Aline da Silva Frost , Alison Ledgerwood , Paul W. Eastwick , Bertram Gawronski
{"title":"Stimulus confounds in implicit and explicit measures of racial bias","authors":"Aline da Silva Frost , Alison Ledgerwood , Paul W. Eastwick , Bertram Gawronski","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104762","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104762","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Implicit measures often show dissociations from explicit measures, including low correlations, distinct antecedents, and distinct behavioral correlates. Interpretations of these dissociations referring to measurement types presuppose that the distinction between implicit and explicit measures is not confounded with other stimulus-related differences. However, in research on racial bias, explicit measures often use verbal category labels, whereas implicit measures include images of specific exemplars. The current work addressed this confound by investigating associations between implicit and explicit measures of racial bias that include verbal category labels and images of exemplars, respectively. Experiments 1 and 2 tested whether implicit and explicit measures show stronger associations when they correspond in terms of their stimuli. Experiments 3 and 4 investigated whether previously obtained moderators of implicit-explicit relations qualify the association between measures that focus on different types of stimuli, rather than implicit and explicit measures per se<em>.</em> While the overall results are mixed, our analysis suggests that more attention should be paid to stimulus confounds when studying dissociations between implicit and explicit measures.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 104762"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144084019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ravit Nussinson , Hadar Ram , Almog Simchon , Ayelet Hatzek , Mayan Navon , Adi Dali , Anat Shechter , Sari Mentser , Nira Liberman
{"title":"Cold and distant: Bi-directional associations between stimulus perceived temperature and its psychological distance and construal level","authors":"Ravit Nussinson , Hadar Ram , Almog Simchon , Ayelet Hatzek , Mayan Navon , Adi Dali , Anat Shechter , Sari Mentser , Nira Liberman","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104759","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104759","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In thirteen studies (eleven preregistered) we examine the associations in people's minds between stimulus temperature (cold vs. warm) and both its psychological distance (distant vs. close) and construal level (high vs. low) within the framework of construal level theory (Liberman & Trope, 1998; Trope & Liberman, 2010). Study Set I examined the association between psychological distance and temperature. Findings show that psychological distance is implicitly and explicitly associated with temperature (Study 1), that psychological distance is seen as compatible with cold and proximity with warm (Study 2), that stimulus psychological distance affects its perceived temperature (Study 3), and that stimulus temperature affects its psychological distance (Studies 4a & 4b). Study Set II examined the association between construal level and temperature. Findings show that abstract is seen as compatible with cold and concrete with warm (Study 5), that natural language reflects an association between abstractness and temperature (seen in word embeddings, Study 6), that stimulus construal level affects its perceived temperature (Study 7), and that stimulus temperature affects its construal level (Studies 8a & 8b). Study Set III examined implications for communication and person perception. Findings suggest that an imaginary cold-color (vs. warm-color) speaker is associated with larger perceived spatial and social distance from their audience and with larger perceived audiences (Study 9); and that people attribute an expansive (contractive) regulatory scope to cold-color (warm-color) imaginary figures (Studies 10a & 10b). We discuss possible mechanisms, and theoretical and practical implications.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 104759"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143937768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Antonio G. Viera, Robert J. Rydell, Kurt Hugenberg, Edward R. Hirt
{"title":"Population base rates as anchors in social categorization under uncertainty1","authors":"Antonio G. Viera, Robert J. Rydell, Kurt Hugenberg, Edward R. Hirt","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104760","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104760","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>People often underutilize the numerical minority group when determining category membership of individuals into perceptually ambiguous social categories (i.e., groups whose members are relatively difficult to accurately identify based on visual information). We find that perceived population base rates can underlie this bias and influence social categorization even when stimulus set base rates are equated. We also provide evidence for an anchoring account to explain this bias. In Experiments 1 and 2, lower experimenter-provided population base rates of the minority group led to reduced utilization of the minority group, while higher base rates increased utilization. In Experiment 3, self-generated population base rates produced the same result and mediated the effect of anchors on categorization. An additional study suggests that anchoring on population base rates is unintentional, and that people insufficiently adjust toward stimulus set base rates. These findings highlight the importance of population base rates in categorizing members of perceptually ambiguous social groups.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 104760"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143937665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Third-party punishment, vigilante justice, or karma? Understanding the dynamics of interpersonal and cosmic justice","authors":"Cindel J.M. White , Julia W. Van de Vondervoort","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104761","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104761","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>People around the world both engage in both interpersonal punishment and expect supernatural punishment of wrongdoers. That is, people will impose costs and withhold benefits from transgressors, and they expect bad things to happen to transgressors more often than to good people. Evolutionary theories have proposed that both interpersonal and supernatural justice beliefs result from similar motivations, cognitive mechanisms, and cultural evolutionary processes that bind human beings into cooperative