Can selecting the most qualified candidate be unfair? Learning about socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages reduces the perceived fairness of meritocracy and increases support for socioeconomic diversity initiatives in organizations.

While the majority of Americans today endorse meritocracy as fair, we suggest that these perceptions can be shaped by whether or not people learn about the presence of socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages in others' lives. Across five studies (N = 3,318), we find that people are able to attach socioeconomic inequalities in applicants' backgrounds to their evaluation of the fairness of specific merit-based selection processes and outcomes. Learning that one applicant grew up advantaged-while the other grew up disadvantaged-leads both liberals and conservatives to believe that otherwise identical merit-based procedures and outcomes are significantly less fair. Importantly, learning about starting inequalities leads to greater support for policies that promote socioeconomic diversity in organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The consequences of heroization for exploitation.

The hero label has become a pervasive positive stereotype applied to many different groups and occupations, such as nurses, teachers, and members of the military. Although meant to show support, appreciation, and even admiration, we suggest that attaching this label to groups and occupations may actually have problematic consequences. Specifically, we theorize that the hero label may affect beliefs about the internal motivations of these group members that make them more vulnerable to exploitation. These ideas are tested and supported across nine preregistered studies using complementary materials and experimental paradigms. In these studies, we find that: (a) heroization strengthens expectations that teachers, nurses, and military personnel would willingly volunteer for their own exploitation; (b) the hero label and its consequences follow workers even after they transition to a new career (e.g., participants expected a military veteran-relative to a matched nonveteran-to be more willing to volunteer for his own exploitation at his subsequent civilian job, because the veteran was perceived to be more heroic than the matched nonveteran); and (c) occupational heroization-likely because of its impact on beliefs regarding what heroized workers would freely choose to do-reduces opposition to exploitative policies. In short, our studies show that heroization ultimately promotes worse treatment of the very groups that it is meant to venerate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Does "Jamal" receive a harsher sentence than "James"? First-name bias in the criminal sentencing of Black men.

OBJECTIVE: Using archival and experimental methods, we tested the role that racial associations of first names play in criminal sentencing. HYPOTHESES: We hypothesized that Black defendants with more stereotypically Black names (e.g., Jamal) would receive more punitive sentences than Black defendants with more stereotypically White names (e.g., James). METHOD: In an archival study, we obtained a random sample of 296 real-world records of Black male prison inmates in Florida and asked participants to rate the extent to which each inmate's first name was stereotypically Black or stereotypically White. We then tested the extent to which racial stereotypicality was associated with sentence length, controlling for relevant legal features of each case (e.g., criminal record, severity of convicted offenses). In a follow-up experiment, participant judges assigned sentences in cases in which the Black male defendant was randomly assigned a more stereotypically Black or White name from our archival study. RESULTS: Controlling for a wide array of factors-including criminal record-we found that inmates with more stereotypically Black versus White first names received longer sentences ß = 0.09, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) [0.01, 0.16]: 409 days longer for names 1 standard deviation above versus below the mean on racial stereotypicality. In our experiment, participant judges recommended significantly longer sentences to Black inmates with more stereotypically Black names above and beyond the severity of the charges or their criminal history, ß = 0.07, 95% CI [0.02, 0.13]. CONCLUSIONS: Our results identify how racial associations with first names can bias consequential sentencing decisions despite the impartial aims of the legal system. More broadly, our findings illustrate how racial biases manifest in distinctions made among members of historically marginalized groups, not just between members of different groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Heroization and ironic funneling effects.

