Psychology Research Digest
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology - Vol 131, Iss 1
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.
Belief in a diversity–meritocracy trade-off.
Organizations and academic institutions often pursue two goals in their selection processes: They seek to uphold a meritocracy wherein the “best” candidates are selected and to increase the diversity of their workforces and student bodies. Across four large, preregistered experiments (N = 5,805) in laboratory and field settings, we theorize a belief in a diversity–meritocracy trade-off—that efforts to promote diversity in selection processes undermine a meritocracy. Using nationally representative U.S. samples, we find that a majority of Americans endorse this belief, even when (a) selection criteria explicitly prioritize meritocratic principles and (b) diversity-promoting actions are not directly related to candidate evaluations. This belief emerges across varying types of diversity—racial, gender, and general (Study 2)—but is starkly politically polarized: Liberals do not believe efforts to promote diversity subvert a meritocracy, whereas those with more moderate and conservative views do (Studies 1–4). Past research focuses on prejudice to explain political divides regarding diversity in selection. Our evidence highlights an additional dynamic: Diversity-promoting actions are divisive because they produce divergent concerns about how fairly candidates will be evaluated (Studies 1–3). To address these fairness concerns, we test an intervention wherein initial actions to promote diversity are followed by selection decisions made “blind” to candidates’ demographic background. We find that this intervention curbs the belief in a diversity–meritocracy trade-off in two distinct contexts: workplace hiring (Study 3) and graduate admissions (Study 4). Our results carry important implications for formulating selection processes that promote both diversity and meritocracy in the eyes of liberals and conservatives alike. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Finding agreement: Functional magnetic resonance imaging hyperscanning reveals that mental state space exploration facilitates opinion alignment.
To find agreement, conversation partners might focus solely on aligning their distinct perspectives. Alternatively, agreement might require partners to explore, by considering different, new perspectives. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) hyperscanning and natural language processing, we tested whether dyadic alignment or exploration during decision-making conversations was a more effective route to agreement. Dyads (N = 60 dyads; 120 people) discussed pressing societal problems after being instructed to either persuade or compromise with their partner, strategies associated with attenuated and amplified exploration, respectively. Analysis uncovered four key results: First, individuals instructed to compromise rather than persuade tended to agree more at the end of the conversation. Second, fMRI hyperscanning and linguistic analyses revealed that encouraging compromise resulted in increased exploration during conversations; dyads given compromise instructions traversed more diverse mental states and topics. Third, heightened exploration was linked to greater agreement at the end of the conversation. Fourth, the effect of the compromise instructions on agreement was mediated by the degree of exploration. Together, these results suggest that finding agreement may be spurred by exploration, something that happens spontaneously when people are motivated to compromise. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>The unexpected importance of expectations in self-conscious emotions.
Prominent accounts suggest that people feel self-conscious emotions when they evaluate their self-caused, identity-relevant behavior as a success or failure (Tracy & Robins, 2004)—even if they expected to succeed or fail. We propose a novel, alternative account that builds on those prior by considering expectations. People feel self-conscious emotions when they evaluate their self-caused, identity-relevant behavior as discrepant from expectations, with discrepancies progressing toward identity-relevant goals eliciting pride and those regressing away from these goals eliciting shame and guilt. Six studies (total N = 1,643) provide support for this account. Studies 1 and 2 examine how expectation–behavior discrepancies influence emotions in hypothetical and recalled situations. Studies 3 and 4 manipulate behaviors or expectations to create discrepancies between them, then examine effects of discrepancies on self-conscious emotions. Study 5 uses a longitudinal, naturalistic design to test how these discrepancies track emotions outside the lab and over time. Study 6 directly tests predictions made by our account and competing accounts against each other. Across studies, a robust, causal, and distinct relationship emerged between expectation discrepancies and self-conscious emotions. When participants exceeded expectations, they felt greater pride compared to when they met or fell below expectations and compared to other positive emotions; when participants fell below expectations, they felt greater shame or guilt compared to when they met or exceeded expectations and compared to other negative emotions. These findings provide the first evidence for a new understanding of the cognitive elicitors of self-conscious emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Trust and trust funds: How others’ childhood and current social class context influence trust behavior and expectations.
