Showing papers in "Advances in Experimental Social Psychology in 2017"

Self-Distancing: Theory, Research, and Current Directions

Abstract: When people experience negative events, they often try to understand their feelings to improve the way they feel. Although engaging in this meaning-making process leads people to feel better at times, it frequently breaks down leading people to ruminate and feel worse. This raises the question: What factors determine whether people's attempts to “work-through” their negative feelings succeed or fail? In this article, we describe an integrative program of research that has addressed this issue by focusing on the role that self-distancing plays in facilitating adaptive self-reflection. We begin by describing the “self-reflection puzzle” that initially motivated this line of work. Next, we introduce the concept of self-distancing and describe the conceptual framework we developed to explain how this process should facilitate adaptive self-reflection. After describing the early studies that evaluated this framework, we discuss how these findings have been extended to broaden and deepen our understanding of the role that this process plays in self-regulation. We conclude by offering several parting thoughts that integrate the ideas discussed in this chapter.

The functional theory of counterfactual thinking : New evidence, new challenges, new insights

Abstract: Thinking about what might have been—counterfactual thinking—is a common feature of the mental landscape. Key questions about counterfactual thinking center on why and how they occur and what downstream cognitive and behavioral outcomes they engender. The functional theory of counterfactual thinking aims to answer these and other questions by drawing connections to goal cognition and by specifying distinct functions that counterfactuals may serve, including preparing for goal pursuit and regulating affect. Since the publication of our last theoretical statement ( Epstude & Roese, 2008 ), numerous lines of empirical evidence support, or are rendered more readily understandable, when glimpsed through the lens of the functional theory. However, other lines of evidence have called into question the very basis of the theory. We integrate a broad range of findings spanning several psychological disciplines so as to present an updated version of the functional theory. We integrate findings from social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, clinical psychology, and health psychology that support the claim that episodic counterfactual thoughts are geared mainly toward preparation and goal striving and are generally beneficial for individuals. Counterfactuals may influence behavior via either a content-specific pathway (in which the counterfactual insight informs behavior change) or a content-neutral pathway (in which the negative affect from the counterfactual motivates generic behavior change). Challenges to the functional theory of counterfactual thinking center on whether counterfactuals typically cohere to a structural form amenable to goal striving and whether behavioral consequences are mainly dysfunctional rather than functional. Integrating both supporting and challenging evidence, we offer a new theoretical synthesis intended to clarify the literature and guide future research in multiple disciplines of psychology.

Intergroup Perception and Cognition: An Integrative Framework for Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Social Categorization

Abstract: The primary aim of this chapter is to provide a framework to understand and synthesize the processes of person construal—early perceptions that lead to initial ingroup/outgroup categorizations—with the processes involved in intergroup relations. To this end, we review research examining the initial perception and categorization of ingroup and outgroup members and its downstream consequences. We first discuss bottom-up processes in person construal based on visual features (e.g., facial prototypicality and bodily cues), and then discuss how top-down factors (e.g., beliefs, stereotypes) may influence these processes. Next, we examine how the initial categorization of targets as ingroup or outgroup members influences identification, stereotyping, and group-based evaluations, and the relations between these constructs. We also explore the implications of the activation of these constructs for a range of social judgments including emotion identification, empathy, and intergroup behaviors. Finally, we describe a variety of well established and more recent strategies to reduce intergroup bias that target the activation of category-based knowledge, including intergroup contact, approach orientations, evaluative conditioning, and perspective taking.

Essentially biased: why people are fatalistic about genes

Abstract: We propose that people are genetic essentialists—that is, they tend to think of genetic attributions as being immutable, of a specific etiology, natural, and dividing people into homogenous and discrete groups. Although there are rare conditions where genes operate in these kinds of deterministic ways, people overgeneralize from these to the far more common conditions where genes are not at all deterministic. These essentialist biases are associated with some harmful outcomes such as racism, sexism, pessimism in the face of illnesses, political polarization, and support for eugenics, while at the same time they are linked with increased tolerance and sympathy for gay rights, mental illness, and less severe judgments of responsibility for crime. We will also discuss how these essentialist biases connect with the burgeoning direct-to-consumer genomics industry and various kinds of genetic engineering. Overall, these biases appear rather resistant to efforts to reduce them, although genetics literacy predicts weaker essentialist tendencies.

