HANDBOOK OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Fifth Edition
 For Gardner Lindzey —
founding editor, scientist, and friend
 Contents

PREFACE

CONTRIBUTORS

VOLUME 1
Part I: The Science of Social Psychology

1.⏐ HISTORY OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: INSIGHTS, CHALLENGES,

AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO THEORY AND APPLICATION 3
Lee Ross, Mark Lepper, and Andrew Ward

2.⏐ THE ART OF LABORATORY EXPERIMENTATION 51

Timothy D. Wilson, Elliot Aronson, and Kevin Carlsmith

3.⏐ SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL METHODS OUTSIDE THE LABORATORY 82

Harry T. Reis and Samuel D. Gosling

4.⏐ DATA ANALYSIS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: RECENT AND

RECURRING ISSUES 115
Charles M. Judd and David A. Kenny

Part II: The Social Being

5.⏐ SOCIAL COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE 143

Matthew D. Lieberman

6.⏐ SOCIAL PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY AND EMBODIMENT 194

Jim Blascovich and Wendy Berry Mendes

7.⏐ AUTOMATICITY AND THE UNCONSCIOUS 228

Ap Dijksterhuis

8.⏐ MOTIVATION 268

John A. Bargh, Peter M. Gollwitzer, and Gabriele Oettingen

9.⏐ EMOTION 317

Dacher Keltner and Jennifer S. Lerner

ftoc.indd vii 12/29/09 12:02:30 PM

 viii Contents

10.⏐ ATTITUDES 353

Mahzarin R. Banaji and Larisa Heiphetz

11.⏐ ATTITUDES AND PERSUASION: FROM BIOLOGY TO SOCIAL RESPONSES

TO PERSUASIVE INTENT 394
Dolores Albarracín and Patrick Vargas

12.⏐ PERCEIVING PEOPLE 428

C. Neil Macrae and Susanne Quadflieg

13.⏐ NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR 464

Nalini Ambady and Max Weisbuch

14.⏐ MIND PERCEPTION 498

Nicholas Epley and Adam Waytz

15.⏐ JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING 542

Thomas D. Gilovich and Dale W. Griffin

16.⏐ SELF AND IDENTITY 589

William B. Swann, Jr. and Jennifer K. Bosson

17.⏐ GENDER 629

Wendy Wood and Alice H. Eagly

18.⏐ PERSONALITY IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 668

David C. Funder and Lisa A. Fast

19.⏐ HEALTH 698

Shelley E. Taylor

20.⏐ EXPERIMENTAL EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY: COPING WITH

THE FACTS OF LIFE 724
Tom Pyszczynski, Jeff Greenberg, Sander Koole, and Sheldon Solomon

VOLUME 2
Part III: The Social World

21.⏐ EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 761

Steven L. Neuberg, Douglas T. Kenrick, and Mark Schaller

22.⏐ MORALITY 797

Jonathan Haidt and Selin Kesebir

23.⏐ AGGRESSION 833

Brad J. Bushman and L. Rowell Huesmann

24.⏐ AFFILIATION, ACCEPTANCE, AND BELONGING: THE PURSUIT

OF INTERPERSONAL CONNECTION 864
Mark R. Leary

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 Contents ix

25.⏐ CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS 898

Margaret S. Clark and Edward P. Lemay, Jr.

26.⏐ INTERPERSONAL STRATIFICATION: STATUS, POWER, AND SUBORDINATION 941

Susan T. Fiske

27.⏐ SOCIAL CONFLICT: THE EMERGENCE AND CONSEQUENCES

OF STRUGGLE AND NEGOTIATION 983
Carsten K. W. De Dreu

28.⏐ INTERGROUP RELATIONS 1024

Vincent Yzerbyt and Stéphanie Demoulin

29.⏐ INTERGROUP BIAS 1084

John F. Dovidio and Samuel L. Gaertner

30.⏐ SOCIAL JUSTICE: HISTORY, THEORY, AND RESEARCH 1122

John T. Jost and Aaron C. Kay

31.⏐ INFLUENCE AND LEADERSHIP 1166

Michael A. Hogg

32.⏐ GROUP BEHAVIOR AND PERFORMANCE 1208

J. Richard Hackman and Nancy Katz

33.⏐ ORGANIZATIONAL PREFERENCES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES 1252

Deborah H. Gruenfeld and Larissa Z. Tiedens

34.⏐ THE PSYCHOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF POLITICAL BEHAVIOR 1288

Jon A. Krosnick, Penny S. Visser, and Joshua Harder

35.⏐ SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LAW 1343

Margaret Bull Kovera and Eugene Borgida

36.⏐ SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LANGUAGE: WORDS, UTTERANCES,

AND CONVERSATIONS 1386
Thomas Holtgraves

37.⏐ CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY 1423

Steven J. Heine

AUTHOR INDEX I-1

SUBJECT INDEX I-85

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ftoc.indd x 12/29/09 12:02:31 PM
Fifth Edition Preface
You hold in your hands (or on your screens) an array of
treasures. Since the first edition appeared in 1935, the
Handbook of Social Psychology has been the standard
reference work in the field, offering historical, integra-
tive, and penetrating surveys of the topics that constitute
the discipline. For this we have the authors to thank. Each
chapter is written by the world’s foremost authorities on
the topic, and the list of contributors reads like an inter-
national who’s who in social psychology. This fifth edi-
tion serves a new generation of students and researchers,
reflecting the tremendous changes the field has experi-
enced in the last decade. Most authors in this edition are
new to the Handbook, as befits a vigorous, cutting-edge
science. Many chapter topics remain from the previous
edition (although in most cases their content has changed
dramatically), and many others (social neuroscience, mind
perception, experimental existential psychology, morality,
and interpersonal stratification) are new to this edition.
This is the last edition of the Handbook that will bear
the name of Gardner Lindzey, who passed away in 2008
at the age of 87. He helped organize this edition, but it is
the first of the modern era to be completed without him.
Carl Murchison brought out the first official edition of the
Handbook in 1935, but empirical work in social psychology
did not really explode until just after World War II, and it was
then that Gardner founded the current Handbook series that
every social psychologist knows so well. His first edition
appeared in 1954; his second and third editions appeared
in 1969 and 1985, respectively (with Elliot Aronson as his
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
co-editor); and his fourth edition appeared in 1998 (with
Daniel Gilbert and Susan Fiske as his co-editors).
From the start, Gardner determined his topics and chose
his authors democratically—by soliciting opinions from
leaders in the field—which at once gave his Handbook
breadth, vision, and credibility. We have continued to use
his method. Gardner ’s fingerprints are all over this fifth
edition in many other ways as well—in our philosophy
of representing the full field from neuron to nation, in our
insistence that authors write for graduate students and not
for one another, in our adherence to a prompt publication
schedule, and we hope, in the continuing excellence of
these volumes.
Gardner ’s impact extended beyond his half century as
the editor of the Handbook. He also shaped the field of
social psychology with his articles and books, although
much of his influence occurred modestly, behind the
scenes—advising, promoting, recommending, persuad-
ing. Neither of us will ever forget meeting with Gardner
15 years ago in a dark, smoke-filled restaurant in Boston,
where he invited us to become part of this great tradition.
We are proud to carry forward his legacy, and we trust
that future editors will do the same—without the smoke,
perhaps, but with the same respect for the institution that
Gardner ’s Handbook has become and with the same enthu-
siasm it inspires in all of us for the hub discipline of social
psychology.
STF, PRINCETON
DTG, CAMBRIDGE
PART I

The Science of Social Psychology

Chapter 1

History of Social Psychology: Insights,

Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and
Application
LEE ROSS, MARK LEPPER, AND ANDREW WARD

In his classic Handbook of Social Psychology chapter,
Jones (1985) offered a particularly comprehensive account
of five decades of social psychology, beginning with the
late 1930s. His treatment of the contributions of Kurt
Lewin, whom he rightly identified as the most important
shaper of modern experimental social psychology—and
the groundbreaking work of Leon Festinger, whose dis-
crepancy reduction model (borrowed from Lewin’s
tension-system concept) was applied to both pressures
toward uniformity within groups and consonant versus dis-
sonant cognitions of actors—remains essential reading for
aspiring researchers who want to understand what social
psychologists study, how they study it, and the “middle-
range” level of theorizing they find most comfortable.
Jones also offered balanced assessments of the most pro-
vocative debates that had taken place within the field and
a clear-eyed account of the waxing and waning of specific
research programs (which he characterized as “bandwagons”
and “sinking ships”). Although we generally refrain from
summarizing these debates and contributions, we do try to
build upon them—not only with some updating, but also with
further consideration of the challenges confronting our disci-
pline, and the various ways in which those challenges have
been met. Any history of a field of study reflects particular
values and tastes. Ours include a fondness for studies that
employ consequential behavioral measures and an appre-
ciation of social psychology’s potential to speak to applied
problems in the real world. In short, this chapter represents
a history, rather than the history of social psychology, an
account of contributions, problems, insights, and events seen
through the particular interpretive lenses of its authors.
The chapter includes five sections, each of which
includes various subsections:
• The first section discusses three major themes in our
field’s approach to research: (a) the normative power
of the group, (b) the centrality of subjective meaning or
interpretation, and (c) an emphasis on impactful, and
often non-obvious, experimental demonstrations.
• The second section examines some historical “dialec-
tics” in the evolution of particular topics and methods
in social psychology. It focuses on influences from psy-
chology in general, from social psychology in particular,
and from real-world events and trends in U.S. society at
large that have created opportunities and challenges, and
on occasion crises, for our field.
• The third section discusses four foundational insights or
“pillars” that constitute cumulative lessons and continue
to guide contemporary analysis, research, and applica-
tion: (a) “naïve realism” (i.e., the assumption of an iso-
morphism between what one “sees” through the prism
of one’s expectations, needs, and knowledge structures
and objective reality) and its social implications and
manifestations; (b) the importance of lay dispositionism

Author note: The authors gratefully acknowledge our many colleagues and graduate students who, over the years, have helped us to
understand and appreciate our field. Special thanks are owed to Benoit Monin, Barry Schwartz, and Greg Walton, who shared their
views with us about classic and contemporary contributions to social psychology, and to Phoebe Ellsworth and Dick Nisbett, whose
discussions with us about this chapter were only the latest in a long history of stimulating exchanges. Grant support to Lee Ross from the
National Science Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is also gratefully acknowledged. Finally, we wish to recog-
nize the invaluable assistance of our editors, Susan Fiske and Dan Gilbert. Their detailed feedback to an earlier draft helped sharpen our
focus and generally improve the chapter in a myriad of ways, both large and small.

3
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
4 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
(i.e., the general failure to appreciate the power of
situational forces and constraints in controlling social
behavior); (c) the motivation or need to see oneself
as consistent, rational, and moral; and (d) the impact
of expectations and beliefs that bias perceptions,
interpretations, and reactions, and in so doing create
“self-fulfilling prophesies.”
• The fourth section reviews promising new topics
and new approaches to topics of continuing interest,
including stereotyping and prejudice, cultural psychology,
limitations of standard economic models of decision
making, evolutionary psychology, implicit influences
on belief and behavior, terror management theory, posi-
tive psychology, self-regulation, hedonic adaptation,
close relationships, “virtual” interaction, and social cog-
nitive neuroscience.
• The final section discusses examples of successful
applications of social psychology to real-world prob-
lems and offers some thoughts on the difficulties and
challenges faced by applied researchers, especially in
“scaling up” small or mid-sized interventions.
CONTINUING THEMES IN CONTENT AND
METHODOLOGY
Three Basic Content Areas
In discussing social psychology, lecturers and text-
book authors commonly highlight three topics of central
and continuing interest. One is the study of intra-group and
intergroup processes (what used to be called group dynam-
ics). This topic includes such concerns as how groups
“energize” behavior and diminish personal responsibility,
prompting individuals to actions they would never under-
take alone; how groups produce and maintain conformity
in public behavior and/or private beliefs; how groups treat
in-group versus out-group members; what determines their
productivity and quality of performance; and what pro-
cesses govern intergroup conflict and/or cooperation. This
last topic, which Lewin pioneered and for which Morton
Deutsch assumed Lewin’s mantle of leadership, continues to
have particular relevance in this age of ethnic conflict (see
Deutsch, 1977; Krauss & Deutsch, 1966; also Arrow,
Mnookin, Ross, Tversky, & Wilson, 1995; Pruitt & Carnevale,
1993; Pruitt & Rubin, 1986; Ross & Ward, 1995).
A second topic that continues to play a large role in
social psychology is the study of attitudes, opinions, and
beliefs—how they are formed; what functions they serve
for the individual or group holding them; their various con-
scious and non-conscious dimensions; how they cluster
together; how they can be changed (and why it is often so
difficult to change them); and how, when, and why, they
influence (or seemingly fail to influence) overt behavior
(see LaPiere, 1934). As a comprehensive and insightful
overview of this topic, William McGuire’s 1969 Handbook
chapter remains a classic, but students interested in more
recent reviews have many excellent sources to choose from
(e.g., Albarracín & Vargas, Banaji & Heiphetz, this volume;
Krosnick, Visser, & Harder, volume 2; Eagly & Chaiken,
1993; Fazio, 1990; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
The third topic of continuing interest, which came to
dominate much of the field, is the study of social percep-
tion and self-perception. This topic includes the processes
and biases that influence the assessments individual social
actors make about each other and themselves (Jones, 1990;
Gilbert, 1998). Today, cutting-edge work in this area is at
least as much about social cognition as social perception
(see Fiske & Taylor, 2008; also Epley & Waytz and Macrae,
this volume), although work on visual perspective per se is
making a bit of a comeback.
As Jones (1985) noted, research on group processes and
influences reached a new high during the Lewin and imme-
diate post-Lewin period, then dipped precipitously and
remained at a surprising low for decades (for reviews, see
both Hackman and Hogg, volume 2). Today, while there is
still a relative paucity of work on groups per se, there has been
a dramatic increase in research on the workings of whole
cultures on the one hand and close personal relationships
on the other. The overall activity index for work on atti-
tudes has been more consistent. What has shifted over the
decades has been the aspect of the topic—measurement,
structure and function, association with personality and/or
ideology, persuasion techniques, effects on overt behavior
and vice versa, implicit versus explicit influences, etc.—pro-
ducing the most activity and interest. Social perception was
the slow starter (with initial work mainly on the degree and
determinants of accuracy in judging traits and emotions).
But interest in this area accelerated with the flourishing of
attribution theory and the study of social perception pro-
cesses and peaked in recent years as interest in potentially
biasing influences (perceptual, cognitive, motivational, and
decisional) gained prominence throughout psychology.
More examples of specific research areas included under
each of these topics at different times in our history are
provided later in Table 1.2, along with a listing of some
prominent social trends and events that contributed to shifts
in the focal research problems of our field. In addition, par-
ticular problems, topics, and paradigms have sometimes
become “sinking ships” because a central question was
answered to the satisfaction of researchers, because new
findings made the topic less instead of more interesting,
or just because no researcher came along with a new para-
digm or question or an idea or insight provocative enough

to maintain the field’s interest in the face of promising new
topics and approaches. Yet other topics and paradigms
declined for reasons that reflect shifts of emphasis in the
field of psychology as a whole.
The disappearance from flagship social psychology
journals of research using laboratory animals to study
social phenomena is a case in point. Throughout the 1960s,
there had been a steady stream of provocative articles on
affiliation, imitation, empathy, and cooperation. Zajonc
(1969) had explored both social facilitation and the effects
of “mere exposure” on liking using a number of different
species. Lawrence and Festinger (1962) had even produced
a fascinating monograph on “dissonance reduction” in lab-
oratory rats—i.e., evidence that animals that had to work
hard for meager or inconsistent extrinsic rewards behaved
more persistently when those rewards were withdrawn
than those that had been more generously and consistently
rewarded. But, for many years, the increasing cognitive
ascendency throughout all of psychology discouraged most
researchers from doing such work of that sort. Recently,
however, there has been a resurgence of research investi-
gating dissonance, jealousy, the operation of hierarchies,
attraction and affiliation, nonverbal behavior, and other
social psychological phenomena in man’s near relatives
(Egan, Santos, & Bloom, 2007; Gosling & Mollaghan,
2006; also, in this volume, chapters by Ambady; Epley &
Waytz, and in volume 2, chapters by Fiske and Leary).
Linking the topics of group processes, attitudes, and
person perception is the study of interpersonal influence—
the strategies individuals employ, successfully or unsuccess-
fully, to induce each other to comply with various requests
(which we discuss in a later section on “non-obvious”
effects) and the determinants of liking and attraction.
Indeed, almost all “applied” undertakings at which social
psychologists have tried their hand demand attention to all
three areas as well. This is certainly true of work on con-
flict resolution, political psychology, health psychology,
industrial psychology, political psychology, environmental
psychology, educational psychology, and psychology and
law. In each area, both societal norms and the dynamics of
small groups are highly relevant, as are the processes of per-
suasion and attitude change, as well as the perceptual and
cognitive processes by which people evaluate each other
and defer to or resist each other’s influence attempts.
But the “real-world” topic linking all three areas that has
received the most attention in social psychology is that of
racism and other forms of stereotyping and stigmatization
(including gender stereotyping and sexism)—a topic that
also brings together the study of underlying perceptual, cog-
nitive, and motivational factors (Allport, 1954b; J. Jones,
1997; Markus, 2008; Schneider, 2004). Work on this topic,
reviewed later in this chapter, has increasingly involved
Continuing Themes in Content and Methodology 5
analysis not only of the processes by which the mem-
bers of the dominant group perceive and respond to the
members of the nondominant group, but also the conse-
quences felt, and responses made, by the latter (Dovidio &
Gaertner and Yzerbyt & Demoulin, volume 2).
Three Central Themes
Across these different research topics, three central “themes”
in the research efforts of social psychologists can be dis-
cerned. The earliest and most obvious theme involves the
power of the group as a normative influence. A second
early and continuing theme—the centrality of subjective
meaning or interpretation—can now be seen in almost all
areas of psychology. However, it came to play a particu-
larly important role in social psychology, wherein the classic
behaviorist formulation focusing on the links between
(simple physical) stimuli and responses was transformed
to deal with the way (more global) situations shape com-
plex social behavior—a shift that required attention to the
particular actors’ understandings or “definitions” of the situ-
ations they were confronting.
The third theme—an emphasis on “non-obvious” exper-
imental demonstrations—became influential somewhat
later (in the 1960s), but may be the one that most distin-
guishes the work of social psychologists from that of other
social scientists. That is, researchers in all three content
areas have frequently placed a premium on demonstra-
tions that seemingly small manipulations could produce
surprisingly big effects, or that the specification of some
non-obvious or subtle “mediator” could allow us to pre-
dict when a given effect would or would not be present.
Also apparent in many such demonstrations is the “situ-
ationist” perspective that has been a major feature of our
field, and with that perspective the implicit suggestion that
stable personal traits or dispositions matter less than lay
observers assume, or at least that they can be outweighed
by particular features or manipulations of the immediate
situation at hand.
Later we will discuss two other possible themes that
have gained increasing prominence in recent years. One
involves a focus on—one might even say an obsession
with—the self. Not coincidentally, conceptions of the self,
and more specifically the relationship between self and
others, have been a particular focus in the “bandwagon”
topic of East–West cultural differences. Research on this
topic has challenged our notions about the sources and nature
of phenomena that we had once egocentrically, or rather ethno-
centrically, assumed to be “basic” and “universal.” The other
increasingly prominent, and again some critics might say
obsessive, theme involves the exploration of cognitive and
motivational “biases” in perception, judgment, and decision
6 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
making, and, especially in the latter case, violations of
specific normative standards (Luce & Raiffa, 1957). More
than any other, this topic has attracted the interest of col-
leagues in other fields and may suggest the most obvious
and direct implications for social policy and intervention.
Group Influence
The study of group influence dominated the early history
of our field. Indeed, as Allport described in his seminal
1954 Handbook chapter, this theme was also central to our
pre-history, before the emphasis first on empiricism and
then on experimentation distinguished the first generation
of true social psychologists from the “armchair” social
philosophers whose observations and theories provided
the departure point for early research. One might even say
that it was appreciation of the fact that group influences
lead individuals to behave in ways not readily explicable in
terms of rational individual calculation, or the satisfaction
of basic needs and drives, that provided a major impetus
for a separate discipline of social psychology.
Some of the landmarks worth noting include an early
recognition of the importance of explicit and implicit
group norms and the relevance of reference groups, both
as a source of such norms and as a basis for satisfaction or
dissatisfaction with one’s life circumstances. This recogni-
tion was followed by systematic theorizing and empirical
investigation by Festinger, Schachter, and their collabora-
tors on pressures to uniformity and the moderating role
of group cohesiveness. Next came the development of
social comparison theory, in which Festinger (1954) effec-
tively moved the focus of analysis and research from the
dynamics of the group to the perceptions, cognitions, and
motivations of the individual. From there, it was but a
short step to Schachter’s (1959) Psychology of Affiliation
monograph, which added affective or emotional state to
the objects of social comparison and self-evaluation, and
only a slightly longer step to the “cognitive” theories
that left the study of social influence behind entirely and that
dominated research for two decades—namely, Festinger’s
(1957) theory of cognitive dissonance and, to a lesser
extent, Schachter and Singer’s (1962) “two-factor” theory
of emotion.
From that point on, while provocative work continued
to be done on several aspects of group influence and group
functioning, including social exchange (Thibaut & Kelley,
1959), group versus individual risk tolerance (Wallach,
Kogan & Bem, 1962), social facilitation (Zajonc, 1965),
“groupthink” (Janis, 1972), de-individuation (Zimbardo,
1970), jury deliberation (Hastie, Penrod, & Pennington,
1983), and other areas, the focus of the field remained
largely on processes within the mind of the individual
perceiver, thinker, and decision maker. At the same time,
the term “social influence” began to replace the more
restrictive “group influence.”
Three later exceptions focusing on collective as well as
individual level variables, however, are worth noting. Two
of these—intergroup relations (including the study of stig-
matization of racial minorities and other outgroups) and
the study of cultural influences—will be discussed at sev-
eral points later in this chapter. The third topic involves
estimates, judgments, and predictions by groups versus
individuals—a topic with a very long history in the field,
going back at least to the 1920s and 1930s (reviewed by
Lorge, Fox, Davitz, and Brenner (1958)). The main mes-
sage of this work, given renewed life by the publication of
Surowiecki’s (2004) best-selling The Wisdom of Crowds,
involves the uncanny accuracy shown by the mean of large
samples or by markets in making predictions, provided that
the responses being aggregated are made independently
rather than collaboratively, thus reflecting independent
sources of information, and that relevant errors are random
and uncorrelated.
Subjectivism
The second longstanding theme, the emphasis on subjec-
tive meaning, was sounded most emphatically, as Jones
noted, in our field’s resistance to behaviorist formulations
that gave no place to “mentalistic” processes. Social psy-
chologists were skeptical about the sufficiency of classical
theories of learning and operant conditioning to explain
complex human behavior. Indeed, even if the temptation
to speculate about the subjective mental life of the rats,
pigeons, and other non-sapiens so often used in the stud-
ies of conditioning and learning is wisely resisted, when
it comes to human social behavior, most social psycholo-
gists would insist that to understand, predict, and control
such behavior, one must be able to a recognize or deter-
mine what stimulus the actors are attending to, and what
it means to those actors in light of their past experiences,
current goals, and understandings about the world.
One also needs to know the actors’ interpretation of their
responses—what the actors intended to accomplish, and in
some cases also how they believed those responses would
be interpreted by others. Moreover, to predict the effects of
more complex events like “non-reinforcement” following
a history of prior reinforcement of the same action, one
needs to know to what that non-reinforcement was “attrib-
uted” by the actor in question. Was it seen as reflecting a
change in the state of the world or in the preferences of the
agent(s) of reinforcement, a “message” that more effort or
more refined responses are required, or simply a “chance”
event that should not influence future responding?
For much of the history of our field, an appreciation of
the importance of subjective interpretation served mainly

as an impetus to attend carefully to research participants’
appraisals or construals of the events they were experiencing
in the laboratory, and to make good use of post-experimental
interviews and questionnaires. The main exception was in
the study of emotion, where the issue of appraisal became
central to theorizing (see Smith & Ellsworth, 1985). Only
in more recent work on framing and priming has the focus
shifted from attempts to measure such processes to the use
of subtle techniques to manipulate the subjective meaning
of a given “objective” situation, and in so doing to alter
the way in which ordinary people respond to that situation.
For example, Liberman, Samuels, and Ross (2004) gave
students an opportunity to play seven rounds of a standard
“Prisoner’s Dilemma” game that required them to opt for
“cooperation” or “defection.” The relevant payoff matrix
was held constant; what varied was the “name of the game”
mentioned by the experimenter and attached to that matrix.
When told it was the Wall Street Game, two-thirds of the
students opted for defection on the first and subsequent
rounds of the game, and one-third opted for cooperation;
by contrast when they were told it was the Community
Game, these proportions were reversed.
Attention to subjective meaning also continues to guide
and sharpen our appreciation of early social psychology
classics. The experimenter’s explicit instructions not-
withstanding, did the youngsters in Triplett’s (1898) early
co-action study (noted by Allport as the first real social
psychology experiment) really regard their spool-winding
task as noncompetitive? In the reports of Sherif Robbers’
Cave studies, describing how competition between groups
of preteen boys in a summer camp to win a valued prize
produced intergroup hostility (Sherif & Sherif, 1953;
Sherif, 1966), we are assured that the camp counselors “did
nothing” to encourage the aggressive acts that took place.
Similarly, in Zimbardo’s (2007) account of the excesses of
the “guards” in his 1971 Stanford Prison Study, we are told
that the authority figures in the “prison” neither suggested
nor encouraged the humiliating treatment of “prisoners.”
But what implicit “message,” one might ask, did the par-
ticipants in these studies take from the lack of reaction on
the part of authority figures when they first began to show
such behavior?
Indeed, some of the most famous studies in the
history of our field prompt related questions. To what
did the participants in Milgram’s classic studies of
destructive obedience attribute the experimenter’s bland
reassurances and failures to act when they asked him check
on the well-being of the unfortunate “learner” (in actuality,
an experimental confederate) to whom they were adminis-
tering increasingly dangerous electric shocks every time he
erred? To what did subjects in Asch’s famous conformity
studies attribute the unanimous inability of their fellow
Continuing Themes in Content and Methodology 7
participants (again, experimental confederates) to make
the simple perceptual judgments they were called upon to
make; and to what did they think their own lone dissent on
the critical conformity trials would be attributed by those
other participants?
In any case, when Kelley (1967), in his seminal Attribution
Theory opus, noted the links between Schachter’s work on
emotional labeling and Bem’s controversial “self-perception”
account of key dissonance theory findings, social psychol-
ogists jumped on the bandwagon with an enthusiasm that
had not met earlier armchair philosophizing about causal
inference by Heider (1958) and Ichheiser (1949). A flood
of papers and chapters ensued (see Harvey, Ickes, & Kidd,
1976, 1978; Jones et al., 1972; Weiner, 1974), including
Kelley’s own more reader-friendly 1973 paper spelling out
two basic principles—“discounting” and “covariation”—
used by ordinary people seeking to understand why particu-
lar actors respond to particular objects or situations as they
do. Some of this work examined the reasons people give for
their “voluntary” actions and decisions (Deci, 1975; Lepper &
Greene, 1978), but most of it examined the causes to which
they attribute their successes and failures (Dweck, 1986,
1999; Jones et al., 1972; Weiner, 1974).
Kelley’s theorizing also brought the once peripheral topic
of person perception to the fore. In an earlier paper, Jones
and Davis (1965) had outlined processes by which observ-
ers of overt actions make inferences about the intentions of
the relevant actors—inferences that in turn allow observers
to determine the degree to which particular actions reflect
dispositions of the actor rather than situational demands
and constraints. Kelley’s papers (1967, 1973), coming at
a time when cognitive psychology was beginning to assert its
dominance within psychology, and Bem’s articles (1965, 1967,
1972) offering a non-motivational account of key dissonance
theory findings, almost immediately began to stimulate
new research. Ironically, given Kelley’s own emphasis on
generally rational and successful attribution processes,
they also motivated younger researchers to shift the main
focus of attention from sensible attributional principles to
attributional biases and their consequences.
Mislabeling of one’s own emotions became one focus
of such research. For instance, Dutton and Aron (1974)
showed how a walk on a swaying suspension bridge could
spur romantic interest. Furthermore, the implications of mis-
labeled internal states, and especially unexplained arousal
or discontinuities and anomalies in mental experience,
suggested fruitful areas of overlap between clinical and
social psychology (Maher, 1968; Zimbardo, 1999). But the
major focus of attribution research centered on inferences
about one’s attitudes or tastes and the factors directing
and constraining one’s behavior (Nisbett & Valins, 1971;
Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). In particular, investigators
8 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
recognized that Bem’s self-perception explanation for clas-
sic dissonance results demanded the additional assumption
that actors in those studies, like observers, are making an
attribution error, and more generally that erroneous per-
sonal and social inferences are common and consequential.
Inevitably, this focus on error led social psychologists to
address other shortcomings in “lay psychology” (see Ross,
1977; also Nisbett & Ross, 1980).
While the study of attributional biases, and of inferential
strategies and biases more broadly, has become a distinct
undertaking in social psychology, the broader insight
regarding subjective construal should not be lost. Greater
understanding of the processes of “construal,” which is the
goal of virtually all work in social perception and social
cognition, is required if we are to understand, predict, and
harness the “power of the situation.” The need to attend to
“the actor’s definition of the situation” is particularly
important in meeting the challenge of effective
intervention—the topic to be addressed in the final sec-
tion of this chapter. That is, the targets of any intervention
will respond to their interpretations of the program and
its consequences—both potential consequences and those
that actually take place—rather than those of the designers,
implementers, or funders of the intervention.
Non-Obviousness and Contrasting Methodological
Approaches
The third theme—emphasis on “non-obviousness”—is of
newer vintage, and it too has been subject to some waxing
and waning. To those outside our field, such an emphasis
might be regarded as an intellectually idiosyncratic prefer-
ence. Contemporary physicists and chemists hardly worry
about whether their theories regarding the dimensions
postulated by “string theory” or the dynamics of hydro-
gen bonds are congruent or incongruent with everyday
“lay physics” or “lay chemistry” (if for no other reason,
because most people lack intuitions about those matters).
Perhaps most strikingly, our closer cousins in economics
feel no need to apologize when their accounts of decision
making seem largely to be a refinement of commonsense
principles of self-interest and their aggregated or “market”
consequences. On the contrary, they are reluctant to assign
a role to influences on decision making that can not read-
ily be ascribed to self-interest; although, as we shall later
describe, many of them have succumbed to the allure of
work by psychologists on framing, reference points, loss
aversion, and other such influences (Kahneman & Tversky,
1984; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974; also Gilovich, Griffin, &
Kahneman, 2002).
To those of us inside the field of social psychology, how-
ever, an emphasis on non-obviousness or “surprisingness”
and the research strategies prompted by that emphasis are
no mere disciplinary idiosyncrasy. It reflects our recogni-
tion that all human beings are, in a sense, already intuitive
psychologists (Ross, 1977)—observers and interpreters
of events who already know a great deal about how their
fellow humans feel, think, and act, and in fact predicate
their own behavior on such knowledge. Indeed, many phe-
nomena and problems that social psychologists investigate
arise from everyday failures in predicting and interpreting
behavior, making the processes and biases that lead to such
failures a matter of both practical and theoretical signifi-
cance. Parallel failures of prediction and interpretation by
practitioners and designers of intervention programs, and
the factors that may lead them to “miscalibrate” the relative
importance of various social and non-social influences that
may determine the success of their programs, similarly
become a topic of concern.
Conventional accounts of human behavior offered in
“general psychology” typically reflect the conviction that
behavior is determined by preceding and attending percep-
tions, thoughts, and feelings (the latter pair of which can be
further distinguished or combined to create categories such
as motives, emotions, tastes, preferences, goals, beliefs,
expectations, and plans). These accounts also assign a critical
role to the consequences of behavior, that is, positive or neg-
ative behavioral outcomes, unexpected as well as expected,
that produce learning, which in turn changes expectations
and shapes subsequent behavior.
One set of non-obvious findings shows that the link-
ages among these events are bidirectional. Bruner and
other New Look investigators showed that perceptions
not only shape motives and expectations; the latter also
shape the former. Similarly, Festinger and his followers
showed that while behavior is dictated by existing beliefs
and preferences, one’s behavior can alter those beliefs and
preferences, and that the relationship between richness
of reward and consequences of reward can be opposite
to what one might expect. A second set of non-obvious
findings shows that social and/or situational context and
interpretation can be even more important than most
people recognize. The “ahistorical” Lewinian approach
emphasized the impact of both immediate factors outside
the mind and body of the actor and their contemporary
meaning to the actor. Subsequent investigators proceeded
to show just how powerfully determinative certain of
those external influences and mechanisms of interpreta-
tion, including relatively subtle ones, can be relative to
some of the influences in the standard general psychology
account (immediate needs and incentives, reinforcement
history, personal tastes and dispositions, even beliefs and
expectations).
A taste for non-obviousness was already implicit in some
early research findings on reference groups and relative

deprivation. Newcomb (1943) reported how thoroughly
Bennington coeds in the 1930s had been weaned from the
class-based political views of their well-to-do parents, once
they were exposed to the liberal-to-radical political norms
of their new peers. Readers of Stouffer et al.’s American
Soldier volume (1949) learned that Black GIs stationed in
the South were more satisfied with military life than those
stationed in the North, despite social and physical condi-
tions that objectively seemed much worse—because of how
they were faring relative to the local non-soldiers of their
race to whom they were comparing themselves. But social
psychology’s emphasis on non-obviousness was first seen
clearly in studies involving “channel factors”—that is, fac-
tors that facilitate the connections (we might say “clear
the pathways” or even “grease the skids”) linking values
and intentions to behavior consistent with those values and
intentions. Here the violation of lay intuition lay not in
the fact or direction of the relevant associations, but in the
magnitude of those effects, relative to our initial intuitions
(Prentice & Miller, 1992), and the real-world responses
that could be influenced.
Cartwright (1949) reported that World War II bond
sales doubled when, instead of relying on media appeals
exhorting workers to buy bonds at banks or post offices,
the government arranged for bonds to be sold in the work-
place via face-to-face requests made by co-workers. Other
field studies showed how heavily the friendship choices of
MIT students in the “Westgate” complex depended not on
shared tastes, interests, or views, but on the frequency with
which physical proximity of homes and various unremark-
able architectural factors such as the location of stairways
and trash receptacles put people into casual everyday con-
tact (Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950; see also Whyte,
1956, 1980). Indeed, one well-known and very early study
(Bossard, 1932) showed that while love may depend on
many unfathomable mysteries of the heart, when it comes to
marriage, mere propinquity plays no small role. In that study,
investigation of 5,000 marriage records revealed that
one-third of marriages in Philadelphia took place between
people living within five blocks of each other.
While such findings attracted great interest, it was the
“demonstration experiment” that brought the pursuit of non-
obviousness and the situationist tradition together to most
dramatic effect. The best known of these experiments consti-
tute our field’s “crown jewels”—the experiments most often
featured in our introductory texts and classroom lectures,
and the ones that we describe to strangers when we want to
convince them that we know a secret or two about human
behavior. The object in these experiments was to show that
some specific social context, subtle situational feature, or
other theoretically relevant factor exerted enough influence
to produce behavioral effects that seemed “too large”—or
Continuing Themes in Content and Methodology 9
at least large enough to cast doubt on the implicit theories
held by lay observers.
The dramatic effects shown in classic bystander inter-
vention studies by Latané and Darley (1968) and Darley and
Batson (1973) are cases in point. The former showed inter-
vention rates of 75% for Columbia undergraduates seated
alone when smoke began to waft into the room in which
they were completing a questionnaire but only 10% when
the undergraduate was seated beside two non-intervening
confederates. Indeed, when three potential interveners
saw the smoke, only 38% of cases produced even one
who sought help. The latter documented the huge effect
(i.e., 10% vs. 63%) of “being late” versus “having time to
spare” on the percentage of Princeton seminary students
(some of whom were on their way to tape a sermon on the
Good Samaritan parable!) who stopped to assist someone
lying in a doorway in apparent need.
Studies of techniques for gaining compliance through
induction of guilt, evoking of behavioral norms, taking
advantage of the obligation people feel to reciprocate gifts,
favors, or concessions, and similar time-tested tactics, offer
many compelling examples of surprisingly large effects of
small manipulations (Cialdini, 2007). In one particularly
noteworthy study, Freedman and Fraser (1966) showed
that the percentage of homemakers who would agree to
a “big request” (to erect a large, crudely lettered “Drive
Carefully” sign on their front lawn) increased from 17%
to 76% when the request had been preceded by a much
smaller request (that they merely place a 3-inch
3-inch
sign with a related auto safety message in a window) made
by a different person, two weeks earlier. In another, Cialdini
et al. (1975) showed that inducing refusal of a big request
(to assume a continuing obligation to counsel youths at a
juvenile detention center) could increase compliance with
a smaller one (to serve as chaperone for one outing only)
from 17% to 50%.
Bearing in mind the lessons of the subjectivist tradi-
tion should lead us to recognize that when seemingly small
changes in the situation have large effects on behavior, it
may be because those small changes significantly changed
the meaning of the situation for the actor. Consider, for
example, the finding that European countries requir-
ing drivers to explicitly “opt out” of a program allowing
the harvesting of their organs if they are the victim of a
fatal accident recruit five to ten times as many potential
donors as countries that require them to explicitly “opt in”
to such a program (Johnson & Goldstein, 2003). Superficial
consideration might lead one to attribute this difference to
laziness on the part of potential donors; but further analysis
would lead one to recognize that the “opt-in” procedure
conveys the message that participation in the program is a
matter of altruism or of indifference as to the treatment of
10 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
one’s corpse, whereas the “opt-out” procedure conveys the
message that participation is normative and non-participation
reflects idiosyncratic rejection of a norm.
While between-condition comparisons can be com-
pelling, the findings in the most dramatic (and contro-
versial) demonstration experiments, such as Milgram’s
obedience experiments (1963; 1974), Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford
Prison experiment (see Zimbardo, 2007), or even the most
famous version of Asch’s conformity experiments (1951),
that defied lay intuition, did not involve any such compari-
sons. Rather, they demonstrated that particular contexts could
produce actions and/or failures to act, displays of seeming
cruelty, mindless conformity or obedience, or buckling to
authority that most of us would not expect from “normal
people.” Fully appreciating the implications of these stud-
ies, and the broader lesson about the power of the types
of situational variables that social psychologists explore,
reduces the surprise experienced upon learning that most of
the low-level perpetrators of the horrors of the Holocaust,
such as concentration camp guards and bureaucratic func-
tionaries, were ordinary people who lived unexceptional
lives both before and after their infamous deeds, rather
than self-selected psychopaths and sadists (Arendt, 1963;
Goldhagen, 1996; Zimbardo, 2007).
The crucial point here is that even without benefit
of inferential statistics, random assignment, or control
groups, readers given only a single data point—that 65% of
Milgram’s subjects fully obeyed the experimenter’s com-
mands to administer potentially life-threatening shocks to
an innocent victim, that 70% of Asch’s subjects conformed
to a blatantly erroneous unanimous judgment offered by
their peers, or that none of the pseudo-patients in Rosenhan’s
(1973) classic study of psychiatric hospitals were ever rec-
ognized as “fakers”—respond to the apparent size and the
surprisingness of those effects. Note that this idea of “psy-
chological” or “intuitive” effect size, which involves an
evaluation of the findings in light of prior assumptions and
expectations, is very different from (and often completely
independent of) any of the measures of “statistical” effect
size so in vogue these days. That these statistically unin-
terpretable but psychologically powerful effects remain
among the most widely cited in our field gives powerful
evidence of the importance of these more intuitive or psy-
chological criteria.
It should be noted that in none of the celebrated stud-
ies cited earlier did the investigators explicitly contrast the
relevant findings with lay predictions.1 Rather, in these
classic studies, the power of the situation, the channel
factor, the reference group, etc., was conveyed implicitly.
Students and colleagues who were surprised upon read-
ing the results of these studies were not explicitly invited
to consider the power of the operative situational factors
relative to that of “personal moral values.” Nevertheless,
it clearly was the violation of their intuition that only cer-
tain “exceptional” kinds of people would obey, conform,
or act brutally in the relevant situations that accounts for
such surprise. The same is true for the violation of intuition
that only certain kinds of people would fail to intervene
in the bystander intervention studies or agree to put up a
huge “Drive Carefully” sign on their lawns in the Freedman
and Fraser study.
It is also worth noting that the intuitive effect size
assessments that we routinely and automatically make
depend crucially upon the precise procedural details and
results in each study. Thus, Milgram’s study is not just
about “obedience” in the abstract, but obedience in a par-
ticular, carefully scripted situation. Had Milgram chosen
as the learner’s punishment, instead of increasingly power-
ful electric shocks, increasingly stringent fines (from 1 to
2 to 3 cents . . .) or worse yet, “fines” involving mere hypo-
thetical points, it is unlikely that the studies would have
been published—much less that they would remain a clas-
sic over half a century later. Nor would these studies have
had such a major impact had they shown only 10% obedi-
ence, even if that 10% were statistically significant com-
pared to some simple control condition.
Another implication to be drawn from the aforementioned
studies is that anyone observing the relevant behavior—even
if he or she knew the specifics of the situation confronting
the actor, but especially if he or she did not, would make
unwarranted dispositional inferences. In addition, any-
one hearing of the behavior second-hand would be much
more likely to assume that it was something about the spe-
cific actor rather than something about the specifics of the
situation that accounted for that behavior (Gilovich, 1987).
Indeed, there is some danger that simply reading summaries
of those studies could lead readers to draw too broad a situa-
tionist lesson. That is, they might overestimate the power of
conformity pressures, the degree of abandonment of respon-
sibility in the “agentic state,” or the likelihood that the role
of prison guard will prompt sadistic behavior “in general,”
without recognizing some of the unique, and subtle, features
of the situations in question that made them so potent.
As the field of social psychology evolved, a second
kind of non-obvious demonstration came into promi-
nence: studies focused on “process-relevant” measures
or manipulations designed to demonstrate the critical
1 Milgram did report that, for one version of the study, psychia-
trists failed to predict anything like the actual rates of obedience
to the bitter end that he obtained; and Bierbrauer (1979) showed
a similar failure on the part of research participants explicitly re-
enacting the roles of “teacher” and “learner.”

(usually under-appreciated) role of various underlying cogni-
tive or motivational mediators of response. This increasing
emphasis on process, and de-emphasis on “mere demon-
strations” of phenomena, was reflected in a progression of
research strategies. The initial strategy involved the use
of internal analysis to show that phenomena and processes
(for example, in group dynamics work, “pressures to uni-
formity”) become more apparent when measures of the
variables suggested by the relevant conceptual analysis
and theory (notably, measures of group “cohesiveness”)
suggested that they should. After Lewin’s death, the prime
strategy for the inheritors of his tradition increasingly
came to involve direct manipulations of process-relevant
variables in 2
2 designs of the sort that remain a standard
practice in our discipline. In these designs, the objective
is to show that the phenomenon of interest is evident, or
perhaps dramatically evident, when, but only when, the
investigator’s theory and conceptual analysis dictates that
it should be.
In this tradition, the ultimate achievement was a research
design that pitted the process of immediate interest against
some other potential source of influence in a way that
prompted erroneous or “opposite direction” expectations
and predictions. The gasp of surprise from laypeople (and
sometimes even researchers not armed with the correct
theory) when the data were presented, rather than mere
acceptance of the study for publication in a leading journal,
became the investigators’ reward. This art form reached
its zenith in the Aronson and Mills (1959) study on the
effect of embarrassing versus innocuous “initiations” into
a group on subsequent ratings of the group and its activi-
ties, and the Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) study of the
effects of receiving large versus small cash payments on
internalization of the counterattitudinal views expressed
by the payment recipient. Aronson and Carlsmith’s (1963)
study on the effects of harsh versus mild injunctions not
to play with a toy on the subsequent attractiveness of that
forbidden toy, Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett’s (1973) study
on the undermining effects of extrinsic incentives on the
intrinsic interest preschool children showed in novel art
materials, and other dissonance and self-perception clas-
sics were in the same tradition.
Not sufficiently noted, or tested, in the dissonance the-
ory studies described above was an implicit “tipping point”
hypothesis regarding the effects of “just enough” versus
“not quite enough” force/ incentive/ justification, etc., to
produce behavior change (Lepper, 1983). In addition, while
dissonance researchers used elaborate manipulations, with
only a few exceptions (most notably those reported by
Zimbardo, 1969; also Marlowe, Frager, & Nuttall, 1965),
they relied exclusively on rather mundane paper-and-pencil
measures of dissonance reduction. The dissonance researchers
Continuing Themes in Content and Methodology 11
also showed a surprising lack of interest in the conditions
under which their dependent measures, namely reported
attitudes and beliefs, persisted over time and influenced
subsequent behavior. These gaps in research may be one
reason why there was so little applied work in this tradition,
or alternatively the lack of interest in application may help
account for the existence of the relevant gaps. Ironically, as
we shall discuss later, researchers influenced by the hyper-
cognitive tenets of self-perception theory made somewhat
more use of behavioral measures and showed more inclina-
tion to do studies with clear applied implications.
There is another use of the 2
2 design that has become
particularly prevalent in the study of cultural differences,
but that was used much earlier to good effect by Stanley
Schachter in his once influential 1959 monograph, The
Psychology of Affiliation. This design “crosses” a person
or status variable (like birth order, or later, SES, race, or
culture of origin) with the manipulation of a theoretically
relevant moderator or mediator variable (e.g., high versus
low fear, or high versus low cultural salience). As in other
studies using a 2
2 design, the goal of the researcher is to
show that one of the two variables that are crossed “mat-
ters” only (or at least more) given one rather than the other
value of the second variable in the study’s design—in pre-
cisely the manner predicted by the investigator’s theory
and conceptual analysis.
Put differently, as the foregoing discussion implies,
social psychologists have long wrestled with a fundamental
issue of self-definition and self-presentation: To what extent
is our field more akin to the physical sciences wherein the
goal is the development of increasingly powerful general
theories and abstract statements of lawful relationships, and
to what extent is the task we are engaged in more akin to
that of philosophers, and even dramatists, whose goal is
to provide a compelling and accurate account of the behav-
ior of people in the context of society? Even the small
sample of studies we have described thus far suggests that
both characterizations can sometimes apply to our field.
Consider the extreme versions of two different meth-
odological approaches portrayed in Table 1.1, based on
Lepper (2009). The first approach involves formulating,
testing, and gradually refining general and abstract psycho-
logical theories, as textbook models of science describe.
From this perspective, multiple conditions, explicit com-
parisons, random assignment, and the like are crucial; and
details of procedure are considered largely secondary. This
approach has generally disposed psychologists to investi-
gate underlying cognitive, perceptual, motivational, and
social processes with, especially in more recent times, a
heavy reliance on analyses that focus on observed correla-
tions between outcome measures and measures of presumed
mediators (see Baron & Kenny, 1986, which now has been
12 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
Table 1.1 Contrasting Models in Social Psychology
“Textbook Model of Science” “Empirical Parables”
• Theory-based hypothesis testing • Phenomenon-based
demonstrations
• “Deductive” • “Inductive”
• Explicit comparisons • Implicit comparisons
• Method and results independent • Method and results
interdependent
• Procedural details secondary • Procedural details critical
• Statistical criteria of effect size • Intuitive criteria of effect size
• Impartial and objective • Persuasive and subjective
• Presenting “the findings” • Telling “the story”
cited over 10,000 times). Unfortunately, according to some,
it also has resulted in a greater premium being placed on
studies that lend themselves to the confines of the labora-
tory, wherein self-report measures relevant to such medi-
ators can readily be solicited, and to a decreased use of
behavioral measures, especially in applied field studies
(Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2007; Cialdini, 2009).2
The second approach begins with laboratory demonstra-
tions (or “bottling”) of specific, provocative phenomena—
generally phenomena with familiar real-world analogues
(Abelson, Frey, & Gregg, 2004). Studies in this tradition
tell a story, indeed offer a kind of “empirical parable”
designed to enlighten us—to hold up a kind of mirror
that allows us to recognize something about the way we, and
our neighbors, respond to particular contexts or in service
of particular motives. In a sense, the investigator, like a
playwright, stages a plausible brief drama (in which all
roles save that of “subject” are scripted), one designed
to prompt us to (re)consider our current theories about
some social behavior of consequence. Thus, procedural
details are critical to our evaluations of the study, and
method and results interdependent. Readers feel impressed
and informed upon finding that their intuitions were dis-
confirmed by actual results. Researchers following this
approach typically then proceed to test experimental varia-
tions designed to illuminate the factors most important in
producing the relevant phenomenon and those determining
or “moderating” its magnitude.
2 Notwithstanding the analytic advantages of such analyses,
there is a potential problem of “over-claiming” that arises espe-
cially when the analyses make use of self-reports of cognitive or
affective states. The limitations of such analysis in pinpointing
“underlying processes” and particularly in establishing causality
and should be abundantly clear in light of papers by Nisbett and
Wilson (1977); Wilson and Gilbert (2008); and others on the sta-
tus of the types of self-reports that these analyses necessarily rely
upon (see also Spencer, Zanna, & Fong, 2005).
Of course, these two models represent extreme cases.
Investigators whose concern was building and testing
general theories often sought to show the world that their
insights about theory allowed them to generate, and con-
firm, non-obvious hypotheses. This was certainly the case
for the dissonance theorists (see Carlsmith, Ellsworth, &
Aronson, 1976; Ellsworth, 2010). Indeed, most memorable
studies in social psychology combine elements of both
approaches, even studies that we remember mainly for
findings that can be described in terms of simple situation-
ist influences. Thus, although the Darley and Batson study
(1973) tested three formal hypotheses about bystander
intervention, it is most remembered for demonstrating that
the presence or absence of “extra time” could determine
whether seminarians on their way to deliver a sermon on
the Good Samaritan parable would stop to help an individ-
ual in obvious need of assistance. Likewise, although the
famous “Bobo doll” studies conducted by Bandura, Ross,
and Ross (1963) explicitly compared the effects of different
types of “models” and media on young children’s inclina-
tion to follow the aggressive example set by those models,
it too became famous not because of such comparisons but
because of the finding that “normal” middle-class children
can readily be induced to imitate such aggressive behavior
themselves. Indeed, the same general argument applies to
most of the well-known multiple-condition studies using
“high impact” designs (Aronson & Carlsmith, 1968) and
consequential behavioral measures that we have described
above.3
In this discussion of differing approaches, it is important
to bear in mind that in social psychology, theories, empiri-
cal generalizations, and even accounts of phenomena are
always underspecified with regard to domain of applicabil-
ity and stipulation of necessary and sufficient conditions.
Accordingly, in both traditions, disconfirmed hypotheses
or failed demonstrations are less informative than suc-
cesses. Furthermore, the design of influential experiments
involves art and skill as well as correct scientific insights
3 In the interest of historical accuracy, we should also note that
both Milgram and Asch—but not Zimbardo or Rosenhan—did
run different versions of the study and/or different conditions
within studies. Milgram, in fact, documented many factors (from
the prestige of the setting to the physical remoteness of the
“teacher” vis-a-vis the “learner”) that “significantly” influenced
rates of obedience; and Asch showed that whereas one variable
(ease of discrimination task) mattered much less than one might
imagine, another (unanimity of the confederates offering the
wrong answer) was absolutely critical. But in each case it is the
single one-condition effect that continues to be celebrated in our
textbooks and that most importantly challenges our intuitions.
 Social History, New Challenges, and Dialectics of Social Research 13
and theories; and the impact on the field of many such
studies may have also reflected the investigators’ ability to
write persuasively and engagingly (Jordan & Zanna, 2007).
We note, too, that some classic paradigms in our field, most
notably both Asch’s conformity studies and Milgram’s obe-
dience research (which developed when Milgram was fol-
lowing up on Asch’s most provocative findings), produced
results initially unanticipated by the investigator, who then
was quick to recognize the significance of those findings,
and to alter the direction of his research and theorizing
accordingly.
SOCIAL HISTORY, NEW CHALLENGES, AND
DIALECTICS OF SOCIAL RESEARCH
An ancient aphorism, as Ned Jones aptly noted, holds that
social psychology is a field with a long past, but a short his-
tory. There are two major chapters in this story. The first,
which marked the emergence more than a century ago of
psychology, under the leadership of Wundt, Helmholtz,
James, Hall, Cattell, Titchener, Brentano, Ebbinghaus, and
others, as a distinct field of study, involved the shift from
philosophical speculation and analysis to reliance upon data.
The second, as Jones described at length, involved the emer-
gence, just before and after WWII, under Lewin, Hovland,
Sherif, Asch, Festinger, and others, of social psychology as
a sub-discipline that relied on experiments in which investi-
gators directly manipulated social and situational factors of
theoretical relevance. Even within this more modern exper-
imental period, however, dramatic changes have occurred
within social psychology—not only in the specific theories
and problems under study, but also in the goals and para-
digms that serve to define our field. Indeed, on balance,
twentieth century social psychology seems to have been
driven as much by phenomena—both those demonstrated
in the laboratory and those documented in mass media—as
by theories.
Influences from Society at Large
The history and agenda of social psychology seems inex-
tricably entwined with the history and priorities of the
American society in which it was developed. Indeed, in
some instances, it is possible to identify specific events
(e.g., the radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds, the Bay
of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the assassination of John Kennedy,
the desegregation of schools, the murder of Kitty Genovese,
or the 9/11 attacks on the United States) that have led to
particular research programs. More typically, we see, in
hindsight, the ways in which larger social trends or events
set the stage for an interest in particular phenomena. Table 1.2
notes a number of salient historical events and trends in
American social history that we believe helped to shape
the agenda of American social psychologists over the past
century. Thus, World War II and the Holocaust clearly stim-
ulated interest in ethnocentrism, aggression, propaganda,
and group morale. McCarthyism gave ominous importance
to the study of conformity. The civil rights movement pro-
vided the background for heightened interest in prejudice
and racism, as well as social identity (Tajfel, 1974). Later,
the influx of African Americans into the field helped to
shift our research focus from the mind and motives of the
perpetrators to the effects of racism on its targets.
The Vietnam War, arguably, was the impetus for increased
interest in problems of obedience and disobedience, sunk
costs, and, ultimately, minority influence (Moscovici, 1976);
and the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the treat-
ment of suspected terrorists have clearly renewed that
interest. Post-Vietnam trends in American social history—the
inward focus of the “me” generation of the 1970s—surely
played a role in our field’s increasing preoccupation with
the self. In turn, both the focus on the self and misgivings
about that self-centeredness arguably played a key role in
the emergence of “positive” psychology. Finally, it is surely
no coincidence that cultural psychology in general, and
research on collectivist Asian cultures in particular, came
to the forefront of our field during a period when the “eco-
nomic tigers” of East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea) began
to roar, and immigration from those nations reached new
heights.
In considering the events listed in Table 1.2, the present
authors are struck by some missed opportunities to evalu-
ate the social and societal impact of “natural experiments”
wherein new technologies (television, personal computers,
credit cards) came to be widely adopted in some regions or
countries before others. We write this chapter at a moment
when two events of historical import—the beginning of the
Obama presidency and the worsening of the most difficult
economic period since the Great Depression of the 1930s—
are very much on the minds of most Americans, including
social psychologists. What impact will these events have
on what we study or on what we find when we investi-
gate racial stereotyping and “stereotype threat” or explore
“risk aversion” and “loss aversion” in economic decision
making? How will our research agenda, not to mention our
methods, be shaped by the increasing prominence of the
Internet and various new information-sharing and social-
networking technologies? Answers to these questions will
help shape the social psychology of the future.
It should go without saying that Table 1.2 is replete
with oversimplifications and omissions, especially omis-
sions involving societal changes that ebb and flow, such
14 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application

Table 1.2 Historical Influences on Social Psychology

Attitudes and Attitude Social (and Self)
Era Context Groups and Group Dynamics Change Perception/Cognition
1930s Great Depression Frustration and aggression Prejudice Stereotyping
Fascism Authoritarianism: Lewin Adorno Attitudes vs. behaviors: LaPiere Empathy and accuracy
et al.
Conformity: Sherif
1940s World War II Norms and productivity: Lewin Propaganda The New Look—Perceptual biases:
Holocaust Relative deprivation: Stouffer Bruner et al.
Cooperation vs. competition: Sherif
1950s Suburbia Laboratory group dynamics: Prejudice: Allport Social comparison theory:
McCarthyism Cartwright & Zander, etc. Communication and persuasion: Festinger
Cold War Conformity: Asch Hovland, Janis, & Kelley Naïve psychology: Heider
Desegregation Affiliation: Schachter Dissonance theory: Festinger, Construal processes: Asch
Home television Game theory: Luce & Aronson
Raiffa,Thibaut & Kelley Balance and other consistency
Aggression: Bandura, etc. models: Heider, McGuire
1960s Civil Rights movement Obedience: Milgram Interactive persuasion models Two-factor model of emotion:
Vietnam War Other compliance studies Learning vs. yielding: McGuire Schachter
Recreational drugs Social facilitation: Zajonc Interpersonal attraction: Walster Self-perception theory: Bem
Intergenerational Bystander helping: Latané & & Berscheid Correspondent inferences: Jones
conflict Darley Ingratiation: Jones Attribution theory: Kelley
Deindividuation: Zimbardo
1970s “Me” generation Social loafing: Latané Stereotyping: Brewer, etc. Self-perception and attribution:
Black power Social identity: Tajfel Mere exposure: Zajonc Bem, Jones, Kelley
Rise of feminism Behavioral confirmation: Snyder Biased assimilation: Chapman Judgmental biases and heuristics:
More women working Minority influence: Moscovici & Chapman, Ross & Lepper, Kahneman & Tversky
Computers Social influence: Cialdini et al. Snyder et al. Self-determination: Deci, Lepper
Deep vs. superficial processing: Fundamental attribution error: Ross
Eagly & Chaiken, Petty & Salience, actors vs. observers:
Cacioppo Jones & Nisbett, Taylor
Social scripts: Abelson
Self-efficacy: Bandura
1980s Reaganism and Social traps, commons problem, Attitude priming: Fazio, Decision making: Kahneman &
Reaganomics Prisoner’s Dilemma: Dawes, Platt, Higgins Tversky
Personal computers etc. Psychophysiology: Cacioppo Intuitive scientist: Nisbett & Ross
End of Cold War Behavioral economics, ultimatum & Petty Self-concepts: Markus, Higgins
Breakup of USSR game, bargaining and negotiation Affect vs. cognition: Zajonc Self-affirmation: Steele
Evolution of cooperation Attitude automaticity: Zanna Automaticity: Gilbert
& Fazio Social cognition: Fiske & Taylor,
Helplessness vs. mastery Wyer & Srull
orientations: Dweck
1990s Democratization Cultural psychology: Markus & Collective representations: Priming unconscious processes:
Globalization Kitayama, Shweder, Nisbett Moscovici Bargh
Rise of East Asia Conflict resolution Stereotype threat: Steele “Ironic” processes: Wegner
Internet and cell Close relationships: Aron, Clark, Aversive racism: Dovidio & Social illusions: Taylor, etc.
phones Duck, etc. Gaertner Prospect theory: Kahneman &
Automatic vs. controlled Tversky
processing
2000s Reality television Terror management theory: Positive psychology: Diener, Self theories: Dweck
Fundamentalism Greenberg & Pyszczynski Seligman, Myers Further heuristics and biases:
9/11 and terrorism Virtual groups and relationships: Implicit attitudes: Banaji & Gilovich, etc.
Iraq and Abu Ghraib Blascovich Greenwald Affective forecasting: Wilson &
Economic meltdown Lucifer effect: Zimbardo Dynamics of race: Eberhardt, Gilbert
Markus, Richeson, Shelton Social neuroscience

as decreases and increases in overall economic prosperity and/ The most notable omission of all involves the dra-
or income inequality, unionization of the workforce, matic shifts in the demographic composition of American
availability of easy credit, rises and falls in religious society—not only the influx of immigrants from non-
observance, or the popularity of particular denominations. European countries, but the decline in the percentage of
 Social History, New Challenges, and Dialectics of Social Research 15
traditional two-parent families and especially the increase
in the number of elderly Americans and the increased
period of time between retirement and death. The intent
of our table is merely to provide some illustrations of the
manner in which changing external events and social trends
may influence the sorts of problems likely to become prom-
inent in the field in the years to follow.
It should be noted, as well, that this table can be mis-
leading because it generally contains entries on particular
topics only when they first emerged as a major research
topic. Thus, an analytic approach like Prospect Theory
first came to prominence in the early 1990s, but its influ-
ence has continued to grow in the ensuing decade. Interest
in non-conscious influences on thinking and perceiving
was strong between the two world wars, declined in the
period when psychoanalytic theory later lost its luster, but
was renewed when new research methods and a general
interest in sources of bias in judgment and decision mak-
ing came together. Likewise, the effects of external events
are not always immediate, but may appear only a decade
later. Terror management theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, &
Solomon, 1986) predates the 9/11 attacks but may have
gained additional prominence as a result of those attacks.
Finally, we should note one other important class of
influences not noted in Table 1.2 that have had a quite
direct impact on social psychology in the United States—
namely, changes in governmental policies concerning the
funding of graduate education and of research grants in
psychology. In the first instance, as Jones (1985) noted, the
massive growth of our field (and many others) following
WWII was in no small part a consequence of the provi-
sions of the G.I. Bill that provided funding for advanced
educational opportunities to veterans of that war. The fact
that this bill incidentally ensured a vast overrepresentation
of men with shared military experiences entering the field
in the post-war period may also have had some important
influences on the types of topics that were central to the
field (e.g., conformity, social comparison, group productiv-
ity, attitude change) and the ones that were largely ignored
(e.g., close relationships, interpersonal attraction, effects
of social support) during that era. Conversely, with later
universal funding of Ph.D. students, at least in most promi-
nent psychology programs, the increasing influx of women
brought the latter topics to the fore, which in turn increased
the attractiveness of the field for other women.
Additionally, under some administrations, specific policy
decisions concerning the eligibility of many areas of social
psychology research or graduate training in social psychol-
ogy for federal funding through the NIH have also had
powerful and immediate effects on the types of problems
and paradigms likely to achieve prominence. These effects
can be positive, as in the case of recent increases in funding
targeted for work in social neuroscience (and, we antici-
pate, work related to energy conservation and the combat-
ing of global warming). But too often the effects have
been negative, as in the cases of topics like interpersonal
attraction, gender studies, game theory, and many others
that have at one time or another been made specifically
ineligible for NIH funding. Some of these ups and downs
in funding have reflected the politics and ideology of
particular administrations, or a willingness to cater to par-
ticular constituencies. But in some cases the shutting off
of funding was as baffling as it was ill advised. Consider
for example, and with benefit of hindsight, the decision
to eschew funding of work on topics like the “commons
dilemma” (Hardin, 1968)—a game-theory topic that
has proven to be all too relevant to our understanding of
why sensible people get caught up in pyramid or “Ponzi”
schemes and fail to protect themselves against the vagaries
of stock market booms, bubbles, and busts.
Finally, Table 1.2 also does not include the considerable
effects of the establishment of Institutional Review Boards
and their accompanying regulations on research that may
pose some risk of harm to participants. For example, the pub-
lication of Milgram’s first obedience studies was followed
quickly by the publication of ethical critiques of these studies,
so that it became virtually impossible for others to replicate
(or fail to replicate) these studies within the United States
(Blass, 2004; Miller, 1986). For thirty years, until Burger
(2009) recognized the feasibility and value of replicating only
the initial stages of the Milgram paradigm (up to the point at
which the “learner” first demanded to be released from the
study, and beyond which the participants who continued to
give the next shock rarely stopped until the maximum shock
level was reached), the only further studies on this topic were
conducted in countries without IRB review.
Yet, in considering the role of politics in social psychol-
ogy, notwithstanding the claims of its critics, it would be
wrong to characterize our field as one consistently dominated
by tenets of political liberalism. While many social psycholo-
gists voiced liberal criticisms regarding past administrations’
“trickle-down” economics, the conduct of war in Iraq, and the
security measures taken in the name of fighting terrorism, an
earlier generation willingly helped in the design of wartime
propaganda (for example, the film series, Why We Fight) to
boost the morale of soldiers and increase civilian support
for the war effort, and in the development of techniques to
enhance worker productivity. Indeed, if any consistent ideo-
logical strain exists in applied social psychology, it is one
best characterized as a combination of reformism and prag-
matism—a combination that sometimes makes for strained
relationships. In particular, social psychological expertise is
welcomed when we help to document need for intervention
and suggest specific, theory-based, intervention strategies.
16 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
But our input is less welcome when we advocate formal experi-
mental evaluation designs rather than the subjective impressions
of participants to document program effectiveness. The con-
tributions and challenges of intervention work will receive
more extended discussion in the final section of this chapter.
Influences from Psychology in General
While sociopolitical factors have helped to shape social
psychology, its concerns and methodologies have also been
influenced by changes taking place in other fields of psy-
chology. Interestingly, however, in the first decades of the
modern experimental era in social psychology, it was social
psychology’s relative independence from developments in
the mainstreams of the field that was most notable. While
many areas of psychology became steeped in psychoana-
lytic theory in the 1920s and remained so well past WWII,
social psychology remained largely unaffected by Freudian
thought. Likewise, while general experimental psychology
during those decades came under the sway of “behaviorism”
and various conditioning models, social psychology did
not succumb to the reductionism of Watson, Pavlov, Hull,
Skinner, and company. Instead, with only a few exceptions
(Lott & Lott, 1985; Staats, 1975; Staats & Staats, 1963), the
field remained resolutely cognitive. Indeed, social psychol-
ogy’s insistence on the central role of “meaning” attached
to potential stimuli, responses, reinforcers, and ultimately
more complex social contexts, constitutes one of its most
powerful continuing legacies.4
Only decades later during the cognitive revolution—as
the computer metaphor for mind replaced the array of prior
hydraulic models of needs, drives, and tension systems—
did social psychology change substantially as a function of
developments in other areas of psychology. In particular,
soon after Lewinian equilibria, Festingerian pressures toward
cognitive consistency, and the dynamic force-field models of
Asch and Milgram had been supplanted by the more purely
4 The ambitious and highly influential work on persuasion
by Carl Hovland and his Yale colleagues paid lip service to
the behaviorist tradition in learning and memory. But their
systematic elaboration of factors (source, content, recipient, and
potential consequence of the persuasive message) actually made
little use of the relevant theoretical machinery. Moreover, contem-
porary critics such as Solomon Asch (1952) were quick to point
out that the putative source of a message changed the way that
message was understood or “construed”—in a famous example,
that “rebellion” is a very different “object of judgment,” which
in turn leads to a very different degree of acceptance, when the
quotation advocating it is attributed to its actual source, Thomas
Jefferson, than when the same quotation is falsely attributed to
the Communist leader V. I. Lenin.
cognitive analyses of Bem, Jones, Kelley, and the other self-
perception and attribution theorists, the work of two Israeli
psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, on
“heuristics of judgment” (Kahneman & Tversky, 1972, 1973;
Tversky & Kahneman, 1973, 1974) began to make its influ-
ence felt. Within a decade, their papers in the judgment and
decision-making tradition were among the most frequently
cited by social psychologists, and their indirect influence on
the content and direction of our field was even greater than
could be discerned from any citation index.
The three heuristics they proposed—which involved the
inferential use of cognitive salience or “availability,” simi-
larity or “representativeness,” and initial “anchors”—were
not irrational or unreasonable. On the contrary, in many
judgment contexts they led to accurate or at least “good
enough” assessments. However, their use, especially at
the cost of ignoring more normative strategies or readily
accessible sources of accurate estimation, disposed users to
make erroneous judgments of frequency, likelihood, and the
relative contribution of causal candidates. Indeed, they can
even lead us to commit striking violations of formal norma-
tive standards such as failure to give weight to probative
“base-rate” information and, most dramatically, violation
of the obvious logical truism that the intersection of two
sets (e.g., feminist bank tellers) cannot be larger than one
of the constituent sets (e.g., bank tellers). Social psycholo-
gists were quick to recognize the significance of this work
for understanding biases in the attribution process and other
shortcomings in the way laypeople perform other tasks of
intuitive psychology such as prediction, inductive general-
ization, and updating of theories and beliefs (Kahneman,
Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Nisbett & Ross, 1980).
Slightly later, Kahneman and Tversky made a second
major contribution by exploring the effects of non-normative
influences not on inference and judgment but on decision
making. Their ground-breaking papers on Prospect Theory
(Kahneman & Tversky, 1979, 1984) had a profound effect
on young behavioral economists. In fact, their contributions,
along with those of Daniel Ariely, Robyn Dawes, Baruch
Fischhoff, Robert Frank, Tom Gilovich, Dale Griffin, Chip
Health, George Loewenstein, Paul Slovic, Richard Thaler,
and other researchers whose work lay at the intersection of
social and cognitive psychology, created an important inter-
disciplinary field of study (Gilovich, Griffin, & Kahneman,
2002). New work in this field, described in more detail later
in this chapter, has important applied implications both for
everyday decisions that people make about expenditures
of time and money and for the formulation and framing of
social policy—implications recognized by the awarding of
the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics to Daniel Kahneman
(unfortunately, too late for it to be shared with his lifelong
friend and collaborator, Amos Tversky, who died in 1996).
 Social History, New Challenges, and Dialectics of Social Research 17

Contemporaneously, new approaches to social cognition
(Fiske & Taylor, 1984) came into prominence. Some research-
ers applied the methods and measures of cognitive psychology
and cognitive science (e.g., reaction time and eye tracking) to the
study of social perception, social memory, and social information
processing (Hastie et al., 1980; Wyer & Carlson, 1979; Wyer &
Srull, 1989). Others went even farther afield to borrow various
brain-imaging techniques (fMRI, ERP, etc.) from the burgeoning
field of neuroscience, creating the new area of “social neurosci-
ence” (Cacioppo et al., 2007; Cacioppo & Berntson, 1992) and the
even more recent offshoot known as “social cognitive neurosci-
ence” (both Blascovich & Mendes and Lieberman, this volume;
Ochsner & Lieberman, 2001). Again, a more detailed discussion
of these developments will appear later in this chapter.
Influences Within Social Psychology
Perhaps the most important influences that have shaped
social psychology over the last eight decades, however,
have come from within the field, as researchers confronted
a changing series of challenges regarding the field’s appro-
priate content and “mission.” As both Jones (1985) and
Allport (1954a) noted, the challenge in the field’s prehis-
tory was the lack of separate identity, with distinct theories
and methods—a challenge that was met most successfully
by Lewin and his students with the emergence of distinct
methodologies, “middle-range” theories (most loosely
adapted from field theory, with its emphasis on oppos-
ing forces and equilibrium states), and a “can-do” spirit.
Moreover, social psychology has remained eclectic and
interdisciplinary, taking “useful” theories and methods
from wherever they could be found in a way that gave it
a clear identity (see Asch, 1952). But the ensuing decades
have lacked neither attacks from without and within the
field nor soul-searching on the part of even its leaders.
However, there are also some enduring philosophical
issues or polarities that have characterized intellectual
inquiry over the ages and across many disciplines. Are

Table 1.3 Prominent Research Traditions in Social Psychology

Big Issues and/or
Distinctive
Dominant Traditions Characteristics Methodologies
Group Dynamics Practicality Field experiments vs. correlations
1935-1950 Obviousness Bottling real-world phenomena
Scientism Cover stories, confederates, covert measures
Internal analysis to assess mediation
Yale School—Attitudes Rationality of persuasion Persuasion experiments—In the lab: Captive audience, high transparency
1950-1960 Obviousness Primarily self-report attitude measures
Festinger/Schachter Irrationality Complex experimental dramas in the lab
1955-1970 Non-obviousness 2
2 designs to assess mediation
“Frivolity” Counterintuitive predictions/findings/presentations
Ethical concerns Often opposite direction of effects
High Impact Era Good vs. evil Experimental dramas as above and
1965-1975 Ethical concerns Counterintuitive predictions—But “size,” not direction, of effects at issue
(Milgram, Cialdini, Often person
situation designs
Latané & Darley, etc.) Pure cases of demonstration experiments
Attribution and Self- Rationality vs. bias in Initially hypothetical paper-and-pencil manipulations
Perception Theories inferences and measures; concern with accuracy
1965-1990 Later, more behavioral measures; concern with biases and applications
Social Cognition High experimental precision Cognitive psychology methods/concepts
1970-1995 Low social relevance Reaction time/mental chronometry/imagery prototypes/multidimensional scaling, etc.
Hypothesis-testing, emphasis on precise theories
Explicit statistical analysis to assess mediation
Judgment and Decision Rationality of choice and Gedanken experiments with real data (some almost
Making inference did not need subjects)
1975-2000 Specific normative standards and claims
Non-conscious Processing Automaticity vs. Non-conscious priming/framing manipulations
1990-2005 deliberative control (eliminating problems of “demand”)
Implicit vs. explicit attitudes—Controlled vs. automatic processing
Cultural Social Universality vs. parochiality Cross-cultural experiments
Psychology Initially, exported American paradigms and main-effect findings
1990-2005 Later, culture
manipulation designs and interaction predictions
Social Neuroscience Localization in brain Brain-imaging techniques—EEG, fMRI, MEG, PET
2000– and other neuroscience techniques
18 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
people generally “good” or “evil,” rational or irrational,
independent or communal, and so forth? Or, more reason-
ably, in what situations does one pole or another become
most powerful? Table 1.3 lists a progression of “domi-
nant” research traditions and suggests some of the larger
issues that the content or methodology of each tradition
sought or failed to address. We trust that the reader will
recognize their relevance when we describe some of the
shifts in research fashion and emphasis over the decades.
We also trust that it will be also apparent that whenever
our field becomes preoccupied with investigations focused
on one “pole” or the other—for example, human “ratio-
nality” versus “irrationality” or the essential “goodness”
versus “evil” of human nature—there comes a point of
diminishing returns whereby the payoffs for investigators
willing to explore the opposite pole become increasingly
attractive. Moreover, events in the world outside academia
may accelerate the speed and extent of “yin-to-yang”
movements in the field that might start for other reasons
(McGuire, 1973).
Likewise, whenever one set of methods or paradigms,
with its various expedient compromises and choices in
terms of balancing desire for control of variables against
that of capturing real-world complexity and consequential
responses, comes to dominate our field for a period of time,
the use of alternative procedures and designs (calling for
different trade-offs and compromises) gains in value, and
attractiveness. And, typically, the results from such shifts
in methodology, like shifts in research emphasis, include
findings that raise new issues and challenge the wisdom of
the day. Recognizing that any analysis of shifting research
procedures and priorities necessarily entails oversimplifi-
cations, let us try to identify some of the salient “problems”
(which at times have escalated to the point of crisis) that
social psychology has faced over the past eight decades.
The Problem of Obviousness
Perhaps the first major “crisis” faced by social psychologists
in the post-war period concerned the seeming obviousness
of most experimental results. Whether discussing the early
Lewinian research on group dynamics or the early efforts of
Hovland and his associates investigating the determinants
of attitude change, there came a time in the mid-1950s at
which it was easy to parody the efforts of even the best
and the brightest investigators as nothing more than prov-
ing things “we knew all along,” or as some commentators
uncharitably put it, documenting “Bubba-psychology,” or
things our grandmothers already knew (without even a
“fancy college degree”) to be true.
In those earliest days of experimental social psychol-
ogy, one central goal of investigators was to show that they
could bring important real-world problems and issues into
the laboratory where they could be systematically studied
and their causes investigated. These early experimental-
ists sought, in the terms of later commentators, to “bottle”
complex phenomena they had observed in the world (e.g.,
the effects of democratic versus autocratic leadership,
intergroup conflict, displays of racial prejudice, or success-
ful versus unsuccessful media appeals) in a form simple
enough to be amenable to experimental manipulation and
systematic study. As a result, the findings of such studies
were typically “scientific” demonstrations of phenomena
that had already been observed and identified in the world
at large.
Eventually, however, announcements that social psy-
chologists had shown that people are generally more
persuaded by communicators that they find trustworthy,
expert, similar, and likable (Hovland and associates), that
more cohesive groups usually have more powerful effects
on their members (Lewin and colleagues), that people
typically compare themselves to others who are like them
(Festinger), or that White Americans hold prejudiced atti-
tudes about non-White Americans and “foreigners,” were
received less enthusiastically and, with a few rare excep-
tions, had less of an impact on the world at large than
the authors might have wished. Indeed, some researchers
working in that era can recall the skeptical, if not derisive,
reactions (e.g., “So, they really pay you to do that kind of
research, huh?”) that sometimes greeted their efforts. Such
reactions proved particularly galling in cases where their
listeners’ wisdom sometimes seemed largely the product of
what we now would call “hindsight bias,” emerging only
after the results in question had been described (Fischhoff,
1975, 1982).
In any discussion of obvious versus non-obvious
findings, it is important to note that, notwithstanding
the conventions of statistical analysis, merely rejecting
the null hypothesis that a particular manipulation exerts
absolutely no effect on a given outcome measure, or
that particular factors are not significantly associated
with particular outcomes, is rarely if ever the real goal
of researchers when they report t-scores, F-ratios, cor-
relation coefficients, and the like (Cohen, 1990). In fact,
the unstated convention among most social psycholo-
gists has been to avoid using overly large sample sizes
in a calculated effort to make effects of trivial magnitude
reach statistical significance. Instead, the researchers
generally seek to show that the manipulations or asso-
ciation in question also matter in terms of pragmatic and
social significance (Abelson, 1995). One way to do this
is demonstrate that a suitable manipulation and/or mea-
sure allows us to influence and/or predict some outcome
 Social History, New Challenges, and Dialectics of Social Research 19

that people care about. Another is to show that particular
factors or influences are more powerful and important
(or in some cases less so)—either in absolute terms or
relative to other factors—than recognized by lay social
observers or even supposed experts.5 As noted earlier,
this latter strategy was at the heart of most of the two-
condition and one-condition demonstration experiments
discussed above.
The Appearance of Frivolity
After a decade of frustration trying to convince the outside
world of the significance and the novelty of their research,
it was hardly surprising that many investigators found
themselves drawn to theories and paradigms capable of
generating surprising or counterintuitive research findings.
In this tradition, as noted earlier, the goal of researchers
went beyond simply illustrating the larger-than-expected
impact of particular factors and manipulations. The premium
was on demonstrating something that not only defied the
expectations of the proverbial person in the street, but that
also came as a surprise to one’s fellow social psycholo-
gists. For a decade and a half, beginning in the mid-1950s,
this search for non-intuitive findings was refined into a
high art form by the intellectual heirs of the Lewinian tra-
dition (most notably Festinger, in his dissonance theory
research, but also Schachter, Aronson, and other students
in that tradition).
In each of the major “insufficient justification” paradigms
(e.g., Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959; Aronson & Mills, 1959;
Aronson & Carlsmith, 1963), for instance, the clear intent
of the investigators, evident even in the way that they
described their studies, was to convince readers that there
was good reason to expect results precisely opposite in
direction from those about to be reported. Whether in jour-
nal articles or in classroom presentations, readers or listen-
ers were led to think about a study’s procedures in terms of
some alternative model (usually a vague version of “rein-
forcement theory”) in a way that heightened the surprise
value of the actual results obtained. Indeed, the practice
of asking students in a class to predict the outcome of dis-
sonance studies, so that their mistaken intuitions could be
made explicit (and any potential hindsight claims to the
contrary made difficult) became so widespread that stu-
dents’ erroneous intuitions in the classroom were later
cited by some in an (unsuccessful) attempt to rebut Bem’s
alternative, self-perception interpretation of these disso-
nance studies.
To some extent the fashion for counterintuitive dem-
onstrations in the Festingerian mode waned for predict-
able reasons. Commonsense understandings of behavior
are, on the whole, reasonably accurate, at least in terms
of the “direction” of predictions if not in the calibration
of effect sizes. The number of domains in which it is
possible to show genuinely counterintuitive between-
condition differences or correlations is limited; and the
kind of training and talent required to do such studies is
in short supply. Furthermore, once a number of exam-
ples of specific counterintuitive findings in a particular
domain have been reported and explained, the intuitions
of one’s professional colleagues begin to change. What
had once been deemed surprising comes to be expected,
especially when more familiar examples of the princi-
ples are brought to mind. (The idea that people try to jus-
tify their bad decisions to themselves as well as others,
that they particularly value things they worked hard for
or sacrificed to obtain, or that they engage in other types
of after-the-fact rationalizations hardly began with Leon
Festinger!)
But there was another set of factors in the late 1960s
and early 1970s that made studies in this tradition lose
favor. Critics both within and outside of the field increas-
ingly began to question the status of this sort of research as
“serious” science. To their detractors, the dissonance
researchers were seen as promoting cleverness for its own
sake, at the expense of their young research participants
(who were subjected to heavy deception and, in a sense,
made to look foolish). When Aronson and Carlsmith con-
cluded their 1968 Handbook chapter on methodology by
urging readers to remember that research in social psy-
chology “is, and ought to be, fun,” their words captured
exactly what the critics decried. Against the backdrop of
the Vietnam War and the widespread rebellion of college

5 While a more complete and nuanced discussion of this issue cannot be undertaken here, it should be understood that the relative impor-
tance of statistical effect size and the specifics of the outcome measure employed, as opposed to simple rejection of the null hypothesis,
obviously depends on the particulars of the research problem and mode of operationalization. Whether a manipulation of fear makes
people sit a mean of 6.9 inches or 9.6 inches closer together is less important than the demonstration that fear increases the desire for
closeness. By contrast, demonstrating that people are “significantly” influenced by perceived norms in a laboratory context that called
for them to sign a petition about water conservation is less noteworthy, and useful, than demonstrating that a manipulation of perceived
norms regarding lawn watering decreased water use in a given neighborhood by 20%—especially when the study includes evidence that
additional prosocial appeals were notably less effective.
20 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
students against established hierarchy, loftier goals and
greater seriousness of purpose seemed called for.6
It is easy, in retrospect, to defend the Festingerians and
to celebrate their contributions to both theory and method-
ology. William McGuire’s (1967) wry comment at the time
(borrowed from H. L. Mencken) that the critics resembled
the Puritans of old who seemed to be worried that “some-
where, somehow, someone might be enjoying himself”
(p. 137) does not seem far off the mark. But the curious
distaste of the dissonance researchers for application,
despite their Lewinian heritage, merits some comment,
especially since many of the most promising young
social psychologists of the time eventually moved from
mainstream research into “do-gooder” kinds of applied
work—promoting energy conservation, fostering good
health habits regarding food and exercise, combating
prejudice, serving disadvantaged students, and trying
to promote other socially desirable (to liberals) types of
behavior change. The failure of Lewin’s immediate intel-
lectual descendants to apply dissonance theory, with its
obvious debt to Lewinian tension-system theorizing, at a
time when a crucial issue of the day—racial integration of
schools and neighborhoods—constituted an immense exer-
cise in forced compliance, and hoped-for attitude change,
is especially puzzling. (Only later did several prominent
Lewinians—Elliot Aronson and Phil Zimbardo, along with
Morton Deutsch and Hal Gerard—turn their attention to
the analysis of important social issues like school integra-
tion, social isolation, alienation, and violence.)
In any case, for young researchers committed to theory
building and basic research, disenchantment with para-
digms involving complex deceptions and laboratory dramas
6A very different questioning of the intellectual “seriousness” of
the experimental tradition more generally came from Kenneth
Gergen (1973), Rom Harré (1979), and other European scholars
who viewed the field’s limitations through the lens of decon-
structionism. Many of their observations and criticisms were
cogent (and consistent with our characterization of landmark
social psychology experiments as empirical parables subject to
interpretation, indeed changing interpretation, in light of social
and scientific developments). However, this critique, as Gergen
(1996) later acknowledged, ultimately, did little to change meth-
odology or even the way in which findings are characterized.
This lack of impact may be attributed in part to the failure of the
methods of inquiry the critics favored to produce much in the way
of new, interesting, and impactful findings. But it also may reflect
the continuing, indeed ever increasing, capacity of mainstream
theories and approaches to offer useful insights regarding con-
temporary social issues and problems and to prompt successful
interventions of the sort to be described in the concluding section
of this chapter.
played a role in the rapid ascendance of new theories and
paradigms that required neither deception nor theatrical
skills. These theories sought to explain phenomena initially
considered profoundly social, motivational, and non-
conscious in more exclusively individual, cognitive, and
conscious terms. Perhaps most prominent was the rapid
spread of interest, noted earlier, in Bem’s (1965, 1967)
highly “behavioristic” formulation of self-perception the-
ory (which constituted a kind of “hostile takeover” of the
dissonance theory enterprise) and in Kelley’s (1967, 1972)
rather abstract attribution theory. Interest in these models
and related work by Jones on “correspondent inference”
(Jones & Davis, 1965) and Ross (1977) on “the fundamen-
tal attribution error” eventually led to the more general
exploration of errors and biases in lay psychology.
Such concerns also dovetailed with increased attention
at this time to the ethics of social research and the devel-
opment of Institutional Review Boards. Some researchers
objected to specific research paradigms and programs in
social psychology, especially Milgram’s studies of obedi-
ence to authority (Baumrind, 1964; Miller, 1986; Orne &
Holland, 1968; Rubin & Moore, 1971). Some objected
to any research that used complex deceptions (Kelman,
1968). In the process, various other methodologies, many
focused on various forms of role-playing, were champi-
oned as potential alternatives to deception research. The
net result, however, was the virtual elimination of further
research on obedience to authority and other ethically sus-
pect paradigms. While such review processes are necessary,
and researchers must take responsibility for the well-being
of participants in their research, overly zealous IRBs may
well have had a chilling effect on researchers who would
seek to employ manipulations and measures that have real
psychological stakes for the participants—one requisite
first step on the rocky road from laboratory exploration
to field demonstration and then to significant real-world
application.
A Seeming Lack of Social Relevance
As social psychology was embracing attribution theory
and beginning to explore biases in inference and judgment,
experimental psychology was well into its own “cognitive
revolution.” With these developments in cognitive psychol-
ogy came an array of new tools, methods, and measures,
which quickly migrated into social psychology, culminating
in the development of the broad new field of social cognition
(Fiske & Taylor, 1984; Wyer & Carlson, 1979). The power
of these new methods was undeniable, and social cognition
became a major focus of the field. However, this emphasis
on cognitive processes, and the particular research para-
digms and measures employed, came at a cost. With some
notable exceptions, such as the work of Bob Zajonc (1980)
 Social History, New Challenges, and Dialectics of Social Research 21
on the “primacy of affect,” processes involving motivation
and emotion were, for some time, largely neglected. In
fact, behavior itself (beyond checking points on question-
naire scales or pushing buttons) and strategies for changing
behavior ceased to be a primary concern.
During this period, the research agenda of much of the
field, and the findings that were winning places in our
leading journals, seemed far removed from the practical
applications and real-world problems that had so occupied
the attention of researchers in the early days of the field.
To some critics, the topics being investigated seemed too
narrow and too esoteric to interest anyone besides other
academic social psychologists. The fact that many of the
research paradigms in common use involved paper-and-
pencil assessments regarding hypothetical social stimuli
and social situations, rather than consequential behavioral
responses to “real” stimuli and situations, was a cause
for concern. Still others worried that some of the distinc-
tively “social” aspects of social psychology could not be
addressed by paradigms adopted from cognitive psychol-
ogy, whereby individual subjects sat alone in front of a
computer—that such subjects were being left, as critics
had earlier said of E. C. Tolman’s rats, “lost in thought.”
Even in areas of psychology where information-processing
models seemed appropriate and of obvious applied rele-
vance, the products of investigators’ increasingly skilled
labors were not bearing fruit of a sort likely to prove appe-
tizing to those outside the field. Perhaps inevitably, the
evidence-based answer to many pressing applied questions
proved to be “It all depends; it’s actually very compli-
cated . . . .” For instance, while once it had seemed that
the generally positive effects of communicator credibility
on persuasion provided a solid building block for success-
ful persuasion, it became increasingly apparent that the
effects of even this most obvious variable depended on its
interaction with a host of other variables, including per-
ceived motives of the communicator, discrepancy of the
message from the initial position of the audience, timing
of the information about the communicator’s credibility,
the personal relevance of the issue to the audience, and so
forth (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; McGuire, 1969; Petty &
Cacioppo, 1986).
Two notable exceptions to this trend were mentioned
earlier and will be discussed at more length later. One, iron-
ically, involved developments that began with attribution
theory—a highly abstract theory, or rather a set of questions
about which to theorize, which, to the surprise of many
who initially found it formulaic and even a bit boring, later
became extremely important in several applied domains.
The other exception involved the meteoric rise to promi-
nence of work on judgment and decision making, wherein
the tenets of Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory
soon had social psychologists writing about loss aversion,
reference points, and especially “framing.” Demonstrations
that the attractiveness of an option or gamble depended not
only on its objective features but also on its description
(e.g., its “framing” in terms of prospective losses relative
to one reference point rather than prospective gains with
respect to another reference point) were particularly wel-
comed in light of the field’s subjectivist tradition.
The Question of Parochialism
In 1991, during an era of unprecedented globalization and the
breathtaking rise of the Asian tigers (China, Japan, and Korea),
Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitiyama published a paper
that challenged the assumption that what most social psy-
chologists in the Western world were studying was the way
people think and act in social contexts—as opposed to the
way people in the West think and act, and the demands and
constraints of Western social contexts. In so doing, they
not only made us more aware of the smug parochialism
that characterized much of our work (a criticism voiced
by Gergen, 1973, and others almost two decades earlier),
they also laid out fertile terrain for new research and for
reconsideration of some of the most firmly established
ideas in dissonance theory, attribution theory, and the study
of inference, judgment, and decision making. Their paper,
which remains one of the most heavily cited in our field,
came at a propitious time in another respect as well; for it
coincided with and helped to prompt the rapid influx of
young researchers from East Asian cultures into American
universities and social psychology programs.
There had, of course, been previous efforts in “cross-
cultural” research, including attempts to replicate famous
findings, and to compare the behavior of people from dif-
ferent societies in familiar research paradigms involving
conformity, obedience to authority, bystander intervention,
and even dissonance reduction following free choice or
forced compliance. The central distinction that Markus and
Kitiyama made between independent and interdependent
cultures had even been anticipated in the extensive pro-
gram of research conducted by Harry Triandis on individu-
alist versus collectivist societies (Triandis, 1968). But the
specific targets of their research, especially their focus on
situational versus dispositional attribution and their chal-
lenge to the notion that dispositionism was a property of
basic cognitive, perceptual, and motivational processes—
and the idea that the “fundamental” attribution error was
not all that fundamental—could not be ignored once the
research evidence began to mount.
The Issue of Negativity
One of the more heartening developments over the past
decade or so has been the emergence of an empirical
22 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
subdiscipline that has been labeled “positive psychol-
ogy” (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). While, as is
the case with most such “new” developments, one can
cite many antecedents—from the humanistic psychology
of Abraham Maslow and others to B. F. Skinner’s contro-
versial fictional 1948 account of a behaviorist utopia in
Walden Two—this development has been dramatic. The
emergence of positive psychology was to some extent a
natural reaction to the endless stream of distressing devel-
opments outside psychology that were discussed earlier. It
was also a reaction not only to demonstrations of nega-
tive behaviors in some of the demonstration classics that
we noted earlier, but to the drumbeat of findings regarding
biases and failings of rationality in judgment and decision
making, to say nothing of the continuing focus on labora-
tory and real-world studies of racism, sexism, justifications
of inequality, and the like.
Finally, it may be that empirically trained psychologists
tired of the stream of hard-cover and paperback books in
the “Human Potential” movement that, despite their lack
of intellectual or scientific rigor, and generally despite the
complete absence of data, outsold even the most influen-
tial works in mainstream social psychology. Certainly, the
singular efforts of a few individuals (most notably Martin
Seligman) who persuaded younger colleagues to focus
their work on happiness, creativity, altruism, morality, and
other ennobling topics, and secured funding for empirical
research and conferences, provided a vital catalyst. In any
case, this area, discussed in more detail later in this chapter,
has clearly been a “bandwagon” not only in terms of journal
publications but also as a source of books (Gilbert, 2006;
Haidt, 2006; Keltner, 2009; Lyubomirsky, 2007) combin-
ing solid empirical work with lively real-world observa-
tions in a way that has attracted popular interest.
FOUR INSIGHTS UNDERLYING RESEARCH
AND APPLICATION
There are four hard-won insights about human perception,
thinking, motivation, and behavior that we believe represent
important, indeed foundational, contributions of social psy-
chology. These involve (1) the existence and implications
of the epistemic stance of “naïve realism” or the assump-
tion of isomorphism between subjective experience and
objective reality; (2) the existence and implications of “lay
dispositionism,” or more generally, the tendency of social
actors and observers to attribute actions and outcomes to
the attributes of the actor (or entity that is moving or chang-
ing) rather than the field of forces influencing the relevant
actor or entity; (3) the existence and implications of social
actors’ inclination to see their own beliefs, assessments,
sentiments, and actions as coherent and consistent with a
positive view of the self; and (4) the impact of expectations
and beliefs on social outcomes—in particular, the role of
confirmation biases and self-fulfilling prophesies.
Each insight on this short list has, of course, prompted
a great deal of provocative research and theorizing. But
our choices also reflect our judgments about the particular
value of these insights in analyzing and addressing con-
temporary social issues and problems. Colleagues with dif-
ferent tastes, priorities, and backgrounds might well offer
a somewhat different list—one that included, for instance,
appreciation of the extent to which the ways that people
feel, think, and act have been shaped by evolutionary pro-
cesses, the importance of non-conscious processes, or the
“primacy” of affect (or motivational goals). We would have
no quarrel with such inclusions. Indeed, in our later review
of important recent contributions to theory and research,
we will discuss each of these insights.
Naïve Realism and Its Consequences
Individuals’ understandings of their everyday interactions
with each other, and of their experiences with objects and
events, inevitably begins with their tacit assumption of
isomorphism between their subjective perceptions—and
even their judgments, inferences, and affective reactions—
and some objective reality. Although typically unexamined
and underappreciated, such naïve realism seems fundamen-
tal and universal—almost certainly a product of very basic
sensory and cognitive processes (Griffin & Ross, 1991).
Any introductory philosophy class will inevitably
challenge students to appreciate the extent to which their
knowledge of the objective world is at best indirect and
mediated, that perceived properties of objects are products
of the interaction between mind and matter—and that, as
Einstein noted, “reality” as we experience it through our
particular sensory system is, in an important sense, an
“illusion.” Indeed, any college physics class will oblige
students to think about matter, energy, space, and even the
passage of time in ways that challenge ordinary experience,
to say nothing of theories at the cutting edge of modern
physics (such as the aforementioned “string theory,” which
postulates many dimensions beyond the standard four of
a Newtonian or Einsteinian world) that utterly defy such
experience. But neither classroom lessons nor mathematics
(nor electron microscopes, fMRI magnets, or other scien-
tific instruments) change our subjective experience of reality.
Nor do they prevent us from continuing to assume that the
perceptions guiding our everyday actions are essentially
faithful reflections of reality.
Such an assumption of isomorphism no doubt is highly
functional in helping us navigate through the physical

world. When it comes to social dealings, however, there is
a cost to that assumption—one of obvious concern to social
psychologists. In analyzing and interpreting the words and
deeds of their peers, even the most skilled “intuitive psy-
chologists” fail to appreciate the extent to which they, no
less than their peers, see actions, events, and even facts
through the lenses of their own experience, the received
wisdom of their group, and the often-distorting influence
of their personal needs, hopes, and fears. The early clas-
sic study by Hastorf and Cantril (1954), on the differing
perceptions of Dartmouth and Princeton students watching
the same football game through the prisms of their rival
partisanships, reflected a radical view of the “constructive”
nature of perception that anticipated later discussions of
naïve realism. So did the following, very modern sounding,
quote from Ichheiser (1949):
We tend to resolve our perplexity arising out of the experience
that other people see the world differently than we see it our-
selves by declaring that those others, in consequence of some
basic intellectual and moral defect are unable to see things “as
they really are” and to react to them in a “normal way.” We thus
imply of course that things are in fact as we see them, and that
our ways are the normal ways. (p. 39, emphasis added)
Likewise, the following even older, but no less penetrat-
ing quote from Ben Franklin (1787, quoted in Copeland,
Lamm, & McKenna, 1999):
Most men, indeed, as well as most sections in religion, think
themselves in possession of all truth, and that [to the extent
that] others differ from them, it is so far error.
The most obvious consequence of naïve realism is that
people expect other reasonable and objective perceivers to
share their views and understandings—if not immediately,
then at least after they have enlightened those others about
the way things really are. Hence, one should expect false
consensus and related egocentric biases in social percep-
tion (see Ross, Greene, & House, 1977; also review by
Marks & Miller, 1987). Moreover, people will attribute
bias and other malignant influences when others, including
third-party mediators or those providing media coverage
on issues of great concern to them, fail to share their “take”
on issues and events. One dramatic example of this phenom-
enon was provided by Vallone, Ross, and Lepper (1985),
who showed pro-Israeli and anti-Israeli viewers samples of
the actual media coverage of the attack by Falangist gunmen
on the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps and found that both
groups of partisan viewers overwhelmingly saw that coverage
as slanted in favor of the “other side.”
Another phenomenon arising at least partially from naïve
realism is the tendency for people to make unwarranted
Four Insights Underlying Research and Application 23
dispositional inferences about other actors (another central
insight to be discussed next), especially those who respond
differently from them, and therefore differently from what
seems warranted by the demands and constraints of the situ-
ation (Ross & Ward, 1996). Closely related is the tendency
for actors and observers to offer divergent attributions for
the same actions and outcomes (Jones & Nisbett, 1972)—
with observers attributing actions and outcomes to inferred
stable dispositions that the actors themselves attribute to
situational factors, including specific goals and obstacles or
constraints blocking the achievement of those goals. Other
phenomena in which naïve realism can be expected to play
a role include overconfident social predictions (Dunning,
Griffin, Milojkovic, & Ross, 1990) and the failure to give
assessments and judgments by one’s peers as much weight
as one’s own.
We earlier noted social psychology’s core message that
people respond to subjective rather than objective reality.
Indeed, the determinants of social perception and social
cognition, and the various biases distorting these processes
have preoccupied investigators from at least the era of Asch,
Heider, and Ichheiser. Here we may also note evidence that
most laypeople recognize many of the biases we study, but
they consistently believe that those biases apply to oth-
ers more than to themselves. In fact, the amount of bias
they attribute to a given individual proves a direct function
of the amount of disagreement between that individual and
themselves (Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross, 2004). This essen-
tial insight regarding the nature and impact of naïve realism
is of particular applied significance in understanding and
addressing interpersonal and intergroup conflict. Even
friends and intimate partners are apt to feel in contexts of
disagreement that the problem is the other person’s lack
of objectively and, in cases of “hurt feelings,” either the
insensitivity of the person who has hurt them or the hyper-
sensitivity of the person accusing them of the relevant
abuse. When problems escalate to the point where some
third party is consulted, both parties proceed in the vain
hope and expectation that the counselor will see that their
view is the reasonable one, and that it is their partner who
needs to be “set straight.”
Most disputants truly feel that their side is “right,” that
the other side is “wrong” (knowingly wrong and insincere,
or perhaps even worse, sincere but deluded and blinded by
their biases). Partisans also sincerely feel that “objective”
third parties should take their side. Naïve realism has rele-
vance as well for issues involving friction between different
cultures or subcultures (wherein each makes invidious com-
parisons between “our” ways of looking at the world and
deciding what is natural, good, moral, and enlightened, ver-
sus “their” ways). The same invidious “us” versus “them”
comparisons arise with respect to matters of race, gender,
24 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
and class as well. It is rarely possible to get people to rec-
ognize fully the degree to which their own perceptions
and assessments are subject to “top-down” influences and
biases of the same sort, and to the same degree, as those
that influence others from different backgrounds.
Academics in the humanities and social sciences may
pay lip service to such recognition in their writing and theo-
rizing, but it does not prevent them from opining about mat-
ters of public concern with unwarranted certainty, and too
often with scorn for those who disagree. Moreover, when
people recognize that they are seeing issues and events
through the prism of their personal experiences or group
identity, they insist that those influences are a source of
enlightenment, while regarding such influences on others as
a source of distortion. In the context of intergroup conflict,
perhaps the best one can hope for is a willingness to attribute
disagreements to sources of bias that are “normal”—that
is, products of motivational and cognitive processes such
as wishful thinking and biased assimilation of information
that are shared by all people—rather than attributing them
to unique or uniquely strong pathologies of the “other.”
Lay Dispositionism and Its Consequences
A second insight intimately linked to the situationist tra-
dition, one with profound applied implications, is that
laypeople (and often even experts) generally fail to fully
appreciate the power of the field of external or “situational”
forces that can compel or constrain the choices that actors
make. And even when experience and education gives us
such appreciation in one behavioral domain, this insight is
rarely generalized to new domains. Thus even a hard-won
appreciation of the lessons of Asch, Milgram, Zimbardo,
and company may not prevent an overly skeptical view of
so-called “false confessions” (Kassin, 2008), which, along
with erroneous but confident recollections and eye-witness
testimony, are a major source of wrongful convictions
(Dunning & Stern, 1994; Loftus, 2003; Wells, Memon, &
Penrod, 2006; Wells & Olson, 2003; Wright & Loftus,
2008). We insist that we could never be induced by artful
interrogators to confess to a crime that we did not com-
mit (which may be correct) and that those who do offer
false confessions must be dim-witted, weak, or plagued by
a guilty conscience (which generally is not correct). Such
misguided emphasis on the “dispositions” of the relevant
actors, as Lewin (1931) observed long ago, represents a
failing of lay psychology, in somewhat the same way that
“Aristotelian” conceptions regarding the movement of
objects (as opposed to Newtonian physics, which recognizes
the role of forces between objects) erroneously attributed
such movement to inherent properties of those objects rather
than the forces acting on and between them.
Lay dispositionism obviously also relates obliquely to
the question of “nature versus nurture,” and not so obliquely
to debates about the relative power of situational versus
dispositional factors—debates prompted in part by the
relative paucity of findings showing larger-than-expected
predictive power of familiar, trait-like, personality variables.
As alluded to earlier, the debate is intractable, indeed mean-
ingless, when it is discussed in the abstract, rather than
with respect to particular personal and situational factors.
Indeed, a review of our situationist classics reveals that
most of these studies involved a limited number of very
specific sources of influence, most notably, channel fac-
tors and sources of actual and/or inferred group norms and
standards.
The much larger set of studies potentially relevant to our
present discussion are demonstrations that, in the labora-
tory and in everyday life, the behavior of a given individual
with respect to willingness to take risks or delay gratifi-
cation or to display cooperativeness or altruism (or many
other dimensions that we typically think of as personal-
ity, temperament, or character) is apt to vary and appear
“inconsistent” across settings. Some of that variability
is random, or at least a product of factors that we cannot
discern. Some simply reflects the influences of situational
pressures or constraints in any given situation that make
people in general more or less likely to behave in ways
that we characterize with terms such as honesty, or selfish-
ness, or for that matter liberalism or conservatism. Some
of the variability reflects the influence not only of specific
situational pressures and constraints but also of factors that
determine the perceptual salience of particular stimulus
features, or the cognitive availability of specific associa-
tions, schemas, or personal goals at a given point in time
for the relevant actor.
Why does experience not educate the layperson to the
impact of situational factors relative to that of stable per-
sonal attributes? The answer to this question is that much
of the time the people we know and encounter in every-
day experience do confirm our expectations about their
behavior, even expectations based on our past experiences
(Swann & Bosson, this volume). But such confirmations
do not necessarily indicate broad, stable, individual dif-
ferences; and even where such differences seem evident,
they may themselves reflect the impact of situational fac-
tors. First, person and situation are inevitably confounded
in the real world, unless a clever researcher finds a way
to “unconfound” them (Mischel, 1968, 1973), because
many situational factors (e.g., role and relational demands,
reputational concerns, commitments, and the costs versus
benefits of honoring or not honoring those commitments)
persist over time, at least in the actor’s dealings with partic-
ular people, and may even persist across diverse contexts.

