#social-psychology — Public Fediverse posts

DATE: October 25, 2026 at 07:18AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: The Psychology Behind Taylor Swift's Billion-Dollar Media Empire

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192133&url=https://www.psypost.org/the-psychology-behind-taylor-swift-s-billion-dollar-media-empire/

Source: PsyPost

The intense, one-sided connections that fans feel toward pop star Taylor Swift—known as a "parasocial relationship"—and their fear of missing out on shared cultural moments strongly predict whether they will attend her concerts and watch her films. These predictive links highlight how the psychological need for social belonging drives large-scale consumer behavior, according to a recent study published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media.

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192133&url=https://www.psypost.org/the-psychology-behind-taylor-swift-s-billion-dollar-media-empire/

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https://www.europesays.com/iran/341130/ Chessany Edmonds seeks Lebanon School Board seat | News #BehaviouralSciences #child #cognition #education #Health #HumanDevelopment #Lebanon #LebanonCommunitySchoolCorporation #MentalHealth #PsychologicalConcepts #Psychology #psychotherapy #SocialIssues #SocialPsychology #SocialWork

DATE: October 25, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Anger and fear nudge voters toward different kinds of leader faces, study suggests

URL: https://www.psypost.org/anger-and-fear-nudge-voters-toward-different-kinds-of-leader-faces-study-suggests/

The specific emotions that political issues stir up in voters may subtly shift the physical traits they look for in a leader. A new study published in Cognition and Emotion indicates that when people think about a policy problem that makes them angry, they lean slightly more toward dominant-looking leaders than when they think about one that makes them afraid. Fear, by contrast, appears to put more weight on whether a leader’s face looks trustworthy.

When people look at a stranger’s face, they form instantaneous impressions about that person’s character. As a 2008 behavioral and computer modeling study found, these rapid evaluations boil down to two main facial qualities: trustworthiness and dominance. Trustworthiness is an impression of a person’s intentions, signaling whether they appear warm, cooperative, and safe to approach. Dominance is an impression of physical strength and assertiveness, signaling a person’s capacity to impose their will or confront rivals.

These split-second facial judgments influence real-world voting decisions, and the traits voters prefer often depend on the surrounding political environment and their own personal beliefs. For instance, a 2025 study by members of the team behind the new research, covered by PsyPost, found that people who are generally distrustful of information from others tend to hold more rigid, dogmatic beliefs and more conservative views, which in turn predicts a preference for dominant, authoritarian-looking leaders. Broader contexts matter as well, with voters generally favoring dominant faces during wartime or conflict and trustworthy faces during peaceful periods.

Different emotional reactions to the same crisis can also pull people in different directions. Although anger and fear are both unpleasant, high-stress emotions, a 2001 study on emotion and risk showed that they trigger opposing mindsets: anger makes people feel certain and willing to take risks, whereas fear makes people feel vulnerable and cautious.

In the political arena, a 2025 panel study of Ukrainians conducted during the Russian invasion found that citizens who reacted to the war with aggressive, angry emotions showed stronger preferences for dominant leaders (and for the other leader traits measured, such as warmth and competence), while those who reacted with fear showed little change in their preferences.

Most research on these emotional dynamics has focused on wars, terrorist attacks, or major geopolitical crises. Far less is known about how anger and fear shape leader evaluations during everyday domestic politics, where citizens routinely react to policy debates over the economy, healthcare, or public safety. The research was led by Mariana von Mohr, a lecturer in social and affective neuroscience at the University of Kent, and conducted at the Centre for the Politics of Feelings at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, which is directed by co-author Manos Tsakiris, a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

“Political issues often evoke strong emotions, which can shape political behavior in different ways,” von Mohr told PsyPost. “For example, anger can increase support for tougher, more confrontational political action, whereas fear can lead people to seek reassurance and favor responses that promise greater safety and protection. Here we wanted to understand whether these emotions also shape who people would prefer to vote for when dealing with the issues that concern them most, simply based on how dominant or trustworthy a potential leader looks.”

To investigate this, the researchers recruited 201 American participants through the online platform Prolific, ensuring the group was evenly split between people who identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party and those who identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party. After removing four individuals who did not pass attention checks during the tasks, the final sample consisted of 197 participants.

The experiment used a within-subjects design, meaning every participant went through both the anger condition and the fear condition in a randomized order. In the anger section, participants viewed a list of 16 major national problems taken from a Pew Research Center survey, such as inflation, gun violence, illegal immigration, and climate change. They were asked to select the single issue that made them feel the most angry, defined as an issue that upsets or annoys them and brings up hostility, and to rate the intensity of their anger on a scale from 0 to 100.

Immediately after reflecting on that issue, participants completed a leader choice task consisting of 36 rapid rounds. In each round, two computer-generated faces appeared side by side on the screen for up to three seconds, and participants had to click on the leader they believed would be most capable of handling their chosen political issue. These nine digital faces were drawn from a standardized scientific database and had been systematically altered to represent different combinations of facial dominance and facial trustworthiness.

In the fear section, the same participants went through an identical process, but this time they selected the political issue from the list that made them feel the most afraid, defined as an issue that worries them a lot and feels like a frightening threat. After rating their fear on the 0 to 100 scale, they completed the 36-round face selection task again to pick the best leader to address that frightening issue.

Across the sample, both emotions were felt intensely, with average intensity ratings of 86.51 out of 100 for anger and 81.95 for fear. The issues most frequently selected for anger were illegal immigration (19.3 percent), gun violence (17.8 percent), and inflation (15.2 percent). For fear, participants most commonly selected climate change (15.2 percent), illegal immigration (14.2 percent), and domestic terrorism (11.2 percent).

The researchers first combined each participant’s choices into an overall index measuring the probability of picking a more dominant and less trustworthy-looking leader. Statistical analyses accounting for emotional intensity and specific policy issues showed that participants had a 49.5 percent probability of choosing a dominant-looking leader when angry, compared to a 46.5 percent probability when fearful, meaning participants on average leaned slightly toward the more trustworthy-looking face in both conditions. How intensely participants felt the emotion was unrelated to their choices. While this 3 percentage point absolute shift between anger and fear is modest, the authors note that even small emotional shifts could matter across an entire population during elections, when campaigns frequently amplify fear- and anger-inducing issues.

To see what drove this shift, the authors broke down the choices round by round to look at how participants weighed dominance cues and trustworthiness cues separately. When participants were in the fear condition, a face’s level of trustworthiness increased the likelihood that it would be chosen, whereas a face’s level of dominance had no statistically significant effect on their choices. When participants were in the anger condition, the positive pull of facial trustworthiness dropped, while facial dominance gained a stronger positive influence on their selections.

“Our findings suggest that how we feel about political issues can influence the kinds of leaders we find appealing, even based on something as simple as their facial appearance,” von Mohr explained. “When angry, people placed greater importance on facial cues of dominance (appearing strong and assertive) and less on trustworthiness. When afraid, they placed more importance on trustworthiness (appearing reliable and benevolent).”

The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2022, which similarly found that anger increased participants’ preferences for dominant-looking leaders over trustworthy ones. However, that earlier study examined anger triggered by non-political frustrations, whereas the new study suggests that anger tied to real-world policy issues is linked to a similar shift while directly contrasting it against political fear.

The researchers also examined the role of political party affiliation. Consistent with previous studies, Republicans showed a higher overall preference for dominant-looking leaders (52.5 percent probability) than Democrats did (43.5 percent probability), representing a 9 percentage point partisan gap. That gap was about three times as large as the 3-point difference between anger and fear. Even though Democrats and Republicans tended to pick different policy issues as their top concerns, the difference between anger and fear did not vary significantly by party, suggesting the emotions influenced leader choices in similar ways for both groups.

The emotion effects did not vary by participants’ gender and held when accounting for the order in which participants completed the tasks. When the researchers statistically controlled for the exact political issue each participant selected in the round-by-round analysis, the distinct effects of anger and fear on how participants weighed dominance and trustworthiness cues remained stable. In the overall-preference analysis, entering each specific issue as a separate factor left the anger-versus-fear difference about the same size but made the estimate less precise.

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these findings. Because participants were allowed to choose whichever political issue personally angered or frightened them the most, the study cannot completely separate the effect of the emotion from the nature of the policy issue itself. Although the researchers used statistical controls to account for the different issues selected, future experiments that induce anger or fear while keeping the policy topic identical for everyone would help isolate the pure effect of the emotion. The study also compared anger only with fear, without a neutral condition, so it cannot say whether anger made dominant faces more appealing, fear made them less appealing, or both.

Additionally, the faces used in the task were standardized, computer-generated avatars rather than photographs of real politicians. While digital faces allow scientists to precisely adjust facial structure without interference from a person’s hairstyle, age, race, or gender, real-world elections involve all of those visual factors alongside party labels and campaign rhetoric. Finally, the study only tested American voters, so it is not known whether the same patterns hold in other countries. Future research could also examine whether other political emotions, such as hope or disgust, shape leader preferences.

The study, “Political emotions shape preferences for leaders’ facial traits: anger favours dominance, fear favours trustworthiness,” was authored by Mariana Von Mohr and Manos Tsakiris.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/anger-and-fear-nudge-voters-toward-different-kinds-of-leader-faces-study-suggests/

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DATE: October 25, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Dominance-seeking workers see more sexual interest in coworkers’ behavior, and that may help explain harassment

URL: https://www.psypost.org/dominance-seeking-workers-see-more-sexual-interest-in-coworkers-behavior-and-that-may-help-explain-harassment/

Two survey studies found that employees with a strong desire to assert dominance were more likely to read sexual interest into the friendly behavior of a coworker of another gender. People who perceived more sexual interest, in turn, reported engaging in more workplace sexual harassment, particularly men. The paper was published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

People often have to interpret whether another person’s friendly behavior reflects simple politeness or romantic and sexual interest. These judgments are not always accurate, and neutral behaviors such as smiling or making small talk can sometimes be misread as signs of sexual attraction. Such misperceptions can create serious problems in the workplace, where professional interactions are shaped not only by attraction but also by status, hierarchy, and power.

Research suggests that men are, on average, more likely than women to perceive sexual interest in ambiguous social behavior, although both sexes can make such errors. In organizational settings, however, individual differences in the desire for social dominance may be especially important. People high in dominance motivation tend to seek status through forceful, controlling, or coercive behavior, whereas prestige-oriented individuals try to gain respect through competence, knowledge, and generosity.

Dominance may therefore make some employees more likely to interpret coworkers’ behavior through a sexualized lens and to assume sexual interest where none was intended. These perceptions may in turn make inappropriate advances seem justified to the person making them and increase the risk of workplace sexual harassment.

Study authors Sanne Feenstra of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Mark van Vugt note that previous research suggests that perceptions of sexual intent can act as triggers for sexual harassment because they shape how people interpret social cues. People who perceive heightened sexual interest may not see their own behavior as harassment, but rather as an appropriate response to the presumed interest of the other person.

The researchers also argued that heightened perceptions of sexual intent might lead dominance-motivated individuals to misread signs of non-consent as “token resistance,” resulting in continued unwanted advances. They conducted two studies to test these ideas.

The first study included 209 employed adults in the United Kingdom recruited through Prolific Academic, who completed two surveys one week apart. Their average age was 38, half were women, and all were heterosexual, because the study’s design involved rating the behavior of someone of another gender.

In the first survey, participants completed measures of dominance motivation (e.g., “I enjoy having control over others”) and prestige motivation (e.g., “My colleagues respect and admire me”), along with sociosexual orientation (openness to and comfort with uncommitted sexual relationships), their formal power at work, and their gender. In the second survey, they read descriptions of seven behaviors by a coworker of another gender, such as smiling brightly and striking up a friendly conversation on the first day of work, and rated how much each indicated sexual interest. Women rated a male colleague’s behavior toward a woman, and men rated a female colleague’s behavior toward a man.

The second study included 345 employed adults in the U.K., also recruited through Prolific Academic. Their average age was 40, and 48% were women. They completed three surveys one week apart: the first two used the same measures as Study 1, and the third asked about general workplace misconduct over the past year and sexual harassment over the past three months.

The harassment measure asked how often participants had engaged in six behaviors toward a colleague of another gender, such as asking intimate questions about their sex life. Reported harassment was rare, with average scores close to the “never” end of the scale.

In the first study, participants with stronger dominance motivation tended to perceive more sexual interest in their coworker’s behavior, regardless of their gender, formal power, or openness to casual sex. Prestige motivation was not linked to these perceptions. Women tended to perceive more sexual interest in men’s behavior than men did in women’s behavior, which the authors say likely reflects women’s expectations about men’s sexual interest rather than a contradiction of earlier research, since the study did not measure whether perceptions were accurate.

