Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology最新文献

The current paper seeks to integrate social and cognitive psychological literature to provide a multifaceted understanding of attention to race. Social psychological studies show that participants demonstrate attentional bias to racial out-group versus in-group faces. Most of this research utilizes White participants and examines the attentional bias to Black faces, concluding that threat stereotypes or negative racial attitudes underlie attentional bias. However, visual processing research demonstrates that various stimulus- and perceiver-driven processes impact attention, suggesting that mechanisms other than racial stereotypes may underlie race-based attention. We propose a framework of attention that accounts not only for direct influences of the stimulus and perceiver but also perceiver-stimulus interactions that emerge iteratively over time. We apply this framework to existing research on attention to race, elucidating various processes that can explain the attention to racial out-groups. We propose that our framework can account for attention to race more generally, beyond the oft-used Black versus White paradigm. We argue that mechanisms underlying attentional bias to race encompass complex factors beyond stereotypes and that our framework can account for stimulus, perceiver, and iterative processes that impact attention to race.

While previous research on interpersonal decisions has focused on individual differences or situational determinants, in this paper, we looked at the interplay of situation and personality in decisions that are characterized by a conflict between self-interest and joint welfare. In an online experiment, 185 participants made decisions about the allocation of their own work time and the work time of another anonymous participant. Agency and uncertainty were manipulated between subjects, and social value orientation as well as dispositional envy were assessed. Participants chose between an option that maximized participants' joint welfare and an option that maximized personal payoffs. The results pointed to an interaction between personality and situational forces: Uncertainty moderated the effect of social value orientation, and agency moderated the effect of envy on decisions. Taken together, the results provide evidence that the effect of individual differences in interpersonal decisions depends on the situation. Implications for team work are discussed in situations where a group potentially benefits disproportionally more from an individual's relatively higher effort than the individual who exerts the effort.

The present research investigates outcome-based dissonance in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a context where a significant number of citizens had unfavorable opinions of both candidates. When one is faced with a choice between two unfavorable alternatives, the outcome will be the same (i.e., unfavorable) regardless of the choice. This dilemma of having multiple alternatives leading to the same unfavorable outcome is known as Morton's Fork. Our results, using a national online sample (n = 247) suggest that when given the opportunity to choose between a favorable and unfavorable alternative, outcome-based dissonance occurs when the preferred (chosen) alternative is inconsistent with the outcome and dissonance reduction proceeds by reducing the “evaluative spread” (i.e., decreasing evaluations of the chosen/losing alternative and/or increasing evaluations of the rejected/winning alternative). In contrast, outcome-based dissonance is diminished (or nonoccurring) when one chooses between unfavorable choice alternatives. These results suggest that valence of choice alternatives is a relevant factor in the production of outcome-based dissonance. Implications are discussed.

Goal setting theory states that its principles (i.e., specific, difficult goals lead to higher performance than general tasks) and the four mediating factors (i.e., attention, strategies, effort, and persistence) of the goal–performance link can be generalized to the workgroup level. However, less is known about individual-level emotional dynamics within a team that shape team-level motivation and strategies and subsequent team performance. Using multisource data, we tested a multilevel mediation model that posits fear of dominance among the fellow teammates and emotional contagion of fear as individual-level predictors of the group goal setting (GGS) mechanisms (i.e., directions, effort and persistence, strategies), which in turn simultaneously but differentially predict subsequent team performance. Surveys were administered to 315 athletes nested in 38 sport teams. Performance was measured objectively via team rank. Results suggest that fear of dominance was negatively related to group direction and effort and persistence. More interestingly, emotional contagion of fear negatively predicted strategies, which in turn positively predicted team performance. We add to the literature by demonstrating the cross-level mediating role of GGS factors in the relationship between individual-level emotional contagion of fear and the team-level performance outcome. Our study also contributes to contagion and dominance literatures as well as GGS theorizing, thus bridging the two disparate research fields of individual-level emotion-related processes and GGS. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in light of the relevance of successful performance management as well as of preventing the adverse effects of individual-level dysfunctional affective experience on teamwork motivation and outcomes.

Schisms occur when a faction breaks away from their parent group to create or to join an already existing group. However, previous researchers who have examined schisms have primarily focused on people's individual intentions to exit their group. This poses two questions: first, does a schism involve both breaking away from a parent group and forming a new group? And second, are the psychological processes that predict individual exit intentions also predicting people's support of schisms, or are there distinct psychological processes involved in a schism? Study 1 (N = 284) confirmed that a schism consists of two subcomponents: subgroup exit and superordinate formation. Study 2 (N = 261) showed that the psychological processes related to individual exit intentions are distinct from those processes related to schisms. Results suggest that support for schisms is distinct from individual exit intentions and that there are unique psychological predictors of schisms.