Is childhood lying shaped by callous-unemotional traits or does lie-telling make children more callous-unemotional? A longitudinal between- and within-person perspective.

The current study aims to advance knowledge on the causal interrelationship between childhood CU traits and lying both at a between- and a within-person perspective across a significant developmental period of mid-childhood to mid-adolescence. Cross-lagged panel models and Random-intercept cross-lagged panel models were used to investigate the prospective associations between lying and the distinct subcomponents of CU traits, including Callousness, Uncaring, and Unemotional in a sample of 719 children (T1; Mage = 10.73 years, SDage = 1.38, range = 7-15 years, 54.4% girls) across four assessment points. Results supported large vulnerability effects at the between-person level across time, indicating that CU traits predominantly influence the subsequent development of lying, with Callousness and Uncaring showing most profound effects on subsequent developmental processes of lying. At the within-person level, fluctuations in CU traits and lying were overall meaningfully related, but no causal relationship could be empirically determined. These findings provide a differentiated etiological viewpoint on the intertwinement of CU traits and lying at a young age, and underscore the importance of an early identification of children with callous and uncaring tendencies in order to prevent more persistent lying in adolescence.

Psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the 15-item Need for Closure Scale: Scale validation and associations with mental health.

BACKGROUND: Need for closure (NFC) has been found to be implicated in different forms of psychopathology. The 15-item Need for Closure Scale (NFCS) is an efficient and easy tool for assessing individuals' NFC in Western contexts. However, the psychometric properties of the 15-item NFCS have not yet been validated in Chinese populations. METHODS: Two different samples of university students from China were recruited in this study. The first sample (N = 5080, 49.9% females) was used to conduct exploratory factor analysis and reliability analysis. The second sample (N = 3968, 64.2% females) was used to perform confirmatory factor analysis, exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), and bifactor models, followed by tests of measurement invariance and criterion validity. RESULTS: The full scale showed good internal consistency. The bifactor-ESEM result with a general factor and four specific factors was chosen as our final model. Strong measurement invariance across sex and ethnicity groups was supported. Evidence was obtained for the criterion validity of NFCS scores with respect to depression, anxiety, and psychological distress. CONCLUSION: The Chinese NFCS appears to be a valid and reliable instrument for measuring the NFC, which could promote both the assessment and research of the NFC in Chinese populations.

Of Mice, Men, and Trolleys: Hypothetical Judgment Versus Real-Life Behavior in Trolley-Style Moral Dilemmas.

Scholars have been using hypothetical dilemmas to investigate moral decision making for decades. However, whether people's responses to these dilemmas truly reflect the decisions they would make in real life is unclear. In the current study, participants had to make the real-life decision to administer an electroshock (that they did not know was bogus) to a single mouse or allow five other mice to receive the shock. Our results indicate that responses to hypothetical dilemmas are not predictive of real-life dilemma behavior, but they are predictive of affective and cognitive aspects of the real-life decision. Furthermore, participants were twice as likely to refrain from shocking the single mouse when confronted with a hypothetical versus the real version of the dilemma. We argue that hypothetical-dilemma research, while valuable for understanding moral cognition, has little predictive value for actual behavior and that future studies should investigate actual moral behavior along with the hypothetical scenarios dominating the field.

Openness as a predictor of political orientation and conventional and unconventional political activism in Western and Eastern Europe.

This study provides a comprehensive investigation of the relationship between Openness and political orientation and activism in Europe. Analyses were conducted on the 4 waves of the European Social Survey, including large representative samples in up to 26 European countries (total N > 175,000). In line with previous studies, a robust, positive relationship between Openness and left-wing political orientation was obtained in Western Europe. However, in Eastern Europe, the relationship between Openness and political orientation was weaker, and reversed in 3 out of 4 waves. Moreover, Openness yielded significant positive relationships with unconventional activism and to a lesser degree with conventional activism. The magnitude of the relationship between Openness and activism was dependent on political orientation and region. Stronger associations between Openness and activism were found for those having a left-wing orientation in Western Europe, whereas in Eastern Europe, Openness was somewhat stronger related to activism for those having a right-wing orientation. In the discussion we elaborate on the role of the geopolitical context in the relationship between Openness and political variables.

