Developing a Comprehensive Social Psychology with Shared Explanations of Primate Social Behavior

Two primate social psychologies have developed in recent decades-one that focuses on the social behaviors of humans and the other on nonhuman primates. Despite the gains in knowledge in each field of social psychology, the two research traditions seem to be largely unaware of the other's existence. Our common evolutionary ancestry makes this ignorance about the "other" social psychology especially troublesome for both fields. This article explores possible points of mutual interest that might lead to shared explanations of social behavior. In particular, I discuss how the topics of sexual behavior, cooperation and conflict resolution, and culture could benefit both social psychologies with respect to theory and methodology. One control group of neonatal monkeys was raised on a single wire mother, and a second control group was raised on a single cloth mother. There were no differences between these two groups in amount of milk ingested or in weight gain. The only difference between the two groups lay in the composition of the feces, the softer stools of the wire-mother infants suggesting psychosomatic involvement. The wire mother is biologically adequate but psychologically inept...A charming lady once heard me describe these experiments and, when I subsequently talked to her, her face brightened with sudden insight: "Now I know what's wrong with me," she said, "I'm just a wire mother." Perhaps she was lucky. She might have been a wire wife

Gestalt Principles and Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Processes: The Parallels

This paper examines the tremendous similarities between the Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Processes that are a central part of many connectionist models and the Gestalt principles that played a central role in the history of Psychology. Gestalt Psychology played a major role in a number of areas in psychology, such as perception, reasoning and problem solving, causal reasoning, and many key aspects of social psychology, such as social perception, group interaction, and belief consistency. Many of the key assumptions of Gestalt Psychology have resurfaced in recent connectionist models. W e propose that Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Processes provide a computational implementation of many of the central principles of Gestalt Psychology. In this paper we discuss the clear parallels between each of five key assumptions of Gestalt Psychology and aspects of Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Processes. The five assumptions we examine are: (1) psychological processing can be treated as interactions in fields of forces, (2) psychological processing is holistic, (3) the whole is greater than the sum its parts, (4) the importance of the structure of cognitive elements; how things are connected and related, and (5) the emphasis on cognitive dynamics, and such concepts as change, equilibrium, and tension

Disgust, contempt, and anger and the stereotypes of obese people

Purpose: Emotions form an important part of stereotyping and prejudice, but little is known about how intergroup emotions are associated with anti-fat prejudice. This study examined the relation between negative intergroup emotions (disgust, contempt, and anger) and the stereotypes of obese people. Method: A community sample (n = 380) and an undergraduate sample (n = 96) rated obese people on common obesity stereotypes (e.g., lazy, sloppy), and also indicated the extent to which they felt disgust, contempt, and anger toward obese people. Results: In both samples, participants reported feeling more disgust and contempt than anger toward obese people. Furthermore, regression analyses indicated that disgust was a significant positive predictor of obesity stereotypes, but contempt and anger were not. Conclusion: Overall, these findings provide further evidence that disgust plays an important role in prejudice toward obese people

A functionalist approach to online trolling

Online trolling is often linked to sadism and psychopathy. Yet, little research has assessed why people high in these traits seek online environments to achieve their nefarious goals. We employ a functionalist approach to examine whether people high in sadism and psychopathy are motivated to seek the affordances of online environments (e.g., anonymity) to reveal their malevolent self-aspects by engaging in trolling behavior. A sample of 515 university undergraduates (Mage = 20.47) read vignettes depicting trolling incidents and rated the acceptability of the perpetrators’ actions and whether they had ever written similar comments. Participants then completed measures of psychopathy, sadism, and toxic anonymous motivations. We find that toxic anonymous motivations partially mediate the relationship between psychopathy and sadism, and online trolling. Whereas trolling is often understood through its underlying personality traits, toxic motivations to seek anonymity may be a more proximal predictor of who is likely to troll online

Probing prejudice with startle eyeblink modification: A marker of attention, emotion, or both?

