Summarized attribute preferences have unique antecedents and consequences.

People have ideas about the attributes (i.e., traits or characteristics that vary along a dimension) that they like in others (e.g., "I like intelligence in a romantic partner"), and these ideas about liking are called summarized attribute preferences (Ledgerwood et al., 2018). But where do summarized preferences come from, and what do they predict? Across four studies, we examined how people form summarized attribute preferences and whether they predict situation selection. We showed participants a series of photographs of faces and assessed both their experienced liking for an attribute (or functional attribute preference) as well as their inference about how much they liked the attribute in the abstract (their summarized attribute preference). Our results suggest that summarized attribute preferences-despite being (weakly) grounded in functional attribute preferences-were affected by incidental aspects of the context in which people learn about them (i.e., the overall likeability of the pool of faces). Furthermore, we observed a double dissociation in the predictive validity of summarized and functional attribute preferences: Whereas summarized attribute preferences predicted situation selection at a distance (e.g., whether to join a new dating website based on a description of it), functional attribute preferences predicted situation selection with experience (e.g., whether to join a new dating website after sampling it). We discuss theoretical and methodological implications for the interdisciplinary science of human evaluation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The unbearable limitations of solo science: Team science as a path for more rigorous and relevant research.

Both early social psychologists and the modern, interdisciplinary scientific community have advocated for diverse team science. We echo this call and describe three common pitfalls of solo science illustrated by the target article. We discuss how a collaborative and inclusive approach to science can both help researchers avoid these pitfalls and pave the way for more rigorous and relevant research.

The Pandemic as a Portal: Reimagining Psychological Science as Truly Open and Inclusive.

Psychological science is at an inflection point: The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities that stem from our historically closed and exclusive culture. Meanwhile, reform efforts to change the future of our science are too narrow in focus to fully succeed. In this article, we call on psychological scientists-focusing specifically on those who use quantitative methods in the United States as one context for such conversations-to begin reimagining our discipline as fundamentally open and inclusive. First, we discuss whom our discipline was designed to serve and how this history produced the inequitable reward and support systems we see today. Second, we highlight how current institutional responses to address worsening inequalities are inadequate, as well as how our disciplinary perspective may both help and hinder our ability to craft effective solutions. Third, we take a hard look in the mirror at the disconnect between what we ostensibly value as a field and what we actually practice. Fourth and finally, we lead readers through a roadmap for reimagining psychological science in whatever roles and spaces they occupy, from an informal discussion group in a department to a formal strategic planning retreat at a scientific society.

Psychological Science in the Wake of COVID-19: Social, Methodological, and Metascientific Considerations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic's wake. Because this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon-an event that hinges on human-to-human contact-we focus on socially relevant subfields of psychology. We highlight specific psychological phenomena that have likely shifted as a result of the pandemic and discuss theoretical, methodological, and practical considerations of conducting research on these phenomena. After this discussion, we evaluate metascientific issues that have been amplified by the pandemic. We aim to demonstrate how theoretically grounded views on the COVID-19 pandemic can help make psychological science stronger-not weaker-in its wake.

Regulatory Scope and Its Mental and Social Supports.

Adaptive functioning requires the ability to both immerse oneself in the here and now as well as to move beyond current experience. We leverage and expand construal-level theory to understand how individuals and groups regulate thoughts, feelings, and behavior to address both proximal and distal ends. To connect to distant versus proximal events in a way that meaningfully informs and guides responses in the immediate here and now, people must expand versus contract their regulatory scope. We propose that humans have evolved a number of mental and social tools that enable the modulation of regulatory scope and address the epistemic, emotive, and executive demands of regulation. Critically, across these tools, it is possible to distinguish a hierarchy that varies in abstractness. Whereas low-level tools enable contractive scope, high-level tools enable expansion. We review empirical results that support these assertions and highlight the novel insights that a regulatory-scope framework provides for understanding diverse phenomena.

Open science, communal culture, and women's participation in the movement to improve science.

Science is undergoing rapid change with the movement to improve science focused largely on reproducibility/replicability and open science practices. This moment of change-in which science turns inward to examine its methods and practices-provides an opportunity to address its historic lack of diversity and noninclusive culture. Through network modeling and semantic analysis, we provide an initial exploration of the structure, cultural frames, and women's participation in the open science and reproducibility literatures (n = 2,926 articles and conference proceedings). Network analyses suggest that the open science and reproducibility literatures are emerging relatively independently of each other, sharing few common papers or authors. We next examine whether the literatures differentially incorporate collaborative, prosocial ideals that are known to engage members of underrepresented groups more than independent, winner-takes-all approaches. We find that open science has a more connected, collaborative structure than does reproducibility. Semantic analyses of paper abstracts reveal that these literatures have adopted different cultural frames: open science includes more explicitly communal and prosocial language than does reproducibility. Finally, consistent with literature suggesting the diversity benefits of communal and prosocial purposes, we find that women publish more frequently in high-status author positions (first or last) within open science (vs. reproducibility). Furthermore, this finding is further patterned by team size and time. Women are more represented in larger teams within reproducibility, and women's participation is increasing in open science over time and decreasing in reproducibility. We conclude with actionable suggestions for cultivating a more prosocial and diverse culture of science.

