Five studies (N = 2,339) found that men and women, especially if high on benevolent sexism, engage in dependency-oriented cross-gender helping relations in domestic tasks. Study 1 revealed that, in response to hypothetical scenarios of cross-gender helping interactions in traditionally feminine domains (e.g., cooking a dish), men's benevolent sexism correlated with their intentions to seek dependency-oriented help (direct assistance, rather than tools for autonomous coping) from women, and women's benevolent sexism correlated with their intentions to provide dependency-oriented help to men. Study 2 revealed that the association between benevolent sexism and (a) men's intentions to seek, and (b) women's intentions to provide dependency-oriented help occurs in cross-gender, but not in same-gender, interactions. Studies 3 and 4 replicated these patterns while examining help-seeking (among men) and help-providing (among women) behavior in a test about common domestic tasks (e.g., how to clean a burned pot). Study 5 focused on heterosexual couples, revealing that when encountering difficulties in traditionally feminine domestic tasks (e.g., getting the kids ready for kindergarten): (a) men, especially if high on benevolent sexism, reported seeking more dependency-oriented help from their partners than women; (b) women, especially if high on benevolent sexism, reported providing more dependency-oriented help to their partners than men; and (c) engagement in dependency-oriented helping predicted an unequal division of household labor. We discuss these findings in light of previous theorizing and research on the social psychological barriers that reinforce men's relatively low involvement in the domestic sphere. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

People’s automatic (unintentional, uncontrollable, and efficient) preference between social groups often determines their automatic preference between unknown individual members of these groups, a prominent example for automatic prejudice. What happens when the person making the judgment has long known the target individuals? Practice might automatize the deliberate judgment of the individuals. Then, if deliberate judgment is non-prejudiced, automatic prejudice might decrease. In 29 studies (total N = 4,907), we compared preferences between a famous member of a dominant social group and a famous member of a stigmatized social group on indirect measures of evaluation that were developed to measure automatic preference and on self-report measures. In most studies, we chose pairs based on prior self-reported preference for the member of the stigmatized group. The measures showed discrepancy, with indirect measures suggesting an automatic preference for the member of the dominant group. We replicated these results with various target individuals, two pairs of social groups (Black/White, Old/Young), two indirect measures, and in two countries (Studies 1-23). The indirectly-measured pro-dominant preference was stronger when visual characteristics of the group were present rather than absent (Studies 24-25), suggesting a stronger effect of group characteristics on automatic than on deliberate preference between the individuals. On self-report and indirect measures, the preferences between individuals were related to the preferences between their groups (Studies 26-27), yet also to individuating information (Studies 28-29). Our results suggest that group evaluation plays a central role in the automatic evaluation of familiar (and not only novel) members of stigmatized groups.

In this commentary, we welcome Schimmack's reanalysis of Bar-Anan and Vianello's multitrait multimethod (MTMM) data set, and we highlight some limitations of both the original and the secondary analyses. We note that when testing the fit of a confirmatory model to a data set, theoretical justifications for the choices of the measures to include in the model and how to construct the model improve the informational value of the results. We show that making different, theory-driven specification choices leads to different results and conclusions than those reported by Schimmack (this issue, p. 396). Therefore, Schimmack's reanalyses of our data are insufficient to cast doubt on the Implicit Association Test (IAT) as a measure of automatic judgment. We note other reasons why the validation of the IAT is still incomplete but conclude that, currently, the IAT is the best available candidate for measuring automatic judgment at the person level.

