Asymmetries in Mutual Understanding: People With Low Status, Power, and Self-Esteem Understand Better Than They Are Understood.

All too often, people who develop exceptionally astute insights into others remain mysterious to these others. Evidence for such asymmetric understanding comes from several independent domains. Striking asymmetries occur among those who differ in status and power, such that individuals with low status and power understand more than they are understood.

An Evaluation of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, Its Rapid Rise, and Its Effective Use.

Over the past 2 decades, many social scientists have expanded their data-collection capabilities by using various online research tools. In the 2011 article "Amazon's Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data?" in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Buhrmester, Kwang, and Gosling introduced researchers to what was then considered to be a promising but nascent research platform. Since then, thousands of social scientists from seemingly every field have conducted research using the platform.

The evolution of extreme cooperation via shared dysphoric experiences.

Willingness to lay down one's life for a group of non-kin, well documented historically and ethnographically, represents an evolutionary puzzle. Building on research in social psychology, we develop a mathematical model showing how conditioning cooperation on previous shared experience can allow individually costly pro-group behavior to evolve. The model generates a series of predictions that we then test empirically in a range of special sample populations (including military veterans, college fraternity/sorority members, football fans, martial arts practitioners, and twins).

Moral Vitalism: Seeing Good and Evil as Real, Agentic Forces.

Moral vitalism refers to a tendency to view good and evil as actual forces that can influence people and events. We introduce a scale designed to assess the belief in moral vitalism. High scorers on the scale endorse items such as "There are underlying forces of good and evil in this world.

What makes a group worth dying for? Identity fusion fosters perception of familial ties, promoting self-sacrifice.

We sought to identify the mechanisms that cause strongly fused individuals (those who have a powerful, visceral feeling of oneness with the group) to make extreme sacrifices for their group. A large multinational study revealed a widespread tendency for fused individuals to endorse making extreme sacrifices for their country. Nevertheless, when asked which of several groups they were most inclined to die for, most participants favored relatively small groups, such as family, over a large and extended group, such as country (Study 1).

Contemplating the ultimate sacrifice: identity fusion channels pro-group affect, cognition, and moral decision making.

Although most people acknowledge the moral virtue in sacrificing oneself to save others, few actually endorse self-sacrifice. Seven experiments explored the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that underlie such endorsements. Participants responded to 1 of 2 moral dilemmas in which they could save 5 members of their country only by sacrificing themselves.

On the nature of identity fusion: insights into the construct and a new measure.

Previous research has documented the consequences of feeling fused with a group; here we examine the nature of identity fusion. Specifically, we sought to determine what fusion is and the mediating mechanisms that lead fused individuals to make extraordinary sacrifices for their group. Guided by the assumption that fusion emphasizes the extent to which people develop relational ties to the group, we developed a measure designed to capture feelings of connectedness and reciprocal strength with the group.

Implicit self-esteem: nature, measurement, and a new way forward.

Gaining insight into the nature and consequences of people's global self-evaluations (i.e., their self-esteem) has been fraught with difficulty.