Subjective status and perceived legitimacy across countries.

The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries (N = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower status, but there is variation across people and countries. The association between subjective status and perceived legitimacy was never negative at any levels of eight moderator variables, although the positive association was sometimes reduced. Although not always consistent with hypotheses, group identification, self-esteem, and beliefs in social mobility were all associated with perceived legitimacy among people who have low subjective status. These findings enrich our understanding of the relationship between social status and legitimacy.

How Ambient Cues Facilitate Political Segregation.

People increasingly self-segregate into politically homogeneous communities. How they do this remains unclear. We propose that people use ambient cues correlated with political values to infer whether they would like to live in those communities. We test this hypothesis in five studies. In Studies 1 (n = 3,543) and 2 (n = 5,609), participants rated community cues; liberals and conservatives' preferences differed. In Studies 3a (n = 1,643) and 3b (n = 1,840), participants read about communities with liberal or conservative cues. Even without explicit information about the communities' politics, participants preferred communities with politically congenial cues. In Study 4 (n = 282), participants preferred politically congenial communities and wanted to leave politically uncongenial communities. In Study 5 (n = 370), people selectively navigated their communities in a politically congenial way. These studies suggest that peoples' perceptions of communities can be shaped by subtle, not necessarily political, cues that may facilitate growing political segregation.

Extremists on the Left and Right Use Angry, Negative Language.

We propose that political extremists use more negative language than moderates. Previous research found that conservatives report feeling happier than liberals and yet liberals "display greater happiness" in their language than do conservatives. However, some of the previous studies relied on questionable measures of political orientation and affective language, and no studies have examined whether political orientation and affective language are nonlinearly related. Revisiting the same contexts (Twitter, U.S. Congress), and adding three new ones (political organizations, news media, crowdsourced Americans), we found that the language of liberal and conservative extremists was more negative and angry in its emotional tone than that of moderates. Contrary to previous research, we found that liberal extremists' language was more negative than that of conservative extremists. Additional analyses supported the explanation that extremists feel threatened by the activities of political rivals, and their angry, negative language represents efforts to communicate as much to others.

Segregation and belief polarization as boundary conditions for when fusion leads to self-sacrifice.

Physical enclavement, away from out-group members, may determine when identify fusion leads to self-sacrifice. When people surround themselves with ideologically similar others, their attitudes may polarize and become moralized, leading to more violence and hostility toward people who do not share those attitudes. We discuss how this segregation may increase the amount of political violence in typically nonviolent systems.

Strong scientific theorizing is needed to improve replicability in psychological science.

The target article makes the important case for making replicability mainstream. Yet, their proposal targets a symptom, rather than the underlying cause of low replication rates. We argue that psychological scientists need to devise stronger theories that are more clearly falsifiable. Without strong, falsifiable theories in the original research, attempts to replicate the original research are nigh uninterpretable.

The state of social and personality science: Rotten to the core, not so bad, getting better, or getting worse?

The scientific quality of social and personality psychology has been debated at great length in recent years. Despite research on the prevalence of Questionable Research Practices (QRPs) and the replicability of particular findings, the impact of the current discussion on research practices is unknown. The current studies examine whether and how practices have changed, if at all, over the last 10 years. In Study 1, we surveyed 1,166 social and personality psychologists about how the current debate has affected their perceptions of their own and the field's research practices. In Study 2, we coded the research practices and critical test statistics from social and personality psychology articles published in 2003-2004 and 2013-2014. Together, these studies suggest that (a) perceptions of the current state of the field are more pessimistic than optimistic; (b) the discussion has increased researchers' intentions to avoid QRPs and adopt proposed best practices, (c) the estimated replicability of research published in 2003-2004 may not be as bad as many feared, and (d) research published in 2013-2014 shows some improvement over research published in 2003-2004, a result that suggests the field is evolving in a positive direction. (PsycINFO Database Record

Social and economic ideologies differentially predict prejudice across the political spectrum, but social issues are most divisive.

Liberals and conservatives both express prejudice toward ideologically dissimilar others (Brandt et al., 2014). Previous work on ideological prejudice did not take advantage of evidence showing that ideology is multidimensional, with social and economic ideologies representing related but separable belief systems. In 5 studies (total N = 4912), we test 3 competing hypotheses of a multidimensional account of ideological prejudice. The dimension-specific symmetry hypothesis predicts that social and economic ideologies differentially predict prejudice against targets who are perceived to vary on the social and economic political dimensions, respectively. The social primacy hypothesis predicts that such ideological worldview conflict is experienced more strongly along the social than economic dimension. The social-specific asymmetry hypothesis predicts that social conservatives will be more prejudiced than social liberals, with no specific hypotheses for the economic dimension. Using multiple target groups, multiple prejudice measures (e.g., global evaluations, behavior), and multiple social and economic ideology measures (self-placement, issue positions), we found relatively consistent support for the dimension-specific symmetry and social primacy hypotheses, and no support for the social-specific asymmetry hypothesis. These results suggest that worldview conflict and negative intergroup attitudes and behaviors are dimension-specific, but that the social dimension appears to inspire more political conflict than the economic dimension. (PsycINFO Database Record

Conservatives report, but liberals display, greater happiness.