According to some impression formation theories, when people perceive an individual member of a social group, the information about the group is activated more spontaneously and easily than information specific to the individual. Therefore, the judgment of individual group members might be more sensitive to group information (relatively to individuating information) the more automatic (fast, unintentional, and effortless) the judgment is. We tested this premise with a minimalistic impression formation paradigm that provided evaluative information about eight individuals and assigned them to two novel groups. In one group, three members behaved positively, and one member behaved negatively. In the other group, three members behaved negatively and one positively. In seven main experiments and 12 auxiliary experiments, we examined whether people’s automatic (but not deliberate) judgment of the atypical group members would be determined by the valence of the typical behavior in the group (group information) or the valence of the typical behaviors of that person (individuating information). Individuating information had a larger effect on automatic and deliberate evaluation than group information. The relative effect of group information (vs. individuating information) was slightly stronger on automatic than on deliberate judgment. This discrepancy increased when we increased the salience of group membership upon judgment, or when participants belonged to one of the groups. Our findings suggest that, inherently, automatic judgment of individuals is only slightly more biased than deliberate judgment by group information. Yet, under circumstances that are common in everyday life, that bias increases in automatic but not in deliberate judgment.

Evaluative Conditioning (EC) effects refer to changes in the liking of a neutral (conditioned) stimulus (CS) due to pairing with an affective (unconditioned) stimulus (US). Some research found that EC effects are resistant to presentations of the CS without the US, whereas other studies found evidence for extinction effects. A recent study found extinction of EC only when participants rated the CS before and after the CS-only presentations, but not when CS evaluation was measured once or indirectly with the Evaluative Priming task. In two experiments (total N= 2,181), we found no evidence that indirectly measured evaluation is sensitive to extinction, using an indirect evaluation measure with high sensitivity – the Implicit Association Test. However, unlike previous research, we found that evaluation of any stimuli (and not only the CS) before the CS-only presentations decreases self-reported EC effects. Our results are compatible with the conclusion that the extinction of EC is limited to evaluation measured directly. We discuss the theoretical implications of these results, and conclude that the specific conditions (and mechanisms) that change the direct evaluative response are yet to be clarified.

Neutral "conditioned" stimuli (CS) acquire the valence of valent "unconditioned" stimuli (US) after the stimuli are paired. This effect has often been attributed to a low-level mechanism that occurs automatically, even without awareness of the CS-US pairing. However, recent research has failed to support this assumption. In three experiments (N = 1,541), we tested the possibility of attitude formation without awareness of pairing with a US using a sensory preconditioning paradigm. Previous research with that paradigm found attitude formation with no retrospective awareness of contingencies. However, retrospectively reported unawareness might be due to forgetting. Another weakness of retrospective measures is that people might show accurate memory of the CS-US pairing based on their evaluation of the CS. Our procedure circumvented these weaknesses. Participants observed co-occurrences between neutral nonwords and neutral faces, followed by a nonword-face co-occurrence memory test. After that test, participants observed co-occurrences between the faces and affective stimuli, indirectly pairing the nonwords with the affective stimuli. At that time, if participants previously failed to remember with which face a certain nonword co-occurred, then they were unaware of the indirect pairing of that nonword with affective stimuli. We found that indirect pairing influenced the evaluation of the nonwords only when memory for the nonword-face contingency was accurate. Contrary to past research, accurate memory in the present research cannot be explained by an effect of the change in evaluation on memory. Our results suggest that contingency awareness is necessary for the effect of stimulus pairing on evaluation.

We hypothesized that aversion to ambiguous situations and overreliance on bodily cues are positively related to people's tendency to make erroneous attributions of internal experiences. To test this prediction, we examined the relationship between the priming effect in the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) and two personality traits: need for cognitive closure (NFCC) and body awareness (BA). Across four studies (total n = 3,538), priming in the AMP was weakly but reliably related to NFCC and BA. Further, direct ratings of the primes used in the AMP were positively related to NFCC and BA, and might partially explain the relation between the personality traits and priming in the AMP. The results advance knowledge about the AMP and the personality traits related to it, as well as about misattribution.

