The Formation of Negative Attitudes Toward Novel Groups.

People perceive out-groups, minorities, and novel groups more negatively than in-groups, majorities, and familiar groups. Previous research has argued that such intergroup biases may be caused by the order in which people typically encounter social groups. Groups that are relatively novel to perceivers (e.g., out-groups, minorities) are primarily associated with distinct attributes that differentiate them from familiar groups. Because distinct attributes are typically negative, attitudes toward novel groups are negatively biased. Five experiments (N = 2,615 adults) confirmed the generalizability of the novel groups' disadvantage to different aspects of attitude formation (i.e., evaluations, memory, stereotyping), to cases with more than two groups, and to cases in which groups were majority/minority or in-groups/out-groups. Our findings revealed a remarkably robust influence of learning order in the formation of group attitudes, and they imply that people often perceive novel groups more negatively than they actually are.

The sustainability liability revisited: Positive versus negative differentiation of novel products by sustainability attributes.

In response to a growing consumer trend towards meat reduction and more plant-based diets, the food industry develops meat-reduced food innovations, such as blended products which replace part of their meat with plant-based ingredients. These products are usually promoted as being more sustainable than existing products. However, it is not clear whether sustainability attributes are used by consumers to positively or negatively differentiate these novel products from existing ones. We investigated these two possibilities in two studies. In Study 1, we tested in an online survey whether positive sustainability attributes of novel food products generally affect purchase intentions in a positive or negative way, mediated by taste expectations. In Study 2, we investigated in a field study in a restaurant the choice of a novel blended meat product versus a classic product. In particular, we tested whether the blended meat product is more likely to share positive attributes with a classic alternative than negative attributes and might therefore lack the power of positive differentiation. The results of Study 1 show a positive differentiation by sustainability when taste attributes are equal compared with a classic product. However, Study 2 demonstrates that the mechanisms of a negative differentiation might attenuate these positive effects, because positive hedonic attributes of the novel blendedmeat product more likely apply also to the classic product than the negative attributes.

The differential similarity of positive and negative information - an affect-induced processing outcome?

People judge positive information to be more alike than negative information. This good-bad asymmetry in similarity was argued to constitute a true property of the information ecology (Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2017). Why good is more alike than bad: Processing implications. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 69-79). Alternatively, the asymmetry may constitute a processing outcome itself, namely an influence of phasic affect on information processing. Because no research has yet tested whether phasic affect influences perceived similarity among stimuli, we conducted 5 Experiments that also tested whether phasic affect can account for the higher judged similarity among positive compared to negative stimuli. In three experiments, we affectively charged pictures of different Pokemon by pairing them with monetary gains and losses (Exp. 1a, 1b) as well as positive and negative trait words (Exp. 2); yet, the evaluative charge did not differentially influence perceived similarity among the Pokemon. Experiment 3 replicated the basic similarity asymmetry among positive and negative words, and found that it was unaffected by externally induced phasic affect. Experiment 4 showed that phasic affect had no influence on perceived similarity of non-evaluative words either. We conclude that albeit a weak influence of phasic affect on perceived similarity of stimuli cannot be ruled out entirely, it can most likely not account for the typically medium to large sized asymmetry in similarity among positive and negative stimuli.

A Cognitive-Ecological Explanation of Intergroup Biases.

People often hold negative attitudes toward out-groups and minority groups. We argue that such intergroup biases may result from an interaction of basic cognitive processes and the structure of the information ecology. This cognitive-ecological model assumes that groups such as minorities and out-groups are often novel to a perceiver. At the level of cognition, novel groups are primarily associated with their unique attributes, that is, attributes that differentiate them from other groups. In the information ecology, however, unique attributes are likely to be negative. Thus, novel groups, and by proxy minorities and out-groups, tend to be associated with negative attributes, leading to an evaluative disadvantage. We demonstrated this disadvantage in three experiments in which participants successively formed impressions about two fictional groups associated with the same number of positive and negative attributes. Participants preferred the first group over the novel group as long as the groups' unique attributes were negative.

A density explanation of valence asymmetries in recognition memory.

The density hypothesis states that positive information is more similar than negative information, resulting in higher density of positive information in mental representations. The present research applies the density hypothesis to recognition memory to explain apparent valence asymmetries in recognition memory, namely, a recognition advantage for negative information. Previous research explained this negativity advantage on the basis of valence-induced affect. We predicted that positive information's higher density impairs recognition performance. Two old-new word recognition experiments tested whether differential density between positive and negative stimuli creates a negativity advantage in recognition memory, over and above valence-induced affect. In Experiment 1, participants better discriminated negative word stimuli (i.e., less false alarms) and showed a response bias towards positive words. Regression analyses showed the asymmetry to be function of density and not of valence. Experiment 2 varied stimulus density orthogonal to valence. Again, discriminability and response bias were a function of density and not of valence. We conclude that the higher density of positive information causes an apparent valence asymmetry in recognition memory.

