Impression managers: Nice guys or serious criminals?

High scores on measures of impression management are traditionally thought to signal dissimulation. Some have argued, however, that impression managers (IM) are as agreeable, self-controlled and interpersonally sensitive as they profess to be. We test this claim in a sample of recently incarcerated male offenders (N = 11,370) by relating attitudes and convictions to impression management scores. Data indicate that although offenders with high IM scores are less likely to project antisocial attitudes, they are more likely than those scoring low to be convicted of the most morally reprehensible crimes (homicide, sexual assault, pedophilia, and incest), and are more likely to receive longer sentences. The data suggest that high impression managers want to convey a virtuous persona, but their behavior indicates otherwise.     

Wouldn't it be Nice? Moral Rules and Distant Worlds

Traditional rule consequentialism faces a problem sometimes called the ideal world objection—the worry that by looking only at the consequences in worlds where rules are universally adhered to, the theory fails to account for problems that arise because adherence to rules in the real world is inevitably imperfect. In response, recent theorists have defended sophisticated versions of rule consequentialism which are sensitive to the consequences in worlds with less utopian levels of adherence. In this paper, I argue that these attempts underestimate the problem they are designed to avoid—the worry about ideal worlds is only one manifestation of a deeper and more general problem, the distant world objection, which threatens not only the sophisticated revisions of rule consequentialism, but any view which determines what we ought to do by evaluating worlds that differ from ours in more than what is up to us.     

Nice or smart? Task relevance of self-characteristics moderates interpersonal projection

Two studies investigated the impact of trait relevance to a specific task on people's projection of their characteristics onto a cooperative partner. We either measured (Study 1) or manipulated (Study 2) the relevance of a trait to a specific cooperative task. In both studies, participants first rated themselves on a list of traits. Then they imagined completing a cooperative task with an unknown partner. Finally, they rated the partner on the same list of traits. In Study 1, we found partner ratings to be positively influenced by self ratings and the idiosyncratic measure of trait relevance. In Study 2, participants rated the self and the partner on competence and warmth traits while completing an intellectual or a social task. We found partner ratings to be positively influenced by self ratings more on competence than on warmth in the intellectual task, but more on warmth than on competence in the social task. These results suggest that people project onto others in a way that maximizes their chances to succeed in cooperation.     

Intelligence and Prosocial Behavior: Do Smart Children Really Act Nice?

Results of previous studies of the relationship between prosocial behavior and intelligence have been inconsistent. This study attempts to distinguish the differences between several prosocial tasks, and explores the ways in which cognitive ability influences prosocial behavior. In Study One and Two, we reexamined the relationship between prosocial behavior and intelligence by employing a costly signaling theory with four games. The results revealed that the prosocial level of smarter children is higher than that of other children in more complicated tasks but not so in simple tasks. In Study Three, we tested the moderation effect of the average intelligence across classes, and the results did not show any group intelligence effect on the relationship between intelligence and prosocial behavior.     

Young Women's Dating Behavior: Why/Why Not Date a Nice Guy?

The purpose of this study was to investigate why some women report a desire to date nice guys but prefer dating jerks. Specifically, young women's dating choices based on their reasons for dating in general and the attractive/unattractive traits that they perceive that a man possesses were explored. Popular texts offer evidence that young women may/may not select nice guys as dating partners because nice guys may/may not be able to provide them with what they want from their dating experiences. Scholarly texts offer evidence that the answer may lie in how the young woman perceives the nice guy—does he possess attractive or unattractive personality traits? The results of the present study suggest that reasons for dating (i.e., not wanting physical contact, wanting stimulating conversation, and wanting an exclusive relationship) and perceived personality traits (i.e., sweet/nice and physically attractive) influence a young woman's desire to date a nice guy, and that perceived personality traits are better predictors of her choice of a man to date than are reasons for dating.     

An Ethical Justification of Women's Studies; or What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

The feminist in academe, says Paula Bennett, is like Procne married to Tereus, “inextricably wedded to the sources of her harm.” An ethical justification of academic feminism can be found, not in cooperation and affiliation, but in the strategies currently necessary to ensure curricular and cultural diversity. Historically contextualized and strategically politicized, this ethic is founded on the claim that universities are places where we may all learn to know what is other than ourselves.     

Nice or Naughty? The Role of Emotions and Digital Media Use in Explaining Adolescents’ Online Prosocial and Antisocial Behavior

The opportunities and mostly the risks of digital communication technologies for adolescents have been documented extensively in the last two decades, but less is known about how adolescents interact with each other online, especially regarding positive interactions. Moreover, since online prosocial and antisocial behavior have rarely been assessed simultaneously, it is hard to obtain a balanced view of adolescents’ online behavior. Therefore, in this study, we examined both dimensions of online social behavior and how these are related to adolescents’ experienced emotions and their uses of digital media. Findings indicated that participants performed and received more prosocial than antisocial behavior online. Experiencing negative as well as positive emotions was related to online social behavior, and these associations were mediated by adolescents’ use of social and audiovisual media, but not by gaming or functional Internet use. The social sharing of emotions and mood management theory are used to discuss the results.     

How Nice of Us and How Dumb of Me: The Effect of Exposure to Benevolent Sexism on Women’s Task and Relational Self-Descriptions

This research demonstrates how women assimilate to benevolent sexism by emphasizing their relational qualities and de-emphasizing their task-related characteristics when exposed to benevolent sexism. Studies 1 (N?=?62) and 2 (N?=?100) show, with slightly different paradigms and measures, that compared to exposure to hostile sexism, exposure to benevolent sexism increases the extent to which female Dutch college students define themselves in relational terms and decreases the extent to which they emphasize their task-related characteristics. Study 3 (N?=?79) demonstrates that benevolent sexism has more pernicious effects when it is expressed by someone with whom women expect to collaborate than when no collaboration is expected with the source of sexism. The implications of these results are discussed.