[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104614.].

People need to accurately understand and predict others' emotions in order to build and maintain meaningful social connections. However, when they encounter new social partners, people often do not have enough information about them to make accurate inferences. Rather, they often resort to an egocentric heuristic, and make predictions about a target by using their own self-knowledge as a proxy. Is this egocentric heuristic a form of cognitive bias, or is it a rational strategy for real-world social prediction? If egocentrism provides a rational and effective solution to the challenging task of social prediction in naturalistic contexts, we should expect that a) egocentric predictions tend to be more accurate, and b) people rely on self-knowledge to a greater extent when it's more likely to be a good proxy. Using an emotion prediction task and personality measures, we assessed similarity and predictive accuracy between first-year college students and their new acquaintance roommate. Results demonstrated that, when people need to predict an unfamiliar target's emotions, self-knowledge can often effectively approximate knowledge about others, and thus support accurate predictions. Moreover, participants that were typical of the sample, whose self-knowledge can better approximate information about the target, relied more on self-knowledge in their predictions, and thus achieved higher accuracy. These findings suggest that people rationally tune their use of egocentrism based on whether it is likely to pay off. Overall, these findings demonstrate a rational side to a cognitive phenomenon usually framed as a cognitive pitfall, namely egocentric projection, when its natural decision context is taken into consideration.

The current work tested whether perceivers believe that women, relative to men, are likely to exaggerate versus downplay pain, an effect we refer to as the gender-pain exaggeration bias. The gender-pain exaggeration bias was operationalized as the extent to which perceivers believe women, relative to men, claim more pain than they feel. Across four experiments, we found that women were expected to exaggerate pain more than men and men were expected to downplay pain more than women (Studies 1-4). Further, judgments that women were more emotionally dramatizing than men contributed to this gender-pain exaggeration bias (Studies 2 and 4). We also assessed whether perceiver-level differences in endorsement of gendered emotional dramatization stereotypes (Studies 3-4) moderated this gender-pain exaggeration bias and found that endorsement of gendered emotional dramatization stereotypes moderated this bias. In sum, we document a relative gender-pain exaggeration bias wherein perceivers believe women, relative to men, to be emotionally dramatizing and therefore more likely to exaggerate versus downplay their pain. This bias may lead perceivers to interpret women's, relative to men's, pain reports as overstatements, inauthentic, or dramatized. Thus, the current work may have implications for well-documented biases in perceptions of (i.e., underestimating) and responses to (i.e., undertreating) women's pain.

The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the vast amount of economic inequality in the U.S. Yet, has it influenced Americans' attitudes and behaviors toward equality? With a three-wave longitudinal survey, the current research provides evidence that experiencing personal harm (e.g., contracting Covid-19, losing jobs, or psychological distress) from the pandemic predicts an increase in people's attitudinal and behavioral advocacy for equality. Specifically, we find that experiencing greater personal harm in the early stages of the pandemic (i.e., May 2020) is associated with increased advocacy for equality one year later (i.e., May 2021; e.g., contacting a public official to express support for reducing inequality). Furthermore, we find that this increase in advocacy for equality is explained, in part, by people's greater endorsement of the external factors (e.g., bad luck, discrimination, etc.) that contribute to inequality. Our work provides evidence that the extent to which people experience harm from the Covid-19 pandemic predicts both their increased understanding of external sources of inequality, as well as their efforts to combat this inequality (e.g., by advocating for policies that combat structural contributors to inequality).

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has triggered a strong sense of uncertainty worldwide, which may lead to short-sighted behaviors. This study aimed to examine the impact of uncertainty induced by COVID-19 on intertemporal choice, as well as its underlying mechanisms, by conducting four experiments. Study 1a verified the causal relationship between uncertainty and intertemporal choice by showing that participants who feel more uncertain are more likely to choose smaller and sooner gains. Study 1b further confirmed this finding by conducting field experiments, which improved the ecological validity of the results. Study 2 not only replicated the results of Study 1 but also investigated the mediating role of future orientation between uncertainty and intertemporal choice. In Study 3, all participants experienced high uncertainty by recalling their own experiences related to COVID-19. The results showed that increasing future orientation reduced their preferences for smaller and sooner gains, further confirming the mediating role of future orientation. Overall, these findings indicate that uncertainty may lead to a present orientation, which in turn fosters preferences for immediate gains.

