Social Class and Social Pain: Target SES Biases Judgments of Pain and Support for White Target Individuals.

Social pain, defined as distress caused by negative interpersonal experiences (e.g., ostracism, mistreatment), is detrimental to health. Yet, it is unclear how social class might shape judgments of the social pains of low-socioeconomic status (SES) and high-SES individuals. Five studies tested competing toughness and empathy predictions for SES's effect on social pain judgments. Consistent with an empathy account, in all studies (Ncumulative = 1,046), low-SES White targets were judged more sensitive to social pain than high-SES White targets. Further, empathy mediated these effects, such that participants felt greater empathy and expected more social pain for low-SES targets relative to high-SES targets. Social pain judgments also informed judgments of social support needs, as low-SES targets were presumed to need more coping resources to manage hurtful events than high-SES targets. The current findings provide initial evidence that empathic concern for low-SES White individuals sensitizes social pain judgments and increases expected support needs for lower class White individuals.

Black individuals' suspicion of Whites' motives negatively predicts expected efficacy with White social partners.

OBJECTIVES: Interracial efficacy is critical to intergroup interactions. However, the antecedents of interracial efficacy are unclear and rarely studied from the perspectives of Black individuals. The current work addresses these empirical gaps by testing whether individual differences in suspicion of Whites' motives negatively relate to expected efficacy in interracial interactions. Suspicion was operationalized as beliefs that Whites' positivity toward people of color (POC) is primarily motivated by concerns with appearing prejudiced. METHOD: Four studies employing correlational and experimental vignette designs with Black adult participants (Ntotal = 2,295; ∼60% female) tested suspicion's hypothesized negative relation with three conceptions of interracial efficacy (general efficacy, liking-based efficacy, and respect-based efficacy). RESULTS: Four studies provided consistent evidence that suspicion of Whites' motives negatively related to expected efficacy in interactions with White social partners. Moreover, this relationship was unique to contexts with White partners and did not extend to imagined interactions with Black partners or members of other outgroup members (e.g., Latine partners). CONCLUSIONS: Results further suggest suspicion increases expected threat (i.e., anticipated uncertainty/anxiety), which undermines Black individuals' confidence in interactions with White partners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

(How) Do You Regret Killing One to Save Five? Affective and Cognitive Regret Differ After Utilitarian and Deontological Decisions.

Sacrificial moral dilemmas, in which opting to kill one person will save multiple others, are definitionally suboptimal: Someone dies either way. Decision-makers, then, may experience regret about these decisions. Past research distinguishes affective regret, negative feelings about a decision, from cognitive regret, thoughts about how a decision might have gone differently. Classic dual-process models of moral judgment suggest that affective processing drives characteristically deontological decisions to reject outcome-maximizing harm, whereas cognitive deliberation drives characteristically utilitarian decisions to endorse outcome-maximizing harm. Consistent with this model, we found that people who made or imagined making sacrificial utilitarian judgments reliably expressed relatively more affective regret and sometimes expressed relatively less cognitive regret than those who made or imagined making deontological dilemma judgments. In other words, people who endorsed causing harm to save lives generally felt more distressed about their decision, yet less inclined to change it, than people who rejected outcome-maximizing harm.