{"title":"Time perspective and helpfulness: Are communicators more persuasive in the past, present, or future tense?","authors":"David Fang , Sam J. Maglio","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104544","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>When people share their experiences, they can communicate seemingly identical information from different time perspectives. Time perspective manifests in words—specifically, verbs in the past tense (e.g., “the experience <em>was</em> great”), the present tense (e.g., “the experience <em>is</em> great”), or the future tense (e.g., “the experience <em>will be</em> great”). This research considers whether this linguistic shift in time perspective impacts how others interpret the message. Two naturalistic studies (sourcing over 2 million Amazon reviews) and three pre-registered lab experiments (<em>N</em><span> = 1259) find that reviews written in the present tense (relative to the past or future tense) receive higher helpfulness ratings through a process of heightened concrete construal<span>. Implications at the intersection of communication, psycholinguistics, and persuasion are discussed.</span></span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50178190","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}
Haihong Li , Xiaofei Xie , Yawen Zou , Tianhong Wang
{"title":"“Take action, buddy!”: Self–other differences in passive risk-taking for health and safety","authors":"Haihong Li , Xiaofei Xie , Yawen Zou , Tianhong Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104542","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span>Not getting vaccinated or an annual physical examination are examples of passive risk-taking. The present research investigates whether people choose differently for themselves or for others in passive risk-taking for health and safety. The results of seven studies (</span><em>N</em><span> = 2304, including two preregistered studies) provided reliable evidence that, compared with personal decision-makers, advisors were more inclined to recommend that others act to prevent risk, representing a self–other decision difference. This effect arose from personal decision-makers assigning greater weight to feasibility and less weight to desirability than advisors. Correspondingly, this difference was reduced when the feasibility level was higher. Understanding self–other differences in passive risk-taking and the underlying mechanisms may aid in designing campaigns to promote individual participation or even contribute to policy enforcement efforts.</span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50178186","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":"Construing hypotheticals: How hypotheticality affects level of abstraction","authors":"Guy Grinfeld , Cheryl Wakslak , Yaacov Trope , Nira Liberman","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104543","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Humans have developed a unique ability to think about hypothetical events (imagined, fictional, improbable events) and to distinguish them from real events (directly experienced, factual, certain events). We examined how people mentally construe events that are more and less hypothetical. In six pre-registered studies (<em>N</em> = 1605) participants completed the Behavioral Identification Form, in which they chose between abstract and concrete action descriptions. We found that participants preferred to describe more hypothetical actions by their abstract goals and less hypothetical actions by their concrete means when the more and the less hypothetical actions were contrasted, but not in the absence of such contrast. We discuss potential difficulties of manipulating hypotheticality and suggest how to overcome them. We also discuss the nature of hypotheticality and how it is both similar to and different from other psychological distances.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50178187","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":"Attributional ambiguity reduces charitable giving by relaxing social norms","authors":"Fiona tho Pesch , Jason Dana","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104530","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104530","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>A growing literature demonstrates reluctant giving: Many people who voluntarily give to charity no longer do so when they have an excuse not to give. The mechanisms of reluctance, however, remain unclear. Consistent with this literature, we found that injecting attributional ambiguity into a real charitable decision significantly reduces donations. Participants in our studies (<em>N</em> = 2147) faced a binary choice between options for distributing money between themselves and a charity, with one option giving more to a charity and the other leaving more for themselves. Borrowing from a classic attributional ambiguity paradigm, we manipulated whether the charity involved was the same for both options or different, giving participants the possible excuse of keeping more money due to preferring one charity over another. Participants indeed kept more for themselves when there were two different charities, regardless of which charity was associated with the more self-beneficial option, ostensibly revealing a hidden preference for selfishness. Using incentive compatible elications, we found no evidence that participants used the excuse of preferring one charity to another to justify their choices. Instead, we find that attributional ambiguity weakened perceptions that there is a norm against keeping more money in the task, both among decision makers and disinterested third parties. We conclude that attributional ambiguity lowers donations by relieving internalized social pressure to give.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50178180","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}
Einav Hart , Eric M. VanEpps , Daniel A. Yudkin , Maurice E. Schweitzer
{"title":"The interpersonal costs of revealing others' secrets","authors":"Einav Hart , Eric M. VanEpps , Daniel A. Yudkin , Maurice E. Schweitzer","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104541","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104541","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>People often keep relevant information secret from others. For example, an employee might keep a coworker's plan to quit without giving notice secret from their manager, or someone might keep a friend's affair secret from their friend's spouse. In this article, we identify a critical but overlooked factor that determines whether an actor will disclose secret information they know about another person: Impression management concerns about how <em>other</em> people will judge their decision to disclose or keep the secret. We conceptualize secret-keeping as social decisions that involve the focal actor (who could keep or disclose a secret), the partner (the focus of the secret), the audience (interested in learning the secret information), and external observers (who may observe if the focal actor disclosed the secret). Across four pre-registered studies, including real-world judgments of secret-keeping dilemmas (field data from a Reddit community; <em>N</em> = 332), a recall study (<em>N</em> = 200), and controlled experiments (<em>N</em><span> = 624), we describe how impression management concerns influence secret-keeping decisions. We find that focal actors are often judged harshly for disclosing others' secrets, even when the audience could derive substantial benefits from learning the information and even when observers judge disclosure to be more moral than keeping a secret. Focal actors are heavily influenced by impression management concerns and routinely keep partners' secrets from an audience who could benefit from the information. Taken together, impression management concerns act as significant impediments to the flow of information, advancing our understanding of both information flows within groups and secret-keeping dilemmas.</span></p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50178188","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}
