"They're Everywhere!": Symbolically Threatening Groups Seem More Pervasive Than Nonthreatening Groups.

The meaning of places is socially constructed, often informed by the groups that seem pervasive there. For instance, the University of Pennsylvania is sometimes pejoratively called "Jew-niversity of Pennsylvania," and the city of Decatur, Georgia, is disparagingly nicknamed "Dyke-atur," connoting the respective pervasiveness of Jewish students and gay residents. Because these pervasiveness perceptions meaningfully impact how people navigate the social world, it is critical to understand the factors that influence their formation. Across surveys, experiments, and archival data, six studies (N = 3,039 American adults) revealed the role of symbolic threat (i.e., perceived differences in values and worldviews). Specifically, holding constant important features of the group and context, we demonstrated that groups higher in symbolic threat are perceived as more populous in a place and more associated with that place than groups lower in symbolic threat. Ultimately, this work reveals that symbolic threat can both distort how people understand their surroundings and shape the meaning of places.

Political ideology affects energy-efficiency attitudes and choices.

This research demonstrates how promoting the environment can negatively affect adoption of energy efficiency in the United States because of the political polarization surrounding environmental issues. Study 1 demonstrated that more politically conservative individuals were less in favor of investment in energy-efficient technology than were those who were more politically liberal. This finding was driven primarily by the lessened psychological value that more conservative individuals placed on reducing carbon emissions. Study 2 showed that this difference has consequences: In a real-choice context, more conservative individuals were less likely to purchase a more expensive energy-efficient light bulb when it was labeled with an environmental message than when it was unlabeled. These results highlight the importance of taking into account psychological value-based considerations in the individual adoption of energy-efficient technology in the United States and beyond.

It's only a matter of time: death, legacies, and intergenerational decisions.

Intergenerational decisions affect other people in the future. The combination of intertemporal and interpersonal distance between decision makers in the present and other people in the future may lead one to expect little intergenerational generosity. In the experiments reported here, however, we posited that the negative effect of intertemporal distance on intergenerational beneficence would be reversed when people were primed with thoughts of death. This reversal would occur because death priming leads individuals to be concerned with having a lasting impact on other people in the future. Our experiments show that when individuals are exposed to death priming, the expected tendency to allocate fewer resources to others in the future, as compared with others in the present, is reversed. Our findings suggest that legacy motivations triggered by death priming can trump intergenerational discounting tendencies and promote intergenerational beneficence.

The power of rank information.

People, organizations, and products are continuously ranked. The explosion of data has made it easy to rank everything, and, increasingly, outlets for information try to reduce information loads by providing rankings. In the present research, we find that rank information exerts a strong effect on decision making over and above the underlying information it summarizes. For example, when multiple options are presented with ratings alone (e.g., "9.7" vs. "9.5") versus with ratings and corresponding ranks (e.g., "9.7" and "1st" vs. "9.5" and "2nd"), the presence of rank information increases preference for the top ranked option. This effect of ranking is found in a variety of contexts, ranging from award decisions in a professional sports league to hiring decisions to consumer choices, and it is independent of other well-known effects (such as the effect of sorting). We find that the influence of ranks is explained by the extent to which decision makers attend to the top ranked option and overlook the other options when they are given rank information. Because they invest a disproportionate amount of attention to the top ranked option when they are given rank information, decision makers tend to learn the strength of the top ranked option, but they fail to process the strengths of the other options. We discuss how rank information may operate as one of the processes by which those at the top of the hierarchy maintain a disproportionate level of popularity in the market. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Temper, temperature, and temptation: heat-related retaliation in baseball.

In this study, we analyzed data from 57,293 Major League Baseball games to test whether high temperatures interact with provocation to increase the likelihood that batters will be hit by a pitch. Controlling for a number of other variables, we conducted analyses showing that the probability of a pitcher hitting a batter increases sharply at high temperatures when more of the pitcher's teammates have been hit by the opposing team earlier in the game. We suggest that high temperatures increase retaliation by increasing hostile attributions when teammates are hit by a pitch and by lowering inhibitions against retaliation.

