{"title":"Is common behavior considered moral? The role of perceived others' motives in moral norm inferences and motivation about environmental behavior","authors":"Kimin Eom , Bryan K.C. Choy","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104684","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104684","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The present research examines how inferences about moral norms from descriptive norms change by perceptions of others' motives in the context of environmental behavior. When individuals think that many others engage in an environmental behavior (e.g., water and energy conservation) for prosocial (vs. proself) motives, they infer moralization about the behavior in a given context. They infer stronger injunctive norms about the behavior and expect others to experience moral outrage at violation of the moral standard (e.g., wasting water and energy). The moral norm perceptions predict people's motivation to engage in environmental behavior themselves. We further show that expected guilt and shame if not engaging in normative behavior explain the effects of prosocial-motivated (vs. proself-motivated) norms. Together, perceived motives behind descriptive norms change people's inferences about moral implications of normative behavior and their motivation to engage in normative behavior.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142428407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hannah I. Volpert-Esmond , Jessica R. Bray , Meredith P. Levsen , Bruce D. Bartholow
{"title":"Share the wealth: Neurophysiological and motivational mechanisms related to racial discrimination in economic decision making","authors":"Hannah I. Volpert-Esmond , Jessica R. Bray , Meredith P. Levsen , Bruce D. Bartholow","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104683","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104683","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Social interactions are influenced by rapid judgements about interaction partners that are assumed to contribute to various behavioral biases. While often negligible in a given instance, such biases can accumulate to contribute to persistent inequities between social groups. Here, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine the extent to which early attention to racial category information during simulated interpersonal interactions contributes to race bias in financial decisions. Undergraduate participants (<em>N</em> = 67; 36 women, 31 men; all White/Non-Hispanic) completed an economic decision-making task in which they decided how much money to invest in a series of male interaction partners (i.e., trustees) who varied in their apparent racial group memberships. Black male trustees received lower investments than White male trustees, replicating prior findings. Of greater interest, an ERP index of attention to trustees' faces predicted racial bias in investments, and was moderated by participants' internalized motivation to respond without prejudice (i.e., a difference score reflecting the extent to which participants' motivation reflected internal [e.g., personal egalitarian values] compared to external [e.g., concerns about social norms] reasons to respond without prejudice). Consistent with motivational models of prejudice control, greater early attention to a trustee's face led to <em>more</em>-biased lending among participants with lower internalized motivation but to <em>less</em>-biased lending among participants with higher internalized motivation. Findings demonstrate a crucial role for within-person variability in attention to race-related cues when interacting with others, along with between-person bias regulation motives, in determining whether attention to race will increase or decrease bias in financial lending.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142428406","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":"Ironic effects of prosocial gossip in driving inaccurate social perceptions","authors":"Samantha Grayson , Matthew Feinberg , Robb Willer , Jamil Zaki","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104682","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104682","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Gossip is often stereotyped as a frivolous social activity, but in fact can be a powerful tool for discouraging selfishness and cheating. In economic games, gossip induces people to act more cooperatively, presumably to avoid the cost of accruing a negative reputation. Might even this prosocial sort of gossip carry negative side effects? We propose that gossip might protect communities while simultaneously giving people the wrong idea about who's in them. Specifically, gossipers might disproportionately share information about cheaters in their midst, driving <em>cynical</em> perceptions among receivers of that gossip. To test these predictions, we first reanalyzed data from a prior study in which people played a public goods game and could gossip about their fellow players. These participants indeed produced negatively skewed gossip: writing much more frequently about cheaters than cooperators, even when most people in their public goods game groups acted generously. To examine the effect of this gossip on cynicism, we ran a new experiment in which a second generation of participants read these gossip notes, and then prepared to play their own public goods game. Gossip recipients inferred that the groups that produced these notes acted significantly more selfishly than they truly had–becoming