dutch faces. In Experiments 2-3 (Ntotal = 144), we used a reinforcement learning go/no-go task, in which people learned to act to images of Moroccan - Dutch faces to obtain rewards and to not act to images of White - Dutch faces to avoid punishments before participating in the emotion recognition task. Results show that reinforcement learning influences emotion recognition. Instead of the commonly observed interaction effect between social category and expression valence (e.g. in Experiment 1 and previous work), we consistently found a main effect of valence on emotion recognition. These findings suggest that aligning (in)actions with rewards/punishments changes emotion recognition.

Safety villages are interventions that aim to boost children's knowledge and behaviour regarding risk-taking behaviours and their consequences via an experiential learning approach. In safety villages, children experience scenarios involving risks that resemble real-life situations. We investigated the extent to which desirable learning outcomes from a single-session safety village visit are visible outside the safety village context. In a well-powered quasi-experimental preregistered field study, we compared students (aged 11-13) who received experiential safety education to a control group of students who had not yet received the education on three important learning outcomes: Knowledge-application, risk-taking behaviour and general risk-taking tendencies. Data were collected outside of the safety village environment, before or after the visit, and without explicit reminders of the visit. Results show students who received experiential safety education outperformed those who did not yet receive experiential education on knowledge-application and reduced risk-taking behaviours. We found no differences on general risk-taking tendencies. These results show a single visit to a safety village visit can reduce risk-taking of risks that were experienced in the village, but not general risk-taking tendencies. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

Although social interactions are ubiquitous, people often choose not to interact with others-for example, people may choose to not greet a stranger, to not talk to a colleague at work, or to ignore a text message from a friend. Here, we systematically investigate how people's actions, inactions, and their consequences (rewards and punishments) affect impressions. In four preregistered experiments (N = 240), we used a reinforcement learning go/no-go task, in which people learned to act or not act to images of fractals/faces to obtain rewards or avoid punishments. Findings replicated the action-valence asymmetry in learning (Experiments 1-4): People more easily learned to act when acting led to the attainment of rewards (vs. the avoidance of punishments), while people learned inactions more easily when these inactions led to the avoidance of punishments (vs. the attainment of rewards). Our experiments demonstrate that these action-valence asymmetries extend to social stimuli (Experiment 2 ingroup faces; Experiment 3 outgroup faces; Experiment 4 ingroup and outgroup faces) and that they affect subsequent impressions. That is, people evaluated faces most positively when acting had previously led to the attainment of rewards; people evaluated faces most negatively when not acting had previously led to the avoidance of punishment. We discuss our findings in light of the approach-avoidance literature. This work has implications for our understanding of the role of inactions in social contexts: It shows evidence that inactions lead to less positive impressions than actions, over and above the effect of punishment signals.

Across two studies, we evaluated the accuracy of five models in predicting the relationship between Agency and Communion at the level of the individual rather than at the level of the sample. Unlike previous research that focused on group-level relations of these dimensions, our analysis investigated whether individual data aligns with the predictions of the five models translated to the individual level. To assess performance, we coded the correspondence between each participant's response pattern and the patterns predicted by the models. Despite growing consensus on the necessity of predictions in psychological research, the question of how to approach prediction remains largely unresolved. Our research explores this question and reveals that at least two out of five models previously supported failed to accurately represent the data. We believe this conclusion is provocative and advances the understanding of the relationship between Agency and Communion by clarifying the models' space.

The second coming of the Ku Klux Klan popularized the Klan and its ideas in the early 1920s, terrorizing Black American, their allies, and others deemed un-American. This article investigates the extent to which the cultural legacy of racial hatred of the Klan has persisted over the years. We use data from large online databases, multiverse analyses, and spatial models to evaluate whether regions with more historical Klan activity show higher levels of modern-day racial bias, and more modern-day White Supremacist activity. We find that regions with more Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1920s show higher levels of modern White Supremacist activity but, unexpectedly, lower levels of modern implicit and explicit racial bias. We discuss the implications of these findings for models linking historical events with present-day attitudes and behavior, and for situational models of bias more broadly.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in response to the murder of George Floyd highlighted the lingering structural inequalities faced by Black people in the United States. In the present research, we investigated whether these protests led to reduced implicit and explicit racial bias among White U.S. Americans. Combining data from Project Implicit, Armed Conflict Location Event Data Project (ACLED), Google Trends, and the American Community survey, we observed rapid drops in implicit and explicit measures of racial bias after the onset of the protests. However, both types of racial bias slowly increased again over time as (attention to) BLM faded. We use directed acyclic graphs to show under which assumptions causal inferences are warranted. We discuss our results in light of situational models of bias, their implications for protest movements, and raise questions about when and how social norms play a role in large-scale attitude change.

