Deservingness,liking relations,schadenfreude, and other discrete emotions in the context of the outcomes of plagiarism

This study investigated effects of like/dislike relations on schadenfreude and other discrete emotions in the context of plagiarism. The predicted emotions were derived from a structural analysis of how the appraisal of deservingness affects emotional reactions to positive or negative outcomes for self or other. One hundred forty‐six undergraduate participants responded to scenarios in which either hypothetical self or other (a classmate) plagiarised information from the internet for a class assignment and either received a high grade (undeserved outcome) or a penalty (deserved outcome). Hypothetical self was represented as either high or low in self‐esteem, other as liked or disliked. As predicted, liking relations moderated perceived deservingness. Schadenfreude (or pleasure) occurred when the disliked classmate received a deserved penalty for detected plagiarism but not when he/she suffered an undeserved positive outcome. This difference was reversed for the emotion of disappointment. Effects on other discrete emotions such as guilt and resentment are also reported.     

The Influence of Perceived Deservingness on Policy Decisions Regarding Aid to the Poor

In the current climate of welfare reform, it is important to understand how perceptions of the poor affect policy decisions. This paper examines how people distinguish between the undeserving poor and the deserving poor, and how this differentiation affects policy decisions. Survey respondents rated each policy in a set of hypothetical policies on a liberal-conservative continuum. Analyses were then conducted to explore differences in the respondents' likelihood of recommending the most liberal and the most conservative of these policies. Study 1 demonstrated that liberal policies were more likely to be recommended and conservative policies were less likely to be recommended when the target group was perceived to be deserving rather than undeserving. Study 2 replicated this effect of perceived deservingness and demonstrated an effect of attribution of responsibility. That is, liberal policies were more likely to be recommended and conservative policies were less likely to be recommended when the responsibility for the target's poverty was attributed to society rather than to the individual.     

Dislike and Envy as Antecedents of Pleasure at Another's Misfortune

Previous research related to pleasure at another's misfortune has focused on the role of envy and competition in inducing such feelings. Additionally, some views assume that this emotion is restricted to mild misfortunes. In this paper, we propose that other-directed negative emotions (e.g., dislike and anger), independent of envy, can give rise to pleasure at another's misfortune and the misfortune can be severe when these other emotions are causal. In addition to providing support for this view in three studies, pleasure at another's misfortune was also associated with different factors when other-directed negative emotions as opposed to envy served as its eliciting condition. For example, given that dislike caused pleasure at another's misfortune, the misfortune was more likely to be perceived as deserved, any misfortune was pleasing, and the observer was more reluctant to help than given envy as the cause.     

The Association of Religiosity and Political Conservatism: The Role of Political Engagement

Some argue that there is an organic connection between being religious and being politically conservative. We evaluate an alternative thesis that the relation between religiosity and political conservatism largely results from engagement with political discourse that indicates that these characteristics go together. In a combined sample of national survey respondents from 1996 to 2008, religiosity was associated with conservative positions on a wide range of attitudes and values among the highly politically engaged, but this association was generally weaker or nonexistent among those less engaged with politics. The specific political characteristics for which this pattern existed varied across ethno‐religious groups. These results suggest that whether religiosity translates into political conservatism depends to an important degree on level of engagement with political discourse.     

The Costs of Hiding and Faking Emotions: The Case of Extraverts and Introverts

The present study examined the moderation effects of extraversion on the relationships between hiding and faking emotions, perceived satisfaction from intimate relationships, and reported physical health concerns. Four hundred and four Israeli participants, who were all involved in intimate relationships at the time of the study, responded to the Extraversion scale from the Big-Five Inventory, the DEELS to measure hiding and faking emotions, the SELF to assess physical health concerns, and the short version of the ENRICH to evaluate perceived satisfaction with intimate relationships. The mean age was 32.3 years (SD = 8.2); and the average length of time as a couple was 7.8 years (SD = 8.2). Of the participants, 198 were married (48.5%). The findings indicate that the effect of hiding negative emotions was stronger for perceived satisfaction with intimate relationships and physical health concerns than that for faking positive emotions. Extraverts who showed a higher frequency of hiding their negative emotions were significantly less satisfied with their relationships than introverts and they also tended to report more concerns with their physical health. These results were not found when extraverts reported a high frequency of faking positive emotions. These results are discussed in the context of the trait-behavior-concordance model and stress the importance of distinguishing faking from hiding.     

