Beyond Observation: Manipulating Circumstances to Detect Affordances and Infer Traits.

Social perceivers seek to understand the opportunities and threats others potentially afford-for example, whether a teammate will behave tenaciously or a romantic partner, faithfully. We typically detect affordances and draw trait inferences by observing behaviors that reveal or predict others' likely intentions and characteristics. However, detection and inference from simple observation are often difficult (e.g., even dishonest people are frequently honest, people often mask unpopular beliefs). In such cases, we propose that people test, actively manipulating others' circumstances to reveal hard-to-observe affordances and characteristics. The Observation-Testing Model is a framework predicting circumstances under which testing is more likely to happen, which affordances and characteristics are more likely to be tested for, and which people are more likely to test and be tested. We identify preliminary support for the model from a range of literatures (e.g., employment assessment, coming-of-age rituals, dating processes) and identify areas needing further research.

Ecology-driven stereotypes override race stereotypes.

Why do race stereotypes take the forms they do? Life history theory posits that features of the ecology shape individuals' behavior. Harsh and unpredictable ("desperate") ecologies induce fast strategy behaviors such as impulsivity, whereas resource-sufficient and predictable ("hopeful") ecologies induce slow strategy behaviors such as future focus. We suggest that individuals possess a lay understanding of ecology's influence on behavior, resulting in ecology-driven stereotypes. Importantly, because race is confounded with ecology in the United States, we propose that Americans' stereotypes about racial groups actually reflect stereotypes about these groups' presumed home ecologies. Study 1 demonstrates that individuals hold ecology stereotypes, stereotyping people from desperate ecologies as possessing faster life history strategies than people from hopeful ecologies. Studies 2-4 rule out alternative explanations for those findings. Study 5, which independently manipulates race and ecology information, demonstrates that when provided with information about a person's race (but not ecology), individuals' inferences about blacks track stereotypes of people from desperate ecologies, and individuals' inferences about whites track stereotypes of people from hopeful ecologies. However, when provided with information about both the race and ecology of others, individuals' inferences reflect the targets' ecology rather than their race: black and white targets from desperate ecologies are stereotyped as equally fast life history strategists, whereas black and white targets from hopeful ecologies are stereotyped as equally slow life history strategists. These findings suggest that the content of several predominant race stereotypes may not reflect race, per se, but rather inferences about how one's ecology influences behavior.

Homosexuality and Pro-Gay Ideology as Pathogens? Implications of a Disease-Spread Lay Model for Understanding Anti-Gay Behaviors.

Negative behaviors targeting gay men and lesbians range from violent physical assault to casting a vote against gay marriage, with very different implications for those targeted. Existing accounts of such actions, however, are unable to differentially predict specific anti-gay behaviors, leaving a large theoretical hole in the literature and hindering the design of effective interventions. We propose (a) that many sexually prejudiced laypersons conceptualize homosexuality and pro-gay ideology as "contaminants" analogous to infectious pathogens and (b) that anti-gay behaviors can thus be viewed as strategic attempts to prevent, contain, treat, or eradicate the "pathogens" of homosexuality and pro-gay ideology. By considering analogues to disease-spread processes (e.g., susceptibility of specific subpopulations, inoculation procedures, prevalence in the local environment, interconnections among community members), we derive novel predictions regarding the incidence and nature of anti-gay behaviors and provide leverage for creating more tailored interventions to reduce such discrimination.

Is She Angry? (Sexually Desirable) Women "See" Anger on Female Faces.

Intrasexual conflict may pose unique challenges for women. Whereas men's aggression tends to be physical and direct, women's tends to be relational and indirect, particularly when directed toward other women. Moreover, women's expressions of anger are often suppressed, perhaps particularly when other women are the targets. Thus, women may face difficulty anticipating anger and anger-based aggression from other women. How might women manage this challenge? The functional projection of emotion may facilitate useful behavior; for instance, "seeing" anger on people believed to pose threats to physical safety may help perceivers preempt or avoid physical harm. Given the threats that women face, we predicted that (a) women are biased to "see" anger on neutral female (but not male) faces and that (b) women who are likely targets of intrasexual aggression (i.e., sexually desirable or available women) show an exaggerated bias. We report three studies that support these hypotheses and, more broadly, illustrate the value of a functional approach to social cognition.

