Terror Management and Personality: Variations in the Psychological Defense Against the Awareness of Mortality

Drawing on terror management theory (TMT), we discuss the psychological motivations that shape personality at two levels: the characteristically human personality common to us all and the individual differences that distinguish some people from others. TMT posits that the motivation to protect the self against deep-rooted fears about mortality drives people to maintain meaningful, reliable conceptions of reality and positive evaluations of themselves, two broad tendencies that form the foundation of every person’s personality. We review studies showing that mortality reminders increase efforts to bolster cultural sources of meaning and self-esteem in similar ways across individuals and cultures. TMT also posits that individual differences in personality partly reflect the different sources of meaning and self-esteem that people invest in to assuage mortality fears. We review evidence that individual differences predict the degree and direction of people’s defensive responses to mortality reminders. Directions for future research are discussed.     

Trading off switch costs and stimulus availability benefits: An investigation of voluntary task-switching behavior in a predictable dynamic multitasking environment

In the present study, we introduce a novel, self-organized task-switching paradigm that can be used to study more directly the determinants of switching. Instead of instructing participants to randomly switch between tasks, as in the classic voluntary task-switching paradigm (Arrington & Logan, 2004), we instructed participants to optimize their task performance in a voluntary task-switching environment in which the stimulus associated with the previously selected task appeared in each trial after a delay. Importantly, the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) increased further with each additional repetition of this task, whereas the stimulus needed for a task switch was always immediately available. We conducted two experiments with different SOA increments (i.e., Exp. 1a = 50 ms, Exp. 1b = 33 ms) to see whether this procedure would induce switching behavior, and we explored how people trade off switch costs against the increasing availability of the stimulus needed for a task repetition. We observed that participants adapted their behavior to the different task environments (i.e., SOA increments) and that participants switched tasks when the SOA in task switches approximately matched the switch costs. Moreover, correlational analyses indicated relations between individual switch costs and individual switch rates across participants. Together, these results demonstrate that participants were sensitive to the increased availability of switch stimuli in deciding whether to switch or to repeat, which in turn demonstrates flexible adaptive task selection behavior. We suggest that performance limitations in task switching interact with the task environment to influence switching behavior.     

Stability of National-Identity Content: Level,Predictors, and Implications

A neglected topic in empirical research on national identity is its stability at the individual level, and this is especially true for its content, that is, the meaning elements that people associate with the concept of nation. In this article, we study the stability of key dimensions of national-identity content. We ask three simple questions: How stable is national-identity content—as captured in the ethnic/civic framework—at the level of individual citizens? Are there clear differences in stability across subgroups? What are the implications of interindividual differences in stability? Analyzing data from four waves of a large-scale panel survey of German citizens (N = 4,654) collected over a five-year period (2016–21), we show that there is high but not perfect stability of the degree to which individuals subscribe to ethnic and civic criteria of nationhood. Second, we find little difference in stability as a function of several theoretically selected characteristics. Third, we show that the association between national-identity content and relevant political attitudes (immigration attitudes and far-right party support) increases with intraindividual stability. These findings have important implications for our understanding of how national-identity content is shaped and mobilized and how it can influence political attitudes and behaviors.     

The content of internal conflicts: A personal values perspective

This paper highlights the importance of considering two facets of the content of internal conflicts: The concrete subject theme of the conflict and the abstract motivations that people perceive as being conflicted (e.g. values implicated in the conflict). The paper demonstrates how personal value priorities contribute to the understanding of internal conflicts. In two studies I examined the relationship between values and the content of internal conflicts. In Study 1 (N = 250), students described a central conflict that they were experiencing and analysed the values they perceived as opposing in their conflict. Results indicated that the reported conflicts were usually between values not conceptualized as motivationally opposite to each other. Furthermore, personal value priorities were related to the values implicated in the conflict both directly and indirectly by their effect on the themes of the conflicts. In Study 2 (N = 230), working parents analysed the values they perceive as coming in conflict in two work–family dilemmas. Findings supported the premise that values explain individual differences in the motivational meaning attributed to a conflict even when the conflict theme is held constant. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Income,Motivation, and Satisfaction with Life: An Empirical Analysis

This paper focuses on how different types of motivations can condition satisfaction with life, studying whether individual heterogeneity in motivations affects the relationship between income and life satisfaction and whether the relationship between motivation and satisfaction differs for people in different income-groups. Data used in this study comes from the World Values Survey and the focus is placed on the relationship between income, motivation and satisfaction with life. Once variables such as gender, age, religion, health or education are controlled for, we find that different motivations significantly affect individual wellbeing. Moreover, our results suggest that moving from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation leads individuals to enjoy greater satisfaction with life. This is so independent of the level of income, but the role of intrinsic motivation is particularly significant for people in the low-income class. Life satisfaction also increases, within extrinsic motivation, when moving from importance placed on a good income to focusing on security and, within intrinsic motivation, when moving from emphasis placed on social relatedness to an increased feeling of accomplishment. Overall, our results suggest that different goals and intended outcomes condition individual’s perceptions of wellbeing, with intrinsic motivations being crucial in attaining greater levels of satisfaction with life.     