both cynical and inaccurate based on gossip. However, this gossip did not affect second generation participants' forecasts of how their own group would behave, nor their own cooperative choices. Together, these findings suggest that gossip skews negative, and, therefore, encourages outside observers to draw more cynical conclusions about groups from which it comes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2024-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142358115","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":"Brilliance as gender deviance: Gender-role incongruity as another barrier to women's success in academic fields","authors":"Boglarka Nyul , Inna Ksenofontov , Alexandra Fleischmann , Rotem Kahalon","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104680","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104680","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>“Brilliance,” a state of extreme intellectual ability, is stereotypically associated with men but not women. Research finds that portrayals of brilliance as a prerequisite for success contribute to women's underrepresentation in certain academic fields and high-level positions. In this work, we examined whether gender roles contribute to the perception of women as less brilliant. In four preregistered experimental studies (<em>N</em> = 920), we tested whether brilliance deviates from ascribed and prescribed gender roles more for women than for men and whether such deviation places women who display their brilliance at a higher risk of experiencing backlash. In Study 1, an average intelligent and a brilliant man were rated as more similar on gender-specific traits than an average intelligent and a brilliant woman. In Study 2, while intelligence and gender individually influenced prescriptions of masculinity and femininity, their interaction did not support larger differences for female targets, indicating a lack of differential expectations by gender and intelligence. Study 3 showed that brilliant women are more likely to experience backlash at work than brilliant men, while Study 4 demonstrated that while brilliance enhances professional desirability across genders, it decreases social desirability, suggesting social costs that could affect workplace dynamics. Our results support that brilliance can be considered a form of gender-role deviance for women and might lead to a backlash. This underscores the need for policies to counteract gendered stereotypes of brilliance, which hinder women's career advancement and contribute to the gender gap in the workplace.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103124000933/pdfft?md5=7745bcb725d9007a38dbbea990157348&pid=1-s2.0-S0022103124000933-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142242921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Feifei Lu , Jin Yang , Xiaoqiang Yao , Yibo Song , Duo Chen , Ting Zhang , Fenghua Zhang
{"title":"The impact of social identity complexity on intergroup parochial and universal cooperation under different payoff structures and frames","authors":"Feifei Lu , Jin Yang , Xiaoqiang Yao , Yibo Song , Duo Chen , Ting Zhang , Fenghua Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104681","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104681","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>As society evolves, individuals increasingly cooperate with both in-group members and out-group strangers, despite risks such as betrayal. Social identity plays a crucial role in motivating this cooperation, significantly shaping cooperative behavior. This study explores how social identity complexity—arising from the overlapping of multiple social identities—affects intergroup cooperation. Using the Intergroup Parochial and Universal Cooperation (IPUC) game, we examined universal cooperation, weak parochial cooperation, and strong parochial cooperation under different payoff structures—the equal outcomes game (EOG) and the collective incentives game (CIG)—and framing conditions (individual and group frames). The findings reveal that social identity complexity is positively related to universal cooperation and negatively related to strong parochial cooperation. Individuals with high social identity complexity demonstrated higher levels of universal cooperation and lower levels of strong parochial cooperation, particularly within the CIG compared to the EOG. Additionally, individuals with high social complexity showed greater universal cooperation and less strong parochial cooperation in the individual frame compared to the group frame, while those with low social identity complexity exhibited more weak parochial cooperation in the individual frame. These findings suggest that higher social identity complexity fosters intergroup cooperation, with different payoff structures and framing conditions significantly influencing cooperative behavior.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142229387","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}
Tania A. Reynolds , Jon K. Maner , Roy F. Baumeister