In social neuroscience research, startle eyeblink modification can serve as a marker of emotion, but it is less clear whether it can also serve as a marker of prejudice. In Experiment 1, 30 White students viewed photographs of White and Black targets while the startle eyeblink reflex and facial EMG from the brow and cheek regions were recorded. Prejudice was related to facial EMG activity, but not to startle modification, which instead appeared to index attention to race. To test further whether racial categorizations are associated with differential attention, a dual-task paradigm was used in Experiment 2. Fifty-four White and fifty-five Black participants responded more slowly to a tone presented when viewing a racial outgroup member or a negative stimulus, indicating that both draw more attention than ingroup members or positive stimuli. We conclude that startle modification is useful to index differential attention to groups when intergroup threat is low

Assessing the affective Simon paradigm as a measure of individual differences in implicit social cognition about death

The authors describe the use of the affective Simon paradigm as a measure of individual differences in implicit social cognition about death. Participants made verbal responses of "good" or "bad" to death and neutral stimuli based on whether the word was a person or a thing. Participants also completed the Revised Death Attitude Profile, a Stroop task, and a version of the Implicit Association Test using death-related words. Although the affective Simon paradigm has some theoretical advantages over the IAT and Stroop procedures, we found no evidence for its validity in the present study

Age Deficits in Facial Affect Recognition : The Influence of Dynamic Cues

Funding This work was supported by the Australian Research Council, Australia (DP150100302) and the Leverhulme Trust, U.K. (F/00152/W).Peer reviewedPostprin

Tears evoke the intention to offer social support: A systematic investigation of the interpersonal effects of emotional crying across 41 countries

Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively on participants from North America and Europe, resulting in limited generalizability. This project examined the tears-social support intentions effect and possible mediating and moderating variables in a fully pre-registered study across 7007 participants (24,886 ratings) and 41 countries spanning all populated continents. Participants were presented with four pictures out of 100 possible targets with or without digitally-added tears. We confirmed the main prediction that seeing a tearful individual elicits the intention to support, d = 0.49 [0.43, 0.55]. Our data suggest that this effect could be mediated by perceiving the crying target as warmer and more helpless, feeling more connected, as well as feeling more empathic concern for the crier, but not by an increase in personal distress of the observer. The effect was moderated by the situational valence, identifying the target as part of one's group, and trait empathic concern. A neutral situation, high trait empathic concern, and low identification increased the effect. We observed high heterogeneity across countries that was, via split-half validation, best explained by country-level GDP per capita and subjective well-being with stronger effects for higher-scoring countries. These findings suggest that tears can function as social glue, providing one possible explanation why emotional crying persists into adulthood.</p

The role of empathy in intergroup relations

Intergroup empathy - feeling empathy for a person or persons on the basis of group memberships - has been, until lately, relatively neglected by researchers and its mechanisms are poorly understood. What is well established is that people typically display a group bias, such that they more readily have empathy for the pain and suffering of ingroup members than they do for outgroup members. I review current research that attempts to answer four main questions about intergroup empathy: (a) what is the role of empathy in prejudice and prejudice reduction? (b) What are the causes and consequences of counter-empathy? (c) How do mimicry and the mirror neuron system play a role? (d) How does the brain produce intergroup empathy? This review draws mainly from studies in social psychology, developmental psychology, and social neuroscience, reflecting a variety of behavioral and neuroscience measures to examine the interplay between prejudice, empathy, counter-empathy, and mimicry, as well as the brain regions that underlie these processes

“Danger, Will Robinson!” The challenges of social robots for intergroup relations

Society's increasing reliance on robots in everyday life provides exciting opportunities for social psychologists to work with engineers in the nascent field of social robotics. In contrast to industrial robots that, for example, may be used on an assembly line, social robots are designed specifically to interact with humans and/or other robots. People tend to perceive social robots as autonomous and capable of having a mind. As such, they are also more likely to be subject to social categorization by humans. As social robots become more human like, people may also feel greater empathy for them and treat robots more like (human) ingroup members. On the other hand, as they become more human like, robots also challenge our human distinctiveness, threaten our identity, and elicit suspicion about their ability to deceive us with their human-like qualities. We review relevant research to explore this apparent paradox, particularly from an intergroup relations perspective. We discuss these findings and propose three research questions that we believe social psychologists are ideally suited to address