Those who ignore the past are doomed…to be heartless: Lay historicist theory is associated with humane responses to the struggles and transgressions of others.

When one learns that current struggles or transgressions of an individual or group are rooted in an unfortunate history, one experiences compassion and reduced blame. Prior research has demonstrated this by having participants receive (or not) a concrete historicist narrative regarding the particular individual or group under consideration. Here, we take a different approach.

To which world regions does the valence-dominance model of social perception apply?

Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov's valence-dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions.

The Social Explanatory Styles Questionnaire: assessing moderators of basic social-cognitive phenomena including spontaneous trait inference, the fundamental attribution error, and moral blame.

Why is he poor? Why is she failing academically? Why is he so generous? Why is she so conscientious? Answers to such everyday questions--social explanations--have powerful effects on relationships at the interpersonal and societal levels. How do people select an explanation in particular cases? We suggest that, often, explanations are selected based on the individual's pre-existing general theories of social causality. More specifically, we suggest that over time individuals develop general beliefs regarding the causes of social events.

More than a lack of control: external explanations can evoke compassion for outgroups by increasing perceptions of suffering (independent of perceived control).

People's explanations for social events powerfully affect their socioemotional responses. We examine why explanations affect emotions, with a specific focus on how external explanations for negative aspects of an outgroup can create compassion for the outgroup. The dominant model of these processes suggests that external explanations can reduce perceived control and that compassion is evoked when negative aspects of an outgroup are perceived as beyond their control.

Ingroup identity moderates the impact of social explanations on intergroup attitudes: external explanations are not inherently prosocial.

Social explanations-causal frameworks used to understand group status and action-shape intergroup attitudes and emotions. Yet, different theoretical perspectives offer divergent predictions regarding associations between external explanations-which construe group actions or outcomes as being caused by forces outside of the group-and consequent attitudes toward outgroups. Specifically, whereas the authors' social explanations framework suggests that external explanations regarding a low-status group will foster prosocial responses, other perspectives suggest that external explanations will foster defensive responses.