Prejudice model 1.0: A predictive model of prejudice.

The present research develops a predictive model of prejudice. For nearly a century, psychology and other fields have sought to scientifically understand and describe the causes of prejudice. Numerous theories of prejudice now exist. Yet these theories are overwhelmingly defined verbally and thus lack the ability to precisely predict when and to what extent prejudice will emerge. The abundance of theory also raises the possibility of undetected overlap between constructs theorized to cause prejudice. Predictive models enable falsification and provide a way for the field to move forward. To this end, here we present 18 studies with ∼5,000 participants in seven phases of model development. After initially identifying major theorized causes of prejudice in the literature, we used a model selection approach to winnow constructs into a parsimonious predictive model of prejudice (Phases I and II). We confirm this model in a preregistered out-of-sample test (Phase III), test variations in operationalizations and boundary conditions (Phases IV and V), and test generalizability on a U.S. representative sample, an Indian sample, and a U.K. sample (Phase VI). Finally, we consulted the predictions of experts in the field to examine how well they align with our results (Phase VII). We believe this initial predictive model is limited and bad, but by developing a model that makes highly specific predictions, drawing on the state of the art, we hope to provide a foundation from which research can build to improve science of prejudice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

What social lives do single people want? A person-centered approach to identifying profiles of social motives among singles.

Despite the worldwide increase in unpartnered individuals (i.e., singles), little research exists to provide a comprehensive understanding of the heterogeneity within this population. In the present research (N = 3,195), we drew on the fundamental social motives framework to provide a theory-based description and understanding of different "types" of single individuals. Across two Western samples (primarily European and American) and one Korean sample (all collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021), we identified three groups of singles with relatively consistent motivational patterns: (a) singles with strong independence motives and little interest in affiliation, mating, or status (i.e., independent profile); (b) singles with great interest in self-protection as well as social connections and status (i.e., socially focused profile); and (c) singles with little interest in self-protection but moderate interest in affiliation (i.e., low safety focus profile). Notably, these profile features did not perfectly replicate in one smaller Western sample collected before the pandemic (particularly the low safety focus profile), highlighting the need to interpret the data with the historical background in mind. Across samples, the independence-oriented group of singles consistently reported greater satisfaction with singlehood compared to other groups. The three groups of singles also showed substantial differences in other affective and behavioral variables (e.g., how they spend their social time). These findings advance the growing body of research on singlehood by offering new theoretical perspectives on different types of singles. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Threats and opportunities: Independent dimensions of goal relevance shape social cognition and behavior.

People pursue goals. They seek to build friendships, find romantic partners, maintain close relationships, gain social status and resources, and stay healthy and safe. But pursuing goals requires assessing who, among the people around them, will help or hurt their ability to reach those goals-that is, who poses goal-relevant affordances. This article overviews recent advances and new predictions from an affordance management approach to social cognition and behavior. The central tenet of this work is that judgments of who helps or hurts goals are independent (rather than opposite ends of a single judgment): Who helps my goal, and who hurts my goal? For any goal, people judge others in one of four ways: as helping the goal, hurting the goal, both helping and hurting the goal, or as irrelevant to the goal. These perceived affordances change across goals: people who help one goal may hurt, both help and hurt, or be irrelevant to another goal. This simple, novel division of helping and hurting across goals has numerous implications for psychological phenomena. It provides a framework for understanding when and how two forms of devaluation will emerge-being seen to pose a threat and being seen as irrelevant-with implications for prejudice, stigmatization, and discrimination. It also provides a lens for understanding how and when others' appraisals of us may affect our own goal pursuit. The article concludes by discussing necessary next steps and promising new directions for applying this approach to understand social cognition and behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The relevance appraisal matrix: Evaluating others' relevance.