Erin Carbone , George Loewenstein , Irene Scopelliti , Joachim Vosgerau
{"title":"He said, she said: Gender differences in the disclosure of positive and negative information","authors":"Erin Carbone , George Loewenstein , Irene Scopelliti , Joachim Vosgerau","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104525","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Research on gender differences in (self-)disclosure has produced mixed results, and, where differences have emerged, they may be an artifact of the measures employed. The present paper explores whether gender – defined as self-identified membership in one's sociocultural group – can indeed account for differences in the desire and propensity to divulge information to others. We additionally identify a possible moderator for such differences. In three studies employing two distinct research approaches – a free recall task for the extreme desire to disclose (Study 1, <em>N</em> = 195) and scaled responses to scenarios that manipulate valence experimentally in an exploratory study (Study 2, <em>N</em> = 547) and a preregistered replication (Study 3, <em>N</em> = 405) – we provide evidence of a robust interaction between gender and information valence. Male participants appear similar to female participants in their desire and likelihood to disclose positive information but are less likely than women to want to share negative information with others, and less likely to ultimately act on that desire. Men are reportedly more motivated than women to disclose as a means of self-enhancement, and self-reports reveal that women perceive their sharing behavior to be relatively normative, while men believe themselves to be more withholding than what is optimal. Information disclosure is increasingly pervasive and permanent in the digital age, and is accompanied by an array of social and psychological consequences. Given their disparate disclosing behaviors, men and women may thus be differentially advantaged by, or susceptible to, the positive and negative consequences of information sharing.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50177794","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}
Magdalena Formanowicz , Marta Witkowska , Maria Laura Bettinsoli , Paweł Jurek
{"title":"Successful groups are seen as more agentic and therefore more human— Consequences for group perception","authors":"Magdalena Formanowicz , Marta Witkowska , Maria Laura Bettinsoli , Paweł Jurek","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104490","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104490","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span>Dehumanization predominantly affects groups facing structural inequalities and these groups often experience low agency in attaining satisfactory work and living conditions. Given that seeing groups as low in agency may underlie the association between social disadvantage and dehumanization, in seven preregistered studies (</span><em>N</em> = 1502), we examined how to raise the perceived agency of disadvantaged groups to increase their humanness ascriptions. Several groups were presented as either succeeding or failing in various contexts (e.g., fighting for human rights, building a community center, crossing the border). Additionally, in five of those studies we added a manipulation of self-relevance to further increase the ecological validity of the presented manipulations. Across all studies, and independent of other factors, success increased agency, which in turn translated to lower dehumanization. The results indicated that shifting the narrative regarding the disadvantaged groups to reflect their successes rather than failures can improve the perception of those groups.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49552409","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}
Christina A. Bauer , Veronika Job , Bettina Hannover
{"title":"Who gets to see themselves as talented? Biased self-concepts contribute to first-generation students' disadvantage in talent-focused environments","authors":"Christina A. Bauer , Veronika Job , Bettina Hannover","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104501","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104501","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Intellectual talent is commonly regarded as an important factor for success – i.e., “what it takes to succeed” in Western educational contexts. Yet, the differential experiences individuals have may not allow everyone to think of themselves as talented - i.e., as having “what it takes to succeed” - to the same degree. In five studies with 3584 students in Western countries, we show i) that first-generation students see themselves as less intellectually talented than continuing-generation students, ii) that this bias in self-concept contributes to disadvantages in their academic experience and engagement, and iii) how this disadvantage may be reduced.</p><p>Quasi-experiments 1a and b (<em>N</em> <em>=</em> 694; 316) show that first-generation students view themselves as relatively less talented, but not less diligent, above and beyond prior performance-levels. Field and experimental Studies 2a-b (<em>N</em> <em>=</em> 1881; 362) show that this bias in students' talent self-concept contributes to disadvantage in first-generation students' academic experience and engagement. Experiment 3 (<em>N</em> <em>=</em> 331) suggests that talent self-concept bias is most consequential in talent-focused environments. If, however, environments emphasize effort, disadvantages connected to talent self-concepts are mitigated.</p><p>The experiences first-generation students have in current Western environments seem to make them see themselves as relatively less talented, contributing to disadvantage. Creating effort-focused environments can reduce this disadvantage and promote equality.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43047219","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":"Face-to-face: Three facial features that may turn the scale in close electoral races","authors":"Jan R. Landwehr , Michaela Wänke","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104488","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50198095","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}
Matthew L. Stanley , Christopher P. Neck , Christopher B. Neck
{"title":"The dark side of generosity: Employees with a reputation for giving are selectively targeted for exploitation","authors":"Matthew L. Stanley , Christopher P. Neck , Christopher B. Neck","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104503","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104503","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>People endorse generosity as a moral virtue worth exemplifying, and those who acquire reputations for generosity are admired and publicly celebrated. In an organizational context, hiring, retaining, and promoting generous employees can make organizations more appealing to customers, suppliers, and top talent. However, using complementary methods and experimental designs with large samples of full-time managers, we find consistent evidence that managers are inclined to take unfair advantage of employees with reputations for generosity, selectively targeting them for exploitation in ways that likely, and ironically, hamper long-term organizational success. This selective targeting of generous employees for exploitation was statistically explained by a problematic assumption: Since they have reputations for generosity, managers assume that, if they had the opportunity, they would have freely volunteered for their own exploitation. We also investigate a possible solution to the targeting of more generous employees for exploitative practices. Merely asking managers to make a judgment about the ethics of an exploitative request eliminates their propensity to target generous employees over other employees for exploitation.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46319367","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}