Journal of personality and social psychology最新文献

Sacrificial moral dilemmas require individuals to choose between allowing harm to several people or preventing this by actively causing harm to a smaller number of people. These dilemmas have been foundational in studying how people resolve conflicts between competing moral principles, with responses traditionally interpreted as reflecting either "utilitarian" concern for the greater good or "deontological" refusal to enact harm. Existing research relies almost exclusively on hypothetical scenarios. We confronted 794 participants across two studies with real-life consequential dilemmas involving minor but genuine physical harm. Participants decided whether to allow two confederates to receive painful electroshocks or shock a third confederate and provided motivations for their decisions. Study 1 manipulated physical proximity to potential targets, while Study 2 examined how the gender composition of potential targets influenced decisions. Moreover, each participant faced this choice twice, allowing us to examine how prior outcomes influence subsequent moral decisions. Results show that responses to traditional hypothetical dilemmas moderately predict real-life behavior. Physical proximity and target gender had no significant effects on actual choices. When confronting the dilemma a second time, approximately one third of participants switched their decision, primarily to distribute harm equitably across potential targets. Analysis of participants' motivations reveals a diverse spectrum of moral considerations beyond utilitarian-deontological frameworks, including fairness concerns, responsibility avoidance, and beliefs about shared versus individual suffering. Our findings invite scholars to expand current theoretical models to better capture the nuanced ways people approach sacrificial trade-offs in consequential, real-world situations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Amid heightened political polarization in the United States, have politics worked their way into the bedroom? An increase in political similarity between romantic partners has consequences not just for romantic relationships but for society as a whole; political homophily increases our political echo chambers and affects future generations. We drew upon 11 data sets with over 4,000 individuals (including more than 500 couples) to test four preregistered research questions about the prevalence, correlates, consequences, and potential buffers of political dissimilarity in modern-day relationships. Across measures of similarity (overall perceptions, partisanship matching, shared political ideology), couples in our sample showed high levels of political similarity (e.g., 23% were cross-partisan, with fewer than 8% composed of one Democrat and one Republican). Examining 18 potential correlates of political dissimilarity, we found little evidence that certain factors predispose people to end up in a politically dissimilar relationship. When considering the potential consequences of political dissimilarity, we found a small association between political dissimilarity and relationship quality in general and in daily life. The effect was evident when examining perceived political dissimilarity (over and above perceptions of overall similarity) and, to a lesser extent, dissimilarity in terms of partisanship and political ideology. Prosocial processes such as appreciation and perspective-taking may moderate these effects. Taken together, these findings speak to the need to further consider the ways in which the sociopolitical context is shaping the formation and maintenance of close relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Protestantism, as opposed to Catholicism, is widely seen as having contributed to the rise of Western individualism. However, little is known about potential value differences between these two branches of Christianity in contemporary Europe. In the current work, we examined patterns of value endorsement among current and former Protestants and Catholics within and between 20 European countries using data from the European Social Survey (N = 163,586). Results reveal that within a given country, Protestants are more likely to endorse self-transcendence values than Catholics are, and these findings held when controlling for religiosity, differences in socioeconomic status, and differences in religious de-identification. Surprisingly, differences between Protestants and Catholics in value endorsement were sometimes larger among less (vs. more) religious respondents and were detectable even among former Protestants and Catholics, with former Protestants resembling religious respondents more than former Catholics did. Results also reveal that some Protestant-Catholic differences are consistent across cultures, whereas others-principally on the dimension of openness to change versus conservation-are moderated by which group is the majority heritage. We discuss the possible contribution of Protestantism to Western individualism's universalistic orientation, considering the association between Protestantism and self-transcendence values. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In the United States, encounters among police officers and civilians are laden with the potential for dangerous outcomes. At the same time, the ubiquity of digital and social media has made observing violent police-civilian encounters easier than ever. Perhaps consequently, recent evidence suggests that Americans automatically associate the police with and behaviorally respond to officers as a source of physical threat. However, little is known about the interplay between observations of violent police encounters and automatic police-threat associations. Four studies (N = 857) reveal a mutually reinforcing dynamic in which (a) automatic police-threat associations shape perceptions of aggression during arrests, (b) perceptions of aggression during arrests influence automatic police-threat associations, and (c) changes in automatic police-threat associations influence downstream perceptions of aggression. That is, people perceive aggression during arrest encounters through the lens of their existing police-threat associations, and these perceptions in turn reinforce those associations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).