The second study replicated these findings. In addition, participants who perceived more sexual interest in coworkers’ behavior reported engaging in more sexual harassment, and these perceptions helped account for the link between dominance motivation and harassment. In analyses that were not planned in advance, this pattern held only for men: among women, perceiving sexual interest was not associated with harassment.

Perceptions of sexual interest were not related to general workplace misconduct, suggesting that the process is specific to sexual harassment rather than to bad behavior at work more broadly. Participants who reported more harassment were also slightly more likely to be men, to be more open to casual sex, and to report more general misconduct.

“Our findings highlight a psychological process linking dominance motivation to workplace sexual harassment and offer insights to diminish such harassment,” the study authors concluded. They suggest that organizations could place less weight on dominance-oriented traits when hiring and promoting employees and reward cooperation and respect instead.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of potential psychological mechanisms behind workplace sexual harassment. However, it should be noted that although the measures were collected at different times, the design of this study does not allow causal inferences to be derived from the results. The associations were also modest: dominance motivation accounted for a small share of the differences in sexual intent perceptions, and the link between those perceptions and self-reported harassment was weak.

All data were self-reported, so participants may have underreported harassment, and the harassment measure had low reliability. Participants rated descriptions of behavior rather than interactions with actual coworkers, and the study did not assess whether their perceptions were accurate. Both samples consisted of heterosexual adults in the U.K., so the findings may not extend to other countries, workplaces, or same-gender interactions.

The paper, “From Dominance to Harassment: The Hidden Role of Sexual Intent Perceptions in the Workplace,” was authored by Sanne Feenstra and Mark van Vugt.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/dominance-seeking-workers-see-more-sexual-interest-in-coworkers-behavior-and-that-may-help-explain-harassment/

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DATE: October 24, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Expecting to lose economic standing hurts well-being more than expecting to gain helps it

URL: https://www.psypost.org/expecting-to-lose-economic-standing-hurts-well-being-more-than-expecting-to-gain-helps-it/

Believing that your socioeconomic position could decline in the future may itself reduce well-being by increasing anxiety about social status, according to research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Expectations of moving up the ladder, by contrast, had weaker and less consistent effects.

Social mobility describes movement up or down the socioeconomic ladder, which can involve changes in income, employment and social standing. Much of the previous research has focused on the promise of upward mobility. But the prospect of moving in the opposite direction may be especially important at a time when some people in wealthy countries expect to experience lower living standards than previous generations.

The researchers focused on status anxiety, or worry about one’s position in the socioeconomic hierarchy. This can include concerns about losing status, failing to advance or being left behind compared with other people. Because anticipated downward mobility represents the possibility of losing resources and social standing, the researchers proposed that it could increase status anxiety and consequently reduce well-being.

Led by Davide Melita of the University of Granada in Spain, the researchers conducted four studies involving 2,819 people in Spain and the United States. The first two were surveys, while the final two were experiments designed to determine whether changing people’s expectations about their socioeconomic future could actually affect status anxiety.

Study 1 surveyed 216 full-time U.S. workers (average age 39; 49% women) about their beliefs regarding mobility in American society as a whole, such as whether most people now earn less than the previous generation. Those who believed downward mobility was more common reported greater status anxiety, which was in turn associated with lower life satisfaction, poorer perceived health and more depressive symptoms. Beliefs about upward mobility were not linked to status anxiety.

Study 2 surveyed 1,536 people in Spain (51% women), recruited to resemble the national population, using single questions about whether participants expected their own socioeconomic status to improve or worsen. Expecting one’s own status to worsen was associated with greater status anxiety and lower life satisfaction. Unexpectedly, expecting one’s status to improve was also associated with greater status anxiety, although it was directly linked to higher life satisfaction as well. The authors suggest that strong expectations of change in either direction may bring uncertainty about the future.

The researchers then tested the relationship experimentally. In Study 3, 472 Spanish university students (average age 22; 70% women) imagined starting a new life in a fictional society called Bimboola. Everyone began in the middle-income group, but participants were randomly told they had good chances of moving up, staying in the same group or moving down, while the level of inequality in the society was held constant.

Participants told they were likely to move down reported more status anxiety than those told they were likely to stay put, although the difference was small. In exploratory analyses, that increased anxiety in turn predicted lower satisfaction with their imagined life in Bimboola. Being told they were likely to move up, however, did not affect status anxiety.

Study 4 repeated the experiment with 595 employed Americans recruited online, and here the manipulation had much stronger effects on participants’ expectations. Prospects of moving down increased status anxiety, while prospects of moving up reduced it, and these changes in anxiety carried through to life satisfaction in Bimboola in opposite directions. The negative effect of anticipated decline was larger than the positive effect of anticipated advancement.

Across the four studies, the pattern for downward mobility was notably consistent: believing that one’s socioeconomic position could worsen was associated with greater status anxiety and, through that anxiety, lower well-being. By contrast, the results for upward mobility varied between studies, and only the U.S. experiment found that prospects of moving up reduced status anxiety and indirectly increased life satisfaction.

Melita and colleagues summarized, “our findings suggest that both upward and downward beliefs influence well-being through status anxiety, but the effects of downward mobility beliefs are stronger and more consistent.” The authors argue that policies aimed at improving well-being should not only expand opportunities for upward mobility but also protect vulnerable groups from economic downturns, for example by strengthening social safety nets.

Some limitations should be noted. The first two studies were correlational, and Study 2 measured mobility expectations with single questions. The experiments involved an imaginary society rather than actual unemployment, income loss or downward mobility, and they measured satisfaction with life in that imaginary society rather than participants’ real lives.

The researchers also noted that cultural circumstances could influence people’s reactions to the scenarios. The Spanish experiment involved young adults in a country with high youth unemployment, who may be skeptical about upward mobility, while Americans tend to overestimate how much mobility exists.

The study, “Prospects of Downward Mobility Cause Status Anxiety and Life Dissatisfaction,” was authored by Davide Melita, Matthias S. Gobel, Juan Matamoros-Lima, Rosa Rodríguez-Bailón and Guillermo B. Willis.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/expecting-to-lose-economic-standing-hurts-well-being-more-than-expecting-to-gain-helps-it/

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DATE: October 23, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: People who believe conspiracy theories overestimate how many others agree, new research finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-believe-conspiracy-theories-overestimate-how-many-others-agree-new-research-finds/

Reading a conspiracy theory does more than just introduce a suspicious narrative; it also inflates a person’s estimate of how many other people believe the claim is true. According to new research published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, this exaggerated sense of public agreement may help explain why people come to accept conspiracy theories after encountering them. In one of the experiments, showing people concrete statistical data about how few others actually endorsed these claims reduced their own belief in them.

Conspiracy theories are explanations for events that assume multiple actors are secretly working together to achieve a harmful or unlawful goal. When people feel uncertain about how to interpret events, they often look to others for cues on what to think or do. Psychologists refer to these cues as descriptive norms, which are perceptions of how common a particular belief or behavior is within a group. Relying on descriptive norms is a form of social proof, where people assume that if many others hold a view, that view is likely valid.

Although conspiracy theories frequently draw massive attention online, actual believers usually represent a minority of the broader public. Still, those who endorse these narratives often assume their views are widely shared. For example, a 2021 study of British participants found that people consistently overestimated how much their peers believed in conspiracy theories, and that thinking peers endorsed these ideas strongly predicted a person’s own belief. Similarly, a 2023 study in Turkey indicated that people who believed local conspiracy theories overestimated how many ordinary citizens and experts agreed with them.

Correcting these misperceptions can alter how people think. In a 2021 experiment with British parents, showing participants that most other parents rejected anti-vaccine conspiracy theories reduced their own endorsement of those claims. Building on this foundation, the new research was led by Jan-Willem van Prooijen, head of the Social Psychology section at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, and endowed professor of radicalization, extremism, and conspiracy thinking at Maastricht University.

He and his colleagues wanted to test whether simply encountering a conspiracy theory inflates perceived descriptive norms, and whether providing hard data on public skepticism can reduce belief in a wide variety of general conspiracy theories.

“People often encounter conspiracy theories, for instance online,” van Prooijen told PsyPost. “One problem is that extreme voices that spread conspiracy theories (e.g., online influencers) sometimes get excessive exposure. That might raise the impression that these conspiracy theories are more widely believed than is actually the case. We wanted to examine these dynamics in our research: Do conspiracy beliefs depend on how normative people think they are, and can we use these insights to develop an intervention?”

To investigate these questions, the researchers conducted six online studies totaling 2,906 participants from the United States and the United Kingdom. All six studies were preregistered, meaning the researchers publicly recorded their hypotheses and analysis plans before collecting data.

In the first pair of studies, the researchers examined the relationship between personal conspiracy beliefs and perceived norms using 300 American participants in Study 1a and 299 British participants in Study 1b. Participants rated how plausible they found 10 popular conspiracy claims, such as the idea that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job by the U.S. government, on a scale from 0 to 100, and then used the same scale to estimate the average plausibility rating given by the other participants in the study.

In both countries, the actual average belief in these 10 theories was relatively low, sitting at 33.09 out of 100 in the American sample and 34.16 in the British sample. However, participants estimated the group average to be higher, guessing 39.85 in the United States and 42.30 in the United Kingdom. Those who strongly endorsed the conspiracy theories themselves were much more likely to think other participants believed them too, with strong correlations of 0.65 in the U.S. sample and 0.71 in the U.K. sample, and their estimates of the group average were less accurate than the estimates of skeptics.

The researchers also tested whether conspiracy believers saw themselves as standing out from the crowd, given that past research has linked conspiracy belief to a desire to feel unique. By comparing each person’s own rating to their estimate of the group rating, the team found that stronger believers saw the gap between their own views and the group’s as no larger than skeptics did.

These initial findings align with research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which found that individuals who are overconfident in their thinking abilities tend to hold stronger conspiracy beliefs and vastly overestimate how many others agree with them.

Because the first two studies only looked at correlations, the researchers next tested whether reading a conspiracy theory directly causes people to think the idea is popular. They recruited 505 American participants for Study 2a and 501 British participants for Study 2b. In each study, half of the participants were randomly assigned to read an anonymous blog post claiming that pharmaceutical companies secretly suppress medical cures to boost their profits, while the other half read a blog post arguing that pharmaceutical companies do not hide cures.

After reading and summarizing the text, participants rated their own belief in four statements about pharmaceutical conspiracies on a 0 to 100 scale, and estimated how the other participants in the study rated them. In the American sample, reading the conspiratorial blog post raised personal belief to an average of 61.78, compared to 49.46 among those who read the non-conspiratorial text. It also pushed estimates of other people’s belief up to 62.64, compared to 51.00 in the control group.

The British sample in Study 2b showed the same pattern. Personal belief averaged 59.78 after reading the conspiracy post versus 41.99 in the control group, while estimates of others’ beliefs rose to 60.28 compared to 46.41 in the control condition. Statistical mediation analyses were consistent with the idea that the increase in personal belief ran through this heightened sense that others believed the claim. But the reverse pattern, in which people’s newly strengthened beliefs shaped their guesses about others, also fit the data, so these analyses cannot establish which came first.

“One reason why people believe conspiracy theories is because they assume many others believe them as well,” van Prooijen explained. “Conspiracy beliefs thus spread via social influence processes. Understanding these processes can help design effective interventions to reduce conspiracy beliefs.”

To test whether changing perceived norms can directly alter conspiracy beliefs, the researchers manipulated the norm information given to participants in Studies 3 and 4. In Study 3, 501 American participants were presented with six popular conspiracy theories, such as the claim that the government uses subliminal messages on television. Half were told that “especially many” previous participants found the statements plausible, while the other half were told that “only a few” found them plausible.

This vague wording did not produce a statistically significant difference between the two groups. Participants told that many others believed the claims scored an average of 44.48 out of 100 on personal belief, compared to 41.65 among those told that few others believed them. The authors noted that words like “many” and “few” are open to personal interpretation; for instance, learning that even 10 percent of the public believes an extreme claim might still register as a large number to some people. Because this study did not measure whether participants’ sense of the norm actually shifted, the authors acknowledge another possibility: that people do not take their cues from norm information at all, and that the link seen in earlier studies reflects people projecting their own beliefs onto others.

In Study 4, the team tested whether providing specific, factual statistics would be more effective. They recruited 800 American participants and showed them eight conspiracy theories from the first study. Half of the participants saw a bar chart for each theory displaying the actual distribution of ratings from Study 1a, along with the median score and a note explaining that most participants did not find the statement plausible at all. The other half saw the conspiracy statements without any statistical data.

Providing concrete data shifted how participants viewed both the public consensus and the theories themselves. Those who saw the charts estimated the previous group’s average belief at 20.95 out of 100, compared to 38.34 among those who received no data. In turn, personal endorsement of the conspiracy theories dropped to an average of 24.06 in the group that saw the factual charts, compared to 33.70 in the control group.

