Erik G. Helzer

Dirty Liberals! Reminders of Physical Cleanliness Influence Moral and Political Attitudes

Many moral codes place a special emphasis on bodily purity, and manipulations that directly target bodily purity have been shown to influence a variety of moral judgments. Across two studies, we demonstrated that reminders of physical purity influence specific moral judgments regarding behaviors in the sexual domain as well as broad political attitudes. In Study 1, individuals in a public setting who were given a reminder of physical cleansing reported being more politically conservative than did individuals who were not given such a reminder. In Study 2, individuals reminded of physical cleansing in the laboratory demonstrated harsher moral judgments toward violations of sexual purity and were more likely to report being politically conservative than control participants. Together, these experiments provide further evidence of a deep link between physical purity and moral judgment, and they offer preliminary evidence that manipulations of physical purity can influence general (and putatively stable) political attitudes.

Why and When Peer Prediction Is Superior to Self-Prediction: The Weight Given to Future Aspiration Versus Past Achievement

Peer predictions of future behavior and achievement are often more accurate than those furnished by the self. Although both self- and peer predictions correlate equally with future outcomes, peers tend to avoid the degree of overoptimism so often seen in self-predictions. In 3 studies, the authors tested whether this differential accuracy arises because people give more weight to past behavior when predicting others, but emphasize agentic information, in particular data about their aspiration level, when predicting the self. Studies 1 and 3 showed that the exact same participants rated past behavior more diagnostic of future performance when predicting another person but viewed aspiration-level data as more valuable when someone else was trying to predict them. In Studies 2 and 3 (predicting an upcoming exam score and performance in a lab task, respectively), participants gave greater weight in self-predictions to aspiration-level data than did a yoked peer, who instead gave greater weight to evidence of past achievement. This differential weighting explained why peer predictions tended to be less optimistic and, thus, more accurate. Discussion centers on strategies for predicting future behavior and why people may remain ignorant of their own incompetence despite feedback.

Traits, states, and attentional gates : Temperament and threat relevance as predictors of attentional bias to social threat

Abstract This study investigated the influence of situational and dispositional factors on attentional biases toward social threat, and the impact of these attentional biases on distress in a sample of adolescents. The results suggest greater biases for personally relevant threat cues, as individuals reporting high social stress were vigilant to subliminal social threat cues, but not physical threat cues, and those reporting low social stress showed no attentional biases. Individual differences in fearful temperament and attentional control interacted to influence attentional biases, with fearful temperament predicting biases to supraliminal social threat only for individuals with poor attentional control. Multivariate analyses exploring relations between attentional biases for social threat and symptoms of anxiety and depression revealed that attentional biases alone were rarely related to symptoms. However, biases did interact with social stress, fearful temperament, and attentional control to predict distress. The results are discussed in terms of automatic and effortful cognitive mechanisms underlying threat cue processing.

Virtuous states and virtuous traits: How the empirical evidence regarding the existence of broad traits saves virtue ethics from the situationist critique

A major objection to the study of virtue asserts that the empirical psychological evidence implies traits have little meaningful impact on behavior, as slight changes in situational characteristics appear to lead to large changes in virtuous behavior. We argue in response that the critical evidence is not these effects of situations observed in social psychological experiments, but evidence of stable individual differences obtained from correlations of individual’s behaviors across multiple contexts. The totality of the empirical evidence is shown to support this claim: broad traits are real, prominent, and consequential, and these traits, conceptualized as density distributions of personality states, exhibit remarkable consistency. In short, the evidence in favor of individual differences is empirically solid, and the study of ethics focused on virtue is not threatened by psychological research.

Control and the “Good Life” Primary and Secondary Control as Distinct Indicators of Well-Being

How does a sense of control relate to well-being? We consider two distinguishable control strategies, primary and secondary control, and their relationships with two facets of subjective well-being, daily positive/negative affective experience and global life satisfaction. Using undergraduate and online samples, the results suggest that these different control strategies are associated uniquely with distinct facets of well-being. After controlling for shared variance among constructs, primary control (the tendency to achieve mastery over circumstances via goal striving) was associated more consistently with daily affective experience than was secondary control, and secondary control (the tendency to achieve mastery over circumstances via sense-making) was associated more strongly with life satisfaction than primary control, but only within the student sample and community members not in a committed relationship. The results highlight the importance of both control strategies to everyday health and provide insights into the mechanisms underlying the relationship between control and well-being.

Agreement on the Perception of Moral Character

This study tested for inter-judge agreement on moral character. A sample of students and community members rated their own moral character using a measure that tapped six moral character traits. Friends, family members, and/or acquaintances rated these targets on the same traits. Self/other and inter-informant agreement was found at the trait level for both a general character factor and for residual variance explained by individual moral character traits, as well as at the individual level (judges agreed on targets’ “moral character profiles”). Observed inter-judge agreement constitutes evidence for the existence of moral character, and raises questions about the nature of moral character traits.

Beyond the Correlation Coefficient in Studies of Self-Assessment Accuracy Commentary on Zell & Krizan (2014)

Zell and Krizan (2014, this issue) provide a comprehensive yet incomplete portrait of the factors influencing accurate self-assessment. This is no fault of their own. Much work on self-accuracy focuses on the correlation coefficient as the measure of accuracy, but it is not the only way self-accuracy can be measured. As such, its use can provide an incomplete and potentially misleading story. We urge researchers to explore measures of bias as well as correlation, because there are indirect hints that each respond to a different psychological dynamic. We further entreat researchers to develop other creative measures of accuracy and not to forget that self-accuracy may come not only from personal knowledge but also from insight about human nature more generally.

Whatever Is Willed Will Be: A Temporal Asymmetry in Attributions to Will

Why do people neglect or underweight their past failures when thinking about their prospects of future success? One reason may be that people think of the past and future as guided by different causal forces. In seven studies, the authors demonstrate that people hold asymmetric beliefs about the impact of an individual’s will on past versus future events. People consider the will to be a more potent determinant of future events than events that happened in the past. This asymmetry holds between- and within-subjects, and generalizes beyond undergraduate populations. The authors contend that this asymmetry contributes to the tendency for people to remain confident about their future performance in domains in which they have largely failed in the past. This research thus contributes to a growing body of literature exploring how thoughts about events in the past differ from thoughts about the same events set in the future.

Prospection by Any Other Name? A Response to Seligman et al. (2013)

We stand in agreement with Seligman et al. (2013, this issue) that prospection is an important psychological process, but we disagree that it has been neglected within the psychological literature. We further question some of the broader claims made by the authors regarding conscious decision making and free will. We argue that future-oriented cognition is fully consistent with deterministic accounts of cognition, including automaticity, and that prospection does little to advance the position of free will.

Morality’s Centrality to Liking, Respecting, and Understanding Others

We examine morality’s relationship to three distinct dimensions of social perception: liking, respecting, and knowing a person. Participants completed two independent tasks. First, they rated acquaintances’ morality, competence, and sociability, and how much they liked, respected, and knew those acquaintances. In the second task, they rated a variety of moral and competence traits on their importance to liking, respecting, and knowing a person. Several findings emerged. First, morality was the most important factor to liking, respecting, and knowing a person but relatively more important to liking and respecting than to knowing; this finding replicated across tasks. Second, certain moral traits were more important than others, especially honesty, compassion, and fairness. Third, these traits were considered important because they were seen as potentially beneficial to the social perceiver. This research reveals morality’s centrality to evaluating and understanding others.