Reactions to Others' Selfish Actions in the Absence of Tangible Consequences

This research assessed the role of perceived selfishness in people's reactions to events without tangible consequences. In Experiment 1, participants were assigned to complete a boring task by another person who gave a selfish, legitimizing, or exculpatory explanation for the decision. However, half of the participants knew that the other's decision was irrelevant and that they would complete the task regardless of the person's decision. In a second experiment, participants were told that the decision was irrelevant either before or after learning that the other person assigned them to do the boring task. Both studies showed that participants who received a selfish explanation responded strongly to the other person whether or not the person's decision had tangible consequences for them.     

Attributions and organizational conflict: The mediating role of apparent sincerity

When individuals behave in a provocative, conflict-inducing manner, they often attribute such actions to external causes (e.g., “I'm only following orders”). It was hypothesized that when such statements are perceived as accurate (sincere), they will mitigate negative reactions and reduce subsequent conflict. However, when they are viewed as inaccurate (insincere), opposite effects will result. It was also hyothesized that the impact of such attributional sincerity is greater in the context of high than low pressure to reach an agreement. In Study 1, male and female subjects negotiated with an accomplice who behaved in a conflict-inducing manner and who attributed such actions, either accurately or falsely, to external causes. These negotiations occurred under either high or low pressure to reach an agreement. Results offered support for both hypotheses. Under high but not low pressure to reach agreement, subjects rated the accomplice as less honest and reported stronger preferences for handing future conflicts with him in nonconciliatory ways (e.g., through avoidance or competition) when this person's attributional statements appeared to be false than when they appeared to be accurate. Surprisingly, however, subjects actually made more and larger concessions to an attributionally insincere than attributionally sincere opponent under both pressure conditions. In Study 2, officers of an urban fire department reported on how they would react to conflict with another member of their department under conditions where this person's provocative behavior stemmed from various causes. Results agreed closely with those of the laboratory study. Subjects reported the most negative reactions under conditions where their opponent falsely attributed his conflict-inducing actions to external causes.     

An attribution-emotion-action interpretation of the “evil eye” in everyday conflict situations

An attribution-emotion-action model was used to examine individuals’ willingness to seek for another person's face in conflict situations. To induce interpersonal conflict and frustration, participants were engaged in the ultimatum bargaining game (UBG) where they received predetermined offers. A simple UBG consists of two players, a Proposer and a Responder, who must decide how to divide a resource. Our findings confirm our predictions in that during the interpersonal conflict (i.e., betraying the norm of equality in the UBG), participants made more controllable based attributions, felt more frustrated (less sympathetic), and more likely requested to view the Proposer's photograph than when there is no conflict. Stated differently, in conflict situations, the likelihood of seeking another person's face increases when controllable attributions are made and when frustration is felt.     

Socially motivated projection: Need to belong increases perceived opinion consensus on important issues

In three studies, we tested whether the need to belong would motivate people to perceive consensus for their opinions on important social issues. In Study 1, a nationally representative telephone survey, participants with a high dispositional need to belong perceived greater consensus for their opinions on immigrant naturalization than did those with a low need to belong. However, this relationship was strongest among participants who reported that the issue was personally important to them. In Study 2, participants primed with rejection‐related (versus acceptance‐related) words, and who reported high levels of issue importance, demonstrated greater false consensus for their opinions on a proposed alcohol tax increase. In Study 3, participants who received random feedback that they held a common (versus uncommon) opinion had a lower subsequent need to belong when the issue was important to them, suggesting that consensus perceptions can in fact mitigate belongingness needs. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Role of Temporal and Spatial Information Cues in Locating Missing Persons

Prospective person memory refers to the search for a missing or wanted person. Performance on prospective person memory tasks has been found to be poor in field‐based experiments. Prior research suggests that the size of the search space may influence success on prospective person memory tasks. In the present research, we gave participants randomly assigned temporal and spatial cues about a mock missing person's whereabouts. Participants were offered a monetary reward for accurately reporting seeing the missing person. Participants who were told the missing person would appear in the building, where they were, had higher expectations of encountering the missing person and made more sightings than participants told the missing person would appear on the university campus. Expectations of encounter predicted participants' intent to look for the missing person, which predicted actual looking behavior, which ultimately predicted accurate sightings.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Moral objectivism across the lifespan

