Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin最新文献

The 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in response to the murder of George Floyd highlighted the lingering structural inequalities faced by Black people in the United States. In the present research, we investigated whether these protests led to reduced implicit and explicit racial bias among White U.S. Americans. Combining data from Project Implicit, Armed Conflict Location Event Data Project (ACLED), Google Trends, and the American Community survey, we observed rapid drops in implicit and explicit measures of racial bias after the onset of the protests. However, both types of racial bias slowly increased again over time as (attention to) BLM faded. We use directed acyclic graphs to show under which assumptions causal inferences are warranted. We discuss our results in light of situational models of bias, their implications for protest movements, and raise questions about when and how social norms play a role in large-scale attitude change.

While it is well-established that educational attainment and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) are negatively correlated, it remains unclear why, as causal effects are hard to distinguish from the effects of confounders. Here, we use an adaptation of the discordant twin design in a structural equation framework (ACE-β models) with 1264 Norwegian monozygotic and dizygotic twins, to investigate whether education and RWA remain associated after controlling for confounders from genes and environmental influences shared by twins. Our model estimates that 25% of the covariance between education and RWA reflects genetic confounders, 47% reflects shared-environmental confounders, and 28% of the covariance remains unaccounted for. This remaining covariance then reflects causal effects and/or environmental confounders not shared by twins. Perceived socioeconomic status (SES) in childhood accounted for about one-third of the shared-environmental confounding. We did not find evidence that effects of education on RWA are mediated by perceived SES in adulthood.

The spread of disinformation is widely regarded as one of the most serious global risks. In one laboratory and three online experiments (N_total = 3,066), we measured trust in true, false, and disinformation statements related to the Russo-Ukrainian war (Experiments 1-3) and to politics, climate, and health (Experiment 4). We examined longer-term effectiveness of a fact-based corrective message delivered either before (prebunking) or after (debunking) participants' initial evaluation of disinformation statements. Across all four experiments, debunking intervention consistently and substantially reduced trust in disinformation, with effects persisting for at least two weeks. Prebunking intervention produced similarly durable benefits only when it was immediately followed by evaluation of the just-corrected disinformation. When evaluation was delayed, prebunking had no reliable impact. We found no significant backfire effects on trust in disinformation across any ideological groups. However, debunking induced a more conservative response pattern overall, reducing trust in true statements as well.

Most research on solidarity focuses on democratic, low-repressive contexts. However, support for Palestinians in the Global North shows that solidarity can also emerge in democracies with issue-specific repression, where costs and risks for solidarity are higher, and dominant narratives limit alternative perspectives. This article explores which beliefs, emotions, and attitudes predict low-cost (i.e., low effort/risk) and high-cost (i.e., high effort/risk) solidarity in such contexts. We conducted three studies during major Israel/Palestine escalations: a 2009 German convenience sample (N = 305) and two 2024 representative samples from Germany (N = 412) and the United Kingdom (N = 409). Perceived peaceful intentions and guilt toward Palestinians predicted both types of solidarity. Perceived injustice and moral outrage were more linked to low-cost solidarity, while perceived collective ownership of the land was stronger for high-cost solidarity. Power imbalance, admiration, sympathy, hate, and antisemitism played no or minor roles for solidarity in these contexts. The results highlight the distinct nature of conflict-related solidarity under issue-specific repression compared to solidarity under low repression.

Interpersonal transgressions are inevitable and pose threats to social bonds and well-being. For victims, holding a grudge is a common response. Recent qualitative work suggests that hurt and anger are central to grudges, yet their relation has not been tested quantitatively. Previous research has focused on the independent effects of hurt and anger, often overlooking their interaction. We predicted that the interaction between hurt and anger contributes to grudge holding. Across three nonexperimental studies and one experimental study (Studies 1-4), we examined how these emotions relate to grudge holding and tested a mechanism in Studies 3 and 4. Results consistently showed that individuals who felt high hurt and anger reported stronger grudges than those who felt only one emotion strongly. Perceiving the transgressor as immoral explained this interaction. This research advances our understanding of grudge holding by examining the interaction between these emotions and empirically testing the underlying theory.

People who perceive they lack power inhibit their needs and goals, sometimes aggress to restore power, and experience poorer well-being. However, people may underestimate how much power they have to meet their needs. Guided by error management principles, we tested whether people systematically underestimate their power in relationships. Across four samples of friendships, same-gender couples, and woman-man couples (N = 1,304 dyads), we used Truth and Bias models to assess discrepancies between people's own perceived power and the power they had as reported by their friends/partners. We found robust evidence that people underestimated their power. Moreover, higher self-protection motives (e.g., attachment anxiety) and specific power motives (e.g., desire for power) predicted greater underestimation bias whereas higher pro-relationship motives (commitment) predicted lower underestimation bias. These results illustrate that self-protection, pro-relationship, and power motives bias perceptions of power, advancing our understanding of why and how these predictors shape power-related behaviors and relationship outcomes.

This research presents the first known meta-analysis of the Dialectical Self Scale, a widely used measure of the extent to which people hold contradictory and changeable self-conceptions. Data were synthesized from k = 139 studies (N = 23,629) from 28 countries to produce a national Dialectical Self Index (DSI). Study 1 used meta-analytic techniques to hierarchically order countries on dialecticism and test demographic moderators. No historical shifts in dialecticism were observed over two decades. In Study 2, dialecticism, at the country-level, was correlated with variables reflecting tolerance of contradiction and expectation of change, and socioecological factors (Buddhism, rice farming), but only weakly related to contemporary macro-social forces (globalization). Dialecticism was unrelated to collectivism and interdependent self-construals, indicating it is a foundational cultural mindset. A world map of dialecticism showed clear regional clustering. The DSI provides a useful tool for conducting cross-national research on dialecticism.

Following the 2016 U.S. Presidential election of Donald Trump, prejudice toward groups targeted during his campaign (e.g., Asian Americans, Mexicans) become more acceptable. By contrast, both Trump and Clinton voters reported less prejudice of their own. We conducted a 2024 conceptual replication, measuring perceived norms of prejudice and own-prejudice toward 128 groups, both before (N = 362) and after (N = 261) the U.S. election. We separately measured the negativity of Trump's campaign rhetoric toward these groups (N = 188). Levels of prejudice and perceived norms of prejudice acceptability were mostly stable pre-/post-election, but Trump's negative rhetoric predicted an increase in perceived acceptability of prejudice among targeted groups (replicating the 2016 results), and a rise in self-reported prejudice in the same groups post-election (reversing the 2016 results). Despite changes in the sociopolitical context between elections, the election of a leading politician who campaigned on prejudice was again associated with increases in the acceptability of prejudice.

This preregistered meta-analysis aimed to determine the association of marital satisfaction with two demographic variables that are often used as indicators of socioeconomic status: income and education. It was hypothesized that income and education would individually have small to moderate associations with marital satisfaction. Data from 25,171 participants across 47 separate manuscripts and datasets were meta-analyzed in a random effects model. Results indicated there was no significant effect for income, but a small, significant effect for education such that increased education was correlated with greater marital satisfaction. The effect of education on satisfaction was moderated by the percentage of African American participants in the sample, meaning that when the sample included a greater percentage of African Americans, the effect of education and satisfaction was stronger. Overall, results indicate that education may be an important contextual factor for married dyads and researchers should be cautioned against controlling for demographic variables.