Second, once people choose situations (as when they under-
take a program of study or enter a career), those choices
in turn guide and constrain their behavior—for example,
by obliging them to make commitments to other people.
Third, as Lewin observed, actors are a part of their own life
space; other people respond to physical and social charac-
teristics of the actor in ways that in turn influence the actor
(Gilbert & Jones, 1986). Finally, both personal factors and
situational factors create “cumulative consequences” in a
way that magnifies the effects of either and produces stabil-
ity over time (Caspi, Bem, & Elder, 1989; Caspi, Elder, &
Bem, 1987, 1988).
In his 2008 best-seller Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
describes several compelling cases reflecting the cumu-
lative consequences of situational factors. Some of these
relate to culture or subculture and therefore to values, aspi-
rations, and reference groups, but some involve situational
advantages or disadvantages that are essentially matters
of coincidence (for example, the predominance of pro-
fessional hockey players whose birthdate guaranteed that
they would be older and physically more mature than most
of their cohort in youth hockey programs, which in turn
meant that they would get to play more, get more attention
from coaches, derive greater self-esteem from that domain,
and thus practice harder and advance to higher levels of
competition). Particular traits, such as patience, persis-
tence, and self-mastery, whether the product of relatively
innate temperaments or parenting practices and other fea-
tures of early social learning, can have similar cumulative
consequences, as Walter Mischel documented in report-
ing the surprisingly high correlation between children’s
nursery school performance in his famous delay of grati-
fication task and subsequent measures of study habits and
academic success (Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990). Work
by Bandura (1977a) on self-efficacy and Dweck (1986)
on personal theories regarding fixed or malleable abilities
similarly suggests that individual differences at one point
in time, regardless of their origins, can lead to choices that
effectively change the actor’s life-space and magnify the
impact of those personal characteristics.
Although dispositionist bias is evident when laypeo-
ple are surprised by the “non-obvious” results of cleverly
crafted psychology experiments of the sort we highlighted
earlier, their inability to outguess wily experimenters is
obviously not the extent, or even an important aspect,
of the problem. The more important consequence is our
failure to realize the extent to which the same person (or
group) may behave very differently when the balance of
the relevant situational forces and constraints (e.g., role
demands, reputational concerns, commitments, or incen-
tive structures) changes. This point has been driven home
to social psychologists who work with community and
Four Insights Underlying Research and Application 25
political leaders whose earlier histories included violence
and terrorism. One such leader (David Ervine, a Northern
Ireland “Loyalist”), in an address at Stanford University,
explained that, in his case, it was a matter of “51% vs.
49%”—that this “change” involved not a transformation of
character but a kind of “tipping point” whereby the futil-
ity and costs of violence became marginally more obvi-
ous and the prospects for securing social justice through
normal politics became marginally brighter. He then added
the striking comment that when he was only 51% certain
about the decision to embrace bombing as a tactic, he was
still 100% a “bomber,” and now that he is only 51% certain
about the prospects for change through peaceful means, he
is 100% a politician and peace activist.
Although the tendency for laypeople to underestimate
the role of situational determinants is ubiquitous (at least in
Western countries), that tendency is not invariant. In fact,
research has revealed counterexamples whereby the influ-
ence lay psychologists assign to certain extrinsic factors—
i.e., salient, tangible rewards and penalties, and self-serving
motives more generally—is exaggerated, and the role of more
intrinsic motives is underestimated (Miller, 1999). Indeed,
Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett (1973) documented something
akin to such misattribution in self-perception in a study with
obvious implications for parents and teachers. The investiga-
tors showed that the amount of time that nursery school chil-
dren opted to play with “magic markers” depended on the
presence or absence of a prior extrinsic motive (the prospect
of receiving a “Good Player” award). As predicted, children
who previously had played with the markers anticipating the
relevant award later showed less interest in that activity than
children who previously had done so without any prospect of
an award. However, no such undermining of intrinsic inter-
est occurred when the same award was presented without
prior mention, and thus represented a “bonus” rather than a
“bribe” (Lepper & Greene, 1978).
Counterexamples wherein the role of certain situational
pressures and constraints is overestimated by observers, and
sometimes also the actors themselves, have significance for
theory. They suggest the dispositionist bias is not inevitable
(or “fundamental,” in the sense of being irreducible) but is
rather the product of many different determining factors that
may operate to different degrees in different contexts. Thus,
Quattrone (1982) proposed that people making attributions
typically begin by making a dispositional attribution, which
they “adjust” (insufficiently) in light of what they know about
situational pressures and constraints (Gilbert, Pelham, &
Krull, 1988). Indeed, the lay dispositionism apparent in
most everyday interpretations of behavior seems almost
overdetermined—a reflection not only of cognitive and
perceptual factors, but also of motivational, linguistic,
cultural, and even ideological factors (Ross, 1977).
26 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
An early and seminal contribution to the attribution lit-
erature by Jones and Nisbett (1972) reported both anecdotal
and experimental evidence showing that people may rec-
ognize the influence of particular situational factors on self
more than on others, and thus be more willing to ascribe
cross-situationally consistent dispositions to others than
to self. In accounting for this self-other divergence in the
attribution process, Jones and Nisbett cited the importance
of two factors. One of these, little investigated at the time,
was a difference in the amount and richness of informa-
tion about past behavior. That is, actors obviously have
more information about cross-situational variation in their
actions and outcomes in different situations that seem-
ingly tap the same disposition. More specifically, actors
are more aware that their actions have varied as a function
of situational demands and constraints, short-term goals
and priorities, and even passing mood states. (Generally,
investigators either ignored such factors, tried to “control”
for them by giving the observer additional information, or
investigated attributions about responses to novel choices
or situations to which past behavior seemed irrelevant.)
The second factor they discussed, and the one that most
caught the attention of investigators at the time, was the
obvious actor-observer difference in “perspective” and
“focus of attention.” Investigators were quick to use video-
replays (Storms, 1973), seating arrangements (Taylor &
Fiske, 1975), and the simple act of looking in a mirror
(Duvall & Wicklund, 1972) to demonstrate the effects on
attributions of giving observers the perspectives of actors
and vice versa, and more generally to show that many other
manipulations that made features of the actor or the situa-
tion confronting the actor more salient could alter causal
attributions (McArthur & Post, 1977; Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, &
Ruderman, 1978; Taylor & Koivumaki, 1976). More
recent investigators, bucking the current trend to empha-
size cognitive factors over perceptual ones, have explored
the effects of subtler and more refined perspective manipu-
lations on people’s interpretations of and reactions to both
past and future events (Libby, Eibach, & Gilovich, 2005;
Pronin & Ross, 2006).7
7 In an important extension of this work on similarities and dif-
ferences in actor versus observer attribution, Nisbett and Wilson
(1977) demonstrated that actors and observers generally are sub-
ject to the same sources of accuracy and error in the attribution
process—i.e., that both interpret the available information in light
of their lay theories. While actors may sometimes have access to
private experiential content (thoughts and feelings, construals,
goals, etc.) that gives them an advantage over observers, they do
not have direct access to any “process” information that guaran-
tees the veridicality of their causal inferences (see also Nisbett &
Ross, 1980, pp. 205-226).
Both lay dispositionism and the tendency for observers
to be less sensitive than actors to the role of situational
pressures and constraints have important real-world impli-
cations. Lack of appreciation of the impact of situational
factors other than salient prospective extrinsic incentives
and disincentives does more than foster erroneous interper-
sonal inferences and undue pessimism about the possibility
of behavior change. It leads people to overlook factors that
may prove important determinants of success or failure in
efforts to produce such changes. This “miscalibration”
regarding strategies for achieving change leads us to be less
effective than we could be, whether the behavior we seek to
change is that of friends, family members, neighbors, co-
workers, or students. The success of programs directed at
citizens whose current practices are at the root of problems
regarding public health, environmental protection, crime
prevention, or promotion of better intergroup relations
similarly will depend on our increasing sophistication
about the role of social and situational factors.
The Need to See the Self as Consistent, Rational,
and Moral
The last three decades of American social psychology (and,
not coincidentally American pop psychology and perhaps
American society as well) have been heavily focused on
the self. Indeed, focus on the autonomous self seems to be
a distinguishing, even defining, characteristic of our every-
day psychology, at least in Western cultures. The study of
the processes by which individuals come to know and make
inferences about themselves and evaluate themselves rela-
tive to others, and later of the biases—cognitive, perceptual,
and motivational—affecting such processes, received a
major impetus from the work of Bem (1967, 1972) and the
attribution theorists. Work on self-schemas (Markus, 1977)
and more dynamic theories about capacities of the self (e.g.,
Bandura, 1977a, 1997; Dweck, 1999; Dweck & Leggett,
1988) have also been influential. Within the larger culture,
popular self-help books, seminars, and parental education
classes, particularly in the latter part of the twentieth cen-
tury, have stressed the need for each of us to “feel good”
about ourselves, and also the obligation we have to help our
children, students, and friends feel good about themselves,
even in the face of failures and less than praiseworthy
behavior. Indeed, countless studies and everyday experience
alike suggest that most people do succeed in developing
and maintaining a generally positive view of self.
Two recurrent themes underlie research in this area
(Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2007; Swann & Bosson, this
volume). The first involves the tendency for actors to see
themselves as coherent, consistent, and rational, despite behav-
ioral evidence that seemingly challenges that view—that is,

when their behavior shows changes across time and cir-
cumstances and especially when it varies as a function of
subtle situational forces and constraints whose determina-
tive role is not apparent to them. Within Western cultures
in particular, people place a value on cross-situational con-
sistency, and while they acknowledge that they respond
adaptively to changes and differences in circumstances,
they generally have a strong sense of a consistent self and
do not subscribe to the notion of socially situated identi-
ties. The second theme, which connects academic and pop
psychology, involves the struggle to maintain and enhance
self-esteem, to see the self not only as coherent and ratio-
nal, but also as good, moral, competent, in control of one’s
fate, and in tune with both one’s own values and the norms
and values of the people whose opinions one values.
This striving to see one’s actions both as consistent
across situations and as commendable or at least justifiable,
can be characterized as “dissonance theory writ large,”
with the proviso (following Aronson, 1969) that actors are
motivated to see themselves as both coherent and esteem-
worthy. People assimilate new information in light of their
existing theories, beliefs, and larger social, religious, and
political ideologies in a way that shields them from the
need to acknowledge error, when such acknowledgment
would be painful or dissonant. To some extent they also
see and interpret events through the prism of their needs
and motives in a manner that similarly shields them from
discomfort. “Self-serving” or “ego-defensive” attributions
play a role here. That is, people can make “dispositional”
attributions for behavior that reflects well on the self and
make situational attributions or offer other exculpatory
explanations for behavior that reflects badly on them (Fiske &
Taylor, 2008, pp. 159–160). But, as Heider (1958) noted,
the need to learn and respond adaptively sets limits on such
“wishful thinking” and self-deception.
The literature on self-serving attributions, however, has
become increasing complex. First, everyday life offers
many instances in which people seem to blame themselves
for failures and unfortunate events under circumstances in
which peers and even neutral observers offer more chari-
table attributions, and at least some laboratory studies
offer similar evidence (e.g., Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky,
2000; Savitsky, Epley, & Gilovich, 2001). Second, taking
credit for success and blaming failure on external factors
beyond one’s control may simply be rational; successes are
intended outcomes that one plans for and works toward,
whereas failures are often the product of obstacles too
daunting to overcome or unforeseeable circumstances
beyond one’s control. Third, even when an apparently self-
serving pattern of personal attributions for success and
situational attributions for failure is found, it is difficult to
determine when such attributions are motivated distortions,
Four Insights Underlying Research and Application 27
rather than the product of cognitive distortions that happen
to have self-serving affective consequences. Finally, it is
often difficult to know whether public assertions involv-
ing the taking of credit (or for that matter taking blame)
faithfully reflect the individuals’ private assessments or
are merely lip-service declarations designed to serve some
social motive. These complexities have discouraged recent
investigators from pursuing this issue—at least in terms of
any general, context-independent, tendency—and to use
Jones’s (1985) term, the disentangling of motivational ver-
sus cognitive determinants of attributional bias has become
a sinking ship.
Of greater contemporary interest are research findings
showing that people engage in selective investment of ego.
These findings, which have obvious and potentially disturb-
ing implications regarding education and other vehicles for
overcoming social and educational disadvantage, suggest
that people “identify” with, care about, and invest energy
in bettering themselves, for dimensions of potential self-
esteem in which they have experienced, and/or expect to
experience, success. Conversely, they “disidentify” from,
and fail to invest effort in, or evaluate their worth in terms
of, dimensions of potential evaluation at which they have
failed or expect failure (Crocker & Major, 1989; Dunning,
2005; Kunda, 1987; Steele, 1988).
Although the processes described above have been the
most frequent targets of research, they are by no means
the only ones that people employ in order to see them-
selves as coherent, commendable, and in control of their
destiny, and to ward off potential threats to those percep-
tions. Most often, people do this in obvious and even laudable
ways—by trying to meet their group’s standards of behav-
ior and achievement, which they have adopted as their own.
Once again, however, it is less obvious processes that have
attracted the greatest research interest. One such process
involves selective or strategic social comparison. People
can compare themselves to others who are less well off
than themselves, or even to themselves at a time when they
were worse off. In a seminal early paper in health psychol-
ogy, Taylor (1983) described how cancer patients coped with
their illness through such comparisons—contrasting their
symptoms, treatment options, and family circumstances
with even more dire diagnoses, options, and circumstances.
By contrast, of course, Festinger and his colleagues argued
strongly that, in our society at least, most comparisons are
made upward, in an invidious direction that may fuel effort
and achievement, but often at the price of dissatisfaction.
Selective comparison also allows one to defend one’s
sense of fairness and morality in the face of dubiously moral
or fair behavior, by comparing oneself to others whose
behavior in the pertinent domain is equally or even more
suspect (Bandura, 1999, Monin, 2007). Another process,
28 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
which both “haves” and “have-nots” can employ to reduce
feelings of guilt, shame, and other threats to self-regard,
is that of “system justification” (Jost & Banaji, 1994;
Jost & Kay, this volume; Lerner, 1980; Pratto, Sidanius,
Stallworth, & Malle, 1994). This process involves a range
of strategies, including the blaming of victims for their
misfortunes or continuing disadvantages, the belief that
society is ultimately or globally fair (or at least as fair as
it could be without imposing odious restrictions), the pre-
sumption that the benefits that one reaps within the system
are worth the costs, or even the faith that privations in this
life will be replaced by the glories of some existence after
death.
Before leaving this topic, it is worth noting the link
between striving for a positive view of the self and naïve
realism. Because people are subject to various “positive
illusions” (Taylor & Brown, 1988; see also Greenwald,
1980, on the “totalitarian ego”), they do not see themselves
as they appear to disinterested observers; and they do not
take kindly to those who challenge their illusions or who
use different bases for assessment or different standards for
comparison. Conversely, when others seem less than wel-
coming of one’s constructive criticisms, gentle warnings
about closed-mindedness or wishful thinking, or comments
about related displays of self-serving or belief-preserving
bias, the attribution is a censorious one.
We are reminded, here, of the wry and telling obser-
vation by comedian George Carlin with regard to driving:
“Ever notice that anyone going slower than you is an idiot
and anyone going faster is a maniac?!” To Carlin’s insight,
which captures the essence of naïve realism as well as any
experiment we know, we would add the observation that
people characteristically see those who are less honest than
themselves on their income tax returns as cheats and those
who are more honest as naïve; by the same token, they see
others who want to move slower than they do in the direc-
tion of any particular social reform as reactionaries and
those who advocate moving faster than they deem prudent
as unrealistic dreamers.
Confirmation Biases: Impact of Expectations,
Beliefs, and Social Representations
Our final social-psychological insight concerns the impact
of beliefs and expectations. More specifically, it involves
the impact of biases in perception and cognition that
make one see, find evidence for, and even produce, what
one expects to see or have occur (or, in some cases, what one
hopes or fears to see or have occur). The biblical parable
of the “scouts” who, depending on the state of mind they
brought to their task, brought back reports either of for-
bidding terrain peopled with fearsome giants or a “land of
milk and honey” long ago suggested the impact of such
biases on perception. So did the Hastorf and Cantril (1954)
study noted earlier on the conflicting perceptions and
recollections of Princeton and Dartmouth football fans.
Such biases do more than confirm expectations and serve
wishful thinking. They make it difficult for people to aban-
don theories or beliefs that are inaccurate and that serve
them badly, even in the face of evidence that unbiased
observers would find convincing. Lord, Ross, and Lepper
(1979) and Edwards and Smith (1996), for example, pro-
vided a striking example of the capacity of objectively
mixed evidence regarding the deterrent efficacy of capital
punishment to strengthen the conflicting views of opposing
partisans.
Indeed, studies of biased perception and assimilation
of information have been a staple in social and cognitive
psychology. What most intrigues those outside our field,
however, is the capacity of beliefs, expectations, and “proph-
esies” (Merton, 1948)—those one holds about oneself and
those held about one by others—to prompt actions or fail-
ures to act that reinforce those convictions (see Snyder,
1992). In some cases, the consequences of these processes
are benign or positive—individuals and groups motivated
to confirm positive expectations, including “positive illu-
sions” (Taylor, 1989; Taylor & Armor, 1996; Taylor &
Brown, 1988) about themselves, tend to act accordingly;
and often they benefit directly or indirectly from doing so.
Similarly, self-confirming positive beliefs, such as the belief
that success is determined less by innate ability than by per-
sistent effort or flexibility in approach (Weiner, 1974), or
that abilities and even general intelligence are themselves
malleable rather than fixed (Bandura, 1997; Dweck, 1999;
Nisbett, 2009)—are not mere “illusions”; they are impor-
tant and empowering insights.
In other cases, however, belief-confirming biases and
especially belief-perpetuating behaviors can have malignant
consequences. In particular, they can result in individual
and collective efforts to counteract or reduce the threat of
negative beliefs and expectations in ways that have delete-
rious personal and social consequences and that may even
serve, paradoxically, to confirm those negative expecta-
tions. The phenomenon of “self-handicapping” (Jones &
Berglas, 1979) involves an all-too-familiar type of behav-
ioral confirmation—one designed (sometimes consciously,
sometimes perhaps without self-awareness) to dampen the
attributional threat of a negative outcome, but does so in
ways that makes that outcome more probable. (Thus self-
handicapping constitutes yet another process that protects
people’s ability to see themselves, and to be seen by others,
in positive terms.) The most obvious example of this phe-
nomenon is provided in cases where actors withdraw effort
and personal investment in the face of the threat of failure;

but alcoholism, drug abuse, tardiness, belligerence toward
supervisors or co-workers, refusal to conform to institu-
tional standards of dress, hygiene, speech, or other violations
of behavioral norms can also be seen as instances of
self-handicapping.
Finally, as Wegner, Schneider, Carter, and White (1987)
showed in a simple study with a result that is both non-obvi-
ous yet obviously true, attempting to avoid a given action,
feeling, or action sometimes increases rather than decreases
its likelihood. The instruction “try not to think of a white
bear” as Wegner et al. showed, ultimately increased the
frequency of such ursine imaginings, as compared to those
reported by a group asked to think of a white bear from the
outset. Trying hard to avoid physical tics, speech disfluen-
cies, slips of the tongue, and the like is apt to prove similarly
counterproductive, and certainly is not the optimal clini-
cal strategy, when anxiety and excessive self-monitoring
already are part of the problem (Wegner, 1994).
When, early in his first term, as the Great Depression
tightened its grip on the United States, President Franklin
Roosevelt said “we have nothing to fear but fear itself,”
he was mindful of more collective processes and conse-
quences. That is, fear of worsening economic conditions,
bank failures, and job losses leads to behaviors (unwill-
ingness to spend or invest and withdrawal of funds from
banks) that bring about precisely thomase dire results,
which in turn further encourage the behaviors that are
exacerbating the problem, in a classic “vicious circle.”
(The economic crisis that is gripping the United States and
most other countries at the time we are writing this chapter
makes accounts of that cycle all too familiar.) Social psy-
chologists are hardly unique in noting the power of percep-
tions and expectations to shape reality. What they brought
to the topic were demonstrations pinpointing some of the
processes by which this occurs, and illustrating how it
might play a role in various social phenomena of concern.
Few in our society would dispute the fact that one’s
goals and plans, and one’s confidence or lack of confidence
about what one can accomplish, play a significant role in
determining what one exposes oneself to, seeks to learn
and perfect, and is willing to take risks or delay gratifica-
tion in order to achieve. Equally obvious is the impact of
other people’s plans for us and expectations about what we
can accomplish, both on what opportunities we are given
and how we take advantage or fail to take advantage of
the opportunities that present themselves. To some extent, we
become what we seek, and expect, and want to become;
to some extent, we also become what others want for us,
demand of us, and help us to become. However, it is worth
noting that acceptance of this seeming truism is by no
means universal. Members of many other societies would
assign a larger role to destiny or God’s will or one’s place
Four Insights Underlying Research and Application 29
in some fixed hierarchy. Even within our own society (and
some domains of psychology), we would still find disagree-
ments about the role of nature versus nurture in determining
not only capacities to achieve, but also the aspects of tem-
perament, tastes, and motivation that play a role in what one
strives for and succeeds or fails in achieving.
The less obvious insight is that beliefs and expectations
can be fulfilled and perpetuated through processes other
than the powerful but mundane ones of deliberate goal-
setting, teaching and learning, and sustained goal-directed
effort either by actors or those in a position to help (or thwart)
such effort. The keen-eyed sociologist Erving Goffman
(1959) offered a “dramaturgical analysis” of social inter-
action that emphasized the constraining effects of roles,
role-based expectations, and audiences. The novelist Kurt
Vonnegut (in Mother Night) warned that since we “are
what we pretend to be” we should take great care in choos-
ing what we pretend to be; and Shaw’s Pygmalion is the
famed story of a working-class girl who is tutored about
upper class speech, manners, and dress so that she can, and
does, pass as a “lady.”
There is more than literary and anecdotal evidence to
attest to the existence and potency of behavioral confirma-
tion. In one famous early study (Kelley, 1950), students
encountered a guest lecturer who had previously been
described to them with a list of traits that included either
the adjective “warm” or “cold.” In another, even more
famous, albeit controversial study featuring a manipula-
tion of expectations (Rosenthal & Jacobsen, 1968), teach-
ers were led to expect that certain students in their classes
were about to show learning spurts. In both cases, the result
was a change in the ensuing student-teacher interactions
that confirmed the relevant expectations (although in the
latter case the phenomenon appears to have been largely
limited to students in one early grade).
A third slightly later study (Miller, Brickman, & Bolen,
1975), which remains less well known than it should be given
the clarity of its applied implications, involved the direct
effects of labeling on youngsters who were labeled. This
study showed that whereas exhorting primary school
students to refrain from a particular practice (e.g., class-
room littering) had only a modest and temporary effect on
behavior (objectively undeserved), communications from
their teacher, the principal, and the school custodian that
students deserved recognition for already showing such
behavior had a larger effect, and one that continued to be
apparent in the period after the “nagging versus labeling”
manipulation had ended.
In yet another study from that era (Snyder, Tanke, &
Berscheid, 1977), young men who had been shown a
picture of either a very attractive or less attractive young
woman then engaged in a telephone conversation with
30 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
someone whom they believed to be that woman. The
result, again, was an interaction that reflected the effect of
the research participants’ expectations. The belief that they
were talking to someone particularly attractive changed the
behavior of the young men, and that of the young women
(who had no inkling about the experimental manipulation
that was influencing the young men) in ways discernable
to raters who were blind to that manipulation. The young
men came away from their experience with an impression
of the person with whom they had been conversing that
was consistent both with their state of mind during the con-
versation and the later ratings of the outside observers.
A particularly pernicious example of self-fulfilling beliefs
and expectations, and the one most studied by social psy-
chologists, is that of stereotypes and other negative beliefs
about particular groups of people. Some of these effects are
obvious, although no less important for their obviousness.
If it is widely believed that the members of some group
disproportionately possess some virtue or vice relevant
to academic or on-the-job performance, one is likely (in
the absence of specific legal or social sanctions) to make
school admission or hiring decisions accordingly—and in
so doing to deprive or privilege group members in terms
of opportunities to nurture their talents, acquire credentials,
or otherwise succeed or fail in accord with the beliefs and
expectations that dictated their life chances.
We will discuss some less obvious effects of racism,
sexism, and other types of stigmatizing belief systems
later in this chapter. For now, let us consider just one clas-
sic study (Word, Zanna, & Cooper, 1974) that nicely fits
our criterion as an empirical parable. The investigators
first showed that White Princeton students interviewing
individuals they believed to be prospective job candidates
unwittingly afforded differential treatment to White and
Black candidates—seating themselves farther away from
the latter, showing more discomfort and awkwardness, and
ending the interview more quickly. In a second phase of
the project, the authors trained interviewers to treat new
applicants, all of whom were White, the way either Black
or White applicants had been treated in the earlier phase
of the study. When videotapes of those interviews were
subsequently viewed by evaluators, those receiving the
treatment previously afforded to Black applicants were
judged more negatively than those receiving the treatment
previously afforded to White applicants. Similar findings,
incidentally, were shown much more recently in an analo-
gous study regarding the effects of the treatment received
by homosexual versus heterosexual job applicants (Hebl,
Foster, Mannix, & Dovidio, 2002).
As is so often the case in social psychology, the take-
away message from years of research is not as simple as
one might assume from the description of a few classic
demonstration experiments. People do not always simply
do what those interacting with them hope and expect;
sometimes, especially in the case of negative expectations,
they both work hard to disconfirm those expectations and
succeed. Consider the phenomenon of psychological reac-
tance (Brehm, 1966), whereby individuals resist attempts
to push their choice in one direction by developing more
positive feelings about the choices they are being prompted
to give up (see also Ward & Brenner, 2006). Moreover, in
many contexts people who are adversaries or even just
competitors see influence attempts in strategic terms (if
they want me to do, buy, or accept X instead of Y, then my
doing, buying, or accepting X instead of Y must be good
for them, and therefore not so good for me).
In fact, even when people are not in an antagonis-
tic or suspicious frame of mind, they do not necessarily
show the responses that are being sought—even by skilled
experimental social psychologists—when those responses
tap motivations and concerns more potent than a vague
inclination to follow where they are led. Such resistance
and reactance on the part of research participants is per-
haps something that journal reviewers, for whom com-
plaints about the possible role played by “Rosenthal” and
“Hawthorne” effects are almost reflexive, should keep in
mind when they evaluate studies with consequential depen-
dent measures. (More than one of our colleagues has mused
that if research participants were as prone to go along with
demand characteristics and to show experimenter bias
effects as reviewers seem to imagine, our collective files of
failed experiments would be notably thinner.)
In most real-world influence attempts (e.g., charitable
appeals, requests for favors, pleas for better pay or working
conditions, ads trumpeting the merits of political candi-
dates, or calls for the cessation of violence), the hope and
expectation of the party making that attempt is explicit.
In this regard, and in recognition of the situationist tradition
in social psychology, we should remember that expectations
are not communicated only in words or gestures. The envi-
ronment itself “signals” norms and expectations that can
in turn influence behavior. The “broken windows” thesis
offered by Wilson and Kelling (1982), and much lauded by
thoughtful conservative commentators, suggested that tol-
erance for vandalism, graffiti, antisocial actions, and other
“trivial” offenses against social order signals a permissive-
ness that encourages more serious offenses. This thesis
(which can be seen as a borrowing of the tipping point
notion implicit in Lewin’s tension system formulation long
before Gladwell, 2000, popularized the phrase in the title of
his best-selling book) has recently been given a successful
empirical test by Keizer, Lindenderg, and Steg (2008), who
demonstrated the phenomenon of “cross norm” violation,
that is, disorder and non-lawfulness in one domain (e.g.,

graffiti or littering) resulting in increased violation (e.g., tres-
passing or even mail theft) in another.
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
Recent history in social psychology has seen contributions
to theory and research in three major areas: the study of
stereotyping, prejudice, and racism; the study of culture
and cultural influences; and the study of cognitive and
motivational influences beyond, or even contrary to, the
rational self-interest model central to economics and other
social sciences. Each area has witnessed upswings and
downturns in the interest it has received, and each has seen
marked shifts in focus as new generations of researchers
have come to the fore.
Stereotyping and Prejudice
From the 1920s to the present, a major concern in social
psychology has been the nature and effects of stereotyp-
ing and prejudice; however, the focus of research has regu-
larly shifted. In the 1920s and 1930s, the main concern of
leading researchers including Thurstone, Bogardus, Likert,
and others was the development of reliable and valid
methods for measuring negative attitudes toward various
racial and ethnic groups. Then, in the 1930s and 1940s,
as Miller and his Yale colleagues sought to translate psy-
choanalytic insights into learning theory models, studies
of the motivational bases for prejudice came to the fore in
social psychology, and phenomena such as scapegoating
and displacement were explored empirically. At the same
time, and in much the same spirit, personality theorists
led by Adorno and colleagues explored ethnocentrism and
authoritarianism.
Throughout that early period, as is the case today, social
scientists recognized that cognitive processes as well as
motivational ones were a central feature in the phenomena
of concern. Walter Lippman, in his 1922 book on Public
Opinion, gave the term “stereotype” its present meaning,
and three decades later Gordon Allport, in The Nature of
Prejudice (1954b), argued that stereotyping could be seen,
in part, as a natural, if undesirable, consequence of ubiqui-
tous and generally useful cognitive processes of categori-
zation and discrimination (see Hamilton, 1981).
As social norms regarding public discourse on matters
of race, ethnicity, and gender began to change following
the 1954 Supreme Court decision integrating the nation’s
public schools and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and as the
Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, attitude mea-
surement again became a focus of interest. Objective evi-
dence of discrimination remained not only in the economy
Social Psychology Today 31
and job market but also in the courts (see Sommers &
Ellsworth, 2001). But whereas Americans once freely
reported their reluctance to accept someone Black, Jewish,
Muslim, or Asian (or a member of some similarly dis-
criminated-against group) in their neighborhoods, social
clubs, or restaurants, previous measures no longer showed
such overt public racism. Indeed, in contexts where liberal
norms on matters of race hold sway, people avoid words
and deeds that could even be misinterpreted as racist or
sexist, unless they have first established their “moral cre-
dentials” as someone not subject to such biases (Monin &
Miller, 2001). More subtle measures were developed, such
as the modern or symbolic racism scales of Kinder, Sears,
and McConahay, in order to detect less blatant forms of
prejudice. This process continues, as today many items on
the so-called Modern Racism Scale (McConahay, 1986)
are no longer endorsed even by respondents who continue
to harbor residues of prejudice (Dovidio & Gaertner and
Yzerbyt & Demoulin, volume 2).
In the years since Jones’s (1985) chapter, this field has
been marked by two major undertakings. The first has
involved the development of theory and measures recognizing
ever more covert forms of stereotyping and prejudice—
including “implicit” attitudes that may be embedded in the
culture rather than solely in the minds of individuals (Banaji &
Heiphetz, this volume). The second undertaking has
involved a shift from the study of the holders of stereotypes
and prejudices to the study of the effects on, and responses
of, their targets (Swann & Bosson, this volume; Fiske,
volume 2; Steele, 2010).
Although controversy currently surrounds the putative
validity of tools designed to assess covert forms of ste-
reotyping (Blanton et al., 2009; Greenwald, Poehlman,
Uhlmann, & Banaji, 2009), such “implicit” measures may
ultimately be shown to provide additional predictive valid-
ity over and above that offered by the standard explicit mea-
sures (e.g., Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, Hoshino-Browne, &
Correll, 2003). The intriguing possibility also exists that
explicit and implicit measures assess related but distinct
constructs, each providing its own window on behavior. In
particular, implicit measures may do a serviceable job of
predicting behaviors that are normally free of conscious
self-monitoring (e.g., opting to hand a pen to a member of a
different race versus placing it on a table; Wilson, Lindsey, &
Schooler, 2000), whereas explicit measures may do a bet-
ter job of predicting behaviors that are subject to such
monitoring and control (e.g., questionnaire ratings of an
interaction partner of a different race; Dovidio, Kawakami,
Johnson, Johnson, & Howard, 1997).
Issues of level of awareness and monitoring can have
profound real-world consequences. Eberhardt, Goff,
Purdie, and Davies (2004) showed that priming police
32 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
officers with crime-related words increased the attention
they directed to Black faces relative to White faces. Correll
et al. (2007) conceptually replicated that result but then
demonstrated that trained police officers were less likely
to exhibit racial bias in a simulated shooting context than
were community members—i.e., that implicit associations
notwithstanding, behaviors toward members of stigma-
tized groups that are deliberate and explicitly executed
may, through self-monitoring and/or training, prove to be
relatively unbiased by such associations.
In focusing on the effects of stereotyping and prejudice,
perhaps the most important insights gained involve the cop-
ing strategies of targeted or “stigmatized” individuals. In
innovative research, Crocker and Major (1989), proceeding
from the surprising finding that members of stigmatized
groups often show no deficit in self-esteem relative to
members of non-stigmatized groups, suggested that indi-
viduals can use the fact of such stigmatization to maintain
self-esteem—notably, by attributing negative outcomes,
behaviors, and life circumstances to injurious prejudice
rather than to their own failures and inadequacies.
Drawing on his work on self-affirmation (Steele, 1988),
Claude Steele similarly argued that in certain “loaded”
domains, notably those implicating intellectual achieve-
ment, stigmatized individuals can respond by “disidenti-
fying” from that domain. As a consequence, in academic
domains (as is the case for stigmatized African American
students, and for women in the domain of mathematics),
they underachieve and narrow their career opportunities
accordingly. In discussing the processes and consequences
of stigmatization, Steele (1997) pointedly maintained that
the relevant toxic social representations are “in the air,” not
just in the mind of targeted individuals. As such, individuals
do not personally need to accept or endorse those representa-
tions to suffer their effects. In the face of what Steele termed
“stereotype threat,” poor performance can result from the
awareness that one risks confirming negative stereotypes—
and from the resulting effects of anxiety and expenditure of
cognitive resources that could otherwise be devoted to the
task at hand (Schmader, Johns, & Forbes, 2008).
The Role of Culture
A second major issue that has received an enormous amount
of recent attention is the topic of culture and cultural dif-
ferences. Following WWII, almost all students of social
psychology were familiar with the work of Ruth Benedict,
Alfred Kroeber, and other anthropologists in the Franz
Boas tradition. Social psychologists were frequently bil-
leted in interdisciplinary programs, such as the Institute for
Human Relations at Yale, the Institute for Social Research
at Michigan, the Department of Social Relations at Harvard,
and the Department of Social Psychology at Columbia,
where they worked side by side with Clyde Kluckholm,
John Whiting, Margaret Mead, and other eminent schol-
ars. Researchers in many places used the Human Relations
Area Files (Whiting & Child, 1953) to empirically test
postulated relationships between cultural practices or cir-
cumstances and features of modal personality (see also
McClelland and colleagues’, 1961, extensive work linking
culture to achievement motivation). In short, the topic of
cultural differences, and anthropology and sociology more
generally, had long occupied a niche within social psychol-
ogy. (Witness also the contents of three successive volumes
of Readings in Social Psychology, in 1947, 1952, and 1958,
sponsored by the Society for the Psychological Study of
Social Issues, that were de rigueur for graduate students
of the late 1950s and early 1960s.)
Soon after, however, culture virtually disappeared from
mainstream social psychology. In part, this turning away
from the study of culture may have reflected the Lewinian
penchant for explaining social influences in terms of the
immediate thoughts and feelings of the individuals who
were interacting, which was ironic in light of Lewin’s own
emphasis on situational and normative influences. Despite
efforts by Triandis (1968), and a few others who tested the
“generalizability” of findings by trying to replicate classic
American studies in other countries, interest in cultural dif-
ferences within our field dropped close to zero. What cre-
ated a sudden bandwagon was the ground-breaking work
of Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama (1991) and their
colleagues (e.g., Morris & Peng, 1994; Nisbett, 2003),
highlighting differences between Eastern and Western cul-
tures (Heine, volume 2).
What made Markus and Kitayama’s (1991) article on
the “independent versus interdependent self ” so impact-
ful and a continuing impetus for new research? First and
foremost, it offered an insight that was both powerful and
correct (Shweder & Bourne, 1984; Triandis, 1989; Weisz,
Rothbaum, & Blackburn, 1984). It was also partially a
matter of timing, as it coincided both with demographic
changes in the United States and the rise of China, Japan,
and South Korea as economic powers and the emergence of
the self as a focal topic (Baumeister, 1999). Additionally,
it offered a strategy of proceeding from a nuanced analy-
sis of a presumed cultural difference rather than a simple
comparison of the way people from different cultures
responded to research paradigms previously developed and
tested in the United States and other Western countries. But
the staying power of the topic additionally resulted from a
timely shift in methodology.
As interesting and enlightening as the comparison of
U.S. and Asian responses was to U.S. college students
and most American researchers, the lessons that such

comparisons offered about other ways of thinking, feel-
ing, and relating to family member and peers were ones
that were already familiar to the average teenager in the
“other” culture (and certainly to the many Asian and Asian
American graduate students who entered our Ph.D. pro-
grams). What brought this work to the very center of our
field, and what made even flagship journal reviewers and
editors receptive, was a shift to 2
2 experimental designs
that allowed a sharpening of hypotheses and findings.
Researchers demonstrated that under one set of circum-
stances the assumed cultural difference in, for example,
dissonance reduction (Kitayama, Snibbe, Markus, &
Suzuki, 2004), attribution (Morris & Peng, 1994), self-
determination (Iyengar & Lepper, 1999), or self-enhance-
ment (Sedikides, Gaertner, & Toguchi, 2003) appears, while
under another set of circumstances, it does not.
In the study of cultural diversity, the distinction between
the Western World and the Far East has received the lion’s
share of attention (Brewer & Chen, 2007). But recent work
on social class, subculture, and religious affiliations as
moderator variables in helping us understand variability
within our society has also gained currency. In the case of
social class, Markus and colleagues (Snibbe & Markus,
2005; Stephens, Markus, & Townsend, 2007) have offered
a compelling demonstration of differences between middle-
class and working-class Americans in the specific domain
of personal agency and choice. Thus, they have shown that,
when making choices, working-class individuals place a pre-
mium on options that reflect similarity to others, whereas
middle-class individuals are more likely to favor options
that distinguish them from others. Exploring subcultures in
the United States, Nisbett and Cohen and their colleagues
(e.g., Cohen, Nisbett, Bowdle, & Schwarz, 1996; Nisbett
& Cohen, 1996) have focused on a particular form of vio-
lence, namely that representing “honor killings,” and other
responses to insults and affronts, that the authors show to
be especially characteristic of Southern U.S. states and of
individuals who have migrated from the South. In such
research, which featured a combination of laboratory stud-
ies, survey data, and crime statistics, once again the goal
has not been simply to demonstrate the existence of group
differences. Rather, it has been to illuminate how cultural
forces interact with particular contextual factors to prime
specific values (e.g., choice, autonomy, honor)—values
that are not unique to a particular culture or subculture but
that are understood and acted upon differently by different
societies and by different groups within those societies.
Critique of Homo Economicus
A third topic with both a long history in social psychology
and a more recent spiking of interest involves the limitations
Social Psychology Today 33
of homo economicus—the standard economic model of
individuals as rational maximizers of utility that has domi-
nated political theory since the eighteenth-century writings
of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham (Tyler, Rasinski, &
Griffin, 1986). Although our critiques today borrow heav-
ily from modern work in the judgment and decision-mak-
ing tradition, it can be noted that social psychologists never
fully succumbed to the appeal of rational decision-making
models and functionalist approaches more generally. They
never forgot that people (to borrow a biblical maxim) “do
not live by bread alone,” but are influenced by a variety of
social motives and values that get in the way of maximiz-
ing material outcomes (Frank, Gilovich, & Regan, 1993;
Schwartz, 1994; Vohs, Mead, & Goode, 2006).
Indeed, people not only leave tips in restaurants that
they anticipate never again visiting, they sacrifice and even
die for beliefs that do not materially enrich them, or for that
matter their kin and descendants (Kahneman, Knetsch, &
Thaler, 1986; Miller, 1999; Tetlock, 2002). Moreover, the
extent to which prosocial values (which sophisticated econ-
omists explain in terms of reputational concerns and other
non-obvious but essentially self-serving motives) influ-
ence behavior proves highly susceptible to situational and
schema-salience manipulations, a finding further attesting
to the limitations of purely economic models (Mikulincer,
Shaver, Gillath, & Nitzberg, 2005). Indeed, as the work
of Frank, Gilovich, and Regan (1993) suggests, exposure
to the self-interested model common in economics tends to
breed self-interested behavior. Thus, undergraduates
majoring in economics displayed much greater rates of
defection in a standard Prisoner’s Dilemma game (72%)
than did nonmajors (47%).
A critique of homo economicus, especially in its simple
formulation, has thus constituted a significant and continu-
ing contribution of our field. (We not only insisted on having
a place for altruism, morality, social reputation, and self-
regard; we also recognized that behavior as well as beliefs
can be dictated by attempts at dissonance reduction and
rationalization, and that manipulations of small situ-
ational factors and the priming of particular goals, frames,
or schemas that do not change objective costs or benefits
can be highly impactful.) But above all, it is work in the
prospect theory tradition of Kahneman and Tversky (e.g.,
1979, 1984) and others who have applied framing and
priming techniques to further challenge standard economic
models and address practical issues of social policy inno-
vation, that proved most challenging and decisive. Unlike
the earlier pioneering work by Herbert Simon on bounded
rationality, which demonstrated conditions under which a
person might reasonably decide not to search for or insist
on an optimal solution, Kahneman and Tversky’s work
illustrated pervasive biases that challenged fundamental
34 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
assumptions of the traditional economic model of human
rationality.
More recent research by social psychologists on the
effects of too much choice has further eroded the validity
of models of decision making that assume rational outcome
maximization. Iyengar and Lepper (2000) found that when
given the opportunity to taste-test six jams, 30% of shop-
pers ultimately purchased a jar of jam. When given the
chance to taste-test twenty-four jams, only 3% of shop-
pers subsequently made a purchase. The availability of an
extensive choice set appears to have actually “demotivated”
individuals from making a choice.
Drawing on this research, Schwartz et al. (2002) sug-
gested a distinction between “maximizers,” who, when
faced with large choice sets, experience behavioral paraly-
sis as they vainly attempt to select the “best” option, and
“satisficers” (Simon, 1955), who are prone to select the
first option that passes some threshold of acceptability
(and who, in surveys, report themselves to be happier and
less prone to depression than maximizers). Although there
are no doubt cultural and situational variations determining
preferences for large versus smaller choice sets, the poten-
tial implications of such work go beyond the concerns of
shrewd marketing executives. Overwhelming citizens,
in the name of free choice and personal responsibility,
with enormous numbers of medical insurance, retirement
investment, or health improvement plans may have the
unfortunate unintended consequence of deterring them
from making any decision at all (or at best of leading then
to choose the most salient option). Clearly, research on bet-
ter ways to frame and present options to help people make
the choices that best serve them promises to be a growth
industry for some time to come.
Promising New Directions
Many other topics and approaches are also stimulating new
and potentially important work. Most of them draw on one
or more of the field’s four foundational insights discussed
earlier. Space concerns compel us to offer only a sample of
illustrative examples:
Evolutionary Psychology
The field of evolutionary psychology, with its singular
ability to bring together structuralism and functionalism,
represents the efforts of researchers in many disciplines,
including biologists, sociologists, and anthropologists,
as well as psychologists from many areas of psychology.
The most powerful evolutionary ideas relevant to social
psychology (such as those pertaining to romantic attrac-
tion, close relationships, and social development) are ones
that relate directly or indirectly to sexual selection, mating
strategies, and differential parental investment. One
animating insight for this work is the fact that throughout
most of human history, the two sexes have faced somewhat
different adaptive challenges in the effort to produce and
ensure the survival of offspring who will in turn reproduce.
The other is that the mechanisms for meeting these chal-
lenges persist and continue to exert their influence (Buss,
1994; Neuberg, Schaller, & Kenrick, this volume).
No topic has been more controversial than the role of bio-
logically based mechanisms of evolutionary origin versus
social and cultural influences. Critics within social psychol-
ogy (e.g., Eagly & Wood, 1999) complain that evolutionary
psychologists give the latter influences too little weight, espe-
cially in considering sex differences. Critics outside the field
complain that in considering contemporary human practices
and preferences, “just-so” stories and teleological specula-
tion are too often a substitute for the more rigorous strategy
of cross-species comparisons and contrasts, with particular
attention to species-specific behaviors that seem anomalous
rather than obviously adaptive. Ironically, perhaps, the most
persuasive rejoinder to critics of evolutionary approaches
has been provided by the very same research strategy that
cultural psychologist have used effectively—that is, distin-
guishing between conditions under which a given phenom-
enon should be present and when it should not.
For example, Haselton et al. (2007) reported that col-
lege women are more likely to “dress to impress,” through
self-grooming and ornamentation of attire, when in the fer-
tile rather than the luteal phase of ovulation. Studies of this
sort are not without their methodological critics and do not
rule out non-evolutionary explanations for the phenomena
in question, much less prove the more general contentions
of evolutionary psychology, but they do reflect increased
sophistication in theorizing and theory testing. Accordingly,
they make it more difficult for social psychologists to dis-
miss such contentions because they are unwelcome. (As in
other “nature vs. nurture” debates, it is important to remem-
ber that the fact of genetic or other biological determina-
tion need not say anything about degree of modifiability or
susceptibility to environmental influence.)
A final point that particularly resonates with social psy-
chologists, indeed one that was discussed by Leon Festinger
(1983), concerns the contrast between conditions of the
ancestral environment and those of the present day. Although
speculative, such analyses may speak to the persistence of
cognitive and motivational biases that appear maladaptive
today. Perhaps most notable is the assumption that others
share one’s goals, tastes, and understandings of the world—
which presumably was a lesser source of error and misun-
derstanding in a world when individuals lived in small bands

with peers who shared their experiences, and strangers with
disparate histories, needs, and preferences were rare.
Implicit Influences
As seen in recent research on prejudice and stereotyping,
investigation of non-conscious priming effects has become
increasingly prevalent and provocative. While much of the
work has involved simple effects on recognition and recall,
there are also some behavioral effects worth noting. In
perhaps the best known of these studies, Bargh, Chen, and
Burrows (1996) demonstrated that participants who per-
formed a sentence unscrambling task featuring words such
as Florida and bingo subsequently walked down a hallway
more slowly than participants who had unscrambled words
with no such age-relevant connotations. In an equally pro-
vocative study, Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998)
reported that respondents primed with a professor stereo-
type correctly answered more Trivial Pursuit items than
did those primed with a secretary stereotype. Finally, in a
study designed to challenge the formulations of conven-
tional economists, Kay, Wheeler, Bargh, and Ross (2004)
showed that players in an Ultimatum Game primed by the
presence of business-relevant objects (such as a briefcase)
made less generous offers than players primed by the pres-
ence of objects related more to academia (such as a back-
pack) than business. In these and many other similar tasks,
the vast majority of participants appear to evince no aware-
ness that their behavior has been influenced by the relevant
prime (Banaji & Heiphetz; Bargh et al.; Dijksterhuis, all in
this volume).
A parallel development in the domain of person percep-
tion concerns the rapidity (and often surprising accuracy)
with which we form initial impressions (Ambady, Bernieri,
& Richeson, 2000)—impressions that appear to be largely
intuitive responses to nonverbal cues, such as body pos-
ture, eye contact or gaze avoidance, and various spontane-
ous expressions of emotion that have been shown to play
an important role in social interactions (Ekman, 2007;
Ellsworth, Carlsmith, & Henson, 1972). In many ways, this
research represents a natural extension of earlier work on
the priming, or enhanced accessibility, of emotion and cog-
nitions. At the same time, a clear debt is owed to the seminal
work of Nisbett and Wilson (1977), who argued that higher-
order cognitive processes leave no conscious substrate
available to introspection. As in recent work investigat-
ing cognitive processes more generally, implicit priming
entails a recognition of dual processes, whereby one set
of responses (e.g., behavior in response to an unconscious
prime) appears to occur relatively automatically, whereas a
second set (e.g., behavior in response to consciously per-
ceived stimuli) typically requires deliberation.
Social Psychology Today 35
Of course, even the most ardent supporter of implicit
processes would acknowledge its limitations. Questions
remain about the power, flexibility, and duration of prim-
ing effects, and most demonstrations continue to involve
responses such as recognition memory rather than com-
plex behavior (Mitchell, 2006). Furthermore, as Bargh et
al. (1996) acknowledge, to be effective, subliminal behav-
ioral primes must be compatible with an individual’s cur-
rent goals and priorities. In short, we have yet to enter the era
when fanciful claims about the effectiveness of “subliminal”
advertisements, such as those in Vance Packard’s (1957)
best-seller, The Hidden Persuaders, have become valid.
Terror Management Theory
In a field often lacking grand, organizing theories, terror
management theory (TMT) has bucked the trend, produc-
ing over 300 studies. Inspired by the work of anthropologist
Ernest Becker, the originators of the theory argue that
knowledge of the finality of life induces people to engage
in practices designed to buffer themselves against the
anxiety associated with that knowledge (Greenberg et al.,
1986). Such “mortality salience,” it is postulated, prompts
defenses of one’s “cultural worldview” in a way that other
threats to the self (e.g., worrisome events, physical pain,
social exclusion) do not (Greenberg, Solomon, & Arndt,
2007; Pyszczynski et al., this volume).
In arguing, among other things, that the ultimate purpose
of self-esteem is its capacity to serve as a buffer against
death anxiety, adherents of terror management theory both
highlight the strengths and reveal the potential limitations
of their approach. Although some limiting conditions have
been cited (Jonas, Schimel, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski,
2002), the theory is offered as an explanation for everything
from suntanning (Greenberg et al., 2007) to the terrorist
attacks in the United States on 9/11/01 (Pyszczynski et al.,
2006). But the long history emphasizing the contextual
nature of social psychological phenomena tends to cir-
cumscribe such grand theorizing. While there well may
be times when self-esteem bolstering behavior is rooted in
concerns regarding death, efforts to enhance self-esteem
can serve other purposes as well—for example, to confirm
one’s sense of social belonging (Leary, Tambor, Terdal, &
Downs, 1995) or, as Greenberg (2008) acknowledges, to
maximize one’s potentialities and competencies.
Given the heralded reach of the theory, it is curious
that, with a few exceptions (e.g., Jonas et al., 2002), TMT
researchers have focused almost exclusively on negative
behaviors (e.g., derogation of those who do not share one’s
cultural worldview) as their “dependent variables.” To date,
the limited number of published TMT studies demonstrat-
ing the “positive” consequences of mortality salience seem
36 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
to have required the introduction of additional manipula-
tions, such as the invocation of “counteracting” values, to
achieve their results (see Niesta, Fritsche, & Jonas, 2008).
This despite the increases in generosity, commitment to
future generations, etc., that so often seem to come from
existential musings, recovery from serious illnesses, near-
death experiences, and the like. Assessing the nature and
scope of this provocative research topic may thus require
researchers from additional areas—indeed, perhaps from the
new tradition discussed next—to fill this gap in knowledge.
Positive Psychology
Begun in the past decade, positive psychology represents
an attempt to promote empirically based research focused
on human growth, strengths, and virtues, as opposed to the
negative behaviors, judgmental shortcomings, and social
pathologies emphasized in most research (Krueger &
Funder, 2004; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Specific
topics of inquiry include happiness, optimism, creativity,
hope, gratitude, forgiveness, love, and other aspects of well-
being (e.g., Gable & Haidt, 2005; Langer, 2002; Lyubomirsky,
King, & Diener, 2005). For example, whereas accounts
abound as to the origin and function of negative emotions,
Fredrickson’s (2001) “broaden and build” theory attempts
to explain the putative roots and purpose of positive emo-
tions, arguing that they serve to expand both thinking and
social resources. Similarly, Gable, Gonzaga, and Strachman
(2006) showed that the way romantic couples respond (or
fail to respond) to positive developments in each other’s
lives offers a better predictor of the health and duration of
the relationship than their reactions to negative events. The
study of beneficial health consequences of positive emo-
tions, relationships, and experiences (Keltner, 2009), not
just the negative consequences of fear, stress, anxiety, and
interpersonal conflicts, thus presents an exciting and pro-
ductive focus for applied research.
There is little likelihood that emphasis on the sunny side
of human functioning will gain as large a share of research
activity as it does shelf space in the popular psychology
section of our bookstores. Research on so-called negative
topics is too important to our collective efforts to address
important societal problems and generate insights relevant
to normal human functioning (Ward, 2000). As is the case
with so many topics, the future of positive psychology as a
field of empirical research will no doubt depend upon the
conjoint influence of societal priorities, funding availabil-
ity, methodological advances, and above all the capacity
of researchers to show and explain phenomena interesting
and important enough to attract our best young minds.
Self-Regulation
Attendant with the general increase in research on the
self has been a resurgence of concern with processes of
self-regulation and control (Baumeister & Vohs, 2004) that
have now been implicated in a wide range of applied prob-
lems, including educational achievement (Shoda, Mischel,
& Peake, 1990) and health maintenance (Mann & Ward,
2007). Theories proposing two distinct motivational sys-
tems, one oriented toward approach and the other toward
avoidance (Carver, Sutton, & Scheier, 2000; Gray, 1990),
have been particularly influential. In regulatory focus the-
ory (Higgins, 1998), for example, the concern is how an
individual’s desire to engage in promotion versus preven-
tion behaviors “fits” goal-relevant tasks in the environ-
ment. Although such an orientation can theoretically be
either personality-based or situationally induced, it is the
interaction between a particular orientation and certain
environmental variables that has produced especially inter-
esting applied findings. For example, Mann, Sherman,
and Updegraff (2004) applied a framing manipulation to a
health message about dental flossing, emphasizing either
gains to be had from enacting the behavior (e.g., healthy
gums, fresh breath) or losses to be suffered from neglecting
the behavior (e.g., unhealthy gums, bad breath). Individuals
who reported a motivational style consistent with promo-
tion behaviors flossed more in response to the gain-framed
than the loss-framed message; those with a style character-
istic of prevention behaviors showed the opposite pattern
of responses.
A second prominent approach has been adopted by
Baumeister and colleagues, who argue that exertions of
self-control in one domain temporarily sap the capac-
ity to engage in self-control in another domain. In their
studies, individuals who engage in “ego-depleting” tasks
(e.g., resisting chocolate chip cookies or making effort-
ful choices between consumer items) have been found to
desist more quickly in a second, unrelated self-control task
(Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007). Questions remain as to
the mechanisms underlying such diverse effects. One sug-
gestion is that such tasks temporarily reduce blood glucose
levels, resulting in subsequent impairments in self-regula-
tion (Gailliot & Baumeister, 2007). Another possibility is
that the initial task merely diminishes an individual’s moti-
vation to persevere at a subsequent task—a possibility sup-
ported by the fact that financial incentives appear to restore
self-regulatory strength (Muraven & Slessareva, 2003).
Whatever the mechanism producing these lapses in self-
control, as Baumeister et al. (2007) acknowledge, additional
research is needed to understand how best to counteract
such failures. Some promising results have been generated
by research on implementation intentions, whereby indi-
viduals are encouraged to anticipate how best to shield goal
pursuits from distracting influences (Gollwitzer & Sheeran,
2006). Likewise, activating a “high-level” construal of
an event, focusing on global, superordinate features,
as opposed to “low-level” construals focusing more on

specific, subordinate features, has also been found to facil-
itate successful self-control (Fujita, Trope, Liberman, &
Levin-Sagi, 2006).
Hedonic Adaptation
In an important early study on hedonic adaptation, Brickman,
Coates, and Janoff-Bulman (1978) had lottery winners,
paralyzed accident victims, and control subjects assess
their past, present, and future happiness. Although the
results have sometimes been mischaracterized, and some
methodological problems need to be acknowledged (e.g.,
more than a third of the accident victims failed to respond
to some questions), the results made the study a classic.
On average, the three groups did not differ in “how happy
they expected to be in a couple of years,” and while acci-
dent victims rated their present happiness levels as some-
what lower than did lottery winners, the latter did not differ
from control group respondents. Moreover, even accident
victims rated their present happiness levels as, on average,
above the midpoint on the scale.
One suspects that the processes involved for these latter
individuals (and the surprise of observers who imagine that
they would be less able to achieve even a moderate level of
life satisfaction) go beyond simple adaptation in the usual
sense of the term. For example, most of the time the focus
of attention of paralyzed individuals is not on their handicap
but on the activity in which they are currently engaged. And
many of those activities—savoring a good meal, watching a
compelling film, enjoying the companionship of friends and
loved ones—are no less pleasurable; indeed, for some indi-
viduals, they may be more pleasurable, because of that hand-
icap. Conversely, lottery winners spend most of their time
engaged in the same types of day-to-day tasks as the rest of
us; and, unless their attention is focused on matters financial,
a fat wallet or bank account does not enhance (and in fact
may diminish) their experience of those tasks. But questions
about precise mechanisms aside, the Brickman et al. study
does provide compelling evidence of our tendency to adapt
hedonically to both positive and negative circumstances.
Twenty years later, Gilbert and Wilson and their collabo-
rators published the first in a series of elegant studies show-
ing how individuals fail to anticipate the mechanisms and
consequences of hedonic adaptation, and thus fare poorly
in forecasting the affective experience that everyday events
are likely to produce (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, &
Wheatley, 1998; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). This work has
drawn on many sources, including Nisbett and Wilson’s
(1977) studies on the limits of introspection; work link-
ing overconfident predictions to underappreciation of the
vagaries of subjective construal (Griffin, Dunning, & Ross,
1990), and research on memory biases (Fredrickson &
Kahneman, 1993). Its implications are unmistakable: Even
Social Psychology Today 37
in the face of continual experiences of events not produc-
ing the degree of positivity or negativity they had expected,
people continue to show levels of hope and anticipation (or
fear and avoidance) that prove unwarranted.
More recently, Wilson and Gilbert (2008) have inves-
tigated the conditions under which hedonic or affective
adaptation does or does not take place. They argue that the
inability to understand and explain an emotion-produc-
ing event (as any academic who has had a manuscript turned
down by a journal editor without a clear explanation for the
rejection can attest) forestalls the adaptation process that
otherwise would occur. Indeed, with respect to negative
events, the predictions of the theory nicely dovetail with
the finding that people who can make sense of traumatic
events in their lives seem to recover better from the events
than those who cannot (Davis, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Larson,
1998; Pennebaker, 1997; see also Kross, Ayduk, & Mischel,
2005). Interestingly, the theory also would seem to predict
that positive events will lose some of their potency when they
can be “explained away.”
Close Relationships
Although the dynamics of interpersonal attraction have long
been a topic of study in social psychology (e.g., Aronson &
Linder, 1965; Berscheid, Dion, Walster, & Walster, 1971;
Walster, Aronson, Abrahams, & Rottman, 1966), research
exploring the long-term health of relationships between dat-
ing and married couples has only recently come into vogue
(Clark & Lemay, volume 2). Much of that work employs
methodologies associated more with traditional personality
psychology than social psychology. Thus, in a typical study,
couples might come to a laboratory for observations of their
interaction style, and those measurements would then be cor-
related with responses from both members of the couple to
various self-report surveys and/or to information culled from
diary entries concerning their relationship over time, revealing
associations between interaction style and relevant outcome
measures (Aron & Aron, 1994; McNulty, O’Mara, & Karney,
2008). This methodology presents problems familiar to all cor-
relational research, but it allows researchers to pose questions
and explore relational factors that could never be investigated
in studies probing the responses of undergraduate college
students interacting for 30 minutes with strangers. Recent
innovations also include an interesting hybrid methodology, a
variant of “speed dating,” whereby researchers use correlational
methods to investigate “first-date” behavior between strangers
seeking partners, who are brought together for a series of brief
initial encounters (Finkel & Eastwick, 2008).
Despite the use of largely correlational methods, many
contemporary studies of close relationships invoke con-
cepts central to social cognition. For example, one influ-
ential program of research by Murray, Holmes, and Griffin
38 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
(1996a, 1996b) has extended earlier work by Taylor and
Brown (1988) on positive illusions from the realm of
individuals to that of couples, arguing that long-term rela-
tional satisfaction is most likely when the partners hold
idealized views of each other. Rusbult et al. (2000) simi-
larly found greatest relational endurance and satisfaction
among partners who perceived themselves as superior to
other couples. Although such correlational findings pre-
clude causal conclusions, they parallel results from other
domains suggesting that an inflated, even delusional
sense of optimism and positivity is not only adaptive, but
can also prove self-fulfilling (see Reed, Kemeny, Taylor,
Wang, & Visscher, 1994).
Virtual Interaction
With the advent of email, the Internet, and related innovations
in communication technology have come unprecedented
opportunities for “virtual interaction” with individuals all
over the world. Social networking sites like MySpace,
Facebook, and Twitter have allowed people, particularly
young people, to post and exchange information not only
with intimate friends but also a network of acquaintances and
in many cases strangers. Social psychologists have begun
to explore the implications of such virtual interactions and
related phenomena, examining, for example, egocentric per-
ceptions when using email (e.g., Kruger, Epley, Parker, &
Ng, 2005) and the tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate
objects such as one’s computer (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo,
2007; Harris & Fiske, 2008; Reis & Gosling, this volume).
With all its promise of uniting our global village, the
ubiquity of computer-based communication has predictably
prompted concerns that such virtual interactions are not a
full substitute for actual human contact, in fact that exces-
sive use of the Internet may be associated with decreases
in well-being (Kraut et al., 1998; but see Gosling, Vazire,
Srivastava, & John, 2004), at least among those already
vulnerable to social isolation (Kraut et al., 2002). Such
concerns, perhaps fueled also by highly publicized cases
of ostracized youngsters carrying out murderous rampages
against their classmates, have prompted researchers to
begin exploring the effects of social isolation and exclu-
sion, which have now been linked to aggression (Twenge,
Baumeister, Tice, & Stucke, 2001) and which some liken
to physical pain (MacDonald & Leary, 2005). Indeed, in
one study, individuals undergoing a brain scan who were
excluded by two other “virtual” interaction partners appeared
to show activations in areas of the brain typically associated
with pain (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003).
While advances in computer and communication tech-
nology create new social concerns, they also provide
researchers with new tools for the studying of social pro-
cesses. Exploitation of increasingly realistic and immersive
virtual environments, for example, raises questions about
the once seemingly clear boundary between imagination
and “real life” (Blascovich et al., 2002); at the same time,
researchers can now explore phenomena that could not
readily be pursued in face-to-face laboratory interactions.
The opportunity to present complex stimuli to research
participants and measure their behavioral responses, even
as they remain immobile in order to permit the simulta-
neous recording of their brain activity, raises especially
exciting possibilities. And there now exist unprecedented
opportunities for the recording and analysis of the ongoing
information-seeking and computer-based “social” interac-
tions that occur as people conduct their lives in today’s
“digital” society.
Social Cognitive Neuroscience
Finally, like our colleagues elsewhere in psychology, social
psychologists are increasingly taking advantage both of
older technologies such as electroencephalography (EEG)
and newer ones including positron emission tomogra-
phy (PET) scanning, and, especially, functional magnetic
resonance imagining (fMRI), in order to study, in vivo,
brain activity accompanying and underlying behavioral
responses (Cacioppo et al., 2007; Lieberman, this volume).
Classic topics such as attitudes, attribution, stereotyping,
motivation, and prejudice can now be explored though the
lenses of neuroscience. In some cases, findings from such
studies have served to buttress results from other domains
of inquiry. For example, Phelps et al. (2000) found that
amygdala activation, which has been implicated in fear
responses, correlated with racial evaluations assessed by
implicit measurement tools including the IAT. In other
cases, neuroscientific evidence has been marshaled in sup-
port of theoretical conjectures originally derived from other
sources, such as the distinction between controlled and
automatic processes involved in attribution (Lieberman,
Gaunt, Gilbert, & Trope, 2002).
In what may be its most promising use, neuroscientific
data has also been employed to test specific social psycho-
logical hypotheses. Harris and Fiske (2006), for example,
asked participants undergoing fMRI to look at photographs
of individuals belonging to socially stereotyped groups
(e.g., elderly, disabled, or wealthy individuals). Photos of
groups who were low on both the dimensions of warmth
and competence (i.e., homeless people and drug addicts)
uniquely failed to trigger activation of the medial prefrontal
cortex, a structure implicated in social cognition. Instead,
activation patterns in response to members of those groups
paralleled responses to depictions of objects rather than
people—chilling evidence for the hypothesized dehuman-
ization of these groups (Vaes, Paladino, Castelli, Leyens, &
Giovanazzi, 2003).

SUCCESSFUL APPLICATIONS AND THE
CHALLENGE OF “SCALING UP”
We conclude this chapter with some examples of applied
or “intervention” research that demonstrate the relevance
of social psychologists’ work for practitioners, decision
makers, and funders outside the field. Such examples
should serve as a source of pride to those in our field who
are still inspired by George Miller’s (1969) clarion call to
“give psychology away.” Increasingly, such work reflects
not only the experience- and tradition-based wisdom of
practitioners but also the application of mainstream theory,
old as well as new, in social psychology.
One longstanding insight relates to the folly of assum-
ing that well-designed interventions will inevitably produce
positive outcomes. Unanticipated and undesirable conse-
quences of seemingly straightforward interventions may
occur for many reasons, including the possibility (noted
prominently in Lewin’s field theory formulations) that
the removal of previously operative forces and constraints
may reveal and alter the dynamics of existing institutions
and relationships that had previously served important
functions. (See Ross & Nisbett, 1991, pp. 208–216, for
accounts of the Cambridge-Somerville project that was
designed to serve Depression-era youth deemed to be at
high risk for crime and delinquency but that proved, if
anything, to be counterproductive; also the Seattle-Denver
“guaranteed income” pilot project, which increased rather
than decreased rates of marital dissolution; and other dis-
appointing intervention results.)
At the same time, experience teaches us that interven-
tion success can sometimes prove easier to achieve than
expected because of so-called “Hawthorne” effects (Mayo,
1933, 1945; Roethlisberger, 1941)8 or other factors that
make participants in intervention experiments strive to
produce results welcome to the experimenter (Rosenzweig,
1933). In fact, unpredictability of outcomes is one of the
reasons why even those social psychologists who are most
8 It should be noted that later critics, such as Bramel and Friend
(1981) challenged and indeed “debunked” traditional secondary
accounts of increased worker productivity as a simple response to
attention and awareness of being in a study. These critics pointed
out, among other things, that the Depression-era participants in
the study were made aware that increased productivity in response
to the relevant changes in working conditions, even unwelcome
ones, was a not only a goal but perhaps a requirement if they were
to retain their jobs and later achieve better conditions. But the
larger point—that the targets of research actively interpret their
circumstances and respond to what they believe will be the con-
sequences of their actions— is uncontestable.
Successful Applications and the Challenge of “Scaling Up” 39
sympathetic to the goals of a project generally advocate the
use of formal evaluation designs, with appropriate control
and comparison groups, objective outcome measures, and
exploration of the subjective experiences of those affected
by the intervention.
Another old Lewinian insight involves the strategy of
achieving change by removing rather than adding forces
to an existing tension system—that is, instead of relying
on positive and negative incentives (which can add “ten-
sion” to a system), it may be more useful to determine
what impediments or barriers stand in the way of achieving
change, and then eliminate or at least reduce them. Barriers
involving unhelpful group norms and pressures were gener-
ally the ones emphasized in the applied Lewinian tradition.
However, the insight is a very general one. The first step in
designing a program to produce change is to analyze the
sources of individual and/or collective resistance to such
change; and this analysis should include not just “social”
and “psychological” barriers but also situational and struc-
tural factors. Thus, failure of unemployed youth to utilize
a job training program may reflect negative group norms
and past experiences, but it may also reflect unrecognized
financial costs or other disincentives, or even the lack of
convenient public transportation to the training site.
Some of the newer insights involve application of prin-
ciples derived from dissonance, self-perception, attribution,
and prospect theory. But others reflect advances in evalu-
ation methods. In particular, researchers have increasingly
come to recognize the value of measures that directly or
indirectly assess the processes assumed to produce change.
We are referring here less to the use of complex statisti-
cal analyses to tease apart a number of different possible
mediating variables than to the simpler task of finding out
whether an intervention did in fact change some factor
or process that the program designers thought in need of
address, and whether that change in process was associ-
ated with positive outcomes. For example, in evaluating
a program designed to improve academic performance
by increasing students’ sense of “belonging” (Walton &
Cohen, 2007), it is important not only to determine whether
students’ grades improved but also to determine both
whether the intervention did in fact increase the students’
sense of belonging and whether the students whose grades
improved the most were those whose sense of belonging
increased the most, and vice versa.
Throughout this chapter, we have documented both
early and contemporary instances of “mainstream” labo-
ratory-based social psychological research with important
implications for potential intervention. The past 40 years
have also seen the growth of a tradition in social psychol-
ogy with a more explicit and extensive emphasis on applied
work—one recognized with the publication of the first issue
40 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 1971 and
the subsequent opening of a number of graduate programs
specifically devoted to training students in applied meth-
odology (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2005). A related
enterprise involves the significant contributions made by
social psychologists to the study of topics relevant to the
legal system. As discussed earlier, their investigations have
exposed the potential unreliability of memories for events,
eyewitness identifications of criminal suspects, and even
confessions offered by those in police custody. They have
also shed light on the group dynamics of jury delibera-
tions and the cognitive and motivational biases that reveal
themselves when citizens are called to render verdicts,
including, notably, decisions in potential capital punish-
ment cases (for a review of this large and important area of
applied research, see Kovera & Borgida, volume 2).
We can also cite instances in which mainstream theorists
skilled in the art of the laboratory experiment have ventured
outside the bounds of academia and engaged in direct inter-
ventions in applied settings—particularly in the domains of
health, education, and environmental conservation. Many of
these social psychologists have followed the Lewinian tradition
of bringing rigorous theory to bear on significant real-world
problems. For example, Aronson and his colleagues have
employed dissonance-inducing “hypocrisy” techniques to
both enhance safer sexual practices among young adults and
promote water conservation (Dickerson, Thibodeau, Aronson,
& Miller, 1992; Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow, & Fried,
1994). In these interventions, participants were induced to
make public statements strongly endorsing behaviors (e.g.,
using condoms, taking short showers) just after having been
made aware that their own behavior in such regards has been
less than exemplary. Participants thus motivated to reduce the
resulting state of dissonance subsequently engaged in more
of the behavior that they had “hypocritically” advocated.
Aronson also pioneered the jigsaw classroom technique,
whereby students cooperatively provide each other with
pieces of information they require to finish their projects
(Aronson, Blaney, Stephin, Sikes, & Snapp, 1978; Aronson &
Patnoe, 1997)—a technique shown to reduce racial ten-
sion and enhance scholastic performance (Aronson, 1990).
Similar techniques have been advocated to reduce the threat
of school violence at the hands of socially rejected students
(Aronson, 2000).
Other social psychologists well known for both their
experimental and applied work have made important con-
tributions in the field of health (Taylor, 2008). Salovey,
Rothman, and colleagues have successfully used framing
techniques to tailor messages to enhance health-promoting
behaviors (Banks et al. 1995, Detweiler, Bedell, Salovey,
Pronin, & Rothman, 1999; Rothman & Salovey, 1997;
Rothman, Salovey, Antone, & Keough, 1993; see also Parent,
Ward, & Mann, 2007). The finding by Dal Cin et al. (2006)
that self-reported condom use in response to a safe-sex mes-
sage was doubled when that message was accompanied by
a “reminder” bracelet is particularly noteworthy. It is also
reminiscent of the much earlier finding by Leventhal,
Singer, and Jones (1965) that combining a persuasive com-
munication with a simple “channel factor” manipulation
(e.g., providing students with a campus map with the uni-
versity health center circled and asking them to find a con-
venient time to visit it) produced an eightfold increase in
tetanus inoculations over the very low rate achieved with
the communication alone. Important advances have also
been made in the areas of smoking reduction (Strahan et
al., 2002; Westling, Mann, & Ward, 2006), and combat-
ing underage drinking. In the latter case, Schroeder and
Prentice (1998) produced a 40% reduction in alcohol con-
sumption among research participants simply by counter-
ing the prevailing pluralistic ignorance on the Princeton
campus about the relevant social norms.
In more recent work in the realm of education, Claude
Steele and his associates applied the valuable lessons
learned in research on both self-affirmation and stereo-
type threat to design the “21st Century Program” at the
University of Michigan. The program, which included a
challenging curriculum modeled after the pioneering work
of University of California, Berkeley, mathematics profes-
sor Uri Triesman, admitted ethnic majority and minority
students in an “honorific” fashion, avoiding the stigmatiz-
ing labels associated with most remediation programs, and
explicitly affirming to students their potential for success.
The promising results of this intervention and related ones
are described by Steele (2010). Others, working within
this same theoretical framework, have shown the power
of short-term interventions affirming students’ sense of
self-worth (Cohen, Garcia, Apfel, & Master, 2006), or, as
alluded to earlier, belongingness (Walton & Cohen, 2007)
to enhance school achievement.
These and many other successful interventions, including
those by particularly skilled and dedicated classroom teach-
ers and administrators whose use of sound social psycholog-
ical principles (as well as sound educational principles and a
lot of hard work) might be more instinctive and less formal,
add to a growing body of social and developmental psychol-
ogy literature that suggests that academic performance, and
indeed intelligence itself, is anything but fixed (J. Aronson,
Fried, & Good, 2002; Diamond, Barnett, Thomas, & Munro,
2007; Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, & Perrig, 2008; Rueda,
Rothbart, McCandliss, Saccomanno, & Posner, 2005). In one
powerful illustration, Blackwell, Trzesniewsk, and Dweck
(2007) showed that persuading junior high school students
that intelligence is malleable was associated with a reversal
of the downward trajectory in grades shown by their peers

over the same time period (see Schwartz, 1997; see also
Nisbett (2009) for an illuminating discussion of successes
and disappointments in preschool, primary school, and high-
school intervention projects, with a particular emphasis on
contributions by social psychologists).
The conclusion supported by such research efforts is
worth underscoring. We now have solid “existence proofs”
of the possibility of helping disadvantaged students greatly
narrow the achievement gap separating them from more
advantaged students through wise educational and social
psychological interventions. At the same time, it must be
acknowledged that many of the hopeful claims of educators
about ways to close the gap through better physical plants,
smaller class sizes, more stringent education requirements
for teachers, or greater racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic
diversity, have not been supported by the data from rigor-
ous evaluation research (although in the case of class size,
the issue is really one of cost-effectiveness, since the ben-
efits, though small, seem to be well-documented).
In a number of settings, Robert Cialdini and his col-
laborators have harnessed the power of classic social-
psychological techniques, most notably the use of “social
proof ” or messages about group norms, to address environ-
mental concerns. For example, in one study, in which the
outcome measure was reuse of hotel towels that are oth-
erwise replaced daily, they showed that pairing a standard
pro-environmental message with norm information (i.e.,
“75% of guests participate in our new resource savings
program”) proved significantly more effective than other
potentially persuasive messages that omitted such informa-
tion (Goldstein, Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2008). Cialdini
and company have similarly used influence techniques
involving norms and norm violations to reduce littering
(Cialdini, Reno, & Kallgren, 1990) and power consump-
tion (Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius,
2007), and they have also pointed out that admonishing
messages about the putative dire consequences stemming
from the high frequency of norm violation can have the per-
verse effect of making such violations seem more socially
acceptable.
The success of these types of small and medium scale
intervention projects, and increasing recognition by
researchers and government officials alike of three impor-
tant facts, set the stage for the scaling-up problem to which
we now turn. First, inside or outside of academia, and
regardless of general political conviction, few would dis-
agree that individual and collective problems of behavior
lie at the heart of the most difficult social issues burdening
our society (specifically, the interrelated complex of factors
at the root of minority and underclass academic under-
achievement, homelessness, high unemployment, absent
fathers, drug abuse, high incarceration rates, etc.). Second,
Successful Applications and the Challenge of “Scaling Up” 41
few could dispute that a half century of work in social psy-
chology and related fields has armed us with an impressive
collection of potential tools for changing behavior. Some
of these intervention tools entail changes in social and situ-
ational pressures and constraints; others entail changes in
perceptions or “definitions” of situations and/or interven-
tion efforts. Finally, as many have documented, positive
intervention outcomes are not only possible but a matter
of proven fact.
Even in the domain of education, as we have just noted,
successful small-scale interventions with disadvantaged
students who face a daunting array of personal and situ-
ational challenges have been demonstrated. These success
stories are important because of the specific lessons they
offer practitioners both about techniques of instruction
and about the social and social psychological factors that
are necessary to make educational efforts more fruitful for
more students. But they perhaps are even more important
insofar as they challenge both conservative pessimism
about the educability of such children and the equally pes-
simistic radical claim that real progress—in the absence of
huge “structural” change in society—is impossible.
What remains to be proven is our capacity to move from
successful small, one-site interventions to achieve similar
success in the kind of district-wide, city-wide, statewide or
nationwide programs that would really make a difference in
American society. Some of the challenges of such “scaling
up” are financial and logistic (finding and training additional
skilled, dedicated teachers and aides to implement new
practices); some are political (gaining cooperation of teach-
ers’ unions and administrators reluctant to accept the input
of “outsiders”), and some are psychological (replicating
the sense of mission on the part of program providers, and the
sense of specialness, belonging, and privilege on the part
of students). Some relate to features of small programs that
necessarily could not be replicated in system-wide contexts
(for example, the ability to exclude especially problematic
students or uncooperative parents, or the requirement that
parents and students alike invest substantial amounts of
time and energy to get into, and to stay in, the program).
Research to determine which of these features matter most
and devising ways to replicate these features in large-scale
programs or, where necessary, to compensate for their
absence, remains a vital applied undertaking.
While these challenges are daunting, we should remem-
ber that we have some lessons from the history of applied
research and the evaluation of natural experiments result-
ing from changes in social policy to guide us. For exam-
ple, the real lessons of the Hawthorne effect studies (and
studies of demand characteristics and confirmation biases
more generally), those of studies attesting to the effects
of behavioral commitment, and above all the consistent
42 History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
message from studies on the importance of perceived
norms, remind us of the unique factors that may be at play
when dedicated professionals apply their skills in small-
scale or medium scale intervention studies. Some of these
factors may be difficult to duplicate on the massive scale
required to make a difference in society at large, although
they should not be ignored; others (for example, creat-
ing a sense of belongingness, making use of mentors and
role models, and clearly communicating to students the
message that success is indeed achievable for them, that
abilities are malleable, and that persistent effort pays off)
readily can be addressed.
Moreover, lessons from the laboratory and observa-
tion of real-world events also help us appreciate factors
that may make it easier, in fact necessary, to intervene on
a large scale rather than a small one—factors involving
not only economies of scale but also channel factors, the
communication of social norms or “default” choices (as in
the “opt-in” vs. “opt-out” studies), and the effects of mass
media role-models, which we have been investigating for
many decades. A striking example relevant not to educa-
tion but to environmentalism makes this point. Consider
the enormous increase over the last two or three decades
in the practice of recycling various materials that once
clogged our refuse dumps and (if burned or buried) were
a source of ground, air, and water pollution. Thirty years
ago, this practice, at least in urban and suburban America,
was largely restricted to a small, socially conscious, largely
liberal elite who duly separated the relevant materials and
took them in their cars to neighborhood or district recy-
cling centers, from which they were transported to larger
centers for processing. Today, in many towns and cities,
placing recyclable products into a single large container
(left, not incidentally, in public view), which is emptied
in large trucks on trash-collection days, is a standard
practice rather than an expression of social and political
values. Indeed, not recycling constitutes a deviant act, an
act at odds with civic virtue, something akin to not shovel-
ing snow or raking the leaves in front of one’s home, or
(in some communities at least) not joining the PTA when
asked to do so on the first day of school.
The virtuous cycle is clear—changes in practice make
compliance easier, ease increases the rate of compliance,
the increased rate of compliance make non-compliance
deviant and therefore unacceptable to self and others. As
Festinger and Bem could tell us, something is undoubtedly
lost in this virtuous cycle. When compliance becomes easy
and expected, the actions in question no longer become a
motive for internalization of values or a cue for personal
identity. But society as a whole benefits—and social psy-
chologists in the Lewinian tradition can shift their energies
to other strategies for transforming social beliefs and practices
in ways that serve the greater good. Norms, of course,
are not communicated solely through policies and practices.
As social psychologists have long recognized, the media
can play a role as well. It is said that when Clark Gable
removed his shirt to reveal a bare chest in the romantic
comedy It Happened One Night, canny undershirt manu-
facturers recognized that trouble lay ahead.
Today, all over the world, telenovenas and radio daytime
dramas are being used by human rights and women’s rights
activists, who make effective use of fictional role models
to motivate and guide women to protect their own health,
safety, and dignity, and that of their children (Bandura,
2006; Rogers et al., 1999). This intervention has its roots
in work that was begun over half a century ago by Albert
Bandura (Bandura & Huston, 1961) showing the ways in
which children learn from, and imitate, the positive and
negative behavior of social “models,” and it skillfully
applies the social learning theory principles that Bandura
developed and shared with the world (Bandura, 1977b). In
a society where so many problems remain, and in a world
beset by so much conflict and so much need, the challenge
to younger researchers to learn from, and imitate the suc-
cessful models of intervention reviewed here could not be
clearer.
Robert F. Kennedy, who in many ways represented a
standard-bearer for his generation’s interventionist spirit,
eloquently posed this challenge in two famous quotations.
The first, distinctly Lewinian in its plea to look beyond
conventional models of change and identify and address
barriers to societal transformation, was paraphrased from
the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw: “There are
those who look at things the way they are, and ask why.
I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.” The
second offers a boost to the collective self-efficacy of our
field: “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself;
but each of us can work to change a small portion of events,
and in the total of all those acts will be written the history
of this generation.” We can think of no more appropriate
message with which to end this chapter.
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 Chapter 2
The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
TIMOTHY D. WILSON, ELLIOT ARONSON, AND KEVIN CARLSMITH
If you are reading this chapter you may well be a graduate
student in social psychology, perhaps at the beginning of
your graduate career. If so, congratulations and welcome
to the field! We assume that your graduate school advi-
sors have already taught you the secret Social Psychology
Handshake that will identify you as a member of our spe-
cial guild. What, they forgot? No worries—in this chapter
we will teach you the handshake, metaphorically speaking.
It is the methods we use that define our guild, and once you
learn about these methods and begin to use them yourself,
you won’t need a special handshake.
To be a successful social psychologist you need good
ideas, of course—astute predictions about how people will
behave and brilliant explanations about why they behave that
way. But in some ways that’s the easy part. Transforming
your ideas into hypotheses that can be tested with an ele-
gant, tightly controlled experiment is the real challenge. As
with any challenge, it can be both frustrating and great fun.
As Leon Festinger once said, it is like solving a difficult
puzzle:
I love games. I think I could be very happy being a chess player
or dealing with some other kinds of games. But I grew up
in the Depression. It didn’t seem one could survive on chess,
and science is also a game. You have very strict ground rules
in science, and your ideas have to check out with the empirical
world. That’s very tou—gh and also very fascinating. (quoted
in D. Cohen, 1977, p. 133)
In this chapter we hope to convey some of this fascina-
tion with a particular kind of scientific game, namely the
laboratory experiment. This is not the only method avail-
able to social psychologists, of course. We can and do use
correlational designs and conduct our research in other set-
tings (e.g., in the field). These approaches have provided
us with some of our richest and most fascinating data
Address correspondence to Dr. Timothy D. Wilson, Department of Psychology, 102 Gilmer Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville,
Virginia 22904-4400. Phone: 434-924-0674, fax: 434-982-4766, e-mail: twilson@virginia.edu.
51
CH02.indd 49
about social phenomena, as described in another chapter
in this volume (Reis & Gosling). In this chapter we hope
to convey something about the approach that has been the
workhorse of social psychological research, the laboratory
experiment.
We have two main goals in this chapter. First, we
will discuss why the laboratory experiment is often the
method of choice. What are its advantages and disadvan-
tages? Why is it used so frequently when it has some clear
drawbacks? This is a timely question, because it is our
impression that the use of the lab experiment has become
less frequent in many areas of psychology, including social
psychology. One reason for this is that social psychologists
have ventured into areas in which it is more difficult to do
experiments, such as the study of culture, close relation-
ships, and the areas of the brain that correspond to social
cognition and behavior (social neuroscience). Another
reason is that sophisticated statistical techniques (e.g.,
structural equation modeling) are now available, allow-
ing more precise tests of the relationships between vari-
ables in correlational designs. Although we welcome
these advances, we fear that the unique power and value
of the experimental method sometimes gets lost in the
enthusiasm generated by new topics and techniques.
In the first part of the chapter we will discuss the advantages
of experiments in general terms.
The second part of the chapter is more of a “how-to”
manual describing, in some detail, how to conduct an
experiment. It is our hope that, during the first part of the
chapter, we will have convinced the reader of the continued
value of experiments; then, in the second part, we hope to
provide detailed instructions about “how to do it” for those
new to this method. We hasten to add that the best way to
learn to do an experiment is to do so under the guidance
of an expert, experienced researcher. Experimentation is
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 52 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
very much a trade, like plumbing or carpentry or direct-
ing a play; the best way to learn to do it is by apprenticing
oneself to a master. Nonetheless, just as it helps to read
manuals explaining how to fix a leaky faucet or stage a
production of Hamlet, our “how to do an experiment”
manual might prove to be a helpful adjunct to a hands-on
apprenticeship.
WHY DO LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS?
You have probably had something like the following expe-
rience (nearly every social psychologist has): You are at a
party and someone asks you what you do. The first thing you
explain is that you are not THAT kind of psychologist;
you aren’t Dr. Phil and you are not analyzing everyone in
the room. OK, your questioner gets that, and understands
that you are a research psychologist who focuses on, say,
stereotyping and prejudice. “But how do you study that?”
your friend asks. Now comes the hard part——explaining
why you do the kind of studies you do.
Suppose, for example, that you had just published a
well-known study of stereotype activation by Gilbert and
Hixon (1991). “Here’s an example of one of my studies,”
you tell your friend. The participants were white college
students who watched a videotape of a woman holding up
a series of cards with word fragments on them, such as
P_ST. The participants’ job was to make as many words
from these fragments as they could within 15 seconds,
such as POST or PAST. Now, unbeknownst to the partici-
pants, there were two versions of the videotape. In one the
woman holding up the cards was Caucasian, whereas in
the other she was Asian. This was one of the independent
variables, you explain to your friend, looking around for
some chalk and a blackboard. “That’s the variable that the
researcher varies to see if it has an effect on some other
variable of interest (the dependent variable).” Your friend
nods, so you continue. The other independent variable, you
explain, was how “cognitively busy” or distracted people
were while watching the videotape. People in the “busy”
condition were asked to remember an eight-digit number,
which made it difficult for them to think carefully about what
they were doing. People in the “nonbusy” condition were not
asked to remember any numbers.
The hypothesis was that people who had to remember the
eight-digit number would not have the cognitive resources
to activate their stereotype of Asians, and thus would
judge the Asian woman no differently than the Caucasian
women. Not busy participants, however, would have the
resources to call to mind their stereotype, and thus would
judge the Asian woman differently than the Caucasian
woman. “But how did you measure stereotype activation?”
CH02.indd 50
your friend asks. Ah, you say, this was the point of the
word completion task. It just so happened that five of
the word fragments on the cards people saw could be
completed to form words that were consistent with
American college students’ stereotypes about Asians. For
example, the fragment S_Y could be completed to make
the word “SHY,” and the fragment “POLI_E” could be
completed to form the word “POLITE.” The measure
of stereotype activation was the number of times people
completed the fragments with the words that reflected
the Asian stereotype.
The results were as predicted, you proudly tell your
friend: People who were not busy and saw the Asian woman
generated the most stereotypic words. People who were
cognitively busy did not generate any more stereotypical
words for the Asian as opposed to the Caucasian woman.
Even better, you (actually, Gilbert & Hixon) did a second
study that distinguished between the activation and the
application of a stereotype, and found that the people’s rat-
ings of the Asian woman’s personality were most stereo-
typic when they were not busy while viewing the videotape
(allowing their stereotypes to be activated) but cognitively
busy while listening to the assistant describe her typical
day (allowing the stereotype to be applied to the woman
with no inhibition).
Assuming that your friend has not left to go talk with
the literature professor across the room, she is likely to
have several questions. “People are being discriminated
against every day on the basis of their race or gender or sexual
preference and wars are being fought over ethnic identity,”
she says. “On the other hand, an African American has
been elected president for the first time in the history of
the United States. With such rich and important material
to study in everyday life, why on earth are you doing a
lab study in which college students watch videotapes and
complete word fragments?”
Good question. Even to seasoned social psychologists,
lab studies sometimes seem far removed from the prob-
lems that inspired them. Most social psychologists would
agree that the perfect study would be one that was conducted
in a naturalistic setting, with a diverse sample of participants,
that revealed the nature and causes of an important social
psychological phenomenon (such as stereotyping and prej-
udice). Unfortunately, such a study is like a Platonic ideal
that can rarely be achieved. Experimentation almost always
involves a trade-off between competing goals: the desire to
study a real problem in its natural context, on the one hand,
and the desire to have enough control over the setting to be
able to learn something about that problem on the other.
There are several important methodological points to be
made here, beginning with the distinction between correla-
tional and experimental studies.
9/2/09 8:09:51 PM