Experiences of liking versus ideas about liking.

We leverage the notion that abstraction enables prediction to generate novel insights and hypotheses for the literatures on attitudes and mate preferences. We suggest that ideas about liking (e.g., evaluations of categories or overall traits) are more abstract than experiences of liking (e.g., evaluations of particular exemplars), and that ideas about liking may facilitate mental travel beyond the here-and-now.

Age Attenuates the Negativity Bias in Reframing Effects.

A growing literature on reframing effects has identified a robust negativity bias: Under many circumstances, people's attitudes change less when framing switches from negative to positive (vs. positive to negative). Like other basic psychological biases, this one is often assumed to reflect a general human tendency, but there are theoretical reasons to expect boundary conditions on when and for whom it operates. In this article, we zero in on age as one important potential moderator, and test competing predictions from different perspectives. Using a large, highly powered data set that synthesizes across multiple past studies ( N = 2,452; aged 18-81 years), we fit multilevel models to test the moderating impact of age on reframing effects, as well as single-shot framing effects. We found that (consistent with socioemotional selectivity theory), the negativity bias in reframing attenuated as age increased. We discuss implications for the aging literature and for understanding valence biases more broadly.

Toward an Integrative Framework for Studying Human Evaluation: Attitudes Toward Objects and Attributes.

Evaluation is central to human experience, and multiple literatures have studied it. This article pulls from research on attitudes, human and nonhuman mating preferences, consumer behavior, and beyond to build a more comprehensive framework for studying evaluation. First, we distinguish between evaluations of objects (persons, places, things) and evaluations of attributes (dimensions, traits, characteristics). Then, we further distinguish between summarized attribute preferences (a valenced response to a direction on a dimension, such as liking sweetness in desserts) and functional attribute preferences (a valenced response to increasing levels of a dimension in a set of targets, such as the extent to which sweetness predicts liking for desserts). We situate these constructs with respect to existing distinctions in the attitude literature (e.g., specific/general, indirect/direct). Finally, new models address how people translate functional into summarized preferences, as well as how attribute preferences affect (a) subsequent evaluations of objects and (b) situation selection.

Achieving local and global shared realities: distance guides alignment to specific or general social influences.

Humans routinely navigate a multitude of potential social influences, ranging from specific individual's opinions to general social norms and group values. Whereas specific social influences afford opportunities to achieve shared inner states with particular individuals, general social influences afford opportunities to achieve shared inner states with broader groups. We review recent theory and evidence examining how people tune into different kinds of social influence in the service of shared reality. We argue that the distance of an attitude object (e.g. how far away it is in time or space) systematically influences what kind of social influence informs people's attitudes. As an attitude object grows more distant, people's attitudes increasingly align with general (vs. specific) social influences.

When good is stickier than bad: Understanding gain/loss asymmetries in sequential framing effects.

Considerable research has demonstrated the power of the current positive or negative frame to shape people's current judgments. But humans must often learn about positive and negative information as they encounter that information sequentially over time. It is therefore crucial to consider the potential importance of sequencing when developing an understanding of how humans think about valenced information. Indeed, recent work looking at sequentially encountered frames suggests that some frames can linger outside the context in which they are first encountered, sticking in the mind so that subsequent frames have a muted effect. The present research builds a comprehensive account of sequential framing effects in both the loss and the gain domains. After seeing information about a potential gain or loss framed in positive terms or negative terms, participants saw the same issue reframed in the opposing way. Across 5 studies and 1566 participants, we find accumulating evidence for the notion that in the gain domain, positive frames are stickier than negative frames for novel but not familiar scenarios, whereas in the loss domain, negative frames are always stickier than positive frames. Integrating regulatory focus theory with the literatures on negativity dominance and positivity offset, we develop a new and comprehensive account of sequential framing effects that emphasizes the adaptive value of positivity and negativity biases in specific contexts. Our findings highlight the fact that research conducted solely in the loss domain risks painting an incomplete and oversimplified picture of human bias and suggest new directions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record

On the psychological function of flags and logos: Group identity symbols increase perceived entitativity.