In recent years, much of the American public has venerated military veterans as heroes. Despite overwhelmingly positive public attitudes toward veterans, veterans have experienced higher rates of unemployment and underemployment than their nonveteran peers. The current research leverages theory and research on positive stereotypes to shed light on this seeming inconsistency between the heroization of veterans and their heightened rates of unemployment and underemployment. We conceptualize the hero label as a pervasive positive stereotype, and we employ complementary methods and designs (correlational, quasi-experimental, experimental, and mediational) to investigate the consequences and implications of attaching this label to military veterans. We then extend our theorizing to other heroized groups (e.g., firefighters, paramedics, teachers, and social workers). The results across studies suggest that heroization leads the American public to funnel heroized individuals and groups into a limited set of lower paying jobs, organizations, and careers associated with selflessness. This research not only offers insights into an important real-world problem but also offers a first experimental investigation of the consequences and implications of labeling a group of people as heroes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Communal expectations conflict with autonomy motives: The western drive for autonomy shapes women's negative responses to positive gender stereotypes.

Western culture idealizes an autonomous self-a self that strives for independence and freedom from the influence and control of others. We explored how the value placed on autonomy in Western culture intersects with the normative trait expectations experienced by men and women. While trait expectations placed on men (i.e., to be confident and assertive) affirm an autonomous sense of self, trait expectations placed on women (i.e., to be caring and understanding) conflict with an autonomous sense of self. We theorized that this conflict contributes to women's resentment toward positive gender stereotypes that emphasize women's interdependent qualities. Six preregistered studies (N = 2,094) demonstrated that U.S. women experienced more anger in response to positive-gendered trait expectations and less motivation to comply with them compared to U.S. men. We found that these effects were partially attributable to stereotypically feminine communal expectations affirming autonomy less than stereotypically masculine agentic expectations. Cross-cultural comparisons between the U.S. (a Western context) and India (a non-Western context) further indicated that the conflict between communal expectations placed on women and Western prioritization of autonomy contributes to U.S. women's anger toward positive gender stereotypes: Although traits expected of women in both the U.S. and India oriented women away from feeling autonomous more than traits expected of men, this diminished sense of being autonomous only elicited anger in a U.S. context. For Western societies, findings illuminate the uniquely frustrating nature of stereotyped expectations that demand interdependence and thus the unequal psychological burden placed on those who must contend with them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The mutual constitution of culture and psyche: The bidirectional relationship between individuals' perceived control and cultural tightness-looseness.

According to the theory of mutual constitution of culture and psyche, just as culture shapes people, individuals' psychological states can influence culture. We build on compensatory control theory, which suggests that low personal control can lead people to prefer societal systems that impose order, to examine the mutual constitution of personal control and cultural tightness. Specifically, we tested whether individuals' lack of personal control increases their preference for tighter cultures as a means of restoring order and predictability, and whether tighter cultures in turn reduce people's feelings of personal control. Seven studies (five preregistered) with participants from the United States, Singapore, and China examine this cycle of mutual constitution. Specifically, documenting the correlational link between person and culture, we found that Americans lower on personal control preferred to live in tighter states (Study 1). Chinese employees lower on personal control also desired more structure and preferred a tighter organizational culture (Study 2). Employing an experimental causal chain design, Studies 3-5 provided causal evidence for our claim that lack of control increases desire for tighter cultures via the need for structure. Finally, tracing the link back from culture to person, Studies 6a and 6b found that whereas tighter cultures decreased perceptions of individual personal control, they increased people's sense of collective control. Overall, the findings document the process of mutual constitution of culture and psyche: lack of personal control leads people to seek more structured, tighter cultures, and that tighter cultures, in turn, decrease people's sense of personal control but increase their sense of collective control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Challenges of Military Veterans in Their Transition to the Workplace: A Call for Integrating Basic and Applied Psychological Science.

Long-standing structural features of the military have created a culture and society that is dramatically different and disconnected from civilian society. Thus, veterans transitioning to civilian society face a number of challenges related to fulfilling basic psychological needs (e.g., need for structure and order, belonging) and civilians' reliance on stereotypes to understand military veterans. In an attempt to enrich the understanding of these challenges, we integrate social psychological theories and insights with research from sociology, clinical psychology, military psychology, and organizational behavior. Theories of compensatory control, stereotype threat, and stereotyping are drawn on to help explain the psychological challenges that veterans may encounter during their transition to civilian society. We present recent research that leverages these theories to understand issues veterans face. This theoretical integration illustrates the opportunity and potential for psychological researchers to conduct basic and applied research in the context of veterans and for clinicians and managers to draw on basic theory to inform programs and interventions.