Correlational Versus Experimental Studies
One of the points of the Gilbert and Hixon (1991) study
was to examine whether the amount of cognitive resources
people have influences the activation of their stereotypes.
Like most social psychological questions this is a causal
hypothesis, namely that one psychological variable (cogni-
tive busyness) will have an interesting effect on another
(stereotype activation). In order to test causal hypotheses,
the researcher needs to have enough control over the situ-
ation to manipulate the independent variable (in this case,
cognitive busyness) while keeping everything else con-
stant. Although that is sometimes possible to do in field
studies, it is much easier to accomplish in the laboratory.
To illustrate this point, think about ways in which we
could test Gilbert and Hixon’s hypotheses about stereotype
activation in a more realistic setting. It wouldn’t be easy, but
maybe we could pull off a study such as the following: At a
large state university, we attend the first day of classes that
are taught by graduate student teaching assistants—some
of whom happen to be Caucasian and some of whom hap-
pen to be Asian. We take advantage of the fact that some
of the classes are held in a building that is being renovated,
such that the high-pitched whine of power saws and the
explosions of nail guns intrude into the classrooms. We can
assume that students in these rooms are cognitively busy,
because the noise makes it difficult to pay close attention
to the instructor. Other classes are held in buildings in
which there is no construction noise, and these students
are assumed to be relatively “nonbusy.” At the end of each
class we ask the students to rate their instructor on various
trait dimensions, including some that are part of the Asian
stereotype (e.g., shyness). Suppose that the results of this
study were the same as Gilbert and Hixon’s: Students in the
“nonbusy” (quiet) classrooms rate Asian instructors more
stereotypically than students in the “busy” (noisy) class-
rooms (e.g., they think the instructors are more shy). There
is no difference between busy and nonbusy students in their
ratings of Caucasian instructors.
To many readers, this study probably seems to have
some definite advantages over the one conducted by
Gilbert and Hixon (1991). The measure of stereotyping—
students’ ratings of their TA—seems a lot more realistic
and important than the word fragments people complete
after watching a videotape in a psychology experiment.
But, whereas the study would be interesting and possibly
worth doing, it would have definite limitations. It would
demonstrate a correlation between cognitive busyness and
stereotypic ratings of Asians (at least as these variables
were measured in this study), but there would be no evi-
dence of a causal relationship between these variables.
For example, students who took the classes in the noisy
CH02.indd 51
Why Do Laboratory Experiments? 53
building might differ in numerous ways from students
who took the classes in the quiet building. Maybe some
departments offer classes in one building but not the other,
and maybe students interested in some subjects have more
stereotypic views of Asians than other students do. If so,
the differences in ratings of the Asian instructors might
reflect these differences in endorsement of the stereotype
and have nothing to do with cognitive busyness. Further,
there is no way of knowing whether the instructors who
teach in the different buildings have similar personalities.
Perhaps the Asian instructors teaching in the noisy building
really were more shy than the Asian instructors teaching in
the quiet building. In short, there is simply no way of tell-
ing whether students’ ratings of the Asian instructors in
the different buildings were due to (a) differences in their
level of cognitive busyness; (b) the fact that different stu-
dents took classes in the different buildings, and these
students differed in their endorsement of the Asian ste-
reotype; or (c) the fact that different instructors taught in
the different buildings, and these instructors had different
personalities.
One of the great advantages of an experiment is the
ability to ensure that the stimuli in experimental conditions
are similar. The fact that Gilbert and Hixon showed all
participants the same videotape of an Asian or Caucasian
woman solved one of the problems with our hypothetical
correlational study: personality differences between the
instructors of the courses. The fact that people who were
nonbusy showed more evidence of stereotyping than peo-
ple who were busy cannot be attributed to differences in
the personality of the Asian women they saw on the video-
tape, because participants in both conditions saw the same
woman.
But how do we know that this difference was not due
to the fact that the students in the nonbusy condition hap-
pened to be more prejudiced toward Asians? Gilbert and
Hixon (1991) solved this problem with the most impor-
tant advantage of experimental designs: The ability to randomly
assign people to conditions. Unlike the correlational study,
people did not “self-select” themselves into the busy or
nonbusy condition (i.e., by deciding which courses to take).
Everyone had an equal chance of being in either condition,
which means that people who were especially prejudiced
against Asians were as likely to end up in one condition
as the other. Random assignment is the great equalizer: As
long as the sample size is sufficiently large, researchers can
be relatively certain that differences in the personalities or
backgrounds of their participants are distributed evenly
across conditions. Any differences that are observed, then,
are likely to be due to the independent variable encoun-
tered in the experiment, such as their different levels of
cognitive busyness.
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 54 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
Our discussion of the limits of correlational designs—and
the advantage of experiments—is no different from that in
any introductory course in statistics or research methodol-
ogy. As straightforward and obvious as these points may
seem, however, they are often overlooked, by both lay
people and professional researchers. To understand why,
consider the following two (fictitious) investigations of
the same problem. In the first, a team of researchers finds
that school performance in a group of inner-city children
is related to the frequency with which they eat breakfast
in the morning. The more often the kids eat breakfast,
the better their school performance, with a highly signifi-
cant correlation of .30 (this means that the relationship
between eating breakfast and school performance is mod-
erately strong and highly unlikely to be due to chance).
As far as you can tell the researchers used good measures
and the study was well conducted. What do you think of
this finding? Does it make you more confident that pro-
grams that provide free breakfasts for underprivileged
children are having positive effects on their academic per-
formance? If you were reviewing a report of this study for
a journal, how likely would you be to recommend publi-
cation? Most of us, we suspect, would find this to be an
interesting and well-conducted study that should be in the
literature.
Now consider this study: A team of researchers conducts
an experiment with a group of inner-city children. Half of
the kids are randomly assigned to a condition in which they
receive free breakfasts at school every morning, whereas
the other half are in a control group that does not receive
this intervention. Unfortunately, the researchers introduced
a confound into their design: While the kids in the first
group eat their breakfast, teachers also read to them and
help them with their homework. After a few months, the
researchers assess the kids’ school performance, and find
that those in the breakfast condition are doing significantly
better than those in the control condition. The measure of
academic performance is the same as in the previous study
and the magnitude of the effect is the same. What do you
think of this experiment? How likely would you be to rec-
ommend that it be published? The confound in the design,
we would guess, is likely to be apparent and appalling to
most of us. Is it eating breakfast that improved the kids’
performance or the reading and extra attention from the
teachers? Many of us would feel that the design of this
study is so flawed that it should not be published.
But let’s compare the two studies more carefully. The
key question is how confident we can be that eating break-
fast causes improved academic performance. The flaw in
the experiment is that we cannot be sure whether eating
breakfast or extra attention from a teacher or both were
responsible for the improved performance. But how confi-
CH02.indd 52
dent can we be from the correlational study? Kids who eat
breakfast probably differ in countless ways from kids who
do not. They may come from more functional families, get
more sleep—or, for that matter, have parents or teachers
who are more likely to help them with their homework!
The experimental study, despite its flaw, rules out every
single one of these alternative explanations except for one.
Admittedly, this is a serious flaw; the researchers did err by
confounding breakfast eating with extra attention from the
teachers. But the fact remains that the correlational study
leaves the door open to the same confound, and dozens or
hundreds of others besides. If the goal is to reduce uncer-
tainty about causality, surely the correlational study is
much more flawed than the experimental one. Why, then,
does it seem like more can be learned from the correlational
study? One reason is that the correlational study was done
well, by the standards of correlational designs, whereas
the experimental study was done poorly, by the stan-
dards of experimental designs. Our point is that the same
standard should be applied to both types of studies: How
much do they reduce uncertainty about causality?
The ability to determine relationships between vari-
ables in correlational designs has improved, we should
add, with the advent of sophisticated statistical techniques
such as structural equation modeling. These methods
allow researchers to test complex relationships between
several variables and are useful techniques for distin-
guishing between competing models. We do not have
the space to review all of the pros and cons of structural
equation modeling (for excellent reviews see Kenny, this vol-
ume and Reis, 1982). Our point is that as useful as this
technique is, it cannot, in the absence of experimental
manipulations with random assignment, determine causal
relationships. One reason for this is obvious but sometimes
overlooked: It is impossible to measure all variables in a
correlational design, and the researchers might have omitted
one or more crucial causal variables. Thus, although there
may be a direct path two variables in a structural model,
one can never be sure whether this is because one variable
really causes the other or whether there are unmeasured
variables that are the true causes and happen to correlate
highly with the measured variables. The only way to defi-
nitely rule out such alternative explanations is to use exper-
imental designs, in which people are randomly assigned to
different experimental conditions.
Validity and Realism in Experiments
We hope we have convinced the reader of the great advan-
tage of the experiment—its ability to answer causal
questions. Some, however, might still be a little uncom-
fortable with our conclusions, in that there is one way in
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which experiments are often inferior to observational and
correlational studies: They are typically done in the “arti-
ficial” confines of a psychology laboratory and involve
behaviors (e.g., forming words from word fragments,
remembering eight-digit numbers) that seem to have lit-
tle to do with the kinds of things people do in everyday
life. This is, perhaps, the most common objection to social
psychological experiments—they seem “artificial” and
“unrealistic.” How can we generalize from such artificial
situations to everyday life?
Types of Validity
Campbell and his colleagues (Campbell, 1957; Campbell &
Stanley, 1963; Cook & Campbell, 1979) distinguished
among different types of validity. In Campbell’s taxonomy,
the interpretation of research results may be assessed with
respect to at least three different kinds of validity—internal
validity, external validity, and construct validity.
Internal Validity Basically, internal validity refers to
the confidence with which we can draw cause-and-effect
conclusions from our research results. To what extent are
we certain that the independent variable, or treatment,
manipulated by the experimenter is the sole source or cause
of systematic variation in the dependent variable? Threats
to the internal validity of research results arise when the
conditions under which an experiment is conducted pro-
duce systematic sources of variance that are irrelevant to the
treatment variable and not under control of the researcher.
The internal validity of a study is questioned, for instance,
if groups of participants exposed to different experimental
conditions are not assigned randomly and are different from
each other in some important ways other than the inde-
pendent variable (as in our hypothetical breakfast-eating
study).
As we have seen, it is usually much easier to maintain
high internal validity in a laboratory experiment, because the
researcher has more control over extraneous variables that
might compromise the design. Even when internal validity
is high, however, there may be questions about the validity of
interpretations of causal effects obtained in any given
study. It is here that the distinction between external valid-
ity and construct validity becomes relevant.
External Validity This term refers to the robustness
of a phenomenon: the extent to which a causal relation-
ship, once identified in a particular setting with particular
research participants, can safely be generalized to other
times, places, and people. Threats to external validity arise
from potential interaction effects between the treatment
variable of interest and the context in which it is delivered
or the type of participant population involved. When labo-
CH02.indd 53
Why Do Laboratory Experiments? 55
ratory experimentation in social psychology is criticized
as being “the study of the psychology of the college soph-
omore,” what is being called into question is the exter-
nal validity of the findings. Because so many laboratory
experiments are conducted with college students as partici-
pants, the truth of the causal relationships we observe may
be limited to that particular population (Sears, 1986). If it
happens that college students—with their youth, above-
average intelligence, and nonrepresentative socioeconomic
backgrounds—respond differently to our experimental
treatment conditions than other types of people, then the
external (but not internal) validity of our findings would
be low.
The issue is actually a little more subtle. No one would
seriously deny that Princeton students might respond dif-
ferently to a particular experimental treatment than would
a sample of 50-year-old working-class immigrants or col-
lege students in another culture. External validity refers to
the extent to which a particular causal relationship is robust
across populations, cultures, and settings. Thus, if we
were interested in the effects of lowered self-esteem on
aggression, we might have to use different techniques to
lower self-esteem in the two populations. Being informed
that one has failed a quiz about the history of Ivy League
football is likely to lower self-esteem more for Princeton
sophomores than for working-class immigrants. But if we
can find another technique of lowering self-esteem among
that second sample, we still must ask whether this lowered
self-esteem will have the same effects on aggression in
both samples.
External validity is related to settings as well as to
participant populations. How do we know whether the
results we find in one situation (e.g., a psychology labo-
ratory) will generalize to another situation (e.g., everyday
life)? For example, Milgram’s (1974) initial studies of
obedience were conducted in a research laboratory at Yale
University, and a legitimate question is the extent to which
his findings would generalize to other settings. Because partici-
pants were drawn from outside the university and because
many had no previous experience with college, the pres-
tige and respect associated with a research laboratory at
Yale may have made the participants more susceptible to
the demands for compliance that the experiment entailed
than they would have been in other settings. To address this
issue Milgram undertook a replication of his experiment
in a very different physical setting. Moving the research
operation to a “seedy” office in the industrial town of
Bridgeport, Connecticut, adopting a fictitious identity as
a psychological research firm, Milgram hoped to mini-
mize the reputational factors inherent in the Yale setting.
In comparison with data obtained in the original study, the
Bridgeport replication resulted in slightly lower but still
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 56 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
dramatic rates of compliance to the experimenter. Thus,
setting could be identified as a contributing but not crucial
factor to the basic findings of the research.
Construct Validity To question the external validity of
a particular finding is not to deny that a cause and effect
relationship has been demonstrated in the given research
study, but rather to express doubt that the same effect could
be demonstrated under different circumstances or with
different participants. Similarly, concerns with construct
validity do not challenge the fact of an empirical relation-
ship between an experimentally manipulated variable and
the dependent measure, but rather question how that fact
is to be interpreted in conceptual terms. Construct valid-
ity refers to the correct identification of the nature of the
independent and dependent variables and the underlying
relationship between them. To what extent do the operations
and measures embodied in the experimental procedures of
a particular study reflect the theoretical concepts that gave
rise to the research in the first place? Threats to construct
validity derive from errors of measurement, misspecifica-
tion of research operations, and, in general, the complexity
of experimental treatments and measures. One of the most
difficult parts of experimental design is constructing a con-
crete independent variable (e.g., memorizing an eight-digit
number) that is a good instantiation of the conceptual vari-
able (cognitive busyness). This is essentially an issue of
construct validity: How well does the independent variable
capture the conceptual variable?
The same issue holds for the dependent variable. When
we devise an elaborate rationale for inducing our partici-
pants to express their attitudes toward the experiment or
toward some social object in the form of ratings on a
structured questionnaire, how can we be sure that these
responses reflect the effect variable of conceptual interest
rather than (or in addition to) the myriad of other complex
decision rules our participants may bring to bear in mak-
ing such ratings? And how do we know that the functional
relationships observed between treatment and effect, under
a particular set of operations, represent the conceptual
processes of interest?
We can now see that the experimenter is faced with a
daunting task: designing a study that is well-controlled
(high in internal validity), includes independent and depen-
dent variables that are good reflections of the conceptual
variables of interest (high in construct validity), and is
generalizable to other settings and people (high in external
validity). Internal validity may be considered a property of
a single experimental study. With sufficient knowledge
of the conditions under which an experiment has been
conducted, of the procedures associated with assignment
of participants, and of experimenter behavior, we should
CH02.indd 54
be able to assess whether the results of that study are
internally valid.
Issues involving construct validity and external validity,
on the other hand, are more complicated. Researchers do
the best they can in devising independent and dependent
variables that capture the conceptual variables perfectly.
But how can external validity be maximized? How can
researchers increase the likelihood that the results of the
study are generalizable across people and settings? One
way is to make the setting as realistic as possible, which is,
after all, one point of field research: to increase the extent
to which the findings can be applied to everyday life, by
conducting the study in real-life settings. The issue of real-
ism however, is not this straightforward. There are several
different types of realism with different implications.
Mundane Realism Versus Experimental Realism
Versus Psychological Realism
Aronson and Carlsmith (1968) distinguished between two
ways in which an experiment can be said to be realistic.
In one sense, an experiment is realistic if the situation is
involving to the participants, if they are forced to take it
seriously, if it has impact on them. This kind of realism
they called experimental realism. In another sense, the term
“realism” can refer to the extent to which events occur-
ring in the research setting are likely to occur in the normal
course of the participants’ lives, that is, in the “real world.”
They called this type of realism mundane realism. The fact
that an event is similar to events that occur in the real world
does not endow it with importance. Many events that occur
in the real world are boring and unimportant in the lives of
the actors or observers. Thus, it is possible to put a partici-
pant to sleep if an experimental event is high on mundane
realism but remains low on experimental realism.
Mundane realism and experimental realism are not
polar concepts; a particular technique may be high on both
mundane realism and experimental realism, low on both, or
high on one and low on the other. Perhaps the difference
between experimental and mundane realism can be clari-
fied by citing a couple of examples. Let us first consider
Asch’s (1951) experiment on perceptual judgment. Here
the participants were asked to judge the length of lines
and then were confronted with unanimous judgments
by a group of peers that contradicted their own percep-
tions. For most participants this experiment seems to have
contained a good deal of experimental realism. Whether
participants yielded to group pressure or stood firm, the
vast majority underwent a rather difficult experience that
caused them to squirm, sweat, and exhibit other signs of
tension and discomfort. They were involved, upset, and
deeply concerned about the evidence being presented to
them. We may assume that they were reacting to a situation
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that was as “real” for them as any of their ordinary expe-
riences. However, the experiment was hardly realistic in
the mundane sense. Recall that the participants were judg-
ing a very clear physical event. In everyday life it is rare
to find oneself in a situation where the direct and unam-
biguous evidence of one’s senses is contradicted by the
unanimous judgments of one’s peers. Although the judging
of lines is perhaps not important or realistic in the mundane
sense, one cannot deny the impact of having one’s sensory
input contradicted by a unanimous majority.
On the other hand, consider an experiment by Walster,
Aronson, and Abrahams (1966) that, although high on
mundane realism, was low indeed on experimental real-
ism. In this experiment, participants read a newspaper article
about the prosecution of criminal suspects in Portugal. In
the article, various statements were attributed to a pros-
ecuting attorney or to a convicted criminal. The article
was embedded in a real newspaper and hence, the partici-
pants were doing something they frequently do—reading
facts in a newspaper. Thus the experiment had a great deal
of mundane realism. However, nothing was happening to
the participant. Very few U.S. college students are seriously
affected by reading a rather pallid article about a remote
situation in a foreign country. The procedure did not have a
high degree of experimental realism.
Aronson, Wilson, and Akert (1994) introduced a third
type of realism that they termed psychological realism. This
is the extent to which the psychological processes that occur
in an experiment are the same as psychological processes that
occur in everyday life. It may be that an experiment is noth-
ing like what people encounter in everyday life (low in mundane
realism) and fails to have much of an impact on people (low
in experimental realism). It could still be high in psycho-
logical realism, however, if the psychological processes that
occur are similar those that occur in everyday life. Consider
the Gilbert and Hixon (1991) study we described earlier. This
study was low in mundane realism; in everyday life people
rarely, if ever, watch a videotape of a woman holding up cards
with word fragments on them and think of words to complete
the fragments. It was also relatively low in experimental real-
ism, in that the study was not very impactful or engaging.
Watching the woman was probably of mild interest, but surely
the study was less impactful than the Milgram or Asch stud-
ies. The study was high in psychological realism, however,
to the extent that the psychological processes of stereotype
activation and application were the same as those that occur
in everyday life. It is common to encounter a member of a
group and for a stereotype of that group to come to mind auto-
matically. To the extent that this psychological process is
the same as what occurred in Gilbert and Hixon’s (1991)
study, they succeeded in devising a situation that was high
in psychological realism.
CH02.indd 55
Why Do Laboratory Experiments? 57
There is some overlap between experimental and psy-
chological realism, in that many of the psychological
processes of interest to psychologists are ones that occur
when people are reacting to impactful events in their envi-
ronments. Thus, the situations in everyday life in which
cognitive dissonance, prejudice, or aggression occur are
usually ones in which people are quite engaged. Thus,
when studying these phenomena, it is imperative to devise
experimental settings that are equally impactful. Such
studies would be high in both experimental and psycho-
logical realism (although not necessarily high in mundane
realism). Increasingly, however, social psychologists have
become interested in psychological processes that occur
when people are not actively engaged or motivated to pro-
cess information carefully. Examples include the study of
automatic processing (as in the Gilbert & Hixon study),
peripheral or heuristic processing of persuasive messages
(Chaiken, 1987, Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), or “mindless-
ness” (Langer, 1989). To study these phenomena it is
important to devise experimental settings that are high in
psychological realism but low in experimental realism.
External Validity: Is it Always a Goal?
Before leaving this topic it is important to make one more
point about external validity and generalizability. It is often
assumed that all studies should be as high as possible in
external validity, in the sense that we should be able to
generalize the results as much as possible across popula-
tions and settings and time. Sometimes, however, the goal
of the researcher is different. Mook (1983) published a
provocative article entitled, “In defense of external invalid-
ity,” in which he argued that the goal of many experiments
is to test a theory, not to establish external validity. Theory-
testing can take a variety of forms, some of which have
little to do with how much the results can be generalized.
For example, a researcher might construct a situation in
which a specific set of results should occur if one theory is
correct, but not if another is correct. This situation may be
completely unlike any that people encounter in everyday
life, and yet, the study can provide an interesting test of the
two theories.
Mook (1983) gives the example of Harlow’s clas-
sic study of emotional development in rhesus monkeys
(Harlow & Zimmerman, 1958). Infant monkeys were
separated from their mothers and placed in cages with
wire-covered contraptions that resembled adult monkeys.
Some of the wire monkeys were covered with terry cloth
and were warmed with a light bulb, whereas others were
bare and uninviting. Nourishment (in the form of a baby
bottle) was sometimes available from one type of mon-
key and sometimes from the other. Harlow found that the
monkeys clung to the terry cloth “mother,” regardless of
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 58 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
whether it contained the bottle of milk. These results were
damaging to drive-reduction theories that argued that the
monkeys should prefer nourishment over emotional com-
fort. Was this study high in external validity? Clearly not.
There was no attempt to randomly select the monkeys
from those reared in the wild, or to simulate conditions
that monkeys encounter in real-life settings. Nonetheless,
if theories of drive reduction that were prevalent at the time
were correct, the monkeys should have preferred the nour-
ishment, regardless of which “monkey” it came from. The
researchers succeeded in devising a situation in which a
specific set of actions should have occurred if a particular
theory was right—even though the situation was not one
that would be found in everyday life. The purpose of this
experiment, then, was to disprove an accepted theory rather
than to establish external validity.
Mook also points out that some experiments are valuable
because they answer questions about “what can happen,”
even if they say little about “what does happen” in every-
day life. Consider Milgram’s experiments on obedience to
authority. As we’ve seen, there was little attempt to simu-
late any kind of real-life setting in these studies; outside of
psychology experiments, people are never asked to deliver
electric shocks to a stranger who is performing poorly on
a memory test. The results were very informative, how-
ever, because it was so surprising that people would act the
way they did under any circumstances. This is sometimes
referred to as “proof of principle.” The fact that people can
be made to harm a complete stranger, because an authority
figure tells them to, is fascinating (and frightening) despite
the artificiality of the setting.
Mook’s (1983) position is persuasive, and we heartily
agree that the goal of many experiments is to test a theory,
rather than to establish external validity. Nonetheless, we
believe that even if external validity is not the main goal of
study, it should never be completely forgotten. The impor-
tance of a theory, after all, depends on its applicability to
everyday life. The reason Harlow’s study is so important
is because the theories it addresses—drive-reduction and
emotional attachment—are so relevant to everyday life. The
theories apply to humans as well as monkeys, and to many
situations beyond cages and wire mothers. It is precisely
because the theories are generalizable (i.e., applicable to
many populations and settings) that a test of those theories
is important. Thus, a specific study might test a theory in
an artificial setting that is low in external validity, but why
would we conduct such a study if we didn’t believe that
the theory was generalizable? Similarly, Milgram’s results
are so compelling because we can generate important, real-
life examples of times when similar processes occurred.
Indeed, the inspiration for Milgram’s study was the Holocaust,
in which seemingly normal individuals (e.g., guards
CH02.indd 56
at prison camps) followed the orders of authority figures to
the point of committing horrific acts. Thus, if we were to
conclude that the psychological processes Milgram uncov-
ered never occur in everyday life, we could justifiably dis-
miss his findings. The fact that these processes appear to
be similar to those that occurred at some of humankind’s
darkest moments—such as the Holocaust—is what makes
his results so compelling.
We are essentially reiterating the importance of psycho-
logical realism in experimentation. To test a theory it may
be necessary to construct a situation that is extremely arti-
ficial and low in mundane realism. As long as it triggers
the same psychological processes as occur outside of the
laboratory, however, it can be generalized to those real-life
situations in which the same psychological processes occur.
Of course, as discussed earlier, claims about psychological
realism cannot be taken completely on faith; only by repli-
cating a study in a variety of settings can external validity
be firmly established.
Problem-Oriented versus Process-Oriented
Research: Studying the Phenomenon Versus
Studying the Process
One of your mythical friend’s objections to the Gilbert
and Hixon experiment was that it didn’t really study the
phenomena that inspired it, stereotyping and prejudice.
Seeing how people complete the word fragment S_Y is far
removed from ethnic conflict or housing discrimination.
We have already addressed this criticism to some extent:
Although it is true that people do not complete word frag-
ments in everyday life (the study was low in mundane realism),
the study may well have captured the processes by which
stereotypes are activated in everyday life—that is, the study
was high in psychological realism. But there is another
answer to this criticism, which is related to our discussion
of Mook’s (1983) defense of external invalidity—whether
the researcher’s goal is to study a phenomenon that he or
she wants to understand and possibly change, such as preju-
dice, or to study the underlying mechanisms responsible for
the phenomenon. This distinction may seem a little odd, in
that it probably seems that these goals are interdependent—
and they are. To understand and change a phenomenon, it
is necessary to understand the mechanisms that cause it.
How can we reduce prejudice, example, without under-
standing the psychological mechanisms that lead to stereo-
type activation? In practice, however, there is a distinction
to be made between research that focuses on the problem
itself and research that focuses on mechanisms.
Part of this distinction involves still another one: the
difference between basic and applied research. With basic
research, investigators try to find the best answer to the
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question of why people behave the way they do, purely for
reasons of intellectual curiosity. No direct attempt is made
to solve a specific social or psychological problem. In
contrast, the goal in applied research is to solve a specific
problem. Rather than investigating questions for their own
sake, constructing theories about why people do what they
do, the aim is to find ways of alleviating such problems
as racism, sexual violence, and the spread of AIDS. Thus,
the basic researcher is more likely to be interested in the
mechanisms underlying an interesting phenomenon than
the applied researcher. If applied researchers find some-
thing that works they might not be as concerned with why.
In medicine, for example, there are many examples of cures
that work for unknown reasons, such as the effects of aspi-
rin on body temperature.
The distinction between problem-oriented and pro-
cess-oriented research, however, involves more than the
distinction between applied and basic research. To illustrate
this, consider two basic researchers who are equally interested
in understanding the causes of prejudice and racism. (As
with many social psychological topics this is, of course,
an eminently applied one as well, in that the research-
ers are interested in finding ways of reducing prejudice.)
One researcher conducts a field study in which members
of different races interact under different conditions (e.g.,
cooperative vs. competitive settings), to study the condi-
tions under which reductions in prejudicial behavior occur.
The other conducts a laboratory experiment on automatic
processing and categorization, or the way in which people
categorize the physical and social world immediately, spon-
taneously, and involuntarily. The stimulus materials, how-
ever, have nothing to do with race per se; in fact, the issue
of race never comes up in this experiment. Participants
judge a white stimulus person, under conditions thought
to trigger automatic evaluations and conditions thought to
trigger more controlled, thoughtful evaluations (e.g. Bargh,
1989; Brewer, 1988; Uleman, 1989).
Which study is a better investigation of prejudice and
racism? Most people, we suspect, would say the former
study. What does the second study have to do with preju-
dice? How can you possibly study racism, one might argue,
without looking at behavior and attitudes of one race toward
another? Herein lies our point: For researchers interested in
process and mechanisms, the study of a phenomenon (such
as prejudice) can involve the study of basic, psychological
processes that are several steps removed from the phenom-
enon itself. In our view both types of studies are important:
Those that study the phenomenon (e.g., racism) itself and
work backward to try to discover its causes, and those that
study the basic mechanisms of human perception, cognition,
motivation, emotion, and behavior, and then work forward to
apply these concepts to important problems (e.g., racism).
CH02.indd 57
Why Do Laboratory Experiments? 59
Like our earlier distinctions, we hasten to add that this
one is not entirely clear-cut. Sometimes research is both
problem- and process-oriented; it explores a problem and
the mechanisms responsible for it simultaneously. Often,
however, the focus of research on a particular problem
changes as research on it progresses. As noted by Zanna
and Fazio (1982), initial investigations of a problem tend
to explore “is” questions: What is the phenomenon? Does
it exist? These studies are, in our terms, very much prob-
lem-oriented; they establish the existence of a particular
phenomenon (e.g., whether there is a stereotype based on
physical attractiveness). When this question is answered,
researchers typically move on to questions that have more
to do with the underlying mechanisms, namely studies
exploring variables that moderate or mediate the effect.
Interestingly, these process-oriented studies sometimes do
not study the original problem at all, focusing instead on
general mechanisms that produce many different effects
(as in our example of basic research on categorization
and impression formation that do not study interactions
between people of different races, but which are quite rel-
evant to stereotyping and prejudice).
The Basic Dilemma of the Social Psychologist
It should be clear by now that the perfect social psychol-
ogy study would be experimental instead of correlational,
be extremely high in psychological realism, and study the
psychological processes underlying an important phenom-
enon. Ideally, the study would be conducted in a natural-
istic setting in which participants were randomly assigned
to experimental conditions and all extraneous variables
were controlled. Unfortunately, it is next to impossible
to design an experiment that meets all of these demands.
Indeed, almost no study ever has. One of the few excep-
tions, perhaps, is the Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett (1973)
classic study of the overjustification effect, which was
conducted in a naturalistic setting (a preschool) in which
participants (3- and 4-year old children) were randomly
assigned to various conditions of rewards or no rewards
for drawing with felt-tip pens, and the dependent vari-
able was how much the kids played with the pens 2 weeks
later during a normal classroom activity. (An interesting
social psychological parlor game is to see if you can come
up with any other studies that meet all of the conditions
we have laid out for the Platonic Social Psychological
Experiment—there are not many.) Aronson and Carlsmith
(1968) called this the basic dilemma of the experi-
mental social psychologist. On the one hand, we want
maximal control over the independent variable, to main-
tain internal validity. But, by maximizing internal validity,
we often reduce external validity (e.g., by conducting our
study in the lab instead of the field).
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 60 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
Programmatic Research
A solution to the basic dilemma of the social psycholo-
gist is to not try to “do it all” in one experiment. Instead, a
programmatic series of studies can be conducted in which
different experimental procedures are used, in different set-
tings, to explore the same conceptual relationship. It is in
this realm of conceptual replication with different scenar-
ios that the interplay between lab and field experimentation
is most clear. However, in considering these interrelation-
ships, the tradeoff mentioned earlier between control and
impact in different experimental settings becomes espe-
cially salient. In order to be defensible, weaknesses in one
aspect of experimental design must be offset by strengths
or advantages in other features, or the whole research effort
is called into question. This dictum is particularly applicable
to field experiments in which inevitable increases in cost and
effort are frequently accompanied by decreases in preci-
sion and control that can be justified only if there are
corresponding gains in construct validity, impact, or the
generalizability of findings.
Multiple Instantiations of the Independent Variable
Essentially, there are two properties that we demand of
a series of experiments before we are convinced that we
understand what the conceptual interpretation should be.
First, we ask for a number of empirical techniques that dif-
fer in as many ways as possible, having in common only
our basic conceptual variable. If all these techniques yield
the same result, then we become more and more convinced
that the underlying variable that all techniques have in com-
mon is, in fact, the variable that is producing the results. For
example, the construct of cognitive dissonance (Festinger,
1957) has been operationalized in a wide variety of ways in
both laboratory and field studies, including having people
read lists of obscene words, write counter-attitudinal essays,
eat unpleasant foods, and make a difficult choice between
which horse to bet on at a racetrack.
Multiple Instantiations of the Dependent Variable
Second, we must show that a particular empirical realization
of our independent variable produces a large number of dif-
ferent outcomes, all theoretically tied to the independent vari-
able. Again, we point to research on cognitive dissonance, in
which a wide array of dependent variables has been used. For
example, asking people to engage in unpleasant activities,
under conditions of high perceived choice, has been found to
influence their attitudes, their galvanic skin response while
receiving electric shocks, and how hungry they are.
Systematic Replications When it comes to interpretation,
there is a fundamental asymmetry between positive and
negative results of replications. If proper techniques have
been employed to preclude bias, successful replications
CH02.indd 58
speak for themselves. Failures to replicate are ambiguous,
however, and therefore require supplementary information.
For these reasons, good programmatic research involves
replication with systematic differences in procedures and
operations so that differences in results are potentially inter-
pretable. In many cases, including exact replication along
with conceptual variations are useful. Suppose, for exam-
ple, that Jones, a hypothetical psychologist at the University of
Illinois, produces a specific experimental result using Illinois
undergraduates as participants. In addition, suppose that
Smith, at Yale University, feels that these results were not a
function of the conceptual variable proposed by Jones but
rather were a function of some artifact in the procedure.
Smith then repeats Jones’s procedure in all respects save
one: She changes the operations in order to eliminate this
artifact. She fails to replicate and concludes that this dem-
onstrates that Jones’s results were artifactual. This is only
one of many possible conclusions. Smith’s failure to rep-
licate has several possible causes and is therefore uninter-
pretable. It may be a function of a change in experimenter,
a different participant population (Yale students may be
different on many dimensions from Illinois students), or
countless minor variations in the procedure such as tone
of voice. Most of this ambiguity could be eliminated by a
balanced design that includes an “exact” replication of the
conditions run by the original experimenter. That is, sup-
pose Smith’s design had included a repeat of Jones’s con-
ditions with the suspected artifact left in, and her results
approximated those of Jones’s experiment. If, as part of
the design, Smith changed the experiment slightly and
produced no differences, or differences in the opposite
direction, one could then be sure that this result was not
merely a function of incidental differences like the experi-
menter or the participant population but must be a function
of the change in the procedure. If she failed even to repli-
cate Jones’s basic experiment, the results would be much
harder to interpret, because the different results could be
due to any number of factors (different experimenters, dif-
ferent population of participants, etc.).
Non-Systematic Replications In many situations it is
difficult to selectively and systematically modify the par-
ticular operational definition of the independent variable
without changing the entire experimental setting. This is most
dramatically true when conceptual replication involves a shift
from laboratory setting to field setting. The potential com-
plementary aspects of different research paradigms are best
exemplified when operations of independent and dependent
variables in laboratory procedures are significantly modi-
fied to take advantage of field settings so as to embed them
appropriately in this altered context. Such modifications
often involve fundamental rethinking about the conceptual
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variables; it is “back to square one,” with attendant costs
in time and effort. If the result is a successful conceptual
replication, the effort has paid off handsomely in enhanced
validity for our theoretical constructs. But what if the rep-
lication fails to confirm our original findings? In this case,
the multitude of procedural differences that could have
increased our confidence (with a successful replication)
now contributes to the ambiguity.
Now that we have discussed the value of laboratory
experiments, we turn to a discussion of how to conduct
one. In discussing the nuts and bolts of experimentation
we will not lose sight of the important questions about
the advantages and disadvantages of experiments and will
return to these issues frequently.
PLANNING AND CONDUCTING A
LABORATORY EXPERIMENT
The best way to describe how to conduct an experiment is
to take a real study and dissect it carefully, examining how
it was done and why it was done that way. We have chosen
for illustrative purposes a classic laboratory experiment
by Aronson and Mills (1959). We use this experiment for
several reasons. First, it illustrates clearly both the advan-
tages and the challenges of attempting to do experimen-
tal research in social psychology; we did not select it as
a Platonic ideal. Second, we discuss it as an example of
basic, process-oriented research that is applicable to many
different phenomena, including the one near the beginning
of this chapter—prejudice. At first glance this might be dif-
ficult to see, in that the Aronson and Mills (1959) study
investigated the effects of the severity of an initiation on lik-
ing for a discussion group—a topic that seems far removed
from the kinds of prejudice and racism we see around us
today. Indeed, some aspects of the Aronson and Mills
study might even seem old-fashioned; it was, after all, con-
ducted over 50 years ago. Nonetheless, it deals with basic
issues that are as fresh and important today as they were in
1959: What happens when people invest time and effort in
something, such as joining a social group, that turns out to
be much less enjoyable than they thought it would be? Can
the psychological processes that are triggered add to our
understanding of why people in contemporary society tend
to be attached to their own groups to an extreme degree,
and why they derogate members of other groups? The fact
is that a laboratory experiment—even one conducted five
decades ago—does have a lot to say about a variety of cur-
rent real-world phenomena, including prejudice, because it
illuminates basic, psychological processes.
Aronson and Mills set out to test the hypothesis that
individuals who undergo a severe initiation in order to be
CH02.indd 59
Planning and Conducting a Laboratory Experiment 61
admitted to a group will find the group more attractive than
they would if they were admitted to that group with little
or no initiation. To test this hypothesis, they conducted
the following experiment. Sixty-three college women were
recruited as volunteers to participate in a series of group
discussions on the psychology of sex. This format was a
ruse in order to provide a setting wherein people could
be made to go through either mild or severe initiations in
order to gain membership in a group.
Each participant was tested individually. When a partici-
pant arrived at the laboratory, ostensibly to meet with her
group, the experimenter explained to her that he was inter-
ested in studying the “dynamics of the group discussion
process” and that, accordingly, he had arranged these discus-
sion groups for the purpose of investigating these dynamics,
which included such phenomena as the flow of communica-
tions, who speaks to whom, and so forth. He explained that
he had chosen as a topic “The Psychology of Sex” in order
to attract many volunteers, as many college people were
interested in the topic. He then went on to say that, much to
his dismay, he subsequently discovered that this topic pre-
sented one great disadvantage; namely, that many volunteers,
because of shyness, found it more difficult to participate in a
discussion about sex than in a discussion about a more neu-
tral topic. He explained that his study would be impaired if
a group member failed to participate freely. He then asked
the participant if she felt able to discuss this topic freely.
Each participant invariably replied in the affirmative.
The instructions were used to set the stage for the initia-
tion that followed. The participants were randomly assigned
to one of three experimental conditions: a severe-initiation
condition, a mild-initiation condition, or a no-initiation con-
dition. The participants in the no-initiation condition were
told, at this point, that they could now join a discussion
group. It was not that easy for the participants in the other
two conditions. The experimenter told these participants
that he had to be absolutely certain that they could discuss
sex frankly before admitting them to a group. Accordingly,
he said that he had recently developed a test that he would
now use as a “screening device” to eliminate those students
who would be unable to engage in such a discussion without
excessive embarrassment. In the severe-initiation condition,
the test consisted of having people recite (to the male exper-
imenter) a list of 12 obscene words and two vivid descrip-
tions of sexual activity from contemporary novels. In the
mild-initiation condition, the women were merely required
to recite words related to sex that were not obscene.
Each of the participants was then allowed to “sit in” on
a group discussion that she was told was being carried on
by members of the group she had just joined. This group
was described as one that had been meeting for several
weeks; the participant was told that she would be replacing
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 62 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
a group member who was leaving because of a scheduling
conflict.
To provide everyone with an identical stimulus, the
experimenter had them listen to the same tape-recorded
group discussion. At the same time, the investigators felt
it would be more involving for participants if they didn’t
feel that they were just listening to a tape recording but
were made to believe that this was a live-group discus-
sion. In order to accomplish this and to justify the lack
of visual contact necessitated by the tape recording, the
experimenter explained that people found that they could
talk more freely if they were not being looked at; therefore,
each participant was in a separate cubicle, talking through
a microphone and listening in on headphones. Since this
explanation was consistent with the other aspects of the
cover story, all the participants found it convincing.
Needless to say, it was important to discourage partici-
pants from trying to “talk back” to the tape, since by doing
so they would soon discover that no one was responding to
their comments. In order to accomplish this, the experimenter
explained that it would be better if she did not try to partici-
pate in the first meeting, since she would not be as prepared
as the other members who had done some preliminary read-
ings on the topic. He then disconnected her microphone.
At the close of the taped discussion, the experimenter
returned and explained that after each session all members
were asked to rate the worth of that particular discussion
and the performance of the other participants. He then
presented each participant with a list of rating scales. The
results confirmed the hypothesis. The women in the severe-
initiation condition found the group much more attractive
than did the women in the mild-initiation or the no-initia-
tion conditions.
At first glance, this procedure has some serious prob-
lems. As with the Gilbert and Hixon (1991) study we dis-
cussed earlier, the experimenters constructed an elaborate
scenario bearing little relation to the “real-life” situations
in which they were interested. The “group” which people
found attractive was, in fact, nothing more than a few voices
coming in over a set of earphones. The participant was
not allowed to see her fellow group members nor was she
allowed to interact with them verbally. This situation is a far
cry from group interaction as we know it outside the labora-
tory. In addition, reciting a list of obscene words is undoubt-
edly a much milder form of initiation to a group than most
actual initiation experiences outside the laboratory (e.g., a
college fraternity or into the Marine Corps). Moreover, the
use of deception raises serious ethical problems as well as
more pragmatic ones such as whether the deception was
successful.
The reasons why Aronson and Mills (1959) opted to do
a laboratory experiment should be clear from our earlier
CH02.indd 60
discussion of experimental versus correlational methods
and laboratory versus field research: the ability to control
extraneous variables and to randomly assign people to the
different conditions. They could have opted to study real
groups, such as fraternities and sororities, measuring the
severity of their initiations and the attractiveness of each
group to its members. Although such a study would have
some advantages, we trust its disadvantages are by now
clear: the inability to determine causality. Because of the
inability to control extraneous variables (i.e., the actual
attractiveness of the different fraternities and sororities),
and the inability to randomly assign people to condition (i.e.,
to groups with mild or severe initiations), there would be
no way of knowing whether severe initiations caused more
attraction to the group. For example, it may be that desir-
able fraternities are inundated with applicants; because
of this, they set up severe initiations to discourage people
from applying. Once word gets around, only those who
are highly motivated to join those particular fraternities
are willing to subject themselves to severe initiations. If
this were the case, it is not the severity of the initiation
that caused people to find the fraternities attractive; rather,
it is the attractiveness of the fraternities that produced the
severity of the initiation!
Choosing the Type of Experiment to Perform
Let us assume that you are a novice researcher with a ter-
rific idea for an experiment. The first decision you would
want to make is whether to design your experiment for
the laboratory or the field. It is our position that all experi-
ments should be conducted in a variety of settings. Thus,
we advocate that, ideally, all experimentally researchable
hypotheses should be tested in both the laboratory and
the field. As we have mentioned, each approach has its
advantages and disadvantages, although it is often easier to
maintain internal validity in the laboratory. So, let’s suppose
that you decide to start there. The next decision you must
make is how to ensure that psychological realism is high in
your study. Often this determines whether the experiment is
to be an impact or a judgment type. In impact experiments
people are active participants in an unfolding series of
events and have to react to those events as they occur. Often,
these events have a substantial impact on their self-views,
and people thus become deeply involved in the experiment.
In judgment experiments participants are more like passive
observers; they are asked to recognize, recall, classify, or
evaluate stimulus materials presented by the experimenter.
Little direct impact on participants is intended, except inso-
far as the stimulus materials capture people’s attention and
elicit meaningful judgmental responses. Which type of
study should you do?
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As we mentioned, it depends on the psychological phe-
nomenon you are studying. A researcher who was interested
in the effects of sexual arousal on persuasibility would be in
the domain of the impact study. It would be absurd to con-
duct an experiment on the effects of sexual arousal without
doing something aimed at affecting the degree of sexual
arousal among some of the participants. On the other hand,
some hypotheses are judgmental in nature. For example, as
we saw, Gilbert and Hixon (1991) hypothesized that ste-
reotypes are more likely to be activated when people are
not cognitively busy. They pointed out that interacting with
a member of a stereotyped group can itself make people
“busy,” in that people have to think about their own actions
and the impressions they are making at the same time they
are forming an impression of the other person. Thus, to see
whether stereotypes are more likely to be triggered when
people are not cognitively busy, it was important to have
people judge a member of a stereotyped group but not to
interact with this person—in short, to make it more of a
judgment than an impact study. They accomplished this
by showing people a videotape of an Asian or Caucasian
woman, instead of having them actually meet and interact
with the woman.
The point is that researchers should tailor their method
to their hypothesis. Judgment experiments are usually
easier to do, because they require a less elaborate “setting
of the stage” to involve the participants in an impactful sit-
uation. If researchers are interested in what happens when
a person’s self-concept is engaged by a series of events that
happen to that person, however, there is no substitute for
the impact experiment.
Experimentation and the Internet
Recent developments in Internet applications have made
it possible to order groceries, adjust a thermostat, and pro-
gram a television recorder from one’s home, office, or wil-
derness retreat. It is thus not surprising that researchers have
also found innovative methods to leverage this medium for
psychological research. Our take on these innovations is
that although they usefully expand the researcher’s tool-
box, the fundamental principles of experimentation that
we are laying out in this chapter remain unchanged. The
mechanics are different, of course, but the underlying prin-
ciples are not.
Researchers have been using desktop computers for
decades to conduct experiments, of course, and the addition
of Internet connectivity enhances those capabilities. The
most obvious and common application involves opinion
surveys that can be easily administered to large groups of
people with more demographic diversity than is typically
found within college populations. This approach has the
added bonus of being able to easily modify the surveys to
CH02.indd 61
Planning and Conducting a Laboratory Experiment 63
create experimental manipulations, or to even dynamically
react to respondents’ answers.
At this point in time, Internet-based research has primarily
focused on judgment-type experiments. However, there have
been several instances in which researchers have designed
impact type experiments that occur over the Internet. For
example, Kip Williams successfully ported a laboratory
paradigm for ostracism (Williams & Sommer, 1997) into the
online realm (Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000). Participants
in original paradigm sat in a waiting room with two confed-
erates who, by design, initiated a three-way game of catch
with a rubber ball. After a predetermined amount of time, the
confederates excluded the participant and only tossed the ball
to each other. Excluded participants found the experience to
be intensely unpleasant and revealed marked cognitive defi-
cits as a result. In the online version of this game, partici-
pants control their own computer avatar and play “catch”
with other players. As in the real-life game, programmed
confederates eventually exclude the participant. Williams et
al. (2000) report that although the psychological impact of
the ostracism is less pronounced, it is nonetheless undeni-
ably real in the sense of having “experimental realism.”
Researchers have also begun to explore the potential of
immersive virtual reality experiences that promise to allow
researchers to control the laboratory experiment with even
more precision (e.g., Blascovich et al., 2002). When these
techniques are coupled with Internet capability, it promises
to increase both the impact of laboratory studies as well as
the range of experimental milieus and subject populations.
The Four Stages of Laboratory Experimentation
The process of planning a laboratory experiment consists
of four basic stages: (l) setting the stage for the experiment,
(2) constructing the independent variable, (3) measuring the
dependent variable, and (4) planning the post-experimental
follow-up. In this section we will suggest ways of develop-
ing a sensible and practical modus operandi for each of
those stages. We will be looking at both the impact experi-
ment and the judgment experiment. It should be mentioned
at the outset that the four phases listed above apply to both
types of laboratory experiment. Almost without excep-
tion, however, the impact experiment is more complex and
involves a wider scope of planning than does the judgment
experiment. Accordingly, much of our discussion will be
devoted to the high-impact type of study, not because we
consider such experiments as necessarily more important
but because we consider them more complex.
Setting the Stage
In designing any laboratory experiment, a great deal of
ingenuity and invention must be directed toward the context,
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 64 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
or stage, for the manipulation of the independent variable.
Because of the fact that our participants tend to be intel-
ligent, adult, curious humans, the setting must make sense
to them. It not only must be consistent with the procedures
for presenting the independent variables and measuring
their impact but also can and should enhance that impact
and help to justify the collection of the data.
Many experiments involve deception; if deception is
used, the setting must include a sensible, internally con-
sistent pretext or rationale for the research as well as a
context that both supports and enhances the collection of
the data and reduces the possibility of detection. This false
rationale is often referred to as a cover story.
In a judgment experiment, the cover story is typically
less elaborate and more straightforward than in an impact
experiment. Although deception is frequently used in a judg-
ment experiment, it is usually minimal and aimed primarily
at increasing the interest of the participants and providing
a credible rationale for the data collection procedures and
judgment task. For example, Aronson, Willerman, and
Floyd (1966) performed a judgment experiment to test the
hypothesis that the attractiveness of a highly competent per-
son would be enhanced if that person committed a clumsy
blunder—because the clumsy blunder would tend to human-
ize the person. To provide an adequate test of the hypothesis,
it was necessary to expose people to one of four experimen-
tal conditions: (l) a highly competent person who commits
a clumsy blunder, (2) a highly competent person who does
not commit a clumsy blunder, (3) a relatively incompetent
person who commits a clumsy blunder, or (4) a relatively
incompetent person who does not.
What would be a reasonable context that would jus-
tify exposing people to one of these stimulus persons and
inducing them to rate the attractiveness of that person?
The experimenters simply informed the participants (who
were students at the University of Minnesota) that their
help was needed in selecting students to represent the
university on the College Bowl, a television program pit-
ting college students from various universities against one
another in a test of knowledge. They told the participants
that they could evaluate the general knowledge of the can-
didates objectively, but that this was only one criterion for
selection. Another criterion was judgments from the par-
ticipants concerning how much they liked the candidates.
The experimenter then presented the participant with an
audio tape recording of a male stimulus person being inter-
viewed. This stimulus person answered a number of ques-
tions either brilliantly or not so brilliantly and either did
or did not clumsily spill a cup of coffee all over himself.
The participant then rated the stimulus person on a series
of scales. The cover story in this experiment was simple
and straightforward and did succeed in providing a credible
CH02.indd 62
rationale for both the presentation of the stimulus and the
collection of the data.
Providing a convincing rationale for the experiment is
almost always essential, since participants attempt to make
sense of the situation and to decipher the reasons for the
experiment. A good cover story is one that embraces all
the necessary aspects of the experiment in a plausible
manner and thus eliminates speculation from a participant
about what the experimenter really has in mind. It also
should capture the attention of the participants so that they
remain alert and responsive to the experimental events.
This is not meant facetiously; if a cover story strikes the
participants as being a trivial or silly reason for conducting
an experiment, they may simply tune out. If the partici-
pants are not attending to the independent variable, it will
have little impact on them.
The setting may be a relatively simple one, or it may
involve an elaborate scenario, depending on the demands
of the situation. Obviously, the experimenter should set the
stage as simply as possible. If a simple setting succeeds
in providing a plausible cover story and in capturing the
attention of the participants, there is no need for greater
elaboration. A more elaborate setting is sometimes neces-
sary, especially in a high-impact experiment. For example,
suppose researchers want to make people fearful. They
might achieve this goal by simply telling the participants
that they will receive a strong electric shock. Yet the
chances of arousing strong fear are enhanced if one has
set the stage with a trifle more embellishment. This can
be done by providing a medical atmosphere, inventing a
medical rationale for the experiment, having the experi-
menter appear in a white laboratory coat, and allowing
the participant to view a formidable, scary-looking electri-
cal apparatus as in Schachter’s (1959) experiments on the
effects of anxiety on the desire to affiliate with others. One
might go even further by providing the participant with a
mild sample shock and implying that the actual shocks will
be much greater.
The point we are making is that in a well-designed
experiment, the cover story is an intricate and tightly woven
tapestry. With this in mind, let us take another look at the
Aronson and Mills (1959) experiment. Here we shall indi-
cate how each aspect of the setting enhanced the impact
and/or plausibility of the independent and dependent
variables and contributed to the control of the experiment.
The major challenge presented by the hypothesis was to
justify an initiation for admission to a group. This was
solved, first, by devising the format of a sex discussion, and
second, by inventing the cover story that the experimenters
were interested in studying the dynamics of the discus-
sion process. Combining these two aspects of the setting,
the experimenter could then, third, mention that because
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shyness about sex distorts the discussion process, it was,
fourth, necessary to eliminate those people who were shy
about sexual matters by, fifth, presenting the participants
with an embarrassment test.
All five aspects of the setting led directly to the manipu-
lation of the independent variable in a manner that made
good sense to the participants, thereby allaying any suspi-
cions. Moreover, this setting allowed the experimenter to
use a tape-recorded group discussion (for the sake of control)
and at the same time to maintain the fiction that it was an
ongoing group discussion (for the sake of impact).
This fiction of an already formed group served another
function in addition to that of enhancing the involvement
of the participants. It also allowed the experimenter to
explain to the participant that all the other members had
been recruited before the initiation was made a require-
ment for admission. This procedure eliminated a possible
confounding variable, namely, that participants might
like the group better in the severe-initiation condition
because of the feeling that they had shared a common
harrowing experience.
Finally, because of the manner in which the stage had
been set, the dependent variable (the evaluation of the
group) seemed a very reasonable request. In many experi-
mental contexts, obtaining a rating of attractiveness tends
to arouse suspicion. In this context, however, it was not jar-
ring to the participant to be told that each member stated her
opinion of each discussion session, and therefore it did not
surprise the participant when she was asked for her frank
evaluation of the proceedings of the meeting. Ultimately,
the success of a setting in integrating the various aspects
of the experiment is an empirical question: Do the partici-
pants find it plausible? In the Aronson-Mills experiment
only one of 64 participants expressed any suspicions about
the true nature of the experiment.
The testing of some hypotheses is more difficult than
others because of their very nature. But none is impossible;
with sufficient patience and ingenuity a reasonable context
can be constructed to integrate the independent and dependent
variables regardless of the problems inherent in the hypothesis.
Constructing the Independent Variable
One of the most important and difficult parts of experi-
mental design is constructing an independent variable that
manipulates only what you want it to manipulate. The
experimenter begins with what we will call the concep-
tual variable, which is a theoretically important variable
that he or she thinks will have a causal effect on people’s
responses. In the Aronson and Mills study, for example,
the conceptual variable might be thought of as cognitive
dissonance caused by an embarrassing initiation. There are
many ways to translate an abstract conceptual variable such
CH02.indd 63
Planning and Conducting a Laboratory Experiment 65
as this into a concrete experimental operation. One of the
most important parts of experimental design is to devise a
procedure that “captures” the conceptual variable perfectly
without influencing any other factors. If we have our par-
ticipants recite a list of obscene words and then listen to a
boring group discussion, how can we be sure that this is,
in fact, an empirical realization of our conceptual variable?
Sometimes this is very difficult, and after an experiment
is done, the researcher realizes that whereas participants
in Conditions A and B were thought to differ only in one
conceptual variable (the amount of cognitive dissonance
people experienced), they also differed in some other way.
Controversy over the correct interpretation of the results
obtained in the Aronson and Mills initiation experiment
discussed earlier provides an example of this problem.
The complex social situation used by Aronson and Mills
has many potential interpretations, including the possi-
bility that reading obscene materials generated a state of
sexual arousal that carried over to reactions to the group
discussion. If that were the case, it could be that transfer of
arousal, rather than effort justification, accounted for the
higher attraction to the group.
A replication of the initiation experiment by Gerard and
Mathewson (1966) ruled out this interpretation. Their experi-
ment was constructed so as to differ from the Aronson and
Mills study in many respects. For example, Gerard and
Mathewson used electric shocks instead of the reading of
obscene words as their empirical realization of severe ini-
tiation (and the dissonance it produced); the shocks were
justified as a test of “emotionality” rather than as a test of
embarrassment; the tape recording concerned a group dis-
cussion of cheating rather than of sex; and the measure of
attractiveness of the group differed slightly. Thus, sexual
arousal was eliminated as a concomitant of the experimen-
tal procedures. The results confirmed the original findings:
People who underwent painful electric shocks in order to
become members of a dull group found that group to be
more attractive than did people who underwent mild shocks.
Such a confirmation of the basic initiation effect under quite
different experimental operations supports, at least indirectly,
the idea that it was cognitive dissonance produced by a
severe initiation, and not some other conceptual variable, that
was responsible for the results. A considerable amount of
research in social psychology has been motivated by similar
controversies over the valid interpretation of results obtained
with complex experimental procedures.
The Issue of Standardization Ideally, the empirical real-
ization of an independent variable is forceful enough to
have maximum impact and clear enough to generate the
intended interpretation in all participants. This section has
sought to establish some important general guidelines. There
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 66 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
is, however, one crucial, yet frequently misunderstood,
point: It is extremely important for all participants to be in
the same psychological state as a result of the manipula-
tion of the independent variable. This does not necessarily
mean that all participants should be exposed to the identical
independent variable. This does mean that the experiment-
er’s skill and wisdom should be used to make sure that all
participants arrive at a similar understanding of the instruc-
tions (or the implications of the “event” manipulation). To
achieve this goal, the experimenter should take consider-
able latitude in delivering the instructions or experimental
manipulation. This is a tricky issue and is one that may
raise doubts in the minds of many investigators. Our point
is this: In their zeal for standardization, many experiment-
ers make an effort to have all instructions to the participants
tape-recorded, printed, or computerized, to ensure that all
participants are exposed to identical stimuli. Such an effort
is admirable, but in practice it ignores the fact that people
are different, and as a consequence, the same instructions
do not mean the same thing to all participants. More pro-
saic, yet more important, participants differ greatly in their
ability to understand instructions. For example, one of the
most common mistakes the novice experimenter makes is
to present the instructions too succinctly; consequently, a
large percentage of the participants fail to understand what
is going on in an experiment (especially one as complicated
as most social psychological experiments are), a good deal
of redundancy is necessary.
A brief analogy to drug trials will make our point. When
a clinician tests the efficacy of an anti-anxiety medication,
she administers a precise quantity of the drug to ensure that
each participant develops the same concentration of the
drug in his or her bloodstream. The 250-pound linebacker
will be administered a significantly higher dose than the
90-pound dancer; but in the end both participants have
the identical therapeutic dose of the drug in their system.
In social psychological experiments it may sometimes be
necessary to “titrate” the independent variable in a similar
manner; one must focus on the outcome of the manipula-
tion rather than the input of the manipulation.
We anticipate that many experimenters will disagree with
us, suggesting that standardization is the hallmark of an
experiment. We agree, but exactly what is it that should be
standardized? What the experimenter says, or what the par-
ticipant understands? We feel that the more variability there
is in the participants’ comprehension of the experimental
operations, the more likely it will be that the changes caused
by the independent variable will be obscured. This discussion
again echoes the constant tension in experimentation between
control and impact. However, in this case we would argue
that by giving up rigid conformity to a script, one in fact can
gain increased impact and decreased variability in the psy-
CH02.indd 64
chological experience of participants. Of course, by allow-
ing the experimenter to depart from a standardized script,
one may increase the possibility of introducing a systematic
bias. But if proper techniques are employed to eliminate bias,
this ceases to be a problem. In particular, if the experimenter
who is giving the instructions is unaware of the participant’s
experimental condition, there is no way in which variations
in the presentation can systematically bias the results.
We return now to a discussion of independent vari-
ables and how they should be administered. Recall that
the essence of an experiment is the random assignment
of participants to experimental conditions. For this rea-
son, it should be obvious that any characteristics that the
participants bring to the experiment cannot be regarded as
independent variables in the context of a true experiment.
It is not infrequent to find an “experiment” purporting to
assess the effects of a participant variable (like level of
self-esteem, for example) on some behavior in a specific situ-
ation. It should be clear that although such a procedure may
produce interesting results, it is not an experiment because
the variable was not randomly assigned. Nonrandom
assignment of participants to experimental conditions is
not confined to the use of personality measures in lieu of
experimental treatments. It usually takes place in more
subtle ways. One of the most common occurs when the
experimenter is forced to perform an “internal analysis” in
order to make sense out of his or her data.
The term “internal analysis” refers to the following situ-
ation. Suppose that an experimenter has carried out a true
experiment, randomly assigning participants to different
treatment conditions. Unfortunately, the treatments do not
produce any measurable differences on the dependent vari-
able. In addition, suppose that the experimenter has had
the foresight to include an independent measure of the
effectiveness of the experimental treatment. Such “manipu-
lation checks” are always useful in providing information
about the extent to which the experimental treatment had
its intended effect on each individual participant. Now,
if the manipulation check shows no differences between
experimental treatments, the experimenter may still hope
to salvage his or her hypothesis. That is, the manipula-
tion check shows that for some reason the treatments were
unsuccessful in creating the internal states in the partici-
pants that they were designed to produce. Since they were
unsuccessful, one would not expect to see differences on
the dependent variable. In this case, the experimenter may
analyze the data on the basis of the responses of the partici-
pants to the manipulation check, resorting participants into
“treatment” according to their responses to the manipula-
tion check. This is an internal analysis.
For example, Schachter (1959) attempted to alter the
amount of anxiety experienced by his participants by varying
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the description of the task in which the participants were to
engage. However, in some of the studies, many participants
who had been given the treatment designed to produce low-
anxiety actually reported higher anxiety levels than some
who had been given the treatment designed to produce high
anxiety. From the results of an internal analysis of these data,
it does seem that anxiety is related to the dependent vari-
able. Again, these data can be useful and provocative, but
since the effect was not due to the manipulated variable, no
causal statement can be made. Although many of the “highly
anxious” participants were made anxious by the “high-anxi-
ety” manipulation, many were highly anxious on their own.
Because people who become anxious easily may be differ-
ent from those who do not, we are dealing with an individual
difference variable. This means that we can no longer claim
random assignment—and, in effect, we no longer have an
experiment.
Another situation in which the treatments are assigned
nonrandomly occurs when the participants assign them-
selves to the experimental conditions. That is, in certain
experimental situations the participant, in effect, is given
a choice of two procedures in which to engage. The
experimenter then compares the subsequent behavior of
participants who choose one alternative with those who
choose the other. For example, Carlsmith, Wilson, and
Gilbert (2008) examined the emotional consequences of
exacting revenge. They created a situation in which the
participant could readily punish an offending person, and
then measured participants’ affect shortly thereafter. One
approach would have been to create two groups—punishers
and non-punishers—by allowing the participants to decide
for themselves whether to punish. Such a procedure, how-
ever, would have confounded the act of punishment with
participant variables. For example, it could be that people
who entered the experiment in a grouchy mood would be
more likely to punish and more likely to report negative
affect. Thus, in order to maintain the experimental nature
of the design, it was necessary to create a true control
group that had no opportunity to punish and to create a
punishment group in which every participant opted to pun-
ish, although technically they had the option not to. The
problem of free choice is a particularly sticky one because,
if the hypothesis involves the effects of choice, it is obvi-
ously important to give the participant a perception of clear
choice. Yet this perception must remain nothing more than
a perception, for as soon as the participant takes advan-
tage of it, we are beset with the problems of nonrandom
assignment.
Between- versus Within-Subject Designs Another deci-
sion facing the experimenter is whether to manipulate the
independent variable on a between-subject or within-subject
CH02.indd 65
Planning and Conducting a Laboratory Experiment 67
basis. In a between-subject design people are randomly
assigned to different levels of the independent variable,
as in the Aronson and Mills study, in which different
groups of people received different levels of initiation. In
a within-subjects design all participants receive all levels
of the independent variable. For example, in the literature
on detecting deception, participants are typically shown a
videotape of another person and are asked to judge whether
that person is lying or telling the truth. A number of factors
have been manipulated to see how easy it is to tell whether
the person is lying, such as whether the person on the tape
is saying something good or bad about another person and
whether the person had the opportunity to think about and
plan the lie before delivering it (e.g. DePaulo, Lanier, &
Davis, 1983). These factors are often manipulated on a
within-subjects basis. In the DePaulo et al. (1983) study,
for example, participants watched people make four state-
ments: a planned lie, a spontaneous lie, a planned true
statement, and a spontaneous true statement. The partici-
pants did not know which statement was which, of course;
their job was to guess how truthful each statement was. As
it turned out, people were able to detect lies at better than
chance levels, but spontaneous lies were no easier to detect
than planned lies.
Within-subject designs are often preferred, because fewer
participants are required to achieve sufficient statistical power.
Imagine that DePaulo et al. (1983) had used a between-
subjects design, such that four separate groups of participants
saw statements that were either planned lies, unplanned lies,
planned truthful statements, or unplanned truthful state-
ments. They probably would have had to include at least 15
people per condition, for a total of 60 participants. By using
a within-design in which every participant was run in each of
the four conditions, fewer people were needed (there were
only 24 people who judged the statements in this study).
One reason fewer participants are needed is because
each participant serves as his or her own control; each
person’s responses in one condition are compared to that
same person’s responses in the other conditions. This con-
trols for any number of individual difference variables
that are treated as error variance in a between-subjects
design. Suppose, for example, that one participant has a
very suspicious view of the world and thinks that people
are lying most of the time. Another participant is very
trusting and thinks that people seldom lie. Suppose further
that a between-subjects design was used, and the distrust-
ful and trusting people are randomly assigned to different
conditions. In this design, it would be difficult to separate
the effects of the independent variable (e.g., whether the
person on the tape was lying or telling the truth) from
how suspicious participants’ are in general. With random
assignment, of course, individual differences tend to cancel
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 68 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
out across condition; the number of suspicious versus
trusting people should be roughly the same in all condi-
tions. Nonetheless the “noise” produced by personality
differences makes it difficult to detect the “signal” of the
effects of the independent variable, and a large number of
participants often have to be run to detect the signal. In a
within-subjects design, this problem is solved by running
every person in every condition. The suspicious person’s
responses to the lies are compared to his or her responses
to the non-lies, thereby “canceling out” his or her tendency to
rate everyone as deceptive.
If a within-subject design is used it is important, of
course, to vary the order of the experimental conditions, to
make sure that the effects of the independent variable are
not confounded with the order in which people receive the
different manipulations. This is referred to as “counterbal-
ancing,” whereby participants are randomly assigned to get
the manipulations in different orders. In the DePaulo et al.
(1983) study, for example, the presentation of the decep-
tive versus nondeceptive statements and planned versus
unplanned statements was counterbalanced, such that dif-
ferent participants saw the statements in different orders.
In many social psychological experiments within-subject
designs are not feasible, because it would not make sense
to participants to evaluate the same stimulus more than
once under slightly different conditions. For example,
in the experiment by Aronson, Willerman, and Floyd, once
a participant was exposed to a tape recording of a compe-
tent person spilling coffee, it would have been ludicrous
to present that same participant with an otherwise identi-
cal tape of a competent person who doesn’t spill coffee.
Who would believe that there are two people in the world
who are identical in all ways except for their coffee-spilling
behavior? By the same token, in the vast majority of impact
experiments, the nature of the impactful manipulation pre-
cludes utilization of the same participants in more than one
condition. For example, in the Aronson and Mills experi-
ment, once the experimenters put a participant through a
severe initiation in order to join a group and then asked her
to rate the attractiveness of that group, it would have been
silly to ask her to start all over and go through a mild initia-
tion. Thus, within-subjects designs are preferable if at all
possible, but in many studies—especially impact experi-
ments—they are not feasible.
Avoiding Participant Awareness Biases It is arguably
more challenging to perform a meaningful experiment in
social psychology than in any other scientific discipline
for one simple and powerful reason: In social psychology,
we are testing our theories and hypotheses on adult human
beings who are almost always intelligent, curious, and expe-
rienced. They are experienced in the sense that they have
CH02.indd 66
spent their entire lives in a social environment and—because
of their intelligence and curiosity—they have formed their
own theories and hypotheses about precisely the behaviors
we are trying to investigate. That is to say, everyone in the
world, including the participants in our experiments, is a
social psychological theorist.
In a nutshell, the challenge (and the excitement) of
doing experiments in social psychology lies in the quest to
find a way to circumvent or neutralize the theories that the
participants walk in with so that we can discover their true
behavior under specifiable conditions, rather than being
left to ponder behavior that reflects nothing more than
how the subjects think they should behave in a contrived
attempt to confirm their own theory.
One special form of participant awareness is closely
related to the idea of “demand characteristics” as described
by Orne (1962). The term refers to features introduced into
a research setting by virtue of the fact that it is a research
study and that the participants know that they are part of
it. As aware participants, they are motivated to make sense
of the experimental situation, to avoid negative evaluation
from the experimenter, and perhaps even to cooperate in a
way intended to help the experimenter confirm the research
hypothesis (Sigall, Aronson, & Van Hoose, 1970). Such
motivational states could make participants responsive to
any cues—intended or unintended—in the research situation
that suggest what they are supposed to do to appear normal
or “to make the study come out right.” It is for this reason
that experimenters frequently employ deception, elaborate
cover stories, and the like, in an attempt to keep participants
unaware of the experimental manipulations in play.
Another aspect of the problem of demand character-
istics and participant awareness is the possibility that the
experimenter’s own behavior provides inadvertent cues that
influence the responses of the participants. In our experi-
ence novice researchers often dismiss this possibility; they
smile knowingly and say, “Of course I wouldn’t act in such
a way to bias people’s responses.” Decades of research on
expectancy effects, however, show that the transmission of
expectations from researchers to participants is subtle and
unintentional, and that this transmission can have dramatic
effects on participants’ behavior. It can occur even between
a human experimenter and an animal participant; in one
study, for example, rats learned a maze quickly when the
experimenter thought they were good learners and slowly
when the experimenter thought they were poor learners
(Rosenthal, 1994; Rosenthal & Lawson, 1964).
Therefore, steps must be taken to avoid this transmission
of the experimenter’s hypotheses to the research participants.
One way of doing so is to keep the experimenter unaware
of the hypothesis of the research. The idea here is that if
the experimenter does not know the hypothesis, he or she
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cannot transmit the hypothesis to the research participants.
In our judgment, however, this technique is inadequate. One
characteristic of good researchers is that they are hypothesis-
forming organisms. Indeed, as we mentioned earlier, this
is one characteristic of all intelligent humans. Thus, if not
told the hypothesis, the research assistant, like a participant,
attempts to discover one. Moreover, keeping the assistant
in the dark reduces the value of the educational experi-
ence. Since many experimenters are graduate students, full
participation in an experiment is the most effective way
of learning experimentation. Any technique involving the
experimenter’s ignorance of the hypothesis or a reduction
in contact with the supervisor is a disservice to him or her.
A more reasonable solution involves allowing the experi-
menters to know the true hypothesis but keeping them
ignorant of the specific experimental condition of each
participant. This is typically referred to as a “double-blind”
study in which both the experimenter and participant are
unaware of the experimental condition. In theory, this is a
simple and complete solution to the problem and should be
employed whenever possible.
In a study by Wilson et al. (1993), for example, the inde-
pendent variable was whether people were asked to think
about why they felt the way they did about some art posters,
to examine the effects of introspection on attitude change
and satisfaction with consumer choices. Participants were
told that the purpose of the study was to examine the dif-
ferent types of visual effects that people like in pictures
and drawings and that they would be asked to evalu-
ate some posters. The critical manipulation was whether
people wrote down why they felt the way they did about
each poster (the reasons condition) or wrote why they had
chosen their major (the control condition). To assign peo-
ple to condition randomly, the experimenter simply gave
them a questionnaire from a randomly ordered stack. To
make sure the experimenter did not know whether it was
the reasons or control questionnaire, an opaque cover sheet
was stapled to each one. The experimenter left the room
while the participant completed the questionnaire, and thus
throughout the experiment was unaware whether the par-
ticipant was in the reasons or control condition.
In other types of experiments, the experimental manipu-
lations cannot be delivered simply by having people read
written instructions, making it more difficult to keep the
experimenter unaware of condition. In studies on intrinsic
motivation, for example, the critical manipulation is the level
of reward people believe they will get for performing a task.
This could be conveyed in written form, but there is a risk
that participants will not read the questionnaire carefully
enough, missing the crucial information about the reward.
A frequently used solution to this problem is to tape record
the instructions, and to keep the experimenter unaware of
CH02.indd 67
Planning and Conducting a Laboratory Experiment 69
which recorded instructions each participant receives (e.g.
Harackiewicz, Manderlink, & Sansone, 1984).
In other studies, however—particularly high impact
ones—the experimenter must deliver the independent vari-
able in person, making it more difficult for him or her to
be unaware of participant’s experimental condition. In the
Aronson and Mills experiment, for example, people’s con-
dition was determined by which list of words they had to
read aloud to the experimenter. The experimenter could
have given people a list and asked them to read the words
to themselves, but this obviously would have reduced the
impact of the manipulation considerably. In studies such
as these, where it is necessary for the experimenter to
“deliver” the independent variable, several steps can still be
taken to avoid demand characteristics, participant aware-
ness biases, and experimenter expectancy effects. First, the
experimenter should be kept ignorant of people’s condition
until the precise moment of crucial difference in manipula-
tions. That is, in most studies, the experimenter need not
know what condition the participant is in until the crucial
manipulation occurs. When the choice point is reached, a
randomizing device can be used, and the remainder of the
experiment is, of course, not carried out in ignorance. For
example, in the Aronson and Mills study, it would have
been easy to delay assignment of participant to condition
until the point of initiation; by reaching into a pocket and
randomly pulling out one of three slips of paper, the exper-
imenter could determine whether the participant would
recite the obscene words, the mild words, or no words at
all. Thus, all the pre-manipulation instructions would be
unbiased.
This is only a partial solution because the experimenter
loses his or her ignorance midway through the experiment.
However, if the experimenter left the room immediately
after the recitation and a different experimenter (unaware
of the participant’s experimental condition) collected the
data, this solution would approach completeness. The use of
multiple experimenters, each ignorant of some part of the
experiment, offers a solution that is frequently viable. For
example, Wilson and Lassiter (1982) were interested in
whether prohibiting people from engaging in unattractive
activities would increase the appeal of those activities; that
is, whether the Aronson and Carlsmith (1963) “forbidden
toy” effect would apply when the prohibited activity was
undesirable at the outset. The participants were preschool
children who were seen individually. In one condition the
experimenter showed the child five toys and said that he
or she could play with any of them but a plastic motorcycle,
which was known to be unattractive to the children. In the
control condition the children were allowed to play with
all five toys. As we have discussed, the experimenter ran-
domly assigned people to condition at the last possible
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 70 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
moment, namely after he had shown the children all the
toys and demonstrated how they worked.
To assess children’s subsequent interest in the toys, the
children were seen again a week later and given two of
the toys to play with—the plastic motorcycle and another,
attractive toy. At this session the same experimenter could
not be used, however, because he was no longer unaware
of the child’s experimental condition. Further, his presence
might cause children to base their choice on factors other
than their liking; for example, they might be concerned
that he still did not want them to play with the motorcycle.
Thus, a different experimenter (unaware of the child’s con-
dition) was used, and the children were not told that this
session was part of the same study as the first session. As
predicted, the children who were prohibited from playing
with the motorcycle in the first session played with it sig-
nificantly more at the second session than did people in the
control condition.
Returning to the more general issue of demand charac-
teristics, it should be clear that the most effective type of
deception in an impact experiment involves the creation
of an independent variable as an event that appears not to
be part of the experiment at all. Creating such an indepen-
dent variable not only guarantees that the participant will
not try to interpret the researcher’s intention but also that
the manipulation has an impact on the participant. Several
classes of techniques have been used successfully to pres-
ent the independent variable as an event unrelated to the
experiment. Perhaps the most effective is the “accident”
or “whoops” manipulation, in which the independent vari-
able is presented as part of what appears to be an accident
or unforeseen circumstance. Wilson, Hodges, and LaFleur
(1995) used a variation on this procedure to influence
people’s memory for behaviors performed by a target per-
son. These researchers showed people a list of positive and
negative behaviors the target person had performed
and then wanted to make sure that people found it easi-
est to remember either the positive or negative behaviors.
They did so by simply showing people either the positive
or negative behaviors a second time. The danger of this
procedure, however, is that it would be obvious to people
that the researchers were trying to influence their memory.
If Wilson et al. had said, “OK, now we are going to show
you only the positive (negative) behaviors again,” partici-
pants would undoubtedly have wondered why and possibly
figured out that the point was to influence their memory
for these behaviors. To avoid this problem, Wilson et al.
told people that they would see all of the behaviors again
on slides. After only positive (or negative) ones had been
shown, it just so happened that the slide projector malfunc-
tioned. The projector suddenly went dark, and after examining
it with some frustration, the experimenter declared that the
CH02.indd 68
bulb was burned out. He searched for another for a while,
unsuccessfully, and then told participants that they would
have to go on with the study without seeing the rest of the
slides. By staging this “accident,” the researchers ensured
that people were not suspicious about why they saw only
positive or negative behaviors a second time.
Another way to make the independent variable seem
like a spontaneous, unrelated event is to have a confederate,
apparently a fellow participant, introduce the manipula-
tion. For example, Schachter and Singer (1962) attempted
to manipulate euphoria by having a confederate waltz
around the room shooting rubber bands, play with hula
hoops, and practice hook shots into the wastebasket with
wadded paper. Presumably, this behavior was interpreted
by the participant as a spontaneous, unique event unrelated
to the intentions of the experimenter. A third method is to
use the whole experimental session as the independent
variable and to measure the dependent variable at some
later time. For example, in the Wilson and Lassiter (1984)
study mentioned earlier, the independent variable (whether
people were constrained from playing with an unattractive
toy) was introduced at one session, and the dependent vari-
able (how long people played with the toy) was assessed
at another session a week later. It is unlikely that the par-
ticipants realized that what happened in the first study was
the independent variable of interest. Even within the same
experimental session it is possible to convince people that
they are taking part in separate, unrelated experiments.
A common ruse is the “multiple study” cover story, in
which people are told that for reasons of convenience sev-
eral unrelated mini-experiments are being conducted at the
same session. This ruse is commonly employed in prim-
ing experiments, in which it is very important that people
not connect the independent variable (the priming of a
semantic category) with the dependent variable (ratings of
a target person whose standing on that category is ambigu-
ous). Higgins, Rholes, and Jones (1977), for example, had
people memorize words related to adventurousness or
recklessness as part of an initial “Study 1” concerned with
perception and memory, and then had people rate a stimu-
lus person, whose behavior was ambiguous as to whether
it was adventurous or reckless, as part of a “Study 2” on
impression formation.
Optimizing the Impact of the Independent Variable As
we mentioned, one problem with keeping experimenters
unaware of condition, by delivering the independent vari-
able in written form, is that the impact of the independent
variable will be reduced. One of the most common mistakes
the novice experimenter makes is to present instructions too
briefly; consequently, a large percentage of the participants
fail to understand some important aspects of the instructions.
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To ensure that all participants understand what is going on
in an experiment (especially one as complicated as most
social psychological experiments), the instructions should
be repeated in different ways.
More important than simple redundancy, however, is
ensuring the instructions are expressed precisely so that
each participant fully understands them and the events that
occur in the experiment. This can be accomplished by a
combination of written and verbal instructions, in which
the experimenter repeats or paraphrases key parts of the
instructions until satisfied that the participant is completely
clear about all of them. Although the point seems obvi-
ous, it has been our experience that many experiments fail
precisely because the instructions were never made clear
enough to become understandable to all the participants.
In the well-designed impact experiment, there is less
likely to be a question about whether the participant
is paying attention to the relevant stimulus conditions.
Nonetheless the experimenter should be as certain as pos-
sible that the complex bundle of stimuli constituting the
independent variable produce the intended phenomenolog-
ical experience in the participants. For this purpose, there
is no substitute for the thorough pretesting of the manipu-
lation. During the pretesting, the experimenter can conduct
long, probing interviews with the participant after the test
run of the experiment is completed or, better yet, after the
manipulation of the independent variable.
One of the most frequently misunderstood aspects of
experimentation is the amount of pretesting that is often
required to make sure that the independent variable is hav-
ing the desired impact. When students read published
experiments in psychological journals, they often have the
impression that the researchers had an idea, designed a
study, collected the data in a few weeks, analyzed the data,
and presto, found exactly what they predicted. Little do they
know that in most cases the experiment was preceded by a
good deal of pretesting, whereby different versions of the
independent variable were “tried out.” For example, in the
Wilson, Hodges, and LaFleur (1995) study mentioned earlier,
in which the researchers staged a malfunction of a slide pro-
jector, a good deal of pretesting was required to “fine tune”
this manipulation. Different versions of the manipulation
were tried before one was found that worked convincingly.
This might seem to be misleading, in that the research-
ers ended up reporting only the version of the indepen-
dent variable that had the desired effect. It is important to
note, however, that there are two meanings of the phrase
“desired effect”: (a) whether the researchers manipulated
what they intended to manipulate and (b) whether the inde-
pendent variable had the predicted effect on the dependent
variable. An experiment cannot test a hypothesis unless the
independent variable manipulates what it is supposed to
CH02.indd 69
Planning and Conducting a Laboratory Experiment 71
manipulate. For example, in the Wilson et al. (1995) study,
the point was to see what happens when people analyze the
reasons for their impressions of a person and either posi-
tive or negative thoughts about that person are most acces-
sible in memory. The hypotheses of the study could only be
tested if the manipulation of people’s memory succeeded
in making positive or negative thoughts more accessible.
The ability to play with a design so that the manipulations
change the right variables is a skill similar to that of a tal-
ented director who knows exactly how to alter the staging
of a play to maximize its impact on the audience. This is
where some of the most important work in experimental
design occurs, but it is rarely reported in published articles,
because it would not be very informative or interesting to
begin the methods section by saying, “We will first tell you
about all the ways of manipulating the independent vari-
able that didn’t work. The first mistake we made was…”
It is another matter, however, if the manipulation works
as intended but does not influence the dependent variable
in the predicted manner. Another reason that a manipula-
tion can fail to have an effect is because the researcher’s
hypothesis is wrong. The manipulation might work exactly
as intended (as indicated, for example, on a manipula-
tion check), but have a different effect on the dependent
variable than predicted. This is informative, because it
suggests that the hypothesis might be wrong. The catch is
that it is often difficult to tell whether an experiment is not
working because the manipulation is ineffective or because
the hypothesis is wrong. The answer to this question often
becomes clear only after extensive tinkering and restaging
of the experimental situation.
Once it becomes clear that the manipulation is working
as intended but the hypothesis is off the mark, a second
talent comes into play: The ability to learn from one’s mis-
takes. Some of the most famous findings in social psychology
did not come from reading the literature and deducing new
hypotheses, or from “aha” insights while taking a shower.
Rather, they came about from the discovery that one’s
hypotheses were wrong and the data suggest a very dif-
ferent hypothesis—one that is quite interesting and worth
pursuing faithfully.
Choosing the Number of Independent Variables We
have been talking thus far of the independent variable in
the social psychological experiment as if it were a simple
two-level variation on a single dimension. Yet many, if not
most, experiments involve procedures that simultaneously
manipulate two or more variables. Once one has taken the
time and trouble of setting up a laboratory experiment,
recruiting participants, and training research assistants, it
seems only efficient to take the occasion to assess the effects
of more than one experimental treatment.
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 72 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
There are no pat answers to the question of how many
independent variables can or should be manipulated at
one time, but our own rule is that an experiment should
be only as complex as is required for important relation-
ships to emerge in an interpretable manner. Sometimes it is
essential to vary more than one factor because the phenom-
enon of interest appears in the form of an interaction. Petty,
Cacioppo, and Goldman (1981), for example, hypothesized
that the way in which people process information in a per-
suasive communication depends on the personal relevance
of the topic. When the topic was highly relevant, people
were predicted to be most influenced by the strength of
the arguments in the communication, whereas when it was
low in relevance, people were predicted to be most influ-
enced by the expertise of the source of the communication.
To test this hypothesis the authors had to manipulate (a) the
personal relevance of the topic, (b) the strength of the argu-
ments in the message, and (c) the expertise of the source of
the message. Only by including each of these independent
variables could the authors test their hypothesis, which was
confirmed in the form of a three-way interaction.
Measuring the Dependent Variable
The basic decision facing the researcher in planning the
measurement of dependent variables is whether to rely on
participants’ self-reports or observations by others as the
means of assessing a person’s responses to the experimen-
tal situation. Actually, it is not that simple, for it is possible
to imagine a continuum ranging from behaviors of great
importance and consequence for the participant down to
the most trivial paper-and-pencil measures about which the
participant has no interest. At one extreme the experimenter
could measure the extent to which participants actually per-
form a great deal of tedious labor for a fellow student (as a
reflection of, say, their liking for that student). At the other
extreme one could ask them to circle a number on a scale
entitled “How much did you like that other person who par-
ticipated in the experiment?” Close to the behavioral end
of the continuum would be a measure of the participant’s
commitment to perform a particular action without actually
performing it. We call this a “behavioroid” measure.
It is a fair assumption to say that most social psychologists
care the most about social behavior: how people treat each
other and how they respond to the social world. The goal is
not to explain and predict which number people will circle
on a scale or which button on a computer they will press, but
people’s actual behavior toward another person or the envi-
ronment. Thus, the first choice of a dependent measure in a
social psychological experiment is usually overt behavior.
The ideal measure of prejudice is the way in which mem-
bers of different groups treat each other, the ideal measure
of attitude change is behavior toward an attitude object, and
CH02.indd 70
the ideal measure of interpersonal attraction is affiliative
behaviors between two individuals. If you pick up a copy
of a recent social psychological journal, however, you will
find that measures of actual behavior are hard to come by
(Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2007; de la Haye, 1991). The
dependent measures are more likely to be such things as
questionnaire ratings of people’s thoughts, attitudes, emo-
tions, and moods; their recall of past events; the speed with
which they can respond to various types of questions; or,
as we saw in the Gilbert and Hixon (1991) study, the ways
in which people complete word fragments.
There are four main reasons why social psychologists
often measure things other than actual behavior. The first
is convenience: It is much easier to give people a question-
naire on which they indicate how much they like a target
person, for example, then to observe and code their actual
behavior toward the target person. Of course, convenience
is no excuse for doing poor science, and the assumption
that questionnaire responses are good proxies for actual
behavior should not be taken on faith. In the early years of
attitude research, for example, it was assumed that people’s
questionnaire ratings of their attitudes were good indicators
of how they would actually behavior toward the attitude
object. It soon became apparent that this was often not the
case (e.g., Wicker, 1969), and many researchers devoted
their energies to discovering when questionnaire measures
of attitudes predict behavior and when they do not. A large
literature on attitude-behavior consistency was the result,
and it is now clear that self-reported attitudes predict behav-
ior quite well under some circumstances but not others (e.g.,
Fazio, 1990; Wilson, Dunn, Kraft, & Lisle, 1989).
Needless to say, there are some situations in which
obtaining a direct measure of the behavior of interest is
not simply inconvenient, it is virtually impossible. For
example, Aronson and his students conducted a series of
laboratory experiments aimed at convincing sexually active
teenagers to use condoms as a way of preventing AIDS
and other sexually transmitted diseases (Aronson, Fried, &
Stone, 1991). The ideal behavioral dependent variable is
obvious: whether the participants in the experimental con-
dition actually used condoms during sexual intercourse to
a greater extent than participants in the control condition.
Think about it for a moment: How would you collect those
data? Even experimental social psychologists feel obliged
to stop short of climbing into bed with their subjects in order
to observe their sexual behavior directly. Aronson and his
students were forced to use proxies. In some of their stud-
ies, they used self-report as a proxy. In others, in addition
to self-report, they set up a situation where, at the close of
the experiment, the experimenter while leaving the room,
indicated that the participants, if they wanted, could pur-
chase condoms (at a bargain price) by helping themselves
9/2/09 8:10:02 PM

from huge a pile of condoms on the table and leaving the
appropriate sum of money. Although the participants had
no way of suspecting that their behavior was being moni-
tored, as soon as they left the laboratory, the experimenter
returned and re-counted the condoms on the table to ascer-
tain exactly how many they had purchased. Admittedly,
the number of condoms purchased is not quite as direct a
measure as the actual use of condoms, but especially given
the fact that this measure was consistent with self-report
measures, it seems like a reasonable proxy.
A second reason behavioral measures are sometimes
avoided has to do with our earlier distinction between
problem-oriented and process-oriented research. If the
research is problem-oriented, then the dependent mea-
sures should correspond as closely to that phenomenon
(e.g., prejudice, consumer behavior, condom use) as
possible. If it is process-oriented, however, the goal is
to understand the mediating processes responsible for
a phenomenon, and the dependent measures are often
designed to tap these processes, not the phenomena they
produce. For example, to understand when people will
act in a prejudiced manner toward a member of a social
group, it is important to know when their stereotype of
that group is activated. As we saw earlier, Gilbert and
Hixon (1991) addressed this question by showing peo-
ple a videotape of a woman holding up cards with word
fragments on them and asking people to complete the frag-
ments to make as many words as they could. The main
dependent measure was the number of times people com-
pleted the fragments with words that were consistent with
Caucasians’ stereotypes of Asians to see if this differed
according to whether the woman on the tape was Asian
and whether people were under cognitive load. Note that
the researchers never measured people’s behavior toward
Asians—participants never interacted with anyone except
the experimenter. How, then, can this be an experiment on
stereotyping and prejudice? It is by studying some of the
psychological processes (stereotype activation) hypoth-
esized to mediate prejudicial behavior.
A third reason why nonbehavioral measures are often
used is that, in many situations, that they can be a more pre-
cise measure of intervening processes than overt behavior.
Behavior is often complex and multidetermined, making
it difficult to know the exact psychological processes that
produced it. For example, suppose in an experiment a con-
federate (posing as a fellow participant) either praises the
participant, implying that he or she is brilliant, or insults
the participant, implying that he or she is stupid. Suppose
our dependent variable is how much the participant likes
the confederate. We can measure it by handing participants
a rating scale and asking them to rate their liking for the
confederate, from +5 to –5. Or, on a more behavioral level,
CH02.indd 71
Planning and Conducting a Laboratory Experiment 73
we can observe the extent to which the participant makes
an effort to join a group to which the confederate belongs.
This latter behavior seems to be a reflection of liking, but
it may reflect other things instead. For example, it may be
that some participants in the “insult” condition want to join
the group in order to prove to the confederate that they are
not stupid. Or it may be that some want an opportunity to
see the insulting person again so that they can return the
favor. Neither of these behaviors reflects liking, and conse-
quently, may produce results different from those produced
by the questionnaire measure.
Fourth, some psychological states are best measured by
self-report instruments—that is, by asking people—than
by observing their behavior. In recent years, for example,
there has been a considerable amount of interest in human
happiness, such as what causes it, how well people can
predict it, and whether it can be changed (e.g., Diener &
Biswas-Diener, 2008; Gilbert, 2006; Wilson & Gilbert,
2003). Researchers have conducted a great deal of psycho-
metric work on how best to measure how happy people
are, and it turns out that the most valid and reliable way is
to ask them (Andrews & Robinson, 1991; Diener, 1994;
Fordyce, 1988). Thus, in some cases self-report instru-
ments are the best measure of the phenomenon researchers
are trying to assess.
Nonetheless, it is important to note some limitations of
questionnaire measures. Most fundamentally, people may
not know the answer to the questions they are asked. This
is especially true of “why” questions, whereby people are
asked to report the reasons for their behavior and attitudes.
Rather than reporting accurately, people might be rely-
ing on cultural or idiosyncratic theories about the causes
of their responses that are not always correct (Nisbett &
Wilson, 1977; Wilson, 2002).
Disguising the Measure Even if people know the answer
to a question, they may not answer truthfully. As previ-
ously mentioned, people might distort their responses due
to self-presentational concerns or because they have fig-
ured out the hypothesis and want to tell the experiment-
ers what they want to hear. It is thus often important to
disguise the fact that a particular collection of data is actu-
ally the measurement of the dependent variable. This presents
problems very similar to those involved in attempting to dis-
guise the independent variable, as discussed in the earlier
section on guarding against demand characteristics. Again,
there are several classes of solutions that can be applied to
the problem of disguising the dependent variable.
One approach is to measure the dependent variable in a
setting that participants believe is totally removed from the
remainder of the experiment. For example, in research on
intrinsic motivation it is common to assess people’s interest
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 74 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
in an activity by observing how much time they spend
on that activity during a “free time” period. Participants
believe that this time period is not part of the experiment
and do not know that they are being observed. Lepper,
Greene, and Nisbett (1973), for instance, measured chil-
dren’s interest in a set of felt-tip pens by unobtrusively
observing how much time they spent playing with the pens
during a free-play period of their preschool class.
Another example of how the dependent measure can
be disguised comes from the Wilson et al. (1993) study
mentioned earlier, in which people either analyzed why
they liked some posters or did not. One hypothesis of this
study was that people who analyzed reasons would change
their minds about which posters they preferred the most,
and would thus choose different types of posters to take
home than people in the control condition. To test this
hypothesis the experimenter told people, at the end of the
study, that as a reward for their participation, they could
choose one poster to take home. Asking people to make
their choice in front of the experimenter would have been
problematic, because self-presentational biases might have
come into play, whereby people chose a poster on the basis
of how this made them look to the experimenter, rather
than on the basis of which one they really liked the best
(Baumeister, 1982; DePaulo, 1992; Schlenker, 1980). The
posters were of different types; some were reproductions
of classic paintings, whereas others were more contempo-
rary, humorous posters. Participants might have thought,
“I would prefer one of the humorous posters but this might
make me look shallow and inane, so I will go ahead and
take the one by Monet.”
To minimize self-presentational biases, Wilson et al.
took the following steps to make the choice of poster as
private as possible: After telling the participant that she
could choose a poster to take home, the experimenter said
that she had to go get the explanation sheet describing the
purpose of the study. She told the participant to pick out
a poster from bins that contained several copies of each
poster, and then left the room. The participant expected the
experimenter to return shortly, and thus may still have been
concerned that the experimenter would see which poster
she chose. To minimize such a concern, the researchers
placed multiple copies of each poster in each bin. Further,
all the posters were rolled up so that only the reverse, blank
side was showing, making it impossible (in the minds of
the participants) for the experimenter to tell which poster
she had chosen. (After the participant had left, the experi-
menter was able to tell which poster people chose by counting
the number left in each bin.) It is possible that despite these
rather elaborate precautions, some participants were still
motivated to choose posters that would make them look
good rather than ones they really liked. It is important to
CH02.indd 72
minimize such self-presentational concerns, however, as
much as possible. As it happened, Wilson et al.’s predic-
tions were confirmed: People who analyzed reasons chose
different types of posters than people who did not.
A similar approach is to tell participants that the depen-
dent variable is part of a different study than the one in
which the independent variable was administered. As men-
tioned earlier the “multiple study” cover story can be used,
in which participants think they are taking part in separate
studies (e.g., Higgins et al., 1977).
If the independent and dependent variables are included
in the same study, steps are often taken to disguise the
purpose of the dependent measure. For example, there is
a family of techniques for measuring a dependent variable
that is parallel to the “whoops” procedure for manipulat-
ing an independent variable. The most common member
of this family involves claiming that the pretest data were
lost so that a second set of measures must be collected. In
attitude-change experiments, the most typical solution is to
embed the key items in a lengthy questionnaire that is
given to the participant. One may have some qualms about
the extent to which this always disguises the measurement
from the participant, yet it has been used effectively in
some instances.
Dependent Measures that are Uncontrollable All of the
above ways of disguising the dependent measure make the
assumption that if people knew what was being measured,
they might alter their responses. The prototypical example of
such a measure is the questionnaire response; if people are
asked on a 7-point scale whether they would help someone
in an emergency, they might indicate how they would like to
respond, or how they think they should respond, instead of
according to how they really would respond. There is another
way of avoiding this problem: Use dependent measures that
by their very nature are uncontrollable, such that people could
not alter their responses even if they wanted to—obviating
the need to disguise the measure. Controllability is a matter
of degree, of course; it is more difficult to control one’s heart
rate than one’s response on a 7-point scale, but even heart
rate can be controlled to some degree (e.g., by holding one’s
breath). Social psychologists have broadened their arsenal
of dependent measures considerably in recent years, and for
present purposes it is interesting to note that many of these
measures are more difficult for people to control than ques-
tionnaire responses, and less susceptible to demand charac-
teristics or self-presentational concerns. Examples include
measures of physiological and neurological responses, as
well as the virtual explosion of measures of automatic cog-
nitive and affective responses (e.g. Bargh, 1990; de Houwer,
in press; Gilbert, 1991; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Nosek,
Greenwald, & Banaji, 2007; Wegner, 1994).
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An obvious advantage of such measures is that they are
difficult for people to control. Another is that they may tap
psychological constructs that are distinct from what peo-
ple are able to report. We do not have the space here to
review the vast literatures on implicit measures and uncon-
scious mental processes (see the chapters in this volume
by Banaji and Dijksterhuis). Suffice it to say that this is an
exciting time for social psychological theory and methods;
new frontiers are opening as researchers develop new tools
and methods to tap psychological processes.
One of these frontiers is social neuroscience, whereby
researchers measure the neural correlates of social psy-
chological processes, typically using functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure blood flow in
the brain and electroencephalography (EEG) to measure
event-related potentials (ERP). These measures can be
quite useful in identifying the regions of the brain that are
active during a particular task, and thus to infer some of
the underlying social psychological processes that drive
a given behavior. For example, Greene et al. (2001;
2004) demonstrated that different sorts of moral dilem-
mas activate different regions of the brain, suggesting a
dual process model of moral reasoning. They found that
“impersonal moral dilemmas” elicited utilitarian responses
(judging personal moral violations to be acceptable when
they serve a greater good), which were associated with brain
activation patterns involving the abstract reasoning centers
of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. By contrast, “personal
moral dilemmas” elicited quite different responses that
focused on fairness and appropriateness rather than “great-
est good” considerations. These latter cases generally drew
quick decisions and involved heightened brain activity in
the emotion and social cognition areas (specifically, the
medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus,
and superior temporal sulcus/temporoparietal junction).
As exciting as some of these advances have been,
we would be remiss not to point out that the value of
brain-imaging studies to date are incremental rather than
revolutionary. Indeed, many of the technical requirements of
current fMRI and ERP studies directly contradict our advice
on previous pages. For example, participants in fMRI stud-
ies are necessarily alone and confined within a rather large
magnet. They cannot have meaningful and authentic social
interactions, and are often acutely aware of the psychologi-
cal variables that are being measured. Current technology
limits these studies to judgment-type experiments, and typi-
cally they rely on wholly within-participant designs. At their
best these studies can clarify the region of the brain involved
in judgments; at their worst they merely identify the neural
correlates of behavior without yielding new psychologi-
cal insight regarding the behavior of humans. This debate
is exacerbated by the tremendous fiscal cost associated
CH02.indd 73
Planning and Conducting a Laboratory Experiment 75
with imaging studies. Critics point out that many of the
published results could have been obtained with more tra-
ditional dependent measures and could have been obtained
for a mere fraction of the cost. We have no doubt that much
will be learned from social neuroscience, particularly as new
technologies are developed (e.g., that permit brain scans dur-
ing social interactions). But we hope that researchers and
funding agencies will conduct cost-benefit analyses of the
value of such studies, and not lose sight of the advantages
of experimental studies that “merely” include self-report and
behavioral measures.
The Postexperimental Follow-up
The experiment does not end when the data have been col-
lected. Rather, the prudent experimenter will want to remain
with the participants to talk and listen in order to accomplish
three important goals: (a) to ensure that the participants are
in a good and healthy frame of mind; (b) to be certain that
the participants understand the experimental procedures, the
hypotheses, and their own performance so that they gain a
valuable educational experience as a result of having par-
ticipated; (c) to avail themselves of the participant’s unique
skill as a valuable consultant in the research enterprise; that
is, only the participants know for certain whether the instruc-
tions were clear, whether the independent variable had the
intended impact on them, and so on; (d) to probe for any
suspicion on the part of the participants, such as whether
they believed the cover story.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of the post-
experimental follow-up. The experimenter should never
conduct it in a casual or cavalier manner. Rather, the exper-
imenter should probe gently and sensitively to be certain
that all of the above goals are accomplished. This is espe-
cially and most obviously true if any deception has been
employed. In this case, the experimenter needs to learn if
the deception was effective or if the participant was suspi-
cious in a way that could invalidate the data based on his
or her performance in the experiment. Even more impor-
tant, where deception was used, the experimenter must
reveal the true nature of the experiment and the reasons
why deception was necessary. Again, this cannot be done
lightly. People do not enjoy learning that they have behaved
in a naive or gullible manner. The experimenter not only
must be sensitive to the feelings and dignity of the partici-
pants but also should communicate this care and concern
to them. We have found that people are most receptive to
experimenters who are open in describing their own dis-
comfort with the deceptive aspects of the procedure. Then,
in explaining why the deception was necessary, the experi-
menter not only is sharing his or her dilemma as an ear-
nest researcher (who is seeking the truth through the use
of deception) but also is contributing to the participants’
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 76 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
educational experience by exploring the process as well as
the content of social psychological experimentation.
Although it is important to provide people with a com-
plete understanding of the experimental procedures, this is
not the best way to begin the postexperimental session. In
order to maximize the value of the participants as consul-
tants, it is first necessary to explore with each the impact of
the experimental events. The value of this sequence should
be obvious. If we tell the participants what we expected to
happen before finding out what the participants experienced,
they may have a tendency to protect us from the realization
that our procedures were pallid, misguided, or worthless.
Moreover, if deception was used, the experimenter, before
revealing the deception, should ascertain whether the par-
ticipant was suspicious and whether particular suspicions
were of such a nature as to invalidate the results.
This should not be done abruptly. It is best to explore
the feelings and experiences of the participants in a gentle
and gradual manner. Why the need for gradualness? Why
not simply ask people if they suspected that they were the
victims of a hoax? Subjects may not be responsive to an
abrupt procedure for a variety of reasons. First, if a given
person did see through the experiment, he or she may be
reluctant to admit it out of a misplaced desire to be help-
ful to the experimenter. Second, as mentioned previously,
since most of us do not feel good about appearing gull-
ible, some participants may be reluctant to admit that
they can be easily fooled. Consequently, if participants
are told pointedly about the deception, they might imply
that they suspected it all along, in order to save face. Thus,
such an abrupt procedure may falsely inflate the number
of suspicious participants and may, consequently, lead the
experimenter to abandon a perfectly viable procedure.
Moreover, as mentioned previously, abruptly telling peo-
ple that they have been deceived is a harsh technique that
can add unnecessarily to their discomfort and, therefore,
should be avoided.
The best way to begin a postexperimental interview is
to ask the participants if they have any questions. If they do
not, the experimenter should ask if the entire experiment
was perfectly clear—the purpose of the experiment as well
as each aspect of the procedure. The participants should
then be told that people react to things in different ways,
and it would be helpful if they would comment on how the
experiment affected them, why they responded as they did,
and how they felt at the time, for example. Then each par-
ticipant should be asked specifically whether there was any
aspect of the procedure that he or she found odd, confusing,
or disturbing.
By this time, if deception has been used and any partici-
pants have any suspicions, they are almost certain to have
revealed them. Moreover, the experimenter should have
CH02.indd 74
discovered whether the participants misunderstood the
instructions or whether any responded erroneously. If no
suspicions have been voiced, the experimenter should
continue: “Do you think there may have been more to the
experiment than meets the eye?” This question is virtually
a giveaway. Even if the participants had not previously sus-
pected anything, some will probably begin to suspect that the
experimenter was concealing something. In our experience,
we have found that many people will take this opportunity
to say that they did feel that the experiment, as described,
appeared too simple (or something of that order). This is
desirable; whether the participants were deeply suspicious
or not, the question allows them an opportunity to indicate
that they are not the kind of person who is easily fooled. The
experimenter should then explore the nature of the suspi-
cion and how it may have affected the participant’s behavior.
From the participant’s answers to this question, the experi-
menter can make a judgment as to how close a participant’s
suspicions were to the actual purpose of the experiment and,
consequently, whether the data are admissible. Obviously,
the criteria for inclusion should be both rigorous and rigid
and should be set down before the experiment begins; the
decision should be made without knowledge of the partici-
pants’ responses on the dependent variable.
The experimenter should then continue with the debrief-
ing process by saying something like this: “You are on the
right track, we were interested in exploring some issues
that we didn’t discuss with you in advance. One of our
major concerns in this study is…” The experimenter should
then describe the problem under investigation, specifying
why it is important and explaining clearly exactly how the
deception took place and why it was necessary. Again,
experimenters should be generous in sharing their own dis-
comfort with the participant. They should make absolutely
certain that the participant fully understands these factors
before the postexperimental session is terminated.
It is often useful to enlist the participant’s aid in
improving the experiment. Often the participant can pro-
vide valuable hints regarding where the weaknesses in
the manipulation occurred and which one of these caused
competing reactions to the one the experimenter intended.
These interviews can and should, of course, be continued
during the time the experiment is actually being run, but it
is usually during pretesting that the most valuable informa-
tion is obtained.
Finally, regardless of whether deception is used, the
experimenter must attempt to convince the participants
not to discuss the experiment with other people until it is
completed. This is a serious problem because even a few
sophisticated participants can invalidate an experiment.
Moreover, it is not a simple matter to swear participants to
secrecy; some have friends who may subsequently volunteer
9/2/09 8:10:04 PM

for the experiment and who are almost certain to press
them for information. Perhaps the best way to reduce
such communication is to describe graphically the colos-
sal waste of effort that would result from experimenting
with people who have foreknowledge about the procedure
or hypothesis of the experiment and who thus can rehearse
their responses in advance. The experimenter should also
explain the damage that can be done to the scientific enter-
prise by including data from such participants. It often
helps to provide participants with some easy but unreveal-
ing answers for their friends who ask about the study (e.g.,
“it was about social perception”). If we experimenters are
sincere and honest in our dealings with the participants
during the postexperimental session, we can be reasonably
confident that few will break faith.
To check on the efficacy of this procedure, Aronson (1966)
enlisted the aid of three undergraduates who each approached
three acquaintances who had recently participated in one of
his experiments. The confederates explained that they had
signed up for that experiment, had noticed the friend’s name
on the sign-up sheet, and wondered what the experiment was
all about. The experimenter had previously assured these
confederates that their friends would remain anonymous.
The results were encouraging. In spite of considerable urging
and cajoling on the part of the confederates, none of the for-
mer participants revealed the true purpose of the experiment;
two of them went as far as providing the confederates with a
replay of the cover story, but nothing else.
What if the participant has been forewarned before
entering the experimental room? That is, suppose a partici-
pant does find out about the experiment from a friend who
participated previously. Chances are the participant will
not volunteer this information to the experimenter before
the experiment. Once again, we as experimenters must
appeal to the cooperativeness of the participant, emphasiz-
ing how much the experiment will be compromised if peo-
ple knew about it in advance. We cannot overemphasize
the importance of this procedure as a safeguard against the
artifactual confirmation of an erroneous hypothesis because
of the misplaced cooperativeness of the participant. If the
participants are indeed cooperative, they will undoubtedly
cooperate with the experimenter in this regard also and will
respond to a direct plea of the sort described.
Ethical Concerns in Experimentation
Experimental social psychologists have been deeply con-
cerned about the ethics of experimentation for a great
many years precisely because our field is constructed on
an ethical dilemma. Basically, the dilemma is formed by
a conflict between two sets of values to which most social
psychologists subscribe: a belief in the value of free sci-
entific inquiry and a belief in the dignity of humans and
CH02.indd 75
Planning and Conducting a Laboratory Experiment 77
their right to privacy. We will not dwell on the historical
antecedents of these values or on the philosophical intrica-
cies of the ethical dilemma posed by the conflict of these
values. It suffices to say that the dilemma is a real one and
cannot be dismissed either by making pious statements
about the importance of not violating a person’s feelings
of dignity or by glibly pledging allegiance to the cause of
science. It is a problem every social psychologist must face
squarely, not just once, but each time he or she constructs
and conducts an experiment, since it is impossible to delin-
eate a specific set of rules and regulations governing all
experiments. In each instance the researcher must decide
on a course of action after giving careful consideration
to the importance of the experiment and the extent of the
potential injury to the dignity of the participants.
Obviously, some experimental techniques present more
problems than others. In general, experiments that employ
deception cause concern because of the fact that lying, in
and of itself, is problematic. Similarly, procedures that
cause pain, embarrassment, guilt, or other intense feel-
ings present obvious ethical problems. In addition, any
procedure that enables the participants to confront some
aspect of themselves that may not be pleasant or positive
is of deep ethical concern. For example, many of Asch’s
(1951) participants learned that they could conform in
the face of implicit group pressure; many of Aronson
and Mettee’s (1968) participants learned that they would
cheat at a game of cards; and many of Milgram’s (1974)
participants learned that they could be pressured to obey an
authority even when such obedience involved (apparently)
inflicting severe pain on another human being. Even more
imposing are the findings of the Stanford prison study in
which college students learned that, even in the absence of
direct explicit commands, they would behave cruelly and
even sadistically toward fellow students (Haney, Banks, &
Zimbardo, 1973).
It can be argued that such procedures are therapeutic or
educational for the participants. Indeed, many of the par-
ticipants in these experiments have made this point. But
this does not, in and of itself, justify the procedure primar-
ily because the experimenter could not possibly know in
advance that it would be therapeutic for all participants.
Moreover, it is arrogant for the scientist to decide that he
or she will provide people with a therapeutic experience
without their explicit permission.
The use of deception, when combined with the possi-
bility of “self-discovery,” presents the experimenter with
a special kind of ethical problem. In a deception experi-
ment it is impossible, by definition, to attain informed
consent from the participants in advance of the experiment.
For example, how could Milgram or Asch have attained
informed consent from their participants without revealing
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 78 The Art of Laboratory Experimentation
aspects of the procedure that would have invalidated any
results they obtained? An experimenter cannot even reveal
in advance that the purpose of an experiment is the study
of conformity or obedience without influencing the partici-
pant to behave in ways that are no longer “pure.” Moreover,
we doubt that the experimenter can reveal that deception
might be used without triggering vigilance and, therefore,
adulterating the participant’s response to the independent
variable.
A number of guidelines have been developed to protect
the welfare of research participants. In 1973 the American
Psychological Association (APA) published a set of guide-
lines for the conduct of research involving human par-
ticipants, which have since been revised and updated a
number of times. It behooves all investigators to read these
guidelines carefully before conducting research (American
Psychological Association, 2002). Further, as stated in the
guidelines, ethical decisions should not be made alone.
Researchers may not always be in the best position to
judge whether their procedures are ethically permissible.
Because of this fact, all research using human subjects
that is funded by the federal government, or conducted at
colleges and universities, must receive approval from an
Institutional Review Board (IRB). This is a panel of sci-
entists and nonscientists who judge whether the risks to
participants outweigh the potential gains of the research.
It is not uncommon for an IRB to ask researchers to revise
their procedures to minimize risks to participants.
It is worth noting that there have been some empirical
investigations of the impact of deception experiments on
participants. These studies have generally found that people
do not object to the kinds of mild discomfort and decep-
tions typically used in social psychological research (e.g.,
Christensen, 1988; Sharpe, Adair, & Roese, 1992; Smith
& Richardson, 1983). If mild deception is used, and time is
spent after the study discussing the deception with partici-
pants and explaining why it was necessary, the evidence is
that people will not be adversely affected. Nonetheless, the
decision as to whether to use deception in a study should not
be taken lightly, and alternative procedures should always be
considered.
As we noted in our discussion of the postexperimental
interview, it is critical to explain to participants in a deception
study, at its conclusion, the true nature of the procedures and
the reasons for them. We strongly recommend, however, that
a thorough explanation of the experiment be provided regard-
less of whether deception or stressful procedures are involved.
The major reason for this recommendation is that we cannot
always predict the impact of a procedure; occasionally, even
procedures that appear to be completely benign can have a
powerful impact on some participants. An interesting exam-
ple of such an unexpectedly powerful negative impact comes
CH02.indd 76
from a series of experiments on social dilemmas by Dawes
and his students (Dawes, McTavish, & Shaklee, 1977). In
these experiments, typically, the participant must make a
decision between cooperating with several other people or
“defecting.” The contingencies are such that if all partici-
pants choose to cooperate, they all profit financially; how-
ever, if one or more defect, defection has a high payoff and
cooperation produces little payoff. Each person’s response is
anonymous and remains so. The nature of the decision and
its consequences is fully explained to the participants at the
outset of the experiment. No deception is involved.
Twenty-four hours after one experimental session, an
elderly man (who had been the sole defector in his group
and had won $19) telephoned the experimenter trying to
return his winnings so that it could be divided among the
other participants (who, because they chose to cooperate,
had each earned only $1). In the course of the conversation,
he revealed that he felt miserable about his greedy behavior
and that he had not slept all night. After a similar experi-
ment, a woman who had cooperated while others defected
revealed that she felt terribly gullible and had learned that
people were not as trustworthy as she had thought. In order
to alleviate this kind of stress, Dawes went on to develop
an elaborate and sensitive follow-up procedure.
We repeat that these experiments were selected for
discussion precisely because their important and powerful
impact could not have been easily anticipated. We are
intentionally not focusing on experiments that present
clear and obvious problems like the well-known obedi-
ence study (Milgram, 1974), or the Stanford prison study
(Haney et al., 1973). We have purposely selected an exper-
iment that involves no deception and is well within the
bounds of ethical codes. Our point is simple but important.
No code of ethics can anticipate all problems, especially
those created through participants discovering something
unpleasant about themselves or others in the course of
an experiment. However, we believe a sensitive postex-
perimental interview conducted by a sincere and caring
experimenter not only instructs and informs, but also
provides important insights and helps reduce feelings of
guilt or discomfort generated by such self-discovery (see
Holmes, 1976a, 1976b; Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975).
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
We hope that this chapter has helped explain why labora-
tory experiments are often the method of choice for social
psychologists and has provided useful tips about how to
conduct experiments. We want to emphasize, however,
that social psychology cannot live by lab experimentation
alone and that we must use multiple methods if we are to
9/2/09 8:10:05 PM

advance theory and find solutions to important problems.
Basic, process-oriented experimental research may isolate
important causal processes, but convincing demonstrations
that those processes operate in applied settings are essen-
tial before theory can be converted into practice.
The research literature on self-affirmation and stereotype
threat provides a particularly good example of how a syn-
thesis between field and laboratory experiments can work
at its best. Research in these areas began with laboratory
experiments conducted with college student participants,
showing that (a) people can deal with threats in one domain
by affirming themselves in another (Steele, 1988), and that
(b) targets of prejudice perform poorly under conditions of
stereotype threat, in which they are concerned that their per-
formance will confirm a negative stereotype of their group
(Steele & Aronson, 1995). Based on these ideas, Cohen,
Garcia, Apfel, and Master (2006) developed an intervention
to improve the academic performance of African American
middle school students. Some students were randomly
assigned to a self-affirmation condition in which they chose
values that were important to them and wrote about these
values for 15 minutes. Students in the control condition
wrote about why the values might be important for some-
one else. This simple intervention had remarkable effects:
Thoughts about race became less accessible to the students
in the self-affirmation condition and the students achieved
higher grades during the remainder of the academic term.
We dare say that the idea that such a “miniscule” interven-
tion could have such dramatic effects would never have
occurred to researchers without the prior laboratory experi-
ments on self-affirmation and stereotype threat.
Another good example of the creative interplay between
laboratory and field experimentation is the work of Aronson
and his colleagues on the effects of cooperative learning
(Aronson & Bridgeman, 1979; Aronson & Osherow, 1980;
Aronson, Stephan, Sikes, Blaney, & Snapp, 1978). The
research began as an experimental intervention in response
to a crisis in the Austin (Texas) school system following
its desegregation. Aronson and his colleagues observed
the dynamics of the classroom and diagnosed that a major
cause of the existing tension was the competitive atmo-
sphere that exacerbated the usual problems brought about
by desegregation. They then changed the atmosphere of
existing classrooms by restructuring the learning environ-
ment so that some students were teaching one another in
small, interdependent “jigsaw” groups, while others con-
tinued to study in more traditional classrooms.
The results of this and subsequent field experiments
showed that the cooperative classroom atmosphere decreased
negative stereotyping, increased cross-ethnic liking, increased
self-esteem, improved classroom performance, and increa-
sed empathic role taking. At the same time, Aronson and
CH02.indd 77
Concluding Comments 79
his colleagues were able to enhance their understanding
of the underlying dynamic of this cooperative behavior by
closer scrutiny under controlled laboratory conditions. For
example, in one such laboratory experiment, they showed
that, in a competitive situation, individuals make situational
self-attributions for failure and dispositional self-attributions
for success, while making the reverse attributions to their
opponent. However, in a cooperative structure, individuals
gave their partners the same benefit of the doubt that they
gave to themselves, that is, dispositional attributions for suc-
cess and situational attributions for failure (Stephan, Presser,
Kennedy, & Aronson, 1978).
Field experimentation in applied settings often provides
an opportunity for impact and involvement of research partic-
ipants that vastly exceeds any ever achieved in the laboratory.
However, the focus of such research also tends to be more
limited than the general tests of theory underlying most labo-
ratory research efforts, because they are forced to deal only
with variables found in the particular applied context under
study. If the distinctive contribution of experimental social
psychology to the general body of knowledge is ever to be
realized, an optimal integration of theory-oriented laboratory
research with applied field experimentation will be required.
At present we are concerned because the alternative
research modes in social psychology seem, for the most
part, to be functioning in isolation from each other. What
is needed now is a new attempt at synthesis; that is, to con-
struct a more limited (and perhaps closer to the original)
version of the Lewinian model of the interplay between
laboratory and field research. Such a synthesis will require
a concern with discovering more specifiable relationships
rather than with attempts to find sweeping general theories
of human social behavior. It will require an emphasis on
assessing the relative importance of several variables, which
all influence an aspect of multiply-determined behavior,
rather than on testing to see if a particular variable has a
“significant” impact. And it will require a sensitivity to the
interaction between research design and research setting
and the benefits of multiple methodologies. We have great
faith in our fellow social psychologists’ ability to meet these
challenges. Indeed, many are already deeply immersed in
research programs that are increasing our understanding of
basic social psychological processes and having an impact
on real world problems. We hope this chapter inspires a
new generation of social psychologists to do the same.
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Chapter 3
Social Psychological Methods Outside the
Laboratory
HARRY T. REIS AND SAMUEL D. GOSLING
When Kurt Lewin ushered in the modern era of experimen-
tal social psychology, he did so with the strong belief that
the scientific psychology of the time seemed to be trying
“increasingly to stay away from a too close relation to life”
(1951, p. 169). Lewin primarily intended to keep experi-
mental social psychology close to life by urging researchers
to maintain an active interest in applications of theory to
social problems, but he also felt that, beyond research with
experimentally created laboratory groups, the field
shall have also to develop research techniques that will per-
mit us to do real experiments within existing “natural” social
groups. In my opinion, the practical and theoretical impor-
tance of these types of experiments is of the first magnitude.
(1951, pp. 164–165)
By this Lewin meant that social psychological research
needed to keep its theoretical feet firmly grounded in real-
world contexts, problems, and social relations.
In the more than half-century of research and theoriz-
ing that followed, social psychology’s remarkable progress
has derived in large measure from laboratory research. For
example, Sears (1986) reported that 78% of the social-
psychological research published in 1985 in the field’s top
journals was conducted in the laboratory. Rozin (2001)
similarly concluded that nearly all of the articles published
in the first two sections of volume 66 (1994) of the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) were situ-
ated in the laboratory or used questionnaires. No doubt this
emphasis reflects the many benefits of laboratory (typi-
cally, although not exclusively experimental) research,
including experimental control over variables, contexts and
procedures, which allows researchers to control extraneous
For their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article, we gratefully thank Matthias Mehl, Peter Caprariello, Michael Maniaci,
Shannon Smith, and the editors.
Direct correspondence to Harry T. Reis, Ph.D., Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, Box 270266, University of
Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627; voice: (585) 275-8697; fax: (585) 273-1100; e-mail: reis@psych.rochester.edu.
82
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
influences and differentiate causal mechanisms from one
another (Smith, 2000), and easy access to undergraduate
samples. These advantages were a great part of the reason
why social psychology, which had been more non-experi-
mental than experimental in its early days, evolved into
a predominantly experimental science during the 1930s
and 1940s (House, 1977; Jones, 1985), a considerable and
enduring legacy.
But these advantages may also have a cost, in terms of
increasing distance from Lewin’s “close relation to life.”
Laboratory settings by definition remove research par-
ticipants from their natural contexts and place them in an
artificial environment in which nearly all aspects of the
setting, including physical features, goals, other persons
involved, and even the possibility of getting up and doing
something else, are determined by an external entity (i.e.,
the experimenter). Natural habitats, in contrast, are marked
by far greater diversity and clutter of the physical and
social environment, the necessity of choosing for oneself
what task to pursue and how to engage it, and the option
of changing settings and tasks. Ironically, social-psy-
chological research has provided ample testimony of the
importance of context for understanding behavior.
The good news is that social psychology can have it
both ways. As is discussed below, researchers have come
to realize that validity is not an “either-or” proposition
but rather the result of complementary methods targeting
the same theories, processes, and concepts. Just as social
psychologists have used stagecraft to import some of the
richness of natural settings into the laboratory, recent meth-
odological advances have made possible with non-labora-
tory methods some of the same precision and control that

heretofore was possible only in the laboratory. Moreover,
many of these advances allow non-laboratory research to
ask more complex questions or to obtain far more detailed
responses than the typical laboratory experiment. As a
result, non-laboratory methods represent a far more power-
ful tool for social psychological research and theory than
they have previously. Adding them to a research program
may also make the results of research more interesting and
relevant, as Cialdini (2009) suggests.
The distinction between laboratory and non-laboratory
research is sometimes conflated with sampling. Although
undergraduate and non-undergraduate samples are stud-
ied in both kinds of settings, in actuality the vast majority of
laboratory studies rely on undergraduate samples, whereas
non-laboratory studies are more likely to use non-student,
adult samples. Eighty-three percent of the studies in Sears’s
(1986) review used samples composed of students.
Reviews of the 1988 volume of JPSP, the 1996 volume
of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and the
2002 volume of JPSP put these estimates at 80%, 85%,
and 85%, respectively (Gosling, Vazire, Srivastava, &
John, 2004; Sherman, Buddie, Dragan, End, & Finney,
1999; West, Newsom, & Fenaughty, 1992). Another study
reported that 91.9% of studies of prejudice and stigma pub-
lished in the field’s top three journals from 1990 to 2005
relied on undergraduate samples, and even in two expressly
applied journals (Journal of Applied Social Psychology,
Basic and Applied Social Psychology), 73.6% of studies
were based on research with undergraduates (Henry, 2008).
Laboratory studies use undergraduate samples because it is
difficult and expensive to recruit nonstudent participants
to come to the lab. With non-laboratory studies, research-
ers usually have little reason to prioritize nonstudent
samples.
This chapter reviews some of the more important,
popular, and timely methods for conducting social psychologi-
cal research outside of the laboratory. The chapter begins
with a review of the purpose of non-laboratory methods,
emphasizing how they have been used in social psychol-
ogy, as well as the kinds of insights that they can and can-
not provide. Included in this section is a review of how
laboratory and non-laboratory methods complement each
other in a research program. We then describe in some
detail five methods that have become influential tools in
social psychology and give every indication of continued
value: field experiments, Internet methods, diary methods,
ambulatory monitoring, and trace measures. The chapter
concludes with a brief commentary on the future of non-
laboratory methods in social psychology.
We do not review two broad and common classes of
non-laboratory methods, survey research and observa-
tional methods, for space reasons and because excellent
What Is Meant By Non-Laboratory Research? 83
discussions of these methods are available elsewhere.
Readers interesting in learning more about survey meth-
odology may consult the chapter by Schwarz, Groves, and
Schumann in the fourth edition of this Handbook (1998),
Krosnick and Fabrigar (in press), Groves et al. (2004), or
Visser, Krosnick, and Lavrakas (2000). Fuller descrip-
tion of observational methods (which are applied both
in the laboratory and in non-laboratory settings such as
work sites, homes, and schools) may be found in Weick’s
(1985) chapter in the third edition of this Handbook, or in
Bakeman (2000), Bakeman and Gottman (1997), Kerig and
Lindahl (2001), and McGrath and Altermatt (2000). Other
non-laboratory methods used by social psychologists that
we do not discuss include archival methods (Simonton,
2003; Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, & Sechrest, 2000),
computer simulations (Hastie & Stasser, 2000), interviews
(Bartholomew, Henderson, & Marcia, 2000), and partici-
pant observation in the field.
WHAT IS MEANT BY NON-LABORATORY
RESEARCH?
We are tempted to define the term non-laboratory research
as all research conducted elsewhere than in a laboratory
suite, room, or cubicle. Laboratories are spaces specially
equipped for research that permit experimenters to control
nearly all facets of the participant’s experience, includ-
ing the physical (e.g., ambient sound and temperature,
furniture, visual cues) and social environment (e.g., other per-
sons), as well as the possibility of distraction by external
circumstances (e.g., cell phones). Conducting non-labo-
ratory research necessarily involves sacrificing this high
level of control over extraneous factors for the benefits
discussed below. Researchers often design non-labora-
tory studies to observe social-psychological phenomena in
their natural context, reflecting the belief that the setting in
which a behavior occurs must be a fundamental part of any
theoretical account of that behavior (Weick, 1985). (This
belief is of course entirely consistent with the rationale for
laboratory research, because settings would not need to
be controlled if they were not influential.) In contrast, the
laboratory setting is likely to engender certain expectations
and scripts (e.g., serious purpose, scientific legitimacy, the
possibility of deception, the importance of attentiveness),
which may affect behavior (Shulman & Berman, 1975).
Non-laboratory research also tends to constrain participant
behavior less, in the sense that the setting offers many more
alternative activities (e.g., participants can choose what to
do, when, where, and with whom) and distractions, so that
self-direction and spontaneous selection among activities
is greater. In a laboratory study, participants usually can
84 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
do little else but complete the tasks assigned to them by
researchers.
Laboratory and non-laboratory settings differ in
various ways, some of them more influential than others.
Administering a questionnaire in a classroom versus
a laboratory cubicle may not make much difference,
whereas conducting a field experiment on the effects of
affectionate smiles on attraction at a social mixer versus
a laboratory room may matter more. Non-laboratory and
laboratory contexts differ in three general ways: the physi-
cal environment, the goals likely to be activated by the
setting and their correspondence with the behaviors being
studied, and the degree to which the setting is natural and
appropriate for the research question. Of these, we see the
latter two factors as more significant for social-psycho-
logical research. That is, because behavior reflects personal
goals and concerns, and is embedded in naturally occurring
contexts, non-laboratory research can complement labora-
tory studies best when it highlights such influences.
It is important to note that the setting in which a study is
conducted is independent of whether a study is experimen-
tal or non-experimental (see Figure 3.1). Studies conducted
outside of the laboratory can possess all of the features of a
true experiment—random assignment to conditions, manip-
ulation of the treatment conditions—as in the case of field
experiments and randomized clinical trials (Wilson et al., this
Handbook), just as studies conducted in a laboratory space
can have an experimental or correlational design. Some stud-
ies include both laboratory and non-laboratory components,
such as when measurements obtained in the laboratory are
used to help explain behaviors observed in non-laboratory
settings. Also, although non-laboratory research may pos-
sess less of the tight control over setting and procedure that is
typically associated with laboratory research, systematic,
carefully designed methods are still essential.
Their relative infrequency notwithstanding, non-lab-
oratory studies have played an important role in social
Design
Experiment Non-Experiment
Lab
Setting
Field
Figure 3.1 Designs and Settings Are Orthogonal.
psychology, both historically and in contemporary
research. A few examples may illustrate this role, as
well as highlight the diversity of methods included in
this general category.
Field studies (including experiments, quasi-experiments,
and nonexperimental designs) include the famous Robbers
Cave research, conducted in 1954, in which observations
of early adolescent boys attending a summer camp led to
findings about ingroup cooperation and outgroup competi-
tion that spawned one of social psychology’s most enduring
research areas, intergroup conflict (Sherif, Harvey, White,
Hood, & Sherif, 1961). The development of cognitive dis-
sonance theory was influenced in an important way by
When Prophecy Fails, a field study in which researchers
infiltrated a prophetic group of doom-sayers predicting the
end of the world (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956).
Many important studies of bystander intervention in the
1960s and 1970s took place in natural settings, such as
grocery stores, streets, the New York City subways, and
Jones Beach (Moriarty, 1975). Important studies examin-
ing if, when, and how intergroup contact reduces prejudice
and discrimination have been conducted with actual con-
flicting groups (Amir, 1969), and real-world classrooms
have been used to study the effects of cooperative learning
structures (the so-called Jigsaw Classroom) on intergroup
relations and academic achievement (Aronson, 2004;
Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 2007). Some of the earliest
studies of self-disclosure processes were conducted with
Navy recruits in boot camp training for service on subma-
rines and other isolated yet intensely interactive settings
(e.g., Altman & Haythorn, 1965). Pioneering studies of
the acquaintance process observed the development (and
non-development) of friendships among new students
at Bennington College and the University of Michigan
(Newcomb, 1961). More contemporary examples of field
research in social psychology include studies of personal
living and working spaces (Gosling, Ko, Mannarelli, &
Morris, 2004), investigations of attachment processes
within the Israeli military (Davidovitz, Mikulincer, Shaver,
Izsak, & Popper, 2007), and Sherman and Kim’s (2005)
studies of self-affirmation among student members of
sports teams. The Internet has also created many new pos-
sibilities for research.
Ambulatory monitoring (including diary methods) has
grown rapidly in recent years, no doubt due to technological
advances that make such procedures more accessible and cost-
effective while providing better, more detailed information.
Among the most popular of these methods are Experience
Sampling (Hektner, Schmidt, & Csikszentmihalyi,
2007) and Ecological Momentary Assessment (Stone &
Shiffman, 1994), both defined later in this chapter, which
have been used extensively to study affect, cognition,
 Why Study Social Psychological Processes Outside the Laboratory?
health symptoms, health-related behavior, social interac-
tion, and activity in everyday life. Ambulatory assessment
procedures have also been used in social psychological
research to collect random samples of the acoustic envi-
ronment (Pennebaker, Mehl, & Niederhoffer, 2003); to
obtain detailed reports of physiological states, particularly
heart rate variability and other cardiovascular measures
(Hawkley, Burleson, Berntson, & Cacioppo, 2003), as they
relate to what the person is doing or experiencing; to char-
acterize sleep (Ajilore, Stickgold, Rittenhouse, & Hobson,
1995); and to quantify person-to-person proximity for
social network analyses (Pentland, 2007).
WHY STUDY SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL
PROCESSES OUTSIDE THE LABORATORY?
Debate over the relative priority that should be given to
internal and external validity is not new. Many commen-
tators have bemoaned the seeming low priority given to
generalizability (e.g., Helmreich, 1975; McGuire, 1967;
Ring, 1967; Silverman, 1971; see Henry, 2008, for a more
recent version). Various replies have been provided, the
most commonly cited of which argue that the purpose of
laboratory experiments is to evaluate theories, regardless
of the applicability of those theories—in other words, to
determine “what can happen” as opposed to “what
does happen” (e.g., Aronson, Wilson, & Brewer, 1998;
Berkowitz & Donnerstein, 1982; Mook, 1983). Perhaps
reflecting the effectiveness of these replies, social psychol-
ogists are usually taught that internal validity has higher
priority than external validity—that it is more important to
be certain about concluding that an independent variable is
the true source of changes in a dependent variable than it
is to know that research findings can be generalized to other
settings and samples. Too often, however, in our opinion,
the lesser priority of external validity is confused with low
priority, which fosters a certain irony. Social psychology
generally seeks principles to describe social behavior that
hold across persons, settings, and (sometimes) cultures
(Cook & Groom, 2004). How do we know this to be so
without research that establishes the point? Non-laboratory
methods are well suited to demonstrating external validity.
As most discussions of methodology point out, no sin-
gle study can maximize all types of validity (e.g., Brewer,
2000; Smith & Mackie, 2000). All methods have their
advantages and drawbacks, which is why methodological
pluralism—using multiple and varied paradigms, operations,
and measures to triangulate on the same concepts—has
long been advocated as a feature of research programs
(Campbell, 1957; Campbell & Fiske, 1959), if more in
principle than in practice. There is little reason to doubt that
85
laboratory settings tend to be preferable for conducting the
most carefully controlled studies, because manipulations
can be crafted to precisely test some theoretical principle,
controlling for the “noise” of the real world and ruling out
alternative explanations and potential artifacts (even those
that may be confounded with the key independent variable
in natural experience). Nevertheless, the value of non-lab-
oratory research goes well beyond showing that the same
processes are also evident in the real world. As Brewer
notes, “the kind of systematic, programmatic research that
accompanies the search for external validity inevitably
contributes to the refinement and elaboration of theory as
well” (2000, p. 13).
Brewer (2000) described the three Rs of how exter-
nal validity contributes to the development of theory and
knowledge:
1. Robustness, or whether a finding is replicated in
different settings, with different samples, or in dif-
ferent historical or cultural circumstances. Although
researchers sometimes couch replications of this sort
in checklist terms (“yes it did” or “no it didn’t”), it is more
informative to think about replications in terms of
their ability to identify boundary conditions for an
effect and other moderating variables, which in turn
may contribute to fuller understanding of the scope,
context, and mechanism for a phenomenon. For exam-
ple, most social psychologists believe that behavior
is a function of Person ⫻ Environment interactions
(Funder, 2006), and such interactions are more likely
to be revealed in studies with heterogeneous popula-
tions. Similarly, ever since Barker (1968), most social
psychologists have believed that settings affect behav-
ior, yet in laboratory studies, although setting variables
may be controlled (perhaps as part of “lab lore”), they
are not systematically investigated. The situational
variable held constant in one program of research may
be the focal variable of another research program.
Replications, in other words, help identify modera-
tor variables that are essential to the full specifica-
tion of a theory and its component processes. Because
laboratory studies typically isolate the variables in
question from influence by settings, individual differ-
ences, and other contextual factors in order to identify
cause-and-effect associations, they tend to privilege
main effects (Cook & Groom, 2004).
2. Representativeness, or do the conditions or processes
actually occur in the real world? This differs from
robustness because an effect might be highly replicable,
but unlike anything that occurs in normal circum-
stances. Brunswik (1956) pointed out the importance
of representativeness, in noting that generalizability to
86 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
the real-world depended on random sampling of both
participants and contexts. Nonetheless, the biological
and physical sciences commonly use unrepresenta-
tive conditions to test theory (e.g., the behavior of
electrons in a vacuum may illuminate a proposed
mechanism), and they may have similar value for social-
psychological theory (Petty & Cacioppo, 1996). For
example, examining the effects of mere exposure with
variably mixed combinations of familiar and unfamiliar
stimuli may not resemble circumstances that naturally
occur, but they allow researchers to compare explana-
tions based on fluency and repetitiveness (Dechêne,
Stahl, Hansen, & Wänke, under review). Nonetheless,
understanding when and how processes apply to natural
social behavior necessarily provides a foundation for
theory development, just as descriptive taxonomies of
species provide a foundation for biological research
(Kelley, 1992). Furthermore, identification of the
circumstances under which a phenomenon occurs
in the real world may suggest important clues about
covariates, mechanisms, and limiting conditions (e.g.,
as has been shown in repeated efforts to apply the
contact hypothesis to actual intergroup conflicts
[Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006]). Representativeness is
also important for translations and application of basic
research.
3. Relevance, or can the findings be used to modify
behavior in the real world? Of course not all research
(laboratory or non-laboratory) is intended to test
intervention-related hypotheses, but to the extent that the-
ories can be used to modify behavior, their theoretical
basis is strengthened. This principle underlies Lewin’s
(1951) belief in the value of “action research” for
theory development, as well as the more general claim
that psychological theories are useful if they can be
used to predict and control behavior. Because non-
laboratory applications do not isolate the effects of a
given manipulation from the simultaneous effects of
other processes in the natural environment, they help
identify the relative strength of a given manipulation
in context, as well as its sensitivity to interference by
moderating variables. (It is easy to imagine circum-
stances in which a manipulation might produce effects
of considerable effect size under the tightly controlled
conditions of the laboratory, yet be ineffectual in the
real world.) Haslam and McGarty (2004) suggest an
inverse relationship between relevance and sensitiv-
ity: The more relevant a given issue to participants,
the less sensitive (i.e., modifiable) their behavior may
be. For example, in most cases it would be easier to
modify lawn care behavior than sexual behavior, even
though the same general theory may apply.
A somewhat different way of conceptualizing the rela-
tive advantage of non-laboratory research concerns the
issue of closeness to real-world concerns (closely related
to, but not the same as, the distinction between mundane
realism, or, the extent to which the events of an experiment
resemble real-world events, and experimental realism, or,
the extent to which experimental events are involving; see
Wilson et al., this Handbook). Weick (1985) posed a series
of intriguing questions about which situations get “closer”
to the human condition: A study of how one tells a newly
acquainted stranger in the laboratory that she is about to
receive a mildly painful electric shock or a study of how a
coroner announces death to next of kin. Or, anticipation of
putting one’s hand in a bucket of ice water in a controlled
laboratory room or learning how to work on high steel in
a 21-story building. Distance, Weick argued, may encour-
age ambiguity and detachment from the motives, wishes,
fears, and concerns that drive behavior in the real world.
To be sure, laboratory studies can be intensely involving,
but often they are not (Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2007),
especially in light of the restrictions that Research Ethics
Boards increasingly demand, which make it difficult for
researchers to engage participants in a way that activates
strong personal involvement. If the setting is chosen
properly, such involvement is readily accessible in non-
laboratory studies—for example, the same undergraduate
student who is only mildly concerned about having per-
formed poorly on a laboratory task of mental arithmetic
may be substantially more engaged in the outcome of her
calculus midterm examination. Similarly, recent speed-
dating research has yielded results that differ from more
traditional laboratory studies of initial romantic interac-
tions (Finkel & Eastwick, 2008). Non-laboratory studies,
in other words, may bring research questions “closer”
to involving, personally meaningful motives, defenses,
affects, and thought processes.
Just how effectively non-laboratory studies accomplish
these goals depends, of course, on how the research is
designed and conducted. Non-laboratory studies need to be
systematic, coherent, and controlled for the impact of errors
and artifacts; a flawed field study contributes no more than
a poorly designed laboratory experiment. No individual
study can simultaneously minimize all threats to internal
validity by experimental control, nor all possible limits on
generalizability by going outside the laboratory. Validity, in
the broadest sense, depends on matching protocols, designs,
and methods to questions, so that, across a program of
research, all reasonable alternative explanations are ruled
out and boundary conditions are established. Thus, as with
laboratory research, the ultimate rationale for conducting
non-laboratory research is to advance the depth, accuracy,
and usefulness of social-psychological knowledge.

FIELD EXPERIMENTS
As mentioned earlier, experiments, quasi-experiments,
and non-experimental (correlational) designs can be
enacted in field settings. The principles that distinguish
these designs from one another are the same, regardless
of whether the research is conducted in the field or in the
laboratory; consequently, readers are referred to the chap-
ter by Wilson et al. (this Handbook) for discussion of the
basic principles of experimentation. It bears noting that a
great deal of field research is non-experimental in nature—
for example, simple observational studies in which the
behavior of persons in natural habitats is observed. We do
not discuss those methods here; for simplicity, we use the
term “field experiments” to refer to field experiments and
field quasi-experiments, although we intend no conceptual
confusion between the terms.
Researchers conduct field experiments for several rea-
sons. The desire to maximize external validity is cardinal
among them, as discussed earlier. Another reason is the
desire to observe phenomena in their natural contexts,
without controlling for other influences, so that processes
can be studied within the full circumstances in which they
are most likely to occur (Reis, 1983). This principle refers
to whether the conditions in research are representative
of the typical conditions in which that effect commonly
occurs.1 A third advantage of field experiments is that most
often, participants are not aware of being in a psychology
experiment, thereby minimizing demand characteristics
(cues that suggest to research participants the behaviors
that researchers expect of them), suspicion, and other
reactive effects that may occur in the laboratory context.
A final reason is that some researchers simply find field
settings “more interesting” (Salovey & Williams-Piehota,
2004), although, we hasten to add, for other researchers the
same sentiment may apply to laboratory research.
Consider a study conducted by Bushman (1988). In this
study, a female confederate approached pedestrians and
instructed them to give change to an accomplice stand-
ing next to an expired parking meter. To investigate the
effects of perceived authority on compliance, the confeder-
ate wore one of three outfits: a uniform, business clothes
(to imply status but not authority), or sloppy clothes that
made her appear to be a panhandler. The uniform condition
induced greater compliance than the other two conditions,
which did not differ significantly from each other. This set-
ting is a natural one for this kind of request and for both
1Although this is sometimes referred to as ecological validity,
Hammond (1998) points out that this term represents a misleading
application of what Brunswik, who originated the term, meant.
Field Experiments 87
the independent (attire) and dependent (giving a coin to the
accomplice) variables. It is unlikely that participants sus-
pected that they were in an experiment or that their response
to the attire was under scrutiny. Had the same experiment
been conducted in the laboratory, participants might well
have been more attentive to these possibilities. (Of course,
in the laboratory, it would be easier to manipulate per-
ceived authority in a way that kept confederates unaware
of conditions, so that their behavior could not have varied
systematically across conditions.) Additionally, participants
cannot walk away muttering “sorry” in the laboratory, as
they can in real life.
The inability to gain control over extraneous circum-
stances that might have influenced the findings is the chief
disadvantage of field experiments. In Bushman’s simple
experiment, these seem unlikely. But consider a field
experiment conducted by Josephson (1987), in which
second- and third-grade boys were frustrated before or
after watching violent or nonviolent television programs
in school, then observed playing floor hockey with other
children. Because of random assignment to conditions,
we can be confident that the conditions were responsible
for observed differences in aggressiveness but various
uncontrolled factors may also have been influential: How
closely did the boys attend to the programs? Did the adults
present respond to the boys in ways that facilitated or
inhibited aggression? Were there cues in the school that
influenced their responses? Did interaction among the
children alter their responses? Questions of this sort are
central to identifying the mechanism responsible for an
effect, and it is likely that these factors could have been
controlled better in a laboratory experiment.
Researchers more commonly conduct quasi-experiments
in field than in laboratory settings, and because partici-
pants in quasi-experiments are not randomly assigned to
conditions, threats to internal validity tend to be greater.
For example, had the boys in Josephson’s study not been
randomly assigned to conditions, but instead had one
classroom been assigned to watch violent programs and
another classroom to watch nonviolent programs, other
factors (e.g., pre-existing differences between the class-
rooms, other classroom events during the study interval)
might plausibly have caused the observed differences. For
this reason, quasi-experiments involve pre-manipulation
and post-manipulation assessments, and typically include
as many other design elements as possible to address these
threats to internal validity (Cook & Campbell, 1979; West,
Biesanz & Pitts, 2000).
Field experiments often alter the typical balance between
mundane and experimental realism. As originally defined
by Aronson and Carlsmith (1968), mundane realism is high
when a research protocol resembles events likely to occur
88 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
in normal activity. Experimental realism, in contrast, is high
when participants find research involving and engrossing so
that they are interested, attentive, and motivated to take their
task seriously. Laboratory research generally puts higher
priority on experimental than mundane realism, for reasons
explained by Wilson et al. (this Handbook). Field research almost
by definition maximizes mundane realism, because partici-
pants are encountered in their normal activity, although per-
haps ironically, experimental realism may not be high. For
example, persuasive messages or a request for help delivered
casually and ineffectually by a stranger in a coffee shop may
be dismissed in a cursory manner, with little or no thought or
concern. Or, distracted passers-by may not even notice events
staged to take place on a busy street corner, in which many
stimuli compete for attention. Researchers should not assume
experimental realism in field settings; establishing it requires
as much (and perhaps more) care as it does in the laboratory.
Of course, some studies are designed to examine processes
that operate with minimal engagement (e.g., automaticity),
and in this circumstance low experimental realism may be
appropriate.
Sometimes, significant real-world events lead research-
ers into the field, either because that event creates a natu-
ral manipulation for what has been studied in the lab (e.g.,
Zucker, Manosevitz, and Lanyon’s 1968 study of affiliation
and birth order during the November 1965 New York City
blackout) or because the event is so inherently compelling
that a research response is called for (e.g., responses to 9/11;
Silver, 2004). Such studies most commonly survey responses
to the events, but quasi-experiments and experiments are also
feasible. For example, one group of researchers conducted lin-
guistic analyses of data collected by an online journaling ser-
vice for two months before and after the 9/11 attacks (Cohn,
Mehl, & Pennebaker, 2004). In another example, researchers
used archived letters to the editors of local newspapers to
study coping responses over time to the Mount St. Helen’s
volcano eruptions (Pennebaker & Newtson, 1983). Pre-data
for natural events may also be available fortuitously; in one
instance the researchers had been conducting a short-term lon-
gitudinal study of falling in love when the 1989 Loma Prieta
earthquakes hit the San Francisco Bay Area (Aron, Paris, &
Aron, 1995). Events such as these often allow researchers to
tell a gripping story, but because it is usually impossible to
control key independent variables or to collect pre-event data
retrospectively, threats to internal validity may be substantial.
Below we briefly discuss several issues for researchers
planning non-laboratory studies to consider.
Sampling and Random Assignment
Field research is often conducted to obtain samples that
are more representative than undergraduate samples. This
need not be the case, however. Studies conducted in or near
specialized settings (e.g., football stadia, bridal shows, sin-
gles’ bars, farmers’ markets, or on Wall Street or Telegraph
Avenue in Berkeley) may also be unrepresentative, in the
sense of providing a non-random sample of persons. Aside
from the possibility that an effect operates differently
in one nonrandom sample than in another, nonrandom
samples may possess restricted range on key variables,
which can attenuate results and obscure potential modera-
tors (Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003). Moreover, in
quasi-experimental and correlational field studies, the fac-
tors that lead participants to one or another condition of a
study may introduce the possibility of substantial alterna-
tive explanations. For example, a study of participants at a
Democratic or Republican presidential rally would need to
contend with the fact that there are likely many differences
between these groups beyond the candidate supported.
It also can be difficult to randomly assign participants
to conditions in field settings. Participants might be more
unwilling to take part in an effortful, costly, or unpleas-
ant condition of an experiment than in a less effortful, less
costly, or more pleasant condition, a potential threat to non-
equivalence of groups and hence internal validity (West
et al., 2000). This can be particularly vexing for interven-
tion studies, in which demanding interventions (e.g., for
smoking cessation) may foster greater attrition in treatment
groups than in wait-list control groups. Or sometimes, the
lesser degree of control that inheres in field settings may
allow participants to undermine random assignment. For
example, teachers might be randomly assigned to run some
classrooms in a very cold and controlling manner but others
in a warmer, more supportive way. Nonetheless, when in
the classroom and faced with instructional demands and
other distractions, teachers may behave as they see fit,
ignoring, misinterpreting, or contradicting the conditions
to which they were assigned.2 Of course, researchers
can and do take steps to monitor and content with these
potential problems; our point is that in field experiments,
participants may make choices that interfere with well-
designed experimental plans.
Finally, field experiments may suffer from uninten-
tional experimenter bias in the selection of participants
and their assignment to conditions. In laboratory studies,
experimenters typically do not choose participants, and
they assign participants to conditions either before arrival
or without possible bias (e.g., by a computer program).
In field studies, however, experimenters sometimes chose
2Of course, this may also be a factor in laboratory experiments,
but because the experimenter has greater control over what tran-
spires, it is less likely.

whom to approach in a public setting (e.g., “the next person
walking alone to turn the corner”) or which condition to
assign a participant. In principle experimenters have no
discretion over these decisions but in practice experiment-
ers are sometimes tempted to skip a potential participant
who looks uncooperative or unfriendly, or to assign an
unattractive person to a condition that would require less
interaction (which would be equally problematic in the
lab). It is important to obviate such biases.
Choice of Outcome Measures
Because field studies are often designed so that “the sci-
entist’s intervention is not detectable by the subject and
the naturalness of the situation is not violated” (Webb,
Campbell, Schwartz, Sechrest, & Grove, 1981, p. 143),
they often use unobtrusive, non-reactive behavioral out-
come measures. Although this tendency is not inviolate—
field studies often rely on self-report, and lab experiments
may use unobtrusive measures (see, for example, Ickes’s
1983 Unstructured Interaction Paradigm, in which par-
ticipants’ spontaneous interactions are videotaped without
their awareness)—field studies invite researchers to develop
and use outcome measures that index the processes under
investigation without raising participants’ awareness that
researchers are scrutinizing their behavior. Non-experiments
have the further goal to avoid altering or modifying partici-
pants’ behavior from what they would otherwise do. These
settings create a need to balance creativity and relevance
(Does the construct actually apply in this setting?) against
validity (Does the measure assess the process it purports to
assess?) and sensitivity (Does the proposed measure vary
systematically and in measurable increments corresponding
to the predictor variable?). Because field research tends to
involve more variability in settings and samples than labo-
ratory experimentation, measure development may take
relatively more time and effort.
A brief and non-representative sampling of measures
used in field studies illustrates the kind of creativity that
characterizes successful field research. We distinguish
passive observation—in which data collection exerts no
meaningful effect on the behaviors being assessed—from
active observation—in which participants respond to
some sort of circumstance or manipulation created by the
experimenter. (This is slightly different than the distinc-
tion between non-reactive and reactive assessment, which
refers to whether participants are required to respond to
something or whether the data are already available.)
Classic examples of passive observation include Triplett’s
(1898) observation that bicycle racers tended to race faster
when in the presence of other racers than when alone and
Cialdini et al.’s (1976) tally of the tendency of students’
Field Experiments 89
to wear school-identifying clothes as a function of foot-
ball victories and losses, supporting the idea of “basking in
reflected glory.” In another example, seating choices of bus
commuters in Singapore display ingroup preferences as a
function of sex and ethnicity, but not age (Sriram, 2002).
And, in a study of Judo participants in the 2004 Athens
Olympics (Matsumoto & Willingham, 2006), photogra-
phers took action shots at several points. Gold and bronze
medal winners were more likely to display Duchenne
(spontaneous, genuine) smiles than silver medal winners,
supporting the role of counterfactual thinking in emotional
experience. Behaviors characteristic of attachment (e.g.,
clinging, crying, hugging, holding hands) demonstrably
occur among adults separating at airports (Fraley & Shaver,
1998). A final example comes from the test of a hypothesis
about the role of concealed ovulation in human mating.
Professional lap dancers earned significantly greater tips
while ovulating, but showed no similar increase if using
oral contraceptives (Miller, Tybur & Jordan, 2007). All
these indicators are passive.
Although field experiments involve active interven-
tion by researchers in creating the conditions being studied,
they often use outcome measures for which participants are
unaware of being observed. Field experiments have been
prominent in the bystander intervention literature, where
the outcome is whether a helping intervention occurred. For
example, in Piliavin, Rodin, and Piliavin’s (1969) classic
experiment, a confederate feigning drunken behavior was less
likely to receive help on a New York City subway train than
a confederate feigning illness. Other studies have used the
lost letter technique, in which fully addressed letters, varying
according to the independent variable of interest (e.g., a return
address of the Communist Party or the American Red Cross)
are left in public places, to be found and mailed by passers-
by, if they are so inclined (Milgram, Mann, & Harter, 1965).
Other well-known field experiments in social psychology
include manipulations of choice and responsibility in a sam-
ple of elderly nursing home residents, which, in an 18-month
follow-up, were shown to have beneficially affected mortal-
ity rates (Langer & Rodin, 1976; Rodin & Langer, 1977).
In still other studies, the number of available alternative
choices influenced purchases of gourmet jams or chocolate
(Iyengar & Lepper, 2000), drivers behind a stopped vehicle
at a green light honked sooner if the stopped vehicle had a
gun rack and an aggressive bumper sticker (Turner, Layton &
Simons, 1975), men were no more likely to pay a return visit
to a prostitute if she had played “hard to get” than if she had
not (Walster, Walster, & Lambert, 1971), and, when French
music was being played in a supermarket, French wine
outsold German wine but when German music was being
played, German wine outsold French wine (North &
Hargreaves, 1997).
90 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
A Special Ethical Consideration in Field
Experiments
Informed consent is a core principle of modern ethical regula-
tions concerning the use of human participants in research.
Even if participants in a laboratory study are not fully informed
as a study commences, by their presence they have given con-
sent, almost always explicitly, to participating in a study. This
consent is based on an implicit and often explicit “contract”
that expresses the participant’s willingness to be observed under
experimentally created conditions, in return for the experiment-
er’s promise to protect his or her welfare and privacy. No such
contract exists in field research. As described earlier, a prime
rationale for field research is to examine natural behavior
when people are unaware of being scrutinized. In many cases,
asking potential participants in a field experiment to provide
informed consent prior to a study would likely (and perhaps
dramatically) reduce external validity.
Some commentators have argued for this reason that field
experiments should be proscribed, but most Research Ethics
committees allow some latitude. Regulations and their inter-
pretation vary from one institution to another, although
some generalizations are possible. Consent can typically
be bypassed in studies that are solely observational and that
involve anonymous, public behavior (e.g., pedestrian walk-
ing patterns). When interventions are involved and consent
would interfere with external validity, researchers must take
more than the usual amount of caution to ensure that partici-
pants will not be harmed, distressed, annoyed, or embarrassed.
Practically, this means that field studies are typically limited to
be less invasive than laboratory studies. (We suspect that few
contemporary ethics committees would permit an experiment
such as Piliavin et al.’s 1969 subway study, described earlier,
because obtaining informed consent prior to the manipula-
tion would render that study uninteresting.) Researchers can
and should ask participants for consent and fully debrief them
afterwards in most field experiments. Although post-hoc con-
sent shows some degree of respect for participants’ privacy, it
does not avert problems brought on by distress, embarrassment,
or unwanted invasions of privacy. After-the-fact consenting may
even alert participants that the situation just encountered was an
experiment rather than a natural occurrence, potentially increas-
ing negativity. Researchers and ethics committees therefore pay
special attention to consent issues in field experiments.
Aronson et al. (1998) provide lengthier discussion of
these issues.
INTERNET RESEARCH
In the late 1990s psychologists and other social scientists
began using the Internet for research. At first the Internet
was simply a new medium for delivering conventional
methods, most often surveys, to new populations in a cost-
effective manner. For example, in 1996 one early study
used an online form to collect pet owners’ ratings of their
pets’ personalities (Gosling & Bonnenburg, 1998). Around
the same time, Ulf-Dietrich Reips and John Krantz sepa-
rately began using the Internet to deliver experiments to
research participants (Musch & Reips, 2000). By today’s
standards these early studies were rather rudimentary, and
the samples were biased towards educated, technically
savvy users. However, the studies hinted at the potential
offered by the Internet. They showed, for example, that
Internet studies could rapidly access large numbers of
participants, many of whom were beyond the convenient
reach of conventional methods, and they could do so at a
fraction of the cost and without the laborious error-prone
data entry associated with traditional methods. So if social
psychologists were concerned about the critique of rely-
ing too heavily on convenience samples of college students
(e.g., Sears, 1986), the Internet offered a ready solution.
It was not long before large-scale projects began to
capitalize on the opportunities afforded by Web research,
using Internet technology to improve the efficiency and
accuracy with which traditional forms of data could be
collected. In addition to reductions in data-entry errors,
the Web allowed researchers to collect data around the
world without the delays of land-based mail. Moreover,
the validity of protocols could be checked instantly, the
data stored automatically, and feedback delivered instan-
taneously to participants. This last benefit quickly proved
to be particularly important because feedback served as a
major incentive for participation (Reips, 2000). By pro-
viding personalized automated feedback, investigators
were able to collect data from hundreds of thousands of
participants, samples previously unheard of in psychologi-
cal research. For example, since 1998 the Project Implicit
website has collected several million tests of implicit atti-
tudes, feelings, and cognitions from all over the world
(http://projectimplicit.net/generalinfo.php).
The role of the Internet in psychological research has
continued to expand as quickly as the growth of the Internet
itself. An idea of the breadth of topics already covered by
Internet research is conveyed by sampling the chapters of a
volume summarizing recent trends in Internet psychology
(Joinson, McKenna, Postmes, & Reips, 2007): In addition
to well-studied areas of investigation, such as social iden-
tity theory, computer-mediated communication, and virtual
communities, the volume also includes chapters on topics as
diverse as deception and misrepresentation, online attitude
change and persuasion, Internet addiction, online relation-
ships, privacy and trust, health and leisure use of the Internet,
and the psychology of interactive websites.