Who shows the Unlikelihood Effect - and why?

Recent work shows that people judge an outcome as less likely when they learn the probabilities of all single pathways that lead to that outcome, a phenomenon termed the Unlikelihood Effect. The initial explanation for this effect is that the low pathway probabilities trigger thoughts that deem the outcome unlikely. We tested the alternative explanation that the effect results from people's erroneous interpretation and processing of the probability information provided in the paradigm. By reanalyzing the original experiments, we discovered that the Unlikelihood Effect had been substantially driven by a small subset of people who give extremely low likelihood judgments. We conducted six preregistered experiments, showing that these people are unaware of the total outcome probability and do formally incorrect calculations with the given probabilities. Controlling for these factors statistically and experimentally reduced the proportion of people giving extremely low likelihood judgments, reducing and sometimes eliminating the Unlikelihood Effect. Our results confirm that the Unlikelihood Effect is overall a robust empirical phenomenon, but suggest that the effect results at least to some degree from a few people's difficulties with encoding, understanding, and integrating probabilities. Our findings align with current research on other psychological effects, showing that empirical effects can be caused by participants engaging in qualitatively different mental processes.

Attitude Formation in More- and Less-Complex Social Environments.

We investigate how the complexity of the social environment (more vs. less groups) influences attitude formation. We hypothesize that facing a larger number of groups renders learning processes about these groups noisier and more regressive, which has two important implications. First, more-complex social environments should lead perceivers to underestimate actual group differences. Second, because most people usually behave positively, more-complex social environments produce negatively biased attitudes and cause perceivers to overestimate the frequency of "negative" individuals among groups. We tested these predictions in five attitude formation experiments (N=2,414). Participants' attitudes and learned base rates of positive and negative group members proved more regressive in complex social environments, that is, with multiple groups, compared with less-complex environments, that is, with fewer groups. In a predominantly positive social environment, this regression caused participants to form more negative group attitudes and more strongly overestimate negative individuals' prevalence among groups.

Differentiation in social perception: Why later-encountered individuals are described more negatively.

According to the cognitive-ecological model of social perception, biases toward individuals can arise as by-products of cognitive principles that interact with the information ecology. The present work tested whether negatively biased person descriptions occur as by-products of cognitive differentiation. Later-encountered persons are described by their distinct attributes that differentiate them from earlier-encountered persons. Because distinct attributes tend to be negative, serial person descriptions should become increasingly negative. We found our predictions confirmed in six studies. In Study 1, descriptions of representatively sampled persons became increasingly distinct and negative with increasing serial positions of the target person. Study 2 eliminated this pattern of results by instructing perceivers to assimilate rather than differentiate a series of targets. Study 3 generalized the pattern from one-word descriptions of still photos of targets to multisentence descriptions of videos of targets. In line with the cognitive-ecological model, Studies 4-5b found that the relation between serial position and negativity was amplified among targets with similar positive attributes, zero among targets with distinct positive or negative attributes, and reversed among similar negative targets. Study 6 returned to representatively sampled targets and generalized the serial position-negativity effect from descriptions of the targets to overall evaluations of them. In sum, the present research provides strong evidence for the explanatory power of the cognitive-ecological model of social perception. We discuss theoretical and practical implications. It may pay off to appear early in an evaluation sequence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Evaluative context and conditioning effects among same and different objects.

We address an apparent discrepancy in the literature on how context stimuli influence evaluations of target stimuli. While a rich literature suggests that target evaluations are often contrasted away from the valence of context stimuli, reported effects of evaluative conditioning (EC) are almost exclusively assimilative. Specifically, when a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) repeatedly co-occurs with a positive unconditioned stimulus (US), the CS is later evaluated more positively. Contrast effects from mere co-occurrences are absent in the EC literature. We hypothesized that this can be explained by the stimulus composition in EC tasks, which usually depict different objects as target (CS) and context (US). In 10 experiments, we confirmed that when target and context stimuli depict different objects, assimilation clearly dominates. Yet, when target and context depict stimuli from the same object class, contrast effects become dominant. These contrast effects are invisible in standard EC tasks because CSs are contrasted with all positive and negative USs of a given stimulus set. The present work thereby identifies a central determinant of the direction that evaluative context and conditioning effects take. While different-object contexts evoke assimilation, same-object contexts increase the likelihood of contrastive evaluations. We discuss the various theoretical and practical implications of our findings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A cognitive-ecological approach to temporal self-appraisals.