Personal choice: a blessing or a burden, or both? A cross-cultural investigation on need for closure effects in two Western and two East-Asian societies.

The present study investigates the role of dispositional need for closure (NFC) in how individuals within a particular culture perceive and appreciate choice. Data sets from the US (283 adults), Europe (263 adults and 427 students), China (218 adults and 309 students) and Singapore (258 students) were collected. The results showed that in Western cultures, people perceived choice in a linear way as either a burden or a blessing, whereas in Chinese culture, such opposition between perspectives did not appear, and individuals generally saw choice as both burden and blessing simultaneously. In Western cultures, high dispositional NFC was strongly associated with viewing choice-as-a-burden, whereas Chinese respondents with a high NFC perceived choice as a blessing and a burden simultaneously. The Singaporean results were similar to the Western pattern. These findings are discussed in terms of the NFC literature and cultural differences in dialectic versus differentiation thinking styles.

Rationally blind? Rationality polarizes policy support for colour blindness versus multiculturalism.

Do White Americans prefer society to be 'colour-blind' by rising above racial identities, or 'multicultural' by openly discussing and considering them? We developed an ideology-rationality model to understand support for these diversity perspectives. Specifically, since people endorse a diversity perspective in line with their ideological values, we hypothesized that conservatism is related to a relative preference for colour blindness over multiculturalism. However, since colour blindness and multiculturalism are complex and multi-layered ideologies, we further hypothesized that the relationship between conservatism and a preference for colour blindness over multiculturalism is especially pronounced under higher levels of rationality. Results confirmed the hypotheses, either when rationality was operationalized within a dual process theory (Study 1, N = 496) or experimentally induced within a tripartite model of cognition (Study 2, N = 497). Higher levels of rationality guided White Americans high in conservatism towards a stronger preference for colour-blindness, but those low in conservatism towards a stronger preference for multiculturalism. These results suggest that among White Americans the endorsement of colour blindness versus multiculturalism stems from the interplay between ideological orientation and rationality and that rational considerations about racial policies may further divide rather than unify along ideological lines.

Development of a Measure of Anti-Rape Attitudes as a Potential Protective Factor Against Rape Perpetration.

The role of attitudes toward women and sexual violence in predicting men's perpetration of rape has been well documented in the literature. While research on rape perpetration has primarily focused on identifying risk factors, the limited understanding of protective factors has hindered the development of psychometric measures to assess attitudinal protective factors. However, comprehending these protective factors is essential for a comprehensive understanding of the risk of rape perpetration and the advancement of strength-based approaches. This research describes the development of a new scale designed to measure anti-rape attitudes (ARA) in young heterosexual men. To generate the initial item pool, relevant information was gathered from sexual violence support service websites and academic literature. This item pool underwent an external expert review for further item generation and cognitive interviews for content validation. This qualitative phase was followed by four quantitative studies for item reduction and scale validation. The resulting 19-item scale demonstrates good internal consistency (Cronbach's α = .84). The ARA scale exhibits strong negative correlations with rape myth acceptance (RMA) and hostile sexism, and strong positive correlations with positive consent attitudes (PCA), supporting the scale's construct validity. We further conducted hierarchical regression analyses to test the unique relationship of ARA with those constructs while controlling for RMA. These showed that ARA have significant, unique associations with PCA and ambivalent sexism. The development of this new scale enables a more comprehensive assessment of the risk of rape perpetration and opens up new avenues for research on protective factors against rape. Ultimately, this study constitutes an important step toward fostering strength-based approaches to combat sexual violence.

Deontologists are not always trusted over utilitarians: revisiting inferences of trustworthiness from moral judgments.