In recent years, the Internet has lived up to its promise of
allowing researchers to access populations and phenomena
that would be difficult to study using conventional meth-
ods. For example, to obtain access to white supremacists’
attitudes about advocating violence toward Blacks, one
group of researchers visited online chat rooms associated
with supremacist groups (Glaser, Dixit, & Green, 2002).
The researchers posed as neophytes, allowing them to
conduct semi-structured interviews concerning the factors
(threat type, threat level) most likely to elicit advocacy of
violence. The anonymity afforded to both researchers and
participants by the chat-room context and the easy access
to a small, hard-to-reach group of individuals resulted in a
dataset that would have been difficult to gather with con-
ventional methods. Another study took advantage of the
Internet to contact and survey a sample of people suffering
from sexsomnia, a medical condition in which individu-
als engage in sexual activity during their sleep (Mangan &
Reips, 2007); the embarrassment and shame experienced
by sufferers meant that little was known about the condi-
tion. Yet, the reach and anonymity afforded by the Internet
allowed the researchers to sample more than five times as
many sexsomnia sufferers than had been reached in all pre-
vious studies combined from 20 years of research.
Domains of Web Research
In the first decade of the new millennium, Internet stud-
ies have proliferated, addressing a broad array of social
psychological topics. To illustrate the scope of poten-
tial research strategies we next provide a non-exhaustive
review of Internet-based studies.
The most basic class of Internet research—sometimes
referred to as “translational methods” (Skitka & Sargis,
2006)—uses Internet technology to improve the effective-
ness with which traditional forms of data can be collected.
One prominent example of this approach is Project Implicit’s
large-scale administration of the Implicit Association Test
(see Banaji & Heiphetz, this volume), which is designed to
measure the strength of automatic associations between men-
tal representations of various concepts (e.g., having implicit
negative feelings toward the elderly compared to the young).
And there have been many other successful attempts to
measure attitudes, values, self-views, and any other entity
that could formerly be measured with computers or paper-
and-pencil instruments. Such studies are administered via
computer, allowing them to take advantage of features asso-
ciated with the medium, such as providing participants with
immediate feedback, automatically checking for errors (e.g.,
missing responses), screening for invalid protocols (e.g., due
to acquiescent responding), implementing adaptive test-
ing (e.g., where the response to one stimulus determines
Internet Research 91
which stimulus is presented next), and presenting rich
media (e.g., sounds and videos [Krantz, 2001; Krantz &
Williams, in press]). Moreover, some methods that for-
merly involved cumbersome procedures, like sorting tasks,
can be straightforwardly implemented online. For example,
“drag-and-drop” objects can easily be used to complete
ranking tasks, magnitude scaling, preference-point maps,
and various other grouping or sorting tasks (Neubarth, in
press; http://hpolsurveys.com/enhance.htm). As a result of
these benefits, more and more researchers are doing basic
experiments (e.g., on priming) via the Internet, sometimes
delivering the studies no further than to a room on their
own campus.
Many researchers have gone beyond merely using the
Internet as a convenient and flexible way to deliver standard
surveys, stimuli, and experiments to participants. Studies
range from those that use the technological capabilities
of computers connected to the Internet to gain access to
new venues and populations (e.g., the White supremacists
noted earlier) to those that focus on behavioral phenomena
spawned by the Internet (e.g., Internet messaging, online
social networking, large-scale music sharing).
The Internet provides opportunities to study phenom-
ena unconstrained by the physical and practical parameters
of the offline world. For example, personal websites can be
used to examine identity claims that are hard to isolate in
real-world contexts (Marcus, Machilek, & Schütz, 2006;
Vazire & Gosling, 2004). Specifically, by exploiting the
unique characteristics of personal websites and compar-
ing personal websites with other contexts in which identity
claims are made, the effects of deliberate self-expression
can be isolated from the effects of inadvertent expression,
which are confounded in most offline contexts of social
perception. For example, a snowboard leaning against a
bedroom wall may indeed reflect the occupant’s past snow-
boarding behavior (i.e., behavioral residue), but her deci-
sion to leave it out rather than stow it in a closet could also
reflect a deliberate statement directed to others about her
lifestyle and preferences (i.e., an identity claim). In a phys-
ical room, one cannot tell whether the snowboard owes its
presence to its role as behavioral residue, as an identity
claim, or both. In contrast, most elements of a personal
website have been placed there deliberately for others to
see and the information on the sites can be rapidly saved
and coded. (It is even possible to obtain records of past
websites via www.archive.org, which is collecting them
for the historical record). In a similar vein, the options of
decorating and furnishing virtual spaces (e.g., in Second
Life) are not subject to the practical, physical, and financial
constraints associated with real-world spaces. The vir-
tual world provides many more possibilities than those
afforded by real life for experimenting with one’s physical
92 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
representation (e.g., choosing avatars or game characters
of a different sex, race, body type, and species).
In addition to being a domain in which to construct new
studies to collect data, the Internet already contains rich
pre-existing deposits of psychologically relevant data that
vigilant researchers can harvest. For example, one study
replicated findings derived from self-reported music pref-
erences (which might be subject to self-reporting biases)
with analyses of music libraries, which were accessible via
a music-swapping website (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2003).
The millions of pages of text that are created online
everyday provide another enormous source of pre-
existing data. These pages offer opportunistic investigators
an abundance of research possibilities. For example, as
noted earlier, one project examining social psychological
reactions to traumas analyzed the diaries of over a thousand
U.S. users of an online journaling service spanning a period
of four months, starting two months prior to the September
11th attacks (Cohn et al., 2004). Linguistic analyses of
the journal entries revealed pronounced psychological
changes in response to the attacks. In the short term, par-
ticipants expressed more negative emotions, were more
cognitively and socially engaged, and wrote with greater
psychological distance. After two weeks, their moods and
social referencing returned to baseline, and their use of
cognitive-analytic words dropped below baseline. Over
the next six weeks, social referencing decreased, and
psychological distancing remained elevated relative to
baseline. The effects were stronger for individuals highly
preoccupied with September 11th but even participants
who hardly wrote about the events showed comparable
language changes. As noted by the authors this study
bypassed many of the methodological obstacles of trauma
research and provided a fine-grained analysis of the time-
line of human coping with upheaval.
Another creative project used a German online auction
site to examine ethnic discrimination (Shohat & Musch,
2003). The apparent ethnicity of sellers was manipulated
by varying their last names. Analyses indicated that sellers
with Turkish names took longer to receive winning bids
than did those with German names. Given that so many
interactions are now conducted online, and that many of
them leave a trace, savvy researchers should be ready to
pounce on opportunities as they arise.
An increasing number of studies focus on Internet
behaviors as worthwhile social psychological phenomena
in their own right, not simply because they are more
convenient than studies done in the physical world. Some
of these behaviors are extensions of offline behaviors
but others are unique to the online world. With mobile
Web access, Internet behaviors are becoming ever more
integrated into the milieu of modern-day social interactions
and the distinction between online and offline life is
becoming increasingly blurred; where, for example, is the
line between speaking face-to-face, talking on the phone,
and chatting via text or IM? With so much of contempo-
rary social life played out online even those interactions
that do not extend to offline contexts should be of interest
to social psychologists because the laws of human behav-
ior are likely to apply regardless of whether interactions
are conducted on or offline.
By some estimates almost 600 million people world-
wide have profiles on online social networking sites, such
as MySpace and Facebook (http://www.comscore.com/
press/release.asp?press=2396), making them an intrigu-
ing domain of inquiry. Which psychological needs are met
by these sites? Which social psychological processes are
operative? One early study of Facebook behavior exam-
ined how cues left by social partners on one’s online net-
working profile can affect observers’ impressions of the
profile owner (Walther, van der Heide, Kim, Westerman,
& Tong, 2008). The investigators examined the effects on
profile owners of the attractiveness of people leaving “wall
postings” (public notes left by friends on a person’s profile
page). Results suggested that the attractiveness of profile
owners’ friends affected ratings of their own attractive-
ness in an assimilative pattern, such that people with wall
posts left by attractive friends were themselves viewed as
more attractive than people with posts left by less attrac-
tive friends.
A large range of applications, such as online social net-
works, online role-playing games, and meeting software
allow people to create online virtual representations of
themselves (e.g., as game characters or avatars in virtual
worlds). The advent of these representations creates whole
new worlds for social psychological inquiry. For example,
how are impressions formed and how are identities
created in immersive virtual worlds such as those found in
games like EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and in the vir-
tual social network Second Life (Yee, Bailenson, Urbanek,
Chang, & Merget, 2007)? And what are the connections
between real people and their virtual representations? As
more interactions and relationships become entirely vir-
tual, it is important for researchers to examine the causes
and consequences of the new social phenomena emerging
in this domain.
The popularity of social networking sites and online
multi-player videogames will almost certainly be super-
seded by new yet-to-be-invented online behaviors. Our
point applies regardless: The online world is a legitimate
venue in which to examine a plethora of social psychologi-
cal behavior. Examples of online phenomena of potential
interest to social psychologists include online message
boards and chat rooms, Internet messaging (IM), virtual

worlds (e.g., Second Life), online support groups (e.g.,
for rare conditions), online multi-player video games
(e.g., World of Warcraft), online social networks (e.g.,
Facebook), Internet dating (e.g., eHarmony), online auc-
tion sites (e.g., eBay), blogs, and an ever-growing list of
others.
Overcoming Skepticism
Initial papers based on Internet research were greeted
with a healthy dose of skepticism. Quite reasonably, jour-
nal editors and reviewers had a number of concerns about
method artifacts and sampling issues. The major fears
about Internet data can be summarized in terms of six
concerns: (1) that Internet samples are not demographi-
cally diverse; (2) that Internet samples are maladjusted,
socially isolated, or depressed; (3) that Internet data do not
generalize across presentation formats; (4) that Internet
participants are unmotivated; (5) that Internet data are
compromised by the anonymity of the participants; and (6)
that Internet-based findings differ from those obtained with
other methods. These concerns were addressed in a study
comparing a large Internet sample with a year’s worth of
conventional samples published in JPSP (Gosling et al.,
2004). Analyses suggested that, compared to conventional
samples, Internet samples are more diverse with respect
to gender, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and
age. Moreover, Internet findings generalize across presen-
tation formats, are not adversely affected by non-serious
or repeat responders, and are generally consistent with
findings from traditional methods. Similar conclusions
have been reached by other reviews addressing the valid-
ity of Internet research (e.g., Krantz & Dalal, 2000). As a
result of these reviews and as Internet research has become
more widespread, much of the skepticism has evaporated.
Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind the advan-
tages and disadvantages associated with Internet-based
methods.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Internet-Based
Methods
As described earlier, Internet methods afford many advantages
to social science researchers. The most important of these
include the improved efficiency and accuracy with which
traditional forms of data (e.g., surveys, informant reports,
reaction-time experiments) can be collected, the possibility of
instantly checking the validity of protocols and providing par-
ticipants with immediate feedback, the ability to reach large
and diverse samples from around the world, and the oppor-
tunity to integrate various media (e.g., sounds, photographs,
videos) into studies (Gosling & Johnson, in press).
Internet Research 93
The central problems of Internet studies stem
from the physical disconnect between researcher and
participant, resulting in a potential lack of control over the
assessment or experimental setting. Researchers are not
physically present when Internet studies are conducted
so they cannot easily assess participants’ alertness and
attentiveness. However, several methods have been
developed to detect the degree to which participants are
attending to the experimental materials and following
instructions properly (Johnson, 2005; Oppenheimer,
Meyvis, & Davidenko, 2008). For example, the Instructional
Manipulation Check (IMC) measures whether participants
are reading the instructions. The IMC works by embedding
a question within the experimental materials that is similar
to the other questions in length and response format but
that asks participants to ignore the standard response for-
mat and instead provide confirmation that they have read
the instruction (Oppenheimer et al., 2008).
Another potential problem with Internet studies is that
researchers cannot easily answer questions from partici-
pants about the procedure. Because they are not directly
observing research participants, researchers cannot be
aware of possible distractions, such as eating, drinking,
television, music, conversations with friends, and the
perusal of other websites. Internet users, especially young
Internet users, are notorious for multitasking while logged
on, which could adversely affect the quality of Internet-
based data. In the case of ability testing, with all of the
information on the Internet at their disposal, it is difficult to
keep participants from cheating. The extent to which these
distractions and other available sources of information
affect the findings of Internet studies is not known; how-
ever, research on Internet data versus real-life samples has
allayed many concerns about data quality by showing that
the Internet samples are generally not inferior to conven-
tional samples from a psychometric standpoint (Gosling
et al., 2004; Luce et al., 2007). Evidence is accumulating
for their validity (Birnbaum, 2004; Krantz & Dalal, 2000).
As noted earlier, one advantage of Internet research is its
ability to reach samples beyond the reach of conventional
methods. Internet-based samples tend to be more diverse
and considerably more representative than the convenience
samples of college students commonly used in psychology
research (Birnbaum, 2004; Gosling et al., 2004; Skitka &
Sargis, 2006) but these samples are still not representative
of the general population (Lebo, 2000; Lenhart, 2000).
Participation in Internet-based research is restricted to
people who have access to the Internet, know how to use
a Web browser, and, in some kinds of research, have a
functioning email address or instant messaging capability.
People who are computer phobic, those who cannot afford
a computer and Internet service and have no public access,
94 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
and those who are uninterested in learning how to browse
the Web will be excluded from Internet research. Evidence
is mixed regarding the extent to which this sampling bias
affects the generalizability of Internet findings (Reips &
Krantz, in press). Generally, and as in all research, inves-
tigators need to be cautious in making claims regarding
the generalizability of their findings; to guide the scope of
their generalizations, researchers should collect and report
information about the demographics of their samples.
Finally, learning to construct Web pages, write program
scripts, manage computer data bases, and engage in all of
the other activities involved in starting up online research
can be time consuming. Entire new sets of skills must
be acquired, practiced, and polished. Fortunately, a large
number of resources are available for aspiring Internet
researchers, which we summarize next.
The Basics of Internet Research
The huge variety of possible topics, experimental designs,
and implementation options make it impossible to provide
much here in the way of specific advice on creating online
experiments. Fortunately, a number of general books for
investigators taking their first steps into the domain of
Internet research are available (Birnbaum, 2001; Fraley,
2004; Gosling & Johnson, in press), along with work-
shops (e.g., by Michael Birnbaum or John E. Williams),
and websites (e.g., iscience.eu; Project Implicit; websm.
org). Birnbaum (in press) provides a particularly useful
introduction to the basic decisions that anyone planning to
conduct an experiment online needs to make. These deci-
sions range from deciding what kind of server makes most
sense to choosing the appropriate client side (e.g., PHP,
Perl) and server side (e.g., Java, JavaScript) programs
and will be guided by design requirements. For exam-
ple, JavaScript can be particularly useful for designs that
require randomizing the order of materials or the assign-
ment of participants to conditions, or adding checks for
unreasonable or missing responses.
For researchers who do not want to program the websites
themselves, several options exist, including survey websites
(e.g., via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; Survey Monkey),
websites for creating experiments (e.g., WEXTOR), col-
laborative opportunities with existing research groups (e.g.,
Project Implicit), and government-funded projects such as
Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS),
which offers researchers opportunities to test their experi-
mental ideas on large, diverse, randomly selected subject
populations via the Internet.
Researchers who do not have the time or resources
to program their own experiments from scratch will find
WEXTOR (http://psych-wextor.unizh.ch/wextor/en/index.
php; Reips & Neuhaus, 2002) especially useful. WEXTOR
is a free Web-based tool that allows researchers to quickly
design and visualize a large variety of Web experiments
in a guided step-by-step process. It dynamically creates
the customized Web pages needed for an experimental
procedure that will run on any platform and it delivers
a print-ready display of the experimental design. Using
an example of a 2 2 factorial design, Reips and Krantz
(in press) provide a useful and accessible step-by-step
description of how WEXTOR can be used to build a Web
experiment; advice is also provided on how to monitor,
manage, and reduce dropout rates (i.e., attrition). Ulf-
Dietrich Reips also maintains iScience.eu, a free and
up-to-date portal to many of the services useful for gener-
ating and editing experiments, recruiting participants, and
archiving studies.
Many decisions face researchers undertaking studies on
the Internet, and many potential pitfalls await the inexperi-
enced or unwary investigator. Before undertaking Internet
experiments, new researchers should draw on the numer-
ous lessons already learned (e.g., Gosling & Johnson, in
press; Reips, 2000, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c). A prudent first
step would be to consult Reips (2002a), which summarizes
expertise gleaned from the early years of Internet-based
experimental research and presents recommendations
on the ideal circumstances for conducting a study on the
Internet, what precautions have to be undertaken in Web
experimental design, which techniques have proven useful
in Web experimenting, which frequent errors and miscon-
ceptions need to be avoided, and what should be reported.
Reips’s article concludes with a useful list of sixteen stan-
dards for Internet-based experimenting.
DIARY METHODS
Diary methods, also known as event sampling, have become
increasingly popular and influential during the past three
decades. A recent PsycInfo search revealed more than
1,200 published papers using or describing these methods.
Although there is some flexibility in what counts as diary
methods, they generally include measures for self-reporting
behavior, affect, and cognition in everyday life, collected
repeatedly over a number of days, either once daily (so-
called daily diaries) or sampled several times during the
day. The most popular of these latter sampling protocols are
the Experience Sampling Method (ESM; Csikszentmihalyi,
Larson, & Prescott, 1977) and Ecological Momentary
Assessment (EMA; Stone & Shiffman, 1994; Shiffman,
Stone, & Hufford, 2008). Another type of diary protocol is
based on the occurrence of particular events, such as social
interactions, sexual activity, or cigarette smoking.

Diary protocols are designed to “capture life as it is
lived” (Bolger, Davis & Rafaeli, 2003, p. 580)—that is, to
provide data about experience within its natural, spontane-
ous context (Reis, 1994). By documenting the “particulars
of life,” researchers have a powerful tool for investigating
social, psychological, and physiological processes within
ordinary, everyday interaction. Key to the diary approach
is an appreciation for “the importance of the contexts in
which these processes unfold” (Bolger et al., 2003, p. 580)
as a central element in the operation and impact of social
psychological processes. As the accessibility and popular-
ity of diary methods have grown, the kinds of questions that
they can address have evolved in range and complexity.
Researchers have used diary methods to study a diverse
range of phenomena and processes in social-personality
psychology. Topics for which diary studies have become
commonplace include affect (e.g., Conner & Barrett, 2005;
Larsen, 1987; Sbarra & Emery, 2005), social interaction
(e.g., Reis & Wheeler, 1991), marital and family interaction
(e.g., Larson, Richards, & Perry-Jenkins, 1994; Story &
Repetti, 2006), stress (e.g., Almeida, 2005), physical
symptoms (e.g., Stone, Broderick, Porter, & Kaell, 1997),
subjective well-being and mental health (e.g., Oishi,
Schimmack, & Diener, 2001), and nearly every trait in
the personality lexicon (e.g., Bolger & Zuckerman, 1995;
Fleeson, 2004; Suls, Martin, & David, 1998). Other areas
in which diary studies are less common but increasingly
useful include sex (e.g., Birnbaum, Reis, & Mikulincer,
2006; Burleson, Trevathan, & Todd, 2007), self-esteem
(e.g., Murray, Griffin, Rose, & Bellavia, 2003), self-
regulation (e.g., Wood, Quinn, & Kashy, 2002), intergroup
relations (e.g., Pemberton, Insko, & Schopler, 1996), social
comparison processes (e.g., Wheeler & Miyake, 1992),
social cognition (e.g., Skowronski, Betz, Thompson, &
Shannon, 1991), attitudes (e.g., Conner, Perugini, O’Gorman,
Ayres, & Prestwich, 2007), motivation (e.g., Patrick, Knee,
Canevello, & Lonsbary, 2007; Woike, 1995), and culture
and the self (e.g., Nezlek, Kafetsios, & Smith, 2008). For
further details, we refer readers to surveys of diary meth-
ods used in social-psychological (Reis & Gable, 2000),
psychopathology (deVries, 1992), and health psychology
(Stone, Shiffman, Atienza, & Nebeling, 2007) research.
A Brief History of Diary Methods
Wheeler and Reis (1991) trace interest in the self-record-
ing of everyday life events to four distinct historical
trends in social science research: time-budget studies,
which date back to the early 1900s (e.g., Bevans, 1913);
the need in behaviorist therapies to have patients keep
track of the behaviors being modified, such as smoking or
marital conflict, so that treatment effectiveness could be
Diary Methods 95
monitored (e.g., Nelson, 1977); industrial psychologists’
use of self-reports of work-related activity, as an adjunct to
observation by outside observers (e.g., Burns, 1954);
and checklist approaches to the study of life-event stress,
popularized by Holmes and Rahe (1967). It was not until
the seminal work of Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues
(Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, & Prescott, 1977), who devel-
oped the ESM, that the field began to develop and apply
systematic methods for studying everyday experience that
could be adapted to diverse phenomena, questions, and cir-
cumstances. Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues wanted to
know more about the contexts in which flow (a mental state
in which people are fully and energetically immersed in
whatever they are doing) emerges, as well as its behavioral,
affective, and cognitive correlates, and they felt that retro-
spective accounts were too inaccurate. Hence they decided
to use pagers to randomly signal research participants, ask-
ing them to report on their experiences at the moment of
the signal. At around the same time, Wheeler and Nezlek
(1977) created the Rochester Interaction Record (RIR), a
systematic method for recording the details of social inter-
actions as they occur. More recently, Stone and Shiffman
(1994) offered a similar method, EMA, which can incorpo-
rate physiological measures. Other sampling frameworks,
notably including daily diary methods, in which respon-
dents provide data once daily for a prescribed period of
time, can be considered adaptations of these methods,
although, as described below, the longer interval of a report
and differing sampling schedule represents an important
conceptual difference.
The Rationale for Diary Research
Diary studies have two main rationales, one conceptual
and one methodological. The conceptual rationale is to
capture information about daily life experiences, as they
occur within the stream of ongoing, natural activity, and
as they reflect the influence of context. Key is the idea that
ordinary, spontaneous behavior, or what Reis and Wheeler
called the “recurrent ‘little experiences’ of everyday life
that fill most of our waking time and occupy the vast
majority of our conscious attention” (1991, p. 340) can
contribute to social-psychological knowledge. Two kinds
of information fit under this heading. The first concerns
basic facts: What happens when, where, and with whom
else present. For example, diary studies can identify activ-
ity patterns, such as the relative distribution of studying,
socializing, and TV watching among adolescents. The sec-
ond refers to the subjective phenomenology of daily life:
to examine “fluctuations in the stream of consciousness
and the links between the external context and the con-
tents of the mind” (Hektner, Schmidt, & Csikszentmihalyi,
96 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
2007, p. 6). Under this heading one might examine reports
of affect and cognition, such as mood, focus of attention,
self-evaluations, feelings of social connection, thoughts,
worries, or wishes. Both kinds of information can be
obtained with open-ended responses or with checklists and
rating scales, although the latter is much more common in
published research.
A more methodological rationale concerns the “dra-
matic reduction” (Bolger et al., 2003, p. 580) in the effects
of retrospection, the result of minimizing the time between
an event and its description. Traditional survey meth-
ods suffer from various well-researched biases, such as
recency (more recent events are more likely to influence cur-
rent judgments), salience (moments of peak intensity and
distinctive or personally relevant events tend to be more
influential), recall (the greater the time between an event and its
recollection, the greater the potential distortion), state of mind
(current states may influence recall of prior states), and aggre-
gation (people find it difficult to summarize multiple events;
see Reis & Gable, 2000; Hufford, 2007; Schwarz, Groves, &
Schuman, 1998; Stone et al., 2000, for reviews). Diary meth-
ods are intended to reduce these biases as well as errors attributable
to difficulty and to heuristic processing. This is a particularly
central rationale for diary methods that require instantaneous
reporting of what is going on at the moment that a signal is
received (e.g., EMA, ESM). These biases are more likely to
affect diary methods that cover longer periods (e.g., daily diaries
or methods that ask for reports of events since the prior report),
although the extent of such effects, which depends on the time
gap, the questions being asked, and the nature of the events, is
likely to be less than with traditional surveys.
Diary methods also have certain advantages over observa-
tional methods that sample a narrower range of behavior, such
as laboratory observations of dyadic interaction. Although
laboratory observations provide a videotaped record that, with
considerable time and effort, can be coded from an independent
and semi-objective perspective, the structured context of being
observed by experts in a restrictive setting may elicit behavior
that is unrepresentative of more natural, unstructured settings
(Reis, 1994). (For example, participants in a laboratory obser-
vation typically cannot get up and turn on the TV, as they can
during real-life conflicts.) Furthermore, observational studies
rarely provide information about behavior in more than one or
two contexts, whereas diary studies can be informative about
multiple and diverse contexts, a key consideration for studies
seeking to identify contextual determinants of behavior.
Types of Questions For Which Diary Methods Are
Well Suited
Perhaps understandably, given their history, diary meth-
ods have had appeal for descriptive research. For example,
diary methods have documented how people spend their
time (Robinson & Godbey, 1997), with whom they social-
ize (Reis & Wheeler, 1991), what they eat (Glanz, Murphy,
Moylan, Evensen, & Curb, 2006), and how often they feel
bored (Csikszentmihalyi et al., 1977). Behavior descrip-
tion is an important, under-recognized and under-practiced
component of theory development in social-personality
psychology (Rozin, 2001, 2009). More than a half-century
ago, Solomon Asch argued, “Before we inquire into origins
and functional relations, it is necessary to know the thing
we are trying to explain” (1952, p. 65). McClelland (1957)
made a similar argument for personality theory, suggest-
ing that behavioral frequencies may be the best place for
personality theorizing to begin. As Reis and Gable com-
mented, “to carve nature at its joints, one must first locate
those joints” (2000, p. 192).
Nonetheless, social-personality psychologists are most
likely to apply diary methods for testing theory-driven
hypotheses in three different ways. First, diary methods
can be used to evaluate alternative mechanisms thought to
underlie an effect. For example, comparing three poten-
tial explanations for the observed correlation between
trait neuroticism and distress, Bolger and Schilling (1991)
reported the best support for the tendency of persons
high in neuroticism to react more strongly to stressful
circumstances. Second, diary studies can be used to distin-
guish competing predictions. An example is Wheeler and
Miyake’s (1992) contrast of two plausible effects of mood
on subsequent social comparison: cognitive priming, which
predicts comparing upward, to better-off persons, and self-
enhancement, which predicts downward comparison, to
less-fortunate others. Upward comparison was better sup-
ported. Third, diary methods are particularly well suited to
identifying conditions under which effects vary in strength
or relevance (moderators). For example, solitary drinking
is more likely on days with negative interpersonal experi-
ences, whereas social drinking is more likely on days with
positive interpersonal experiences (Mohr et al., 2001).
Looking at the types of questions that diary methods can
address in a somewhat different way, Bolger et al. (2003)
described three types of research questions to which diary
studies are suited: aggregating over time, modeling the time
course, and examining within-person processes. The first
asks about persons over time and context and involves
aggregating individual responses over multiple reports.
Typically, this approach is meant to improve over methods
that ask respondents to summarize their experience dur-
ing a timespan (e.g., “How much have you socialized with
others during the past two weeks?”), which are subject to
retrospection, selection, and aggregation biases. Although
diary designs sometimes seem like overkill for questions
of this sort—asking people to repeatedly report a range of

experiences for the purpose of arriving at a single summary
score—the substantial increase in data quality provides
more than adequate justification for the effort. The oppor-
tunity for “data mining”—sorting through large amounts
of data to ask more refined, more detailed, or alternative
questions—is an additional tangible benefit.
Modeling the time course allows researchers to explore
temporal and/or cyclical patterns in phenomena. Well-
known among these patterns are diurnal (Clark, Watson, &
Leeka, 1989) and weekly (Reis, Sheldon, Gable,
Roscoe, & Ryan, 2000; Stone, Hedges, Neale, & Satin,
1985) cycles of affect, such that positive affect tends to be
higher, and negative affect lower, in the early evenings and
on weekends, respectively. Diary designs are also amena-
ble to identifying more complex trends (e.g., repeated “up
and down” cycles, such as might be shown in a sine wave
[Walls & Schafer, 2006]), longer intervals (e.g., seasons
or years), dynamic models, or so-called “broken stick” or
step-function models, in which the pattern of an outcome
variable is discontinuous before and after a particular point
(e.g., following a major life event, such as September 11th,
unemployment, or divorce). Analyses of this sort have
been rare in social psychology.
The most widespread use of diary designs in social
psychology falls into Bolger et al.’s (2003) third category,
examining within-person processes. Such studies inves-
tigate “the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of
daily experiences” (Bolger et al., 2003, p. 586) as well
as, potentially, the processes underlying their operation.
For example, studies have shown that high work stress is
likely to lead to family conflict (Repetti, 1989) and that
invisible support tends to yield better adjustment to
stressors than visible support does (Bolger, Zuckerman,
& Kessler, 2000). Many researchers construe this use
of diary methods as the non-experimental equivalent of
experimentation, inasmuch as the association between
specified independent and dependent variables can be
assessed. However, there is an obvious and important
difference: Experiments involving random assignment
of participants to conditions permit causal inference,
whereas diary studies do not (although data analyses
can rule out some alternative explanations, as described
below). Conversely, a major advantage of diary meth-
ods is their ability to examine Person ⫻ Environment
(P ⫻ E) interactions, or whether situational effects
vary systematically for different kinds of persons. For
example, low self-esteem persons respond to perceived
relationship threats by distancing from their partners
whereas high self-esteem persons respond to the same
kind of threats by moving closer (Murray et al., 2003).
By allowing researchers to track individual differences in
response to variability in the natural environment, diary
Diary Methods 97
methods are ideal for studying P ⫻ E effects of the sort
first theorized by Lewin and since then endorsed, at
least in the abstract, by nearly all social and personality
psychologists (Fleeson, 2004; Funder, 2006).
Diary designs also have the important advantage of
unconfounding between-person and within-person ques-
tions. Consider the hypothesis that perceived discrimination is
associated with lower effort in achievement settings. This
might be studied by characterizing a person’s experiences
with discrimination (e.g., with a questionnaire) and relating
those scores to measures of achievement-related effort. An
alternative study might sample moments in a person’s life,
assessing ongoing covariation between perceived discrimi-
nation and achievement-related effort. Although seemingly
similar, these two hypothetical studies address indepen-
dent questions. The former study asks a personological
question: Do persons who tend to perceive discrimination
also exert differential effort in achievement-related set-
tings? The latter study asks an experiential question: When
discrimination occurs, do people respond with differential
effort? Numerous theorists (e.g., Epstein, 1983; Gable &
Reis, 1999) have noted that these questions, and hence the
nature of the processes that would explain their answers,
differ fundamentally. In a more general way, Campbell
and Molenaar (in press) argue that much of psychological
science erroneously assumes that intra-individual variation
in response to time or context follows the same rules and
mechanisms as inter-individual variation. They discuss
what they see as a major reorientation in the field toward
“person-specific paradigms,” capable of distinguishing
these different levels of explanation. Diary methods are a
powerful tool for any such reorientation.
Design and Methodological Issues in Diary
Research
Like any research paradigm, diary methods require that
researchers make choices guided by conceptual and practi-
cal concerns. Diary methods are flexible and can be tailored
to the needs of an investigation. At the same time, planning
and conducting research requires addressing inherent prac-
tical issues and limitations. Below we review some of the
more important (and in some cases contentious) issues that
have arisen in current practice. More detailed information is
available in Christensen, Barrett, Bliss-Moreau, Lebo, and
Kaschub (2003), Conner, Barrett, Tugade, and Tennen (2007),
Reis and Gable (2000), or Christensen’s website, http://
psychiatry.uchc.edu/faculty/files/conner/ESM.htm. Hektner
et al. (2007) describe practical issues in the ESM in more
detail, and Piasecki, Hufford, Solhan, and Trull (2007)
describe the application of diary methods in clinical
assessment. For a proposed list of methodological
98 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
information to include in journal reports, see Stone and
Shiffman (2007).
Designs
Choice among reporting protocols is generally based on
two considerations: The research question and the relative
frequency of the key phenomena. Wheeler and Reis (1991)
described three major protocols: interval-, signal-, and event-
contingent (see also Reis & Gable, 2000). Interval and
signal are preferred choices when researchers are inter-
ested in “phenomena as they unfold over time” (Bolger
et al., 2003, p. 588) or when the phenomena occur often.
Studies that focus on specific events, especially rare events
(e.g., major life events, drug use), are more likely to use
event-contingent protocols.
Interval-contingent methods require reports at regular,
predetermined times, so that the gap between successive
reports is relatively constant. The most popular such sched-
ule is the daily diary, in which participants report on their
experiences once a day, typically in the evening, before
bedtime. This daily cycle is consistent with the importance
of the day as a natural interval for organizing life activities,
as well as circadian rhythms underlying certain biologi-
cal and psychological processes (e.g., DeYoung, Hasher,
Djikic, Criger, & Peterson, 2007; Hasler, Mehl, Bootzin, &
Vazire, 2008). Other research has collected reports at sev-
eral fixed times during the day, such as thrice-daily (noon,
dinnertime, and bedtime; Larsen & Kasimatis, 1991).
Fixed intervals are particularly valuable for studies of
time-sequences and temporal cycles, in which repetitive,
constant, or precisely timed intervals are helpful or essen-
tial (e.g., day-of-the-week effects or the time-bound impact
of activities, such as meals or afterschool activities).
Signal-contingent protocols prompt participants to
report their experiences at the moment of receiving a
signal, usually delivered by pagers, cell phones, or prepro-
grammed devices (e.g., palmtop computers, watches). As
a rule, signaling schedules are random and unpredictable
within predetermined blocks of time, so that a fixed num-
ber of prompts are sent each day (often, but not necessarily,
around 10). Randomness is key: Because the data presum-
ably represent a random sampling of daily experiences,
researchers receive non-selective, unbiased estimates of
the distribution and quality of daily activities, affects, and
cognitions. Non-random signals might be skewed toward par-
ticular kinds of experiences, and predictability would allow
participants to alter their activities shortly before signal.
Signal-contingent methods also typically demand that
participants report their experiences right at the moment
of signal, with little or no delay, to support the claim
that they represent “real-time data capture” (Stone
et al., 2007) without functional retrospection bias.
Signal-contingent protocols are limited in their ability
to capture rare, occasional, or fleeting events, for which
event-contingent protocols are better suited. When events
are rare or short-lived, random signals are unlikely to sam-
ple a sufficient number, especially when researchers wish to
compare different subtypes of those events. Thus, instruc-
tions may ask participants to record their experiences
whenever a target event occurs. Examples include social
interactions lasting 10 minutes or longer (Wheeler & Reis,
1991), conflicts among adolescents (Jensen-Campbell &
Graziano, 2000), ostracism (Williams, 2001), sex
(Birnbaum et al., 2006), smoking (Moghaddam & Ferguson,
2007), alcohol consumption (Mohr et al., 2001), altruistic
thoughts and behavior (Ferguson & Chandler, 2005), social
comparisons (Wheeler & Miyake, 1992), prejudice and
discrimination (Swim, Hyers, Cohen, & Ferguson, 2001),
and stressful events (Buunk & Peeters, 1994). To avoid
bias, event-contingent protocols must unambiguously
define the types of events to be reported, and participants
must do so when those events occur. Alternatively, a recent
technological innovation uses sensors embedded within
a recording device to detect certain events (for example,
an accelerometer to monitor activity levels) and signal the
respondent to provide a report (Choudhury et al., 2008).
Delivery Systems
The earliest ESM studies, reflecting that era’s tech-
nology, used pagers to prompt participants to com-
plete paper-and-pencil records. Since then, advances in
microprocessing technology have enabled many more
sophisticated systems for collecting diary data. One of
the earliest developments relied on digital watches, which
could be preprogrammed to deliver on schedule a week
or more’s worth of signals, although paper-and-pencil
reports were still required (Delespaul, 1992). A more
important advance came from Personal Digital Assistants
(PDAs, such as palmtop computers), which allowed
researchers to signal participants, collect responses, and
branch to different question sets depending on what the
participant is doing at the time (Barrett & Barrett, 2001).
Several websites provide or describe programming for
such devices, at least one of which, developed by Lisa
Feldman Barrett and Daniel Barrett with National Science
Foundation support, is free (www2.bc.edu/˜barretli/esp).
Relative to paper-and-pencil, PDAs offer the advantage
of verifying the time of the participant’s response (which
can then be compared to the schedule to assess fidelity,
as described below) and can also record the reaction time
or duration of responding for particular questions. On the
other hand, PDAs are costly, breakable, stealable, and can
be difficult, inconvenient, or intrusive for some partici-
pants (e.g., with elderly or less tech-savvy samples) and in

some circumstances (e.g., when participants are in classes
or meetings). Some researchers have created specialized
or proprietary devices that can be programmed to accom-
modate particular circumstances (e.g., Invivodata Inc).
A relatively recent and promising development uses cell
phones in this manner (Collins, Kashdan, & Gollnisch,
2003). Downloadable software for using cell phones to
conduct context-aware experience sampling can be found
at http://myexperience.sourceforge.net.
The regularity of interval-contingent protocols permits
use of dedicated Internet sites for data collection. These
tend to be appropriate when participants have easy Internet
access (e.g., college students), and the scheduled timing of
reports is consistent with this access (e.g., end of the day,
when participants are at home). Internet data collection
verifies the time of reporting and has the further advantage
of allowing researchers to monitor compliance in real time,
so that noncomplying participants can be contacted imme-
diately. A conceptually similar low-tech approach involves
a telephone call to participants at each prearranged time
and having an interviewer ask questions and record answers
(Wethington & Almeida, in press). Verification of the time
of report is particularly important when researchers wish
to synchronize diary reports with other ambulatory mea-
sures, such as physiological data. For example, one study
examined covariation in cardiac function and emotional
experience at randomly selected moments over 3 days
(Lane, Reis, Peterson, Zareba, & Moss, 2008).
The benefits of electronic data collection methods not-
withstanding, many researchers (including us) still see an
appropriate role for paper-and-pencil diaries. When elec-
tronic methods are not needed to deliver random signals
or varying protocols, and when the need to verify com-
pliance is either not great or otherwise achievable (see
below), paper-and-pencil diaries (e.g., in booklet form) are
convenient, easy, accessible, user-friendly, and minimally
burdensome, all significant advantages when people are
asked to report repeatedly in a personal way on their activi-
ties, thoughts, and feelings. We therefore recommend that
the choice of delivery systems take into account both the
needs of the research and the likely experience of partici-
pants when using that system.
Fidelity
Because the rationale for diary studies depends on timely
reporting, controversy exists about whether participants can
be trusted to comply with these schedules in the absence
of verification. This controversy was made prominent in
an important study comparing compliance among partici-
pants using an electronic diary, which overtly recorded
the time of response, with paper diaries contained in
a logbook that surreptitiously recorded openings and
Diary Methods 99
closings3 (Stone, Shiffman, Schwartz, Broderick, &
Hufford, 2002). About 94% of the electronic diaries were
compliant with the reporting schedule, but only 11% of the
paper responses. A further problem was that the vast major-
ity of the paper-condition participants claimed (apparently
falsely) that they had been compliant. Chief among the fac-
tors that may contribute to noncompliance is hoarding: the
tendency to complete multiple records at one time, such as
shortly before collection by researchers.
Most published research either cannot or does not verify
compliance, although diary researchers would likely agree
that noncompliance varies across studies, contexts, and per-
sons. Nevertheless, subsequent studies have suggested that
the problem of noncompliance may not be as pandemic as
Stone et al. indicate. For example, three studies reported
by Gaertner, Elsner, Pollmann-Dahmen, Radbruch, and
Sabatowski (2004) indicate that noncompliance is far less
common than Stone et al. report, a conclusion similar to
that of Tennen, Affleck, Coyne, Larsen, and DeLongis,
who state, “in six separate studies, we found almost no
evidence of hoarding” (2006, p. 115). To social psycholo-
gists, a more important question than the frequency of
noncompliance is the question of impact. In this regard,
Green, Rafaeli, Bolger, Shrout, and Reis (2006) conducted
extensive analyses, concluding that paper diaries (which
could not be verified) and electronic diaries (which could
be verified) yielded psychometrically equivalent data and
findings. A similar conclusion follows from another study
comparing electronic and paper pain diaries (Gaertner
et al., 2004).
Perhaps more than with most methods, we see fidelity
as a matter of participant motivation: Diaries are often bur-
densome, and they require that participants regularly and
reliably invest a significant amount of time and attention
to describing their experiences. Client motivation affects
patient compliance with self-reporting protocols in behav-
ior therapy research (Korotitsch & Nelson-Gray, 1999).
For this reason, many diary researchers emphasize the
importance of developing a collaborative, trusting rela-
tionship with participants. It is unlikely that the fact of
monitoring or the method of administration—e.g., using
a PDA that records time of response—will resolve most
issues of noncompliance. For example, if participants are
busy, have misplaced their PDA, become reactive to the
suggestion that they cannot be trusted, feel that the protocol
is difficult or unpleasant, or do not feel enough commit-
ment to the research project to prioritize timely recording,
noncompliance rates may be high. (Simply eliminating
3 An unfortunate confound in this study is that there were also
other differences between conditions.
100 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
persons or reports exceeding some compliance criterion
may introduce nonrandomness, a potentially important
problem.) Furthermore, even near-immediate reports are
not free of memory-related distortion (Takarangi, Garry,
& Loftus, 2006). For these reasons, researchers should
take steps to minimize the motivation and opportunity
for noncompliance rather than emphasizing monitoring.
When objective verification is desired, PDAs or Internet
sites routinely record time of response. Compliance can
be monitored with paper diaries, such as with a portable
secure (unalterable) time-stamping device or, for daily dia-
ries, by requiring that data be handed in or mailed each
day. Postmarks might also be used as an admittedly imper-
fect variant of the bogus pipeline (a technique for reducing
response bias whereby research participants are led to
believe that researchers have access to their true feelings
or attitudes) for encouraging and monitoring compliance
(Tennen et al., 2006).
Reactivity
Researchers sometimes worry that the process of
diary record-keeping may alter participants’ experiences
and reports. Hypothetically, any of several effects are
feasible. Self-monitoring might enhance awareness of
personal behavior—for example, eating or work habits—
motivating participants to pursue change. Self-awareness
may reduce the intensity of affective states (Silvia, 2002)
and introspection about traumatic events may facilitate
healthy cognitive reorganization (Pennebaker, 1997).
Habituation or response decay over time might lead to
stereotyped, non-thoughtful responding. Knowledge about a
phenomenon—for example, which circumstances seem to be
associated with memory loss—might develop as participants
reflect on their personal experiences with it. Anticipation of
a diary report might even cause participants to modify their
behavior. For example, asking people about their intent to
engage in certain behaviors increased the frequency of those
behaviors in three nondiary studies (Levav & Fitzsimons,
2006). Similarly, participants might avoid undesirable or
illegal activities, or circumstances that will be effortful to
describe, lest they have to inform researchers about those
activities.
Although little research has investigated these possi-
bilities, what research there is suggests minimal problems.
Some studies report little effect of repeated responding
(e.g., Hufford, Shields, Shiffman, Paty, & Balabanis, 2002),
whereas other studies have found small effects as a func-
tion of the number of required reports (Mahoney, Moura &
Wade, 1973) or the obtrusiveness of the recording process
(Kirby, Fowler & Wade, 1991). The process of recording
healthy habits had no discernible effects on enactment
of those habits (Conti, 2000), nor did keeping diaries of
marital conflicts for 15 days alter spouses’ behavior on
a videotaped conflict-resolution task (Merrilees, Goeke-
Morey, & Cummings, 2008). Similarly, momentary reports
of mood collected several times a day did not enhance later
recollection of those moods (Thomas & Diener, 1990).
And, although a sample of treated alcoholics claimed
becoming more aware of their drinking patterns after taking
part in a signal-contingent protocol, few actual differences
were observed (Litt, Cooney, & Morse, 1998).
These reassuring findings notwithstanding, the poten-
tial for reactivity problems suggests the need for caution
in designing protocols, minimizing factors that may
adversely affect participants’ willingness to be thoughtful
and specific (e.g., asking too many similar questions; insensi-
tivity to interference with normal activities; running studies
for unnecessarily lengthy periods). Analyses should also
routinely examine data for signs of response stereotypy
or carelessness, or for changes in the nature and pattern
of responses from early and late records (e.g., comparing
week-1 and week-2 means and variances in a two-week
diary study; see Green et al., 2006, for examples). Finally,
we concur with others (e.g., Bolger et al., 2003; Gable &
Reis, 2000; Rafaeli, 2009) who have called for further
research into reactivity effects. Such research would have
methodological benefits, and would shed light on the role
of self-monitoring and awareness in everyday experience.
Data Analytic Considerations
Diary data represent an analytic challenge for two reasons.
Statistically, diary data are nested within individuals (and
often individuals are nested within higher-order units, such
as couples, classrooms, or work groups), so that repeated
observations are not independent (Kenny, Kashy, & Bolger,
1998). Furthermore, as with most time-series data, vari-
ables in one report are likely to be correlated with prior
reports, creating autocorrelation, which must be consid-
ered in data analyses. Conceptually, because researchers
using diary methods are usually interested in something
more than a count of the total number of stressful events
or the mean level of intimacy across all social interactions,
at the least simple aggregation underutilizes effortfully
collected, potentially informative data.
Multilevel models have become the standard method of
analysis, allowing researchers to examine both between-
person and within-person processes (that is, variation
within person as a function of time or conditions), as well
as their interaction. Although under certain circumstances
multilevel analyses can be conducted with traditional
methods (e.g., repeated-measures analysis of variance),
maximum-likelihood estimation is more common.
Maximum-likelihood methods (e.g., Hierarchical Linear
Modeling [Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992]) provide more

Yt⫺1 Yt Yt⫺1 Yt
Xt⫺1
Xt
Prospective Prediction Contemporaneous Change
Figure 3.2 Two Kinds of Temporal Comparisons in Diary
Designs.
accurate estimation of population values, especially when
the number of records varies from one person to the next
and when random effects are considered more appropriate
than the usual fixed effects. Excellent discussions of these
analytic methods are available elsewhere (e.g., Bolger
et al., 2003; Nezlek, 2003; Schwartz & Stone, 1998; Walls
& Schafer, 2006; West & Hepworth, 1991), so we do not
discuss them here.
Given the possibility of carryover from one report to
the next, researchers often analyze a given criterion vari-
able by controlling for the prior report’s value of that vari-
able—for example, by examining today’s affect controlling
for yesterday’s affect. This is commonly done in either of
two ways, as shown in Figure 3.2, and their implications
differ significantly, although the choice is rarely explicit.
The first method, prospective prediction, involves analyz-
ing the outcome variable on a given day t as a function of
the predictor and outcome on the prior day, t–1. The sec-
ond method, contemporaneous change, looks at covariation
between outcome and predictor on a given day t controlling
for the outcome on the prior day t–1. The major rationale for
prospective prediction concerns inferences about causal prior-
ity. By predicting outcomes from both prior-day variables,
reverse causality—that the outcome is causally responsible
for the predictor—is rendered implausible. In other words,
and similar to the logic of prospective prediction in longi-
tudinal studies, because the partialled predictor at time t–1
shares no common variance with the outcome yet tempo-
rally precedes the outcome at time t, it plausibly exerts a
causal effect on the outcome. For example, this method
has been used to establish that daily events are more likely
to be causally responsible for daily affect than the reverse
(Gable, Reis, & Elliot, 2000). On the other hand, because
in the contemporaneous change model outcome and predic-
tor are assessed simultaneously, causal priority cannot be
ascertained. However, controlling for the prior t–1 outcome
variable removes carryover effects so that whatever asso-
ciations are obtained result from that moment or interval,
rather than prior moments or intervals.
Although prospective prediction has clear advantages,
there is a potential downside: The effects of the predictor
Diary Methods 101
variable must be durable enough to persist from reports at
t–1 to reports at t. This seems more likely in designs where
assessments are separated by relatively small intervals (e. g.,
ESM, EMA). In the common daily diary designs, prospec-
tive prediction requires that effects endure from one day
to the next, a relatively tenuous assumption for many
phenomena, given that a full day’s worth of activity, as
well as the restorative effects of sleep, intervene. It follows
furthermore that in the absence of intervening events, the
contemporaneous change model provides a more accurate
estimate of the association between outcome and predictor.
For this reason, contemporary change models are prefer-
able in certain instances, their greater inferential ambiguity
notwithstanding. The choice of analytic models, therefore,
should be based on the researcher’s goals.
Although social psychologists have been quick to adopt
diary methods for examining processes within persons,
they have been slow to use these methods for investigat-
ing more complex temporal patterns. For example, one
might use spectral analysis to examine the periodicity
(frequency and amplitude of repetitive cycles) of various
phenomena, such as mood, over the day (Larsen, 1987)
or week (e.g., the day-of-the-week effect; Reis et al.,
2000), or in response to major life events (e.g., bereave-
ment). Investigating the natural life cycle of phenomena
such as conflict, instances of ostracism or discrimination,
affective forecasts, or persuasive appeals, and accounting
for variability in these cycles as a function of situational
factors and individual differences is a fertile opportunity for
expanding social psychological knowledge. Another type
of analysis exploits the repeated sampling of diary designs
by using temporal models to specify processes that con-
tribute to continuity and discontinuity in social behavior
over time. In this regard, Fraley and Roberts (2005) pro-
pose different statistical models that contribute to longitudi-
nal stability—that is, to a high test-retest correlation—in
personality characteristics over the life course. These mod-
els can also be used to better understand stability in social-
psychological phenomena over shorter intervals.
Diary Research with Couples and Families
Diary methods, especially daily diaries, have become par-
ticularly popular among researchers who study couples and
families. All of the advantages of diary methods discussed
earlier apply to couples and families; additionally, diary
methods allow researchers to study interactive processes
(e.g., family conflict, intimacy) as they unfold in interde-
pendent social units and also to identify contextual and
dispositional factors that moderate their impact (e.g., work
stress, self-esteem). For example, one partner’s feelings of
vulnerability may engender behavior that contributes to
the other partner’s dissatisfaction with the relationship, a
102 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
process that is exacerbated when the vulnerable partner is
high in rejection sensitivity or low in self-esteem (Downey,
Freitas, Michaelis, & Khouri, 1998; Murray et al., 2003).
Conducting diary research with couples and families
generally necessitates that partners do not discuss their
responses and that they keep their reports confidential from
each other. Confidentiality is important because partners
might well be reluctant to report certain behaviors (e.g.,
violence, infidelity, sources of dissatisfaction) if there was
even a slim chance that their partners might see their reports.
Privacy can be difficult to ensure with standard delivery
systems, so that dedicated systems are preferred (e.g., cell
phones or PDAs that do not store responses locally or that
are password-protected). The former is particularly impor-
tant when comparisons of partners’ perspectives are of
interest, as in the example of studies that examine the rela-
tive impact on daily affect and relationship well-being of
shared and differing perspectives about everyday couple
interaction (Gable, Reis, & Downey, 2003). At the same
time, couple and family researchers coordinate reporting
schedules so that all parties provide reports at the same
time or following the same events. Otherwise, one would
not know if divergence reflected differing perspectives on
the same interaction or whether different interactions were
being described.
Couple and family data require special methods of
analysis to manage interdependence (Kenny, Kashy,
& Cook, 2006), and multilevel analyses of diary data
are no exception. The couple/family adds an additional
level of nesting to such analyses (repeated reports are
nested within individuals, whose responses are nested
within the couple or family), and some researchers pre-
fer to analyze these data as three-level hierarchical mod-
els. Nevertheless, there are both practical and statistical
reasons to consider using two-level models, using a tech-
nique introduced by Raudenbush, Brennan, and Barnett
(1995) and recently described by Laurenceau and Bolger
(2005). This method takes advantage of the fact that part-
ners are distinguishable—for example, one is husband and
one is wife—so that predictor variables representing both
of them can be included in the same level of analysis.
AMBULATORY ASSESSMENT
The term ambulatory assessment refers to the use of
mechanical or electronic devices to record information
about an individual’s activity, circumstances, or states
within ordinary daily life.4 First developed for medical
purposes—specifically, monitoring of blood pressure and
cardiac function over the course of normal activity—with
the increasing complexity and miniaturization of digital
technology, ambulatory methods have become exponen-
tially more useful and adaptable to research. In this sec-
tion we briefly review the application of these methods to
social psychology. Fahrenberg and Myrtek (2001) provide
a more general review. It bears noting that most researchers
include momentary self-report methods, such as ESM and
EMA, under the general heading of ambulatory assessment.
This chapter has not followed that convention because
ESM and EMA are used primarily for self-reports, whereas
the methods reviewed in this section are non-self-report.
Non-self-report ambulatory methods can also be combined
with ESM and EMA, as several examples below show.
The main rationale for ambulatory assessment is the
same as that discussed earlier for diary methods: To pro-
vide detailed data about variables of interest within their
natural, spontaneous context. By applying this approach to
behavioral (i.e., not self-reported) data, researchers capitalize
on the advantages of non-laboratory assessment—
external validity, repeated, contextually sensitive data—
while avoiding the pitfalls of self-reports (Stone et al.,
2000). Ambulatory measures are particularly useful for
assessing processes that operate outside of awareness,
which cannot be self-reported. Currently available ambu-
latory methods include tools for assessing physiological
processes, location and activity, speech, and features of the
ambient environment. How this is done varies markedly.
Ambulatory measures can be obtrusive (e.g., blood pressure
monitors) or unobtrusive (e.g., sound recording devices,
motion sensors), and they can be self-contained (e.g.,
PDAs) or telemetric (devices that transmit data remotely,
such as by using mobile phone technology). As modern
technology has expanded the range of what is possible,
more and more sophisticated gadgets and gizmos have been
designed with significant potential for behavioral science
research (Goodwin, Velicer, & Intille, 2008). Application of
these tools in theory-oriented research programs has been
variable, with some gaining immediate favor and others
awaiting adoption. This variability reflects several practi-
cal considerations—cost, ease of use, adaptability to par-
ticular circumstances, involvement of social psychologists
in development and dissemination—as well as a more
4 Many researchers include ESM and EMA in the general cat-
egory of ambulatory assessment methods, because many of the
same methodological and conceptual principles mentioned here
also apply to ESM and EMA. We do not follow that convention
for two reasons. First, common practice in social psychology
uses ESM and EMA in much the same manner as other diary
methods. Second, the data collected with ESM and EMA are self-
reports of experiences, thoughts, and feelings, much like diary
data, whereas we limit the discussion of ambulatory assessment
methods to direct recording of non-self-report data.

fundamental question: Researchers need to imagine how a
new method can enhance the informativeness of their work.
In some instances, technological advances offer relatively
small potential for theoretical advances, whereas in other
instances, these advances may have potential to dramati-
cally improve the quality and relevance of findings. In still
other instances, a new device may open an entirely new
area to social-psychological research.
Below we describe four examples—two established, two
novel—with particular relevance to social psychology.
Ambulatory Cardiovascular Monitoring
Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring for medical pur-
poses is now commonplace, as research showed that
blood pressure recordings taken in the individual’s normal
environment were better indicators of cardiovascular risk
than office-based assessments (e.g., White, Schulman,
McCabe, Holley, & Dey, 1989). Cardiovascular reactivity
has long been considered an important marker of stress, and
more particularly of whether stressful circumstances are
appraised as threatening or challenging (Blascovich, 2000).
Combining these two principles suggests that ambulatory
cardiovascular monitors would provide better indications
of the impact of social-personality factors on cardiovas-
cular function than laboratory assessments. For example,
trait negative affects (depression, anger, neuroticism) pre-
dict higher blood pressure in daily life (Ewart & Kolodner,
1994; Raikkonen, Matthews, Flory, Owens, & Gump,
1999). In a related vein, lonely people tend to be higher
than non-lonely persons in total peripheral resistance, a
physiological indication of threat responses (Hawkley
et al., 2003).
If ambulatory measurements are combined with event
records (such as daily diaries), within-person changes to
social-psychologically relevant events can be assessed.
Thus research has shown that the association between
trait negative affectivity and blood pressure elevation
is stronger in the classroom than in other settings
(Ewart & Kolodner, 1994), and that New York City traffic
enforcement officers experience higher blood pressure than
baseline when engaging in unpleasant communications
with the public (Brondolo, Karlin, Alexander, Bobrow, &
Schwartz, 1999). Similarly, momentary negative moods
elevated both systolic and diastolic blood pressure among
optimists to approximately the same levels characteristic
of chronically negative people (Raikkonnen et al., 1999).
Ambulatory cardiovascular monitors have become
increasingly sophisticated and are now capable of recording
more than blood pressure and vascular resistance. For
example, Holter monitors can continuously record cardiac
activity (much like an office ECG) for periods as long as 24
Ambulatory Assessment 103
hours. Using a sample of individuals with Long QT syndrome
(a genetically based disorder that puts affected individuals at
risk for sudden cardiac death), Lane et al. (2008) found that
positive emotion was associated with shortening of the Q-T
interval, lessening the risk of cardiac events.
Electronic Recording of the Acoustic Environment
Observational researchers sometimes fantasize about
implanting recording devices on the person of a research
participant so as to obtain an objective account of everything
they do. The Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR),
developed by Pennebaker and colleagues (Pennebaker,
Mehl, Crow, Dabbs, & Price, 2001), represents a first, less
megalomaniacal step in that direction. The EAR is a por-
table audio recorder that unobtrusively switches on and off
at random or regular intervals, providing samples of the
acoustic environment as participants go about their daily
activities. Participants cannot tell when the device is record-
ing, allowing researchers an opportunity to unobtrusively
observe even relatively subtle sounds. For example, in sev-
eral studies, the EAR switched on for 30 seconds every
12.5 minutes, yielding about 70 samples per person per day,
which contain about 35 minutes worth of recordings (Mehl,
Vazire, Ramirez-Espinosa, Slatcher, & Pennebaker, 2007).
Most commonly, researchers have used the EAR to sample
spoken language (i.e., verbal content and linguistic styles,
which can be transcribed and analyzed via manual content
analysis or text-analysis software), but it can also be used to
describe the acoustic environment in other ways; for exam-
ple, what sorts of interactions or activities are taking place
(Mehl & Pennebaker, 2003a). An added benefit is that EAR
transcriptions are easily archived for subsequent reanalysis
as new hypotheses emerge.
The EAR has been used in social psychology in several
ways. One analysis reported simple word frequencies from
six studies, concluding that the popular stereotype that
women are more talkative than men is unfounded (Mehl
et al., 2007). Men and women both used about 16,000
words per day—with large individual differences but no
evidence of a sex difference (the least talkative person used
695 words, the most talkative 47,016 words). A study fortu-
itously begun just before the events of September 11, 2001,
found that a relative preponderance of dyadic over group
interactions fostered success coping (Mehl & Pennebaker,
2003b). The EAR has also been used to obtain a measure
of the frequency of different behaviors (e.g., talking on the
telephone), which were then used as objective criteria for
comparing the relative accuracy of self-ratings and other-
ratings of behavior (Vazire & Mehl, 2008). (Close others
were often as accurate as the self, although these two
perspectives were often independent.)
104 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
Activity Monitoring
Accelerometers are small devices used for detecting
acceleration and changes in gravity-related forces (recent
wireless versions are called wockets). They are prob-
ably most familiar to social psychologists in iPhones
and iPods, but researchers can also use them for sensing
movement and activity patterns. Some researchers use
accelerometers to provide objective accounts of sedentari-
ness. For example, TV-watching was inversely related to
general activity levels in one study (Hager, 2006), and in
another, autonomous motivation for exercise predicted the
frequency of moderate-intensity exercise (Standage,
Sebire, & Loney, 2008). Accelerometers are also popular
in sleep research. For example, the Actigraph is a rela-
tively inexpensive wristwatch-like sensor that identifies
and stores objective information about physical motion,
yielding data that is highly correlated with more expen-
sive and intrusive sleep lab polysomnography (deSouza
et al., 2003). Accelerometer readings can also be used with
activity recognition algorithms to identify unique motion-
activity patterns, such as walking, eating, working on a
computer, gesturing, and talking on the telephone, which,
once identified, might generate a signal to participants to
record event-contingent ratings about their thoughts and
feelings (Choudhury et al., 2008).
Although accelerometers are rare in social-personality
psychology, they seem useful for examining hypotheses
about the relationship between activation level and mood,
or about movement and activity patterns associated with
individual differences, for describing patterned responses
to social stimuli (e.g., freezing or fleeing a fearful stimu-
lus, orienting one’s body toward or away from a potential
interaction partner), or for determining whether social
interaction partners synchronize their movement. They
are also likely to be helpful in applications of social psy-
chological theories to health, where objective accounts of
activity levels are desired.
Location Mapping
Global positioning systems (GPS) have become highly
precise, capable of identifying a person’s location within
a foot or so. Moreover, this technology is readily avail-
able. Pentland notes that “the majority of adults already
carry a microphone and location sensor in the form of a
mobile phone, and that these sensors are packaged with
computational horsepower similar to that found in desk-
top computers” (2007, p. 59). Location can be informative
for social-psychological research. For example, location
readings might be used to identify behavior settings of
research interest, such as schools, work, or nature, which,
when entered, might trigger requests for self-reports of
thought or affect. Intille (2007) refers to this as context-
sensitive EMA. Another intriguing possibility would use
location sensors to keep track of social network mem-
bers’ proximity to one another. Proximity creates oppor-
tunities for interaction, a venerable topic in interpersonal
attraction research, but as yet no studies have examined
systematically how physical presence leads to interaction.
For example, family members might each carry with them
a small badge containing a sensor that would continuously
transmit location information to a central computer. These
records could be combined to describe proximity among
family members, co-workers, friends, or caregivers and
care recipients. Continuous real-time records of this sort
are ideally suited for data-intensive analytic methods,
such as dynamic modeling of social influence processes
(Mason, Conrey, & Smith, 2007).
TRACE MEASURES
Some social behaviors, attitudes, cognitions, and emotions
leave physical traces in their wake. Bumper stickers on
cars, political buttons pinned to overcoats, and posters of
icons pinned to bedroom walls are all used to convey ele-
ments of attitudes, values, and identity to others. The fact
that some phenomena leave residue in the physical envi-
ronment raises the possibility of assessing psychological
phenomena by examining the physical traces they
produce.
Perhaps the most ambitious and wide-reaching effort
to understand behavior from physical traces was William
Rathje’s garbage project. Rathje reasoned that just as
archeologists use ancient refuse to learn about the behavior
of people who lived many millennia ago, he too could
use modern-day garbage to get insight into contemporary
behavior. Thus, in 1973 he founded the garbage project
at the University of Arizona with the goal of using refuse
to understand contemporary patterns of consumption. In
contrast to traditional studies, which had relied on ques-
tionnaires, surveys, government documents, or industry
records, the garbage project was grounded in hands-on
sorting of quantifiable bits and pieces of garbage. Instead
of self-reports, the “garbologists” made inferences about
consumer behavior directly from the material realities peo-
ple left outside their houses. The investigators often found
discrepancies between the answers given in self-reports
and those provided by their refuse analyses. For example,
in one study, “front door” interview data suggested beer
consumption occurred in only 15% of the homes and was
no higher than eight cans per week, whereas “back door”
garbage analyses revealed that beer was consumed in 77%

of the homes, with 54% of them exceeding the supposed
maximum of eight cans (Rathje & Hughes, 1975). In addi-
tion to fresh sorts of garbage bags left outside houses, the
garbage project researchers also examined other sources,
such as “core samples” drilled out from deep inside
landfills.
At a very broad level, all trace measures rely on the pro-
cesses of either erosion or accretion (Webb et al., 1981).
A classic and widely cited example of erosion came from
staff at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, who
noticed that the floor tiles in front of the hatching chicks
exhibit had to be replaced more frequently than those in
front of other exhibits, providing an index of the relative
popularity of different exhibits. Staying in the museum
context, Webb et al. suggest that accretion measures too
could be used to track the popularity of exhibits with glass
fronts by counting the numbers of nose-prints on the glass,
even making estimates of the ages of the viewers from the
heights of the prints.
Building on this tradition, the personal environments
that individuals craft around themselves, such as offices and
bedrooms, could be rich with information about the occu-
pants (Gosling et al., 2002). It seems likely, for example,
that the pictures a person selects to hang on her walls, the
books she chooses to read, and the way she arranges
the items that fill the space around her all reflect aspects
of her attitudes, behaviors, values, and self-views. Three
different mechanisms can be delineated by which people
can have an impact on the environments around them and,
in turn, how physical environments can serve as reposito-
ries of individual expression (Gosling et al., 2002; Gosling,
Gaddis, & Vazire, 2008). Broadly, people alter their spaces
for three reasons: They want to affect how they think and
feel, they want to broadcast information about themselves,
and they inadvertently affect their spaces in the course of
their everyday behaviors.
• Thought and Feeling Regulators. Personal environments
are the contexts for a wide range of activities, ranging
from relaxing and reminiscing to working and playing.
The effectiveness with which these activities can be ac-
complished may be affected by the physical and ambient
qualities of the space. It can be hard to relax with a lot of
noise around and it is difficult to concentrate when sur-
rounded by distractions. Specific memories, thoughts,
and emotions can be evoked by mementos and photos
of people, pets, and places. As a result, many items
within an environment owe their presence to their abil-
ity to affect the feelings and thoughts of the occupant.
Elements used to regulate emotions and thoughts could
include the music on an iPod (e.g., upbeat music to get
a person pumped up for a night on the town), keepsakes
Trace Measures 105
on the windowsill (e.g., a twig from a tree once planted
with an uncle who has since passed away), and pho-
tos of family on the refrigerator (e.g., images of an
absent grandparent to evoke feelings of belonging and
security).
• Identity Claims. One of the ways in which people make
spaces their own is by adorning them with “identity
claims”—deliberate symbolic statements about how
they would like to be regarded (Baumeister, 1982;
Swann, 1987; Swann, Rentfrow, & Guinn, 2003).
Posters, awards, photos, trinkets, and other memen-
tos are often displayed in the service of making such
statements. Such signals can be split into two broad
categories: Self-directed identity claims are symbolic
statements made by occupants for their own benefit,
intended to reinforce their self-views (e.g., displaying
a fountain pen awarded in a high-school science fair).
Other-directed identity claims are symbolic statements
(e.g., displaying a poster of Malcolm X) about attitudes
and values made to others about how one would like to
be regarded.
Identity claims consist of things individuals do
deliberately to their spaces, even if the occupants do
not direct conscious attention to the psychological goals
underlying their actions; thus, even if taping a humorous
article from the satirical newspaper, The Onion, to one’s
office door is driven by the goal of projecting a quirky
nerdy cynical persona to others, it is likely that the
occupant will experience the motive as “I just thought it
was funny.” Of course, some identity claims are made
deliberately, but that does not mean they are disingenu-
ous; self-verification theory suggests that people make
many of these claims not to create a false impression
but to induce others to see them as they genuinely see
themselves (Swann, this volume; Swann et al., 2002).
Nonetheless, it is still possible that some claims are made
with the explicit intention of fooling others (e.g., falsely
claiming to admire a rock band with street credibility by
wearing the band’s logo on a t-shirt). Of course, there
are numerous obstacles to pulling off a successful ruse
(Gosling, 2008).
• Behavioral Residue. Many behaviors leave some kind
of discernible residue in their wake. Given that large
quantities of behavior occur in personal environments, it
is reasonable to suppose that these environments might
accumulate a fair amount of residue. Interior behavioral
residue refers to the physical traces in an environment
of activities conducted within that space (e.g., an
organized desk). Exterior behavioral residue refers to
remnants of past activities and material preparations
for activities that will take place elsewhere (e.g., a
snowboard).
106 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
The elements in people’s spaces are psychologically
interesting phenomena in their own right but they can also
be used to measure occupants’ behaviors, attitudes, values,
goals, and self-views. For example, cohabiting couples
may use jointly acquired objects to signal things to oth-
ers about their couple identity (e.g., prominently displayed
honeymoon photos) or to remind themselves of special
moments together (e.g., pebble from a beach where they
had their first kiss); as a result, these objects may reflect
the couples’ relationship closeness, commitment, and
dyadic adjustment (Arriaga, Goodfriend, & Lohmann,
2004; Lohmann, Arriaga, & Goodfriend, 2003). To date, only
a few measures of physical spaces have been developed
(Gosling, Craik, Martin, & Pryor, 2005a, 2005b). As a
result, environmental evidence of social psychological
behaviors has remained largely untapped despite interest in
the topic in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nonetheless, the potential value of trace measures
to social psychologists is great, especially given that the
environmental manifestations of attitudes, values, and self-
views extend well beyond physical environments. Many
kinds of environments other than physical spaces (and the
possessions that fill them) could furnish information about
people. Just as people craft their physical spaces, they
also select and mould their auditory and social environ-
ments (Mehl, Gosling, & Pennebaker, 2006; Rentfrow &
Gosling, 2003, 2006). Just as people physically dwell
in houses and offices, they dwell virtually in online
environments like virtual worlds, personal websites, and
social-networking portals (e.g., Facebook.com; Back,
Schmukle, & Egloff, 2008; Vazire & Gosling, 2004). Just
as people leave traces of their actions, intentions, and
values in their permanent spaces, they also leave traces
in other immediate surroundings such as their cars (e.g.,
dings in the door, unpaid scrunched-up parking tickets in
the foot well, bumper stickers) or clothing (e.g., muddy
running shoes, mismatched socks, a t-shirt or button with
a rock band or political icon on it; Alpers & Gerdes, 2006;
Vazire, Naumann, Rentfrow, & Gosling, 2008).
Thus, many environments may be used to obtain infor-
mation about people. Gosling et al.’s (2002) model was
developed in the context of two studies of physical envi-
ronments but it can easily be applied more widely. For
example, the mechanisms linking individuals to their
environments can be applied to physical appearance—
hairstyle and clothing can reflect identity claims, clothing
and accessories can provide evidence of past or anticipated
behaviors, or even levels of sexual motivation (Haselton,
Mortezaie, Pillsworth, Bleske-Rechek, & Frederick,
2007). In the domain of personality, narcissism can be
expressed in terms of the kinds of clothes that people wear
(e.g., expensive, stylish), their condition (e.g., organized
and neat appearance), and other malleable elements of
appearance (e.g., in female targets, plucked eyebrows and
cleavage showing; Vazire et al., 2008). In other words,
physical appearance often holds clues to an individual’s
attitudes, values, intentions, behaviors, and self-views.
One study of the links between human territoriality and
aggression relied on trace measures of territoriality found
on cars (Szlemko, Benfield, Bell, Deffenbacher, & Troup,
2008). Starting with a definition of territoriality as a set
of behaviors and cognitions that a person exhibits based
on perceived ownership of space, bumper stickers, window
decals, and other forms personalization served as an index
of territoriality. As predicted, drivers of cars with territo-
riality markers scored higher on tests of driver aggression
and lower on the use of constructive expressions of anger
behind the wheel.
As with all methods, trace measures have their own
advantages and disadvantages. One drawback is that it may
be difficult to know who was responsible for a particular
trace or whether the action presumed to be responsible for
the trace actually caused it. For example, it may be diffi-
cult to tell whether the current or previous owner placed a
bumper sticker on a car. As with any measure, the onus is
on the researcher to establish its construct validity. Thus,
the study of territoriality markers in cars validated the car
owners’ reports of bumper stickers, window decals, and
so on with codings by judges made from photographs of
participants’ cars; the investigators also demonstrated that
the presence of markers showed expected patterns of cor-
relations with other variables such as the condition of the
vehicle and the owner’s attachment to it (Szlemko et al.,
2008).
Past research can be used to validate trace measures.
For example, research on “social snacks” supports the idea
that pictures of loved ones kept in one’s wallet or sitting on
one’s desk are used as emotion regulation strategies buffer-
ing the pain of social isolation. In one study, participants
were assigned to bring to the lab either a photo of a friend
or a photo of a favorite celebrity (Gardner, Pickett, &
Knowles, 2005). Participants put the photos on the desks in
front of them and were then asked to recall in vivid detail
an experience of being rejected by other people. Unlike the
people who had a picture of a celebrity in front of them,
the people who were looking at a friend’s image did not
experience a drop in mood.
The validity of behavioral residue may also vary within
a category. For example, some music genres are more
tightly associated than other genres with particular values,
self-views, preferences, and activities. For example, the
stereotype that contemporary religious music fans place
high importance on values like forgiveness, inner harmony,
love, and salvation shows some accuracy, but the stereotype

that rap fans place low importance on values like a world
of beauty, inner harmony, intellect, and wisdom has lit-
tle accuracy (Rentfrow & Gosling, 2007). Such findings
would inform researchers who use music-preference infor-
mation (e.g., from iPods, CD collections) as indicators of
values held by participants.
Findings that converge across methods are particularly
valuable because they both underscore the robustness of
the findings and cross-validate the methods. One study
found converging evidence for the psychological underpin-
nings of political orientation by gathering data based on
self-views, behavioral codings of social interactions, and
records of behavioral residue (Carney, Jost, Gosling, &
Potter, 2008). In particular, liberals’ tendencies to be open-
minded, creative, and interested in novelty seeking was
reflected in high self-ratings on openness, in their tendency
to smile and to be expressive and engaged in social inter-
actions, and for their bedrooms to contain a wide variety
of books (including books on travel and feminism), music
(including world and classical genres), art supplies, and
cultural memorabilia. Conservatives’ need for order
and conventionality was reflected in high self-ratings on
conscientiousness and low ratings on openness, in their
tendency to be detached and disengaged in social inter-
actions, and for their bedrooms to contain organizational
items (e.g., event calendars), conventional décor (e.g.,
sports paraphernalia, American flags), and be generally
neat, clean, and organized.
One major advantage of studying behavioral residue
rather than behavior itself is that it overcomes some of the
significant practical challenges associated with observ-
ing behavior in natural settings (Barker, 1968; Barker &
Wright, 1951; Craik, 2000; Gosling, John, Craik, & Robins,
1998; Hektner et al., 2007; Mehl et al., 2006). Moreover,
whereas self-reports of behavior may underestimate actual
behavioral occurrences, the existence of behavioral residue
(e.g., a beer can in the trash) is usually a good sign that the
behavior actually occurred. A final major benefit of resi-
due is the advantage of aggregation. A single behavior is
less reliable than a behavioral trend and physical spaces
reflect behavioral trends (Epstein, 1983). For example,
whereas even a generally organized person may occasion-
ally fail to return a CD to its case and file it in the right slot,
it is unlikely that such a person would have a chaotic CD
collection, because a disorganized collection of CDs is the
result of repeatedly engaging in similar actions.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter we have tried to describe the rationale for
conducting social-psychological research outside of the
Conclusion 107
laboratory, emphasizing what it offers for the field while at
the same time acknowledging its limitations. Whatever one’s
preferences for working inside or outside of the laboratory,
we hope it is apparent that we see non-laboratory studies as
neither more nor less desirable than laboratory work. Just
as an artist or a craftsperson uses different tools to carry
out different parts of a creative work, laboratory and non-
laboratory settings can provide social psychologists with dif-
ferent, and if used appropriately, complementary tools for our
creative work. Both are intended to give researchers useful
instruments for testing important theories and hypotheses
about social behavior. And more important than the par-
ticular methods outlined here, we hope this chapter will
serve to stimulate researchers to remain vigilant for new
opportunities to examine social psychological phenomena
in their natural habitats.
Most commentators agree in principle that the most
valid theories and findings are those that have been tested
with multiple methods in diverse settings, as noted in the
introduction to this chapter. Nevertheless, current social
psychological practice (as, we hasten to note, in many
other disciplines) often falls short of this lofty standard.
Instead, researchers tend to stick with an established para-
digm, more often conducted in the laboratory with college
students than anywhere else. Extending a laboratory para-
digm to non-laboratory settings may sometimes require
greater effort and time than conducting an additional labo-
ratory replication but researchers who step outside the
laboratory are often rewarded with increased validity and
generalizability of their findings.
Kurt Lewin’s call for action-oriented, real-world-
relevant research, now well-aged more than a half-century,
still inspires many social psychologists. Were Lewin still
alive, we think he would be even more enthusiastic today
about the prospects for conducting rigorous, theoreti-
cally informative and practically useful research outside
of the laboratory. As we have tried to illustrate, the tools
available for such research are far more sophisticated
today than they were in Lewin’s era. The Internet affords
unparalleled access to large and diverse samples and data-
bases. Advances in computerization, miniaturization, and
cellular technology have spawned devices capable of pro-
viding extensively detailed accounts of behavior, from
internal biological events to subjective states and affects
to descriptions of the person’s environment. Statistical
methods to take advantage of these data and yield finer
insights are becoming ever more sophisticated. In other
words, advancing technology has made the non-laboratory
environment an increasingly viable and fertile site for the
generation of social-psychological knowledge. There is
little doubt that these technological advances will continue
and likely accelerate. As they do they will enhance our
108 Social Psychological Methods Outside the Laboratory
prospects for asking and answering interesting and impor-
tant questions in social psychology and beyond.
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Chapter 4
Data Analysis in Social Psychology: Recent
and Recurring Issues
CHARLES M. JUDD AND DAVID A. KENNY
INTRODUCTION
In 1969, John Tukey described data analysis as detective
work. The scientist has a case to solve—trying to understand
reality—and the data are the clues that are used to solve
that case. Statistical methods are the tools that can be used
to understand the meaning of those clues. Unfortunately,
all too often social psychologists treat data analysis and
statistics as more of an onerous, obligatory ritual that they
must endure rather than as an opportunity to dig, discover,
and be enlightened. One of the goals of this chapter is show
how data analysis can be used to help us better understand
the social-psychological reality that interests us.
Tukey (1980) also argued that data analysis is often
confirmatory as well as exploratory: The researcher has a
theory of reality and tries to determine whether the data
conform to that theory. Similarly, Robert Abelson, in his
wonderful book Statistics as Principled Argument (1995),
argues that the data analyst is an advocate and uses statis-
tics in order to argue for a causal theory. Most data analysis
in social psychology is confirmatory and most of the theo-
ries that we seek to confirm are causal theories. Successful
data analysis in social psychology very often requires that the
analyst have an explicit causal theory that guides the analy-
sis. Social psychologists are most familiar with having a
causal theory underlying their analyses when they analyze
the results of randomized experiments in order to look at the
causal effects of independent variables. They are also famil-
iar with causal modeling in the context of structural equation
modeling of non-experimental data. However, these are
not the only contexts in which causal thinking guides data
analysis. We shall see that having the right causal theory
is essential if we are to conduct mediation and moderation
We thank Anne Black, Niall Bolger, Randi Garcia, John Graham, Deborah A. Kashy, David MacKinnon, Dominique Muller, Kris
Preacher, Eliot Smith, Amanda Snook, Tessa West, and Vincent Yzerbyt who provided much appreciated comments on an earlier version
of this chapter.
115
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
analysis, handle missing data, and establish the equivalence
of measures.
It may seem that there is a tension between the roles of
the data analyst: as detective and as advocate or data analy-
sis as exploratory and as confirmatory. But in fact these roles
are easily reconcilable. Data analysis presumes a causal the-
ory, and one explores one’s data in making the case for that
causal theory. One must be willing to be surprised along
the way and open to modifications to one’s guiding causal
theory.
Two aspects of a causal theory and their implications for
data analysis deserve elaboration before we plunge into the
details of this chapter. The first concerns the nature of what
we call invariance assumptions. The second, and related,
aspect is the assumptions that are made about error. We
turn to each of these briefly and then we provide a road-
map for the remaining sections of the chapter.
Assumptions About Invariance
A key aspect of a causal law is the assumption of invari-
ance. Invariance means that the causal law is assumed
to apply across some domain. Social psychologists rou-
tinely wish to argue for invariance across persons: We
routinely examine whether results generalize across people
in our studies and worry about generalizing causal theo-
ries across people in general. Thus, a central concern in
contemporary social psychology has been whether results
are truly invariant across people from different cultures.
However, there are other domains across which we can
and should worry about invariance. Sometimes invariance
might be assumed to be across time rather than across
persons. For instance, although we might assume that stress
116 Data Analysis in Social Psychology: Recent and Recurring Issues
generally causes negative mood, we may further acknowl-
edge that the strength of the causal relationship may be
different for different persons. If we are to allow for a
causal effect to vary across persons, we may assume that
within each person this relationship is invariant across time
and situations. Alternatively, we might also want to assume
invariance of a causal effect across specific stimulus items
that are used in studies. For instance, in studies involving
implicit measures, such as evaluative priming procedures
(Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995), we gener-
ally have many trials and we routinely assume invariance
across these. Making appropriate assumptions about where
invariance is expected and where it is not is critical for
conducting the proper statistical analyses.
Invariance is crucial to research design and data
analysis because it points to where it is that one obtains
replications. If the causal model is the same for all persons,
we can obtain replications by studying more people. If,
however, the causal relationship varies across persons but
is invariant over time, we can obtain more replications by
measuring more times for each person.
Assumptions About Errors
Once we have chosen a causal theory and determined
the domain to which it applies (i.e., the invariance), we
then employ statistical models to analyze our data. Judd,
McClelland, and Ryan (2008) have described data as hav-
ing two parts. One part is the model we build and that we
understand; the other part is what is left over and is the part
we do not understand:
Data
Model  Error
By “Model,” they include what social psychologists
focus on most: means, mean differences, and regression
coefficients. We social psychologists are keen on under-
standing the Model part of data analysis, but we often
forget about Error. If the theory of Error is wrong, the Model
may be misleading and probably misunderstood. Consider
three ways in which we might have the wrong model of
Error: non-normality, outliers, and multiple levels.
We are all taught about the assumption that errors are
normally distributed. If the distribution of the errors is
not normal, then our estimate of the error variance and con-
sequently our measures of uncertainty of parameter estimates
(e.g., differences between means) would be incorrect.
Outliers are anomalous observations that may drasti-
cally affect both the estimates of the Model and Error
(McClelland, 2000). Their presence requires that a differ-
ent model of error needs to be applied to them. In other
words, most observations may have errors that come from
one distribution of errors, but then there may be a few
weird cases sampled from another distribution of errors.
These can “grab” the model unless one recognizes that
they really come from a different error distribution.
Probably most perniciously, in a great deal of social
psychological data there is more than one source of errors,
commonly called levels. Most obviously, repeated mea-
sures taken from the same person involve errors both at the
person level and at the level of individual observations over
time within a person. But this kind of multiple-level struc-
ture characterizes many other sorts of data as well, often
unbeknownst to the researcher. When people are in dyads
or groups, there are errors both at the person and group
levels and these are very likely to have different variances.
A model that assumes only one source of error would lead
to serious problems of statistical inference.
Chapter Overview
Our focus in this chapter is on various issues in data
analysis in social psychology that we believe cause most
researchers problems. We do not intend to comprehensively
survey how data analysis proceeds and to summarize ana-
lytic methods.1 Rather, our goal is to point to ongoing
issues in data analysis that we feel deserve close attention.
The chapter is divided into five main sections. In the first,
we deal with issues in the assessment of mediation. The
second is devoted to moderation of causal effects. The third is
devoted to issues in repeated measures analyses and multi-
level modeling. The fourth discusses problems of missing
data and how these might be handled. And the final section
is devoted to the general issue of invariance. These various
sections can be read discretely.
MEDIATION
Since Baron and Kenny’s (1986) influential paper on medi-
ation and moderation, mediational analysis has largely
become de rigueur in many disciplines, including social
psychology. For instance, 34% of papers published in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2004
employ some form of mediational analysis. As a result
there is a large and flourishing literature devoted to the
1There are many excellent comprehensive guides. For the basics
on the general linear model, analysis of variance, and regression
procedures, integrated guides are provided by Cohen, Cohen,
West, and Aiken (2003), Judd, McClelland, and Ryan (2008),
and Maxwell and Delaney (2003). A recent guide to effectively
reporting and interpreting social psychological results is Kashy,
Donnellan, Ackerman, and Russell (2009).

conduct of mediational analysis, including a recent book
devoted to the subject (MacKinnon, 2008). Our purpose
is not to thoroughly review this literature. Rather, what
we wish to do is raise some concerns about this literature
and the ways in which mediational analyses are routinely
conducted.
As articulated by Baron and Kenny (1986) (and Judd
& Kenny, 1981 previously), a mediational model is a
causal model in which an independent variable of interest
is presumed to affect some outcome variable because, at
least in part, the independent variable affects a mediator
that in turn affects the outcome. This causal model is laid
out in Figure 4.1, with the designation of effects (typically,
but not always, least-squares regression coefficients) given
in the terminology that has become standard in the litera-
ture on mediation. In the top causal model, c is the estimate
of the total effect of the independent variable (X ) on the
outcome (Y ). In the bottom causal model, a is the estimate
of the effect of the independent variable on the mediator
(M ) and b and c are estimates of two partial effects, the
first is the effect of the mediator on the outcome controlling
for the independent variable and the second is the effect of
the independent variable on the outcome, controlling for
the mediator. The fundamental equality that underlies cur-
rent approaches to mediation is that c
c  ab. In words,
the total effect of the independent variable on the outcome
(c) can be partitioned into two parts, the direct effect (c)
and the indirect effect via the mediator (ab). Solving for ab
yields the expression of c  c
ab, which in words says
that the reduction in the effect of X on Y is the amount of
mediation.
Baron and Kenny (1986) argued that four conditions
must hold to demonstrate mediation:
1. c should differ from zero.
2. a should differ from zero.
3. b should differ from zero.
4. Ideally, c should be zero, or at least smaller in
absolute value than c.
c was widely tested using what is called the Sobel test (Sobel,
X Y
M involving resampling procedures (MacKinnon, Fairchild, &
a b
c
X Y
Figure 4.1 Mediation Models Where X Is the Causal Variable,
M the Mediator, and Y the Outcome (Top Model without the
Mediator and Lower Model with the Mediator).
Mediation 117
The subsequent literature on the conduct of mediation has
largely focused on two issues: (1) the necessity of each of
these four conditions and (2) the most powerful approaches
to test for mediation.
The first Baron and Kenny condition, that there be an
overall or total effect of the independent variable (c苷 0),
arose because of the conviction that there must be such an
effect for the question of mediation to even make sense:
“If there is no effect of the independent variable, there is
nothing to mediate.” There is now, however, an emerging
consensus (see Kenny, Kashy, & Bolger, 1998; MacKinnon,
Lockwood, Hoffman, West, & Sheets, 2002; Shrout & Bolger,
2002) that this first condition is unnecessary. Note that if the
total effect (c) is in fact zero, then by necessity the indirect
effect (ab) would have the opposite sign from the residual
direct effect (c), a condition defining what is known as
suppression (MacKinnon, Krull, & Lockwood, 2000). In
other words, there may be an effect of the independent
variable that emerges only when the mediator is controlled
and this effect goes in the opposite direction from the
mediated effect.
An example can help illustrate suppression and why it
sometimes ought to be considered a special case of media-
tion. A developmental psychologist may believe that
children who are more intelligent (X ) ought to show more
emotional stability (Y ). However, it happens that the sim-
ple relation between these two (c) is close to zero. She has
also measured the extent to which children are bullied by
other children. The degree of being bullied is the M vari-
able. Intelligence results in being bullied more (i.e., a > 0).
Additionally, being bullied leads to less emotional stability
(i.e., b < 0). Hence, the indirect effect of intelligence on
stability via being bullied is negative (i.e., ab < 0). Once
one controls for the bullying variable the residual direct
positive effects of intelligence on emotional stability
emerges (i.e., c > 0).
Following from these considerations and also from the
fact that the indirect effect (ab) may differ significantly
from zero even if one of its components does not, the bulk
of the literature has concluded that ultimately there is only
a single condition that must be met to statistically establish
mediation: ab
c  c 苷 0. For many years this condition
1982); there are now more powerful approaches, largely
Fritz, 2007; MacKinnon et al., 2002; Preacher & Hayes,
2004, 2008; Shrout & Bolger, 2002) to determine if ab is
statistically different from zero.
Although in our opinion the reconsideration of the Baron
and Kenny (1986) four conditions represents a substantial and
appropriate clarification and refinement, the conclusion that
only a single condition must hold to demonstrate mediation,
118 Data Analysis in Social Psychology: Recent and Recurring Issues
i.e., ab
c  c 苷 0, has led to the unfortunate conclusion
among many social psychologists that there is a statistical
“test” of mediation and all that one needs to do to argue for
mediation is to have that “test” be statistically significant.
This is far from true. The “test” simply amounts to a test of
whether a partial slope is different from an unpartialed or
zero-order slope. And these two slopes may certainly differ
in many contexts where the mediational causal model is
totally implausible (see the next paragraph for an example).
In fact, with any three variables, so long as there is some
correlation among all possible pairs and regardless of the
true causal model that is responsible for those correlations,
the zero-order slope of the first variable regressed on the
second would almost always be different from the partial
slope of the first regressed on the second controlling for
the third. Surely such a condition by itself cannot be used
to argue for the set of causal assumptions that underlies the
mediational model. What the statistics do is estimate and
test the indirect path if the model is true. However, the
model might be wrong in many ways and the statistics
never inform us about that.
An example can illustrate the argument. Height, Weight,
and Gender are all correlated with each other. Suppose one
estimated a “mediational” model in which Height is the
X variable, Gender is the M variable, and Weight is the Y
variable. Undoubtedly, in this model c would be greater
than zero (i.e., taller people do weigh more). Also we could
predict Gender from Height to some extent, i.e., a苷 0, and
surely Gender is related to Weight even controlling for
M
True 1
M 1
1
EX
1
a b
U
X
W V
1
1 1
X Figure 4.2 Mediation Model with Specification Error:
Y
True
c
2 The reader might think that we need to assume that the outcome, Y, has no measurement error. This need not be assumed because we
can include measurement error in Y in its disturbance variable.
Height, i.e., b 苷 0. Accordingly, we would certainly
expect the “indirect effect” of Height on Weight via
Gender (i.e., ab) to differ significantly from zero. So the
statistical “test of mediation” would likely be found to be
statistically significant, but surely we would not want to
argue that the causal assumptions built into “mediational”
model hold because the test was significant. Obviously,
Height does not cause Weight in part because it causes
Gender!
Critical Assumptions of the Mediation Model
The mediational models in Figure 4.1 are causal models
with very strong assumptions that are not critically exam-
ined simply by estimating model parameters and “testing”
mediation. In Figure 4.2, we have drawn the model with all of
the paths, covariances, and variances that are assumed to be
zero. First, in mediational models we assume that the causal
directions are correct. That is, it is not the case that Y causes
M (bMY
0) or X (bXY
0) or that M causes X (bXM
0).
Second, we must assume that the causal variables X and M
have no measurement error2 (σEX2
σEM2
0). Third, we
must assume that there are no unmeasured common causes
of any of the pairs of variables (σWU
σWV
σ UV
0).
Violation of any of these eight assumptions may substantially
bias the estimates of mediation.
A proper mediation analysis requires more than the esti-
mation of the parameters in the mediation model and a media-
tional “test”; rather, it requires an adequate rationale for that
EM
Reverse Causal Effects, Omitted Variables, and Measurement
Error in X and M.

model and for assuming that all eight of the “extra” param-
eters are zero. Design consideration can be used. For instance,
if X were a manipulated experimental variable, then five of
the parameters can safely be assumed to be zero (bXY
bXM

σ EX2
σ WU
σ WV
0). This model, with a manipulated
X, is given in Figure 4.3. We can relax the assumption of zero
error variance in the mediator by the use of multiple indica-
tors. We can lessen the chance that Y causes M by measuring
M before Y, although it still may be the case that covariation
between M and Y may be due to a prior value of Y that causes
M and the observed Y (Cole & Maxwell, 2003).
The most difficult and problematic assumption is that there
are no common causes of M and Y, besides X. Most typically,
both M and Y are measured variables that are likely to have
many common causes over and above X. If these exist and
are not controlled, then the estimates of the model would be
biased, almost always in a direction that leads to an overesti-
mation of the indirect effect and hence of mediation.
There are three ways of dealing with this most serious
problem. First one could attempt to specify, measure, and
control likely common causes of both M and Y. Second, one
could conduct further work in which M is experimentally
manipulated (Spencer, Zanna, & Fong, 2005). The presence
of an effect of manipulated M on Y certainly helps make the
argument for mediation, although comparing the effect of an
experimental manipulation of M to the estimated effect of a
measured M can be difficult because of issues of construct
validity: Is manipulated M the same construct as measured
M? Third, if one can assume that c is zero (i.e., there is “com-
plete” mediation), then one can estimate a mediational model
that includes and estimates rUV.3 Of course, this assumption
of complete mediation is also a very difficult one to make.
As we said at the start of this section, the recent litera-
ture on mediation has largely concentrated on procedures
U
1 1
EM M 1
M
True
a b
V
c Y Figure 4.3 Mediation Model with a Manipulated X
X
3 The basic mediational model, the lower model in Figure 4.1, is said to be just-identified or saturated. If the causal model were overi-
dentified because we believed we had complete mediation (i.e., path c
0), then it would be possible to estimate one additional covari-
ance in the model, otherwise assumed to be zero.
Moderation 119
to improve the power of tests of the indirect effect in a
mediational model. While we applaud these developments,
we strongly believe that this literature has insufficiently
emphasized the very difficult assumptions that underlie
the mediational model. This deficiency has led to many
papers that employ a mediation test without any discus-
sion of the strong assumptions that are implicitly being
made. Establishing the causal assumptions of mediation is
not something that is easily done. Those assumptions are
complex and no statistical treatment of the data, by itself,
can render those assumptions plausible. Ultimately, theo-
retical and empirical arguments need to be made for the
plausibility of a mediating process. And these arguments
undoubtedly involve much more than the estimation of a
simple mediational model and a “test” of mediation. At the
least and even in a situation where X has been experimen-
tally manipulated, it seems crucial to demonstrate that the
partial path between the mediator and the outcome really
represents a causal effect, be it by further experimentation
or in some other way.
Let us be clear. We are not arguing that mediational analy-
sis should not be done. Rather, we are arguing that the dif-
ficult and important issues in mediational analysis are not
statistical. The most difficult issue is in establishing the ade-
quacy of the theory underlying the mediational model and
the design considerations that have been used to buttress that
theory. We should expect to see an extended discussion of
these issues whenever mediational analyses are presented.
MODERATION
Although moderation has been given much less attention
than mediation, examining moderation is just as essential
Variable and Specification Error.
120 Data Analysis in Social Psychology: Recent and Recurring Issues
to theory development. In essence, moderation examines
claims about the invariance of causal relationships across
different domains, be they persons, situations, or cultures.
We might examine, for instance, whether the impact of a
persuasive message on attitude change depends on the extent
to which participants are motivated to attend to the message.
We might ask whether the degree to which one expresses
less liking of an outgroup than an ingroup depends on the
situational constraints against showing outgroup hostility.
And we might ask whether the factors that give rise to par-
ticularly high levels of self-esteem depend on one’s culture.
The basic data-analytic approach for testing modera-
tion is well worked out (Aiken & West, 1991; Judd et al.,
2008); however, the practice of testing moderation in the
literature has problems to which we wish to call attention.
We start with some common problems in the testing of
moderation, problems that have been articulated in the lit-
erature but that nevertheless persist in the common conduct
of moderation analysis. We then turn to a more perplexing
issue that has not been dealt with elsewhere. And finally,
we briefly discuss models that integrate this section with
the previous section on mediation; specifically, we discuss
mediated moderation and moderated mediation.
Continuing Problems
We start with the simplest model of moderation in which
the effect of attitudes (A) on behavior (B) is assumed to
be moderated by some factor (F) such as attitude strength,
familiarity, or direct experience. The test of moderation
involves testing the partial effect of a product predictor
(A*F) in a linear model where B is regressed on A, F, and
the product:
B = b0 +b1A +b2 F +b3 (A * F ) + e
In this model, the b’s are simply unstandardized partial
slopes or partial regression coefficients. Importantly, the
interaction is not tested by a simple regression with only
the product as the predictor. Rather, one must test the par-
tial slope of the product controlling for its two components
(A and F) (Cohen, 1978).
One key issue in the testing of interactions is that of
statistical power. McClelland and Judd (1993) compared
the typical power for tests of moderation in experimental
situations, where the A and F variables are manipulated at
relatively extreme values, and in field settings in which the
variables are measured and may show considerably less
variability. For instance in the laboratory, we may give
people positive or negative attitudes toward some hypo-
thetical issue (e.g., senior comprehensive exams) and then
manipulate the strength of those attitudes by either giving
people very strong arguments or rather weak arguments.
We might then expect that there is considerable variability
in both the attitudes themselves and the strength of those
attitudes as a function of our manipulations. In field set-
tings, however, the actual attitudes and the strength of
those attitudes are likely to vary much more continuously,
with the majority of people expressing neither particularly
strong nor particularly weak attitudes.
A key factor that affects the power of the test of the
interaction, i.e., testing the partial slope of the product, is
the residual variance of the product, having partialed out the
component variables. Although the variances of the compo-
nent variables may be less in field settings than in laboratory
settings, the variance of the partialed product variable would
be much less in field settings. Accordingly, with continu-
ously measured independent variables, rather than experi-
mentally manipulated ones, the power to test for moderation
is often exceedingly low. Very often to have adequate
power, one needs sample sizes in the high hundreds. For
instance, Aiken and West (1991) argue that if A and F are
two normally distributed and uncorrelated variables and the
effect of partialed product is typical, one needs 392 cases to
have an 80 percent chance to detect moderation! Because of
this low power, replication of effects across different opera-
tions of the variables can be important. We urge researchers
to report (and editors to allow them to report) estimates for
all tests of moderators (and not just statistical decisions, i.e.,
“not significant”) in reporting moderator effects.
A second issue is the interpretation of the various para-
meter estimates in the above linear model. Although the
meaning of the effect of the product term is not fun-
damentally affected by the scaling of A and F, the
meanings of coefficients for A and F dramatically change
when they are rescaled. The parameter estimate for A
estimates the simple A effect when F equals zero and the
parameter estimate for F estimates the simple F effect when
A equals zero. Thus, a change in the zero point of one of
these variables changes the parameter estimate associated
with the other. Moreover, if zero is not meaningful for
either A or F, then the simple effects are meaningless.
To illustrate, suppose that A varied from 1 to 7, with
higher numbers indicating a more favorable attitude. And
F also varied from 1 to 7, again with higher numbers indi-
cating greater attitude strength. While b3 in the above
model estimates the effect of the A by F interaction, b1
in the above model estimates not the “main” effect of A,
but the simple effect of A when and only when F equals 0,
an impossible value. A similar interpretation applies to b2.
One suggestion to make the effects of components inter-
pretable is to center (i.e., subtract the grand mean (Aiken &
West, 1991)) for the two component variables (A and F) prior
to computing the product predictor and then these centered

variables (along with their product) be used as the predictors
in the model. What centering does is make the zero value for
A and F interpretable. Note, however, that sometimes center-
ing may be unnecessary. If A already has a meaningful value
at zero (e.g., neutrality), then centering may be less informa-
tive. Generally, we recommend that researchers always scale
their variables so that zero is a meaningful value. So instead of
using a 1 to 7 scale for attitude, we use a 3.5 to 3.5 scale,
where 0 would represent a neutral attitude. Of course, the
grand mean may sometimes be the most meaningful value, in
which case our recommendation is equivalent to the centering
recommendation.
Frequently, one or both of the component variables of an
interaction may be categorical; such variables may be either
experimental manipulations or measured variables (e.g.,
gender). All too often, because the rationale underlying the
interpretation of slopes of component variables in interac-
tive models is not fully understood, researchers use coding
conventions for these categorical variables where zero is not
a meaningful value. For instance, if one coded a categori-
cal variable using a 1 versus 2 coding system and included
this variable, a continuous predictor, and the product of these
two variables in a moderation model, then the slope of the
continuous predictor estimates the simple slope of that pre-
dictor at a meaningless level of the categorical predictor, i.e.,
when it equals zero. Even in the case of dummy coding, where
zero is a meaningful value, researchers all too often interpret
the slope of the continuous predictor as the “main effect”
of that variable and fail to realize that it is the simple effect
for that variable for the condition coded as 0 on the dummy
code. The lesson is that for both categorical and continuous
predictors in a model involving product predictors, we need to
be aware that slopes of component predictors estimate simple
effects at the zero level of the other component predictors.
Accordingly, one needs to think about what the zero points
of those variables are, even in the case of categorical predic-
tors. In our own research with categorical variables, we gener-
ally prefer to use contrast codes or effects codes rather than
dummy codes precisely for this reason.
Examining Moderation When the Direction of
Causation Is Unknown
A thorny and largely unrecognized issue4 in the examina-
tion of moderation concerns the direction of the causal
relationship between A and B, assumed to be moderated
by F. If A were a manipulated variable, then it would be
reasonable to assume that A causes B. However, very often
4We especially want to thank Irving Kirsh who originally pointed
out this problem to us.
Moderation 121
in moderation analysis neither A nor B is manipulated, and
the causal direction may be unclear. Most researchers pre-
sume that the direction of causation does not matter in tests
of moderation. After all, regressing variable A on variable
B produces the exact same standardized regression coef-
ficient as regressing B on A. So it might be supposed that
it is immaterial whether A is presumed to cause B or vice
versa. However, as we shall see, the causal direction can
matter a great deal for tests of moderation.
Consider the statistics from an artificial dataset in
Table 4.1. We give the variances for A and B and their cor-
relation for two levels of the moderator variable F (assumed
to be dichotomous). Again, by way of illustration we mea-
sure participants’ attitudes, their behavior intentions, and
finally we measure F, a dichotomous variable that captures
whether participants regard the attitude issue as important
or not. Note that the correlation is exactly the same at the
two levels of the moderator. However, note that there is an
asymmetry in the variances. For F
–1, the variance of A
is greater than the variance of B. The pattern reverses for
F
1. It is this asymmetry that produces the “strange” result
that the moderator effect reverses as a function of whether
one examines the effect of the A*F interaction on B or the
effect of the B*F interaction on A. When the analysis is
done presuming that A causes B, the relationship is stronger
when F
1 than when F
–1; however, when the analy-
sis is done presuming that B causes A, the within-group
unstandardized regression coefficient is stronger when
F
–1 than when F
1. As this example illustrates, chang-
ing the assumptions about the direction of causation can
have a dramatic effect on the estimated moderator effect.
Mathematically, the effect of A on B equals bBA
rAB ( s s )
B
and the effect of B on A equals bAB
rAB ( s s ) , where sA and
A
A
B
sB equal the standard deviations of A and B and rAB equals
their correlation. From these two expressions for the partial
2 2
slopes, it follows that b b
s s . Because the size of s s
AB
BA
A
2
B
A
2
B
can vary dramatically across levels of the moderator, the
effect of the moderator may reverse direction depending
Table 4.1 Hypothetical Effects of Moderator Variable Illustrating
How the Direction of Causation Can Affect the Degree of Moderation
(F Moderating the A:B Relationship)
F
1 F
1
sA2
4 sA2
1
2
1 sB2
4
sB
rAB
.5 rAB
.5
A→B
bBA
0.25 bBA
1.00
B→A
bAB
1.00 bAB
0.25
122 Data Analysis in Social Psychology: Recent and Recurring Issues
on which variable, A or B, is treated as the dependent vari-
able and which is treated as the predictor.
What should researchers do to test for moderation given
this ambiguity? We believe first that the researcher needs
to consider in depth the plausible direction of causation.
Sometimes the direction of causation is known by the design
of the research. For instance if one variable is manipulated
or if one variable is measured prior to another,5 the causal
direction may be known. Other times, theory can be used
to justify the direction of causation. For instance, in our
attitude–behavior example, many—though not all—would
argue that attitudes are more likely to cause behaviors than
the other way around. That said, the researcher needs to
explicitly provide a rationale for the choice of cause and
effect and a rationale why causation does not flow in the
other direction. Without such a rationale, the results from
the moderation analysis are dubious, especially if there are
unequal variances.
If the direction of causation is known, say from A to B,
there are potentially three different parameters that could
be moderated by F:
a. the variance of the causal variable or sA2 ,
b. the strength of the causal effect or bBA, and
c. the unexplained variance of the outcome or sB2 | A .
Let us consider each of these in turn.
First, very often what a moderator variable does is
generate variance in the causal variable. That is, modera-
tors are variables that are suspected to activate or inhibit a
causal process. They may activate the process by expand-
ing the range of the causal variable, and they may inhibit
the process by restricting the range of that variable. For
instance, consider the effect of attitudes on behavior and
the moderation of that causal effect by direct experience
(Fazio & Towles-Schwen, 1999). Most likely direct expe-
rience with an attitude object leads to a wider range of
attitudes toward that object. We note that even if there is no
moderation in the sense of different regression slopes, the
correlation between A and B would tend to be greater for
the group with the larger variance in the causal variable,
assuming that the two groups have the same residual vari-
ance in the outcome variable. The standard test of a differ-
ence in variance is the F test of homogeneity of variance.
5Measuring Y after X of course does not by itself guarantee that
X causes Y. There are likely third variables that affect them both
and that are likely responsible for the shared variance between
X and Y. Longitudinal data can help point to the causal direction
but they are no guarantee.
For more complicated problems, one might consider the
O’Brien test (1979).
The second type of moderation is that the causal effect
is stronger in one group than the other. This is the type
of moderation that is almost always assumed and typically
the only one that it is estimated and tested, using the test
of the product term in multiple regression. This test, of
course, presumes homogeneity of variance.
Third, the unexplained variance in B may vary across
groups. As we just said, in the typical test of moderation,
testing the product term in multiple regression, the unex-
plained variance in the two groups is assumed to be equal.
But this assumption is seldom tested. We think it would
be beneficial to test this assumption when conducting a
moderator analysis. If one found less unexplained variance in
one group, then it could be argued that the moderator may be
inhibiting the causal effects of other unmeasured variables on
B. This would seem to be the least plausible of the three expla-
nations but when it does occur, it can be very interesting.
If the direction of causation is unknown, we suggest
the following two-step procedure. First, we test if both
of the variances (the variances of the both B and A) are
equal across the levels of F. As we have argued, often
moderators generate or inhibit variance. If the variances do
not differ, then the standard approach to testing for mod-
eration, i.e., testing the partial effect of the product, can
be used, and it does not matter which variable is treated as
the outcome variable. In the presence of equal variances, a
statistically significant moderator effect would also mean
that the correlations between A and B across levels of the
moderator would also be unequal.
Our discussion in this section has focused on a categori-
cal moderator with just two levels, because the problems
are easier to illustrate in this case. However, what we have
said also applies to continuous moderators. When the direc-
tion of causation is unknown and when the homogeneity of
variance assumption is violated, such that either B or A
becomes more variable at higher levels of the moderator,
then different patterns of moderation may ensue depending
upon whether B or A is treated as the dependent variable in
the analysis of moderation.
Once again, we emphasize the importance of a causal the-
ory on which data analysis is based. Given a strong causal theory,
there is no ambiguity about how moderation is to be assessed.
Mediated Moderation
The final issue to be discussed in this section involves an
integration of the topic of the previous section, mediation,
with our current focus on moderation. Assuming that one
has a causal theory that predicts moderation of the effect
of A on B as a function of some variable F, one might also

have a causal theory in mind about the mediating process
that accounts for that moderation. Such a theory posits what
has been called mediated moderation (Edwards & Lambert,
2007; Muller, Judd, & Yzerbyt, 2005; Preacher, Rucker, &
Hayes, 2007; Wegener & Fabrigar, 2000) and in this sec-
tion, we present a brief overview of such.
To illustrate mediated moderation and its alternative
forms, we continue to use the attitude–behavior example,
assuming that the causal direction is known, from A to B.
Let us further consider two potential moderators of this
relationship: attitude strength (Krosnick & Petty, 1995)
and behavioral control (Ajzen & Madden, 1986). Stronger
attitudes should strengthen the attitude–behavior link.
Additionally, attitudes should lead to consistent behaviors
only when one has the ability or control to implement the
behavior. Finally, for this example, we consider behavioral
intentions as the variable that mediates the effects of atti-
tudes on behavior: Attitudes result in consistent behavioral
intentions that then translate into actual behaviors.
The causal models of Figure 4.4 underlie mediated mod-
eration and make clear the various ways in which it can
be produced. In the model at the top of the figure, there is a
causal effect of the attitude (A) on behavior (B) and this over-
all causal effect is moderated by F, either attitude strength or
behavioral control (or both). This overall moderation is indi-
cated by the arrow from F in the model to the causal path
linking A to B. In the model at the bottom of the figure, we
have added the mediator, M, which in the example is behav-
ioral intentions. We remind the reader of the very strong
assumptions that underlie the demonstration of mediation,
discussed in the earlier section of this chapter. Given the
overall moderation and fact that the causal effect of A on B
is assumed to be mediated by M, then one might reasonably
c
A B
F
F F
a M b mediation. The distinction is that in mediated moderation
c
A B
F as a function of some moderator. At a deep level, mediated
Figure 4.4 Mediated Moderation Models.
Moderation 123
expect that the moderation of the overall effect of A on B by
F results from the moderation by F of the indirect effect of
A on B via M. And there are two alternatives here, indicated
by the two places in which F moderates the two components
of the indirect effect in Figure 4.4. First, there may be mod-
eration of the causal connection between A and the mediator,
M (called path a in the mediation section). Second, the effect
of M on B may also be moderated by F (called path b). As
we will illustrate, the variable that may moderate these two
different indirect effects may be different. Thus, we use F to
indicate moderators in general rather than a specific variable.
Additionally, the residual direct effect of A on B (called path c)
may also be moderated, as indicated in Figure 4.4.
In terms of the two potential moderators of the attitude–
behavior relationship that we have used in the example, it
certainly seems reasonable that attitude strength would be
a moderator of the first link: The link between attitudes and
the intention to behave in attitude consistent ways should
be stronger for those whose attitudes are more important
and stronger. And it seems likely that behavioral control
would be a moderator of the second link: Intentions would
translate into behaviors only to the extent that the behavior
is under volitional control.
Muller et al. (2005) lay out the basic analytic models for
examining mediated moderation. In essence, these models
estimate and test whether there is significant moderation of
the overall effect of A and B, then whether the moderator
affects the component of the indirect effect from A to the
mediator and/or the component of the indirect effect from
the mediator to B. These models are straightforward exten-
sions of the basic mediational models except that the mod-
eration of the various effects on those models is estimated.
An important question is whether, in the presence of the
overall moderation of the treatment effect, that moderation
is fully accounted for by the moderation of the indirect
effect via the mediator, either on the effect from A to M
or on the effect from M to B. If the moderation of these
indirect effects is not found, then one can conclude that
the overall moderation is not in fact mediated, i.e., there
persists moderation of the residual effect of A on B, as
indicated by the effect of F on the A–B effect in the model
at the bottom of Figure 4.4.
Besides mediated moderation, there is also moderated
one starts with overall moderation of the treatment effect
and then asks whether that moderation is mediated. On the
other hand, in the case of moderated mediation, one starts
with an overall hypothesis about mediation and then exam-
ines whether that mediation, i.e., the indirect effect, varies
moderation and moderated mediation are analytically the
same. However, there is a conceptual difference in that in
124 Data Analysis in Social Psychology: Recent and Recurring Issues
mediated moderation one starts with overall moderation,
whereas with moderated mediation one starts with overall
mediation.
Regardless of whether one prefers conceptually to think
about moderation that is mediated (i.e., mediated mod-
eration) or mediation that is moderated (i.e., moderated
mediation), the fundamental expectation is that both sug-
gest that the indirect effect via a mediator is moderated.
And what is perhaps a more interesting distinction from
a theoretical point of view is where the moderation of the
indirect effect occurs. Is it that the effect of A on M is mod-
erated (as for example attitude strength moderates the atti-
tude–behavioral intention link) or that the effect of M on B
is moderated (as in our example behavioral control might
be expected to moderate the behavioral intention–behavior
link)? Or does a moderator affect both components of the
indirect effect? These distinctions are likely the most inter-
esting from a theoretical point of view.
EXTENDING THE ANALYSIS
OF REPEATED MEASURES
Most social psychologists have been trained to do experiments
and, as such, are thoroughly conversant with the analysis of
experimental data using factorial analysis of variance pro-
cedures. Additionally, due to the pioneering work of Jacob
Cohen and collaborators (Cohen, 1968; Cohen & Cohen,
1975; Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003), there is now wide-
spread recognition that the analysis of variance is simply
a special case of the general linear model. Accordingly, the
false dichotomy between analysis of variance and multiple
regression procedures has largely been eliminated, and social
psychologists have taken to heart the admonition not to force
continuous independent variables into discrete categorical
ones (via median splits, for instance) simply to fit them into
their analysis of variance programs (MacCallum, Zhang,
Preacher, & Rucker, 2002).
Additionally, there is now widespread recognition
that serious bias results when the general linear model is
applied without modification to data that exhibit depen-
dencies (Kenny & Judd, 1986). Dependencies potentially
exist whenever individual observations in a dataset can be
linked in some way to other observations in that dataset. For
instance, if we measure the same participant multiple times,
those observations are likely dependent upon each other
because they come from the same person. Dependencies
can also arise when data are collected from both members
of a pair, from members of small groups, from families,
and from any other sort of groupings that link individual
observations to each other. As we briefly discussed in the
introduction, such dependencies mean there are errors at
different levels (the individual observation level and the
level at which observations are linked) and these errors
would each have their own variance.
Social psychologists are routinely trained in the analy-
sis of data that are linked because they come from the same
participants who are repeatedly observed in different experi-
mental conditions (independent variables that vary “within
subjects”). Thus, “repeated measures” ANOVA or “mixed”
ANOVA procedures (where some independent variables
vary within subjects and others vary between them) are
procedures with which most social psychologists are quite
familiar. We refer to these in general as RANOVA. Although
widely used and appropriate under the right circumstances,
RANOVA has a series of requirements that may not be met.
First, it requires that the independent variables that vary within
participants have discrete categorical levels. And it is assumed
that each participant has a single score under each combina-
tion of levels of those independent variables, with no missing
data. Finally, it is assumed, when coupled with the homoge-
neity of variance assumption, that all the correlations of the
repeated measures across participants are the same, i.e., that
there is an equal degree of dependence across all measures
taken on the same participants. As we shall discuss, these
assumptions are unnecessarily restrictive and social psycholo-
gists should expand their horizons beyond RANOVA. In this
section, we initially describe RANOVA, then show how it can
be reconceptualized so that the limitations discussed above
can be overcome.
Conventional RANOVA
We begin with a simple design that can be handled by
RANOVA, and we show later how our approach can be gen-
eralized to handle cases that RANOVA cannot handle. For
illustrative purposes, assume we are interested in the role
of issue involvement in persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo,
1984). Participants are asked to read about two issues
(e.g., instituting comprehensive senior exams and requir-
ing senior theses from all students). For each issue, they
are given a persuasive communication but the strength of
the arguments in those communications varies between
participants. Half of the participants receive strong argu-
ments in favor of both issues and half receive relatively
weak arguments. Additionally, the personal relevance of
the issues varies within participants, such that one issue is
described as potentially being implemented on campus in
the next year while the other issue is described as poten-
tially being implemented on a different campus. Which
specific issue is the high or low relevance issue is of course
counterbalanced, as well as their order and, to simplify our

considerations, we presume that there are no effects of issue
and order. After reading the communications on each issue,
participants are asked to indicate how much in favor of the
issue they are. Accordingly, this is a two-factor experimen-
tal design, varying personal relevance within participants
and argument strength between them. Designs like this are
ubiquitous in experimental social psychology.
The between-subject factor, argument strength (A) has
levels A1 (strong arguments) and A2 (weak arguments). The
within-subject factor relevance (R) also has two levels R1
(high relevance issue) and R2 (low relevance issue). Assume
a single dependent variable measured in each condition (atti-
tude toward each issue), designated as Y1i and Y2i, measured
for R1 and R2 respectively. The standard RANOVA of the
data from such a design partitions the variation in these scores
into two components, one between-subjects, where the main
effect of A is tested, and the other within-subjects, where the
R main effect and the A  R interaction are tested. The result-
ing RANOVA source table is given in Table 4.2. Note that
the two portions of the table have different error terms, one
at the level of the individual observation and one at the level
of the participant, and their relative sizes are indicative of the
degree of dependence in the data induced by participants, as
indexed by the intraclass correlation (Shrout & Fleiss, 1979).
RANOVA Through the Analysis of Sums and
Differences
Most social psychologists are familiar with the RANOVA
decomposition, which we have just described. What is less
well known is that the exact same analysis is identically
conducted through regression procedures, analyzing two
composite variables computed as the sum of each partici-
pant’s two Y scores and as their difference (Judd et al., 2008).
This is conceptually important because once we realize that
RANOVA can be equivalently done by analyzing these two
composite variables, then it is a short further step to incor-
porate continuously varying independent variables. In the
Table 4.2 A 2  2 Repeated Measures ANOVA Source
Table (Factor A Between-subjects, Factor R Within-subjects)
Source DF
Between Subjects
A 1
Error between n2
Total between n1
Within Subjects
R 1
AR 1 ond model estimates the degree to which the mean
Error within n2
Total within n
Extending the Analysis of Repeated Measures 125
following, we first demonstrate the analysis using the com-
posite sum and difference scores and then we extend it.
If we assume that variation in each Y is partially
due to which A condition a participant is in (contrast
coded as X i
 ½ if A1 and X i
 ½ if A2 ), then we
have the following models for each observed depen-
dent variable:
Y1i
b10  b1X Xi  e1i
Y2 i
b20  b2 X Xi  e2 i
The intercepts ( b 10and b 20) in these models are the
unweighted means of the two variables, averaging
across levels of A , and the slopes ( b 1X and b 2X) equal
the difference in the means of each variable between the
two levels of A . From the two above equations we do
not get the usual RANOVA tests of the main effects
of A , R , and the A  R interaction. To obtain these,
we need to create the two composite variables, the
sum of the two Y variables, Y Si
Y 1i Y 2i and their dif-
ference, Y Di
Y 1i Y 2i. Given the above models, the
definitional models for the two composite variables,
Y Si and Y Di are:
YSi
(b10  b20 )  (b1X  b2 X ) Xi  (e1i  e2 i )
YDi
(b10  b20 )  (b1X  b2 X ) Xi  (e1i  e2 i )
Accordingly, if one estimates coefficients for the following
two equations:
YSi
bS 0  bSX Xi  eSi
YDi
bD 0  bDX Xi  eDi
the slope in the first model estimates the mean dif-
ference between the levels of A in the sum of the two
Y variables; its associated t statistic, when squared,
exactly equals the F statistic from the RANOVA test-
ing the main effect of factor A (i.e., are attitudes on
both issues more favorable with stronger arguments
than weaker ones?). The estimated intercept from the
second model estimates the mean difference between
the R conditions, on average across levels of A, and
its associated t statistic, once squared, is identical to the F
statistic for the main effect of the within-subject factor R
in the RANOVA (i.e., are attitudes more or less favor-
able on the high relevance issue than on the low relevance
issue?). And finally, the estimated slope of Xi in the sec-
difference between the levels of R differs as a function
of factor A. Its associated t statistic, again once squared,
126 Data Analysis in Social Psychology: Recent and Recurring Issues
is identical to the F statistic for the A  R interaction in
the RANOVA (i.e., does the effect of strong versus weak
arguments depend on issue relevance?). Thus, by com-
puting and analyzing the sum and difference we can
obtain the very same information as in RANOVA.
Continuous Predictors in Repeated
Measures Data
Reconceptualizing RANOVA in terms of the sum and dif-
ference has the advantage of pointing to ways in which
data that exhibit dependencies may be analyzed more flex-
ibly. First, it easily allows the inclusion of between-subject
independent variables that vary continuously. For instance,
maybe the between-subject variable is an individual differ-
ence measure such as the need for cognition (Cacioppo &
Petty, 1982). Rather than using a dichotomous variable, Xi,
to predict the sum and difference, we can use such a con-
tinuously varying predictor. Assuming that it has been
centered (Aiken & West, 1991),6 the interpretations for the
various regression coefficients that we have already given
continue to hold, paralleling those for the RANOVA, albeit
with a continuous between-subject independent variable.
This reconceptualization also makes possible the
straightforward inclusion of continuously measured covari-
ates that vary both between and within subjects. Imagine,
for example that we also measured how long each partici-
pant spent reading each of the two persuasive communications.
We might want to analyze the attitude scores on each issue
controlling for the reading time measures. As before, the
attitude scores, Y1i and Y2i, are the primary dependent vari-
ables of interest. The two reading time scores, the covariates,
we designate as Z1i and Z2i. Standard RANOVA proce-
dures do not readily incorporate such covariates.
We can model each of the two Y variables as a func-
tion of its respective Z variable and as a function of the
between-subjects factor A, coded as before by Xi:
6 In the earlier section on moderation, we discussed the impor-
tance of having variables that are components of the interaction
product have zero points that are meaningful. Sometimes this is
best accomplished by centering the variables, but there are also
other possible meaningful values that might be used. In the pres-
ent context, it is important that the independent variable have
a meaningful zero value because the intercept in the difference
model equals the predicted difference as a function of the within-
subject variable when the predictor equals zero. Fundamentally,
the issue here is the same as the issue discussed in the section on
moderation, because the intercept in the difference model esti-
mates the simple effect of the within-subject factor when the pre-
dictor variable equals zero.
Y1i
b10  b1Z Z1i  b1 X Xi  e1i
Y2 i
b20  b2 Z Z2 i  b2 X Xi  e2 i
Notice we are assuming that there are no cross-issue
effects, i.e., that reading time for one communication is
related to the attitude on only that issue and not to the atti-
tude on the other issue, once reading time on that other
issue is controlled. If we make the additional assumption
that the effects of the covariate, reading time, in each rele-
vance condition are the same, i.e., b1Z
b2Z
bZ (no reading
time by relevance interaction), a reasonable assumption in
such an experimental paradigm, then it can be shown that
the models for the analysis of the sums and differences of
the Y’s, YSi and YDi, respectively, are as follows:7
YSi
(b10  b20 )  (bZ )( Z1i  Z2 i )
 (b1X + b2 X ) Xi  (e1i  e2 i )
YDi
(b10  b20 )  (bZ )( Z1i  Z2 i )
 (b1 X  b2 X ) Xi  (e1i  e2 i )
Accordingly, one might estimate the following two
models:
YSi
bS 0  bSZ ZSUMi  bSX Xi  eSi
YDi
bD 0  bDZ ZDIFi  bDX Xi  eDi
where ZSi
Z1iZ2i and ZDi
Z1iZ2i.
In the first of these models the estimated slope for Xi
estimates the mean difference between the two A condi-
tions, controlling for or adjusting for mean reading time
for each participant (i.e., is there an attitude difference as
a function of strong versus weak arguments, on average
across both attitude issues, once the average reading time
for the two issues is controlled?). In the second model, the
intercept now estimates the predicted difference in the two
Y scores, Y1iY2i, between the two levels of the within-
subject factor R when the difference in reading times,
ZDi
Z1iZ2i, equals zero. In essence, we are now asking
whether attitudes are more favorable for the higher rele-
vance issue once the reading times for the high versus low
7 Itis empirically unlikely that the two cross-condition effects
would be exactly zero and that the effects of reading time will be
exactly equivalent in each relevant condition. If neither of these
assumptions holds, then the sum and difference Y scores need
to be modeled as a function of both the sum of the Z’s and their
difference. This complicates these models but it does not change
the fundamental interpretation of the coefficients in these models
that we give below. A full exposition of these more complicated
models, not making the simplifying assumptions we make here,
is given in Judd, Kenny, and McClelland (2001).