Power and Gender Influences on Responsibility Attributions: The Case of Disagreements in Relationships

Abstract

In a sample of 156 college students (74 men and 82 women), the authors examined the influences of power status and gender on responsibility attributions and resolution choices during disagreements in personal relationships. The participants read vignettes in which relationship partners disagreed; then the participants placed themselves in the situations depicted and reported their perceived responsibility and resolution choices. The participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 power-status conditions (you have/your partner has greater power in the situation). Power status was based on resource power (i.e., a monetary inheritance) or on perceived power (i.e., financial knowledge). The authors tested 2 alternative power-status hypotheses (justified benefits/rights and ability/accountability) and 1 gender hypothesis. The results supported both power-status hypotheses. In addition, the men's and the women's responsibility attributions and resolution choices (i.e., adhering to their own wishes or deferring to their partner's wishes) revealed differential dependence on the type of power held by the person with greater situational power. The authors suggest issues further research concerning how situational differences in socially based expectations (e.g., power status and gender) may affect conflicts within relationships.     

The Effects of Onset and Offset Responsibility on Affects and Helping Judgments1

Attributional studies of helping have examined perceivers affective responses and helping intentions as a function of responsibility (controllability) for the onset of a problem. This study extended the analysis to a responsibility for the solution (offset) of a problem and examined how the cause of both the onset and the offset of a problem determined perceivers' affective responses and helping intentions. One hundred and eighty subjects participated in the study. The subjects read one of three stories regarding the target person's behavior at the onset of falling behind in school (“sick” vs. “effort” vs. “no effort”) and reported their perceptions of the cause of the problem, affective responses, and helping intentions. Then they read one of three stories regarding the target person's behavior for the offset of the problem (“sick” vs. “effort” vs. “no effort”:' and responded again to the previously administered scales. Results indicated (a) that the final responses were strongly determined by the offset information. and (b) that sickness at the time of the onset led to negative affect and less helping intention when the offset information was “no effort.” The latter effect is discussed within the context of the moral judgment. Furthermore, structural equation analyses for the responses after the offset information revealed (a) that Weiner's “attribution-emotion-helping” model was applicable. and (b) that the effect of the effort perception on the helping intention was mediated by anger and pity.     

Rousing the Partisan Combatant: Elite Incivility,Anger, and Antideliberative Attitudes

The claim that elite political incivility can rouse partisan, antideliberative attitudes has many adherents, but the empirical record demonstrating a relationship is surprisingly limited. Yet the extant research suggests that incivility can stimulate aversive feelings, of the sort that discrete and dimensional theories of emotion predict should induce a partisan, antideliberative mode of citizenship among those exposed. Leveraging two online experiments, I address the questions of whether elite incivility provokes anger, rather than enthusiasm and anxiety, and whether the affective reactions induced by incivility yield the changes in deliberative attitudes that theories of emotion predict. I find that elite incivility, when counterattitudinal, rouses anger, which in turn can provoke an active and combative form of partisan citizenship. Despite claims to the contrary, the link between proattitudinal incivility, anger, and antideliberative attitudes is less clear. The results provide insight into the dynamics of discourse in the digital age, when affective polarization is the norm and elites commonly employ uncivil rhetoric.     

The Human Message in Politics: The Impact of Emotional Slogans on Subtle Conformity

The present work directly tests the persuasive potential of emotions in political slogans. Previous research that distinguished emotions on the human dimension found that individuals conform differently to the opinion of members of the in-group or the out-group when these targets expressed themselves in terms of uniquely human emotions (Vaes, Paladino, Castelli, Leyens, & Giovanazzi, 2003 Vaes, J., Paladino, M. P., Castelli, L., Leyens, J-Ph. and Giovanazzi, A. 2003. On the behavioral consequences of infrahumanization: The implicit role of uniquely human emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85: 1016–1034. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In line with these findings, the present experiment tested the hypothesis that political slogans that express a uniquely human emotion and that are associated with the campaign of a political candidate who has the same political affiliation as participants (i.e., in-group) will induce more conformity reactions than a candidate of the opposing coalition (i.e., out-group) who presents similar kinds of slogans. Results confirmed this hypothesis on a subtle conformity measure and are discussed as a consequence of an infrahumanization process. Finally, possible applications of the presented findings and new avenues for future research are proposed.     

