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Humans are essentialists: They believe hidden “essences” underlie membership in natural and social kinds. Although essentialism has well-established implications for important societal issues (e.g., discrimination), little is known about its origins. A…

Stereotype threat, the concern about being judged in light of negative stereotypes, causes underperformance in evaluative situations. However, less is known about how coping with stereotypes can aggravate underperformance over time. We propose a model …

We examined whether sexual similarity, complementarity, and perceptual accuracy exist within a large sample of heterosexual couples. Partners exhibited similarity and complementarity of sexual preferences, and they perceived each other’s preferen…

Research has shown that men perceive women wearing red, relative to other colors, as more attractive and more sexually receptive; women’s perceptions of other women wearing red have scarcely been investigated. We hypothesized that women would als…

This article proposes distinctions between guilt and two forms of shame: Guilt arises from a violated norm and is characterized by a focus on specific behavior; shame can be characterized by a threatened social image (Image Shame) or a threatened moral…

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was designed to measure automatically activated attitudinal associations, free of the influence of processes that affect their expression. Subsequent research has shown that IAT performance also is influenced by non-…

Mindset theory suggests that a deliberative mindset entails openness to information in one’s environment, whereas an implemental mindset entails filtering of information. We hypothesized that this open- versus closed-mindedness influences individ…

We investigated individual difference predictors of ascribing ingroup characteristics to negative and positive ambiguous targets. Studies 1 and 2 investigated events involving negative targets whose status as racial (Tsarnaev brothers) or national (Woo…

Three studies offer novel evidence addressing the consequences of explicit–implicit sexual orientation (SO) ambivalence. In Study 1, self-identified straight females completed explicit and implicit measures of SO. The results revealed that partic…

Liberals and conservatives disagree about obeying authorities, with conservatives holding the more positive views. We suggest that reactions to conservative authorities, rather than to obedience itself, are responsible for the division. Past findings t…