Recent research has looked at how people infer the moral character of others based on how they resolve sacrificial moral dilemmas. Previous studies provide consistent evidence for the prediction that those who endorse outcome-maximizing, utilitarian judgments are disfavored in social dilemmas and are seen as less trustworthy in comparison to those who support harm-rejecting deontological judgments. However, research investigating this topic has studied a limited set of sacrificial dilemmas and did not test to what extent these effects might be moderated by specific features of the situation described in the sacrificial dilemma (for instance, whether the dilemma involves mortal or non-mortal harm). In the current manuscript, we assessed the robustness of previous findings by exploring how trust inference of utilitarian and deontological decision makers is moderated by five different contextual factors (such as whether the sacrificial harm is accomplished by an action or inaction), as well as by participants' own moral preferences. While we find some evidence that trust perceptions of others are moderated by dilemma features, we find a much stronger effect of participants' own moral preference: deontologists favored other deontologists and utilitarians favored utilitarians. PROTOCOL REGISTRATION: The stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 21 September 2022. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21325953 .

The public's preferred level of involvement in local policy-making.

We investigated what people consider the optimal level of citizen involvement in local policy decision-making. This is an important question to answer, given that civil servants and politicians are increasingly confronted with the pressure to add a participatory layer to representative democratic policy-making. Across five empirical studies (total N = 1470), we consistently found that, overall, the most preferred decision-making model is a balanced model in which citizens and the government are equally involved. Despite this preferred 'overall' pattern of equal involvement, we identified three subgroups within the citizenry with different preference curves: Some citizens prefer a model in which citizens and the government are truly equal partners, whereas others prefer a model in which either the government or citizens are relatively more involved in the policy decision-making process. The main contribution of our work is thus that we identified a perceived 'overall' optimal level of citizen engagement, and variations to that optimum depending on citizens' individual traits. This information might be helpful to policy-makers in developing effective citizen participation processes.

Trust is in the eye of the beholder: How perceptions of local diversity and segregation shape social cohesion.

A more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between ethnic diversity and social cohesion is needed. Ever since Robert Putnam (2007) has put forward the highly contested constrict claim holding that diversity is related to less trust and more social withdrawing, hundreds of follow-up studies across the globe have been conducted. In the present contribution, we investigated the association between diversity and "hunkering down" in the Netherlands, hereby taking into account the role of segregation. Indeed, Uslaner (2012) pointed to local segregation as the true motor of the so-called diversity effects on intergroup relations in general, and trust in others in particular. We did not only investigate objective indicators of diversity and segregation, but also added an "eye of the beholder" perspective by probing into the subjective perceptions of these variables. Specifically, in a stratified community sample of 680 Dutch ethnic-cultural majority members (52% male, mean age 51), we assessed the additive and interactive effects of four variables (objective diversity, perceived diversity, objective segregation, and perceived segregation) at the municipal level in the prediction of three outcomes (generalized trust, ingroup trust, and outgroup trust). The results revealed three interesting patterns. First, neither of the objective indicators of diversity and segregation, nor their interaction effect significantly predicted any type of trust. Second, higher perceptions of diversity and higher perceptions of segregation were negatively associated with outgroup trust (but not with generalized and ingroup trust). Third, and most importantly, there was a significant interaction effect between perceived diversity and perceived segregation, indicating that simultaneous perceptions of high levels of diversity and high levels of segregation were related to the lowest levels of trust in other ethnic-cultural groups. These findings shed a more nuanced light on the diversity debate, showing that perceptions of segregation shape diversity effects. In sum, the present study shows that perceived rather than objective indicators of diversity and segregation matter, and that both diversity and segregation should be taken into account when it comes to social cohesion in general, and trust in particular.

The role of need for closure in essentialist entitativity beliefs and prejudice: an epistemic needs approach to racial categorization.

