Psychology Research Digest
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology - Vol 128, Iss 6
The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology publishes original papers in all areas of personality and social psychology. It emphasizes empirical reports but may include specialized theoretical, methodological, and review papers.
The ecology of relatedness: How living around family (or not) matters.
How does living in an environment with many or few family relatives shape our psychology? Here, we draw upon ideas from behavioral ecology to explore the psychological effects of ecological relatedness—the prevalence of family relatives in one’s environment. We present six studies, both correlational and experimental, that examine this. In general, people and populations that live in ecologies with more family relatives (Studies 1–4b), or who imagine themselves to be living in such ecologies (Studies 2/3a/3b/4b), engage in more extreme pro-group behavior (e.g., being willing to go to war for their country), hold more interdependent self-concepts, are more punishing of antisocial behaviors (e.g., support the death penalty for murder), identify themselves as more connected to and trust nearby groups (e.g., their community and neighbors) but less so distant groups (e.g., foreigners, the world), and also judge sibling incest as more morally wrong. These effects are examined across three countries (the United States, Ghana, the Philippines) and are robust to a range of controls and alternative explanations (e.g., ingroup preferences, familiarity effects, kinship intensity). The current work highlights the psychological effects of an underexamined dimension of our social ecology, provides a set of methods for studying it, and holds implications for understanding the ecological origins of a range of social behaviors and cultural differences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Feedback receptivity from people in power reduces gender, sexual orientation, and disability bias concerns.
Seven preregistered studies (total N = 2,443) demonstrate that feedback receptivity of people in power, or their openness to feedback, reduces bias concerns among members of marginalized groups (marginalized group meta-analytic dz = 0.53; nonmarginalized group meta-analytic dz = 0.10). Study 1 finds that the extent to which engineering students and staff perceive their faculty advisors as receptive to feedback predicts women’s lower concerns about facing gender bias and that this effect is weaker for men. Studies 2–4 show that reading about a person in power who is high in feedback receptivity (vs. no information about feedback receptivity) reduces women’s gender bias concerns in male-dominated environments; lesbian, gay, and bisexual people’s sexual orientation bias concerns at work; and disabled students’ ability bias concerns in the classroom. Studies 3–6 find that perceptions of relational leadership, or perceptions that the person in power is caring, trustworthy, and uses power for good, explain why feedback receptivity reduces bias concerns. Study 7 introduces an important caveat: When people in power ask for but then explicitly ignore feedback, bias concerns are higher than when they do not solicit feedback. Feedback receptivity may not appear tied to social identity but may be a helpful tool for making academic and professional cultures more equitable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Stress reactivity and sociocultural learning: More stress-reactive individuals are quicker at learning sociocultural norms from experiential feedback.
When interacting with others in unfamiliar sociocultural settings, people need to learn the norms guiding appropriate behavior. The present research investigates an individual difference that helps this kind of learning: stress reactivity. Interactions in an unfamiliar sociocultural setting are stressful, particularly when the actor fails to follow its rules. Although stress is typically considered a liability, more stress-reactive individuals may be more motivated to improve and, thus, quicker to learn these rules. Consistent with this idea, a pilot study found that people genetically inclined to stress reactivity, as computed by a genetic profile score across 59 single-nucleotide polymorphisms on 10 different genes, learned unfamiliar sociocultural norms from experiential feedback at a faster rate (i.e., exhibited a greater increase in accuracy across trials). Study 1 found that participants with higher acute cortisol reactivity in response to a physical stressor were faster at learning unfamiliar sociocultural norms. Study 2 conceptually replicated these results using a self-report measure of dispositional stress reactivity. Study 3 found that self-reported dispositional stress reactivity similarly predicted the rate of learning in a sociocultural task and a nonsocial task. Study 4 provided evidence for the underlying mechanism—participants higher on dispositional stress reactivity experienced more stress early in the sociocultural norm learning task, which predicted faster learning overall and lower stress later on in the task. These findings indicate that more stress-reactive individuals get more stressed out from the negative feedback that they receive in social interactions in unfamiliar settings, which motivates them to learn the relevant norms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 20 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Meaning-making with romantic partners: Shared reality promotes meaning in life by reducing uncertainty.