relevance issues are made equivalent.8 And the estimated
slope for the Xi predictor in the second model continues to
estimate the A  R interaction, but this time holding con-
stant the difference between the two reading times: Does
argument strength affect attitudes more for the high rel-
evance issue even when we control for the linear effect of
reading time? Finally, we can also interpret the coefficients
for the two Z variables in both models. In the sum model,
we are asking whether mean reading times are related to
mean attitude scores, averaging across the two relevance
conditions, within levels of the between-subject A factor.
And in the difference model, the estimated slope for the Z
difference variable examines whether reading time differ-
ences as a function of relevance are predictive of attitude
differences.
The example that we have just explored incorporates
continuous predictor variables that vary between partici-
pants, either measured once or measured at each level of a
dichotomous within-subject independent variable. We can
now extend our within-subject independent variable so that
it becomes possible to treat it as continuously measured as
well. We begin this extension by thinking first about the
analysis of a within-subject factor that is in fact categori-
cal, but that is an ordered categorical one having many levels,
such as time (T). Each participant is measured once each
day on some outcome variable for a total of 10 days. So
we now have 10 Y scores from each participant, Yki where
k represents time and i represents participant. Each par-
ticipant is, as before, under one of the two levels of the
between-subject factor A. So, for instance, we might be
examining persuasion on a single issue over time (10 days)
as a function of argument strength (factor A).
Again, we could conduct a traditional RANOVA on the
resulting data, resulting in the source table contained in
Table 4.3. Note that the degrees of freedom for both the T
main effect and the A  T interaction equal 9 and the error
term for testing these two effects has 9(n – 2) degrees of
freedom. If there are more than two levels of the repeated
measures, as there are here, we encounter the likely viola-
tion of the assumption that all pairs of observations mani-
fest the same degree of dependence.9
8 Note that the zero value of this Z difference score is theoretically
meaningful—it represents the situation where the two reading
scores are equal to each other. Therefore, we are not centering
this predictor because it already has a meaningful zero point.
9 In actuality, the assumption is that each possible difference we
might compute among pairs of the S has the same variability across
participants and thus that we can use a pooled or combined error
term in the within-subject portion of the source table. We also note
that we can, should we wish to, conduct a multivariate analysis of
variance, which does not make this restrictive assumption.
Extending the Analysis of Repeated Measures 127
Table 4.3 A 2  9 Repeated Measures ANOVA Source
Table (Factor A Between-subjects, Factor T Within-subjects)
Source df
Between Subjects
A 1
Error between n–2
Total between n–1
Within Subjects
T 9
AT 9
Error within 9(n – 2)
Total within 9n
If we were to specify particular within-subject differ-
ences in which we were most interested, we could test each
one of these individually, allowing different error terms for
each. Suppose, for instance, in the present example, that
we were only interested in linear change in the Yki’s over
time. Assuming that these are taken from 10 adjacent days,
we could compute a difference among them using contrast
weights for the linear orthogonal polynomial for 10 obser-
vations: 4.5, 3.5, 2.5, 1.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1.5, 2.5, 3.5,
and 4.5 (i.e., time centered). We call these values of Tk.
We now have one linear difference score for each partici-
pant, YLDi (equaling kTkYki ) and both this difference vari-
able and the sum of the Yki scores, YSi (
⌺kYki), could be
regressed on the Xi variable that contrast codes the levels of
factor A:
YSi
bS 0  bS1 Xi  eSi
YLDi
bLD 0  bLD1 Xi  eLDi
As before, the slope in the first model estimates the main
effect of factor A, collapsing across all ten levels of factor
T, time. The intercept in the second model now estimates
the linear main effect of T, examining linear changes on
average in the Yki scores over time. And the slope in the
second equation estimates the degree to which those linear
changes over time differ for the two levels of factor A, i.e.,
the linear time by A interaction.
The conceptual step from this analysis to one that
involves within-subject predictors that vary continuously
comes with the realization that the linear time difference
that we just discussed YLDi, as well as the composite sum
variable, YSi, emerge equivalently if we were to compute a
separate regression equation for each participant, regress-
ing his or her 10 attitude scores, Yki, on a predictor variable
that codes time, using the exact same values for that predic-
tor that went into computing the linear polynomial differ-
ence, i.e., Tk. To understand these individual regressions,
imagine the data for a generic participant. There are two
128 Data Analysis in Social Psychology: Recent and Recurring Issues
variables for this participant, Yki and a variable called Tki.
We estimate a linear regression model for this participant
across his or her 10 observations, treating Yki as the criterion
and Tki as the predictor. It can be shown that the resulting
intercept from this regression equals that participant’s mean
Yki score, Y 10 , and the slope equals that participant’s YLDi
Si
score divided by constant, Y ∑ T . Thus each participant’s
LDi
2 els of factor A); finally, the interpretation of the slope in
k k
slope and intercept from their within-subject regression
model are perfectly correlated with their sum and dif-
ference scores, respectively, and these (the intercept and
slope) could be used as the dependent measures in the
between-subject regression models that were used before.
In general, for each participant, we estimate the follow-
ing model
Yki
a0 i  a1i Tki  eki
In this model, a0i represents each participant’s intercept
(the mean of all 10 attitude scores for that participant),
a1i is each participant’s slope (the difference in their pre-
dicted Yki scores as a linear function of time), and eki
is a residual or error in predicting each participant’s
individual Yki scores as a linear function of time. We
have intentionally used different letters to represent
the regression coefficients in this model from the ear-
lier models in order to differentiate the levels at which
each model holds. This model is estimated at the level of
each individual participant, estimated across his or her
observations; the earlier models were estimated across
participants. Note also in this model that the intercept
and slope have i subscripts, thus indicating that these are
estimated for each participant and, accordingly, vary
across them. This model is commonly referred as the
level-1 growth-curve equation in the multilevel model-
ing literature. “Growth curve” here simply means that
we are examining each individual’s change over time,
admittedly in this model simply the linear change over
time. Nonlinear time effects could be added to the model
to make it more truly a growth “curve” model.
As we have already explained, each participant’s esti-
mated intercept and slope are completely redundant with
his or her YSi and YLDi composite variables. Accordingly,
these estimates can be modeled as a function of the
between-subject predictor:
a0 i
b00  b01 Xi  u0 i
a1i
b10  b11 Xi  u1i
In these models, we have used u’s to indicate the errors or
residuals. These two equations are called the level-2 model
in multilevel modeling. The interpretation of the slope
of Xi in the first model remains what it was in the model
where YSi was the criterion (i.e., the main effect of fac-
tor A—strong versus weak arguments); the interpretation
of the intercept in the second model remains what it was
in the model where YLDi was the criterion (i.e., the linear
time difference in attitudes on average across the two lev-
the second model also remains what it was in the model
where YLDi was the criterion (i.e., the linear time by factor
A interaction: Are the linear changes over time in attitudes
different as a function of argument strength?).
Multilevel Modeling
So far, we have broadened traditional RANOVA by using
sums and differences. We have shown that the sum and dif-
ference parallel an intercept and a slope that is estimated
for each participant. There is an even more general esti-
mation strategy of repeated measures data, called mul-
tilevel modeling or MLM. This method—which has also
been called hierarchical linear modeling, mixed models,
and random coefficient modeling—permits the analysis of
data that involve continuously varying predictors within
subjects, that relaxes the assumption that each participant
is measured once and only once under each level of the
within-subject independent variable, and that can handle
random missing data (MCAR, see the later section of this
chapter on missing data). Moreover, MLM is more flex-
ible and more efficient than the computation of sums and
differences. We assume that each participant has multiple
observations, Yki, and that these have associated with them
values on various predictor variables that also vary within
subjects, e.g., T1ki, T2ki. These can be measured continu-
ously or categorically and may interact with each other.
Individuals can vary in how often they are measured and
the levels of the various predictor variables under which they
are measured. Then models are estimated at two levels, one at
the level of the individual, across that individual’s k obser-
vations, estimating that individual’s intercept and slopes.
Then at the second level, across participants, models are
estimated in which these intercepts and slopes are mod-
eled as a function of predictor variables that vary across
them. These person-level predictors can be categorical or
continuous.
Although this very general multilevel approach to the
analysis of dependent data may be done in a piecemeal
fashion, using standard multiple regression procedures, it
is optimally done using MLM. This approach uses algo-
rithms that estimate the models at both levels simultaneously
and that optimally weight the individual observations
(Kenny et al., 1998). Unlike the piecemeal approach of

sums and difference that uses least squares, MLM typically
uses restricted maximum likelihood. Details on how to do
this estimation are now available in many different sources
(e.g., Hox, 2002; Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002; Snijders &
Bosker, 1999).
To make clear the estimation at both levels simultane-
ously as done by MLM, consider as before the case where
we have two levels, person being level 2 and time being
level 1. The model for each person, called the level-1
model, is as follows:
Yki
a0 i  a1iTki  eki
where a0i represents each participant’s intercept and a1i is
each participant’s slope. We can treat each random vari-
able in their level-2 equations:
a0 i
b00  b01 X i  u0 i
a1i
b10  b11 X i  u1i
Substituting these level-2 equations into the level-1
model yields the combined equation for person i at obser-
vation k:
Yki
(b00  b01 Xi  u0 i ) (b10  b11 Xi  u1i )Tki  eki

b00  b01 Xi  b10 Tki  b11 Xi Tki  Tki u1i  u0 i  eki
It is this latter model that is actually estimated by MLM
procedures, but it often helps to think of the model as two
submodels, a level-1 and a level-2 submodel. Note that in
many ways this is a standard moderation model. The esti-
mated b00 is the predicted value of Yki when Xi and Tki are
zero; note if Xi and Tki are centered then b00 is like a grand
mean. The estimate b01 represents the effect of Xi, the level-
2 predictor, when Tki is zero; the estimate b10 is the effect of
Tki, the level-1 predictor, when Xi is zero; and the estimate
b11 represents the interaction of Tki and Xi.
Importantly, in this model there is not one random error
term but three, u1i, u0i and eki these can have different vari-
ances and two of them, u1i and u0i, may be correlated with
each other. Thus, returning to a central point made in the
introduction to this chapter, these models allow multiple
random errors for individual observations, at the various
levels under which those observations are nested. Thus,
the inherent limitations in assuming a single set of errors
are avoided. Moreover the interpretation of these variances
can be important. Consider the variance in the slopes of
effect of Tki on Yi. It tells us whether the effect of Tki var-
ies by participant, i.e., a participant by Tki interaction. In
essence, the variance tells us whether there is some type of
moderation of the Tki effect across participants.
Extending the Analysis of Repeated Measures 129
While those who use RANOVA can benefit from learn-
ing MLM, multilevel modelers can benefit from concepts
from RANOVA. As an example, we return to a growth
curve model and consider first the test of the slope. As we
have shown above, in RANOVA the slope is computed for
each participant, and we can compute the average slope
and test its significance using the variance in slopes as
the error term. In RANOVA, we can treat non-linearity
as an error term for the variance in slopes. In MLM, the
researcher has a choice to treat the slope as either fixed
or random. Treating the slope as random implies that
the slope interacts with person. If the slope parameter is
mistakenly treated as fixed when it is random, there is an
increased probability of making a Type I error in the test
of the slope. Because the test of variance of the slopes is
a test of moderation, it has low power. Thus, very often,
we may falsely not reject the null hypothesis of no slope
variance (i.e., make a Type II error), which will lead us to
falsely reject the null hypothesis that the average slope is
zero (i.e., make a Type I error). The most conservative test
of the average slope is to presume that slopes are random.
With MLM, the researcher has a great deal of flexibility
in testing assumptions about the correlational structure of
the errors. Unfortunately, many MLM researchers do not
avail themselves of that flexibility. We suggest the follow-
ing strategy. One might estimate the growth curve model
above. Then one compares the fit of two models.10 One is
the standard growth curve model with random slopes and
intercepts. The other is the model in which slope and inter-
cept are fixed, but the error structure can take on any form.
The later model, in which the all the error variances and all
the covariances are free, is the more general model. What
we would hope to show is that the simpler model, the stan-
dard growth model, fits as well as the more complicated
model.
A final point is that traditionally MLM treats time points
as nested within persons, whereas RANOVA treats time as
crossed with person. What is lost by treating the design
as nested is the main effect of time. Note in Table 4.3,
there is the main effect of time that has 9 df. Traditional
MLM estimates only one effect of time, the linear one. If
there were other effects of time, which there often are, the
model would be misspecified. It is possible to adapt MLM
to the analysis of crossed designs (commonly called cross-
classified in the MLM literature) and such an approach
should be considered instead of the more traditional nested
10 Agrowth-curve model may not appear to be a nested under a
model in which the error variance-covariance matrix is free, but
as discussed by Singer and Willet (2003), it is.
130 Data Analysis in Social Psychology: Recent and Recurring Issues
approach. One advantage of using the crossed approach is
that it is possible to allow for the effect of another indepen-
dent variable (e.g., the effect of stress on mood) to interact
with time as well as person.
Our goal in this section is to encourage social psy-
chologists to think about the analysis of data that exhibit
dependencies in ways that considerably extend the typi-
cal RANOVA models that we all have learned well. At the
very least, we would hope that researchers expand their
analyses of repeated measures data by analyzing sum and
difference scores and thereby incorporating continuously
varying independent variables as between-subject predic-
tors in such models. For even more flexibility, we strongly
encourage readers to expand their analyses of data that
exhibit dependencies, or that exhibit a multilevel struc-
ture, by using multilevel modeling procedures. The fact
that these procedures allow errors to be at multiple lev-
els represents a very significant analytic advance. Again,
we recommend that interested readers consult more thor-
ough treatments of multilevel models (e.g., Bickel, 2007;
Hox, 2002; Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002; Snijders & Bosker,
1999).
Mediation in Repeated Measures
and Multilevel Data
With repeated measures data, in which each participant is
measured once in each condition, and where there is some
hypothesized mediator measured in each condition as well,
the approach we outlined earlier for the analysis of sum
and difference scores can be used to examine mediation. In
essence, one asks whether the difference in the dependent
variable between conditions is reduced once the within-
subject difference on the potential mediator is controlled.
This approach to analyzing mediation in repeated measures
data is thoroughly explicated in Judd et al. (2001).
When we have many repeated measures and we apply
MLM, one can estimate mediational models with appro-
priate level-1 and level-2 models. A number of recent
papers have considered such multilevel mediational analy-
ses (Bauer, Preacher, & Gill, 2006; Kenny, Korchmaros,
& Bolger, 2003, Krull & MacKinnon, 1999). The compli-
cations in such multilevel mediation models derive from
the fact that the various variables in the models may be
measured at the same or different levels. If the variables in
the mediating model are measured at level 1 (at different
times within the same individual in the repeated measures
example we have been using), then the slopes that estimate
components of the indirect effect and the direct effect may
be random variables that vary between persons. This then
introduces complications because these different effects
may also covary across persons.
Consider a model is which all three variables, the out-
come Yik, the mediator Mik, and independent variable Xik, all
vary over time within individuals. For instance, we might
be interested in exercise behavior and subjective well-
being. The treatment (amount of exercise) varies within
individuals over days. We assume that everyone exercises
at least some each day. We also measure the outcome, sub-
jective well-being each day. Additionally, we might have
a mediator that is measured each day, such as mood while
exercising. In this case, we can estimate the mediational
model slopes within each participant: ci would be the esti-
mated overall effect of exercise on subjective well-being
for the ith participant; ai would be the effect of exercise on
mood for that participant; bi would be the partial effect
of mood on subjective well-being controlling for exercise;
and c´i would be the partial effect of exercise on subjective
well-being controlling for mood. Because these effects
in the mediational model, ci, ai, bi, and c´,i are random
variables that may vary across individuals, they may also
covary. As Bauer et al. (2006) and Kenny et al. (2003) have
shown, the fundamental equality that underlies mediational
models (c  c
ab) does not then hold because of the cova-
riance between ai and bi: People who show a larger effect of
exercise on mood while exercising may also show a larger
effect of mood while exercising on well-being. Bauer et al.
(2006) have developed a way to estimate this covariance.
If Xi varies only between individuals (e.g., an intervention
to increase exercise), and is accordingly a level-2 variable,
whereas the other variables in the mediational model, Mik,
and Yik, vary across level-1 units as well, then bi would be a
random variable, varying across level-2 units, but the other
effects in the mediational model would not be. And finally,
if Yik is the only variable at level 1 while Xi and Mi vary
across only level-2 units, then the mediational equality can be
expected to hold.
Again, it is worth re-emphasizing the very strong assump-
tions that underlie the assessment of mediation. While a
multilevel mediational analysis can certainly be conducted,
the multilevel nature of the data in no way makes those
causal assumptions any easier to make. For instance, for
the exercise example, we would have to assume that being
in a good mood does not cause people to exercise more or
that those factors other than exercise that result in better
daily moods do not also increase daily estimates of subjec-
tive well-being.
MISSING DATA
Our studies almost always have missing data, but we often
act as though they do not. In recent years, considerable the-
oretical and analytic progress has been made in the handling

of missing data. Most social psychologists are unfamiliar
with these important developments. In this section, we pro-
vide a brief introduction. We begin with a typology of missing
data. We then discuss strategies for handling missing data.
Finally, we discuss viewing other issues as missing
data issues.
We consider the following as a running example. A
researcher studies 200 people who are randomly assigned
to a treatment and control group, a variable we designate
as T. There is a set of covariates measured at the pretest,
which are designated here as X variables. There are miss-
ing data: Ten percent of the pretest sample (20 people) do
not show up for the posttest, Y. This example is much sim-
pler than most examples in that there are only missing data
on a single variable, the outcome variable. Nonetheless, it
can illustrate the major points that we want to make.
Typology of Missing Data
Probably the most important contribution to the theory of
missing data is the Rubin (1987; Little & Rubin, 2002)
typology of missing data. Unfortunately, the terms of
this typology can be confusing, not only to practitioners
but even to methodologists and statisticians. They are nev-
ertheless critical to the understanding of missing data. The
typology focuses on the process or the causal mechanism
by which the missing data were created. As is to be seen,
the focus is on the variable(s) that bring about or cause the
missing data. We need to introduce a variable that social
psychologists do not often consider: missingness. For each
variable in the data set, there is a variable that equals one
if the case is missing and zero if it is not missing. For our
running example, we need only consider the missingness
of the outcome variable. Essentially, the different types of
missing data in this typology concentrate on the model
underlying the missingness variable(s), i.e., what causes a
score on a variable to be missing.
The first type in the Rubin typology is Missing Completely
at Random or MCAR. Here the data are lost by a random
process. For instance, suppose it were entirely random who
shows up for the posttest and who does not. Thus, the vari-
able that determines missingness is random (i.e., indepen-
dent) with respect to the other variables in the model. We can
empirically evaluate MCAR by running a logistic regression
in which we predict showing up at the posttest versus not (our
missingness variable) using the X variables and T as predic-
tors. In principle, none of the X variables or T should predict
missingness. Little (1988) provides a general method across
multiple missingness variables for testing whether the data are
consistent with the MCAR assumption and his procedure is
now implemented in many computer packages (e.g., SPSS’s
Missing Values).
Missing Data 131
The second type is Missing at Random or MAR. The data
loss is non-random, but missingness is due to a variable that
is measured. The name for this type may seem a little strange
because we start by saying the loss is non-random. But in
fact it is random once we control for that variable that causes
missingness. Imagine for our example that gender determines
who shows up for the posttest and who does not. It does not
determine it perfectly, rather it is the only variable that has
a systematic effect on showing up for the posttest. Further,
assume that gender is one of the X variables measured at the
pretest. Thus, the variable that determines missingness is one
of the variables that are measured. When we run the logistic
regression, we would find that gender would be a predictor
of missingness. We would then need to control for gender in
subsequent analyses.
The third type is Missing Not at Random or MNAR,
which is sometimes also called Nonignorable Missing
Data. Here, the variable causing the missing data is either
not measured or is itself missing. An important special case
is when the variable on which observations are missing,
Y, is the cause of whether data are missing. For instance, it
might be that people who would score low on the posttest,
Y, are less likely to show up for that testing. Alternatively,
if gender caused missingness and Y, but we did not mea-
sure gender, then we would have MNAR.
A serious difficulty arises from the fact that MNAR and
MAR are not empirically distinguishable. For instance,
presume that we have MNAR and there is an unmeasured
variable, for example “motivation to change,” that deter-
mines missingness. Imagine also that this variable is corre-
lated with gender. If we ran a logistic regression, we would
find that gender predicts missingness, but gender is not the
variable that truly causes missingness, rather it is motiva-
tion to change that causes missingness. We need to have the
correct model of missingness. If we do and if that model is
MAR, the results from the logistic regression would give
us the right answer. But if we do not, and the correct model
is MNAR, the logistic model can lead us astray and make
us think that we have MAR.
Strategies for Handling Missing Data
We consider the following strategies: case deletion, imputa-
tion, and estimation without imputation. Finally, we outline a
method with which most social psychologists are unfamiliar:
multiple imputation.
Case Deletion
The old-fashioned way of handling missing data is to
delete missing cases. One common strategy is what is
traditionally called listwise deletion. The rule is that if a
case has missing data on one or more variables, the case is
132 Data Analysis in Social Psychology: Recent and Recurring Issues
missing entirely. There are several limitations with listwise
deletion. First, it can result in the loss of too much data.
Particularly when the study involves combining many
sources of data (e.g., a multiwave longitudinal study), the
listwise-deleted data set may be too small for a meaningful
statistical analysis. Second, if the loss of data is not MAR,
the sample means and variances resulting from listwise
deletion can be highly unrepresentative.11 For instance for
our example, if men are more likely not to show up at the
posttest than women and men score lower than women,
then the posttest mean would end up being inflated due to
listwise deletion.
Imputation
With imputation, the researcher substitutes a value for the
missing case. Most social psychologists use mean substitu-
tion for data imputation. With mean substitution, we take
as the posttest value for the missing cases the mean of cases
for which we do not have missing data. Mean substitution,
though widely used, is problematic for several reasons.
First, it assumes, probably incorrectly, MCAR, because
the assumption is that the missing cases are just like all the
non-missing cases on average. Second, mean substitution
results in greatly reduced variances. That is, the variance
of the posttest is necessarily underestimated because all of
the missing cases have values on the posttest that equal
the posttest mean. This will typically result in inflated
Type I error rates. In general, mean substitution provides
unbiased estimates only for means, and only then when
missingness is MCAR. Even under MCAR, mean substi-
tution gives biased estimates for all other parameters (e.g.,
variances and regression coefficients).
A second alternative is to use multiple regression12 to esti-
mate the missing values. This strategy, which assumes MAR,
involves using available data to predict the posttest via mul-
tiple regression. Then using the coefficients of the regression
equation, we can obtain predicted scores for the missing cases.
This method is much better than mean substitution because it
provides unbiased estimates of covariances. However, regres-
sion derived estimates suffer from the same problem as mean
substitution: The imputed values have too little variability.
We can obtain statistically better and more general estimates
of missing values using EM algorithm (Graham, Cumsille, &
Elek-Fisk, 2003; Schafer, 1997) but this method too suffers from
the problem of the imputed values having too little variability.
11 However, listwise deletion tends to perform as well as the better
methods we describe later for estimating regression coefficients
(Graham & Donaldson, 1993).
12 We are assuming that all the variables with missing data are
measured at the interval level of measurement. If not, the strategy
would need to be modified.
A third alternative for imputation, and better than the
last set, is to take the multiple regression or maximum
likelihood estimates of missing values, and add to them
a random score that would produce the correct estimate
of variability. For instance, if we were using a multiple
regression equation to predict posttest scores, we would
obtain an estimate of mean square error or the variances
of the residuals. We would then take our regression esti-
mate of a missing value and add to it a random normal
score whose variance would equal the mean square error.
We refer to this method as stochastic imputation. This
method produces unbiased estimates of means, covari-
ances, and variances. Note that this method would yield a
somewhat different estimate each time it is performed. Thus,
if the analysis were redone, there would be differences, hope-
fully small, in the results, because the imputed data change.
Multiple Imputation
With stochastic imputation, as just discussed, a random num-
ber is added to the score. Thus, one source of sampling error
is the imputation itself and so the process of estimating
the missing case creates “error.” With multiple imputation,
we estimate the sampling variance due to imputation. As the
name suggests, we create several different data sets, each with
different imputed values. We can then measure how much the
results change due to imputation. Multiple imputation was
originally suggested by Rubin (1987) and many important
contributions have been made by Schafer (1997). Graham et
al. (2003) and Sinharay, Stern, and Russell (2001) have writ-
ten introductions to the method for psychologists.
There are four steps in multiple imputation:
Step 1: We first impute the missing cases using a stochastic
method.
Step 2: We do the statistical analysis using the imputed
values and save the standard errors and estimates of
relevant parameters.
Step 3: We redo the first two steps m times. (How large m
must be depends on how much missing data there are.)
Step 4: We pool estimates and we pool the standard errors and we
add to the standard error the variability due to imputation.
Obviously, multiple imputation is computationally inten-
sive, but it is better than single imputation methods to handle
missing data that is MAR. Increasingly, multiple imputation
is an option that is becoming available in software packages.
As discussed by Schafer and Graham (2002), it is becoming
a very useful method for the handling of missing data.
Handling Missing Data Without Imputation
It is possible to handle missing data without either listwise
deletion or imputation. A simple example is what happens

when one has a scale with multiple items and one or more,
but not all, of the items are missing for any person. To form
a scale score, we use the available items and compute an
average across them. The general principle of this approach
is that we do not impute the missing values at all. Rather,
we use all the available data to obtain estimates of the rel-
evant variables or parameters of the model. In this case, the
relevant variable is the average score on the variables in
the scale for all non-missing items.
A second more complicated analysis is growth curve
modeling. Imagine 50 persons who are measured at 30 times,
but for some people one or more time points are missing.
However, all persons have three or more time points. We
can then estimate a slope and intercept for each person
without needing to impute any of the missing cases. Thus,
the slope and intercept for each person (the relevant param-
eters) can be estimated, and there is no imputation of the
missing observations.
A third example is the use of Full Information Maximum
Likelihood (FIML; Arbuckle, 1996) estimation within
Structural Equation Modeling. We could apply FIML to
our missing posttest data set. What this procedure does
is treat the data as if there were two “groups,” one with a
posttest and one without. It would then use the informa-
tion in the two variance–covariance matrices with means to
estimate the effects. Again, there is no imputation of raw
scores. Graham et al. (2003) highly recommend the use of
FIML for missing data and see it as effective as multiple
imputation.
Missing Data Viewed More Generally
Modern thinking about missing data has greatly extended
the way we can think about missingness. That is, the usual
conception of missing data is that we had hoped to gather
all the data, but somehow we failed to do so. The more
modern approach is to think that sometimes we gather all
the data we want to, but there were data that we could have
gathered but we decided not to. We briefly discuss two
such applications of this new approach: design differences
and causal inference.
Consider the difference between a between-subjects
design in which participants are in one of two conditions
and a within-subjects design in which participants are in
both conditions. We could view the between-subjects
design as a within-subjects design with missing data. In a
randomized experiment, for instance, we might think that
subjects in the experimental condition have missing data
in the control condition and those in the control condition
have missing data in the experimental condition. Assuming
that subjects have been randomly assigned, then we can
assume that the data are MCAR.
Invariance of Effects 133
Similarly, some counterbalancing designs involve stra-
tegically chosen missing data. Consider a design in which
we counterbalance experimental condition with stimulus. We
might use what is called a Latin-square design to do this. Such
a design does not fully cross the stimuli with all experimental
conditions, rather the stimuli are ordered and then the order-
ing is crossed with conditions. In such a study, we do not
create all possible combinations of stimuli and condition. We
strategically create “missing data” because the model that we are
interested in does not require the gathering of such data.
Missing data play a role in causal inference. Consider
the quasi-experimental design known as the regression dis-
continuity design (Shadish, Cook, & Campbell, 2002). In
this design, persons are assigned to the treatment or con-
trol conditions not randomly but based on their scores on
some X variable: those above a certain value of X receive
the treatment and those below that value of X are in the
control group. For instance, one might evaluate the effects
of being on the dean’s list on subsequent academic perfor-
mance. Prior GPA determines who is on the dean’s list and
who is not, and there is a fixed cut-point for making this
decision. In this design, we do not observe treated persons
who score below the cut-point and control persons who
score above it. We do not observe them because treatment
is deliberately confounded with X. But because we mea-
sure X and because we assume that X has a certain form of
relationship with the outcome, usually linear, we can con-
trol for the confounding effects of X. With the regression
discontinuity design, we have missing data, but we make
causal assumptions about the relationship between X with
the treatment variable and the outcome.
In general, we think that social psychologists need to
be much more creative in how they deal with missing data.
This will require approaching missingness using modern
methods. Finally, thinking about missing data creatively
can lead to new insights about design decisions that are
made in the conduct of research.
INVARIANCE OF EFFECTS
The final topic that we wish to explore in this chapter is
the concept of invariance. Numerous previous parts of the
chapter are related to the issue of invariance; our goal in
this section is to bring that work into sharper focus by
defining exactly what we mean by invariance, exploring
its various forms, and arguing for a deeper appreciation for
invariance assumptions that are routinely made, and occa-
sionally explored, in social psychological research.
At the core of inferential statistics is the question of
invariance. The invariance question is the following: Across
what entities are we making generalizations? Alternatively,
134 Data Analysis in Social Psychology: Recent and Recurring Issues
the question is for what entities does the model apply, in the
sense that the model parameters are invariant across them?
Most typically, social psychologists worry about general-
ization across participants, but in fact there are many other
types of entities across which we might wish to generalize.
These include, in addition to participants, the situations,
the times, the variables, the experimental stimuli, and
any other factor across which one might like to general-
ize some set of results. Lee Cronbach, in developing what
he and others have called Generalizability Theory, referred
to these various factors as “facets” across which gener-
alizability might be sought (Cronbach, Gleser, Nanda, &
Rajaratnam, 1972; Shavelson & Webb, 1991).
It is the parameter estimates that we obtain from a spe-
cific dataset that we would like to be able to generalize.
Those estimates derive from a dataset collected from par-
ticular participants, in a particular context, at a particular
time, examining a particular set of measured variables.
Such parameter estimates include means, variances, struc-
tural coefficients (i.e., slopes, including mean differences),
and measurement coefficients (i.e., factor loadings).
In the conduct and reporting of research results, there
are three ways in which we may deal with (or not deal with)
the question of the invariance of our parameter estimates.
First, there are many occasions when we have an explicit
hypothesis that invariance does not hold and we explicitly
test for the absence of invariance (i.e., we hypothesize that
parameter estimates vary in a specific way and we examine
this hypothesis). For instance, we anticipate that two groups
of participants have different means. Or we anticipate growth
(e.g., means change over time). Or we anticipate mod-
eration (i.e., that the slope linking an independent to a
dependent variable depends on particular participant
groups or contexts). Or we anticipate that individual vari-
ables have different degrees of reliability in different sam-
ples. The key feature is that there is a specific hypothesis
that model parameters vary in a particular way and that
hypothesis is evaluated.
A second way in which the invariance question is dealt
with is when we expect an invariance to hold and we
explicitly base our conclusions on tests of that invariance.
This occurs whenever we estimate a standard error of a
parameter estimate across some set of entities (most typi-
cally participants). For instance, in testing the null hypoth-
esis that a particular slope or effect differs from zero, we
derive its standard error across some set of entities and test
that null hypothesis. Our conclusion, given that the hypoth-
esis is rejected, is that we can generalize that slope across
the population of entities from which we have sampled.
And the final way in which the invariance question is
dealt with is when we presume invariance, either explic-
itly or implicitly, and never examine it. This happens all
the time in social psychological research where we assume
that our results can be generalized across stimulus materials,
contexts, times, and cultures without explicitly thinking about
whether such generalization is actually appropriate. All too
often the only sort of invariance that we expect and exam-
ine is invariance across participants. There are many other
factors or types of entities across which invariance ought
to be examined.
Now that we have developed a general overview of what
we mean by invariance and the alternative ways in which it
is typically dealt with, we want to turn to several particular
recurrent issues in social psychological research where we
think invariance tends to be problematically assumed and
generally not examined.
Failing to Examine Invariance
In this section, we consider three different situations in
which social psychologists often assume invariance but fail
to examine that assumption: invariance across items, con-
federates, and situations.
First, whenever one uses multiple questionnaire items
and then collapses these into a single total scale score, one
is implicitly assuming invariance across the items. By this
we mean that all of the items in that scale are assumed to
measure the same thing and that the effects of the inde-
pendent variable across those items are invariant. It is the
case that researchers are somewhat sensitive to this sort
of invariance assumption, as they are likely to report the
reliability of the resulting scale scores. Additionally, they
might conduct a factor analysis to establish their unidi-
mensionality. The important issue, however, in terms of
invariance is whether other variables relate to each of the
items in the same way, which is to say that the effects of
the independent variables are invariant across items.
Another situation in which invariance is typically not
examined occurs when social psychologists use confeder-
ates. Consider the classic case in social psychology where
one or more experimental confederates might be used to
examine behavioral manifestations of prejudice directed
toward minority group members. One might use confed-
erates, who are members of a minority group, to examine
how comfortable participants are interacting with minor-
ity group members. In the sense just described, confeder-
ates can be seen as “items” and the question of invariance
across them becomes important. Typically, researchers pay
attention only to the random variation across participants
when they should also be paying attention to random vari-
ation that may be due to the confederates. All too often
experimenters assume invariance across confederates who
are sampled from the minority group, but they are unable
to test for that invariance because they have just a single

confederate. And when they do have multiple confederates,
they do not include confederate in the statistical model. It
is crucial to demonstrate that effects are invariant across
confederates in this example.
It is not just items and confederates for which we assume
but fail to examine invariance. Ironically, we social psy-
chologists, who sometimes pride ourselves on making clear
the power of the situation, fail to fully examine invariance
across situations. Consider the following example: an inves-
tigation of the factors that lead people to help others. An
investigator has a model that victim need (N) and provider
resources (R) both affect helping (H). The investigator
writes a single scenario about a hypothetical case, describ-
ing the hypothetical victim and provider. This scenario is
then read by all participants who provide judgments of N,
R, and H. Then, a model is estimated to measure the effect
of N and R on H using participant as the unit of analy-
sis. Note that both N and R are variables that are likely to
vary much more over situations than over participants. As
a result, one should be asking whether effects are invariant
across situations rather than across participants. A better
research design would be the following: One writes many
scenarios. One gives these scenarios to participants13 and
then one can examine the effects of N and R on H at three
different levels of analysis: person, situation, and their
interaction. One can determine if the causal effects are the
same (i.e., are invariant) across these three levels.
Meta-Analysis
We very often fail to realize that invariance assumptions
are at the heart of meta-analysis. Consider a meta-analy-
sis of 20 studies of an experimental variable that has two
levels. Because different outcome variables are used in
each study, the meta-analyst computes a d value (mean
difference between conditions divided by the pooled
within-groups standard deviation) for each study. While
we routinely compute d, doing so makes very strong
invariance assumptions. One assumption is that the error
variance in each study, relative to the mean difference, is
a constant. Almost certainly, if all studies used the same
outcome measure and if we had the raw data from the stud-
ies that were combined, we would find that the equal error
variance assumption is violated. Another assumption is
that the variability of the independent variable (the degree
13 We do not necessarily have to give every participant every sce-
nario. Because of participant time limitations, it might be better
to randomly divide scenarios into sets and then each participant
would read one set of scenarios.
Invariance of Effects 135
to which the treatment, for instance, is different from the
control) is invariant across studies. We think that is essen-
tial for meta-analysts to code for the variability of the inde-
pendent variable and to examine whether that variability
moderates the treatment effect.
Invariance Assumptions in Logistic Regression
Logistic regression is increasingly used in social psy-
chology to examine the effects of independent variables
on dichotomous outcome variables. Let us consider a
simple example. Suppose we conduct a foot-in-door study
and find more compliance when a small prior request is
complied with than when no such prior request is made.
Suppose also we conduct the study in China and Japan and
we find that the logistic regression coefficient, B, is greater
in China than in Japan. Following Allison (1999), logistic
regression coefficients are inherently standardized and it is
problematic to compare these B values across groups. The
issue is that to compare the B’s, we need to make the assump-
tion that the error variance is the same (i.e., is invariant) in
both groups. This is akin to the homogeneity of variance
in multiple regression. However, note that if the outcome
were continuous, then we could evaluate the homogeneity
of variance assumption by computing the error variance in
the two countries. With a dichotomous outcome, there is
no way to check for that invariance. Thus the finding that
the foot-in-the-door effect is different in Japan and China
might be due to the fact that other variables affect com-
pliance less in one country than the other. For instance, if
there were some unmeasured variable that equally affected
compliance in both countries but that varied more in one
country than the other (e.g., the politeness of the request
for compliance), then there would be differences in the
error variance in the two countries that would go unno-
ticed. Readers might consult Allison (1999) who proposes
a solution to this problem.
Cross-Cultural Modeling
An important issue in invariance concerns what is known
as measurement or factorial invariance, when we use the
“same” measures in multiple groups. It is then important
to examine whether the latent factor structure underlying
those measures is the same, i.e., invariant, across groups
(Chen, 2008; Meredith, 1993; Reise, Widaman, & Pugh,
1993). Only with some sort of measurement invariance
is it possible to make any comparison between different
groups. The usual approach to measurement invariance
is to estimate a measurement model in each group and then
to examine whether the coefficients of that model (most
typically factor loadings) are similar across groups. This
136 Data Analysis in Social Psychology: Recent and Recurring Issues
is notoriously difficult to do when exploratory principal
components or common factor analyses are done in mul-
tiple groups because of rotational indeterminacy issues.
A more appropriate approach is through the use of
multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis, where one
estimates the same factor model simultaneously in mul-
tiple groups and then statistically evaluates measure-
ment invariance. In the following, we assume some
basic knowledge of confirmatory factor analysis and
structural equation modeling. Invariance of a measure-
ment model has several different meanings. In the least
restrictive form of measurement invariance, the same
confirmatory model is examined in each group without
any between-group constraints on factor loadings or any
other estimates. Such a model implies that the measured
variables map onto the same set of latent factors in the
same manner, although the specific magnitude of load-
ings is allowed to vary across groups. A more restrictive
model is one with loading invariance, constraining all
of the loadings in one group to equal the loadings in the
other groups. If supported, this form of measurement
invariance suggests that the factors are equivalently
defined in each group, in other words that the loadings
of individual items on their latent factors are equivalent
in the different groups.
If the loadings are invariant across groups, then one
can explore other forms of invariance. If there is no causal
model within each group, the focus would be on the invari-
ance of factor variances and covariances and of means.
For variances and covariances, one constrains factor vari-
ances and covariance across groups. For the means, one
initially fixes the intercepts of the measured variables to
be the same across groups; one sets the factor means
to zero in one group, and frees the factor means in the other
groups. If these factor means are nonzero, then the means
are not invariant. This provides a strong test that the groups
are equivalent in their true means on the latent variables.
Although it may frequently be the case that loading invari-
ance is found across groups, variance/covariance invariance
and mean invariance of the latent factors are much less likely.
And even more restrictive is complete invariance, where the
error variances of the measured variables are assumed to be
equal across groups. If all of these invariances are met, then
the conclusion is that the full mean and variance/covariance
structure of the variables is equivalent in the groups, a most
unlikely result.
If there is a structural model that is estimated in both
groups, where one or more latent factors is assumed to
affect other factors, then the typical focus in on whether
those structural effects are invariant across groups. Before
this can be meaningfully evaluated, measurement invari-
ance must be established.
Another approach to the question of invariance, fol-
lowing Nesselroade (2007; see also Nesselroade, Gerstrof,
Hardy, & Ram, 2007), is as follows. We allow for the mea-
surement model (i.e., loadings) to vary across groups, but
we force the structural model to be invariant. In this case,
we argue that the measures relate to theoretical constructs
in different ways in each culture, but the constructs relate
in the same way to each other. To accomplish this analysis,
we do the following. First, we do not use a marker vari-
able strategy in the measurement (i.e., fix one loading on
each factor to one), but rather we allow all the loadings
of the indicators of latent variables to be free. Next, we
fix the variances of all latent exogenous variables to one.
Next, we fix all the endogenous disturbance variances to
one. Finally, we fix the paths in the structural model to be
invariant across groups.14
Summary
A fundamental issue is knowing the appropriate domain
over which our results are generalizable. We are fairly
skilled at determining if our results are generalizable over
participants. We encourage researchers to broaden their
thinking and think about other sources of variability. We
find it ironic that a field that emphasizes the importance
of situations over persons (Ross & Nisbett, 1991) focuses
much more on the degree to which results are invariant
across persons and much more infrequently attends to
invariance across situations.
CONCLUSION
Returning to the theme in the introduction, data analysis is
detective work. All too often we think that looking at our
data is “fishing” and therefore improper. Rather, “playing
with our data” helps us understand the social reality that
generated our observations. We believe that too much of
data analysis is “publication oriented.” That is, we do only
the analyses that we need to include in the tables and results
sections for the paper that we are writing. We need to learn
that some analyses are worth doing even if they cannot
ultimately be published. Let us give some examples.
Sam Smith has a dichotomous outcome and is told that
he needs to run logistic regression, a method with which he
14 Still another method to relax invariance assumptions is mixture
modeling where a model’s parameters can be different for dif-
ferent people. For example, Muthén and Muthén (2000) found
different growth curve trajectories for different groups of people.
These models are also called latent class models.

is unfamiliar. Besides the logistic analysis, he might run an
ordinary multiple regression analysis treating the outcome
as a 0/1 variable. Such an analysis is statistically incorrect,
and editors and reviewers would rightly be very critical.
Nonetheless, Sam might be encouraged to do the analysis,
because it should generally be very similar to the better
logistic analysis. If Sam can more easily comprehend the
wrong analysis, he can better understand the right analysis.
By doing the wrong analysis, Sam can see if he actually
understands the right analysis.
Anna Jones has persons in groups and must conduct a
multilevel analysis. She predicts a cross-level interaction in
that gender differences (a level 1 or person variable) interacts
with a group size (three vs. eight; a level 2 or group variable).
She uses the computer program HLM for the very first time
and finds what she thinks is that interaction and computes and
graphs the predicted means using HLM. Anna would likely
benefit from redoing the analysis, ignoring group, and treat-
ing person as the unit. From such an inappropriate analysis,
she would obtain a 2  2 table of means. The means from this
wrong analysis should be very similar to those she computed
from the HLM analysis. If not, then likely the HLM analysis
was done incorrectly or misinterpreted.
Arielle Cohen has a 2  2 between-subjects design in
which she predicts a cross-over interaction and she has two
outcome variables, Y1 and Y2. She finds the results that she
has predicted on each outcome variable. On a lark, Arielle
treats Y1 as a covariate in the Y2 analysis. She notices that
the interaction for Y2 disappears. When she makes Y2 the
covariate, the interaction for Y1 is weakened but is still present.
By fooling around with his data, Arielle has preliminary
evidence that Y1 might be mediating the interaction for the
Y2 variable, consistent with mediated moderation.
Rui Lopes measures depression with a 21-item inven-
tory. He averages scores on the items to get a total score
for each individual. In the process of doing his analysis,
he happens to examine the correlations between the indi-
vidual 21 items scores and the average score. He notices
that these correlations look rather different for the men in
his sample than for the women. This leads him to wonder
if the construct has the same meaning for men and women.
He begins to consider whether he should have a different
theory about depression for the two groups.
Lola Anthony has a simple two-group study, and she
does a t-test and finds a large and statistically significant
difference between the two groups. All is fine, but on a
lark she does a median split on the outcome and does a
simple 2  2 chi square contingency table analysis of her
data. Much to her surprise, she finds no difference in the two
groups, either in terms of statistical significance or the pro-
portions. This result suggests a problem, so she looks at
a full scatter plot of the full data set for the two groups.
References 137
Sure enough there is an extreme outlier in her data. After
she removes the outlier, she finds that the mean difference
disappears.
Our point in these hypothetical examples is that much
can be revealed through the probing of data in ways that
go beyond standard and conventional analyses. Like a good
detective, the good data analyst searches for clues to a
causal argument through his or her data, wherever they
can be found. And often they turn up in the most surpris-
ing places, uncovered in ways of looking at data that are
not what journal editors and statisticians expect. We do not
mean by this to denigrate the expectations of journal edi-
tors and statisticians. Rather, we simply want to encourage
the probing of data. Moreover, we realize ideally that Sam
Smith should understand the details of logistic regression,
that Anna Jones should be well-versed in the use of the
computer program HLM, that Arielle Cohen should have
had an a priori theory of the causal ordering of her depen-
dent variables, that Rui Lopes should have initially con-
ducted an extensive item analysis on his inventory, and that
Lola Anthony should have screened her data for outliers
before doing the t-test. However, the last time we checked,
we do not live in such an ideal world where everyone has
all the skills they need to analyze their data completely and
most appropriately. Exploring data is how one learns about
one’s data and, at the same time, perfects one’s skills in
data analysis.
We social psychologists conduct laboratory and field
experiments, conduct surveys, perform meta-analyses, and
probe archival data. To accomplish all of these analyses,
we must be familiar with a very wide range of data-analytic
methods. We hope that this chapter has provided our col-
leagues with some guidance to make us better detectives in
understanding the clues that social reality has given us.
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PART II

The Social Being

 Chapter 5
Social Cognitive Neuroscience
MATTHEW D. LIEBERMAN
Who we are as humans has a lot to do with what happens
between our ears. What happens between our ears has a lot
to do with the social world we traverse, engage, and react
to. The former has been the province of neuroscience and
the latter the province of social psychology for nearly a
century. Recently, scientists have begun to study the social
mind by literally looking between the ears using the tools
of neuroscience. Social cognitive neuroscience uses the tools
of neuroscience to study the mental mechanisms that cre-
ate, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the
social world. On its worst days, social cognitive neurosci-
ence is phrenological, cataloguing countless brain regions
involved in the vast array of social processes. On its best
days, social cognitive neuroscience enhances our under-
standing of the social mind as well as any other method.
The goals of this handbook chapter are to give an
overview of the human history of this research area
(Section I), to summarize the techniques common to this
approach (Section II), to survey the functional neuro-
anatomy of social cognition (Section III), and to discuss
how brain research can make specific contributions to the
social psychological enterprise (Section IV). A special
note to social psychologists with little intrinsic interest in
the brain trying to determine whether social cognitive neu-
roscience is worth getting acquainted with: Go straight to
Section IV.
I. HISTORY
The Oxford Dictionary of Psychology (Colman, 2006)
identifies a 2001 conference, held at the University of
California, Los Angeles, as a starting point for social cog-
nitive neuroscience. This was the first formal meeting on
social cognitive neuroscience, and many of the attendees
I would like to thank Naomi Eisenberger and members of the UCLA Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory for various discussions
about the contents of this chapter.
143
CH05.indd 143
have become leaders in the field, despite few having pub-
lished social cognitive neuroscience findings at that point.
There were introductory talks on social cognition and cog-
nitive neuroscience by Neil Macrae and Jonathan Cohen,
respectively, along with symposia on stereotyping (William
Cunningham, Jennifer Eberhardt, Matthew Lieberman,
and Wendy Mendes), self-control (Todd Heatherton, Kevin
Ochsner, and Cary Savage), emotion (Ralph Adolphs,
Turhan Canli, Elizabeth Phelps, and Stephanie Preston),
imitation and social relations (Alan Fiske, Marco Iacoboni,
David Perrett, and Andrew Whiten), and theory of mind
(Chris Ashwin, Josep Call, Vittorio Gallese, and Kevin
McCabe). If this meeting represented the first time that all
of the ingredients of social cognitive neuroscience were
mixed together in a single pot, the water was already boil-
ing when the ingredients were tossed in. To appreciate
how the pot got this way, several historical strands must
be highlighted.
In the early 1990s, John Cacioppo used the term “social
neuroscience” (Cacioppo, 1994) to characterize how the
social world affects the nervous system. Work in this area
was mostly health relevant (Berntson, Sarter, & Cacioppo,
1998; Kiecolt-Glaser & Glaser, 1989; Segerstrom, Taylor,
Kemeny, & Fahey, 1998) or animal research (Carter, 1998;
Insel & Winslow, 1998; Panksepp, 1998) examining the
impact of social factors on the autonomic, neuroendocrine,
and immune systems (Blascovich & Mendes, this volume).
In other words, early social neuroscience primarily focused
on how the social world affects the peripheral nervous system
and other bodily systems. Although neurocognitive mecha-
nisms clearly fall under the umbrella of social neuroscience,
there were few investigations linking social processes with
brain processes during the 1990s. Social cognitive neuro-
science represented a new arm of social neuroscience that
primarily focused on the neurocognitive mechanisms of
12/22/09 5:33:29 PM
 144 Social Cognitive Neuroscience

everyday social cognition. Subsequently, the terms “social
cognitive neuroscience” and “social neuroscience” have
largely become synonymous because the domains and meth-
ods of study have merged.
Although social cognitive neuroscience reached its
boiling point around 2001, with numerous scientists begin-
ning to use neuroscience methods to study social cogni-
tion, there were isolated programs of research focusing on
social cognitive neuroscience in the 1990s. Antonio and
Hannah Damasio’s work on the socioemotional changes in
individuals with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFC; see
Table 5.1 for a list of acronyms and neuroscience terms
used in this chapter) (Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, &
Anderson, 1994) sparked great interest in social cognitive
neuroscience, affective neuroscience (Panksepp, 1998),
and neuroeconomics (Camerer, Loewenstein, & Prelec,
2005). Chris and Uta Frith began an extremely fruitful line
of research on the neural bases of theory of mind in the
mid-1990s (Fletcher et al., 1995), a topic that is founda-
tional within social cognitive neuroscience. Stan Klein and
John Kihlstrom examined self-knowledge by examining a
patient with temporary amnesia, providing the best early
example of how neuroscience could provide constraints on
social psychological theories (Klein, Loftus, & Kihlstrom,
1996). Research on the neural bases of face and biologi-
cal motion processing were relatively advanced in this
period (McCarthy, Puce, Gore, & Allison, 1997), but not
yet in a way that resonated with traditional social psycho-
logical questions. Finally, Cacioppo, Crites, and Gardner
(1996) examined the neural bases of attitudes and evalu-
ative processing using event-related potentials (ERPs)
and demonstrated important dissociations between social
Table 5.1 Acronyms and Jargon in Social Cognitive Neuroscience
PFC Prefrontal Cortex
STS Superior Temporal Sulcus
TPJ Tempoparietal Junction
FFA Fusiform “Face” Area
ACC Anterior Cingulate Cortex
Anterior Towards the front of the brain
Posterior Towards the back of the brain
Rostral Towards the front of the brain
Caudal Towards the back of the brain
Dorsal Towards the top of the brain
Ventral Towards the bottom of the brain
Superior Towards the top of the brain
Inferior Towards the bottom of the brain
Lateral Away from the middle of the brain
Medial Towards the middle of the brain
cognitive processes that were seemingly similar. These
lines of research are the precursors of social cognitive neu-
roscience and served as inspiration for many who would
go on to work in this area.
Finally, a great deal of human capital was spent bring-
ing social cognitive neuroscience into existence. Influential
scientists already doing social neuroscience, such as John
Cacioppo and Ralph Adolphs, helped promote funding for
and publication of social cognitive neuroscience research.
Established top-notch social psychologists including Todd
Heatherton, Mahzarin Banaji, Neil Macrae, and Susan
Fiske began conducting social cognitive neuroscience
research and lent much-needed credibility to the fledg-
ling area of research. Finally, Steve Breckler and Carolyn
Morf, program officers at the National Science Foundation
(NSF) and National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH),
respectively, had the vision to fund young scientists in this
area, before the area even existed.
Stir all these ingredients together and drop in a generous
helping of motivated graduate students and, voilà: social
cognitive neuroscience. In 2000, the term “social cognitive
neuroscience” first appeared in two papers (Lieberman,
2000; Ochsner & Schachter, 2000), and the first functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study examining a
traditional social psychology topic was published (Phelps
et al., 2000). In 2001, the first review of social cogni-
tive neuroscience was published (Ochsner & Lieberman,
2001), although, in truth, the paucity of published research
at that time made this review as much a promissory note as
a progress report.
In the decade since, social cognitive neuroscience has
gone through an explosion. In 2001, a Google search for
“social cognitive neuroscience” returned 6 hits. In 2009,
the same search returned over 52,000 hits (see Figure 5.1).
Similarly, the number of empirical social cognitive neuro-
science articles published each year has steadily increased
from 2000 through 2008 (see Figure 5.1). There have been
numerous literature reviews of social cognitive neurosci-
ence (Adolphs, 2001; Amodio & Frith, 2006; Bechara,
2002; Blakemore, Winston, & Frith, 2004; Lieberman,
2007a; Ochsner, 2004, 2007), not to mention a few cri-
tiques (Cacioppo et al., 2003; Kihlstrom, 2006; Vul, Harris,
Winkielman, & Pashler, 2009; Willingham & Dunn, 2003).
There have been special issues on social cognitive neurosci-
ence in several journals, including Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology (2003), Neuropsychologia (2003),
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2004), Neuroimage
(2005), Brain Research (2006), New York Academy of
Sciences (2007), Group Processes and Intergroup Relations
(2008), and Child Development (2009). Two new jour-
nals were founded in 2006 to focus on this area of study:
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) and

CH05.indd 144 12/22/09 5:33:29 PM

 Methods and Analysis 145

Google hits for SCN (cumulative)

60000
52600

42700
40000
Number of Hits

29500

21600
20000

3530

6 115 346 922

0
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Year

Empirical SCN publications (per year) (Aug. 08)

200
196

150 162
Number of Publications

142

100
Figure 5.1 Growth of social cognitive neu-
94 roscience. The top panel displays the num-
92
ber of hits returned from a Google search of
“social cognitive neuroscience” on January 1
50 53 of each year from 2001–2009. The bottom
42 panel displays the number of social cogni-
33
20 tive neuroscience empirical articles published
0 each year from 2000–2009. Note that the 196
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 articles indicated for 2008 were from January
Year through August.

Social Neuroscience. Several funding agencies have had to understand the tools themselves (this section) and the
special funding initiatives for social cognitive neurosci- techniques (next section) used to draw inferences about
ence; these agencies include the National Institute of social psychological processes in the brain. The primary
Mental Health, National Institute of Drug Addiction, tools used are neuroimaging techniques (fMRI, PET, ERP)
National Institute of Aging, and the National Institute of and lesion studies.
Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Finally, there have been
a series of social cognitive neuroscience preconferences Positron Emission Tomography
and small meetings, and now a yearly Social and Affective The earliest neuroimaging that focused on functional brain
Neuroscience (SAN) conference. In this decade, social localization was PET. In PET, the subject is either injected
cognitive neuroscience has gone from virtually nonex- with or inhales radioactive tracers that attach to biologi-
istent to having an increasingly firm foundation and the cally active molecules. Gamma rays from these tracers can
other accoutrements of a scientific discipline. then be detected with PET, allowing for the identification
of where the tracers are traveling in the brain during dif-
ferent kinds of mental activity. Typically, PET scans have
II. METHODS AND ANALYSIS
a temporal resolution of about a minute (i.e., one aggre-
gate data point per minute) and a spatial resolution of
Social Cognitive Neuroscience Methods
about a cubic centimeter. Apart from being the first form
Before jumping into a review of what has been learned with of functional neuroimaging of the whole brain, PET’s
the tools of social cognitive neuroscience it is important greatest advantage is that different kinds of molecules can

CH05.indd 145 12/22/09 5:33:30 PM

 146 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
be tagged by tracers, thereby allowing studies to examine
not just blood flow in the brain but also the distribution of
neurochemical processes.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a nonin-
vasive neuroimaging technique that has replaced PET as the
dominant mode of functional neuroimaging largely because
of its better temporal resolution (1 to 2 seconds) and spatial
resolution (approximately 3 mm3). Most fMRI studies use
blood oxygen level–dependent (BOLD) fMRI to determine
which brain regions are more or less active during any psy-
chological task. BOLD fMRI works on the principle that
the blood flowing to an active region is more oxygenated
than blood elsewhere, and oxygenated blood has differ-
ent magnetic properties than deoxygenated blood: fMRI
can detect the spatial location of these different magnetic
properties and reconstruct where blood was flowing to.
A limitation of fMRI is that each condition of interest must
typically be represented by several trials, which can lead
to habituation and contamination effects. Also, nearly
all fMRI analyses are comparisons between experimental
conditions within a subject, typically aggregated across
subjects. Between-group analyses are the exception, not
the norm, and even these are between-group comparisons
of within-subject comparisons. Various social psychologi-
cal findings become difficult to replicate with fMRI if sub-
jects are exposed to all task conditions.
Event-Related Potentials
Event-related potentials (ERPs) are derived from an elec-
troencephalograph (EEG), which measures the summated
electrical activity from neurons firing in the outer layers
of the cortex. ERPs are the reliable responses that occur
time-locked to a stimulus or response, averaged over sev-
eral trials. The two primary advantages of the ERPs are
that they directly measure the brain’s electrical activity and
have millisecond temporal resolution, allowing for exqui-
site measurement of time course. Two weaknesses of ERPs
are that only the outer cortex can be reliably assessed and
the spatial resolution of ERPs is quite poor.
Lesions
By examining individuals with damage to different brain
regions and observing the ensuing psychological deficits,
one can determine the contributions of the damaged regions
to psychological function. The great advantage of lesion
studies over neuroimaging methods is that neuroimaging
only identifies regions active during psychological pro-
cesses but cannot establish their causal relevance, whereas
lesion studies yield causal inferences. The main limitation
of lesion studies is that damage is rarely limited to one
CH05.indd 146
brain region and thus it is difficult to make inferences to a
specific region.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) allows for the
creation of temporary lesions to a particular region of cor-
tex and thereby overcomes some of the limitations of lesion
studies. TMS relies on electromagnetic pulses, which stim-
ulate the neurons in a small area of cortex. This is typi-
cally done to excite the neurons until they stop operating
efficiently. Functionally speaking, this repetitive TMS will
take a brain region offline for several minutes, allowing
researchers to determine which temporary lesions produce
performance deficits on tasks of interest.
Neuroimaging Analyses
Most published social cognitive neuroscience research has
used fMRI, and thus it is worth describing in more detail
how analyses are conducted with fMRI data (also see
Lazar, 2008). This section is provided with an eye toward
the social psychologist who may want to know a bit more
about the steps involved in inferring that “region X is
more active during task A than during task B,” without
having to mire through too much jargon.
Preprocessing
fMRI data are typically preprocessed before analyses
are conducted. What this means is that various things are
done to the raw data that are obtained during scanning to
make the information suitable for analysis. One can think
of it a bit like statistically normalizing scales before com-
bining them or applying log transformations to make a
distribution more normal. In fMRI studies, realignment,
normalization, and smoothing are the standard components
to preprocessing. It should be noted that each of these steps
introduces some noise to the signal while improving the
signal in other ways. Assumptions go into how each of
these steps is performed, and the practical implementation
of these assumptions is never perfect.
Realignment is a process that corrects the brain images
to account for the motion of a subject’s head while in the
scanner. Small movements of a few millimeters in any
direction can alter whether the signal appears to be com-
ing from one brain structure or another. Realignment uses
structural features of the brain to determine how the brain
has moved and then “puts the brain back” in the same space
as the brain was in during a reference scan. When success-
ful, realignment ensures that the amygdala, for instance,
shows up in the same place in the acquired brain images
throughout the entire data collection.
Whereas realignment tries to ensure that an individual’s
brain maintains its own constant “coordinate space,” the
12/22/09 5:33:30 PM

goal of normalization is to put all of the different subjects’
realigned brain scans into a single coordinate space so
that the brain structures line up across subjects. Brains
come in all shapes and sizes, and normalization essentially
morphs different brains into a common space. Different
programs do this in different ways, and no method does
this perfectly.
Spatial smoothing is the last key step in preprocessing.
Smoothing involves averaging over adjacent “voxels” (i.e.,
three-dimensional [3D] pixels) in the brain images. This
provides a number of benefits in terms of enhancing the
detection of certain kinds of signals, but this is done at
the expense of diminishing the likelihood of detecting other
kinds of signals. Usually this is a desirable trade-off, but it
again demonstrates that the data analyzed in fMRI studies
are far from their raw state and represent a series of deci-
sions and transformations that render the data more analyz-
able, while sometimes introducing problems when the data
do not conform to the assumptions behind the transforma-
tions. In many ways this differs little from the assumptions
that are made in statistical analyses but are often untested in
our behavioral studies (heteroscedasticity anyone?).
Whole-Brain Analyses
The great majority of analyses reported in fMRI research
are whole-brain analyses comparing brain activations under
two task conditions across all of the voxels in the brain.
For instance, imagine a study in which the subject spends
alternating 30-second periods looking at pictures of ingroup
members and then outgroup members, for a total of 3 min-
utes. Say we want to know which brain regions are dif-
ferentially activated under these two conditions. The MRI
scanner may collect a full brain volume (i.e., a set of images
taken at roughly the same time that, stacked together, cover
the entire brain) every 3 seconds, and thus there are a total
of 60 volumes takes over the 3-minute scan. Each of the
60 volumes represents a time point; thus, at each voxel in
the brain there is a 60-point time series reflecting the rela-
tive activation of each voxel. The statistical tools convolve
a hypothetical BOLD response (i.e., a model of how the
blood oxygenation typically rises and falls over time in an
active area) with the experimental design to create a hypo-
thetical time series of what a brain region’s activity would
look like if it were differentially sensitive to the two con-
ditions of the experiment. This hypothesized time series is
then regressed against the actual time series at every voxel
in the brain to see which voxels in the brain show a pat-
tern of activation consistent with the hypothesized pattern.
When several contiguous voxels from a brain region all
show the hypothesized pattern across time, it is generally
inferred that this region of the brain is more active under
one condition than another. The brain images in published
CH05.indd 147
Methods and Analysis 147
articles that show yellow and orange “blobs” typically
represent the regions that cross some threshold (e.g., 10
contiguous voxels all with regression values of p < .001)
for consistency with the experimental regressor.
These analyses yield the brain regions for a single subject
that are sensitive to task demands. Our interest is usually
in generalizing to the population at large, so we combine
single-subject whole-brain analyses across subjects to
determine which brain regions are reliably active across
subjects. This is done by computing one sample t-test at
each voxel, using the parameter estimates (i.e., regression
coefficients) from each subject at the same voxel. If the
average parameter estimate from each subject in a particu-
lar region is large enough, it will emerge as significant in
this random effects analysis.
Region of Interest Analyses
Neuroimaging studies commonly report the results of
region of interest (ROI) analyses. Such analyses reflect the
search within a specific region of the brain for significant
activations. ROI analyses can serve several different pur-
poses in a study. One benefit of searching within a smaller
region of the brain is that it reduces the number of simul-
taneous statistical tests and thus reduces the burden of cor-
recting for multiple comparisons. It also allows for a priori
hypothesis testing by intentionally searching within brain
regions thought to be relevant to the comparison. In some
ways, this is analogous to performing one-tailed rather than
two-tailed t-tests where a more lenient test can be performed
because a precise hypothesis is specified. One unfortunate
side effect of papers that rely solely on the ROI approach is
that they can give the inadvertent impression that only the
examined regions are involved in a process of interest.
Whatever the purpose of an ROI analysis, it is impor-
tant to know exactly what kind of ROI analysis is being
reported. There are at least two kinds of distinctions to
be drawn between different ROI analyses. First, an ROI
can be either functionally or anatomically defined. An
anatomically defined ROI involves trying to find the true
borders of a brain structure on the brain images. Functional
ROIs ignore anatomical boundaries and instead use some
existing pattern of activation to identify the ROI. For
instance, one might run a “localizer scan” (Saxe, Brett, &
Kanwisher, 2006) to define an ROI using a task well known
to activate a particular brain structure and then examine
what that ROI does in some new experimental condition.
The second kind of distinction among ROI analyses
concerns whether the ROI is treated as a “supervoxel” or
a “search space.” Some ROI analyses treat the ROI as a
space within which significant clusters of activation can
be detected. Other ROI analyses treat the ROI as a single
entity that is either significant as a whole or not.
12/22/09 5:33:31 PM
 148 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
Each kind of ROI analysis described here is valid, and
there are more kinds that were not described. Nevertheless,
it is critical to know which kind of ROI is being used
because each supports different kinds of inferences and has
different limitations.
Connectivity Analyses
Researchers are increasingly interested in the relationships
between brain regions, rather than focusing on what each
brain region is doing independently. Connectivity analyses
provide an estimate of the extent to which brain regions are
showing coordinated activity under particular task condi-
tions. Inverse connectivity is also of interest within social
cognitive neuroscience because this indicates that two
brain regions show a pattern consistent with one region
regulating the other. These analyses do not establish cau-
sality, as they are entirely correlational; however, the cor-
relations do point to the regions that are good candidates to
have causal effects.
There are two main kinds of connectivity analyses
that correspond roughly to between-subjects and within-
subjects analyses. Between-subjects connectivity analyses
are much easier to conduct, but they are less likely to be able
to provide strong evidence that brain regions are actually
working together or at odds with one another. Such anal-
yses involve correlating a single estimate of activity for
each subject in one brain region with a single estimate of
activity for each subject in another brain region. What such
analyses reveal is whether the extent to which a person
activates brain region X more during task A than task B
is associated with the activity in brain region Y during the
same comparison of task A and B. For instance, is the mag-
nitude of activity in a region of prefrontal cortex for each
subject during attempts at self-control, compared with a
baseline task, inversely associated with the magnitude of
amygdala activity across subjects as well. The limitation
of this procedure is that a single average estimate of activity
during the task is used (i.e., how much did a subject activate
the prefrontal region averaged across all self-control trials
of the task?) and thus it says nothing about the temporal
dynamics of the brain regions.
The second type of connectivity, functional connectiv-
ity, addresses this issue by examining the extent to which
the time series of activation in two regions are correlated
with one another. Specifically, functional connectivity
assesses whether the time series of activation between
brain regions X and Y are more strongly correlated under
task A than under task B. This analysis must be carried
out on each subject individually and then aggregated
across subjects. The conceptual limitation of these anal-
yses is that they typically assess only how brain regions
are correlated at the same moment in time. One can easily
CH05.indd 148
imagine that the true dynamics between some regions
involve time lags of up to a few seconds (e.g., 2 seconds
of prefrontal effort toward self-control might be needed
before downstream reductions in amygdala area are
observed). A between-subjects connectivity analysis might
still capture this effect because it does not make assump-
tions about the temporal dynamics, but a functional connec-
tivity analysis would probably miss the effect. Solutions to
these problems, allowing for hypothesis-driven time lags,
are being worked on (Formisano et al., 2002).
Regression Analyses
Because social psychologists are interested in how social
and personality factors interact to affect task behavior,
social cognitive neuroscience commonly uses regression
analyses in fMRI. Regression analyses are straightforward
to run in most fMRI statistical packages. Here, a vector of
regressor values, one value per subject, is entered into a
whole-brain comparison of two task conditions. The output
will look like any whole-brain analysis with p-values for
each voxel, indicating the reliability for the correlation, and
brain maps displaying clusters of activation. For discussion
of the characterization of such analyses as “voodoo,” see
papers by Vul et al. (2009) and Lieberman, Berkman, and
Wager (2009).
With use of this technique, any trait-level or self-
report variable can be used to examine whether it is
associated with the pattern of activity across subjects.
Socioeconomic status, neuroticism, and rejection sensi-
tivity are just a few of the trait variables whose relation
to neural responses have been examined. One can also
assess behavior that occurs after the scanning procedures
to examine the relation of that behavior to neural responses
during a relevant task in the scanner. For instance, one
could examine whether individual differences in automatic
mimicry in a laboratory setting are associated with indi-
vidual differences in the magnitude of imitation-related
brain activity in an fMRI scanning session. The between-
subjects connectivity analyses described earlier are actu-
ally just a special application of this kind of regression
analysis.
One can also use physiological, behavioral, or self-
report responses obtained during the scanning session itself
as a regressor at the single-subject level. Here, as with func-
tional connectivity, the regressor of interest is correlated
with the time series of activity to determine whether the
two are related. For instance, a study might involve the pre-
sentation of 50 works of art and obtain the subject’s rating
of desirability for each. These ratings can then be entered as
a regressor unfolding over time to determine, within a sub-
ject, which brain regions have activity that rises and falls
with this psychological response.
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Reverse Inference
Reverse inference refers to a particular difficulty in
drawing psychological inferences from neuroimaging data
(Poldrack, 2006). Ideally, neural activations could serve
as markers that a particular psychological process has
occurred. If we could confidently assert that every time the
amygdala is activated some form of fear processing has
occurred, this would be a boon to social psychologists
for whom the limitations of self-report and introspection
are well-known (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Unfortunately,
the amygdala is activated under numerous task conditions,
including, for instance, getting a reward. Without a one-
to-one correspondence between function and structure,
reverse inferences become far less reliable (Ochsner, 2007).
In truth, reverse inference is a part of almost every
study and will continue to be. It is only slightly different
outside of fMRI research. For instance, reaction times can
vary for any number of reasons, and thus it is problem-
atic to assume that it necessarily reflects the number of
underlying operations or the difficulty of each operation.
Realistically, reverse inference will always be a potential
inferential problem, but several steps can be taken to mini-
mize the problem.
First, a focus on networks of brain regions rather than
a single brain region can help dramatically. For instance,
the dorsomedial PFC, posterior superior temporal sulcus
(STS), and temporal poles are commonly coactivated
when subjects perform theory of mind or mentalizing
tasks (i.e., thinking about the psychological states and
characteristics of another; Frith & Frith, 2003). Although
the temporal poles may be activated under various task
conditions (e.g., semantic processing), there is little evi-
dence that all three regions are coactivated under condi-
tions that do not involve mentalizing (Cabeza & Nyberg,
2000). Thus, the presence of any one of the three regions
may not be a valid marker for mentalizing, but the three
together may constitute a marker. Connectivity analyses
can also suggest that these regions are working in concert
with each other during a particular task, strengthening the
inference further. Localizer scans can help as well. If each
subject performs an explicit mentalizing task prior to a
second task where we would like to surreptitiously assess
whether mentalizing is occurring, functionally defined
ROIs can be created for each subject in the particular
regions used for mentalizing. It is then possible to deter-
mine whether those same ROIs are activated during the
subsequent task.
Eye Movement Confounds
Another consideration before leaving this section concerns
how eye movement may dramatically alter our interpreta-
tion of neuroimaging (and for that matter, behavioral) data.
CH05.indd 149
Functional Neuroanatomy 149
It has been observed that autistic individuals, compared
with healthy matched control subjects, show less amygdala
activity when presented with emotional faces (Baron-
Cohen et al., 1999; Pelphrey, Morris, McCarthy, & LaBar,
2007). The initial inference drawn was that the amygdalae
of autistic persons were less sensitive to faces or the emo-
tional content of faces. However, autistic individuals also
spend less time looking at the eyes of a face than do healthy
individuals, and the eyes are extremely important for iden-
tifying emotional expressions (Adolphs et al., 2005). When
eye gaze differences were accounted for, using eye-tracking
equipment in the scanner, there were no remaining dif-
ferences in amygdala responses of autistic versus control
subjects (Dalton et al., 2005). Similarly, when a patient
with amygdala damage who was impaired at recognizing
fear expressions (Adolphs, Tranel, Damasio, & Damasio,
1994) was retested with instructions to attend to the eyes
of the target faces, the patient performed at normal levels
(Adolphs et al., 2005). These results change the interpreta-
tion of the original findings, suggesting that the amygdala
directs eye gaze to important cues in the environment and
that autistic individuals and those with amygdala damage
are less likely to spontaneously do this. Another possibil-
ity is the amygdalae of autistic persons are hypersensitive,
rather than hyposensitive, to distressing social information
and therefore look less at these stimuli. It is natural to think
that the extent to which a region of the brain responds to a
stimulus presented in the scanner reflects that brain region’s
sensitivity to that class of stimuli. Knowing where the sub-
jects are looking, what they are attending to, or what they
are thinking about while processing the stimulus can lead to
very different interpretations.
III. FUNCTIONAL NEUROANATOMY
Welcome to the “lite-brite” portion of the chapter. This sec-
tion reviews the known neural bases of social cognition,
self-processes, and processes specific to social interactions.
“Lite-brite” is a pejorative term, based on a toy from the
1960s, for studies that examine social psychological pro-
cesses in the scanner and see what lights up. This is also
referred to as brain mapping and has gotten something of
a bad rap. Social psychologists have rightly pointed out
that knowing where a process occurs in the brain does not
in itself add one iota to psychological theories. But some-
times, such studies lead to other studies that do add an iota
or two to our theories. Sometimes, several brain mapping
studies considered together can suggest new divisions and
commonalities between processes that might not have been
obvious from other behavioral and self-report methods (see
Section IV).
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 150 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
Social Perception
Humans and other primates are sensitive to a wide array of
nonverbal cues of social significance. We may not always
reflect on the meaning of these cues, but ongoing social
perception invariably influences our thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors. Basic capacities of social perception are taken for
granted in many models of social cognition, yet it is these
basic capacities that received the most attention in the early
days of social cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive neurosci-
entists have extensively studied the neural bases of face and
body perception, biological motion, action observation,
and emotion recognition. Each of these social perception
processes is reviewed in this section (see Figure 5.2).
Face and Body Perception
Face perception research has been a major topic for
neuroimaging research since the mid-1990s. The primary
question has been whether there are regions of the brain that
are tuned specifically for the processing of faces or whether
faces are one of many entities decoded through a common set
of perception processes. A number of neuroimaging studies
have converged on a region of the fusiform gyrus, which
links the occipital and temporal cortices, that is selectively
Social Perception
1 posterior superior temporal
sulcus 5 amygdala
2 fusiform “face” area 6 inferior parietal lobule
3 extrastriate “body” area 7 ventrolateral PFC – pars opercularis
4 occipital “face” area 8 ventrolateral PFC – pars orbitalis
Figure 5.2 The brain regions involved in social perception (face
and body perception [2–4], biological motion perception [1], action
observation [6, 7], and emotion recognition [5, 8]). Numbers in
brackets correspond to the regions in the figure reliably associated
with a particular aspect of social perception.
CH05.indd 150
and maximally activated by facial stimuli (Kanwisher,
McDermott, & Chun, 1997; McCarthy et al., 1997). This
region has been dubbed the fusiform face area (FFA) by
Kanwisher and colleagues (1997). A second, more posterior
region that also shows face selectivity has been called the
occipital face area (OFA; Hoffman & Haxby, 2000).
A significant challenge to the equating of the FFA and
OFA with face processing came from Gauthier, Skudlarski,
Gore, and Anderson (2000). Gauthier argued that the FFA
is specialized for expert visual processing and that face
processing is just one obvious application of this region’s
computations. Gauthier created fictional animals (“gree-
bles”) and found that increased perceptual experience
with greebles led to increases in FFA activity. Similarly,
car and bird experts show significant activity in the FFA
and OFA to cars and birds, respectively (Gauthier et al.,
2000). Kanwisher notes that across these studies, the FFA
still shows the greatest activation to faces (Grill-Spector,
Knouf, & Kanwisher, 2004).
Another approach (Haxby et al., 2001) suggests that
although the FFA may be most attuned to faces, whereas
other regions of occipitotemporal cortex are more respon-
sive to nonface objects, this is not the only metric that
matters. Regardless of what class of object each of these
regions is most responsive to, the activity in each of
these regions still discriminates between the presence and
absence of numerous kinds of stimuli. Thus, the FFA may
be most relevant to processing faces and yet still partici-
pate, along with other regions in a distributed network, in
the processing of various nonface stimuli.
Just as the FFA is particularly responsive to the presence
of faces, another region in occipital cortex, referred to as
the extrastriate body area (EBA), is more active when sub-
jects are presented with bodies than when shown faces or
other stimuli (Downing, Yuhong, Shuman, & Kanwisher,
2001). Interestingly, the response of the EBA is greater
when the head is occluded than when the head is visible
(Morris, Pelphrey, & McCarthy, 2006). The EBA is also
more active when subjects view bodies from a distance,
allocentrically, rather than from an egocentric perspective
typically associated with viewing one’s own body directly
(Chan, Peelen, & Downing, 2004).
Biological Motion
The fact that even infants have the ability to discriminate
between biological motion (i.e., movements consistent
with the biomechanics of biological organisms) and non-
biological motion (Fox & McDaniel, 1982) suggests that
the brain may have dedicated support for processing bio-
logical motion. Like many aspects of nonverbal decoding,
biological motion simply appears to us in perception as
qualitatively different from nonbiological motion.
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Biological motion is detectable from “point light
walkers” (Johansson, 1973) in which only a handful of
points identifying a target’s joint locations are shown
as the target moves. Several fMRI studies have shown that
the posterior STS (see Figure 5.2) is more active dur-
ing the presentation of point light walkers than various
control stimuli (Grèzes et al., 2001; Grossman & Blake,
2002; Vaina, Solomon, Chowdhury, Sinha, & Belliveau,
2001). Additionally, increased posterior STS activity
to point light walker stimuli over a period of training is
associated with improvements in behavioral performance
(Grossman, Blake, & Kim, 2004). Even sounds of people
walking activate the posterior STS (Bidet-Caulet, Voisin,
Bertrand, & Fonlupt, 2005; Saarela & Hari, 2008). Finally,
lesions to this region produce deficits in processing point
light walkers (Saygin, 2007). Together, these findings sug-
gest a strong link between this form of biological motion
detection and the posterior STS (cf. Noguchi, Kancoke,
Kakigi, Tanabe, & Sadato, 2005). The inferior parietal lob-
ule (IPL) and FFA have also been implicated in a subset of
point light walker studies (Grèzes et al., 2001; Grossman &
Blake, 2002; Grossman et al., 2004; Vaina et al., 2001).
Processing the gaze direction of others has also
reliably activated the posterior STS, particularly in the
right hemisphere (Cloutier, Turk, & Macrae, 2008;
Hoffman & Haxby, 2000; Hooker et al., 2003; Mosconi,
Mack, McCarthy, & Pelphrey, 2005; Pelphrey, Morris, &
McCarthy, 2005; Pelphrey, Singerman, Allison, & McCarthy,
2003; Pelphrey, Viola, & McCarthy, 2004; Wicker, Perrett,
Baron-Cohen, & Decety, 2003). Young children show this
effect (Mosconi et al., 2005), whereas individuals with
lesions to the superior temporal region have gaze-process-
ing deficits (Akiyama, Kato, Muramatsu, Saito, Nakachi,
et al., 2006; Akiyama, Kato, Muramatsu, Saito, Umeda, et al.,
2006). Hoffman and Haxby (2000) observed that the presen-
tation of faces showing different gaze cues could modulate
FFA or posterior STS activity depending on whether sub-
jects were instructed to attend to the targets’ identity or
gaze, respectively. Similar to the observation of walking, gaze
perception also modulates activity in the IPL (Hoffman &
Haxby, 2000; Pelphrey et al., 2003).
Action Observation
Action observation involves the perception of biologi-
cal motion that implies a specific action is being enacted
intentionally. Most action observation studies have exam-
ined the neural responses to “reaching to grasp” actions or
other hand actions. These studies have commonly observed
increased activity in the left IPL and left posterior ventro-
lateral PFC (bleeding into the contiguous region of ventral
premotor cortex) during action observation compared with
control stimuli (Chong, Williams, Cunnington, & Mattingley,
CH05.indd 151
Functional Neuroanatomy 151
2008; Decety et al., 1997; Johnson-Frey et al., 2003; Lamm,
Batson, & Decety, 2007; Lotze et al., 2006; Molnar-Szakacs,
Kaplan, Greenfield, & Iacoboni, 2006; Pierno et al., 2009).
One study examining the effects of cognitive load on action
observation found that IPL and posterior STS activity were
unaffected by load but that ventrolateral PFC responses
to action were absent during load (Chong et al., 2008).
In addition, the posterior STS and temporoparietal junction
(TPJ) have been observed in some of these studies as well
(Chong et al., 2008; Lamm, Batson, et al., 2007; Liljeström
et al., 2008).
Emotion Recognition
Recognizing the emotional displays of other people is one
of the most frequent and important forms of nonverbal
decoding performed by humans. Such displays provide
relatively automatic, prereflective access into the psycho-
logical state of others, although it should be noted that
the bare perception of these displays does not necessarily
imply that those psychological states are being explicitly
represented or processed.
A number of brain regions have been implicated in
the processing of emotional facial expressions; however, the
vast majority of studies have focused on the amygdala.
The amygdala has been a central focus of study in affective
neuroscience more generally, in part because of its clear
causal role in fear conditioning in rodents (LeDoux, Iwata,
Cicchetti, & Reis, 1988) and its frequent activation in neu-
roimaging studies of fearful faces (Morris et al., 1996).
Since these early studies, it has become clear that the
amygdala can respond to both positively and negatively
valenced stimuli (Hamann, Ely, Hoffman, & Kilts, 2002),
as long as they are high in arousal (Anderson, Christoff,
Panitz, De Rosa, & Gabrieli, 2003; Cunningham, Raye, &
Johnson, 2004), as well as various facial expressions
(Fitzgerald, Angstadt, Jelsone, Nathan, & Luan Phan, 2006;
van der Gaag, Minderaa, & Keysers, 2007). An increas-
ingly common view is that the amygdala serves as a detec-
tor of potential emotional significance of things in the
environment. Consistent with this view, the amygdala is
responsive to novelty, regardless of valence or arousal,
as new things may provide as yet unidentified reward or
threat (Schwartz et al., 2003).
If the amygdala is part of the brain’s advance scout team
determining what is important to focus on and react to, one
would expect this region to operate very efficiently. There
is now converging evidence to suggest that the amygdala
processes the emotional significance of perceptual stim-
uli automatically. First, the amygdala responds to threat
stimuli presented subliminally (Morris, Öhman, & Dolan,
1998; Whalen et al., 1998) or in binocular rivalry para-
digms (Pasley, Mayes, & Schultz, 2004; Williams, Morris,
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 152 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
McGlone, Abbott, & Mattingley, 2004). Second, individuals
who have damage to visual pathways still produce activa-
tion of the amygdala to emotional stimuli (Anders et al.,
2004; Hamm et al., 2003; Vuilleumier et al., 2002). Third,
intracranial recordings of amygdala activity suggest that it
responds to emotional stimuli within 200 ms of their pre-
sentation (Krolak-Salmon, Hénaff, Vighetto, Bertrand, &
Mauguière, 2004). Finally, amygdala activity to emotional
stimuli is preserved under some forms of cognitive load
(Anderson et al., 2003; Vuilleumier, Armony, Driver, &
Dolan, 2001), although not always (Pessoa, McKenna,
Gutierrez, & Ungerleider, 2002).
With respect to facial expressions, the role of the amyg-
dala has been most clearly established in lesion studies by
Adolphs, Tranel, Damasio, and Damasio (1995) demonstrat-
ing that damage to the amygdala produces deficits in iden-
tifying emotional expressions, particularly fear. Lesions to
the insula (Calder, Keane, Manes, Antoun, & Young, 2000),
basal ganglia (Calder, Keane, Lawrence, & Manes, 2004),
and ventromedial PFC (Heberlein, Padon, Gillihan, Farah, &
Fellows, 2008) have also been shown to impair identifica-
tion of one or more facial expressions.
The FFA is also modulated by emotional expressions
compared with neutral faces; however, a series of studies by
Vuilleumier and colleagues have demonstrated that this
response is likely due to feedback from the amygdala after
the amygdala has already processed the facial expression.
First, the pattern of activity in amygdala and FFA under
dual-task conditions is more consistent with the amygdala’s
influence over FFA than visa versa (Vuilleumier et al.,
2001; Vuilleumier, Mohr, Valenza, Wetzel, & Landis, 2003).
Second, patients with amygdala lesions do not show
greater FFA activity to emotional than nonemotional faces
(Vuilleumier, Richardson, Armony, Driver, & Dolan, 2004).
The right ventrolateral PFC is another region that is
commonly activated during emotion recognition. This
activity may be specifically related to explicitly identi-
fying an emotional expression (Lieberman et al., 2007;
Nomura et al., 2004), as this region is less often observed
during passive viewing of emotional faces and is typically
absent if attention is directed toward nonemotional aspects
of emotional faces. This parallels the finding of decreased
activity in the ventrolateral PFC during action observation
under cognitive load, described earlier, and other similar
findings in the domains of visual self-recognition (Sugiura
et al., 2000) and imitation (Lee, Josephs, Dolan, &
Critchley, 2006), described later.
Although the lion’s share of emotion recognition has
focused on facial expressions, some studies have examined
emotional prosody (i.e., tone of voice) as well as body posi-
tion and movements as indicators of emotional state. Passive
presentations of emotional compared with nonemotional
CH05.indd 152
prosody have been shown to activate the right superior
temporal gyrus or STS in a region anterior to the region
commonly observed in studies of biological motion
(Beaucousin et al., 2007; Wiethoff et al., 2007). When the
emotional tone heard is explicitly labeled, there is still STS
activity along with activity in right or bilateral ventrolateral
PFC (Bach et al., 2008; Ethofer et al., 2006; Wildgruber,
Pihan, Ackermann, Erb, & Grodd, 2002; Wildgruber et al.,
2005). Identifying emotion from bodies has been shown
to activate the right posterior STS, right TPJ, EBA, amyg-
dala, and bilateral temporal pole each in one of three stud-
ies (de Gelder, Snyder, Greve, Gerard, & Hadjikhani, 2004;
Grèzes, Pichon, & de Gelder, 2007; Peelen, Atkinson,
Andersson, & Vuilleumier, 2007), with only the bilateral
ventrolateral PFC appearing in multiple studies. Finally,
one study has used a standardized test of nonverbal decod-
ing ability, the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (Rosenthal,
Hall, DiMatteo, Rogers, & Archer, 1979), and observed
posterior STS, left IPL, left TPJ, and bilateral ventrolateral
PFC activity while labeling the emotional state of the tar-
gets. Additionally, those self-reporting greater social skills
produced larger increases in right ventrolateral PFC, dor-
somedial PFC, and basal ganglia.
Social Inference
Social inference has been at the heart of social cognition
for more than three decades. Social inference encompasses
a variety of processes invoked as we form representations
of the psychological states, traits, and preferences of oth-
ers. These inferences can be made using inferential alge-
bra (Jones & Harris, 1967), covariation analyses (Kelley,
1973), stereotype-based inferences (Ames, 2004; Fiske &
Neuberg, 1990), or by projecting oneself onto the target
(Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). Some of these processes
occur automatically, whereas others occur slowly guided
by specific inferential intentions that require cognitive
resources and effort (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988).
Despite social psychology’s focus on a deficit in the ability
of humans to make sense of other minds (Gilbert & Malone,
1995), the vast majority of social cognitive neuroscience
studies of social inference have been inspired by the study of
children developing the ability to make sense of other minds
(i.e., “mentalizing”). Wimmer and Perner (1983) first used
false-belief tests to determine when children begin to show
basic mentalizing competence. These tasks are usually of the
following form: Person A knows that X is true (e.g., Sally
knows her marble is in the box on the left); while Person A is
absent, things are changed such that X is no longer true (e.g.,
while Sally is out of the room, Anne moves the marble to the
box on the right). The subject is then asked what Person A
now believes about X. The subject knows that X is no longer
12/22/09 5:33:35 PM

true, but Person A does not and therefore the subject should
indicate that Person A believes X is true. Good performance
is thought to indicate that the child has a theory of other
minds (i.e., theory of mind; Premack & Woodruff, 1978) and
that other minds can represent the world differently from our
own. Most children master this basic mentalizing skill by age
three or four.
Mentalizing
To isolate the neural correlates of mentalizing, several
researchers have used verbal stimulus materials, includ-
ing variants of the false-belief paradigm described earlier
(Gobbini, Koralek, Bryan, Montgomery, & Haxby, 2007;
Grèzes, Berthoz, & Passingham, 2006; Grèzes, Frith, &
Passingham, 2004; Mitchell, 2008; Perner & Aichhorn,
2006; Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003; Saxe, Moran, Scholz, &
Gabrieli, 2006; Saxe, Schulz, & Jiang, 2006). Other ver-
bal tasks have used short stories that require mentalizing to
explain a target’s behavior, but do not specifically depend
on a false belief (Fletcher et al., 1995; Gallagher et al., 2000;
Happé et al., 1996; Hynes, Baird, & Grafton, 2006; Saxe &
Kanwisher, 2003; Völlm et al., 2005). Also, some verbal tasks
are used to assess the ability to infer other individual’s feel-
ings, rather than thoughts (Hynes et al., 2006; Shamay-Tsoory,
Tibi-Elhanany, & Aharon-Peretz, 2006; Shamay-Tsoory &
Aharon-Peretz, 2007; Vollm et al., 2006).
Other tasks induce mentalizing nonverbally. Several
studies have used animations of geometric shapes inspired
by the classic Heider and Simmel (1944) fighting triangles
video (Castelli, Frith, Happé, & Frith, 2002; Gobbini et al.,
2007; Moriguchi et al., 2006; Ohnishi et al., 2004; Schultz,
Imamizu, Kawato, & Frith, 2004), which promote anthro-
pomorphism and mental state attributions to the shapes.
Some nonverbal tasks require inferences to be drawn about
mental states from a target’s eyes (Baron-Cohen et al.,
1999; Platek, Keenan, Gallup, & Mohamed, 2004) or use
nonverbal cartoons in which subjects choose a final panel
based on their understanding of the target’s mental state
from the earlier panels (Brunet, Sarfati, Hardy-Baylé, &
Decety, 2000; Gallagher et al., 2000).
A third type of mentalizing study examines judgments of
enduring psychological characteristics of others via impres-
sion formation, for example, by asking what characteristics
the person has (Harris, Todorov, & Fiske, 2005; Heberlein &
Saxe, 2005; Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005a, 2005b;
Mitchell, Cloutier, Banaji, & Macrae, 2006), and via con-
ceptual perspective-taking, for example, by asking how
the person would judge topic X (Ruby & Decety, 2003,
2004). Inferences about momentary intentions have also
been examined in paradigms that require subjects to infer
the intentions of others (Ciaramidaro et al., 2007; German,
Niehaus, Roarty, Giesbrecht, & Miller, 2004; Kampe,
CH05.indd 153
Functional Neuroanatomy 153
Frith, & Frith, 2003; Walter et al., 2004) or to determine
what one’s own intention would be in particular situations
(Blakemore, den Ouden, Choudhury, & Frith, 2007; den
Ouden, Frith, & Blakemore, 2005).
A final set of mentalizing studies has examined online
mentalizing as it occurs in the context of interaction with
other people (although not face-to-face). In three studies,
subjects played strategy games (e.g., prisoner ’s dilemma)
against a person or computer, under the assumption that
mentalizing should occur only when playing against a
person (Fukui, Murai, Shinozaki, 2006; Gallagher, Jack,
Roepstorff, & Frith, 2002; Rilling, Sanfey, Aronson,
Nystrom, & Cohen, 2004). In a fourth study, subjects
believed they were either collaborating on a task with the
experimenter or working alone (Gilbert et al., 2007). In a
fifth study, professional taxi drivers drove a simulated taxi
in a virtual reality environment in which they interacted
with numerous other characters whose mental states were
relevant (Spiers & Maguire, 2006).
In addition to these different methods for studying men-
talizing, there have been a handful of studies that have
reported on the neural bases of irony and idiom compre-
hension (Lauro, Tettamanti, Cappa, & Papagano, 2008;
Wakusawa et al., 2007; Wang, Lee, Sigman, & Dapretto,
2006a, 2006b). Comprehension of irony and idiom involves
understanding of communicative intent and requires dis-
tinguishing literal from contextually suggested meanings.
Therefore, these tasks probably require similar, if not iden-
tical, processes as those used for mentalizing.
Across 45 tasks/studies,1 three regions were present in
more than half of the studies (see Table 5.2 and Figure 5.3).
The dorsomedial PFC (Brodmann areas [BA] 8/9) was
reported in 91% of mentalizing tasks, whereas the TPJ and
temporal pole were reported in 59% and 52%, respectively.
The posterior STS and precuneus were each observed in
39% of studies, and the medial PFC (BA 10) was observed
in 33%. In approximately half of the studies reporting
temporal pole, posterior STS, and TPJ activations, these
activations were bilateral. In those studies in which
these regions were reported in only one hemisphere, only
the posterior STS was reliably lateralized, appearing in the
right hemisphere in 88% of these nonbilateral studies.
Table 5.2 also breaks down the activations by mentaliz-
ing induction type for any method that has been used at least
four times (false belief, story, animation, impression forma-
tion, intention inference, online mentalizing, and irony and
idiom comprehension). There are three notable conclusions.
First, the dorsomedial PFC is the only region that is reliably
1
Studies including runs of more than one method are counted
separately for each method’s results.
12/22/09 5:33:36 PM
 154 Social Cognitive Neuroscience

Table 5.2 Activations from 45 Mentalizing Studies

DMPFC TPJ Temporal Pole pSTS Precuneus MPFC IFG VMPFC Fusiform Gyrus
False belief (n⫽8) 88% 88% 25% 25% 63% 25% 25% 0% 0%
Verbal stories (n⫽6) 83% 100% 67% 17% 33% 17% 17% 17% 0%
Animations (n⫽5) 100% 0% 100% 100% 20% 20% 40% 20% 80%
Impression formation (n⫽6) 100% 66% 33% 33% 66% 33% 33% 50% 0%
Intention inference (n⫽6) 100% 67% 67% 67% 67% 67% 33% 17% 17%
Online mentalizing (n⫽5) 100% 40% 40% 20% 20% 40% 0% 0% 0%
Irony & idioms (n⫽4) 75% 25% 75% 75% 0% 50% 25% 50% 0%
Total (n⫽45) 91% 59% 52% 39% 39% 33% 24% 15% 13%

Mentalizing Mentalizing

Mirror System Empathy

Figure 5.3 The brain regions involved in

social inference. The top row of images
displays the regions commonly activated in
mentalizing and theory of mind tasks. The
bottom left image displays the mirror sys-
1 dorsomedial PFC 6 ventrolateral PFC – pars opercularis and tem. The bottom right image displays brain
2 precuneus/posterior cingulate ventral premotor cortex regions identified in studies of empathy.
7 inferior parietal lobule
3 temporal junction Note: Anterior insula is displayed on the medial
8 dorsal anterior cingulate cortex wall for presentation purposes, but is actually
4 posterior superior temporal sulcus
9 anterior insula between the medial and lateral walls of the
5 temporal pole 10 medial PFC cortex.

activated by each mentalizing paradigm. Second, anima-
tion-induced mentalizing consistently recruits the temporal
pole and posterior STS, but not the TPJ; verbally induced
mentalizing via false belief and other verbal stories consis-
tently recruits the TPJ, but not the temporal pole and poste-
rior STS. This is consistent with the notion that the STS and
TP are involved in nonreflective social cognition, whereas
the TPJ, as part of lateral parietal cortex, is involved in more
reflective aspects of social cognition (Satpute & Lieberman,
2006; Liberman, 2009b). Finally, although fusiform gyrus
was observed in 13% of the studies overall, it was present in
80% of the animation-based studies.
These results suggest that the dorsomedial PFC may
play a central role in mentalizing in general, with other
subsets of regions being recruited for particular kinds of
materials or task demands. There is at least some evidence
to suggest that dorsomedial PFC activation is modulated
by an explicit mentalizing goal and can be taken offline by
cognitive load in dual-task paradigms. Conversely, the
posterior STS and temporal pole can be activated to
mentalizing-relevant materials in the absence of a mentaliz-
ing goal and are still activated to the same degree with and
without cognitive load (den Ouden, U. Frith, C. Frith, &
Blakemore, 2005; Mason, Banfield, & Macrae, 2004;

CH05.indd 154 12/22/09 5:33:36 PM


Mitchell, Macrae, & Banaji, 2004; van Duynslaeger, van
Overwalle, & Verstraeten, 2007).
A number of lesion studies have also helped to identify
the regions that causally contribute to mentalizing. These
studies can be subdivided into those that focus on the pre-
frontal cortex, TPJ, or amygdala. Several lesion studies
have demonstrated prefrontal involvement in mentalizing;
however, these studies do not provide much anatomical
specificity (Channon & Crawford, 2000; Stone, Baron-
Cohen, & Knight, 1998; Stuss, Gallup, & Alexander, 2001).
One study did find that left ventrolateral PFC was asso-
ciated with impairments in making personality judgments
(Heberlein, Adolphs, Tranel, & Damasio, 2004).
Bird, Castelli, Malik, and Husain (2004) reported a
case study of a patient with focal dorsomedial PFC and
medial PFC damage. Despite the strong links in the fMRI
literature between the dorsomedial PFC and mentalizing,
this patient demonstrated no mentalizing impairments. It is
worth noting that developmental mentalizing studies have
consistently reported decreasing dorsomedial PFC activ-
ity with age, suggesting that it may play a greater causal
role in adolescence than in adulthood (Blakemore et al.,
2007; Wang et al., 2006a; see also Pfeifer, Lieberman, &
Dapretto, 2007). This would be consistent with the dor-
somedial PFC playing a controlled processing role in
mentalizing that may be less needed as elements of men-
talizing are increasingly automated.
In another case study, a patient with focal right ventrolateral
PFC damage experienced mentalizing deficits under specific
circumstances (Samson, Apperly, Kathirgamanathan, &
Humphreys, 2005). The patient was capable of reasoning
about a target’s false belief if the story was crafted to indi-
cate that the target had a false belief without revealing
what the true state of affairs was. In contrast, if the patient
knew the true state of affairs, he consistently projected this
knowledge onto the target. Samson and colleagues inter-
preted these findings as indicating an impaired ability to
inhibit one’s own perspective and knowledge, rather than a
deficit in belief reasoning per se (see also Lamm, Nusbaum,
Meltzoff, & Decety, 2007). This interpretation is supported by
developmental findings that mentalizing abilities in children
are correlated with inhibitory skill as well (Carlson & Moses,
2001). Three studies examining left TPJ lesions (Apperly,
Samson, Chiavaino, & Humphreys, 2004; Heberlein et al.,
2004; Samson, Apperly, Chiavarino, & Humphreys, 2004)
also demonstrated significant mentalizing impairments asso-
ciated with this region (cf. Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2006).
Finally, there has been an ongoing debate about the
role of the amygdala in mentalizing. The amygdala fig-
ured prominently in early theories of mentalizing (Baron-
Cohen et al., 2000), but it was reported in only 2 of the 45
neuroimaging studies of mentalizing reviewed. Although
CH05.indd 155
Functional Neuroanatomy 155
the results of studies looking at mentalizing in individuals
with amygdala lesions is mixed (Han, Jiang, Humphreys,
Zhou, & Cai, 2005; Shaw et al., 2007; Stone, Baron-Cohen,
Calder, Keane, & Young, 2003), a study by Shaw et al. (2004)
may help explain the amygdala’s role in mentalizing and
why it does not appear in most neuroimaging studies. Shaw
et al. (2004) compared 15 subjects with congenital amyg-
dala damage from birth or early childhood to 11 subjects
with amygdala lesions that developed in adulthood. Early
damage was associated with a variety of mentalizing defi-
cits, whereas late damage was not. Moreover, the subject’s
age at the time the lesion developed was strongly correlated
with overall mentalizing performance. This suggests that
the amygdala may play a critical role in bridging between
early and mature forms of mentalizing. More sophisticated
forms of mentalizing may not specifically depend on the
amygdala; however, they may develop in the first place
only if simpler amygdala-based mentalizing skills are in
place to be built upon (see Machado, Snyder, Cherry,
Lavenex, & Amaral, 2008).
Attempts are being made to determine the functional
contributions of particular brain regions to mentalizing,
but most of the results are quite tentative at this point
(Decety & Lamm, 2007; Gallagher & Frith, 2003; Saxe &
Wexler, 2005). The posterior STS responds to biological
motion cues (e.g., gaze shifts, lip movements) that are likely
to provide raw perceptual material for drawing inferences
about the mental states of others. Temporal poles are com-
monly activated when seeing the faces or names of famil-
iar people (Sugiura et al., 2006), and some have suggested
that this region represents semantic information in the social
domain (Lambon Ralph, Pobric, & Jefferies, 2009). Saxe and
colleagues have suggested that the TPJ is specifically respon-
sible for belief-related cognition (Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003;
Saxe & Wexler, 2005); however, others have suggested that
the TPJ is responsible for directing attention to salient cues
in the environment (Decety & Lamm, 2007; Mitchell, 2008)
rather than having a specific role in mentalizing.
Although the dorsomedial PFC is by far the most com-
monly activated region during mentalizing, there is not yet
an agreed-upon account of its function (Amodio & Frith,
2006; Saxe & Powell, 2006). One relatively unexplored
idea suggests an analogy to working memory processes
where the dorsolateral PFC is thought to orchestrate work-
ing memory using various “slave” systems in the lateral
parietal cortex (Baddeley, 2002) and elsewhere (Postle,
2006). In the context of mentalizing, the dorsomedial PFC
would orchestrate cognition about mental states with the
help of more simplistic slave systems in the TPJ, posterior
STS, and temporal poles. Such a model would be relatively
straightforward to test with modified working memory
paradigms.
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 156 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
Mentalizing About Similar Others
Even if the exact role of the dorsomedial PFC is not yet
specified, a recent series of studies have helped clarify
how the dorsomedial and medial PFCs differentially con-
tribute to mentalizing. Mitchell and colleagues (Mitchell
et al., 2005b; Mitchell, Macrae, & Banaji, 2006) have
demonstrated that the subjective similarity between a
target and oneself determines which PFC region is most
strongly associated with mentalizing. In most mental-
izing studies, there is little basis for even evaluating the
similarity of targets to oneself, and these studies reliably
recruit the dorsomedial PFC. In Mitchell’s studies, to
the extent that targets are rated as dissimilar to the self, the
dorsomedial PFC is again the region most activated by
mentalizing. However, to the extent that targets are rated
as similar to oneself, a more ventral region in the medial
PFC is increasingly activated. Mitchell has suggested that
for similar targets, subjects are projecting themselves onto
the other person to answer questions about the target. Self-
referential processing is strongly associated with medial
PFC activity (Lieberman, 2007), and thus this account
makes intuitive sense.
Other qualitative distinctions might contribute to a
split between the contributions of the dorsomedial PFC
and medial PFC in mentalizing. Mentalizing is typically
equated with theory of mind processes in a broad fashion.
Yet people have a theory of “minds in general” as well as
theories of “specific minds.” It could be the case that the
dorsomedial PFC supports the general theory of mind,
including rules for understanding how the average person
is likely to experience and respond to different situations
and events. In contrast, the medial PFC might support idio-
syncratic theories of specific minds, including our own
mind and those close to us. To this end, van Overwalle
(2009) published a meta-analysis suggesting that mentaliz-
ing about close others does reliably recruit the medial PFC
(cf. Heatherton et al., 2006). From this perspective, the
similarity findings from Mitchell and colleagues (2005b)
may be a special case of applying a specific theory of
mind (i.e., one’s specific theory of one’s own mind) to a
similar other.
Imitation and the Mirror Neuron System
In the early 1990s, Rizzolatti and colleagues (di Pellegrino,
Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese, & Rizzolatti, 1992; Gallese, Fadiga,
Fogassi, & Rizzolatti, 1996) discovered a set of neurons
in the ventral premotor cortex in monkeys that was active
both when the monkey performed a goal-directed action
(e.g., grabbing a raisin) and when the monkey watched
someone else perform the same goal-directed action. Later
researchers observed similar effects in the anterior section
of the IPL (Gallese, Fogassi, Fadiga, & Rizzolatti, 2002).
CH05.indd 156
Together, the ventral premotor cortex and anterior IPL
form, in monkeys, what has been called the mirror neuron
system (Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004).
Although no human research has identified single
neurons in these regions that respond both when observ-
ing and when performing an action, there is compelling
fMRI data to suggest that a homologous mirror system
exists in humans. Iacoboni and colleagues (1999) pro-
vided the first evidence by having subjects observe and
imitate finger tapping while in a scanner. They found
three brain regions that were active during both observa-
tion and imitation: left posterior ventrolateral PFC,2 right
anterior IPL, and right anterior intraparietal sulcus. The
bilateral posterior ventrolateral PFC and bilateral anterior
IPL have been identified as the regions central to the
mirror system (Chaminade & Decety, 2002; Hamilton,
Wolpert, Frith, & Grafton, 2006; Heiser, Iacoboni, Maeda,
Marcus, & Mazziotta, 2003; Urgesi, Moro, Candid, &
Aglioti, 2006). One critical difference between the human
and monkey mirror systems is that in monkeys, only hand
actions that are observed in the presence of the object to
be manipulated produce activity in the mirror neurons
(Gallese et al., 1996). In contrast, for humans a variety of
hand actions that do not involve an object or involve an
occluded object still produce mirror system activity (Liu
et al., 2008; Montgomery, Isenberg, & Haxby, 2007). Also,
the human mirror system is active when observing goal-
directed actions performed by robots whose action paths
differ from human actions (Engel, Burke, Fiehler, Bien, &
Rösler, in press; Engel, Burke, Fiehler, Bien, & Rösler, 2008;
Gazzola, Rizzolatti, & Keysers, 2008; cf. Tai, Scherfler,
Brooks, Sawamoto, & Castiello, 2004).
Beyond the original studies of hand–object actions,
there have been a number of extensions regarding the
classes of actions that activate the mirror system in humans.
Communicative hand gestures and mimed actions both acti-
vate this system (Liu et al., 2008; Montgomery et al., 2007).
Hearing actions activate the ventral premotor cortex (Kohler
et al., 2002). In addition, being touched or watching another
person being touched produces mirror-like effects in the IPL
(Keysers et al., 2004). A series of studies have also deter-
mined that the mirror system is activated during observation
and imitation of facial expressions (Carr, Iacoboni, Dubeau,
Mazziotta, & Lenzi, 2003; Hennenlotter et al., 2005;
2
For the remainder of this chapter, “posterior ventrolateral PFC”
is used to refer to the pars opercularis region of the inferior fron-
tal gyrus and the neighboring ventral premotor region commonly
found in imitation studies. “Ventrolateral PFC” is used to refer to
mid-ventrolateral and anterior ventrolateral areas, including the
pars triangularis, pars orbitalis, and lateral BA 10.
12/22/09 5:33:38 PM

