Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin最新文献

Although some studies demonstrated that counterdispositional behavior may be taxing, substantially more studies fail to provide evidence for this notion or even find beneficial effects of acting in a more extraverted or conscientious way. Because extraversion and conscientiousness are more socially valued and energizing in nature, it raises the question of what the consequences are of acting counterdispositionally on a more "neutral" personality dimension (i.e., openness). To address this issue, the current study examined the within-person relationship between (perceived) counterdispositional openness, positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), and exhaustion. Using a 14-day experience sampling methods dataset (N = 191 individuals and N = 14,095 repeated observations), we found that higher levels of (perceived) openness were associated with higher levels of PA and lower levels of exhaustion, while no relationship was found with NA. Hence, no costs were associated with acting out of character, even when considering subjective experiences of counterdispositional behavior.

Many organizations offer their members social comparison feedback, which informs them how they perform relative to others. Previous research has linked social comparison feedback to improved motivation and performance. We propose, however, that such feedback has psychological costs that disproportionately impact women. Across six pre-registered studies, we show that social comparison feedback is more aversive and anxiety-inducing for women than for men. This gender difference persists after accounting for performance expectations and actual performance. Two mechanisms underlie women's greater aversion to social comparison feedback: Compared to men, women are less competitive and more concerned that social comparisons will harm their relationships. Our findings extend social comparison research by distinguishing between self-initiated and externally imposed comparisons and documenting a novel gender difference. We discuss the hidden costs of a common feedback method and the need to consider gendered responses when designing feedback systems.

Moral disagreement across politics revolves around the key question, "Who is a victim?" Twelve studies explain moral conflict with assumptions of vulnerability (AoVs): liberals and conservatives disagree about who is especially vulnerable to victimization, harm, and mistreatment. AoVs predict moral judgments, implicit attitudes, and charitable behavior-and explain the link between ideology and moral judgment (usually better than moral foundations). Four clusters of targets-the Environment, the Othered, the Powerful, and the Divine-explain many political debates, from immigration and policing to religion and racism. In general, liberals see vulnerability as group-based, dividing the moral world into groups of vulnerable victims and invulnerable oppressors. Conservatives downplay group-based differences, seeing vulnerability as more individual and evenly distributed. AoVs can be experimentally manipulated and causally impact moral evaluations. These results support a universal harm-based moral mind (Theory of Dyadic Morality): moral disagreement reflects different understandings of harm, not different foundations.

Contemporary representations of Native Peoples in mainstream U.S. society are largely scarce and inaccurate. This paper investigates individual differences in Native Peoples' sensitivity to biased social representations of their group. Across three of the largest surveys conducted with Native Peoples in the United States (N_Total = 16,157), participants, who are more sensitive (vs. less sensitive) to misrepresentation and omission, report poorer psychological well-being (e.g., lower life satisfaction, higher anxiety, and depression). This relationship is explained, in part, by perceptions of group discrimination such that more sensitive individuals are also more attuned to the discrimination Native Peoples experience. These findings suggest that the way Native Peoples are represented or fail to be represented may negatively impact their well-being. One way to improve Native Peoples' well-being is to systematically acknowledge and discourage omissions and misrepresentations, and to uplift diverse and accurate representations, preferably defined by Native Peoples for Native Peoples.

People differ in how positively they perceive others at first glance. The present research examined whether such positivity differences are already evident during early stages of impression formation, under conditions that do not require explicit evaluative judgment. We developed a recognition-based paradigm in which participants read vignettes describing unfamiliar targets and later completed an unexpected recognition task. In Study 1 (n = 312), participants differed in the valence of traits they recognized; those who recognized more positive traits reported greater liking for the targets and scored higher in agreeableness, conscientiousness, and age. Study 2 (n = 837) replicated these findings, introduced a "don't know" response option to reduce guessing, and demonstrated moderate overlap with rating-based measures of perceiver positivity. Together, the results indicate that perceiver positivity differences can emerge during early impression formation and reflect stable individual differences.

