Rebecca Neel

Individual differences in fundamental social motives.

Motivation has long been recognized as an important component of how people both differ from, and are similar to, each other. The current research applies the biologically grounded fundamental social motives framework, which assumes that human motivational systems are functionally shaped to manage the major costs and benefits of social life, to understand individual differences in social motives. Using the Fundamental Social Motives Inventory, we explore the relations among the different fundamental social motives of Self-Protection, Disease Avoidance, Affiliation, Status, Mate Seeking, Mate Retention, and Kin Care; the relationships of the fundamental social motives to other individual difference and personality measures including the Big Five personality traits; the extent to which fundamental social motives are linked to recent life experiences; and the extent to which life history variables (e.g., age, sex, childhood environment) predict individual differences in the fundamental social motives. Results suggest that the fundamental social motives are a powerful lens through which to examine individual differences: They are grounded in theory, have explanatory value beyond that of the Big Five personality traits, and vary meaningfully with a number of life history variables. A fundamental social motives approach provides a generative framework for considering the meaning and implications of individual differences in social motivation. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Vividness of Happiness in Dynamic Facial Displays of Emotion

Rapid identification of facial expressions can profoundly affect social interactions, yet most research to date has focused on static rather than dynamic expressions. In four experiments, we show that when a non-expressive face becomes expressive, happiness is detected more rapidly anger. When the change occurs peripheral to the focus of attention, however, dynamic anger is better detected when it appears in the left visual field (LVF), whereas dynamic happiness is better detected in the right visual field (RVF), consistent with hemispheric differences in the processing of approach- and avoidance-relevant stimuli. The central advantage for happiness is nevertheless the more robust effect, persisting even when information of either high or low spatial frequency is eliminated. Indeed, a survey of past research on the visual search for emotional expressions finds better support for a happiness detection advantage, and the explanation may lie in the coevolution of the signal and the receiver.

Does seeing faces of young black boys facilitate the identification of threatening stimuli

Pervasive stereotypes linking Black men with violence and criminality can lead to implicit cognitive biases, including the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons. In four experiments, we investigated whether these biases extend even to young Black boys (5-year-olds). White participants completed sequential priming tasks in which they categorized threatening and nonthreatening objects and words after brief presentations of faces of various races (Black and White) and ages (children and adults). Results consistently revealed that participants had less difficulty (i.e., faster response times, fewer errors) identifying threatening stimuli and more difficulty identifying nonthreatening stimuli after seeing Black faces than after seeing White faces, and this racial bias was equally strong following adult and child faces. Process-dissociation-procedure analyses further revealed that these effects were driven entirely by automatic (i.e., unintentional) racial biases. The collective findings suggest that the perceived threat commonly associated with Black men may generalize even to young Black boys.

Would an Obese Person Whistle Vivaldi? Targets of Prejudice Self-Present to Minimize Appearance of Specific Threats

How do targets of stigma manage social interactions? We built from a threat-specific model of prejudice to predict that targets select impression-management strategies that address the particular threats other people see them to pose. We recruited participants from two groups perceived to pose different threats: overweight people, who are heuristically associated with disease and targeted with disgust, and Black men, who are perceived to be dangerous and targeted with fear. When stereotypes and prejudices toward their groups were made salient, overweight people (Studies 1 and 2) and Black men (Study 2) selectively prioritized self-presentation strategies to minimize apparent disease threat (wearing clean clothes) or physical-violence threat (smiling), respectively. The specific threat a group is seen to pose plays an important but underexamined role in the psychology of being a target of prejudice.

From the bedroom to the budget deficit: Mate competition changes men's attitudes toward economic redistribution

How do economic recessions influence attitudes toward redistribution of wealth? From a traditional economic self-interest perspective, attitudes toward redistribution should be affected by ones financial standing. A functional evolutionary approach suggests another possible form of self-interest: That during periods of economic threat, attitudes toward redistribution should be influenced by ones mate-value-especially for men. Using both lab-based experiments and real-world data on voting behavior, we consistently find that economic threats lead low mate-value men to become more prosocial and supportive of redistribution policies, but that the same threats lead high mate-value men to do the opposite. Economic threats do not affect womens attitudes toward redistribution in the same way, and, across studies, financial standing is only weakly associated with attitudes toward redistribution. These findings suggest that during tough economic times, mens attitudes toward redistribution are influenced by something that has seemingly little to do with economic self-interest-their mating psychology.