In the present work, we set out to assess whether and how much people learn in response to their stereotypic assumptions being confirmed, being disconfirmed, or remaining untested. In Study 1, participants made a series of judgments that could be influenced by stereotypes and received feedback that confirmed stereotypes the majority of the time, feedback that disconfirmed stereotypes the majority of the time, or no feedback on their judgments. Replicating past work on confirmation bias, patterns in the conditions with feedback indicated that pieces of stereotype-confirming evidence exerted more influence than stereotype-disconfirming evidence. Participants in the Stereotype-Confirming condition stereotyped more over time, but rates of stereotyping for participants in the Stereotype-Disconfirming condition remained unchanged. Participants who received no feedback, and thus no evidence, stereotyped more over time, indicating that, matching our core hypothesis, they learned from their own untested assumptions. Study 2 provided a direct replication of Study 1. In Study 3, we extended our assessment to memory. Participants made judgments and received a mix of confirmatory, disconfirmatory, and no feedback and were subsequently asked to remember the feedback they received on each trial, if any. Memory tests for the no feedback trials revealed that participants often misremembered that their untested assumptions were confirmed. Supplementing null hypothesis significance testing, Bayes Factor analyses indicated the data in Studies 1, 2, and 3 provided moderate-to-extreme evidence in favor of our hypotheses. Discussion focuses on the challenges these learning patterns create for efforts to reduce stereotyping.

Many people practiced COVID-19-related safety measures in the first year of the pandemic, but Republicans were less likely to engage in behaviors such as wearing masks or face coverings than Democrats, suggesting radical disparities in health practices split along political fault lines. We developed an "" which aimed to identify the framings that would promote mask wearing among a representative sample of Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. from Oct 14, 2020, to Jan 14, 2021 ( = 4931). Seven different conditions reflecting different moral values and factors specific to COVID-19-including protection from harm (self), protection from harm (community), patriotic duty, purity, reviving the economy, threat, and scientific evidence-were implemented to identify which framings would "win" in terms of promoting mask wearing compared to a baseline condition. We found that Republicans had significantly more negative attitudes toward masks, lower intentions to wear them, and were less likely to sign or share pledges on social media than Democrats, which was partially mediated by Republicans, compared to Democrats, perceiving that the threat of COVID-19 was lower. None of our framing conditions significantly affected Republicans' or Democrats' attitudes, intentions, or behaviors compared to the baseline condition, illustrating the difficulty in overcoming the strength of political polarization during COVID-19.

This registered study aimed at testing the role of emotion in the intervention effect of an experimental intervention study in academic settings. Previous analyses of the National Study of the Learning Mindset (Yeager et al., 2019) showed that in a randomized controlled trial, high school students who were given the growth mindset intervention had, on average higher GPA than did students in the control condition. Previous analyses also showed that school achievement levels moderated the intervention effect. This study applied a sentence-level text analysis strategy to detect participants' attentional focus in five emotional dimensions (valence, arousal, dominance/control, approach-avoidant, and uncertainty) across three writing prompts students wrote during the intervention. Linear mixed models were conducted to test if emotional dimension scores computed using the text analysis predicted a higher intervention effect (i.e., higher post-intervention GPA given pre-intervention GPA). The moderating role of school achievement levels was also examined. The results of this study have implications on the possibility of applying text analysis strategies on open-ended questions in interventions or experimental studies to examine the role of the emotion-attentional focus of participants during intervention or experimental studies on the intervention or experimental outcomes, especially those that are conducted in academic settings.

