Psychology Research Digest
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology - Vol 130, 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.
Social distancing from innocent victims by spatial distality.
Drawing on just-world theory and theories of psychological distance, we tested the idea that people respond to injustice by symbolically distancing themselves from innocent victims. Across 12 studies using varied victimization contexts and spatial arrangement methods, we examined whether perceived injustice motivates people to place victims further from the self in visual space based on perceived value or personality similarity. Participants distanced themselves from victims receiving unjust (vs. just or neutral) outcomes by placing a symbolic self-representation farther from the victims’ names in 2D space (Studies 1a–1c). Study 2 found that this distancing effect was independent of victim derogation and blame, while Study 3 demonstrated that distancing was especially pronounced for traits central (vs. peripheral) to the self-concept. Studies 4a/4b revealed that distancing depends on victims’ innocence and perceived injustice, ruling out a general avoidance account. Studies 5a/5b confirmed that spatial distancing corresponds to perceived dissimilarity, and Studies 6a/6b showed the reverse process: identical outcomes were judged as more unjust when they befell spatially close versus distant others. Finally, Study 7 extended these findings to self-relevant contexts, showing that participants distanced their current self from past selves who experienced unfair (vs. fair) events, over and above subjective and objective temporal distance. Taken together, these findings highlight the reciprocal relationship between experiences of injustice and symbolic social distancing, revealing how people mentally represent victims as more or less distant from the self, and contribute to the broader understanding of social and spatial representations of self–other (dis)similarity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Does artificial intelligence cause artificial confidence? Generative artificial intelligence as an emerging social referent.
As generative artificial intelligence (gen-AI) becomes more prevalent, it becomes increasingly important to understand how people psychologically respond to the content it explicitly creates. In this research, we demonstrate that exposure to gen-AI produced content can affect people’s self-confidence at the same task through a social comparison process. Anchoring this research in the domain of creativity, we find that exposing people to creative content believed to have been created by gen-AI (vs. a human peer) increases people’s self-confidence in their own relevant creative abilities. This effect emerges for jokes, stories, poetry, and visual art, and it can consequently increase people’s willingness to attempt the activity—even though the greater confidence underscoring their actions might be unwarranted. We further show that these effects emerge because gen-AI is perceived as a lower social referent for creative endeavors, bolstering people’s own self-perceptions. As a result, for domains in which gen-AI is perceived as an equal or greater social referent (i.e., in fact-based domains), the effects are attenuated. These findings have significant implications for understanding human–AI interactions, antecedents for creative self-confidence, and the known referents that people use for social comparison effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Overestimation in the aggregation of emotional intensity of social media content.
Users on social media are regularly presented with sequences of emotional content in their newsfeeds, which affects their viewpoints and emotions. Could the way users aggregate and remember emotional content from their feeds contribute to the fact emotions are amplified on social platforms? Across five studies (N = 1,051), using experimentally manipulated social media feeds, we found that participants consistently overestimated the average emotional intensity of the individual responses expressed by other users in a sequence (Study 1a). This overestimation led to stronger emotional reactions to the news content that these responses were reacting to (Study 1b). Investigating the mechanism suggested that while there was stronger memory for more emotional responses within a response sequence, we could not find a direct link between memory and overestimation (Study 2). We showed that overestimation was driven mainly by the salience of emotional intensity of different items in the sequence, by replicating the effect using sequences of emotional words (Study 3). We then turned to the consequences of overestimation, showing that overestimation of emotional sequences was uniquely associated with perceiving more intense emotional responses as more representative of how other people would react (Study 4) and with overestimation of the emotionality of the newsfeed as a whole (Study 5). Overestimation of the average individual emotional intensity ratings of a sequence was also predictive of willingness to share articles. This set of findings sheds light on how sampling from newsfeeds amplifies the perception of emotionality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>The failure gap.
People are systematically unaware of the mishaps, problems, and failures around them, a phenomenon we dub the failure gap. People underestimate tens of thousands, and in some cases, millions of failures at the individual, national, and international level across 30+ life domains (Study 1). For every three species that go extinct, the public knows of one; for every five weapons undetected by airport security, people think one sneaks by. Why are people unaware of the problems around them? Failure is underreported relative to success (Studies 2–5). The failure gap had policy implications for key decision makers. Closing the failure gap reduced support for harsh punishment (e.g., school suspensions) among educators, lowered support for mass incarceration among voters, led managers to extend paid parental leave to new mothers, and shrank social stigma in the workplace (Studies 6 and 7). Taken together, the failure gap is common, crippling, and encouragingly correctable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>U.S. citizens’ judgments of moral transgressions against fellow citizens, refugees, and undocumented immigrants.
Prior work shows that people are often more sensitive to moral transgressions that target ingroup members than outgroup members. But does that depend on which groups are involved? We investigate how lifelong U.S. citizen participants make judgments about moral transgressions that target fellow lifelong citizens, compared with refugees or undocumented immigrants. Across five studies (N = 1,953), we find that participants overall judge moderate transgressions targeting refugees and undocumented immigrants to be more wrong than those targeting fellow lifelong citizens. This pattern emerges specifically for moderate-severity transgressions but occurs across physical harm, emotional harm, deception, fairness, and property violations. Responses are predicted by political orientation; more liberal participants show the pattern more than conservative participants. We find mediational and experimental evidence for perceived vulnerability/welfare and sympathy toward groups as partial mechanisms: People judge it to be worse to harm more victims they perceive to be more vulnerable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Asymmetric polarization: The perception that Republicans pose harm to disadvantaged groups drives Democrats’ greater dislike of Republicans in social contexts.
