Psychology Research Digest
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology - Vol 131, Iss 3
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 cost of an expanding moral circle: After living abroad, outcasts matter more but loved ones matter less.
People tend to morally prioritize their extremely close others (loved ones; such as family, partners, or friends) while disregarding extremely distant others (societal outcasts; such as pariahs, villains, or criminals). Across seven primary and 15 supplemental studies, we document how multicultural experiences might alter this universal default through moral compression: the simultaneous expansion of moral concern toward societal outcasts and contraction away from loved ones, effectively “compressing” the outermost and innermost anchors of the moral circle closer toward each other. Specifically, we find that greater breadth of living abroad experiences can compress the moral circle through heightened identification with all humanity, an association strengthened by cultural distance between home and host countries. Moral compression reflects a shift toward more impartial moral treatment under cognitive constraints. Whereas centuries of moral thought have idealized an ever-expanding moral circle, we draw from theories of bounded cognition and social identity abstraction to explore a costly trade-off of moral change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Fleeting generalization: How unstable belief updating keeps people overly pessimistic about talking to strangers.
Conversations with strangers and weak ties tend to be positive experiences, and yet research suggests a reliable tendency to hold overly pessimistic expectations about such conversations. We examine how people update their beliefs after talking with strangers to understand how people’s miscalibrated social expectations could persist even in the presence of more positive social experiences. In three longitudinal experiments, having a conversation led to more optimistic (and better calibrated) expectations about a future conversation, especially with the same person, but updating was fleeting. Within 1 or 2 weeks, expectations reverted to a more pessimistic baseline similar to those who had no conversation to learn from in the first place. This fleeting generalization was unique to conversation (compared to a noninteractive control condition). It emerged both when a future conversation was with the same person and when it was with a different person, when people were explicitly asked to predict their experience before having it and when they were not, and across both relatively shallow and deeper conversations. Fleeting generalization stems partly (but not entirely) from recalling conversations as less positive than they felt immediately after having them. These findings suggest that miscalibrated social beliefs can persist even with unbiased experience to learn from. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Outgroup friendships and social influence in the development of adolescent attitudes toward secondary outgroups.
Having outgroup friends not only improves attitudes toward the (primary) outgroup but potentially also toward other (secondary) outgroups. This “secondary transfer effect” is attributed to the generalization of intergroup contact, but it may also reflect social influence as friends shape each other’s outgroup attitudes. In three studies (two empirical and one simulation), we applied stochastic actor-oriented models to longitudinal network data representing friendships between adolescents. Across Studies 1 (n = 812) and 2 (n = 2,559), we found no evidence that having more primary outgroup friends was associated with a change in secondary outgroup attitudes; instead, adolescents’ attitudes became more similar over time to those of their primary outgroup friends. Study 3, a simulation, further showed that social influence can lead to either more positive or more negative attitudes toward secondary outgroups. Thus, friendships with primary outgroup members may have negative implications for secondary outgroups when those friends hold more negative attitudes. We discuss how social influence can advance research on the generalization of intergroup contact effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Exploring the counteractive effects of mandating diversity training: Solution aversion, reactance, and polarized social beliefs.
A common strategy to address social inequity in organizations is to implement mandatory diversity training policies. But how do people react to such mandates? Mandating such training can signal the importance of diversity-related issues (e.g., discrimination), potentially increasing acknowledgment of these problems. However, integrating the theory of psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966) with the notion of solution aversion (Campbell & Kay, 2014), we suggest that learning about mandatory diversity training initiatives (compared to optional ones) could also exert an opposing effect, engendering negative emotional responses (i.e., reactance) which fuel increased political polarization surrounding beliefs that diversity-related problems still persist (i.e., solution aversion). Four preregistered experiments support this hypothesis. Study 1 and Study 2a demonstrate that recalling or anticipating mandatory (compared to optional) diversity training leads to increased reactance, which in turn leads to increased denial that social inequity is a problem. Study 2b shows that the effect is unique to mandatory diversity training, but not mandatory training unrelated to diversity. Study 3, via tests of parallel mediation, demonstrates that this effect counteracts the positive effect that mandating training policies have via signaled importance of the problem. Importantly, in all studies, we observe a consistent pattern of moderation by political orientation, such that reactance-induced negative emotions predict denial of discrimination more strongly for more politically conservative (compared to liberal) participants. Our research has significant implications for understanding the repercussions of mandatory diversity training policies, as well as the potential role of imposing solutions on exacerbating political polarization surrounding issues of social inequity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Is my loneliness killing me? Effects of loneliness and social isolation on transitions between cognitive status categories and death.