“We have done two studies testing the intervention, but it only worked if we gave people factual statistical information of how few people believed a conspiracy theory,” van Prooijen noted. “If we provided more abstract information, only stating that ‘few people’ believe the theory without providing concrete numbers, the intervention did not work. It remains speculative why that is the case, but it is nevertheless informative for future interventions based on this research.”

“The practical significance is that these insights quite directly suggest an intervention to reduce conspiracy beliefs,” van Prooijen said. “We have tested the effects of exposing people to factual statistical information of how widespread belief in a particular conspiracy theory is. Such information often clarifies to people that a conspiracy theory actually is not widely endorsed at all, which decreases the likelihood that people will believe the theory themselves.”

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these results. Participants in brief online experiments may partly respond the way they think researchers expect, which the authors note could mean these effects are smaller in everyday life, and the “others” in these studies were fellow online participants rather than the broader population. In addition, social media algorithms and online communities can surround users with like-minded believers, creating environments where conspiracy theories genuinely are the local norm.

“It is important to keep in mind that in everyday life, these processes are likely to be more complicated,” van Prooijen said. “For instance, we examined the effects of exposing people to conspiracy theories on their perceptions of how normative belief in these theories is. But in real life, people to some extent also choose what information they wish to be exposed to. People may for instance actively search the Internet looking for conspiracy theories, and be motivated to think belief in these theories is widely shared.”

The authors also point out that factual norm interventions could backfire if applied to the rare conspiracy theories that actually are endorsed by a majority of the public, such as theories surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Future studies could examine how these social processes operate in real-world online networks and in more collectivistic cultures, where pressure to conform to group norms may be even stronger.

“An important caveat is that the intervention that we tested might only work in communities where a particular conspiracy theory is indeed not so widespread,” van Prooijen added. “Some conspiracy theories ARE widespread, for instance in the general population (e.g., about the Kennedy assassination), or in specific groups (e.g., online anti-vaccination groups). These are complications that need to be investigated further, and are important to take into account before putting these insights into practice.”

“We were excited to see that our findings almost naturally suggested an intervention, which indeed had the anticipated effects,” he continued. “At the same time, the intervention was successful in only one experiment. We need more testing to assess the effectiveness of this approach. One possible goal is to examine these issues in a longitudinal design: What is the long-term effectiveness of an intervention based on information about descriptive norms?”

The study, “Everyone Knows It’s a Hoax: The Role of Perceived Descriptive Norms in Conspiracy Beliefs,” was authored by Jan-Willem van Prooijen, Paul K. Bergmann, Vladimira Čavojová, and Jakub Šrol.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/people-who-believe-conspiracy-theories-overestimate-how-many-others-agree-new-research-finds/

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Scientists discover a surprising secret behind the human brain’s wrinkles

Most primates have relatively large brains covered in distinctive folds and grooves. However, common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) are…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Science #SocialPsychology;Perception;ChildDevelopment;MentalHealth;NewSpecies;Monkeys;InvasiveSpecies;EvolutionaryBiology
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/891926/

DATE: October 22, 2026 at 03:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Haunted houses may bring people closer, but psychological research suggests the bonding really happens on the ride home

URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-benefits-of-frightening-activities-depend-on-what-you-do-afterward-according-to-new-psychology-research/

A new study published in the journal Emotion provides evidence that visiting a haunted house with others is linked to feeling more connected to them. People who felt more scared, and who held hands or made physical contact, were more likely to say the experience brought them closer, though before-and-after closeness ratings barely changed, and interviews suggested that talking about the experience afterward may be where much of the bonding happens.

Humans are highly social creatures, and forming bonds with others is strongly linked to overall health and psychological well-being. Scientists have gathered substantial evidence showing that sharing positive emotions, like laughing at a comedy show or cheering at a concert, amplifies interpersonal closeness. A separate line of research suggests that negative emotions, specifically fear, also push people to seek out the company of others. When people face a common threat, they often prefer to face it together rather than alone.

Beyond simply seeking company, shared emotional arousal can create a sense of unity. Previous studies indicate that fear can spread from person to person, synchronizing heart rates and potentially reinforcing group cohesion. Most previous experiments exploring the link between fear and social bonding relied on artificial laboratory settings or situations involving genuine threats. The researchers wanted to investigate how fear affects relationships in a recreational context, where the threat is entirely simulated.

Jane Wiley conducted this research as an undergraduate student at the University of Florida and is now an incoming social psychology doctoral student at the University of Virginia. The project grew out of a passion Wiley shares with their faculty advisor and the study’s senior author, Lawton K. “Ken” Swan.

“He and I are huge horror and haunted house fans,” Wiley told PsyPost. “We have shared plenty of stories (and have heard many others from haunted house guests) of how going through a haunted house together can be a strong bonding experience.”

Wiley noted that anecdotal success stories served as inspiration for the project. “A first date he had at Halloween Horror Nights led to a happy marriage, and I got very close with a best friend — Garrett Johnson, another author of the paper — after we went through a haunted house together,” they said. “This interpersonal focus had not been researched in recreational fear literature when we began, so that was what drew us to studying what we did.”

Millions of people seek out recreational fear every year by riding roller coasters, watching horror movies, or visiting haunted attractions. The scientists designed this project to test whether the fear experienced in these playful, safe environments translates into stronger social ties. They wanted to know if the temporary thrill of a scare can generate a lasting sense of interpersonal warmth among friends, family members, and acquaintances.

To explore these ideas, Wiley and their colleagues at the University of Florida conducted a series of five studies over three Halloween seasons at a commercial haunted attraction in Florida, the Gainesville Fear Garden. In the first study, the team surveyed 986 attraction attendees immediately after they finished a sensory deprivation haunted house. The participants answered questions on a 7-point scale regarding how much fear they felt, how much they enjoyed the attraction, and whether the experience brought them closer to the person in their group they already felt closest to. The researchers also asked if participants communicated or held hands with their companion during the event.

About 48 percent of participants agreed that the experience brought them closer to their companion. Higher levels of reported fear predicted a stronger feeling of having bonded, with each additional point of fear on the 7-point scale associated with about a fifth of a point higher rating on the bonding question. Holding hands, communicating during the event, and enjoying the experience also predicted higher ratings. This provided preliminary, correlational evidence that shared fear in a fun setting is linked to feeling closer.

To verify these findings and look for measurable changes, the researchers conducted a second study with 500 participants during the next Halloween season. This time, guests completed surveys both immediately before and right after navigating the attraction. This method allowed the scientists to measure shifts in interpersonal closeness. As in the first study, participants were asked to focus on the person in their group they felt closest to.

Once again, the amount of fear a person felt predicted how much they believed the experience brought them closer to their companion, with 58 percent agreeing that the attraction brought them closer. Yet, when the scientists looked at the direct difference between the before and after closeness ratings, they found no measurable change: participants rated closeness at an average of 6.27 out of 7 before entering and 6.12 after exiting. The researchers suspected a ceiling effect, meaning that because these participants already rated their relationship so highly before entering the attraction, there was very little mathematical room for their closeness score to increase on a 7-point scale.

For the third study, the researchers adjusted their focus to see if the bonding effect applied to less intimate relationships. They surveyed 554 participants, asking them to focus on the group member they felt the least close to, or someone they argued with most often. Participants were asked if the attraction brought them closer to this specific person, how much fear they felt, and if they made any physical contact.

The scientists found that fear and physical contact remained strong predictors of feeling brought together, even for the least close companions. Approximately 45 percent of participants agreed that the experience made them feel closer to their least close group member. When asked about their party as a whole, an even higher percentage, about 64 percent, felt the experience brought their entire group closer. This suggests that the link between fear and feeling closer is not limited to already-close relationships, and the authors suggest the effect may be even stronger at the group level, though the group and individual figures came from different questions.

In the fourth study, the only one that was preregistered, the researchers again attempted to capture a measurable shift in closeness from before to after the haunted house. They maintained their focus on least close companions to avoid the ceiling effect seen in earlier attempts. The researchers collected complete survey data from 263 attendees who rated their closeness to their least close groupmate before entering and then again after exiting. The team also asked the participants to rate their fear, enjoyment, and physical contact during the immersive 30-minute experience.

The predictive model held up for a fourth time, with fear, physical contact, and enjoyment all predicting perceptions of enhanced closeness. Additionally, the researchers finally detected a statistically significant increase in closeness ratings from before the experience to afterward, rising from 4.61 before entering to 4.81 after exiting, an average increase of just 0.21 points on a 7-point scale. This modest change raised questions about why about half of participants said the experience brought them closer, even though their numerical closeness ratings barely moved.

“Our most surprising finding was when we kept seeing no pre-to-post change in closeness, prior to figuring out that post-haunt reflection is essential for bonding to occur,” Wiley noted.

Wiley added that this lack of initial change was difficult to interpret at first. “This ultimately ended up being a good obstacle to encounter since it led us to transition to qualitative data collection (which helped us deduce the post-experience reflection bit), but it was hard to make sense of at the time,” Wiley said. “So I would say the most surprising finding is that going through a haunted house together alone, without the time to talk and laugh afterwards, does not seem to be sufficient for significant bonding.”

To understand this paradox, the researchers conducted a fifth and final study consisting of face-to-face qualitative interviews. Qualitative research involves gathering non-numerical data, such as conversational responses, to understand underlying concepts, opinions, and motivations. The researchers interviewed 20 guests right after they completed the haunted house and the quantitative survey. They asked the participants what feeling closer meant to them and why their numerical scores might not have changed despite reporting a stronger bond.

In the interviews, 16 of the 20 attendees said that talking, laughing, and swapping stories about the scares afterward, such as on the car ride home, played a central role in making them feel closer. Fourteen described the novelty of the experience as part of its appeal, and many said that relying on one another while blindfolded or frightened created a sense of vulnerability. Twelve commented on the survey itself: some said they had not yet had time to process the experience, and several said they had not distinguished between their overall closeness and their closeness in that moment when answering the questions.

“Haunted houses seem to have the ability to make two people feel closer together, whether these two people were previously very close or not,” Wiley explained. “In other words, going through a haunted attraction with either your best friend or your annoying coworker will likely prove to be beneficial to the relationship. However, this link is quite contingent on what you and that other person do after the experience.”

Wiley emphasized that what happens after the scare may matter most. “Post-haunt reflection is important to the process of bonding: the haunted house on its own may not do much to strengthen the relationship, but if you talk, reminisce, and laugh about the experience afterwards, you’ll probably feel more bonded with that person,” they said.

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. All five studies took place at one attraction whose format changed from year to year, and none compared haunted house visitors with people doing a non-scary activity together, so the studies cannot show that fear itself, rather than simply sharing a fun outing, drives the sense of bonding. Closeness was measured with single survey items, only the fourth study was preregistered, and in the interviews, participants were told about the earlier null results before being asked to explain them.

“As there is with any study, ours certainly had limitations,” Wiley noted. “We used convenience samples of people who were already at the haunted house, so not only were race, ability, and income unevenly distributed, but our conclusions can only really be generalized to people who would normally show up at a haunted house with their friends or family (this is a double-edged sword though — we’re interested in recreational fear, so we are particularly interested in people who seek out these experiences on their own time anyway).”

Environmental factors during the surveys might have also influenced the data. “We were surveying people inside the bar of the haunted house, which was a pretty chaotic and high-traffic space: the music was loud, people were drinking, and participants filled out surveys side-by-side with other participants, who in some cases were the people they came with,” Wiley explained. “So it was definitely not a distraction-free environment we were collecting data in, which may have impacted responses. We also only examined the impact of haunted houses in particular, so we cannot make these same conclusions yet about other forms of recreational fear, like horror movies or extreme sports.”

Scaring people together is not a guaranteed relationship fix. Across the studies, only about half of participants agreed the haunted house brought them closer, and a notable minority disagreed. The authors speculate that shared fear might strain a relationship when people’s fear responses are badly mismatched or one person feels unsupported, and they propose that recreational fear may act as an interpersonal stress test: responding to a frightened companion with comfort and humor could reinforce a bond, while failing to do so could weaken it.

Expanding the research could yield useful insights into how shared emotional intensity shapes human connection over time. “We would definitely like to expand on this study, particularly adding an experimental manipulation where some participants have time for post-experience reflection while others don’t, in order to investigate the cause-and-effect relationship,” Wiley said. “We’d also like to see if this bonding pattern exists for other forms of recreational fear.”