Given growing political polarization in recent years, partisan dislike—defined as the negativity that individuals display at the prospect of having close social relations with supporters of the other party—has received increasing attention. While traditional work in social and political psychology has held that conservatives display greater outgroup hostility than liberals, the worldview conflict perspective suggests that both groups similarly express hostility toward value incongruent outgroups. Contradicting both established perspectives, we present evidence across five preregistered studies (and two additional studies reported in the Supplemental Materials) conducted between 2022 and 2023—two social media field experiments (N = 10,000) examining actual behavior and five survey-based studies (N = 2,443) operationalizing partisan dislike in various ways (e.g., blocking on social media, rating the likability of various targets, and evaluating hiring suitability)—that Democrats (i.e., liberals) dislike Republicans (i.e., conservatives) more than vice versa. We provide a potential explanation for this phenomenon by extending the worldview conflict perspective to account for asymmetries in how moralized specific values are among two conflicting groups at a given point in time. Specifically, we theorize that in light of recent social trends in the modern-day United States, the moralized belief that counter-partisans pose harm to disadvantaged groups, particularly racial/ethnic minorities, has become an asymmetric contributor to partisan dislike among Democrats. We found support for our theory across both measurement-of-mediation and experimental-mediation approaches and in both field experimental and survey data. Overall, this work advances research on ideology and outgroup hostility and extends the worldview conflict perspective to better explain partisan dislike. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Once a procrastinator, always a procrastinator? Examining stability, change, and long-term correlates of procrastination during young adulthood.
Procrastination—a voluntary delay of an intended action despite the expectation of negative consequences—is a widespread phenomenon. Previous research has mainly focused on procrastination in specific situations and has rarely examined stability and change in procrastination over long periods of time. In the present study, we conducted an 18-year longitudinal study of procrastination. We report on stability and change in procrastination as well as its associations with conscientiousness and neuroticism, and long-term correlates using self-reports starting from high school graduation, in a large sample of young adults (N = 3,023) in Germany. We found that procrastination was slightly less stable than conscientiousness and neuroticism, tended to decrease with age, and that higher procrastination was associated with delayed entry into the workforce. Procrastination overlapped with but was distinct from conscientiousness and neuroticism. We also found strong links between changes in procrastination and changes in conscientiousness and neuroticism over time. Finally, both initial levels and trajectories of procrastination predicted consequential long-term correlates up to 18 years after the first measurement, including academic, workplace, relationship, health, and pandemic-related outcomes. In sum, this long-term longitudinal examination of procrastination highlights patterns of stability and change in procrastination and demonstrates its relevance for important life outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Using machine learning to predict individual differences in psychological reactivities to social interactions.
Individual differences in psychological reactivities (i.e., the degree to which individuals react differently to social interactions) are central to psychological research. Previous theory-based research has identified substantial individual differences in reactivities but few robust predictors of these differences. This work aimed to address two questions: First, can individual differences in reactivities to social interactions be accurately predicted at all? Second, what are the most important person-level variables for this prediction? A data-driven machine learning approach was applied to three large-scale experience sampling data sets (overall N = 5,047) to predict the extent to which individuals reacted with positive and negative affect to momentary social interaction characteristics (e.g., interaction depth). Individual differences in reactivities were extracted via multilevel modeling (i.e., random slopes) and then predicted with machine learning methods using a variety of person-level variables (i.e., sociodemographics, personality traits, and political and societal attitudes). The robustness of predictions was examined by built-in cross-validation and across independent samples. Feature importance and interactions were analyzed with SHapley Additive exPlanations values. Our results suggest that, whereas complex prediction models outperformed a baseline model in predicting individual differences in reactivities in most analyses, the overall predictive performance was limited. This finding underlines the importance of replicating machine learning results across outcomes and independent samples. We revealed several predictive patterns that can stimulate future research, elaborate on limitations of current machine learning approaches for intensive within-person data, and discuss the results against the background of dynamic conceptualizations of personality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>Person-related selection bias in mobile sensing research: Robust findings from two panel studies.
In psychology, mobile sensing is increasingly used to record behavior in real-life situations. However, little is known about the selectivity of samples participating in these new data collection approaches and thus about potential risks to the validity of research findings. We therefore investigated two potential sources of selection bias in smartphone-based data collections. Specifically, we examined whether smartphone system ownership (Android vs. iOS, i.e., platform-related differences) and willingness to participate (nonparticipation vs. intention to participate vs. actual participation, i.e., nonresponse error) are associated with sociodemographic, socioeconomic, and personality characteristics. Using two large-scale panel studies, we found replicable patterns for platform-related differences (N = 1,218 and N = 5,123) and nonresponse error (N = 1,673 and N = 2,337): The ownership of Android devices (in comparison to iOS devices) was associated with lower levels of education, income, and extraversion. The willingness to participate in mobile sensing studies was found to be higher among younger age groups, males, those with higher levels of openness to experience, and those with lower levels of neuroticism. Furthermore, different person characteristics played different roles at different stages of the recruitment process. Taken together, the results show that some selection bias in mobile sensing studies exists and that the effects were small to moderate in magnitude as well as comparable to selection bias for other, more common data collection approaches, such as online surveys. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
Publication date: Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Access the article >>To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
- Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (1895)
Reach Out