Trust is vital for success in all kinds of social interactions. But how do people decide whether an individual can be trusted? One factor people may consider is that individual’s social class. We hypothesize that people trust others from lower social class contexts more than others from higher class contexts; we also consider nuances between current and childhood class context and between trust as a behavior and trust as an expectation. Five preregistered studies (total N = 1,934, with three of five studies including a within-subjects component), and 12 preregistered replications summarized in the supplement, yielded two sets of findings. First, people consistently behaviorally trusted others whose childhoods were spent in low-class (compared to high-class) contexts and expected them to honor that trust. These effects were mediated by perceived morality. Second, people behaviorally trusted others currently in low-class (compared to high-class) contexts, but they did not expect these individuals to honor that trust or perceive them as moral. Instead, the effect of current class was linked to altruism. Our findings emerged in samples drawn from different populations, across varying manipulations of social class, in actual and hypothetical decisions, and with imaginary targets and real acquaintances. We consider implications for the psychology of trust and of social class. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 22 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Do people across the world want to remember positive ingroup histories?
A key assumption in collective memory research is that group members are particularly inclined to preserve history that reinforces the ingroup’s positive identity. Yet, this assumption lacks solid empirical support, as research has rarely measured the identity-protective potential of historical events considered important to remember. Theoretically, this support is essential because group members may engage with history for reasons other than benefiting their ingroup. We complement existing literature by systematically testing the identity-protective tenet using a bottom-up approach. After sampling a broad set of historical events, we assessed the identity-relevant characteristics attributed to the events and examined how these characteristics relate to group members’ willingness to remember them. Across a preregistered study conducted in seven different national contexts (N = 2,045 participants; N = 7,665 ratings of 360 unique events), we found that events viewed as involving the ingroup in an agentic manner were considered important to remember in most countries. At the same time, we observed notable cross-national variation in the willingness to preserve events in which the ingroup caused positive consequences, behaved morally, or experienced threats, with a stronger tendency to remember ingroup-favoring history in less individualistic or less globally connected countries. We discuss how these findings bridge a crucial empirical gap by demonstrating that identity protection likely represents only one component of collective remembrance, whose importance appears to vary considerably across countries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Exploring the socioeconomic pattern of humans’ future orientation: A multimethod multistudy approach.
Future orientation (FO) is a key human capacity that integrates cognitive, affective, and motivational components, crucial for achieving positive outcomes. Although theory posits a consistent link between FO and socioeconomic status (SES), empirical evidence remains scarce and fragmented. This research addressed this gap with two main goals. The first was to strengthen the evidence for the SES–FO relationship at the between-subject level. This was achieved through three complementary studies: Study 1 (a coordinated data analysis of sociological surveys using probabilistic samples), Study 2 (analysis of FO-related content in social media posts to increase ecological validity), and Study 3 (experimental manipulation of subjective SES). Beyond these between-subject designs, little research has examined whether and how individuals adjust their FO in response to socioeconomic changes. Thus, the second goal was to investigate whether changes in SES relate to intra-individual changes in FO. Study 4 used longitudinal data collected before and after the Great Recession (2007–2008) to assess how real-life socioeconomic changes are associated with individuals’ FO. Finally, Study 5 validated these longitudinal findings through experimental manipulations within a mixed factorial design. These last two studies indicate that SES fluctuations may lead to corresponding changes in FO, suggesting an adaptive psychological response to socioeconomic adversity. Overall, this research provides new evidence on both between- and within-subject socioeconomic differences in FO. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>The dispositional basis of selective prosociality.
