People tend to be bad at detecting lies: When explicitly asked to infer whether others tell a lie or the truth, people often do not perform better than chance. However, increasing evidence suggests that implicit lie detection measures and potentially physiological measures may mirror observers' telling apart lies from truths after all. Implicit and physiological responses are argued to respond to lies as a threatening stimulus associated with a threat response.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany apps (e.g., social media, online streaming) include a social component where individual privacy decisions go beyond individual contexts and affect other people.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOstracism triggers negative emotions such as sadness, anger, and hurt feelings. Do targets of ostracism truthfully share their emotions with the sources of ostracism? Drawing on past research on social-functional accounts of emotions and interpersonal emotion regulation, we investigated the possibility that targets may misrepresent their emotions (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUsing both correlational and experimental designs across four studies (N = 1251 working individuals), the current project aimed to contribute to the understanding of workplace ostracism by studying two research questions. First, we tested whether the subjective experience of targets reflects the current theorizing of ostracism. Second, drawing from the transactional theory of stress and coping, we investigated whether this subjective experience impacts targets' coping responses.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial exclusion triggers aversive reactions (e.g., increased negative affect), but being excluded may bring substantial benefits by reducing pathogen exposure associated with social interactions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExisting research has documented the social benefits (i.e., higher popularity and liking) of extraversion and agreeableness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this paper, we present the Online Coalition Game (OCG): an open-source tool written for the open-access research platform oTree that enables high-powered interactive coalition formation experiments. Besides containing a tutorial on conducting and configuring studies using the OCG, we discuss two previous implementations. With these examples, we demonstrate that online use of the OCG provides the benefits of large sample sizes and fast data collection, while leading to convergent and robust findings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA key observation in coalition formation is that bargainers with most resources are often excluded from coalitions: the Strength-is-Weakness effect. Previous studies have suffered from low sample sizes and lack of (appropriate) incentives and have rarely focused on underlying processes. To address these issues, we conducted a cross-platform replication using the Online Coalition Game.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCultural practices and anecdotal accounts suggest that people expect suffering to lead to fortuitous rewards. To shed light on this illusory 'suffering-reward' association, we tested why and when this effect manifests. Across three vignette studies in which we manipulated the degree of suffering experienced by the protagonist, we tested a 'just-world maintenance' explanation (suffering deserves to be compensated) and a 'virtuous suffering' explanation (suffering indicates virtues, which will be rewarded).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals may respond to ostracism by either behaving prosocially or antisocially. A recent paper provides evidence for a third response: solitude seeking, suggesting that ostracized individuals may ironically engage in self-perpetuating behaviors which exacerbate social isolation. To examine this counterintuitive response to ostracism, we conceptually replicated the original paper in three studies ( = 1,118).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe current article examined the characteristics of real-life revenge acts. A demographically diverse sample of avengers described autobiographical revenge acts and the preceding offense. They rated the severity of both acts, the time before taking revenge, and motives for the timing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImpressions of trustworthiness based on facial cues influence many consequential decisions, in spite of their (generally) poor accuracy. Here, we test whether reliance on facial cues can be better explained by (a) the belief that facial cues are more valid than other cues or by (b) the quick and primary processing of faces, which makes relying on facial cues relatively effortless. Six studies ( = 2,732 with 73,182 trust decisions) test the two accounts by comparing the effects of facial cues and economic payoffs on trust decisions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial outcomes can result both from people's own behavior (claim process) and from the behavior of others (grant process). Prior research compared the effect of these two processes on people's experience of inclusion and outperformance, using two virtual ball-toss games: claimball and cyberball. We extend this work by using the same games to assess reactions to a third social outcome, overinclusion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt has long been supposed that the confirmation bias plays a role in the prevalence and maintenance of misconceptions. However, this has been supported more by argument than by empirical evidence. In the present paper, we show how different types of belief-feedback evoke physiological responses consistent with the presence of a confirmation bias.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground and aims Prior research indicates that swearing increases pain tolerance and decreases pain perception in a cold pressor task. In two experiments, we extend this research by testing whether taboo hand gesticulations have a similar effect. Methods Study 1 focused on males and females who, across two trials, submerged an extended middle finger (taboo) and an extended index finger (control) in ice water until discomfort necessitated removal.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople make trait inferences based on facial appearance, and these inferences guide social approach and avoidance. Here, we investigate the effects of textural features on trait impressions from faces. In contrast to previous work, which exclusively manipulated skin smoothness, we manipulated smoothness and the presence of skin blemishes independently (Study 1) and orthogonally (Study 2).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTheoretical reflections suggest that avengers and targets of revenge have self-serving perception biases when judging the severity of revenge acts and preceding offenses. Empirical research investigating such biases has so far focused on either the offense or the revenge act and may have confounded a perception bias with a situational selection bias (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHumiliation lacks an empirically derived definition, sometimes simply being equated with shame. We approached the conceptualisation of humiliation from a prototype perspective, identifying 61 features of humiliation, some of which are more central to humiliation (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOstracism has been shown to elicit pain in both the target and the observers. Two experiments investigated the autonomic thermal signature associated with an ostracism experience and assessed whether and how social categorization impacts the autonomic arousal of both the target and the observer. Autonomic response was assessed using thermal infrared imaging, recording facial temperature variation during an online game of ball toss (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA pre-registered experiment was conducted to examine psychophysiological responses to being lied to. Bridging research on social cognition and deception detection, we hypothesized that observing a liar compared to a truth-teller would decrease finger skin temperature of observers. Participants first watched two targets while not forewarned that they would later be asked to judge (direct and indirect) veracity, and then watched another two targets while forewarned about this.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe examined 120 Cyberball studies (N = 11,869) to determine the effect size of ostracism and conditions under which the effect may be reversed, eliminated, or small. Our analyses showed that (1) the average ostracism effect is large (d > |1.4|) and (2) generalizes across structural aspects (number of players, ostracism duration, number of tosses, type of needs scale), sampling aspects (gender, age, country), and types of dependent measure (interpersonal, intrapersonal, fundamental needs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBeyond breathing, the regulation of body temperature-thermoregulation-is one of the most pressing concerns for many animals. A dysregulated body temperature has dire consequences for survival and development. Despite the high frequency of social thermoregulation occurring across many species, little is known about the role of social thermoregulation in human (social) psychological functioning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the social psychological threat-compensation literature, there is an apparent contradiction whereby relatively extreme beliefs both decrease markers of physiological arousal following meaning violations, and increase the values affirmation behaviors understood as a palliative responses to this arousal. We hypothesize that this is due to the differential impact of measuring extremism on behavioral inhibition and approach systems following meaning violations, whereby extremism both reduces markers of conflict arousal (BIS) and increases values affirmation (BAS) unrelated to this initial arousal. Using pupil dilation as a proxy for immediate conflict arousal, we found that the same meaning violation (anomalous playing cards) evoked greater pupil dilation, and that this pupillary reaction was diminished in participants who earlier reported extreme beliefs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrior definitions and empirical research do not distinguish responses to transgressions driven by feelings of revenge from responses to transgressions driven by feelings of anger. We used autobiographical recalls to examine differences between vengeful and anger-driven responses. Our findings revealed that vengeful responses are not the same as anger-driven responses.
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