The morality of organization versus organized members: Organizations are attributed more control and responsibility for negative outcomes than are equivalent members.

Seven experiments demonstrate that framing an organizational entity (the target) as an organization ("an organization comprised of its constituent members") versus its members ("constituent members comprising an organization") increases attribution of responsibility to the target following a negative outcome, despite identical information conveyed. Specifically, the target in the organization (vs. members) frame was perceived to have more control over a negative outcome, which led to an increased attribution of responsibility (Studies 1-3). This effect surfaced for both for-profits and nonprofits (Study 5). However, when the target in the members frame had explicit control over the outcome (Study 3), or when participants held strong beliefs in individual free will (Study 4), the effect of frame on responsibility attenuated. To the extent that framing increased perceptions of control, punishment for the target also increased (Studies 6a and 6b). By demonstrating how a subtle shift in framing can impact people's perceptions and judgments of organizations, we reveal important knowledge about how people understand organizations and the psychological nature of organizational and group perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Six of one, half dozen of the other: expanding and contracting numerical dimensions produces preference reversals.

The scales used to describe the attributes of different choice options are usually open to alternative expressions, such as inches versus feet or minutes versus hours. More generally, a ratio scale can be multiplied by an arbitrary factor (e.g., 12) while preserving all of the information it conveys about different choice alternatives. We propose that expanded scales (e.g., price per year) lead decision makers to discriminate between choice options more than do contracted scales (e.g., price per month) because they exaggerate the difference between options on the expanded attribute. Two studies show that simply increasing the size of an attribute's scale systematically changes its weight in both multiattribute preferences and willingness to pay: Expanding scales for one attribute shifts preferences to alternatives favored on that attribute.

Strategies for revising judgment: how (and how well) people use others' opinions.

A basic issue in social influence is how best to change one's judgment in response to learning the opinions of others. This article examines the strategies that people use to revise their quantitative estimates on the basis of the estimates of another person. The authors note that people tend to use 2 basic strategies when revising estimates: choosing between the 2 estimates and averaging them. The authors developed the probability, accuracy, redundancy (PAR) model to examine the relative effectiveness of these two strategies across judgment environments. A surprising result was that averaging was the more effective strategy across a wide range of commonly encountered environments. The authors observed that despite this finding, people tend to favor the choosing strategy. Most participants in these studies would have achieved greater accuracy had they always averaged. The identification of intuitive strategies, along with a formal analysis of when they are accurate, provides a basis for examining how effectively people use the judgments of others. Although a portfolio of strategies that includes averaging and choosing can be highly effective, the authors argue that people are not generally well adapted to the environment in terms of strategy selection.

The collective aggregation effect: Aggregating potential collective action increases prosocial behavior.

The authors investigated the effectiveness of aggregating over potential noncontingent collective action ("If X people all do Y action, then Z outcomes will be achieved") to increase prosocial behavior. They carried out 6 experiments encouraging 4 different prosocial activities and found that aggregating potential benefits over 1,000 people produced more prosocial intentions and actions than aggregating over 1 person did. The authors further showed that aggregating potential benefits over 1,000 people produced more prosocial intentions than aggregating benefits over 1,000 days did. This collective aggregation effect was due to the presentation of larger aggregated benefits (Experiments 1-6), attenuation of psychological discounting (Experiment 4), and increased perceptions of outcome efficacy (Experiments 5-6). The effect was not due to social norms (Experiment 3) or a simple anchoring process (Experiments 4-5). Often individual contributions to societal ills seem like mere "drops in a bucket"; collective aggregation helps by making individual actions seem bucket-sized, immediate, important, and effective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

There's no team in I: How observers perceive individual creativity in a team setting.

