In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many journals swiftly changed their editorial policies and peer-review processes to accelerate the provision of knowledge about COVID-related issues to a wide audience. These changes may have favoured speed at the cost of accuracy and methodological rigour. In this study, we compare 100 COVID-related articles published in four major psychological journals between 2020 and 2022 with 100 non-COVID articles from the same journal issues and 100 pre-COVID articles published between 2017 and 2019.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJustice scholars have elaborated a variety of social psychological mechanisms that contribute to our desire to see some action following an injustice, to see justice done. Research over the past 20 years has significantly advanced our understanding of how to repair a sense of justice by articulating the psychological needs that follow from its experience from victim, offender, and observer perspectives. In this review, we summarize key insights from this literature, including the specific needs identified as relevant to justice, the challenges that arise when seeking justice for multiple parties in a conflict, and the procedural approaches that can aid in reconciling disparate perspectives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScience and religion are influential social forces, and their interplay has been subject to many public and scholarly debates. The present article addresses how people mentally conceptualize the relationship between science and religion and how these conceptualizations can be systematized. To that end, we provide a comprehensive, integrative review of the pertinent literature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry
December 2024
Background And Objectives: Sadistic pleasure - gratuitous enjoyment from inflicting pain on others - has devastating interpersonal and societal consequences. The current knowledge on non-sexual, everyday sadism - a trait that resides within the general population - is scarce. The present study therefore focussed on personality correlates of sadistic pleasure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Bull
March 2024
Almaatouq et al. argue that an "integrative experiment design" approach can help generating cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge. Here, we discuss the novelty of their approach and scrutinize its promises and pitfalls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThree studies explore the relation between victim sensitivity-the sensitivity to being a victim of injustice - and anti-immigration attitudes and behaviour. Based on theoretical considerations and prior research, we hypothesized that victim sensitivity positively predicts anti-immigration attitudes and behaviour over and above political orientation and ideology. Results from a longitudinal study (Study 1; N = 1038), a computerized online experiment (Study 2; N = 299), and a laboratory experiment (Study 3; N = 178) provide support for this hypothesis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose Of Review: Sadistic pleasure-the enjoyment of harm-infliction to others-can have devastating interpersonal and societal consequences. The goal of the current review is to illuminate the nomological net of traits related to sadism. We aim to achieve an understanding of the current empirical status on the link between sadism and personality disorders, psychopathy, the Dark Triad, and basic personality traits in clinical and community-based samples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn an attempt to display themselves as warm, approachable, and trustworthy, researchers might reveal personal details about themselves (i.e., self-disclosure) when communicating their science to the public.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPunishment is expected to have an educative, behaviour-controlling effect on the transgressor. Yet, this effect often remains unattained. Here, we test the hypothesis that transgressors' inferences about punisher motives crucially shape transgressors' post-punishment attitudes and behaviour.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychological and situational factors (for example, the intent of the agent or the presence of physical contact between the agent and the victim) can play an important role in moral dilemma judgements (for example, the trolley problem).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPunishing offenders for their misdeeds can restore a sense of justice achieved (i.e., justice-related satisfaction) among victims and increase their willingness to reconcile, especially if offenders signal that they understand why punishment has been inflicted on them.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReaders use prior knowledge to evaluate the validity of statements and detect false information without effort and strategic control. The present study expands this research by exploring whether people also non-strategically detect information that threatens their social identity. Participants (N = 77) completed a task in which they had to respond to a "True" or "False" probe after reading true, false, identity-threatening, or non-threatening sentences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScience is unthinkable without collaboration between scientists. Yet, science is also unthinkable without competition (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch is often fueled by researchers' scientific, but also their personal interests: Sometimes, researchers decide to pursue a specific research question because the answer to that question is idiosyncratically relevant for themselves: Such "me-search" may not only affect the quality of research, but also how it is perceived by the general public. In two studies (N = 621), we investigate the circumstances under which learning about a researcher's "me-search" increases or decreases laypeople's ascriptions of trustworthiness and credibility to the respective researcher. Results suggest that participants' own preexisting attitudes towards the research topic moderate the effects of "me-search" substantially: When participants hold favorable attitudes towards the research topic (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScience should be self-correcting. However, researchers often hesitate to admit errors and to adopt reforms in their own work. In two studies (overall = 702), we test whether scientific self-criticism and reform intentions expressed by researchers damage or rather improve their reputation in the eyes of the public (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPers Soc Psychol Rev
November 2021
Victims commonly respond to experienced wrongdoing by punishing or forgiving the transgressor. While much research has looked at predictors and immediate consequences of these post-transgression responses, comparably less research has addressed the conditions under which punishment or forgiveness have positive or negative downstream consequences on the victim-transgressor relationship. Drawing from research on Social Value Orientation (SVO), we argue that both forgiveness and punishment can be rooted in either prosocial (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBy mid-March 2020, most countries had implemented nationwide lockdown policies aimed at decelerating the spread of SARS-CoV-2. At that time, nobody knew how long these policies would have to remain in force and whether they would have to be extended, intensified or made more flexible. The present study aimed to illuminate how the general public in Germany reacted to the prospect of increasing the length, the intensity and/or the flexibility of distancing rules implied by different lockdown scenarios.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhen people are transgressed against, they are usually motivated to restore personal power that was threatened by the transgression. We argue and test the new idea that while revenge and forgiveness responses are typically seen as opposites, both may be empowering, depending on the offender's intent to harm. Across two studies, one experimental (N = 381) and one employing an autobiographical recall paradigm (N = 251), we tested a moderated mediation model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocietal inequality has been found to harm the mental and physical health of its members and undermine overall social cohesion. Here, we tested the hypothesis that economic inequality is associated with a wish for a strong leader in a study involving 28 countries from five continents (Study 1, = 6,112), a study involving an Australian community sample (Study 2, = 515), and two experiments (Study 3a, = 96; Study 3b, = 296). We found correlational (Studies 1 and 2) and experimental (Studies 3a and 3b) evidence for our prediction that higher inequality enhances the wish for a strong leader.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Persistent medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) are a major burden for health care. Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) is efficacious for patients with MUS, with small to medium effects. The current study investigates whether therapy outcomes of a CBT for MUS patients can be improved by complementing it with emotion regulation training.
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