Journal of personality and social psychology最新文献

Do you believe the world will come to an end within your lifetime, and does that belief change the way you see existential threats to humanity? One third of Americans answer yes to the first question; we venture to answer the second question here. Stories about the end of the world are historically and globally prevalent and come in many flavors. End of world beliefs have been hypothesized to shape processes of risk perception and social behavior that have implications for how societies respond to existential threats. Despite their cultural significance, current understanding of the psychology of these beliefs is lacking. In this article, we present the results of six pilot studies (N = 2,079) and one preregistered study (N = 1,409) that establish a psychological framework for end of world beliefs. A measure of end of world beliefs was created and validated across six religious populations (Catholics, Mainline Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and nonreligious). We find that end of world beliefs are common, vary along psychologically meaningful dimensions, and are uniquely predictive of people's risk perception, risk tolerance, and willingness to support extreme action to address the five most pressing global existential risks (i.e., economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal, and technological). Results are interpreted in light of current models of risk perception and the cultural evolution of worldviews. Aligning with sociological and historical accounts, we argue that belief in apocalyptic narratives-irrespective of their accuracy-is consequential for how populations confront concrete risks, including those that threaten humanity today. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Conversations with strangers and weak ties tend to be positive experiences, and yet research suggests a reliable tendency to hold overly pessimistic expectations about such conversations. We examine how people update their beliefs after talking with strangers to understand how people's miscalibrated social expectations could persist even in the presence of more positive social experiences. In three longitudinal experiments, having a conversation led to more optimistic (and better calibrated) expectations about a future conversation, especially with the same person, but updating was fleeting. Within 1 or 2 weeks, expectations reverted to a more pessimistic baseline similar to those who had no conversation to learn from in the first place. This fleeting generalization was unique to conversation (compared to a noninteractive control condition). It emerged both when a future conversation was with the same person and when it was with a different person, when people were explicitly asked to predict their experience before having it and when they were not, and across both relatively shallow and deeper conversations. Fleeting generalization stems partly (but not entirely) from recalling conversations as less positive than they felt immediately after having them. These findings suggest that miscalibrated social beliefs can persist even with unbiased experience to learn from. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The idea that racial prejudice contributes to discrimination not only deliberately but also in a more automatic fashion has been one of the most prominent topics in social psychological research in the past 30 years. Much of the evidence for theories of automatic prejudice stems from the use of indirect measures of implicit attitudes, yet meta-analyses give differing estimates regarding the predictive validity of such measures. The present adversarial collaboration provides a test of the relationships between prominent measures of implicit racial attitudes and discriminatory behavior using a set of established lab-based paradigms among a sample of White Americans (N = 2,114). Using structural equation models that can account for measurement error, frequentist and Bayesian multiverse analyses confirmed that White Americans' performance on indirect measures correlate modestly with these behavioral outcomes, and explain unique variance (∼2.5%) beyond direct, self-report measures of racial attitudes. At the same time, self-report measures exhibited greater predictive and incremental validity than indirect measures (explaining ∼45% of the variance) despite behavioral measures of discrimination displaying weak internal reliability. Results provided some support for greater predictive and incremental validity for indirect measures among participants scoring relatively low on measures of executive function and motivation to control prejudice. These results lend themselves to both relatively optimistic and pessimistic interpretations concerning scientific and practical significance. All collaborators agree that the best path forward is collaborative and focused on the generalizability of implicit racial attitudes to high-accountability organizational settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Prior work shows that people are often more sensitive to moral transgressions that target ingroup members than outgroup members. But does that depend on which groups are involved? We investigate how lifelong U.S. citizen participants make judgments about moral transgressions that target fellow lifelong citizens, compared with refugees or undocumented immigrants. Across five studies (N = 1,953), we find that participants overall judge moderate transgressions targeting refugees and undocumented immigrants to be more wrong than those targeting fellow lifelong citizens. This pattern emerges specifically for moderate-severity transgressions but occurs across physical harm, emotional harm, deception, fairness, and property violations. Responses are predicted by political orientation; more liberal participants show the pattern more than conservative participants. We find mediational and experimental evidence for perceived vulnerability/welfare and sympathy toward groups as partial mechanisms: People judge it to be worse to harm more victims they perceive to be more vulnerable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In psychology, mobile sensing is increasingly used to record behavior in real-life situations. However, little is known about the selectivity of samples participating in these new data collection approaches and thus about potential risks to the validity of research findings. We therefore investigated two potential sources of selection bias in smartphone-based data collections. Specifically, we examined whether smartphone system ownership (Android vs. iOS, i.e., platform-related differences) and willingness to participate (nonparticipation vs. intention to participate vs. actual participation, i.e., nonresponse error) are associated with sociodemographic, socioeconomic, and personality characteristics. Using two large-scale panel studies, we found replicable patterns for platform-related differences (N = 1,218 and N = 5,123) and nonresponse error (N = 1,673 and N = 2,337): The ownership of Android devices (in comparison to iOS devices) was associated with lower levels of education, income, and extraversion. The willingness to participate in mobile sensing studies was found to be higher among younger age groups, males, those with higher levels of openness to experience, and those with lower levels of neuroticism. Furthermore, different person characteristics played different roles at different stages of the recruitment process. Taken together, the results show that some selection bias in mobile sensing studies exists and that the effects were small to moderate in magnitude as well as comparable to selection bias for other, more common data collection approaches, such as online surveys. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Drawing on just-world theory and theories of psychological distance, we tested the idea that people respond to injustice by symbolically distancing themselves from innocent victims. Across 12 studies using varied victimization contexts and spatial arrangement methods, we examined whether perceived injustice motivates people to place victims further from the self in visual space based on perceived value or personality similarity. Participants distanced themselves from victims receiving unjust (vs. just or neutral) outcomes by placing a symbolic self-representation farther from the victims' names in 2D space (Studies 1a-1c). Study 2 found that this distancing effect was independent of victim derogation and blame, while Study 3 demonstrated that distancing was especially pronounced for traits central (vs. peripheral) to the self-concept. Studies 4a/4b revealed that distancing depends on victims' innocence and perceived injustice, ruling out a general avoidance account. Studies 5a/5b confirmed that spatial distancing corresponds to perceived dissimilarity, and Studies 6a/6b showed the reverse process: identical outcomes were judged as more unjust when they befell spatially close versus distant others. Finally, Study 7 extended these findings to self-relevant contexts, showing that participants distanced their current self from past selves who experienced unfair (vs. fair) events, over and above subjective and objective temporal distance. Taken together, these findings highlight the reciprocal relationship between experiences of injustice and symbolic social distancing, revealing how people mentally represent victims as more or less distant from the self, and contribute to the broader understanding of social and spatial representations of self-other (dis)similarity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).