OBJECTIVE In most countries, vaccine uptake is a voluntary decision. If people experience threats to this freedom, for example, by pro-vaccination media campaigns or government pressure, psychological reactance may be induced. To regain freedom, the opposite behaviour (vaccine refusal) may become more attractive, forming a vaccination barrier. It remains unclear how state reactance fluctuates and how it relates to vaccination intention versus behaviour. Therefore, this pre-registered longitudinal study aimed to gain insight in the changes in state reactance during a COVID-19 vaccination programme and its relationship with vaccine uptake. METHODS A representative sample of Dutch adults under 60 completed questionnaires before being eligible for vaccination, shortly before they were invited for vaccination, and after the opportunity for vaccination. RESULTS Data were analysed using regression analyses (N = 1411). Reactance did not change as hypothesised, but remained stable over time. As hypothesised, reactance predicted lower subsequent vaccination intention. Controlling for intentions, however, reactance did not predict vaccine uptake. Furthermore, reactance predicted lower decision confidence about vaccination, except for people who strongly opposed vaccination. CONCLUSION Reactance has a sustained role in anticipation of a vaccination decision. Although reactance seems to affect the process towards the decision, this does not determine the final choice.

Establishing behavior change toward appetitive foods can be crucial to improve people's health. Food go/no-go training (GNG), in which people respond to some food items and not to other food items depending on the presentation of a go or no-go cue, is a means to establish behavior change. GNG changes the perceived value of food items and food consumption. After GNG, no-go items are rated as less attractive than go and/or untrained items, an empirical phenomenon called the NoGo-devaluation-effect. This effect is not always found, however. One theory-based explanation for these inconsistent results may be found in the timing of the go and no-go cues, which is also inconsistent across studies. Hence, in the present work we conducted two experiments to examine the possible role of go and no-go cue presentation timing in eliciting the NoGo-devaluation-effect. In Experiment 1, we presented the food items before the presentation of go/no-go cues, whereas we reversed this order in Experiment 2. As predicted, the NoGo-devaluation-effect was obtained in Experiment 1. This effect was absent in Experiment 2. Moreover, recognition memory for stimulus-action contingencies moderated the devaluation effect in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2. These results show that NoGo devaluation is dependent on the timing of the NoGo cue, which has theoretical and applied implications for understanding how and when go/no-go training influences food consumption. We propose that the value of food items is updated during go/no-go training to minimize prediction errors, and that this updating process is boosted by attention.

Consistently not responding to stimuli during go/no-go training leads to lower evaluations of these NoGo stimuli. How this NoGo-devaluation-effect can be explained has remained unclear. Here, we ran three experiments to test the hypothesis that people form stimulus-stop-associations during the training, which predict the strength of the devaluation-effect. In Experiment 1, we tried to simultaneously measure the stimulus-stop-associations and NoGo-devaluation, but we failed to find these effects. In Experiment 2, we measured NoGo-devaluation with established procedures from previous work, and stimulus-stop-associations with a novel separate task. Results revealed a clear NoGo-devaluation-effect, which remained visible across multiple rating blocks. Interestingly, this devaluation-effect disappeared when stimulus-stop-associations were measured before stimulus evaluations, and there was no evidence supporting the formation of the stimulus-stop-associations. In Experiment 3, we found evidence for the acquisition of stimulus-stop-associations using an established task from previous work, but this time we found no subsequent NoGo-devaluation-effect. The present research suggests that the NoGo-devaluation-effect and stimulus-stop-associations can be found with standard established procedures, but that these effects are very sensitive to alterations of the experimental protocol. Furthermore, we failed to find evidence for both effects within the same experimental protocol, which has important theoretical and applied implications.

The success of new technologies such as contact tracing mobile applications depends on large-scale end-user adoption. However, the implementation may encounter resistance, since the uncertainty surrounding novel technology may raise anxiety, and persuasion efforts to promote use can evoke reactance. Thereby, anxiety and reactance are two forms of resistance to new technology. Little is known about the role of resistance over the course of the innovation implementation process, in a social environment where technology functionality depends on adoption by others. Therefore, this four-wave longitudinal study followed adoption of the Dutch COVID-19 contact tracing app during four months (N = 1120), and explored the time dynamics and interplay of reactance to freedom threat, anxiety, and perceived social norms on app use. Mixed-effect analyses showed that anxiety and, subtly, reactance decreased with time; initial freedom threat predicted later reactance. App use related negatively to reactance and anxiety; and positively to positive social norms. Over time, the norm effect was mediated by lower reactance and anxiety. The results imply that resistance is pervasive, suggest that self-perceived app use norms may be key to overcoming resistance to new applications, and demonstrate that theories predicting innovation or technology acceptance benefit from studying predictors over time.

