Perspectives on Psychological Science

Hindsight bias occurs when people feel that they “knew it all along,” that is, when they believe that an event is more predictable after it becomes known than it was before it became known. Hindsight bias embodies any combination of three aspects: memory distortion, beliefs about events’ objective likelihoods, or subjective beliefs about one’s own prediction abilities. Hindsight bias stems from (a) cognitive inputs (people selectively recall information consistent with what they now know to be true and engage in sensemaking to impose meaning on their own knowledge), (b) metacognitive inputs (the ease with which a past outcome is understood may be misattributed to its assumed prior likelihood), and (c) motivational inputs (people have a need to see the world as orderly and predictable and to avoid being blamed for problems). Consequences of hindsight bias include myopic attention to a single causal understanding of the past (to the neglect of other reasonable explanations) as well as general overconfidence in the certainty of one’s judgments. New technologies for visualizing and understanding data sets may have the unintended consequence of heightening hindsight bias, but an intervention that encourages people to consider alternative causal explanations for a given outcome can reduce hindsight bias.

Social psychologists fighting prejudice and clinical psychologists fighting depression have long been separated by the social–clinical divide, unaware that they were facing a common enemy. Stereotypes about others leading to prejudice (e.g., Devine, 1989) and schemas about the self leading to depression (e.g., A. T. Beck, 1967) are fundamentally the same type of cognitive structure. According to the integrated perspective on prejudice and depression, negative stereotypes (i.e., schemas) are activated in a Source, who expresses prejudice toward the Target, causing the Target to experience depression. This linking of prejudice and depression (i.e., “comorbid” prejudice and depression) can occur at the societal level (e.g., Nazis’ prejudice causing Jews’ depression), the interpersonal level (e.g., an abuser’s prejudice causing an abusee’s depression), and the intrapersonal level (e.g., a person’s self-prejudice causing his or her depression). The integrated perspective addresses several longstanding paradoxes, controversies, and questions; generates new areas of inquiry; and spotlights specific methods and findings that have direct cross-disciplinary applications in the battle against prejudice and depression. Ironically, some interventions developed by depression researchers may be especially useful against prejudice, and some interventions developed by prejudice researchers may be especially useful against depression.

According to the resource model of self-control, overriding one’s predominant response tendencies consumes and temporarily depletes a limited inner resource. Over 100 experiments have lent support to this model of ego depletion by observing that acts of self-control at Time 1 reduce performance on subsequent, seemingly unrelated self-control tasks at Time 2. The time is now ripe, therefore, not only to broaden the scope of the model but to start gaining a precise, mechanistic account of it. Accordingly, in the current article, the authors probe the particular cognitive, affective, and motivational mechanics of self-control and its depletion, asking, “What is ego depletion?” This study proposes a process model of depletion, suggesting that exerting self-control at Time 1 causes temporary shifts in both motivation and attention that undermine self-control at Time 2. The article highlights evidence in support of this model but also highlights where evidence is lacking, thus providing a blueprint for future research. Though the process model of depletion may sacrifice the elegance of the resource metaphor, it paints a more precise picture of ego depletion and suggests several nuanced predictions for future research.

A widely advocated idea in education is that people learn better when the flow of experience is under their control (i.e., learning is self-directed). However, the reasons why volitional control might result in superior acquisition and the limits to such advantages remain poorly understood. In this article, we review the issue from both a cognitive and computational perspective. On the cognitive side, self-directed learning allows individuals to focus effort on useful information they do not yet possess, can expose information that is inaccessible via passive observation, and may enhance the encoding and retention of materials. On the computational side, the development of efficient “active learning” algorithms that can select their own training data is an emerging research topic in machine learning. This review argues that recent advances in these related fields may offer a fresh theoretical perspective on how people gather information to support their own learning.

Our central goal is to provide a definition of boredom in terms of the underlying mental processes that occur during an instance of boredom. Through the synthesis of psychodynamic, existential, arousal, and cognitive theories of boredom, we argue that boredom is universally conceptualized as “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.” We propose to map this conceptualization onto underlying mental processes. Specifically, we propose that boredom be defined in terms of attention. That is, boredom is the aversive state that occurs when we (a) are not able to successfully engage attention with internal (e.g., thoughts or feelings) or external (e.g., environmental stimuli) information required for participating in satisfying activity, (b) are focused on the fact that we are not able to engage attention and participate in satisfying activity, and (c) attribute the cause of our aversive state to the environment. We believe that our definition of boredom fully accounts for the phenomenal experience of boredom, brings existing theories of boredom into dialogue with one another, and suggests specific directions for future research on boredom and attention.