COVID-19 is an unprecedented threat and an effective response requires a collective effort: engagement in preventive health behaviors, even from people at low risk. Previous research demonstrates that belongingness to social groups can promote prosocial, preventive health behaviors. The current research tests the effects of belongingness to two types of groups, intimate (family) and social category (nation), on intentions to comply with preventive health behaviors and reasons for these behaviors. We conducted three studies using French participants at low risk of grave effects from COVID-19 (total  = 875). In Study 1, across three time periods, belongingness was correlated with greater intentions to comply with preventive behaviors when these behaviors were not enforced by law. In Study 2, we experimentally manipulated threat to belongingness (vs. no threat). When belongingness was threatened, participants were less concerned with protecting vulnerable people. Closeness to family predicted preventive behavior intentions and both self-centered and prosocial reasons for these behaviors, regardless of condition. National identification buffered the negative effects of the threat to belongingness condition on preventive behavior intentions. In Study 3, we experimentally primed thoughts of belongingness to family vs. nation vs. control condition. We found greater intentions to engage in preventive behaviors and greater concern with protecting oneself and close relatives in the family condition. In summary, belongingness to one's family promotes preventive behavior intentions and the reasons given are to protect both oneself and others. Self-reported (but not primed) national identification can be related to prevention behavior intentions under certain conditions.

The COVID-19 pandemic allowed for a naturalistic, longitudinal investigation of the relationship between faith and science mindsets and concern about COVID-19. Our goal was to examine two possible directional relationships: (Model 1) COVID-19 concern ➔ disease avoidance and self-protection motivations ➔ science and faith mindsets versus (Model 2) science and faith mindsets ➔ COVID-19 concern. We surveyed 858 Mechanical Turk workers in three waves of a study conducted in March, April, and June 2020. We found that science mindsets increased whereas faith mindsets decreased (regardless of religious type) during the early months of the pandemic. Further, bivariate correlations and autoregressive cross-lagged analyses indicated that science mindset was positive predictor of COVID-19 concern, in support of Model 2. Faith mindset was not associated with COVID-19 concern. However, faith mindset was a negative predictor of science mindset. We discuss the need for more research regarding the influence of science and faith mindsets as well as the societal consequences of the pandemic.

The novel Coronavirus that spread around the world in early 2020 triggered a global pandemic and economic downturn that affected nearly everyone. Yet the crisis had a disproportionate impact on the poor and revealed how easily working-class individuals' financial security can be destabilised by factors beyond personal control. In a pre-registered longitudinal study of Americans ( = 233) spanning April 2019 to May 2020, we tested whether the pandemic altered beliefs about the extent to which poverty is caused by external forces and internal dispositions and support for economic inequality. Over this timespan, participants revealed a shift in their attributions for poverty, reporting that poverty is more strongly impacted by external-situational causes and less by internal-dispositional causes. However, we did not detect an overall mean-level change in opposition to inequality or support for government intervention. Instead, only for those who most strongly recognized the negative impact of COVID-19 did changes in poverty attributions translate to decreased support for inequality, and increased support for government intervention to help the poor.

We hypothesized that because Covid-19 (C19) remains an urgent and visible threat, efforts to combat its negative health consequences have become moralized. This moralization of health-based efforts may generate asymmetries in judgement, whereby harmful by-products of those efforts (i.e., instrumental harm) are perceived as more acceptable than harm resulting from non-C19 efforts, such as prioritizing the economy or non-C19 issues. We tested our predictions in two experimental studies. In Study 1, American participants evaluated the same costs (public shaming, deaths and illnesses, and police abuse of power) as more acceptable when they resulted from efforts to minimize C19's health impacts, than when they resulted from non-health C19 efforts (e.g., prioritizing economic costs) or efforts unrelated to C19 (e.g., reducing traffic deaths). In Study 2, New Zealand participants less favorably evaluated the quality of a research proposal empirically questioning a C19 elimination strategy in NZ than one questioning strategy, although both proposals contained the same amount of methodology information. This finding suggests questioning elimination approaches is morally condemned, a similar response to that found when sacred values are questioned. In both studies, condition effects were mediated by lowered moral outrage in response to costs resulting from pursuing health-minded C19 efforts. Follow-up analyses revealed that both heightened personal concern over contracting C19 and liberal ideology were associated with greater asymmetries in human cost evaluation. Altogether, results suggest efforts to reduce or eliminate C19 have become moralized, generating asymmetries in evaluations of human suffering.