Group identity symbols such as flags and logos have been widely used across time and cultures, yet researchers know very little about the psychological functions that such symbols can serve. The present research tested the hypotheses that (a) simply having a symbol leads collections of individuals to seem more like real, unified groups, (b) this increased psychological realness leads groups to seem more threatening and effective to others, and (c) group members therefore strategically emphasize symbols when they want their group to appear unified and intimidating. In Studies 1a-1c, participants perceived various task groups as more entitative when they happened to have a symbol. In Study 2, symbols not only helped groups make up for lacking a physical characteristic associated with entitativity (physical similarity), but also led groups to seem more threatening. Study 3 examined the processes underlying this effect and found that group symbols increase entitativity by increasing perceived cohesiveness. Study 4 extended our results to show that symbols not only shape the impressions people form of novel groups, but also change people's existing impressions of more familiar and real-world social groups, making them seem more entitative and competent but also less warm. Finally, Studies 5a and 5b further expand our understanding of the psychological function of symbols by showing that group members strategically display symbols when they are motivated to convey an impression of their group as unified and threatening (vs. inclusive and cooperative). We discuss implications for understanding how group members navigate their social identities.

The effects of psychological distance on abstraction: Two meta-analyses.

Psychological distance and abstraction both represent key variables of considerable interest to researchers across cognitive, social, and developmental psychology. Moreover, largely inspired by construal level theory, numerous experiments across multiple fields have now connected these 2 constructs, examining how psychological distance affects the level of abstraction at which people mentally represent the world around them. The time is clearly ripe for a quantitative synthesis to shed light on the relation between these constructs and investigate potential moderators. To this end, we conducted 2 meta-analyses of research examining the effects of psychological distance on abstraction and its downstream consequences. Across 106 papers containing a total of 267 experiments, our results showed a reliable and medium-sized effect of psychological distance on both level of abstraction in mental representation and the downstream consequences of abstraction. Importantly, these effects replicate across time, researchers, and settings. Our analyses also identified several key moderators, including the size of the difference in distance between 2 levels of a temporal distance manipulation and the dependent variable's capacity to tap processing of both abstract and concrete features (rather than only one or the other). We discuss theoretical and methodological implications, and highlight promising avenues for future research.

Sticky prospects: loss frames are cognitively stickier than gain frames.

Research across numerous domains has highlighted the current--and presumably temporary--effects of frames on preference and behavior. Yet people often encounter information that has been framed in different ways across contexts, and there are reasons to predict that certain frames, once encountered, might tend to stick in the mind and resist subsequent reframing. We propose that loss frames are stickier than gain frames in their ability to shape people's thinking. Specifically, we suggest that the effect of a loss frame may linger longer than that of a gain frame in the face of reframing and that this asymmetry may arise because it is more difficult to convert a loss-framed concept into a gain-framed concept than vice versa. Supporting this notion, loss-to-gain (vs. gain-to-loss) reframing had a muted impact on both risk preferences (Study 1) and evaluation (Study 2). Moreover, participants took longer to solve a math problem that required reconceptualizing losses as gains than vice versa (Studies 3-5), and reframing changed gain-based conceptualizations but not loss-based ones (Study 6). We discuss implications for understanding a key process underlying negativity bias, as well as how sequential frames might impact political behavior and economic recovery.

The social side of abstraction: psychological distance enhances conformity to group norms.

Intuition suggests that a distanced or abstract thinker should be immune to social influence, and on its surface, the current literature could seem to support this view. The present research builds on recent theorizing to suggest a different possibility. Drawing on the notion that psychological distance regulates the extent to which evaluations incorporate context-specific or context-independent information, we suggest that psychological distance should actually increase susceptibility to sources of social influence that tend to be consistently encountered across contexts, such as group norms. Consistent with this hypothesis, two studies showed that psychological distance and abstraction increased conformity to group opinion and that this effect persisted in a novel voting-booth paradigm in which participants believed their voting behavior was both anonymous and consequential. We discuss implications of these findings for understanding the social side of abstraction as well as the conditions under which different types of social influence are likely to be most influential.

Short, Sweet, and Problematic? The Rise of the Short Report in Psychological Science.

Our field has witnessed a rapid increase in the appeal and prevalence of the short report format over the last two decades. In this article, we discuss both the benefits and drawbacks of the trend toward shorter and faster publications. Although the short report format can help us cope with ever-increasing time constraints; ease the burden on hiring, promotion, and tenure committees; speed the publication of our findings; and promote the dissemination of research beyond the borders of our discipline, it can also exacerbate problems with publication bias and selective reporting, decrease theoretical integration within our science, and risk overemphasizing colorful effects relative to basic processes. In the face of these challenges, we believe it is essential to find ways to preserve the advantages of the short-and-fast approach while minimizing its disadvantages and while acknowledging the complementary and critical importance of longer articles in advancing the field.