Journal of personality and social psychology
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Comparative Study
Personality and affective forecasting: trait introverts underpredict the hedonic benefits of acting extraverted.
People report enjoying momentary extraverted behavior, and this does not seem to depend on trait levels of introversion-extraversion. Assuming that introverts desire enjoyment, this finding raises the question, why do introverts not act extraverted more often? This research explored a novel explanation, that trait introverts make an affective forecasting error, underpredicting the hedonic benefits of extraverted behavior. Study 1 (n = 97) found that trait introverts forecast less activated positive and pleasant affect and more negative and self-conscious affect (compared to extraverts) when asked to imagine acting extraverted, but not introverted, across a variety of hypothetical situations. ⋯ Accordingly, the personality differences in affective forecasts represent errors. In these studies, introverts tended to be less accurate, particularly by overestimating the negative affect and self-consciousness associated with their extraverted behavior. This may explain why introverts do not act extraverted more often (i.e., they overestimate hedonic costs that do not actually materialize) and have implications for understanding, and potentially trying to change, introverts' characteristically lower levels of happiness.
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Racial classification has drawn increasing attention in public discourse; it intertwines with issues related to racialized perceptions. However, few social psychological studies have systematically examined racial categorization processes and their implications for interracial relations. ⋯ Results linked the belief in racial essentialism to an increased tendency to engage in race-based categorization (Studies 1-3) and greater sensitivity in discerning racial group membership (Studies 4-5). These results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding and managing interracial relations in the United States.
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Accuracy and consensus in judgments of trustworthiness from faces: behavioral and neural correlates.
Perceivers' inferences about individuals based on their faces often show high interrater consensus and can even accurately predict behavior in some domains. Here we investigated the consensus and accuracy of judgments of trustworthiness. In Study 1, we showed that the type of photo judged makes a significant difference for whether an individual is judged as trustworthy. ⋯ Replicating previous research, we found that perceptions of trustworthiness from the faces in Study 4 corresponded to participants' amygdala response. However, we found no relationship between the amygdala response and the targets' actual cheating behavior. These data suggest that judgments of trustworthiness may not be accurate but, rather, reflect subjective impressions for which people show high agreement.
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Six experiments examined how people strategically use thoughts of foregone misdeeds to regulate their moral behavior. We tested 2 hypotheses: 1st, that people will feel licensed to act in morally dubious ways when they can point to immoral alternatives to their prior behavior, and 2nd, that people made to feel insecure about their morality will exaggerate the extent to which such alternatives existed. ⋯ This distortion of the past involved overestimating the number of Black individuals they had encountered on the prior task (Study 4) and exaggerating how stereotypically Black specific individuals had looked (Studies 5 and 6). We discuss implications for moral behavior, the motivated rewriting of one's moral history, and how the life unlived can liberate people to lead the life they want.
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The so-called bias blind spot arises when people report that thinking biases are more prevalent in others than in themselves. Bias turns out to be relatively easy to recognize in the behaviors of others, but often difficult to detect in one's own judgments. Most previous research on the bias blind spot has focused on bias in the social domain. ⋯ If anything, a larger bias blind spot was associated with higher cognitive ability. Additional analyses indicated that being free of the bias blind spot does not help a person avoid the actual classic cognitive biases. We discuss these findings in terms of a generic dual-process theory of cognition.