Loneliness and social isolation are associated with numerous adverse physical and psychological health outcomes in older adulthood, including cognitive impairment and mortality risk. Yet, how the individual and joint effects of loneliness and social isolation contribute to these outcomes remains unclear, particularly given the interplay between individual differences (loneliness) and environmental factors (social isolation) in shaping these important health outcomes in older adulthood (i.e., person–environment interactions). We used Cox regression, logistic regression, and multistate survival models to systematically investigate the individual and adjusted associations among loneliness, social isolation, cognitive aging outcomes, and mortality risk. Further, extensive between-study variability in operational definitions, modeling approaches, and covariate adjustments may be contributing to mixed results in the existing literature. In this registered report, we applied a multistudy approach (i.e., coordinated data analysis) in which independent but identical models were fit across 11 longitudinal studies representing participants from 18 countries (Ntotal = 175,070). Random effects meta-analyses synthesized results across studies, showing that loneliness was consistently associated with an elevated risk of cognitive impairment and mortality across statistical approaches, even after adjusting for social isolation. Conversely, social isolation was not consistently associated with cognitive impairment and showed weaker associations with mortality risk. Together, our findings suggest that loneliness is a robust, proximal predictor of major aging outcomes and highlight avenues for theory development, strategies to strengthen cognitive resilience and independence in older adulthood, and more efficient resource allocation of public health resources. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>From charm to conflict: Simulating narcissistic interpersonal dynamics with agent-based modeling.
Narcissism is a dynamic, normally distributed trait ranging from nonpathological to pathological expressions, with narcissistic personality disorder representing its extreme. Its complex interpersonal dynamics and paradoxical social outcomes underscore the need of uncovering its underlying mechanisms. However, experimental investigations face methodological constraints, making simulation—such as agent-based modeling (ABM)—a valuable alternative for controlled, theory-driven exploration. This study pursued three aims: (1) formalizing existing theories of narcissism into a computational framework for ABM, (2) evaluating its assumptions through an expert survey incorporating researchers and practitioners, and (3) implementing the framework as an agent-based model to simulate narcissistic dynamics over time. We developed the Framework of Interpersonal Narcissism Dynamics (FIND), which postulates five key processes: Status Assessment, Behavior Selection, External Feedback, Status Reassessment, and Movement. The expert survey supported FIND’s conceptual validity, informed parameters, and facilitated implementation. Simulations produced empirical patterns: Agentic behavior occurred more frequently than antagonistic behavior, these behaviors were moderately positively correlated, and higher narcissism levels were associated with increased status instability. Beyond anticipated outcomes, simulations revealed novel insights, such as an association between higher narcissism levels and more steps without interaction partners and a nonlinear relationship between narcissism and outcome variables—for example, movement increased with rising narcissism levels, but only beyond a moderate threshold. Our findings provide proof of concept for FIND and highlight the potential of ABM in psychological research. ABM offers a valuable tool for exploring complex interpersonal dynamics that are challenging to examine empirically, thereby addressing key methodological constraints in that field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Speaking of gender: Language genderedness and its association with gender differences in personality across 48 languages.
Previous studies have suggested that personality assessments can be influenced by the language people speak. Therefore, gendered ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving may be associated with gendered structures encoded in different languages. Here, we study the association between gender differences in personality traits as measured by the IPIP-NEO-120 (n = 755,307; representing 48 languages from 122 countries, with English being the language of assessment and therefore held constant) and the genderedness of languages as rated by experts, estimated by word-embedding models on large-scale text corpora from movie subtitles and Wikipedia, and rated by large language models such as ChatGPT-5.2, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek-V3.2. Consistent across all measures of language genderedness, more gendered languages were associated with stronger gender differences in personality traits compared to less gendered languages (r = .51–.59), suggesting that language might influence people’s self-concept in terms of their gender. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>