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Acquiring information that aids decision-making is subject to a trade-off of accuracy versus cost, given that time, effort, or money are required to obtain decision-relevant information. Three studies (N = 2010) investigated the motivational dynamics shaping the priorities that govern this trade-off. Motivational orientations related to both the decision-making process and its outcome were examined. Regulatory focus theory describes two broad orientations to goal pursuit: promotion focus, prioritizing eager achievement, versus prevention focus, prioritizing vigilant security. We hypothesized that when the framing of a decision-making task activates a prevention focus rather than a promotion focus, individuals would be more willing to assume the costs of acquiring additional information before making their decisions. To test this hypothesis, participants made incentivized decisions with the option of acquiring additional information before making a final decision; importantly, obtaining this information incurred financial costs. Results consistently confirmed that prevention-focused decision makers were indeed more willing to assume the costs of acquiring additional information than promotion-focused individuals. The first two studies involved a scenario where participants were indifferent to the specific outcome of the decision process; accuracy was their only concern. In the final study, searchable, accuracy-enhancing information was also related to decision makers' partisan political preferences. Regulatory focus and the preference for partisan-congenial information were observed to be co-occurring but functionally orthogonal drivers of costly information search. Thus, prevention-framed messages can motivate the search for decision-relevant information, even when this search is costly and could lead to disagreeable data.

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We examined the "othering" of Asian Americans in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given past evidence that pathogen-related threat perceptions can exacerbate intergroup biases, as well as salient public narratives blaming the Chinese for the pandemic, we assessed whether individuals experiencing a greater sense of threat during the pandemic were more likely to apply the "perpetual foreigner" stereotype to Asian Americans. Over a seven-week period, we recruited 1,323 White Americans to complete a measure of the perceived Americanness of Asian, Black, and White targets. Asian targets were consistently perceived as less American than White targets, across variations in subjective health threat and regional case counts. The direct and indirect connections of political ideology to the observed patterns were examined, revealing that White participants who blamed China for the pandemic were more likely to apply the perpetual foreigner stereotype to Asian Americans. These results indicate that the othering of Asian Americans is pervasive among White Americans and that variables related to social conditions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic can predict the potency of this association.

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Prior literature has demonstrated the power of zero pricing to boost consumer demand, but the current research shows a novel "boomerang effect": a zero (vs. low, nonzero) price can lower demand when the offer comes with high incidental costs (e.g., the time cost in commuting to an offline class; the physical risk of getting a new vaccine). Five studies show that zero pricing, relative to low pricing, has a boosting (boomerang) effect on demand when incidental costs are low (high). The diverging effects of zero pricing on demand are explained by a dual-process model with a positive affective pathway and negative scrutiny pathway. Zero pricing triggers both positive affect and cognitive scrutiny of incidental costs; when incidental costs are high, the scrutiny pathway overrides the affective pathway and decreases demand. The finding has managerial implications as incidental costs often vary widely between marketing channels and over a product's life cycle. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11747-022-00842-1.