We investigate self-appraisals over time using a cognitive-ecological approach. We assume that ecologically, negative person attributes are more diverse than positive ones, while positive person attributes are more frequent than negative ones. We combine these ecological properties with the cognitive process of similarity- and differences-based social comparisons to predict temporal self-appraisals. The resulting cognitive-ecological model predicts that people should evaluate similarities with themselves over time positively, whereas differences would be evaluated more negatively. However, because positive attributes are reinforced over time relative to negative attributes, we predicted an asymmetry to emerge such that distinct attributes of the past self (past differences) would be most negative. Six experiments (total N = 1,796) and an integrative data analysis confirmed the cognitive-ecological model's predictions for temporal self-appraisals. However, we found no evidence for motivated self-perception across time. We discuss the implications of these findings for temporal self-appraisal theory and other aspects of self and identity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Why leading is (almost) as important as winning.

Competitions in sports, business, or politics often provide perceivers with cumulative standings over time. Recent research suggests that people fail to accurately update their impressions from cumulative observations as they are influenced by previous standings. This cumulative redundancy bias (CRB) implies that competitors that are leading during a competition will receive more favorable evaluations, over and beyond their eventual success or failure. While the CRB has far-reaching implications, its underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. We present data from four experiments in which we modified the standard CRB task by adding a step-by-step procedure to track the dynamics of perceivers' impressions during the competition. We also manipulated the length of the competition and tested different possible explanations for the CRB. Results suggest that the CRB is a robust phenomenon that constitutes an actual bias and that is best explained by an additive effect of cumulative redundancy.

Fluency and positivity as possible causes of the truth effect.

Statements' rated truth increases when people encounter them repeatedly. Processing fluency is a central variable to explain this truth effect. However, people experience processing fluency positively, and these positive experiences might cause the truth effect. Three studies investigated positivity and fluency influences on the truth effect. Study 1 found correlations between elicited positive feelings and rated truth. Study 2 replicated the repetition-based truth effect, but positivity did not influence the effect. Study 3 conveyed positive and negative correlations between positivity and truth in a learning phase. We again replicated the truth effect, but positivity only influenced judgments for easy statements in the learning phase. Thus, across three studies, we found positivity effects on rated truth, but not on the repetition-based truth effect: We conclude that positivity does not explain the standard truth effect, but the role of positive experiences for truth judgments deserves further investigation.

Explaining Negativity Dominance without Processing Bias.

In a recent study, Shin and Niv explain both negativity and positivity biases in social evaluations as a function of the diversity and low frequency of events. We discuss why negative information is indeed more diverse and less frequent, and highlight the implications beyond social evaluations.

Attitudes from mere co-occurrences are guided by differentiation.

People often form attitudes about objects, individuals, or groups by examining and comparing their attributes. Such attribute-based attitude formation is guided by a differentiation principle: Whether people come to like or dislike an attitude object depends on the object's attributes that differentiate it from other objects. Attributes that are redundant with previously encountered attitude objects are typically cancelled out. We tested whether the same differentiation principle applies to co-occurrence-based attitude formation, also known as Evaluative Conditioning. This form of attitude formation describes the phenomenon that attitudes are influenced by positive or negative stimuli that have co-occurred with attitude object, but which are not inherent attributes of the attitude object itself. Across 7 experiments (N = 1611), we consistently found that co-occurrence-based attitude formation is guided by the same differentiation principle as attribute-based attitude formation. Specifically, participants' attitudes toward unknown brands were most strongly influenced by positive or negative stimuli that distinctly co-occurred with a specific brand, and that differentiated that brand from previously encountered ones. Stimuli that redundantly co-occurred with multiple brands had weaker influences on brand attitudes. The results further suggest that differentiation operates at the learning stage during which distinct stimulus co-occurrences enjoy a processing advantage. We discuss the present findings' theoretical and practical implications for attitude formation and identify differentiation as a possible cause of biased attitudes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The redundancy in cumulative information and how it biases impressions.

The present work identifies a so-far overlooked bias in sequential impression formation. When the latent qualities of competitors are inferred from a cumulative sequence of observations (e.g., the sum of points collected by sports teams), impressions should be based solely on the most recent observation because all previous observations are redundant. Based on the well-documented human inability to adequately discount redundant information, we predicted the existence of a cumulative redundancy bias. Accordingly, perceivers' impressions are systematically biased by the unfolding of a performance sequence when observations are cumulative. This bias favors leading competitors and persists even when the end result of the performance sequence is known. We demonstrated this cumulative redundancy bias in 8 experiments in which participants had to sequentially form impressions about the qualities of two competitors from different performance domains (i.e., computer algorithms, stocks, and soccer teams). We consistently found that perceivers' impressions were biased by cumulative redundancy. Specifically, impressions about the winner and the loser of a sequence were more divergent when the winner took an early lead compared with a late lead. When the sequence ended in a draw, participants formed more favorable impressions about the competitor who was ahead during most observations. We tested and ruled out several alternative explanations related to primacy effects, counterfactual thinking, and heuristic beliefs. We discuss the wide-ranging implications of our findings for impression formation and performance evaluation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Sharing Rare Attitudes Attracts.