The present research investigates how people's general epistemic motives may inspire essentialist beliefs about racial groups and racism. In three studies, we focus particularly on essentialist entitativity (EE, referring to beliefs about the uniformity, informativeness, and inherent core of racial groups), probing into its relationships with epistemic need for closure (NFC) and prejudice. In Study 1, we develop an EE scale, empirically distinguish it from the naturalness component of essentialism and non-EE beliefs, and establish its predictive utility for explaining racial prejudice. Study 2 provides experimental evidence for the causal effect of NFC on EE beliefs. Study 3 demonstrates in three different samples that EE beliefs mediate the relationship between dispositional NFC and racial prejudice. It is argued that EE beliefs about racial groups are an expression of motivated social cognition, serving people's seizing needs for quick and easy social judgment.

To have or to be? A comparison of materialism-based theories and self-determination theory as explanatory frameworks of prejudice.

The present study aimed to delineate the psychological structure of materialism and intrinsic and extrinsic value pursuit. Moreover, we compared models based on self-determination theory (SDT), Fromm's marketing character, and Inglehart's theory of social change to account for racial prejudice. In a sample of undergraduate students (n=131) and adults (n=176) it was revealed that the extrinsic value pursuit Financial Success/Materialism could be distinguished from the extrinsic value scales Physical Appeal and Social Recognition, and Community Concern could be distinguished from the intrinsic value pursuit scales Self-acceptance and Affiliation. Moreover, Financial Success/Materialism and Community Concern were consistently and significantly related to prejudice, whereas the other SDT facet scales yielded weaker relationships with prejudice. Structural models based on SDT and Inglehart were not corroborated, but instead the present data supported a mediation model based on Fromm's work in which the effect of Community Concern was mediated by Financial Success/Materialism. Broader implications for SDT are critically assessed.

On the effectiveness of approach-avoidance instructions and training for changing evaluations of social groups.

Prior evidence suggests that White participants who repeatedly approach images of Black people and avoid images of White people can exhibit a reduction in implicit racial bias (Kawakami, Phills, Steele, & Dovidio, 2007). In contrast, a recent study by Van Dessel, De Houwer, Gast, and Smith (2015) showed that mere instructions to perform approach-avoidance training in an upcoming phase produces a similar change in implicit evaluations of unfamiliar but not familiar social groups. We report 4 experiments that examined the replicability and generalizability of these findings for well-known social groups. Experiment 1 was a replication of the study by Kawakami et al. (2007) in a different domain (i.e., Flemish students' bias toward Turkish people) showing relatively weak evidence for small approach-avoidance training effects on implicit evaluations and explicit liking ratings. Experiment 2 replicated the finding of Van Dessel et al. (2015) that approach-avoidance instructions do not influence implicit evaluations of social out-groups and found no instruction effects even when participants first completed training with nonsocial stimuli. Experiment 3 established the presence of a small approach-avoidance training effect on implicit (but not explicit evaluations) in a large online sample. Experiment 4 directly compared approach-avoidance training and instruction effects, corroborating (a) the effect of training on implicit evaluations which was both small and subject to boundary conditions and (b) the absence of such an effect of instructions. There were again no effects on explicit evaluations. Whereas the current findings provide supportive evidence for training-based approach-avoidance effects (on Implicit Association Test [IAT] scores: meta-analytic effect size current experiments: d = 0.18, Bayes Factor = 65.22; current and prior experiments: d = 0.23, Bayes Factor = 4404.42) and evidence for the absence of instruction-based effects (Bayes Factors < 0.19), they also illustrate that there is still much uncertainty regarding the boundary conditions of these effects and the underlying mental processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Utilitarianism in minimal-group decision making is less common than equality-based morality, mostly harm-oriented, and rarely impartial.