People hold different beliefs about the changeability of happiness. Some believe that happiness is biologically predetermined and thus unchangeable (essentialist beliefs), while others believe that it is malleable and can be changed (non-essentialist beliefs). Do these beliefs have a tangible impact on how individuals actually experience well-being? Here, we predict and empirically demonstrate that endorsing essentialist beliefs about happiness (EBH) can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy that buffers the changes in subjective well-being (SWB) following life events. Through a series of four studies utilizing diverse methodologies (total N = 7,364), we provide converging evidence that happiness essentialists, compared to non-essentialists, experience relatively stable levels of SWB following life events, particularly negative ones. We find that this pattern also emerges when people recall past events or anticipate hypothetical or impending future events. Together, happiness essentialism extends beyond mere belief and has real-world implications for how individuals experience fluctuations in SWB.

Emotion regulation research has routinely pitted the antecedent-focused strategy of cognitive reappraisal against the response-focused strategy of expressive suppression. This research has largely yielded that reappraisal is an effective strategy by which to change emotional experience, but implications of expressive suppression are not as clear. This may be due to variations in experimental methodologies, which have not consistently evaluated suppression against a within-subject control condition, as well as conceptual limitations that have muddled the implications of significant findings. Across two high-powered, within-subject paradigms, the present study demonstrates that expressive suppression induces significant decreases in negative emotion relative to one's general attempts to downregulate negative emotion (Study 1) and respond naturally (Study 2). Our findings add to a growing body of literature that demonstrate that suppression may facilitate emotion regulation at both the expressive and experiential levels, and underscore the importance of incorporating flexibility and goal-focused frameworks in future research.

Using data from Project Implicit collected between 2005 and 2020, comprising 1,489,721 observations in 111 countries, we find that implicit and explicit gender stereotypes about career and family are more pronounced in more economically developed countries. Besides, these gender stereotypes are strongly correlated at the country level with gender differences in values (such as family values), self-reported personality traits (such as agreeableness or dependence), and occupational preferences (such as health-related occupations), and may account for the fact that these gender imbalances are "paradoxically" stronger in more economically developed countries (the so-called "gender equality paradox").In line with social role theory, our findings suggest that there are in developed countries strong gender stereotypes about career and family, which may at least partly explain the persistence or even the "paradoxical worsening" of a number of gender differences in these countries, despite generally high levels of gender equality in other areas.

Sacrificing a target to save a group violates deontological ethics against harm but upholds utilitarian ethics to maximize outcomes. Although theorists examine many factors that influence dilemma decisions, we examined justice concerns: We manipulated the moral character of sacrificial targets, then measured participants' dilemma responses and just world beliefs. Across four studies (N=1116), participants considering guilty versus innocent targets scored lower on harm-rejection (deontological) responding, but not outcome-maximizing (utilitarian) responding assessed via process dissociation. Just world beliefs (both personal and general) predicted lower utilitarian and somewhat lower deontological responding, but these effects disappeared when accounting for shared variance with psychopathy. Results suggest that dilemma decisions partly reflect the moral status of sacrificial targets and concerns about the fairness implications of sacrificing innocent targets to save innocent groups.

Little attention has been given to self-objectification, which refers to viewing oneself as an instrument or object rather than a full human, in an educational context. To address this gap, the current research aims to test self-objectification among students, and we hypothesized that a performance goal orientation would result in self-objectification (H1), which would further predict reduced authenticity (H2). Six studies (N = 1,716) confirmed our hypotheses. Studies 1-2, employing cross-sectional and 2-wave designs, found a positive association between a performance goal orientation and self-objectification among college students. Study 3 further showed the link among middle school students (i.e., adolescents). Studies 4-5b employed experimental methodologies to demonstrate the causal relationship between the performance goal orientation and self-objectification. In addition, increased self-objectification triggered by the performance goal orientation was further related to reduced authenticity (Studies 3-5b). This work advances the understanding of self-objectification in the educational domain.