Lee et al., 2006; Leslie, Johnson-Frey, & Grafton, 2004;
Pfeifer, Iacoboni, Mazziotta, & Dapretto, 2008).
Hennenlotter et al. (2009) found that amygdala activity in
response to angry faces was reduced in subjects after Botox
injections into their foreheads; they also observed that the
reduction in amygdala activity correlated with the reduction
in “frown muscle” activity. These results suggest that spon-
taneous imitation of the observed facial expressions contrib-
utes to the strength of one’s own limbic responses. Finally,
somewhat counter to the notion that the same representation
for action is activated both when seeing and when per-
forming an action, performing actions that complement
an observed action activate the mirror system more than
actually imitating the action (Newmann-Norlund, van
Schie, van Zuijilen, & Bekkering, 2007).
The discovery of mirror neurons in primates and the
homologous mirror system in humans has produced enor-
mous excitement within the scientific community and
beyond. This system is proposed to be at the root of our lan-
guage abilities, the ability to learn through imitation, a basis
for social ingratiation through unconscious mimicking,
and a mechanism critical to automatic nonverbal encod-
ing and decoding, mental state inference, and empathy.
Faith in the significance of the mirror system has led some
to “predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology
what DNA did for biology. . . . They will provide a unify-
ing framework and help explain a host of mental abilities
that have hitherto remained mysterious” (Motluck, 2001).
In contrast, Gopnik (2007) has argued that much like the
left-brain/right-brain notions that took root in popular
culture in the 1970s and still retain a myth-like status, the
mirror neuron mania is promising much more than it has
delivered. Publications of articles in the mainstream media
with titles such as “Cells That Read Minds” (Blakeslee,
2006) oversimplify the findings and give an inaccurate char-
acterization of what these neurons are known to be doing.
Beyond responding both when an action is observed and
performed, what are the functional properties of the mirror
system? One open question is whether this is a system that
supports vicarious learning of new behaviors or is tuned to
respond to actions that are already well established in one’s
behavioral repertoire. Supporting the latter interpretation,
professional pianists show greater mirror system activity
when listening to music than do nonmusicians (Bangert
et al., 2006) and professional dancers show greater mir-
ror system activity when watching a dance performance in
their own style of dance than a performance from another
tradition (Calvo-Merino, Glaser, Grèzes, Passingham, &
Haggard, 2005). In contrast, two studies have found that
observation of unknown guitar chords, for which no motor
representation already exists, produced mirror system
activity (Buccino et al., 2004; Vogt et al., 2007), with one
CH05.indd 157
Functional Neuroanatomy 157
of these finding greater mirror system activity for unknown
than for known chords (Vogt et al., 2007). One resolution
to these conflicting findings centers on the observer ’s goal.
In the studies in which only known actions activated the
mirror system, subjects did not have the goal of subse-
quently performing these unknown actions. In the studies
in which unknown actions produced robust mirror system
activity, subjects were required to subsequently perform
these actions. Thus, having the explicit goal of learning to
perform an action can bring the mirror system online even,
or perhaps especially, while observing unknown actions.
A final study relevant to the role of the mirror system in
known and unknown actions scanned dancers before and
after 5 days of training on particular dance routines (Cross,
Kraemer, Hamilton, Kelley, & Grafton, 2009). Subjects
were scanned while watching several dance routines—
some that would be learned and others that would not. For
both kinds of dances, the mirror system was at its most active
before the training period. Those that were then practiced
for 5 days retained nearly the same level of activation in the
mirror system, whereas the untrained dances produced far
less mirror system activity at the posttest. These data suggest
that having a preexisting action representation contributes
less to mirror system activity than the motivational rel-
evance of the actions to oneself. The fact that food-grasping
behavior produces more mirror system activity in hungry
subjects than in satiated subjects is consistent with this
motivational account (Chen, Meltzoff, & Decety, 2007).
Is Mirroring Automatic?
It is generally assumed that the mirror neuron system oper-
ates automatically, converting third-person observations of
actions into embodied first-person experiences, and there-
fore into an understanding of the mental states (intentions,
thoughts, feelings, desires) of others. Taking the automa-
ticity claim first (with the second claim addressed in the
next section), the best evidence for this comes from a study
in which some subjects were instructed to explicitly focus
on an actor ’s actions and intentions and other subjects
were instructed simply to watch the video clips (Iacoboni
et al., 2005). Similar levels of mirror system activity were
found in both sets of subjects, leading to the conclusion
that mirror system activity is automatic. The difficulty with
this interpretation is that the subjects not receiving action
observation instructions (1) were free to explicitly focus on
the intentions and actions in the clips and (2) viewed clips
in which there was little else to attend to but the actions.
Stronger tests of automaticity have thus far come down on
the side of the mirror system being relatively intentional
and controlled. For instance, Lee and colleagues asked
subjects to look at emotionally expressive faces and to
imitate the emotional expressions in one set of trials and
12/22/09 5:33:39 PM
 158 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
to make gender discriminations in the other set of trials
(Lee et al., 2006). In both types of trials, subjects were
attending to the faces, but only the imitate trials produced
mirror system activity. If the mirror system responds auto-
matically, there should have been activity in both condi-
tions. Another study found that when simulated biological
motion was viewed along with a task to determine whether
the motion was biologically plausible, there was more
mirror system activity than if the same motion was observed
with an instruction to focus on the colors of the moving
elements (Engel et al., 2008). A third study used a work-
ing memory paradigm to examine neural responses when
one, two, or three actions had to be held in memory for
several seconds; mirror system activity in this study was
found to increase linearly with the number of actions to be
remembered (Engel et al., in press). This suggests that the
mirror system may operate as a working memory system
for action, which is consistent with a controlled processing
account. Given the paucity of studies examining whether
the mirror system functions automatically, the answer is
not yet clear, but the evidence thus far does suggest that the
mirror system may not function automatically.
Mentalizing Versus Mirroring
Most studies examining individuals’ ability to infer the
contents of another ’s mind (i.e., mental state inference)
have typically come from the theory of mind tradition
(Wimmer & Perner, 1983). The mirror system is thought to
represent a neural substrate for a second way of understand-
ing the mental states of others characterized by simulation
theory (Goldman, 1989). According to simulation theory,
“we understand others’ thoughts by pretending to be in their
‘mental shoes’ and by using our own mind/body as a model
of the minds of others” (Gallese, Ferrari, & Umiltà, 2002,
p. 36). In terms of the mirror system, this suggests that we
understand the mental states that lead a person to perform a
certain action because seeing this action activates the motor
representations we possess for performing the same action.
This then allows us to use our own activated mental states to
understand the other individual’s mind.
This is an appealing account of understanding others in
an embodied way. The open question is whether the mirror
system contributes to understanding others, and if so, in
what ways? Despite the claim that mirror neurons provide
a unifying “basis of social cognition” (Gallese, Keysers, &
Rizzolatti, 2004), studies of the mirror system almost never
assess the social understanding supposedly obtained as a
result of mirror system activity, and studies that examine
social cognition overtly (i.e., mentalizing studies) rarely
report activity in the mirror system.
The limitation of previous studies to address this issue
is that mentalizing and mirroring studies each leave out
CH05.indd 158
a critical element that would lead the “other team” to cry
foul. On one hand, imitation studies that successfully
recruit the mirror system do not ask subjects to draw infer-
ences about the mental states of the observed target or
check whether they have. On the other hand, mentalizing
studies, which almost always have an abstract detached
quality to them, do not lend themselves to mirror system
involvement. Reading vignettes or watching abstract shapes
move around are not the kinds of real-life experiences that
simulation theory focuses on.
Two studies have attempted to address these multiple
concerns in a single study. In a 2 ⫻ 2 study design by
Wheatley, Milleville, and Martin (2007), subjects were
shown object animations. The researchers varied whether
the animations looked like animate or inanimate entities
and whether subjects were watching or imagining the
movements. The mirror system was activated, and to a
similar degree, during all four trial types. In contrast, the
brain regions that selectively responded to animacy were
almost all mentalizing regions and none were mirror sys-
tem regions, except for the posterior STS, which is the one
region that sometimes appears in both networks. Judging
animacy is not the same as mental state inference, but it is
certainly a step in that direction.
In another study, Spunt, Satpute, and Lieberman (in press)
presented subjects with video clips of an actor performing
simple everyday goal-directed behaviors (e.g., brushing his
teeth) but manipulated the subject’s inferential goal along
an action identification hierarchy (Vallacher & Wegner,
1987). On different trials, subjects were asked to think
about what the target was doing (medium action identi-
fication level; “brushing his teeth”), how the target was
performing the behavior (low action identification level;
“moving his arm”), or why the target was performing the
behavior (high action identification level; “maintaining
oral hygiene”). Critically higher levels of action identifica-
tion require a greater focus on the internal mental states
of the actor, and lower levels shift attention away from men-
tal states and focus more on the external mechanics of the
behavior. Similar to the results of the study by Wheatley
et al. (2007), performing each of the identification tasks
activated the mirror system to the same degree, suggest-
ing that differential needs for mental state inference did
not differentially engage the mirror system. In contrast,
multiple regions in the mentalizing network produced
parametric increases in activity that tracked increases in
action identification level. Given that these were every-
day kinds of behaviors that could or could not be used
to draw inferences about the mental states of the actor,
depending on the subject’s goals, it is difficult to raise the
abstraction argument that applies to previous mentalizing
tasks.
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At this point, it appears that the mirror system is primarily
involved in understanding observed behaviors externally
as behaviors (i.e., behavior identification) but may not be
involved in consciously understanding or representing the
mental states of others. In contrast, the mentalizing net-
work thus far appears to be more central to mental state
inference. Interestingly, at rest the mentalizing and mirror
system networks are negatively correlated with one another
(Fox et al., 2005).
Empathy
Empathy has quickly become a major area of study within
social cognitive neuroscience. One of the first studies in
this area involved subjects being scanned while alternately
receiving painful stimulation and observing their romantic
partner receiving painful stimulation (Singer et al., 2004).
Analogous to the mirror system’s common response to per-
forming and observing an action, Singer and colleagues
found that the pain distress regions of the brain, the dor-
sal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the anterior insula,
were activated while receiving and observing another
receive painful stimulation. Eight studies have now almost
all shown the dorsal ACC and anterior insula to be active in
studies of empathy for physical pain (Botvinick et al., 2005;
Morrison, Peelen, & Downing, 2007; Ochsner et al., 2008;
Singer et al., 2004, 2006), distressing loud noises (Lamm,
Batson, et al., 2007), and disgusting odors (Jabbi, Swart, &
Keysers, 2007; Wicker, Keysers et al., 2003) in which sub-
jects were both observers and receivers of the distressing
experience.
Although this is an extremely robust set of findings, it is
unclear how they relate to the broader concept(s) of empathy.
More than any other domain in social cognitive neuro-
science, there seems to be little agreement about what
empathy is and what psychological processes it involves.
Lamm, Batson, et al. (2007) recently defined empathy in
terms of three components: “(1) an affective response to
another person, which some believe entails sharing that
person’s emotional state; (2) a cognitive capacity to take
the perspective of the other person; and (3) some moni-
toring mechanisms that keep track of the origins (self vs.
other) of the experienced feelings” (p. 42). This definition
gives a seat at the table to each of several different existing
approaches to empathy.
Another way to arrive at the same definition is to con-
sider three things that empathy is not. Empathy is not a mere
cognitive understanding of the emotional state of another
without having any emotional reaction of one’s own. For
instance, one could see a picture of Hitler wincing in pain
and be able to accurately indicate his level of pain without
necessarily feeling a similar emotional response of one’s
own (Singer et al., 2006). We would not want to label this
CH05.indd 159
Functional Neuroanatomy 159
as an empathic response. Similarly, empathy is not merely
being in the same emotional state as another person. If one
were to see another in pain and become so distressed that
one began to ruminate on one’s own distress and how such
painful episodes could be avoided by oneself in the future,
this also would not be an empathic response (Batson,
1991). Along similar lines, having a positive emotional
response to the sight of one’s favorite food being served to
someone who despises that dish does not seem empathetic
either. Here, one would be focused on one’s own response
rather than the other person’s.
Thus, there are open questions as to what common brain
activations during the observation and experience of pain-
ful stimulation means with respect to empathy. Because
self-reported empathic feelings have not been correlated
with neural responses in the more than four dozen fMRI
studies of empathy, it is difficult to know whether subjects’
distress is related to feeling bad for the observed target or
if subjects are experiencing a self-focused type of distress.
One study has found that dorsal ACC and anterior insula
activity is modulated by whether the target receiving pain-
ful stimulation has previously been observed treating
others unfairly or not (Singer et al., 2006). If pain observa-
tion were only leading to self-focused distress, the moral
assessment of the pain recipient would probably be of little
consequence. Thus, this study provides some evidence that
the mirrored pain response may reflect empathic responses
rather than self-focused responses.
Another issue is whether the dorsal ACC and ante-
rior insula activations reported during visual observation
of pain and distress generalizes to other kinds of empa-
thy inductions (e.g., linguistic) and empathy inductions
focused on different domains of experience (e.g., sharing
in another ’s success). Humans are capable of empathizing
with an endless variety of experiences, but thus far pain has
been the primary experience examined. It is plausible that
dorsal ACC and anterior insula activity is a consequence
of already feeling empathic toward a person who now hap-
pens to be in pain and that other brain regions would be
activated if one watched an empathized-with person win
the lottery.
Although a number of studies have begun to address
these issues, few conclusions have emerged, because there
has been little consensus across different studies. For instance,
when subjects are exposed to stories or scenarios meant
to induce empathic responses (Decety & Chaminade,
2003; Farrow et al., 2001; Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer, Berger,
Goldsher, & Aharon-Peretz, 2005), the dorsal ACC and ante-
rior insula are not commonly activated. Instead, mentaliz-
ing regions such as the dorsomedial PFC and temporal pole
tend to be activated along with amygdala. As mentioned,
no study has obtained self-reported empathy to presented
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 160 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
stimuli that can be used to correlate with neural responses;
however, several studies have assessed trait empathy and
correlated this with neural responses. Here, the brain region
most commonly associated with trait empathy is the medial
PFC (BA 10; Ranklin et al., 2006; Shamay-Tsoory, Tomer,
Berger, & Aharon-Peretz, 2003; Shamay-Tsoory, Lester
et al., 2005; Singer et al., 2004). Other regions, including the
dorsal ACC, anterior insula, ventrolateral PFC (both mirror
system and non–mirror system areas), dorsomedial PFC,
and ventral striatum, have each been identified in at least
two studies using trait empathy measures (Chakrabarti,
Bullmore, & Baron-Cohen, 2006; Kaplan & Iacoboni,
2006; Pfeifer et al., 2008; Ranklin et al., 2006; Schulte-
Rüther, Markowitsch, Fink, & Piefke, 2007; Singer et al.,
2004; Shamay-Tsoory, Lester et al., 2005).
Perhaps most clarifying in light of the tripartite empathy
definition given previously are the two studies by Lamm and
colleagues (Lamm, Batson, et al., 2007; Lamm, Nussbaum,
et al., 2007) that assessed trait emotional contagion, the
tendency to mirror what others are feeling. These studies
both found that activity in the dorsal ACC, anterior insula,
and mirror system was related to trait emotional contagion,
suggesting that these regions may be specifically involved
in the bottom-up emotion matching that often occurs with
empathy, rather than the top-down components of empathy
(i.e., perspective taking and keeping focus on the other
rather than on the self).
One of these studies in particular helps bolster this inter-
pretation. Lamm, Nussbaum et al. (2007) had subjects view
two sets of pictures that depicted needles going through
the skin of a person’s hand; however, for one set, subjects
were informed that the “hand had already been numbed for
a biopsy.” The bottom-up visual inputs from both sets of
images appear painful, but top-down cognitive appraisal
should drive very different empathy responses to the two
stimuli. Pain regions including the dorsal ACC, anterior
insula, and somatosensory cortex were strongly activated
by both sets of pictures. In contrast, regions involved in
mentalizing (the medial PFC, dorsomedial PFC, ventrome-
dial PFC, and precuneus) and self-control (the right ven-
trolateral PFC) were differentially activated to the different
sets of pictures. These regions may play a role in contex-
tualizing empathic responses to take account of what the
experience of the other is likely to be, based on knowledge
of their situation (e.g., numbed hand) or personality (e.g.,
masochist?).
A number of studies have now examined what differs
in the brain as one considers another ’s distress rather than
one’s own. These studies are an important complement to
those that reveal the commonalities. Some of the studies
that reported commonalities also reported what was greater
during experiencing or observing something distressing
CH05.indd 160
(Ochsner et al., 2008; Singer et al., 2004; Wicker, Keysers,
et al., 2003). Other studies manipulated the subjects’ per-
spective to focus on a target’s experience or their own
experience (Jackson, Brunet, Meltzoff, & Decety 2006;
Preston et al., 2007; Schulte-Rüther et al., 2007). Although
no brain region was observed as being active in a majority
of these studies, some regions were more involved in self-
or other-focused attention. Specifically, the dorsal ACC,
anterior insula, and posterior ventrolateral PFC were more
active only during self-focused or personal experience
conditions. In contrast, the ventromedial PFC, precuneus,
posterior STS, TPJ, IPL, and amygdala tended to be more
active during other-focused or target observation condi-
tions. In a connectivity analysis, Zaki, Ochsner, Hanelin,
Wager, and Mackey (2007) observed stronger connectivity
between the dorsal ACC and medial PFC, posterior STS,
precuneus, and IPL during the observation, relative to the
experience, of pain. This suggests a role for the mentaliz-
ing network in empathy.
Thus, the tentative conclusion that may be drawn at this
point is that the dorsal ACC and anterior insula are acti-
vated both when a person is observing and experiencing
painful stimulation, potentially supporting an internal mir-
roring of another ’s affective response. In contrast, self and
social cognition regions, including the medial PFC, dorso-
medial PFC, ventromedial PFC, and precuneus, may sup-
port processes supporting focusing on and making sense of
another ’s experience as it would feel for them.
Attributions of Morality and Trustworthiness
Although most neuroimaging studies examining the pro-
cesses whereby the psychological states and traits of others
are inferred have focused on this process generically, there
has been some work focusing on domain-specific attribu-
tions. Two commonly studied domain-specific attributions
are for morality and trustworthiness.
The most significant finding in the domain of morality
judgments is that personal, relative to impersonal, moral
decisions recruit more regions associated with mentaliz-
ing and self-referential processing, including the medial
PFC, precuneus, and TPJ (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom,
Darley, & Cohen, 2001). Moral reasoning in general also
invokes elements of the mentalizing and self-reference
network, including the medial PFC, ventromedial PFC, TPJ,
and posterior STS (Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, Bramati, &
Grafman, 2002; Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, Eslinger et al.,
2002). Several studies have now shown modulation of these
regions as factors related to moral attributions are manipu-
lated, including the actor ’s intentions (Berthoz, Armony,
Blair, & Dolan, 2002; Borg, Hynes, Horn, Grafton, & Sinnott-
Armstrong, 2006) and beliefs about the consequences of
the action (Young, Cushman, Hauser, & Saxe, 2007), actual
12/22/09 5:33:40 PM

consequences (Borg et al., 2006; Young et al., 2007), and
whether an audience is present to the actions (Finger,
Marsh, Kamel, Mitchell, & Blair, 2006). Additionally,
damage to the ventromedial and medial PFCs has been
associated with impaired ability to make personal, but
not impersonal, moral judgments (Ciaramelli, Muccioli,
Ladavas, & di Pellegrino, 2007; Mendez, Anderson, &
Shapira, 2005).
In contrast, judgments of trustworthiness have been
almost exclusively linked to amygdala activity across studies.
Adolphs, Tranel, and Damasio (1998) observed that
patients with bilateral amygdala damage, relative to con-
trols, were heavily biased to rate faces as more trustworthy.
Similarly, an early fMRI study found that the amygdala
was more active when the subject was presented with
untrustworthy faces than with trustworthy faces (Winston,
Strange, O’Doherty, & Dolan, 2002). Interestingly, Engell,
Haxby, and Todorov (2007) observed that amygdala
responses more closely tracked consensus judgments of
trustworthiness for different faces than the subjects’ own
ratings for those faces.
Self-Processes
The self has been a central topic within social psychology for
decades, because many theories regarding the development,
maintenance, and regulation of the self suggest that these
are profoundly social processes and because self-processes
continuously influence our social cognition and behavior. It
is little surprise then that the self has been one of the most
actively researched topics within social cognitive neurosci-
ence. In the following sections, I discuss in turn the functional
neuroanatomy of agency, self-recognition, self-reflection and
self-knowledge, and self-control (see Figure 5.4).
Self-Processes
1 medial PFC 5 supplementry motor area
2 dorsomedial PFC 6 ventrolateral PFC
3 precuneus/posterior cingulate 7 inferior parietal lobule
4 rostral ACC
CH05.indd 161
Functional Neuroanatomy 161
Agency
Agency refers to the sense that one was causally responsible for
a particular behavior and forms one of the phenomenological
cores of selfhood. The neural correlates of agency have been
examined in two different ways. First, a number of studies
have compared the neural bases of freely chosen self-initi-
ated actions to externally triggered actions. Although these
studies do not assess the experience of agency, they operate
under the assumption that freely chosen actions are asso-
ciated with a sense of agency and free will. Perhaps the
most famous of these studies is Libet’s, which has been
referred to time and again to argue that free will is an
illusion (Libet, Wright, & Gleason, 1982).
In Libet’s study, subjects freely chose when to make a
response and were asked to watch a clock and remember
the precise time when they formed the intention to respond.
Intriguingly, Libet observed a neural response, the readiness
potential thought to emanate from the supplementary motor
area, a few hundred milliseconds prior to when subjects
claimed to have formed an intention. Libet argued that the
neural responses that would ultimately trigger a behavior
were causing an intention to be formed rather than an inten-
tion setting the motor response in motion (see also Fried
et al., 1991). The neuroimaging studies that have followed
have commonly observed supplementary motor area activ-
ity, along with the dorsal ACC, lateral PFC, medial PFC,
and precuneus (Babiloni et al., 2008; Brass, Derrfuss, &
von Cramon, 2005; Brass, Zysset, & von Cramon, 2001;
C. Frith, Friston, Liddle, & Frackowiak, 1991; Hunter
et al., 2003; Lau, Rogers, Haggard, & Passingham, 2004;
Lau, Rogers, Ramnani, & Passingham, 2004). One study
observed that supplementary motor area activity that occurs
just prior to intention formation predicts the timing of self-
reported intention formation, whereas activity in the medial
Figure 5.4 The brain regions involved in
self-processes (agency processing [1, 3, 5, 7],
self-recognition [6, 7], self-reflection [1–3],
and self-control [4, 5, 6]). Numbers in brackets
correspond to the regions in the figure reliably
associated with a particular self process.
12/22/09 5:33:41 PM
 162 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
PFC and precuneus up to 10 seconds prior to intention
formation predicts the timing of self-reported intention for-
mation (Soon, Brass, Heinze, & Haynes, 2008).
These studies are not without limitations. Waiting for an
extended time until one has an intention to press a button
is an artificial task that may well involve processes dis-
tinct from those involved in intention–action connections
in more naturalistic settings. These studies do not merely
examine intention formation but rather intention formation
while in the mind-set of reflecting on and detecting one’s
own intention formation. This would seem to have all of
the usual issues with introspection (Nisbett & Wilson,
1977). One can imagine monitoring one’s own intention
formation, particularly in such an artificial task, to be more
of a signal detection task than a direct read-off of one’s
own psychological states. When attending to one’s own
thoughts, a variety of fleeting thoughts are likely to occur,
and the individual must decide which rise to the level of
full-blown intentions and which do not. In the study by
Soon et al. (2008), it is not hard to imagine that a partially
formed and vaguely conscious intention to press a button
occurs at one point but does not meet one’s threshold for
declaring that an intention has occurred. Nevertheless,
this subthreshold intention may set in motion a series of
psychological events that trigger the full-blown intention
several seconds later. If the subthreshold intention is not
reported, its neural correlates would appear to predict the
subsequent above-threshold intention, thus subverting the
apparent order of events. Consequently, it is unclear at this
point whether neural events causally precede all inten-
tions or just those intentions that we reflectively recognize
as intentions.
The second approach to the study of agency involves cre-
ating discrepancies between one’s behavior and the visual
presentations of one’s behavior. Typically, these studies
manipulate visual feedback such that one’s arm movements
appear to move in a different trajectory than intended, or a
delay is used such that one’s hand movements are seen a few
hundred milliseconds after they are produced. Across these
studies, the most common finding is that the IPL, in the area
of the TPJ, increases in activity as the mismatch between
produced and observed behavior increases (Blakemore,
Oakley, & Frith, 2003; Farrer, et al., 2003; Farrer et al., 2008;
Leube et al., 2003; Shimada, Hiraki, & Oda, 2005). Studies
have used TMS applied to this area to disrupt agency judg-
ments (Preston & Newport, 2008; Tsakiris, Costantini, &
Haggard, 2008). Bilateral activity in this region has also
been observed when hearing delayed playback of one’s own
voice (Hashimoto & Sakai, 2003).
Similar to these findings, schizophrenic patients and those
with related experiences of external control of one’s actions
tend to produce greater right IPL activity during normal
CH05.indd 162
behavior than do control subjects, with the effect increasing
with symptom strength (Franck, O’Leary, Flaum, Hichwa, &
Andreasen, 2002; Ganesan, Hunter, & Spence, 2005;
Spence, Brooks, Hirsch, Liddle, & Grasby, 1997). Lastly,
lesion-induced out-of-body experiences have been localized
to the IPL–TPJ region (Blanke, Landis, Spinelli, & Seeck,
2004), with intracranial stimulation and TMS to this region
producing out-of-body–like experiences (Blanke, Ortigue,
Landis, & Seeck, 2002; Blanke et al., 2005). Together, these
results suggest that this region may code for the mismatch
between intention and action, with quiescence in this region
resulting during normal personal agency.
Overall, these two experimental approaches suggest
that forming an intention to act and assigning agency to
an observed behavior may depend on different neural sys-
tems. Forming an intention appears to rely largely on struc-
tures on the medial walls of the cortex, whereas evaluating
whether the behavior that results is one’s own involves a
lateral region of parietal cortex.
Self-Recognition
The canonical test for whether an animal or human baby has
self-awareness is the mirror self-recognition test (Gallup,
1970). In this test, colored ink or powder is applied to the
subject’s forehead while the subject is asleep. Once awake,
the subject is placed in front of a mirror. If upon notic-
ing the colored patch in the mirror, the subject proceeds
to touch its own forehead where the color is, the subject is
then said to have passed the mirror self-recognition test.
A number of neuroimaging studies have now established
the network of brain regions involved in recognizing one-
self from pictures. Nine of ten neuroimaging studies using
“pictures of the self” observed increased right ventrolateral
PFC activity (Devue et al., 2007; Hodzic, Muckli, Singer, &
Stirn, 2009; Kaplan, Aziz-Zadeh, Uddin, & Iacoboni, 2008;
Morita et al., 2008; Platek et al., 2004, 2006; Suguira
et al., 2000, 2005, 2008). About half of these also reported
increased right IPL activity (cf. Morita et al., 2008). One
of these studies (Kaplan et al., 2008) found that identify-
ing the self from pictures or voice recordings activated the
same region of right ventrolateral PFC. Additionally, TMS
applied to right IPL was found to reduce subjects’ sensi-
tivity to self–other distinctions (Uddin, Molnar-Szakacs,
Zaidel, & Iacoboni, 2006). One study of note (Suguira
et al., 2000) compared active and passive responses to
self-images. In the conjunction of these two tasks, right
IPL activity was observed, whereas right ventrolateral
PFC activity was observed only in the comparison of the
two tasks such that it was more active when subjects were
explicitly identifying their own faces. Thus, right IPL activ-
ity may be involved in lower-level visual processing of the
self, whereas right ventrolateral PFC activity may be more
12/22/09 5:33:42 PM

involved in intentional self-recognition. Interestingly, in East
Asian subjects, right ventrolateral PFC activity is more
active for one’s own face relative to a coworker ’s face, if
they are primed with an independent self-construal (Sui &
Han, 2007), whereas an interdependent self-construal
produces similarly strong activations for both faces in this
region.
Self-Reflection and Self-Knowledge
The ability to reflect on one’s current and past experiences,
preferences, traits, and abilities is one of the signature
achievements of the human brain. Although some other spe-
cies have shown evidence of rudimentary self-awareness,
perhaps as evidenced by the mirror self-recognition test, no
other species has such an overdeveloped self-awareness as to
need aisle after aisle of self-help books. A few dozen neuro-
imaging and lesion studies have now examined the processes
by which we focus our attention internally on ourselves.
Free-form reflection on the self has been found to
produce activity in the medial PFC and the contiguous
regions of the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex
(jointly referred to in this section as precuneusPCC) rela-
tive to control tasks; in addition, there is more activity in
the medial PFC (BA 10) relative to free-form reflection
on another individual (D’Argembeau et al., 2005; Farb
et al., 2007; Johnson et al., 2006; Kjaer, Nowak, & Lou,
2002). The involvement of the medial PFC is of particular
interest given that this is the only region of the prefrontal
cortex known definitively to be disproportionately larger
in humans than in other primate species (Semendeferi,
Schleicher, Zilles, Armstrong, & Van Hoesen, 2001). Trait
self-consciousness has also been specifically associated
with medial PFC activity (Eisenberger, Lieberman, &
Satpute, 2005). Similarly, explicitly attending to one’s pref-
erences, relative to a non–self-reflective control task, has
reliably been associated with medial PFC and dorsomedial
PFC activity (Goldberg, Harel, & Malach, 2006; Gusnard,
Akbudak, Shulman, & Raichle, 2001; Johnson et al., 2005;
Lane, Fink, Chau, & Dolan, 1997; Ochsner, Knierim,
et al., 2004). Interestingly, mindfulness meditation train-
ing that attempts to shift self-processing from linguistic
self-evaluation to a more experiential basic awareness has
been shown to diminish this medial PFC activity (Farb
et al., 2007). Another study (Johnson et al., 2006) found
that reflecting on the self with a promotion or prevention
focus (Higgins, 1998) was associated with either increased
medial PFC or precuneusPCC activity, respectively.
Additionally, the medial and ventromedial PFCs have
both been associated with self-insight processes. For
instance, patients with damage to these regions were less
aware of whether their behavior constituted social trans-
gressions compared with patients with damage to the
CH05.indd 163
Functional Neuroanatomy 163
lateral PFC (Beer, John, & Knight, 2006; see also Beer,
Heerey, Keltner, Scabini, & Knight, 2003). Similarly,
activity in the medial and ventromedial PFCs was greater
when subjects successfully predicted whether they would
be able to retrieve particular words from memory (Schnyer,
Nicholls, & Verfaellie, 2005). Although there have been
only a few neuroscience investigations of self-insight,
these studies are particularly important because they link
neural processes to adaptive outcomes of self-reflection.
It is one thing to identify the medial PFC’s involvement
when people try to reflect on themselves, but it is quite
another to determine that activating the medial PFC dur-
ing these attempts is associated with something useful and
accurate about oneself.
The great majority of self-reflection studies have
focused on trait self-knowledge. In these studies, subjects
are typically asked to indicate whether trait words or
phrases are descriptive of themselves, are descriptive
of another person, or have some textual or semantic feature
(Craik et al., 1999; D’Argembeau, Xue, Lu, Van der Linden, &
Bechara, 2008; Fossati et al., 2003, 2004; Gutchess,
Kensinger, & Schacter, 2007; Heatherton et al., 2006;
Johnson et al., 2002; Kelley et al., 2002; Kircher et al., 2002;
Lou et al., 2004; Macrae, Moran, Heatherton, Banfield, &
Kelley, 2004; Moran, Macrae, Heatherton, Wyland, & Kelley,
2006; Pfeifer et al., 2007; Saxe, Moran, et al., 2006;
Schmitz & Johnson, 2006; Schmitz, Kawahara-Baccus, &
Johnson, 2004; Seger, Stone, & Keenan, 2004; Turner,
Simons, Gilbert, Frith, & Burgess, 2008; Vanderwal, Hunyadi,
Grupe, Connors, & Schultz, 2008; Zhang et al., 2006; Zhu,
Zhang, Fan, & Han, 2007). All but one of these studies
has shown increased medial PFC activity during self-
judgments relative to either other-judgments or con-
trol judgments, with precuneusPCC and dorsomedial PFC
activations also present in several studies. Two studies have
found that the medial PFC is more active while judging
positive self-traits than negative self-traits (Fossati et al.,
2003, 2004), and a third found that the medial PFC was
not sensitive to this distinction and that the subgenual
ACC was activated by positive self-traits relative to nega-
tive self-traits (Moran et al., 2006). Multiple studies have
also linked the medial PFC to subsequent memory for self-
relevant traits (Fossati et al., 2004; Macrae et al., 2004),
which is consistent with the association of the medial PFC
with autobiographical memory relative to episodic mem-
ory more generally (Gilboa, 2004).
Given that self-knowledge and self-concepts change
over time, it is important to determine the neural processes
involved in the developmental and experience-driven
changes in these processes. One developmental fMRI
study (Pfeifer et al., 2007) found that the medial PFC was
significantly more active in 9-year-old children than in
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 164 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
adults when making trait self-judgments. In contrast, the
levels of medial PFC activity in young adults and older
adults were similar when making trait self-judgments
(Gutchess et al., 2007). A study on self-schemas compared
trait self-judgments in domains for which subjects were or
were not self-schematic (i.e., had substantial experience)
(Lieberman, Jarcho, & Satpute, 2004). Judgments made in
the self-schematic domain produced greater activity in the
ventromedial PFC, ventral striatum, amygdala, lateral tem-
poral cortex, and precuneusPCC than judgments from the
nonschematic domain. In contrast, nonschematic judg-
ments produced greater activity in the dorsomedial PFC
and medial temporal lobe. These results suggest that sche-
matics may recruit more automatic affective processes than
nonschematics in making these judgments.
Change over time has also been examined by asking
subjects to take different temporal perspectives on the self.
Studies comparing the present perspective of the self to
future (Ersner-Hershfield, Wimmer, & Knutson, in press)
and past (D’Argembeau et al., 2008) perspectives of the self
have both observed greater medial PFC activity when indi-
viduals focus on the self as it is currently constituted rather
than on the self at other time points. These data are con-
sistent with the notions that there is a greater identification
with the current self and that future and past selves may be
treated in some ways as if they are altogether different indi-
viduals from oneself (Libby, Eibach, & Gilovich, 2005).
Other open questions include whether the medial PFC is
similarly active for self- and other-judgments and whether
the medial and dorsomedial PFCs are each involved in
both self and social cognition. As to the first question,
some studies have reported greater medial PFC activity for
self-judgments relative to other-judgments (Kelley et al.,
2002; Lou et al., 2004), although some have not (Schmitz
et al., 2004; Seger et al., 2004). One criticism of those that
have shown a difference is that in these studies the self is a
far better known target than nonself targets (e.g., the queen
of Denmark or the president of the United States). One
study (Heatherton et al., 2006) specifically compared self-
judgments to judgments of a close friend and still found
significantly greater medial PFC activity for self-versus
other-judgments; however, others have found similar
medial PFC activity for self-judgments and judgments of a
significant other or mother (Ochsner et al., 2005; Schmitz
et al., 2004; Vanderwal et al., 2008).
With respect to the relative involvement of the medial
PFC, dorsomedial PFC, and precuneusPCC, across all of the
self-reflection and self-knowledge studies, medial PFC
activations were present in 94% of the studies, whereas
dorsomedial PFC and precuneusPCC activations were pres-
ent in 53% and 63% of studies, respectively. Thus, acti-
vations of the dorsomedial PFC and precuneusPCC are
CH05.indd 164
common; however, these activations are not as reliably
invoked by self-reflection processes as is medial PFC
activity. This is almost the mirror image of the pattern from
mentalizing studies in which dorsomedial PFC activations
were present in 91% of studies and medial PFC and precu-
neusPCC activations were present in 33% and 39% of stud-
ies, respectively.
Finally, classic theories of self-knowledge have pro-
posed that self-concepts develop when individuals take
the perspective of others on themselves (Cooley, 1902;
Mead, 1934). Reflected appraisals constitute one person’s
assessment of what another person thinks of him or her.
Three studies of adults have now examined the neural cor-
relates of reflected appraisals of the self (“what I think you
think of me”) compared with direct appraisals of the self
(“what I think of me”), and each have found similar
levels of medial PFC and dorsomedial PFC activity in
the two forms of appraisals (D’Argembeau et al., 2007;
Ochsner et al., 2005; Pfeifer et al., 2009). One of these
studies (Pfeifer et al., 2009) focused primarily on ado-
lescents, because this is a critical period of self-concept
development. The TPJ, a region that commonly appears
in mentalizing tasks, was strongly activated during
reflected appraisals in adolescents and adults. Given
that reflected appraisals involve mentalizing about the
belief another person holds toward oneself, this is not a
surprising result. Perhaps more surprising was the strong
activation of the TPJ during direct appraisals in adoles-
cents, but not in adults. This suggests the possibility that
adolescents, but not adults, are spontaneously drawing
upon social sources of information when asked to gener-
ate direct appraisals. Consistent with this notion, a num-
ber of regions involved in mentalizing about others were
more active during direct appraisals in adolescents than
in adults, including the dorsomedial PFC, posterior STS,
and precuneusPCC.
Self-Control
Self-control, or the ability to regulate, manipulate, or con-
trol one’s prepotent thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, has
been extensively examined using various tools of neuro-
science. Explicit attempts at self-control across various
domains commonly recruit a network of brain regions,
including the lateral PFC and the contiguous regions of
the dorsal ACC, presupplementary motor area (BA 6),
and posterior dorsomedial PFC (BA 8). It should be noted
that the dorsal ACC is typically thought to serve a con-
flict detection function indicating the need for self-control,
whereas the lateral PFC is thought to be more involved in
implementing control or inhibiting prepotent responses
(MacDonald, Cohen, Stenger, & Carter, 2000). Lesion data
support the latter claim regarding the lateral PFC (Aron,
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Robbins, & Poldrack, 2004), but they are less supportive
of the former claim regarding the dorsal ACC (Fellows &
Farah, 2005).
Most relevant to social psychology are the more than
30 neuroimaging studies of affect and emotion regula-
tion (Ochsner & Gross, 2005; for relevant cognitive
studies, see Goel & Dolan, 2003; Mitchell et al., 2007).
These studies can be divided according to whether emo-
tion regulation is the explicit goal of the task or whether
emotion regulation occurs incidentally as a consequence
of another process not intended to produce emotion regu-
lation effects. Explicit emotion regulation tasks include
reappraisal (Banks, Eddy, Angstadt, Nathan, & Luan Phan,
2007; Beauregard, Levesque, & Bourgouin, 2001; Eippert
et al., 2007; Goldin, McRae, Ramel, & Gross, 2007;
Harenski & Hamann, 2006; Herwig et al., 2007; Kim &
Hamann, 2007; Luan Phan et al., 2005; McRae, Ochsner,
Mauss, Gabrieli, & Gross, 2008; Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, &
Gabrieli, 2002; Ochsner, Ray, et al., 2004; Schaefer
et al., 2003; Urry et al., 2006; Wager, Davidson, Hughes,
Lindquist, & Ochsner, 2008), suppression (Goldin et al.,
2007; Lee, Dolan, & Critchley, 2008; Ohira et al., 2006),
detachment (Kalisch et al., 2005; Levesque et al., 2003),
and self-distraction (Kalisch, Wiech, Herrmann, &
Dolan, 2006).
Across 19 neuroimaging studies, task conditions that
invoked explicit emotion regulation efforts were com-
monly associated with activations in right ventrolateral
PFC (63% of studies), left ventrolateral PFC (63% of stud-
ies), the contiguous regions of the presupplementary motor
area and posterior dorsomedial PFC (47%), and left dorso-
lateral PFC (32% of studies). Approximately half of these
studies also reported on frontal regions whose activity was
associated with regulatory success either in terms of self-
reported affect or limbic activity. Although there is not an
entirely consistent pattern among these analyses, right and
left ventrolateral PFCs do appear more often than other
regions.
Most of these studies have examined the regulation
of negative affect. Although a few studies have looked at
regulation during the presentation of positively valenced
images (Kim & Hamann, 2007; Ohira et al., 2006), it is
unclear whether such images produce a similarly intense
emotional response to the negative images typically
used. A study by Delgado, Gillis, and Phelps (2008) exam-
ined reappraisal in the context of financial reward and
observed increased left ventrolateral and left dorsolateral
PFC activity along with diminished ventral striatum activ-
ity during reappraisal.
More than a dozen studies have examined incidental
emotion regulation using affect-based conflict resolution,
placebo, and affect labeling paradigms. In placebo studies,
CH05.indd 165
Functional Neuroanatomy 165
subjects are led to believe that their pain or anxiety will be
alleviated by a pill or cream that is in fact pharmacologi-
cally inert. Although there is no instruction to intention-
ally regulate one’s pain or anxiety, subjects often report
less distress in placebo conditions. In the five neuroimag-
ing studies (Kong et al., 2006; Lieberman, Jarcho, Berman
et al., 2004; Petrovic et al., 2005; Wager et al., 2004, studies
1 and 2) that have related neural responses to placebo-
related distress reductions, four have reported right ven-
trolateral PFC activity and two have reported activity in
left ventrolateral PFC, right dorsolateral PFC, and rostral
ACC. Five studies employed conflict resolution tasks in
which emotional cues must be ignored to successfully per-
form the task (Enger, Etkins, Gale, & Hirsch, 2008; Etkin,
Enger, Peraza, Kandel, & Hirsch, 2006; Felmingham
et al., 2007; Most, Chun, Johnson, & Kiehl, 2006; Ochsner,
Hughes, Robertson, Cooper, & Gabrieli, in press). Here, the
regulation of emotional responses is secondary to the main
task of making a fast categorical judgment about another
stimulus; thus, regulation is secondary to the main task.
In all five of these studies, the rostral ACC was associ-
ated with successful regulation of the emotional distracter.
Lastly, four fMRI studies (Altshuler et al., 2005; Hariri,
Bookheimer, & Mazziotta, 2000; Lieberman, Hariri, Jarcho,
Eisenberger, & Bookheimer, 2005; Lieberman et al., 2007)
have examined the neural basis of why putting feelings into
words can dampen emotional responses (Pennebaker &
Beall, 1986). In these studies, subjects chose affective
labels to characterize the negative emotional images. In
each of these studies, right ventrolateral PFC was the pri-
mary brain region active during “affect labeling,” relative
to control conditions. In addition, in each of these studies,
right ventrolateral PFC activity was associated with dimin-
ished amygdala responses to the negative stimuli. During
these studies, emotion regulation was incidental; subjects
were not trying to regulate their emotional responses.
Across all of the incidental emotion regulation studies, right
ventrolateral PFC and rostral ACC activations were pres-
ent in 57% and 50% of these studies, respectively. Across
both intentional and incidental emotion regulation studies,
right ventrolateral PFC activity was reported most often
(59%), followed by left ventrolateral PFC activity (41%).
Although right ventrolateral PFC activity was equally
likely to be present in intentional and incidental emotion
regulation studies (63% vs. 57%), left ventrolateral PFC
activity was far more likely to be present in intentional than
in incidental regulation studies (63% vs. 14%), as was the
case for the contiguous regions of the presupplementary
motor area and posterior dorsomedial PFC (47% vs. 0%).
In contrast, the rostral ACC was much more likely to
be invoked during incidental regulation studies (50%) than
in intentional regulation studies (5%).
12/22/09 5:33:44 PM
 166 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
Social Interaction
Trust, Cooperation, and Fairness
Building relationships of any kind and effectively work-
ing with others depends on mutual trust, a willingness to
cooperate, and a sense that rewards and responsibilities
are being distributed fairly. Using paradigms created by
behavioral economists, social cognitive neuroscientists
and neuroeconomists have been examining these different
social adhesives (see Figure 5.5).
Several fMRI studies have used variants of the “trust
game” (Berg, Dickhaut, & McCabe, 1995) to examine the
neural processes invoked when deciding whether to trust a
stranger. In the trust game, there are two players: decision
maker 1 (DM1) and decision maker 2 (DM2). DM1, also
called the investor, is given a sum of money (e.g., $10). This
money can be kept or invested. If invested, the money is
moved to DM2, also called the trustee. Any money received
by the trustee is increased by a known and predetermined
factor (e.g., multiplied by 4). DM2 then decides how much
money to transfer back to DM1. In the case of mutual trust
and repeated games with the same individual, it would be in
both players’ interest for DM1 to invest the entire sum and
for DM2 to return half of the proceeds. However, if DM1
does not trust DM2 to return a fair share, DM1 is less likely
to invest as much of the initial endowment. Additionally, in
a one-shot game where each player will make only a single
Fairness, Trust, & Helping Unfairness & Social Rejection
Unfairness & Social Rejection
1 medial PFC
2 ventromedial PFC
3 ventral striatum
4 dorsal ACC
5 anterior insula
6 ventrolateral PFC
CH05.indd 166
decision with the other player, it is considered irrational for
DM2 to return any money to DM1.
To examine the neural correlates of trusting another
person in a one-shot trust game (McCabe, Houser, Ryan,
Smith, & Trouard, 2001), in contrast to mere investing
phenomena, subjects played some rounds with a human
DM2 and some with a computer DM2. The researchers
observed that the medial PFC was more active for DM1
when DM1 decided to transfer the funds over to DM2. It is
possible that the medial PFC represents the DM1’s feeling
of similarity to DM2 (Mitchell, Macrae, & Banaji, 2006)
and thus DM1’s willingness to cooperate. In another type
of cooperative game, Decety and colleagues also found the
medial and ventromedial PFCs to be more active when a per-
son was being cooperative (Decety, Jackson, Sommerville,
Chaminade, & Meltzoff, 2004). In their trust game study,
Delgado, Frank, and Phelps (2005) observed greater ven-
tral striatum and left TPJ activity in DM1 when that person
chose to trust. King-Casas and colleagues (2005) examined
multiple games played between the same DM1 and DM2 and
found that when a DM1 responded to DM2’s untrustworthy
behavior by investing even more on the next round of the
game, rather than less, activity in the caudate in the dorsal
striatum of DM1 increased. Finally, Krueger and colleagues
(2007) observed greater dorsomedial PFC, ventral striatum,
and septal activity in DM1 when that person chose to trust.
Thus, although there is substantial variability across studies,
Figure 5.5 The brain regions involved in
social interactions. The top left image dis-
plays brain regions activated in studies of
fairness, trust, and helping. The top right
and bottom right images display brain
regions activated in studies of unfairness
and social rejection.
Note: Anterior insula is displayed on the lateral
wall for presentation purposes, but is actually
between the medial and lateral walls of the
cortex.
12/22/09 5:33:44 PM

these findings do suggest that different regions on the
medial prefrontal wall (the dorsomedial PFC, medial PFC,
and ventromedial PFC) and in the striatum (dorsal and ven-
tral) are more active during the decision to trust.
Brain-based oxytocin levels are also associated with
DM1’s trust behavior in the trust game. In the first study to
examine this, a DM1 receiving an intranasal dose of oxy-
tocin transferred more money to DM2 than those who had
received a placebo (Kosfeld, Heinrichs, Zak, Fischbacher, &
Fehr, 2005). In another study (Baumgartner, Heinrichs,
Vonlanthen, Fischbacher, & Fehr, 2008), a dozen one-
shot trust games were played after an oxytocin or placebo
induction; however, subjects received feedback about game
dynamics after the first six games had been played. At this
point, subjects who were in the role of DM1 were informed
that in 50% of the prior games, DM2 had not transferred
money back to them. Knowing that future betrayals were
likely, placebo DM1 subjects reduced their later transfers
to DM2. In contrast, DM1’s who had received oxytocin
actually increased their transfers to DM2 after receiving
the feedback. These oxytocin findings make sense in light
of the known role of oxytocin in social attachment and pair
bonding in animals (Insel & Shapiro, 1992).
Two studies have examined the neural correlates asso-
ciated with finding out that another person has failed
to reciprocate one’s own trusting behavior. One study
(Rilling, Dagenais, Goldsmith, Glenn, & Pagnoni, 2008)
used the “prisoner ’s dilemma” game in which DM1’s and
DM2’s financial outcomes are each dependent on both
their own and the other player ’s decision. If both DM1 and
DM2 choose to cooperate, they receive equitable outcomes
that maximize their joint reward total. However, for each
decision maker, given a particular decision by the other
player, defecting will produce a greater personal reward
than cooperating. Rilling found that if DM1’s cooperation
was unreciprocated by DM2, DM1 produced greater insula
and reduced ventral striatum activity. Similarly, in a trust
game, Delgado and colleagues (2005) found that DM2’s
choice not to transfer funds back to DM1 led to reduced
ventral striatum activity in DM1. This might have been
due to the diminished financial reward associated with this
outcome; however, Delgado also showed that this effect
was absent when DM2 was believed by DM1 to be of high
moral character. This suggests that the diminished ventral
striatum activity was at least in part due to social factors.
Finally, multiple studies have examined the decision
to punish those who exhibit unfair behavior. A trust game
study using PET (de Quervain et al., 2004) found that if
DM1 was given the opportunity to punish DM2 when DM2
did not transfer money back, DM1 showed increased activ-
ity in the dorsal striatum, and the magnitude of this activity
was correlated with the size of the punishment delivered.
CH05.indd 167
Functional Neuroanatomy 167
Other studies have used the “ultimatum game” (Fehr &
Schmidt, 1999) to examine punishment for unfair treatment.
In this game, DM1 is given an endowment (e.g., $10) and
makes a proposal for how DM1 and DM2 should split the
endowment (e.g., DM1 will keep $7 and DM2 will receive $3).
If DM2 accepts the proposal, both players receive what DM1
has proposed. If DM2 rejects the proposal, both players get
nothing. At one time, economists supposedly argued that
DM2 should accept any nonzero offer, being better than zero,
and thus DM1 should always offer one penny and DM2 should
accept. In actual play, DM1 usually offers 30% to 50% and
DM2 will reject many of the offers lower than 30%. Sanfey
and colleagues published the first neuroimaging study of
the ultimatum game and found that subjects in the DM2
role showed greater anterior insula activity to unfair offers
($1 or $2 out of $10) than to fair offers, but only if DM1 was a
person, not a computer (Sanfey, Rilling, Aronson, Nystrom, &
Cohen, 2003). Additionally, the magnitude of anterior insula
activity was associated with the tendency to reject the offer.
Given that anterior insula activity has been associated with
feelings of disgust, Sanfey suggested that this activity may
represent the sense of insult or injustice associated with an
unfair offer. A second fMRI study of the ultimatum game
(Tabibnia, Satpute, & Lieberman, 2008) equated the mate-
rial payoff of fair and unfair offers, comparing, for instance,
a fair offer of $5 out of $10 to an unfair offer of $5 out
of $23. As in the study by Sanfey and colleagues, anterior
insula activity was associated with the tendency to reject
unfair offers.
The study by Tabibnia et al. (2008) also examined the
psychological struggle that can occur when an offer is
simultaneously unfair and financially desirable (e.g., $5
out of $23). Subjects who more frequently accepted these
unfair but desirable offers showed increased activity in
right ventrolateral PFC, a region that’s been associated
with emotion regulation and self-control more generally,
and also showed a correlated decrease in anterior insula
activity. In contrast, two studies (Knoch, Pascual-Leone,
Meyer, Treyer, & Fehr, 2006; van’t Wout, Khan, Sanfey, &
Aleman, 2005) observed less frequent rejection of unfair
offers when TMS was applied to right dorsolateral PFC,
presumably reducing the contribution of this region to
decision processes during this task.
Two other studies using the ultimatum game have
identified causal neural mechanisms contributing to an
enhanced tendency to reject unfair offers. In one of these
studies (Koenigs & Tranel, 2007), patients with damage to
the ventromedial PFC and right ventrolateral PFC were
more likely to reject unfair offers. In the second study
(Crockett, Clark, Tabibnia, Lieberman, & Robbins, 2008),
pharmacological reduction of serotonin levels also led to
more frequent rejection of unfair offers. Reduced serotonin
12/22/09 5:33:45 PM
 168 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
levels have been shown to diminish ventrolateral PFC
activity during a motor inhibition task (Evers et al., 2005),
and thus it is plausible that regulation of one’s sense of
insult is less effective due to serotonergic depletion effects
on the ventrolateral PFC.
Social Rewards and Helping
An interesting finding that has emerged from fMRI studies
of two-person economic games described in the previous
section is that people show evidence of reward activation
when they participate in good interactions involving trust-
ing and fair behavior, even when this treatment confers
no additional financial benefit to them or even leads to a
loss. In a prisoner ’s dilemma study (Rilling et al., 2002),
subjects showed greater ventral striatum activity dur-
ing mutual cooperation than during any other combina-
tion of responses. This is striking in light of the fact that
mutual cooperation is not the most financially rewarding
outcome possible. This suggests that against their own
financial interest, there is a hedonic benefit to participat-
ing in a reciprocated trusting behavior. Similarly, Tabibnia
et al. (2008) observed that fair offers produced greater
activity in the ventral striatum and ventromedial PFC than
unfair offers that would yield the same material benefit.
A number of behavioral studies have yielded results con-
sistent with those of the fMRI studies, suggesting that being
treated fairly is rewarding above and beyond the material
benefits that fair treatment often brings (De Cremer &
Alberts, 2004; Tyler, 1991). It has been suggested that this
makes sense evolutionarily because fair treatment can be
considered a proxy for whether one is valued by others
in a group. From an evolutionary perspective, continued
inclusion in social groups has been critical to receiving a
share of needed resources and even to survival; thus, any
cue that one has met this inclusion criterion is likely to be
rewarding.
Indeed, simple signs of social acceptance have been
associated with ventral striatum activity in a number of
recent studies. Izuma, Saito, and Sadato (2008) found
that a person’s ventral striatum was similarly activated
by financial rewards and by being informed that others
view that person in a positive light. In a developmental
social neuroscience study (Scott, Dapretto, Ghahremani,
Poldrack, & Bookheimer, under review), children’s good
performance on each trial of a task was rewarded by either
financial reward or a smiling female face with the words
“that’s correct” next to it. Similar increases in ventral stria-
tum activity were observed whether the reward was finan-
cial or social.
Another set of studies has shown that helping behav-
ior in the form of charitable giving also generates reward
activity. Moll and colleagues (2006) asked people to accept
CH05.indd 168
or reject each of a series of propositions that would yield
positive, neutral, or negative financial outcomes for one-
self and/or for different charities (money really went to
these charities in this study). Trials in which subjects could
gain money for themselves with no negative consequence
for the charity unsurprisingly led to increased ventral stria-
tum activity. What was surprising is that trials in which
the charity would gain while the subject would lose money
(i.e., a donation) led to a higher level of ventral striatum
activity than receiving money oneself. Additionally, the
magnitude of ventral striatum activity during donation
decisions was associated with the tendency to accept dona-
tion propositions during the task. All of these studies taken
together suggest that enacting or being the recipient of
prosocial behavior activates the ventral striatum, a region
that has been commonly associated with reward responses
to primary reinforcers and to nonsocial secondary rein-
forcers such as money, drug cues for addicts, and erotic
images (Lieberman & Eisenberber, 2009).
Social Rejection
The study of social rejection and ostracism has been a
major area of social psychological research in the past
decade (Williams, 2007). Being excluded or rejected repre-
sents some of the most distressing experiences that people
have, and fear of rejection is a powerful motivator that may
help explain a wide array of classic findings of conformity
and obedience to authority (Williams, Bernieri, Faulkner,
Grahe, & Gada-Jain, 2000). Based initially on animal stud-
ies (Panksepp, Herman, Conner, Bishop, & Scott, 1978), it
has been suggested that there may be an overlap in the way
that the brain represents experiences of physical pain and
social pain (i.e., the pain of social rejection, exclusion, or
isolation) (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004; MacDonald &
Leary, 2005).
In humans, the neural components of the physical “pain
matrix” are fairly well understood, including the dorsal
ACC, anterior insula, somatosensory cortex, and periaque-
ductal gray (Price, 2000). Of these regions, the dorsal ACC
has been most reliably associated with the distress of phys-
ical pain (Rainville, Duncan, Price, Carrier, & Bushnell,
1998), in contrast to the somatosensory cortex, which
has been primarily associated with the sensory aspects of
physical pain (e.g., identifying where on the body the pain
is felt). For instance, after surgical lesioning of the dorsal
ACC for chronic pain, patients typically report that they
can identify the location of a painful stimulus on their body
and how intense the stimulus is, but they also report that
the pain no longer bothers them (Foltz & White, 1968).
Finally, as described earlier, right ventrolateral PFC and
rostral ACC have both been associated with the regulation
of physical pain distress.
12/22/09 5:33:46 PM

Eisenberger and colleagues have conducted a series of
neuroimaging studies that suggest that social pain processes
largely rely on this same physical pain network (Eisenberger,
Gable, & Lieberman, 2007; Eisenberger, Lieberman, &
Williams, 2003; Masten, Telzer, & Eisenberger, under
review; Way, Taylor, & Eisenberger, 2009). In these studies,
subjects believe they are playing a simulated ball-tossing
game on the Internet while they and two other subjects are
all in MRI scanners. Once in the scanner, the subjects actu-
ally play against computer players programmed to include
the subject for a certain amount of time and then stop throw-
ing the ball to the subject for the remainder of the scan.
Self-reported social distress during this exclusion episode is
associated with greater dorsal ACC activity, whereas lower
distress reports are associated with increased right ventro-
lateral PFC activity (Eisenberger et al., 2003; Eisenberger,
Way, Taylor, Welch, & Lieberman, 2007). Other studies have
also observed increased dorsal ACC activity in response to
rejection-themed images (Kross, Egner, Ochsner, Hirsch, &
Downey, 2007) and video clips of disapproving facial
movements (Burklund, Eisenberger, & Lieberman, 2007).
Additionally, dorsal ACC activity during exclusion in the
scanner correlates with daily experiences of social dis-
connection outside the scanner (Eisenberger, Gable et al.,
2007). Thus, the distress of social pain in the dorsal ACC
and the regulation of social pain in right ventrolateral PFC
closely parallel the findings from the physical pain litera-
ture. The animal literature supports these findings as well,
having shown that electrical stimulation of the dorsal ACC
increases and surgical lesions of ACC decrease distress
vocalizations associated with social isolation in nonhuman
mammals (MacLean & Newman, 1988; Smith, 1945).
One criticism of these findings (Sommerville,
Heatherton, & Kelley, 2006) focuses on the common view
that the dorsal ACC is responsible for cognitive processes,
whereas the rostral ACC is responsible for corresponding
affective processes. This viewpoint suggests that the social
rejection findings may reflect a violation of cognitive
expectations of inclusion and that the dorsal ACC is there-
fore activated because of cognitive conflict monitoring.
However, this perspective does not account for the activity
correlating with the self-reported distress of the experience
(Eisenberger et al., 2003). Furthermore, it does not account
for the increased dorsal ACC activity in rejection-sensitive
individuals to cues of rejection (Burklund et al., 2007),
because these individuals expect rejection more and yet
show more dorsal ACC activity in response to it. Finally,
the strong linkage between an opioid polymorphism and the
dorsal ACC response to rejection is hard to square with a
purely cognitive account (Way et al., 2009).
It is worth considering where this critique comes from
historically. The belief that the dorsal and rostral ACCs are
CH05.indd 169
Functional Neuroanatomy 169
involved in cognitive and affective processes, respectively, is
largely a consequence of an influential review paper (Bush,
Luu, & Posner, 2000). In this study the researchers reviewed
dozens of cognitive conflict studies and found that these
tended to activate the dorsal ACC, whereas a study of emo-
tional conflict detection in an emotional Stroop paradigm and
other clinical symptom provocation studies produced rostral
ACC activity. First, it is important to note that this literature
review included no studies of physical pain. Even though the
dorsal ACC has been repeatedly associated with the emo-
tional distress of physical pain, this finding was not accounted
for in their analysis. Second, subsequent emotional conflict
monitoring has found activity in the dorsal ACC (Davis
et al., 2005; Ochsner, Hughes, Robertson, Cooper, & Gabrieli,
2009). Third, numerous neuroimaging studies have shown
dorsal ACC activity associated with anxiety and other affective
processes (Ehrsson, Weich, Weiskopf, Dolan, & Passingham,
2007; McRae, Reiman, Fort, Chen, & Lane, 2008; Simmons
et al., 2008; Straube, Mentzel, & Miltner, 2007). Fourth, neu-
ropsychological lesion data are more supportive of the dorsal
ACC’s role in pain distress than cognitive conflict monitor-
ing, because dorsal ACC lesions are commonly found to
diminish pain distress (Foltz & White, 1968), whereas cogni-
tive conflict monitoring is often spared (Baird et al., 2006;
Fellows & Farah, 2005; Stuss, Floden, Alexander, Levine, &
Katz, 2001).
One way to reconcile these notions of dorsal ACC func-
tion is to think of it functioning like an alarm (Eisenberger &
Lieberman, 2004). Consider the typical smoke alarm. To
work successfully, it must fuse two functions together. On
one hand, it must have a mechanism capable of detect-
ing when a critical threshold for smoke particles has been
met—a mechanism conceptually analogous to cognitive
conflict monitoring. On the other hand, in order to notify
people that there’s a fire, it must have a mechanism that
can sound an audible alarm after the first mechanism has
detected the smoke. This latter process resembles the func-
tion that pain distress plays in our lives, experientially
notifying us that some harm may come to us. From this
perspective, determining the function of the dorsal ACC
may not be an either/or decision. Rather conflict monitor-
ing and pain distress may reflect coordinated cognitive and
experiential components of a single alarm mechanism.
Attachment and Close Relationships
A number of imaging studies have begun to examine how
the brain responds to the people we love (spouse, partner,
child, parent). Across these studies, most have observed
limbic activations (e.g., amygdala, striatum, dorsal ACC,
insula), although some report widespread activity in the
mentalizing network (Leibenluft, Gobbini, Harrison, &
Haxby, 2004; Seifritz et al., 2003). Hearing a child crying
12/22/09 5:33:46 PM
 170 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
has been associated with dorsal ACC activity (Lorberbaum
et al., 2002; Seifritz et al., 2003), whereas seeing pictures
of one’s own child or infant tends to activate the amygdala,
dorsal ACC, anterior insula, and bilateral lateral PFCs
(Bartels & Zeki, 2004; Leibenluft et al., 2004; Minagawa-
Kawai et al., 2008; Ranote et al., 2004). One study of
mothers viewing pictures of their infant has shown ven-
tral striatum activity (Strathearn, Li, Fonagy, & Montague,
2008), but this result has not yet been replicated. Only
one study has examined the interaction of viewing one’s
own infant or another ’s, either in distress or not; this study
revealed strong dorsal ACC and dorsomedial PFC activ-
ity when mothers viewed their own infant in distress rela-
tive to the other conditions (Noriuchi, Kikuchi, & Senoo,
2008). A recent study using near-infrared spectroscopy
(Minagawa-Kawai et al., 2008) has examined infants’ neu-
ral responses to their mother ’s face and observed greater
medial PFC activity in response to their mother smiling
(relative to the mother not smiling and a stranger smiling or
not smiling).
Viewing pictures of one’s romantic attachments has
typically produced dorsal striatum activity (Aron et al.,
2005; Bartels & Zeki, 2000); however, one study that sub-
liminally primed the name of one’s loved one has reported
increased ventral striatum activity (Ortigue, Bianchi-
Demicheli, Hamilton, & Grafton, 2007). Similar to the
network associated with seeing cues associated with one’s
own child, adult attachment studies have observed rela-
tionships between anxious attachment style and activity in
the amygdala and dorsal ACC during relationship distress
or hostile feedback paradigms (Gillath, Bunge, Shaver,
Wendelken, & Mikulincer, 2005; Lemche et al., 2006). In
addition, another study reported that avoidant attachment
was associated with diminished ventral striatum feed-
back during supportive feedback from a stranger (Vrticka,
Andersson, Grandjean, Sander, & Vuilleumier, 2008).
Finally, a few studies have examined grief responses by
prompting individuals to think about the recent loss of a
significant other (e.g., mother recently dying of cancer or
a romantic relationship that recently ended). These studies
have typically observed greater activity in the dorsal ACC
and anterior insula, consistent with a social pain account
of grief, and in the posterior cingulate (Gundel, O’Connor,
Littrell, Fort, Lane, 2003; O’Connor et al. 2008). One
study (O’Connor et al., 2008) examined the neural dif-
ferences among individuals who were showing a normal
level of recovery from grief compared with those with
complicated grief, which refers to a persistent grief that is
not following the normal recovery pattern. Complicated
grief was associated with increased ventral striatum activ-
ity, relative to noncomplicated grief, when responding
to cues related to the deceased. This activity was also
CH05.indd 170
associated with self-reported yearning for the deceased,
suggesting that ventral striatum activity may reflect cur-
rent desires for connection with the deceased that typi-
cally abate over the course of several months of normal,
noncomplicated grief.
Attitudes and Attitude Change
Attitudes are one of social psychology’s oldest constructs
(Thurstone, 1928). People’s attitudes are of great interest
because they are believed to predict an individual’s behav-
ior in a variety of attitude-relevant situations. In contrast to
our intuitions, self-reported attitudes are often poor indica-
tors of subsequent behaviors. This has led researchers to
examine the existence and predictive efficacy of implicit
attitudes (Fazio & Williams, 1986), to assess attitudes in
the aggregate (Ajzen, 2001), and to identify the critical
role of behavioral intentions linking attitudes to behaviors
(Gollwitzer, 1999). To date, the neuroscience of attitudes
has largely focused on the neural correlates of attitudinal
evaluation and the neural correlates of attitude change.
Attitudinal Evaluation
Several studies have examined which brain regions are
more active when expressing attitudinal evaluations (e.g.,
how good is it?) compared with when control judgments
are made (e.g., how symmetrical is it?). There is substan-
tial variability in the activations reported across studies of
attitudinal evaluation. This may be a result of the diversity
of attitude objects examined in different studies. The
objects examined include geometric shapes (Jacobsen,
Slotkin, Westerveld, Mencl, & Pugh, 2006), paintings
(Kawabata & Zeki, 2004), music (Brattico, Tervaniemi, &
Picton, 2003), social concepts (Cunningham et al., 2004),
unfamiliar faces (O’Doherty et al., 2003), famous names
(Cunningham, Johnson, Gatenby, Gore, & Banaji, 2003;
Zysset, Huber, Ferstl, & von Cramon, 2002), and cur-
rent political candidates (Kaplan, Freedman, & Iacoboni,
2007). The most frequently observed activations in these
studies occur in the bilateral ventrolateral PFC, along with
a host of mentalizing and self-referential brain regions,
including the medial PFC, dorsomedial PFC, posterior
cingulate, TPJ, and temporal pole.
When subjects report their evaluations, it is difficult to
know what psychological processes are occurring to gen-
erate this evaluation. For instance, evaluations are some-
times constructed in the moment, and other times they are
retrieved from memory. Sometimes people feel comfort-
able expressing their attitudes, and other times they engage
in effortful mental processes to shape the expression of an
attitude for public consumption. Evaluations also vary in
valence and arousal, and therefore task materials that vary
12/22/09 5:33:47 PM

on these dimensions across studies could produce different
results as well. Some of these elements have been exam-
ined. With respect to valence, positive and negative atti-
tudes have been associated with left and right lateral PFCs,
respectively (Cunningham, Espinet, DeYoung, & Zelazo,
2005). In contrast, attitudinal intensity or arousal has
been associated with the amygdala and ventromedial PFC
(Cunningham et al., 2004). Self-reported efforts to control
one’s evaluation have been associated with activity in the
ventrolateral PFC, dorsolateral PFC, dorsal ACC, medial
PFC, and precuneus. In contrast, being exposed to liked or
disliked attitude objects without expressing an evaluation
has been associated with activity in the ventral striatum
(Aharon et al., 2001) and amygdala (Cunningham et al.,
2003), respectively, suggesting that these regions may play
a role in implicit attitudes.
More recently, an area of research referred to as neu-
romarketing has begun examining branding effects that
bear a close relationship to attitude processes. The most
significant of these studies recreated the Pepsi challenge
inside the scanner (McClure et al., 2004). In the classic
advertising campaign from the 1970s, it was found that
despite overwhelming self-reported preference for Coke,
when each drink was tasted without labels, Pepsi was
more often preferred. The implication is that Coke is pre-
ferred because of the brand association rather than its taste.
In this study, subjects tasted Coke and Pepsi on a series
of trials, but could see the brand labels on only some of
the trials. They observed that in the absence of labels,
ventromedial PFC activity was associated with drink pref-
erence, consistent with this region’s common association
with hedonic experience (Trepel, Fox, & Poldrack, 2005).
In contrast, when the brand labels were available, prefer-
ences were associated with dorsolateral PFC and hippo-
campal activity, suggesting a role for higher cognitive and
memory processes.
Attitude Change
The first neuroscience investigation of attitude change
explored cognitive dissonance processes in patients with
anterograde amnesia (Lieberman, Ochsner, Gilbert, &
Schacter, 2001). Cognitive dissonance reduction usually
refers to the change in attitudes or beliefs that occur when
one has freely chosen to engage in a behavior that conflicts
with a previously held attitude or belief. For instance, in the
free choice paradigm, an individual ranks his or her prefer-
ences for several items in a category (e.g., kitchen appli-
ances; Brehm, 1956) and then chooses which of two closely
ranked items he or she would like to own; the subject then
finally re-ranks all of the items. The classic finding is that
the selected item goes up in the re-rankings, whereas the
unselected item goes down in the re-rankings. The dissonance
CH05.indd 171
Functional Neuroanatomy 171
account suggests that choosing between evenly liked items
is at odds with previously ranking them as similar and that
by “spreading the alternatives” in one’s updated rankings,
the selected items comes to look as though it was an obvi-
ous choice all along. Of course, to outsiders, this looks like
post hoc rationalization.
Several early accounts of cognitive dissonance pro-
cesses suggested that dissonance reduction processes were
relatively explicit and slow, occurring over a long period
of time after the conflictual behavior occurred (Festinger,
1964; Hovland & Rosenberg, 1960; Steele, Spencer, &
Lynch, 1993). According to this model, an individual must
be consciously aware that he or she has engaged in counter-
attitudinal behavior, attribute the resulting dissonance feel-
ings to this specific conflict, and then engage in effortful
processing to change this attitude over time. Lieberman et al.
(2001) compared attitude changes in amnesics and healthy
controls because it is unlikely that amnesics would recog-
nize that they have engaged in a behavior that conflicts with
a previously expressed attitude. Despite this impairment,
amnesics showed as much attitude change as control sub-
jects, suggesting that the conventional account of cognitive
dissonance effects relies too heavily on controlled process-
ing mechanisms being deployed slowly over time. Multiple
electroencephalograph (EEG) studies also suggest that dis-
sonance effects may occur more quickly than previously
assumed (Harmon-Jones, Gerdjikov, & Harmon-Jones,
2006; Harmon-Jones, Harmon-Jones, Fearn, Sigelman, &
Johnson, 2008).
Stereotyping and Intergroup Processes
Perceiving Race
Neuroscience research on stereotyping and related inter-
group processes represents a microcosm of the larger
social cognitive neuroscience landscape, including studies
of social perception, implicit attitudes, self-like process-
ing of others, and self-control. This is also one of the areas
of social cognitive neuroscience where ERP studies vastly
outnumber fMRI studies (for review, see Amodio, 2008;
Bartholow & Dickter, 2007; Kubota & Ito, 2009).
A number of fMRI studies have examined the percep-
tion of Black and White faces. Across these studies, inverse
affective and perceptual effects have emerged. On one
hand, greater amygdala activity in response to Black ver-
sus White faces (Lieberman et al., 2005; Ronquillo et al.,
2007) suggests a possible negative evaluative response
to or greater emotional evocativeness of Black faces. In
contrast, greater activity in the FFA to ingroup versus out-
group faces (Golby, Gabrieli, Chiao, & Eberhardt, 2001;
Lieberman et al., 2005) has been interpreted as reflect-
ing greater perceptual expertise with ingroup faces.
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 172 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
These results are paralleled by ERP studies (Ito & Urland,
2003), which reveal some early components that are more
responsive to outgroup faces (N100, P200) and another
early component that is more responsive to ingroup faces
(N200), which has been linked to FFA activity (Allison
et al., 1994).
Although these early ERP components are not modu-
lated by race-related encoding goals (Ito & Urland, 2005),
both race-based categorization and individuation goals
have been associated with diminished amygdala responses
to Black faces in fMRI studies. Wheeler and Fiske (2005)
observed diminished amygdala activity when subjects
judged a target’s food preference. In contrast, Lieberman
et al. (2005) observed diminished amygdala activity during
the labeling of a target’s race, similar to the effects of affect
labeling. Along the same lines, a study of stigma (Krendl,
Macrae, Kelley, Fugelsang, & Heatherton, 2006) reported
less amygdala activity when subjects’ judgments were
explicitly focused on the stigma, compared with when they
were not. In addition, amygdala responses to race have
been modulated by skin darkness (Ronquillo et al., 2007)
and the direction of a target’s eye gaze (Richeson, Todd, &
Trawalter, 2008).
Implicit Attitudes
Other neuroimaging studies have examined the relation-
ship between attitudes and amygdala responses to Black
faces, relative to White faces. Most notably, an early fMRI
study (Phelps et al., 2000) observed that amygdala activity
to Black faces was correlated with the strength of negative
implicit attitudes toward Blacks but was not correlated
with an explicit measure of racism. Similarly, another study
(Cunningham, Johnson et al., 2004) reported greater amyg-
dala activity to Black faces versus White faces only when
the faces were presented subliminally, suggesting potential
self-regulation under supraliminal conditions. In this study,
implicit attitudes were associated with amygdala activity
during subliminal presentations but not during supralimi-
nal presentations. Somewhat surprisingly, a patient with
amygdala damage showed normal implicit racial attitudes
(Phelps, Cannistraci, & Cunningham, 2003), although the
lesion was acquired in adulthood and other social processes
have been spared for amygdala lesions acquired in adult-
hood (Shaw et al., 2004). In contrast, patients with ventro-
medial and medial PFC damage do not produce implicit
attitude effects (Milne & Grafman, 2001).
Controlling Bias
Given that stereotype-based expectations can lead to sys-
tematically biased behavior (Payne, 2001) and given that
most individuals are motivated to be or appear nonbiased,
self-regulation processes are often brought online in order to
CH05.indd 172
guard against having biased thoughts, feelings, or behaviors
toward outgroup members. Multiple fMRI studies have
observed a network almost identical to those seen in other
forms of self-control (ventrolateral PFC, dorsolateral PFC,
dorsal ACC, supplementary motor area) more active in con-
ditions in which subjects are exposed to Black faces under
conditions where bias could be revealed (Cunningham,
Johnson et al., 2004; Richeson et al., 2003). In addition,
work with ERPs (Amodio et al., 2004; cf. Bartholow
et al., 2005) has shown evidence of a fast response in the
dorsal ACC, called the error-related negativity response,
during the Weapons Identification Task (Payne, 2001) on
trials that reveal bias. Critically, the dorsal ACC response
on a particular trial predicted greater controlled processing
during the subsequent trial. This suggests that this activa-
tion is an internal indicator of potential bias and the need to
be more careful on ensuing trials.
Naturally, there are situations in which individuals do
not mind acting on the basis of ingroup favoritism. People
want members of their ingroups to succeed and obtain their
fair share of resources, at a minimum. One study observed
neural responses associated with this ingroup bias in the
absence of pressure to be unbiased (Rilling, Dagenais,
et al., 2008). Subjects were separated into groups using a
minimal group paradigm manipulation; they then played
prisoner dilemma games with ingroup and outgroup mem-
bers. Approximately one third of the subjects reported
feeling differently when playing against an ingroup mem-
ber than an outgroup member. This subsample, but not
the sample as a whole, produced greater activity in the
dorsomedial PFC and right TPJ, both regions in the men-
talizing network, when playing with an ingroup rather than
with an outgroup member. In other words, playing with an
ingroup player may have produced more mentalizing about
the perspective of the other player.
Being the Target of Prejudice
Although the vast majority of intergroup studies, both
behavioral and neuroimaging, have examined the percei-
ver ’s side of bias, a handful have examined the reactions
of the targets of prejudice. In the behavioral literature, ste-
reotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995) is the most widely
used paradigm for examining the effect of stereotypes on
the target of those stereotypes. In these studies, subjects for
whom a stereotype exists (e.g., females are bad at math)
perform a stereotype-relevant task (e.g., a math test) that
either is characterized as measuring their ability or is char-
acterized in nonability terms (e.g., it is a game). The stan-
dard finding is that stereotype targets perform worse on
these tasks when they believe the task is diagnostic of their
ability, and these results are explained in terms of anxiety
over confirming the stereotype. In other words, if a female
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 How Social Cognitive Neuroscience Contributes to Social Psychology
is anxious or distracted, thinking that poor performance on
a math test will confirm negative math stereotypes about
women, this may limit the woman’s ability to focus on
task, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Two fMRI studies have examined the neural correlates of
stereotype threat (Krendl, Richeson, Kelley, & Heatherton,
2008; Wraga, Helt, Jacobs, & Sullivan, 2006; see also
Masten et al., under review). In both studies, increased ste-
reotype threat was associated with increased rostral ACC
activity. Given that this region has been associated both
with emotional experience and with the regulation of emo-
tions, it is difficult to interpret the significance of this com-
mon activation from just these two studies. In one of the
studies (Wraga et al., 2006), increased activity in the rostral
ACC was marginally associated with poorer task perfor-
mance. However, this could be explained either as distress
interfering with task performance or as attention to regu-
lating one’s distress interfering with task performance. An
ERP study (Forbes, Schmader, & Allen, 2008) found that
those in a stereotype threat condition who responded to the
task by devaluing its significance produced smaller error-
related negativity responses to their own errors, suggesting
less self-monitoring as a consequence of devaluing.
IV. HOW SOCIAL COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
CONTRIBUTES TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Now that we have reviewed where dozens of social psy-
chological processes occur in the brain, anyone would be
forgiven for believing that social cognitive neuroscience is
little more than phrenology. Knowing that social processes
can be localized within the brain is not all that interesting.
What is the alternative hypothesis? That they will be local-
ized in your elbow? A cognitive neuroscientist who has
taken a shine to the social side of things might respond that
brain mapping is essential to understanding what differ-
ent brain regions do. How can we really understand what
a brain region does if it is examined using only abstract
decontextualized stimuli that cognitive psychologists typi-
cally use? A complete understanding of the brain will be
constituted only if the brain is studied while situated in all
its social psychological glory.
A social psychologist would likely respond that it is all
fine and well that neuroscientists want to probe their favor-
ite brain regions using social psychological paradigms to
figure out what those regions do. But what does that do for
social psychology? Is our social psychology improved at
all by looking at the brain? Are there social psychological
theories that should be updated in light of social cognitive
neuroscience data? Is there conventional wisdom in our
field that needs to be reconsidered or looked at in a fresh
CH05.indd 173
173
light because of brain data? Do neuroscience methods
allow us to ask social psychological questions that have
gone unanswered for years? If the answer to any of these
questions is yes, then social psychology needs the tools of
neuroscience just as surely as it needed the tools of cogni-
tive psychology a few decades ago.
Can social cognitive neuroscience answer all of social
psychology’s questions? Of course not. No method can.
Neuroimaging is no more a panacea than reaction time mea-
sures or introspective self-reports. Indeed, for most of the
interesting findings from the history of social psychology,
neuroimaging would have been a far worse tool than those
already used by social psychology. During a typical fMRI
session, a person lays prone in the scanner wearing goggles
that allow the subject to see a video feed; the subject responds
during tasks almost exclusively with button boxes limited
to a few buttons, and there are constant loud noises during
scanning. Finally, experimental trials from each condition of
interest often must be repeated dozens of times, meaning that
any task for which trial repetition will necessarily contami-
nate the psychological phenomenon is off limits. Despite
these limitations, there are specific ways in which neurosci-
ence can contribute to our social psychological enterprise
that should matter even to social psychologists uninterested
in the brain. The remainder of this section discusses some
of the ways that social cognitive neuroscience can and has
contributed to the mission of social psychology.
Brain Mapping
Knowing where social psychological processes occur
in the brain does matter for at least a few reasons. First,
animal research and cognitive neuroscience have made
significant progress in figuring out the computations per-
formed by particular brain regions. This knowledge can
be drawn on to generate preliminary inferences about the
kinds of subprocesses subserving macrolevel social pro-
cesses. That is, social processes usually encompass multiple
component processes simultaneously or in rapid sequence,
and identifying the involvement of brain regions with well-
characterized functions can help us identify which corre-
sponding psychological processes may contribute to the
total mental act. For instance, imagine that when individu-
als watch one person greeting another person, a region of
the lateral temporal cortex known to be primarily involved
with semantic processing (Noppeney & Price, 2004) was
activated, compared with some control task. One might
infer that watching this social episode is comprehensible to
us because we retrieve social scripts from semantic memory.
Alternatively, imagine that watching this greeting activates
the mirror system. This finding might suggest that people
understand social episodes through simulation rather than
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 174 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
semantic coding. Incidentally, it could be the case that both
the mirror system and semantic processes are activated
when observing the greeting. One of the advantages of neu-
roimaging over standard behavioral testing is that multiple
systems can be interrogated simultaneously and often with-
out eliciting a behavioral response from subjects that would
require particular instructions and an attentional set that
might contaminate the natural attitude of the subject.
Brain mapping discoveries are the beginning, not the
end, of the process for social cognitive neuroscience. Once
the regions involved in a social process are identified,
one can then more carefully interrogate those regions in
future studies that focus on hypothesis testing. As social
psychologists, we are used to our everyday experiences
serving as the anecdotal database from which we design
studies. Brain mapping studies are the way that social cog-
nitive neuroscientists create an anecdotal database.
In many cases, it might be argued that brain mapping is
telling us something we already know from other existing
behavioral research, and that is a fair criticism. However,
we should ask ourselves what the value of a neuroimaging
study would have been, had it come first. Would it have
updated our social psychological theories just as the behav-
ioral research did? If so, it indicates that neuroimaging data
can constrain our theories (Kihlstrom, 2006); it is just a his-
torical accident that the behavioral study came first. Surely
in the future there will be times when the neuroimaging
study will come first and make significant contributions.
Convergences
Although social cognitive neuroscience is still a young dis-
cipline, one of its most exciting contributions is a series of
findings in which two experiences that seem quite different
from each other phenomenologically, or were thought to be
only metaphorically related, actually rely on overlapping
neural processes. The assumption is that if two processes
rely on common brain regions, then they rely on common
computational processes as well. It is exceedingly difficult
to demonstrate that two psychological events that feel dif-
ferent from each other share a great deal at the computa-
tional level (Kosslyn, 1999). Yet such demonstrations are
a critical component to advancing social psychological
theory. We group psychological phenomena into domains
of study based on whether phenomena feel similar or meet
some set of logical criteria; however, additional progress
would be made if psychological phenomena were grouped
based on their deep structure.
Social Metaphors Are Not So Metaphorical
A number of social psychological phenomena have now
been linked to nonsocial phenomena in ways that raise the
CH05.indd 174
possibility that descriptions of social experience may be far
less metaphorical than once thought. Social rewards such
as positive social feedback or being treated with respect
(Izuma et al., 2008; Tabibnia et al., 2008) activate the ven-
tral striatum in much the same way that winning money
or eating chocolate does. The experience and regulation of
social pain are associated with brain regions involved in the
experience and regulation of physical pain (Eisenberger &
Lieberman, 2004). The sense of insult in response to
unfair treatment and the experience of disgust in response
to sensory stimuli are both associated with activity in the
anterior insula (Borg, Lieberman, & Kiehl, 2008; Calder
et al., 2000; Hsu, Anen, & Quartz, 2008; Sanfey, Rilling,
Aronson, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2003; Wicker, Keysers,
et al., 2003). In each of these cases, the social phenom-
enon seems less abstract and more embodied in light of
these linkages. In addition, these unexpected convergences
have led to behavioral studies that would not have been done
otherwise. For instance, behavioral studies have examined
the relationship between social and physical pain sensi-
tivity (DeWall & Baumeister, 2006; Eisenberger, Jarcho,
Lieberman, & Naliboff, 2006), with one recent experiment
finding that taking Tylenol reduced self-reported feelings
of social rejection (DeWall et al., in press).
The linkage of social to physical pain changes our con-
ceptual understanding of social rejection and the need for
social connection. Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs
orders our needs (from most basic to least basic) as bio-
logical, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.
In other words, biological and safety needs are critical to
survival, and the rest are more or less gravy. However,
deficits in social connection cause a form of pain just
as deficits in other survival needs cause a form of pain (e.g.,
hunger, thirst, cold). It seems that evolution has a special
painful place for deficits in basic survival needs, and social
connection has made the cut. It has been speculated that
because mammalian young are born relatively helpless,
incapable of securing their own food, water, and shelter,
continued social connection with their caregiver(s) is their
primary means of survival. Knowing that social rejection
activates the same pain processes as other survival need
deficits allows us to think differently about social connec-
tion’s place in our hierarchy of needs (Baumeister & Leary,
1995; Lieberman & Eisenberger, 2009).
Using the Self to Understand Similar Others
Other work has shown convergences within social cogni-
tion that have been hypothesized but never clearly dem-
onstrated. For instance, although it is not surprising that
people would use their knowledge of themselves to make
sense of others, until recently there had been no hard evi-
dence one way or the other. Studies by Mitchell, Macrae,
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 How Social Cognitive Neuroscience Contributes to Social Psychology
and Banaji (2006) provide compelling evidence that we
do use ourselves to make sense of at least some people.
Specifically, they showed that the same region of the medial
PFC is active when making self-referential judgments
and judgments about a similar other but that this region
is not active when making judgments about a dissimilar
other. Such findings open up a variety of opportunities to
hypothesize about how targets will be differentially under-
stood and treated based on the relative contributions of the
medial PFC or dorsomedial PFC (Harris et al., 2005).
Empathy
Knowing that experiencing physical pain and seeing oth-
ers in physical pain recruit the same neural systems makes
an important contribution to empathy research (Singer
et al., 2004). When someone says, “I feel your pain,” we
can certainly quibble about whose pain they are feeling, but
for the first time there is evidence they are really feeling
someone’s pain rather than merely entertaining an abstract
idea. This often-replicated overlap also provides an experi-
mental paradigm for testing various important aspects of
empathy theories in the future because the modulation
of this overlap by situational and personality factors can
be easily assessed (Singer et al., 2006).
Direct and Reflected Self-appraisals
Social psychologists and sociologists have long hypoth-
esized about the role that others’ evaluations of us have
on our own self-views (Cooley, 1902; Mead, 1934). As
compelling and influential as this symbolic interactionist
account has been over the years, there has been surpris-
ingly little empirical evidence to support it. Behavioral
research has focused on the overlap in the content of direct
and reflected self-appraisals. Neuroimaging, however,
allows us to examine the overlap in the structures support-
ing different kinds of appraisals. It might be expected that
asking a 12-year-old boy what his best friend thinks of
him would recruit brain regions known to be involved in
self-referential processing and also brain regions known to
be involved in mentalizing. Here, the adolescent is being
asked to reflect on the mental state of another person and
to derive a self-evaluation from this. The fact that adoles-
cents recruit both of these systems when asked to make
a direct appraisal of themselves (e.g., what do you think
of yourself?) is more surprising. This finding constitutes
preliminary evidence of reflected appraisals being spon-
taneously generated even when they have not been asked
for (Pfeifer et al., 2009). Adults do not show broad acti-
vation of the social cognition network when making self-
referential judgments. Note that if asked to make a direct
self-appraisal, neither adolescent nor adult is likely to spon-
taneously use reflected appraisal language in their replies,
CH05.indd 175
175
but these neuroimaging data suggest that adolescents are
doing something social when making direct self-appraisals.
What this something is requires further investigations.
To be sure, these convergences are open to multiple inter-
pretations. They are new findings that need further interroga-
tion. However, each suggests new conceptual understandings
of social phenomena and may inspire a variety of behavioral
and neuroscience studies to follow up on these leads. New
findings are rarely ends in themselves. However, each of
these findings is part of a social psychological conversation,
and suggests that neuroscience can indeed have a seat at the
table and even have something worth saying to social psy-
chologists now and then. It is also worth noting that in each
of the preceding examples, knowing which brain regions are
involved is relatively superfluous to the relevance of the find-
ings for social psychology. One need not have an interest in
neuroanatomy to find an overlap in how the brain processes
social and nonsocial rewards quite compelling. One need
never know that the ventral striatum is the point of conver-
gence for this to be relevant. The anatomy can be left to the
anatomists, but the investigation of such overlaps provides a
method for conceptual advances within social psychology.
Dissociations
A basic tenet of all psychological research is that if two pro-
cesses or performances can be dissociated on some depen-
dent measure such as reaction time, then the processes are
distinct from one another. Neuroscience research is no dif-
ferent. When lesion studies observe that damage to region
A produces deficits in task X but not in task Y, compared
with damage to region B, which produces deficits in task
Y but spared performance in task X, this is taken as strong
evidence that task X and Y rely on different psychological
processes. Similarly, when an fMRI study reveals that
different brain structures tend to be active during tasks
X and Y, this too suggests different psychological pro-
cesses may be at work. In some cases, these differences
are quite relevant to social psychological theories.
Social Cognition Is Special
Perhaps the single best example of a neuroimaging study
challenging the traditional understanding of a social psycho-
logical finding comes from Mitchell et al. (2004). In a clas-
sic behavioral study, subjects read passages with the goal of
either memorizing the material for later testing or forming
a social impression of the target in the passage (Hamilton,
Katz, & Leirer, 1980). The surprising finding was that the
impression formation goal led to better performance on a
subsequent memory test, even though those with an impres-
sion formation goal did not know the test was coming and
those in the memorization condition did. The generally
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 176 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
accepted explanation of these results was depth of process-
ing (Craik & Tulving, 1975), such that social encoding was
believed to be a deeper, more elaborative form of encoding
than encoding with a memorization goal.
Mitchell and colleagues (2004) replicated this paradigm
in the scanner and discovered what those earlier studies could
not. Social and nonsocial encoding do not just differ quan-
titatively on a depth of processing dimension. Rather, they
rely on qualitatively dissociable processes. Countless stud-
ies have shown that successful memorization (i.e., encod-
ing that leads to later retrieval success) is associated with
activity in left ventrolateral PFC and the medial temporal
lobes (Wagner et al., 1998). Mitchell found that activity in
these regions did predict retrieval success in the memori-
zation condition but did not predict retrieval success in the
social encoding condition. Instead, retrieval success in the
social encoding condition was associated with activity in
the dorsomedial PFC. This finding strongly calls into ques-
tion the depth of processing account and instead suggests that
there is something qualitatively different about social encod-
ing. Regardless of how one evaluates the significance of this
problem, it is a clear case in which the inference from the
behavioral data was wrong and the neuroimaging evidence
provided a clear and compelling case for distinct processes
operating in social and nonsocial encoding. Upon learning
the results of this study, one must update one’s understand-
ing of this phenomenon based on these neuroimaging data.
Social by Default
One of the most significant discoveries in the past decade
of cognitive neuroscience research is the default network.
These regions are highly activated when a subject is at rest
(i.e., when not being given any experimental task to perform)
(Raichle et al., 2001) and show highly coordinated activ-
ity with each other at rest (Fox et al., 2005). They become
less active when cognitive tasks are performed (Greicius,
Krasnow, Reiss, & Menon, 2003; Shulman et al., 1997),
to the extent that the cognitive tasks are more demand-
ing (McKiernan, Kaufman, Kucera-Thompson, & Binder,
2003), but when active during cognitive tasks, they tend to be
associated with producing errors (Boly et al., 2007; Li, Yan,
Bergquist, & Sinha, 2007; Weissman, Roberts, Visscher, &
Woldorff, 2006). At rest, these regions produce activity that
is inversely correlated with activity in brain regions support-
ing common cognitive tasks (Fox et al., 2005).
What is striking is that this default network could easily
be mistaken for a self and social cognition network. All of
the regions that are highly active at rest (dorsomedial PFC,
medial PFC, ventromedial PFC, precuneus, TPJ in almost
all studies, with fusiform gyrus and temporal poles also
appearing with some frequency) are among the regions that
figure most prominently in this review of social cognitive
CH05.indd 176
neuroscience. The implication is obvious. When left to
their own devices, people think about themselves and their
social lives (D’Argembeau et al., 2005; Gusnard et al.,
2001; Iacoboni et al., 2004; Mason et al., 2007; Wicker,
Ruby, Royet, & Fonlupt, 2003).
Put a different way, the brain’s default focus is social.
Only when something nonsocial, like a working memory
task, requires it to direct its resources elsewhere does it
momentarily stop focusing on the social. Social psycholo-
gists might find this to be obvious, but to funding agen-
cies, the media, and your grandparents this kind of finding
really helps to firm up the significance of what we study
(the fact that the size of the prefrontal cortex across species
correlates the typical group size in each species is a good
one to throw out there too; Dunbar, 1998).
It should be noted that it was recently reported that anes-
thetized unconscious monkeys still had increased activity in
the default regions (Vincent et al., 2007; see also Fransson
et al., 2007). This raises a fascinating issue, one that should
be relevant to social psychologists (and not just impress
their grandparents). Does the brain show these social cog-
nition activations at rest because this is what we choose to
think about in our spare time? Or is it the case that we tend
to focus on social and self-related thinking in our spare time
because high baseline activity in these regions biases us, in
a sense priming us, to think about these things? Has evolu-
tion progressed in such a way that it has proved adaptive to
have our spare thought biased toward processing and repro-
cessing information about ourselves and the social world?
Automaticity and Control
At the end of the 1990s, great attention was being
devoted to the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald,
McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) as a method for assessing
implicit attitudes. On one hand, large numbers of social
psychologists were conducting Implicit Association Test
studies because among implicit measures it was straight-
forward to use and produced strong experimental effects
with relatively modest sample sizes. On the other hand,
there was a great deal of controversy over what the Implicit
Association Test measured and whether what it mea-
sured could legitimately be called implicit. At one point,
so the story goes, the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology had a moratorium on publishing any addi-
tional Implicit Association Test papers until it was clear
that it really assessed implicit attitudes. When Phelps and
colleagues (2000) reported that the strength of amygdala
responses to images of Black faces was strongly associated
with Implicit Association Test scores but not with explicit
attitude scores, this was generally received as significantly
strengthening the case that the Implicit Association Test
truly measured implicit attitudes. The amygdala has long
12/22/09 5:33:50 PM
 How Social Cognitive Neuroscience Contributes to Social Psychology
been thought to primarily engage in automatic processes,
given its phylogenetic history, its early position in the
visual processing stream, its role in fear conditioning in
rodents, and the fact that subliminal presentations of fear
expressions activate this region. If the Implicit Association
Test scores, but not explicit attitudes, are associated with
amygdala responses, then there is a good chance the
Implicit Association Test is measuring something implicit.
Thus, neuroimaging findings help distinguish implicit from
explicit attitudes and clarify the interpretation of one of the
most commonly used social psychological instruments.
As with implicit and explicit attitudes, several dual-
process models within social psychology (Chaiken & Trope,
1999) posit some combination of automatic and controlled
processes believed to share the work in various domains
(e.g., persuasion, attribution, self-knowledge, empathy).
Automatic processes are fast, resistant to interruption,
independent of conscious intention, or outside of aware-
ness, whereas controlled processes are slow, interruptible,
intention-driven, and accessible to awareness (Wegner &
Bargh, 1998). There are several remaining important ques-
tions about dual-process models. For instance, are auto-
maticity and control two ends of a spectrum in which the
same processes and representations are employed but with
differing levels of efficiency? Or are there distinct auto-
matic and controlled processes that differ qualitatively
and may be sensitive to different types of inputs, store infor-
mation differently, and respond differently as a function
of context? If there are separate processes, how many sets of
dual-processes exist? One scientist (Kruglanski et al.,
2003) hyperbolically suggested that there might be 30 sets
of dual-processes based on the fact that a contemporary
volume on dual-process models (Chaiken & Trope, 1999)
had 30 chapters, each putting forth a dual-process model
with only minimal connections made between the different
models. Because experiences in different domains of social
psychology feel so different from one another and have
such different outcomes, it is hard to assess whether dual-
process models in these domains (e.g., persuasion and ste-
reotyping) rely on common processes. Similarly, because
different underlying processing architectures can produce
the same behaviors, it can be difficult to identify which pro-
cessing architectures are really at work (Gilbert, 1999).
Neuroimaging has been quite informative in general
in helping to tease apart processes that are implicit, auto-
matic, nonconscious, or reflexive from those that are
explicit, controlled, conscious, or reflective (Lieberman,
2009a; Satpute & Lieberman, 2006). For instance, explicit
learning is impaired in anterograde amnesiacs but not in
patients with Parkinson’s disease, whereas implicit learning
is impaired in patients with Parkinson’s disease but not in
anterograde amnesiacs (Knowlton, Mangels, & Squire, 1996).
CH05.indd 177
177
Based on the neural deficits associated with each neuropsy-
chological impairment, neuroimaging studies have shown
that implicit learning is associated with basal ganglia acti-
vations, whereas explicit learning has been associated
with medial temporal lobe activations (Lieberman, Chang,
Chiao, Bookheimer, & Knowlton, 2004; Poldrack et al.,
2001). Moreover, these regions appear to be in competition
such that if one region is relatively active during task perfor-
mance, the other tends to be correspondingly deactivated.
In one particularly elegant study, Foerde, Knowlton, and
Poldrack (2006) trained subjects on two tasks known to be
learnable using both implicit and explicit processes. For one
task, subjects were trained under cognitive load; the other
task was learned without cognitive load. When there was no
cognitive load task, thus facilitating explicit learning strat-
egies, activity in the medial temporal lobe during training
was associated with performance accuracy at a follow-up
test session. When there was cognitive load during train-
ing, thus interfering with explicit learning strategies, activity
in the medial temporal lobe during training was associated
with performance at test; instead, activity in the basal gan-
glia was associated with later performance. Critically, the
behavioral performances were equivalent in both condi-
tions. In other words, behaviorally there was no evidence
that different underlying psychological processes were sup-
porting performance at test, but neuroimaging revealed that
there were indeed different processes at work. These results
strongly suggest that there are two separate processes that
operate at different times and in different contexts. Although
there may be a smooth transition in observable performance
as learning and performance switch from being controlled to
automatic, the underlying neural responses argue for quali-
tatively distinct processes.
Although social cognitive neuroscience research has
rarely set out to compare automatic and controlled variants
of social cognition, a number of studies have had conditions
that would at least roughly meet the criteria allowing for such
a comparison. Lieberman (2007) reviewed the findings from
several domains of social cognition. Six brain regions were
reliably invoked during controlled, but not automatic, forms
of social cognition; these regions included the lateral PFC,
lateral parietal cortex, medial PFC, dorsomedial PFC, precu-
neus, and medial temporal lobe. Four regions were reliably
invoked during automatic, but not controlled, forms of social
cognition; these regions included the amygdala, ventrome-
dial PFC, lateral temporal cortex, and ventral striatum.
These results suggest an answer to the first of the lin-
gering dual-process questions: Are there really separate
automatic and controlled social processes? The findings are
more consistent with an account of separate automatic and
controlled processes, rather than an account wherein single
processes are called automatic when they operate efficiently
12/22/09 5:33:50 PM
 178 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
and called controlled when they operate inefficiently. Rather,
it appears that with training, the brain regions responsible
for automatic processes slowly develop computational algo-
rithms to support task performance, and as these processes
come online, brain regions supporting controlled processing
are needed less and less.
These data also speak to the second lingering ques-
tion of how many sets of dual-processes exist. Although
no definitive answer is available, the review (Lieberman,
2007) found that brain regions involved in automatic or
controlled processes tended to each be involved in a
variety of automatic or controlled processes. For instance,
the ventromedial PFC has been associated with automatic
aspects of self-knowledge, decision making, emotional
experience, and attitudes, whereas right ventrolateral PFC
has been associated with inhibitory control over behavior,
thought, emotion, attitudes, and perspective (Cohen &
Lieberman, in press). Thus, it appears that the same net-
works responsible for automatic and controlled processing
in one social psychological domain may deal with auto-
matic and controlled processing in other domains as well.
The phenomenologically different inputs in each social
domain may produce different outputs but still make use of
a shared dual-process architecture. This may help explain
phenomena such as ego depletion (Baumeister, Bratslavsky,
Muraven, & Tice, 1998), in which self-control efforts in one
domain undermine subsequent self-control efforts in another
domain. From the perspective of the brain, the processing
resources from the same brain regions may be required for
both tasks, and thus the brain is not starting fresh when mov-
ing from one task to another.
Such neuroscience findings may also help update our
understanding of the relationship between automatic-
ity and control more broadly. Similar to the implicit and
explicit learning findings, in a number of the reviewed stud-
ies (Lieberman, in press), increasing activity in controlled
processing regions was associated with decreased activity
in automatic processing regions such as the amygdala. For
instance, looking at an emotional picture nonreflectively
leads to reliable amygdala activity. However, labeling the
emotional content of the same picture reflectively leads
to reliable right ventrolateral PFC activity and correlated
decreases in amygdala activity. From the typical view of
automaticity, it is difficult to explain how amygdala activity
in response to an emotional picture would be diminished by
the addition of a conscious reflective process. The amyg-
dala response occurs when such pictures are presented sub-
liminally (Morris et al., 1998; Whalen et al., 1998), a gold
standard for automaticity. Automatic processes are believed
not to rely on the common pool of controlled processes
resources; thus, conscious reflective processing should not
take away any resources that the amygdala needs to respond.
CH05.indd 178
Additionally, by definition, automatic processes that can be
triggered without one’s intentions (e.g., through subliminal
presentations) are believed to be immune to interruption
from conscious processing. Finally, the controlled process
in question directs attention to the emotional aspects of the
stimulus and thus is unlikely to reduce amygdala activity
through distraction effects.
Although difficult to explain from a social cognition per-
spective, from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, these
results are quite amenable to explanation. There are brain
regions that, independent of one another, show evidence
of possessing the operating characteristics of automatic or
controlled processes, as commonly defined. However, these
brain regions are also interconnected in a multitude of ways,
including functionally inhibitory connections. In other
words, the amygdala may process emotional inputs in an
automatic fashion that requires no controlled processing
resources to operate; however, the amygdala may also be
anatomically linked with regions of the prefrontal cortex
that can inhibit the amygdala’s functioning if they are acti-
vated. Although such results do not in themselves demand
a rewriting of all the rules of automaticity and control, they
do suggest aspects that are worth reconsidering and testing
as this new channel of data becomes available.
Internal and External Self-Focus
The mirror self-recognition test (Gallup, 1970) is used to
test whether a particular species possesses self-awareness.
Consequently, it is rather surprising that the network of
brain regions involved in recognizing oneself in a picture
and the network of brain regions involved in reflecting on
one’s feelings, preferences, and traits are completely non-
overlapping networks (Lieberman, 2007). External self-
focus (i.e., visual self-recognition) is reliably associated
with a lateral frontoparietal network in the right hemi-
sphere, whereas internal self-focus (i.e., reflecting on one’s
psychological characteristics) is reliably associated with a
medial frontoparietal network. What’s more, the activity in
these two networks at rest tend to be inversely correlated
with one another (Fox et al., 2005). This separation of the
neural networks supporting internal and external self-focus
calls into question whether the mirror self-awareness test is
actually an index of the ability to reflect on the psychologi-
cal aspects of oneself or is limited to an ability to recognize
the physical manifestations of oneself, perhaps a precursor
to, rather than evidence of, true self-awareness.
Potentially the greatest implication of this dissociation
is that it may help explain why nearly all human beings
maintain some intuitive belief in mind–body dualism,
even when rationally admitting that dualism is a nonstarter
logically (Lieberman, 2009a). Although the broad strokes
of Descartes’ brand of dualism focused on the existence of
12/22/09 5:33:51 PM
 How Social Cognitive Neuroscience Contributes to Social Psychology
two strata—the material and the immaterial, the impact of
dualism largely follows from imputing material and imma-
terial aspects to each individual (i.e., mind and body). Part
of the reason that this discredited theory is so compelling
is that everyone has experiences that feel like a struggle
between two aspects of the self. When we “drag ourselves
out of bed,” this fits nicely with the notion that there is a
mind that somehow forces the unwilling body out of bed.
However, the clean division between the brain regions
involved in internal self-focus (i.e., focusing on one’s
mind) and external self-focus (i.e., focusing on one’s body)
suggests that mind–body dualism may be a particularly
sticky notion because our brain cleaves our perceptions
of ourselves into these components whether we ask our
brain to or not. Just as sights and sounds are automatically
processed by separate neural networks and give rise to
irreducibly distinct sensations, perhaps the separate pro-
cessing streams for reflecting on one’s own mind and body
produce the irreducible experience of dualism.
Future Questions
Expected or unexpected convergences and dissociations in
the brain regions responsible for particular social processes
help group these processes into the appropriate psycholog-
ical bins. Neuroscience techniques allow for other kinds
of insights and hypothesis testing as well, although at this
point, very little of this work has been done. For instance,
as cognitive neuroscientists refine their understanding of
the basic computations performed by different regions,
activation in different networks can serve as an indicator
that certain psychological processes have been invoked
(c.f. Poldrack, 2006). This is not to suggest that we will
be able to look at the brain and know whether someone is
reading Haruki Murakami or Italo Calvino anytime soon,
but we may be able to have some idea of whether a person
is at least recruiting self-processes in a very general way,
which would be useful.
Starting in the 1970s, a variety of self-serving or ego-
centric biases were reported on. For instance, people who
live together each tend to believe they are responsible for
a disproportionate amount of the housework that gets done
(Ross & Sicoly, 1975). Similarly, after being asked if they
would walk around wearing a giant sign saying “Eat at
Joe’s” for a small payment, regardless of the choice they
made, subjects tended to believe most other people would
make the same choice as they did (Ross et al., 1977). Rival
accounts of these self-serving biases (Greenwald, 1980;
Nisbett & Ross, 1980) led to countless studies attempting
to show whether these effects were due to motivational
processes intended to justify a person’s own behavior and
positions or were due to cognitive processes that tended
CH05.indd 179
179
to be biased as a result of the structure of information
processing and the information sample available for con-
sideration (e.g., a person is aware of all the housework
done by oneself but only a portion done by a roommate).
Because studies often provided positive evidence for their
position without providing evidence against the alternative
account, the debate eventually lost steam and was believed
by many to be irresolvable (Tetlock & Levi, 1982). If
neuroimaging can assess the extent to which self-related
or motivational processes are at work, it should be pos-
sible to fruitfully revisit this debate. In all likelihood, both
motivational and cognitive processes can contribute to
these effects, but neuroimaging might reveal individual
differences in the source of these biases across individuals,
which in turn might relate to different psychological con-
sequences (e.g., resistance to being challenged).
In the 1990s, research on automatic goals, motives, and
behavior was (and continues to be) enormously influen-
tial (Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001). The fact that priming
“impression” leads people to act as if they have an impres-
sion formation goal (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996), that
priming “succeed” can produce an array of motivational
phenomena (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, &
Trötschel, 2001), and that priming “elderly” can lead peo-
ple to walk more slowly (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996)
are extraordinary findings. Nevertheless, it is unclear from
these findings alone whether automatic and nonautomatic
variants of these processes are in fact one and the same.
The assumption within this literature is that they are the
same, but this has remained an assumption. Neuroimaging
may be relatively uniquely positioned to address this
question because it can clearly show whether two puta-
tive processes are relying on common or distinct neural
networks.
Automatic goals, motives, and behaviors fall into the
broader category of phenomena that are real but seem a bit
magical. There are other linkages that always seem a
bit magical as well, such as the functioning of placebo
effects, hypnosis, and the impact of social support on
health (after controlling for specific health care provided
by supporters). In each of these cases, it’s hard to tell a
straightforward compelling story about why the phenom-
ena occur because each is at odds with our basic dualistic
notions that beliefs can change beliefs and overt behavior
but beliefs cannot change low-level perceptual or physi-
ological responses (i.e., our more mechanistic processes).
In each case, neuroimaging data are starting to reveal
where in the brain the magic happens (Eisenberger, Taylor,
Gable, Hilmert, & Lieberman, 2007; Kosslyn, Thompson,
Costantini-Ferrando, Alpert, & Spiegel, 2000; Wager
et al., 2004), and this will allow for further interrogation of
these brain regions and how their neurocognitive function
12/22/09 5:33:52 PM
 180 Social Cognitive Neuroscience
might produce the observed results. Neuroscience is hardly
a cure-all, but these are the kinds of problems for which
neuroscience methods may shed new light and prompt new
programs of behavioral research.
V. CONCLUSIONS AND THE NEXT DECADE
This chapter has provided a history of social cognitive neu-
roscience, the neural landmarks that have been laid down
for hypothesis testing in various domains of social psy-
chology, and an exploration of the specific ways in which
social cognitive neuroscience directly contributes to the
mission of social psychology. Given the number of pages
devoted to each of these sections, there is no denying that
the emphasis of the past decade has been on brain mapping
far more than hypothesis testing. This is not surprising,
because for neuroimaging research, the hypothesis test-
ing phase generally follows the brain mapping phase. But
a more significant factor in the relative balance between
brain mapping and hypothesis testing is that doing the
kind of social cognitive neuroscience studies that ask and
answer the questions of social psychology is hard, much
harder than doing a brain mapping study to see what lights
up. Indeed, making truly meaningful contributions to
social psychology using any methodology is hard because
our phenomena are counterintuitive, our subjects are mov-
ing targets trying to figure out the purpose of our experi-
ments, and our experiments must recreate just the right
ecologically valid experiences within ethically acceptable
limits, while still assessing the appropriate dependent vari-
ables. All of this is made that much harder when subjects
are essentially lying in coffin-like confinement, unable to
move, unable to speak, and needing several repetitions of
each trial type to extract detectable signals from the noise.
Social cognitive neuroscience studies that address
social psychological questions will only be carried out
to the extent that social psychologists want to ask those
questions and make a commitment to conducting social
cognitive neuroscience studies, either on their own or with
collaborators. Cognitive neuroscientists who are interested
in using social psychological paradigms to clarify what
different brain regions do have every right to do so. They
are pursuing their intellectual passion and they should.
There is no reason why they should suddenly care about
the enduring questions of social psychology anymore than
social psychologists should suddenly care about the endur-
ing issues in neuroscience.
It is incumbent upon social psychologists to make use
of neuroscience for their own ends. And this is nothing new
for social psychologists. In the 1970s, social psychology
reinvented itself in large measure by co-opting the methods
CH05.indd 180
of cognitive psychology for its own purposes. Whether
social psychologists choose to embrace the methods of neu-
roscience to pursue our mission is still an open question.
Nevertheless, this alone will determine whether the next
review of social cognitive neuroscience, a decade from now,
will have a better balance between brain mapping studies
and studies that move social psychology forward.
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 Chapter 6
Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
JIM BLASCOVICH AND WENDY BERRY MENDES
In 1969, in the second edition of Handbook of Social
Psychology, David Shapiro and Andrew Crider authored
a chapter titled “Psychophysiological Approaches to
Social Psychology,” describing theory and research relat-
ing biological and social psychological processes; this is
the first and only such chapter in this series. Reflecting
growing interest and research in neurophysiological
approaches to social psychology, the editors of this fifth
edition recognized a need for not one but two chap-
ters relating biology and social psychology: one focuses
on intracranial processes (see Lieberman, this volume)
embodied via the brain, and one (this chapter) focuses on
peripheral neurophysiological processes embodied via the
visceral, somatic, and endocrine systems. The function of
the separation of these chapters is primarily organizational
as both levels of processing are inexorably intertwined
(cf. Niedenthal, 2007; Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman,
Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005).
Although the goals for social psychologists exploring
relevant central and peripheral neurophysiological pro-
cesses are not mutually exclusive, they differ in emphasis.
A current important goal for social psychologists explor-
ing the brain itself is to understand how online and offline
neural substrates of conscious and unconscious affective,
cognitive, motivational, and motor processes comport
with social psychological theories, and to use such knowl-
edge to bolster, bound, or expand them. An important goal
of those exploring visceral, somatic, and peripheral endo-
crine systems is to understand how such bodily expressions
relate to centrally controlled affective, cognitive, and moti-
vational processes, and how such peripheral responses can
be used to index social psychological constructs to mea-
sure critical independent and dependent variables more
precisely than might otherwise be the case. Another goal
Preparation of this chapter was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (grant 0527377; J.B.) and National Heart, Lung
and Blood Institute (grant RO1 HL079383; W.B.M.). We thank Susan Fiske, Dan Gilbert, Greg Willard, and members of the Health and
Psychophysiology Lab at Harvard University for comments on an early draft of this chapter. We also acknowledge Kristin Concannon for
her editorial assistance in the preparation of this chapter.
194
CH06.indd 194
of exploring peripheral neurophysiology is to understand
how embodied somatic activity catalyzes social psycho-
logical processes including, for example, social cognition,
memory, emotion, and mimicry (cf. Niedenthal, 2007).
The central and peripheral approaches are certainly com-
patible, and the goals are not mutually exclusive. Both fit
within a field that has come to be known as social neuro-
science. Indeed, many social psychologists work in both
domains.
The section topics included in this chapter are deemed
by us as the most relevant for the intended audience of
graduate students, researchers, and readers desiring some
familiarity with its entitled topics, though much more
could have been included about social psychophysiology
and embodiment were it not for page restrictions inherent
in a project such as the Handbook of Social Psychology.
Furthermore, this chapter is not intended to be an exhaus-
tive review of the relevant empirical literature, but rather,
given its didactic intent, a selective one.
In the first section, Roots of Social Psychophysiology
and Embodiment, we provide a historical analysis of
how modern-day social psychophysiology and embodi-
ment came to be, followed by a discussion of the value
of these topics for social psychology. The second section,
Neurophysiological Systems, focuses on the unique value
of neurophysiological indexes of social psychological con-
structs for research. The third section, Relative Advantages
of Peripheral and Central Neurophysiological Indexes
for Social Psychology, describes neurophysiological sys-
tems and functions in broad terms with some discussion
comparing the relative value of various uses of peripheral
and central neurophysiological measures in social psychol-
ogy. In the fourth section, Peripheral Neurophysiological
Indexes, we describe the basis on which validation of
12/18/09 2:36:56 PM

peripheral neurophysiological indexes of social psychology
should rest. This is followed by a fifth section, Evolution of
Social Psychophysiological Theories, which reviews social
psychophysiological theories, more specifically, reason-
ably prominent theories incorporating peripheral neuro-
physiological processes and constructs. In the final section,
Uses of Peripheral Neurophysiological Indexes In Social
Psychology, we review representative constructs that are
relevant to social psychology and have been examined
using peripheral neurophysiological indexes.
ROOTS OF SOCIAL PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY
AND EMBODIMENT
One can trace historical elements of social psychophysiology
and embodiment nearly three millennia in both Eastern and
Western cultures. Indeed, heart rate was reportedly used to
infer emotion (i.e., “love”) as early as the third century BC
(Mesulam & Perry, 1972). Not surprisingly, overt embodi-
ments, especially those involving nonverbal behaviors
(e.g., mutual gaze) were known by ancient peoples to sig-
nify intimacy or the desire for it.
Monism and Dualism
In many ways, this long history reflects a dialectical struggle
between proponents of mind-body monism and proponents
of mind-body dualism among scholars interested in mind-
behavior issues including philosophers, psychologists,
physiologists, and neuroscientists. Generally, the struggle
has been about the corporeal nature of the mind, though
even the reality of the physical nature of the body has
been questioned in some quarters. Basically, monism is
the view that mind and body are not ontologically distinct
entities, whereas dualism is the view that they are. In its
strong Cartesian form, or “substance dualism,” mind and
brain are composed of different “substances” (e.g., body
and soul). In a weaker form, or “property dualism,” the
mind is thought of as a group of independent properties
that emerge from, but cannot be reduced to, the brain even
though the mind is not made up of distinct substances (e.g.,
Searle, 1992).
As might be expected, Cartesian dualism led to a bifurca-
tion of philosophy of mind on the one hand and physiology
on the other. Western physiology, freed by Cartesian dual-
ism from concern with the mind, began making rapid
advances. For example, William Harvey, the Western anat-
omist, “first” described the cardiovascular (CV) system
in the 17th century, though the Arab physician, Ibn al
Nafis, did so (and also described the pulmonary system)
four centuries earlier (Gregory, 2001). By the mid-19th
CH06.indd Sec1:195
Roots of Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment 195
century, Theodor Schwann, Matthias Schleiden, and
Rudolf Virchow had solidified cell theory. As the living
cell became generally accepted as the common structural
and reproductive component of all organic substances,
including those in both plants and animals, the field of
biology came into its own.
Psychology became distinguished from philosophy only
in the mid- to late-19th century. During that time, clinicians
claimed that certain psychic (e.g., hysteria) and some-
times even physical abnormalities (e.g., catatonia) had
no apparent physiological causes, and empiricists applied
observational techniques, including experiments, to their
study of mind and behavior. Arguably, property dualism,
as described earlier, provided the metaphysical underpin-
nings of such psychological luminaries as Sigmund Freud,
Carl Jung, Wilhelm Wundt, William James, and others.
Wundt, a structuralist, and James, a functionalist, dif-
fered as the former proceeded introspectively to infer
common mental structures and processes to explain psy-
chology. James looked more outwardly, examining the
person’s adaptive relationship with the environment.
However, their philosophies of mind, like those of many
other founding fathers of modern psychology, comport
with the metaphysical assumptions of property dualism
more than substance dualism or strict monism; that is, men-
tal activity derives from bodily processes but is not nec-
essarily reducible to it. The monism–dualism debate was
avoided altogether by Watsonian and Skinnerian behavior-
ism, which held sway in psychology for 50 years or longer.
Radical behaviorism, as it applied to humans, eschewed
anything to do with the mind and brain, considering it
metaphorically a “black box,” the operation of which was
unimportant to understanding human behavior. Rather,
the behaviorists looked to environmental contingencies to
explain behavior.
By the last half and particularly the last quarter of
the 20th century, a number of factors contributed toward the
reemergence, weak at first, but stronger by the dawn of
the new millennium, of mind-body interaction in social
psychology and related fields. These factors included
seminal theoretical and empirical work by social psycholo-
gists, such as Schachter and Singer ’s (1962) neo-Jamesian
model of emotions; by personality psychologists, such as
Friedman and Rosenman’s (1974) Type A dispositional
construct; and by health psychologists’ mind-body con-
nectionism, such as Ader and Cohen’s (1975) seminal
psychoneuroimmunology work. It also included work on
metaphysical assumptions underlying social neuroscience.
Social psychologists John Cacioppo and Louis Tassinary
(e.g., 1990) espoused the “identity thesis,” arguing that
all mental, and hence psychological, states and processes
are embodied corporeally. In 1994, neuroscientist Antonio
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 196 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
Damasio published his landmark work, Descartes’ Error:
Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, putting another,
perhaps final, nail in the philosophical coffin of mind-body
substance dualism (also see Taylor; Keltner & Lerner; and
Funder & Fast, this volume).
The rejection of Cartesian mind-body dualism and the
drift toward monism led Blascovich and Seery (2006) to
delineate several implications of the view of mind and
body stated in Cacioppo and Tassinary’s identity thesis.
For one, the identity thesis implies that understanding
bodily responses can inform our understanding of mental
states and processes and vice versa. For another, biological
and psychological levels of analysis must be integrated for
social psychologists to understand mind-body relation-
ships. Third, the modern monistic view as elucidated in
the identity thesis argues against reductionism (i.e., that
a complex system is only the sum of its parts and, there-
fore, can be understood and explained by reducing it to
accounts of those parts) and determinism (i.e., that every-
thing, including affect, cognition, and behavior, is causally
determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences), as
well as pure psychologism (i.e., that mental states play the
pivotal causal role for behavior). Finally, the identity thesis
implies that state-of-the-art training in social psychology
must include training in neurophysiology without aban-
doning social psychology’s substantive purviews.
Body and Mind
That the body and mind are two sides of the same coin is
arguably the essence of the identity thesis and the current
more monistic, or at least, property dualistic metaphysical
view of human nature. The common Western view is that
the metaphorical coin is the brain or, as we have described
it, the site of primary control over body and mind.
In his essay “Where am I?” philosopher of mind Daniel
Dennett (1978) grapples with the location of the self. He
implies that if the brain were somehow remote from the rest
of the body, lying in a nutrient bath connected by wires or
telemetric microwaves distally to their bodies, most people
would identify their “self ” as located in brain. Such “com-
mon sense” replies are consistent with the theme, one that
is science fiction to some and a remote possibility to others
that human brains sans bodies could simply communicate
with one another, directly eliminating the need for physical
bodies. But would the need for bodies really be eliminated?
According to embodiment theory, it would not.
The embodiment theory perspective is that a reciprocal
relationship exists between peripheral bodily expressions
(e.g., of memories, emotions, and sensorimotor skills) and
central nervous system (CNS) processing of information
from those domains (cf. Niedenthal et al., 2005). To put
CH06.indd 196
it more simply, the proverbial detached brain would be
impoverished in terms of information processing without
peripheral embodiments.
Modern theoretical embodiment accounts of social
psychological constructs can be traced to Charles Darwin
(1872), who argued that attitude is a collection of pos-
tural motor behaviors revealing an organism’s emotional
response toward an object. A decade or so later, William
James and Carl Lange independently arrived at similar but
physiologically expanded notions regarding the nature of
the relationship between body and emotion. James (1884)
and later Lange and James (1922) held that emotion is the
perception of peripheral physiological conditions (including
those of the musculature viscera) that result from some
stimulus. The mind’s perception of stronger heartbeat,
increased or decreased muscle tension, higher adrenaline
levels, sweaty palms, and so forth is the emotion according
to these theorists; that is, physiological reactions form the
basis of subsequent emotional reactions. Walter Cannon
and Philip Bard (Bard, 1929; Cannon, 1929) challenged
the James-Lange theory. They postulated that perception of
a stimulus leads to both the emotion and peripheral physi-
ological activity, and that, indeed, many different emotions
shared the same peripheral physiological responses.
Much later, Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer
(1962) modified the James-Lange view maintaining that
people perceive peripheral physiological responses and
interpret them emotionally taking account of the context
within which they find themselves. In their classic experi-
ment, they injected experimental participants with epi-
nephrine and found that those who did not expect to be
affected physiologically by the injection but, in reality,
were affected nonetheless labeled their emotions positively
or negatively in line with contextual social cues. This was
one of the first experiments within the tradition of modern
embodiment theory. However, several statistical and other
critiques (e.g., Plutchik & Ax, 1967; Stern, Botto, &
Herrick, 1972; Stricker, 1967), as well as replication fail-
ures such as those by Maslach (1979) and Marshall and
Zimbardo (1979), eventually dimmed the impact of the
neo-Jamesian perspective.
Interoceptive (i.e., perception of visceral organ activity)
accuracy became the target of much research in the 1970s
and 1980s when psychophysiologists such as Jasper Brener
(e.g., Brener & Kluvitse, 1988), Gary Jones (e.g., Brener &
Jones, 1974), Edward Katkin (e.g., 1985), William
Whitehead (e.g., Whitehead & Drescher, 1980), and others
investigated the role of people’s perceptual acuity (i.e., intero-
ceptive accuracy) for detecting peripheral physiological
signals. Stimulated, in part, by Miller’s (1978) notion that
accurate visceral perceivers would benefit more from
biofeedback therapy (e.g., for relaxation) than less accurate
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perceivers, these and other investigators spent more than
a decade perfecting research paradigms for assessing the
accuracy of individuals’ perceptions of visceral signals,
concentrating, for the most part, on heartbeat detection
(though the idea that accurate visceral perceivers would
need external biofeedback seems to be counterintuitive).
In general, most work on interoception (e.g., Katkin,
Blascovich, & Goldband, 1981) demonstrated that men,
and especially women, were extraordinarily poor visceral
perceivers—though men benefited somewhat from perfor-
mance feedback training in discriminating their own bodily
signals (i.e., heartbeats) from simulated ones—calling
into question any functional relationship between visceral
perceptual ability and emotional expression. Although one
or two studies in this research tradition supported the neo-
Jamesian perspective on emotion, a few others suggested
the opposite. For example, Hantas, Katkin, and Blascovich
(1982) found that more accurate heartbeat detectors self-
reported greater emotional reactions to emotionally evoca-
tive photographs than inaccurate ones. Later, consistent
with affect intensity theory (Larsen & Diener, 1987),
Blascovich et al. (1992) demonstrated that poor heartbeat
detectors tended to exaggerate their reported emotions more
than good heartbeat detectors. Still later, Barrett, Quigley,
Bliss-Moreau, and Aronson (2004) proposed and found
evidence that visceral interoceptive ability was positively
related to the intensity of emotional experience as delineated
in Barrett’s core affect model (Barrett & Bliss-Moreau, in
press). In sum, the role of interoception in emotion is
undoubtedly more complicated than researchers in the past
have theorized, and more sophisticated theory and research
are needed to explain the seemingly oppositional effects of
interoceptive ability and emotion reported in the literature.
Clearly, data from interoception experiments sug-
gest, in general, that there is little consistent relationship
between conscious visceral interoception and psychologi-
cal processes such as emotional ones (cf. Barrett et al.,
2004). However, embodiment theorists would argue that
visceral and proprioceptive information (i.e., perception
of skeletal muscle activity) need not rise to the level of
consciousness to affect emotion. For example, based on
Waynbaum’s (1907) novel ideas relating cerebral blood
flow and facial expressions, Zajonc, Murphy, and Inglehart
(1989) proposed the vascular theory of emotional effer-
ence. Specifically, they hypothesized that facial muscle
movements regulate the temperature of venal blood in the
cavernous sinus in the brain that, in turn, is causally related
to emotional experience (with decreases in blood tempera-
ture accompanied by more positive affect and increases in
blood temperature accompanied by more negative affect).
Accordingly, in the James-Lange tradition, facial somatic
changes lead to emotional experience.
CH06.indd 197
Roots of Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment 197
Key to emotional efference theory is the likelihood that
affectively driven facial muscle contortions differentially
cool venal blood flow that passes near the cavernous sinus
via a heat exchange mechanism with the ambient envi-
ronment. In a series of sophisticated experiments using
essentially “one-of-a-kind” noninvasive technology to
measure forehead temperature at critical locations related
to venal blood flow, Zajonc and colleagues (1989) demon-
strated that such differential cooling was correlated with
the hypothesized differences in affect. Interestingly, these
experiments were run with the ambient temperature in the
room in which they were conducted at lower levels (prob-
ably around room temperature) than the range of normal
human blood temperature (e.g., around 98–99˚ F). If the
ambient temperature (e.g., around 110˚ F) were greater
than normal blood temperature, then the predictions based
on the heat exchange principle should be reversed. If local
environmental ambient temperature is less than body tem-
perature, facial expressions (e.g., smiling) associated with
cooling venal blood should result in positive affect. In con-
trast, if local environmental ambient is higher than body
temperature, those same facial expressions (e.g., smiling)
should be associated with warming venal blood and nega-
tive affect, thereby providing stronger inferential evidence
for Zajonc and colleagues’ hypothesized mechanism.
As far as we know, such an experiment has never been
conducted.
Although the blood temperature mechanism that Zajonc
and colleagues (1989) specified has received relatively lit-
tle attention and remains unverified in strong ways empiri-
cally, these theorists, themselves, foresaw the importance
of facial expressions as embodiments of emotion regard-
less of their hypothesized blood temperature regulation
mechanism. Specifically, they stated:
Independent of the validity of the particular physiological
processes that could be involved in producing subjective
effects, the basic principle that facial efferents may have regu-
latory functions, and thereby subjective consequences, has
a great deal of plausibility and, if true, profound theoretical
importance. (p. 397)
Their idea that facial muscular embodiments of emo-
tional states, as well as other muscular embodiments,
play a causal role in affective and emotional experience
has been taken up by many researchers, albeit via hypoth-
esized mechanisms other than venal blood temperature
regulation.
Niedenthal and colleagues (Niedenthal, 2007; Niedenthal
et al., 2005) maintain that attitudes, memories, emotion, and
social perceptions involve perceptual, visceral, and motoric
“reexperiencing” or “embodiment.” Niedenthal and her
colleagues’ literature reviews and explanatory offerings
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 198 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
provide strong evidence for embodiment processes and
pose a theoretical explanation. With regard to the evidence
on affect-related somatic embodiments (e.g., facial expres-
sions and postures), Niedenthal (2007) concludes: (1)
emotion-specific posturing leads to experience of specific
affect/emotions (e.g., Cacioppo, Priester, & Berntson, 1993;
Wells & Petty, 1980); (2) facilitation of emotion-specific
postures increases posture-consistent attitudes (e.g., Duclos
et al., 1989); and (3) inhibition of emotion-specific postures
interferes with experience of posture-specific emotions (e.g.,
Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988).
Furthermore, Niedenthal maintains that such embodiments
are involved in both online and offline processing of psy-
chological states such as attitudes, memories, emotions,
and so forth. More specifically, actual or online postural
movements affect the experience and encoding of such
psychological states. Hence, online embodiments facilitate
the initial capture of information relevant to psychological
states, whereas offline embodiments are thought to aid
recall, reenactment, reexperience, among others, of those
psychological states. In the words of Niedenthal et al:
In theories of embodied cognition, using knowledge—as in
recalling memories, drawing inferences, and making plans—is
thus called “embodied” because an admittedly incomplete but
cognitively useful reexperience is produced in the originally
implicated sensory-motor systems, as if the individual were
there in the very situation, the very emotional state, or with the
very object of thought. (Niedenthal et al., 2005, p. 18)
For example, in an experiment conducted by Rauscher,
Krauss, and Chen (1996), participants watched a cartoon.
Afterward, participants who had been prevented from
gesturing compared with those who were unfettered were
slower to recall cartoon details. Glenberg and Kaschak
(2002) demonstrated that participants more quickly judged
the sensibility of sentences when motion meaning com-
ported with the arm motion described (e.g., “Close the
drawer.”).
Although Zajonc et al. (1989) suggested blood tem-
perature regulation as a possibility for the physiologi-
cal mechanism linking facial postures (i.e., expressions),
Niedenthal and colleagues (2005) suggested the opera-
tion of motor neurons, specifically mirror neurons, as the
physiological mechanism linking not only facial postures
but all somatic embodiment postures. Although explicit
and detailed discussion and debate regarding the concept,
operation, and evidence of mirror neurons is more within
the scope of our sister chapter on social neuroscience, it
seems at the time this chapter was written, that mirror neu-
rons represent a plausible mechanism linking peripheral
somatic embodiments to both online and offline central
processing of underlying social psychologically relevant
CH06.indd 198
psychological states. Nevertheless, the evidence is strong
that such embodiments play important roles in the devel-
opment and operation of the processes underlying psycho-
logical states.
Values of Psychophysiology and Embodiment in
Social Psychology
The scientific values of examining the interplay among
neurophysiological and social processes within social psy-
chology fall into three categories: theoretical, methodolog-
ical, and applied.
Theoretical
Social psychological theories are strengthened as behav-
ioral scientists (with social psychologists being no
exception) continue to become more sophisticated about
neurophysiological processes. By no account does this
mean that social psychologists should become reduc-
tionistic, deterministic thinkers, thereby abandoning the
explanatory value of social psychology as an important
level of analysis. Rather, it means that such knowledge can
improve the precision of social psychological theories.
Methodological
In addition to possible theoretical advances stemming
from an understanding of mind-body relationships, there
are substantial methodological, particularly measurement,
advantages as well. Indeed, many social psychologists
have attempted to test hypotheses and bolster theories by
including neurophysiological indexes of social psycho-
logical constructs. However, the value of such indexes
depends on the quality of the physiologically based
linkages between measures and constructs as social neu-
roscientists have maintained for more than a quarter of
a century (e.g., Blascovich, 2000; Blascovich & Seery,
2006; Cacioppo, Tassinary, & Berntson, 2000; Cacioppo &
Tassinary, 1990; Obrist, 1976). If a social psychological
construct is well defined, if a strong theoretical case for its
neurophysiological underpinnings is made, and if a neu-
rophysiological index (typically but not necessarily incor-
porating multiple measures) is independently validated,
then the methodological advantages of neurophysiological
measures in social psychology are substantial. These
advantages accrue from the fact that neurophysiological
measures can best be measured continuously, covertly, and
in an online manner.
Continuous measurement eliminates the loss of infor-
mation that typically occurs with point time estimates.
One can examine the topology of construct expression
via neurophysiological indexes over time. For example,
the four continuous functions revealed in Figure 6.1
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Amplitude
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
msex ⫻ 10
Figure 6.1 Four examples of hypothetical activation of a
neurophysiological response over time.
depict examples of a hypothetical activation of a single
neurophysiological measure over some period. As can
easily be seen, each function has the same mean and
median over the epoch, but the distributions of data they
represent differ substantially over time. The difference in
form can not only provide a more fine grained distinction
between processes underlying the multiple functions, but it
can also better inform theory development.
Covert or implicit measurement, as is well known
among social psychologists, avoids the pitfalls of impres-
sion management artifacts that can plague self-report–
based measurement. Nearly all neurophysiological and
embodiment-based measures can be considered in this
category.
Online neurophysiological measurement provides for
accurate synchronization of neurophysiological indexes
with the activities of participants during the measurement
epoch, typically the critical periods of an experiment.
Indeed, online measurement also provides the possibility
that certain experimental activities (e.g., presentation of
stimuli, requirements of action, etc.) can be triggered by
levels of neurophysiological activity on some variable or
variables over time; for example, when facial electromy-
ography (EMG) reveals that a participant is in a positive or
negative affective state. Furthermore, online neurophysi-
ological measures do not suffer problems associated with
prospective and retrospective self-reports.
Applied
Given social psychology’s value for understanding how
the exigencies of everyday social life can impact one’s
health, neurophysiological indexes of constructs such as
stress (Ader & Cohen, 1975; Matthews, 1986; McEwen,
2002), threat (Blascovich & Tomaka, 1996; Tomaka,
Blascovich, & Kelsey, 1993), and coronary prone behavior
CH06.indd 199
Neurophysiological Systems 199
(Friedman & Rosenman, 1974) have been related to health
outcomes. Indeed, voluminous literature links peripheral
neurophysiological measures including neuroendocrine
and immunological ones to a variety of disease states but
is beyond the scope of this chapter (but see Taylor, this
volume).
Future performance can also be predicted via theory-
based neurophysiological indexes. For example, research
has demonstrated that patterns of CV markers related to
motivational states during appropriate assessment tasks
10 can predict future physical and cognitive performance
(Blascovich, Seery, Mudridge, Norris, & Weisburch, 2004;
Kassam, Koslov, & Mendes, in press; Schmader, Forbes,
Zhang, & Mendes, 2009). Discriminatory hostile behav-
ior can be predicted from specific somatic responses per-
mitting body and head movements. For example, McCall,
Blascovich, Young, and Persky (2009) have shown that
Anglo-American individuals who maintain more interper-
sonal distance and more gaze aversion between themselves
and African-American opponents display more hostile and
perceived fatal gunfire toward them than Anglo-Americans
who maintain less distance. Such an effect does not occur
in Anglo-American to Anglo-American pairings.
NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
Human physiology can be modeled as a cybernetic or con-
tinuous feedback system involving control and operational
systems (see Figure 6.2). The primary control systems are
intracranial and include the CNS—that is, the brain and
spinal cord, and the pituitary gland. The hypothalamus, a
brain structure, links the CNS and the pituitary gland via
a structure called the “median eminence.” The CNS con-
trols the endocrine system via the hypothalamic-pituitary
configuration but with feedback from the peripheral endo-
crine system via the bloodstream (as the arrows illustrate).
Hence, together, the CNS and cranial endocrine executive,
the pituitary, control the lower-level operational systems
neurally via the peripheral nervous system and peripheral
endocrine glands.
Major operational systems include the immune, visceral,
skeletal-motor or somatic, and endocrine systems. Our dis-
tinction between control and operational systems does not
preclude control functions at the operational systems level
or even lower within operational components (e.g., heart,
thymus). Control and operational functions are even embed-
ded in cells, the basic building blocks of all life (e.g., reuptake
receptors near neuronal synapses), but the higher-level orga-
nization fits our purposes here. Importantly, our distinction
between control and operational systems is not meant to
imply primacy of intracranial processes as the originating
12/18/09 2:36:59 PM
 200 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
Central
Nervous
System
Cranial
Endocrine
System
Skeletal-
Immune Visceral Endocrine
Motor
System System System
System
Figure 6.2 Cybernetic feedback system of human physiology.
source of all psychological and social-psychological
processes. Although such may or may not be the case during
dream and hallucinatory episodes, inputs to the CNS come
from sensory intake and feedback from peripheral neuro-
physiological systems including, importantly, kinesthetic
information (cf. Niedenthal et al., 2005).
Cybernetic cranial-based control of operational systems
permits continuously operating physiological processes
to vary from, and return to, homeostatic levels for func-
tional purposes. The CNS transmits instructions to the
operating systems via efferent neurons and receives feed-
back via afferent neurons. Central endocrine control
occurs via pituitary generated gland-specific hormones that
transmit instructions to the endocrine operating system
(i.e., glands) and receive feedback via circulating glan-
dular hormones, as well as peripheral and central neural
feedback. Endocrine systems communicate with other
operational systems, especially the visceral systems (i.e.,
pulmonary, CV, gastrointestinal, renal, hepatic, bladder),
often synergistically.
RELATIVE ADVANTAGES OF PERIPHERAL
AND CENTRAL NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL
INDEXES FOR SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
As discussed at the outset, this chapter focuses on the value
of peripheral visceral, somatic, and endocrine processes
as indexes of psychological constructs that can advance
social psychological theory. Both peripheral and central
neurophysiological indexes share certain methodological
measurement advantages over subjective measures by
virtue of their properties (i.e., continuous, online, and
covert). Peripheral and central measures each have relative
advantages over the other, and neither is a measurement
nor assessment panacea.
CH06.indd 200
Employment of peripheral neurophysiological embodi-
ments currently enjoys a few advantages over CNS
embodiments but only insofar as they are used as indexes
of psychological constructs. These include practical and
inferential ones. Cost, intrusiveness, and accessibility are
some relative practical advantages. For the most part, the
monetary costs of recording, scoring, and analyzing periph-
eral measures remain under the costs for recording, scoring,
and analyzing central neurophysiological measures such
as bloodborne signals via positron emission topogra-
phy (PET) and blood oxygen level–dependent signals
via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and
are typically somewhat below the costs of high-density
electroencephalography.
Peripheral measures are typically less intrusive than
central ones. Although neither central nor peripheral mea-
sures need be invasive, both types can be (e.g., intravenous
injection of radio-opaque dyes, collection of blood). The
technological requirements for peripheral measures, even
for relatively sophisticated technology such as impedance
cardiography, does not overly restrict postures and move-
ments, allowing for unconstrained interactions and experi-
ences in a more naturalistic settings. Such is not currently
the case with PET- and fMRI-based measures. Generally,
physiological recording equipment for peripheral measures
is more easily accessible, requires little, if anything, in the
way of a specialized recording environment, and has been
miniaturized, thereby permitting even ambulatory mea-
surements in the field.
Given the varied types of peripheral physiological pro-
cesses, such as sympathetic and parasympathetic branches
of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), muscle activity,
skin temperature, hormonal and immune changes, to name
a few, measures based on them might have an advantage
over central measures in certain contexts because one
can examine convergence and divergence across various
systems simultaneously, whereas the limited mobility
required as part of fMRI and PET procedures, at present,
circumscribes looking at multiple system responses con-
comitantly with the induction of specific mental states.
Currently, a number of peripheral neurophysiologi-
cal indexes of certain psychological constructs have been
experimentally validated, but their counterpart upstream
CNS indexes have not yet been. For example, CV indexes
of challenge and threat motivational states can be indexed
peripherally via patterns of CV responses (Blascovich &
Tomaka, 1996; Tomaka et al., 1993; see later). However,
the hypothalamic differentiation putatively underlying these
peripheral patterns has not yet been and, perhaps, cannot
yet be distinguished via fMRI- or PET-based brain imag-
ing. For example, functional brain imaging data may be
able to demonstrate activation of the hypothalamus but has
12/18/09 2:37:00 PM