People seek to detect who facilitates and who impedes their goal pursuit. The resulting relevance appraisals of opportunity and threat, respectively, can strongly shape subsequent social judgment and behavior. However, important questions about the nature of relevance appraisals remain unanswered: Are relevance appraisals unidimensional or multidimensional? Are people evaluated as generally posing opportunities and/or threats, or as dynamically relevant depending on perceiver goals? We test two hypotheses. First, we propose that opportunity and threat are appraised independently, rather than as endpoints of a single dimension. If so, then others can be evaluated as (a) facilitating a goal, (b) impeding a goal, (c) both facilitating and impeding a goal, or (d) neither facilitating nor impeding a goal. Second, we hypothesize that relevance appraisals shift dynamically with perceiver goals. For example, a single person may be appraised as facilitating one's mate-seeking goal, but as neither facilitating nor impeding one's self-protection goal. In two studies, participants rated the extent to which a variety of targets (e.g., a doctor, a 5-year-old child) pose threats and opportunities to different goals. Confirmatory factor analyses support both hypotheses. We also explore relationships between the Relevance Appraisal Matrix and the stereotype content (Fiske et al., 2002) and ABC (Koch et al., 2016) models of stereotypes, finding evidence that relevance appraisals are distinct from stereotypes of group attributes. In sum, we provide a framework for understanding the structure of relevance appraisals: A central and consequential, yet dynamic and relatively understudied, aspect of social cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Category salience and racial bias in weapon identification: A diffusion modeling approach.

Stereotypes linking Black Americans with guns can have life-altering outcomes, making it important to identify factors that shape such weapon identification biases and how they do so. We report 6 experiments that provide a mechanistic account of how category salience affects weapon identification bias elicited by male faces varying in race (Black, White) and age (men, boys). Behavioral analyses of error rates and response latencies revealed that, when race was salient, faces of Black versus White males (regardless of age) facilitated the classification of objects as guns versus tools. When a category other than race was salient, racial bias in behavior was reduced, though not eliminated. In Experiments 1-4, racial bias was weaker when participants attended to a social category besides race (i.e., age). In Experiments 5 and 6, racial bias was weaker when participants attended to an applicable, yet nonsubstantive category (i.e., the color of a dot on the face). Across experiments, process analyses using diffusion models revealed that, when race was salient, seeing Black versus White male faces led to an initial bias to favor the "gun" response. When a category besides race (i.e., age, dot color) was salient, racial bias in the relative start point was reduced, though not eliminated. These results suggest that the magnitude of racial bias in weapon identification may differ depending on what social category is salient. The collective findings also highlight the utility of diffusion modeling for elucidating how category salience shapes processes underlying racial biases in behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Accuracy in Perceptions of Fundamental Social Motives: Comparisons to Perceptions of Big Five Traits and Associations With Friendship Quality.

Accurately perceiving others' personalities helps people to successfully navigate their social relationships. However, it is not yet clear whether people can accurately perceive one aspect of people's personalities that may be especially important to understand: motivations. Using the fundamental social motives framework, we examined the extent to which people accurately perceived a friend's motivations (vs. big five traits) and how this was related to friendship quality. A sample of friend dyads completed both self- and friend-assessments of the big five traits and the fundamental motives, and rated friendship quality. Perceivers accurately detected their friend's unique, self-reported ordering of motives (i.e., distinctive accuracy), though to a lesser extent than traits. However, accuracy for motives and traits was positively associated with greater friendship quality to a similar extent. Importantly, these associations emerged above and beyond tendencies to view others highly normatively, as socially desirable, and as similar to the self.

Family Matters: Rethinking the Psychology of Human Social Motivation.

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thoroughly connected to relevant comparative and evolutionary work on other species, and in the case of kin care, these bonds have been less well researched. Examining varied sources of data from 27 societies around the world, we found that people generally view familial motives as primary in importance and mate-seeking motives as relatively low in importance. Compared with other groups, college students, single people, and men place relatively higher emphasis on mate seeking, but even those samples rated kin-care motives as more important. Furthermore, motives linked to long-term familial bonds are positively associated with psychological well-being, but mate-seeking motives are associated with anxiety and depression. We address theoretical and empirical reasons why there has been extensive research on mate seeking and why people prioritize goals related to long-term familial bonds over mating goals. Reallocating relatively greater research effort toward long-term familial relationships would likely yield many interesting new findings relevant to everyday people's highest social priorities.

Are Black Women and Girls Associated With Danger? Implicit Racial Bias at the Intersection of Target Age and Gender.

