Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Many college students, especially first-generation and underrepresented racial/ethnic minority students, desire courses and careers that emphasize helping people and society. Can instructors of introductory science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses promote motivation, performance, and equity in STEM fields by emphasizing the prosocial relevance of course material? We developed, implemented, and evaluated a prosocial utility-value intervention (UVI): A course assignment in which students were asked to reflect on the prosocial value of biology or chemistry course content; our focus was on reducing performance gaps between first-generation and continuing generation college students...

The time between adolescence and adulthood is a transformative period of development. During these years, youth are exploring work, relationships, and worldviews while gaining the capacities needed to take on adult roles. These social and psychological processes are reflected in how personality develops across this period. Most youth personality development research has focused on the Big Five domains, ignoring the hierarchical structure of personality and missing broader, higher order processes and more specific, lower order processes...

Many studies have found that feelings and expressions of gratitude bring profound benefits to people and relationships. We complicate this view of gratitude. We examine two variables known to impact people's expectations for relationships: culture (collectivist vs. individualist) and relational distance (close vs. distant), and we find evidence that expressing gratitude conveys that relationship expectations have been exceeded, such that people view it as less desirable to give and receive gratitude for actions that are expected duties of a relationship...

Flattery is one of the oldest and most commonly used impression-management tactics in everyday life. Though it often brings benefits to the flatterer, less is known about how it affects the target. In the present research, we explore when and why being flattered can be costly for leaders-common targets of flattery-depending on how they respond to it. We suggest that leaders who are observed rewarding flatterers risk appearing naïve to others. Across seven studies and six supplementary studies ( N = 4,612), we find evidence that leaders who grant favors to flatterers are often perceived to have naively "fallen for flattery," which shapes observers' impressions of the leaders and the organizations they represent...

Society is largely shaped by creativity, making it critical to understand why, despite minimal mean gender differences in creative ability, substantial differences exist in the creative achievement of men and women. Although the greater male variability hypothesis (GMVH) in creativity has been proposed to explain women's underrepresentation as eminent creators, studies examining the GMVH are sparse and limited. This systematic review and meta-analysis were conducted to examine whether the GMVH in creativity can adequately explain the gender gap in creative achievement...

The present research tested the idea that a self-determined orientation may help people manage death-related thoughts and anxieties, and mitigate the effects of death awareness on well-being. Seven studies ( N = 3,331), using a diversity of measures and manipulations, were consistent with that idea. First, mortality salience (vs. other topic primes) increased death-thought accessibility, but not if participants had high need-satisfaction (Study 1, n = 160; Study 2, n = 216) or were prompted to recall self-determined experiences (Study 3, n = 188)...

Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like "moral" and "immoral"? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent to which they perceive moral character as "localized" (varying along many contextually embedded dimensions) versus "generalized" (varying along a single dimension from morally bad to morally good). This variation might be partly the product of cultural evolutionary adaptations to different kinds of social networks...

Cyber-racism has emerged as a societal issue that affects many youths and adults; however, no published work has elucidated the psychological processes germane to predicting cyber-racism perpetration. Theory-without data to support its postulates-argues that online disinhibition mediates the relationship between anonymity afforded the online user and cyber-racism. The purpose of the current research was to examine this prediction and add to the theory by testing additional mediators and moderators. Six empirical studies tested this theory with U...

To what extent do individuals differ in understanding how others see them and who is particularly good at it? Answering these questions about the "good metaperceiver" is relevant given the beneficial outcomes of meta-accuracy. However, there likely is more than one type of the good metaperceiver: One who knows the specific impressions they make more than others do ( dyadic meta-accuracy ) and one who knows their reputation more than others do (generalized meta-accuracy ). To identify and understand these good metaperceivers, we introduce the social meta-accuracy model (SMAM) as a statistical and conceptual framework and apply the SMAM to four samples of first impression interactions...

Scarcity often encourages decisions that favor the present over the future. While prevailing theories largely attribute these decisions to myopic, impulsive decision making, five studies find support for an alternative, less prevalent perspective. We introduce the time horizon of threatened needs as an important determinant of scarcity's effect on intertemporal choice, demonstrating that people's decisions under scarcity reflect attempts to address threatened needs. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (Study 1) and preregistered studies ( N = 10,297) show that time horizon moderates intertemporal decisions under scarcity...

