Juliana Schroeder

Befriending the enemy: Outgroup friendship longitudinally predicts intergroup attitudes in a coexistence program for Israelis and Palestinians

One of the largest Middle East coexistence programs annually brings together Israeli and Palestinian teenagers for a 3-week camp in the United States. For 3 years, we longitudinally tracked how this intervention affected Israelis’ and Palestinians’ relationships with, and attitudes toward, each other. Specifically, we measured participants’ outgroup attitudes immediately before and after camp, and, for 2 years, 9 months following “reentry” to their home countries. In all 3 years, participants’ attitudes toward the outgroup improved from precamp to postcamp. Participants who formed an outgroup friendship during camp developed more positive feelings toward outgroup campers, which generalized to an increase in positivity toward all outgroup members. Although the positivity faded upon campers’ reentry, there was significant residual positivity after reentry compared to precamp. Finally, positivity toward the outgroup after reentry was also predicted by outgroup friendships. Future contact interventions may profit from encouraging individuals to make and maintain outgroup friendships.

The sound of intellect: : Speech reveals a thoughtful mind, increasing a job candidate’s appeal

A person’s mental capacities, such as intellect, cannot be observed directly and so are instead inferred from indirect cues. We predicted that a person’s intellect would be conveyed most strongly through a cue closely tied to actual thinking: his or her voice. Hypothetical employers (Experiments 1–3b) and professional recruiters (Experiment 4) watched, listened to, or read job candidates’ pitches about why they should be hired. These evaluators rated a candidate as more competent, thoughtful, and intelligent when they heard a pitch rather than read it and, as a result, had a more favorable impression of the candidate and were more interested in hiring the candidate. Adding voice to written pitches, by having trained actors (Experiment 3a) or untrained adults (Experiment 3b) read them, produced the same results. Adding visual cues to audio pitches did not alter evaluations of the candidates. For conveying one’s intellect, it is important that one’s voice, quite literally, be heard.

The lesser minds problem

Bold pronouncements on what it means to be human have been a preoccupation of poets (such as Pope), philosophers, religious leaders, politicians, and social scientists. Conceptions of humanness are embedded in diverse histories and philosophies (see Stevenson & Haberman, 1998) and are used to explain our strengths and flaws, our motivations (e.g., selfish or altruistic), and our limits. Our basic human propensities and their consequences are the subject of debate in philosophy (e.g., Hobbes, 1996/1651; Hume, 1978/1739; Nussbaum, 1992) and in the social sciences (e.g., Buss, 2001; Kagan, 2004; Schwartz, 1986).Editing a book can be an exciting and daunting process, but it is the excitement that keeps things going. We are very excited to have the opportunity to coordinate a volume showcasing new ideas and thinking in the linked fields of humanness and dehumanization. This derives from both the fascinating ideas of our contributors, and because it shows that this critical field of research is gaining broader recognition. Ideas about humanness are important in many sciences, ranging from biology to sociology, and are consequential in other fields, from religion to politics. However, the importance of beliefs about humanness is a relatively recent interest in psychology, even though it pervades many aspects of human functioning and interaction.

Overlooking others: Dehumanization by comission and omission

Dehumanization, the denial of fundamentally human capacities to others, has contributed to largescale intergroup conflict and violence, ranging from the Holocaust, to American slavery, to Rwandan warfare between the Hutus and Tutsis. The type of dehumanization that emerges in these contexts typically stems from the motives to represent others actively and overtly as subhuman (e.g., Jews as vermin, African Americans as apelike, Tutsis as cockroaches) and to justify and facilitate aggression toward that group. Representing others as subhuman denies them fundamental human rights for freedom and protection from harm. Although psychology has primarily focused on this active, aggressive, and intergroup-oriented form of dehumanization, which we call dehumanization by commission, a more common form of dehumanization exists in everyday life. We call this form dehumanization by omission, a passive process whereby people overlook, or fail to recognize, others’ fundamentally human mental capacities, as opposed to denying them these capacities actively. Here, we document the two forms of dehumanization — by commission and by omission — and describe their antecedents, psychological importance, and consequences.

A (Creative) Portrait of the Uncertain Individual Self-Uncertainty and Individualism Enhance Creative Generation

Building on findings that self-uncertainty motivates attempts to restore certainty about the self, particularly in ways that highlight one’s distinctiveness from others, we show that self-uncertainty, relative to uncertainty in general, increases creative generation among individualists. In Studies 1 to 3, high (but not low) individualists performed better on a creative generation task after being primed with self-uncertainty as opposed to general uncertainty. In Study 4, this effect emerged only among those who were told that the task measured creative as opposed to analytical thinking, suggesting that the positive effects of self-uncertainty on performance are specific to tasks that bolster perceptions of uniqueness. In Study 5, self-uncertain individualists experienced a restoration of self-clarity after being induced to think about themselves as more (vs. less) creative. Implications for compensatory responses to self-uncertainty and factors that influence creativity are discussed.

