I feel your pain
Cool, but understanding...Experiencing cooler temperatures promotes perspective-taking performance
Claudia Sassenrath, Kai Sassenberg & Gün Semin
Acta Psychologica, June 2013, Pages 245-251
Abstract:
The current research examined the impact of temperature cues on perspective-taking. Individuals often start with their own point-of-view when taking another's perspective and thereby unintentionally project their own perspective onto others, which ultimately leads to egocentrically biased inferences of others' perspectives. Accordingly, perspective-taking is enhanced under conditions reducing this egocentric anchoring. In two studies, we show that perspective-taking is enhanced when participants are exposed to cooler rather than warmer temperature cues. Specifically, this is shown to be the case, because cooler temperatures reduce egocentric anchoring in perspective-taking (Study 2). Results are discussed with reference to the literature on (temperature) grounded cognition indicating a link between cold temperatures and social distance. Hence, whereas earlier research has shown that individuals feel more distant from each other when undergoing cooler thermal experiences, the present research suggests that this thermal experience prevents them from over-imputing their own perspectives onto others.
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Adrian Ward, Andrew Olsen & Daniel Wegner
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
People often think that something must have a mind to be part of a moral interaction. However, the present research suggests that minds do not create morality but that morality creates minds. In four experiments, we found that observing intentional harm to an unconscious entity - a vegetative patient, a robot, or a corpse - leads to augmented attribution of mind to that entity. A fifth experiment reconciled these results with extant research on dehumanization by showing that observing the victimization of conscious entities leads to reduced attribution of mind to those entities. Taken together, these experiments suggest that the effects of victimization vary according to victims' preexisting mental status and that people often make an intuitive cognitive error when unconscious entities are placed in harm's way. People assume that if apparent moral harm occurs, then there must be someone there to experience that harm - a harm-made mind. These findings have implications for political policies concerning right-to-life issues.
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Wen-Bin Chiou & Chun-Chia Lee
Judgment and Decision Making, May 2013, Pages 372-380
Abstract:
Social networking sites (SNSs) provide users with an efficient interface for distributing information, such as photos or wall posts, to many others simultaneously. We demonstrated experimentally that this type of indiscriminate one-to-many (i.e., monologue) communication may induce self-focused attention and thereby impair perspective taking. The present study used multiple paradigms to explore the link between engaging in online one-to-many communication and a decrease in perspective taking. Experiment 1 revealed that Facebookers who published a personal photo to the public or their friends were less likely to adopt another person's visual perspective than were those in the control group. Experiment 2 showed that Facebookers who engaged in indiscriminate one-to-many wall posting were more likely than those in the control group to rely heavily on their own perspectives. A state of self-focus, as measured by greater Stroop interference in naming the color of self-relevant versus neutral words, mediated the detrimental effect of indiscriminate one-to-many communication on cognitive perspective taking. These findings suggest that indiscriminate one-to-many communication on SNSs may promote public self-focus, leading to self-referential processing when making social judgments. Online monologue communication may be more harmful to perspective taking than previously understood.
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The Belief in a Just World as a Personal Resource in the Context of Inflation and Financial Crises
Fabian Christandl
Applied Psychology, July 2013, Pages 486-518
Abstract:
This paper examines the role of the belief in a just world as a personal resource when people are faced with the adverse consequences of inflation and financial crises by presenting results from two longitudinal studies. The first study, based on responses from 262 German residents, found that participants with a strong personal belief in a just world perceived a lower economic impact in light of price increases following a tax increase. This effect remained stable after controlling for the socioeconomic variables of gender, age, household income, and education. The second study, based on a sample of 177 German residents, found that residents with a strong personal belief in a just world perceived a lower economic impact in light of the global subprime mortgage crisis. Again, this effect remained stable after controlling for the socioeconomic variables of gender, age, household income, and education. Furthermore, the personal belief in a just world influenced perceived economic impact over time and the relationship between personal belief in a just world and perceived economic impact was partially mediated by differences between life satisfaction in the future as measured in a first wave and current life satisfaction as measured in a second wave.