The “Hero‐Protector Narrative”: Manufacturing Emotional Consent for the Use of Force

How do political leaders manufacture collective emotions to justify the use of force? This article introduces the “hero‐protector narrative” as a conceptual model to analyze how political leaders try to manufacture specific collective emotions to encourage their audience to perceive violence as the only morally acceptable course of action. In our model, we formalize a set of distinctive narrative structures (roles and sequences), which are combined to activate compassion and moral anger as well as identification with “heroic” behavior. Furthermore, we argue that the resonance of this narrative draws on values of hyper‐masculinity in patriarchal societies. As such this narrative is to be found across different types of actors (state/nonstate) and culturally diverse settings. To test our model, we use a computer‐assisted QDA approach. We compare systematically discourses produced by political actors legitimizing the use of force versus actors opposing the use of force. We find that discourses supporting the use of force, such as those produced by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden in the context of the Iraq war, share the structural characteristics of the hero‐protector narrative. In this regard, they differ remarkably from violence‐opposing discourses, regardless of their cultural background.     

On the political right,the customer is always right: Political ideology,entitlement, and complaining

Across three preregistered studies and five supplementary datasets, we predicted and found that conservatives were more inclined to complain than liberals due to conservative consumers feeling a greater sense of entitlement. This research contributes to the literature by introducing consumer entitlement as a novel explanation for ideological differences in consumer behavior, and by building on previous work suggesting that conservative consumers complain less than liberals (Journal of Consumer Research, 2017, 44 , 477). Evidence is provided across several service contexts and types of complaining behaviors. Study 1 and 4 supplementary datasets supported the basic process. Next, theory-relevant boundary conditions provided converging process evidence. In Study 2, complaining intentions decreased among conservatives when they felt less (vs. more) entitled than the target of social comparison. In Study 3, complaining intentions decreased among conservatives when a service recovery was framed as providing special treatment. Implications and future research directions are discussed.     

The Social Structure of Political Echo Chambers: Variation in Ideological Homophily in Online Networks

We predict that people with different political orientations will exhibit systematically different levels of political homophily, the tendency to associate with others similar to oneself in political ideology. Research on personality differences across the political spectrum finds that both more conservative and more politically extreme individuals tend to exhibit greater orientations towards cognitive stability, clarity, and familiarity. We reason that such a “preference for certainty” may make these individuals more inclined to seek out the company of those who reaffirm, rather than challenge, their views. Since survey studies of political homophily face well‐documented methodological challenges, we instead test this proposition on a large sample of politically engaged users of the social‐networking platform Twitter, whose ideologies we infer from the politicians and policy nonprofits they follow. As predicted, we find that both more extreme and more conservative individuals tend to be more homophilous than more liberal and more moderate ones.     

On the Relation Between Religiosity and the Endorsement of Conspiracy Theories: The Role of Political Orientation

Religious and conspiracy beliefs share the feature of assuming powerful forces that determine the fate of the world. Correspondingly, they have been theorized to address similar psychological needs and to be based on similar cognitions, but there exist little authoritative answers about their relationship. We delineate two theory-driven possibilities. If conspiracy theories and religions serve as surrogates for each other by fulfilling similar needs, the two beliefs should be negatively correlated. If conspiracy and religious beliefs stem from the same values and cognitions, this would speak for a positive correlation that might be diminished—for example—by controlling for shared political ideologies. We approached the question with a meta-analysis (N = 10,242), partial correlations from large Christian-dominated datasets from Germany, Poland, and the United States (N = 12,612), and a preregistered U.S. study (N = 500). The results indicate that the correlations between religiosity and conspiracy theory endorsement were positive, and political orientation shared large parts of this covariance. Correlations of religiosity with the more need-related conspiracy mentality differed between countries. We conclude that similarities in the explanatory style and ideologies seem to be central for the relation between intrinsic religiosity and endorsing conspiracy theories, but psychological needs only play a minor role.     