Creativity is highly valued in organizations as an important source of innovation. As most creative projects require the efforts of groups of individuals working together, it is important to understand how creativity is perceived for team products, including how observers attribute creative ability to focal actors who worked as part of a creative team. Evidence from three experiments suggests that observers commit the fundamental attribution error-systematically discounting the contribution of the group when assessing the creative ability of a single group representative, particularly when the group itself is not visually salient. In a pilot study, we found that, in the context of the design team at Apple, a target group member visually depicted alone is perceived to have greater personal creative ability than when he is visually depicted with his team. In Study 1, using a sample of managers, we conceptually replicated this finding and further observed that, when shown alone, a target member of a group that produced a creative product is perceived to be as creative as an individual described as working alone on the same output. In Study 2, we replicated the findings of Study 1 and also observed that a target group member depicted alone, rather than with his team, is also attributed less creative ability for uncreative group output. Findings are discussed in light of how overattribution of individual creative ability can harm organizations in the long run. (PsycINFO Database Record

Claiming a large slice of a small pie: asymmetric disconfirmation in negotiation.

Three studies show that negotiators consistently underestimate the size of the bargaining zone in distributive negotiations (the small-pie bias) and, by implication, overestimate the share of the surplus they claim (the large-slice bias). The authors explain the results by asymmetric disconfirmation: Negotiators with initial estimates of their counterpart's reservation price that are "inside" the bargaining zone tend to behave consistently with these estimates, which become self-fulfilling, whereas negotiators with initial "outside" estimates revise their perceptions in the face of strong disconfirming evidence. Asymmetric disconfirmation can produce a population-level bias, even when initial perceptions are accurate on average. The authors suggest that asymmetric disconfirmation has implications for confirmation bias and self-fulfilling-prophecy research in social perception.

Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: how perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons.

People are inaccurate judges of how their abilities compare to others'. J. Kruger and D. Dunning (1999, 2002) argued that unskilled performers in particular lack metacognitive insight about their relative performance and disproportionately account for better-than-average effects. The unskilled overestimate their actual percentile of performance, whereas skilled performers more accurately predict theirs. However, not all tasks show this bias. In a series of 12 tasks across 3 studies, the authors show that on moderately difficult tasks, best and worst performers differ very little in accuracy, and on more difficult tasks, best performers are less accurate than worst performers in their judgments. This pattern suggests that judges at all skill levels are subject to similar degrees of error. The authors propose that a noise-plus-bias model of judgment is sufficient to explain the relation between skill level and accuracy of judgments of relative standing.

Social network schemas and the learning of incomplete networks.

Social networks that are missing relations among some of their members--termed incomplete networks--have been of critical theoretical and empirical interest in sociological research on weak ties and structural holes but typically have been overlooked in social psychological studies of network learning. Five studies tested for schematic processing differences in the encoding and recalling of incomplete networks. In Studies 1 and 2, prior knowledge of missing relations facilitated learning an unfamiliar, incomplete network. Study 3 ruled out differences in general pattern recognition ability as an explanation. Study 4 manipulated the degree of familiarity with missing relations, which produced predicted differences in learning rates. Finally, Study 5 examined how improved learning of an incomplete network affected a strategic organizational choice. The findings suggest that people can become schematic for complex, incomplete social networks.

The wisdom of select crowds.

Social psychologists have long recognized the power of statisticized groups. When individual judgments about some fact (e.g., the unemployment rate for next quarter) are averaged together, the average opinion is typically more accurate than most of the individual estimates, a pattern often referred to as the wisdom of crowds. The accuracy of averaging also often exceeds that of the individual perceived as most knowledgeable in the group. However, neither averaging nor relying on a single judge is a robust strategy; each performs well in some settings and poorly in others. As an alternative, we introduce the select-crowd strategy, which ranks judges based on a cue to ability (e.g., the accuracy of several recent judgments) and averages the opinions of the top judges, such as the top 5. Through both simulation and an analysis of 90 archival data sets, we show that select crowds of 5 knowledgeable judges yield very accurate judgments across a wide range of possible settings-the strategy is both accurate and robust. Following this, we examine how people prefer to use information from a crowd. Previous research suggests that people are distrustful of crowds and of mechanical processes such as averaging. We show in 3 experiments that, as expected, people are drawn to experts and dislike crowd averages-but, critically, they view the select-crowd strategy favorably and are willing to use it. The select-crowd strategy is thus accurate, robust, and appealing as a mechanism for helping individuals tap collective wisdom.