How does personality change when people get older? Numerous studies have investigated this question, overall supporting the idea of so-called personality maturation. However, heterogeneous findings have left open questions, such as whether maturation continues in old age and how large the effects are. We suggest that the heterogeneity is partly rooted in methodological issues. First, studies may have failed to recover age effects as they did not stringently separate within-person changes from confounding between-person differences...

Extensive evidence has been found for the associations between personality traits and health. However, it remains unknown whether the relationships between personality and health show differential patterns across different life stages. The current research examined how the associations between the levels of and changes in the Big Five personality traits and different types of health outcomes (self-rated, physical, and physiological health outcomes) differ across ages over the life span (Sample 1, age range: 15-100) and during the aging process (Sample 2, age range: 50-109) in particular...

The last 2 decades have witnessed increased research on the role of life events in personality trait development, but few findings appear to be robust. We propose that a key to resolving this issue is incorporating individuals' subjective experiences into the study of event-related development. To test this, we developed and administered a survey about event-related personality change to a representative Dutch sample (N = 5,513, Ages 16-95) and linked their responses to 12-year trajectories of measured Big Five development...

We examine individual differences in smartphone behavior to understand the independent effects of Big Five traits and four different contextual factors (places, people, co-occurring activities, and psychological situations) on the frequency and duration of smartphone use in daily life. Using survey, experience sampling, and mobile sensing data collected over the span of 2 weeks from two samples of college students (Sample 1, N = 634; Sample 2, N = 211), we conducted a series of multilevel Bayesian gamma hurdle and negative binomial hurdle models to explain smartphone use (vs...

Existing wisdom holds that secrecy is burdensome and fatiguing. However, past research has conflated secrecy with the kinds of adverse events that are often kept secret. As a result, it is unclear whether secrecy is inherently depleting, or whether these consequences vary based on the underlying meaning of the secret. We resolve this confound by examining the consequences of positive secrets. In contrast to the prior research, five experiments (N = 2,800) find that positive secrets increase feelings of energy, relative to (a) content-matched positive non-secrets, (b) other pieces of unknown positive information, and (c) other kinds of secrets...

Reports an error in "Gain- but not loss-related self-perceptions of aging predict mortality over a period of 23 years: A multidimensional approach" by Susanne Wurm and Sarah K. Schäfer ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 2022[Sep], Vol 123[3], 636-653). The last sentence of the second paragraph of the Prediction of Mortality Based on Single Gain- or Loss-Related SPA Dimensions section now appears as Figure 3 shows a Kaplan-Meier curve as schematic illustration of the relationship between gain-related SPA (ongoing development) and mortality over 23 years...

The desire to change one's personality traits has been shown to be stronger if people are dissatisfied with associated aspects of their life. While evidence for the effects of interventions on personality trait change is increasing, it is unclear whether these lead to subsequent improvements in the satisfaction with various domains of life. In this study, we examined the effects of a 3-month digital-coaching personality change intervention study on 10 domains of satisfaction. We focused on the three largest intervention groups of the study ( N = 418), which included participants who wanted to increase their Emotional Stability, Conscientiousness, or Extraversion...

Many real-life examples-from interpersonal rivalries to international conflicts-suggest that people actively engage in competitive behavior even when it is negative sum (benefiting the self at a greater cost to others). This often leads to loss spirals where everyone-including the winner-ends up losing. Our research seeks to understand the psychology of such negative-sum competition in a controlled setting. To do so, we introduce an experimental paradigm in which paired participants have the option to repeatedly perform a behavior that causes a relatively small gain for the self and a larger loss to the other...

Traditional methods of personality assessment, and survey-based research in general, cannot make inferences about new items that have not been surveyed previously. This limits the amount of information that can be obtained from a given survey. In this article, we tackle this problem by leveraging recent advances in statistical natural language processing. Specifically, we extract "embedding" representations of questionnaire items from deep neural networks, trained on large-scale English language data. These embeddings allow us to construct a high-dimensional space of items, in which linguistically similar items are located near each other...

Reports an error in "In it together: Shared reality with instrumental others is linked to goal success" by Abdo Elnakouri, Maya Rossignac-Milon, Kori L. Krueger, Amanda L. Forest, E. Tory Higgins and Abigail A. Scholer ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , Advanced Online Publication, Jul 13, 2023, np). In the original article, the abstract was revised. Specifically, there were errors in the the second and third sentences of the fifth paragraph of the Shared Reality section, fifth sentence of the Present Research section, An updated Figure 1 now appears in the erratum...