We propose that, although deeply personal, meaning is facilitated by interpersonal processes. Namely, we theorize that experiencing a sense of shared reality with a close partner (i.e., perceiving an overlap in inner states about the world in general) reduces uncertainty about one’s environment, which in turn promotes meaning in work and life. In the current research, we test this hypothesis across five mixed-method studies (e.g., longitudinal, experimental). We find cross-sectional evidence for this association in a couples’ study (Study 1: N = 103 romantic dyads) and in ecologically rich samples of people experiencing highly uncertain situations, specifically Black people consistently facing racism in the United States (Study 2: N = 190 participants) and frontline health care workers directly treating COVID-19 patients during the height of the pandemic (Study 3: N = 139 participants). Further, we provide causal evidence for this association in two experiments (Studies 4 and 5: N₄ = 364 participants, N₅ = 389 participants). Taken together, this work suggests that shared reality with close partners has real-world benefits, reducing uncertainty and promoting meaning. In addition, we show that experimentally heightening shared reality, by reducing uncertainty, can promote a greater sense of meaning in life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Familial similarity and heritability of personality traits and life satisfaction are higher than shown in typical single-method studies.
Personality trait similarity among ordinary relatives is surprisingly low, with parent–offspring and sibling–sibling correlations usually r ≤ .15. We explain why these correlations are biased in typical single-method studies and argue that this problem can only be addressed with multimethod designs. We also explain why ordinary relative comparisons can provide a more generalizable way of estimating (additive, narrow-sense) heritability than the better known twin comparisons. In a sample of parent–offspring (Npairs = 522), sibling–sibling (Npairs = 388), and second-degree relative pairs (Npairs = 476), who rated their Big Five personality traits and life satisfaction and were each rated by an independent informant (Nparticipants = 2,258 + informants), we found that parent–offspring and sibling correlations were about one third higher than typically shown (r ≈ .20). Based on the ordinary relative comparisons, the heritability of personality traits and life satisfaction was about 40%, compared with about 26% typical to self-report studies. Life satisfaction was as heritable as personality traits, sharing about 80% of its genetic variance with neuroticism, extraversion, and conscientiousness. About half of life satisfaction’s phenotypic correlations with neuroticism and extraversion and its entire correlation with conscientiousness were explained by shared genetic factors. Using data from a larger sample of relatives with only self-reports (Nparticipants = 32,004; Npairs = 24,118), we provide further evidence that growing up together does not make people more similar. The results were consistent for both aggregate traits and individual items. Only multimethod designs can accurately reveal traits’ similarity among relatives and their genetic and environmental transmission. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Methods reflect values: Evaluating the shortcomings of the average for measuring population well-being.
As governments and institutions embrace subjective well-being as a policy outcome, aggregating well-being in a population has become commonplace. The default method used to aggregate population well-being is taking the arithmetic mean (average). However, using average well-being as a key performance indicator, while useful, can omit morally relevant information, like the extent of suffering and inequality. We examine three alternative methods for aggregating life satisfaction, grounded in the ethical theories of: prioritarianism (a weighted average that prioritizes improvements at the bottom of the scale), sufficientarianism (the proportion of respondents answering above a “suffering” threshold), and egalitarianism (the degree of inequality) and compare them to the average. Toward this end, we used nationally representative data from 3,035,971 participants across 148 countries drawn from the 2005 to 2022 Gallup World Poll and the 1981–2021 World Values Survey. We found that the distribution of life satisfaction deviated significantly from a normal distribution in all countries, suggesting that using the mean and standard deviation cannot adequately capture the full distribution. After re-ranking countries according to the degree of life satisfaction inequality, we found that 56 countries deviated by at least 20 ranks compared to their average life satisfaction rankings. Finally, we observed that 9%–46% of the time, increases in average well-being at the country level were accompanied by increasing suffering and inequality. Our findings show the downside of using the average and offer alternatives that are aligned with promoting equitable well-being growth. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Automatic implicit motive codings are at least as accurate as humans’ and 99% faster.
Implicit motives, nonconscious needs that influence individuals’ behaviors and shape their emotions, have been part of personality research for nearly a century but differ from personality traits. The implicit motive assessment is very resource-intensive, involving expert coding of individuals’ written stories about ambiguous pictures, and has hampered implicit motive research. Using large language models and machine learning techniques, we aimed to create high-quality implicit motive models that are easy for researchers to use. We trained models to code the need for power, achievement, and affiliation (N = 85,028 sentences). The person-level assessments converged strongly with the holdout data, intraclass correlation coefficient, ICC(1,1) = .85, .87, and .89 for achievement, power, and affiliation, respectively. We demonstrated causal validity by reproducing two classical experimental studies that aroused implicit motives. We let three coders recode sentences where our models and the original coders strongly disagreed. We found that the new coders agreed with our models in 85% of the cases (p < .001, ϕ = .69). Using topic and word embedding analyses, we found specific language associated with each motive to have a high face validity. We argue that these models can be used in addition to, or instead of, human coders. We provide a free, user-friendly framework in the established R-package text and a tutorial for researchers to apply the models to their data, as these models reduce the coding time by over 99% and require no cognitive effort for coding. We hope this coding automation will facilitate a historical implicit motive research renaissance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
- Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)
Reach Out