Journal of Experimental Social Psychology This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Regret-action effect: Action-inaction asymmetries in inferences drawn from perceived regret
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 84Author(s): Gilad Feldman, Jieying ChenAbstractExtending the literature on cognitive effects of action-inaction asymmetries regarding regret, we hypothesized asymmetries in inferences drawn from regret regarding action and inaction. We conducted four experiments with two undergraduate samples from Hong Kong and two American Amazon Mechanical Turk samples (overall N = 1186). We contrasted situations involving either regret or lack of and examined whether these were perceived to be a result of action or inaction. We found consisten...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 20, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Explicit categorization goals affect attention-related processing of race and gender during person construal
Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 85Author(s): Hannah I. Volpert-Esmond, Bruce D. BartholowAbstractFaces are categorized by gender and race very quickly, seemingly without regard to perceivers' goals or motivations, suggesting an automaticity to these judgments that has downstream consequences for evaluations, stereotypes, and social interactions. The current study investigated the extent to which early neurocognitive processes involved in the categorization of faces vary when participants' tasks goals were to categorize faces by race or by gender. In contrast to previ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 20, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

The moral landscape of war: A registered report testing how the war context shapes morality's constraints on default representations of possibility
Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 85Author(s): Hanne M. Watkins, Mark BrandtAbstractMental representations of possibility in everyday contexts incorporate descriptive and prescriptive norms. People intuitively think that Mr. X cannot perform an immoral action; even when upon deliberation they realize that the immoral action is in fact possible (Phillips & Cushman, 2017). We replicate this “moral-possibility constraint”, providing further support for the notion that default representations of possibility are - at first pass - limited to moral alternatives. We also t...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 20, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

The effect of moral loss and gain mindset on confronting racism
Publication date: Available online 18 July 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyAuthor(s): Hanna Szekeres, Eran Halperin, Anna Kende, Tamar SaguyAbstractIn the present research, we tested whether the prospect of moral failure or moral gain can motivate (some) people to confront racism. We investigated the influence of moral loss and moral gain mindset on people's tendency to contest racism as a function of their moral commitment to non-prejudice. Drawing on research on regulatory focus, we predicted that a moral loss mindset (vs. control) would increase confronting tendencies among those who are morally com...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 19, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Tracing physical behavior in virtual reality: A narrative review of applications to social psychology
Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 85Author(s): Haley E. Yaremych, Susan PerskyAbstractVirtual reality (VR) offers unique benefits to social psychological research, including a high degree of experimental control alongside strong ecological validity, a capacity to manipulate any variable of interest, and an ability to trace the physical, nonverbal behavior of the user in a very fine-grained and automated manner. VR improves upon traditional behavioral measurement techniques (e.g., observation and coding) on several fronts as data collection is covert, continuous, passiv...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 19, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Science, God, and the cosmos: Science both erodes (via logic) and promotes (via awe) belief in God
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 84Author(s): Kathryn A. Johnson, Jordan W. Moon, Morris A. Okun, Matthew J. Scott, Holly P. O'Rourke, Joshua N. Hook, Adam B. CohenAbstractScience and analytical thinking have been linked with atheism. We propose dual pathways whereby scientific engagement may have paradoxical effects on belief in God. Logical aspects of science, associated with analytical thinking, are associated with unbelief. However, people can also be awed by scientific information, and awe is associated with feelings of self-transcendence and belief in a mystica...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 18, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Escalation of negative social exchange: Reflexive punishment or deliberative deterrence?
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 84Author(s): James Vandermeer, Christine Hosey, Nicholas Epley, Boaz KeysarAbstractNegative escalation of social exchange exacts significant costs on both individuals and society. Instead of in-kind reciprocity—an eye for an eye—negative reciprocity may escalate, taking two eyes for an eye. We tested two competing mechanisms for negative escalation using a modified dictator game that reliably produces escalating reciprocity to others' negative actions but not to positive actions. According to one mechanism, escalation is strategic...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 18, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