Sex Differences in Jealousy: A 25-Year Retrospective

Abstract: The theory of evolved sex differences in jealousy has emerged as one of evolutionary psychology's most prominent lines of research. In this paper, we offer a 25-year retrospective on the theory. We begin with a review of the theory itself and the statistical implications of the theory. We then discuss many of the prominent challenges to the theory. These challenges include: a suggestion that sex differences in the interpretation of the questions often used in sex difference in jealousy studies confound the results, psychometric concerns regarding the response scales used to assess the sex difference in jealousy, whether actual experiences with infidelity mirror participants’ hypothetical reactions, potential cognitive influences on the sex difference in jealousy, ambiguous results regarding physiological manifestations of the sex difference in jealousy, meta-analyses that reach seemingly different conclusions regarding the existence of the sex difference in jealousy, and moderators (including sexual orientation) that attenuate the sex difference in jealousy. Finally, we evaluate the state of the theory in light of the evidence we review, we consider why researchers from different subfields of psychology appear to have such different interpretations of the evidence for sex differences in jealousy, and we outline recommendations for future research directions.

Changing Our Implicit Minds: How, When, and Why Implicit Evaluations Can Be Rapidly Revised

Abstract: How easily can our first impressions of others be updated when we learn new, contradictory evidence? We review recent work in the social cognition literature on the ways in which implicit evaluations can be updated in a durable and robust manner. These findings show that implicit evaluations of novel individuals can be revised when the new information is believable and diagnostic, and if it reinterprets the evaluative meaning of the original information. We discuss implications of this evidence for the degree to which evaluative memories can be updated, as well as new directions for theories of human evaluation and implicit cognition.

Implicit Theories: Assumptions That Shape Social and Moral Cognition

Abstract: Implicit theories are a priori beliefs about the features and properties of objects, including humans. In this chapter, I describe research examining the effects of implicit theories on different points of the social information processing stream. Much of this research has focused on comparing people with an “entity theory” (the belief that human qualities are fixed) to people with an “incremental theory” (the belief that human qualities are malleable). I also review research that has focused on people's theories about intentionality, as well as their theories about genetics. I describe each type of theory's influence on such processes as attention allocation, encoding, retrieval, and attributional reasoning. I also summarize evidence indicating that the activation of an implicit theory creates a motivated bias that privileges information that is consistent with the theory. Taken together, I suggest ways in which taking an implicit theories approach sheds new light on foundational social information processes.

The Motivational Underpinnings of Belief in God

Abstract: Beliefs in powerful Gods are prevalent across time and across societies. In this chapter, we explore the motivated underpinnings of this phenomenon. After describing two popular theories that help account for some of this prevalence—one focused on byproducts of normal human cognition and the other focused on the cultural benefit conferred by shared belief in powerful Gods—we propose that a third perspective may be needed to fully explain why so many people believe: that believing in God is one mechanism through which people fulfill their need to perceive the world as structured, orderly, and nonrandom. We then describe a model that outlines the causes and consequences of perceptions of structure, and leverage this model to organize the evidence connecting belief in God to people's need for structure. We then note the ways in which belief in a powerful God, though not the only form of belief that can satisfy the need for structure, may hold an advantage over most alternatives. Finally, we conclude by discussing the implications of this perspective for understanding the ongoing evolution of religious belief.

The intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics of self-regulation in the leadership process

Abstract: This chapter presents a model and empirical research approaching the antecedents and consequences of leadership behavior from a self-regulation perspective. The presented self-regulation model of leadership behavior (SMLB) focuses on the role of self-regulation strategies (1) as antecedents of leadership behavior and (2) as guides of leaders’ social influence on followers. Research testing hypotheses derived from the model for regulatory focus, regulatory mode, and need for cognitive closure in the context of leadership is summarized. The presented research addresses two prominent gaps in research on leadership behavior: the impact of motivation on leadership behavior and the social influence processes underlying successful leadership (e.g., perceived leader effectiveness and follower effort).

Stereotype Threat and Learning

Abstract: Extensive research on stereotype threat has examined how worries and concerns about confirming negative performance stereotypes can harm stereotyped individuals’ performance. An impressive body of knowledge about stereotype threat performance effects has accumulated. However, only a handful of studies have shown that stereotype threat can also negatively impact learning. Although much more research is needed, in this chapter, we review and examine the work on stereotype threat and learning to date and present a model about why and how these learning effects occur. We also discuss how stereotype threat can influence reactions to feedback that occurs in learning settings and how interventions that mitigate stereotype threat can improve learning. Understanding how stereotype threat affects learning is a relatively new avenue for research on stereotype threat that has the potential to provide useful information about how to improve skill acquisition and performance for negatively stereotyped individuals.