not yet been shown to distinguish between the oppositional
motivational states resulting from that activation. Peripheral
indexes are currently necessary for the latter. On the other
hand, there is little agreement regarding valid peripheral
neurophysiological indexes of basic level emotions, point-
ing to the possibility that neural activation might be able to
identify emotional responses where peripheral physiologi-
cal indexes have failed to do so (see Cacioppo, Berntson,
Larsen, Poehlmann & Ito, 2000, for meta-analysis).
However the brain works, we can often discern some-
thing about what it has done via peripheral neurophysi-
ological responses. If the brain has “chosen” to increase
cardiac output, we can measure it via peripheral CV mea-
surement (Tomaka et al., 1993). If the brain has caused the
endocrine system to increase cortisol level, we can measure
it via its in saliva, urine, or blood (Dickerson & Kemeny,
2004). If the brain has caused a change in head orientation,
we can measure head movements in a variety of ways (e.g.,
McCall et al., 2009).
In addition, there are several current impediments to
the development of brain-based indexes of psychological
states. The issues of complexity, plasticity, individual dif-
ferences, and “dark matter” must be overcome before we
can better take advantage of brain-based indexes of social
psychological constructs.
Regarding complexity, the structure and functions of the
human brain represent perhaps the most complex and mas-
sive living system on earth. Estimates of brain structures
range as high as 100 billion neurons, each synapsing, on
average, to 10,000 other neurons. This presents an impor-
tant quantitative challenge to brain science, and presents
difficulties in terms of determining specific purposes and
functions of all neural connections, subsystems, “mod-
ules,” and so forth in the brain. The brain is also highly
plastic (i.e., adaptable) in the sense that certain cortical
areas in the brain devoted to one kind of mental activity
can take over mental activities that are normally sup-
ported by other areas that are permanently or temporarily
“out of order” (Ramachandran, Rogers-Ramachandran, &
Stewart, 1992). Hence, the psychological processes may
appear externally (i.e., peripherally) exactly the same
across individuals, but the spatial or temporal location, or
both, of CNS control differs. Apart from insult-caused con-
trol dislocations in the brain, there is also a great deal of
between-individual variability in certain measures of CNS
operations. For example, Miller et al. (2002) have found
that brain images aggregated across individuals pointing to
localized brain control of specific cognitive and affec-
tive processes often mask considerable individual differ-
ences in location. Aggregation techniques can actually
point to activation of a brain location across participants
that no single participant actually exhibits. Finally, Marcus
CH06.indd 201
Peripheral Neurophysiological Indexes 201
Raichle, a pioneering brain imager and leading figure
in human cognitive neuroscience argues, via his “dark
matter” metaphor, that the subtractive techniques inherent
to imaging techniques such as fMRI and PET can be mis-
leading because they highlight certain brain activity while
seemingly downplaying other brain activity that actually is
involved (Raichle, 2006).
However, if one’s intent is to understand the affective,
cognitive, somatic, and motoric processes underlying social
behavior, central neurophysiological measures have the
advantage inferentially. No one doubts that affective, cog-
nitive, somatic, and motivational outputs are processed by
the brain, albeit with inputs from the environment and from
peripheral physiological operational systems (i.e., embodi-
ments). Potential direct causal explanation of mind-body
relationships lies much more in the realm of central neuro-
physiological than peripheral neurophysiological processes.
PERIPHERAL NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL
INDEXES
One of the challenges facing researchers interested in
exploiting the methodological advantages that neurophysi-
ological indexes bring to social psychological research is
how to select among the seeming plethora of possible ones
to use. Just as an investigator would not use just any exist-
ing paper and pencil or behavioral measure to index any
social psychological construct, one should not select just
any physiological measure or measures. Rather, one should
be concerned about the validity of a neurophysiological
measure as an index of a particular construct and, therefore,
search for validated neurophysiological indexes of that
construct (several are discussed later). In the absence in the
literature of such a validated neurophysiological index, one
can take on the task of melding appropriate neurophysi-
ological theory with psychological processes underlying
the target construct, and developing and validating such an
index,1 though that can be a daunting task.
1
Blascovich and Seery (2006) outlined a methodological approach
to establishing and using peripheral neurophysiological indexes
of social psychological constructs including “first principles”
and “propositions” building on Cacioppo and Tassinary’s (1990)
“strength of inference” classification scheme. In contrast with
many self-report and even some behavioral measures, most periph-
eral neurophysiological measures have little, if any, face validity
with regard to their applicability to social psychological constructs.
Consequently, the identification and validation of such indexes
is more complicated than subjective and behavioral ones. As dis-
cussed later in the chapter, some of this work has already been
accomplished, but not to the degree that a plethora of practical vali-
dated peripheral neurophysiological indexes of constructs exists.
12/18/09 2:37:01 PM
 202 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
Alternatively, one can manipulate independent variables
and choose dependent variables for which there are extant
validated peripheral neurophysiological indexes. At first
read, the previous sentence may seem to be suggesting
changing what one wants to investigate. However, that is
not necessarily the case. Because the inferentially stron-
gest peripheral neurophysiological indexes that exist are
ones associated with superordinate categories of affect
(i.e., positive vs. negative) or motivation (i.e., chal-
lenge vs. threat), and they can be indexed at the super-
ordinate level. Given that social psychologists are often
interested in affect and motivational measures, these can
be indexed validly neurophysiologically and relatively
easily at the superordinate level. Unless it is important
for the investigator to distinguish happiness from love or
fear from anxiety, indexing positive and negative affect
neurophysiologically provides important information to
the investigator via the stated advantages of physiological
measures.
Propositions for Validating Neurophysiological
Indexes of Social Psychological Constructs
Cacioppo and colleagues (Cacioppo & Tassinary,
1990; Cacioppo, Tassinary, & Berntson, 2000, 2007)
specified three dimensions that yield the taxonomy
of psychophysiological relationships presented here
High
Many-to-one
CONCOMITANT
OUTCOME
y
alit
ner
Sensitivity
e e
G i
MARKER
Context-dependent
Low
CH06.indd 202
(see Figure 6.3). The three dimensions are generality
(context), specificity, and sensitivity, and combined pro-
duce four categories of psychophysiological relationships:
outcomes, concomitants, markers, and invariants that can
vary in sensitivity.
Generality or context refers to the continuum of situa-
tions, and varies from very limited or “context-dependent”
situations to unlimited or “context-independent” situations.
Context-independent indexes are more desirable than context-
dependent ones in terms of the generalizability of results
based across all situations. However, they are difficult and,
in some cases, impossible to achieve especially in terms
of neurophysiological indexes of social psychological
constructs. However, context-dependent indexes can be
valuable provided that the context represents a reasonable
domain within which the social-psychological processes
represented by the construct operate. Indeed, given Lewin’s
dictum that social psychology represents the study of the
interaction between person and situation, context-specific
indexes, or “markers” in Cacioppo and Tassinary’s taxon-
omy, validated in the specified contexts can be valuable
and, therefore, a reasonable goal.
Specificity refers to the nature of the relationship
between the index and target construct. Optimal speci-
ficity is a singular or “one-to-one” relationship between
index and construct. Specifically, if the index is positive,
the construct is expected to be present; and if the index
Context-free
INVARIANT
Sp
cif
cit
y
One-to-one
Figure 6.3 Cacioppo and colleagues’ taxon-
omy of psychophysiological inference.
12/18/09 2:37:01 PM

is negative, the construct is expected to be absent.
Furthermore, the relationship is symmetrical so that if the
construct is present or absent, the index is correspondingly
positive or negative; and if the index is positive or nega-
tive, the construct is present or absent, correspondingly.
Although this description of a one-to-one relationship
between an index and construct is a dichotomous one, one-
to-one relationships are certainly possible with continuous
bipolar indexes as well.
Sensitivity refers to the likelihood that a physiological
response will covary with a psychological state. At low
levels of sensitivity, a physiological response might simply
signal the presence or absence of a psychological state. At
higher levels of sensitivity, the amplitude and temporal tra-
jectory are specified to respond to the variable intensity of
the psychological event. For example, if skin temperature
were highly sensitive to the experience of anger, one
would expect that as anger increased there would be a
linear relationship with skin temperature that could index
the “amount” of anger experienced.
These dimensions are by no means the only dimensions
by which psychophysiological indexes can be established.
Indeed, Blascovich and Seery (2006) expanded on these
dimensions within an organizing framework of a multi-
trait multimethod matrix as a way to explore divergent and
convergent validity of physiological indexes and their rela-
tionship to mental states.
Summary
Achieving one-to-one relationships between social-
psychological constructs and peripheral neurophysiological
indexes is advanced by targeting less inclusive rather than
more inclusive contexts in which to use them. Establishing
valid indexes is optimized by using a divergent valida-
tional approach, by including a physiologically theoreti-
cally meaningful pattern of multiple neurophysiological
responses, and by assessing such patterns over time. Note
that a neurophysiological index based on a single physio-
logical response can provide basis for inference. However,
strong inference (i.e., a marker or invariant) is less likely
though not logically impossible.
EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL
PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL THEORIES
As described earlier, the goal of social psychophysiology
is to understand the links between social-psychological
and neurophysiological theories. Toward this end, social
psychophysiological theories have emerged with roots
in psychophysiological, especially neuroendocrine- and
CH06.indd 203
Evolution of Social Psychophysiological Theories 203
autonomic-based systems, and social-psychological
theories. Importantly, at this juncture, additional psycho-
physiological theories are ripe for increasing our under-
standing of social-psychological processes.
Historically, psychophysiological theories have focused
on one or both of the two primary biological systems that
are active during the operation of affective and cognitive
processes underlying motivation and performance: the
sympathetic adrenal medullary (SAM) and hypothalamic-
pituitary-adrenal cortical (HPA) axes. At the risk of over-
simplification, one can think of the SAM system as acti-
vating during fight-or-flight situations, whereas the HPA
system is more conservative and activates after longer
exposure to stress, such as preparing for comprehensive
examinations. When the SAM system is activated, epi-
nephrine is released from the adrenal medulla, which con-
tributes to several changes in the body, including increasing
heart rate and blood pressure, dilating pupils, and inhibit-
ing the gastrointestinal tract. HPA activation is initiated in
the hypothalamus, which releases corticotropin-releasing
hormone, which triggers the anterior pituitary to release
adrenocorticotropin hormone, which travels to the adrenal
cortex, which sits on top of the kidneys, and stimulates an
area of the adrenal cortex called the “zona fasciculata” to
release cortisol.
These systems can operate relatively independently,
though in some contexts are coactivated and can moder-
ate each other. Although the SAM and HPA axes can be
activated concomitantly, their onset and offset times can
differ. The SAM system can fully respond and peak within
seconds on exposure to a stimulus, thought, or emotion,
and its response can be measured in terms of changes
in the ANS and increasing circulating catecholamines. In
contrast, the HPA system activates more slowly and gen-
erally takes minutes rather than seconds to reach its peak
response. Similarly, recovery time (i.e., return to homeo-
static levels) is longer after activation of the HPA com-
pared with the SAM axis.
Some of the primary questions concerning these systems
for psychophysiologists, and especially social psycho-
physiologists, include: What are the different eliciting psy-
chological factors associated with activating these systems?
How do emotions and individual differences influence acti-
vation? How can social situations influence responses? and
What can we learn about people’s experiences and behav-
ior by examining how these systems activate and recover?
To begin to examine how social psychophysiologists have
tried to answer some of these questions linking mind and
body, it is important to look at how modern research in
the area of physiological responses to mental states began.
Though one could point to many starting points, an espe-
cially important figure in the 20th century was Hans
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 204 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
Selye and what ended up being his clumsy, but fortuitous,
approach to studying rats.
Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome
One of the pioneers in stress research, endocrinologist
Hans Selye is largely credited with identifying the coordi-
nated bodily responses that occur with stress (Selye, 1956).
As a medical student in 1925 at the University of Prague,
Selye noted that stress responses could influence the body
in general ways. Although patients differed in primary
diagnoses, they shared common symptoms and identifi-
able manifestations; for example, they looked and felt ill,
their tongues were coated, they experienced loss of appe-
tite, and reported pain in their joints. Even though a com-
mon disease was not inflicting these patients, they shared
similar symptoms suggesting a general bodily response
that co-occurred with specific diseases of the body.
Selye’s early observations were confirmed a decade
later when he was attempting to identify a new ovar-
ian hormone. In these experiments, he injected rats with
a variety of hormonal extracts, but apparently being a
bit short on dexterity, Selye struggled with injecting
the rats and would often end up dropping and chasing the
rats around the laboratory. When he autopsied the rats,
regardless of the extract (or placebo) injected, all the rats
had developed the same triadic syndrome that included
enlargement of the adrenal cortex, shrinking of lymphatic
structures, and bleeding ulcers. Apparently, Selye had
created his own laboratory-based stressor and his rats
showed evidence of chronic stress. Selye recalled his
early observations as a medical student and surmised that
the triadic syndrome of bodily response was meaningful,
and that such responses to general or nonspecific demands
might explain a general sickness behavior. Thus, the gen-
eral adaptation syndrome (GAS) was born, which Selye
argued was a universal response to stress that included
coordinated changes in the body.
The GAS identifies three stages of stress. The first
stage is alarm, in which the body signals the fight-or-
flight response. Under continued stress, resistance follows,
which results in the body trying to cope or adapt with the
new demands. If the stress continues, the bodily demands
are depleted and the final stage, exhaustion, occurs. Selye
argued that, in the latter stage, the body is most susceptible
to new illnesses or exacerbation of existing diseases. By
adopting the GAS model, many researchers explicitly or
implicitly argued that stress responses were unidirectional
and assumed that all stress responses were the same.
Although Selye may have influenced researchers to
focus on the damaging effects of stress, he also emphasized
the importance of differentiating harmful and damaging
CH06.indd 204
distress from the positive or less damaging eustress. This
idea, that changes in the body caused by stress could be
beneficial, is a recurring theme in contemporary psycho-
physiological theory and one we will return to often in this
chapter.
In contemporary psychophysiological research, the
word “stress” is rarely used, most likely because of
the weak inference and fuzzy construct it represents.
Instead, contemporary researchers use “allostasis” as
a general term to represent changes in the body from
homeostasis. Allostasis is a combination of the Greek word
allos or “variable” and statis or “stable,” thus “remaining
stable by being variable.” Allostasis refers to the body’s
response to external demands by activating the fight-or-
flight response and is viewed as the body’s “swift and effi-
cient method of dealing with danger” (McEwen, 2002, p. 5).
In contrast, the term that is used to highlight the deleteri-
ous effects on the body is “allostatic load” and is reserved
for occasions when the allostasis response is not turned off
and the body begins to break down defenses.
Psychophysiological Models of Hypothalamic-
Pituitary-Adrenal and Sympathetic Adrenal
Medullary Responses
The importance of James’s, Cannon-Bard’s, and Selye’s
theories is unquestionable in terms of generating attention
to the links between mental states and bodily responses,
in contrast with James, however, the latter two theories
treated changes in physiological responses as nonspecific.
Little attention was paid to the different eliciting conditions,
and thus little or no specificity was identified regarding
the mental states that preceded the physiological changes.
In subsequent years, several theories attempted to remedy
this problem by focusing on relative changes in the two
primary stress systems described earlier and by defining
which psychological antecedents were associated with
specific profiles of activation.
For example, Frankenhäuser (1986) examined changes
in epinephrine (indexing SAM activation) and cortisol
(indexing HPA activation), and focused on individuals’ per-
ceptions of effort and distress. She theorized that different
levels of effort and distress would result in unique physio-
logical patterns related to SAM and HPA activation. When
individuals were distressed but no effort was expended,
cortisol production was hypothesized to increase together
with small increases in epinephrine production. When
individuals felt distressed and exerted effort, both epineph-
rine and cortisol responses increase, though epinephrine
predominated. Finally, when individuals expended effort
but there was not a concomitant experience of distress,
epinephrine production would increase, but cortisol would
12/18/09 2:37:02 PM

not. Theoretically, these patterns of responses map onto a
continuum of helplessness (distress without effort) to mas-
tery (effort without distress), with the question of perceived
control influencing where one fell on the continuum.
A similar model was proposed by Henry (1980, 1986),
who also focused on control as a critical psychological fac-
tor that determined patterned physiological responding.
In this model, defense was linked to SAM activation and
defeat to HPA. Henry further differentiated defense into
control and striving. Specifically, control indicated when a
potential threat was effectively managed and under control,
whereas striving indicated a threat that still needed active
management. Henry’s model produced three distinct psy-
chological states and multiple outcomes related to behavior,
emotion, neuroendocrine, and autonomic responses. His
control state was believed to result in aggressive behavior
toward the potential threat, elation and loss of anxiety, and
increases in norepinephrine, testosterone, blood pressure,
and cardiac output. In contrast, the striving defense was
characterized by struggle, tension, fear, and high epineph-
rine levels, moderate increases in cortisol, and moderate
blood pressure and cardiac output increases. Finally, loss
of control or the defeat response was characterized as help-
lessness, anxiety, depression, high cortisol and low testos-
terone, and little or no changes in autonomic reactivity.
Although the comparison between Frankenhäuser
and Henry highlights the fact that the profiles of physi-
ological responses tend to be similar across theories, what
differentiates the theories are the specific psychological
antecedents that best represent the eliciting conditions
associated with the physiological profiles. The profiles
that Frankenhäuser and Henry outlined can be seen in
whole or in part in many subsequent theories, all of which
have their own explication of the experiential component
that brings about these profiles.
Dienstbier ’s Theory of Physiological Toughness
Similar to Frankenhäuser and Henry, Richard Dienstbier
focused on the possibility that not all changes in physio-
logical responses in a potentially distressful or threatening
situation should be viewed negatively and took seriously
Selye’s notion of eustress. Even with psychoneuroendocri-
nologists attempting to differentiate SAM and HPA acti-
vation, relatively little attention was paid to beneficial or
adaptive physiological changes, and the prevailing zeitgeist
of the 1970s and 1980s was that increases in peripheral
physiological responses were associated with negative psy-
chological states and inherently did damage to biological
systems, as well as impair cognition. Richard Dienstbier ’s
physiological toughness model (1989) directly ques-
tioned these “negative views of arousal,” and he reviewed
the many and varied ways peripheral changes could be
CH06.indd 205
Evolution of Social Psychophysiological Theories 205
associated with adaptive functioning, improved immune
system, and better performance.
Incorporating animal and human studies, Dienstbier ’s
premise was that small stressors experienced by an
animal or human could “toughen” them so that subsequent
stressors were better coped with physiologically. This
perspective was in sharp contrast with stress models that
assumed that all peripheral increases signified damage and
impaired cognitive performance. For example, Dienstbier
reviewed evidence that strongly questioned the commonly
held belief that arousal would be related to cognitive or
behavioral performance in a curvilinear relation (simi-
lar to the Yerkes-Dodson principle). Instead, he observed
strong linear relations between higher catecholamines and
better cognitive and physical performance. Most typi-
cally, greater catecholamine increases from baseline were
associated with better math performance among students
(especially for epinephrine relative to norepinephrine).
Physical performance also yielded a similar finding:
Greater increases in catecholamines were associated with
better technical competence among military paratroopers
in training.
In contrast, strong evidence has been reported that
end products of HPA activation, specifically cortisol, do
show an inverted U-relation with performance (Lovallo &
Thomas, 2000). For example, memory is improved when
there are small increases in cortisol, but impaired at higher
levels of cortisol. Disease models and neural regions associ-
ated with memory provide insight into this finding. Patients
with Cushing disease, characterized by an overactive HPA
response, resulting in chronically high levels of circulating
glucocorticoid responses, tend to have poor memory and
smaller hippocampi because of degeneration. The hippo-
campus, strongly linked to memory, has high-affinity and
low-affinity receptors for cortisol. At low levels of corti-
sol production, high-affinity receptors are activated, which
improves memory, but at higher levels or chronically acti-
vated cortisol, low-affinity receptors are activated, which
can impair memory (Reul & de Kloet, 1985).
The physiologically tough pattern extends to better
psychological adjustment as well. Greater increases in cat-
echolamines from resting levels are associated with ego
strength, stress tolerance, low neuroticism, and daily stress
scores. In contrast, clinically anxious individuals respond
to laboratory challenges with lower sympathetic nervous
system (SNS) increases.
What characterizes a physiologically tough (adaptive)
response from a weak (maladaptive) one? Much of the dif-
ferences lie in the baseline or resting levels, and in the tem-
poral trajectory once the organism is exposed to a stressor.
In Figure 6.4, the hypothesized changes in end products of
SAM and HPA activation (specifically SNS changes and
12/18/09 2:37:03 PM
 206 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
Theoretical HPA activation
Theoretical SAM activation
Adaptive
Maladpative
Rest Stressor Habituation Recovery Rest
cortisol responses, respectively) are depicted to contrast
adaptive profiles from maladaptive responses.
For example, Dienstbier (1989) described an adaptive
SAM profile to include low resting baseline responses
(e.g., low heart rate, low levels of epinephrine), a strong
and immediate increase in response to a stressor, followed
by quick habituation and recovery. In contrast, an adap-
tive HPA response is characterized by low cortisol, small
increases after the initiation of a stressor, and quick habitu-
ation and recovery. When examining a maladaptive profile,
the resting and response reactions are quite different. First,
in terms of SAM levels, there are higher resting levels of
catecholamines, at the onset of the stressor there is a slug-
gish increase in activation, an increase in activation over
the course of the task (rather than habituation), and then a
sluggish recovery once the stressor is complete. The HPA
response that characterizes a malignant profile, accord-
ing to Dienstbier, is increased cortisol level at rest, a large
increase in cortisol level in response to a stressor, together
with sluggish habituation and recovery.
Obrist’s Somatic Coupling/Uncoupling
Arguably one of the most important psychophysiologists
of the 20th century was Paul Obrist. His varied and far-
reaching contributions to CV psychophysiology included
using pharmacological agents to constrain physiological
responses, exploring psychological precursors of essential
hypertension, and highlighting the importance of context
when examining the link between psychology and physiol-
ogy. Indeed, in his presidential address to the Society for
Psychophysiological Research, Obrist (1976) claimed that,
“Cannon was right, he just failed to understand situational
specificity” (p. 103).
In his early work, Obrist (1968) published evidence
that cardiac changes were concomitant with somatic-
motor (i.e., bodily movement) changes. Using aversive
conditioning paradigms, Obrist exposed participants to
paired trials of light (conditioned stimulus [CS]) and shock
(unconditioned stimulus [UCS]), but also varied the delay
between the CS and UCS. When the intertrial interval was
CH06.indd 206
Figure 6.4 Hypothesized activation of
sympathetic adrenal medullary (SAM) and
hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal cortical (HPA)
responses from Dienstbier’s model of physi-
Stressor Habituation Recovery ological toughness.
long (i.e., 7 s), heart rate decreased and muscle activity
(in the neck, arm, and chin) increased, and these responses
were correlated (i.e., the lower the heart rate the greater the
muscle activity). However, with shorter intertrial intervals
(e.g., 1 s), a correlation also existed between cardiac and
somatic (body) responses, but in this case, both responses
increased: increased heart rate and increased muscle
activity. These data were critical in establishing that bio-
logical systems could respond in a coordinated fashion;
however, the context could change the relationship.
But even the coupled relationship between cardiac
(heart) and somatic (body) activity at short and long
intervals proved to be dependent on situational factors.
In later research, Obrist (e.g., 1976) established that
cardiac-somatic coupling occurred in the context of pas-
sive stressors—for example, during aversive events that
were minimally involving or engaging—primarily because
in these situations the heart is controlled by vagal (i.e.,
parasympathetic) innervation. Regarding the physiological
changes in passive coping tasks (such as aversive shock),
Obrist commented that they were “biologically trivial
and . . . tell little about the psychological state of the organ-
ism other than . . . momentarily suspended somatic activ-
ity” (p. 103). Indeed, he speculated that the cardiac-somatic
coupling might simply be caused by momentary changes
in posture and body positioning, rather than a function of
a psychological or experiential response. In contrast, Obrist
was quite optimistic about the value of physiological
changes brought about during active tasks, or ones that
allowed an individual to act or cope. Not only were changes
in cardiac responses much larger than those seen in passive
tasks, but now cardiac and somatic activity were uncou-
pled. Changes in body positioning could no longer explain
changes in cardiac responses; thus, the psychological state
of the individual was the likely candidate for the observed
physiological changes.
Context distinctions are critical for understanding mind-
body interactions for several reasons. For one, the func-
tions of the SNS are primarily for fight or flight, but in our
modern age, we often experience SNS changes when no or
12/18/09 2:37:03 PM

minimal metabolic demand is required. Obrist’s point was
that there was little, if any, value in examining peripheral
physiology during passive stressors, and that any changes
seen represent somatic or motoric changes that are inde-
pendent of psychological experience. Instead, active tasks,
which require an opportunity to cope with environmental
or internal demands, would result in meaningful periph-
eral changes that would correspond to psychological
states. Obrist’s observation is critically important when we
review emotion and motivational research that has occa-
sionally ignored this distinction often to the detriment of
research progress.
Blascovich and Colleagues’ Biopsychosocial Model
of Challenge and Threat
One of the direct descendants of Dienstbier ’s distinction
of physiological toughness (vs. weakness) and Obrist’s
specification of active coping states is Challenge and
Threat Theory (Blascovich & Mendes, 2000; Blascovich &
Tomaka, 1996; Tomaka et al., 1993; cf. Wright & Kirby,
2003). This theory states that in situations that are active
and goal relevant (based on Obrist’s notion of active tasks),
a combination of evaluations of situational demands and
personal resources to cope produce distinct psychological
states. At the most general level, when evaluated demands
are greater than perceived resources to cope, individuals
experience a psychological state of threat. In contrast,
when resources are greater than demands, individuals
experience a challenge state (see Lazarus & Folkman,
1991). Of course, many factors influence the evaluated
demands and resources in a motivated performance situa-
tion. Factors that have been identified as likely to increase
demand evaluations include danger, uncertainty, novelty,
and required effort, and there are likely additional ones not
yet specified (Blascovich & Mendes, 2000).
For example, danger, either psychological or physi-
cal, can be signaled in multiple ways during an active,
goal-relevant task. At a psychological level, danger can
be associated with fear of negative evaluation, such as an
unsympathetic or hostile audience during a talk. Physical
danger, though rare in active coping tasks used in the labo-
ratory (studies using electrical shock are done so in passive
coping situations with no opportunity for escape), also con-
ceivably would increase demand evaluations. Situational
novelty increases demand evaluations, whereas situational
familiarity decreases demand evaluations. Finally, effort
also has an effect on demand evaluations. In some cases,
effort can be viewed as strictly metabolic—as physical
demands are placed on metabolic output the total demands
are likely to be exceeded. But effort can also relate to
strictly cognitive demands. As more information or dis-
traction in the environment is introduced, internal states
CH06.indd 207
Evolution of Social Psychophysiological Theories 207
can be compromised (e.g., cognitive load) and situational
demands will be increased, and all else being equal, a per-
son will experience a threat state.
If the demand construct was all there was to the theory,
the Challenge and Threat model would be closer to Selye’s
GAS model, which highlighted stress factors associated
with activation and exhaustion of bodily states. However,
even in the presence of elevated demands (e.g., danger,
uncertainty, and required effort), increases in resources can
offset demands and ultimately produce challenge states.
These resource factors include but are not limited to dis-
positions, knowledge and abilities, and external support.
Dispositions, such as optimism, control, and self-esteem,
can be construed as personal resources that can be brought
to bear on a task (see Tomaka & Blascovich, 1994; Seery,
Blascovich, Weisbuch, & Vick, 2004). For example, indi-
viduals who score high in a Belief in a Just World typically
experience challenge states when exposed to an ambiguous
social stressor compared with those low in Belief in a Just
World, who typically experience more threat. How indi-
viduals evaluate their knowledge and abilities can influ-
ence resources as well, especially when the knowledge is
relevant to the task at hand (Blascovich, Mendes, Hunter, &
Salomon, 1999). For example, an advanced degree in
math during the final Jeopardy round would be helpful if
the category is Euclidian geometry, less so if the category
is Adriatic port cities. In this case, it is anticipated that
greater knowledge results in greater evaluated resources.
The final identified resource is social support, which can
increase feelings of security and hence result in increased
perceived resources.
The physiological changes that co-occur with the onset
of challenge and threat states have focused primarily on
CV changes. Specifically, CV responses exhibited during
challenge states tend to be associated with greater SAM
activation, thus increasing ventricular contractility, car-
diac efficiency, and vasodilation in the arterioles, which
provides greater blood flow to the periphery. The CV pat-
tern of reactivity associated with challenge is similar (if
not identical) to the pattern-1 (activational) response iden-
tified by medical researchers (see Brownley, Hurwitz, &
Schneiderman, 2000). Similar to challenge states, threat
states also are characterized by an increase in sympa-
thetic activation, but in contrast with challenge states,
threat states consist of less efficient cardiac responses and
vasoconstriction. Similar to the pattern-2 (inhibitional)
response, CV reactivity during threat states is believed to
be associated with avoidant and defeat-related motivation
(Brownley et al., 2000).
Although challenge and threat can be linked to high
“arousal” positive and negative emotional states, respectively,
more accurately, the states are proposed as motivational
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 208 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment

rather than affective (Blascovich, 2008; Herrald & Tomaka, oblongata and extends to the face, heart, stomach, and
2002; Mendes, Major, McCoy, & Blascovich, 2008), most abdominal organs. One way to examine vagal
and thus are orthogonal to valence. As such, challenge nerve influences on the heart is by examining variability
states index approach motivation and not necessarily of the cardiac cycle. Initially, heart rate variability was
positive emotion. One implication of this is that approach- believed to be a measurement artifact or nuisance, but
negative emotions, such as anger, should be more closely further exploration into spontaneous changes in the tim-
related to challenge than threat. ing of the heart cycle proved to be psychologically and
Table 6.1 presents the psychological states of challenge physiologically meaningful. Though disagreements still
and threat together with the emotional, motivational, and occur on the specifics related to measurement, quantifi-
physiological responses that differentiate these psycho- cation, and psychological meaningfulness of vagal tone
logical states. Notably, the general profile of threat states, and cardiac vagal reactivity (see Porges, 2007), these
in terms of its physiological concomitants, is considerably measures might prove to be especially important for
more pernicious in the amount of damage the physiologi- social and personality psychologists interested in emo-
cal response could enact on the CV system. Indeed, those tion or mental effort.
who experience more threat responses compared with One theory that has received much attention in terms of
challenge responses during stressful laboratory tasks show the psychological inferences one can draw from vagal nerve
accelerated biological aging measured with telomerase, influences is Porges’ polyvagal theory (e.g., Porges, 2007).
an enzyme that protects chromosomal DNA during The polyvagal theory specifies that heart rate variability,
replication, which has been directly linked to disease out- measured as respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), indexes
comes (see Mendes & Epel, 2009). a specific branch of the vagus, unique to primates and not
found in reptiles (but see Grossman & Taylor, 2007), which
Porges’ Polyvagal Theory has evolved as part of the social engagement system. One
Whereas challenge and threat theory focuses exclusively of the postulates of polyvagal theory is that social factors
on differentiating responses associated with SNS activa- (affiliation, social engagement, self-conscious emotions),
tion, there is growing interest in the responses associated personality factors (pessimism, self-esteem, mindfulness),
with parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) changes and clinical factors (depression, autism) can modulate
and specifically the role of the vagus nerve (also known vagal activity.
as “cranial nerve X”), which originates in the medulla Specifically, Porges argues that higher RSA at rest
(higher cardiac vagal tone) can be used as an index of
adaptive emotional regulation and responsiveness to the
social environment. Similarly, cardiac vagal reactivity
Table 6.1 Emotional, Motivational, and Behavioral Responses
Associated with Psychological States of Challenge and Threat (changes in RSA) might also index appropriate social
engagement in that increased vagal reactivity during a
Challenge Threat
task might be associated with calmness, equanimity, and
Evaluations: Evaluations: a lack of distress.
Resources > Demands Resources < Demands Though most work has focused on resting cardiac vagal
Affect: Affect:
tone and its links to dispositions and responses to social
Pride/↑ self-esteem/anger Shame/anxiety/↓ self-esteem
Autonomic nervous system (ANS) ANS reactivity: and emotional situations, there is also a growing literature
reactivity: on cardiac vagal reactivity—focusing on RSA changes—
↑ CO (cardiac output) No change in CO and vagal rebound. Vagal rebound is the extent to which
↑ VC (ventricle contractility) ↑ VC
↓ TPR (total peripheral resistance) ↑ TPR RSA responses return to or even overshoot baseline lev-
Behavior: Behavior: els after suppression of the vagal brake (i.e., decreases in
Open posture, leaning toward Rigid, freeze, withdraw, closed vagal activity).
approach posture, moving away from
stimulus, defeat
Though typically vagal responses have been linked to
Recovery: Recovery: emotional or attentional processes, a recent theory has
Quick sympathetic nervous Slow SNS, PNS, and cortisol linked self-esteem with vagal tone (Martens, Greenberg, &
system (SNS) recovery
Allen, in press). This theory argues that high vagal tone
recovery, vagal rebound
(parasympathetic nervous and high self-esteem buffer individuals from experiences
system [PNS] activity of threat. These researchers then draw specific links to
overshooting baseline levels), suggest that these two outcomes, high vagal tone and high
and quick cortisol recovery
self-esteem, might be linked. For example, they point out
Note: ↑= increases;↓ = decreases. that depression and sadness can co-occur with low levels

CH06.indd 208 12/18/09 2:37:04 PM


of vagal tone, and that vagal nerve stimulation, resulting
in an increase in vagal tone, can reduce depressive symp-
tomatology. These authors also present preliminary evi-
dence showing that increases in self-esteem can result in
increased vagal reactivity. As intriguing as this theory is, it
remains to be seen how strong and specific the relationship
is between self-esteem and vagal tone.
Adding some complexity to both polyvagal theory and
the link between self-esteem and vagal tone, however,
is the nature of the social context and its influence on vagal
responses. Indeed, in highly stressful situations or tasks
that require some amount of mental attention or effort, one
expects a withdrawal of the vagal brake (resulting in lower
RSA) to indicate greater attentional control and effort.
Indeed, cognitive psychophysiologists have used decreases
in RSA as an index of attention or mental effort for several
years (Tattersall & Hockey, 1995).
Cacioppo and Colleagues’ Doctrine
of Autonomic Space
Though most of the psychophysiological theories of
the 20th century acknowledged the interplay between
sympathetic and parasympathetic branches, these theories
treated the relationship between these two branches of the
ANS as lying on a single continuum of reciprocity—as one
system increased the other decreased. Indeed, the view that
these systems have a reciprocal relationship is an enduring
myth still promulgated in some physiological textbooks.
The psychophysiological team of Gary Berntson, John
Cacioppo, and Karen Quigley (1991) argued convincingly
against this doctrine, and showed that there were multiple
modes of autonomic control and the standard reciproc-
ity principle had limited utility. Their autonomic space
model outlined a two-dimensional space that includes the
various relationships between sympathetic and parasympa-
thetic responses, which can be reciprocal, uncoupled, or
co-activated. This distinction is important for reconciling
uncoupled relationships between the SNS and PNS. For
example, the orienting response is characterized by cardiac
deceleration (increased PNS), pupil dilation (decreased
PNS), and increases in electrodermal responses (increased
SNS). If the systems were completely reciprocal, there
would be great difficulty in explaining reactions to an ori-
enting response.
Understanding the multiple modes of autonomic control
sheds light on how situational specificity can differentially
influence ANS responding. For example, the orienting
response is typically associated with heart rate decelera-
tion. If one examines heart rate during a task designed to
be an orienting task and observes no deceleration of heart
rate, they might conclude that the orientating response was
not present. However, during novel compared with familiar
CH06.indd 209
Evolution of Social Psychophysiological Theories 209
tasks, sympathetic and parasympathetic systems tend to
be co-activated rather than reciprocal. Hence, one cannot
simply look at the outcome, heart rate deceleration, and
conclude that a psychological state was not present. One
has to consider both the psychophysiological theory and
the context of the task, both of which can influence SNS
and PNS responding.
The doctrine of autonomic space provides a critical
specification of the relationship between the sympathetic
and parasympathetic systems. However, the potential
exploitation of this model for developing strong inferen-
tial psychophysiological theories has yet to be realized.
Because of the critical importance of context in the doctrine
of autonomic space, perhaps future social psychophysiolo-
gists will take advantage of this model to develop theories
linking psychological states to physiological responses
associated with the autonomic space model.
Dickerson & Kemeny’s Neuroendocrine Model
of Social Evaluative Threat
Returning to the other stress system, the HPA, a recent the-
ory proposes the importance of examining how different
social factors and eliciting conditions could activate this
system. To examine the sensitivity of the HPA system to
various social factors, Dickerson and Kemeny (2004) con-
ducted a meta-analysis of 208 studies that examined cor-
tisol increases in the context of a laboratory stressor to
test their social evaluative threat theory. This theoretical
model specifies that during motivated performance situa-
tions (i.e., situations likely to engender SAM activation),
specific contextual and experiential factors will activate
HPA responses, specifically perceived uncontrollability of
the situation and the extent to which the person’s social
esteem is threatened. Social evaluative threat hypothesizes
that situations that could possibly lead to failure or loss of
social esteem would be more likely to activate the social
preservation system indicated by activation of the HPA.
The results of the meta-analysis strongly supported the
theory and showed that strong situational effects were
related to cortisol increases. When studies examined cor-
tisol changes during passive tasks, even ones with aversive
elements such as shock, noise exposure, or watching a scary
movie, they did not observe increases in cortisol level;
indeed, the grand mean across the studies showed a decrease
in cortisol from baseline to after the task when the task was
passive (likely representing the circadian decreases of cor-
tisol throughout the day). Also, the presence of a motivated
performance situation (i.e., an active task) was not sufficient
by itself to increase cortisol responses; again, the grand
mean of cortisol changes was less than zero. Instead, when
motivated performance situations included an element of
social evaluative threat—potential loss of social esteem—or
12/18/09 2:37:04 PM
 210 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment

an uncontrollable task, the authors observed significant to fight, flee, or cope in any active way. This state might
increases in cortisol. Uncontrollability and social evalua- be best characterized by defeat or helplessness, which
tive threat also appeared to have independent and additive includes stress signals but without behavioral intentions to
effects on cortisol increases, because when these factors change or modify the situation or the experience.
were examined collectively, the highest cortisol responses
occurred when motivated performance situations included
USES OF PERIPHERAL
both social evaluative threat and uncontrollability.
NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL INDEXES
IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Summary
As described earlier, psychophysiology can play important
Many of the psychophysiological theories described earlier
theoretical and empirical roles in social psychology. In the
(a nonexhaustive subset of all such theories) involve the
previous section, we described the evolution of social psy-
effects and interplay of two neurophysiological systems. In
chophysiological theories. In this section, we focus more
terms of indexing social psychological constructs, research
on the empirical role of physiological indexes for social
supporting some of these theories measured SAM changes
psychology, ones that provide valid and powerful empiri-
more directly and inferred HPA responses (e.g., challenge
cal physiological indexes of social psychological and
and threat theory; but see Mendes, Ayduk, Akinola, & Epel,
related constructs. This focus is not meant to imply that
2009); other theories measured HPA changes directly and
the theoretical and empirical roles are independent; indeed,
inferred SAM activation (e.g., social evaluative threat).
they are very much related. Nor is our selection of useful
Overall, however, there is much agreement regarding the
peripheral physiological indexes meant to be exhaustive.
physiological and biological outcomes when these systems
For example, we did not include important work that has
are activated, but the eliciting conditions and psychological
relied on physiological measures in the development of the-
states that co-occur or engender these responses are still
ory such as emotion regulation/suppression, effort mobili-
debated. Table 6.2 organizes the various theories by using
zation, decision-making processes, self-enhancement, or
the relative activation of the two neuroendocrine systems
aggression. Many of these topics are covered in other
with the various psychological elicitors.
chapters (e.g., see Bushman, volume 2; Keltner & Lerner,
For example, at high levels of SAM and low levels of
this volume; and Taylor, this volume). In this section, we
HPA activation, the psychological experiences tend to have
begin by reviewing intrapersonal processes, such as affect,
a flavor of eustress and approach-related behavior that
attitudes, emotion, consciousness, and self-control and
might be associated with dominance and control. In con-
self-regulatory processes. We then move to interpersonal
trast, high SAM and high HPA tends to characterize dis-
and intergroup processes such as social facilitation, social
tress and threat, and possibly submissiveness and lack of
interactions, discrimination, intergroup interactions, and
control. In contrast, the final column identifies high HPA
social support processes.
responses with low SAM activation. In laboratory settings
focused on human participants, this might be the most dif-
Affect
ficult combination to study because it requires activation
of the more conservative neurophysiological systems (e.g., Among the superordinate constructs central to social psy-
HPA) without engagement of the SAM activation—in other chology is affect. Social psychologists have been concerned
words, strong alarm signals without the organism trying with positive and negative affect in many contexts including

Table 6.2 Mental States Associated with Activation of the Sympathetic Adrenal Medullary and Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal
Cortical Axes

SAM: Medium to large increases SAM: Medium to large increases SAM: No to small increases

HPA: No to small increases HPA: Medium to large increases HPA: Medium to large increases

Effort without distress Effort and distress Helplessness

Challenge Threat Defeat
Defense Self-preservation theory Withdrawal
Anger Striving for control
Being in control Uncertainty
Fear

HPA, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal; SAM, sympathetic adrenal medullary.

CH06.indd 210 12/18/09 2:37:05 PM

 Uses of Peripheral Neurophysiological Indexes in Social Psychology 211
attitude, emotion, and well-being. Affect might best be
measured using facial EMG, which requires placement of
sensors over muscle regions to detect electrical activity to
indicate contractions of muscles. With EMG, one of the
more useful measures of affect is startle modulation, which
can provide a powerful and elegant tool to differentiate
positive and negative affect.
Startle modulation theory (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert,
1990) relies on the observation that most mammals have
a strong defensive reflex to a sudden, unexpected sensory
event. This reflex takes the form of a full-body startle
reflex and can include, but is not limited to, a sudden and
strong eye-blink response, retraction of the head, tensing of
muscles, and deceleration of heart rate. The sensory events
that elicit these responses can be audible, visual, or tactile.
It was first noted by Brown, Kalish, and Farber (1951) that
animals under threat of attack or pain showed an exagger-
ated startle reflex.
Capitalizing on this finding and other findings demon-
strating potentiated startle responses to negative-affective
stimuli, as well as attenuated startle responses on exposure
to interesting (compared with dull) stimuli, Bradley, Lang,
and Cuthbert proposed a model of startle reflex modula-
tion (e.g., Bradley, Cuthbert, & Lang, 1990; Bradley &
Lang, 2007; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1997). This model
examines how concomitant emotional experiences can
modulate the startle reflex. Specifically, startle modulation
theory posits that because emotions are organized superor-
dinately in terms of affective states, and the startle reflex
is a hedonically negative response, when there is a match
between superordinate affective states and the hedonic tone
of the reflex—that is, negative emotions and defensive
responses—the startle response will be potentiated. In con-
trast, when there exists a mismatch between hedonic tone
and reflex, there will be attenuation in the startle response.
Support from this theory comes from a variety of experi-
ments that span clinical science, personality, and social
contexts. Methodologically, most research uses the eye-
blink response as its primary startle measure most likely
because of the ease in which the eye blink response can be
measured using EMG (recording electrical impulses gener-
ated by muscle activity to index the onset, strength, and off-
set of that muscle activity). To measure the blink response,
researchers place two sensors on the orbicularis oculi
(i.e., the muscle surrounding the eye), typically below the
eye, and then present startle probes typically in the form
of a 95-decibel sound burst. Researchers then measure the
magnitude and latency of the eye-blink response. The ini-
tial studies looking at the eye-blink response as a result of
a startle probe found that the magnitude of muscle activ-
ity underlying the startle-blink response was smaller when
participants were viewing pleasant pictures compared with
CH06.indd 211
unpleasant pictures. Furthermore, as the normative arousal
rating of the pictures increased, the difference between
the blink magnitudes was exacerbated, with very pleas-
ant pictures attenuating startle and very unpleasant pic-
tures potentiating blink responses to auditory startles (see
Bradley, 2000, for a review).
Measuring affective states using a startle modulation
paradigm requires the use of startle probes; however, there
are circumstances in which researchers want to glean
affective response without using a probe as an elicitor. In
these circumstances, we can still look to the face to pro-
vide indications of emotional state. One commonly used
method to examine more specific emotional responses
is measuring changes in specific muscle activation in
the face corresponding to facial expressions of emo-
tions. Ekman and Tomkins’s detailed taxonomy of the
facial muscles relating to emotional expressions provides
social psychophysiologists a useful map to determine
placement of facial EMG sensors to detect small changes
in muscles related to positive or negative affect, as well
as specific emotional expressions such as disgust and fear
(Fridlund & Cacioppo, 1986). Capitalizing on this tech-
nique, Cacioppo, Petty, Losch, and Kim (1986) used facial
EMG to examine affective responses to valenced stimuli
that differed in intensity. Muscle region activity differed by
valence and intensity: Brow muscles responded to negative
stimuli, whereas cheek muscles showed greater activity to
positive stimuli. Some evidence also existed that intensity
of stimuli was monotonically related to targeted muscle
activity: moderately negative stimuli produced more cor-
rugator activity than mildly negative stimuli. Importantly,
the muscles activated were so small that when observ-
ers examined the videotaped responses of participants,
they could not detect muscle movement that facial EMG
detected.
Attitudes
Much of social psychological research has been devoted to
the role of attitudes. Indeed, in the Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, social psychology’s top-tiered
journal, one-third of the journal space is dedicated to atti-
tudes and social cognition. Here, we illustrate what psy-
chophysiological and embodiment theory and methods
have brought to bear on our understanding of individuals’
evaluation of the positive or negative qualities associated
with an entity.
Assessing attitudes or evaluations associated with
attitudinal objects seems like a relatively easy task to
accomplish—simply ask people what they like or dis-
like. However, much attitude research is replete with
problems associated with this seemingly straightforward
12/18/09 2:37:05 PM
 212 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
technique, some of which we have already described:
demand characteristics, social desirability, need for intro-
spection, and online continuous recording. Indeed, this last
obstacle, obtaining online changes in attitudes, has been
addressed using nonphysiological solutions. During elec-
tion seasons, a ubiquitous sight on television coverage of
presidential debates is a continuous, online, horizontally
scrolling waveform that represents shifts in viewers’ atti-
tudes during the candidates’ answers and comments. Such
“audience response systems” allow observers to track how
viewers are feeling at any given moment toward a candi-
date’s speech. Though such online devices represent prodi-
gious leaps in advancing election research, they still suffer
from at least two intractable problems. First, respondents
can still mask their “true” attitudes, indeed even deliber-
ately overcorrecting by indicating that they are more (or
less) persuaded than they actually are (Mendes & Koslov,
2009). The second problem is that participants have to
continuously introspect about how they feel so that they
can indicate their attitudes. It is unclear what the process
of conscious introspection does, and indeed, the data are
equivocal on this point (e.g., Lieberman et al., 2007). Both
of these problems can and have been overcome with the
use of peripheral psychophysiological methods in attitude
research.
Although early on attitude researchers attempted to use
heart rate and skin conductance changes as indexes of atti-
tudes, these endeavors were inherently flawed and made
little progress (e.g., Rankin & Campbell, 1955). This is not
surprising given that, as described earlier, changes in heart
rate are multiply determined and skin conductance changes
can be brought on by multiple psychological states that are
not necessarily valenced and, as such, provided weak infer-
ences of attitudes. This does not mean that more complex
ANS measures are inappropriate for studying attitudes (as
we will review later). However, the most successful psy-
chophysiological indexes of attitudes have capitalized on
facial EMG and startle modulation, both of which provide
information along valence and intensity dimensions.
Facial Electromyography
In the late 1990s, Vanman and his colleagues exploited
facial EMG to test subtle affect changes on exposure to
White and Black target faces with the expressed motive
of imagining completing a cooperative task with the tar-
get person (Vanman, Paul, Ito, & Miller, 1997). Across
three studies, Vanman and colleagues found that White
participants displayed more negative affect (a compos-
ite of corrugator [brow] and zygomaticus major [cheek]
activity) when exposed to Black targets compared with
White targets. In addition, they found that at greater levels
of explicit racial bias (measured with the Modern Racism
CH06.indd 212
Scale), activity around the brow muscles increased
when exposed to Black targets relative to White targets.
Measuring facial muscles was especially informative in
this research because the physiological measures “told” a
different story than the self-reported measures. In all three
studies, participants’ self-reported liking of Black targets
was greater than their reported liking of White targets.
A subsequent examination of affect measured with
facial EMG underscored the predictive validity of these
measures (Vanman, Saltz, Nathan, & Warren, 2004). In
this study, participants chose one of three students for a
prestigious teaching award. The students’ pictures (two
White and one Black students, same sex as the partici-
pant) were presented together with other favorable infor-
mation in a folder. The students were later recruited for a
second “unrelated” study in which their facial EMG was
recorded while simply looking at White and Black faces
and evaluating how friendly they appeared. They found
that facial muscle activity predicted the race of the candi-
date chosen. Specifically, when participants showed more
cheek activity to White over Black faces, they were
more likely to choose a White candidate. When no detect-
able cheek bias was present (responses to White and Black
faces were not different in terms of the activity at the zygo-
maticus major muscle), participants were more likely to
choose the Black candidate.
Racial attitudes were also the focus of a study using star-
tle responses on exposure to ingroup (White) or outgroup
(Black) targets (Amodio, Harmon-Jones, & Devine, 2003).
Unlike the previous studies, individual differences in atti-
tudes were measured with a standard questionnaire, then
each participant’s startle-blink response was measured and
used as an indication of their automatic evaluation of the
target. This investigation also manipulated the latencies of
the startle probe with the justification that at shorter laten-
cies (400 ms) between target presentation and startle probe,
controlled processes could not be used and only automatic
attentional responses would be observed. In contrast, at
longer latencies between target and probe (4000 ms),
controlled processes are theoretically available and, con-
sequently, a different pattern of eye-blink responses were
predicted that captured affective responses. In the longer
latency conditions, participants’ racial bias predicted star-
tle responses. Specifically, for those who internalized their
motivation not to be prejudiced and were not concerned
with external pressure to appear unprejudiced, there were
no differences in startle responses to White or Black faces.
However, for those lower in internal motivation not to be
prejudiced or high on both motivations, startle responses
were greater to Black faces than to White faces.
These examples focus on affective responses that might
be influenced or shaped by particular attitudes one holds.
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 Uses of Peripheral Neurophysiological Indexes in Social Psychology 213
What is the effect of processing new information for attitudes
that are not well developed? Bombarded with information
from our social world, we often have to process multiple
sources of information. Information that is easy to process
is liked more. Consider the two sentences, “Stormy seas
tossed the boat,” and “Stormy seas tossed the lamp.” Not
surprisingly, the former is pronounced faster and judged
more pleasant than the latter. Similar to the mere exposure
effect (exposure to a target can increase liking for it), lik-
ing of target objects can be increased by familiarity, which
makes targets easier to process. Winkielman and Cacioppo
(2001) tested their hedonic fluency model, which is the
idea that processing ease is associated with positive affect
regardless of the valence of the judgment context (i.e.,
focusing on positive vs. negative evaluations). In their first
study, they presented neutral line drawings and had par-
ticipants rate whether they liked or did not like the draw-
ing (unipolar ratings of affect) while they measured facial
EMG linked to positive and negative affect, specifically
zygomaticus major activity (positive affect) and corrugator
supercilii activity (negative affect). They also manipulated
whether a subliminal prime (16 ms) presented just before
the target object matched the configural display of the tar-
get stimulus. Consistent with their hedonic fluency model,
zygomaticus activity was greater when the prime matched
the target outline and when participants were focused on
positive evaluation. Self-reported liking of the targets was
also greater in this condition.
In study 2, instead of subliminally priming matched or
mismatched figures, they increased presentation time in
200-ms intervals—a duration time imperceptible to partici-
pants—so that target pictures were presented at 300, 500,
700, or 900 ms. Also, instead of unipolar ratings of evalu-
ation, all participants completed bipolar ratings of liking.
Again, target pictures that were easier to process—that is,
those that were presented at the longest durations—resulted
in more zygomaticus activity compared with pictures pre-
sented for briefer duration. Taken together, these studies
support the idea that targets that are easy to process are
associated with positive affect.
Cardiovascular Patterns
Covertly measuring attitudes with physiological responses,
specifically facial muscles and the startle response, has
revealed complex relationships between attitude inten-
sity and valence, and how they are related to self-reported
attitudes. However, there is also the interesting and
long-lived question of the function of attitudes. Fazio
(1989) argued that the chronic accessibility of an attitude
from memory determines the power and attitude function-
ality. Therefore, well-established or rehearsed attitudes
function to ease decision making, and when attitudes are
CH06.indd 213
not effortlessly and chronically accessible, quick decision
making is difficult and potentially “stressful.”
To explore the idea that attitude accessibility reduces
distress during decision making, researchers examined CV
responses during quick decision-making trials as a func-
tion of chronically accessible or inaccessible attitudes
(Blascovich et al., 1993). Attitudes were induced experi-
mentally by having participants rehearse their attitudes to
a series of abstract paintings by stating their degree of lik-
ing for each painting aloud. After the rehearsal task, par-
ticipants performed a rapid pairwise preference task during
which they had to choose which of two paintings they pre-
ferred in a repetitive forced-choice task. The participants
had been randomly assigned to making these rapid pair-
wise judgments between pairs of the familiar paintings
for which they had well-rehearsed attitudes or between
pairs of paintings they had not seen before. Physiological
responses showed greater sympathetic activation during
decision making when participants did not have well-
rehearsed attitudes and little to no increases in sympathetic
activation when participants had well-rehearsed attitudes.
A physiological interpretation of these findings is that when a
well-rehearsed attitude is available to the person, the body
does not have to mobilize responses to cope with the poten-
tially stressful rapid pairwise preference task. Instead, the
body can maintain homeostasis during the quick decision-
making task.
Emotion
Lay theories and observations abound regarding how our
bodies respond to emotional states: hearts pound with
fear, skin burns with anger, palms sweat from anxiety, and
cheeks turn red from embarrassment. Indeed, the relation-
ship between bodily changes and emotional responses
seems so inextricably linked that William James stated,
“The only emotions I propose expressly to consider here
are those that have a distinct bodily expression” (1884,
p. 189). Given what appear to be strong links between
emotional states and bodily changes, one would think
that linking discrete emotional states to patterned physi-
ological responses would be a relatively easy endeavor.
Unfortunately, emotion-specific ANS profiles have proven
quite elusive.
In more modern times, Levenson, Ekman, and their col-
leagues (Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen, 1983; Levenson,
Ekman, Heider, & Friesen, 1992) led the way in exploring
the link between specific emotions and distinct changes
in the ANS. In an early article (Ekman et al., 1983), they
argued that specific ANS changes would result from
the experience of discrete emotions. Empirically, these
researchers attempted to manipulate specific emotions
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 214 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
using two techniques. One, the directed facial action task,
required participants to isolate and manipulate specific
facial muscles until the facial expression associated with
a discrete emotion was formed. Participants were then
instructed to maintain these facial expressions while ANS
responses were recorded. Their rationale was based on
embodiment notions (see earlier), similar to the facial feed-
back hypothesis (Strack et al., 1988), which argues that the
manipulation of specific facial muscles linked to happiness
(e.g., zygomaticus major muscle region), for example, can
subsequently engender more happiness. More specifically,
if somatic embodiment informs emotional experience,
then posed facial expressions linked to emotions should
increase the target emotion that, in turn, should elicit spe-
cific patterns of autonomic responses (see also Adelmann &
Zajonc, 1989). The second technique Ekman, Levenson,
and colleagues used to engender emotion was the relived
emotional experience task, in which participants are asked
to imagine specific emotion-eliciting events while periph-
eral changes in ANS are recorded.
Based on Ekman’s distinctions of basic emotions,
Levenson, Ekman, and colleagues (1992, 1993) focused
on surprise, disgust, sadness, anger, fear, and happiness,
and measured a variety of ANS responses. Results showed
some support for ANS differences in discrete emotions,
especially from responses during the posed facial expres-
sions. Specifically, emotional manipulations of happiness,
disgust, and surprise resulted in lower heart rate; fear and
sadness were associated with higher heart rate and lower
skin temperature; and anger was associated with higher
heart rate and higher skin temperature.
To determine some degree of the universality of dis-
crete emotions influencing patterned ANS responses,
Levenson and colleagues trekked to a remote region of
West Sumatra to examine whether people in a non-Western
culture, specifically the Minangkabau, exhibited similar
patterns of ANS responses to posed facial expressions as
Westerners (Levenson et al., 1992). Indeed, patterns of
ANS responses after discrete posed expressions were simi-
lar for the Minangkabau to those observed in the United
States. These researchers viewed this evidence as support
for the idea that ANS responses to specific emotions were
universal.
Since these early studies, many other researchers have
taken up the challenge and investigated the possibility
that discrete emotions might be characterized by specific
patterning of ANS responses. Cacioppo and colleagues
conducted a meta-analysis and performed subsequent
updates on the meta-analysis for editions of Handbook
of Emotions (Cacioppo, Bernston, Klein, & Poehlmann,
1997; Cacioppo, Bernston, et al., 2000). Though the
meta-analytic evidence showed some patterns of emotion
CH06.indd 214
specificity—for example, heart rate responses tended to
be greater for anger than happiness—commonalities in
autonomic responses across specific emotions were also
observed that were predictable by common emotion valence
and underlying motivation.
For example, Cacioppo and colleagues (1997, 2000)
reported stronger ANS changes during negative than posi-
tive emotions, and differential patterning for approach
compared with withdrawal emotions. The emotion elicita-
tion technique also might have mattered. Consistent with
Obrist’s (1981) distinction between passive and active cop-
ing situations, relived emotional experiences, a passive task,
was an especially poor manipulation for revealing ANS
patterns of emotion specificity. Furthermore, facial muscle
manipulation might reliably influence cognitive compo-
nents associated with emotion, but might be too weak and
passive to reliably influence somatovisceral changes.
In a landmark study, Stemmler (1989) investigated
emotion-specific ANS responses using a multitrait multi-
method approach to examine convergent and discriminant
validity. In one of his first studies, female participants
experienced or imagined two target emotions: fear and
anger. To manipulate the experience of fear, researchers had
participants sit in a room in which the lights were dimmed,
a warning was heard that “something will happen that is
out of your control,” and participants then listened to Edgar
Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which was
mixed with dramatic music (Prokofiev’s 2nd Symphony).
The fear induction ended with an unexpected darkness
for 1 minute. To manipulate imagined fear, researchers
asked participants to first recollect and then speak about
a frightening life episode. The critical imagined phase
occurred after the speech when participants were instructed
to imagine their speech vividly with their eyes closed. To
manipulate the experience of anger, researchers required
participants to solve a series of anagrams during which an
experimenter interrupted them and aggressively stated that
they were not speaking loud enough. The experimenter
interrupted a second time with a brusque “Louder please!”
and then a third interruption “Can’t you speak up?” The
imagined anger phase was similar to the imagined fear
in which participants first spoke about an “annoying life
episode”; then for the critical imagined phase, participants
sat quietly with their eyes closed and imagined their story
vividly.
Stemmler found that self-reports of emotional states
were consistent across contexts (imagined or experienced).
However, distinct ANS responses associated with specific
emotions occurred only in the experienced condition. In the
imagined condition, discrete emotions resulted in similar
physiological changes. One explanation of these findings
follows from Obrist (1981), who suggested that cardiac and
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 Uses of Peripheral Neurophysiological Indexes in Social Psychology 215
vascular changes associated with active tasks are likely to
result in more ANS specificity, whereas passive tasks are
unlikely to produce patterned responses. A second possible
explanation is that the intensity of the emotional experi-
ence drives the ANS patterning.
Subsequently, Stemmler, Heldman, Pauls, and Scherer
(2001) again compared experienced versus imagined emo-
tions, and again focused on fear and anger, but this time
they introduced a “control” condition that consisted of
informing participants of everything that would happen in
the emotion eliciting conditions before induction. In other
words, participants experienced the context exactly the
same as in the experienced condition, but they were fully
informed of all elements before the emotion-eliciting tasks.
Based on their model of context-deviation specificity, they
argued that it is necessary to partition the effects associ-
ated with the metabolic demands needed to complete the
task from the effects of experiencing the emotions. In this
study, they examined self-reported emotional responses
and 29 physiological responses (all somatovisceral) dur-
ing fear and anger inductions that were either experienced
or imagined. Consistent with previous research, imagined
emotions tend to produce much less ANS differentiation
than experienced ones. Also, informing participants of the
nature of the upcoming manipulation before it reduced both
the self-reported experience of the emotion and somatovi-
sceral responses relative to the experimental conditions.
Finally, experienced fear and anger did show some differ-
entiated ANS responses, though these differences might
have resulted from underlying motivation that differenti-
ates anger from fear.
Although the search for ANS differentiation of discrete
emotions has yet to produce reliable findings, many pro-
ponents of embodied emotion specificity simply claim
that the reason we have yet to observe reliable differences
of biological responses of emotion specificity is that we
have not used the right tools. This perspective is based
on the expectation that advances in neurophysiological
measurement techniques will eventually reveal clear and
persistent differences in emotions. Whether this claim is
eventually supported or rejected remains to be seen (see
Kemeny, 2003; Panksepp, 2007; cf. Barrett et al., 2007).
Consciousness
The meaning of consciousness has been debated for thousands
of years, and little consensus exists. What consciousness is,
or consists of, is sometimes called the “hard consciousness
problem” (Chalmers, 2007). Distinguishing among processes
that are unconscious (also known as “subconscious,” “pre-
conscious,” or “automatic” mental processes), conscious
(also known as “first order thought” processes; e.g., a
CH06.indd 215
person’s awareness of actually running), and metaconscious
(also known as “higher order thought” processes, such as
thinking about thinking or experiencing experience; e.g., a
person’s wonderment at their awareness of running) exem-
plifies what is known as “the easy” conscious problem.
Importantly, metaconsciousness, an explicit type of
higher order thought (Smallwood & Schooler, 2006), pro-
vides humans with the ability to interact mentally not only
with others but also with themselves. Theorists at least
since James have argued that we have many social selves
and these reflect the input of others’ views of us (cf. Cooley,
1902). More than seven decades after James, Erving
Goffman expanded James’s notions in his Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life (1959).
During the first three quarters of the 20th century, social-
psychological aspects of consciousness were examined
nearly exclusively by sociologists and sociological social
psychologists. However, in the late 1970s and early
1980s, social psychologists took up the challenge.
Work by Nisbet and Wilson (Nisbet & Wilson, 1977;
Wilson & Nisbet, 1978), Schneider and Shiffrin (1977),
and Bargh and colleagues (e.g., Uleman & Bargh, 1989)
approached some of these issues directly. The published
debate (1984) in the American Psychologist between
Richard Lazarus and Robert Zajonc on the primacy of affect
versus cognition highlighted the conscious-unconscious
distinction in social psychology. During the ensuing quar-
ter century, social cognitive psychologists (e.g., Uleman &
Bargh, 1989; Wegner, 2002) verified the important roles
played by unconscious or automatic processes in social
behavior. Such work is discussed more fully in other chap-
ters of this handbook (Dijksterhuis, chapter 7).
In terms of social neuroscience, most neurophysiological
work attempting to distinguish conscious from uncon-
scious processes has focused on the brain (cf. Gazzaniga,
Ivry, & Mangun, 2002). Also, there is much in the literature
hypothesizing and demonstrating unconscious relation-
ships between psychological factors, including social
psychological ones, and peripheral physiological states
related to health (e.g., Ader & Cohen 1975, Friedman &
Rosenman, 1974). However, relatively little attention has
been paid directly to the relationships among peripheral
physiological activity, social psychological stimuli, and
the simple consciousness problem. However, some efforts
have been worth noting.
Misattribution of Arousal
Perhaps the most frequent incursion, albeit most likely
unwittingly, within social psychophysiology into the realm
of consciousness research (i.e., on the simple conscious-
ness problem) fits within the general rubric of “misattribu-
tion of arousal,” a descriptor stemming from Schachter ’s
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 216 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
(1964) two-factor theory of emotion and empirically on
Schachter and Singer ’s (1962) and others’ experiments (for
a review, see Cotton, 1981). Unlike embodiment theory,
in which proponents do not stake a claim to conscious
influence of proprioceptive and interoceptive experiences,
misattribution of arousal theory proponents tends toward
a claim of conscious awareness (cf. Schachter & Singer,
1979, but see Valins, 1966) of phasic, increased neuro-
physiological activity (i.e., nonhomeostatic bodily states),
with little or no consciousness awareness of its cause.
According to most versions of relevant misattribution the-
ories, residual arousal stemming from some prior event or
context has an effect on the current context that may (e.g.,
Schachter & Singer, 1962; 1979; Zillman & Bryant, 1975)
or may not be conscious (e.g., Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).
Importantly, with few notable exceptions (e.g., Zillmann &
Bryant, 1975), few of the studies testing misattribution
of arousal theories have actually assessed physiologi-
cal responses. Indeed, as Cotton (1981) has written, few
have even assessed participants’ awareness of increases in
physiological activity.
“Unconscious” Stimuli
In more recent work, social psychophysiologists have
examined the effects of unconscious or subliminal
stimuli on motivational states during performance situ-
ations (Dijksterhuis, this volume, chapter 7). In two
experiments, Weisbuch-Remington, Mendes, Seery, and
Blascovich (2005) subliminally presented (i.e., < 20 ms)
positive and negative Christian religious icons (e.g.,
angels, devils) outside of participants’ conscious aware-
ness. During a potentially threatening speech task that
immediately followed the stimuli presentations, Christian,
but not non-Christian, participants exhibited patterns of
CV responses consistent with challenge and threat moti-
vational states (see earlier), particularly when the speech
topic required participants to reflect on their own mor-
tality. Nonreligious icons did not influence Christian
participants, and Christian icons did not influence non-
Christian participants’ CV responses. One can conclude
from this study that meaningful unconscious stimuli can
affect motivational states, and the appraisal process that
precedes challenge and threat responses does not require
conscious awareness of resources.
Consistent with the idea that many thoughts and emo-
tions lie beyond individuals’ ability to consciously reflect
on them but can still influence behavior is work by
Bechara and colleagues (Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, &
Damasio, 1997). These investigators measured skin con-
ductance responses (SCRs; a change in the amount of
sweat in the eccrine glands) while participants engaged in
a decision-making task (“Iowa gambling task”) involving
CH06.indd 216
the blind selection of the top card from one of four decks
of facedown cards. Depending on the card turned up on
each trial, participants could either win or lose a lot or
a little bit of money. The decks differed in their propor-
tions of gain and loss cards, with two decks providing big
gains, but also big losses, and the other two decks provid-
ing smaller gains, but also smaller losses. Overall, the two
latter decks provided the optimal choice in terms of money
won. Participants’ self-reported “hunches” regarding
the biased nature of the decks of cards began to develop
by the 50th trial (for non-brain-damaged participants).
However, SCRs related to the biased nature of the decks
typically occurred by the 10th trial, thereby preceding con-
scious awareness by approximately 40 trials. Specifically,
SCRs suggested an intuition of an impending loss as their
hand reached out to the decks with the higher probability of
loss before participants’ conscious awareness or hunches
of them.
Self-Control and Self-Regulatory Processes
Self-regulation is especially well suited for physiologi-
cal investigation. The capacity for self-regulation appears
to be a limited and consumable resource, such that one
act of self-control reduces one’s subsequent self-control
(Baumeister, 1998). Self-regulation is thus vulnerable to
fatigue, and as demands on the executive self increase,
one is more likely to experience failures of self-regulation:
inability to remain vigilant about the status of one’s goals
and to inhibit one’s prepotent responses. But what are the
underlying mechanisms of self-regulation and loss of regu-
latory strength, and what can peripheral physiology tell us
about self-control and loss of control?
Goal setting and self-enhancement are often consid-
ered in the framework of self-regulatory tasks. Some of
the questions from this line of research include: Do self-
enhancement strategies promote achievement? Are subtle
exaggerations of our accomplishments deliberate obfusca-
tions to convince others that we are better than we know our-
selves to be, or can these exaggerations signify an optimistic
projection of future goals? This question has been explored
by examining responses associated with exaggeration, spe-
cifically focusing on emotional composure (assessed with
parasympathetic activity). In previous studies, roughly
50% of students exaggerated their grade point averages
(GPAs), and these students tended to improve academi-
cally more than those who did not exaggerate (Willard &
Gramzow, 2009). Was this exaggeration a form of implicit
goal setting, or was it simply a form of anxious repression?
To examine this, Gramzow, Willard, and Mendes (2008)
measured RSA reactivity to differentiate anxious orienta-
tion from motivated goal setting. In this study, participants
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 Uses of Peripheral Neurophysiological Indexes in Social Psychology 217
first reported their GPA and course grades in private and
then met with an experimenter to review their academic
history. During this interview, the participant’s electrocar-
diogram (ECG: the electrical signal of the heart cycle) and
respiration were recorded. The investigators found that the
more participants exaggerated, the greater the increase in
RSA from baseline to interview. This pattern suggested that
participants who exaggerated their GPA were not anxious
about their exaggerated standards and may have a posi-
tive orientation toward the academic domain. Converging
evidence from nonverbal behavior coded during the inter-
view revealed that exaggerators appeared composed rather
than anxious. In addition, those who had greater increases
in RSA when discussing their (exaggerated) GPA tended
to improve their academic performance in a subsequent
semester, suggesting emotional composure (and possibly
RSA itself) as a possible mediator for why implicit goal
setting results in improved performance.
Interpersonal Processes
It is fair to say that since the late 1970s, social psycho-
logical experiments that involve actual interaction between
two individuals, let alone among more than two, occur
relatively rarely, and many of those that do involve a confed-
erate as one of the interacting parties (Baumeister, Vohs, &
Funder, 2007). Social psychophysiological experimen-
tation involving actual interaction is rarer still and work
involving CNS measures even more so. There are several
reasons for this paucity including a focus more on social
cognitive processes; the time and work associated with
developing actual interaction scenarios and procedures; the
use of proxies for interactants including vignettes, audio
and video recordings, and confederates; the near abandon-
ment by experimental social psychologists of small-group
research to scholars in other disciplines; and expense. The
latter factor is even greater in studies that involve the rela-
tively higher expense of taking neurophysiological mea-
sures, especially CNS measures.
Nonetheless, some social psychophysiologists have
persisted in creating experiments in which actual social
interaction occurs while assessing peripheral neurophysi-
ological indexes. Here, we look at some of the latter with
a focus, first, on basic interpersonal social influence pro-
cesses including social facilitation, social comparison, and
social support, and second, with a focus on intergroup inter-
actions including stigma, stereotypes, and discrimination.
Social Facilitation
Triplett (1898) is usually credited with reporting the first
experiment in modern social psychology (cf. Allport, 1954;
Gardner, Gabriel, & Diekman, 2000). Triplett’s identification
CH06.indd 217
of the influence of the physical presence of others on an
individual’s behavioral performance gave rise to perhaps the
most basic of all interpersonal effects, social facilitation and
its subsumed counterpart, social inhibition.
Social facilitation and inhibition refer to the enhancement
and impairment of performance, respectively, brought on by
the presence of others whether mere observers or co-actors.
This seemingly simple consequence of the presence of
others (i.e., an audience) on actors has been examined and
reexamined for more than a century, producing nearly 300
published articles including many more experiments and
more than a half-dozen theoretical accounts (see Bond &
Titus, 1983; Kent, 1994; Sanders, 1984, for reviews).
Triplett (1898) reported a naturalistic observational study
and a controlled experiment exploring social facilitation
effects. The former described his observation that competi-
tive cyclists raced faster against other cyclists than against
the clock. The controlled experiment included children
spinning a fishing wheel-like apparatus either alone or in
co-action with other children. Supporting the social facili-
tation hypothesis, 50% of the children performed faster
in the coaction condition, whereas 25% performed about
the same and 25% performed worse in the presence of the
coactors than alone. That is, Triplett found both social facil-
itation (i.e., performance enhancement) and social inhibi-
tion (i.e., performance impairment) effects. Over the years,
research indicated that co-actors were unnecessary for
social facilitation and inhibition effects to occur, only the
presence of others proved necessary (Kent, 1994).
Working independently, Thibaut and Kelly (1959)
and Zajonc (1965) introduced the concept of physiologi-
cal arousal as a major motivational factor in their theo-
retical accounts of social facilitation/inhibition effects.
Zajonc, for example, postulated that the presence of oth-
ers increases arousal that, in turn, facilitates dominant
responses and inhibits nondominant responses that lead to
improved performance on simple or well-learned tasks and
decreased performance on complex or novel tasks. Based
on this notion of arousal (one that is at best metaphori-
cal in nature; cf. Carver & Scheier, 1981; Sanders, 1981),
many investigators have measured unitary physiological
responses (falsely positing or implicitly assuming that
autonomic measures were interchangeable) in social facili-
tation studies. However, Bond and Titus’s meta-analysis
(1983) reported that there were only weak effects on
palmer sweating (e.g., galvanic skin response), leading
Cacioppo and Petty (1984) to conclude that more sensitive
physiological measures were needed.
Based on the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat
motivation (Blascovich, 2008; Blascovich & Mendes, 2000;
Blascovich & Tomaka, 1996), Blascovich, Mendes, Hunter,
and Salomon (1999) undertook Cacioppo and Petty’s (1986)
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 218 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
prescription for more valid and sensitive physiological
measures to untangle the role of peripheral physiology in
social facilitation processes. They reasoned that the pres-
ence of others during a person’s performance increases
the self-relevance of task performance and increases task
engagement for that performer. If the performer evaluates
his or her resources as overcoming the task demands, he or
she will be challenged during the task. If the person does
not make such an evaluation, he or she will be threatened.
Hence, a well-learned task should lead to challenge and bet-
ter performance, and a novel task should lead to threat and
worse performance.
The researchers tested these hypotheses in a 2 (pres-
ence of others: audience vs. alone) by 2 (task mastery: well
learned vs. unlearned) completely randomized experimental
design. In the first phase of the experiment, participants
practiced one of two randomly assigned moderately difficult
categorization tasks until they reached a proficiency crite-
rion of 80% correct on consecutive blocks of task trials. In
the second phase, participants went on to perform either the
learned or unlearned task (randomly assigned) in the pres-
ence of others (i.e., a male and a female observer) or alone.
The physiological results (specifically, increased ven-
tricular contractility and heart rate) indicated that partici-
pants who performed either the well-learned or novel task
with the audience were more task engaged during the
task than those performing alone. Furthermore, partici-
pants performing the well-learned task with an audience
exhibited challenge responses (specifically, increased car-
diac output and decreased peripheral vascular resistance),
whereas participants performing the novel task exhibited
threat responses (specifically, decreased cardiac output
and increased peripheral vascular resistance). Behavioral
results were consistent with social facilitation theory:
Participants performing the well-learned task in the pres-
ence of others performed better when being watched than
alone, and those completing the novel task performed
worse when being watched compared with being alone.
This study adds substantially to our knowledge of social
facilitation effects. Theoretically, the authors suggest that
heightened self-relevance and its ensuing task engagement
brought on by an audience has much to do with an indi-
vidual’s evaluations of his or her own resources to meet
the demands of a performance situation. Methodologically,
this study illustrates the value of using peripheral
neurophysiological markers consisting of patterns of phys-
iological responses to test predictions regarding arousal as
a likely mediator of cognitive-behavioral effects.
Social Support
Humans are gregarious, at times seeking out and at other
times providing support to each other, especially during
CH06.indd 218
times of actual or potential emotional distress, be it due to
loss, infirmity, or performance. Furthermore, it is assumed
that, in general, social support provides health-promoting
effects, in part, by buffering acute and chronic stress
responses (Uchino, Cacioppo, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 1996). For
example, classic studies (e.g., Glaser, Kennedy, Lafuse, &
Bonneau, 1990; Kiecolt-Glaser, Speicher, Holliday, & Glaser,
1984) have shown that compared with gregarious ones,
lonely medical students exhibit greater decreases in immune
functionality.
Individuals who provide social support to others also
benefit from receiving social support themselves. For
example, caregivers of patients with Alzheimer disease
(Kiecolt-Glaser, Dura, Speicher, Trask & Glaser, 1991) or
patients with cancer (Baron, Cutrona, Hicklin, Russell, &
Lubaroff, 1990) who lack social support are more likely to
be immune suppressed than caregivers who receive social
support themselves.
Positive effects of social support on physiological activ-
ity appear to operate largely within the domain of emotional
support. Gardner et al. (2000) suggest two mechanisms by
which the chance to discuss a stressful emotional situation
may help the support target. First, the chance to discuss
one’s distressful emotional state may cause a more benign
reappraisal of the situation (cf. Tomaka, Blascovich,
Kibler, & Ernst, 1997) and decrease the likelihood of
pathophysiological response patterns. Second, the chance
to discuss one’s problems provides the substantial benefits
of confiding in others (cf. Pennebaker, 1989), and both
reappraisal and confiding may interact in a synergistically
beneficial way.
The plausibility of both of these mechanisms is rein-
forced in studies in which others were present but with-
out opportunity to provide emotional support, and hence,
the possible benefits of reappraisal or confiding in others,
or both, were absent. For example, Allen, Blascovich,
Tomaka, and Kelsey (1991) measured autonomic responses
(i.e., skin conductance, systolic and diastolic blood pres-
sure, and heart rate) in middle-aged women during a stress-
ful serial subtraction task in the presence of no supportive
other, their best female friend, or their beloved pet dog (the
experimenter was present in all three conditions). Friends
were instructed not to talk or touch the participant, and
petting the dog was not allowed. In the presence of their
best female friend, autonomic reactivity was significantly
greater on all measures compared with the presence of the
experimenter and the pet dog. Indeed, the mere presence of
the dog was associated with significantly lower autonomic
reactivity during the serial subtraction task for partici-
pants than either of the other two conditions. Later, Allen,
Blascovich, and Mendes (2002) replicated these findings
with 240 male/female married couples in the presence of
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 Uses of Peripheral Neurophysiological Indexes in Social Psychology 219
no one, their spouse, their pet dog or cat (for pet owners),
their best friend (for non-pet owners), their spouse and pet
(for pet owners), and their spouse and best friend (for non-
pet owners). Again, they found greater reactivity in the
presence of the human friend or spouse and lower reactiv-
ity in the presence of the pet.
The higher reactivity in the friend/spouse conditions
of the Allen et al. (1991) study can be contrasted with a
study reported by Kamarck, Manuck, and Jennings (1990)
in which half the participants were accompanied by a sup-
portive other (i.e., a personal friend). Because the support-
ive others in that study were instructed to silently cheer the
participant on, gently touch the participant’s wrist, and wore
noise-abating headphones, they could not evaluate partici-
pant, which is the likely reason the authors found a reduction
in CV reactivity when the participant’s friend was present.
That the pets had a lowering effect on autonomic reac-
tivity in both of Allen et al.’s studies (1991, 2002) provides
additional support for the reappraisal mechanism, albeit
perhaps an unconscious one. More specifically, the pres-
ence of the dog or cat for pet owners may provide a sense
of security or positive affect, or both, that minimizes the
psychological danger of the situation, thereby resulting
in more challenge rather than threatening appraisals (cf.
Blascovich & Mendes, 2000).
On the other side of the social support coin is the extent to
which people lack social networks or have a sense of being
lonely. Cacioppo and his colleagues have studied loneliness
and its far-reaching and profound effects on physical health,
primarily by looking at physiological responses that are con-
comitant with loneliness as a way to determine how loneli-
ness gets under the skin to influence health (Cacioppo et al.,
2002; Cole, Hawkley, Arevalo, Sung, Rose, & Cacioppo,
2007; Cacioppo, Hawkley, & Bernston, 2003). This group
has shown in various settings that individuals reporting
greater levels of loneliness are more likely to show lower
cardiac output (less efficiency of the heart) and higher vas-
cular resistance (more constriction of the blood vessels)
than individuals reporting lower levels of loneliness. This
effect has been found in both laboratory-based settings in
response to social evaluation and field studies using ambu-
latory impedance and blood-pressure devices. In the field
study, because of lack of ability in determining whether
individuals were actually in a motivated performance situa-
tion, the authors interpreted these profiles as indicating pas-
sive versus active coping styles (Sherwood, Dolan, & Light,
1990), with lonely individuals adopting more passive coping
styles within the context of their day. Adding causal evidence
to the deleterious effects of loneliness, Zadro, Richardson,
and Williams (2005) examined social isolation with an ostra-
cism manipulation and found that the experience of ostracism
brought on CV changes consistent with threat states.
CH06.indd 219
In sum, the effects of social support (or lack of it) on
physiological response patterns associated with ill health
and motivational threat are somewhat complicated. The
nature of the social support provider, the substance of
the support, and the context all matter.
Intergroup Interaction
The use of psychophysiological theory has been especially
useful for social psychologists interested in studying social
interactions with stigmatized or racial outgroup members
because of increased impression management concerns
that can influence self-report and deliberate behavioral
responses during such interactions. Though there are sev-
eral early examples of attempts to find physiological dif-
ferences on exposure to ingroup versus outgroup members
(e.g., Rankin & Campbell, 1955), these early investigations
were based on putative measures of general “arousal” (e.g.,
heart rate and skin conductance) in fairly unconstrained
settings, thus lacking specificity and inference power (see
also Gaertner & Dovidio, 1977; Vrana & Rollock, 1998).
It should not come as a surprise (given the discussion in
the early sections of this chapter) that these investigations
revealed few, if any, differences between individuals inter-
acting with outgroup or ingroup members. It was not until
social psychophysiologists paid attention to the specific-
ity and inferential quality of their measures and/or con-
strained the context that their research endeavors proved
to be fruitful.
By constraining the emotional context, specifically to
a fear conditioning paradigm, Banaji and her colleagues
examined whether individuals might be evolutionarily
“prepared” to fear outgroup members (Olsson, Ebert,
Banaji, & Phelps, 2005). In this study, electric shocks
were paired with either ingroup or outgroup male faces.
Electrodermal activity was measured to indicate changes in
sympathetic activation, as evidenced by the amplitude
of the SCRs in response to the pictures. In the learning
phase, the shock (UCS) was repeatedly linked with the
ingroup or outgroup picture (CS). Later, the shock was
removed and SCRs were examined on exposure to the CS.
The critical examination was the length of extinction, or
how long it took participants to no longer show a SCR to the
CS once the aversive element was removed. Indeed, when
shocks were paired with outgroup faces compared with
ingroup faces, SCRs persisted longer and were of greater
magnitude in the extinction phase. In this example, SCRs
could be interpreted as fear responses because the context
was constrained to a fear-eliciting (shock) situation.
In a subsequent extension of this work, Navarette and
colleagues (2009) tested the boundary conditions of this
work within the theoretical context of the subordinate
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 220 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
male hypothesis (Sidanius & Pratto, 2004), which takes an
evolutionary perspective on intergroup conflict suggesting
that racial tension should be especially pronounced among
men and not women. These researchers replicated the
Olsson study discussed earlier with one additional factor:
the gender of the people depicted in the pictures. The subor-
dinate male hypothesis would predict that only male faces
would produce the effect observed in the original study,
and that outgroup female faces would not show a sustained
fear response during the extinction trials. Consistent with
the theory, results showed that SCRs persisted longer to
outgroup male faces than any other condition (outgroup
female, ingroup male, ingroup female).
Group boundaries and social categories of race, gender,
class, and so forth are mutable and can be influenced by
presence of other more distinct outgroups or by context.
One might not think of their gender category while sit-
ting in the audience listening to a symphony, but might be
acutely aware of their gender category if they are in the
numerical minority at a boxing match or a fashion show.
In academic environments, subtle and not so subtle cues
regarding one’s status might influence one’s feelings of
acceptance and expected performance. For example, if
there was only one women’s restroom in an entire building
dedicated to math, but six men’s restrooms, a female math
major might be reminded on a daily basis that she was in
the numerical minority. What are the effects for these envi-
ronmental cues that remind some that they are not part of
the majority? A study from Stanford University explored
how environments based on the imbalance of males to
females influenced SNS responses (Murphy, Steele, &
Gross, 2007). In this research, male and female partici-
pants viewed one of two videos that presented either a
gender-balanced group of students or a gender-unbalanced
(mostly white males) group of students in the domain of a
math and engineering science camp. Changes in SNS acti-
vation (especially skin conductance levels) from a base-
line period to watching the videos were computed. The
investigators found that women showed greater increases
in SNS activation when watching the gender-unbalanced
video than when watching the gender-balanced video, and
male participants did not differ in their SNS responses
as function of the gender composition of the video. The
authors concluded that the gender imbalance was espe-
cially threatening for women.
Stigma
People’s interactions with members of stigmatized groups
have received a great deal of attention among social psy-
chologists since the 1950s. Goffman (1963) surmised
that interactions between stigmatized and nonstigmatized
individuals are threatening to members of both groups.
CH06.indd 220
Not surprisingly, stigma theorists (e.g., Crocker, Major &
Steele, 1998) maintain that such interactions cause interac-
tants, particularly nonstigmatized interactants, uncertainty,
discomfort, anxiety, and danger during social encounters.
Only in the new millennium, however, have researchers
produced physiological evidence of threat in actual social
interactions between stigmatized and nonstigmatized
interactants. Based on the biopsychosocial model of chal-
lenge and threat, Blascovich, Mendes, Hunter, Lickel, and
Kowai-Bell (2001) hypothesized that nonstigmatized indi-
viduals would exhibit threat as evidenced physiologically
even in cooperative performance situations as a result of
resource/demand evaluations in which demands for them
outweighed resources.
In their first two studies, these researchers created dyads
of nonstigmatized and stigmatized individuals as coopera-
tive partners in performance situations involving speech and
word-finding tasks. They manipulated stigma by Kleck
and Strenta’s (1980) technique of using opaque or transparent
makeup to manipulate the appearance of facial birthmarks
on confederates. The latter interacted with nonstigmatized
others in the cooperative tasks. Their results showed that
CV response patterns associated with threat were evidenced
by the nonstigmatized partners during the interactions with
partners with birthmarks, and challenge was evidenced dur-
ing interactions with partners without birthmarks. In a sepa-
rate article (Mendes, Blascovich, Lickel, & Hunter, 2002),
they found similar effects when White individuals interacted
with African Americans of the same sex. Interestingly, in
the stigma studies by Mendes, Blascovich, and colleagues,
many possible moderators of physiological threat responses
were attempted. However, the only one to prove reliable
was intergroup contact. In the third study of the Blascovich,
Mendes, Hunter, Lickel & Kowai-Bell. (2001) article, a pre-
test measure of intergroup contact with African Americans
moderated the threat effect such that White participants who
had high-quality intergroup contact with African Americans
(e.g., had dinner at the home of an African American friend)
showed CV responses similar to participants interacting
with a same race partner.
Based on a theoretical argument of the role of
uncertainty, Mendes, Blascovich, Hunter, Lickel, and Jost
(2007) focused on one of several possible mechanisms
contributing to threat experienced by members of nonstig-
matized groups when interacting with stigmatized groups.
Specifically, they focused on the uncertainty created when
members of stigmatized groups violate expectancies
of members of nonstigmatized groups during social inter-
actions. In their first two experiments, nonstigmatized
participants interacted with confederates who either vio-
lated or confirmed expectancies based on ethnicity and
socioeconomic status (SES). They found that participants
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 Uses of Peripheral Neurophysiological Indexes in Social Psychology 221
interacting with stereotypical partners (low-SES Latinos
or high-SES Whites) showed the benign challenge pattern,
whereas participants interacting with counterstereotypical
partners (high-SES Latinos or low-SES Whites) exhibited
CV responses consistent with threat. In the third and final
experiment, they extended the expectancy violation test
from counterstereotypical partners to atypical partners.
Specifically, they paired participants with either a White
or Asian confederate who either spoke with an expected or
southern U.S. accent. Confirming the uncertainty hypothe-
sis, when participants were paired with Asian partners and
they spoke with southern U.S. accents, they exhibited the
greatest levels of CV threat reactions.
Stereotype Threat
Steele and Aronson (1995) argue that performing in a
domain (e.g., academia) in which one’s group’s perfor-
mance is negatively stereotyped leads to anxiety, uncer-
tainty, and other reactions. Such stereotype threat is created
by the possibility that one’s performance will confirm the
negative stereotype by placing increasing task-unrelated
situational demands on the stereotyped individual, impair-
ing performance. In 2001, Blascovich, Spencer, Quinn, and
Steele published an article demonstrating heightened blood
pressure responses among stereotype threatened African
Americans taking a verbal abilities test.
In a stereotype threat study relying on the interpretation
that decreased heart rate variability indexes mental effort,
Croizet et al (2004) examined changes in RSA (a type of
heart rate variability) during a stereotype threat paradigm.
They found that participants assigned to receive a stereo-
type threat prime had a greater decrease in RSA and poorer
performance than those in the control condition, and that
RSA changes mediated the relationship from the condition
to the performance effects.
More recently, Vick, Seery, Blascovich, and Weisbuch
(2008) tested the stereotype threat hypothesis and confirmed
threat response via the challenge/threat CV response pat-
terns. In the Vick et al. experiment, participants took a diffi-
cult math test, one that they had been led to believe was either
gender-fair or gender-biased in favor of male individuals.
During the test, stereotype-threatened women exhibited
a CV pattern associated with threat, whereas nonstereo-
typed threatened women exhibited challenge. Interestingly,
the CV patterns were reversed for men. Specifically, men
exhibited challenge when a male gender bias was implied,
but threat when it was not, suggesting that male participants
were threatened by the absence of the female stereotype.
Discrimination
Health disparities because of racial identity are large, with
African Americans at least two times more likely to be
CH06.indd 221
hypertensive than European Americans, and disparities
in coronary heart disease are increasing (National Center
for Health Statistics, 2003; Willems, Saunders, Hunt, &
Schorling, 1997). One possible explanation for racial dis-
parities in physical health is that perceiving discrimination
engenders physiological responses that are harmful to health
(Clark, Anderson, Clark, & Williams, 1999). Among the
many complicated facets of this research has been
the confounding of the expectation of discrimination
from the experience of discrimination. Several research
programs have attempted to differentiate these types of
discrimination experiences to examine the physiological
sequelae to attempt to understand how discrimination may
get under the skin to affect physical health.
Evidence is growing that based on past experiences
with discrimination, some individuals develop a schema
that the world is a threatening place and become vigilant
to signs of prejudice and discrimination in their environ-
ment (Allport, 1954; Barrett & Swim, 1998). That is, they
are likely to expect social rejection in interactions with
the nonstigmatized, and interpret negative or ambiguous
social evaluations in terms of discrimination (Frable,
Blackstone, & Scherbaum, 1990; Major, Quinton, &
McCoy, 2002). Furthermore, these individuals may per-
ceive discrimination even in situations where it does not
objectively exist.
Karen Matthews and her colleagues have examined how
discrimination might influence resting and changes in CV
responses as a function of perceived discrimination (e.g.,
Guyll, Matthews, & Bromberger, 2001). Although no evi-
dence was found linking baseline blood pressure responses
to perceptions of discrimination, they did find that African
American women who reported that past interpersonal
treatment was due to racial discrimination exhibited sig-
nificantly larger increases in diastolic blood pressure when
speaking of a potentially racially charged event (i.e., being
accused of shoplifting).
But what about situations in which discrimination is
not retrospective, but rather online? Do minority and stig-
matized targets respond with shame, negative affect, and
threat when experiencing negative treatment that they attri-
bute to discrimination? Although the lay intuition might
be to conclude that racial minorities would be the most
distressed in clear discriminatory situations, attributional
ambiguity theory suggests a different response (Crocker &
Major, 1989). In their original theory, Crocker and Major
suggested that the ability to attribute negative feedback or
reactions from others to external reasons rather than inter-
nal causes might be protective for some stigmatized group
members. This ability to attribute negative responses to
external rather than internal causes might protect self-
esteem of stigmatized group members.
12/18/09 2:37:11 PM
 222 Social Psychophysiology and Embodiment
To test these ideas and the possibility that previous work
had yielded increases in self-esteem because of defensive
responding, a recent study measured CV responses during
a dyadic social interaction between same-race (White-
White; Black-Black) or different-race (White-Black)
partners (Mendes et al., 2008). During the social interac-
tion, partners (i.e., confederates) provided explicit written
negative or positive social feedback immediately after the
participant completed a speech regarding “why they made
a good friend.” Social rejection was chosen for manipula-
tion because of its powerful effects on emotions, such as
shame, sadness, and even depression (Ayduk, Mischel, &
Downey, 2002; Williams, 2001), and its far-reaching neg-
ative effects on physical health (Cacioppo et al., 2003;
Stroud, Tanofsky-Kraff, Wilfley, & Salovey, 2000) and
mental health (Williams, 2001). Following attributional
ambiguity theory, the prediction was that social rejection
from an outgroup member would be more likely to be
attributed to discrimination than the same feedback from
an ingroup member. Indeed, when a different race partner
gave negative social feedback, participants attributed the
feedback to discrimination. Importantly, in a subsequent
cooperative interaction with the partner, participants who
received negative social feedback from an outgroup part-
ner did not exhibit threat-related CV responses; instead,
they exhibited large increases in cardiac responses and
decreases in vascular resistance—a pattern consistent with
challenge. When nonverbal behavior manifested during
the interaction was coded, it appeared that participants
who perceived the rejection as caused by discrimination
were angry not ashamed. Therefore, the challenge-related
responses, in this case, were signaling approach-related
motivation, which was consistent with the experience of
anger.
Section Summary
In this section, we have illustrated a variety of constructs
of interest to social psychologists for which physiological
measures have been utilized as indexes. Most, if not all, of
these constructs represent superordinate psychological
states and processes such as positive and negative affect,
approach- and avoidance-type motivation, and functional
and dysfunctional self-regulation. These indexes have
been derived on the basis of psychophysiological and
social psychophysiological theories that span multiple
biological systems including autonomic, neuroendocrine,
and neural ones.
Notably, these indexes differ in the strength of inference
they provide to theorists regarding the psychological states
that they index vis-à-vis Cacioppo and Tassinary’s taxon-
omy as described earlier. Noticeable is the relative paucity
CH06.indd 222
of measures that fit the definition of an invariant. This is
not surprising given the requirements for such inferential
strength. Indeed, some may argue that the single invari-
ant, startle modulation, may actually be context bound,
occurring only in passive rather than active performance
situations (Schneider, 1997). The fact that a psychophysi-
ological index may be context bound or can be linked to
many different psychological states does not mean that it is
not valuable for the study of social psychological processes.
It merely means that there are few, if any, physiological
indexes that have symmetrical one-to-one relationships
with specific social psychological constructs. However,
investigators utilizing physiological indexes must be aware
of the strength of the inferences drawn from these indexes
and be responsible in the interpretation of the meaning of
physiological responses within the context of their experi-
mental protocols.
SUMMARY
Scholars have been interested in the relationship of physi-
ology to topics such as affect and emotion experiences,
motivational states, and cognitive processes for millennia,
though with a respite of several hundred recent years in
Western societies created by adherence to Descartes’ mind-
body dualism. With the fall of mind-body dualism over the
past century, scholars in many of the psychological science
subdisciplines have increasingly integrated biological,
psychological, and social processes into “biopsychosocial”
causal explanations of their phenomena of interest. Social
psychologists are no exception.
Although the label social psychophysiology came into
being only in the last 40 years ago or so, the integration of
social psychology and physiology can be traced to semi-
nal integrative notions of William James, Walter Cannon,
Hans Selye, and Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer.
David Shapiro and Andrew Crider ’s (1969) chapter in the
second edition of this handbook helped propel a relatively
small coterie of “social psychophysiologists,” to articulate
and illustrate the ways in which neurophysiological mea-
sures could be used to advance social psychological theory
and research (e.g., Cacioppo & Petty, 1984; Waid, 1984).
John Cacioppo first integrated social psychological and
physiological theory, applying principles of inference to
neurophysiological indexes.
Part of the initial and continuing appeal of social neu-
roscience to social psychologists is the proven value of
peripheral neurophysiological measures for advancing
social psychological research and theory. Not surprisingly,
what initially may have seemed to be, or hoped by some to
be, a quick and fruitful marriage turned out to be a much
12/18/09 2:37:12 PM

more complex relationship than expected. But it is a much
stronger marriage for that complexity.
In this chapter, we have illustrated the evolution
of impactful social psychophysiological theories by
describing ones that are biopsychosocial in nature and
that provide the theoretical bases for developing strong
inferential links between social psychological constructs
and peripheral neurophysiological indexes of them, which
we have also illustrated. Furthermore, the importance of
understanding these theories and linkages is highlighted by
our brief overview of embodiment theory. The latter argues
that peripheral neurophysiological processes at least mod-
erate and may even mediate social psychologically rele-
vant affective, cognitive, and motivational processes often,
but perhaps prematurely assumed to be purely within the
domain of the CNS.
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Chapter 7
Automaticity and the Unconscious
AP DIJKSTERHUIS
The German philosopher Ernst Platner did not introduce
the term “unconscious” until the 18th century, but the
importance of what we now call unconscious processes
was recognized earlier by many influential thinkers such
as St. Thomas Aquinas, Kepler, Paracelcus, Shakespeare,
Cervantes, Dante, and da Vinci. It may well be that the
first written reference to the possibility of unconscious
psychological processes was made in the third century
AD by the Greek philosopher Plotinus, who remarked that
“the absence of a conscious perception is no proof of the
absence of mental activity” (Koestler, 1964, p. 148).
Two distinct observations serve as the pillars on which
our current knowledge of automaticity and unconscious
processes stand. The first is that some of our behavior does
not feel voluntary. It seems to be caused by the situation
we are in. It feels automatic. This idea is of central impor-
tance for social psychology as a science and also touches
on the big philosophical question of whether people have
free will. More than 250 years ago, David Hartley (1749)
observed that “the Motions of the body are of two kinds,
automatic and voluntary.” Whereas Hartley did not yet
specify which of the two is the more frequent, many others
have been much bolder. Some have even suggested that
voluntary behavior is nothing more than an illusion, a pow-
erful trick of consciousness. As the novelist Tom Wolfe
said (2004, p. 283), “Let’s say you pick up a rock and you
throw it. And in midflight you give that rock consciousness
and a rational mind. That little rock will think it has free
will and will give you a highly rational account of why it
has decided to take the route it is taking.”
The second observation is that the capacity of con-
sciousness is small (Miller, 1956; Norretranders, 1998).
Filmmaker David Lynch once called it our “golfball-size
consciousness” (Lynch, 2006, p. 28), and many people, espe-
cially those working in creative areas, have made similar
This chapter was supported by a VICI grant from Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) (453-05-004).
I thank Henk Aarts, Pamela Smith, and the editors for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.
228
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
comments. We are confronted with so much information
and the capacity of consciousness is so minimal that it fol-
lows logically that we must have unconscious processes.
The British philosopher John Norris, a contemporary of
Descartes and Locke whom he vehemently criticized, said:
“We may have ideas of which we are not conscious. . . .
There are infinitely more ideas impressed on our minds
than we can possibly attend to” (Koestler, 1964, p. 150).
So here we are. The foundations of modern social psy-
chological thinking about human behavior are humbling
as well as salutary: Some behavior is automatic, and con-
sciousness is a golf ball.
Although those foundations may be easy to understand,
the vast structure that has been built on top of them is highly
complex. Exactly how much of our behavior is automatic?
Is automaticity only important for relatively unimportant
actions, or does it play a role in our most important endea-
vours as well? Conversely, what happens when we feel
we control our behavior? How “real” is control? What
do we do with our vast unconscious processing capacity?
How sophisticated is our unconsciousness? Finally, what is
consciousness good for?
This analysis starts with a description of four tradi-
tional lines of thought and research that all emphasize
the importance of unconscious or automatic processes
(or both). Subsequently, some key concepts are defined
against the background of current (partly neuroscientific)
research on attention, consciousness, and the unconscious.
In the large middle section, a number of important social
psychological processes are discussed, and the extent to
which these processes are automatic is analyzed. The
subsequent section focuses on control, and finally, the
chapter ends with a brief explanation of the prevailing
view in neuroscience and cognitive science on the function
of consciousness.