We report the results of two studies that examine folk metaethical judgments about the objectivity of morality. We found that participants attributed almost as much objectivity to ethical statements as they did to statements of physical fact and significantly more objectivity to ethical statements than to statements about preferences or tastes. In both studies, younger participants attributed less objectivity to ethical statements than older participants. Females were observed to attribute slightly less objectivity to ethical statements than males, and we found important interactions between attributions of objectivity and other factors, such as how strong participants’ moral opinions were and how much disagreement about the issue they perceived to exist within society. We believe our results have significant implications for debates about the nature of folk morality and about the nature of morality in general.     

Empathic forecasting: How do we predict other people's feelings?

When making affective forecasts, people commit the impact bias. They overestimate the impact an emotional event has on their affective experience. In three studies we show that people also commit the impact bias when making empathic forecasts, affective forecasts for someone else. They overestimate the impact an emotional event has on someone else's affective experience (Study 1), they do so for friends and strangers (Study 2), and they do so when other sources of information are available (Study 3). Empathic forecasting accuracy, the correlation between one person's empathic forecast and another person's actual affective experience, was lower than between-person forecasting correspondence, the correlation between one person's empathic forecast and another person's affective forecast. Empathic forecasts do not capture other people's actual experience very well but are similar to what other people forecast for themselves. This may enhance understanding between people.     

Compensatory nonconformity: Self-uncertainty and low implicit self-esteem increase adoption and expression of minority opinions

The present studies tested whether people, particularly those who are most vulnerable to self-threats as indicated by low implicit self-esteem, adopt and express minority opinions to compensate for self-uncertainty. In Studies 1 through 3, low implicit self-esteem participants who were made to feel uncertain about themselves as individuals (versus uncertain about a self-irrelevant issue in Study 1, certain about themselves in Study 2, or uncertain about their group memberships in Study 3) expressed more disagreement with others' opinions. Additionally, Study 3 demonstrated that this effect is specific to minority opinions and does not emerge on majority opinions. In Study 4, the relation between self-uncertainty and disagreement with others' opinions was strongest among participants with both low implicit and high explicit self-esteem, who respond to self-threats in particularly defensive ways.     

Olfactory Comfort and Attachment Within Relationships

We replicated a previous study that found that men and women often smell their sexual partners' clothing when they are apart ( McBurney, Shoup, & Streeter, 2006 ). We found that women tend to perform this behavior across a broader range of relationships than do men. We asked 128 participants if they had ever intentionally smelled another person's clothing, slept with another person's clothing because of its smell, or given another person an article of their own clothing. The most common response was a romantic partner's clothing. However, women more often than men reported smelling the clothing of family members.     

Cultural differences in the primacy effect for person perception

Previous work has shown there are robust differences in how North Americans and East Asians form impressions of people. The present research examines whether the tendency to weigh initial information more heavily—the primacy effect—may be another component of these cultural differences. Specifically, we tested whether Americans would be more likely to use first impressions to guide person perception, compared to Japanese participants. In this experiment, participants read a vignette that described a target person's behaviour, then rated the target's personality. Before reading the vignette, some trait information was given to create an expectation about the target's personality. The data revealed that Americans used this initial information to guide their judgments of the target, whereas the Japanese sample based their judgments on all the information more evenly. Thus, Americans showed a stronger primacy effect in their impression formation than Japanese participants, who engaged in more data‐driven processing.     

The Selective Laziness of Reasoning

Reasoning research suggests that people use more stringent criteria when they evaluate others' arguments than when they produce arguments themselves. To demonstrate this “selective laziness,” we used a choice blindness manipulation. In two experiments, participants had to produce a series of arguments in response to reasoning problems, and they were then asked to evaluate other people's arguments about the same problems. Unknown to the participants, in one of the trials, they were presented with their own argument as if it was someone else's. Among those participants who accepted the manipulation and thus thought they were evaluating someone else's argument, more than half (56% and 58%) rejected the arguments that were in fact their own. Moreover, participants were more likely to reject their own arguments for invalid than for valid answers. This demonstrates that people are more critical of other people's arguments than of their own, without being overly critical: They are better able to tell valid from invalid arguments when the arguments are someone else's rather than their own.     