Worldviews about change: Their structure and their implications for understanding responses to sustainability,technology, and political change

People hold different perspectives about how they think the world is changing or should change. We examined five of these “worldviews” about change: Progress, Golden Age, Endless Cycle, Maintenance, and Balance. In Studies 1–4 (total N = 2733) we established reliable measures of each change worldview, and showed how these help explain when people will support or oppose social change in contexts spanning sustainability, technological innovations, and political elections. In mapping out these relationships we identify how the importance of different change worldviews varies across contexts, with Balance most critical for understanding support for sustainability, Progress/Golden Age important for understanding responses to innovations, and Golden Age uniquely important for preferring Trump/Republicans in the 2016 US election. These relationships were independent of prominent individual differences (e.g., values, political orientation for elections) or context-specific factors (e.g., self-reported innovativeness for responses to innovations). Study 5 (N = 2140) examined generalizability in 10 countries/regions spanning five continents, establishing that these worldviews exhibited metric invariance, but with country/region differences in how change worldviews were related to support for sustainability. These findings show that change worldviews can act as a general “lens” people use to help determine whether to support or oppose social change.     

The interplay of individual differences,norms, and group identification in predicting prejudiced behavior in online video game interactions

Despite the increasing popularity of video games and the diversity of people who play, prejudice remains common in online gaming. In the current study, we use structural equation modeling to test the role of social norms, individual differences, and gamer identification as predictors of how likely someone is to report engaging in prejudiced behavior while playing online video games. We also test the relative importance of these predictors to assess how likely people are to confront prejudice when it occurs in online video games. Participants (N = 384) completed a series of questionnaires to assess their attitudes and perceptions of online gaming norms, as well as to report their own prejudiced and confrontation behavior in video games. We found that both social norms and individual differences are significant predictors of behavior in online gaming. The more normative people report prejudice to be, the more they report making prejudiced comments. Similarly, the more normative confrontation of prejudice is reported to be, the more likely people are to report confronting prejudice. The more people endorsed generally prejudiced attitudes, the more likely they were to report making prejudiced remakes in online gaming and the less likely they were to report confronting prejudiced remarks. These results provide a foundation to inform interventions to reduce prejudice in gaming and indicate that both individual differences and norms are important to consider when designing interventions.     

Values,achievement goals,and individual‐oriented and social‐oriented achievement motivations among Chinese and Indonesian secondary school students

This study examined how values related to achievement goals and individual‐oriented and social‐oriented achievement motivations among secondary school students in China (N = 355) and Indonesia (N = 356). Statistical comparisons showed the Chinese students endorsed more strongly than the Indonesian students on self‐direction and hedonism values, individual‐oriented achievement motivation, and mastery‐approach goals. Conversely, the Indonesian students endorsed more strongly than their Chinese counterparts on security, conformity, tradition, universalism and achievement values, social‐oriented achievement motivation, and performance‐approach and mastery‐avoidance goals. Values explained a significant amount of the variance in almost all of the dimensions of motivation. Etic and emic relationships between values and achievement motivations were found.     

Appraisal of Memory Functioning and Memory Performance in Healthy Ageing and Early-Stage Alzheimer's Disease

ABSTRACT

Background/Aims: To compare memory evaluations in healthy older people and people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and present standardised individual and dyadic methods for classifying degree of memory awareness in the participants with dementia. Methods: Cross-sectional study evaluating awareness of memory functioning and performance and providing normative data for healthy individuals and couples, together with comparison data from people with AD. Results: As a group, older people are reasonably accurate raters of their own memory functioning and performance, although considerable individual differences can be observed, and control dyads show good comparative accuracy. Comparing normative data from the control group to data from participants with AD confirms that significant overestimation is a frequent feature among people with dementia, with approximately two-thirds showing this pattern, although significant under-estimation is also reliably observed in a small proportion of people with dementia. Different types of measure elicit different profiles of memory awareness in participants with dementia. Conclusion: Normative data from older individuals and couples provides useful percentile-based indices for determining level of memory awareness in people with dementia.     