Research suggesting that political conservatives are happier than political liberals has relied exclusively on self-report measures of subjective well-being. We show that this finding is fully mediated by conservatives' self-enhancing style of self-report (study 1; N = 1433) and then describe three studies drawing from "big data" sources to assess liberal-conservative differences in happiness-related behavior (studies 2 to 4; N = 4936). Relative to conservatives, liberals more frequently used positive emotional language in their speech and smiled more intensely and genuinely in photographs. Our results were consistent across large samples of online survey takers, U.S. politicians, Twitter users, and LinkedIn users. Our findings illustrate the nuanced relationship between political ideology, self-enhancement, and happiness and illuminate the contradictory ways that happiness differences can manifest across behavior and self-reports.

Diverse crowds using diverse methods improves the scientific dialectic.

In science, diversity is vital to the development of new knowledge. We agree with Duarte et al. that we need more political diversity in social psychology, but contend that we need more religious diversity and methodological diversity as well. If some diversity is good, more is better (especially in science).

Will the real fundamental difference underlying ideology please stand up?

Negativity bias explains many ideological differences, yet does not explain research such as conservatives' greater life satisfaction. Conservatives live in safer communities, perhaps to escape negative emotions, yet display numerous other community preferences unrelated to negativity. This tendency toward cognitive consistency can explain both these phenomena and many of the phenomena described in the target article.

What is freedom--and does wealth cause it?

The target article's climato-economic theory will benefit by allowing for bidirectional effects and the heterogeneity of types of freedom, in order to more fully capture the coevolution of societal wealth and freedom. We also suggest alternative methods of testing climato-economic theory, such as longitudinal analyses of these countries' histories and micro-level experiments of each of the theory's hypotheses.

Creatureliness priming reduces aggression and support for war.

Terror management theory (TMT) posits that humans distance themselves from, or elevate themselves above, other animals as a way of denying their mortality. The present studies assessed whether the salience of aggressive tendencies that humans share with other animals make thoughts of death salient and whether depicting human aggression as animalistic can mitigate aggressive behaviour and support for aggression. In Study 1, participants primed with human-animal similarities (i.e., human creatureliness) exhibited elevated death-thought accessibility (DTA) after hitting a punching bag. In Studies 2a and 2b, creatureliness priming caused participants to hit a punching bag with less frequency, perceived force, and comfort. In Study 3, participants primed to view violence as animalistic exhibited increased DTA and reported less support for war against Iran. These studies suggest that portraying violence as creaturely may reduce the intensity of aggressive actions and support for violent solutions to international conflicts.

Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth Over Publishability.

An academic scientist's professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and ignore negative results. Prior reports demonstrate how these incentives inflate the rate of false effects in published science. When incentives favor novelty over replication, false results persist in the literature unchallenged, reducing efficiency in knowledge accumulation. Previous suggestions to address this problem are unlikely to be effective. For example, a journal of negative results publishes otherwise unpublishable reports. This enshrines the low status of the journal and its content. The persistence of false findings can be meliorated with strategies that make the fundamental but abstract accuracy motive-getting it right-competitive with the more tangible and concrete incentive-getting it published. This article develops strategies for improving scientific practices and knowledge accumulation that account for ordinary human motivations and biases.

Cumulative and career-stage citation impact of social-personality psychology programs and their members.

Number of citations and the h-index are popular metrics for indexing scientific impact. These, and other existing metrics, are strongly related to scientists' seniority. This article introduces complementary indicators that are unrelated to the number of years since PhD. To illustrate cumulative and career-stage approaches for assessing the scientific impact across a discipline, citations for 611 scientists from 97 U.S. and Canadian social psychology programs are amassed and analyzed. Results provide benchmarks for evaluating impact across the career span in psychology and other disciplines with similar citation patterns. Career-stage indicators provide a very different perspective on individual and program impact than cumulative impact, and may predict emerging scientists and programs. Comparing social groups, Whites and men had higher impact than non-Whites and women, respectively. However, average differences in career stage accounted for most of the difference for both groups.