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Previous research highlights how adept people are at emotional recovery after rejection, but less research has examined factors that can prevent full recovery. In five studies, we investigate how changing one’s self-definition in response to reje…

The operational sex ratio—the ratio of men to women in a given population—affects a range of social processes. The current research demonstrates that biased sex ratios (greater numbers of one sex than the other) influence fundamental aspect…

Whites are theorized to support color-blind policies as an act of racial agenda setting—an attempt to defend the existing hierarchy by excluding race from public and institutional discourse. The present analysis leverages work distinguishing betw…

A preference for “naturals” over “strivers” in performance judgments was investigated to test whether the effect is generalizable across domains, as well as to ascertain any costs imposed on decision quality by favoring naturals. Despite being presente…

Events can be far away from or near an observer in several respects: They can be distant or close in a spatial, temporal, social, or hypothetical sense. They can also vary in magnitude, physically, or in terms of impact and importance. We examine the e…

Research on interethnic relations has focused on two ideologies, asking whether it is best to de-emphasize social-category differences (colorblind) or emphasize and celebrate differences (multicultural). We argue each of these can manifest with negativ…

Mate preference research has focused on traits people desire in partners (i.e., dealmakers) rather than what traits they avoid (i.e., dealbreakers), but mate preferences calibrate to both maximize benefits and minimize costs. Across six studies (N >…

Much of contemporary American political rhetoric is characterized by liberals and conservatives advancing arguments for the morality of their respective political positions. However, research suggests such moral rhetoric is largely ineffective for pers…

The dual-process component of Terror Management Theory (TMT) proposes that different types of threats lead to increases in death-thought accessibility (DTA) after different delay intervals. Experimental studies of terror management threats’ effec…

Drawing on research on the collapse of compassion and group processes and interrelations, four experiments investigated how labeling a conflict “genocide” affects distant bystanders’ support for intervention. The genocide label (compared with no …