A Note on the Power of Multiattribute One‐switch Utility Functions

One‐switch utility functions model situations in which the preference between two alternatives switches only once as the outcome of one attribute of both alternatives changes from low to high. Recent research cites evidence that the sum of exponential functions (sumex) is the most convincing type for modelling one‐switch utility functions. Sumex functions allow to model exactly one preferential switch and they are convenient for estimating one‐switch utility functions. However, it is unclear so far if sumex functions are suitable to model preferential switches that are perceivable by a decision maker. This paper first analyses how different the utility of two alternatives before and after a preferential can be modelled with sumex functions given that the preferential switch is caused by a particular attribute outcome improvement. It thereafter investigates how accurately decision makers perceive such utility differences. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children’s Understanding and Use of Four Dimensions of Social Status

ABSTRACT

Beginning early in life, children are exposed to people who differ in social status. In five studies, we investigate whether 3- to 6-year-old children recognize different dimensions of status (i.e., wealth, physical dominance, decision-making power, and prestige) and use these dimensions to inform their social judgments (preferences and resource allocation). Across studies, we found that by age 3, children identify high-status people as in-charge. Further, while 3-6-year-olds favor higher status individuals over lower status individuals on a preference measure, 5-6-year-olds allocate a resource to a lower status individual over a higher status individual and 3-4-year-olds are at chance in their allocation. We observed minimal differences across dimensions of status in these studies. Taken together, across five pre-registered studies, we demonstrated that children identify and use social status distinctions to inform their social judgments across a variety of different dimensions.     

Success,social comparison,and self-assessment: Parents' midlife evaluations of sons,daughters, and self

The literatures on sex-role socialization and social comparison theory were used to predict how parents would evaluate the life success of adult sons and daughters and how parents' assessments of themselves would be influenced by comparisons with these children. Although parents (N=215) did not report different levels of life success for 291 adult sons versus 251 adult daughters, parental well-being was more closely tied to assessments of sons' success. In addition, although parents' reported that both sons and daughters had exceeded their own life success, theparent-child comparison with daughters was the better predictor of parents' well-being. Findings are discussed in terms of parents' individual development, family processes at midlife, and cohort differences between parents and their children.     

Justice for the People? How Justice Sensitivity Can Foster and Impair Support for Populist Radical-Right Parties and Politicians in the United States and in Germany

Many people argue that support for populist radical-right political agents is motivated by people feeling “left behind” in globalized Western democracies. Empirical research supports this notion by showing that people who feel personally or collectively deprived are more likely to hold populist beliefs and anti-immigration attitudes. Our aim was to further investigate the psychological link between individuals' justice concerns and their preferences for populist radical-right political agents. We focused on stable individual differences in self-oriented and other-oriented justice concerns and argue that these should have opposing correlations with preferences for populist radical-right parties. We tested our hypotheses in two national samples, one from the United States (N = 1500) and one from Germany (N = 848). Sensitivity to injustice towards oneself enhanced the likelihood of preferring Trump (United States) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) (Germany) via increased anti-immigration attitudes and increased populist attitudes. Sensitivity to injustice towards others reduced the likelihood of preferring Trump and AfD via decreased anti-immigration attitudes. We discuss our findings in regard to how stable individual differences in the evaluation of fairness can motivate intra- and interpersonal political conflicts in modern w estern societies and how politics and mass media can fuel these conflicts.     

When is risk relevant? An assessment of the characteristics mountain climbers associate with eight types of climbing

Research concerned with the experiences and motivations of people who participate in mountain climbing tends to overlook the varied nature of this pursuit, with comparisons between different types of climbing only occasionally receiving attention. Accordingly, the present study (N = 207) sought to examine representations of a broad range of different types of climbing. Of particular interest was the notion of risk. Principal component analyses for each type of climbing revealed “challenge,” “risk,” “enjoyment,” and “perspective and self‐reflection” components. Attitudes toward participation were regressed on these components. Although the results revealed significant differences between the ratings of risk reported for the different types of climbing, risk had limited predictive impact on attitudes.     

When the Going Gets Tough,the Differentiated Keep Going: Cybernetic Self-Determination,Daily Obstacles,and Persistent Goal Pursuit

ABSTRACT. Cybernetic theories of self-regulation contend that an individual's goal system may work best to the extent it is differentiated. The present investigation pioneered an assessment of goal differentiation in relation to an important feature of goals—intrinsic motivation—and quantified the extent to which intrinsic motivation systematically increased from low- to mid- to high-level goals, the resulting individual difference termed cybernetic self-determination. In Study 1 (n = 106), it was found that frustrating daily events precipitated motivations to quit at low, but not high, levels of cybernetic self-determination. In Study 2 (n = 111), it was found that negative feedback was associated with reduced goal persistence at low, but not high, levels of cybernetic self-determination. The findings therefore converge on the idea that individual differences in cybernetic self-determination are consequential in buffering reactions to obstacles in daily life. Implications for personality, motivation, and self-regulation literatures are discussed.     