People like others who share their attitudes. Online dating platforms as well as other social media platforms regularly rely on the social bonding power of their users' shared attitudes. However, little is known about moderating variables. In the present work, I argue that sharing rare compared with sharing common attitudes should evoke stronger interpersonal attraction among people. In five studies, I tested this prediction for the case of shared interests from different domains. I found converging evidence that people's rare compared with their common interests are especially potent to elicit interpersonal attraction. I discuss the current framework's theoretical implications for impression formation and impression management as well as its practical implications for improving online dating services.

The "common good" phenomenon: Why similarities are positive and differences are negative.

Positive attributes are more prevalent than negative attributes in the social environment. From this basic assumption, 2 implications that have been overlooked thus far: Positive compared with negative attributes are more likely to be shared by individuals, and people's shared attributes (similarities) are more positive than their unshared attributes (differences). Consequently, similarity-based comparisons should lead to more positive evaluations than difference-based comparisons. We formalized our probabilistic reasoning in a model and tested its predictions in a simulation and 8 experiments (N = 1,181). When participants generated traits about 2 target persons, positive compared with negative traits were more likely to be shared by the targets (Experiment 1a) and by other participants' targets (Experiment 1b). Conversely, searching for targets' shared traits resulted in more positive traits than searching for unshared traits (Experiments 2, 4a, and 4b). In addition, positive traits were more accessible than negative traits among shared traits but not among unshared traits (Experiment 3). Finally, shared traits were only more positive when positive traits were indeed prevalent (Experiments 5 and 6). The current framework has a number of implications for comparison processes and provides a new interpretation of well-known evaluative asymmetries such as intergroup bias and self-superiority effects. (PsycINFO Database Record

Why Good Is More Alike Than Bad: Processing Implications.

Humans process positive information and negative information differently. These valence asymmetries in processing are often summarized under the observation that 'bad is stronger than good', meaning that negative information has stronger psychological impact (e.g., in feedback, learning, or social interactions). This stronger impact is usually attributed to people's affective or motivational reactions to evaluative information. We present an alternative interpretation of valence asymmetries based on the observation that positive information is more similar than negative information. We explain this higher similarity based on the non-extremity of positive attributes, discuss how it accounts for observable valence asymmetries in cognitive processing, and show how it predicts hitherto undiscovered phenomena.

Psychological distance reduces literal imitation: Evidence from an imitation-learning paradigm.

The present experiments tested the hypothesis that observers engage in more literal imitation of a model when the model is psychologically near to (vs. distant from) the observer. Participants learned to fold a dog out of towels by watching a model performing this task. Temporal (Experiment 1) and spatial (Experiment 2) distance from the model were manipulated. As predicted, participants copied more of the model's specific movements when the model was near (vs. distant). Experiment 3 replicated this finding with a paper-folding task, suggesting that distance from a model also affects imitation of less complex tasks. Perceived task difficulty, motivation, and the quality of the end product were not affected by distance. We interpret the findings as reflecting different levels of construal of the model's performance: When the model is psychologically distant, social learners focus more on the model's goal and devise their own means for achieving the goal, and as a result show less literal imitation of the model. (PsycINFO Database Record

A general valence asymmetry in similarity: Good is more alike than bad.

The density hypothesis (Unkelbach, Fiedler, Bayer, Stegmüller, & Danner, 2008) claims a general higher similarity of positive information to other positive information compared with the similarity of negative information to other negative information. This similarity asymmetry might explain valence asymmetries on all levels of cognitive processing. The available empirical evidence for this general valence asymmetry in similarity suffers from a lack of direct tests, low representativeness, and possible confounding variables (e.g., differential valence intensity, frequency, familiarity, or concreteness of positive and negative stimuli). To address these problems, Study 1 first validated the spatial arrangement method (SpAM) as a similarity measure. Using SpAM, Studies 2-6 found the proposed valence asymmetry in large, representative samples of self- and other-generated words (Studies 2a/2b), for words of consensual and idiosyncratic valence (Study 3), for words from 1 and many independent information sources (Study 4), for real-life experiences (Study 5), and for large data sets of verbal (i.e., ∼14,000 words reported by Warriner, Kuperman, & Brysbaert, 2013) and visual information (i.e., ∼1,000 pictures reported in the IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2005; Study 6). Together, these data support a general valence asymmetry in similarity, namely that good is more alike than bad. (PsycINFO Database Record