Personality and Social Psychology Review最新文献

According to the extended contact hypothesis, knowing that in-group members have cross-group friends improves attitudes toward this out-group. This meta-analysis covers the 20 years of research that currently exists on the extended contact hypothesis, and consists of 248 effect sizes from 115 studies. The aggregate relationship between extended contact and intergroup attitudes was r = .25, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [.22, .27], which reduced to r = .17, 95% CI = [.14, .19] after removing direct friendship's contribution; these results suggest that extended contact's hypothesized relationship to intergroup attitudes is small-to-medium and exists independently of direct friendship. This relationship was larger when extended contact was perceived versus actual, highlighting the importance of perception in extended contact. Current results on extended contact mostly resembled their direct friendship counterparts, suggesting similarity between these contact types. These unique insights about extended contact and its relationship with direct friendship should enrich and spur growth within this literature.

Machine learning has led to important advances in society. One of the most exciting applications of machine learning in psychological science has been the development of assessment tools that can powerfully predict human behavior and personality traits. Thus far, machine learning approaches to personality assessment have focused on the associations between social media and other digital records with established personality measures. The goal of this article is to expand the potential of machine learning approaches to personality assessment by embedding it in a more comprehensive construct validation framework. We review recent applications of machine learning to personality assessment, place machine learning research in the broader context of fundamental principles of construct validation, and provide recommendations for how to use machine learning to advance our understanding of personality.

Associative attitude learning is typically viewed as a low-level process that automatically registers mere co-occurrences between stimuli, independent of their validity and relational meaning. This view invites to critically examine how attitude formation conforms to four operating conditions (i.e., unawareness, efficiency, goal independence, and uncontrollability) and two operating principles (i.e., unqualified registration of mere co-occurrences between stimuli and formation of direct stimulus-response links), which is the main purpose of the present contribution. The general discussion examines how contemporary attitude models endorse these conditions and principles. Overall, this contribution calls for (a) a nuanced understanding of the nature and scope of associative attitude learning, (b) a fine-grained understanding of how contemporary attitude models endorse conditions and principles reviewed here and find them relevant to their theorization of attitude formation, (c) a clarification of how direct and indirect evaluative measures relate to these conditions and principles, and (d) enhanced efforts in specifying contemporary attitude formation models.

An influential line of research suggests that initial bouts of self-control increase the susceptibility to self-control failure (ego depletion effect). Despite seemingly abundant evidence, some researchers have suggested that evidence for ego depletion was the sole result of publication bias and p-hacking, with the true effect being indistinguishable from zero. Here, we examine (a) whether the evidence brought forward against ego depletion will convince a proponent that ego depletion does not exist and (b) whether arguments that could be brought forward in defense of ego depletion will convince a skeptic that ego depletion does exist. We conclude that despite several hundred published studies, the available evidence is inconclusive. Both additional empirical and theoretical works are needed to make a compelling case for either side of the debate. We discuss necessary steps for future work toward this aim.

Self-esteem promises to serve as the nexus of social experiences ranging from social acceptance, interpersonal traits, interpersonal behavior, relationship quality, and relationship stability. Yet previous researchers have questioned the utility of self-esteem for understanding relational outcomes. To examine the importance of self-esteem for understanding interpersonal experiences, we conducted systematic meta-analyses on the association between trait self-esteem and five types of interpersonal indicators. To ensure our results were not due to self-esteem biases in perception, we focused our meta-analyses to 196 samples totaling 121,300 participants wherein researchers assessed interpersonal indicators via outsider reports. Results revealed that the association between self-esteem and the majority of objective interpersonal indicators was small to moderate, lowest for specific and distal outcomes, and moderated by social risk. Importantly, a subset of longitudinal studies suggests that self-esteem predicts later interpersonal experience. Our results should encourage researchers to further explore the link between self-esteem and one's interpersonal world.

This article advances the debate about costs and benefits of self-enhancement (the tendency to maintain unrealistically positive self-views) with a comprehensive meta-analytic review (299 samples, N = 126,916). The review considers relations between self-enhancement and personal adjustment (life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect, depression), and between self-enhancement and interpersonal adjustment (informant reports of domain-general social valuation, agency, communion). Self-enhancement was positively related to personal adjustment, and this relation was robust across sex, age, cohort, and culture. Important from a causal perspective, self-enhancement had a positive longitudinal effect on personal adjustment. The relation between self-enhancement and interpersonal adjustment was nuanced. Self-enhancement was positively related to domain-general social valuation at 0, but not long, acquaintance. Communal self-enhancement was positively linked to informant judgments of communion, whereas agentic self-enhancement was linked positively to agency but negatively to communion. Overall, the results suggest that self-enhancement is beneficial for personal adjustment but a mixed blessing for interpersonal adjustment.

Theories of risk aversion, epistemic defense, and ingroup enhancement converge in predicting greater impact of negative (vs. positive) experiences with outgroup members on generalized evaluations of stigmatized outgroups. However, they diverge in predictions for admired outgroups. Past tests have focused on negative outgroups using correlational designs without a control group. Consequently, they have not distinguished between alternative explanations or ascertained the direction of causality/generalization, and they have suffered from self-selection biases. These limitations were redressed by a meta-analysis of experimental research on individual-to-group generalization with positive and negative outgroups (59 tests; 3,012 participants). Controlling for modest confounds, the meta-analysis found a generalization advantage of negative experiences for stigmatized outgroups and a generalization advantage of positive experiences for admired outgroups. These results highlight the centrality of valenced expectations about outgroups, consistent with epistemic defense and ingroup enhancement and inconsistent with risk aversion. Implications for positive changes in intergroup dynamics are discussed.

Terror management theory outlines how humans seek self-esteem and worldview validation to manage death-related anxiety. Accumulating evidence reveals that close relationships serve a similar role. However, to date, there has been no synthesis of the literature that delineates when close relationships buffer mortality concerns, under what conditions, on which specific outcomes, and for whom. This systematic review presents over two decades of research to address these questions. Findings from 73 reviewed studies revealed that close relationships serve an important role in buffering death-related anxiety. A range of dispositional and situational moderating factors influence either the activation or inhibition of relational strivings to manage heightened death awareness, the most influential being attachment, gender, and relationship-contingent self-esteem. These findings were integrated into an overarching model that highlights some of the conditions under which mortality salience (MS) influences relational outcomes. We conclude by highlighting a range of theoretical and methodological concerns to be addressed by future research.