Social cognition,artefacts, and stigmergy revisited: Concepts of coordination

A number of different coordination concepts have been developed to explain how individual activities are coordinated on a social level, and the variety of concepts shows there is an interest in many domains to find such explanations. Stigmergy being one of them, has come to be increasingly applied on various kinds of human activities. In other domains we find other concepts for explaining how environmental resources contribute to work activities or how people use them to structure their work. This paper discusses different coordination concepts, including stigmergy, articulation work, coordination mechanisms, triggers, placeholders, and entry points. The first three concepts are explicitly concerned with coordination among several agents, while the last three instead concern individual activities, but arguably they can be extended to the social level. They also bring an explicitly cognitive dimension to coordination, which is not as salient in the former concepts. The concepts discussed here do have some similarities, but also important differences. They may not be interchangeable, but they could complement each other, or contribute to further elaboration of existing concepts. The stigmergic sign, e.g., could usefully be developed to recognise qualitative differences in its role as a coordination mechanism.     

Culture,context, and cognition: The Semantic Procedural Interface model of the self

Several studies have found evidence that social information processing is strongly influenced by the person either primarily defining his or her self as an autonomous entity (independent self-construal) or as related to other people (interdependent self-construal). In this chapter, we describe the psychological mechanisms by which independent and interdependent self-construals affect individual experience. We propose the Semantic Procedural Interface (SPI) model of the self, which distinguishes two such mechanisms. In addition to differences in the semantic content areas from which independent and interdependent self-construals arise (semantic application mechanism), there are also different procedural modes of thinking (procedural application mechanism) associated with them. Independent self-definitions coincide with the tendency to process stimuli unaffected by the context in which they appear. Relating the self to the social contexts within interdependent self-construals facilitates context-bounded thinking (i.e., processing stimuli by paying attention to their relation to the given context). The results of several experiments attesting to the value of the differentiation between both application mechanisms are presented. We discuss how far differences in information processing between members of different cultural groups can be traced back to the mechanisms described in the SPI model.     

Matching Messages to Motives in Persuasion: A Functional Approach to Promoting Volunteerism1

This study examined a functional strategy for investigating audience responses to motivationally-based persuasive appeals. It was predicted that people exposed to advertisements informing them how they could satisfy personally relevant motivations through volunteering (i.e., functionally matched messages) would judge these ads to be more persuasive, more emotionally positive, and would report being more likely to volunteer than people exposed to advertisements unrelated to their personally relevant motivations (i.e., functionally mismatched messages). These predictions were confirmed in an experiment wherein participants whose attitudes toward volunteerism served a Social Adjustive, Value Expressive, Utilitarian, Knowledge, or Ego Defensive function viewed advertisements promoting volunteerism that either matched or mismatched their personally relevant motivations. Results confirmed predictions as participants responded more favorably to the functionally matched than mismatched messages. The implications of this research for understanding the mechanisms by which functionally matched messages exert persuasive influence and the ramifications of the research for the practice of volunteerism are discussed.     

Confidence of social judgments is not just error: Individual differences in the structure,stability, and social functions of perceptual confidence

The present research uses a Social Relations Model approach to focus on individual differences in perceptual confidence – a person’s confidence in her or his impressions of others. Across two samples of group interactions, we found that the majority of variance in perceptual confidence was explained by individual differences in how people tended to perceive others (i.e., perceiver effects). A smaller percentage of variance was explained by differences in how people tended to be perceived by others (i.e., target effects). Both these individual differences were stable over time, were related to relevant personality measures, and group outcomes. Together, these results demonstrate that although perceptual confidence may not be substantially related to accuracy, it exists as a stable individual difference dimension that has important consequences for social interactions.     

Perceptions of Ethical Climate and Research Pressures in Different Faculties of a University: Cross-Sectional Study at the University of Split,Croatia

We determined the prevailing ethical climate at three different schools of a single university, in order to explore possible differences in the ethical climate related to different research fields: the School of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Naval Architecture; the School of Humanities and Social Sciences; and the School of Medicine. We used the Ethical Climate Questionnaire to survey the staff (teachers and administration) at the three schools, and used the research integrity and organizational climate (RIOC) survey for early-stage researchers at the three schools. The dominant ethical climate type perceived collectively at the three university schools (response rate 49%, n = 294) was Laws and professional codes, which is associated with the cosmopolitan level of analysis and the ethical construct of principle. Individually, the same climate predominated at the schools for engineering and humanities, but the School of Medicine had the Self-interest ethical climate, which is associated with the individual level of analysis and the egoism ethical construct. In the RIOC survey (response rate 85%; n = 70), early-stage researchers from the three university schools did not differ in their perceptions of the organizational research integrity climate, or in their perceived individual, group or organizational pressures. Our study is the first, to the best of our knowledge, to show differences in perceived ethical climate at a medical school compared to other schools at a university. Further studies are needed to explore the reasons for these differences and how they translate to organizational outcomes, such as job satisfaction, commitment to the institution and dysfunctional behaviour, including research misconduct.