Does Lower Psychological Need Satisfaction Foster Conspiracy Belief? Longitudinal Effects Over 3 Years in New Zealand.

Although conspiracy belief may arise from a frustration of psychological needs, research has yet to investigate these relationships over time. Using four annual waves of longitudinal panel data in New Zealand (2019-2022; = 55,269), we examined the relationship between four psychological needs (namely belonging, control, meaning in life, and self-esteem) and conspiracy belief. Results from four random-intercept cross-lagged panel models reveal stable between-person effects indicating that those whose core needs are less satisfied tend to exhibit higher levels of conspiracy belief across time.

It will (never) stop hurting: Do repeated or chronic experiences of exclusion lead to hyper- or hyposensitive psychological responses?

Unlike one-time lab manipulations of exclusion, in real life, many people experience exclusion, from others and from groups, over extended periods, raising the question of whether individuals could, over time, develop hypo- or hypersensitive responses to chronic exclusion. In Study 1, we subjected participants to repeated experiences of inclusion or exclusion (three Cyberball games, time lag of three days, = 194; 659 observations). We find that repeatedly excluded individuals become hypersensitive to inclusion, but not to exclusion.

Effects of an open-label placebo intervention on reactions to social exclusion in healthy adults: a randomized controlled trial.

Social exclusion, that is being left out by others, can have adverse consequences for individuals' psychological well-being. Even short-term experiences of social exclusion strongly threaten basic psychological needs and cause so-called social pain. Prior research suggests an overlap between the experience of social and physical pain that, amongst others, is reflected by the effectiveness of physical pain treatments in alleviating social pain.

Social pain by non-social agents: Exclusion hurts and provokes punishment even if the excluding source is a computer.

Prior research has shown that being excluded by computer-agents in experimental exclusion paradigms threatens individuals' basic needs to a similar extent as being excluded by humans. It is less clear, however, why this similarity between computer and human exclusion occurs, and whether it applies only to reactions immediately after the exclusion event (reflexive stage), or also to reactions that occur further downstream (e.g.

This feels like the right choice: how decision aids may facilitate affect-based valuation.

When individuals cannot make up their mind, they sometimes use a random decision-making aid such as a coin to make a decision. This aid may also elicit affective reactions: A person flipping a coin may (dis)like the outcome, and thus decide according to this feeling. We refer to this process as and to the aid as .

Deciding advantageously after flipping a coin.

Folk wisdom, advice columns, and pop culture suggest that when undecided, individuals may flip a coin - not to simply follow the suggestion, but to inspect their reaction to the outcome and then use the reaction to decide. While being intuitively appealing, it remains an open question whether this strategy results in advantageous decisions. Here we used an adapted version of the Iowa Gambling Task to test whether flipping a coin before making a decision may result in advantageous choices.

Depressed and excluded: Do depressive symptoms moderate recovery from ostracism?

Background: Prior studies show that depressed individuals react with more immediate reflexive need threat to ostracism than healthy controls. However, it remains unclear whether the observed difference between depressed individuals and healthy controls is caused by ostracism. To find out, the exclusion condition needs to be compared to a baseline condition: inclusion.

Truth feels easy: Knowing information is true enhances experienced processing fluency.

Information is more likely believed to be true when it feels easy rather than difficult to process. An ecological learning explanation for this fluency-truth effect implicitly or explicitly presumes that truth and fluency are positively associated. Specifically, true information may be easier to process than false information and individuals may reverse this link in their truth judgments.

This outcome feels right! subjective evaluations of coin flip outcomes reflect previously stated preferences.

When facing a difficult decision, individuals may rely on a coin flip to help them come to a conclusion. In some cases, however, individuals might not adhere to the coin's outcome, but instead report liking or disliking the coin flip's outcome, and may use this affective reaction to form their decision. In this manuscript we investigate the affective reaction towards the outcome of a coin flip and determine whether this affective reaction provides valid feedback in regards to individuals' underlying preferences (Hypothesis 1).

Negative Is True Here and Now, But Not So Much There and Then.

How do people judge the veracity of a message? The negativity bias in judgments of truth describes the phenomenon that the same message is more likely judged as true when framed negatively compared to positively. This manuscript investigates the negativity bias in conditions of psychological proximity and the possibility that the bias decreases when distance increases. This notion is informed by construal level theory, which holds that negative information is more salient and weighed more strongly in conditions of psychological proximity compared to distance.

The experience of ostracism over the adult life span.

Ostracism, that is, being excluded and ignored by others, is a highly painful and threatening experience for individuals. Most empirical research on ostracism has been carried out in the lab or focused on samples in specific contexts. Here, we investigate the effects of age on how individuals experience ostracism within a broad, representative sample of the adult German population (the Socio-Economic Panel).

Manipulating the odds: The effects of Machiavellianism and construal level on cheating behavior.

Values, beliefs, and traits differ across individuals, and these concepts might impact whether individuals choose to engage in (dis)honest behavior. This project focuses on interindividual differences in Machiavellianism, which is defined as a tendency toward cynicism and manipulativeness, and the belief that the ends justify the means. We hypothesized that trait Machiavellianism would predict dishonest behavior.

