Journal of personality and social psychology最新文献

Why do we care so much for friends-much more than one might predict from reciprocity alone? According to a recent theory, organisms who cooperate with each other come to have a stake in each other's well-being: A good cooperator is worth protecting-even anonymously if necessary-so they can be available to cooperate in the future. Here, we present three experiments showing that reciprocity creates a stake in a partner's well-being, such that people are willing to secretly pay to protect good cooperative partners, if doing so keeps those partners available for future interaction. Participants played five rounds of a cooperative game (Prisoner's Dilemma) and then received an opportunity to help their partner, without the partner ever knowing. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were more willing to help a cooperative partner if doing so kept that partner available for future rounds, compared to when the help simply raised the partner's earnings. This effect was specific to cooperative partners: The type of help mattered less for uncooperative partners or for recipients that participants did not directly interact with. In other words, an ongoing history of reciprocity gave people a stake in their partner's good condition but not their partner's payoff. Experiment 3 showed that participants had less stake in their partners if those partners could be easily replaced by another cooperator. These findings show that reciprocity and stake are not separate processes. Instead, even shallow reciprocity creates a deeper stake in a partner's well-being, including a willingness to help with zero expectation of recognition. Future work should examine how one's stake in partners is affected by ecological factors that affect the gains of cooperation and the ease of finding new partners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The call to pursue one's passion is ubiquitous advice, and prior research highlights the many upsides to doing so. To pursue one's passion sustainably, people need to try different pursuits-and, critically, drop those that are not tenable for them. However, disengaging from a passion is seemingly antithetical to the stereotypical expectations people hold of how passion should be pursued, which is commonly depicted as persevering through challenges. These expectations, we suggest, lead people to perceive disengaging from a passion as a negative event that myopically focuses their attention on the decision to disengage rather than future opportunities to (re-)engage in a new passion. As a result, when people consider giving up on a passion, we hypothesize that they overestimate how harshly their character will be judged by others and that this occurs because others-from their distant vantage point-see disengaging from a passion as an opportunity to (re-)engage in other passions more than passion pursuers expect they will. These misperceptions, we argue, are consequential because they reduce passion pursuers' willingness to speak out against challenging working conditions or pursue other opportunities. We find evidence for these predictions across seven main and three supplemental studies in the lab and field (N = 4,825), including samples of PhD students, nurses, and teachers. Our theory and results uncover a critical social impediment to the pursuit of passion: By overestimating how harshly they are judged for giving up, people may struggle to sustainably pursue their passion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Discrimination remains a key challenge for social equity. A prerequisite for effective individual and societal responses to discrimination is that instances of it are detected. Yet, prejudice and discriminatory intent are rarely directly observable and the presence of discrimination has to be inferred from circumstantial evidence, such as the over- or underrepresentation of certain individuals (i.e., statistical bias). Here, we study how people judge outcomes that are statistically biased along different dimensions. Six primary and two supplemental studies with Dutch and U.S. participants (total N = 3,591, six preregistered) show that gender- and race-biased outcomes are perceived as much less fair than unbiased outcomes, but we do not observe the same for attractiveness-biased outcomes. While this pattern is partly explained by differences in the perceived legitimacy of different biases (i.e., people judge attractiveness bias as more acceptable than gender and race bias), we also find consistent evidence for an additional mechanism. People spontaneously pay attention to a few salient dimensions, such as gender and race, when scrutinizing decision outcomes for bias. Statistical bias along less salient dimensions, such as physical attractiveness, is more likely to go undetected. Our findings suggest that the (seeming) tolerance of attractiveness-biased outcomes is partly explained by people's failure to spontaneously notice that the outcome is attractiveness-biased in the first place. In other words, it is possible that people show muted responses to a biased outcome not because they actually approve of it, but because they fail to notice the bias. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Big Five personality traits and states are positively associated with each other. However, most of this knowledge is based on intrapersonal perception (i.e., either self- or partner reports), and little is known about the associations based on interpersonal perception (i.e., combining self- and partner reports). Such knowledge, however, would be crucial in understanding how accurately close others (e.g., romantic partners) perceive each other's personality in general and daily life. Therefore, the goal of this study was to comprehensively test the trait-state associations, using self- and partner reports, to better understand accuracy of personality judgment among couples. Moreover, to learn about the conditions of better or worse accuracy in personality judgment, we examined the moderating roles of relationship satisfaction and situational factors. Data came from 292 recently cohabiting couple members (M = 25.41 years) who participated in a preregistered experience-sampling study, providing up to 50 personality-state assessments over 10 days. The findings from multilevel models supported previous knowledge on intrapersonal perception and significantly expanded the knowledge on interpersonal perception. Specifically, the findings suggested the most robust pattern for conscientiousness and neuroticism, ascribing these Big Five domains a significant role among recently cohabiting couples. Interestingly, accuracy was not enhanced among more satisfied couple members, but it was largely facilitated when partners were exclusively together as a couple (vs. with other people). Overall, this research shows that the use of multiple sources allows for a more comprehensive understanding of personality, especially when the aim is to understand the accuracy of personality judgment in couples. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Almost all formal models of decision making under uncertainty require agents to judge the likelihood of relevant uncertainties. Typically, decisions are best made when these judgments are accurate. In the context of probabilistic subjective survival expectations, from a nationally representative English sample of participants aged over 50 (N = 3,946), we test whether IQ is associated with calibration. We find strong evidence that high-IQ respondents make substantially lower forecast errors and produce less noise in their predictions than low-IQ respondents. These results are confirmed when we leverage the randomness in genetic variants linked to IQ as an instrumental variable (Mendelian randomization) and when directly using participants' genetic variants related to educational attainment-that captures IQ as well as other cognitive and noncognitive traits relevant to educational success. These results highlight important channels through which IQ contributes to beliefs about the world and may explain why low IQ is often linked to poor financial decision making, lower economic growth and economic welfare, and judgmental biases. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).