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[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 123(4) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2023-02979-003). In the article, a coding error that impacted the results of Experiments 2a and 2b has been corrected, and the supplemental material and Figures 3 and 4 have also been updated. All versions of this article have been corrected.] A growing body of scholarship documents the intersectional nature of social stereotyping, with stereotype content being shaped by a target person's multiple social identities. However, conflicting findings in this literature highlight the need for a broader theoretical integration. For example, although there are contexts in which perceivers stereotype gay Black men and heterosexual Black men in very different ways, so too are there contexts in which perceivers stereotype these men in very similar ways. We develop and test an explanation for contradictory findings of this sort. In particular, we argue that perceivers have a repertoire of lenses in their minds-identity-specific schemas for categorizing others-and that characteristics of the perceiver and the social context determine which one of these lenses will be used to organize social perception. Perceivers who are using the lens of race, for example, are expected to attend to targets' racial identities so strongly that they barely attend, in these moments, to targets' other identities (e.g., their sexual orientations). Across six experiments, we show (a) that perceivers tend to use just one lens at a time when thinking about others, (b) that the lenses perceivers use can be singular and simplistic (e.g., the lens of gender by itself) or intersectional and complex (e.g., a race-by-gender lens, specifically), and (c) that different lenses can prescribe categorically distinct sets of stereotypes that perceivers use as frameworks for thinking about others. This lens-based account can resolve apparent contradictions in the literature on intersectional stereotyping, and it can likewise be used to generate novel hypotheses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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Risk-taking is sometimes admired and sometimes disparaged. In this research, we examine previously unexplored questions concerning how membership in social groups is related to expectations and perceptions of risk-taking. We propose that prototypes of risk-takers incorporate racial associations. We conducted five studies (NTotal = 1,603, predominantly White residents of the United States) examining whether prototypes of risk-takers-primarily reckless and responsible ones-activate racial stereotypes and discrimination. We first focused on whether participants perceive Black (vs. White) men as more likely to engage in risk-taking, broadly construed (Study 1). Next, we tested whether the trait attributions (Studies 2 and 3) and mental images constructed with the reverse correlation task (Study 3) of reckless risk-takers are more stereotypically Black (and less White) than responsible risk-takers. In Study 4, we employed an investment game to investigate participants' willingness to trust targets we depicted using the racialized mental images of reckless and responsible risk-takers derived from Study 3. A final study examined whether thinking about reckless risk-takers evokes Black stereotypes broadly, including even positive stereotype content. Findings confirmed that reckless risk-takers were imagined as more phenotypically Black and as having more stereotypically Black traits (both positive and negative), compared with responsible risk-takers. Theoretical and practical implications for this novel stereotype content in the domain of risk are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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The growing visibility of transgender women and men in the US challenges a dominant cultural model of gender in which dichotomous sex assigned at birth gives rise to dichotomous gender identity in adulthood. How are these groups - verbally marked as atypical relative to their cisgender counterparts - stereotyped? Moreover, how do gender essentialist beliefs predict the content of such stereotypes? Across four studies with diverse methods of stereotype measurement, we assessed characteristics that cisgender people associate with transgender women and men, comparing these to their stereotypes of cisgender women and men. In our final study, we directly assessed how cisgender people mentally position transgender groups relative to cisgender groups. Across these studies, transgender categories were characterized in less positive ways than cisgender ones, and there was as a lower level of consensus about transgender than cisgender stereotypes. On average, transgender groups were de-gendered relative to cisgender groups, such that transgender women and men were not strongly differentiated on traditionally-gendered stereotype dimensions. Finally, we showed that participants higher in gender essentialism (relative to participants lower in gender essentialism) evaluated cisgender groups more positively and were more likely to stereotype transgender groups based on their sex assigned at birth.

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Racial preferences in sexual attraction are highly visible and controversial. They may also negatively impact those who are excluded. It is unclear whether these preferences are merely self-attributed or extend to patterns of experienced sexual arousal. Furthermore, some argue that racial preferences in sexual attraction reflect idiosyncratic personal preferences, while others argue that they are more systematically motivated and reflect broader negative attitudes toward particular races. In two studies, we examined these issues by measuring the sexual arousal patterns and negative racial attitudes of 78 White men in relation to their racial preferences in sexual attraction to White versus Black people. For both White heterosexual men (n = 40; Study 1) and White gay men (n = 38; Study 2), greater racial preferences in sexual attraction to White versus Black people of their preferred gender were associated with more subjective and genital arousal by erotic stimuli featuring White versus Black people of their preferred gender, and with more explicit and implicit negative attitudes toward Black people. Findings suggest that racial preferences in sexual attraction are reflected in patterns of sexual arousal, and they might also be systematically motivated by negative attitudes toward particular races.

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There is ample evidence of racial and gender bias in young children, but thus far this evidence comes almost exclusively from children's responses to a single social category (either race or gender). Yet we are each simultaneously members of many social categories (including our race and gender). Among adults, racial and gender biases intersect: negative racial biases are expressed more strongly against males than females. Here, we consider the developmental origin of bias at the intersection of race and gender. Relying on both implicit and explicit measures, we assessed 4-year-old children's responses to target images of children who varied systematically in both race (Black and White) and gender (male and female). Children revealed a strong and consistent pro-White bias. This racial bias was expressed more strongly for males than females: children's responses to Black boys were less positive than to Black girls, White boys or White girls. This outcome, which constitutes the earliest evidence of bias at the intersection of race and gender, underscores the importance of addressing bias in the first years of life.