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Essentialist Beliefs About Bodily Transplants in the United States and India
Meredith Meyer et al.
Cognitive Science, May/June 2013, Pages 668-710
Abstract:
Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviors of category members. We investigated whether reasoning about transplants of bodily elements showed evidence of essentialist thinking. Both Americans and Indians endorsed the possibility of transplants conferring donors' personality, behavior, and luck on recipients, consistent with essentialism. Respondents also endorsed essentialist effects even when denying that transplants would change a recipient's category membership (e.g., predicting that a recipient of a pig's heart would act more pig-like but denying that the recipient would become a pig). This finding runs counter to predictions from the strongest version of the "minimalist" position (Strevens,2000), an alternative to essentialism. Finally, studies asking about a broader range of donor-to-recipient transfers indicated that Indians essentialized more types of transfers than Americans, but neither sample essentialized monetary transfer. This suggests that results from bodily transplant conditions reflect genuine essentialism rather than broader magical thinking.
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Accent imitation positively affects language attitudes
Patti Adank et al.
Frontiers in Psychology, May 2013
Abstract:
People in conversation tend to accommodate the way they speak. It has been assumed that this tendency to imitate each other's speech patterns serves to increase liking between partners in a conversation. Previous experiments examined the effect of perceived social attractiveness on the tendency to imitate someone else's speech and found that vocal imitation increased when perceived attractiveness was higher. The present experiment extends this research by examining the inverse relationship and examines how overt vocal imitation affects attitudes. Participants listened to sentences spoken by two speakers of a regional accent (Glaswegian) of English. They vocally repeated (speaking in their own accent without imitating) the sentences spoken by a Glaswegian speaker, and subsequently imitated sentences spoken by a second Glaswegian speaker (order counterbalanced across participants). After each repeating or imitation session, participants completed a questionnaire probing the speakers' perceived power, competence, and social attractiveness. Imitating had a positive effect on the perceived social attractiveness of the speaker compared to repeating. These results are interpreted in light of Communication Accommodation Theory.
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Rich Contexts Do Not Always Enrich the Accuracy of Personality Judgments
Helen Wall et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We test the common assumption that information ‘rich' contexts lead to more accurate personality judgments than information ‘lean' contexts. Pairs of unacquainted students rendered judgments of one another's personalities after interacting in one of three, increasingly rich, contexts: Internet ‘chat', telephone, or face-to-face. Accuracy was assessed by correlating participants' judgments with a measure of targets' personalities that averaged self and informant ratings. As predicted, the visible traits of extraversion and conscientiousness were judged more accurately than the less visible traits of neuroticism and openness. However, judgment accuracy also depended on context. Judgments of extraversion and neuroticism improved as context richness increased (i.e., from Internet ‘chat' to face-to-face), whereas judgments of conscientiousness and openness improved as context richness decreased (i.e., from face-to-face to Internet ‘chat'). Our findings suggest that context richness shapes not only the availability of personality cues but also the relevance of cues in any given context.
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Anouk Keizer et al.
PLoS ONE, May 2013
Abstract:
To date, research on the disturbed experience of body size in Anorexia Nervosa (AN) mainly focused on the conscious perceptual level (i.e. body image). Here we investigated whether these disturbances extend to body schema: an unconscious, action-related representation of the body. AN patients (n = 19) and healthy controls (HC; n = 20) were compared on body-scaled action. Participants walked through door-like openings varying in width while performing a diversion task. AN patients and HC differed in the largest opening width for which they started rotating their shoulders to fit through. AN patients started rotating for openings 40% wider than their own shoulders, while HC started rotating for apertures only 25% wider than their shoulders. The results imply abnormalities in AN even at the level of the unconscious, action oriented body schema. Body representation disturbances in AN are thus more pervasive than previously assumed: They do not only affect (conscious) cognition and perception, but (unconscious) actions as well.