In the study of utilitarian morality, the sacrificial dilemma paradigm has been the dominant approach for years. However, to address some of the most pressing issues in the current research literature, the present studies adopt an alternative approach by using a minimal group paradigm in which participants have to make decisions about the allocation of resources. This approach allows not only to pit utilitarianism against equality-based morality, but also to study these modes of morality for both harm and benefit, and to directly address the role of group identity affecting the (im)partial nature of 'utilitarian' (i.e., outcome maximizing) decisions. In our experiments, across four different samples (total N = 946), we demonstrate that although participants generally prefer equality-based allocations over maximizing distributions, outcome maximizing choices become more prevalent when they served to minimize harm compared to maximizing benefit. Furthermore, reducing the objective value of the equal distribution outcomes further prompts participants to adopt a more utilitarian approach in situations involving harm, but has little effect in situations where benefits have to be distributed. Finally, the introduction of (minimal) group identity consistently demonstrates that decisions that maximize the overall outcome are more likely if they also serve the ingroup compared to when they rather serve the outgroup. We discuss how these findings have meaningful implications that may be especially relevant for recent movements that advocate a utilitarian approach to charity, and for our understanding of (im)partiality in lay people's 'utilitarian' decision making.

Investigating the Robustness of the Illusory Truth Effect Across Individual Differences in Cognitive Ability, Need for Cognitive Closure, and Cognitive Style.

People are more inclined to believe that information is true if they have encountered it before. Little is known about whether this illusory truth effect is influenced by individual differences in cognition. In seven studies (combined N = 2,196), using both trivia statements (Studies 1-6) and partisan news headlines (Study 7), we investigate moderation by three factors that have been shown to play a critical role in epistemic processes: cognitive ability (Studies 1, 2, 5), need for cognitive closure (Study 1), and cognitive style, that is, reliance on intuitive versus analytic thinking (Studies 1, 3-7). All studies showed a significant illusory truth effect, but there was no evidence for moderation by any of the cognitive measures across studies. These results indicate that the illusory truth effect is robust to individual differences in cognitive ability, need for cognitive closure, and cognitive style.

Age differences in conservatism: evidence on the mediating effects of personality and cognitive style.

The present study investigates the commonly found age-conservatism relationship by combining insights from studies on the development of personality and motivated social cognition with findings on the relationships between these factors and conservative beliefs. Based on data collected in Belgium (N=2,373) and Poland (N=939), we found the expected linear effect of age on indicators of social-cultural conservatism in Belgium and Poland and the absence of such effects for indicators of economic-hierarchical conservatism. We further demonstrated that these effects of age on indicators of cultural conservatism in both countries were (in part) mediated through the personality factor Openness to Experience and the motivated cognition variable Need for Closure. The consistency of these findings in two countries with a very dissimilar sociopolitical history attests to the importance of the developmental perspective for the study of the relationship between age and conservatism.

The interrater reliability of a pain mechanisms-based classification for patients with nonspecific neck pain.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the interrater reliability and agreement of a pain mechanisms-based classification for patients with nonspecific neck pain (NSNP). METHODS: Design - Observational, cross-sectional reliability study with a simultaneous examiner design. SETTING: University hospital-based outpatient physical therapy clinic. PARTICIPANTS: A random sample of 48 patients, aged between 18 and 75 years old, with a primary complaint of neck pain was included. INTERVENTIONS: Subjects underwent a standardized subjective and clinical examination, performed by 1 experienced physical therapist. Two assessors independently classified the participants' NSNP on 3 main outcome measures. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The Cohen kappa, percent agreement, and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated to determine the interrater reliability for (1) the predominant pain mechanism; (2) the predominant pain pattern; and (3) the predominant dysfunction pattern (DP). RESULTS: There was almost perfect agreement between the 2 physical therapists' judgements on the predominant pain mechanism, kappa=.84 (95% CI, .65-1.00), p<.001. There was substantial agreement between the raters' judgements on the predominant pain pattern and predominant DP with respectively kappa=.61 (95% CI, .42-.80); and kappa=.62 (95% CI, .44-.79), p<.001. CONCLUSION(S): The proposed classification exhibits substantial to almost perfect interrater reliability. Further validity testing in larger neck pain populations is required before the information is used in clinical settings. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: NCT03147508 (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03147508).