Justifying Optimistic Predictions With Minimally Diagnostic Information Under Conditions of Outcome Dependency

Participants in 2 studies received information varying in diagnosticity about another person whom they were motivated to view positively or negatively. In Study 1, participants' chances of winning a prize depended on whether another player won or lost an 11-trial game. Although estimates of this player's chances of winning were identical prior to the game, participants who wanted him to win were more optimistic than those who wanted him to lose after he was said to have won the first trial. Predictions following later trials also showed evidence of motivation, but only when participants had not made pregame predictions. Ratings after individual trials were also sensitive to whether the yoked player won or lost. In Study 2, participants received information that did or did not relate to the probable performance of their partner, opponent, or a control target in an upcoming creativity game. After receiving the information, participants rated their opponent more negatively than they did the control target, regardless of information diagnosticity, and despite the fact that participants acknowledged the difference in diagnosticity. Evidently, when seeking evidence for optimistic predictions, people may apply different standards to minimally diagnostic information depending on its favorability, despite understanding the information's low utility.     

Mad enough to see the other side: Anger and the search for disconfirming information

The current research explored the effect of anger on hypothesis confirmation—the propensity to seek information that confirms rather than disconfirms one's opinion. We argued that the moving against action tendency associated with anger leads angry individuals to seek out more disconfirming information than sad individuals, attenuating the confirmation bias. We tested this hypothesis in two studies of experimentally primed anger and sadness on the selective exposure to hypothesis confirming and disconfirming information. In Study 1, participants in the angry condition were more likely to choose disconfirming information than those in the sad or neutral condition when given the opportunity to read more about a social debate, and reading the disconfirming information affected their subsequent attitude. Study 2 measured participants' opinions and information selection about the 2008 US Presidential Election and their desire to “move against” a person or object. Participants in the angry condition reported a greater tendency to oppose a person or object, which resulted in the attenuation of the confirmation bias.     

Individualism–collectivism and organ donation intentions

This article investigates the impact of individualism–collectivism on a person's willingness to donate organs. In Study 1, an online survey showed that individualism–collectivism was significantly and positively associated with participants' willingness to register as organ donors while perceived benefit mediated this relationship. Study 2 demonstrated the causal effect of individualism–collectivism on organ donation intentions using a priming technique. Participants primed with collectivism were more likely to register as organ donors than those primed with individualism. Our findings provide unique insights into whether cultural values (i.e., individualism–collectivism) can predict people's organ donation intentions.     

Are lies more wrong than errors? Accuracy judgments of inaccurate statements

People are often mistaken when estimating and predicting quantities, and sometimes they report values that they know are false: they lie. There exists, however, little research devoted to how such deviations are being perceived. In four vignette studies, participants were asked to rate the accuracy of inaccurate statements about quantities (prices, numbers and amounts). The results indicate that overstatements are generally judged to be more inaccurate than understatements of the same magnitude; self-favorable (optimistic) statements are considered more inaccurate than unfavorable (pessimistic) statements, and false reports (lies) are perceived to be more inaccurate than equally mistaken estimates. Lies about the future did not differ from lies about the past, but own lies were perceived as larger than the same lies attributed to another person. It is suggested that estimates are judged according to how close they come to the true values (close estimates are more correct than estimates that are less close), whereas lies are judged as deviant from truth, with less importance attached to the magnitude of the deviation.     

Discrimination of Visual Patterns as a Function of Motivation and Frequency of Reinforcement

The influence of the content of statements regarding delay and the level of role involvement (free choice of verbalization condition, assignment to verbalization condition, or passive listening to statement) on self-control in 98 preschool boys and girls was investigated in a task in which the child's possession of accumulating candy rewards was made contingent upon the child's stopping further accumulation. Children who chose to verbalize the task-centered utterance waited longer before taking the rewards than did the children in the three conditions involving reward-centered statements. Children who were told to use the task-centered statement or who passively heard it waited longer than did children who were told to use the reward-centered statement or who passively heard it. Children who chose the reward-centered statement waited less than children in the other two reward-centered conditions. Children given no direction regarding what to do during the waiting period delayed less than children in the task-centered conditions and they delayed about the same as children in the reward-centered groups, suggesting that preschoolers spontaneously employed delay plans which did not maximally facilitate self-control.