Prototypes of People With Depression

This article investigates the content and the consequences of the prototypes of people with depression in a multimethod fashion. Fourteen preregistered studies (total N = 5,023, with U.S. American, British, and French adult participants) show that laypeople consider people with depression as having specific psychological, social, and physical features (e.g., unattractive, overweight, unsuccessful, introverted). Target prototypicality influences how much laypeople believe others have depression, how much observers believe that depression-like symptoms cause someone to experience psychological pain, and how much professional mental health care is appropriate for others. This effect was not reduced by instructing people to focus on the symptoms and ignore the target features yet was weakly reduced by informing them of the effect. We discuss theoretical implications for the understanding of prototypes of people with depression and practical implications for alleviating the impact of prototypes.</p

Prototypes of People With Depression

This article investigates the content and the consequences of the prototypes of people with depression in a multimethod fashion. Fourteen preregistered studies (total N = 5,023, with U.S. American, British, and French adult participants) show that laypeople consider people with depression as having specific psychological, social, and physical features (e.g., unattractive, overweight, unsuccessful, introverted). Target prototypicality influences how much laypeople believe others have depression, how much observers believe that depression-like symptoms cause someone to experience psychological pain, and how much professional mental health care is appropriate for others. This effect was not reduced by instructing people to focus on the symptoms and ignore the target features yet was weakly reduced by informing them of the effect. We discuss theoretical implications for the understanding of prototypes of people with depression and practical implications for alleviating the impact of prototypes.</p

Slow lies: response delays promote perceptions of insincerity

Evaluating other people’s sincerity is a ubiquitous and important part of social interactions. Fourteen experiments (total N = 7565; ten preregistered; eleven in the main paper, three in the SOM; with U.S. American and British members of the public, and French students) show that response speed is an important cue on which people base their sincerity inferences. Specifically, people systematically judged slower (vs. faster) responses as less sincere for a range of scenarios from trivial daily conversations to high stakes situations such as police interrogations. Our findings suggest that this is because slower responses are perceived to be the result of the responder suppressing automatic, truthful thoughts, and fabricating a novel answer. People also seem to have a rich lay theory of response speed, which takes into account a variety of situational factors. For instance, the effect of response delay on perceived sincerity is smaller if the response is socially undesirable, or if it can be attributed to mental effort. Finally, we showed that explicit instructions to ignore response speed can reduce the effect of response speed on judgments on sincerity. Our findings not only help ascertain the role of response speed in interpersonal inference making processes, but also carry important practical implication. In particular, the present study highlights the potential effects that may be observed in judicial settings, since the response speed of innocent suspects may mislead people to judge them as insincere and hence guilty

Super-Size Me: An Unsuccessful Preregistered Replication of the Effect of Product Size on Status Signaling

Dubois, Rucker, and Galinsky (2012, Experiment 1) found that consumers view larger-size options as a signal of higher status. We conducted a close replication of this finding (N = 415), and observed a nonsignificant effect in the opposite direction (small vs. large product size: doriginal = 1.49, 95%CI [1.09, 1.89], dreplication = 0.09 95%CI [-0.15, 0.33]; medium vs. large: doriginal = 0.89 95%CI [0.52, 1.26], dreplication = 0.11 95%CI [-0.13, 0.34]; small vs. medium: doriginal = 0.62 95%CI [0.26, 0.98], dreplication = -0.01 95%CI [-0.25, 0.23]). We discuss potential reasons for this unsuccessful replication as well as implications for the status-signaling literature in consumer psychology

Loudness perceptions influence feelings of interpersonal closeness and protect against detrimental psychological effects of social exclusion

We propose that perceptions of auditory loudness and interpersonal closeness are bidirectionally related. Across 12 experiments (total N = 2219; 10 preregistered; with Singaporean, British, U.S. American, Indian, and Australian participants), we demonstrated that louder audio made people feel physically (Study 1a) and socially (Study 1b) closer to others, presumably because of loudness activates interpersonal closeness-related concepts implicitly (Studies 1c, 1d). This loudness-interpersonal closeness effect was observed across diverse samples (Studies 2a, 3a, S1), for longer listening intervals (Study 2b), and in natural settings (Studies 3a, 3b). Conversely, individuals made to feel socially excluded rated their surroundings as quieter (Study 4). Furthermore, following social exclusion, individuals showed a preference for louder volume (Study 5). Finally, exposure to loud stimuli mitigated detrimental psychological effects of social exclusion (Study 6). Theoretical implications for the social cognition of loudness, social exclusion and compensatory strategies, and practical implications for ameliorating loneliness are discussed

Transaction-Level Wage Transparency: How Fair Wage Disclosure Affects Consumer Preferences

Firms are usually reluctant to disclose information about the production costs of their goods and services; however, some firms have recently started to disclose cost information to consumers. This research examines the consequences of disclosing transaction-level wage information on consumer preferences. Eight experiments, both in field and lab settings across multiple service domains, document that disclosing a service worker’s compensation can increase consumer preference for that firm’s service if the compensation is sufficiently high (i.e., perceived as fair by consumers). We provide evidence for a dual-process model, indicating that this greater preference for services provided in a fair-wage setting is driven by consumers’ feelings of anticipated guilt and higher expectations concerning quality. Available social norms regarding fair compensation and the nature of the service worker (human vs. non-human) are both identified as important boundary conditions of the psychological processes. This research offers a first step toward understanding the psychological and behavioral consequences of disclosing transaction-level wage information to consumers, thereby enabling managers to better identify when they should disclose wage information as part of their marketing strategy. This research also informs policy makers on how to encourage social preferences and consumer choices to promote fair outcomes for consumers, firms, and workers

Justify your alpha

Benjamin et al. proposed changing the conventional “statistical significance” threshold (i.e.,the alpha level) from p ≤ .05 to p ≤ .005 for all novel claims with relatively low prior odds. They provided two arguments for why lowering the significance threshold would “immediately improve the reproducibility of scientific research.” First, a p-value near .05provides weak evidence for the alternative hypothesis. Second, under certain assumptions, an alpha of .05 leads to high false positive report probabilities (FPRP2 ; the probability that a significant finding is a false positive