A lack of political diversity in psychology is said to lead to a number of pernicious outcomes, including biased research and active discrimination against conservatives. We surveyed a large number (combined N = 800) of social and personality psychologists and discovered several interesting facts. First, although only 6% described themselves as conservative “overall,” there was more diversity of political opinion on economic issues and foreign policy. Second, respondents significantly underestimated the proportion of conservatives among their colleagues. Third, conservatives fear negative consequences of revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues. Finally, they are right to do so: In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.

This comment is in two parts. The first presents some implications of Inbar and Lammers’ (2012, this issue) findings by making salient many of the advantages and privileges enjoyed by scientists when they extol the moral and intellectual superiority of liberals, liberal beliefs, liberal attitudes, and liberal policy preferences over conservatives, conservative beliefs, conservative attitudes, and conservative policy preferences. The second part of this comment refutes (or, at least, vigorously contests) some of the most common arguments that have attempted to defend social psychology from charges of unscientific and distorting liberal biases.

Inbar and Lammers (2012, this issue) conducted two surveys of a sample of Society for Personality and Social Psychology listserv members to empirically examine two questions: How many social psychologists are politically liberal, and is there evidence that liberal social psychologists are biased against their conservative colleagues and/or research taking a conservative perspective? They conclude that the field is overwhelming liberal, and that there is ample evidence of bias against both conservatives and conservatively motivated research. Biased sampling, conversational norm and question context effects, missing control conditions, and a focus on hypothesis confirmation instead of hypothesis testing, however, undermine the scientific confidence one can place in their findings. Is there liberal bias? Probably. Is the evidence scientifically sound? Not so much. The field needs to adhere to the same standards of scientific rigor when conducting self-critical research as it requires of normal science.

Inbar and Lammers (2012, this issue) contribute to the growing empirical evidence of discrimination against conservative (i.e., right-of-center) people and ideas not only in social and personality psychology, but within the academy generally. Because sociopolitical values are often a core component of self-identity that significantly impact our interpersonal relationships, sociopolitical discrimination is difficult to overcome. There is a tendency to marginalize the sociopolitical “other,” along with a groupthink that implicitly presupposes that this form of discrimination is acceptable (e.g., because conservatives are self-interestedly motivated, conservative ideas are incorrect, or conservatism is well represented elsewhere in society and thus need not be in the academy). Yet discrimination must be overcome because sociopolitical diversity is vital for scholarly inquiry, pedagogy, and for ethical professional practice. Recent research suggests that the assumptions underlying psychology’s value system of promoting racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation diversity—that is, that doing so recognizes people’s personal identities, ameliorates discrimination, and has educational benefits—may be all the more compelling with respect to sociopolitical ideas.

Recent analyses of the predominance of liberals in personality and social psychology have raised the possibility that this ideological imbalance is driven in part by active discrimination against conservatives. In this article, I review empirical evidence relevant to this possibility and find little support for it. The evidence points instead to a predominance of liberal views in academia more generally, driven by multiple factors including the consonance of academic work with the goals and values of liberals. Within the field of personality and social psychology, this concentration of liberal views has fostered strong liberal norms, which both intensify and exaggerate the field’s ideological homogeneity. These liberal norms have unfortunate narrowing effects on research in personality and social psychology; remedies for these effects should focus on weakening the norms.

The Inbar and Lammers (2012, this issue) survey revealed potentially disturbing pockets of ideological intolerance among social psychologists. Their findings raise a mix of procedural-justice questions bearing on fair treatment of colleagues and epistemological questions bearing on the opportunity costs of research programs that were either never conceived or smothered in infancy. An appropriately self-critical disciplinary response is to conduct identity-substitution thought experiments that explore (a) how we would collectively react to differential treatment in counterfactual worlds in which minority–majority faction roles were reversed, (b) how ideological bias may have suppressed research with the potential to undermine liberal policy positions (e.g., affirmative action, income redistribution, “dove-ish” security policies), and (c) how ideological bias may have led to attaching labels to conservative policy positions that moderates and conservatives consider tendentious (e.g., system justification, symbolic racism).