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It is well established that low-level visual features affect person categorization in a bottom-up fashion. Few studies have examined top-down influences, however, and have largely focused on how information recalled from memory or from motivation influ…

Five studies tested the common assumption that women prefer nonconformist men as romantic partners, whereas men prefer conformist women. Studies 1 and 2 showed that both men and women preferred nonconformist romantic partners, but women overestimated t…

Craig, M. A., & Richeson, J. A. (2014). More diverse yet less tolerant? How the increasingly diverse racial landscape affects White Americans’ racial attitudes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40, 750–761. doi:10.1177/014616…

Previous research has shown that when confronted with failure, individuals with a fixed view of intelligence (entity theorists) perform worse on subsequent tasks than those with a malleable view of intelligence (incremental theorists). This study finds…

Although it is widely assumed that collective apologies for intergroup harms facilitate forgiveness, evidence for a strong link between the two remains elusive. In four studies we tested the proposition that the apology–forgiveness link exists, b…

Legal and prescriptive theories of blame generally propose that judgments about an actor’s mental state (e.g., her knowledge or intent) should remain separate from judgments about whether the actor caused an outcome. Three experiments, however, s…

Five studies tested four hypotheses on the drivers of punitive judgments. Study 1 showed that people imposed covertly retributivist physical punishments on extreme norm violators when they could plausibly deny that is what they were doing (attributiona…

Loneliness is a well-known indicator of relationship deficits, with potentially severe consequences on health and well-being (Perlman & Peplau, 1981). Research has used cross-sectional methods to examine behavioral consequences of loneliness (e.g.,…

The present study examined how achievement goals affect retrieval-induced forgetting. Researchers have suggested that mastery-approach goals (i.e., developing one’s own competence) promote a relational encoding, whereas performance-approach goals…

In a four-wave longitudinal study with N = 1,321 adolescents in Germany, we examined the impact of class-level normative beliefs about aggression on aggressive norms and behavior at the individual level over the course of 3 years. At each data wave, pa…