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Information that conveys racial group membership plays a powerful role in influencing people's information processing including perceptual, memory and evaluative judgments. Yet whether own- and other-race information can differentially impact people's perceptual awareness at a preconscious level remains unclear. Employing a breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm, we investigated whether compared with other-race stimuli, participants' own-race stimuli would be prioritized to gain privileged access to perceptual awareness. Across five experiments (N = 136), we firstly found that participants' own-race faces enjoyed privileged access to perceptual awareness (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2-5, we employed an associative training task to establish associations between otherwise arbitrary visual stimuli and own- vs. other-racial groups. Although otherwise arbitrary visual stimuli were prioritized to represent one's own race (vs. other-race) during the training, own- and other-race representing stimuli did not differ in their potency in entering perceptual awareness. This dissociation was further corroborated by Bayesian analyses and an internal meta-analysis. Taken together, our findings suggest that people's perceptual expertise with their own-race members' faces plays a determining role in shaping perceptual awareness. In contrast, newly learned race-representing stimuli did not influence early perceptual selection processes as indicated by the time they take to emerge into perceptual awareness.

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We investigated the racial content of perceivers' mental images of different socioeconomic categories. We selected participants who were either high or low in prejudice toward the poor. These participants saw 400 pairs of visually noisy face images. Depending on condition, participants chose the face that looked like a poor person, a middle income person, or a rich person. We averaged the faces selected to create composite images of each social class. A second group of participants rated the stereotypical Blackness of these images. They also rated the face images on a variety of psychological traits. Participants high in economic prejudice produced strongly class-differentiated mental images. They imagined the poor to be Blacker than middle income and wealthy people. They also imagined them to have less positive psychological characteristics. Participants low in economic prejudice also possessed images of the wealthy that were relatively White, but they represented poor and middle class people in a less racially differentiated way. We discuss implications for understanding the intersections of race and class in social perception.

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One triumph of the human mind is the ability to place the multitudinous array of people we encounter into in- and out-group members based on racial characteristics. One fundamental question that remains to be answered is whether invisible own- and other-race faces can nevertheless influence subsequent affective judgments. Here, we employed continuous flash suppression (CFS) to render own- and other-race faces unperceivable in an affective priming task. Both on-line and off-line awareness checks were employed to provide more stringent control of partial awareness. Results revealed that relative to own-race faces, imperceptible other-race faces significantly facilitated participants' identification of negative words, suggesting an other-race derogation bias. When faces were presented consciously, we found that not only other-race faces facilitated detection of negative words, but also own-race faces facilitated detection of positive words. These findings together provide novel and strong evidence suggesting that invisible racial faces can bias affective responses.

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Do numbers have gender? Wilkie and Bodenhausen (2012) examined this issue in a series of experiments on perceived gender. They examined the perceived gender of baby faces and foreign names. Arbitrary numbers presented with these faces and names influenced their perceived gender. Specifically, odd numbers connoted masculinity, while even numbers connoted femininity. In two new studies (total N = 315), we further examined the gendering of numbers. The first study examined explicit ratings of 1-digit numbers. We confirmed that odd numbers seemed masculine while even numbers seemed feminine. Although both men and women showed this pattern, it was more pronounced among women. We also examined whether this pattern holds for automatic as well as deliberated reactions. Results of an Implicit Association Test showed that it did, but only among the women. The implicit and explicit patterns of numerical gender ascription were moderately correlated. The second study examined explicit perceptions of 2-digit numbers. Again, women viewed odd numbers as more masculine and less feminine than even numbers. However, men viewed 2-digit numbers as relatively masculine, regardless of whether they were even or odd. These results indicate that women and men impute gender to numbers in different ways and to different extents. We discuss possible implications for understanding how people relate to and are influenced by numbers in a variety of real-life contexts.

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The present study investigated the extent to which people can suppress unwanted autobiographical memories in a memory-detection context involving a mock crime. Participants encoded sensorimotor-rich memories by enacting a lab-based crime (stealing a ring) and received instructions to suppress memory of the crime in order to evade guilt detection in a brain-wave-based concealed-information test. Aftereffects of suppression on automatic memory processes were measured in an autobiographical Implicit Association Test. Results showed that suppression attenuated brain-wave activity (the P300) associated with crime-relevant memory retrieval, which rendered waveforms from innocent and guilty participants indistinguishable. However, the two groups could nevertheless be discriminated via the late-posterior-negative slow wave, which may reflect the need to monitor response conflict arising between voluntary suppression and automatic recognition processes. Finally, extending recent findings that suppression can impair implicit memory processes, we provide novel evidence that suppression reduces automatic cognitive biases often associated with actual autobiographical memories.

