Pitfalls of self-reported measures of self-control: Surprising insights from extreme debtors.

OBJECTIVE: We took a rare opportunity to examine whether extreme debtors have inflated assessment of their self-control capacity, potentially rendering self-reported measures ineffective as prediction tools for debt risks. METHOD: The self-control profiles of extreme debtors (n = 1442), whose credit card debt amounted to more than 12 months of their income, were compared with samples of the general population (n = 505) and students from an elite university (n = 1011) on a self-reported measure, a behavioral intention measure, and an executive function measure. RESULTS: Extreme debtors reported the highest self-control on the self-reported measure but scored the lowest on the behavioral intention measure and executive function. This pattern was robust across different subsections of demographics and diverse reasons of indebtedness. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest that self-reported measures may be more susceptible to psychological distortions than behavioral measures, a pitfall that past research has overlooked. Furthermore, we reveal a double whammy faced by extreme debtors: they have a low capacity to regulate their behavior but hold an illusory perception of high capacity, which may expose them to further debt accumulation. The insights from our study underscore the utility of examining extreme segments of the population for advancing psychological knowledge.

A Multilab Replication of the Ego Depletion Effect.

There is an active debate regarding whether the ego depletion effect is real. A recent preregistered experiment with the Stroop task as the depleting task and the antisaccade task as the outcome task found a medium-level effect size. In the current research, we conducted a preregistered multilab replication of that experiment. Data from 12 labs across the globe (N = 1,775) revealed a small and significant ego depletion effect, d = 0.10. After excluding participants who might have responded randomly during the outcome task, the effect size increased to d = 0.16. By adding an informative, unbiased data point to the literature, our findings contribute to clarifying the existence, size, and generality of ego depletion.

Stunted upward mobility in a learning environment reduces the academic benefits of growth mindsets.

Does stunted upward mobility in an educational system impede beneficial psychological processes of learning? We predicted that growth mindsets of intelligence, a well-established psychological stimulant to learning, would be less potent in low-mobility, as compared to high-mobility, learning environments. An analysis of a large cross-national dataset and a longitudinal experiment accumulated converging evidence for this hypothesis. Study 1 examined data from 15-y-old students across 30 countries (n = 235,141 persons). Replicating past findings, growth mindsets positively predicted students' math, science, and reading literacy. More importantly, the country-level indicator of educational mobility (i.e., the percentage of children from low-education households to graduate from tertiary education) moderated the effect of growth mindsets. Depending on the subject, the gain in predicted academic performance from a one-unit increase in growth mindsets was reduced by 42 to 45% from a high-mobility to a low-mobility country. Results were robust with or without important covariates. Study 2 experimentally manipulated people's perception of mobility in a carefully constructed learning environment. The moderating role of educational mobility was replicated and extended to learning behavior, which subsequently predicted performance. Evidence further suggests that in high-mobility environments, both advantaged and disadvantaged learners benefited from growth mindsets, albeit likely through diverging mechanisms; when the effect of growth mindsets was attenuated in low-mobility environments, the potential for the disadvantaged to overcome the performance gap was also limited. Implications for galvanizing the upward mobility of the disadvantaged, evaluating the effectiveness of mindset interventions, and conceptualizing social mobility from a psychological perspective are discussed.

Conditional Love: Threat and Attitudinal Perceptions of Immigrants Depend on Their Instrumentality to Locals' Basic Psychological Needs.

Although threat perceptions are commonly used to explain attitudes toward immigrants, the psychological factors underlying threat are surprisingly understudied. Drawing from goal pursuit and self-determination theory, we examined the perceived instrumentality of immigrants as an antecedent of locals' threat and attitudinal perceptions. Through four studies (N = 1,372) with different configurations of local population segments and target immigrant groups, we investigated the impact of immigrants' instrumentality in terms of hindrances to locals' autonomy, belonging, and competence needs. Including hindrances to our proposed model of threats and attitudes led to an improvement in the overall fit with the data, allowed for a better specification of the threats-to-attitudes pathways, and elucidated the complexity and downstream consequences (endorsement of pro-immigration policies) of attitudes. The present findings underscore the utility of goal-driven approaches to studying intergroup conflicts, and implications for understanding and improving locals' attitudes toward immigrants are discussed.

Gratitude inhibits competitive behaviour in threatening interactions.