Who gets ostracized? A personality perspective on risk and protective factors of ostracism.

Ostracism, excluding and ignoring others, results from a variety of factors. Here, we investigate the effect of personality on the likelihood of becoming a target of ostracism. Theorizing that individuals low in conscientiousness or agreeableness are at risk of getting ostracized, we tested our hypotheses within 5 preregistered studies: Four experiments investigating participants' willingness to ostracize targets characterized by different personality traits and a reverse correlation face modeling study where we determined and subsequently validated the stereotypical face of an ostracized person.

Catalyzing decisions: How a coin flip strengthens affective reactions.

When individuals are undecided between options, they may flip a coin or use other aids that produce random outcomes to support decision-making. Such aids lead to clear suggestions, which, interestingly, individuals do not necessarily follow. Instead when looking at the outcome, individuals sometimes appear to like or dislike the suggestion, and then decide according to this feeling.

When and Why Being Ostracized Affects Veracity Judgments.

Ostracism-being ignored and excluded by others-is a ubiquitous experience with adverse effects on well-being. To prevent further exclusion and regain belonging, ostracized individuals are well advised to identify affiliation partners who are sincerely well-disposed. Humans' ability to detect lies, however, is generally not very high.

Who's to blame? Dissimilarity as a cue in moral judgments of observed ostracism episodes.

When observing an ostracism episode, observers may wish to know whether ostracism is justified or not. If ostracism appears unjustified, observers will likely blame the sources and sympathize with the target; if it appears justified, observers will likely blame and devalue the target. Here we introduce the "social dissimilarity rule," which holds that observers base their moral judgments on dissimilarities between the members of the observed group.

The Basel Face Database: A validated set of photographs reflecting systematic differences in Big Two and Big Five personality dimensions.

Upon a first encounter, individuals spontaneously associate faces with certain personality dimensions. Such first impressions can strongly impact judgments and decisions and may prove highly consequential. Researchers investigating the impact of facial information often rely on (a) real photographs that have been selected to vary on the dimension of interest, (b) morphed photographs, or (c) computer-generated faces (avatars).

When Silence Is Not Golden: Why Acknowledgment Matters Even When Being Excluded.

Following ostracism, individuals are highly sensitive to social cues. Here we investigate whether and when minimal acknowledgment can improve need satisfaction following an ostracism experience. In four studies, participants were either ostracized during Cyberball (Studies 1 and 2) or through a novel apartment-application paradigm (Studies 3 and 4).

Correction: Under threat by popular vote: German-speaking immigrants' affect and cognitions following the Swiss vote against mass immigration.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Under threat by popular vote: German-speaking immigrants' affect and cognitions following the Swiss vote against mass immigration.

A popular initiative in support of regulating future immigration to Switzerland was accepted by the electorate in 2014. Assuming that the initiative acted as an exclusionary threat for current immigrants of Switzerland, we conducted an online survey among a sample of highly-skilled German-speaking immigrants ("expats"). Participants reported having experienced negative affect following the vote.

When It's Okay That I Don't Play: Social Norms and the Situated Construal of Social Exclusion.

Being excluded and ignored has been shown to threaten fundamental human needs and cause pain. Such reflexive reactions to social exclusion have been conceptualized as direct and unmoderated (temporal need threat model of ostracism). Here, we propose an extension and argue that reflexive reactions depend on how social exclusion situations are construed.

Regulatory focus and generalized trust: the impact of prevention-focused self-regulation on trusting others.

The current research suggests that taking self-regulatory mechanisms into account provides insights regarding individuals' responses to threats in social interactions. In general, based on the notion that a prevention-focused orientation of self-regulation is associated with a need for security and a vigilant tendency to avoid losses and other types of negative events we advocate that a prevention-focused orientation, both as a disposition as well as a situationally induced state, lowers generalized trust, thus hindering cooperation within social interactions that entail threats. Specifically, we found that the more individuals' habitual self-regulatory orientation is dominated by a prevention focus, the less likely they are to score high on a self-report measure of generalized trust (Study 1), and to express trust in a trust game paradigm as manifested in lower sums of transferred money (Studies 2 and 3).

Unconscious processes improve lie detection.

The capacity to identify cheaters is essential for maintaining balanced social relationships, yet humans have been shown to be generally poor deception detectors. In fact, a plethora of empirical findings holds that individuals are only slightly better than chance when discerning lies from truths. Here, we report 5 experiments showing that judges' ability to detect deception greatly increases after periods of unconscious processing.

Towards a better understanding of the legibility bias in performance assessments: the case of gender-based inferences.

Background: Handwriting legibility systematically biases evaluations in that highly legible handwriting results in more positive evaluations than less legible handwriting. Because performance assessments in educational contexts are not only based on computerized or multiple choice tests but often include the evaluation of handwritten work samples, understanding the causes of this bias is critical.

Aims: This research was designed to replicate and extend the legibility bias in two tightly controlled experiments and to explore whether gender-based inferences contribute to its occurrence.