Being "good" or "good enough": Prosocial risk and the structure of moral self-regard.

The motivation to feel moral powerfully guides people's prosocial behavior. We propose that people's efforts to preserve their moral self-regard conform to a moral threshold model. This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their prosocial behavior legitimates the claim that they have acted morally, a claim that often diverges from whether their behavior is in the best interests of the recipient. Specifically, it predicts that for people to feel moral following a prosocial decision, that decision need not have promised the greatest benefit for the recipient but only one larger than at least one other available outcome. Moreover, this model predicts that once people produce a benefit that exceeds this threshold, their moral self-regard is relatively insensitive to the magnitude of benefit that they produce. In 6 studies, we test this moral threshold model by examining people's prosocial risk decisions. We find that, compared with risky egoistic decisions, people systematically avoid making risky prosocial decisions that carry the possibility of producing the worst possible outcome in a choice set-even when this means avoiding a decision that is objectively superior. We further find that this aversion to producing the worst possible prosocial outcome leads people's prosocial (vs. egoistic) risk decisions to be less sensitive to those decisions' maximum possible benefit. We highlight theoretical and practical implications of these findings, including the detrimental consequence that people's desire to protect their moral self-regard can have on the amount of good that they produce. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Social norm perception in groups with outliers.

Social outliers draw a lot of attention from those inside and outside their group and yet little is known about their impact on perceptions of their group as a whole. The present studies examine how outliers influence observers' summary perceptions of a group's behavior and inferences about the group's descriptive and prescriptive norms. Across 4 studies (N = 1,718) we examine how observers perceive descriptive and prescriptive social norms in groups containing outliers of varying degrees. We find consistent evidence that observers overweight outlying behavior when judging the descriptive and prescriptive norms, but overweight outliers less as they become more extreme, especially in perceptions of the prescriptive norm. We find this pattern across norms pertaining to punctuality (Studies 1-2 and 4) and clothing formality (Study 3) and for outliers who are both prescriptively and descriptively deviant (e.g., late arrivers), as well as for outliers who are only descriptive deviants (e.g., early arrivers). We further demonstrate that observers' perceptions of the group shift in the direction of moderate outliers. This occurs because observers anchor on the outlier's behavior and adjust their recollections of nonoutlying individuals, making their inferences about the group's average behavior more extreme. (PsycINFO Database Record

Behavioral Processes in Long-Lag Intervention Studies.

We argue that psychologists who conduct experiments with long lags between the manipulation and the outcome measure should pay more attention to behavioral processes that intervene between the manipulation and the outcome measure. Neglect of such processes, we contend, stems from psychology's long tradition of short-lag lab experiments where there is little scope for intervening behavioral processes. Studying process in the lab invariably involves studying psychological processes, but in long-lag field experiments it is important to study causally relevant behavioral processes as well as psychological ones. To illustrate the roles that behavioral processes can play in long-lag experiments we examine field experiments motivated by three policy-relevant goals: prejudice reduction, health promotion, and educational achievement. In each of the experiments discussed we identify various behavioral pathways through which the manipulated psychological state could have produced the observed outcome. We argue that if psychologists conducting long-lag interventions posited a theory of change that linked manipulated psychological states to outcomes via behavioral pathways, the result would be richer theory and more practically useful research. Movement in this direction would also permit more opportunities for productive collaborations between psychologists and other social scientists interested in similar social problems.

Changing Norms to Change Behavior.

Providing people with information about the behavior and attitudes of their peers is a strategy commonly employed by those seeking to reduce behavior deemed harmful either to individuals (e.g., high alcohol consumption) or the collective (e.g., high energy consumption). We review norm-based interventions, detailing the logic behind them and the various forms they can take. We give special attention to interventions designed to decrease college students' drinking and increase environment-friendly behaviors. We identify the conditions under which norm information has the highest likelihood of changing the targeted behavior and discuss why this is the case.

Inventing racist roads not taken: the licensing effect of immoral counterfactual behaviors.