Religion and intergroup conflict: findings from the Global Group Relations Project.

How might religion shape intergroup conflict? We tested whether religious infusion-the extent to which religious rituals and discourse permeate the everyday activities of groups and their members-moderated the effects of two factors known to increase intergroup conflict: competition for limited resources and incompatibility of values held by potentially conflicting groups. We used data from the Global Group Relations Project to investigate 194 groups (e.g., ethnic, religious, national) at 97 sites around the world. When religion was infused in group life, groups were especially prejudiced against those groups that held incompatible values, and they were likely to discriminate against such groups. Moreover, whereas disadvantaged groups with low levels of religious infusion typically avoided directing aggression against their resource-rich and powerful counterparts, disadvantaged groups with high levels of religious infusion directed significant aggression against them-despite the significant tangible costs to the disadvantaged groups potentially posed by enacting such aggression. This research suggests mechanisms through which religion may increase intergroup conflict and introduces an innovative method for performing nuanced, cross-societal research.

The selfish goal meets the selfish gene.

The connection between selfish genes and selfish goals is not merely metaphorical. Many goals that shape contemporary cognition and behavior are psychological products of evolutionarily fundamental motivational systems and thus are phenotypic manifestations of genes. An evolutionary perspective can add depth and nuance to our understanding of "selfish goals" and their implications for human cognition and behavior.

Beyond the negative: political attitudes and ideologies strategically manage opportunities, too.

Hibbing et al. use evolutionarily derived logic to suggest that political attitudes are related to responses to negative features of the environment. We suggest that the authors focus too narrowly on the negative and contend, instead, that a more comprehensive evolutionary approach focusing on people's responses to threats and opportunities will better account for variation in political attitudes.

Rational reasons for irrational beliefs.

According to many, we live in "posttruth" times, with the pervasiveness of falsehoods being an existential threat to democracy and the functioning of free societies. Why do people believe and propagate falsehoods? Current accounts focus on psychological deficiencies, heuristic errors, self-enhancing motivations, and motivations to sow chaos. Here, we advance a complementary, outwardly (vs. inwardly) oriented, and ultimate (vs. proximate) account that people often believe and spread falsehoods for socially functional reasons. Under this view, falsehoods can serve as rare and valued information with which to rise in prestige, as signals of group commitment and loyalty tests, as ammunition with which to derogate rivals, or as outrages with which to mobilize the group toward shared goals. Thus, although people often generate and defend falsehoods through processes that are epistemically irrational, doing so might be rational from the perspective of the functions falsehoods serve. We discuss the implications of this view for puzzling theoretical phenomena and changing problematic beliefs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Responses to political partisans are shaped by a COVID-19-sensitive disease avoidance psychology: A longitudinal investigation of functional flexibility.

How do natural changes in disease avoidance motivation shape thoughts about and behaviors toward ingroup and outgroup members? During the COVID-19 pandemic, political party affiliation has been a strong predictor in the United States of COVID-19-related opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. Using a six-wave longitudinal panel survey of representative Americans (on Prolific, N = 1,124, from April 2020 to February 2021), we explored how naturally occurring changes across time in both risks of COVID-19 infection and people's disease avoidance motivation shaped thoughts about and behaviors toward Republicans and Democrats (e.g., perceived infection threat, feelings of disgust, desires to avoid). We found a significant effect of dispositional level of motivation, over and above powerful effects of in-party favoritism/out-party derogation: Participants with a dispositionally stronger motivation to avoid disease showed greater infection management responses, especially toward Republicans; this held even for Republican participants. More importantly, we also found a significant interactive effect of within-person variability and ecological infection risk: Participants who sensitively upregulated their motivation during the rapid spread of COVID-19 perceived greater infection threat by Republicans and felt less disgust toward and desire to avoid Democrats. This finding, too, held for Republican participants. These results provide evidence of functionally flexible within-person psychological disease avoidance-a theoretically important process long presumed and now demonstrated-and suggest another mechanism contributing to U.S. political polarization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Would an obese person whistle vivaldi? Targets of prejudice self-present to minimize appearance of specific threats.