Every day, human beings make decisions with social consequences. These social consequences matter most when they impact those closest to us. Recent research has shown that humans exhibit reliable preferences when deciding between conflicting outcomes involving close others - for example, prioritizing the interests of one's family member over one's friend. However, virtually nothing is known about the mechanisms that drive these preferences. We conducted a pre-registered study in a large (maximum =375) sample to quantify the computational and motivational mechanisms of human social decision-making preferences involving close others. By pairing assessment techniques from behavioral economics and psychological science with computational modeling and random coefficient regression, we show that value-based cognitive computations (e.g., risk and loss aversion) drive social decision-making preferences involving financial outcomes, whereas socioemotional motivations (e.g., relationship quality) underlie preferences involving social outcomes. These results imply mechanistic heterogeneity, underscoring a need for greater attention to contextual specificity in social decision-making.

•The only two published studies on subliminal anchoring report contradictory results.•In two replications of these studies we could not find any evidence for subliminal anchoring.•Replications were as close as possible and high data quality was ensured, for example by introducing new manipulation checks.•Both our studies feature entirely open materials and preregistration of all materials including the analysis scripts. OPEN SCIENCE BADGES: Please grant all three badges, Preregistration, Open Materials, and Open Data.

As ordinary citizens increasingly moderate online forums, blogs, and their own social media feeds, a new type of censoring has emerged wherein people selectively remove opposing political viewpoints from online contexts. In three studies of behavior on putative online forums, supporters of a political cause (e.g., abortion or gun rights) preferentially censored comments that opposed their cause. The tendency to selectively censor cause-incongruent online content was amplified among people whose cause-related beliefs were deeply rooted in or "fused with" their identities. Moreover, six additional identity-related measures also amplified the selective censoring effect. Finally, selective censoring emerged even when opposing comments were inoffensive and courteous. We suggest that because online censorship enacted by moderators can skew online content consumed by millions of users, it can systematically disrupt democratic dialogue and subvert social harmony.

Theorizing from humanistic and motivational literatures suggests attitude change may occur because high quality listening facilitates the insight needed to explore and integrate potentially threatening information relevant to the self. By extension, self-insight may enable attitude change as a result of conversations about prejudice. We tested whether high quality listening would predict attitudes related to speakers' prejudices and whether self-insight would mediate this effect. Study 1 (preregistered) examined scripted conversations characterized by high, regular, and poor listening quality. In Study 2, we manipulated high versus regular listening quality in the laboratory as speakers talked about their prejudiced attitudes. Finally, Study 3 (preregistered) used a more robust measure of prejudiced attitudes to test whether perceived social acceptance could be an alternative explanation to Study 2 findings. Across these studies, the exploratory (pilot study and Study 2) and confirmatory (Studies 1 & 3) findings were in line with expectations that high, versus regular and poor, quality listening facilitated lower prejudiced attitudes because it increased self-insight. A meta-analysis of the studies ( = 952) showed that the average effect sizes for high quality listening (vs. comparison conditions) on self-insight, openness to change and prejudiced attitudes were, s = 1.19, 0.46, 0.32 95% [0.73, 1.51], [0.29, 0.63] [0.12, 0.53], respectively. These results suggest that when having conversations about prejudice, high-quality listening modestly shapes prejudice following conversations about it, and underscore the importance of self-insight and openness to change in this process.

The dimensions that explain which societal groups cooperate more with which other groups remain unclear. We predicted that perceived similarity in agency/socioeconomic success and conservative-progressive beliefs increases cooperation across groups. Self-identified members ( = 583) of 30 society-representative U.S. groups (gays, Muslims, Blacks, upper class, women, Democrats, conservatives etc.) played an incentivized one-time continuous prisoner's dilemma game with one self-identified member of each of these groups. Players knew nothing of each other except one group membership. Consistent with the ABC (agency-beliefs-communion) model of spontaneous stereotypes, perceived self-group similarity in agency and beliefs independently increased expected and actual cooperation across groups, controlling for shared group membership. Similarity in conservative-progressive beliefs had a stronger effect on cooperation than similarity in agency, and this effect of similarity in beliefs was stronger for individuals with extreme (progressive or conservative) compared to moderate beliefs.

Between the land and ocean, diverse coastal ecosystems transform, store, and transport material. Across these interfaces, the dynamic exchange of energy and matter is driven by hydrological and hydrodynamic processes such as river and groundwater discharge, tides, waves, and storms. These dynamics regulate ecosystem functions and Earth's climate, yet global models lack representation of coastal processes and related feedbacks, impeding their predictions of coastal and global responses to change. Here, we assess existing coastal monitoring networks and regional models, existing challenges in these efforts, and recommend a path towards development of global models that more robustly reflect the coastal interface.