Six experiments examined how people strategically use thoughts of foregone misdeeds to regulate their moral behavior. We tested 2 hypotheses: 1st, that people will feel licensed to act in morally dubious ways when they can point to immoral alternatives to their prior behavior, and 2nd, that people made to feel insecure about their morality will exaggerate the extent to which such alternatives existed. Supporting the 1st hypothesis, when White participants could point to racist alternatives to their past actions, they felt they had obtained more evidence of their own virtue (Study 1), they expressed less racial sensitivity (Study 2), and they were more likely to express preferences about employment and allocating money that favored Whites at the expense of Blacks (Study 3). Supporting the 2nd hypothesis, White participants whose security in their identity as nonracists had been threatened remembered a prior task as having afforded more racist alternatives to their behavior than did those who were not threatened. This distortion of the past involved overestimating the number of Black individuals they had encountered on the prior task (Study 4) and exaggerating how stereotypically Black specific individuals had looked (Studies 5 and 6). We discuss implications for moral behavior, the motivated rewriting of one's moral history, and how the life unlived can liberate people to lead the life they want.

How the moralization of issues grants social legitimacy to act on one's attitudes.

Actions that do not have as their goal the advancement or protection of one's material interests are often seen as illegitimate. Four studies suggested that moral values can legitimate action in the absence of material interest. The more participants linked sociopolitical issues to moral values, the more comfortable they felt advocating on behalf of those issues and the less confused they were by others' advocacy (Studies 1 and 2). Crime victims were perceived as being more entitled to claim special privileges when the crime had violated their personal moral values (Studies 3 and 4). These effects were strongest when the legitimacy to act could not already be derived from one's material interests, suggesting that moral values and material interest can represent interchangeable justifications for behavior. No support was found for the possibility that attitude strength explained these effects. The power of moralization to disinhibit action is discussed.

Religiosity and social welfare: competing influences of cultural conservatism and prosocial value orientation.

This research examines the hypothesis that religiosity has two competing psychological influences on the social welfare attitudes of contemporary Americans. On the one hand, religiosity promotes a culturally based conservative identity, which in turn promotes opposition to federal social welfare provision. On the other hand, religiosity promotes a prosocial value orientation, which in turn promotes support of federal social welfare provision. Across two national samples (Ns = 1,513 and 320) and one sample of business employees (N = 710), reliable support for this competing pathways model was obtained. We argue that research testing influences of nonpolitical individual differences on political preferences should consider the possibility of competing influences that are rooted in a combination of personality processes and contextual-discursive surroundings.

Reducing exposure to trust-related risks to avoid self-blame.

Three studies demonstrated that anticipated self-blame elicits more conservative decisions about risks that require trust than about otherwise economically identical risks that do not. Participants were more reluctant to invest money in a company when it risked failure due to fraud versus low consumer demand (Study 1), and to risk points in an economic game when its outcome ostensibly depended on another participant versus chance (Studies 2 and 3). These effects were mediated by anticipated self-blame (Studies 1 and 2). Additionally, participants who actually experienced a loss felt more self-blame when the loss violated their trust and became even more conservative in subsequent risk decisions relative to participants whose loss did not violate their trust (Study 3). No support emerged for alternative explanations based on either the perceived probability of incurring a loss or an aversion to losses that profit others. The motivational power of trust violations is discussed.

Distinguishing between silent and vocal minorities: not all deviants feel marginal.

People's opinions can deviate from that of the average group member in two ways. Descriptive deviants diverge from the average group attitude in a direction consistent with the desirable group attitude; prescriptive deviants diverge from the average group attitude in a direction inconsistent with the desirable group attitude. Three studies tested the hypothesis that descriptive deviants are more willing to express their opinions than either nondeviants or prescriptive deviants. Study 1 found that college students reported more comfort in expressing descriptive deviant opinions because descriptive deviance induced feelings of superior conformity (i.e., being "different but good"). Study 2 found that descriptive deviants reported more pride after expressing their opinions, were rated as more proud by an observer, and were more willing to publicize their opinions. Study 3 showed that political bumper stickers with descriptive deviant messages were displayed disproportionately more frequently than were those with prescriptive deviant messages.

Inferring the popularity of an opinion from its familiarity: a repetitive voice can sound like a chorus.

Despite the importance of doing so, people do not always correctly estimate the distribution of opinions within their group. One important mechanism underlying such misjudgments is people's tendency to infer that a familiar opinion is a prevalent one, even when its familiarity derives solely from the repeated expression of 1 group member. Six experiments demonstrate this effect and show that it holds even when perceivers are consciously aware that the opinions come from 1 speaker. The results also indicate that the effect is due to opinion accessibility rather than a conscious inference about the meaning of opinion repetition in a group. Implications for social consensus estimation and social influence are discussed.