The study, “Haunted Attraction: The Effects of Recreational Fear on Interpersonal Bonding,” was authored by Jane K. Wiley, Alexa A. Rivers, Otho Garrett Johnson, Cristina S. Negraru, Jake T. Watson, Tara M. Perreault, Rebecca Martin, Sara C. Slayton, Steffano I. Segovia-Palacios, Benjamin R. Stanisky, Kate E. Doherty, and Lawton K. Swan.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-benefits-of-frightening-activities-depend-on-what-you-do-afterward-according-to-new-psychology-research/

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https://www.europesays.com/ie/746051/ Scientists discover a surprising secret behind the human brain’s wrinkles #Éire #IE #Ireland #Science #SocialPsychology;Perception;ChildDevelopment;MentalHealth;NewSpecies;Monkeys;InvasiveSpecies;EvolutionaryBiology

DATE: October 21, 2026 at 03:41AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: Netflix Releases "The New Stanford Prison Experiment" TV Series

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192067&url=https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/oct/21/the-new-stanford-prison-experiment-review-netflix

Source: The Guardian

Television has rerun the Stanford prison experiment before, most notably in 2002 when the BBC aired "The Experiment," based on a study in which volunteers role-played prison guards and prisoners. The creator of the original 1971 experiment, Philip Zimbardo, long claimed that reality TV shows weren't comparable to his study because participants were aware of being on TV and played to the cameras. Now Netflix has released a new series with the...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192067&url=https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/oct/21/the-new-stanford-prison-experiment-review-netflix

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under neoliberal fascism, there is justification to expand the term “depraved indifference” into the realm of sociological social psychology

#sociology #socialpsychology #psychology #neoliberalfascism #indifference

DATE: October 19, 2026 at 11:24AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: Mothers and Fathers May Pass Along Different Kinds of Sexism to Their Kids

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192002&url=https://www.psypost.org/mothers-and-fathers-may-pass-along-different-kinds-of-sexism-to-their-kids-new-research-suggests/

Source: PsyPost

Psychologists often divide sexism into two categories: hostile sexism, which involves openly negative feelings toward women, and benevolent sexism, which involves idealizing women and believing that they require men's protection. Now, a new study has found that fathers' hostile sexism and mothers' benevolent sexism are most consistently linked to their children's views, hinting that mothers and fathers may play different roles in passing along...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=192002&url=https://www.psypost.org/mothers-and-fathers-may-pass-along-different-kinds-of-sexism-to-their-kids-new-research-suggests/

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while preparing my next lecture on self concept/self worth etc. i just had a revelation concerning individualistic vs collectivist cultures and the very different [!] difficulties neurodivergent individuals most likely will have to endure in those, respectively.

#neurodivergence #socialPsychology #neurodiversity

DATE: October 15, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Social freedom shapes whose version of reality you adopt, new research suggests

URL: https://www.psypost.org/social-freedom-shapes-whose-version-of-reality-you-adopt-new-research-suggests/

New research provides evidence that the culture or social environment we live in influences whose version of the world we adopt as our own. People in settings where relationships are easily formed and broken tend to align their worldviews more selectively with people who help them achieve their goals, partly by feeling less in sync with those who don’t. The findings were published in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Human beings have an inherent need to make sense of the world, a process often shaped by the people around them. Psychologists refer to this merging of inner states, beliefs, and judgments as shared reality. As noted in a study covered by PsyPost in 2021, this psychological factor acts as an important bonding mechanism. It allows two people to experience the world through a common lens, deepening their connection.

People do not attempt to establish this deep mental connection with just anyone. They are often motivated to build shared reality with instrumental others, which refers to friends, family members, or colleagues who help them achieve specific personal or professional goals. In fact, a study covered by PsyPost in 2023 indicated that experiencing a shared reality with these helpful individuals is associated with greater academic and personal success. Sharing reality with helpful people has been linked to greater confidence in one’s own abilities and may help keep those relationships intact.

The research, led by Abdo Elnakouri, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston and director of the Worldviews in Motion Lab, alongside Eli J. Finkel of Northwestern University and Abigail A. Scholer of the University of Virginia, explored how the broader cultural context might alter this dynamic. Specifically, the authors focused on a concept called relational mobility. This refers to the degree of freedom people have in a given society to form new relationships and end existing ones.

“Honestly this came as an idea to previous work our team had done on shared reality and goal success,” Elnakouri told PsyPost. “I came across the relational mobility variable through reading and going to conferences. Seemed like a possible cool extension.”

“Research finds those in high relational mobility contexts invest more in their relationships: they express more love, give grander gifts, and reveal deeper secrets,” Elnakouri said. “In these contexts, people don’t take their relationships for granted (the person can leave!), working harder to invest in them. So it made sense that this might extend out to shared reality as well.”

In low relational mobility contexts, social networks are more rigid, and people are largely tied to their existing connections. In high relational mobility settings, by contrast, people can easily choose new ties or walk away from current ones. Elnakouri and his team suspected that when people live in highly mobile environments where partners could leave, they might feel a stronger need to secure their most beneficial relationships.

“Specifically, I wondered whether relational mobility might push people to not only invest their hearts , but also their minds in those they care about,” Elnakouri continued. “Might people be motivated to share reality, or ‘merge minds,’ with others when in a high relationally mobile context?”

To test this idea, the researchers first analyzed an archival dataset containing responses from nearly 17,000 participants across 39 countries. Participants completed questionnaires assessing the relational mobility of their local environment. They also reported on their relationship with a close friend or romantic partner, rating how much emotional support that person provided and whether they could count on the person in times of need. In addition, they rated how much they felt the person truly understood them, which served as a basic measure for shared reality.

People who lived in more relationally mobile settings tended to report more shared reality with their close partner. This association depended on how supportive the partner was. Comparing countries, the gap arose because people in high-mobility countries reported less shared reality with less supportive partners; when the researchers instead used participants’ own perceptions of mobility, the gap arose because people reported more shared reality with supportive partners.

To build on these initial patterns, the researchers conducted two social network studies with undergraduate students at a Canadian university, 353 in the first and 277 in the second. Both samples were composed mostly of women. Instead of focusing on just one close relationship, participants nominated people they had been in contact with during the past month (up to 30 in the first study and up to five in the second), rating each person’s helpfulness for their goals and their degree of shared reality.

When looking at these broader social networks, the researchers did not find that high relational mobility predicted an overall increase in shared reality. Instead, the effects centered on the relative difference between helpful and unhelpful members of their network. In both the 39-country dataset and the network studies, the scientists also measured other types of similarity, including shared personality traits, upbringing, and geographical background, but these did not follow the same pattern, suggesting the dynamic was specific to shared reality.

In three of four analyses, students who saw their social world as highly mobile showed a bigger gap between helpful and unhelpful people in their networks. In one analysis, this gap stemmed from lower shared reality with less helpful people; in the others, the shifts with helpful and unhelpful people were not statistically significant on their own. A measure of how free participants themselves felt to leave relationships showed no such pattern, which the authors interpret as a sign that concerns about others leaving drive the effect.

“I think the fact that people seem to primarily distance themselves from those who do not support their goal in high relationally mobile contexts was interesting,” Elnakouri explained. “So when people have choices, they look to more exclusively invest in those who are invested in them. It could have been the case that people only drew closer to those who helped them with their goal instead of distancing themselves from those that didn’t.”

Because the first three datasets relied on correlational data, the authors conducted an experiment to test whether shifting perceptions of relational mobility would directly alter shared reality. They recruited 590 adults and asked them to nominate three specific people in their lives: one who was helpful for their career goals, one who was not helpful for their career, and a third newer acquaintance unrelated to their career. In a separate pilot study of 102 people, the researchers confirmed that their experimental writing task shifted how freely people felt others around them could come and go.

In the main experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the high relational mobility condition, they wrote about whether the third acquaintance might eventually drift away and leave their life. In the low relational mobility condition, they wrote about how that person might stay close and remain in their life.

Participants in the high relational mobility condition reported less shared reality with their less helpful career contacts (an average of 3.69 on a 7-point scale, compared with 4.04 in the low mobility condition). Shared reality with helpful contacts did not differ between conditions, suggesting that a sense of social fragility leads people to mentally distance themselves from less helpful ties.

“To answer that question, we find that the answer is ‘yes,’ but with one crucial caveat,” Elnakouri said, looking across the research program as a whole. “It looks like relational mobility pushes people to invest more in some relationships, yes, but also less in others.”

“The takeaway: cultures seem to shape how we see the world, but also who we look to in order to form our perceptions of the world/reality,” Elnakouri noted. “I think this is a cool connection between work on culture, shared reality, relationships, and self-regulation.”

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind regarding these findings. In the first study, participants were recruited through Facebook and 86 percent were women, which may limit generalizability. In addition, the social network studies relied on student samples at a single university, and the experiment manipulated perceptions by focusing on thoughts about a single acquaintance. Study 1 also measured shared reality with a single survey question, which captures only a narrow slice of the concept; the later studies used a more complete, validated questionnaire.

Social fluidity is also just one piece of the puzzle. “Effect sizes were what you’d expect from typical social psychology studies, so there is sure to be plenty of other factors shaping our worldviews!” Elnakouri pointed out.

There is also the question of how these selective alignments impact society at large. The authors suggest that if people in fluid social environments build shared reality more selectively with those who benefit their goals, they might form insular bubbles, leading to diverging views from those outside their immediate circles. Future research could test whether more relationally mobile cultures are more prone to defensiveness, polarization, and divided worldviews.

The research team plans to continue investigating how environmental contexts and personal goals interact. “I want to continue to explore how people’s worldviews are shaped by complex dynamics across multiple levels of analysis (e.g., self-regulatory needs, cultural context) that too rarely come into conversation with one another,” Elnakouri said.

The study, “Choosing Our Reality: Relational Mobility Shapes When and With Whom People Share Reality,” was authored by Abdo Elnakouri, Eli J. Finkel, and Abigail A. Scholer.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/social-freedom-shapes-whose-version-of-reality-you-adopt-new-research-suggests/

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DATE: October 14, 2026 at 12:20PM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: AI Can Act Just Like a Human, But We Still Don't Think It's Conscious

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191933&url=https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261012185017.htm

Source: Science Daily - Top Health

As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, reports of it misleading users, working together, or pursuing its own goals are becoming common. Yet a new study finds that people draw a sharp line between human consciousness and AI, even when both behave identically. On the whole, people regard even the most responsive AI as less conscious than the least responsive human, but when asked about "awareness" instead, people judge humans and AI...

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191933&url=https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261012185017.htm

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DATE: October 12, 2026 at 02:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Researchers identify a factor linked to how much happier couples are than singles

URL: https://www.psypost.org/researchers-identify-a-factor-linked-to-how-much-happier-couples-are-than-singles/

People in romantic relationships typically report higher life satisfaction than single people, but a new study of more than 380,000 adults in Great Britain suggests that the size of this gap varies depending on where people live. The gap tended to be wider in areas where romantic partnerships were more common, mostly because partnered people in those areas reported higher satisfaction. The research was published in Psychological Science.

Relationship status simply refers to whether a person is currently in an intimate partnership or is single. Life satisfaction is an evaluation of how positive or fulfilling a person finds their overall life circumstances. In social psychology, the idea of person-culture match suggests that people experience higher well-being when their individual traits, beliefs, or lifestyle match the prevailing norms of their immediate community.

Prior studies suggest that the size of the life-satisfaction gap between partnered and single people is not the same everywhere. Married people tend to report higher life satisfaction than unmarried people, but the size of that difference varies across countries and U.S. states, and one U.S. analysis found that marriage was more strongly tied to life satisfaction in states where more residents were married.

Not every study has found a strong role for social norms, though: a 2012 study of 45 European countries found that a country’s family values had little bearing on the well-being gaps between partnership statuses, apart from a wider gap between divorced and married women in more family-oriented societies.

Other research suggests that community-level norms can shape how individual life circumstances affect personal well-being. For example, earlier work by some of the same researchers, covered by PsyPost in 2024, found that in regions with higher obesity prevalence, individuals with obesity experienced less severe relationship and health disadvantages compared to low-prevalence regions.

The current study aimed to bridge these lines of research to test whether local relationship rates relate to the well-being gap between singles and couples. “Many studies find that partnered people are happier than single people and such findings often read as evidence that romantic relationships are good for us,” lead researcher Tita Gonzalez Avilés of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Bamberg told PsyPost. “But the reasons behind this life satisfaction gap are not entirely clear. We wanted to shift the focus from the relationship itself to the regional contexts in which partnered and single people’s lives unfold.”

The research team reasoned that in areas with high relationship rates, couples might feel more supported and aligned with local relationship norms. Single individuals, on the other hand, might feel more excluded or experience greater social pressure in environments where couplehood is the dominant pattern.

To examine this question, the scientists analyzed data from the BBC Big Personality Test. The sample included 382,078 adults living across 379 local authority districts in Great Britain, administrative areas similar in size to counties in the United States. Participants answered questions about whether they were currently in an intimate relationship and rated their life satisfaction on a scale from one to seven.