A Privileged Point of View: Effects of Subjective Socioeconomic Status on Naïve Realism and Political Division.

In the United States, both economic inequality and political conflict are on the rise. We investigated whether subjective socioeconomic status (SSS) may help explain why these dual patterns emerge. We hypothesized that higher SSS may increase naïve realism-the belief that one perceives the world as it is, rather than as interpreted through one's own knowledge and beliefs-regarding political issues. Using a representative sample of the American electorate, we found that higher SSS predicted more political naïve realism toward those from a different political party (Study 1). The remaining experiments examined the causal relationship between SSS and political naïve realism (Studies 2-5). We extended these findings by investigating whether SSS influenced participants' willingness to exclude those with contrary views from a vote (Studies 4 and 5). Together, these studies demonstrate that SSS enhances political naïve realism and can lead to the exclusion of others with contrary opinions.

The Psychological Appeal of Fake-News Attributions.

The term fake news is increasingly used to discredit information from reputable news organizations. We tested the possibility that fake-news claims are appealing because they satisfy the need to see the world as structured. Believing that news organizations are involved in an orchestrated disinformation campaign implies a more orderly world than believing that the news is prone to random errors. Across six studies (N > 2,800), individuals with dispositionally high or situationally increased need for structure were more likely to attribute contested news stories to intentional deception than to journalistic incompetence. The effect persisted for stories that were ideologically consistent and ideologically inconsistent and after analyses controlled for strength of political identification. Political orientation showed a moderating effect; specifically, the link between need for structure and belief in intentional deception was stronger for Republican participants than for Democratic participants. This work helps to identify when, why, and for whom fake-news claims are persuasive.

Structure-seeking as a psychological antecedent of beliefs about morality.

People differ in their beliefs about the objectivity of moral claims. We investigated a possible psychological antecedent that might be associated with people's beliefs about the objectivity of moral claims. More specifically, we examined the relationship between the endorsement of moral objectivism and one's need to see the world as structured, ordered, and predictable. By believing that the world comprises objective facts about morality, a simple, rigid, and unambiguous structure is imposed on the moral landscape that is invariant to the whims and preferences of any particular person or group. Our results suggest that those more in need of personal structure and order in their lives are indeed more likely to endorse moral objectivism. We discuss the implications of these results for psychological theories of control and structure-seeking, and for cooperation, prosociality, social orderliness, and social goal pursuit. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding contemporary forms of exploitation: Attributions of passion serve to legitimize the poor treatment of workers.

The pursuit of passion in one's work is touted in contemporary discourse. Although passion may indeed be beneficial in many ways, we suggest that the modern cultural emphasis may also serve to facilitate the legitimization of unfair and demeaning management practices-a phenomenon we term the legitimization of passion exploitation. Across 7 studies and a meta-analysis, we show that people do in fact deem poor worker treatment (e.g., asking employees to do demeaning tasks that are irrelevant to their job description, asking employees to work extra hours without pay) as more legitimate when workers are presumed to be "passionate" about their work. Of importance, we demonstrate 2 mediating mechanisms by which this process of legitimization occurs: (a) assumptions that passionate workers would have volunteered for this work if given the chance (Studies 1, 3, 5, 6, and 8), and (b) beliefs that, for passionate workers, work itself is its own reward (Studies 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8). We also find support for the reverse direction of the legitimization process, in which people attribute passion to an exploited (vs. nonexploited) worker (Study 7). Finally, and consistent with the notion that this process is connected to justice motives, a test of moderated mediation shows this is most pronounced for participants high in belief in a just world (Study 8). Taken together, these studies suggest that although passion may seem like a positive attribute to assume in others, it can also license poor and exploitative worker treatment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Lean in messages increase attributions of women's responsibility for gender inequality.