Inhibitory-control training can change food consumption. Here, we review work on one specific inhibitory-control training, namely go/no-go training (GNG), with the aim of clarifying how this training changes behavior. Recent work suggests it is unlikely that GNG trains general inhibitory control or even food-specific inhibition. Instead, recent research suggests GNG changes the value of food items. These findings call for theorizing on how a training task in which people merely respond or not respond to food items without any external reinforcement can impact the value of these items. We propose the value of trained food items is updated during GNG by action and inaction decisions. This value-updating account is descriptively accurate and generates new research questions and testable hypotheses to better understand the underlying mechanisms of GNG. The account also prompts questions about how everyday NoGo decisions can stimulate moderate consumption patterns.

The accurate and swift decoding of emotional expressions from faces is fundamental for social communication. Yet, emotion perception is prone to error. For example, the ease with which emotions are perceived is affected by stereotypes (Bijlstra et al., 2010). Moreover, the introduction of face masks mandates in response to the Covid-19 pandemic additionally impedes accurate emotion perception by introducing ambiguity to the emotion perception process. Predictive coding frameworks of visual perception predict that in such situations of increased ambiguity of the sensory input (i.e., faces with masks), people increasingly rely on their prior beliefs (i.e., their stereotypes). Using specification curve analysis, we tested this prediction across two experiments, featuring different social categories (Study 1: Gender; Study 2: Ethnicity) and corresponding emotion stereotypes. We found no evidence that face masks increase reliance on prior stereotypes. In contrast, in Study 1 (but not in Study 2), we found preliminary evidence that face masks decrease reliance on prior stereotypes. We discuss these findings in relation to predictive coding frameworks and dual process models and emphasize the need for up-to-date analytic methods in social cognition research.

Objectives The current study assessed whether trait mindfulness relates to social decision making as increased acceptance rates towards offers in the Ultimatum Game. Mindfulness has been associated to a reduction in emotional reactivity and an increase in emotion regulation once intense emotions do occur. Therefore, we reasoned that trait mindfulness would predict acceptance in the Ultimatum Game, perhaps even in case of unfair offers. Methods In two online studies we assessed whether trait mindfulness positively predicts acceptance of offers in the Ultimatum Game among community samples (study 1 N = 107; study 2 N = 118). In study 2, we also assessed participants’ emotional reactions to offers prior to their decision to accept or reject. Results Whereas study 1 indeed showed a significant positive relation between trait mindfulness and acceptance of offers (OR = 2.01, p = .05), study 2 did not show this relation (OR = .91, p = .81). Also, the results of study 2 showed that trait mindfulness may moderate emotional responses to offers ( β = − .06, p = .03). Yet, analyses of the pooled data indicated no relation between trait mindfulness and acceptance of offers ( p < .15). Conclusions Our research provides mixed support regarding the association between trait mindfulness and behavioral acceptance of offers in the Ultimatum Game. We discuss the need for more fine-grained examinations of when and why mindfulness should lead to acceptance of unfairness, and if and when mindfulness would lead to wise responding in social exchange situations.

The clothing industry is one of the biggest polluters impacting the environment. Set in a sustainable environment, this study addresses whether certain ambient odors can influence the purchase of second-hand clothing. This study fulfilled three aims, increasing methodological, statistical, and theoretical rigor. First, replicating the finding that fresh laundry odor can boost purchasing behavior in a second-hand store-this time in a larger sample, using a fully counterbalanced design, in a pre-registered study. Second, assessing the effectiveness of another cleanliness priming control condition (citrus odor) unrelated to the products at hand, to test hypotheses from a hedonic vs. utilitarian model. Third, combining questionnaire data tapping into psychological processes with registered sales. The results (316 questionnaires, 6781 registered transactions) showed that fresh laundry odor significantly increased the amount of money spent by customers compared to the no smell condition, (replication) and compared to citrus odor (extension). Arguably, fresh laundry odor boosts the utilitarian value of the product at (second) hand by making it smell like non-used clothing, ultimately causing customers to purchase far greater amounts in this sustainable setting.

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.

We investigated the influence of framed norm messages about food consumption on motivation to consume, and actual consumption of, healthy and unhealthy foods. We proposed that the effects of positive and negative message frames would vary by the type of underlying norms (i.e., injunctive, descriptive). More specifically, based on information processing theories, it was expected that injunctive norms would be more effective when framed negatively compared with positively, while the opposite was expected for descriptive norms. In both experiments, participants were randomly assigned to one of four framed social norm conditions or a no-norm control condition. In Experiment 1, motivation to consume healthy and unhealthy foods was assessed by means of both indirect and self-report measures. In Experiment 2, actual food consumption was assessed. In both experiments, the predicted interaction was found. Results show that injunctive norms benefit from a negative (vs. positive) frame, while preliminary evidence suggests the opposite for descriptive norms.