Social Cognition

Ackerman, Joshua M.

2018 Social Cognition

doi: 10.1521/soco.2018.36.3.275

Why do people sometimes struggle to say “no” to persuasion attempts? Research suggests that individual self-control use can deplete people, reducing those individuals' resistance to persuasion attempts. The current investigation instead tests whether the experience of mental connection between self-control users and observers can make observers more agreeable and compliant. Greater connection led observers to exhibit more positive attitudes and decisions toward persuasive messages and advertisements containing centrally processed arguments. This research identifies an important and commonly overlooked factor in self-regulatory contexts and helps to advance our mechanistic understanding of vicarious self-control processes. Thus, in social settings marked by high mental connection, as in many group meals or shopping trips, people may suffer the depleting consequences of others' decisions.

Chen, Jacqueline M.; Ratliff, Kate A.

2018 Social Cognition

doi: 10.1521/soco.2018.36.3.301

Prejudice against social groups is a universal societal problem. This research investigated the role of psychological essentialist beliefs in predicting individual variation in prejudice levels in two large national samples. Study 1 (N = 583) showed that people with stronger essentialist beliefs had higher levels of implicit and explicit prejudice against African Americans. Study 2 (N = 3110) examined a mechanism by which people higher in essentialism form stronger intergroup attitudes using an experimental attitude induction. We demonstrated that essentialism facilitates explicit and, to some extent, implicit prejudice formation toward a novel group after brief exposure to positively or negatively valenced information about individuals belonging to that group. Our findings illustrate the importance of integrating individual difference and social cognitive approaches to understanding prejudice formation and maintenance.

Sheldon, Oliver J.; Plaks, Jason E.; Sridharan, Vasundhara; Shoda, Yuichi

2018 Social Cognition

doi: 10.1521/soco.2018.36.3.324

The covariation model of attribution holds that when an actor's behavior varies across situations, observers make situational, rather than dispositional, inferences about the actor. We conducted four studies to test the hypothesis that situationally variable behavior can also elicit strong dispositional inferences when the behavior follows a systematic if…then… situation-behavior contingency. In all studies, participants, who believed that they were interacting with another person in a 30-round repeated prisoner's dilemma game, made strong dispositional inferences about counterparts. However, the specific dispositions they inferred depended upon the type of variability the counterpart displayed: positive dispositions (e.g., rational) when the counterpart's behavior followed a systematic (if…then…) pattern that made sense given the context; negative dispositions (e.g., irrational) when the counterpart's behavior was unsystematic, or when the if…then… pattern was inappropriate for the context. Taken together, these studies begin to identify when behaviors that vary across situations improve versus harm perceivers' impressions.

Conway, Paul; Weiss, Alexa; Burgmer, Pascal; Mussweiler, Thomas

2018 Social Cognition

doi: 10.1521/soco.2018.36.3.345

A growing literature suggests that generalized distrust mindsets encourage carefully considering alternatives—yet it remains unclear whether this pertains to moral decision making. We propose that distrust simultaneously increases opposing moral response inclinations when moral decisions pit two moral responses against one another, such as classic moral dilemmas where causing harm maximizes outcomes. Such a pattern may be invisible to conventional analytic techniques that treat dilemma response inclinations as diametric opposites. Therefore, we employed process dissociation to independently assess response inclinations underlying moral dilemma responses. Three studies demonstrated that activating generalized distrust (vs. trust and control) mindsets increased both harm avoidance and out-come-maximization response tendencies. These effects canceled out for conventional relative dilemma judgments. Moreover, perceptions of feeling torn between available response options mediated the impact of distrust on both response inclinations. These findings clarify how distrust impacts decision-making processes in the moral domain.

2018 Social Cognition

doi: 10.1521/soco.2018.36.3.381