How do targets of stigma manage social interactions? We built from a threat-specific model of prejudice to predict that targets select impression-management strategies that address the particular threats other people see them to pose. We recruited participants from two groups perceived to pose different threats: overweight people, who are heuristically associated with disease and targeted with disgust, and Black men, who are perceived to be dangerous and targeted with fear. When stereotypes and prejudices toward their groups were made salient, overweight people (Studies 1 and 2) and Black men (Study 2) selectively prioritized self-presentation strategies to minimize apparent disease threat (wearing clean clothes) or physical-violence threat (smiling), respectively. The specific threat a group is seen to pose plays an important but underexamined role in the psychology of being a target of prejudice.

Beauty at the ballot box: disease threats predict preferences for physically attractive leaders.

Why does beauty win out at the ballot box? Some researchers have posited that it occurs because people ascribe generally positive characteristics to physically attractive candidates. We propose an alternative explanation-that leadership preferences are related to functional disease-avoidance mechanisms. Because physical attractiveness is a cue to health, people concerned with disease should especially prefer physically attractive leaders. Using real-world voting data and laboratory-based experiments, we found support for this relationship. In congressional districts with elevated disease threats, physically attractive candidates are more likely to be elected (Study 1). Experimentally activating disease concerns leads people to especially value physical attractiveness in leaders (Study 2) and prefer more physically attractive political candidates (Study 3). In a final study, we demonstrated that these findings are related to leadership preferences, specifically, rather than preferences for physically attractive group members more generally (Study 4). Together, these findings highlight the nuanced and functional nature of leadership preferences.

Putting all your eggs in one basket: life-history strategies, bet hedging, and diversification.

Diversification of resources is a strategy found everywhere from the level of microorganisms to that of giant Wall Street investment firms. We examine the functional nature of diversification using life-history theory-a framework for understanding how organisms navigate resource-allocation trade-offs. This framework suggests that diversification may be adaptive or maladaptive depending on one's life-history strategy and that these differences should be observed under conditions of threat. In three studies, we found that cues of mortality threat interact with one index of life-history strategy, childhood socioeconomic status (SES), to affect diversification. Among those from low-SES backgrounds, mortality threat increased preferences for diversification. However, among those from high-SES backgrounds, mortality threat had the opposite effect, inclining people to put all their eggs in one basket. The same interaction pattern emerged with a potential biomarker of life-history strategy, oxidative stress. These findings highlight when, and for whom, different diversification strategies can be advantageous.

Suspicion About Suspicion Probes: Ways Forward.

Suspicion probes are the traditional tool employed to assess the extent to which participants suspect intentional misdirection or deception within the research context. A primary reason psychologists use deception in research settings is to prevent participants from altering their behavior in light of knowing what is being studied, which could undermine internal validity as well as threaten the generalizability of findings to the real world (i.e., external validity). The present article elucidates a number of challenges with suspicion probes. A definition and framework for conceptualizing the construct of suspicion in research settings are proposed. Following a literature review, an analysis of existing evidence, and new data on the prevalence of using and reporting suspicion probes, we conclude that suspicion is a likely problem in research practice. We provide a decision guide to help researchers navigate the numerous choices involved in addressing potential suspicion and call for a combination of (a) renewed research leading to empirically supported tools and best practices and (b) systemic changes to editorial policies, funding practices, professional standards, and research training that would increase rigor and focus on this aspect of research methodology.

Beyond prejudice to prejudices.