Although women's underrepresentation in senior-level positions in the workplace has multiple causes, women's self-improvement or "empowerment" at work has recently attracted cultural attention as a solution. For example, the bestselling book Lean In states that women can tackle gender inequality themselves by overcoming the "internal barriers" (e.g., lack of confidence and ambition) that prevent success. We sought to explore the consequences of this type of women's empowerment ideology. Study 1 found that perceptions of women's ability to solve inequality were associated with attributions of women's responsibility to do so. Studies 2, 3, 5a, and 5b experimentally manipulated exposure to women's empowerment messages, finding that while such messages increase perceptions that women are empowered to solve workplace gender inequality, they also lead to attributions that women are more responsible both for creating and solving the problem. Study 4 found a similar pattern in the context of a specific workplace problem, and found that such messages also lead to a preference for interventions focused on changing women rather than changing the system. Studies 5a and 5b sought to replicate prior studies and document the weakened effects of messages that explicitly explain that women's "internal barriers" are the products of "external barriers" obstructing women's progress. This research suggests that self-improvement messages intended to empower women to take charge of gender inequality may also yield potentially harmful societal beliefs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

System justification: Experimental evidence, its contextual nature, and implications for social change.

We review conceptual and empirical contributions to system justification theory over the last fifteen years, emphasizing the importance of an experimental approach and consideration of context. First, we review the indirect evidence of the system justification motive via complimentary stereotyping. Second, we describe injunctification as direct evidence of a tendency to view the extant status quo (the way things are) as the way things should be. Third, we elaborate on system justification's contextual nature and the circumstances, such as threat, dependence, inescapability, and system confidence, which are likely to elicit defensive bolstering of the status quo and motivated ignorance of critical social issues. Fourth, we describe how system justification theory can increase our understanding of both resistance to and acceptance of social change, as a change moves from proposed, to imminent, to established. Finally, we discuss how threatened systems shore up their authority by co-opting legitimacy from other sources, such as governments that draw on religious concepts, and the role of institutional-level factors in perpetuating the status quo.

Thought-control difficulty motivates structure seeking.

Struggling to control one's mind can change how the world appears. In prior studies testing the compensatory control theory, reduced control over the external environment motivated the search for perceptual patterns and other forms of structured knowledge, even in remote domains. Going further, the current studies test whether difficulty controlling thoughts similarly predicts structure seeking. As hypothesized, thought-control difficulty positively predicted perceptions of causal connections between remote events (Study 1a) and nonexistent objects in visual noise (Study 1b). This effect was mediated by aversive arousal (Study 2) and caused specifically by thought-control difficulty as distinct from general difficulty (Study 3). Study 4 replicated the effect with a sample of meditators learning to control their thoughts, showing that thought-control difficulty was a powerful predictor of structure seeking. These findings reveal a novel form of motivated perception. (PsycINFO Database Record

A Gender Bias in the Attribution of Creativity: Archival and Experimental Evidence for the Perceived Association Between Masculinity and Creative Thinking.

We propose that the propensity to think creatively tends to be associated with independence and self-direction-qualities generally ascribed to men-so that men are often perceived to be more creative than women. In two experiments, we found that "outside the box" creativity is more strongly associated with stereotypically masculine characteristics (e.g., daring and self-reliance) than with stereotypically feminine characteristics (e.g., cooperativeness and supportiveness; Study 1) and that a man is ascribed more creativity than a woman when they produce identical output (Study 2). Analyzing archival data, we found that men's ideas are evaluated as more ingenious than women's ideas (Study 3) and that female executives are stereotyped as less innovative than their male counterparts when evaluated by their supervisors (Study 4). Finally, we observed that stereotypically masculine behavior enhances a man's perceived creativity, whereas identical behavior does not enhance a woman's perceived creativity (Study 5). This boost in men's perceived creativity is mediated by attributions of agency, not competence, and predicts perceptions of reward deservingness.

