Differentiating explanations of attitude-consistent behavior: the role of perspectives and mode of perspective taking.

We examined whether participants could differentiate between explanations of attitude-consistent behavior related to EU membership given from two perspectives (EU supporter and EU opponent) by means of three perspective taking modes (the explainer's own perspective, imagined in-group members' perspective, and imagined out-group members' perspective). Participants were presented with explanations provided from different perspectives and perspective taking modes, and they were asked to judge the extent to which they agreed with each explanation, to guess the attitude of the provider of each explanation, and to rate the quality of each explanation in various respects. Participants could not differentiate between explanations given by in-group members and out-group members who imagined the same perspective. They responded more favorably to explanations given from own perspective than from the imagined perspectives. The results suggest that there exists a shared understanding about how both sides should explain attitude-consistent behavior, but this understanding is measurably different from the actual explanations.

Patterns and universals of mate poaching across 53 nations: the effects of sex, culture, and personality on romantically attracting another person's partner.

As part of the International Sexuality Description Project, 16,954 participants from 53 nations were administered an anonymous survey about experiences with romantic attraction. Mate poaching--romantically attracting someone who is already in a relationship--was most common in Southern Europe, South America, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe and was relatively infrequent in Africa, South/Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Evolutionary and social-role hypotheses received empirical support. Men were more likely than women to report having made and succumbed to short-term poaching across all regions, but differences between men and women were often smaller in more gender-egalitarian regions. People who try to steal another's mate possess similar personality traits across all regions, as do those who frequently receive and succumb to the poaching attempts by others. The authors conclude that human mate-poaching experiences are universally linked to sex, culture, and the robust influence of personal dispositions.

Universal sex differences in the desire for sexual variety: tests from 52 nations, 6 continents, and 13 islands.

Evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized that men and women possess both long-term and short-term mating strategies, with men's short-term strategy differentially rooted in the desire for sexual variety. In this article, findings from a cross-cultural survey of 16,288 people across 10 major world regions (including North America, South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Oceania, South/Southeast Asia, and East Asia) demonstrate that sex differences in the desire for sexual variety are culturally universal throughout these world regions. Sex differences were evident regardless of whether mean, median, distributional, or categorical indexes of sexual differentiation were evaluated. Sex differences were evident regardless of the measures used to evaluate them. Among contemporary theories of human mating, pluralistic approaches that hypothesize sex differences in the evolved design of short-term mating provide the most compelling account of these robust empirical findings.

Ability to take an out-group's perspective in explaining positive and negative behaviors.

A total of 251 Latvian and Russian schoolteachers explained positive and negative behaviours from their own perspective and from the perspective of an ethnic out-group. The results were in line with the attributional pattern usually found in studies using Hewstone's direct perspective of judgement, when participants are asked to take the perspective of an ethnic out-group. That is, there was an outcome effect in causal attributions for in-group actors and a categorization effect for negative behaviour from the imagined (out-group's) perspective. The attributions from the direct perspective only partly replicated the commonly found pattern. The results support Montgomery's perspective theory.