The researchers calculated regional relationship rates by determining the percentage of participants in each district who reported being in an intimate relationship. District relationship rates ranged from about 55 percent in one London borough to 80 percent in the district of Bolsover. To isolate the role of local relationship rates, the authors controlled for individual characteristics including age, gender, education, employment, income, health, and personality traits, as well as district-level factors such as population density, median income, birth rates, median age, political leanings, and religious affiliation.

Across Great Britain as a whole, partnered individuals reported higher life satisfaction than single individuals. Partnered people scored about half a standard deviation higher on life satisfaction, a difference the authors noted is comparable to differences tied to employment status or health. These findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that people in intimate relationships report higher emotional well-being and life satisfaction compared to singles.

The results also align with research covered by PsyPost in 2025 that examined lifelong singlehood among primarily older adults and found lower life satisfaction among singles compared to partnered individuals.

“Although life satisfaction varied across regions, partnered individuals consistently reported higher life satisfaction compared to single individuals on average,” Gonzalez Avilés noted. “So, while regional context contributes to people’s life satisfaction, it cannot fully account for the gap between these two groups.”

When the researchers looked across regions, they found that the size of the gap varied based on the local relationship rate. In districts with the lowest relationship rates, the gap was 0.49 standard deviations; in districts with the highest rates, it was 0.63, an increase of nearly 29 percent. This widening gap was primarily driven by partnered individuals, who reported higher life satisfaction in high-relationship districts, while life satisfaction among single individuals remained relatively constant regardless of the local relationship rate.

The district-level pattern held across several robustness checks. The association remained consistent when using official census marriage and cohabitation rates instead of survey-derived relationship rates, when applying broader regional controls, and when using stricter minimum thresholds for district sample sizes.

In additional analyses that were not planned in advance, the researchers found that the gap was also larger in districts with lower median incomes, a higher share of votes to leave the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum, and more residents reporting a religious affiliation. In the more politically conservative and religious districts, the wider gap mainly reflected lower life satisfaction among single people. The authors note that they did not directly measure attitudes toward singlehood and describe their explanations for these patterns as speculative.

“We expected single people to be less satisfied where many others are partnered but found no evidence for this,” Gonzalez Avilés said. “What seemed to be more important for the single people was not how many people are partnered but the prevailing regional attitudes toward singlehood (i.e., single people being less satisfied in more conservative and religious regions).”

“Regional relationship norms and societal expectations can affect how partnered and single people evaluate their own life,” Gonzalez Avilés added.

In an exploratory analysis that was not registered in advance, the researchers evaluated whether the pattern held at a neighborhood scale across 52,836 participants in 218 postal districts in London. In postal districts with the lowest relationship rates, the gap was 0.41 standard deviations, compared to 0.62 in districts with the highest rates, reflecting an increase of about 51 percent. As in the national sample, this difference was mainly driven by partnered residents reporting greater satisfaction in neighborhoods where relationships were common.

The authors also examined whether people in high-relationship areas placed more importance on having a relationship. They found no evidence that couples or singles placed higher importance on being partnered in those areas. Single people in high-relationship areas actually placed slightly less importance on having a relationship, which the researchers speculate could reflect singles shifting their focus toward other life goals.

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. The sample consisted of online volunteers who chose to take a personality test between 2009 and 2011, and roughly 64 percent of the respondents were women. The data are also more than 15 years old. The authors did find that regional marriage rates in the survey closely mirrored 2011 census figures, which supports the accuracy of the geographic estimates.

The overall regional effect was modest, and partnered people reported higher life satisfaction than singles even in districts with the lowest relationship rates. Because the data were correlational, the study cannot establish cause and effect. Happier couples might simply be more inclined to move to communities where relationships are more prevalent.

“We did not test why partnered individuals were more satisfied in regions where romantic relationships were more common,” Gonzalez Avilés explained. “It may be that they have more positive experiences when living among many other couples, but it is also possible that happily coupled people are more likely to move to such regions.”

The researchers tested this possibility by repeating their analysis using only individuals who still resided in the region where they grew up, which reduces the likelihood that migration explains the pattern. Future studies tracking people over time could provide better insight into whether moving or changing relationship status shifts life satisfaction. Scientists could also investigate whether specific mechanisms, such as tax, housing, or other policy advantages for couples, help explain why partnered people fare better in these environments.

The findings are also based solely on Great Britain. Testing these relationships in other countries could help researchers determine whether similar regional patterns exist in different cultural and institutional settings.

The study, “Ties That Bind, Places That Matter: The Life-Satisfaction Gap Between Partnered and Single Individuals Varies Across Regions,” was authored by Tita Gonzalez Avilés, Franz J. Neyer, Peter J. Rentfrow, and Tobias Ebert.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/researchers-identify-a-factor-linked-to-how-much-happier-couples-are-than-singles/

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"Cognitive psychologists, hired by Silicon Valley over a decade ago, played a pivotal role in optimizing interface design such as the shift of social networks to phone-based social media apps with its likes, followers and the endless scroll. In this sense, the language of the interface was always amenable to cognitive and behavioral experts. The pathologies were built in – a slight tilt of the media pharmakon scales and the poison leaks out. Such disciplinary awareness often seems absent in today’s paper-driven research culture. An army of concerned cognitive psychologists, behavior scientists and pedagogists focus their do-good research exclusively on kids and teenagers, leaving adults and the companies themselves off the hook. The moral panic around our anxious youth has left media scholars with their own existential anxiety. Decades of platform critique echoed like voices in the desert, while whit-coat authority reverberates through the halls of government like a siren’s call. The social media ban is crude, almost as blunt as the research underpinning it, but why haven’t others been able to turn the policy dials?

Noticeable in all this is the absence of the word ‘advertisement’ in all their social-medical experiments. Social media giants such as Meta, Google, and TikTok are advertising companies and love to hide their revenue models. This early insight remains remarkably absent from psychological and pedagogical research. The focus is solely on quantifying screen time, as a stand in for the evils of social media. To note that all nuance is lost when being online is cast as the original media sin is to say the obvious, and yet we can’t deny the media theory as moral panic is effective.

But while the damage to the young brain is evident, the medicalization of social media critique is not."

https://networkcultures.org/geert/2026/10/09/white-coat-authority/

#SocialMedia #MoralPanics #Censorship #NannyState #SocialPsychology #SocialSciences #PseudoScience

DATE: October 7, 2026 at 02:45AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: "Complete Devastation": How NSF Gutted Its Social Sciences Research

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191817&url=https://www.science.org/content/article/complete-devastation-how-nsf-gutted-its-social-sciences-research

Source: Science

Social scientists in the U.S. have known for months that their National Science Foundation funding was threatened but were unsure how dire the situation was. With the end of the 2026 fiscal year on September 30, the extent of the damage is now becoming clear. "For entire disciplines, this is existential," says Wendy Naus, head of the nonprofit Consortium of Social Science Associations. Among those disciplines defunded at NSF: social psychology.

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191817&url=https://www.science.org/content/article/complete-devastation-how-nsf-gutted-its-social-sciences-research

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DATE: October 5, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Two decades of U.S. data challenge an evolutionary explanation for the gender-equality paradox

URL: https://www.psypost.org/two-decades-of-u-s-data-challenge-an-evolutionary-explanation-for-the-gender-equality-paradox/

Two studies that tracked Americans for two decades or more found that as the United States grew wealthier and more gender-equal, psychological differences between men and women did not grow, and in a few cases they shrank. The findings, published in Social Psychology and Psychological Reports, provide evidence against a popular evolutionary explanation for why such differences appear larger in richer, more egalitarian countries.

The research addresses a phenomenon known as the gender-equality paradox. This concept refers to the observation that differences between men and women in personality, academic strengths, and mental health often appear larger in countries with higher levels of gender equality and economic prosperity.

A study covered by PsyPost in 2024 found that higher living conditions were associated with larger sex differences in personality and depression across different countries, though differences in math, sexual behavior, and partner preferences were smaller. Similar patterns have been observed in education, with another 2024 study showing that differences in girls’ and boys’ relative academic strengths, with girls relatively stronger in reading and boys in math and science, are consistently larger in wealthier, more gender-equal nations.

To explain this paradox, many evolutionary psychologists point to the resource hypothesis, sometimes called the free expression hypothesis. This framework proposes that humans possess innate, sex-specific tendencies rooted in early human evolution, when, according to this view, men and women faced different pressures that shaped different psychological traits.

On this account, when a society meets its citizens’ basic material needs and relaxes strict social rules, individuals are finally free to express their true, biologically driven gender differences. Under this theory, a highly developed country removes the struggle for basic survival, allowing men and women to naturally drift toward distinct, gendered interests and emotional patterns.

“The study was motivated by a long-standing debate about the so-called gender-equality paradox,” Gabriele Prati, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bologna and the author of both studies, told PsyPost.

“The problem is that most of the evidence supporting this explanation comes from comparisons between different countries at a single point in time,” he explained. “Countries differ in many other respects—history, culture, institutions, religion, economic structure, and social norms—so a correlation between gender equality and sex differences does not necessarily tell us what happens when equality or economic resources actually increase.”

A more direct test is to follow what happens within a single society as it changes. Prati did this in two longitudinal studies, which follow the same people over many years, tracking Americans across a period of rising wealth and gender equality.

The first study, published in Social Psychology, analyzed data from the Midlife in the United States project, which included a nationally representative sample of 7,108 adults. At the start of the study, participants averaged 46 years old, and 52 percent were women. Prati examined three waves of data collected between the mid-1990s and 2014. During this nearly twenty-year span, the United States experienced documented increases in its gross domestic product, a standard measure of economic prosperity, as well as an overall increase in gender equality.

Participants completed surveys assessing their personality traits, including extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism. The surveys also measured altruism, trust, negative emotions, and clinical depression. At the start, women scored higher than men on most of these measures, including negative emotions, agreeableness, and neuroticism, while men scored slightly higher on openness. The research aimed to determine whether the psychological gaps between men and women widened as the societal conditions improved, exactly as the resource hypothesis would predict.

The findings did not support the evolutionary resource hypothesis. The gap between men and women in altruism, trust, negative emotions, and all major personality traits remained unchanged over the nearly twenty-year span. For depression, the gender gap actually shrank. Women were still more likely than men to meet the criteria for depression in 2014, but the gap narrowed because women’s odds of depression fell by about 38 percent while men’s did not change.

Prati also tested the hypothesis at the individual level by looking at changes in household income adjusted for household size. Rising income was not followed by growing differences between men and women. The two associations that did emerge ran opposite to the theory’s predictions: higher income was followed by slightly lower conscientiousness among women and, at the edge of statistical significance, a higher likelihood of depression among men.

“The main takeaway is that greater prosperity and gender equality did not make men and women progressively more psychologically different in the way predicted by the resource hypothesis,” Prati said.

“An important broader lesson is that a pattern observed when comparing countries is not necessarily evidence of the mechanism producing that pattern,” he noted. “Following people and societies over time provides a more direct test, and in this study that test did not support the resource hypothesis in its current form.”

To test the hypothesis in a different developmental stage, Prati conducted a second study, published in Psychological Reports, focusing on adolescents and young adults. This research used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, which tracked a nationally representative sample of 6,504 Americans from 1994 to 2018. Over five survey waves, participants grew from middle and high school students into adults in their late thirties. This dataset allowed Prati to examine different outcomes in younger people: math and science grades, scores on a picture vocabulary test, self-reported willingness to take risks, self-esteem, and depressive symptoms.

Once again, the results did not support the predictions of the evolutionary framework. Gender differences in math and science grades did not change between the mid-1990s and the end of high school, differences in vocabulary scores did not change between 1994–95 and 2001–02, and differences in willingness to take risks did not change between 1996 and 2018.

Just as in the adult study, the gender differences in depressive symptoms decreased over time. The gap in depressive symptoms, on a scale from 0 to 3, shrank from 0.14 points in 1994–95 to 0.10 points in 2008–09, and the self-esteem gap, in which boys typically score higher, shrank from 0.16 to 0.05 points on a five-point scale by 2001–02. Prati describes these changes as very small to small, but they ran opposite to the theory’s prediction.

As with all research, there are some caveats to consider. Both studies rely on data from a single country, and tracking these changes in countries with different cultural histories or economic structures might yield different patterns.

In addition, because the same people were aging while society changed, the studies cannot fully separate the effects of societal change from ordinary development. The self-esteem gap, for example, tends to narrow as teenagers become adults.

Another detail to keep in mind is the way certain traits were measured. Some, such as risk-taking and trust, were assessed using a single survey question, which might not capture their full complexity. The datasets also lacked some of the measures most central to the theory, such as interest in working with things versus people, so future studies could test whether those show different patterns.