Positive Stereotypes Are Pervasive and Powerful.

Stereotypes and their associated category-based processes have traditionally been considered largely within the context of the negativity of their content and consequences, both among the general public and the scientific community. This review summarizes and integrates extant research on positive stereotypes, which are subjectively favorable beliefs about social groups, and examines their implications for individuals and groups directly targeted by such stereotypes. Furthermore, we examine the beneficial and adverse implications of positive stereotypes for interpersonal and intergroup relations, as well as the ways in which positive stereotypes, more so than negative stereotypes, may contribute to and perpetuate systemic differences in power and privilege.

Compensatory control and the appeal of a structured world.

People are motivated to perceive themselves as having control over their lives. Consequently, they respond to events and cognitions that reduce control with compensatory strategies for restoring perceived control to baseline levels. Prior theory and research have documented 3 such strategies: bolstering personal agency, affiliating with external systems perceived to be acting on the self's behalf, and affirming clear contingencies between actions and outcomes within the context of reduced control (here termed specific structure). We propose a 4th strategy: affirming nonspecific structure, or seeking out and preferring simple, clear, and consistent interpretations of the social and physical environments. Formulating this claim suggests that people will respond to reduced control by affirming structured interpretations that are unrelated to the control-reducing condition, and even those that entail otherwise adverse outcomes (e.g., pessimistic health prospects). Section 1 lays the conceptual foundation for our review, situating the proposed phenomenon in the literatures on control motivation and threat-compensation mechanisms. Section 2 reviews studies that have demonstrated that trait and state variations in perceived control predict a wide range of epistemic structuring tendencies, including pattern recognition and causal reasoning. We posit that these tendencies reflect a common desire for a structured understanding of one's environment. Accordingly, a new meta-analysis spanning the reviewed studies (k = 55) revealed that control reduction predicts nonspecific structure affirmation with a moderate effect size (r = .25). Section 3 reviews research on individual differences and situational moderators of this effect. The discussion addresses the interplay of compensatory control strategies and practical implications.

Randomness increases self-reported anxiety and neurophysiological correlates of performance monitoring.

Several prominent theories spanning clinical, social and developmental psychology suggest that people are motivated to see the world as a sensible orderly place. These theories presuppose that randomness is aversive because it is associated with unpredictability. If this is the case, thinking that the world is random should lead to increased anxiety and heightened monitoring of one's actions and their consequences. Here, we conduct experimental tests of both of these ideas. Participants read one of three passages: (i) comprehensible order, (ii) incomprehensible order and (iii) randomness. In Study 1, we examined the effects of these passages on self-reported anxiety. In Study 2, we examined the effects of the same manipulation on the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related brain potential associated with performance monitoring. We found that messages about randomness increased self-reported anxiety and ERN amplitude relative to comprehensible order, whereas incomprehensible order had intermediate effects. These results lend support to the theoretically important idea that randomness is unsettling because it implies that the world is unpredictable.

Subjective status shapes political preferences.

Economic inequality in America is at historically high levels. Although most Americans indicate that they would prefer greater equality, redistributive policies aimed at reducing inequality are frequently unpopular. Traditional accounts posit that attitudes toward redistribution are driven by economic self-interest or ideological principles. From a social psychological perspective, however, we expected that subjective comparisons with other people may be a more relevant basis for self-interest than is material wealth. We hypothesized that participants would support redistribution more when they felt low than when they felt high in subjective status, even when actual resources and self-interest were held constant. Moreover, we predicted that people would legitimize these shifts in policy attitudes by appealing selectively to ideological principles concerning fairness. In four studies, we found correlational (Study 1) and experimental (Studies 2-4) evidence that subjective status motivates shifts in support for redistributive policies along with the ideological principles that justify them.