Social Psychological and Personality Science

Using three online experimental studies of liberals and conservatives in the United States (N = 696), we explore whether an interaction partner’s political friendship diversity could reduce people’s experience of social identity threat. In the first two studies, liberal and conservative participants who were exposed to a political outgroup member with a politically diverse friendship network (vs. a politically homogeneous friendship network or control condition) had improved meta-perception concerns and increased friendship interest. In the third study, having a partner with a politically diverse network of friends, compared with the homogeneous condition, largely led liberal and conservative participants to have improved meta-perceptions, increased friendship interest, improved perceptions, increased interest in learning about their partner, believed their partner was more interested in learning about them, and lessened dehumanization of their interaction partner. This research suggests that interpolitical friendship diversity has the potential to improve interpolitical relations.

The research explored the frequency of politically diverse friendships—that is, those characterized by dissimilar political attitudes—and their association with political outgroup attitudes and friendship quality. In two studies, 971 pairs of adult friends in the United States reported their political attitudes and affiliation, discussion of controversial political issues, comfort with political disagreement (CPD), friendship quality and attitudes toward political groups. Friendships between Democrats and Republicans were rare and the degree of political attitude dissimilarity within pairs was generally low. Multilevel models estimated the association that CPD and political attitude dissimilarity within pairs each have with political outgroup attitudes and friendship quality. Political attitude dissimilarity was associated with lower prejudice toward political outgroups, but also lower friendship quality. CPD was weakly associated with higher friendship quality.

Affective polarization, the growing gap between negativity toward political outgroups and positivity toward political ingroups, threatens democracies. This preregistered research tested the effectiveness of a novel moral learning treatment, which combines the significance of morality with basic learning principles, in reducing affective polarization in the U.S. context. A pre-study demonstrated in-party preference, which was challenged in Experiment 1, which assigned moral behaviors to one political group (e.g., Republican) and immoral behaviors to the other political group (e.g., Democrat). As predicted, the learning treatment reduced self-reported and automatic preference for in-party individuals both immediately and after a 2-day delay. Experiment 2 replicated this finding, using neutral control to rule out that immoral behaviors caused the reduction in in-party preference. Experiment 3 showed the effect extended beyond individual party members to the entire out-party. Highlighting out-party members’ moral behavior could strengthen shared values and be useful in political campaigns or education.

Trust plays a central role in social interactions. Recent research has highlighted the importance of others’ moral decisions in shaping trust inference: individuals who reject sacrificial harm in moral dilemmas (which aligns with deontological ethics) are generally perceived as more trustworthy than those who condone sacrificial harm (which aligns with utilitarian ethics). Across five studies (N = 1,234), we investigated trust inferences in the context of iterative moral dilemmas, which allow individuals to not only make deontological or utilitarian decisions, but also harm-balancing decisions. Our findings challenge the prevailing perspective: While we did observe effects of the type of moral decision that people make, the direction of these effects was inconsistent across studies. In contrast, moral similarity (i.e., whether a decision aligns with one’s own perspective) consistently predicted increased trust. Our findings suggest that trust is not just about adhering to specific moral frameworks but also about shared moral perspectives.

Despite decades of research and growing public awareness, sexism and gender discrimination remain pervasive, partly due to men’s lower awareness of sexism. Here, we explored whether man−woman romantic relationships can be leveraged to promote men’s awareness of sexism. In Study 1 (N = 576), men who read about gender discrimination targeting their ostensible partner (versus a friend or stranger) were more likely to perspective-take and appraise the situation as sexist, and in turn, reported greater broader awareness of gender discrimination toward women and less sexist attitudes. In Study 2 (N = 570), 76% of men reported that their partner had disclosed an experience of sexism. Greater perspective-taking was associated with recognizing these experiences as sexist and greater awareness of sexism and allyship behaviors (n = 432). The findings suggest that man−woman romantic relationships offer a unique context to promote men’s awareness of sexism and gender discrimination, revealing both novel insights and challenges for reducing sexism.

The greater acceptance of gay, compared with transgender, people in Western countries may be a result of a specific trajectory—where queer rights was centered by and around White, middle class, gender-conforming gay men—and may not generalize to other places. Two surveys of respondents in 23 countries (Ns∼ = 500 or 1,000 per country) showed that bias toward gay and transgender people is lower in Western (vs. non-Western) countries, but that the relative bias changes as a function of region: there is greater acceptance of gay (vs. transgender) people in most Western countries, whereas the reverse is true in most non-Western countries. Analyses of legal frameworks (N = 193) show that recognition of same-gender unions is prevalent in Western countries but virtually nonexistent elsewhere, whereas recognition of gender marker changes is prevalent throughout the world. Overall, in the most intolerant places, transgender people are relatively more accepted than gay people.

Correlations among implicit measures of racial bias tend to be weak, raising questions about their validity. Weak individual-level correlations, however, could reflect a temporally unstable construct. According to the Bias of Crowds model, implicit bias can be fleeting for individuals but, when aggregated, reveals which concepts are widely accessible for a population. Using this framework, we hypothesized that correlations between two tests—the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP)—would be weak across individuals but stronger across counties. We also predicted that county-level racial bias should relate to meaningful contextual factors, like structural inequality. In support of these hypotheses (N = 2,137 people, 103 counties), the IAT and AMP were correlated more strongly at the level of counties (r = .47) than individuals (r = .24). Furthermore, county-level bias was significantly related to structural inequality. This study shows that implicit measures show substantially more convergent validity at the context than the person level.

Brief messages have the flexibility to reach the public quickly and the potential to ignite social change. We use recent advances in antiracist messaging to create and compare four messages that differ in their focus of intervention. Two experiments randomly exposed participants to messages emphasizing either (a) awareness of personal race bias; (b) empathy for targets of racism; (c) the need for racial justice, or (d) social norms about the unacceptability of racism. Participants exposed to the empathy for targets message reported significantly more allophilia, egalitarianism, and awareness of racism (Study 1; N = 658), as well as more antiracism (Study 2; N = 813) than those exposed to the other messages. Moderation tests showed that the effectiveness of empathy-focused messaging did not depend on trait empathy or trait motivation. This work underscores the effectiveness of encouraging empathy for targets when promoting antiracism.

The link between economic inequality and individual well-being has been gaining increasing research attention. This study examines this relationship using data from 71 countries with diverse national incomes, addressing three key research gaps: (1) incorporating measures of both perceived and objective economic inequality, (2) extending analysis to multiple components of well-being beyond happiness, including meaning in life, harmony, and spirituality, and (3) assessing levels of both current and ideal well-being. Findings reveal that perceived economic inequality predicts personal well-being more strongly than objective inequality. In addition, perceived inequality is associated with a wider gap between current and ideal levels of happiness, meaning, harmony, and spirituality, although national income moderates the effects of meaning, harmony, and spirituality. We discuss the implications of these results, highlighting the need for more culturally sensitive studies on perceived economic inequality and well-being.

When faced with self-threat, people often engage in self-protective reactions. Yet not everyone does. The extent to which self-protection occurs, is thought to depend on people’s personality. We put this claim to test by considering multiple personality traits from different content domains. In an experiment, participants (N = 1744) performed a bogus performance test and received negative versus positive feedback. As an indicator of self-protective reactions, we assessed participants’ tendency to question the validity of the test. We found that high self-esteem and high narcissism predicted stronger self-protective reactions, particularly when these traits were assessed in the content domain targeted by the negative feedback. Contrary to our hypotheses, the self-insight motive and mindfulness also predicted stronger (and not weaker) self-protective reactions. These findings provide better understanding of the role that personality plays in motivated reasoning.