Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin最新文献

High subjective social status (SSS) is believed to protect health in the current literature. However, high SSS entails social responsibilities that can be stressful in collectivistic cultural contexts. Here, we tested the hypothesis that those socialized in collectivistic societies (e.g., Japan) recognize their high social status as entailing social duties difficult to ignore even when they are excessive. Using cross-cultural survey data (N = 1,289) and a measure of biological health risk (BHR) by biomarkers of inflammation and cardiovascular malfunction, we found that higher SSS predicted lower BHR for American males. In contrast, higher SSS predicted higher BHR for Japanese males, mediated by the perceived difficulty of disengaging from their current goals. In both cultural groups, females showed no association between SSS and BHR. These findings suggest that social status has differing health implications, depending on the relative salience of privileges and burden-producing responsibilities in different cultural contexts.

By conforming to ingroup norms, individuals coordinate with other group members, preserve cohesion, and avoid costs of exclusion. Previous experiments have shown that increased concerns about infectious disease increase conformity. However, coordination with other group members has multiple benefits, most of which exist independent of pathogenic infection. Hence, a strong causal effect of pathogen avoidance motivations on conformity seems unlikely. Results from five experiments (N = 1,931) showed only limited support for the hypothesis that experimentally increasing pathogen avoidance motivations influences conformity. Overall, our findings are not consistent with the notion that the human mind contains a fast-acting psychological mechanism that regulates conformity as a function of short-term pathogen avoidance motivations.

Society changes, but the degree to which it has changed can be difficult to evaluate. We propose that people possess beliefs that society has made, and will make, progress in a linear fashion toward social justice. Five sets of studies (13 studies in total) demonstrate that American participants consistently estimated that over time, society has made positive, linear progress toward social issues, such as gender equality, racial diversity, and environmental protection. These estimates were often not aligned with reality, where much progress has been made in a nonlinear fashion. We also ruled out some potential alternative explanations (Study 3) and explored the potential correlates of linear progress beliefs (Study 4). We further showed that these beliefs reduced the perceived urgency and effort needed to make further progress on social issues (Study 5), which may ultimately inhibit people's willingness to act.

Waiting for important news is uniquely anxiety provoking, and expectations for one's outcome fluctuate throughout the wait. Emotional volatility is typically associated with negative outcomes, but little is known about volatility in expectations. In Study 1, law graduates (N = 248) estimated their chances of passing the bar exam every 2 weeks during the wait for results. Greater volatility in expectations, operationalized as the frequency with which outcome expectations changed during the wait, was associated with greater worry and more negative emotionality throughout the wait. Study 2 partially replicated these findings in a sample of Trump and Biden supporters (N = 444) awaiting the result of the 2020 presidential election. Study 2 also demonstrated a causal link between constrained (vs. volatile) expectations and worry. Our findings have implications for how best to manage one's expectations while awaiting important news, with the goal of minimizing worry and other negative emotions.

When a task or goal is hard to think about or do, people can infer that it is a waste of their time (difficulty-as-impossibility) or valuable to them (difficulty-as-importance). Separate from chosen tasks and goals, life can present unchosen difficulties. Building on identity-based motivation theory, people can see these as opportunities for self-betterment (difficulty-as-improvement). People use this language when they recall or communicate about difficulties (autobiographical memories, Study 1; "Common Crawl" corpus, Study 2). Our difficulty mindset measures are culture-general (Australia, Canada, China, India, Iran, New Zealand, Turkey, the United States, Studies 3-15, N = 3,532). People in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD)-er countries slightly agree with difficulty-as-improvement. Religious, spiritual, conservative people, believers in karma and a just world, and people from less-WEIRD countries score higher. People who endorse difficulty-as-importance see themselves as conscientious, virtuous, and leading lives of purpose. So do endorsers of difficulty-as-improvement-who also see themselves as optimists (all scores lower for difficulty-as-impossibility endorsers).

Social interactions unfold within networks of relationships. How do beliefs about others' social ties shape-and how are they shaped by-expectations about how others will behave? Here, participants joined a fictive online game-playing community and interacted with its purported members, who varied in terms of their trustworthiness and apparent relationships with one another. Participants were less trusting of partners with untrustworthy friends, even after they consistently showed themselves to be trustworthy, and were less willing to engage with them in the future. To test whether people not only expect friends to behave similarly but also expect those who behave similarly to be friends, an incidental memory test was given. Participants were exceptionally likely to falsely remember similarly behaving partners as friends. Thus, people expect friendship to predict similar behavior and vice versa. These results suggest that knowledge of social networks and others' behavioral tendencies reciprocally interact to shape social thought and behavior.

Building on earlier research that examined the characteristics people associate with heroes, our research examined similarities and differences of the hero stereotype across cultures. Specifically, in Study 1 (N = 209) and Study 2 (N = 298), we investigated lay perceptions of heroes among participants from a collectivistic culture. In Study 3 (N = 586), we examined whether group membership could be determined by participants' centrality ratings of the combined set of hero features. In Study 4 (N = 197), we tested whether the hero features that distinguish American and Chinese participants, when used to describe a target person, influence the impression that the target person is a hero. In Study 5 (N = 158) and Study 6 (N = 591), we investigated cultural differences in perceptions of different types of heroes (e.g., social, martial, civil) and the influence of individualism and collectivism on the perception of those heroes.

Social comparison theories suggest that ingroups are strengthened whenever important outgroups are weakened (e.g., by losing status or power). It follows that ingroups have little reason to help outgroups facing an existential threat. We challenge this notion by showing that ingroups can also be weakened when relevant comparison outgroups are weakened, which can motivate ingroups to strategically offer help to ensure the outgroups' survival as a highly relevant comparison target. In three preregistered studies, we showed that an existential threat to an outgroup with high (vs. low) identity relevance affected strategic outgroup helping via two opposing mechanisms. The potential demise of a highly relevant outgroup increased participants' perceptions of ingroup identity threat, which was positively related to helping. At the same time, the outgroup's misery evoked schadenfreude, which was negatively related to helping. Our research exemplifies a group's secret desire for strong outgroups by underlining their importance for identity formation.

The current work investigates the effects of target of perception's waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) on perceivers' judgments of sexual unrestrictedness and sexual victimization prototypicality. Studies 1a and 1b found that women with lower WHRs were perceived as relatively more sexually unrestricted. Studies 2a and 2b found that women with lower WHRs were perceived as relatively more prototypic of sexual victimization. Study 3 built on these findings to consider implications for responses to sexual assault disclosures. Perceivers disbelieved and minimized a disclosure of assault relatively more when made by a woman with a higher WHR. In sum, this body of work implicates WHR as a body cue that can inform consequential sexual perception. Thereby, this work identifies factors that could influence judgments of credibility of sexual violence reports, which may have implications for hesitancy to report sexual violence.

The literature has widely discussed and supported the relationship between poverty and support for authoritarian leaders and regimes. However, there are different claims about the mediating mechanism and a lack of empirical tests. We hypothesize that the effect of poverty on support for authoritarianism is mediated by shame: People living in poverty frequently experience social exclusion and devaluation, which is reflected in feelings of shame. Such shame, in turn, is likely to increase support for authoritarianism, mainly due to the promise of social re-inclusion. We support our hypothesis in two controlled experiments and a large-scale field study while empirically ruling out the two main alternative explanations offered in the literature: stress and anxiety. Finally, we discuss how the present findings can support policymakers in efficiently addressing the negative political consequences of poverty.