It is well established that gratitude favours prosocial tendencies in neutral and amicable social interactions. Less is clear, however, about the role of gratitude in threatening situations that breed competitive impulses. As gratitude inhibits self-centred impulses and motivates a communal orientation, we predict and demonstrate that gratitude reduces competitive behaviour in threatening interactions. In Study 1 (N = 171), after emotion induction, participants went through the classic Trucking game paradigm, whereby a bogus opponent behaved in a competitive manner (i.e. closing the gate on them). Gratitude, as compared to joy and a neutral mood state, reduced participants' competitive behaviour against the opponent. In Study 2 (N = 422), after losing to a bogus opponent on a self-relevant task, participants were given an opportunity to sabotage the opponent's chances of winning a lottery. Individuals induced to feel gratitude showed less sabotaging behaviour than those in a neutral mood state. Importantly, this effect was only observed against a highly competitive, but not a neutral, opponent, suggesting that gratitude inhibits competitive behaviour only under high threat. Our findings suggest that gratitude is instrumental in arresting the competitive cycles from developing in threatening social interactions.

Positive emotion, appraisal, and the role of appraisal overlap in positive emotion co-occurrence.

Appraisal research has traditionally focused on negative emotions but has not addressed issues concerning the relationships between several positive emotions and appraisals in daily life and the extent to which co-occurrence of positive emotions can be explained by overlap in appraisals. Driven by a priori hypotheses on appraisal-emotion relationships, this study investigated 12 positive emotions and 13 appraisal dimensions using Ecological Momentary Assessment. The results provide strong evidence that positive emotions and appraisals correlate significantly in daily life. Importantly, we found that the positive emotions' overlap on theoretically relevant, as compared to irrelevant, appraisals was stronger and more predictive of their co-occurrence. Furthermore, appraisal overlap on theoretically relevant appraisals predicted the co-occurrence of positive emotions even when the appraisal of pleasantness was excluded, indicating that positive emotions do not co-occur just by virtue of their shared valence. Our findings affirmed and refined the appraisal profiles of positive emotions and underscore the importance of appraisals in accounting for the commonality and differences among positive emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record

Authentic and hubristic pride: Differential effects on delay of gratification.

Research demonstrates that there are 2 distinct facets of pride: the prosocial, achievement-oriented form of pride known as authentic pride, and the self-aggrandizing, egotistical form of pride known as hubristic pride. This research examined whether authentic pride and hubristic pride have divergent effects on delay of gratification. Support was found for the prediction that authentic pride would facilitate the ability to delay gratification, whereas hubristic pride would undermine it. Also, self-transcendent value affirmation was demonstrated to moderate the effects of pride on delayed gratification. Specifically, when people feeling hubristic pride had an opportunity to affirm a self-transcendent value that was important to them, their tendency to seek immediate gratification was attenuated. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Depletion suspends the comparator mechanism in monitoring: The role of chronic self-consciousness in sequential self-regulation.

In 4 studies, we accumulated support for the prediction that depletion suspends the comparator mechanism of self-regulatory monitoring. We adopted an individual difference approach and designated chronic self-consciousness as a signature variable for the comparator mechanism. In the nondepletion condition, we found that self-consciousness predicted self-regulation by itself (Study 1), or by interacting synergistically with other motivational factors such as online goal focus (Study 2) and task motivation (Study 3). In the depletion condition, self-consciousness ceased to predict task performance, which suggested that the self-focused comparator mechanism is suspended by depletion. Instead, depleted participants' self-control was predicted by their implicit goal to rest (Study 3), indicating that depletion does not indiscriminately suspend all self-regulatory processes. In Study 4, we showed that when an effective comparator mechanism is counterproductive to task performance, depletion can actually increase task performance. Implications of our findings for the underlying process of depletion as well as models positing ultimate explanations for sequential self-regulation are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Gratitude facilitates behavioral mimicry.

Recent theorists argue that gratitude, besides encouraging social exchange, serves an important function of relationship building. However, there is a lack of research exploring the specific behaviors through which gratitude promotes relationship building. Given that behavioral mimicry serves important affiliative needs, we explored whether gratitude promotes behavioral mimicry. We found that participants who received intentional help later mimicked the behavioral mannerisms of their benefactor. This mimicry tendency was not extended to a nonbenefactor. In contrast, participants who ended up with the same positive outcome, but believed that it was attributable to chance, did not exhibit a reliable level of mimicry. Our results suggest that nonconscious behavioral mimicry might be a subtle but important first step through which gratitude promotes communal relationships.