We investigated whether stereotypes linking Black men and Black boys with violence and criminality generalize to Black women and Black girls. In Experiments 1 and 2, non-Black participants completed sequential-priming tasks wherein they saw faces varying in race, age, and gender before categorizing danger-related objects or words. Experiment 3 compared task performance across non-Black and Black participants. Results revealed that (a) implicit stereotyping of Blacks as more dangerous than Whites emerged across target age, target gender, and perceiver race, with (b) a similar magnitude of racial bias across adult and child targets and (c) a smaller magnitude for female than male targets. Evidence for age bias and gender bias also emerged whereby (d) across race, adult targets were more strongly associated with danger than were child targets, and (e) within Black (but not White) targets, male targets were more strongly associated with danger than were female targets.

The stigma of perceived irrelevance: An affordance-management theory of interpersonal invisibility.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 126(5) of Psychological Review (see record 2019-58645-001). In the article, the following citation was omitted: Goff, P. A., Thomas, M. A., & Jackson, M. C. (2008), "Ain't I a Woman?": Towards an intersectional approach to person perception and group-based harms. Sex Roles, 59, 392-403. All versions of this article have been corrected.] A growing body of research shows that older adults, Black women, and other groups often encounter stigmatization that manifests not as negative prejudice, but as indifference and inattention-that is, interpersonal invisibility. We propose an affordance-management theory to explain who is interpersonally invisible, to whom, and with what consequences. A social affordance-management perspective suggests that people seek to detect and strategically engage with those who facilitate or obstruct achievement of important goals. We argue that invisibility emerges from the perception that another person neither helps nor hurts one's ability to achieve chronically or acutely active goals. We thus distinguish among phenomena commonly subsumed under the term stigmatization: invisibility-based stigmatization of those perceived to be irrelevant, and threat-based stigmatization of those perceived to obstruct one's goals. Invisibility and threat-based stigmatization are theorized to differ in origin, manifestation, and impact. Furthermore, rather than being a static property of particular target groups, interpersonal invisibility dynamically emerges from perceiver goals, target cues, and situational features. Nonetheless, some perceivers, targets, situations, and goals are more likely to lead to invisibility than others. This affordance-based theory of invisibility helps to organize the heterogeneous field of stigma research; unifies a diverse array of social, cognitive, motivational, and affective phenomena; and suggests numerous novel directions for future stigma research from both perceiver and target perspectives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Racial bias in implicit danger associations generalizes to older male targets.

Across two experiments, we examined whether implicit stereotypes linking younger (~28-year-old) Black versus White men with violence and criminality extend to older (~68-year-old) Black versus White men. In Experiment 1, participants completed a sequential priming task wherein they categorized objects as guns or tools after seeing briefly-presented facial images of men who varied in age (younger versus older) and race (Black versus White). In Experiment 2, we used different face primes of younger and older Black and White men, and participants categorized words as 'threatening' or 'safe.' Results consistently revealed robust racial biases in object and word identification: Dangerous objects and words were identified more easily (faster response times, lower error rates), and non-dangerous objects and words were identified less easily, after seeing Black face primes than after seeing White face primes. Process dissociation procedure analyses, which aim to isolate the unique contributions of automatic and controlled processes to task performance, further indicated that these effects were driven entirely by racial biases in automatic processing. In neither experiment did prime age moderate racial bias, suggesting that the implicit danger associations commonly evoked by younger Black versus White men appear to generalize to older Black versus White men.

Individual Perceptions of Self-Actualization: What Functional Motives Are Linked to Fulfilling One's Full Potential?

Maslow's self-actualization remains a popular notion in academic research as well as popular culture. The notion that life's highest calling is fulfilling one's own unique potential has been widely appealing. But what do people believe they are doing when they pursue the realization of their full, unique potentials? Here, we examine lay perceptions of self-actualization. Self-actualizing, like any drive, is unlikely to operate without regard to biological and social costs and benefits. We examine which functional outcomes (e.g., gaining status, making friends, finding mates, caring for kin) people perceive as central to their individual self-actualizing. Three studies suggest that people most frequently link self-actualization to seeking status, and, concordant with life history theory, what people regard as self-actualizing varies in predictable ways across the life span and across individuals. Contrasting with self-actualization, people do not view other types of well-being-eudaimonic, hedonic, subjective-as furthering status-linked functional outcomes.