An Intuitionist Theory of Argument Strength in Politics: How Intuitive Cognitive Biases Produce Universally Strong Arguments

Why are some political arguments more persuasive than others? Extant theories have mainly explained argument strength with reference to familiarity. Such explanations suggest that arguments are only strong for particular populations: those living in particular cultures, those following particular news, or those holding particular political values. Here, we argue for and identify the existence of a universally strong class of arguments transcending such divides: arguments that are congruent with intuitively held cognitive biases. We focus on arguments about social welfare that are congruent with a particular cognitive bias: the deservingness heuristic. Embedding a novel experiment in representative surveys in the United States, Japan, and Denmark, we demonstrate that people intuitively process arguments that resonate with this heuristic and that such arguments are strong across cultural divides, across individual levels of familiarity with the arguments, and across individual differences in political values. Finally, against the idea that intuitive arguments are simplistic, we demonstrate that such arguments can be inferentially complex, as long as they resonate with a cognitive bias.     

On Different Sides: Investigating the Persuasive Effects of Anger Expression in Political News Messages

Anger expression is increasingly prevalent in political news messages. However, the persuasive effects of expressing anger in a political context have received scant attention from researchers. We conducted two experiments to investigate the hypothesis that anger expression is detrimental to persuasion because it runs counter to well‐established social norms for the polite expression of opinions. We created political news messages including a persuasive appeal by a politician that was supported either with an expression of anger or with an expression of nonemotional disagreement. The results of Experiment 1 (N = 120) showed that anger messages were perceived as less appropriate than control messages, and that politicians expressing anger were perceived as less likable and less competent than politicians who disagreed in nonemotional terms. In Experiment 2 (N = 1,005), the negative effects of anger expression on perceived likability and competence were replicated. Also in line with Experiment 1, anger messages were perceived as less appropriate, but this time only for those with negative a priori attitudes toward the advocated position. In contrast, those with positive a priori positions toward the advocated position perceived anger messages as more appropriate than the control messages.     

Pluralistic Ignorance and Political Correctness: The Case of Affirmative Action

The pressure to appear politically correct can have important consequences for social life. In particular, the desire to appear politically correct, and to avoid being seen as racist, sexist, or culturally insensitive, can lead people to espouse publicly support for politically correct issues, such as support for affirmative action, despite privately held doubts. Such discrepancies between public behavior and private attitudes, when accompanied by divergent attributions for one's own behavior and the identical behavior of others, can lead to pluralistic ignorance. Two studies investigated pluralistic ignorance with respect to affirmative action among undergraduates. Their survey responses indicate that people overestimate their peers' support for affirmative action and underestimate their peers' opposition to affirmative action, that people's ratings of the political correctness of supporting affirmative action are correlated with their overestimation of support for affirmative action, and that people view their own attitudes toward affirmative action as unique.     

The Formation of Left‐Right Identification: Pathways and Correlates of Parental Influence

Given the significance of the left‐right dimension as one of the most frequently employed capping term of ideological thought in most western democracies, the question arises as to how people come to identify themselves along this continuum. Drawing on a set of parent‐child pairs located in Catalonia, we seek to determine whether the processes found elsewhere with respect to the intergenerational transmission of partisanship and issue stances also apply to left‐right ideology, in a novel context characterized by the presence of a distinctive, partially cross‐cutting dimension based on center‐periphery loyalties. Results provide strong support for the principles of the direct transmission model as derived from social learning theory, while also showing the significant role of parents' place identities in conditioning the passing on of left‐right orientations.     

The Ideational Foundations of Symbolic Ideology

Theories of symbolic ideology view it as an affective orientation untouched by ideational content. Drawing on Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values, we propose that four bedrock values—universalism, openness to change, conservation, and self-enhancement—shape symbolic ideology. We explore whether politically sophisticated and unsophisticated individuals ground symbolic ideological identities in cognitive values to a comparable degree. Using data from two nationally representative U.S. surveys, we find that universalism and conservation predict liberal-conservative attachments for people at all levels of sophistication. By contrast, openness to change and self-enhancement values appear to have little influence on symbolic ideology. The universalism and conservation effects hold controlling for multiple psychological and individual differences variables. These results suggest that ideational predispositions play a substantial role in shaping symbolic ideology.