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Although people may endorse egalitarianism and tolerance, social biases can remain operative and drive harmful actions in an unconscious manner. Here, we investigated training to reduce implicit racial and gender bias. Forty participants processed counterstereotype information paired with one sound for each type of bias. Biases were reduced immediately after training. During subsequent slow-wave sleep, one sound was unobtrusively presented to each participant, repeatedly, to reactivate one type of training. Corresponding bias reductions were fortified in comparison with the social bias not externally reactivated during sleep. This advantage remained 1 week later, the magnitude of which was associated with time in slow-wave and rapid-eye-movement sleep after training. We conclude that memory reactivation during sleep enhances counterstereotype training and that maintaining a bias reduction is sleep-dependent.

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Categorization plays a fundamental role in organizing daily interactions with the social world. However, there is increasing recognition that social categorization is often complex, both because category membership can be ambiguous (e.g., multiracial or transgender identities) and because different categorical identities (e.g., race and gender) may interact to determine the meaning of category membership. These complex identities simultaneously impact social perceivers' impressions and social targets' own experiences of identity, thereby shaping perceptions, experiences, and interactions in fundamental ways. This review examines recent research on the perception and experience of the complex, multifaceted identities that both complicate and enrich our lives. Although research has historically tended to focus more on difficulties and challenges associated with multiple identities, increasing attention is being paid to opportunities that emerge from the possession of identities that include multiple distinct or overlapping groups. We consider how these opportunities might benefit both perceivers and targets.

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We present a theoretical model of reappropriation--taking possession of a slur previously used exclusively by dominant groups to reinforce another group's lesser status. Ten experiments tested this model and established a reciprocal relationship between power and self-labeling with a derogatory group term. We first investigated precursors to self-labeling: Group, but not individual, power increased participants' willingness to label themselves with a derogatory term for their group. We then examined the consequences of such self-labeling for both the self and observers. Self-labelers felt more powerful after self-labeling, and observers perceived them and their group as more powerful. Finally, these labels were evaluated less negatively after self-labeling, and this attenuation of stigma was mediated by perceived power. These effects occurred only for derogatory terms (e.g., queer, bitch), and not for descriptive (e.g., woman) or majority-group (e.g., straight) labels. These results suggest that self-labeling with a derogatory label can weaken the label's stigmatizing force.

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Aggression pervades modern life. To understand the root causes of aggression, researchers have developed several methods to assess aggressive inclinations. The current article introduces a new behavioral method-the voodoo doll task (VDT)-that offers a reliable and valid trait and state measure of aggressive inclinations across settings and relationship contexts. Drawing on theory and research on the law of similarity and magical beliefs (Rozin, Millman, & Nemeroff [1986], Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 703-712), we propose that people transfer characteristics of a person onto a voodoo doll representing that person. As a result, causing harm to a voodoo doll by stabbing it with pins may have important psychological similarities to causing actual harm to the person the voodoo doll represents. Nine methodologically diverse studies (total N = 1,376) showed that the VDT had strong reliability, construct validity, and convergent validity. Discussion centers on the importance of magical beliefs in understanding the causes of aggressive inclinations.

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One of the most heavily debated questions in implicit social cognition is the extent to which implicit measures can be voluntarily controlled. The experiment reported here is the first to employ a novel strategy for intentionally controlling performance in the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT). Specifically, when explicitly instructed to do so, participants were able to speed up their responses in the incongruent blocks of the aIAT and thus influence the outcome of the test. This effect was larger when the experimental instruction was followed by practice in speeding responses than when the instruction was given alone. A process-dissociation analysis suggested that the effect was due to reductions in the ability of participants' automatic associations to influence responses when instructions to speed up were provided. This experiment provides new insight into the potential for strategic control in the performance of implicit measures and into the interplay between automatic and controlled processes underlying performance on implicit measures.

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Persuasive messages are more effective when they are custom-tailored to reflect the interests and concerns of the intended audience. Much of the message-framing literature has focused on the advantages of using either gain or loss frames, depending on the motivational orientation of the target group. In the current study, we extended this research to examine whether a persuasive appeal's effectiveness can be increased by aligning the message framing with the recipient's personality profile. For a single product, we constructed five advertisements, each designed to target one of the five major trait domains of human personality. In a sample of 324 survey respondents, advertisements were evaluated more positively the more they cohered with participants' dispositional motives. These results suggest that adapting persuasive messages to the personality traits of the target audience can be an effective way of increasing the messages' impact, and highlight the potential value of personality-based communication strategies.

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