Political-economic values and the relationship between socioeconomic status and self-esteem.

Values concerning the distribution of wealth are an important aspect of identity for many Americans, and such values may therefore influence how Americans experience their own socioeconomic status (SES). Based on this proposition, the present research examines political-economic values as a moderator of the relationship between SES and self-esteem. Results supported the hypothesis that there is a stronger relationship between SES and self-esteem among individuals who report relatively inegalitarian values than among individuals who report relatively egalitarian values. This result was replicated using both objective and subjective measures of SES. Implications of the present findings for the study of values and well-being, psychological conflict, and the influence of economic factors on self-esteem are discussed.

Essentializing differences between women and men.

People represent many social categories, including gender categories, in essentialist terms: They see category members as sharing deep, nonobvious properties that make them the kinds of things they are. The present research explored the consequences of this mode of representation for social inferences. In two sets of studies, participants learned (a) that they were similar to a member of the other gender on a novel attribute, (b) that they were different from a member of the other gender on a novel attribute, or (c) just their own standing on a novel attribute. Results showed that participants made stronger inductive inferences about the attribute in question when they learned that it distinguished them from a member of the other gender than in the other conditions. We consider the implications of these results for the representation of social categories and for everyday social inference processes.

How surveillance begets perceptions of dishonesty: the case of the counterfactual sinner.

Three studies support the hypothesis that observers' impressions of actors reflect not only what actors do but also what they can easily be imagined doing. Participants in Studies 1 and 2 observed a 10-year-old boy take a math test in a context in which the incentive to cheat and the constraints against cheating varied. When the incentive to cheat was high but the likelihood of getting caught was also high, observers perceived a target who resisted the temptation to cheat as less honest than the average boy. This effect was not found when the incentive to cheat was low, which suggests that its occurrence under high temptation resulted from observers in that condition generating the counterfactual thought that the target would have cheated had the likelihood of detection been low. Study 3 further supported the link between spontaneous counterfactual thought and inferences of dishonesty. The implications of the counterfactual correspondence bias are discussed.

Counterfactual thinking and the first instinct fallacy.

Most people believe that they should avoid changing their answer when taking multiple-choice tests. Virtually all research on this topic, however, has suggested that this strategy is ill-founded: Most answer changes are from incorrect to correct, and people who change their answers usually improve their test scores. Why do people believe in this strategy if the data so strongly refute it? The authors argue that the belief is in part a product of counterfactual thinking. Changing an answer when one should have stuck with one's original answer leads to more "if only . . ." self-recriminations than does sticking with one's first instinct when one should have switched. As a consequence, instances of the former are more memorable than instances of the latter. This differential availability provides individuals with compelling (albeit illusory) personal evidence for the wisdom of always following their 1st instinct, with suboptimal test scores the result.

Seeing approach motivation in the avoidance behavior of others: implications for an understanding of pluralistic ignorance.

Four studies tested the hypothesis that observers tend to interpret others' actions as approach motivated even when they recognize that their own identical choices were motivated by avoidance. Study 1 found that voters in the 2000 U.S. Presidential election who chose a candidate primarily because of their aversion to the alternative thought that others who voted for the same candidate liked him more than they themselves did. In Studies 2, 3, and 4 participants who learned that others made the same choice as themselves between 2 unappealing flavors of soda orjelly beans estimated that the others would pay more than they would for their common choice. The relevance of these findings for an understanding of pluralistic ignorance is discussed.

The emergence of homegrown stereotypes.

Homegrown stereotypes are generalizations that groups develop about their own typical characteristics. They are a distinct class of in-group stereotypes in the contexts and processes that give rise to them, as well as in their consequences for individual group members. The authors develop the concept of homegrown stereotypes and locate the origins of these stereotypes in self-presentation processes. They discuss the accuracy of these stereotypes and consider their similarities to and differences from a number of related phenomena. An examination of homegrown stereotypes highlights the importance of taking into account the impact of in-group, as well as intergroup, dynamics on the production of stereotypes.