A Network Model of Goals Boosts Convergent Creativity Performance

To increase employee creativity is critical for organizational success, and yet we still know very little about what organizational contexts promote creative performance. Our research proposes that goal regulation in the workplace may have consequences for creativity. While there is an increasing trend for organizations and workers to visualize the structure of their goals (e.g., management hierarchy, concept-map, flowchart), prior research suggests the visualization approaches differ as one of the three types: hierarchical, network, and sequential models. Because a network model (vs. hierarchical and sequential models) highlights multiple connections between goals and reveals unobvious connections between them, we hypothesized that the use of a network goal model might increase people’s ability to integrate seemingly unrelated ideas, even on subsequent unrelated tasks, leading to higher (convergent) creative performance. To test the hypothesis, we conducted an experiment in 2017 manipulating participants’ goal models (hierarchical, network, sequential; N = 191, median age = 19) and measured their creativity. Results suggest that those in the network model condition performed better in the kind of creativity task that requires meaningful integration of unrelated ideas (i.e., convergent creativity); in contrast, there was no difference between goal model conditions on divergent creative performance. These findings thus illuminate how goal models may influence creativity, providing new insights into situational inductions that can boost creative performance. Theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and future directions of the work are discussed

The Psychological Science Accelerator’s COVID-19 rapid-response dataset

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures for each experimental study, a general questionnaire examining health prevention behaviors and COVID-19 experience, geographical and cultural context characterization, and demographic information for each participant. Each participant started the study with the same general questions and then was randomized to complete either one longer experiment or two shorter experiments. Data were provided by 73,223 participants with varying completion rates. Participants completed the survey from 111 geopolitical regions in 44 unique languages/dialects. The anonymized dataset described here is provided in both raw and processed formats to facilitate re-use and further analyses. The dataset offers secondary analytic opportunities to explore coping, framing, and self-determination across a diverse, global sample obtained at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can be merged with other time-sampled or geographic data

Demo of “Guess Who” Game by SPSP ECR Committee

A simplified version of the live game during the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Convention 2021, for community members to identify pre-eminent scholars from when they were early career

Assessing Perceptions of Immigrant Contribution: Scale Development and Organizational Implications

The literature on immigrant perceptions has predominantly focused on the effects of perceived threat on attitudinal and behavioral outcomes towards immigrants. Although this threat perspective is useful, it is mismatched with many public opinions that immigrants are vital contributors to organizational and societal growth. The implications of immigrant contribution perceptions are still largely unknown. Building on a dual-dimension framework, this paper explores and presents the perceived immigrant contribution (PIC) construct and develops a scale as a tool to measure perceptions of economic/realistic (i.e., physical resources) and symbolic (i.e., cultural resources) immigrant contributions. Five studies provide evidence for the scale and construct validity in both general and workplace-specific contexts. The inclusion of this construct will allow future scholars to capture an alternative perspective and gain additional insights into immigrant-directed attitudes and behaviors, guiding future research towards a more positive psychology approach to studying immigrant perceptions and its organizational implications for workplace well-being, treatment, and integration

Message Framing Influences Perceptions of Feedback (In)directness

Communication varies in indirectness, influencing the effectiveness of the message as well as interpersonal dynamics. However, this issue was not studied empirically in the feedback literature. Integrating communication indirectness and message framing theories, we propose that whether success and failure feedback are framed as a negation (non-losses, non-gains) or affirmation (gains, losses) affects perceived indirectness. Three studies (N=589) consistently showed that both feedback receivers (Studies 1 and 3) and feedback providers (Study 2) viewed feedback in negation (vs. affirmative) frames as more indirect and communicating the feedback signal (positive, negative) less strongly. Feedback providers utilized more negation frames when attempting to be indirect and delivering failure feedback (Study 2). Further, through influencing perceived positivity in feedback, indirectness has downstream effects on feedback providers’ use of frames (Study 2) and feedback receivers’ reactions (Study 3). This work contributes to our understanding of communication indirectness and its potential implications for feedback effectiveness

Do Foreign Experiences Make us Wiser? The links between multicultural experiences, foreign travel and wisdom - Rodrigo Pimentel

Poster Presentation - SPSP Annual Convention Atlanta 202

Wisdom and culture

Wisdom is often considered to be the pinnacle of human development. Though it is universally cherished, it is unclear whether the concept of wisdom can be applied similarly across cultures. We review the emerging research on this topic, exploring extant scholarly definitions, portrayals of wisdom in the world’s philosophies, folk beliefs concerning wisdom and its development, and empirical insights evaluating expression of wisdom-related characteristics. There appears to be a large amount of convergence in scholarly and cross-cultural folk concepts, suggesting that wisdom involves certain aspects of pragmatic reasoning, with less clarity concerning emotion regulatory and prosocial aspects of wisdom. Folk beliefs about wisdom vary across cultures in the degree to which they emphasize social components and characterize development of wisdom as an incremental ability (vs. an immutable entity). Cultures also vary in the likelihood of expressing wisdom. We conclude by calling for a culturally-grounded understanding of the distribution and function of wisdom-related psychological phenomena

Signaling Trustworthiness: A Self-Regulation Account

Trustworthiness is generally considered a positive trait, and past research has investigated different factors that lead a person to be deemed trustworthy. As suggested in recent work, one important predictor and signal of trustworthiness is self-control. In this chapter, we offer a literature review on the social effects of self-control on trustworthiness. We first outline basic models of self-control and review empirical evidence of the interpersonal processes through which perceptions of self-control and trustworthiness are formed and connected. Then, we review evidence to identify and propose implications, both potential upsides and downsides, of self-control induced trustworthiness. We conclude by discussing understudied and novel factors that may potentially influence the associations between self-control and trust, and offer ideas for future directions