The Humanizing Voice: Speech Reveals, and Text Conceals, a More Thoughtful Mind in the Midst of Disagreement:

A person’s speech communicates his or her thoughts and feelings. We predicted that beyond conveying the contents of a person’s mind, a person’s speech also conveys mental capacity, such that hearing a person explain his or her beliefs makes the person seem more mentally capable—and therefore seem to possess more uniquely human mental traits—than reading the same content. We expected this effect to emerge when people are perceived as relatively mindless, such as when they disagree with the evaluator’s own beliefs. Three experiments involving polarizing attitudinal issues and political opinions supported these hypotheses. A fourth experiment identified paralinguistic cues in the human voice that convey basic mental capacities. These results suggest that the medium through which people communicate may systematically influence the impressions they form of each other. The tendency to denigrate the minds of the opposition may be tempered by giving them, quite literally, a voice.

The “Empty Vessel” Physician Physicians’ Instrumentality Makes Them Seem Personally Empty

Although much research examines how physicians perceive their patients, here we study how patients perceive physicians. We propose patients consider their physicians like personally emotionless “empty vessels”: The higher is individuals’ need for care, the less they value physicians’ traits related to their personal lives (e.g., self-focused emotions), but the more they value physicians’ traits related to patients (e.g., patient-focused emotions). In an initial study, participants recalled fewer personal facts (e.g., marital status) about physicians who seemed more important to their health. In subsequent experiments, participants in higher need for care believed physicians have less personal emotions. Although higher need individuals, such as patients in a clinic, perceived their physicians to be personally emotionless, they wanted the clinic to hire physicians who displayed patient-focused emotion. We discuss implications of perceiving physicians as empty vessels for health care.

The Psychology of Rituals: An Integrative Review and Process-Based Framework

Traditionally, ritual has been studied from broad sociocultural perspectives, with little consideration of the psychological processes at play. Recently, however, psychologists have begun turning their attention to the study of ritual, uncovering the causal mechanisms driving this universal aspect of human behavior. With growing interest in the psychology of ritual, this article provides an organizing framework to understand recent empirical work from social psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. Our framework focuses on three primary regulatory functions of rituals: regulation of (a) emotions, (b) performance goal states, and (c) social connection. We examine the possible mechanisms underlying each function by considering the bottom-up processes that emerge from the physical features of rituals and top-down processes that emerge from the psychological meaning of rituals. Our framework, by appreciating the value of psychological theory, generates novel predictions and enriches our understanding of ritual and human behavior more broadly.

Functional intimacy: Needing—But not wanting—The touch of a stranger.

Intimacy is often motivated by love, but sometimes it is merely functional. For example, disrobing and being touched at an airport security check serves the goal of catching a flight, not building a relationship. We propose that this functional intimacy induces discomfort, making people prefer greater social distance from their interaction partner. Supporting this prediction, participants who considered (Experiments 1 and 2) or experienced (Experiment 3) more physically intimate medical procedures preferred a health provider who is less social. Increased psychological intimacy also led people to prefer social distance from cleaning and health providers (Experiments 4–5), a preference revealed by nonverbal behavior (e.g., turning away and looking away, Experiments 6–7). These patterns of distancing are unique to functional (vs. romantic) intimacy (Experiment 7). Although creating social distance may be an effective strategy for coping with functional intimacy, it may have costs for service providers.

Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-control

Rituals are predefined sequences of actions characterized by rigidity and repetition. We propose that enacting ritualized actions can enhance subjective feelings of self-discipline, such that rituals can be harnessed to improve behavioral self-control. We test this hypothesis in 6 experiments. A field experiment showed that engaging in a pre-eating ritual over a 5-day period helped participants reduce calorie intake (Experiment 1). Pairing a ritual with healthy eating behavior increased the likelihood of choosing healthy food in a subsequent decision (Experiment 2), and enacting a ritual before a food choice (i.e., without being integrated into the consumption process) promoted the choice of healthy food over unhealthy food (Experiments 3a and 3b). The positive effect of rituals on self-control held even when a set of ritualized gestures were not explicitly labeled as a ritual, and in other domains of behavioral self-control (i.e., prosocial decision-making; Experiments 4 and 5). Furthermore, Experiments 3a, 3b, 4, and 5 provided evidence for the psychological process underlying the effectiveness of rituals: heightened feelings of self-discipline. Finally, Experiment 5 showed that the absence of a self-control conflict eliminated the effect of rituals on behavior, demonstrating that rituals affect behavioral self-control specifically because they alter responses to self-control conflicts. We conclude by briefly describing the results of a number of additional experiments examining rituals in other self-control domains. Our body of evidence suggests that rituals can have beneficial consequences for self-control.