It is also possible that two decades is not long enough to observe deep cultural shifts in how gender differences are expressed. However, Prati notes that the hypothesis does not specify how long these effects should take to emerge, and that there is no clear reason to expect individual income gains to take decades to have an effect.

“We should be cautious about concluding that giving people more economic resources and greater gender equality naturally reveals or amplifies innate psychological differences between women and men,” Prati added. “Differences between women and men are likely shaped by a much more complex combination of social, cultural, environmental, and possibly biological influences.”

The study, “No Evidence for the Evolutionary Resource Hypothesis as an Explanation of the Gender-Equality Paradox: A Three-Wave Longitudinal Analysis of Sex Differences in the United States,” was authored by Gabriele Prati. The study, “The Gender-Equality Paradox: A Longitudinal Test of the Free Expression or Resource Hypothesis Among Adolescents,” was also authored by Gabriele Prati.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/two-decades-of-u-s-data-challenge-an-evolutionary-explanation-for-the-gender-equality-paradox/

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DATE: October 4, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Psychologists identify “collective anti-mattering” as a key driver of modern political grievances

URL: https://www.psypost.org/psychologists-identify-collective-anti-mattering-as-a-key-driver-of-modern-political-grievances/

New research suggests that when people believe their social group is treated as unimportant by others, they tend to report more anger about their group’s treatment and more anxiety about its future. These feelings were in turn linked to involvement in collective action, support for strong leadership, and, among White Americans, support for punitive policies. The findings were published in European Journal of Social Psychology.

The research examines a psychological concept known as collective anti-mattering. This is the belief that one’s specific social group does not count, is ignored, or is viewed as disposable by other groups or by society at large. It expands on the idea of personal anti-mattering, which describes the painful experience of feeling personally unnoticed or unvalued by other people. Research into personal feelings of unimportance, such as a 2021 study of adolescents and young adults, indicated that feeling like one does not matter to others is a unique form of distress that predicts loneliness and depression.

“The idea grew out of research on mattering, the basic psychological need to feel that we are noticed, valued, and significant to other people,” Nassim Tabri, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University, told PsyPost. “More recent work has examined anti-mattering, which is the belief that other people actively regard you as unimportant or insignificant.”

“We examined whether people can experience something analogous at the group level: not simply ‘I don’t matter,’ but ‘people like us don’t matter,'” he explained. “Historically marginalized groups may feel that their concerns or suffering are ignored by more advantaged groups or institutions, whereas members of historically advantaged groups may sometimes feel that their group is increasingly being overlooked or displaced.”

Tabri and colleagues proposed that this same feeling can occur at the group level and influence political life. When groups feel that they are morally invisible, they may experience two distinct emotional responses: group-based anger and collective angst. Group-based anger is a reaction to perceived unfairness in the present moment. It is the feeling that one’s group is being illegitimately devalued, which often motivates people to confront the source of the injustice.

Collective angst, on the other hand, is an anxiety focused on the future. It occurs when people fear that their group’s vitality, culture, or very existence might be in jeopardy. Previous work on group dynamics, such as a 2021 set of experiments, indicated that White people reminded of demographic changes, particularly those who saw race relations as zero-sum, felt more anxiety about their group’s future, which was linked to less support for progressive social movements and more anti-immigrant sentiment.

By studying collective anti-mattering, the authors sought to understand how feeling disregarded acts as a starting point for both anger and angst. They theorized that this single feeling could push marginalized groups to demand recognition and push advantaged groups to defend their status.

To test these ideas, the researchers conducted three separate studies using data from online panels, meaning the samples were not nationally representative. In the first study, they recruited 368 Black American adults who completed questionnaires measuring their sense of collective anti-mattering, individual anti-mattering, perceived injustice toward their group, group-based anger toward White Americans, and collective angst. Finally, participants reported how often they take part in collective action on behalf of Black Americans, such as demonstrations, and how much they agreed that their group needs a strong leader who will do whatever it takes to get things done for it.

The researchers found that collective anti-mattering was distinct from personal anti-mattering and strongly predicted both group-based anger and collective angst. It was also strongly correlated with perceived injustice, but statistical analyses showed the two were separate concepts.

The two emotions, however, predicted different outcomes. Higher levels of collective angst were associated with more frequent involvement in collective action, while anger did not predict collective action. Both collective angst and group-based anger predicted greater support for a strong leader, though the items measured broad support rather than specific authoritarian actions. Across the three studies, the statistical models explained only 6% to 12% of the differences in collective action, compared to 13% to 55% for strong-leader support.

For the second study, the researchers surveyed 552 Black British citizens living in the United Kingdom to see if the patterns would hold true in a different national context. The participants completed similar measures, focusing on their perceptions of how Black British people are viewed by White British people. They also answered questions about whether they felt White British people tried to control their group’s identity, a concept known as collective autonomy restriction.

The results of the second study showed that collective anti-mattering on its own was essentially unrelated to collective action, but it was again linked to both group-based anger and collective angst. Just as with the American participants, collective angst was the emotion linked to collective action. Both anger and angst were associated with support for strong leadership. The study also showed that feeling collectively disregarded is a separate experience from feeling that one’s group is being explicitly controlled or treated as less than human.

The third study shifted focus to a historically advantaged majority group. The researchers surveyed 399 White American adults, balancing the sample between Democrats and Republicans. This time, the collective anti-mattering questions asked participants how much they felt White Americans were disregarded by other Americans or by society in general. Along with measuring anger, angst, collective action, and strong-leader support, the researchers asked participants about their political attitudes, including their support for government bans on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, as well as their support for persecuting undocumented immigrants, measured with statements ranging from praising the work of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to supporting the use of physical force and even executions.

Believing that White Americans no longer matter to society predicted higher levels of both group-based anger and collective angst, although average levels of collective anti-mattering were much lower among White Americans (about 2.1 on a 1-to-7 scale) than among Black Americans (about 4.0) or Black British participants (about 3.5). Collective angst was again linked to more involvement in collective action and stronger support for a strong leader. Unlike in the first two studies, anger was not linked to strong-leader support.

Group-based anger, however, was linked to different outcomes. Higher levels of anger were associated with stronger support for banning diversity initiatives and a greater willingness to support punitive measures against undocumented immigrants, while collective angst was not. These effects remained consistent even when the researchers adjusted their statistical models to account for whether the participant was a Democrat or a Republican. This differs from the 2021 experiments described earlier, in which anxiety about the group’s future, rather than anger, was linked to anti-immigrant sentiment.

“What struck me most was the consistency of the basic psychological pattern across groups who occupy very different structural positions in society,” Tabri said. “I was also struck by what we found when we expanded the range of political outcomes examined among White Americans. In this group, anger associated with perceived disregard was, in turn, associated with greater support for punitive and exclusionary political responses, including opposition to DEI initiatives and support for punitive treatment of undocumented immigrants. This suggests that the consequences of believing that one’s group does not matter may depend on the emotion involved and the broader social and political context.”

“I would characterize the findings as meaningful but not deterministic,” he added. “Collective anti-mattering showed moderate-to-large associations with the emotional processes we examined, particularly group-based anger and collective angst, but political attitudes and behavior obviously have many causes. The practical significance, in my view, comes less from any single effect size than from the consistency of the pattern across three samples and two countries. Perceiving that one’s group is disregarded appears to capture a psychologically meaningful form of group grievance.”

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. All three studies relied on cross-sectional survey data, meaning the researchers measured all variables at a single point in time. Because of this, it is not possible to establish a strict chain of cause and effect between feelings of disregard, specific emotions, and political behaviors.

“We found that collective anti-mattering was associated with particular emotions and political responses in theoretically meaningful ways, but we cannot conclude from these studies alone that making people feel that their group does not matter will cause those responses,” Tabri noted. “I would also caution against interpreting the findings as equating the experiences of advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Black Americans and Black British people may perceive disregard in the context of longstanding discrimination and structural inequality, whereas perceptions of disregard among White Americans can arise despite their group’s continued structural advantage.”

The researchers also emphasized how to view the study’s leadership questions. “Support for a ‘strong leader’ in our measures should not automatically be interpreted as support for authoritarianism,” Tabri said. “A strong leader can be understood as someone who protects or advances the group’s interests without necessarily rejecting democratic norms. This is one reason we distinguish strong-leader support from the more explicitly punitive and exclusionary outcomes we examined among White Americans.”

Additionally, the focus of the collective anti-mattering questions varied between the studies. In the first two studies, participants were asked about disregard from a specific majority group, while the third study asked about disregard from society more broadly. Future research could investigate whether feeling ignored by a specific group produces different political reactions than feeling ignored by social institutions as a whole.

Looking ahead, Tabri outlined plans to further investigate these dynamics. “An important next step is to establish whether collective anti-mattering actually has a causal influence on group-based emotions and behavior,” he said. “Experimental studies that manipulate perceptions of collective disregard, along with longitudinal studies that follow these processes over time, will help establish whether changes in collective anti-mattering precede changes in anger, anxiety about the group’s future, and political behavior.”

“One aspect of the concept that I think is especially important is the distinction between being treated unfairly and feeling that your group simply does not count,” Tabri said. “Injustice is about what is being done to a group; collective anti-mattering is about what people believe their group means to others—whether its concerns, welfare, and future are regarded as consequential. That distinction may help us understand some contemporary political grievances that are difficult to capture solely in terms of material interests or explicit discrimination. People and groups want not only fair outcomes but recognition that they matter.”

The study, “Collective Anti-Mattering: Belief That One’s Group Is Being Disregarded Fuels Collective Action and Authoritarian Leadership Support Among Both Advantaged and Disadvantaged Groups,” was authored by Nassim Tabri, Isabelle Boutros, and Michael J. A. Wohl.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/psychologists-identify-collective-anti-mattering-as-a-key-driver-of-modern-political-grievances/

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DATE: October 3, 2026 at 05:20AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: Removing Confederate Monuments Does Not Seem to Change Racial Bias

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191689&url=https://www.psypost.org/removing-confederate-monuments-did-not-measurably-change-racial-bias-study-finds/

Source: PsyPost

A recent investigation into whether the presence or removal of Confederate monuments affects racial prejudice found no evidence that these statues cause changes in people's biases. The findings suggest that while these monuments are deeply tied to historical inequalities, simply being exposed to them does not directly alter subconscious or conscious racial attitudes, and there is no evidence that removing them from public squares does either.

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191689&url=https://www.psypost.org/removing-confederate-monuments-did-not-measurably-change-racial-bias-study-finds/

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DATE: September 30, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Removing Confederate monuments did not measurably change racial bias, study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/removing-confederate-monuments-did-not-measurably-change-racial-bias-study-finds/

A recent investigation into whether the presence or removal of Confederate monuments affects racial prejudice found no evidence that these statues cause changes in people’s biases. The findings suggest that while these monuments are deeply tied to historical inequalities, simply being exposed to them does not directly alter subconscious or conscious racial attitudes, and there is no evidence that removing them from public squares does either. The research was published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Confederate monuments are statues and memorials erected to honor the pro-slavery Southern states that seceded during the American Civil War. In recent years, many communities have debated whether to remove these statues, viewing them as symbols of white supremacy that continue to harm marginalized groups. Psychologists often distinguish between two types of prejudice that such environments might influence. Explicit bias involves conscious beliefs and feelings about a racial group, while implicit bias involves subconscious, automatic associations that people might not even realize they hold.

Previous research suggested that implicit bias is driven by local environments and historical oppression. For instance, a 2019 study found that white residents in Southern counties with historically higher rates of slavery still display stronger implicit racial bias today. The idea that changes in community environments can shift people’s biases is supported by other research. For example, a separate 2019 study found that antigay bias declined roughly twice as fast after states legalized same-sex marriage, suggesting that changes in public institutions can shift community attitudes.

The new research, led by Maximilian A. Primbs of Radboud University, was designed to test whether this idea applies to Confederate symbols to see if their physical presence or removal actually changes residents’ racial biases. Primbs told PsyPost that his motivation stemmed from the cultural climate a few years ago. “I had previously done research on the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement and discussions about Confederate monuments and what to do with them were widespread in 2020/2021,” he explained.

“These discussions eventually reached Europe, which had its own subsequent reckoning with colonial monuments,” Primbs continued. “Monuments were being graffitied, removed, or in one case even thrown in a river. I want to contribute to these debates by investigating some of the effects of these monuments.”

His 2024 study, covered by PsyPost, indicated that the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests led to a rapid, immediate decrease in implicit racial bias among white Americans, though this reduction was temporary. These patterns are consistent with the Bias of Crowds model, proposed in 2017, which holds that physical and social cues in an area constantly activate stereotypes, shaping the prejudices of the people living there.