Putting the Freeze on Priming: The Role of Need for Cognitive Closure on the Prime-Norm Dynamic.

Past research has indicated that individuals with a high need for cognitive closure (NFCC) are more susceptible to priming effects in norm-absent contexts. We proposed that in norm-present contexts, whereby normative information competes with priming in affecting individuals' understanding of the social environment, the opposite pattern would occur. In Study 1, low- rather than high-NFCC individuals showed greater prime-consistent behavior in a context with a strong norm to comply. In Study 2, when both priming and normative information were manipulated, priming dictated low-NFCC individuals' behaviors, whereas norms guided high-NFCC individuals' behavior. In Study 3, the effect of a single priming manipulation was observed in two consecutive contexts. While high-NFCC individuals, compared with low-NFCC ones, were less prime-consistent in the norm-present context, they were more influenced by the same priming manipulation in the norm-absent context. Our findings underscore the importance of NFCC in people's selection of environmental cues to guide self-regulation.

Psychological "gel" to bind individuals' goal pursuit: gratitude facilitates goal contagion.

Past research demonstrates that gratitude affects individuals' self-regulation of behavior primarily through engendering a prosocial tendency. Based on theories proposing that gratitude plays an unique role in fostering communal relationship (e.g., Algoe, 2012), we propose that gratitude can have an incidental effect in facilitating goal contagion: automatically inferring and adopting the goal implied by a social other's behavior. This hypothesis is supported in 3 studies. In Study 1, after being exposed to the behaviors of a social target that implied either a cooperative or a competitive goal, individuals adopted the respective goal and behaved accordingly in a Resource Dilemma Task. This occurred, however, only when they were feeling gratitude and not when they were feeling joy or a neutral mood. In Study 2, after being exposed to a social target's behavior that implied the goal to make money, people feeling gratitude, as compared to those feeling pride or a neutral mood, strove for a future opportunity to earn money. Study 3 further demonstrated that individuals' goal striving behavior was mediated by a heightened level of goal activation. Finally, it was found that gratitude facilitated goal contagion only when the social target was a member of participants' own social group. Through this mechanism, gratitude, thus, seems to bind one's self-regulation with those of social others. Theoretical and practical implications of this new perspective are discussed.

Beyond anti-Muslim sentiment: opposing the Ground Zero mosque as a means to pursuing a stronger America.

Americans' opposition toward building an Islamic community center at Ground Zero has been attributed solely to a general anti-Muslim sentiment. We hypothesized that some Americans' negative reaction was also due to their motivation to symbolically pursue a positive U.S. group identity, which had suffered from a concurrent economic and political downturn. Indeed, when participants perceived that the United States was suffering from lowered international status, those who identified strongly with the country, as evidenced especially by a high respect or deference for group symbols, reported a stronger opposition to the "Ground Zero mosque" than participants who identified weakly with the country did. Furthermore, participants who identified strongly with the country also showed a greater preference for buildings that were symbolically congruent than for buildings that were symbolically incongruent with the significance of Ground Zero, and they represented Ground Zero with a larger symbolic size. These findings suggest that identifying group members' underlying motivations provides unusual insights for understanding intergroup conflict.

When perception is more than reality: the effects of perceived versus actual resource depletion on self-regulatory behavior.

Considerable research demonstrates that the depletion of self-regulatory resources impairs performance on subsequent tasks that demand these resources. The current research sought to assess the impact of perceived resource depletion on subsequent task performance at both high and low levels of actual depletion. The authors manipulated perceived resource depletion by having participants 1st complete a depleting or nondepleting task before being presented with feedback that did or did not provide a situational attribution for their internal state. Participants then persisted at a problem-solving task (Experiments 1-2), completed an attention-regulation task (Experiment 3), or responded to a persuasive message (Experiment 4). The findings consistently demonstrated that individuals who perceived themselves as less (vs. more) depleted, whether high or low in actual depletion, were more successful at subsequent self-regulation. Thus, perceived regulatory depletion can impact subsequent task performance-and this impact can be independent of one's actual state of depletion.