Several recent studies have explored how people may favor different explanations for others' behavior depending on the moral or evaluative valence of the behavior in question. This research tested whether people would be less willing to believe that a person's environment played a role in causing her to exhibit antisocial (as compared to prosocial) behavior. In three experiments, participants read a description of a person engaging in either antisocial or prosocial behavior. Participants were less willing to endorse environmental causes of antisocial (versus prosocial) behavior when the environmental influence in question was witnessing others behaving similarly, either during childhood (Experiment 1) or recently (Experiment 2), or being directly encouraged by others to engage in the behavior described (Experiment 3). These results could be relevant to understanding why people resist attributing wrongdoing to causes outside of individual control in some cases.

Many healthcare disparities studies use the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to assess bias. Despite ongoing controversy around the IAT, its use has enabled researchers to reliably document an association between provider implicit prejudice and provider-to-patient communication (provider communication behaviors and patient reactions to them). Success in documenting such associations is likely due to the outcomes studied, study settings, and data structure unique to racial/ethnic healthcare disparities research. In contrast, there has been little evidence supporting the role of providers' implicit bias in treatment recommendations. Researchers are encouraged to use multiple implicit measures to further investigate how, why, and under what circumstances providers' implicit bias predicts provider-to-patient communication and treatment recommendations. Such efforts will contribute to the advancement of both basic social psychology/social cognition research and applied health disparities research: a better understanding of implicit social cognition and a more comprehensive identification of the sources of widespread racial/ethnic healthcare disparities, respectively.

Widespread messages use metaphoric language and imagery to prompt recipients to interpret health-related concepts in terms of dissimilar, familiar concepts (e.g., " the on cancer"). When do these messages work? According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, thinking metaphorically involves looking past concepts' superficial differences to identify their similarities at a structural level. Thus, we hypothesized that when people's general construal mindset is oriented to focus on information's abstract meaning, not its concrete details, they would process a metaphor's target health concept in ways that correspond to the dissimilar concept. Accordingly, after priming an abstract, but not concrete, construal mindset: framing sun exposure as enemy confrontation (vs. literally) increased cancer risk perceptions and sun-safe intentions (Study 1; =186); and framing smoking cessation as an arduous journey (vs. literally) increased appreciation of quitting difficulties and interest in cessation tools (Study 2; =244). We discuss practical and theoretical implications for improving health communication.

Research shows that smokers feel stigmatized, but does stigmatizing smokers do more harm than good? The model of stigma-induced identity threat was used to experimentally examine how U.S. and Danish smokers respond to stigma-relevant cues. Heavy smokers (112 Americans, 112 Danes) smoked a cigarette while giving a speech that was either video (stigma-visible condition) or audio recorded (stigma-concealed condition). Smokers high in self-concept reacted to the stigma-visible (as opposed to the stigma-concealed) condition with greater physiological reactivity ( = -2.80, = .05), cognitive depletion (U.S. smokers, = -0.06, = .11), self-exempting beliefs ( = 0.32, < .001), and less interest in stopping smoking ( = 0.28, = .02). Thus, stigmatization led smokers toward emotional, cognitive, and attitudinal reactions that might make them less likely to quit. Future research should examine when smokers respond to stigmatization by quitting rather than with resistance or indifference.

While some researchers have suggested that preferences for attractive faces are the result of a domain-specific beauty detection module, others argue these preferences develop based on averages of stimuli through a domain-general learning mechanism. We tested whether cognitive and perceptual mechanisms sensitive to experience underlie facial preferences by familiarizing participants with human, chimpanzee, or morphed faces (60%-chimp/40%-human). Results indicated that participants familiarized with human-chimp morphs showed greater zygomaticus major activity, a physiological correlate of positive affect (Study 1), and higher explicit attractiveness ratings (Study 2) to faces morphed to some degree with chimpanzees. These results demonstrate that experience shifts attractiveness preferences away from the normative average, and suggest that a domain-general cognitive mechanism better accounts for facial preferences than a domain-specific innate beauty-detector.

Analogies between humans and animals based on facial resemblance have a long history. We report evidence for reverse anthropomorphism and the extension of facial stereotypes to lions, foxes, and dogs. In the stereotype extension, more positive traits were attributed to animals judged more attractive than con-specifics; more childlike traits were attributed to those judged more babyfaced. In the reverse anthropomorphism, human faces with more resemblance to lions, ascertained by connectionist modeling of facial metrics, were judged more dominant, cold, and shrewd, controlling attractiveness, babyfaceness, and sex. Faces with more resemblance to Labradors were judged warmer and less shrewd. Resemblance to foxes did not predict impressions. Results for lions and dogs were consistent with trait impressions of these animals and support the species overgeneralization hypothesis that evolutionarily adaptive reactions to particular animals are overgeneralized, with people perceived to have traits associated with animals their faces resemble. Other possible explanations are discussed.