{"title":"Bless her heart: Gossip phrased with concern provides advantages in female intrasexual competition","authors":"Tania A. Reynolds , Jon K. Maner , Roy F. Baumeister","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104670","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104670","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Although many women report being victimized by gossip, fewer report spreading negative gossip. Female gossipers might be unaware they are gossiping if they disclose such statements out of concern for targets. Four studies (<em>N</em> = 1709) investigated whether women believe their gossip is motivated by concern and whether expressing concern for targets insulates female gossipers against social costs, while simultaneously impairing targets' reputations. Study 1 examined sex differences in gossip motivations. Compared to men, women endorsed stronger concern than harm motivations, especially when gossiping about other women, suggesting these motivations characterize female intrasexual gossip. In Study 2, female gossipers who phrased their negative gossip with concern (versus maliciously or neutrally) were evaluated as more trustworthy and desirable as social and romantic partners. Study 3 replicated the favorable evaluations of concerned female gossipers. Female participants especially disliked malicious female gossipers, suggesting professions of concern might help to avoid women's scorn. Male participants reported lower romantic interest in female gossip targets when they learned concern (versus malicious or no) gossip, suggesting concerned gossip can harm female targets' romantic prospects. Study 4 revealed these patterns extend to face-to-face interactions. A female gossiper was preferred as a social partner when she phrased her gossip with concern versus maliciously. Moreover, concerned gossip harmed perceptions of the female target as effectively as malicious gossip. Altogether, findings suggest that negative gossip delivered with concern effectively harms female targets' reputations, while also protecting gossipers' reputations, indicating a viable strategy in female intrasexual competition.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142167350","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":"Revisiting the moral forecasting error – A preregistered replication and extension of “Are we more moral than we think?”","authors":"Simen Bø, Hallgeir Sjåstad","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104662","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104662","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Predictions are often inaccurate. Still, the direction of prediction errors may vary. Contrary to research on the intention-behavior gap, where people fail to live up to their ambitions, a study on “moral forecasting” found that people behaved <em>more</em> honestly than they predicted. In this registered report, we present two close replication attempts and one conceptual replication attempt of this moral forecasting error across two experiments. In Experiment 1 (<em>N</em> = 1839), we recruited a general population sample from the same country as the original study (Canada) to an online experiment. We successfully replicated the moral forecasting error using a math-based cheating task from the original study: Predicted cheating was much higher in a moral forecasting condition than actual cheating in a moral action condition (<em>d</em> = 0.69). In Experiment 2 (<em>N</em> = 1381) we replicated the forecasting error again, using the same task in a general population sample from the U.S. (<em>d</em> = 0.72). However, we were unable to conceptually replicate the effect using a different dishonesty measure, the “mind game”, in Experiment 1 (φ = 0.03). We also could not reduce the forecasting error through a debiasing intervention in Experiment 2 (<em>d</em> = 0.01). Across both experiments, participants predicted that others would cheat much more than they would themselves. In this registered report, we conclude that the moral forecasting error is robust for the original cheating task. We also show that it can generalize contextually (from a lab to an online setting), but not to a different task. Future research may show exactly when predictions about one's own honesty are pessimistic rather than optimistic.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2024-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103124000751/pdfft?md5=2e07dae9b41a7e365c6dd932efdd8151&pid=1-s2.0-S0022103124000751-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142122917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fairness revisionism: Reducing discrimination for the future reduces perceived unfairness in the past","authors":"Tito L.H. Grillo , Shuhan Yang , Adrian F. Ward","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104671","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104671","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Marginalized groups may face systemic discrimination for generations until concrete advancements in society finally ensure fairer treatment for their members. Although fairness advancements may benefit these groups in the present and future, they do not change the past; they cannot undo the discrimination already experienced by previous generations. However, five studies (<em>N</em> = 1672) suggest that fairness advancements that benefit a marginalized group may change how its members perceive their own prior experiences with discrimination, leading them to see these experiences as having been fairer compared to when there are no such advancements. We find evidence of this revisionism of unfair past experiences in different historically marginalized groups (women and immigrants) and cultural contexts (U.S., U.K., and China). Critically, fairness revisionism arises even when fairness advancements have no objective impact on individuals themselves, as long as there are benefits for current and future members of their social group. Fairness revisionism does not arise, however, in response to gains for marginalized groups to which one does not belong, nor when individuals assess fairness in other groups' past experiences from an outsider's perspective. Overall, this phenomenon may be a double-edged sword: it may provide peace of mind for those treated unfairly by assuaging the memory of adverse experiences, but may also make discrimination issues in society seem less pressing based on the perspective of victims themselves.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103124000842/pdfft?md5=ce114b4e5b6fac58c6e7e545293abd21&pid=1-s2.0-S0022103124000842-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142096565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jasmine B. Norman , Daphne Castro Lingl , Eric Hehman , Jacqueline M. Chen
