Act with authority: Romantic desire at the nexus of power possessed and power perceived

The social psychological literature and the evolutionary literature on power suggest different routes by which power might inspire romantic desire: the former highlights the appealing actions of the powerful, whereas the latter demonstrates that people desire powerful individuals upon learning of those individuals' powerful status. We predicted that, in an initial face-to-face interaction, both elements must align for the powerful to inspire romantic desire. In a live mixed-sex interaction, participants experienced the most romantic desire for an opposite-sex target who (a) actually possessed power and (b) was perceived by the participant to possess power. This interaction was mediated by observable behavior—the extent to which the target controlled the conversation and was given legitimacy by the group—indicating that the powerful do not behave powerfully around unaccommodating subordinates. Power manipulations implemented in only one person's mind may not approximate how power functions in real social interactions.     

The Mere‐Measurement Effect: Why Does Measuring Intentions Change Actual Behavior?

Recent research has demonstrated that merely measuring an individual's purchase intentions changes his or her subsequent behavior in the market. Several different alternative explanations have been proposed to explain why this “mere‐measurement effect” occurs. However, these explanations have not been tested to date. The purpose of this article is to test several competing explanations for why measuring general intentions to purchase (e.g., How likely are you to buy a car?) changes specific brand‐level behavior (e.g., which specific brand of car is purchased). The results provide a clearer understanding of the cognitive mechanism through which the mere‐measurement effect operates. The results show that when asked to provide general intentions to select a product in a given category, respondents are more likely to choose options toward which they hold positive and accessible attitudes, and are less likely to choose options for which they hold negative and accessible attitudes, compared to a control group of participants who are not asked a general intentions question. These results provide support for the conjecture that asking a general purchase intent question influences behavior by changing the accessibility of attitudes toward specific options in the category.     

Language and interpersonal cognition: causal effects of variations in pronoun usage on perceptions of closeness

Four studies examined the hypothesis that subtle language variations can have a causal impact on perceptions of relationships. In interpersonal interactions, language can function implicitly to reflect, perpetuate, and communicate relationship perceptions. Previous research has shown that interpersonal closeness and plural pronoun use are correlated; the current research demonstrates that manipulating pronoun use can lead people to perceive their own and other relationships as closer and higher in quality. In Study 1, participants who read about a relationship that was described using the pronoun we versus she and I perceived the relationship to be closer and of higher quality. Study 2 showed that pronoun variations similarly affected perceptions of participants' own ongoing relationships; Study 3 showed similar effects for perceptions of an actual interpersonal interaction. Study 4 examined potential mechanisms of this effect.     

In search of the silver lining: the justice motive fosters perceptions of benefits in the later lives of tragedy victims

Past research has demonstrated that people's need to perceive the world as fair and just leads them to blame and derogate victims of tragedy. The research reported here shows that a positive reaction--bestowing additional meaning on the lives of individuals who have suffered--can also serve people's need to believe that the world is just. In two studies, participants whose justice motive was temporarily heightened or who strongly endorsed the belief that reward and punishment are fairly distributed in the world perceived more meaning and enjoyment in the life of someone who had experienced a tragedy than in the life of someone who had not experienced tragedy, but this pattern was not found for participants whose justice motive was not heightened or who did not strongly endorse a justice belief. These results suggest that being motivated to see the world as just--a motivation traditionally associated with victim derogation--also leads people to perceive a "silver lining" to tragic events.     

Gender and the integration of acoustic dimensions of prosody: implications for clinical studies.

This study was conducted to detect the existence of a relationship between spectral and temporal prosodic cues and to examine gender differences in any such relationship. The rationale for the investigation was to gain a greater understanding of normal prosody and the requirements for control groups in clinical studies of prosody. Ten male and 10 female speakers with no known speech or neurological deficits participated in the study. They performed a reading task which involved delivering 10 sentences first with a declarative and then repeated with an interrogative intonation (20 sentences per speaker). Intrasubject and intersubject analyses of the speech data revealed a dependence of pitch on duration that differed between male and female speakers. Significant differences between the genders were also found in speech rate, pitch range, and pitch slope. The findings suggest that an integrated treatment of acoustic cues may provide a more invariant feature of normal prosody against which clinical groups may be compared. The data also imply that in clinical studies of the production of prosody gender should be carefully controlled.     

Social disadvantage and the self-regulatory function of justice beliefs

Five studies support the hypothesis that beliefs in societal fairness offer a self-regulatory benefit for members of socially disadvantaged groups. Specifically, members of disadvantaged groups are more likely than members of advantaged groups to calibrate their pursuit of long-term goals to their beliefs about societal fairness. In Study 1, low socioeconomic status (SES) undergraduate students who believed more strongly in societal fairness showed greater intentions to persist in the face of poor performance on a midterm examination. In Study 2, low SES participants who believed more strongly in fairness reported more willingness to invest time and effort to achieve desirable career outcomes. In Study 3, ethnic minority participants exposed to a manipulation suggesting that fairness conditions in their country were improving reported more willingness to invest resources in pursuit of long-term goals, relative to ethnic minority participants in a control condition. Study 4 replicated Study 3 using an implicit priming procedure, demonstrating that perceptions of the personal relevance of societal fairness mediate these effects. Across these 4 studies, no link between fairness beliefs and self-regulation emerged for members of advantaged (high SES, ethnic majority) groups. Study 5 contributed evidence from the World Values Survey and a representative sample (Inglehart, Basa?ez, Diez-Medrano, Halman, & Luijkx, 2004). Respondents reported more motivation to work hard to the extent that they believed that rewards were distributed fairly; this effect emerged more strongly for members of lower SES groups than for members of higher SES groups, as indicated by both self-identified social class and ethnicity.     

Vicarious goal satiation

A signature feature of self-regulation is that once a goal is satiated, it becomes deactivated, thereby allowing people to engage in new pursuits. The present experiments provide evidence for vicarious goal satiation, a novel phenomenon in which individuals experience “post-completion goal satiation” as a result of unwittingly taking on another person's goal pursuit and witnessing its completion. In Experiments 1 and 2, the observation of a goal being completed (vs. not completed) led to less striving by the observer on the same task. Given that an actor's strength of commitment affects goal contagion, we hypothesized that such commitment would be an important boundary condition for vicarious goal satiation. The results of Experiment 2 showed that observing stronger (vs. weaker) goal commitment lowered accessibility of goal-related words, but only when the goal being observed was completed. Implications of vicarious goal satiation for goal pursuit in everyday environments are discussed.