Measuring the evolutionarily important goals of situations: Situational Affordances for Adaptive Problems

According to the Fundamental Motives Framework, basic goals such as protecting oneself, forming coalitions, and avoiding disease have emerged as a result of evolutionary processes to enhance reproductive fitness. This article introduces the Situational Affordances for Adaptive Problems (SAAP), a measure of situation characteristics that promotes or prevents the achievement of these evolutionarily important goals. In Study 1, participants rated a recent situation they encountered using a preliminary version of the SAAP. Using factor analysis, the measure was reduced to 28 items. In Study 2, the factor structure was confirmed. Studies 3 and 4 evaluated the psychometric properties of the measure including its predictive validity. Future studies can use the SAAP to investigate differences in the everyday experience of these fundamental motives.

Women selectively guard their (desirable) mates from ovulating women.

For women, forming close, cooperative relationships with other women at once poses important opportunities and possible threats-including to mate retention. To maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of same-sex social relationships, we propose that womens mate guarding is functionally flexible and that women are sensitive to both interpersonal and contextual cues indicating whether other women might be likely and effective mate poachers. Here, we assess one such cue: other womens fertility. Because ovulating (i.e., high-fertility) women are both more attractive to men and also more attracted to (desirable) men, ovulating women may be perceived to pose heightened threats to other womens romantic relationships. Across 4 experiments, partnered women were exposed to photographs of other women taken during either their ovulatory or nonovulatory menstrual-cycle phases, and consistently reported intentions to socially avoid ovulating (but not nonovulating) women-but only when their own partners were highly desirable. Exposure to ovulating women also increased womens sexual desires for their (highly desirable) partners. These findings suggest that women can be sensitive to subtle cues of other womens fertility and respond (e.g., via social exclusion, enhanced sexual attention to own mate) in ways that may facilitate their mate retention goals while not thwarting their affiliative goals.

Priorities in Residential Water Use A Trade-Off Analysis

A trade-off paradigm was used to examine priorities in residential water use. A total of 426 participants allocated either a small or large budget to various household water uses.  A comparison of allocations across budget conditions revealed which water uses were regarded as most important, as well as the amount of water regarded as sufficient for each use. Further analyses focused on the perceived importance of outdoor water use, which accounts for the majority of the water used in residences. Data indicated that indoor uses, especially those related to health and sanitation, were consistently higher priorities for participants in this study.   The finding that residents are more willing to curtail outdoor water use than indoor water use has important implications for behavior change campaigns. Individual difference variables of environmental orientation and duration of residence in the desert accounted for some of the variance in water choices.

Solidarity through shared disadvantage: Highlighting shared experiences of discrimination improves relations between stigmatized groups

Intergroup relations research has largely focused on relations between members of dominant groups and members of disadvantaged groups. The small body of work examining intraminority intergroup relations, or relations between members of different disadvantaged groups, reveals that salient experiences of ingroup discrimination promote positive relations between groups that share a dimension of identity (e.g., 2 different racial minority groups) and negative relations between groups that do not share a dimension of identity (e.g., a racial minority group and a sexual minority group). In the present work, we propose that shared experiences of discrimination between groups that do not share an identity dimension can be used as a lever to facilitate positive intraminority intergroup relations. Five experiments examining relations among 4 different disadvantaged groups supported this hypothesis. Both blatant (Experiments 1 and 3) and subtle (Experiments 2, 3, and 4) connections to shared experiences of discrimination, or inducing a similarity-seeking mindset in the context of discrimination faced by one’s ingroup (Experiment 5), increased support for policies benefiting the outgroup (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) and reduced intergroup bias (Experiments 3, 4, and 5). Taken together, these experiments provide converging evidence that highlighting shared experiences of discrimination can improve intergroup outcomes between stigmatized groups across dimensions of social identity. Implications of these findings for intraminority intergroup relations are discussed.

Individual Perceptions of Self-Actualization: What Functional Motives Are Linked to Fulfilling One’s Full Potential?

Maslow’s self-actualization remains a popular notion in academic research as well as popular culture. The notion that life’s highest calling is fulfilling one’s own unique potential has been widely appealing. But what do people believe they are doing when they pursue the realization of their full, unique potentials? Here, we examine lay perceptions of self-actualization. Self-actualizing, like any drive, is unlikely to operate without regard to biological and social costs and benefits. We examine which functional outcomes (e.g., gaining status, making friends, finding mates, caring for kin) people perceive as central to their individual self-actualizing. Three studies suggest that people most frequently link self-actualization to seeking status, and, concordant with life history theory, what people regard as self-actualizing varies in predictable ways across the life span and across individuals. Contrasting with self-actualization, people do not view other types of well-being—eudaimonic, hedonic, subjective—as furthering status-linked functional outcomes.