Younger and older adults' visual scan patterns were examined as they passively viewed younger and older neutral faces. Both participant age groups tended to look longer at their own-age as compared to other-age faces. In addition, both age groups reported more exposure to own-age than other-age individuals. Importantly, the own-age bias in visual inspection of faces and the own-age bias in self-reported amount of exposure to young and older individuals in everyday life, but not explicit age stereotypes and implicit age associations, significantly and independently predicted the own-age bias in later old/new face recognition. We suggest these findings reflect increased personal and social relevance of, and more accessible and elaborated schemas for, own-age than other-age faces.

What is a "rational" decision? Economists traditionally viewed rationality as maximizing expected satisfaction. This view has been useful in modeling basic microeconomic concepts, but falls short in accounting for many everyday human decisions. It leaves unanswered why some things reliably make people more satisfied than others, and why people frequently act to make others happy at a cost to themselves. Drawing on an evolutionary perspective, we propose that people make decisions according to a set of principles that may not appear to make sense at the superficial level, but that demonstrate rationality at a deeper evolutionary level. By this, we mean that people use adaptive domain-specific decision-rules that, on average, would have resulted in fitness benefits. Using this framework, we re-examine several economic principles. We suggest that traditional psychological functions governing risk aversion, discounting of future benefits, and budget allocations to multiple goods, for example, vary in predictable ways as a function of the underlying motive of the decision-maker and individual differences linked to evolved life-history strategies. A deep rationality framework not only helps explain why people make the decisions they do, but also inspires multiple directions for future research.

A series of experiments investigated the effect of speakers' language, accent, and race on children's social preferences. When presented with photographs and voice recordings of novel children, 5-year-old children chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language rather than foreign-language or foreign-accented speakers. These preferences were not exclusively due to the intelligibility of the speech, as children found the accented speech to be comprehensible, and did not make social distinctions between foreign-accented and foreign-language speakers. Finally, children chose same-race children as friends when the target children were silent, but they chose other-race children with a native accent when accent was pitted against race. A control experiment provided evidence that children's privileging of accent over race was not due to the relative familiarity of each dimension. The results, discussed in an evolutionary framework, suggest that children preferentially evaluate others along dimensions that distinguished social groups in prehistoric human societies.

The present research suggests that negotiators who represented negotiation issues more abstractly were more likely to reach integrative agreements. Specifically, participants who were prompted to directly think about their negotiation issues in a more abstract manner by generating general descriptions of the issues rather than more concretely about the negotiation issues by generating specific descriptions of the issues made more multi-issue offers and achieved higher joint gain from the negotiation. The role of abstraction in negotiation and conflict resolution is discussed.

Over the past two decades, an abundance of evidence has shown that individuals typically rely on semantic summary knowledge when making trait judgments about self and others (for reviews, see Klein, 2004; Klein, Robertson, Gangi, & Loftus, 2008). But why form trait summaries if one can consult the original episodes on which the summary was based? Conversely, why retain episodes after having abstracted a summary representation from them? Are there functional reasons to have trait information represented in two different, independently retrievable databases? Evolution does not produce new phenotypic systems that are complex and functionally organized by chance. Such systems acquire their functional organization because they solved some evolutionarily recurrent problems for the organism. In this article we explore some of the functional properties of episodic memory. Specifically, in a series of studies we demonstrate that maintaining a database of episodic memories enables its owner to reevaluate an individual's past behavior in light of new information, sometimes drastically changing one's impression in the process. We conclude that some of the most important functions of episodic memory have to do with its role in human social interaction.

How do brain representations of the utility of a hedonic goal guide decisions about whether to pursue it? Our focus here will be on brain mechanisms of reward utility operating at particular decision moments in life. Moments such as when you encounter an image, sound, scent or other cue associated in your past with a particular reward; or perhaps just vividly imagine that cue. Such a cue can often trigger a sudden motivational urge to pursue that goal, and sometimes a decision to do so. In drug addicts trying to quit, a cue for the addicted drug might trigger urges that rise to compulsive levels of intensity, despite prior commitments to abstain, leading to the decision to relapse into taking the drug again. Normal or addicted, the urge and decision may well have been lacking immediately before the cue was encountered. The decision to pursue the cued reward might never have happened if the cue had not been encountered. Why can such cues momentarily dominate decision making? The answer involves brain mesolimbic dopamine mechanisms that amplify the incentive salience of reward cues, selectively elevating decision utility to trigger "wanting" for the goal. We describe affective neuroscience studies of brain limbic generators of "wanting" that shed light on how cues trigger pursuit of their goals, both normally and even under intense conditions of irrational goal pursuit.