To investigate the impact of Confederate monuments, the researchers conducted four distinct studies. The first study analyzed a massive dataset from the Project Implicit database, comparing it with records of Confederate monuments from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The sample included up to 1.75 million white participants across the United States. The scientists looked at geographic areas such as counties and commuting zones, tracking whether areas with monuments had higher aggregate levels of bias, adjusting for variables like population density and the proportion of Black residents.

The authors tracked changes in bias around the time specific monuments were taken down, looking for immediate or delayed drops in prejudice. The results did not show any reliable shifts in implicit or explicit racial bias following a monument’s removal. While there were some minor correlations between the number of monuments and bias levels, the results were inconsistent and sometimes even pointed in the opposite direction of what the theory predicted. The data provided no evidence that taking a statue down caused a change in the local community’s racial attitudes.

Notably, these results conflict with a 2019 study by two of the current paper’s co-authors, Heidi A. Vuletich and B. Keith Payne, which found that college campuses displaying Confederate monuments had higher average implicit bias among students. The researchers suggest three possible explanations for the discrepancy: the earlier result might have been a false positive, the correlation might have reflected an unmeasured third factor, or college campuses might simply operate differently than wider communities.

“We very strongly expected to find effects of Confederate monuments,” Primbs noted. “Many prior studies have found that historical inequalities like slavery, sundown towns, or the Ku Klux Klan shaped social and cultural norms and structures within geographical regions in ways that caused biased attitudes to persist over generations.”

“Confederate monuments are a physical manifestation of these White Supremacist beliefs, and therefore should have shown a similar link,” he added. “To me, this suggests that perhaps social and cultural environments are more important in determining racial biases than physical environments.”

Because observational data can be influenced by many outside factors, the scientists designed a second study to test the effect in a controlled laboratory setting. They recruited 1,161 white participants and 416 Black participants for an online experiment. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to read an educational text explaining the racist history and symbolism of the Confederacy.

After reading the text, this group took an Implicit Association Test with images of Confederate monuments displayed in the background. This test measures the speed at which a person associates positive or negative words with Black or White faces, serving as a standard metric for subconscious prejudice. The control group simply took a standard version of the test.

The researchers found no statistically significant differences in implicit or explicit bias between the group exposed to the monuments and the control group, for both white and Black participants. Further statistical analyses, known as equivalence tests, confirmed that any potential effect of the monuments was smaller than a conventionally small effect size, indicating that exposure does not meaningfully alter bias.

A third study utilized a different measure of subconscious prejudice called the Affect Misattribution Procedure. In this task, participants briefly see a photo of a Black or White face, followed immediately by an abstract painting that they must rate as pleasant or unpleasant. The idea is that feelings about the face subtly influence judgments about the painting. In a sample of 537 participants, those who viewed a slideshow of Confederate monuments and described their associations with them showed no statistically significant differences in bias compared to a control group.

To see if these laboratory findings held up in the real world, the researchers conducted a final field experiment in Tilburg, a city in the Netherlands. Instead of Confederate monuments, they used a local colonial monument, a 1926 statue showing the Catholic missionary Peerke Donders standing over a kneeling Black man from colonial Suriname, which critics say reflects colonial racial hierarchies. The scientists approached 174 white Dutch pedestrians passing by either the colonial monument or a visually similar control monument and asked them to fill out a survey measuring their conscious racial biases and policy preferences.

Half of the participants were given an informational text explaining the colonial monument’s historical meaning before answering the questions. Similar to the previous experiments, neither the physical presence of the monument nor the provided historical context altered the participants’ explicit racial attitudes. Whether people were standing in front of the colonial statue or a statue of the Virgin Mary, their self-reported feelings about minority groups remained similar.

There are a few things to keep in mind regarding these findings. The lack of an effect on psychological bias does not mean that monuments are harmless or lack historical importance. “I’d like to make clear that Confederate monuments not affecting racial bias does not mean that Confederate monuments do not have negative effects,” Primbs said, noting that prior research indicates these statues are often perceived as markers of inequality by Black Americans and have been linked to anti-Black hate crimes.

The authors suggest that the transmission of bias might rely more on interpersonal interactions, community norms, and social behaviors than on isolated physical structures. People might absorb prejudice by observing how others act and speak rather than by walking past a monument.

“Confederate monuments are a physical reminder of historical inequality, a built structure commemorating past evil committed,” Primbs said. “Yet, simply removing the monuments had no effects on racial bias. The key takeaway for a lay person might be that undoing past wrongs is not as simple as removing a monument.”

“Discrimination has become deeply entrenched in societal systems, and to tackle it successfully we need to make changes to the system,” he continued.

Future research might explore other environmental cues that are more socially active or frequently discussed to see what actually sustains regional biases. “This research is part of a research line that highlights the historical origins of present-day racial attitudes,” Primbs noted.

“We’re currently pursuing further research that examines how these historical inequalities shape present-day behaviors, for example by affecting how Black and White people interact and share space,” he concluded.

The study, “On Confederate Monuments, Their Removal and Racial Bias,” was authored by Maximilian A. Primbs, Nicolas Sommet, Gijsbert Bijlstra, B. Keith Payne, Ruddy Faure, Tessa A. M. Lansu, Rob W. Holland, Amanda B. Diekman, and Heidi A. Vuletich.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/removing-confederate-monuments-did-not-measurably-change-racial-bias-study-finds/

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ConfederateMonuments #RacialBias #ImplicitBias #ExplicitBias #MonumentRemoval #SocialPsychology #BiasResearch #PublicSquares #HistoricInequality #CulturalEnvironment

The quiet person in the room is being judged differently from everyone else. And they have not said a word yet. #brainscience #howthemindworks #humanbehaviour #psychologyfacts #socialpsychology #Trending

https://econopass.com/people-who-talk-less-perceived-intelligent/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into FLIPBOARD EXCHANGE FEED 🗞️ @flipboard-exchange-feed-Econopass

“Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and discerning if they hold their tongues.” #brainscience #howthemindworks #humanbehaviour #psychologyfacts #socialpsychology #Trending

https://econopass.com/people-who-talk-less-perceived-intelligent/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Why We Do That @why-we-do-that-Econopass

if you ever wondered how many cognitive errors you can trip over, please be welcome to discover this comprehensive and at the same time aesthetically pleasing graphic.

they also integrated a rough categorization system that i find somewhat helpful.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg

#biases #socialPsychology #cognitiveBiases #kahneman #tversky #heuristics

It arrives without warning. You are driving, washing dishes, or lying in bed trying to fall asleep, and suddenly your brain serves up a scene from fifteen years ago... #HumanBehaviour #PsychologyFacts #HowTheMindWorks #SocialPsychology #BrainScience #Trending

https://econopass.com/why-brain-remembers-embarrassing-moments/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into FLIPBOARD EXCHANGE FEED 🗞️ @flipboard-exchange-feed-Econopass

DATE: September 27, 2026 at 08:58AM
SOURCE: SOCIALPSYCHOLOGY.ORG

TITLE: Your Worldview Might Dictate How You Perceive Neutral Faces

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191597&url=https://www.psypost.org/how-a-dangerous-worldview-shapes-our-perception-of-everyday-threats/

Source: PsyPost

People who view the world as an inherently dangerous place consistently overestimate the likelihood of specific threats, from violent crimes to animal attacks. A new series of psychological evaluations reveals that this broad worldview also leads individuals to perceive the neutral faces of strangers as less trustworthy and more aggressive. The findings were published in the Journal of Individual Differences.

URL: http://www.socialpsychology.org/client/redirect.php?from=rss_feed&id=191597&url=https://www.psypost.org/how-a-dangerous-worldview-shapes-our-perception-of-everyday-threats/

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Worldview #Perception #Trustworthiness #NeutralFaces #SocialPsychology #CognitiveBias #ThreatPerception #FacePerception #PsychologyResearch #JournalOfIndividualDifferences

It arrives without warning. You are driving, washing dishes, or lying in bed trying to fall asleep, and suddenly your brain serves up a scene from fifteen years ago... #HumanBehaviour #PsychologyFacts #HowTheMindWorks #SocialPsychology #BrainScience #Trending

https://econopass.com/why-brain-remembers-embarrassing-moments/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Why We Do That @why-we-do-that-Econopass

You have checked your phone since you started reading this. You may not have noticed. That is rather the point. #Trending #brainscience #howthemindworks #humanbehaviour #psychologyfacts #socialpsychology

https://econopass.com/cannot-stop-checking-phone/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into FLIPBOARD EXCHANGE FEED 🗞️ @flipboard-exchange-feed-Econopass

You have checked your phone since you started reading this. You may not have noticed. That is rather the point. #Trending #brainscience #howthemindworks #humanbehaviour #psychologyfacts #socialpsychology

https://econopass.com/cannot-stop-checking-phone/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Why We Do That @why-we-do-that-Econopass

The Moment Someone Decides They Do Not Like You Happens in 7 Seconds. Here Is What Occurs in That Window. #Trending #brainscience #howthemindworks #humanbehaviour #psychologyfacts #socialpsychology

https://econopass.com/7-seconds-first-impression/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into FLIPBOARD EXCHANGE FEED 🗞️ @flipboard-exchange-feed-Econopass

Count how many times you said sorry yesterday. Not the apologies that mattered. The other ones... #Trending #brainscience #howthemindworks #humanbehaviour #psychologyfacts #socialpsychology

https://econopass.com/you-apologise-too-much/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into FLIPBOARD EXCHANGE FEED 🗞️ @flipboard-exchange-feed-Econopass

https://www.europesays.com/ie/696804/ Scientists find that “perfect” systems may be surprisingly fragile #Éire #IE #Ireland #Science #SocialPsychology;GenderDifference;Relationships;MaterialsScience;EngineeringAndConstruction;Physics;ComputerModeling;NeuralInterfaces;Mathematics

‘Fill my cup’: Expert calls for open dialogue on mental health and self-care in new podcast – The Killeen Daily Herald

‘Fill my cup’: Expert calls for open dialogue on mental health and self-care in new podcast  The Killeen Daily…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Mentalhealth #elizabethjennings #Health #killeen #MentalHealth #podcast #Psychology #Socialissues #socialpsychology #suicideprevention #Texas
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/852465/

The Contagion of Fear

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/13/the-contagion-of-fear/

Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49689460

#HackerNews #ContagionOfFear #FearCulture #SocialPsychology #MentalHealth #Awareness

"Laughter is, after all, the sound of social rigidity cracking under the pressure of human nature. [...] What elite culture has often dismissed as frivolous media content – easy laughter, excessive emotionality – has played an important role in the democratisation of emotions in general, and laughter in particular, in the past century."

cited from the above article

@amydiehl

#equality #SocietalLearning #psychology #socialPsychology #CulturalNorms #soapOpera #media #cinema #inequality

IG NOBEL ECONOMICS PRIZE 2026

“Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1118373109

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals.

In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals.

Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

#inequality #ignobel #economics #socialPsychology #Psychology

DATE: September 3, 2026 at 08:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------

TITLE: Focusing on your appearance increases benevolent sexist beliefs in both men and women

URL: https://www.psypost.org/focusing-on-your-appearance-increases-benevolent-sexist-beliefs-in-both-men-and-women/

A recent study published in 社会心理学研究 (Japanese Journal of Social Psychology) suggests that when both men and women focus on their physical appearance, they tend to become more supportive of benevolent sexism. These findings indicate that everyday situations emphasizing how we look might inadvertently reinforce traditional gender roles and preserve the societal status quo.

Benevolent sexism is a set of attitudes toward women that appear positive on the surface but are actually restrictive. It involves the belief that women are delicate creatures who should be cherished, protected, and financially supported by men. Unlike hostile sexism, which involves overt anger and antagonism toward women who challenge male power, benevolent sexism relies on traditional gender roles and rewards women only when they conform to those roles. Because it is often perceived as harmless or romantic, benevolent sexism can be particularly insidious.

Focusing on one’s appearance is defined as the situational attention people pay to how they look. This happens naturally in everyday situations, like trying on clothes or looking in a mirror. While it is a normal behavior, focusing on appearance often triggers thoughts about societal beauty standards, which are deeply intertwined with traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity. When people think about their appearance, they often compare themselves to these ideals, which can lead to feelings of inadequacy or body dissatisfaction.

A 2010 study demonstrated that when women are exposed to subtle, seemingly positive sexist attitudes, they tend to focus heavily on monitoring their own appearance. Another 2010 study indicated that holding benevolent sexist attitudes is closely tied to how people evaluate their own bodies. These earlier findings established that experiencing benevolent sexism prompts people to fixate on their physical appearance.