Empathizing with others is widely presumed to increase our understanding of their emotions. Little is known, however, about which empathic process actually help people recognize others' feelings more accurately. Here, we probed the relationship between emotion recognition and two empathic processes: spontaneously felt similarity (having had a similar experience) and deliberate perspective taking (focus on the other vs. oneself). We report four studies in which participants (total  = 803) watched videos of targets sharing genuine negative emotional experiences. Participants' multi-scalar ratings of the targets' emotions were compared with the targets' own emotion ratings. In Study 1 we found that having had a similar experience to what the target was sharing was associated with lower recognition of the target's emotions. Study 2 replicated the same pattern and in addition showed that making participants' own imagined reaction to the described event salient resulted in further reduced accuracy. Studies 3 and 4 were preregistered replications and extensions of Studies 1 and 2, in which we observed the same outcome using a different stimulus set, indicating the robustness of the finding. Moreover, Study 4 directly investigated the underlying mechanism of the observed effect. Findings showed that perceivers who have had a negative life experience similar to the emotional event described in the video felt greater personal distress after watching the video, which in part explained their reduced accuracy. These results provide the first demonstration that spontaneous empathy, evoked by similarity in negative experiences, may inhibit rather than increase our understanding of others' emotions.

Is ingroup bias associated with any benefit for maintaining close relationships? We examined the link between biased impression updating for ingroup members (i.e., friends) and relationship maintenance, as measured by the number of friends participants reported having (Studies 1 and 2). We also investigated the underlying neural basis of this possible effect, focusing on activity in the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ), a region of the social brain involved in moral updating (Study 2). Specifically, we tested whether selectively discounting negative information about close others, manifested in reduced impression updating, and indexed by reduced RTPJ activity, is related to maintaining close relationships. In Study 1, after imagining a friend and a stranger performing different positive and negative behaviors, participants who were reluctant to update how close they felt to their friend (friend-closeness) reported having more friends in real life. In Study 2, participants were led to believe that a friend and a stranger gave money to them or took money away from them, while they were in the scanner. Participants who engaged in less negative updating of friends versus strangers reported having more friends. Participants who engaged in less friend-closeness updating also showed reduced RTPJ activity when their friend took money from them, and this neural pattern was associated with reports of having more friends. Together, these findings suggest that selectively discounting close others' negative behavior is linked to maintaining close relationships, indicating a potential social benefit of ingroup bias.

Many social interactions involve alcohol consumption, and drinking alcohol can lead to powerful increases in enjoyment in these social contexts. Yet we know almost nothing of the means by which alcohol enhances social experience. Importantly, since individuals in social contexts not only respond to environmental conditions, but can also actively generate these conditions, understanding alcohol's social enhancement within wholly unstructured social interaction presents challenges. To address this issue, the current study examines responses of individuals participating in a structured pleasurable experience in social context (humor presentation)-a drinking context with ecological-validity that permits us to test theories of alcohol-related social-enhancement through isolating responses to the controlled presentation of pleasurable stimuli (i.e., comedy punchlines). Participants ( = 513) were randomly-assigned to consume an alcoholic, placebo, or control beverage in the laboratory. Participants were video-recorded during presentation of a comedy routine in 3-person groups, and participants' Duchenne smiles were recorded on a frame-by-frame basis using the Facial Action Coding System. Comedy punchlines were coded by five raters and validated via an independently collected sample of participants ( = 30). Results of nested frailty survival models, controlling for the smiles of other group members, indicated a significant interaction between punchlines and alcohol in predicting smiles. Specifically, alcohol selectively increased smiling during times when no humorous stimuli were being presented, whereas there was no significant effect of alcohol on smiling in response to the humorous stimuli themselves. Findings highlight the importance of less intrinsically entertaining social moments for understanding alcohol-related social enhancement.