groups. To explore these ideas, three preregistered studies (N = 3430) investigated situational factors and individual differences that shape reactions to interpersonal and supernatural justice. Perceived appropriateness of both interpersonal justice and supernatural justice depended on recipients' past moral actions, with more positive impressions when antisocial actions and bad outcomes befell previously antisocial victims. However, third-party interpersonal punishment was viewed far more negatively than interpersonal reprimands or supernatural punishments, especially when the potential punisher was unaware of the victim's past transgressions. Explicit belief in karma significantly moderated perceptions of harmful outcomes not caused by human agents, but karma belief was largely unrelated to perceptions of harm caused by humans. Together, results reveal distinct factors that predict judgments about interpersonal punishment and karmic punishments, and provide insight into the distinct dynamics of interpersonal and supernatural justice.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 104761"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143937666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Does conscious perception render agents more responsible? A study of lay judgments","authors":"Claire Simmons , Kristina Krasich , Aditi Chitre , Walter Sinnott-Armstrong","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104757","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104757","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Theoretical debates have raged around whether conscious perception is necessary for responsibility. It is still unclear, however, what lay people think, and lay views can be important to legal and sociopolitical decision-making. To explore this issue, the current work conducted three online, vignette-based studies to test how lay third-party responsibility judgments varied with what agents unconsciously and consciously visually perceived when deciding how to act. The findings showed that, for both good and bad outcomes, people judge conscious perception not to be necessary for responsibility: an agent was still judged to be at least partially responsible without having consciously perceived pertinent information about how to act appropriately. However, conscious perception did modulate judgments about degrees of responsibility: insofar as the information was perceptually available and accurate, the agent was judged to be more responsible for the outcome when they had consciously perceived pertinent information compared to when they only unconsciously perceived it. For bad outcomes, this effect was mediated by judgments about whether the agent should and could have consciously perceived pertinent information. These findings are interpreted within current theories of consciousness and responsibility and provide insights into how the public may judge someone as responsible for real-world successes and wrongdoing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 104757"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143885994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shuai Wang , Haojiang Ying , Qinyi Wang , Lu Li , Xue Lei , Frank Krueger , Chengyang Han
{"title":"Timing is everything: Unraveling the temporal dynamics of the cheerleader effect","authors":"Shuai Wang , Haojiang Ying , Qinyi Wang , Lu Li , Xue Lei , Frank Krueger , Chengyang Han","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104758","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104758","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Facial attractiveness is one of the most immediate and universal sources of social information. However, current theories cannot fully explain its computational mechanisms, especially with regard to facial attractiveness in a group context. Recent studies have found that faces appear more attractive when presented in a group compared to individually (the cheerleader/friend effect). Does the presentation time of faces influence the magnitude of the cheerleader effect, as time factors have been shown to have a significant impact in many other studies on face perception? Here, we investigated the effect of presentation time on the cheerleader effect, dividing it into two segments: pre- and post-cue time (cue indicates the position of target face). We conducted five behavioral experiments (Exp), testing a total of 473 subjects, including both in-lab and online tasks (with pre-registration). We observed a negative, nonlinear effect of pre-cue time on the cheerleader effect (Exp 1 & 2), indicating that changes in overall group-face presentation time impact judgments of target face attractiveness. We identified the optimal pre-cue duration for peak effect (Exp 3), offering a reference for future research. However, we demonstrated that the cheerleader effect was not influenced by post-cue time (Exp 4 & 5). Our results suggested that the potential perceptual process involved in the “overestimation” of the attractiveness of the target face within a group occurs before cue appearing. In conclusion, our study offered a novel explanation for the cheerleader effect, demonstrating that the duration of face observation during group interactions significantly influences perceptions of facial attractiveness.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 104758"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143882427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christopher D. Petsko , Rebecca Ponce de Leon , Ashleigh Shelby Rosette
{"title":"Beyond the motherhood penalty: Evidence of a (potentially race-based) parenthood boost in workplace evaluations","authors":"Christopher D. Petsko , Rebecca Ponce de Leon , Ashleigh Shelby Rosette","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104753","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104753","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>According to previous research, people more readily question the competence of, and express greater discrimination against, women (vs. men) who are described as parents in the workplace. In the present manuscript, we sought to examine whether the magnitude of this bias, which is referred to as the motherhood penalty, would be moderated by whether the women and men in question are Black rather than White. To explore this possibility, we conducted four large-scale replication attempts of well-known studies on the motherhood penalty (three of <span><span>Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2004</span></span>, reported in-text; one of <span><span>Heilman & Okimoto, 2008</span></span>, reported in the online supplement). Across replication attempts, we manipulated not just target employees' parenthood statuses and gender groups, but also their racial groups. To our surprise, results from these replication attempts—as well as those from an internal meta-analysis (<em>N</em> = 4742)—revealed no evidence of a motherhood penalty. Instead, we found evidence of a <em>parenthood boost</em>: a tendency for people to more positively evaluate employees who are described as parents than employees who are not. Moreover, while parenthood-boost magnitudes did not vary by employees' gender groups, there was some evidence that they varied by employees' racial groups, with White parents receiving larger boosts than Black parents. Overall, these findings suggest that the motherhood penalty may no longer emerge in single-shot evaluative contexts. Indeed, there may be contexts in which parenthood now conveys evaluative advantages to both women and men in the workplace, with potential racial differences in the magnitude of those advantages.