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that consciously intended goal pursuits have unintended consequences for social judgment and behavior. From evolutionary theory (Dawkins 1976/2006) and empirical evidence of a nonconscious mode of goal pursuit (Bargh, 2005) we derive the hypothesis that most human goal pursuits are open-ended in nature: Once active, goals will operate on goal-relevant content in the environment, even if that content is not the intended focus of the conscious goal. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that goals to evaluate a job applicant for either a waiter or crime reporter position also shape impressions of incidental bystanders in the situation, such that the bystander is later liked or disliked not on his own merits, but on how well his behavior matches the criteria consciously applied in evaluating the job applicant. Experiment 3 finds that a goal to help a specific target person spills over to influence actions toward incidental bystanders, but only while active. Implications of these findings for goal pursuit in everyday life are discussed.

According to the approach/inhibition theory of power (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003), having power should be associated with the approach system, and lacking power with the avoidance system. However, to this point research has focused solely on whether power leads to more action, particularly approach-related action, or not. In three experiments, we extend this research by exploring the direct, unintentional relation between power and both approach and avoidance tendencies. Priming high power led to greater relative BAS strength than priming low power, but did not affect the BIS (Exp. 1). High-power priming also facilitated both simple and complex approach behavior, but did not affect avoidance behavior (Exp. 2-3). These effects of power occurred even in power-irrelevant situations. They also cannot be explained by priming of general positive versus negative constructs, nor by changes in positive, negative, approach-related, or avoidance-related affect.

Historical developments regarding the attitude concept are reviewed, and set the stage for consideration of a theoretical perspective that views attitude, not as a hypothetical construct, but as evaluative knowledge. A model of attitudes as object-evaluation associations of varying strength is summarized, along with research supporting the model's contention that at least some attitudes are represented in memory and activated automatically upon the individual's encountering the attitude object. The implications of the theoretical perspective for a number of recent discussions related to the attitude concept are elaborated. Among these issues are the notion of attitudes as "constructions," the presumed malleability of automatically-activated attitudes, correspondence between implicit and explicit measures of attitude, and postulated dual or multiple attitudes.

Social cognition research suggests that incidental, environmental stimuli (e.g., business suits) can nonconsciously influence the degree to which behavioral dispositions (e.g., competitiveness) are expressed. Similarly, cognitive research suggests that incidental action-related objects (e.g., hammers) can prime action plans that then affect the speed with which a concurrent, intended action (e.g., power grip) is executed. However, whether incidental stimuli can instigate actions that run counter to one's current goals has yet to be determined. Moving beyond indirect effects, we show that such stimuli can directly cause the expression of undesired actions: Incidental stimuli resembling musical notation caused the systematic expression of unintended key presses in musicians, but not in nonmusicians. Moreover, the effect was found even when targets and distracters bore no apparent perceptual or semantic relation. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of action production and for social-cognitive concepts (e.g., applicability) regarding the limits of nonconscious processing.

Dion, Berscheid, and Walster (1972), in their seminal article, labeled the attribution of positive characteristics to attractive people the "beauty-is-good" stereotype. The stereotyping literature since then provides extensive evidence for the differential judgment and treatment of attractive versus unattractive people, but does not indicate whether it is an advantage to be attractive or a disadvantage to be unattractive. Two studies investigated the direction of attractiveness stereotyping by comparing judgments of positive and negative attributes for medium vs. low and medium vs. high attractive faces. Taken together, results for adults (Experiment 1) and children (Experiment 2) suggest that most often, unattractiveness is a disadvantage, consistent with negativity bias (e.g., Rozin & Royzman, 2001) but contrary to the "beauty-is-good" aphorism.

White participants were exposed to other-race or own-race faces to test the generalized mere exposure hypothesis in the domain of face perception, namely that exposure to a set of faces yields increased liking for similar faces that have never been seen. In Experiment 1, rapid supraliminal exposures to Asian faces increased White participants' subsequent liking for a different set of Asian faces. In Experiment 2, subliminal exposures to Black faces increased White participants' subsequent liking for a different set of Black faces. The findings are consistent with prominent explanations for mere exposure effects as well as with the familiar face overgeneralization hypothesis that prejudice derives in part from negative reactions to faces that deviate from the familiar own-race prototype.