The modulating role of self-posed questions in repeated choice: Integral and incidental questions can increase or decrease behavioral rigidity
Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 85Author(s): Sophie Lohmann, Christopher R. Jones, Dolores AlbarracínAbstractSimple, self-posed questions may modulate behavioral repetition of choices in situations that are neither fully habitual nor fully intentional. In six experiments, participants were trained to repeatedly choose their preferred door out of an array of three doors. Questions generally increased speed in the upcoming task, supporting past findings that even exposure to question-like syntax can enhance performance. More importantly, affirmatively phrased question...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 18, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

The “future is now” bias: Anchoring and (insufficient) adjustment when predicting the future from the present
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 84Author(s): Julian Givi, Jeff GalakAbstractIn the present research, we document a novel forecasting bias, which we term the “future is now” (FIN) bias. Specifically, we show that people tend to believe that the future will mirror the present, even when such a belief is unfounded. That is, people overestimate the chances that whatever is happening now, will happen in the future, even when the (known) explicit probabilities of future outcomes contradict such a belief. This appears to be driven by an anchoring and (insufficient) adj...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 16, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

A control-based account of stereotyping
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 84Author(s): Anyi Ma, Jordan Axt, Aaron C. KayAbstractDrawing from compensatory control theory, we propose that because stereotypes provide psychological assurance that the world is orderly and predictable, stereotyping should increase among those lacking control. Four studies support this control-based account of stereotyping: lower personal control, both measured (Studies 1 and 3) and manipulated (Study 2a and 2b), was associated with greater gender (Studies 1, 2a, and 2b) and occupational stereotyping (Study 3). Furthermore, the as...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 16, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Psychological reactance as a function of thought versus behavioral control
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 84Author(s): Anyi Ma, Simone Tang, Aaron C. KayAbstractHow can people persuade and influence others? One option is to directly target others' behavior through rules and incentives. Another increasingly popular option, however, is to focus on modifying what others think rather than how they behave, and hoping behaviors will then change as a result. The assumption underlying this latter approach is that targeting thoughts and attitudes might be easier or more effective than targeting behaviors. Drawing from psychological reactance theor...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 16, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

A time for creativity: How future-oriented schemas facilitate creativity
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 84Author(s): Brandon Koh, Angela K.-y. LeungAbstractAccording to the creative cognition approach, extraordinarily creative ideas are rare because people often generate ideas by retrieving and incrementally modifying concepts from accessible schemas. Grounded in social schema research, we hypothesize that a future-orientation is a means to broaden thinking through activating change and progress schemas, which in turn facilitates creativity. We first offered qualitative evidence that people generally hold a schema that the future is inu...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 16, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Group identities benefit well-being by satisfying needs
Publication date: September 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 84Author(s): A. Kyprianides, M.J. Easterbrook, R. BrownAbstractAlthough research has highlighted the importance of differentiating between different types of social ties – group ties and individual ties – no experimental work exists that investigates the claim that group ties are more beneficial than individual ties, and little is known about how group memberships influence well-being, relative to relationships. We designed a series of experiments that: a) primed either multiple group memberships or multiple interpersonal relation...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 16, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

A hero for the outgroup, a black sheep for the ingroup: Societal perceptions of those who confront discrimination
Publication date: Available online 12 July 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyAuthor(s): Maja Kutlaca, Julia Becker, Helena RadkeAbstractConfrontation of discrimination can be seen as a form of morally courageous behavior, however those who engage in it presumably risk societal backlash. In three experiments, we examined societal perception of those who engage in confrontation of sexist (Study 1 and Study 2) and racist advertisement (Study 3). We tested two competing hypotheses. First, prior research on confrontation of discrimination suggests that members of disadvantaged groups who confront injustice (i...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 13, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Defending victims of bullying in the classroom: The role of moral responsibility and social costs
Publication date: Available online 12 July 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyAuthor(s): J. Loes Pouwels, Tirza H.J. van Noorden, Simona C.S. CaravitaAbstractThe current study examined the role of moral responsibility (i.e., moral disengagement) and social costs (i.e., prioritizing popularity and classroom norms) in defending victims of bullying in the classroom. Participants were 1362 students (Age 8–15) from 58 classrooms who completed self-reported measures on moral disengagement and prioritizing popularity and peer-reported measures on bullying and defending. We first examined whether the outcome of...
Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 13, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research