Prosocial behavior is vital for societal well-being. However, people often display it selectively, treating certain individuals more favorably than others. Such selectivity reinforces social inequalities, highlighting the need to understand its roots. Prior research focused on the situational factors driving selective prosociality (e.g., group membership), largely neglecting person characteristics of actors. To close this gap, we systematically investigated the dispositional basis of selective prosociality across four preregistered studies applying two different incentivized behavioral paradigms. We studied the predictive power of basic (honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, dark factor) and specific, theoretically relevant personality traits for selective prosociality (Studies 1–4) and assessed its temporal stability (Study 3). We also compared selective prosociality (i.e., selectivity in giving to different recipients) with general prosociality (overall giving) regarding their personality correlates and stability. Findings show that selective prosociality is linked to certain personality traits, which are largely distinct from those linked to general prosociality. The dark factor of personality was the strongest positive predictor of selective prosociality across studies, followed by right-wing authoritarianism. Furthermore, social dominance orientation was positively correlated with selective prosociality, whereas openness was negatively correlated in three out of four studies. Selective prosociality also showed moderate stability over 4 weeks (rs = .58), supporting its conceptualization as a traitlike construct. Additionally, a thematic analysis of open-ended responses revealed that selective prosociality was driven by attitudinal preferences. Our findings provide evidence for a dispositional basis of selective prosociality, suggesting some individuals are consistently more selective than others and offering theoretical insights into the construct and its drivers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Dynamic networks of social contact, social desire, and affect across time scales.
Social relationships are central to well-being because they fulfill social affiliation needs. To explain how social needs are regulated, theories describe daily-life processes among social desire, social contact, and affect. Still, these processes remain empirically underexplored because of their complexity. In this study, we estimated multivariate associations of social desire and affect with social contact across different modalities (in-person, digital), time scales (hourly, daily), and levels of analysis (between-person, contemporaneous, temporally lagged). Participants from two age-heterogeneous samples answered experience sampling questions and contributed data through unobtrusive smartphone sensing, with roughly hourly assessments across 2 days (N = 303) and daily assessments across 14 days (N = 377). Multilevel vector autoregressive network models revealed associations between social contact, social desire, and affect across levels of analysis. Results were highly specific to the examined time scale. When measured at an hourly timescale, people desired more social contact than usual when they engaged in more in-person contact, and higher social desire predicted more future social contact in both experience sampling and smartphone sensing. In contrast, at a daily timescale, social desire did not predict future contact. Bidirectional linkages of affect and social contact were also much denser hourly (vs. daily). Compared with in-person contact, calls and communication app usage generally showed distinct associations with affect. We discuss theoretical implications for the dynamic regulation of social needs, especially regarding homeostatic temporal processes and the role of positive affect in predicting social contact. Finally, we delineate future directions of multimethod research into daily-life social dynamics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Patterns and sources of life satisfaction stability and change at different developmental stages.
How life satisfaction develops across several stages of development and to what extent genetic and environmental factors contribute to its stability and change was the focus of this multimodal study. The sample comprises 10,277 participants from the German population-based twin family panel TwinLife including twin pairs from three birth cohorts (Npairs = 2,042, aged 10–33 years), twins’ full siblings, and their biological parents (aged 10–81 years). Latent state-trait change models were used to disentangle stable and time-dependent individual differences, as well as variance in systematic change of life satisfaction, measured repeatedly across 8 years. Quantitative genetic models were applied to estimate genetic and environmental contributions to these variance components. Polygenic scores were added to these models for a genotyped subsample (N = 4,581). By analyzing longitudinal twin data and polygenic scores across several developmental stages, the study contributes to the ongoing debate about differences in the heritability of well-being. Life satisfaction showed high rank-order stability (r = .47–.89), which increased with age, and a U-shaped mean-level trend from early adolescence to middle adulthood (Δ ≈ ±0.5 SD). Moreover, 17%–37% of stable life satisfaction differences were explained by genetic differences, while variance in systematic change was entirely environmental, except for young adults, where genetic variance started to emerge. Polygenic scores supported this, as they significantly predicted stable differences (R² = .015), while associations with change were weaker (R² = .002). The prediction of stable differences increased with rank-order stability throughout adolescence and young adulthood (R² = .038) but decreased with the transition to middle and older adulthood (R² = .012). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>