Charles R. Seger
University of East Anglia
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Publication
Featured researches published by Charles R. Seger.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology | 2007
Eliot R. Smith; Charles R. Seger; Diane M. Mackie
Recent advances in understanding prejudice and intergroup behavior have made clear that emotions help explain peoples reactions to social groups and their members. Intergroup emotions theory (D. M. Mackie, T. Devos, & E. R. Smith, 2000; E. R. Smith, 1993) holds that intergroup emotions are experienced by individuals when they identify with a social group, making the group part of the psychological self. What differentiates such group-level emotions from emotions that occur purely at the individual level? The authors argue that 4 key criteria define group-level emotions: Group emotions are distinct from the same persons individual-level emotions, depend on the persons degree of group identification, are socially shared within a group, and contribute to regulating intragroup and intergroup attitudes and behavior. Evidence from 2 studies supports all 4 of these predictions and thus points to the meaningfulness, coherence, and functionality of group-level emotions.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology | 2004
David H. Silvera; Charles R. Seger
The “better-than-average” effect, the tendency for people to view themselves as above average on positive characteristics but belowaverage on negative characteristics, is an important manifestation of the motive for self-enhancement. The present research examined whether the better-than-average effect occurred in Norway, a country with strong norms for modesty, and whether the same association between unrealistically positive self-appraisals and self-esteem would be observed in Norway and the United States. Seventy-six American and 102 Norwegian participants were asked to rate the favorability and self-descriptiveness of 42 personality traits, and these ratings were used to generate a self-enhancement index. Norwegians showed significantly less self-enhancement bias than did Americans, and Norwegians showed no association between self-esteem and self-enhancement bias.
Basic and Applied Social Psychology | 2014
Charles R. Seger; Eliot R. Smith; Elise James Percy; Frederica R. Conrey
A brief, casual interpersonal touch results in positive behavior toward the toucher, presumably because touch is a cue to friendship. Research on intergroup contact shows that feelings of friendship toward an individual outgroup member reduce prejudice toward that entire group. Integrating these areas, we examined whether interpersonal touch by an outgroup member could reduce prejudice. In three replications in two studies, interpersonal touch decreased implicit, though not explicit, prejudice toward the touchers group. Effects of interpersonal touch can extend beyond the toucher to others sharing the touchers ethnicity, and findings suggest that such effects are automatic and outside conscious awareness.
Cognition & Emotion | 2017
Charles R. Seger; Ishani Banerji; Sang Hee Park; Eliot R. Smith; Diane M. Mackie
ABSTRACT Emotions are increasingly being recognised as important aspects of prejudice and intergroup behaviour. Specifically, emotional mediators play a key role in the process by which intergroup contact reduces prejudice towards outgroups. However, which particular emotions are most important for prejudice reduction, as well as the consistency and generality of emotion–prejudice relations across different in-group–out-group relations, remain uncertain. To address these issues, in Study 1 we examined six distinct positive and negative emotions as mediators of the contact–prejudice relations using representative samples of U.S. White, Black, and Asian American respondents (N = 639). Admiration and anger (but not other emotions) were significant mediators of the effects of previous contact on prejudice, consistently across different perceiver and target ethnic groups. Study 2 examined the same relations with student participants and gay men as the out-group. Admiration and disgust mediated the effect of past contact on attitude. The findings confirm that not only negative emotions (anger or disgust, based on the specific types of threat perceived to be posed by an out-group), but also positive, status- and esteem-related emotions (admiration) mediate effects of contact on prejudice, robustly across several different respondent and target groups.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations | 2017
Rose Meleady; Charles R. Seger
Imagined contact is a relatively new technique designed to focus the accumulated knowledge of over 500 studies of intergroup contact into a simple and versatile prejudice-reduction intervention. While it is now clear that imagined contact can improve intergroup attitudes, its ability to change actual intergroup behavior is less well established. Some emerging findings provide cause for optimism with nonverbal, and unobtrusive measures of behavior. This paper extends this work by adopting methods from behavioral economics to examine more deliberative behavior. Participants believed they were playing a prisoner’s dilemma with an outgroup member. They could choose whether to cooperate or compete with the other player. In three studies, we provide reliable evidence that imagined contact (vs. control) successfully encouraged more prosocial, cooperative choices. In the third study we show that this effect is mediated by increased trust towards the outgroup member. The findings demonstrate that imagined contact interventions can have a tangible impact on volitional intergroup behaviors.
Frontiers in Psychology | 2015
Philip J. Corr; Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap; Charles R. Seger; Kei Tsutsui
Is parochial altruism an attribute of individual behavior? This is the question we address with an experiment. We examine whether the individual pro-sociality that is revealed in the public goods and trust games when interacting with fellow group members helps predict individual parochialism, as measured by the in-group bias (i.e., the difference in these games in pro-sociality when interacting with own group members as compared with members of another group). We find that it is not. An examination of the Big-5 personality predictors of each behavior reinforces this result: they are different. In short, knowing how pro-social individuals are with respect to fellow group members does not help predict their parochialism.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences | 2012
Charles R. Seger; Philip J. Corr
Individuals differ in their support for social change. We argue that examinations of inequality and change would benefit from consideration of underlying personality processes. New data suggest that Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation, indicators of support for inequality, may be motivated by biologically driven personality processes, particularly those related to positive-approach motivation.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology | 2009
Charles R. Seger; Eliot R. Smith; Diane M. Mackie
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology | 2008
Zakary L. Tormala; Derek D. Rucker; Charles R. Seger
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology | 2008
Douglas S. Krull; Charles R. Seger; David H. Silvera