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The mirror effect: Self-awareness alone increases suicide thought accessibility
Leila Selimbegović & Armand Chatard
Consciousness and Cognition, September 2013, Pages 756-764
Abstract:
According to objective self-awareness theory, when individuals are in a state of self-awareness, they tend to compare themselves to their standards. Self-to-standard comparison often yields unfavorable results and can be assimilated to a failure, activating an escape motivation. Building on recent research on the link between failure and suicide thought accessibility, the present experiment tested the hypothesis that mirror exposure alone provokes an increase in suicide thought accessibility. Participants were exposed to their mirror reflection (or not) while completing a lexical decision task with suicide-related words. Self-to-standard discrepancy salience was manipulated by asking participants to list actual and ideal traits before versus after the lexical decision task. As predicted, mirror-exposed participants recognized suicide-related words quicker than those unexposed to their mirror image. Self-to-standard discrepancy salience did not moderate this effect. Discussion focuses on the role of the motivation to escape self-awareness in the availability of suicide-related ideas.
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Social Rejection Biases Estimates of Interpersonal Distance
Megan Knowles, Allison Green & Alicia Weidel
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Given the power of belonging needs to shape individuals' thoughts, feelings, and behavior, we posited that people's desire for reconnection even influences judgments of physical distance. We hypothesized that rejection motivates individuals to distance themselves from sources of rejection and draw near those who are accepting. We tested this hypothesis in five studies. Participants recalled someone who had rejected or accepted them previously (Study 1), tossed a ball with inclusive and exclusive confederates (Study 2), and relived a past rejection, acceptance, or failure in the presence of an uninvolved other (Studies 3-5). Participants provided retrospective estimates of distance to rejecting and accepting others (Studies 1-2) and to uninvolved others (Studies 3-5). Participants reported that (1) accepting others were closer than rejecting others and (2) uninvolved others were closer than nonsocial targets after rejection but not acceptance or failure. Findings suggest that individuals distort perceptions of distance to serve belonging needs.
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Rachael Brown, Ursula Kemp & Vaughan Macefield
Frontiers in Neuroscience, June 2013
Abstract:
The cardiovascular and respiratory effects of exercise have been widely studied, as have the autonomic effects of imagined and observed exercise. However, the effects of observed exercise in the first person have not been documented, nor have direct recordings of muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA) been obtained during observed or imagined exercise. The aim of the current study was to measure blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, skin blood flow, sweat release, and MSNA (via microelectrodes inserted into the common peroneal nerve), during observation of exercise from the first person point of view. It was hypothesized that the moving stimuli would produce robust compensatory increases in the above-mentioned parameters as effectively as those generated by mental imagery and - to a lesser extent - actual exercise. Nine subjects watched a first-person running video, allowing them to view the action from the perspective of the runner rather than viewing someone else perform the exercise. On average, statistically significant increases from baseline during the running phase were seen in heart rate, respiratory rate, skin blood flow, and burst amplitude of MSNA. These results suggest that observation of exercise in the first person is a strong enough stimulus to evoke "physiologically appropriate" autonomic responses that have a purely psychogenic origin.
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Processing of invisible social cues
Ida Gobbini et al.
Consciousness and Cognition, September 2013, Pages 765-770
Abstract:
Successful interactions between people are dependent on rapid recognition of social cues. We investigated whether head direction - a powerful social signal - is processed in the absence of conscious awareness. We used continuous flash interocular suppression to render stimuli invisible and compared the reaction time for face detection when faces were turned towards the viewer and turned slightly away. We found that faces turned towards the viewer break through suppression faster than faces that are turned away, regardless of eye direction. Our results suggest that detection of a face with attention directed at the viewer occurs even in the absence of awareness of that face. While previous work has demonstrated that stimuli that signal threat are processed without awareness, our data suggest that the social relevance of a face, defined more broadly, is evaluated in the absence of awareness.