Far away or yesterday? Shifting perceptions of time for political ends.

Voters evaluate political candidates not only based on their recent record but their history, often faced with weighing the relevance of long-past misdeeds in current appraisal. How should a distant transgression be taken to reflect on the present? Across multiple years, political figures and incidents, we found that people's subjective perceptions of time concerning political candidate's histories can differ radically, regardless of objective fact; political bias shapes people's perception of the time of things past. Results showed that despite equidistant calendar time, people subjectively view a favored politician's successes and opposing politician's failures as much closer in time, while a favored politician's failures and opponent's success seem much further away. Studies 1-3 tested the proposed phenomena across distinct (real and hypothetical) political contexts, while Study 4 tested the causal effects of temporal distance framing. Study 5 provided a final preregistered test of the findings. Overall, we demonstrate that partisans can protect their candidates and attack opponents by shifting their perception of time.

Gendered Language in Interactive Discourse.

Over two studies, we examined the nature of gendered language in interactive discourse. In the first study, we analyzed gendered language from a chat corpus to see whether tokens of gendered language proposed in the gender-as-culture hypothesis (Maltz and Borker in Language and social identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 196-216, 1982) can be found in interactive language. Of the eight tokens examined only three were found to differ in the hypothesized direction, and these only in male-male dyads. In the second study, we trained a male and a female confederate to use either male or female gendered tokens found to be reliable in Study One in their chats with participants. Our design permits disentangling of effects due to knowledge of the gender of the interlocutors and use of specific language tokens. We find that use of language tokens by the confederate promoted use of the same token by their interlocutor, regardless of knowledge of the confederate's gender. Moreover use of tokens consistent or inconsistent with visible gender influenced how the interlocutor perceived the confederate. Taken together these data are inconsistent with either the notion that gendered language is context independent (as suggested in the gender-as-culture hypothesis) or the notion that gendered language only emerges when gender is made salient, as would, in these studies, occur in mixed-gendered groups.

Changing theories of change: strategic shifting in implicit theory endorsement.

People differ in their implicit theories about the malleability of characteristics such as intelligence and personality. These relatively chronic theories can be experimentally altered, and can be affected by parent or teacher feedback. Little is known about whether people might selectively shift their implicit beliefs in response to salient situational goals. We predicted that, when motivated to reach a desired conclusion, people might subtly shift their implicit theories of change and stability to garner supporting evidence for their desired position. Any motivated context in which a particular lay theory would help people to reach a preferred directional conclusion could elicit shifts in theory endorsement. We examine a variety of motivated situational contexts across 7 studies, finding that people's theories of change shifted in line with goals to protect self and liked others and to cast aspersions on disliked others. Studies 1-3 demonstrate how people regulate their implicit theories to manage self-view by more strongly endorsing an incremental theory after threatening performance feedback or memories of failure. Studies 4-6 revealed that people regulate the implicit theories they hold about favored and reviled political candidates, endorsing an incremental theory to forgive preferred candidates for past gaffes but leaning toward an entity theory to ensure past failings "stick" to opponents. Finally, in Study 7, people who were most threatened by a previously convicted child sex offender (i.e., parents reading about the offender moving to their neighborhood) gravitated most to the entity view that others do not change. Although chronic implicit theories are undoubtedly meaningful, this research reveals a previously unexplored source of fluidity by highlighting the active role people play in managing their implicit theories in response to goals.