We suggest that there is an association in people's minds between the vertical position of a stimulus (up vs. down) and its construal level (high vs. low), which results in bi-directional effects between the dimensions. In Study 1, participants exhibited both implicit and explicit associations between the dimensions. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that stimulus construal level affects its vertical position, with participants showing a preference for positioning abstract concepts higher up and concrete concepts lower down. Study 4 testified to the effect of vertical positioning of information on its level of construal. Behaviors presented at the top of a display (more than those presented at the bottom) were construed in terms of why they are performed rather than how to perform them. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

We suggest that disability is metaphorically represented in people?s minds as heaviness. In three studies we demonstrate the existence of a mental association between physical weight (light vs. heavy) and disability (non-disabled vs. disabled) as well as its bi-directional causal effects (from weight to disability and from disability to weight). In Study 1 (N?=?250), participants exhibited the hypothesized association between the dimensions on both a direct and an indirect measure. Study 2 (N?=?191) demonstrated that perceived weight affects the perceived severity of a disability, with the weight of a clipboard held by participants affecting perceptions of a target person?s stutter or limp. Study 3 (N?=?103) testified to the reverse effect: participants who heard a monologue by someone with a pronounced (as opposed to mild) stutter perceived the clipboard they were holding as heavier and estimated its weight in grams as higher. Our findings may suggest that experiences of weight affect both estimates of the prevalence of disabilities in others and in the self as well as level of identification with the disabled. Theoretical implications are discussed as well.

We suggest that there is an association in people’s minds between the vertical position of a stimulus (up vs. down) and its construal level (high vs. low), which results in bi-directional effects between the dimensions. In Study 1, participants exhibited both implicit and explicit associations between the dimensions. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that stimulus construal level affects its vertical position, with participants showing a preference for positioning abstract concepts higher up and concrete concepts lower down. Study 4 testified to the effect of vertical positioning of information on its level of construal. Behaviors presented at the top of a display (more than those presented at the bottom) were construed in terms of why they are performed rather than how to perform them. Theoretical and practical implications are

Simple first is our name for a set of hypotheses that we have found useful in our research on evaluative learning. The hypotheses are: (1) It is easier to encode and retrieve information that two concepts are linked than information about how they are linked; (2) It is easier to store and retrieve information than to make an inference based on that information; (3) When people encounter an object and memory activates valence that is mentally linked to that object, they consider the activation valid evidence that the activated valence characterizes the object. We demonstrate how these hypotheses generate useful assumptions about Evaluative Conditioning, and open paths for further research on evaluative learning and evaluation.

Introduction: The increasing prevalence of anti-fat bias in American society comes at a great cost to the health and well-being of people who are overweight or obese. A better understanding of the correlates of anti-fat bias would inform development of interventions for reducing anti-fat bias. Based on three theoretical perspectives, this study tested the relation between attitudes and beliefs about weight and anti-fat bias (implicit and explicit): (1) The belief that one is like people who are fat (social identity theory). (2) The belief that one can control her/ his weight (attribution theory). And (3) the beliefs that most people prefer thin people and that weight is important (socio-cultural theory). Methods: Participants were 66,799 volunteers (47,265 women, mean age of 27.88 +/- 11.9 years) who completed the Thin-Fat Implicit Association Test on the Project Implicit website (https://implicit.harvard.edu/) during 2016. Explicit anti-fat bias and weight-related attitudes and beliefs were assessed by self-report. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to examine links between weight-related attitudes and beliefs and anti-fat bias. Results: All tested weight-related attitudes and beliefs were significantly (p < .001) correlated with explicit and implicit anti-fat bias, but some of the correlations were very weak. An examination of the relative contribution of the tested weight-related attitudes and beliefs to a model explaining anti-fat bias suggested that the strongest correlates of explicit anti-fat bias were the beliefs that weight was important (beta = 0.194, p < .001), that most people prefer thin people (beta = 0.177, p < .001), and that the respondent was like people who are fat (beta= - 0.180, p < .001). Discussion: The social-identity and socio-cultural theories may provide a stronger explanation for anti-fat bias relative to attribution theory. Future research could use longitudinal designs with more reliable measures in order to verify these cross-sectional findings.