{"title":"Race in the eye of the beholder: Decomposing perceiver- and target-level variation in perceived racial prototypicality","authors":"Jasmine B. Norman , Daphne Castro Lingl , Eric Hehman , Jacqueline M. Chen","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104667","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104667","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Perceivers' ability to use multiple sources of information when forming impressions—including top-down, perceiver-level features, and bottom-up, target-level features—is a hallmark of social cognition. We investigate this primary foundation by examining the role of perceiver-level and target-level variation in perceived racial prototypicality in the U.S. In Study 1 (200 unique faces; 2608 raters), we quantified contributions of perceiver- and target-level effects to perceived racial prototypicality. Perceiver- and target-level contributions varied across racial category (Asian, Black, Latine, Middle Eastern, and Multiracial), with Multiracial and Middle Eastern prototypicality being more perceiver-driven. Although several appearance features (e.g., perceived ambiguity, skin tone) related to perceived prototypicality, there were distinctions in how perceivers used them (e.g., some people strongly used skin tone to infer Black prototypicality, while others used this less or not at all). A second study (<em>N</em> = 511) experimentally manipulated race essentialist beliefs. While there was no impact on perceived racial prototypicality, regardless of the category (Asian, Black, Latine, Middle Eastern, Multiracial, and Native American), Middle Eastern, Multiracial, and Native American prototypicality were generally more perceiver-driven than other categories, converging with Study 1. Further, perceivers' social dominance orientation, but not several other individual differences, were associated with less use of each of these categories. Taken together, findings suggest perceived racial prototypicality may originate less from stable individual differences like attitudes and instead reflects both i) differences in perceptions of target features and ii) differences in how people use particular target features in making racial prototypicality judgments.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142089336","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}
Adi Amit , Ido Liviatan , Sari Mentser , Eitan Venzhik , Yuval Karmel , Tal Moran
{"title":"Exemplar-based ingroup projection: The superordinate national category is associated more strongly with ingroup than outgroup political leaders","authors":"Adi Amit , Ido Liviatan , Sari Mentser , Eitan Venzhik , Yuval Karmel , Tal Moran","doi":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104669","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jesp.2024.104669","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We studied mental representations of social categories in the context of political groups nested within national identities. Extending previous works derived from the Ingroup Projection Model, which had investigated category representations based on prototypical <em>attributes</em>, we examined category representations based on prototypical <em>exemplars</em>, focusing on group leaders. We hypothesized that the mental representation of the superordinate, national, category is more strongly associated with the mental representation of ingroup political leaders than outgroup political leaders. We tested our hypothesis in three preregistered experiments, looking at two different national-political contexts and using diverse methods. In Studies 1 (<em>N</em> = 145) and 2 (<em>N</em> = 103), both conducted in Israel, we found that participants explicitly associated the national category with leaders of their own political camp more than with leaders of the rival political camp. In Study 2, we further found that participants were more likely to falsely remember that ingroup relative to outgroup political leaders were paired with the national category (versus their political wing). In Study 3 (<em>N</em> = 381), conducted in the USA, we found using an implicit measure of association (ST-IAT) that Democrats and Republicans sorted stimuli, representing political leaders, faster when the national category (represented by American symbols) was paired with the ingroup rather than the outgroup category. Implications for theoretical accounts of ingroup projection, as well as for the understanding of political polarization and intergroup leadership, are discussed.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48441,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Social Psychology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142075787","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}