Americans misperceive the frequency and format of political debate.

Disagreement over divergent viewpoints seems like an ever-present feature of American life-but how common is debate and with whom do debates most often occur? In the present research, we theorize that the landscape of debate is distorted by social media and the salience of negativity present in high-profile spats. To understand the true landscape of debate, we conducted three studies (N = 2985) across online and lab samples. In contrast to the high-profile nature of negative debates with strangers, we found that people most commonly debate close contacts, namely family members and good friends. In addition, they often report feeling positive after engaging in debate. We then directly measured misperceptions regarding debate in a representative sample of Americans (N = 1991). We found that Americans systematically overestimated how often others engage in debate. This overestimation extended across debate partners (family members, good friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and strangers) and contexts (in-person and online; p's < 0.001, d's > 0.98), most strongly overestimating how often Americans debate strangers online. This misprediction may be psychologically costly: overestimating how often Americans debate strangers online significantly predicted greater hopelessness in the future of America. Together, our findings suggest that Americans may experience a false reality about the landscape of debate which can unnecessarily undermine their hope about the future.

Bias against AI art can enhance perceptions of human creativity.

The contemporary art world is conservatively estimated to be a $65 billion USD market that employs millions of human artists, sellers, and collectors globally. Recent attention paid to AI-made art in prestigious galleries, museums, and popular media has provoked debate around how these statistics will change. Unanswered questions fuel growing anxieties. Are AI-made and human-made art evaluated in the same ways? How will growing exposure to AI-made art impact evaluations of human creativity? Our research uses a psychological lens to explore these questions in the realm of visual art. We find that people devalue art labeled as AI-made across a variety of dimensions, even when they report it is indistinguishable from human-made art, and even when they believe it was produced collaboratively with a human. We also find that comparing images labeled as human-made to images labeled as AI-made increases perceptions of human creativity, an effect that can be leveraged to increase the value of human effort. Results are robust across six experiments (N = 2965) using a range of human-made and AI-made stimuli and incorporating representative samples of the US population. Finally, we highlight conditions that strengthen effects as well as dimensions where AI-devaluation effects are more pronounced.

Positive-More than unbiased-Self-perceptions increase subjective authenticity.

Authenticity is often described using terms like "real," "genuine," and "true" suggesting that unbiased and objective self-perception is a core component of the construct. However, people tend to view themselves in an overly positive way. Therefore, we propose that experiencing a positive self-versus an unbiased self-will increase authenticity. We find support for this in seven studies (Ntotal = 1,795) with two operationalizations of self-rated authenticity: attributed and state authenticity. We find that authenticity emerges from positive self-beliefs (Study 1), positive personality assessments (Study 2), and positive self-expressions (Study 3a and b). Further, we find that these effects are not driven only by positivity, but positive selves (Study 4), and mediated by the identity centrality (Study 5). Finally, Study 6 finds that this positivity bias does not extend to other-rated authenticity: People who present an overly positive self seem less authentic to others relative to a mixed or negative self-presentation. Taken together, these findings suggest that being "unreal" through positive self-illusions can, paradoxically, make one feel more real. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Yours truly: On the complex relationship between authenticity and honesty.

Authenticity is defined as being true to yourself, but does being true to yourself always mean being truthful? The apparent similarity between authenticity and honesty has obscured directly scrutinizing possible tension between the two constructs. In the current paper, we review recent research which reveals their orthogonality, highlighting how honesty can decrease authenticity and dishonesty can increase authenticity. In addition, we delineate between honesty with the self and self-rated authenticity, as well as honesty with others and perceived authenticity. Finally, we propose the importance of coherence and morality which describe when honesty will serve (or harm) authenticity both intra- and interpersonally, illuminating avenues for future research.

Authentic self-expression on social media is associated with greater subjective well-being.

Social media users face a tension between presenting themselves in an idealized or authentic way. Here, we explore how prioritizing one over the other impacts users' well-being. We estimate the degree of self-idealized vs. authentic self-expression as the proximity between a user's self-reported personality and the automated personality judgements made on the basis Facebook Likes and status updates. Analyzing data of 10,560 Facebook users, we find that individuals who are more authentic in their self-expression also report greater Life Satisfaction. This effect appears consistent across different personality profiles, countering the proposition that individuals with socially desirable personalities benefit from authentic self-expression more than others. We extend this finding in a pre-registered, longitudinal experiment, demonstrating the causal relationship between authentic posting and positive affect and mood on a within-person level. Our findings suggest that the extent to which social media use is related to well-being depends on how individuals use it.

Born to choose: the origins and value of the need for control.

Belief in one's ability to exert control over the environment and to produce desired results is essential for an individual's wellbeing. It has repeatedly been argued that perception of control is not only desirable, but is also probably a psychological and biological necessity. In this article, we review the literature supporting this claim and present evidence of a biological basis for the need for control and for choice-that is, the means by which we exercise control over the environment. Converging evidence from animal research, clinical studies and neuroimaging suggests that the need for control is a biological imperative for survival, and a corticostriatal network is implicated as the neural substrate of this adaptive behavior.

Medium of exchange matters: what's fair for goods is unfair for money.

Organized groups face a fundamental problem of how to distribute resources fairly. We found people view it as less fair to distribute resources equally when the allocated resource invokes the market by being a medium of exchange than when the allocated resource is a good that holds value in use. These differences in fairness can be attributed to being a medium of exchange, and not to other essential properties of money (i.e., being a unit of account or a store of value). These findings suggest that egalitarian outcomes have a greater likelihood of being accepted as fair when the resources being distributed take the form of in-kind goods rather than of cash transfers.

Doing better but feeling worse. Looking for the "best" job undermines satisfaction.

Expanding upon Simon's (1955) seminal theory, this investigation compared the choice-making strategies of maximizers and satisficers, finding that maximizing tendencies, although positively correlated with objectively better decision outcomes, are also associated with more negative subjective evaluations of these decision outcomes. Specifically, in the fall of their final year in school, students were administered a scale that measured maximizing tendencies and were then followed over the course of the year as they searched for jobs. Students with high maximizing tendencies secured jobs with 20% higher starting salaries than did students with low maximizing tendencies. However, maximizers were less satisfied than satisficers with the jobs they obtained, and experienced more negative affect throughout the job-search process. These effects were mediated by maximizers' greater reliance on external sources of information and their fixation on realized and unrealized options during the search and selection process.