Journal of personality and social psychology最新文献

Scarcity often encourages decisions that favor the present over the future. While prevailing theories largely attribute these decisions to myopic, impulsive decision making, five studies find support for an alternative, less prevalent perspective. We introduce the time horizon of threatened needs as an important determinant of scarcity's effect on intertemporal choice, demonstrating that people's decisions under scarcity reflect attempts to address threatened needs. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (Study 1) and preregistered studies (N = 10,297) show that time horizon moderates intertemporal decisions under scarcity. Study 2 manipulates scarcity perceptions among people engaged to be married, leading to increased preferences for sooner outcomes when wedding dates have shorter time horizons and a significant reversal when wedding dates have longer time horizons. Study 3 demonstrates that time horizon predicts intertemporal choice only when the intertemporal choice can help address threatened needs. Study 4 holds expense salience constant and replicates the moderation by time horizon using a paradigm that manipulates both scarcity and time horizon. Study 5 introduces multiple needs that vary in time horizon and importance, finding that decisions under scarcity reflect consideration of both the importance and temporal proximity of needs. These findings align with the perspective that people facing scarcity attempt to make decisions that are contextually appropriate. This work underscores the importance of understanding contextual variation in experiences of scarcity, suggests that decision making under scarcity is less thoughtless than presumed by the impulsive, myopic account, and offers recommendations for interventions for changing behavior under scarcity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

We propose that self-essentialist reasoning is a foundational mechanism of the similarity-attraction effect. Our argument is that similarity breeds attraction in two steps: (a) people categorize someone with a shared attribute as a person like me based on the self-essentialist belief that one's attributes are caused by an underlying essence and (b) then apply their essence (and the other attributes it causes) to the similar individual to infer agreement about the world in general (i.e., a generalized shared reality). We tested this model in four experimental studies (N = 2,290) using both individual difference and moderation-of-process approaches. We found that individual differences in self-essentialist beliefs amplified the effect of similarity on perceived generalized shared reality and attraction across both meaningful (Study 1) and minimal (Study 2) dimensions of similarity. We next found that manipulating (i.e., interrupting) the two crucial steps of the self-essentialist reasoning process-that is, by severing the connection between a similar attribute and one's essence (Study 3) and deterring people from applying their essence to form an impression of a similar other (Study 4)-attenuated the effect of similarity on attraction. We discuss the implications for research on the self, similarity-attraction, and intergroup phenomena. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Social psychologists have struggled with the vexing problem of variability over time in implicit bias. While many treat such variability as unexplainable error, we posit that some temporal variability, whether within persons or across society at large, reflects meaningful and predictable fluctuation based on shifts in the social-cultural context. We first examined fluctuations at the group-level in a Project Implicit data set of female participants who completed the Weight Implicit Association Test between 2004 and 2018 (N = 259,613). Extending our prior work showing that mass media celebrity fat-shaming increased women's implicit antifat bias, we show that celebrity body positivity events reduced such bias (Study 1a). We then focused on a specific form of body positivity-that is, celebrity "push-back" in response to fat-shaming. Whereas fat-shaming without antibias push-back was associated with spikes in negative weight attitudes, fat-shaming with push-back showed no change in such bias (Study 1b). Critically, however, closer analysis revealed that this apparent stability was due to the canceling out of opposing negative (fat-shaming) and subsequent positive (body positivity) influences-an effect that was obscured when the window of observation was expanded. Finally, in Study 2, we examined parallel effects at the individual level in a daily diary study. Consistent with the group-level, between-subjects data, women's intraindividual fluctuations in implicit attitudes were reliably predicted based on prior-day exposure to fat-shaming and/or body positivity influences. Taken together, our work highlights how both group- and individual-level variability across time can be meaningfully explained rather than treated as unexplainable or left as unexplained. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).