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 104753"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143858877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What goes around comes around: Foreign language use increases immanent justice thinking","authors":"Janet Geipel , Constantinos Hadjichristidis , Luca Surian","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104747","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104747","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Immanent justice thinking refers to the tendency to perceive causal connections between an agent's bad (good) deeds and subsequent bad (good) outcomes, even when such connections are rationally implausible. We asked bilinguals to read scenarios written either in their native language or in a foreign language and examined how language influences immanent justice endorsements. In five pre-registered, randomized experiments involving 1875 participants from two bilingual populations, we demonstrate that foreign language use increases immanent justice endorsements. This effect was largely unrelated to foreign language proficiency, emerged only for problems that could trigger immanent justice intuitions, and was eliminated by a prompt to think rationally. These results suggest that using a foreign language increases immanent justice endorsements by reducing awareness of the conflict between intuition and rational reasoning.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 104747"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143837990","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Marine Rougier , Pieter Van Dessel , Tal Moran , Colin Tucker Smith
{"title":"Can approach-avoidance instructions influence facial representations? A distinction between past- and future-oriented inferences","authors":"Marine Rougier , Pieter Van Dessel , Tal Moran , Colin Tucker Smith","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104756","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104756","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Mere instructions about a supposedly upcoming approach/avoidance training (i.e., “you will approach stimulus A and avoid stimulus B”) can influence stimuli evaluation (e.g., stimulus A is evaluated more positively). In this work, we argue that because approach/avoidance instructions are typically future-oriented (e.g., “you <em>will</em> approach stimulus A”), they are less powerful than past-oriented information (e.g., “you <em>approached</em> stimulus A”). We introduce the placebo approach/avoidance training, a procedure implementing past-oriented information that involves a bogus training without actual contingencies between stimuli and approach/avoidance actions. Experiments 1a and 1b revealed an approach/avoidance effect on visual representations when employing placebo training. Experiment 2 showed that the effect of placebo training (involving past-oriented information) is larger than the effect of approach/avoidance instructions (involving future-oriented information). Finally, Experiment 3 replicated the distinct effect of past- vs. future-oriented approach/avoidance information by controlling for the experience of approaching/avoiding stimuli. This work highlights the role of past-oriented thinking in approach/avoidance effects.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 104756"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143837989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tiffany Matej Hrkalovic , Aria Li , Magnus Boop , Yingling Li , Daniel Balliet
{"title":"Task affordances affect partner preferences","authors":"Tiffany Matej Hrkalovic , Aria Li , Magnus Boop , Yingling Li , Daniel Balliet","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104751","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2025.104751","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>People frequently participate in interdependent tasks (i.e., tasks in which the outcome of one person is reliant on the other person's actions), in which people can behave in ways that benefit others (i.e., cooperate) to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes in daily life. The ability to select appropriate cooperative partners for these tasks is essential to achieve successful outcomes. Yet, little is known about individual partner preferences for interdependent tasks and whether these preferences change in response to situational affordances of the task (i.e., which traits can affect task outcomes). Here, we report four studies (<em>N</em> = 1021) that investigate the relationship between partner preference, person perceptions, and partner selection in interdependent tasks that afford the expression of warmth- or competence-related traits to affect outcomes. Over four studies, participants were randomly assigned to an interdependent task affording for warmth- or competence-related traits, then rated the most important traits in a partner (Study 1–4), evaluated potential partners' warmth and competence (Study 3–4), and selected partners (Study 3–4). Overall, participants strongly prefer warmth-related traits in a partner, but partner preferences also vary depending on task affordance. Specifically, people demonstrated a stronger preference for partner trustworthiness in tasks affording warmth-related traits and preferred highly competent partners in tasks affording competence-related traits. Additionally, preferences for partner traits strengthened the relationship between the perceived partner trait afforded by the situation and partner selection. We discuss these findings in relation to theories of partner selection and cooperation, as well as the implications of these results to develop tools and interventions to help people optimize their partner selections.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 104751"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2025-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143834027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}