Solidarity through shared disadvantage: Highlighting shared experiences of discrimination improves relations between stigmatized groups.

Intergroup relations research has largely focused on relations between members of dominant groups and members of disadvantaged groups. The small body of work examining intraminority intergroup relations, or relations between members of different disadvantaged groups, reveals that salient experiences of ingroup discrimination promote positive relations between groups that share a dimension of identity (e.g., 2 different racial minority groups) and negative relations between groups that do not share a dimension of identity (e.g., a racial minority group and a sexual minority group). In the present work, we propose that shared experiences of discrimination between groups that do not share an identity dimension can be used as a lever to facilitate positive intraminority intergroup relations. Five experiments examining relations among 4 different disadvantaged groups supported this hypothesis. Both blatant (Experiments 1 and 3) and subtle (Experiments 2, 3, and 4) connections to shared experiences of discrimination, or inducing a similarity-seeking mindset in the context of discrimination faced by one's ingroup (Experiment 5), increased support for policies benefiting the outgroup (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) and reduced intergroup bias (Experiments 3, 4, and 5). Taken together, these experiments provide converging evidence that highlighting shared experiences of discrimination can improve intergroup outcomes between stigmatized groups across dimensions of social identity. Implications of these findings for intraminority intergroup relations are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Does Seeing Faces of Young Black Boys Facilitate the Identification of Threatening Stimuli?

Pervasive stereotypes linking Black men with violence and criminality can lead to implicit cognitive biases, including the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons. In four experiments, we investigated whether these biases extend even to young Black boys (5-year-olds). White participants completed sequential priming tasks in which they categorized threatening and nonthreatening objects and words after brief presentations of faces of various races (Black and White) and ages (children and adults). Results consistently revealed that participants had less difficulty (i.e., faster response times, fewer errors) identifying threatening stimuli and more difficulty identifying nonthreatening stimuli after seeing Black faces than after seeing White faces, and this racial bias was equally strong following adult and child faces. Process-dissociation-procedure analyses further revealed that these effects were driven entirely by automatic (i.e., unintentional) racial biases. The collective findings suggest that the perceived threat commonly associated with Black men may generalize even to young Black boys.

Women selectively guard their (desirable) mates from ovulating women.

For women, forming close, cooperative relationships with other women at once poses important opportunities and possible threats-including to mate retention. To maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of same-sex social relationships, we propose that women's mate guarding is functionally flexible and that women are sensitive to both interpersonal and contextual cues indicating whether other women might be likely and effective mate poachers. Here, we assess one such cue: other women's fertility. Because ovulating (i.e., high-fertility) women are both more attractive to men and also more attracted to (desirable) men, ovulating women may be perceived to pose heightened threats to other women's romantic relationships. Across 4 experiments, partnered women were exposed to photographs of other women taken during either their ovulatory or nonovulatory menstrual-cycle phases, and consistently reported intentions to socially avoid ovulating (but not nonovulating) women-but only when their own partners were highly desirable. Exposure to ovulating women also increased women's sexual desires for their (highly desirable) partners. These findings suggest that women can be sensitive to subtle cues of other women's fertility and respond (e.g., via social exclusion, enhanced sexual attention to own mate) in ways that may facilitate their mate retention goals while not thwarting their affiliative goals.

Individual differences in fundamental social motives.

Motivation has long been recognized as an important component of how people both differ from, and are similar to, each other. The current research applies the biologically grounded fundamental social motives framework, which assumes that human motivational systems are functionally shaped to manage the major costs and benefits of social life, to understand individual differences in social motives. Using the Fundamental Social Motives Inventory, we explore the relations among the different fundamental social motives of Self-Protection, Disease Avoidance, Affiliation, Status, Mate Seeking, Mate Retention, and Kin Care; the relationships of the fundamental social motives to other individual difference and personality measures including the Big Five personality traits; the extent to which fundamental social motives are linked to recent life experiences; and the extent to which life history variables (e.g., age, sex, childhood environment) predict individual differences in the fundamental social motives. Results suggest that the fundamental social motives are a powerful lens through which to examine individual differences: They are grounded in theory, have explanatory value beyond that of the Big Five personality traits, and vary meaningfully with a number of life history variables. A fundamental social motives approach provides a generative framework for considering the meaning and implications of individual differences in social motivation. (PsycINFO Database Record

Growing Fixed With Age: Lay Theories of Malleability Are Target Age-Specific.