The present study examines how target group's stereotype content (on warmth and competence dimensions) influences subsequent target evaluation following self-threat related to one's competence. Participants first received threatening or non-threatening feedback on their competence. They evaluated then a job candidate who was stereotyped either as competent and cold (Asian) or as warm and incompetent (working mother). As predicted, threatened participants derogated only the Asian target on her perceived warmth and her suitability for a job, but did not derogate the working mother. Moreover, perceived warmth mediated the observed differences in the evaluation of the targets' job suitability. These results extend research on self-threat and prejudice by including Stereotype Content Model in this link.

Arguing from the nature of goal pursuit and from the economy of mental resources this paper suggests that automatic goal pursuit, much like its controlled counterpart, may be flexible. Two studies that employ goal priming procedures examine this hypothesis using the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (Study 1) and a variation of the Iowa Gambling Task (Study 2). Implications of the results for our understanding of the dichotomy between automatic and controlled processes in general, and for our conception of automatic goal pursuit in particular, are discussed.

Research evidences stronger reactions toward those whose behaviors seem consistent with appearance. To better understand the processes underlying appearance-behavior congruity effects, we assessed regions responding as a function of the congruity between visual (appearance) and abstract (behavior) cues. Using fMRI, trustworthy- and untrustworthy-looking faces were paired with positive, negative, or neutral behaviors. Approach judgments were stronger for congruent over incongruent targets, replicating prior work. Incongruent targets (e.g., untrustworthy face/positive behavior) elicited medial prefrontal (mPFC) and dorsolateral prefrontal (dlPFC) cortex activity more than congruent (e.g., untrustworthy face/negative behavior), suggesting processing incongruent targets requires additional mentalizing and controlled processing. Individual differences in enjoying interpersonal interactions negatively correlated with mPFC activity toward incongruent over congruent targets, suggesting more effortful processing of incongruent targets for individuals with lower levels of social motivation. These findings indicate mPFC contributions to processing incongruent appearance-behavior cues, but suggest that individual differences may temper the extent of this effect.

Social species create emergent organizations beyond the individual. These emergent structures evolved hand in hand with neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced. Social neuroscience seeks to specify the neural, hormonal, cellular, and genetic mechanisms underlying social behavior, and in so doing to understand the associations and influences between social and biological levels of organization. Success in the field, therefore, is not measured in terms of the contributions to social psychology per se, but rather in terms of the specification of the biological mechanisms underlying social interactions and behavior-one of the major problems for the neurosciences to address in the 21 century.

People frequently collaborate to learn and remember information, and this may help groups create a shared representation of the world (i.e., ). However, contrary to intuitions, collaboration also lowers group recall levels. Such impairment occurs regardless of whether people collaborate when first experiencing, or encoding, an event (the , or when retrieving, or remembering, the event (the In understanding how collaboration impairs group recall and enhances collective or shared memories it remains unknown as to where collaboration exerts the greatest influence - at encoding or at retrieval - to shape these distinct phenomena. The current study simultaneously compared collaboration at these two stages and revealed the power of collaborative retrieval. Collaboration impaired the group recall product at both time points, but especially so at retrieval. Furthermore, only collaborative retrieval played a significant role in the formation of collective memories.

The current studies investigate whether, and under what conditions, children engage in system-perpetuating and system-attenuating behaviors when allocating resources to different social groups. In three studies, we presented young children with evidence of social group inequalities and assessed whether they chose to perpetuate or rectify these inequalities. Children (aged 3.5-11.5 years) heard about two social groups (i.e., racial or novel groups) whose members received resources unequally(two cookies versus one). Participants were then given the opportunity to distribute additional resources to new members of the same groups. In Experiment 1, when children were presented with inequalities involving groups of Blacks and Whites, older children (aged 7.5-11.5 years) rejected the status quo, providing more resources to members of groups with fewer resources (White or Black), whereas younger children (aged 3.5-7.5 years) perpetuated the status quo. In Experiments 2 and 3, the inequalities involved Asians and Whites and novel groups. Children of all ages perpetuated inequality, with rectification strategies applied only by older children and only when Black targets were involved in the inequality. Equal sharing occasionally occurred in older children but was never a common response. These findings provide evidence that system-perpetuating tendencies may be predominant in children and suggest that socialization may be necessary to counter them.