Kunyoung Park and Makoto Numazaki at Tokyo Metropolitan University designed a new study to investigate the reverse causal link. They wanted to see if the simple act of focusing on one’s appearance could lead people to endorse benevolent sexism.

The rationale for this question draws on a concept called system justification. This is the psychological tendency for individuals to defend and rationalize existing social structures, especially when they feel uncomfortable or threatened. When people focus on their appearance and notice a gap between how they look and societal ideals, they experience psychological discomfort. To cope with this discomfort and maintain a sense of social belonging, they might lean into traditional gender roles. Endorsing a system that frames men and women as naturally different and complementary helps soothe that discomfort.

To test this idea, the researchers recruited 181 undergraduate students in Japan, consisting of 107 men and 74 women. The participants were told they were taking part in a study about online shopping behavior and personality characteristics. This cover story helped ensure the students would behave naturally without guessing the true purpose of the experiment.

In a simulated online shopping platform, the students first evaluated neutral items like food and daily goods. Then, they were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the appearance-focused condition, participants looked at photos of mannequins wearing swimsuits and chose the ones they found most flattering for themselves to wear at a pool with friends. Men were shown men’s swimwear, and women were shown women’s swimwear.

In the control condition, participants evaluated and selected sneakers for a trip to the shopping mall. The researchers chose sneakers instead of everyday clothing to avoid triggering body consciousness in the control group, providing a culturally neutral baseline comparison.

After completing the shopping task, participants filled out the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, a standardized questionnaire that measures both hostile and benevolent sexist beliefs. Participants rated their agreement with statements on a scale of 1 to 6. They also completed a scale measuring gender self-stereotyping, which assesses how much individuals attribute positive traditional masculine traits (like being brave or decisive) or feminine traits (like being warm or delicate) to themselves. The researchers also recorded participants’ body mass index to ensure body size was accounted for in the statistical models.

The researchers found that participants who imagined trying on swimsuits reported higher levels of benevolent sexism compared to those who shopped for sneakers. Among men, the average benevolent sexism score was 3.30 in the swimsuit condition, compared to 3.07 in the sneaker condition. Among women, the average score was 3.10 in the swimsuit condition, compared to 2.88 in the sneaker condition. This increase in benevolent sexist beliefs occurred regardless of the participants’ body mass index.

Focusing on appearance did not influence scores on hostile sexism. The hostile sexism scores remained similar across both the swimsuit and sneaker groups for both men and women. This supports the idea that appearance concerns are specifically tied to the complementary, romanticized gender roles promoted by benevolent sexism, rather than outward hostility toward women.

Interestingly, the appearance-focused task did not increase gender self-stereotyping. The researchers had expected that women might rate themselves as more feminine and men as more masculine after thinking about swimwear. Instead, participants in the swimsuit condition tended to rate themselves more positively across all traits in general, suggesting they used a broad strategy of self-enhancement to protect their self-image rather than leaning into specific gender stereotypes.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. One alternative explanation for the findings relates to heterosexual intimacy. Evaluating swimsuits might have made participants think about being evaluated by potential romantic partners. Adopting the perspective of a potential partner could make the traditional roles of benevolent sexism feel more appealing in that specific moment, rather than the shift being driven purely by a desire to justify the social system.

Another consideration is the use of sneakers as a comparison. Thinking about sneakers might bring to mind physical activity, agency, or independence. This mindset could have inadvertently lowered benevolent sexism scores in the control group. Future research could use different types of control items to clarify this dynamic.

The researchers also note that they did not directly measure the exact level of psychological discomfort participants felt when evaluating their appearance. Measuring this emotional state in future studies would help map out the exact mental steps that link appearance focus to sexist attitudes.

The study, “Focusing on one’s appearance increases benevolent sexism in women and men,” was authored by Kunyoung Park and Makoto Numazaki.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/focusing-on-your-appearance-increases-benevolent-sexist-beliefs-in-both-men-and-women/

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #FocusingOnAppearance #BenevolentSexism #GenderRoles #AppearanceSelfEsteem #SystemJustification #SexismResearch #MasculinityFemininity #SocialPsychology #OnlineShoppingStudy #MannequinSwimsuitExperiment

russian history
(English language books)
#russian history
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/307

Social psychology
(English language books)
#Social psychology
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/306

Personality psychology
(English language books)
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/305

Developmental psychology
(English language books)
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/304

Cognitive psychology
(English language books)
#Cognitive psychology
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/303

Abnormal psychology
(English language books)
#Abnormal psychology
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/301

Memory And Mind Tweaking
(English language books)
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/299

Clinical Psychology
(English language books)
#Clinical Psychology
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/296

History
(English language books)
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/289

Photography
(English language books)
#Photography
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/287

_Politics, economics and law
(English language books)
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/283

Anthropology, sociology and culture
(English language books)
#Anthropology, #sociology and #culture
(#English_language_books)
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/282

Библиотека ФИДО
FIDO Library, Бібліотека ФІДО
#Библиотека #ФИДО
#FIDO #Library, #Бібліотека #ФІДО
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/281

Путеводители путешествия страны и континенты города и веси
Путівники подорожі країни та континенти міста та весі
#путеводители #книги #books
Travel guides countries and continents cities and towns
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/280

Нацистско-коммунистическая и фашистская мифология и пропаганда
Нацистсько-комуністична і фашистська міфологія і пропаганда
Communazi and fascist mythology and propaganda
#коммунаци #мифология #пргопаганда
#комунаці #міфологія #пропаганда #комунаці #міфологія #пропаганда #kommunazi #mythology #propaganda
Периодика, газеты, журналы, Periodicals, newspapers, magazines, Періодика, Газети, Журнали
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/279

Нацистско-коммунистическая и фашистская мифология и пропаганда
Нацистсько-комуністична і фашистська міфологія і пропаганда
Communazi and fascist mythology and propaganda
#коммунаци #мифология #пргопаганда
#комунаці міфологія #пропаганда комунаці #міфологія пропаганда #kommunazi #mythology #propaganda
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/278

russian history
(English language books)
#russian history
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/307

Social psychology
(English language books)
#Social psychology
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/306

Personality psychology
(English language books)
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/305

Developmental psychology
(English language books)
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/304

Cognitive psychology
(English language books)
#Cognitive psychology
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/303

Abnormal psychology
(English language books)
#Abnormal psychology
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/301

Memory And Mind Tweaking
(English language books)
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/299

Clinical Psychology
(English language books)
#Clinical Psychology
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/296

History
(English language books)
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/289

Photography
(English language books)
#Photography
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/287

_Politics, economics and law
(English language books)
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/283

Anthropology, sociology and culture
(English language books)
#Anthropology, #sociology and #culture
(#English_language_books)
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/282

Библиотека ФИДО
FIDO Library, Бібліотека ФІДО
#Библиотека #ФИДО
#FIDO #Library, #Бібліотека #ФІДО
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/281

Путеводители путешествия страны и континенты города и веси
Путівники подорожі країни та континенти міста та весі
#путеводители #книги #books
Travel guides countries and continents cities and towns
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/280

Нацистско-коммунистическая и фашистская мифология и пропаганда
Нацистсько-комуністична і фашистська міфологія і пропаганда
Communazi and fascist mythology and propaganda
#коммунаци #мифология #пргопаганда
#комунаці #міфологія #пропаганда #комунаці #міфологія #пропаганда #kommunazi #mythology #propaganda
Периодика, газеты, журналы, Periodicals, newspapers, magazines, Періодика, Газети, Журнали
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/279

Нацистско-коммунистическая и фашистская мифология и пропаганда
Нацистсько-комуністична і фашистська міфологія і пропаганда
Communazi and fascist mythology and propaganda
коммунаци мифология пргопаганда
комунаці міфологія пропаганда комунаці міфологія пропаганда kommunazi mythology propaganda
t.me/scilib_yura15cbx/278

Social Psychology Category added to sciencefind.org today!

https://sciencefind.org/categories/social_psychology_category.php

Find Wikipedia Social Psychology articles to read!

#science #learning #education #selfeducation #withoutai #socialpsychology #wikipedia

Nosso destino em queda

Nosso destino em queda

Olhe esta geração da vingança.
Leia os sinais que vêm do mundo.
Mostre os delírios.
Assusta-me saber que acham normal
ver os delírios.
Observe: nada disso é normal.

Carlos de Campos 

Avalie isto:

#israel #palestine #gaza #westbank #opt #socialpsychology #youth #zionism #narratives #traumata

2/2

… largely ignored by the Israeli media. "I'm glad I opened my eyes, but it came at a cost: discovering that this country is toxic. Today, I think that [a different government] wouldn't change anything. This country is too deeply rooted in fanaticism. It's irreversible."«

#israel #palestine : #gaza / #westbank / #opt / #socialpsychology / #youth / #zionism / #narratives / #traumata

»"I grew up in a family that saw Baruch Goldstein [who perpetrated a massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers at the Hebron mosque in 1994] as a hero. Then I discovered that he was a terrorist criminal. It broke my heart to realize that I had been raised to believe lies." She said she read the foreign press to stay informed about topics she felt were …

1/2
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/07/25/what-young-israelis-say-about-their-country-its-army-wars-politics-and-religion_6755835_4.html?lmd_medium=al&lmd_campaign=envoye-par-appli&lmd_creation=ios&lmd_source=default

The checklist for a social media post is ever getting longer:

Is it fake?
Is it by a bot?
Is it by a troll?
Is it click bait?
Is it rage bait?
Is it a dogmatical post?
Is it a fanatical post?
Is it a puritanical post?
Is it by a toxic poster?
Or is it posted only to annoy or tease?

(There is an even longer version...)

#EternalSeptember
#InformationAge
#InformationSociety
#LifeInTheInformationAge
#SocialMedia
#SocialPsychology
#UmbertoEco2015

Literacy is more than reading, it’s a cultural practice where we read and share what we think about what we read.

I have people try to shame me for investing thought in anything that doesn’t translate into a flex, has some social or monetary reward.

It’s a disturbing pattern that makes the isolation of ageism even worse.

Weapons of Mass Perception
What the death of reading is doing to our brains.
#DW #DeutscheWelle #News #Capitalism #Media #Reading #Literacy #Culture #Psychology #SocialPsychology #EnvironmentalPsychology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6t-BBQ8fUQ&t=629s

I think some of our problems are made worse by the fundamental attribution error: a bias toward assuming others' actions are intentional (that's one way to interpret the FAE, anyway). For example, Graham Platner probably does not spend his days planning how to sexually assault women--it's much more plausible that he intends not to do that, but (if the allegations are true) frequently fails to live up to that intention. Not all cops have a basic plan to unfairly treat Black and other nonwhite people like shit; it's most likely that most of them have stereotypes (possibly from being on the force) and truly believe that they are always doing the right, safe, proper thing, because people with stereotypes don't know it; they think they simply see the world reasonably and accurately.

The actions aren't much better without premeditation or intention; they still do the same amount of harm. However, assuming that every bad thing is caused by a dyed-in-the-wool psychopath offers very little possibility for positive change, in addition to almost always being wrong.

It's much easier to demonize than it is to fix problems. Don't worry; you can still impose consequences even if you don't assume that every injustice is committed by someone knowingly and callously committing injustice.

#politics #subtoot #SocialPsychology

TikTok users don’t have as much agency over their FYPs as they think

The

Archive: ia: https://s.faithcollapsing.com/gdauk
https://s.faithcollapsing.com/yt8us#science #social-media #social-psychology #tech

 

 

⚠️ Trump's vows 2024. (and then Iran) ⚠️

To be honest, I also remember Biden about Ukraine (among other topics!)

⛔ Brief, when we go voting, are we so certain for who we are voting? (valid on both sides, Dem. or Rep. or Maga or ....)
🗽🗽🗽🗽🗽🗽🗽🗽🗽🗽🗽🗽🗽

#democracy #us #usa #uspol #disinformation #politics #vote #maga #democrats #senat #democratiedies #Governor #VoteBlue #sociology #SocialPsychology #iran #iranWar

“A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”
― Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, 1984

#manipulation #persuasion #validation #influence #conversation #memory #neuroscience #campaigning #narratives #storyTelling #Psychology #socialPsych #socialPsychology #facilitation #Cialdini #book

Individuals often harbor positive personal attitudes toward #sexual and #gender minorities but underestimate the broader public's level of acceptance. This misperception acts as a psychological barrier, causing potential allies to withhold active support for #LGBTQ+ individuals wishing to come out.
#Psychology #BehavioralScience #SocialPsychology # LGBTQ #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/03/psy03312601.html

Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

https://www.psypost.org/audio-tapes-reveal-mass-rule-breaking-in-milgram-s-obedience-experiments-2026-03-26/

#HackerNews #MilgramExperiments #ObediencePsychology #RuleBreaking #EthicsInResearch #SocialPsychology