Faces are categorized by gender and race very quickly, seemingly without regard to perceivers' goals or motivations, suggesting an automaticity to these judgments that has downstream consequences for evaluations, stereotypes, and social interactions. The current study investigated the extent to which early neurocognitive processes involved in the categorization of faces vary when participants' tasks goals were to categorize faces by race or by gender. In contrast to previous findings, task-related differences were found, such that differentiation in the P2 event-related potential (ERP) according to perceived gender was facilitated by having an explicit task goal of categorizing faces by gender; however, the P2 was sensitive to race regardless of task goals. Use of principal components analysis (PCA) revealed two underlying components that comprised the P2 and that were differentially sensitive to the gender and race of the faces, depending on participants' top-down task goals. Results suggest that top-down task demands facilitate discrimination of faces along the attended dimension within less than 200 ms, but that the effect of top-down task demands may not be evident when examining early ERP components that reflect more than one distinct underlying process.

Virtual reality (VR) offers unique benefits to social psychological research, including a high degree of experimental control alongside strong ecological validity, a capacity to manipulate any variable of interest, and an ability to trace the physical, nonverbal behavior of the user in a very fine-grained and automated manner. VR improves upon traditional behavioral measurement techniques (e.g., observation and coding) on several fronts as data collection is covert, continuous, passive, and occurs within a controlled context. The current review synthesizes extant methods for tracing physical behavior in VR, such as gaze tracking and interpersonal distance measurement, and describes how researchers have applied these methods to understand important phenomena within the context of social psychology. To date, primary areas of application have included the assessment of social approach and avoidance, social evaluation and bias, and engagement. The limitations of behavioral tracing methods in VR, as well as future directions for their continued application and extension, are discussed. This narrative review equips readers with a thorough understanding of behavioral tracing methods that can be implemented in VR, their benefits and drawbacks, the insight they may offer into social processes, and future avenues of work for applying emergent technologies to research questions in social psychology.

Simple, self-posed questions may modulate behavioral repetition of choices in situations that are neither fully habitual nor fully intentional. In six experiments, participants were trained to repeatedly choose their preferred door out of an array of three doors. Questions generally increased speed in the upcoming task, supporting past findings that even exposure to question-like syntax can enhance performance. More importantly, affirmatively phrased questions like , framed either as an instruction to make the choice or as material unrelated to the study, produced more choice repetition than presenting either no question at all or a control question. In contrast, negatively phrased questions like decreased behavior repetition. These effects allowed efficient and fast responding and thus showed features of automaticity. These findings imply that self-talk questions can affect choices in various domains of interest to social, clinical, educational, and health psychology.

Asking questions about a behavior has been found to influence subsequent performance of that behavior, a phenomenon termed the (QBE). The present study addressed two under-researched questions concerning the QBE: (1) Can the QBE be used to change multiple health behaviors, and (2) does enhancing dissonance during questionnaire completion increase the magnitude of the QBE? Participants ( = 1534) were randomized to one of three conditions (dissonance-enhanced QBE; standard QBE; control) that targeted three health-protective behaviors (eating fruit and vegetables, physical activity, dental flossing) and three health-risk behaviors (alcohol intake, sedentariness, unhealthy snacking). The dissonance-enhanced intervention comprised a message designed to pressurize participants into forming healthful behavioral intentions. Behavior was assessed via self-reports at four-week follow up. Findings showed significant overall effects of the QBE both in increasing performance of health-protective behaviors ( = .001) and in reducing performance of health-risk behaviors ( = .04). Compared to the standard QBE condition, the dissonance-enhanced QBE intervention increased performance of health-protective behaviors ( = .04) and marginally reduced performance of health-risk behaviors ( = .07). The dissonance-enhanced QBE intervention outperformed the control condition in all analyses. This is the first report that a brief QBE intervention influences performance of multiple health behaviors. Findings supported the idea that magnifying dissonance increases the impact of the QBE.

Previous work has demonstrated that people are more likely to trust "deontological" agents who reject harming one person to save many others than "consequentialist" agents who endorse such instrumental harms, which could explain the higher prevalence of non-consequentialist moral intuitions. Yet consequentialism involves endorsing not just instrumental harm, but also impartial beneficence, treating the well-being of every individual as equally important. In four studies (total  = 2086), we investigated preferences for consequentialist vs. non-consequentialist social partners endorsing instrumental harm or impartial beneficence and examined how such preferences varied across different types of social relationships. Our results demonstrate robust preferences for non-consequentialist over consequentialist agents in the domain of instrumental harm, and weaker - but still evident - preferences in the domain of impartial beneficence. In the domain of instrumental harm, non-consequentialist agents were consistently viewed as more moral and trustworthy, preferred for a range of social roles, and entrusted with more money in economic exchanges. In the domain of impartial beneficence, preferences for non-consequentialist agents were observed for close interpersonal relationships requiring direct interaction (friend, spouse) but not for more distant roles with little-to-no personal interaction (political leader). Collectively our findings demonstrate that preferences for non-consequentialist agents are sensitive to the different dimensions of consequentialist thinking and the relational context.