Different groups, because they are perceived to pose different threats, elicit different prejudices. Collective action by disadvantaged groups can amplify the perception of specific threats, with predictable and potentially counterproductive consequences. It is important to carefully consider the threat-based psychology of prejudice(s) before implementing any strategy intended to promote positive social change.

Infection breeds reticence: the effects of disease salience on self-perceptions of personality and behavioral avoidance tendencies.

Social living brings humans great rewards, but also associated dangers, such as increased risk of infection from others. Although the body's immune system is integral to combating disease, it is physiologically costly. Less costly are evolved mechanisms for promoting avoidance of people who are potentially infectious, such as perceiving oneself as less social and increasing the tendency to make avoidant movements. In Experiment 1, exposure to a disease prime led participants to rate themselves as less extraverted than did exposure to a control prime, and led participants high in perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD) to rate themselves as less agreeable and less open to experience than did exposure to a control prime. In Experiment 2, a disease prime facilitated avoidant tendencies in arm movements when participants viewed photographs of faces, especially for participants high in PVD. Together, these findings reveal functional changes in perception and behavior that would serve to promote avoidance of potentially infectious individuals.

Following in the wake of anger: when not discriminating is discriminating.

Does seeing a scowling face change your impression of the next person you see? Does this depend on the race of the two people? Across four studies, White participants evaluated neutrally expressive White males as less threatening when they followed angry (relative to neutral) White faces; Black males were not judged as less threatening following angry Black faces. This lack of threat-anchored contrast for Black male faces is not attributable to a general tendency for White targets to homogenize Black males-neutral Black targets following smiling Black faces were contrasted away from them and seen as less friendly-and emerged only for perceivers low in motivation to respond without prejudice (i.e., for those relatively comfortable responding prejudicially). This research provides novel evidence for the overperception of threat in Black males.

Deep Rationality: The Evolutionary Economics of Decision Making.

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

Moving beyond unwise replication practices: The case of romantic motivation.

Replication research holds an increasingly important place in modern psychological science. If such work is to improve the state of knowledge rather than add confusion, however, replication attempts must be held to high standards of rigor. As an example of how replication attempts can add confusion rather than clarity, we consider an article by Shanks and colleagues (2015). They conducted a meta-analysis of studies examining romantic motivation, using problematic criteria for the inclusion of effects and reached conclusions of a null effect that were unwarranted. A more rigorous and defensible approach, relying on a representative analysis of effects and p-curves, suggests a different, more positive conclusion with no evidence of p-hacking. Shanks et al. also conducted several experiments that suffered from numerous issues, such as relying on inappropriate subject samples (e.g., older adults likely to be less sensitive to mating manipulations than college students used in previous research), altered research methods, and demonstrably weak manipulations, among other problems. We discuss the broader implications of this case, to illustrate both the opportunities and the pitfalls inherent in attempts to replicate contextually sensitive research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

When do the stigmatized stigmatize? The ironic effects of being accountable to (perceived) majority group prejudice-expression norms.

How do frequently stigmatized individuals feel about and respond to members of other potentially stigmatizable groups? Four studies demonstrated that perceptions of majority group norms regarding prejudice expression can shape how minority individuals respond to minority individuals from other groups. Study 1 revealed that Black and White men and women have somewhat different perceptions of Whites' norms regarding prejudice expression. Study 2 manipulated whether evaluations of Native American job candidates were to remain private or to be made public to unfamiliar Whites upon whom the evaluators were dependent: Black men used a strategy of publicly (but not privately) denigrating the minority target to conform to presumed prejudice-expression norms. Study 3, in which the authors explicitly manipulated prejudice-expression norms, and Study 4, in which they manipulated audience race, further supported the role of such norms in eliciting public discrimination against minority group members by other minority group members. The desire to avoid being targeted for discrimination, in conjunction with the perception that the majority endorses discrimination, appears to increase the likelihood that the often-stigmatized will stigmatize others.