Beliefs about whether people can change ("lay theories" of malleability) are known to have wide-ranging effects on social motivation, cognition, and judgment. Yet rather than holding an overarching belief that people can or cannot change, perceivers may hold independent beliefs about whether different people are malleable-that is, lay theories may be target-specific. Seven studies demonstrate that lay theories are target-specific with respect to age: Perceivers hold distinct, uncorrelated lay theories of people at different ages, and younger targets are considered to be more malleable than older targets. Both forms of target-specificity are consequential, as target age-specific lay theories predict policy support for learning-based senior services and the rehabilitation of old and young drug users. The implications of target age-specific lay theories for a number of psychological processes, the social psychology of aging, and theoretical frameworks of malleability beliefs are discussed.

Renovating Situation Taxonomies: Exploring the Construction and Content of Fundamental Motive Situation Types.

The present work demonstrates a method for constructing theoretically based situational classifications and exploring their behavioral implications. Fundamental motives theory (FMT; Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg, & Schaller, 2010; Kenrick, Neuberg, Griskevicius, Becker, & Schaller, 2010) proposes that humans have evolved seven specific social motives that would be differentially evoked by different situations. Experts in FMT used the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ) to describe prototypic motive-relevant situations and the Riverside Behavioral Q-sort (RBQ) to construct templates representing predictions of how people would behave in them. A sample of 201 undergraduate participants used the RSQ to describe situations they had experienced within the past 24 hours, and they described their behavior in each situation using the RBQ. For both the RSQ and RBQ, self-protection and disease avoidance templates were highly similar to each other and different from mate-seeking and affiliation templates. Participants more often reported experiencing situations similar to the mate-seeking, affiliation, and kin care templates and less often reported experiencing situations similar to the self-protection and disease avoidance templates. Participants' reported behavior was consistent with expectations from FMT. This study illustrates how relations between situations and behavior can be illuminated through the use of theoretically derived templates.

Measuring the Evolutionarily Important Goals of Situations : Situational Affordances for Adaptive Problems.

According to the Fundamental Motives Framework, basic goals such as protecting oneself, forming coalitions, and avoiding disease have emerged as a result of evolutionary processes to enhance reproductive fitness. This article introduces the Situational Affordances for Adaptive Problems (SAAP), a measure of situation characteristics that promotes or prevents the achievement of these evolutionarily important goals. In Study 1, participants rated a recent situation they encountered using a preliminary version of the SAAP. Using factor analysis, the measure was reduced to 28 items. In Study 2, the factor structure was confirmed. Studies 3 and 4 evaluated the psychometric properties of the measure including its predictive validity. Future studies can use the SAAP to investigate differences in the everyday experience of these fundamental motives.

From the bedroom to the budget deficit: mate competition changes men's attitudes toward economic redistribution.

How do economic recessions influence attitudes toward redistribution of wealth? From a traditional economic self-interest perspective, attitudes toward redistribution should be affected by one's financial standing. A functional evolutionary approach suggests another possible form of self-interest: That during periods of economic threat, attitudes toward redistribution should be influenced by one's mate-value-especially for men. Using both lab-based experiments and real-world data on voting behavior, we consistently find that economic threats lead low mate-value men to become more prosocial and supportive of redistribution policies, but that the same threats lead high mate-value men to do the opposite. Economic threats do not affect women's attitudes toward redistribution in the same way, and, across studies, financial standing is only weakly associated with attitudes toward redistribution. These findings suggest that during tough economic times, men's attitudes toward redistribution are influenced by something that has seemingly little to do with economic self-interest-their mating psychology.

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.