A growing body of research claims that stimuli presented outside conscious awareness can influence affect, speech perception, decision-making, eating behavior, and social judgments. However, research has shown that conscious awareness is a continuous phenomenon. Using a continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm to suppress awareness of affective faces (smiling and scowling), we demonstrate that some awareness of suppressed stimuli is required for the stimuli to influence social judgments. We discovered this using a rigorous within-participants psychophysics method that allowed us to assess awareness at very low levels, which is difficult using traditional methods. Our findings place boundary conditions on claims (made previously by us and others) that stimuli presented completely outside conscious awareness influence judgments. This work contributes to the literature highlighting the need to study conscious awareness as a continuous phenomenon and provides a framework for researchers to ask and answer questions regarding conscious awareness and its relation to judgment and behavior.

People have the ability to make important choices in their lives, but deliberating about these choices can have costs. The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that writing about conflicted personal goals and values (conflict condition) would impair self-control on an unrelated subsequent task as compared to writing about clear personal goals and values (clarity condition). Personal conflict activates the behavioral inhibition system (BIS; Hirsh, Mar, & Peterson, 2012), which may make it harder for participants to successfully execute self-control. In this large (=337), pre-registered study participants in the conflict condition performed worse on anagrams than participants in the clarity condition, and the effect of condition on anagram performance was mediated by a subjective uncertainty measure of BIS activation. This suggests that BIS activation leads to poor self-control. Moreover, given that conflict is inherent in the exercise of self-control, results point to BIS activation as a mechanism for why initial acts of self-control impair self-control on subsequent, unrelated tasks.

Does intuition favor prosociality, or does prosocial behavior require deliberative self-control? The Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH) stipulates that intuition favors advantageous behavior - but which behavior is typically advantageous depends on both the individual and the context. For example, non-zero-sum cooperation (e.g. in social dilemmas like the Prisoner's Dilemma) typically pays off because of the opportunity for reciprocity. Conversely, reciprocity does not promote zero-sum cash transfers (e.g. in the Dictator Game, DG). Instead, DG giving can be long-run advantageous because of reputation concerns: social norms often require such behavior of women but not men. Thus, the SHH predicts that intuition will favor social dilemma cooperation regardless of gender, but only favor DG giving among women. Here I present meta-analytic evidence in support of this prediction. In 31 studies examining social dilemma cooperation (N=13,447), I find that promoting intuition increases cooperation to a similar extent for both men and women. This stands in contrast to the results from 22 DG studies (analyzed in Rand et al., 2016) where intuition promotes giving among women but not men. Furthermore, I show using meta-regression that the interaction between gender and intuition is significantly larger in the DG compared to the cooperation games. Thus, I find clear evidence that the role of intuition and deliberation varies across both setting and individual as predicted by the SHH.

The dehumanization of Black Americans is an ongoing societal problem. Reducing configural face processing, a well-studied aspect of typical face encoding, decreases the activation of human-related concepts to White faces, suggesting that the extent that faces are configurally processed contributes to dehumanization. Because Black individuals are more dehumanized relative to White individuals, the current work examined how configural processing might contribute to their greater dehumanization. Study 1 showed that inverting faces (which reduces configural processing) reduced the activation of human-related concepts toward Black more than White faces. Studies 2a and 2b showed that reducing configural processing affects dehumanization by decreasing trust and increasing homogeneity among Black versus White faces. Studies 3a-d showed that configural processing effects emerge in racial outgroups for whom untrustworthiness may be a more salient group stereotype (i.e., Black, but not Asian, faces). Study 4 provided evidence that these effects are specific to reduced configural processing versus more general perceptual disfluency. Reduced configural processing may thus contribute to the greater dehumanization of Black relative to White individuals.