J Pers Assess
November 2024
Spiteful behavior, where one is willing to harm oneself to harm another, is a common social behavior that is associated with social competition. However, there is currently only one well-used psychological measure that claims to measure spitefulness, the Spitefulness Scale (Marcus et al., 2014).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDrawing on the 'engaged followership' reinterpretation of Milgram's work on obedience, four studies (three pre-registered) examine the extent to which people's willingness to follow an experimenter's instructions is dependent on the perceived prototypicality of the science they are supposedly advancing. In Studies 1, 2 and 3, participants took part in a study that was described as advancing either 'hard' (prototypical) science (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Milgram's seminal obedience studies, participants' behaviour has traditionally been explained as a demonstration of people's tendency to enter into an 'agentic state' when in the presence of an authority figure: they attend only to the demands of that authority and are insensitive to the plight of their victims. There have been many criticisms of this view, but most rely on either indirect or anecdotal evidence. In this study, participants (n = 40) are taken through a Virtual Reality simulation of the Milgram paradigm.
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