Generalized Trust Through Civic Engagement? Evidence from Five National Panel Studies

According to a popular version of social capital theory, civic engagement should produce generalized trust among citizens. We put this theory to the test by examining the causal connection between civic engagement and generalized trust using multiple methods and multiple (prospective) panel datasets. We found participants to be more trusting. This was mostly likely caused by selection effects: the causal effects of civic engagement on trust were very small or nonsignificant. In the cases where small causal effects were found, they turned out not to last. We found no differences across types of organizations and only minor variations across countries.     

Does Religion Breed Trust? A Cross‐National Study of the Effects of Religious Involvement,Religious Faith,and Religious Context on Social Trust

Many previous studies have linked religiosity to social trust. Yet much of this relation remains insufficiently understood, which is partly due to the fact that religiosity is a multidimensional phenomenon. In this article, we identify several of those dimensions, including the integration in religious communities, the importance of God in people's lives, and the religious context. These dimensions give rise to different mechanisms that produce both trust‐enhancing and trust‐reducing effects. Data from the European Values Survey (2008) were used to test the resulting hypotheses, using multilevel logistic regression models. We conclude that the micro effects are ambivalent: integration in religious communities furthers trust, whereas religious socialization and the importance of God lower trust. On the macro level, we find a strong effect of Protestantism, which is in line with previous studies, but that remains puzzling since the individual‐level difference between Protestants and the other religious traditions was found to be very small. In addition, in contrast to other studies, we found that religious diversity increases social trust.     

A new perspective on human reward research: How consciously and unconsciously perceived reward information influences performance

The question of how human performance can be improved through rewards is a recurrent topic of interest in psychology and neuroscience. Traditional, cognitive approaches to this topic have focused solely on consciously communicated rewards. Recently, a largely neuroscience-inspired perspective has emerged to examine the potential role of conscious awareness of reward information in effective reward pursuit. The present article reviews research employing a newly developed monetary-reward-priming paradigm that allows for a systematic investigation of this perspective. We analyze this research to identify similarities and differences in how consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards impact three distinct aspects relevant to performance: decision making, task preparation, and task execution. We further discuss whether conscious awareness, in modulating the effects of reward information, plays a role similar to its role in modulating the effects of other affective information. Implications of these insights for understanding the role of consciousness in modulating goal-directed behavior more generally are discussed.     

A longitudinal study of the effects of coping motives,negative affect and drinking level on drinking problems among college students

We examined among college students the interactive effects of drinking to cope (DTC) motivation, anxiety and depression symptoms, and drinking level in predicting drinking-related problems (DRPs). Using an Internet-based survey, participants (N = 844, 53% women) first reported on their drinking motives and monthly for up to three months, they reported on their drinking level, anxiety, depression, and DRPs. We found a three-way interaction between DTC motivation and average levels of drinking and anxiety (but not depression) in predicting DRPs. Specifically, among individuals with stronger DTC motives, higher mean levels of anxiety were associated with a stronger positive association between mean drinking levels and DRPs. We did not find three-way interactions in the models examining monthly changes in anxiety, depression, and drinking in predicting monthly DRPs. However, individuals high in DTC motivation showed a stronger positive association between changes in drinking level and DRPs. The results are discussed in terms of mechanisms related to attention-allocation and self-control resource depletion.     

A matter of perspective: why past moral behavior can sometimes encourage and other times discourage future moral striving

In this paper, we investigate the role of different perspectives people take on their past moral and nonmoral behavior. Across two experiments, we show that when people focus on progress toward personal goals, past moral behavior leads to less future moral striving compared to past nonmoral behavior. However, when people focus on commitment toward personal goals, past moral behavior tends to lead to more future moral striving compared to past nonmoral behavior. Our results integrate seemingly contradictive empirical evidence from past research, relying on the overarching theoretical framework of goal regulation theory.     

Effort responses to suboptimal reward cues are related to striatal dopaminergic functioning

Reward cues have been found to increase the investment of effort in tasks even when cues are presented suboptimally (i.e. very briefly), making them hard to consciously detect. Such effort responses to suboptimal reward cues are assumed to rely mainly on the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the ventral striatum. To provide further support for this assumption, we performed two studies investigating whether these effort responses vary with individual differences in markers of striatal dopaminergic functioning. Study 1 investigated the relation between physical effort responses and resting state eye-blink rate. Study 2 examined cognitive effort responses in relation to individually averaged error-related negativity. In both studies effort responses correlated with the markers only for suboptimal, but not for optimal reward cues. These findings provide further support for the idea that effort responses to suboptimal reward cues are mainly linked to the mesolimbic dopamine system, while responses to optimal reward cues also depend on higher-level cortical functions.     

A DDL Approach to Pluralistic Ignorance and Collective Belief

A group is in a state of pluralistic ignorance (PI) if, roughly speaking, every member of the group thinks that his or her belief or desire is different from the beliefs or desires of the other members of the group. PI has been invoked to explain many otherwise puzzling phenomena in social psychology. The main purpose of this article is to shed light on the nature of PI states – their structure, internal consistency and opacity – using the formal apparatus of Dynamic Doxastic Logic, and also to study the sense in which such states are “fragile”, i.e. to identify plausible conditions under which a PI state cascades into a state of shared belief as the result of announcement.