FOUR TRADITIONAL LINES OF THOUGHT
Our current appreciation of the importance of automatic
and unconscious processes is the result of various thought and
research traditions: incubation or unconscious thought,
lack of introspection, skill acquisition and routine action,
and preconscious processing. These four traditions are very
different. However, they have all emphasized the same
idea: Unconscious processes are of paramount importance
for human functioning.
Incubation or Unconscious Thought
One might almost believe that half of our thinking takes
place unconsciously . . . . I have familiarized myself with
the factual data of a theoretical and practical problem;
I do not think about it again, yet often a few days later the
answer to the problem will come into my mind entirely
from its own accord; the operation which has produced it,
however, remains as much a mystery to me as that of an
adding-machine: what has occurred is, again, unconscious
rumination.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer (1851, pp. 123–124)
Artists and scientists have long marvelled about the
wonders of the unconscious. It often feels as if creativity
solely derives from unconscious processes. Mozart, when
asked to explain his extraordinary creativity, said he just
“heard” his compositions: “the whole, though it be long,
stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that
I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at
a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination successively,
but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight
this is I cannot tell!” (Andreasen, 2005, p. 40). Mozart’s
compositions were the result of elaborate unconscious
processes, and at some point they just appeared in con-
sciousness. Mozart was also clear about the irrelevance of
conscious will. He did not know when his compositions
would surface, and conscious force did not help at all.
Anecdotes about the role of the unconscious in creativity
abound. One of the most famous poems ever written, Kubla
Kahn: Or, a vision in a dream by Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
was revealed to the author in a dream. Albert Einstein did,
often suddenly and unexpectedly, simply “see” solutions
to scientific problems. Henri Poincaré’s detailed introspec-
tive account of his most important mathematical discovery
is justifiably famous. He failed to solve a mathematical
problem and went to the countryside with the goal to
relax and not to think about it for a few days. Completely
unexpectedly, the solution to the problem came like a flash
at the exact moment he boarded a train.
Creativity is often the result of a three-step process.
First, a problem is attended to consciously. One thinks and
Four Traditional Lines of Thought 229
reads about the problem and sometimes discusses matters
with others. This stage allows the necessary information—
the input for the system—to be obtained, but during this
stage, a truly creative idea is seldom produced. The sec-
ond stage is the incubation stage. The problem is put aside
for a while, and conscious attention is directed elsewhere.
However, the input is further processed unconsciously,
sometimes leading to a “Eureka experience” in which
the creative product suddenly and unexpectedly enters
consciousness. The third stage is one in which conscious
attention again plays a role. The creative product needs to
be verbalized and communicated. A composition or poem
needs to be put on paper, a scientific discovery needs
detailed proof before it can be communicated to others.
Interestingly, outsiders often see the third stage as the
actual creative work, whereas the actors themselves see
the second stage as the most important. For them, the third
stage is merely some after-the-fact business to finalize
matters. Einstein disliked it (“Conventional words or other
signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a [later]
stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently
established and can be reproduced at will”; Ghiselin, 1952,
p. 43). After Mozart had sufficiently developed a new
composition, he would write it down quickly and often,
unbelievable as this may sound, while he was chatting with
his wife or with his friends.
Incubation often feels mysterious, and sometimes peo-
ple do not even feel responsible for—or proud of—the
ensuing product. In a recent interview, J. K. Rowling,
the author of the Harry Potter series, was asked how she
wanted to be remembered. “As someone who has opti-
mally used her talents,” she answered. When asked about
her success and the extent to which she had been lucky,
she exclaimed that “having the idea was luck.” In general
Rowling seemed to be (justifiably) proud of her years of
hard work but not really of the brilliant idea(s) that pre-
ceded it. The reason is simple: The idea(s) were not the
result of conscious labor but from the unconscious. They
felt like they were “given.”
The process of incubation is at this point only partly
understood. There are two different (but not mutually
exclusive) hypotheses as to why incubation has effects.
The first is that, when trying to solve a problem, a period
of thinking about something else can enable a later return
to the problem with a fresh look. The example people often
use is that of solving a chess problem. You may start to
think along the wrong lines (“the first move has to be with
the knight”) and continued conscious thought is fruitless,
because, as Schopenhauer once put it, it “robs the mind of
elasticity.” A period of distraction can lead you to forget the
erroneous lead, and, upon return, you immediately realize
you should start with the queen. Such a process, sometimes
230 Automaticity and the Unconscious
called “set-shifting” has indeed been demonstrated in vari-
ous experiments (see e.g., Schooler & Melcher, 1995; S.
M. Smith, 1995).
However, set-shifting is merely a consequence of the
discontinuation of conscious thought. The unconscious
does not need to do anything. The more interesting second
possibility is that we think—unconsciously but actively—
during incubation (Andreasen, 2005; Dijksterhuis, 2004b;
see also Claxton, 1997; Poincaré, 1913). There is indeed
evidence for this. Dijksterhuis and Meurs (2006) asked
participants to “list things that one can do with a brick”
and showed that a period of unconscious thought led people
to come up with more creative activities than a period
of conscious thought. Zhong, Dijksterhuis, and Galinsky
(2008) presented participants with extremely difficult RAT
triads (groups of three words for which a fourth, associ-
ated word needs to be found; Mednick, 1962) and showed
that unconscious thought led to greater accessibility of
the appropriate answers than conscious thought. In both
lines of research, very taxing distractor tasks were used for
unconscious thinkers to make sure participants could not
engage in conscious thought. The conclusion seems to be
that a period of distraction can help creativity and problem
solving both through set-shifting and through unconscious
thought.
Multiple processes are operating during unconscious
thought. During periods of unconscious thought, people
associate widely and divergently (Bowers, Regehr,
Balthazard, & Parker, 1990; Dijksterhuis & Nordgren,
2006) and even make new associations (Andreasen, 2005).
During unconscious thought, information becomes orga-
nized in a different, and often better, manner (Dijksterhuis,
2004b; Ellenbogen, Hu, Payne, Titone, & Walker, 2007),
and such processes even continue during sleep. In a
fascinating recent experiment, Ellenbogen et al. (2007)
presented experimental participants with information
about the relations between various stimuli (of the sort of
A
B, B
C, C
D, etc.). Immediately after the experi-
ment, participants understood the close relations (e.g.,
A
B), but only after hours of engaging in other work
did they understand the moderately remote ones (A
C).
Finally, participants needed a good night’s sleep to grasp
the most abstract and remote relations (A
E).
It is likely that great associative power, divergent
thinking, some sort of self-organizing principle, and the
ability to grasp remote and abstract relations (Andreasen,
2005; Claxton, 1997; Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006;
Zhong et al., 2008) are causing people to have creative
and new ideas after a period of incubation. In contrast,
conscious thought is analytical and focused. It can be used
to check the details of creative ideas, but it is not so useful
for generating such new ideas.
Lack of Introspection
Our mind is so fortunately equipped, that it brings us the most
important bases for our thoughts without our having the least
knowledge of this work of elaboration. Only the results of
it become conscious. This unconscious mind is for us like an
unknown being who creates and produces for us, and finally
throws the ripe fruits in our lap.
—Wilhelm Wundt (Koestler, 1964, p. 153)
We sometimes do not know why we do things (although
sometimes we think we know), and we sometimes do
not know how we do things (Wilson, 2002). Our conscious
knowledge about ourselves is limited. Many thoughts,
feelings, and actions come from behind a veil that we can
often barely peer beneath.
More than a century ago, Watt (1905) demonstrated
that we do not have conscious access to how we think. In
his experiment, participants were presented with nouns
(e.g., oak) and were asked to come up with an associa-
tion as quickly as they could. Sometimes participants were
requested to name a superordinate word (oak tree), but on
other occasions, they were asked to come up with a part
(oak acorn) or a subordinate (oak beam). This way, thinking
could be divided into four stages: the instructions (e.g.,
superordinate), the presentation of the noun (e.g., oak), the
search for an appropriate association, and the verbalization
of the reply (e.g., tree). Participants were asked to introspect
on all four stages separately to assess the contribution of
consciousness during each stage. The third stage (search-
ing for an association) is the stage during which the actual
thinking takes place, and hence this was considered the
most interesting stage. However, unlike the other stages,
this stage was introspectively blank: Participants could not
report anything. The instruction in combination with the
presentation of the noun automatically started the think-
ing process. The thinking itself was unconscious, at least
until the answer surfaced. As alluded to earlier, studying
the unconscious is a humbling experience. We have lim-
ited introspective access to how we think.
Our poor introspective abilities have much broader con-
sequences in that they often obscure the main causes of our
actions, feelings, and choices. As an example of the latter,
people tend to buy clothes at least in part because of their
position in a display (further to the right is better), but they
are completely unaware of this. In fact, people believe
that their preference for a chosen pantyhose is based on
something unique, when the chosen pantyhose was in fact
exactly the same as the alternatives that were not chosen
(Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). An even more striking demon-
stration of people’s unawareness of the reasons for their
choices comes from recent research by Eastwick and
Finkel (2008). They studied speed-daters and found that

people really do not know what they value in a partner.
When participants were asked for their preferences, men
indicated that they valued physical attractiveness, whereas
women primarily valued the earning prospects of their
future partner. But did these preferences predict their actual
desires, behaviors, and choices? Not at all.
People are sometimes also unaware of the reasons for
their actions, even when these actions are quite important.
A well-known example is the bystander effect: The more
people who witness an accident, the less likely it is that
someone will intervene (i.e., the bystander effect; Latane &
Darley, 1970). However, when witnesses are asked why
they did not intervene, they tend to come up with other
reasons (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).
Another example of poor introspection on the causes
of people’s behavior—in this case, performance on a
memory test—comes from recent research by Nordgren,
van der Pligt, and van Harreveld (2006), in their research
on the hot–cold empathy gap (Loewenstein, 1996). They
had some participants do a challenging memory test while
they were experiencing mild pain (they kept their non-
dominant arm in a bucket of ice water). Indeed, compared
with control participants, who had kept their hand in room
temperature water, the participants in pain underperformed
on the memory test. Just 10 minutes after the memory test,
some of the participants who had experienced pain before
were again asked to keep their hand in ice water, whereas
others were not and placed their hand in room temperature
water. Participants were then asked to explain their earlier
poor performance on the memory test. The participants who
experienced pain while they explained the cause correctly
attributed their performance to the earlier pain. However,
participants who made their attributions pain-free did so to
a much lesser extent, despite the fact that they were in pain
only 10 minutes earlier!
Finally, because of poor introspective abilities, people
can misjudge the origins of their feelings. Because we mis-
attribute arousal, we mistakenly think we are in love when
we meet an attractive person, when in reality our excite-
ment is caused by crossing a scary suspension bridge
(Dutton & Aron, 1974). In sum, we do not have access to
the processes underlying many behaviors, cognitions, and
feelings, and we often do not know why we think, feel, or
behave the way we do.
Skill Acquisition and Routine Behavior
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books
and by eminent people making speeches, that we should culti-
vate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise
opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the
Four Traditional Lines of Thought 231
number of operations which we can perform without thinking
about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges
in a battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require
fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
—Alfred North Whitehead (1911, p. 61)
William James was not fond of the idea of a nonconscious.
He called it “a tumbling ground for whimsies” (1890, p.
163). However, James did write extensively about the
importance of habits. He advised young people to develop
useful social and mental habits: “We must make automatic
and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions
as we can” (1890, p. 122). In his various writings, he
stressed two good reasons for developing good habits. The
first is that strong habits are what they are—strong—and
because of that, a good habit invariably leads to appropri-
ate behavior (which is also why he warned against devel-
oping bad habits). The second is echoed in this section’s
opening quote. Conscious thought is a scarce resource, so
the more one can do without it, the better it is. We can
consciously think about important matters, such as writing,
during many routine daily activities, because these routines
do not need conscious guidance. Writing a chapter such
as this would be much more difficult when things such as
driving, taking a shower, or brushing one’s teeth would
indeed require conscious guidance (see also Aarts &
Dijksterhuis, 2000).
Unlike many other concepts, the concept of habit
easily survived the start of behaviorism. In fact, behavior-
ists saw habits, or past behavior in general, as the main
determinant of future behavior (Hull, 1943; Watson,
1914). The current use of the term “habit” is strongly
rooted in the behaviorist approached to learning theory.
Behaviorists studied the development of habits, albeit in a
slightly different way than the researchers that investigated
skill acquisition and automaticity in the 1970s and 1980s.
Whereas behaviorists assumed that cognitive processes do
not mediate the activation of habitual responses to cues in
the environment, in later research, the emphasis shifted
more and more toward understanding the (cognitive) pro-
cesses underlying habitual behavior. Researchers became
more and more interested in the mechanisms and processes
that enable people to perform complex routine actions with
no or minimal conscious attention.
Shiffrin and Schneider (1977) did the most widely
known set of experiments. In their experiments, partici-
pants looked at an array of stimuli with the goal to search
for a particular target stimulus (e.g., the letter G) as quickly
as possible. Participants practiced this for a long time,
and as one would expect, the more distracter stimuli were
depicted in an array, the longer it took to find the target
stimulus. However, the effect disappeared over time. After
232 Automaticity and the Unconscious
a period of practice, finding the target became an automatic
process, whereby the number of distracter stimuli (4, 9, or
16) no longer influenced the speed with which the target
was detected. The key in the Shiffrin and Schneider (1977)
experiments was attention. At first, participants searched
for the targets by devoting attention to each stimulus sepa-
rately. After practice, attention became parallel, whereby
multiple stimuli could be attended to simultaneously. Such
processes can often be witnessed in real life, as when
people try to master driving a car.
In the past 30 years, our knowledge of automaticity in
routine action has increased greatly as a result of a large
number of priming experiments (e.g., Bargh, Chen, &
Burrows, 1996; Devine, 1989; Higgins, Rholes, & Jones,
1977; see Dijksterhuis, Chartrand, & Aarts, 2007, for a
review). Perhaps the best-known example is an experiment
by Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996, Experiment 2). In
this experiment, half the participants were primed with the
elderly by doing a language task (they had to make sen-
tences with lists of words) in which words were hidden
that were related to the elderly (e.g., Old, Bingo, walking
stick, Florida). Control participants received a language
task in which the critical words were replaced by words
not related to the elderly. After participants had finished,
they were told the experiment was over, but it was sur-
reptitiously measured how long it took them to walk to the
nearest elevator. In line with the stereotype of the elderly
as slow, primed participants took significantly longer.
Whereas in laboratory experiments, activation of
concepts generally occurs through priming techniques,
in the outside world, activation of a concept follows the
perception of relevant stimuli. People repeatedly use
the same personality traits and stereotypes when they
form an impression of others. In addition, people often
engage in the same behavior and pursue the same goals
in the same context. After a while, such traits, stereotypes,
behaviors, and goals become mentally represented as asso-
ciations between features in the (social) environment and
the concepts themselves. The environment can automati-
cally activate the concepts, which then sets the appropriate
psychological process in motion.
In sum, by repeatedly performing the same action or the
same set of actions, behavior can be made automatic.
Preconscious Processing
Unconsciousness is a regular and inevitable phase in the
processes constituting our mental activity; every mental act
begins as an unconscious one, and it may either remain so or
go on developing into consciousness.
—Sigmund Freud (1915/1963, p. 53)
The fourth traditional line of research is the youngest,
and its origins can only be traced back to the general the-
oretical work (not so much the psychoanalytic work) of
Sigmund Freud. The logic behind the notion of preconscious
processing is that before something reaches conscious-
ness, some kind of constructive perceptual or concep-
tual analysis has to take place. We do not “see” a door.
We see a red, rectangular shape, a little bigger than a person,
surrounded by something large and white. Only after some
preconscious construction processes are we consciously
aware of the fact that it is a door.
As Wegner and Bargh (1998) concluded, the “New
Look” approach in perception (Allport, 1954; Bruner,
1957; Erdelyi, 1974) was the seminal line of experimental
research on preconscious processing. This approach looked
at motivational determinants of conscious perceptual
thresholds. One important discovery was the phenomenon
of perceptual defense—the finding that the threshold for
conscious perception is higher for “taboo” words, or more
generally, for emotionally threatening stimuli. This was a
breakthrough because the common view at the time was
that perception was only affected by properties of the
stimulus, and that other factors, such as motivational ones,
could only play a role after a stimulus had reached con-
scious awareness.
The literature on selective attention (Broadbent, 1958;
Moray, 1959; Treisman, 1960) provided further evidence
for preconscious processing. Various researchers dem-
onstrated that we perceive much more than what reaches
consciousness, and that information that we do not attend
to is filtered out. For example, Treisman (1960) found that a
story presented to an unattended ear was sometimes attended
to when it became relevant for the story presented to the
attended ear. Another vivid example is the cocktail-party
effect (Moray, 1959). At a party where people are chatting
in various small groups, an individual generally only attends
to the conversation in his or her own group. However, when
someone else in an adjacent group mentions that individu-
al’s first name, he or she hears this immediately.
The recent research on inattentional blindness and
change blindness also fits this tradition. In a spectacular
demonstration, D. J. Simon and Chabris (1999) showed
that when people watch a group of people playing basket-
ball with the objective of counting the number of passes,
they can be completely oblivious to a gorilla (well, a person
dressed as a gorilla) walking through the group. Perceived
stimuli that are normally extremely salient can fail to reach
consciousness when attention is directed elsewhere.
In sum, although controversial at first, the essence of the
New Look argument is now widely accepted (Wegner &
Bargh, 1998). Perception is not just a function of features

in the environment but instead is an interaction of internal
states and the environment. In addition, we perceive much
more than what reaches consciousness. Some perceived
stimuli reach consciousness after some constructive pro-
cesses, but the vast majority of percepts never do.
THE UNCONSCIOUS, GOALS, AND
CONSCIOUSNESS: A TAXONOMY
The various research traditions discussed in the previous
section are quite different, and together they show that
automaticity is a multidimensional concept. The litera-
ture on unconscious thought demonstrates that important
mental activity takes place unconsciously, that is, outside
of conscious awareness. In addition, effects of incuba-
tion do not seem to be under conscious control and feel
as if they do not require effort or attention. The work on
people’s lack of introspective abilities again points at the
importance of the unconscious, but also at the fact that
human behavior does not necessarily follow conscious
intention or conscious goals. The experiments on skill
acquisition are primarily concerned with effort: Practice
can lead to automatized behavior that does not require
any effort. Finally, the literature on preconscious pro-
cessing again emphasizes the importance of unconscious
processes but also of control. What we perceive is not simply
a matter of conscious choice.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the prevailing view on the
concepts of automaticity and control was that they cre-
ated a dichotomy based on various dimensions (e.g.,
Posner and Snyder, 1975). Automatic behavior was unin-
tentional, it did not need attention, it occurred outside of
conscious awareness, and once started, it was uncontrol-
lable. Conversely, controlled behavior was intentional,
effortful, controllable, and dependent on conscious guid-
ance. The problem with such a multidimensional dichot-
omy was that it did not capture the full range of human
behaviors very well. Behavior is rarely controlled on all
dimensions, and although behavior that is fully automatic
does exist—reflexes, for instance—these behaviors are not
the most interesting ones for psychologists. Instead, most
behavior is automatic on some dimensions and controlled
on others. Driving a car is largely independent of attention,
and many of the subactions required do not need conscious
guidance. However, it is not unintentional and certainly
not uncontrollable. The contemporary view is that the four
dimensions (or “the four horsemen,” see Bargh, 1994)
should be treated as being at least partly independent.
To be able to see individual trees in the large forest of
automaticity, a taxonomy is now presented that will be used
throughout this chapter. The taxonomy is based on work
The Unconscious, Goals, and Consciousness: A Taxonomy 233
by many others, with three theoretical analyses shining
through most clearly. The first is the seminal work by
Bargh (1989, 1994), who made various taxonomies in the
realm of automaticity that proved to be highly useful for
analyzing social psychological phenomena. The second is
the recent work by Moors and de Houwer (2006, 2007),
who extensively discussed the relations among the different
features of automaticity. The final pillar is the emerging
neuroscientific literature on the relative independence of
consciousness and attention (e.g., Dehaene, Changeux,
Naccache, Sackur, & Sergent, 2006; Koch & Tsuchiya,
2007; Lamme, 2003).
The taxonomy is based on two important distinctions.
The first is whether a process is unconscious or conscious,
and the second is whether a process is goal-dependent or
not. One may note that these distinctions are reminiscent
of the two age-old observations with which this chapter
started. In Table 7.1, the taxonomy is depicted.
Unconscious Versus Conscious
The first distinction that can be used to classify social
psychological processes is whether a process is precon-
scious, postconscious, or conscious (see also Bargh 1989).
Preconscious processes are unconscious, and the information
the processes are based on was perceived unconsciously.
While driving, people pass a lot of advertisements—
for instance, on billboards—without ever being consciously
aware of these ads. However, such ads can subtly affect
people’s attitudes toward advertised brands. Sometimes
the results of preconscious processes can become con-
scious later on, but that is not necessary.
A subclass of preconscious processes are sublimi-
nal processes. One can consciously perceive a billboard
when one wants to. However, one can also present infor-
mation subliminally, that is, one can present information
so quickly that it cannot be consciously perceived, even
when attention is paid to the information. For example,
a word that is presented on a computer screen for only a
few milliseconds generally escapes conscious percep-
tion, even when a person is looking at the screen at the
right time. The word subliminal comes from the Latin
words “sub” (meaning “below”) and “limen” (meaning
“threshold”).
Table 7.1 A 2 × 2 Taxonomy to Categorize Social Psychological
Processes
Preconscious/postconscious Preconscious/postconscious
goal-independent goal-dependent
Conscious goal-independent Conscious goal-dependent
Processes that fall in the gray cells are at least to some extent automatic.
234 Automaticity and the Unconscious
Postconscious processes are unconscious processes
based on information that has been in consciousness previ-
ously. Preconscious and postconscious processes will often
be lumped together because they are functionally equivalent
(Bargh, 1989), and many preconscious processes can also
take place postconsciously. An example of a postcon-
scious process is incubation or unconscious thought. Here,
people process information unconsciously, after they have
first encoded this information consciously.
Finally, conscious processes are those that are accom-
panied by conscious awareness of aspects of the process.
It important to realize that it is enough to be consciously
aware of some aspects of the process for it to qualify as a
conscious process. Speaking is conscious, because we are
aware of our speaking while we do it. However, the pro-
cesses responsible for the production of speech are largely
preconscious. For instance, we are not consciously aware of
our search for each and every word. If we had to be aware
of all aspects for a process to qualify as conscious, there
would in fact be no conscious processes left. Every con-
scious process is accompanied by unconscious processes.
Goal-Dependency
The second distinction is whether a process is goal-
dependent or goal-independent. A goal represents a desired
state. A discrepancy between a current and a desired state
is what orients our attention (Moors & de Houwer, 2007).
The goal to drink something will orient a perceiver to
stimuli in the environment that may quench thirst, such as
a glass, a bottle, or a tap. That is, thirst directs attention to
stimuli that may help quenching it. It is important to realize
that attention should not be equated with conscious aware-
ness. Although it is true that a stimulus that is attended to
is more likely to enter consciousness than a stimulus that is
not attended to, attention and consciousness are to some
extent independent (e.g., Lamme, 2003). For instance, we
know that subliminal priming of stimuli—unconscious by
definition—only has effects when attention is paid to the
stimuli while they are presented (Koch & Tsuchiya, 2006).
Rather than as a cause for conscious awareness, attention
is better understood as the extent to which the brain pro-
cesses an incoming stimulus, or perhaps as the effort the
brain puts into processing a stimulus.
It is important to realize that there is no one-to-one
relation between attention and consciousness. Some
people find it difficult to appreciate that important
psychological processes, such as goal pursuit, thought,
evaluative conditioning, and implicit learning, do not
require conscious awareness. Perhaps this is caused by
the idea that, because these processes can ensue without
conscious awareness, they are instigated in a random and
unpredictable fashion. However, as it currently stands, the
crux is not consciousness but attention. Goal pursuit,
thought, evaluative conditioning, and implicit learning are
almost certainly not dependent on conscious awareness, but
they are goal-directed and they do require attention (Bargh,
Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Troetschel, 2001; Bos,
Dijksterhuis, & van Baaren, 2008; Custers & Aarts, 2009;
Eitam, Hassin, & Schul, 2008; Field & Moore, 2005).
A 2 × 2 Taxonomy
These two distinctions combined lead to a 2 (preconscious/
postconscious vs. conscious)  2 (goal-independent vs.
goal-dependent) table with which social psychological
phenomena can be classified. This taxonomy also takes into
account the role of intention and the role of control, and
the definition of those concepts is based on Moors and de
Houwer (2006, 2007), who classified intentional processes
and controlled processes as special cases of goal-dependent
processes. A goal-dependent behavior is a behavior for
which a goal is needed. This goal may be a proximal goal
to engage in that behavior, in which case the behavior
is intentional, or more remote, in which case it is not.
Furthermore, controlled behavior is behavior in which the
goal is to change other behavior—to alter it, to avoid it, to
stop it. This definition of control has consequences for an
analysis of what we can control and what we cannot con-
trol, as we shall see later in this chapter.
One caveat is that some phenomena can fall into
multiple cells of the 2  2 table. For instance, mimicry
of subtle facial expressions or movements is a basic pro-
cess, in that it can be preconscious and goal-independent
(Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). However, the extent to which
we mimic someone is at least in part driven by goals, such
as the goal to affiliate (Lakin & Chartrand, 2003), making
it a preconscious goal-dependent process. Finally, people
can choose to strategically mimic someone—to establish
rapport secretly, to learn a skill, or just for fun—in which
case mimicry becomes a conscious goal-dependent act.
In what follows, social psychological phenomena
are classified according to this taxonomy. It should be
noted that the term “automatic” will be used to describe
psychological processes that diverge in at least one way
from conscious goal-dependent processes—that is, it is
unconscious, goal-independent, or both.
UNCONSCIOUS AND AUTOMATIC
PROCESSES IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
One could argue that the role of unconscious pro-
cesses and the distinction between goal-dependent and

goal-independent processes is relevant for all areas in
social psychology. However, for some areas, it is espe-
cially important, in that relevant phenomena are impossible
to understand fully without an analysis of their automatic
components. The areas that are reviewed here in more detail
here are as follows: (1) attitudes, (2) person perception, (3)
categorization and stereotyping, (4) imitation and behavior
priming, (5) goal pursuit, and (6) judgment and decision
making.
As Wegner and Bargh (1998, p. 465) noted, such areas
“share a concern for the genuineness of social behavior”
(emphasis added). If a person says he is not prejudiced,
is that really true? If someone explicitly expresses an atti-
tude toward something, does that reflect her true opinion?
We tend to believe that automatic processes are more
genuine than controlled processes. In addition, we think
that tapping the unconscious reflects more “truth” than
asking consciousness. The number of social psychological
publications that speaks to this issue has probably doubled
in just the past 10 years, which is fortunate for the reader,
but a little less so for the person who has to incorporate the
new work. Here we go.
Attitudes
The distinction between unconscious and conscious processes
is relevant for various areas in attitude research: attitude for-
mation (and change), attitude activation, the relation between
attitudes and behavior, and, the new kid on the block of atti-
tude research, the role of implicit versus explicit attitudes. For
more information on attitudes, see also Banaji and Heiphetz
(this volume) and Albarracín and Vargas (this volume).
Attitude Formation
Attitudes can develop in many ways, and many such ways
are largely or completely automatic. The most basic process
of attitude formation is through mere exposure (Zajonc,
1968). Merely perceiving a stimulus repeatedly, such as a
brand on a billboard one passes every day, makes it more
positive. This effect is mediated by perceptual fluency
(Gordon & Holyoak, 1983). Fluency leads to a positive feel-
ing of familiarity that is then associated with the stimulus.
When perceivers evaluate stimuli in an analytic way, such
as when they have to extensively justify why they like a
stimulus, the effects of fluency are overridden, and the mere
exposure effect disappears (Whittlesea & Price, 2001).
Mere exposure effects do not require a goal to evalu-
ate, nor do they require conscious awareness. In fact, mere
exposure effects occur even when novel stimuli are pre-
sented subliminally for extremely brief durations (e.g.,
Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980). Intriguingly, in such sub-
liminal mere exposure experiments, participants indicate a
Unconscious and Automatic Processes in Social Psychology 235
preference for, or a positive attitude toward, stimuli they
do not remember being exposed to. Presumably, mere
exposure effects can be grouped under the most basic of
categories of goal-independent preconscious processes.
Mere exposure is socially relevant, because its effects
influence social interaction. Bornstein, Leone, and Galley
(1987) did an interesting experiment in which partici-
pants were subliminally presented with a photograph of
one of two confederates. At a later stage, the participant
met the two confederates. The two confederates disagreed
about something rather mundane, and the participant was
“forced” to take sides. As the experimenters expected, in
two-thirds of the cases the participants chose to side with
the confederate they had been subliminally exposed to.
Recently, it has been shown that mere exposure effects
generalize from perceived stimuli to stimuli from the same
category (Monahan, Murphy, & Zajonc, 2000), and this has
may have consequences for racial prejudice. Zebrowitz,
White, and Wieke (2008) showed that brief exposure of
Black faces to White participants increased these partici-
pants’ liking for Blacks. P. K. Smith, Dijksterhuis, and
Chaiken (2008) found that subliminal presentation of
White faces to White participants decreased their liking
of Blacks.
A second automatic route to attitude formation is
through evaluative conditioning. When an attitude object
(the conditioned stimulus, or CS) is repeatedly paired with
a familiar object that already has a positive or negative
valence (the unconditioned stimulus, or US), this attitude
object takes on the valence of the object it is paired with.
Evaluative conditioning has been applied in many domains.
Most initial demonstrations (e.g., Razran, 1940) were per-
formed in the context of persuasion, whereby a message
was paired with a positive CS. Recently, evaluative con-
ditioning has been applied to heighten self-esteem (e.g.,
Baccus, Baldwin, & Packer, 2004; Dijksterhuis, 2004a)
and to understand clinical phenomena such as spider
phobia (Merkelbach, de Jong, Arntz, & Schouten, 1993).
Jones and colleagues (J. T. Jones, Pelham, Carvallo, &
Mirenberg, 2004) reported an engaging demonstration of
the effects of evaluative conditioning. People generally
find the letters in their own name more positive than other
letters. Because of this, people like objects—including
other people—more when they are associated with letters
in their own name. For this reason, people are dispropor-
tionately likely to marry others whose first or last names
resemble their own!
Early demonstrations of the effects were open to
alternative explanations such as demand effects (Razran,
1940; Staats & Staats, 1958), because participants were
often explicitly aware of the possible relation between the
CS and the US, the intentions of the experimenter, or both.
236 Automaticity and the Unconscious
Recent demonstrations have dealt with such problems.
Various researchers have shown that evaluative condition-
ing occurs when either the CS or the US, or even both,
are presented subliminally (e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2004a;
Krosnick, Betz, Jussim, & Lynn, 1992; Murphy, Zajonc, &
Monahan, 1995; Niedenthal, 1990) rendering any alterna-
tive explanation that requires conscious awareness highly
unlikely. Krosnick et al. (1992), for instance, presented
their participants with nine slides of a target person engag-
ing in routine daily activities. These slides were preceded
by slides of positive or negative events (e.g., a child with
a Mickey Mouse doll vs. a bloody shark) presented for a
mere 13 ms. Later, participants were asked to evaluate the
target person. A target person paired with positive stimuli
was evaluated more positively in general and was rated as
having a nicer personality compared with a target person
paired with negative stimuli.
These findings notwithstanding, the extent to which
evaluative conditioning is automatic is still debated. Some
researchers have suggested that conditioning effects only
take place when perceivers are aware of the contingency
between a CS and a US (Pleyers, Corneille, Luminet, &
Yzerbyt, 2007). However, given the results on conditioning
with subliminal stimuli, it is more likely that contingency
awareness is merely the consequence of some other factor
that is necessary for conditioning. That is, it is likely that
conditioning is goal-dependent and that a certain degree of
attention—driven by a goal—is necessary during encod-
ing for conditioning to be able to occur (see also Field &
Moore, 2005).
In addition, there are various other demonstrations of
preconscious (or postconscious) routes to attitude forma-
tion. Wells and Petty (1980) showed that bodily feedback
affects attitude formation. Participants in their experiment
were led to believe they were testing the sound quality of
headphones for people who wanted to wear these head-
phones during biking or jogging. To simulate biking, some
participants were asked to move their heads sideways
(thereby making a head movement implying “no”), and to
simulate jogging, some others were asked to move their
heads up and down (making a head movement implying
“yes”). While they did this, participants listened to a per-
suasive message advocating changes in college tuition.
As predicted, participants who nodded while listening
later agreed more with the message than participants who
shook their heads. Later, comparable findings have been
obtained with other bodily feedback such as arm flexion
and extension (Cacioppo, Priester, & Berntson, 1993).
Bodily feedback can trigger a preconscious approach reac-
tion (heads up and down, arm flexed with hand toward
shoulder) or avoidance reaction (heads sideways, arm
extended as if pushing something away) that affects the
way incoming information is evaluated. Although it has not
been tested specifically, it could well be that these effects
are goal-dependent—for instance, in that they only occur
with certain processing goals, such as the goal to evaluate
incoming stimuli.
Gilbert and colleagues (Gilbert, 1991; Gilbert,
Tafarodi, & Malone, 1993) documented what can be seen
as an automatic bias in attitude formation. When we
encounter new information (“a spekbokking is an edible
fish”), it seems plausible that we would first carefully
deliberate before deciding whether such a statement is true
or false. However, this is not what happens. On the basis of
insights that can be traced back to the Dutch philosopher
Baruch Spinoza, Gilbert and colleagues showed that we
automatically believe what we hear, at least momentarily
(“Indeed, a spekbokking is an edible fish”). If we want to
determine whether a statement is false, we need to actively
“unbelieve” it, which requires attentional resources and
most likely also conscious awareness. This is intriguing,
because it shows that agreeing with something is an auto-
matic process (that is, it can take place preconsciously),
whereas disagreeing is a controlled process. Gilbert et al.
(1993) also showed this asymmetry can have deleterious
real-life consequences. In a jury trial simulation, false
information about a defendant was believed by partici-
pants and used to establish a sentence if their attention was
occupied by a second task.
Attitude Activation
For an attitude to guide behavior, it has to be activated
in the first place. For a long time, the dominant position
was that attitudes were activated by conscious retrieval
and, hence, that attitudes would not affect behavior under
circumstances in which conscious retrieval was impeded.
Simply stated, a positive attitude toward the Democratic
presidential candidate would only lead to a vote for the
Democrats when that attitude was consciously retrieved
immediately before voting. If for whatever reason the atti-
tude is not consciously retrieved at the right time, it will not
guide behavior. Although behavior can indeed be evoked
in such a way, it is likely that such consciously activated
attitudes merely reflect a minute portion of all attitudes
that guide behaviour.
Fazio and colleagues (Fazio, Chen, McDonel, & Sherman,
1982; Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986)
brought the idea of automaticity into the realm of attitude
research. They defined an attitude as the evaluation that
becomes active upon—or the evaluative tag associated
with—an attitude object. Again, the crucial factor in deter-
mining whether an attitude affects behavior is that the
attitude is active, but whereas it was widely assumed this
was the consequence of an intentional, conscious process,

Fazio argued that the mere presence of an attitude object
was enough to activate the attitude.
In a first set of studies, Fazio and colleagues (1982)
showed that attitudes can guide behavior postcon-
sciously, by investigating the role of attitude accessibility.
Participants in their experiments were asked to repeat-
edly express their attitudes, and this in itself resulted in
behavior that was more consistent with the attitude.
In further studies, Fazio and Williams (1986) measured
rather than manipulated attitude accessibility, and they
showed that the accessibility of an attitude greatly influences
behavior. They asked their participants for their opinions
of the 1984 presidential candidates Ronald Reagan and
Walter Mondale, and the speed with which participants
replied (i.e., the accessibility of their attitudes) predicted
their evaluations of the candidates in their first debate and
even their actual voting behavior 6 months later.
Fazio et al. (1986) took the next important step and
greatly influenced attitude research in the years to come by
demonstrating that attitudes can be automatically activated
upon the perception of the attitude object. They used a pro-
cedure that has been used widely ever since (see also the
next subsection, “Which Attitude?”). In their experiments,
participants were presented with prime/target pairs. The
primes were words referring to attitude objects in which
the authors were interested, and the targets were positive
or negative adjectives. Participants were asked to indicate,
as quickly as possible, whether each adjective was positive
or negative by pressing buttons labelled “good” or “bad.”
The researchers made sure the stimulus onset asynchrony
(SOA, the time between onset of prime and target) was
very short (250 ms) to ensure participants could not engage
in conscious processing.
If it is true that attitudes are activated automatically,
participants should have been faster to respond to negative
adjectives after negative primes (because negativity is
activated) and faster to respond to positive adjectives after
positive primes. This is indeed what the authors found
in their series of experiments. However, the effect was
moderated by attitude strength. Fazio and colleagues found
their effects (what is now generally called the affective
priming effect by most people) only for attitudes that were
pretested as strong, but not for those that were pretested
as weak.
Bargh, Chaiken, and colleagues (Bargh, Chaiken,
Govender, & Pratto, 1992; Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond, &
Hymes, 1996) tested whether attitude activation was goal-
dependent or intentional. In the experiments done by
Fazio et al. (1986), participants had the goal of evaluating
the target adjectives. Is this goal necessary for automatic
attitude activation to occur? The answer based on the
experiments by Bargh and others was intriguing: yes, and
Unconscious and Automatic Processes in Social Psychology 237
no. In the most telling set of studies, Bargh et al. (1996)
made a crucial change to the dependent variable compared
with the original experiments by Fazio et al. (1996). Rather
than having participants evaluate adjectives, they had to
merely verbalize them. With this procedure, where the
goal to evaluate was absent, automatic attitude activation
was again found, or so it seemed at first. As it turned out,
the new procedure did produce the effects, but now they
occurred for all attitude objects. That is, attitude strength
failed to moderate, unlike in Fazio et al. (1986) experi-
ments. Bargh et al. (1996) named the effect the automatic
evaluation effect, and proposed that all incoming stimuli
are automatically—preconsciously and independent of
goals—activated.
To restate the findings and to reconcile the differences
between the data obtained by Bargh and colleagues and
Fazio and colleagues, it seems reasonable to make the
following assumption: Automatic evaluation is a goal-
independent, preconscious effect that pertains to all incom-
ing information (based on Bargh et al., 1996). However,
when perceivers do have a goal to evaluate, automatic
attitude activation (or the affective priming effect) ensues,
whereby the strength of the attitude activation is dependent on
attitude strength. This makes the latter a goal-dependent
preconscious effect (based on Fazio et al., 1986).
However, to make matters more complex, there is
recent evidence demonstrating that although the process of
automatic evaluation is goal-independent, the evaluation
of specific stimuli is at least partly dependent on goals and
varies between different contexts. For example, smokers
automatically evaluate a cigarette as positive when they
truly crave one, but they may evaluate a cigarette as nega-
tive after they have just had one (Sherman, Rose, Koch,
Presson, & Chassin, 2003). Ferguson and Bargh (2004)
demonstrated that objects that are normally evaluated as
neutral can be automatically evaluated as positive when
detecting that the neutral words serve a current goal. Hence,
the process of automatic evaluation itself is an example of
goal-independent preconscious automaticity, whereas the
outcome of the process is goal-dependent.
Relatively few effects that are interesting for social
psychologists fall in the category of goal-independent
preconscious automaticity, but automatic evaluation does.
It shows that this faculty is very basic and of fundamen-
tal importance for human evolution. The functionality of
automatic evaluation is further emphasized by the fact that
negative or threatening information attracts more attention
than positive information (the automatic vigilance effect;
Pratto & John, 1991) and that negative stimuli need less
stimulus input to be detected than positive stimuli. Hansen
and Hansen (1988) showed that we quickly see an angry
face among happy faces and that this is not moderated by
238 Automaticity and the Unconscious
the number of happy faces surrounding the angry face (at
least not within the confines of the paradigm they used).
Others have shown that we detect the valence of a stimulus
before we are conscious of its meaning (Bargh, Litt,
Pratto, & Spielman, 1989) and that this is especially true
for negative stimuli (Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2003). Finally,
Fiske (1980) demonstrated that negative information often
receives more weight in impression formation than positive
information.
Which Attitude?
The literature on automatic attitude activation and auto-
matic evaluation led to a highly interesting new research
tradition that has grown so quickly, it completely bulldozed
some other areas in the realm of attitudes: the relation
between implicit and explicit attitudes (see also Banaji &
Heiphetz, this volume).
The procedure used to measure automatic attitude
activation discussed earlier speaks not only to the process
of attitude activation but also to the content. Extremely
brief reaction times on positive adjectives presented after an
attitude object, together with a long reaction times on negative
adjectives presented after that same object, are indicative of
a very positive attitude toward that object. Indeed, the
affective priming task is now widely used an attitude mea-
sure, and the later developed Implicit Association Test (the
IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwarz, 1998) is so influen-
tial that it can justifiably be seen as the driver of the bull-
dozer mentioned previously.
Researchers soon discovered that attitudes measured in
such a way—that is, implicitly—often differed from atti-
tudes measured the traditional, explicit way (e.g., Fazio,
Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995), and a new field was
born: the study of the difference and relation between
implicit and explicit attitudes. The terminology may need
more explanation. Explicit attitudes are defined as atti-
tudes that can be verbalized and generally measured with
rating scales, whereas implicit attitudes are attitudes that
are based on automatically activated evaluations. People
tend to have poor access to implicit attitudes (although
there are exceptions; see Nosek, 2005). Intriguing as this
area may be, it is also relatively new, so many fundamental
issues are not yet resolved. One is that we do not yet know
what the most influential of implicit measures, the IAT,
really measures (Blanton & Jaccard, 2006). Most would
agree that the findings are at least partly based on the
strength of the evaluation that is automatically activated
upon perceiving an object, but there is no more consensus
than that. Another issue has to do with terminology. If one
were to maintain that explicit and implicit attitudes are two
independent things, there is nothing wrong with using the
terms “explicit” and “implicit” attitudes. However, if you
propose that implicit and explicit attitudes are essentially
measuring the same underlying construct but in very dif-
ferent ways, it is more appropriate to talk about explic-
itly measured attitudes and implicitly measured attitudes
(Fazio & Olson, 2003).
The distinction between explicit and implicit attitudes
bears on the question touched on earlier of what people’s
true attitudes are. Is the implicit or the explicit attitude
more representative of what people really feel? Almost 200
years before people started to measure implicit attitudes,
the philosopher Schopenhauer already had an opinion
about it: “If you want to know how you really feel about
someone take note of the impression an unexpected letter
from him makes on you when you first see it on the door-
mat” (1851/ 1970, p. 171). In other words, it is not what
one explicitly says about someone that matters. Instead,
the evaluation that is automatically activated upon perceiv-
ing the object is what counts.
Of course, a discussion about which attitude is more
genuine is only relevant if there is a serious discrepancy
between the two. If explicit and implicit attitudes correlate
highly, the debate is futile. However, it quickly became
apparent that correlations between explicit and implicit
attitudes were often very low or even completely absent.
Moreover, this seemed especially true for important
attitudes, such as racial attitudes (Fazio et al., 1995)
or attitudes toward the self (i.e., self-esteem; Bosson,
Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000). Nosek (2005) related atti-
tudes measured with an IAT measured explicitly and found
that the correlations varied enormously. Some were high
(Pro-choice/Pro-life .70, Bush/Gore .66), some were mod-
erate (United States/Japan .36, Microsoft/Apple .33), and
for other objects they were low or absent (Rich/Poor .16,
Females/Males .05).
These wildly varying correlations led to two views
about the relation between implicit and explicit attitudes.
One possibility is that they are independent in that they
do not share an underlying representation or construct,
implying that one is just as genuine as the other. Another
possibility is that they do in part rely on the same underly-
ing construct and that implicitly measured attitudes are
more closely linked to this underlying construct than
explicitly measured attitudes, because the latter is affected
more by biases that take place during conscious thought
(e.g., demand effects, social desirability concerns). In
other words, explicit attitudes are based on implicit atti-
tudes and some other influencing factors (see e.g., Fazio &
Olson, 2003). The latter view implies that the strength of
the link between implicit and explicit attitudes should vary
as a function of moderators that “enable” implicit attitudes
to better influence explicit attitudes. Such moderators
have indeed been found. The link between implicit and

explicit attitudes is stronger when (a) demand effects and
social desirability concerns are either attenuated or con-
trolled for, (b) when explicit attitudes have to be expressed
quickly and/or under load, and (c) when implicit attitudes
are strong rather than weak (see, e.g., Fazio et al., 1995;
see Dijksterhuis, Albers, & Bongers, 2008; Hofmann,
Gschwender, Nosek, & Schmitt, 2005; Nosek, 2005, for
reviews).
Why is the distinction between implicit and explicit atti-
tudes relevant for the domain of automaticity? Implicit
attitudes can be seen as unconscious attitudes, whereas
explicit attitudes can be seen as conscious attitudes.
Incidentally, this does not mean that implicit attitudes can-
not become conscious. People doing an IAT often “feel”
what the result will be and can be said to have some con-
scious access to their implicit attitude. The consequence is
that implicit attitudes will mostly influence preconscious
behavior, whereas explicit attitudes affect behavior mostly
conscious behavior. For example, implicit attitudes toward
Blacks predict nonverbal behavior during an interaction
with a Black person, whereas explicit attitudes predict
consciously made judgments—for instance, as to who was
guilty in causing the riots in Los Angeles in 1992 (Fazio
et al., 1995).
The findings of the experiments by Fazio and colleagues
(1995) are telling in this regard. They measured implicit
attitudes with the affective priming task and explicit atti-
tudes with the Modern Racism Scale. They then used
both measures to predict various behaviors. Indeed, the
explicit measure was a better predictor of more con-
scious behaviors (such as ratings of the attractiveness of
Blacks versus Whites or an evaluation of the Rodney King
verdict), whereas the implicit measure predicted behavior
that is largely guided preconsciously, such as participants’
friendliness toward a Black experimenter. Such findings are
common now (see, e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami & Gaertner,
2002). Dotsch and Wigboldus (2008) recently published
an intriguing extension with the help of virtual reality tech-
nology. They showed that Dutch undergraduates showed
more skin conductance and kept more interpersonal dis-
tance from a Moroccan man as a function of their implicit,
but not their explicit, attitudes toward Moroccans.
To summarize, automatic processes play a key role in
attitudinal processes. Attitude formation can ensue precon-
sciously (and postconsciously) in various ways, whereby
some processes are goal-independent and others goal-
dependent. Automatic evaluation is a goal-independent
preconscious process, whereas attitude activation is a goal-
dependent preconscious process. A significant part of our
(interpersonal) behavior is accounted for by our implicit
(or unconscious) attitudes. Finally, attitude research is in
keeping with a general trend in social psychology: The more
Unconscious and Automatic Processes in Social Psychology 239
knowledge we acquire, the more we realize that key social
psychological processes are largely automatic.
Person Perception
For this chapter, the term “person perception” is used to
encompass all processes that are related to forming an
impression of, evaluating, or judging another person (see also
Macrae & Quadflieg, this volume). The range of relevant
processes are divided into three subareas: automatic evalua-
tion, inference and attribution, and effects of accessible infor-
mation on judgment. As we shall see, person perception is
dominated by goal-dependent preconscious processes.
Automatic Evaluation
Automatic evaluation was discussed extensively in the
previous section. However, because it is (justifiably)
categorized by most people as an attitudinal process, the
important role it plays in person perception is often forgotten.
After all, automatic evaluation is a goal-independent pre-
conscious process that may well precede other processes
during person perception. That is, if we meet someone, we
immediately and automatically evaluate him or her, and
the outcome of this process may well guide (or bias) subse-
quent processes, such as the inferences we make.
Inference and Attribution
One could propose that humans are such skilled person
perceivers that they need little information to draw infer-
ences about people’s personality traits. What do we base
such inferences on? The answer is on almost anything that
is potentially useful.
First of all, research has shown that facial features
evoke trait inferences. From a baby face—a round face
with big eyes, small chin, and a small nose—we infer that
a person is weaker, more naive, sweeter, more honest, and
less competent (e.g., Zebrowitz-McArthur & Montepare,
1992). Men with small eyes, thin lips, and a broad jaw
are seen as mature and dominant (Cunningham, Barbee,
& Pike, 1990). Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, and Hall
(2005) recently reported a spectacular demonstration of
just how important such facially based inferences can be.
These researchers showed participants pairs of political
candidates running against each other in previous elections
for the Senate and House. Participants only saw faces of
candidates that they did not recognize, and their simple
task was to judge which person in of each pair was the
most competent. Intriguingly, with this simple judgment
made by a group of naive participants, the researchers
could “predict” the results of approximately 68% of the
elections. We may not want to judge a book by its cover,
but we do. The candidate with the most competent face
240 Automaticity and the Unconscious
won in two-thirds of the cases. In subsequent experiments,
competence judgments made after seeing the faces for a
single second still predicted election results. This strongly
suggests we are dealing with a form of goal-dependent
preconscious automaticity.
Research on so-called thin slices of behavior also dem-
onstrate the remarkable capacity of people to quickly—and
often accurately—judge others on important dimensions
(e.g., Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992). On the basis of short
and silent video clips, perceivers can often accurately
deduce such wide-ranging characteristics as how well a
teacher teaches, how extraverted someone is, and whether
someone is heterosexual or homosexual (e.g., Ambady,
Hallahan, & Corner, 1999). In a fascinating line of
work, Gosling and colleagues (Gosling, Ko, Mannarelli, &
Morris, 2002) even demonstrated that people can form
remarkably accurate impression of someone they have
never met by merely looking into that person’s bedroom.
Such results show that when people have the goal to form
an impression, they quickly (and presumably precon-
sciously) apply an impressive body of largely implicit
knowledge of the relation between someone’s living con-
ditions and personality traits.
Most of the research on inferences has been done to
better understand the correspondence bias or fundamental
attribution error (Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Jones & Davis,
1965; E. E. Jones & Harris, 1967; Ross, 1977). The corre-
spondence bias refers to the tendency of person perceivers
to attribute the behavior of others to their personalities
rather than to situational forces, even when this is clearly
unwarranted. People who read essays that are either favor-
able or unfavorable toward Fidel Castro indeed believe the
authors to be pro- or anti-Castro, even if they are told
the writers had been forced to take this particular position
(E. E. Jones & Harris, 1967). When two people are ran-
domly assigned the role of quizmaster or contestant, with
the quizmaster asking the contestant questions, perceivers
see the inability of the contestant to answer all questions
correctly as a sign that he or she is less intelligent than the
quizmaster (Ross, 1977).
Research on automaticity in the 1980s has revealed the
major cause of the correspondence bias (Gilbert, Pelham, &
Krull, 1988; Winter & Uleman, 1984). First, Winter and
Uleman discovered that perceivers infer traits from other
people’s behavior. In their experiments, they presented par-
ticipants with sentences that strongly implied personality
traits (“Dan helped the old man across the busy street” or
“Susan won the science quiz”). Participants read many such
sentences and were later asked to recall as many of them as
possible. When they were first presented with the implied
traits (“helpful,” “intelligent”), recall improved. The traits
functioned as retrieval cues, and the authors reasoned the
effect was caused by participants spontaneously inferring
these traits during encoding. Later research with different
paradigms showed that such spontaneous trait inferences
were indeed automatic or, more precisely, a form of goal-
dependent preconscious automaticity (Todorov & Uleman,
2003; Uleman, Hon, Roman, & Moskowitz, 1996; Wigboldus,
Dijksterhuis, & van Knippenberg, 2003).
Gilbert and colleagues (e.g., Gilbert & Malone, 1995;
Gilbert et al., 1988) applied this knowledge of spontaneous
trait inferences to explain the correspondence bias. If we
try to find the cause of someone’s behavior, we should,
ideally at least, look at both the person and the situation.
Could it be that there is some sort of natural asymmetry
that explains why the person generally receives more
weight? Indeed, it was found that whereas personality traits
are inferred automatically, as discussed earlier, situational
inferences are usually not. In fact, attribution often follows
a particular temporal order. People first automatically infer
traits, and only then they may engage in “situational cor-
rection.” That is, you first automatically infer that Ap is
an unfriendly and rude person, and only subsequently you
may correct for the fact that his national team has just lost
the quarter finals of the Euro Cup.
In one of their experiments, Gilbert and colleagues
(Gilbert, Pelham & Krull, 1988) had participants watch
a silent video fragment showing a woman being inter-
viewed. The woman was evidently restless and nervous.
Some participants were led to believe that the woman
was interviewed about something that would make most
of us nervous (i.e., sexual fantasies), whereas other were
told that the woman talked about something mundane that
should not give rise to nervousness (i.e., plans for her next
holiday). Moreover, some participants watched the video
under conditions of cognitive load, whereas others did
not. When asked to judge how dispositionally nervous the
woman was, participants who watched without load indeed
thought the woman was more dispositionally nervous
when she talked about holiday plans rather than about sex.
However, this difference disappeared under conditions of
cognitive load. Apparently, participants under load made
the automatic inference (“she’s very nervous”) but then
failed to make the situational correction (“yes, but that is
because she has to talk about sex”).
Gilbert and colleagues published a large number of
experiments in which they showed that many processes
prevent people from making situational corrections. For
example, if behavior is ambiguous or obscure, characteriz-
ing the behavior is more difficult than usual and indeed not
fully automatic. In such a case, inferring what someone is
doing takes up cognitive resources that cannot be used later
in the process—for instance, for a situational correction.
Ironically, when an inference is not made automatically

because behavior is ambiguous, making this inference
takes up resources that make a later situational correction
even more unlikely, resulting in a strong correspondence
bias (e.g., Gilbert, McNulty, Guiliano, & Benson, 1992).
Likewise, people who try to regulate their behavior during
a social interaction (for instance, because they have to
maintain that their interaction partner is friendly when he
isn’t) use up resources that lead to an enhanced correspon-
dence bias (Gilbert, Krull, & Pelham, 1988).
Although the asymmetry between the way we infer traits
and the way we take into account the situation can explain
the ubiquity of the correspondence bias, recent research has
shown that person perceivers are more flexible than we had
first thought (Krull, 1993). People have implicit theories
about situational causes of behavior (Gawronski, 2004),
and they can make spontaneous situational inferences
(Krull & Dill, 1996; see also Ham & Vonk, 2003) if they
have the goal to do so. In that sense, both trait inferences as
well as situational inferences are forms of goal-dependent
preconscious (or postconscious) automaticity. Hence, the
fact that people often have the goal to form an impression
of another person (thereby leading to automatic trait infer-
ences rather than situational inferences) is presumably at
least partly responsible for the frequency with which people
fall prey to the correspondence bias.
In the past decade, the research on trait inferences has
expanded in interesting ways (see Uleman, Saribay, &
Gonzalez, 2008, for a recent review). Hassin and col-
leagues showed that people automatically infer goals from
the behavior of others (Hassin, Aarts, & Ferguson, 2005).
When we read, “While passing the pet shop, the girl tells
her father that everyone in her class has a dog,” we auto-
matically infer that she wants her father to acquire a dog.
In other research, it was demonstrated that perceivers make
other causal inferences automatically (Hassin, Bargh, &
Uleman, 2002). If we hear that Jane has lost her wallet after
spending a day exploring the sights in New York City, we
automatically infer pickpocketing. Dunning and Sherman
(1997) found that people make so-called tacit inferences on
the basis of stereotypes. If you hear that a nun is unhappy
with the amount of alcohol that is consumed at a party,
you make a different inference than when you hear that
a rock star is unhappy with the amount of alcohol that is
consumed at a party. Finally, Ham and van den Bos (2008)
demonstrated that people automatically infer values such
as whether certain procedures (such as grading or hiring)
were fair or unfair, or just or unjust.
In sum, people can make many inferences on the basis
of all sorts of information, and as it currently stands,
these inferences can be made preconsciously, but they
are goal-dependent. The goal that is active in a certain
situation may be the most important determinant of the
Unconscious and Automatic Processes in Social Psychology 241
kind of inference (trait, goal, situation, etc.) perceivers
make.
Priming and Accessibility Effects on Judgment
Person perceivers not only make automatic inferences
about others; they also make explicit judgments. When
we are asked, “Do you think Pam is smart?” or “Do you
think Henk is a warm person?” we engage in conscious
judgment. Nevertheless, even such conscious judgments are
influenced—infused, if you wish—by preconscious pro-
cesses. The way we interpret information or judge a person
is highly dependent on the information that is accessible at
that time.
Higgins et al. (1977) reported what is arguably the
first real priming study in social psychology. In a first
phase, participants were asked to study a list of words.
For some participants, the positive trait “adventurous”
was primed, for others the negative trait “reckless” was
primed. Subsequently, participants were led to believe
the experiment was over, and they moved on to another
experiment, in which they had to form an impression of a
person named Donald on the basis of a brief description.
Donald’s behavior was ambiguous in that it could be con-
strued as both adventurous and reckless (e.g., he wanted to
cross the Atlantic in a small boat). The researchers found
that the prime had a profound impact on the way Donald
was judged. Participants primed with adventurous had a
more positive impression of Donald than participants
primed with reckless. These findings were soon replicated
and extended (e.g., Srull & Wyer, 1979). Although the pro-
cedure used by Higgins and colleagues only allowed the
conclusion that the effects of priming were postconscious,
a few years later Bargh and Pietromonaco (1982) showed
comparable effects with subliminal primes.
The finding that we apply information that is highly
accessible has an interesting implication. Not only are
we all susceptible to the effects of priming, we also differ
in what information is chronically accessible. Higgins,
King, and Mavin (1982) found that when people formed an
impression of another person, they later remembered some
kinds of information better than others. The specific infor-
mation people remembered depended on the traits that were
most accessible. Indeed, they correlated with the traits that
people listed most often when they had to describe friends
and close others. Presumably, when we describe people,
some traits come to mind first. These traits are chroni-
cally accessible and guide our impressions of novel people
as well.
In a later experiment, Bargh and Pratto (1986) demon-
strated that traits that are (chronically) accessible affect the
impression we form of a person at a very early stage. It
is not just the case that accessible information affects the
242 Automaticity and the Unconscious
way we interpret ambiguous information (as the Higgins,
Rholes, and Jones study had shown), but it also determines
what information we attend to in the first place. They used
the Stroop paradigm to measure attentional interference.
Participants had to name the color in which trait words
were printed, and they took longer to name the color of
chronically accessible traits than other traits. This find-
ing is also interesting because participants merely had the
goal to name the word, not to judge or form an impres-
sion, demonstrating that effects of accessible constructs
on attention are not just preconscious but can also be
goal-independent.
Whereas priming generally leads to assimilation,
whereby a judgment converges toward the primed con-
struct, it can also result in contrast. Herr (1986) found that
when people were primed with traits (“hostile”) or mod-
erately extreme exemplars (“Joe Frazier”), a target was
perceived as more hostile, but when a very extreme exem-
plar (“Hitler”) was primed, a target was perceived as less
hostile. The explanation is that when people are primed
with an extreme exemplar, they may use this as a standard
of comparison against which a target is judged (“Well,
George is not quite as hostile as Hitler”). For some time,
it was believed by at least some researchers that contrast
effects resulted from conscious correction processes, and
indeed, they sometimes do (e.g., Martin, Seta, & Crelia,
1990; Moskowitz & Roman, 1992; Strack, Schwarz, Bless,
Kubler, & Wanke, 1993). However, it is now clear that
there are also unconscious routes to contrast, as various
researchers have found contrast effects with paradigms
that rule out conscious mediation (e.g., Dijksterhuis et al.,
1998; Stapel & Suls, 2004).
To recapitulate, effects of accessible constructs—
whether assimilative or contrastive—can be preconscious.
Moreover, effects of accessible constructs on attention
seem to be goal-independent.
Categorization and Stereotyping
Social psychologists have been struggling to understand
categorization and stereotyping for a long time. Whether
we perceive people as individuals or merely as members
of a group or category (Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg,
1990; Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, & Ruderman, 1978) deter-
mines to a significant extent how we behave toward them.
And there is a paradox we grapple with: The vast majority
of us do not want to stereotype or discriminate, but there is
no denying that we often do.
Is stereotyping inevitable? The answer seems to be
something like “Sort of, but perhaps not completely.” The
current state of affairs is heavily influenced by our knowl-
edge of automatic and controlled processes. If there is one
domain in social psychology that did benefit the most from
our increased knowledge of automaticity and control, it is
research on categorization and stereotyping—although the
reverse is obviously true as well.
Categorization
Research on categorization can be traced back to Allport
(1954) and even to Lippman (1922), who argued that cate-
gorization and stereotyping are spontaneous processes that
naturally accompany social perception. Taylor and col-
leagues (Taylor et al., 1978) showed this indeed to be the
case. When perceivers watch a group discussion involving
members of two categories (e.g., three women and three
men) and are later asked to recall who said what during
the discussion, they more often confuse people from the
same category than people from opposing categories.
Hence, perceivers use categories spontaneously to orga-
nize information in memory. In later years, it became clear
that categories are functional in the sense that their use
during social perception is efficient. When we apply social
categories, the process of impression formation requires
fewer resources than when we do not apply them (e.g.,
Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). Moreover, when resources are
scarce (such as when we are under load or time pressure),
we engage in more categorization (Bodenhausen, 1988;
Macrae, Stangor, & Milne, 1994). Finally, people who use
categorization during impression formation perform better
at a secondary task than people who do not, demonstrat-
ing that categorization indeed literally frees up resources
(Macrae, Milne, & Bodenhausen, 1994).
Although it was initially thought that category acti-
vation was fully automatic—preconscious and goal-
independent—this is not the case. Gilbert and Hixon (1991)
demonstrated that category activation does require some
resources. Ironically, once a category is activated, it is
used more when resources are scarce, but scarce resources
can prevent category activation in the first place. Macrae
and colleagues (Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, Thorn, &
Castelli, 1997) demonstrated that participants do not nec-
essarily activate a category upon the perception of a face.
They will do so under most circumstances, but participants
who process faces as mere objects and not people (i.e., they
only have to report whether a white dot is present on pho-
tographs) show no signs of category activation. Thus, cat-
egorization is a preconscious but goal-dependent process:
Perceivers need the goal to process a face as a social stimu-
lus in order to categorize.
Whereas research in the 1990s treated categorization as
an all-or-none process, recent research has demonstrated
that the process is actually more complex and, to some
extent, gradual. This newer research, in which the effects
of distinct facial features were investigated, also brought

us a step closer to the source of categorization. Livingston
and Brewer (2002) showed that negative affective reactions
(i.e., prejudice) toward African Americans are automati-
cally activated in response to various phenotypic features
rather than to the abstract racial category. In fact, African
Americans who had fewer prototypical features but who
were still unambiguously categorized as African American,
elicited less prejudice than African Americans with more
prototypical features. Blair, Judd, and Fallman (2004)
compared stereotyping on the basis of facial features with
stereotyping on the basis of abstract categories and found
that both were highly efficient processes but that the former
is harder to control. Participants who were asked to sup-
press their stereotypes while judging faces could do so for
the stereotypes associated with the abstract racial category,
but not for stereotypes associated with individual facial
features. Dotsch and colleagues (Dotsch, Wigboldus,
Langner, & van Knippenberg, 2008) recently showed
that just as automatic stereotype activation correlates
with measures of prejudice, our representations of proto-
typical features do as well. With an ingenious procedure,
they obtained from White Dutch participants their unique
individual representation of the prototypical face of a
Moroccan male (the least liked group of immigrants in the
Netherlands). Participants high in implicit prejudice had a
more negative representation of a typical Moroccan face.
The relation between these facial features and an abstract
racial category is not yet fully understood. Whereas some
(such as Blair et al., 2004) seem to conceive of them as two
independent factors that can lead to prejudice, others seem
to suggest that categorization is a downstream effect of
the detection of certain facial features (e.g., Ito & Urland,
2003; Macrae, Quinn, Mason, & Quadflieg, 2005). Yet
other theoretical perspectives assume that categorization is
based on features and that an abstract, amodal representa-
tion of a category does not exist (or is at least not necessary
to explain empirical findings: Niedenthal, Barsalou,
Winkielman, Kraut-Gruber, & Ric, 2005). Cloutier, Macrae,
and colleagues (Cloutier & Macrae, 2007; Cloutier, Mason, &
Macrae, 2005) showed that sometimes one feature can
dominate social perception and automatically lead to cat-
egorization. In their experiments, participants saw faces
with one important cue (e.g., long vs. short hair in a sex
categorization task) that were rotated to various degrees, up
to the point that some faces were presented upside down.
The results showed that the speed of categorization did not
suffer from rotation as long as the dominant feature (length
of hair) was clearly visible.
As for the automaticity of categorization on the basis
of facial features, it is preconscious (e.g., Ito & Urland,
2003) and goal-dependent (Macrae et al., 2005). As noted,
it is interesting and disconcerting that prejudice as a result
Unconscious and Automatic Processes in Social Psychology 243
of features is more difficult to control than prejudice as a
result of abstract categorization (Blair et al., 2004).
The Relation Between Categorization and
Stereotype Activation
The problem with categorization is not the activation of
categories per se. After all, categorization in and of itself
is a functional process (see, e.g., Park & Judd, 2005).
Instead, the problem is that category activation can lead
to the activation of stereotypes, and these stereotypes are
often erroneous and negative. Devine (1989) demonstrated
that categorization indeed seems to lead automatically to
stereotype activation. White Americans’ cultural stereo-
types of African Americans became active when stimuli
related to the stereotype were presented subliminally
(see also Dovidio, Evans, & Tyler, 1986; Pratto & Bargh,
1991). Importantly, Devine also showed that stereotype
activation was not moderated by people’s level of explicit
prejudice (i.e., their scores on the Modern Racism Scale).
The conclusion of this work was bleak: We preconsciously
activate cultural stereotypes, and this is true for all of us,
even for people who are not explicitly prejudiced.
One initial reaction was to investigate the possibility of
suppressing stereotypes. If it is true that the activation
of stereotypes is inevitable, the way to prevent stereo-
types from affecting impressions and social behavior is
to actively inhibit or suppress them once they have been
activated (Devine, Monteith, Zuwerink, & Elliot, 1991).
Various researchers have investigated this possibility,
with mixed success. It is certainly true that stereotypes
can sometimes be suppressed (Monteith, 1993; Monteith,
Sherman, & Devine, 1998), but as with the suppression of
other constructs (Wegner, 1994), stereotype suppression
is prone to pitfalls: It may backfire once active suppres-
sion ceases, leading the stereotypes to be more active than
before (Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne & Jetten, 1994).
Later research showed that the automatic, one-to-one
relation between category activation and the activation of
cultural stereotypes, as proposed by Devine (1989), was
more complex than initially assumed. Devine presented par-
ticipants not just with words related to categories but also
with some of the associated stereotypes themselves. Hence,
these studies did not really assess whether category activa-
tion inevitably leads to stereotype activation. Lepore and
Brown (1997) presented participants with words related only
to the social categories themselves, not the associated
stereotypes, and showed that different people did activate
different associations. What they activated was dependent on
their level of explicit prejudice. Prejudiced people activated
negative stereotypes and nonprejudiced did not. Hence, it
is true that category activation automatically leads to the
activation of associated traits, but these are not necessarily
244 Automaticity and the Unconscious
(negative) cultural stereotypes (see also Dijksterhuis, Aarts,
Bargh, & van Knippenberg, 2000). In addition, stereotype
activation is at least somewhat malleable. Kawakami and
colleagues (Kawakami, Dovidio, Moll, Hermsen, & Russin,
2000) showed that participants can be trained to activate
positive associations rather than negative cultural stereo-
types when they encounter a category member.
Downstream Consequences of Categorization and
Stereotyping
There are many immediate consequences of categorization
and stereotyping, and this is not the place to review them all
(see Dovidio & Gaertner, volume 2). However, to appreci-
ate the importance of categorization and stereotyping for
social interaction, it is necessary to briefly emphasize some
of the ways in which stereotyping affects social interac-
tion, especially because most of these downstream effects
of stereotyping are themselves automatic.
First of all, stereotypes can have a direct effect on overt
behavior (see also the next section on imitation and behav-
ioral priming). Bargh et al. (1996) had participants do a
laborious task. During this task, some participants had been
subliminally primed with African American faces, whereas
others had not. At some point, the computer program appar-
ently crashed, and participants had to start all over again. In
the interaction that followed the request to start over again,
participants primed with African Americans were more hos-
tile than participants who were not primed. Chen and Bargh
(1997) demonstrated that such an effect can lead to detri-
mental self-fulfilling prophecies (for a classic demonstration,
see Word, Zanna, & Cooper, 1974). Because the mere pres-
ence of an African American activates the hostile stereotype,
people display hostility when interacting with an African
American, and African Americans are hostile in return, thus
creating the impression that, indeed, African Americans are
hostile. Needless to say, such a complex social process can
ensue without any conscious awareness of any stereotype.
After Amidou Diallo, an unarmed Black immigrant
from Africa, was killed by White New York City police
officers who thought he was armed, new research was con-
ducted to investigate the automatic effects of categoriza-
tion. Various researchers have used a version of what is
now called the “shooter paradigm.” Participants see photos
of Whites and Blacks holding either a weapon or some-
thing harmless (e.g., a cell phone) and are asked to decide
as quickly as possible to “shoot” (when the target holds a
weapon) or not (when the target does not hold a weapon),
generally by pressing one of two keys on a computer key-
board. Unfortunately, participants in such experiments are
generally affected by race, such that there is a bias to shoot
more often when the target is Black (Correll, Park, Judd, &
Wittenbrink, 2002, 2007; Correll, Park, Judd, Wittenbrink,
Sadler, & Keesee, 2007; Eberhardt, Atiba Goff, Purdie, &
Davies, 2004; Payne, 2001). Even merely showing a Black
face makes people more likely to misidentify a tool as a
gun (Eberhardt et al., 2004; Payne, 2001). These effects
are also affected by priming. People who have just read
stories about Black criminals show more bias (Correll
et al., Park, Judd & Wittenbrink, 2007). Finally, activating
the abstract concept of “crime” induces attentional bias to
black males (Eberhardt et al., 2004).
In addition to effects on overt behavior, categoriza-
tion strongly affects other processes in person perception.
Some of the most influential models in social psychol-
ogy are (in part) built on this idea (Brewer, 1988; Fiske &
Neuberg, 1990). Stereotypes unobtrusively guide our impres-
sions of others in a stereotype-confirming way. Subliminally
priming the category of Blacks leads people to judge an (unre-
lated) target as more aggressive (Devine, 1989). However,
there are many processes that can mediate the relation
between category activation and the resulting stereotypical
impression. One example is that category activation influ-
ences spontaneous trait inferences. Stereotype-congruent
and neutral inferences are made automatically, but once a
stereotype is activated, stereotype-incongruent inferences
are inhibited, thereby reducing the chance a stereotype is
actually disconfirmed (Wigboldus et al., 2003).
To summarize, categorization is a preconscious goal-
dependent process, and the activation of a category leads
to the activation of associated characteristics, although not
necessarily cultural stereotypes. Many downstream effects
of category activation are also automatic. Finally, catego-
rization may be more than an all-or-nothing phenomenon,
and it may be driven more by the individual perception of
different features rather than by the activation of holistic,
abstract constructs.
Imitation and Behavior Priming
Not only are our judgments and impressions largely the
consequence of automatic processes, much of our overt
behavior is, too. The vast majority of the empirical dem-
onstrations of automaticity in overt behavior have been
published in the past 10 to 12 years, so this topic features
prominently in the Handbook of Social Psychology for
the first time. Here, a distinction is made between imita-
tion and behavior priming. Imitation involves perceivers
mimicking the observable behavior of others. Behavioral
priming is when priming a social category or a personality
trait changes a person’s overt behavior.
Imitation
Imitation is ubiquitous, among human beings as well as
many other species. The evidence for imitation among

people is abundant and covers various concrete behavioral
domains. First, there is support for imitation of various
speech-related variables. One phenomenon is that of syn-
tactic persistence, or the tendency to use a certain syntax
when that syntax is made cognitively available. In an
experiment by Levelt and Kelter (1982), an experimenter
called various shops and asked either, “What time does
your shop close?” or “At what time does your shop
close?” If the former was asked, the shopkeepers most
often answered, “Five o’clock.” However, if the latter
was asked, the shopkeepers most often answered, “At
five o’clock.” Syntactic structures appear to carry over
from one sentence to another (see also Bock, 1986, 1989).
Importantly, these effects have also been found for single
words, clauses, and for the structural format of entire sen-
tences (Levelt & Kelter, 1982). Additionally, Levelt and
Kelter found that cognitive load did not increase speech
imitation effects, which shows that such imitative effects
are highly efficient. Finally, Neumann and Strack (2000)
found that interaction partners tend to mimic the tone of
each other ’s voice.
There is also abundant evidence that people imitate
the facial expressions of others (e.g., Dimberg, 1982;
Vaughan & Lanzetta, 1980, Zajonc, Pietromonaco, &
Bargh, 1982). Yawning is an example of a familiar,
highly contagious facial “expression.” If someone around
you starts to yawn, it is common to feel the need to yawn
as well. Another example of imitation of facial expres-
sions comes from research conducted by Bavelas and col-
leagues (Bavelas, Black, Lemery, & Mullett, 1986, 1987).
During their research studies, participants witnessed the
confederate have a painful accident that caused the con-
federate to wince. The more visible the wince was to the
participant, the more the participant imitated the expres-
sion. In other words, the easier it was for the participants
to perceive the expression, the greater the effect on their
own behavior.
Research on couples has revealed similar results. Zajonc
and colleagues (Zajonc, Adelmann, Murphy, & Niedenthal,
1987) reasoned that couples who have lived together for a
long period of time have experienced many similar emo-
tions at the same time. Because frequent facial expressions
eventually lead to changes in facial lines, they predicted
that partners should start to look more like each other the
longer they are together. Indeed, participants judged cou-
ples who had been married for 25 years to resemble each
other more than random pairs of people of the same ages or
newlywed couples.
Imitation of facial expressions is related to the study of
emotional contagion (e.g., Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson,
1994). Facial expressions affect emotions through a
feedback process elicited by facial muscles (Neumann &
Unconscious and Automatic Processes in Social Psychology 245
Strack, 2000; Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988). As a result,
imitation of facial expressions leads to shared emotions.
For example, seeing a happy face can lead to a happy
expression on the perceiver, leading the perceiver in turn
to begin to feel happy. Zajonc et al. (1987) found a strong
relationship between shared facial expressions and shared
emotions. They found that partners who had grown to look
like each other more were happier together than those who
had not, because their resemblance was due to a greater
history of shared emotions, and shared emotions lead to a
stronger bond between partners.
Unconscious mimicry is not limited to speech and
facial expressions. We also mimic others’ postures, ges-
tures, and mannerisms. Bernieri (1988; see also Bernieri,
Reznick, & Rosenthal, 1988) provided solid evidence for
posture imitation. First, two participants (A and B) were
asked to interact. Later, the two participants A and B
were asked to switch partners with another dyad, C and D,
such that A interacted with C and B interacted with D. All
interactions were videotaped. Subsequently, two video-
tapes were constructed, both appearing to show partici-
pants A and B interacting with each other. One videotape
showed the actual interaction between A and B. The other
tape, using a splicing technique, appeared to show A and B
together, but actually showed A when A was interacting
with C, and B when B was interacting with D. Observers—
who were unaware that one interaction was actually a
“fake” interaction—estimated the degree of posture simi-
larity. The degree of similarity was deemed greater on the
first tape (the actual interaction) than on the second, pro-
viding evidence for posture matching.
At first, the general belief was that although imitation
was unconscious, it was also likely to be goal-directed.
For instance, Bavelas and colleagues (Bavelas et al., 1987;
see also Scheflen, 1964) argued that imitation serves a
communicative function, whereby the imitator conveys
empathy (“I know how you feel”). Such a process is
indeed likely to be goal-dependent. However, a study by
Chartrand and Bargh (1999) demonstrated that imitation
can ensue independent of goals. Their study focused on
specific mannerisms rather than on basic posture mirror-
ing. Specifically, participants interacted with two different
confederates during two consecutive dyadic sessions. Each
session involved the participant and the confederate taking
turns describing some photographs. One confederate
touched her face, while the other shook her foot through-
out their respective interactions with the participant.
Interactions were videotaped and coded for amount of face
touching and foot shaking displayed by the participant.
Chartrand and Bargh found that participants were more
likely to touch their own faces when they interacted with
the touching confederate than when they interacted with the
246 Automaticity and the Unconscious
shaking confederate, but were more likely to shake their
own feet when they interacted with the foot-shaking con-
federate than when they interacted with the face-touching
confederate. Importantly, the mannerisms the participants
imitated were mundane, making it difficult to argue that
they served a communicative function. This makes it likely
that imitation is (or at least can be) a goal-independent
process.
New evidence that for the idea of goal independence
comes from research showing that imitation during social
interaction is “default” behavior and that not engaging in
imitation requires an additional process. This had been
hypothesized in the past (e.g., Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001)
and was recently confirmed empirically. For example,
Finkel and colleagues (2006) showed that someone who
is “antimimicked” during a social interaction shows signs
of ego-depletion relative to someone who is mimicked. In
addition, Lee, Dolan, and Critchley (2008) demonstrated
that when viewing an emotional expression, express-
ing a different emotion leads to behavioral conflict and
interference.
That being said, the amount of imitation that occurs
during social interaction can increase or decrease as a
function of goals. Both people who are given a conscious
affiliation goal (i.e., they were told “you will be interacting
with this person as part of a cooperative task in which it
is important to get along and work well together”) or an
unconscious affiliation goal (i.e., they were subliminally
primed with words related to affiliation—affiliate, friend,
together) are more likely to mimic the behaviors of an
interaction partner than people who do not have a goal to
affiliate (Lakin & Chartrand, 2003). That is, situations in
which there is a conscious or unconscious desire to affiliate
activate the tendency to mimic the behaviors of interaction
partners.
In addition, recent research shows that imitation increases
after being socially excluded. In one of the studies reported
by Lakin, Chartrand, and Arkin (2006), participants were
told that they would complete two unrelated experiments.
The first involved playing an online ball-tossing game
(Cyberball; Williams, Cheung, & Choi, 2000) with three
other participants. With the exception of the three other
players’ initials, participants had no information about their
fellow players and did not expect to ever meet or interact
with them again. In reality, the other players were com-
puter-controlled and were programmed either to exclude
or to include participants while playing Cyberball. After
the Cyberball game was completed, participants com-
pleted a photo description task with a new confederate. As
expected, participants who were excluded mimicked the
behaviors of the confederate more than participants who
were included.
A few other moderators have been identified. First,
one’s style of information processing affects mimicry. If one
is in a context-dependent mind-set, more imitation occurs
than when one is in a context-independent mind-set (Van
Baaren, Horgan, Chartrand, & Dijkmans, 2004). Likewise,
self-construal has an effect on mimicry. Van Baaren,
Maddux, Chartrand, de Bouter, and van Knippenberg (2003)
primed participants with independence, interdependence,
or neither through a scrambled sentence task. Participants
then interacted with a confederate who was playing
with a pen. A hidden videocamera recorded the extent
to which each participant mimicked the confederate.
Interdependence-primed participants mimicked more than
independent-primed participants. Chartrand and Bargh
(1999) hypothesized that individual differences in empathy
might influence the likelihood of mimicking the behavior
of an interaction partner. Perspective taking, or the ability
to adopt and understand the perspective of others, is one
component of empathy (Davis, 1983). Indeed, Chartrand
and Bargh (1999) found that the higher people scored on
the perspective-taking subscale of Davis’s (1983) empathy
questionnaire, the more likely they were to imitate the
behavior of others.
To recapitulate, although imitation does serve a clear
social function, it does not seem to be goal-dependent. In
fact, it seems to be default social behavior, and antimim-
icry may be the exception rather than the rule. Goals are
important, however, in that they affect the extent to which
people mimic.
Behavioral Priming
The evidence for behavioral priming has been reviewed
previously (Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001; Dijksterhuis et al.,
2007; Wheeler & Petty, 2001). A few examples to illustrate
the wide variety of behavioral dependent variables that
have been used in this area of research follow.
The previously discussed experiment by Bargh, Chen,
and Burrows (1996, Experiment 2), in which priming the
category of elderly led to changes in walking speed, is an
example of the effects of priming on motor behavior. The
effect has been replicated by Hull, Slone, Meteyer, and
Matthews (2001) with the same social category and the
same dependent variable. Spears, Gordijn, Dijksterhuis, and
Stapel (2004) primed the category of businesspeople among
their participants and showed that it made people walk
(and generally behave) more quickly. Macrae et al. (1998)
primed people with Formula 1 World Champion Michael
Schumacher and showed that people started to read faster.
Finally, Aarts and Dijksterhuis (2002) made participants
walk faster or slower by activating the representation of
animals associated with speed (cheetah, gazelle) or slow-
ness (turtle, snail).

Apart from walking speed, activated categories have
also been shown to affect reaction times in a lexical
decision task. Dijksterhuis, Spears, and Lepinasse (2001)
had some participants form an impression of a group
of elderly people, whereas other participants formed
an impression of young people. In a later lexical deci-
sion task, participants who had thought about the elderly
reacted more slowly compared with participants who
had thought about young people. Kawakami, Young, and
Dovidio (2002) and Schubert and Häfner (2003) also dem-
onstrated effects of the activation of the elderly categories
on reaction times.
Carver and colleagues (Carver, Ganellen, Froming, &
Chambers, 1983) were the first to show effects of trait
priming on overt interpersonal behavior. They asked
participants to complete a scrambled sentence task (see,
e.g., Srull & Wyer, 1979) in which words or phrases
related to hostility were hidden (e.g., “hits he her them”).
In the experimental condition, 80% of the content of the
scrambled sentence task pertained to hostility, whereas in
the neutral priming condition, only 20% did. In a second,
unrelated part of the experiment, participants had to fulfill
the role of a teacher in a learning experiment based on
Milgram’s (1963) work. Participants asked the “learner”
(a confederate separated from the participant by a wooden
partition) 34 questions, of which the confederate answered
20 incorrectly. Participants were asked to administer
an electric shock to the learner upon every incorrect
answer. Importantly, however, the participants could
determine the level of each shock. Participants primed
with hostility gave shocks of higher intensity than control
participants.
Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996, Experiment 1)
presented their participants with a scrambled sentence
task. In one condition, the scrambled sentences con-
tained words related to rudeness (e.g., aggressively, bold,
rude), whereas in a second condition, the scrambled sen-
tences contained words pertaining to politeness (e.g.,
respect, patiently, polite). In a third (control) condition,
the scrambled sentence task did not contain words related
to either rudeness or politeness. Participants were told to
meet the experimenter in a different office after finishing
the task. When participants approached the experimenter, the
experimenter was talking to a confederate. Of interest
was the proportion of participants who interrupted the
conversation within 10 minutes. As expected, participants
who were primed with rudeness were more likely to inter-
rupt (63%) than were control participants (38%), whereas
participants primed with politeness were least likely to
interrupt (17%). These findings were recently replicated
and extended by Krolak-Schwerdt (2003), who primed par-
ticipants with the traits extraverted or introverted and found
Unconscious and Automatic Processes in Social Psychology 247
corresponding behavioral effects. Others have behavioral
priming effects on people’s willingness to help others
(Macrae and Johnson, 1998; Nelson & Norton, 2005;
Walther, Muller, & Schott, 2001).
Finally, priming affects mental performance. Dijksterhuis
and van Knippenberg (1998) improved people’s intellec-
tual performance by activation of both social categories as
well as traits. In their first experiment, some of their partic-
ipants wrote down everything that came to mind regarding
the typical attributes of college professors, whereas others
were not given this task. In an ostensibly unrelated second
phase, participants were asked to answer 42 general knowl-
edge questions that were taken from the game “Trivial
Pursuit” (such as “What is the capital of Bangladesh?” a.
Dhaka, b. Bangkok, c. Hanoi, d. Delhi). In line with the
prevailing stereotype of professors as being intelligent,
primed participants answered more questions correctly
than did no-prime control participants. In other experi-
ments, participants performed worse on a general knowl-
edge task after having thought about soccer-hooligans, a
social group that is associated with stupidity. Finally, it was
shown that performance on the general knowledge task
could be changed by priming traits (intelligent or dumb)
rather than social categories.
The effects obtained by Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg
(1998) have been replicated and extended a number of
times (Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 2000; Dijksterhuis,
Spears et al., 1998; Haddock, Macrae, & Fleck, 2002; Hull
et al., 2001; LeBoeuf & Estes, 2004; Schubert & Häfner,
2003). In addition to soccer-hooligans, the categories of
supermodels (Dijksterhuis, Spears et al., 1998; Haddock
et al., 2002) and “tramps” (Schubert & Häfner, 2003) have
also been shown to temporarily reduce intellectual perfor-
mance. Hull and colleagues (2001) obtained their effects
on intellectual performance after priming participants with
“success.” Changes in intellectual performance have not
only been shown with general knowledge questionnaires
but also on tasks assessing the proficiency with which
participants acquired and understood new knowledge
(Haddock et al., 2002). Finally, various researchers have
demonstrated that social category priming can affect peo-
ple’s ability to do arithmetic. For instance, Wheeler, Jarvis,
and Petty (2001) primed their participants with the stereo-
type of African Americans, after which these participants
performed worse on a math test compared with control
participants (see also Shih, Ambady, Richeson, Fujita, &
Gray, 2002).
It has also been shown that activation of the stereotype
of the elderly affects memory performance among under-
graduate participants (Dijksterhuis, Aarts, et al., 2000;
Dijksterhuis, Bargh & Miedema, 2000; but see Levy,
1996). In an experiment conducted by Dijksterhuis, Bargh
248 Automaticity and the Unconscious
and Miedema (2000) participants were seated behind a
desk on which 15 objects were placed (a book, a pencil,
a bag, etc.). Some participants were asked to answer ques-
tions about elderly people (“How often do you meet elderly
people?” Do you think elderly people are conservative?”),
whereas others were asked to answer questions about col-
lege students. After answering questions for 3 minutes,
participants were placed in a different room and asked to
recall as many of the objects present in the previous room
as possible. Participants primed with the elderly stereotype
recalled fewer objects than other participants (see also
Dijksterhuis, Aarts, et al., 2000).
Finally, recent research shows that stereotype activation
can lead to converging attitudes (Kawakami, Dovidio, &
Dijksterhuis, 2003). In the experiments by Kawakami
and colleagues, half of the participants were primed with
the stereotype of the elderly. In different experiments,
different priming methods were used, ranging from con-
scious manipulations to subliminal manipulations. In a
second, ostensibly unrelated task, participants were asked
to what extent they agreed with attitude statements such
as, “There is too much sex and nudity on TV these days” and
“More people should go to church these days.” Following
the prevailing stereotype of elderly expressed more con-
servative attitudes relative to control participants who
were not primed. In a conceptual replication, Kawakami
and colleagues (2003) also showed that activation of the
social category “skinhead” led to more racist attitudes.
Dijksterhuis, Spears, and colleagues (1998) demon-
strated that priming does not always result in behavioral
assimilation but that it can also result in behavioral con-
trast. Based on earlier work showing that category or trait
activation usually leads to assimilation in judgments,
whereas activation of exemplars usually leads to contrast
(Stapel, Koomen, & van der Pligt, 1996; 1997; see also
Wyer & Srull, 1989), Dijksterhuis, Spears, and colleagues
assessed behavioral effects of exemplar activation versus
category activation. In their first experiment, they
primed participants with either categories or exemplars.
Concretely, participants were primed with either the cat-
egory “college professors” or the category “supermodels,”
or with the exemplar “Albert Einstein” or the exemplar
“Claudia Schiffer.” After the priming procedure, partici-
pants answered a number of trivia questions. In line with
earlier work (Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998),
participants primed with professors outperformed those
primed with supermodels. More important, however, prim-
ing exemplars lead to behavioral contrast. Participants
primed with Albert Einstein performed worse on the
general knowledge questions than participants primed
with Claudia Schiffer. In further studies, these behavioral
contrast effects were also demonstrated in the paradigm
first used by Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996). Whereas
Bargh and colleagues had shown that priming the elderly
stereotype led participants to walk slower, Dijksterhuis,
Spears, and colleagues (1998) showed that priming an
elderly exemplar (the 88-year-old Dutch Queen Mother)
prompted participants to walk faster.
To recap, behavioral priming has been demonstrated for
various behaviors, and it can be elicited by using catego-
ries as well as traits as primes. The effects are preconscious
(they can even be brought about subliminally) or postcon-
scious, and they are likely to be goal-independent. The
underlying process is more complex than initially thought
(Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996; Dijksterhuis & Bargh,
2001). The effects can be explained by the ideomotor
mechanism, that is, the notion that perception and thought
have a direct link with overt behavior (e.g., James, 1890).
This may make behavioral priming a “default” effect,
where additional processes, such as goals, are needed
for the effects not to occur. However, there is evidence
that at least in some cases the process is more complex
in that people’s self-concept is involved in guiding overt
behavior after priming in a specific direction (i.e., contrast
or assimilation; Wheeler, DeMarree, & Petty, 2007).
In addition, the fact that these effects can be seen as
a form of goal-independent, default social behavior (just
like imitation) does not mean that goals do not play a role.
Research has shown that goals can moderate the effects of
behavioral priming. Cesario, Higgins, and Plaks (2006)
proposed that behavioral priming effects are caused by
perceivers preparing to interact with the primed group
members. For instance, in one of their studies, participants
primed with a disliked outgroup (gay men) showed evidence
for interaction preparation (i.e., increased aggression)
rather than assimilation behavior (i.e., passivity). Jonas and
Sassenberg (2006) also demonstrated that primed partici-
pants do not always show assimilative behavior. Instead,
they sometimes show appropriate response behavior. For
example, if one is primed with a nurse, one can show
assimilative behavior such as helpfulness but also response
behavior that is most appropriate in the situation, such as
cooperativeness.
Goal Pursuit
To analyze the automaticity of goal pursuit, it is helpful to
divide the process into various stages. The first stage is the
adoption stage. The second stage is the activation stage.
After a goal has been formed, it can be activated time and
again, but this step is necessary before a goal can affect
behavior. The third stage is the planning stage, in which
people develop strategies to attain the goal. The final stage is
the goal-striving and monitoring stage. People engage in

goal-directed behavior, and progress toward a reference
point needs to be monitored. If there are discrepancies
between the current state of affairs and the reference
point, the individual has to persist (or to decide whether
to quit, revise, or disengage; Carver & Scheier, 1998). If
there are no discrepancies between the behavior and the
reference point, the goal has been attained. Traditionally,
people have assumed that conscious awareness of the goal
is necessary to successfully complete all stages. Recently,
however, it has been proposed that goals can be activated
outside consciousness and, in fact, that the entire process
of goal pursuit may ensue without conscious awareness of
the goal (e.g., Bargh et al., 2001).
The proposal that goals can be activated automatically
is based on two ideas. First, goals are mentally represented
as desired states in a hierarchically ordered knowledge
structure (Kruglanski et al., 2002). Such hierarchical
knowledge structures include desired states, actions, and
means to reach the desired states. For this reason, goals
can be activated automatically, just like other mental
representations (Bargh et al., 2001; Chartrand & Bargh,
1996; Fishbach, Friedman, & Kruglanski, 2003). Second,
consciously chosen goals can develop the capacity to
become unconsciously activated. When goals are activated
consistently and repeatedly in a specific situation, these
goals will be activated automatically whenever the person
encounters that same situation. The question addressed
here is whether conscious awareness is necessary in any
of the above stages of goal pursuit (see also Bongers &
Dijksterhuis, 2009; Moskowitz, Li, & Kirk, 2004).
Goal Adoption
Goals can be formed internally as well as externally. Goals
that originate externally are often assigned goals, such
as when a mother asks her young child to finish the food
on his or her plate. Such goals have to be endorsed by
the individual for them to be pursued. Whether a goal
is endorsed or not depends on an evaluation process, in
which constraints (will my mother be angry when I do not
finish my plate?) as well as the attractiveness of the goal
(how awful is the food?) will be weighted. If people evalu-
ate a goal positively, they may endorse it; if not, they may
not accept the goal and will not commit to it.
Goals that originate internally can be elicited when
other goals are not met. This can occur as a top-down
process as well as a bottom-up process. An example of
a top-down process is that when the higher-level goal to
achieve academically is not reached. One fails an exam,
the goal to pass the retest will be activated, and hence, the
lower-level goal to study hard will be adopted. An example
of a bottom-up process is a joke that falls flat: You attract
attention, deliver the punchline, and you find blanks stares
Unconscious and Automatic Processes in Social Psychology 249
rather than laughs. This can be perceived as a threat to the
higher-level goal to affiliate or maintain self-esteem, and
hence, the goal representation of affiliation or to height-
ened self-esteem is activated.
But can goals be adopted without conscious awareness?
There is considerable evidence—for instance, from the
literature on evaluative conditioning—that the valence of
stimuli can be changed without awareness (see earlier this
chapter). If stimuli are paired with positive stimuli, these
stimuli become more positive, whereas if stimuli are paired
with negative stimuli, these stimuli become more negative.
This means that behavior can be made more desirable.
However, this does not yet show that people will commit to
goals that were created this way. That is, although people
may evaluate a behavior more positively, it does not auto-
matically mean that they want to engage in it. Concretely,
I am positive about running a marathon, but I do not see
myself ever running one.
However, recent research disentangled these “liking”
effects from “wanting” effects (Custers & Aarts, 2005).
In some clever experiments, neutral behavioral states (i.e.,
activities such as doing puzzles or going for a walk) were
paired unconsciously with positive, neutral, or negative
words, and subsequently participants were asked to evalu-
ate these activities and to indicate whether they wanted to
engage in these activities. Consistent with the evaluative
conditioning literature, activities paired with positive words
were evaluated more positively, and activities paired with
negative words were evaluated more negatively, compared
with activities paired with neutral words. More important,
wanting was higher for activities that were paired with
positive words, compared with activities that were paired
with neutral and negative words, but there was no differ-
ence in wanting between activities that were paired with
neutral words and activities that were paired with negative
words. These data demonstrate that goals can be formed
and adopted unconsciously.
As mentioned earlier, goals that originate internally are
often invoked when other goals are not reached. Detecting
a discrepancy between a current state and a chronic goal
state will lead to the activation of middle-level goals and
a selection of lower-level goals. Recent research has dem-
onstrated that this can occur unconsciously as well. In an
experiment by Custers and Aarts (2005), participants were
presented with 25 sentences, each immediately followed
a probe word. In one condition, five of these sentences
described actual states or situations that were discrepant
with the goal to look well groomed (i.e., “The shoes you
put on look dirty.”), and in the other condition these five
sentences were nondiscrepant with that goal (i.e., “The
shoes you put on have laces.”). After presenting each sen-
tence, participants were asked to indicate whether the probe
250 Automaticity and the Unconscious
word appeared in that sentence. The probe word referred to
an applicable instrumental action (i.e., to polish) that never
appeared in the sentence. If people automatically activate
goal-directed actions upon reading goal-discrepant sen-
tences, the reaction time to indicate that the probe word did
not appear in the sentence would be longer after discrepant
than nondiscrepant sentences. The results indeed showed
this reaction time difference, but only for participants
who frequently pursued the goal to be well groomed. In
sum, detecting a discrepancy between a current state and a
chronic goal state automatically leads to the activation of
middle-level goals.
Goal Activation
Well-established goals can be unconsciously triggered
by the environment. For example, Bargh and colleagues
(2001) unobtrusively exposed participants to words such
as “strive” and “succeed” to prime the achievement goal
(a goal held by most students) and then gave them the
opportunity to perform well by giving them an anagram
task. Participants primed with the achievement goal out-
performed those who were not primed with the goal. Bargh
et al. (2001) also demonstrated that such goal priming leads
to qualities associated with motivational states or “goal-
directedness,” such as persistence and increased effort in
working toward the goal. These and other recent experi-
mental demonstrations (e.g., Aarts, Custers, & Marien,
2008; Lakin & Chartrand, 2003; Oikawa, 2004; Shah,
Friedman, & Kruglanski, 2002; Sheeran, Aarts, et al.,
2005) indicate that the mere activation of a goal represen-
tation suffices to motivate people to work on the primed
goal without any conscious thought.
In another recent study, Holland, Hendriks, and Aarts
(2005) examined whether the mere perception of odor is
capable of directly activating goals. They exposed some
participants to the scent of all-purpose cleaner with-
out participants’ conscious awareness of the presence of
the scent. Because the scent of all-purpose cleaner was
assumed to enhance the accessibility of the concept of
cleaning, Holland et al. (2005) hypothesized that partici-
pants exposed to the scent would spontaneously start to be
cleaner. Participants were requested to eat a very crumbly
cookie in the lab, and indeed, participants exposed to the
scent put in more effort to keep their direct environment
clean and crumb-free.
An interesting implication of the automatic goal
inference effect described earlier (Hassin et al., 2005, see
the “Person Perception” section) is that people may also
be able to automatically activate goals that they infer
from others’ goal-directed actions. Evidence that per-
ceivers indeed start to strive for such goals comes from
a recent study conducted by Aarts and colleagues (Aarts,
Gollwitzer, & Hassin, 2004). They reasoned that goals
inferred from another person’s actions may be readily
adopted when these goals represent a positive, desired
state for the perceiver (cf. Heider, 1958), thus leading to
what they termed goal contagion. To investigate this, in
one of their studies, they briefly exposed participants to
a short script implying either the goal of earning money
or not. After reading the goal-implying scenario, partici-
pants were told that they could participate in a lottery in
which they could win money, but only if there was enough
time left. They were then given a computer task, and the
question was whether participants would speed up their
performance as a means to ensure that they could participate
in the goal-relevant task. Results showed that participants
who were exposed to the behavior implying the goal of
earning money were indeed faster than those in the con-
trol condition. These behavioral changes occurred without
conscious intent and were more pronounced when their
desire to earn money was relatively strong. These findings
were replicated in another experiment with heterosexual
male students and the goal of seeking casual sex.
Goals may also be automatically activated by being
primed with significant others. Research has shown that
goals and resultant actions are activated when people are
exposed to the names of friends, parents, and spouses
(Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2003; Shah, 2003). For exam-
ple, Fitzsimons and Bargh (2003) hypothesized that
people readily take on the goals they share with others
on the basis of the interpersonal interactions they have
with them. Hence, priming the names of these others leads
to the automatic adoption of the goals associated with
them. Accordingly, capitalizing on the notion that the goal
of helping is part of, and strongly associated with, inter-
personal interactions with good friends, Fitzsimons and
Bargh (2003) found that participants who were merely
instructed to think of a good friend were more often
helpful to the experimenter by agreeing to participate.
These automatic goal-adoption effects were replicated for
different relationships and different interpersonal goals,
such as child–mother relations and the goal of achieve-
ment and were moderated by the degree to which partici-
pants associated the goal with the relationship.
Choosing Means
The planning stage refers to the development of strategies
to attain a goal. After a goal has been adopted and acti-
vated, alternative behavioral paths by which a goal can
be attained must be evaluated and selected. The goal to be
healthy, for instance, can be achieved by quitting smok-
ing, by exercising more often, by eating more healthy food
and less unhealthy food, by reducing alcohol intake, or
by any combination of these and many other behaviors.

For successful goal pursuit, people need to select means or
lower-level goals.
Although the selection of means is sometimes a
conscious process, such as when we engage in conscious
planning (this is discussed in the section “Control”), choos-
ing means can also occur unconsciously. If people consis-
tently and repeatedly choose the same lower-order goal to
attain a higher-order goal (such as always taking the stairs
to be healthy), activation of this lower-order goal can become
automatic. This happens, for instance, in habitual behavior.
Aarts and Dijksterhuis (2000) directly tested the idea that
habits are represented as goal-mean links in the realm of
travel behavior. In one set of studies, they employed a
response latency paradigm to demonstrate that for habitual
cyclists (an easy group to find in the Netherlands), cycling
is automatically activated by the goal to travel to the uni-
versity. In their experiments, habitual and nonhabitual
bicycle users were unobtrusively primed with the goal to
travel to the university or not. In a subsequent reaction time
task, accessibility of the concept of bicycle was measured.
Results showed that the travel goal facilitated access to the
concept of bicycle but only for those people who regularly
use the bicycle for this trip. It appears that conscious atten-
tion is often not necessary in the planning stage.
Goal Striving and Monitoring
During the goal-striving stage, an individual engages
in goal-directed behavior, and progress toward goal
attainment is monitored. This is a crucial stage, and an
active monitoring process is also what distinguishes goal-
directed behavior from other behavior. Although perhaps
counterintuitive, converging evidence has shown that goals
can be monitored and run to completion without the person
ever becoming consciously aware of the goal at any point.
The monitoring process serves to increase the likelihood
of goal attainment by scanning the environment for threats
and opportunities. If an opportunity for goal pursuit is
detected, the monitoring process increases the salience of
this opportunity by heightening its accessibility or by signal-
ing to the person that an opportunity has been detected. If
a threat (i.e., alternative goals or temptations) is detected,
the monitoring process inhibits this threat by decreasing its
accessibility. If inhibition fails—for instance, if the threat
is too strong or cannot be avoided—the monitoring process
signals to the person that goal pursuit might be under threat.
One example of unconscious monitoring is the cocktail-
party effect (Moray, 1959). This effect is based on the
idea that people have a chronic goal to process self-
relevant information. Imagine you are at a big party. You
consciously focus on a conversation with a friend, filtering
out the noise of others. However, if someone other than
your conversation partner mentions your name, it will
Unconscious and Automatic Processes in Social Psychology 251
capture your attention, even when you did not hear a
word the same person said beforehand. As soon as some-
thing relevant or important is said (i.e., goal-related or
self-relevant information), this unconscious monitoring
process brings that information into your attention and into
your consciousness.
Other examples of unconscious monitoring processes
can be found in the literature on thought suppression
(Wegner, 1994; Wegner & Erber, 1992). When people are
not allowed to think about something or do not want to
think about something, the “forbidden” thought is, ironi-
cally, more likely to pop into consciousness. For instance,
when participants are asked not to think about white bears
(i.e., they are asked to suppress these thoughts) for a
period of time, after that period, they report more thoughts
about white bears than participants who were not asked
to suppress the thoughts in the first place. The reasoning
behind these findings is that for participants who were not
allowed to think about white bears, a monitoring process
searched for failures to suppress these thoughts. In other
words, a monitoring process keeps track of whether some-
one is still engaging in goal pursuit, and threats to this
pursuit are signaled to the person (this research is discussed
more elaborately in the “Control” section).
The two examples described here show that the monitor-
ing process indeed signals to the person that opportunities
or threats have been detected in the environment, with-
out the person being aware of this monitoring process.
Moreover, there is evidence that threats to current goal
pursuit are inhibited automatically. In recent research (Shah
et al., 2002), participants were asked to provide three cur-
rent goals. Then, in a modified lexical decision, participants
were presented with various stimuli, including their three
current goals, and had to indicate whether the stimulus was
a personal goal or not. Each stimulus was preceded by an
unconscious prime: one of the three current goals or a con-
trol stimulus. Responses to current goals were slower when
the preceding prime was one of the other two current goals
compared with when the preceding prime was a control
stimulus. There was no effect of prime on response time
when the target word was not a goal. These data indicate
that the activation of a current goal results in the inhibition
of alternative “threatening” goals. It has also been demon-
strated that the activation of a goal can lead to inhibition of
temptations (Fishbach, Friedman, & Kruglanski, 2003).
In sum, monitoring can occur outside of awareness. If
opportunities for successful goal pursuit are detected in the
environment, these opportunities then increase in acces-
sibility, whereas if threats to successful goal pursuit are
detected, these threats then decrease in accessibility. Taken
together, there is ample evidence that conscious attention
is not necessary in the goal-striving and monitoring stage.
252 Automaticity and the Unconscious
More broadly, the recent literature on goal pursuit shows
that all stages of goal pursuit can proceed preconsciously.
Judgment and Decision Making
Perhaps because the research area of judgment and decision
making is strongly influenced by economics’ emphasis on
rationality, the influence of researchers interested in auto-
maticity have been modest. A fine-grained analysis of which
aspects of decision making are automatic, and to what extent
they are automatic, is impossible at this time. However,
there is a clearly visible trend toward a more prominent role
for intuitive and automatic processes in understanding deci-
sion making. For a full discussion on judgment and decision
making, see Gilovich and Griffin (this volume).
Leading theories in the realm of decision making have
long been based on the idea of subjective expected utility
(Edwards, 1961): Decisions should be aimed at finding the
alternative with the best possible outcome(s). More spe-
cifically, a choice between alternatives should be based
on weighted adding: For each alternative, the valence of
the various attributes is determined, and later these attri-
butes are given a weight corresponding to their relative
importance (see, e.g., Janis & Mann, 1977). In the end, the
weighted sum should determine the choice.
At first this approach was treated as both normatively
desirable and descriptively accurate. That is, people should
do it this way, and, by and large, they seem to do it this way.
However, a rational choice made in such a way requires a
lot of deliberation or conscious thought, and people rarely
engage in the amount of deliberation necessary for accu-
rate weighted adding. Moreover, to engage in accurate
weighted adding, people need to determine how important
different attributes are. We now know that this requires a
degree of introspection that people simply cannot achieve
(see, e.g., Gilbert, 2006). That is, rationality is bounded by
human and environmental limitations (H. A. Simon, 1955),
and people use heuristics—or mental shortcuts—to arrive
at decisions (Kahneman, 2003; Tversky & Kahneman,
1973, 1974). These heuristics, in turn, can lead to various
biases that can violate statistical or logical principles.
Are We Rational?
One effect of the classic approach to studying decision
making is that rationality became more or less equated
with deliberation or with conscious thought. A decision
that has been thought about carefully is rational, whereas
a quick decision is usually irrational. This interchangeable
use of the terms “rational” and “conscious” can also be wit-
nessed outside academia. A remark that an important deci-
sion, such as buying a new car, has been made on the basis
of intuition rather than on a period of conscious thought
often leads to the reply—accompanied by a wagging
finger—that this is “not very rational.” But is it truly irra-
tional? Answering this question is important, because it
can in part explain why decision-making research was
hardly influenced by automaticity research.
So how do our choices hold up against the standard of
rationality? This depends on the definition of rationality.
There are two distinct ways to define it: rationality from
a normative viewpoint and rationality from a subjective
viewpoint. Evans and Over (1996, 1997) defined the nor-
mative version as follows: “Thinking, speaking, reasoning,
making a decision, or acting when one has a reason for
what one does sanctioned by a normative theory” (Evans &
Over, 1997, p. 2, emphasis added). The second defini-
tion they offered is more subjective: “Thinking, speaking,
reasoning, making a decision, or acting in a way that is
generally reliable and efficient for achieving one’s goals”
(Evans & Over, 1997, p. 2, emphasis added).
For a long time, the first, normative definition was favored
by researchers. A problem with the normative definition,
however, is that it irrevocably leads to the somewhat sober-
ing conclusion that human decision makers are indeed often
highly irrational. The number of well-documented phenom-
ena in human decision making that show violations of a nor-
mative definition of rationality is so enormous (Kahneman &
Tversky, 2000; Shafir & LeBoeuf, 2002) that the conclusion
that we are almost all poor decision makers, continually find-
ing ourselves in trouble, would be almost inescapable. Yet
life experience shows that many people are doing quite well,
thank you, suggesting that it may be illuminating to pay more
attention to people’s own goals and standards (Gigerenzer &
Todd, 1999). It makes more sense from both a psychological
and an evolutionary perspective to use a subjective definition
(Cosmides & Tooby, 1996). Evolution cares about whether
people achieve their goals (especially the most basic ones,
such as finding food, avoiding danger, and procreating), and
psychology should reflect these priorities. Stated bluntly,
evolution does not care about logic.
If we are willing to accept that rationality should be
defined in terms of goal achievement (and not in terms
of normative theories), it becomes clear that the relation
between rationality and conscious thought or deliberation
is completely different than once assumed. After all, in the
previous section, evidence was discussed for the notion
that goal pursuit can ensue without conscious intervention.
The bottom line is that the relation between the rationality
of a decision and the “consciousness” of the preceding
thought process is likely to be orthogonal.
Heuristics and Biases
Two insights were important for the development of a
more realistic and less normative look at decision making.

The first was the realization that people often use heuristics
to make judgments and are subject to systematic biases
(e.g., Kahneman & Tversky, 2000; Tversky & Kahneman,
1973, 1974). In an extremely impressive line of research,
Amos Tversky and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman
investigated many such heuristics and biases. Their
research was guided by “the idea that intuitive judgments
occupy a position—perhaps corresponding to evolutionary
history—between the automatic operations of perception
and the deliberate operations of reasoning” (Kahneman,
2003, p. 697). In a drastic departure from the past, Tversky
and Kahneman opened the door to intuitive, or even auto-
matic, processes. It is impossible to review their entire
body of work, so only one example of the use of a heuris-
tic, as well as of the effect of a bias, is discussed here.
People use the availability heuristic to assess frequency
and probability. For example, Kahneman and Tversky
(1973) asked participants whether there are more words
beginning with the letter “r” or with “r” as the third letter.
Most participants thought there were more words begin-
ning with an “r,” whereas there are in fact more words with
an “r” as the third letter. The reason participants made this
error is that words with an “r” in first position are easier to
bring to mind—they are more available—than words with
an “r” in third position. Slovic, Fischoff, and Lichtenstein
(1982) showed effects of the availability heuristic on
people’s assessments of perceived frequency of causes of
death. Causes that come to mind easily because of media
attention are overestimated (accidents, tornadoes, homi-
cide), whereas causes that are difficult to bring to mind are
underestimated (vaccinations, diabetes, asthma).
An example of a bias that people can fall prey to is the
framing effect. Tversky and Kahneman (1981; see also
Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) discovered that whether
choice outcomes are framed in terms of gains or losses has
a profound effect on the choices. The well-known “Asian
disease” problem provides a good example. Assume 600
people are infected with a disease. You have to choose
between two intervention programs, both framed in terms
of gains: With program A, you save 200 people. With pro-
gram B, you have a one third chance that you will save
all 600 people, and a two thirds chance that no one will
be saved. Faced with this dilemma, most people avoid risk
and choose program A. However, one can also frame the
choice in terms of losses: With program A, 400 people will
die. With program B you have a one third chance that no
one will die and a two thirds chance that all will die. In this
case, most people choose to be risky and select program B.
Heuristics have been seen by many people as unavoid-
able human shortcomings. We should not really use
heuristics, but alas, given cognitive and environmental
constraints, we sometimes have to rely on them. However,
Unconscious and Automatic Processes in Social Psychology 253
it should be noted that the researchers who first described
these heuristics (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1973; see also
Nisbett & Ross, 1989) portrayed them as highly adaptive,
a viewpoint that has also been advocated by Gigerenzer
more recently (e.g., Gigerenzer, 2008; Gigerenzer & Todd,
1999). A good example of a highly adaptive heuristic is
the recognition heuristic (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002).
In an experiment, participants in both the United States
and Germany were asked which of two U.S. cities, Detroit
or Milwaukee, was bigger. Intuitively, one would predict
U.S. participants would do better, because they should
have more information about their own cities than German
participants. However, as it turned out, the German par-
ticipants did better. Approximately 90% of the German
participants gave the correct answer (Detroit) as opposed to
60% of the U.S. participants. The U.S. participants indeed
knew more, and used their information—including nondi-
agnostic information—to make their guesses. The German
participants, devoid of much information, simply chose the
one they recognized best, and indeed arrived at the right
answer. The recognition heuristic is highly useful under
many circumstances. Gigerenzer and colleagues even
showed that simply following the recognition heuristic can
lead to investment decisions that are much better than those
made by experts (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002).
The Fallibility of Conscious Thought
The second important insight was that conscious thought
is not always beneficial for decision making. Wilson and
colleagues (e.g., Wilson & Schooler, 1991; Wilson et al.,
1993; see also Levine, Halbertstadt, & Goldstone, 1996)
have demonstrated that conscious contemplation disturbs
what they called “natural weighting schemes.” In one well-
known experiment, Wilson et al. (1993) looked at the post-
choice satisfaction of people who had to choose from five
art posters. Some participants had been merely asked to
choose, whereas others had been asked to deliberate. More
specifically, they had been asked to carefully scrutinize the
reasons for their preference. As it turned out, people who
had engaged in thorough conscious thought were less happy
with their choice. Wilson and colleagues (1993, p. 332)
attributed this to suboptimal weighing: “Introspection . . .
can change an optimal weighing scheme into a suboptimal
one. When people analyze reasons, they might focus on
those attributes of the attitude object that seem like plausi-
ble causes of the evaluations but were not weighted heavily
before.” Conscious thought leads people to put dispropor-
tionate weight on attributes that are accessible, plausible,
and easy to verbalize (see also Schooler, Ohlsson, & Brooks,
1993) and therefore too little weight on other attributes.
There is also research on how consistently people weight
attributes. In experiments by Levine and colleagues (1996),
254 Automaticity and the Unconscious
participants had to evaluate a large number of faces that
varied along six dimensions (such as the shape of the nose).
Participants either merely evaluated these faces or had to
think about the reasons for their evaluations before doing
so. Of interest to the experimenters was the way people
used and weighted the six dimensions to evaluate the faces.
The data clearly demonstrated that conscious thought made
weighting more varied and inconsistent. Recently, these
findings were replicated and extended by Nordgren and
Dijksterhuis (2009), who showed that when people judge
the exact same object under the exact same circumstances
twice (with 45 minutes in between), they become more
inconsistent the longer they think about their judgments.
Finally, there is also considerable research showing that
conscious deliberation is not a successful antidote against
certain biases or against the use of inappropriate heuristics.
Igou and Bless (2008) demonstrated that the more moti-
vated people are to deliberate about a choice, the bigger
framing effects become. Pelham and Neter (1995) demon-
strated that motivating people to think harder may increase,
rather than decrease, the effects of the representativeness
heuristic. More thought may sometimes simply lead to
more use of whatever is available, such as a heuristic. As
Pelham and Neter put it (1995, p. 583), “If the only tool at
a person’s disposal is a hammer, convincing the person to
work harder can only lead to more vigorous hammering.”
In general, there is strong evidence demonstrating that
more conscious thought does not simply lead to better
choices. Camerer and Hogarth (1999; see also Shafir &
LeBoeuf, 2002) reviewed 74 studies on the relation between
motivation (manipulated with incentives) and proneness
to heuristics and biases. Although they found that moti-
vation can help, it can just as well deteriorate choosing.
The problem is that whatever the decision problem is,
people always have to apply the right strategy to solve it.
More motivation may occasionally help, but often it just
leads to more enthusiastic application of a wrong strategy,
thereby leading to inferior choices (e.g., Arkes, Dawes, &
Christensen, 1986).
The Current State of Affairs: Two Systems
The literature on heuristics shows that people often do not
engage in thorough conscious thought when making deci-
sions, whereas the literature on the fallibility of conscious
thought shows that this is not necessarily a bad thing. One
may then assume that decision makers sometimes engage
in thorough conscious thought and on other occasions rely
on more intuitive, automatic processes. Indeed, Kahneman
(2003) recently proposed such a dual-process (or dual-
systems) model.
On the basis of a long tradition of dual-process models
(e.g., Chaiken & Trope, 1999), Kahneman (2003) proposed
a model for decision making based on what Stanovich and
West (2000) had called System 1 and System 2. System 1
is the intuitive system, and its features map onto the fea-
tures we associate with automatic processes: fast, parallel,
effortless, associative, and so on. System 2 is the reason-
ing system, and its features are the ones we associate with
conscious, controlled processes: slow, serial, effortful,
rule-governed, and so on. As of yet, there is no clear “road-
map” to show when automatic versus controlled processes
dominate the decision process. However, there is no more
escaping the conclusion that an important portion of judg-
ment and decision making is done by intuitive and auto-
matic processes.
Unconscious Thought
In my own laboratory, my colleagues and I have sought to
find evidence for the relative automaticity of one stage of
the decision process. When people have processed informa-
tion about various choice alternatives, how do they form a
preference for one of the alternatives? Traditionally, people
have thought that this is when conscious deliberation (per-
haps even with a balance sheet listing plusses and minuses)
comes in. However, my colleagues and I (Dijksterhuis,
Bos, Nordgren, & van Baaren, 2006) reasoned that, because
consciousness has such a low processing capacity and
because consciousness is often poor at weighting the
relative importance of attributes (Wilson et al., 1993), so-
called unconscious thought may be preferable for arriving
at a preference in a complex decision situation.
In one of our experiments, participants read information
pertaining to a choice problem. More specifically, they
would be presented with information about four apart-
ments, in which each apartment was described using 12
aspects. We rigged the information so that one apartment
had many more positive attributes (and therefore fewer
negative attributes) than the others. After participants
had read all the information, some were asked to choose
between the apartments immediately. Others were given
some time to consciously think before they chose, whereas
a third group was distracted for a while and then asked to
choose. Participants in this latter group were performing
a very taxing task, preventing conscious thought. Instead,
they were hypothesized to engage in unconscious thought.
What we have generally found with this paradigm is that
unconscious thinkers make better decisions than either con-
scious thinkers or immediate choosers, in that they choose
alternatives with more positive and fewer negative char-
acteristics (for more details, see Dijksterhuis, 2004b;
Dijksterhuis et al., 2006; Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006;
Ham, van den Bos, & van Doorn, 2009). Moreover, we
have also obtained similar effects with participants who
chose an actual object (such as a poster) rather than a

hypothetical one, with quality of choice operationalized
as postchoice satisfaction (Dijksterhuis et al., 2006;
Dijksterhuis & van Olden, 2006).
In a recent set of experiments, we showed that uncon-
scious thought is a goal-dependent process (Bos et al., 2008).
In our experiments, we again gave participants information
about a decision problem. All participants were distracted
before they made a decision. However, one group was told
that we would later ask them some questions about the deci-
sion problem before they were distracted, because we have
always instructed unconscious-thought participants in pre-
vious experiments. The other group was instead told that
they were done with the decision problem and would not
be asked anything about it later. In other words, one group
had the goal to further process the information, whereas the
other group had no such goal. Results showed that the former
group made better decisions than the latter. This means that
unconscious thought is a postconscious goal-dependent pro-
cess. Merely distracting people does not help.
As noted earlier, it would be premature to provide a
detailed treatment of the relative automaticity of various
stages in the decision-making process. However, intuitive
and automatic processes do claim a more prominent role, and
there is increasing recognition that this is not by definition
a bad thing (Brainerd & Reyna, 1990; Dijksterhuis &
Nordgren, 2006; Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999; Kahneman,
2003; Wilson & Schooler, 1991).
CONTROL
One may draw the conclusion that because social behavior
is largely an automatic affair, there is little explanatory
space left for the flipside of the coin: control. Although it
is indeed true that social behavior is largely automatized,
it does not necessarily follow that people do not (attempt
to) control their actions. On the contrary, they do so very
often. The questions addressed here are when and how?
Moors and de Houwer (2006, 2007) defined control as a
special kind of goal. Control is the goal to change, alter, or
stop an ongoing process. To answer the questions of what
we can control and how we can do this, it is useful to refer
to the earlier taxonomy of social psychological processes in
terms of a 2 (preconscious/postconscious vs. conscious) ×
2 (goal-dependent vs. goal-independent) table. The pos-
sibility of controlling a psychological process—and the
strategies that can be deployed for such control—depend
on the cell of the 2 × 2 table the process falls into. Control
is discussed for the cells individually, distinguishing
between four kinds of control: preconscious control, cor-
rection, suppression, and planning. A separate subsection
is devoted to the role of consciousness in control.
Control 255
Preconscious Goal-Independent Processes
Strictly speaking, control is impossible for these processes.
Control is a goal, and these processes are independent
of active goals, including control goals. The only form of
control that applies here is correction of the outcome of the
process. You cannot control closing your eye upon the per-
ception of an approaching snowball, but you can “control”
opening your eye later on. Hence, the form of control that
can be used for preconscious goal-independent processes
is after-the-fact correction. Importantly, to do this one
has to become consciously aware of the consequence of
the preconscious goal-independent process (Wilson &
Brekke, 1994), and this often does not happen. A social-
psychological example especially familiar to people who
speak multiple languages is the following: You are engag-
ing in a conversation and at some point you notice that
you are mimicking the accent of your conversation partner.
After you are consciously aware—and perhaps a little
embarrassed—of this spontaneous mimicry, you can
engage in an attempt to control.
Preconscious Goal-Dependent Processes
Many of the processes social psychologists are interested
in (attitudinal processes, processes involved in stereotyping
and prejudice, attribution, social judgment, etc.) are pre-
conscious (or postconscious) goal-dependent processes,
and control is highly relevant here. Just as preconscious
goal-independent processes can be controlled by after-the-
fact correction, so, too, can preconscious goal-dependent
processes. However, there is a much more interesting way
in which preconscious goal-dependent processes can be
controlled. It follows from the definition of control as a
goal, that, in principle at least, all these processes can be
controlled. After all, if they are guided by a goal, they can
also be guided by a control goal. Given that goals can exert
their effects preconsciously, control goals should be able
to do so as well. This opens the possibility of preconscious
control.
Evidence for preconscious control has been gath-
ered in various domains, arguably the most interesting
in the domain of stereotyping and prejudice. Moskowitz,
Gollwitzer, Wasel, and Schaal (1999) recruited male par-
ticipants with chronic egalitarian goals toward women
as well as participants without such goals. In the experi-
ment, participants had to pronounce trait words as quickly
as possible. Some of these traits were stereotypical for
women, and some were stereotypical for men. These trait
words were preceded by a photograph of either a man
of woman. Under normal circumstances, participants should
show evidence of stereotype activation: Female traits
256 Automaticity and the Unconscious
should pronounced more quickly when they follow a
photograph of a woman than a photograph of a man. This
was indeed found for individuals who had no goal to be
egalitarian. However, for individuals who had the chronic
goal to be egalitarian, no stereotype activation was appar-
ent. In fact, they seemed to inhibit stereotype-activation,
thereby successfully engaging in preconscious control. In
other studies (Galinsky & Moskowitz, 2000), it was also
found that preconscious control of stereotype activation
was possible with temporary goals (such as perspective
taking) rather than chronic goals.
Again, although the evidence is lacking for most phe-
nomena, it is likely that preconscious control is possible
for all preconscious goal-dependent phenomena one wants
to control. Stereotyping and prejudice are two phenomena
that people obviously may want to control, but one could
also think about persuasion or unwarranted negative attri-
butions. Krull and Ericksson (1995) showed that people
make situational (rather than dispositional) attributions
when given the goal to do so, and there is no reason to
assume that this cannot happen preconsciously.
Conscious Goal-Independent Processes
This is a somewhat odd class of processes, but one can
think about fleeting daydreams, other random thoughts,
and unwanted conscious thoughts. It is not perfectly clear
whether such thoughts are functional in some way (although
daydreams probably are; Antrobus & Singer, 1964), but it is
clear that consciousness is sometimes occupied with thoughts
that are extremely difficult to link to ongoing goals. In fact,
empirical studies from the 1960s on daydreaming (for a
review, see Singer, 1975) showed that experimental manipu-
lation to decrease participants’ “task-irrelevant thoughts”
such as daydreams were often surprisingly unsuccessful,
suggesting that we may daydream more than we realize.
In addition to thoughts that seem not to serve a goal, peo-
ple also have thoughts that go against current goals (Wegner,
1994). In order to control the contents of consciousness,
which usually means to ban thoughts that we do not want, we
can engage in suppression (e.g., Wegner, 1994; Wegner &
Erber, 1992). Wegner and colleagues (Wegner, Schneider,
Carter, & White, 1987) started to investigate thought sup-
pression in the 1980s, with a paradigm that became known
as the “white bear paradigm.” Participants in their first stud-
ies were simply asked to think about whatever they wanted,
except for a white bear. Should they think about a white
bear, they were to press a button so that the frequency of
thoughts of a white bear could be assessed. This was done
under varying circumstances, and Wegner and colleagues
found that suppression can have ironic effects: The to-be-
suppressed thought can rebound and become more acces-
sible than ever before.
The reason lies in the nature of the suppression process.
When we try to suppress a thought—for instance, about
smoking a cigarette—two processes start simultaneously:
an operating process and a monitoring process. The operat-
ing process is effortful and is responsible for finding dis-
tractors: If I think about tonight’s soccer game between
Holland and Italy, it is easier not to think about a ciga-
rette. The monitoring process is automatic and searches the
mind for the unwanted thought itself. However, this pro-
cess can have ironic consequences because it can actually
increase the activation of the unwanted thought. As long
as the operating process functions properly, no problems
arise, but if the effortful operating process breaks down, a
rebound effect occurs.
Wegner and colleagues have documented numerous
such rebound effects, especially when people are under
load—that is, when the automatic monitoring process is
effective but the operating process is not. People who try
to be happy under load become sad, whereas the reverse
is true for people who try to be sad (Wegner, Erber, &
Zanakos, 1993). People who try to sleep stay awake and
those who want to stay awake have an easier time fall-
ing asleep (Ansfield, Wegner, & Bowser, 1996). People
who are afraid to fail to control sexist thoughts are espe-
cially likely to express them (Wegner, Erber, Bowman, &
Shelton, 1996). Finally, others have found rebound
effects among people who wanted to suppress stereotypes
(Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Jetten, 1994).
Conscious Goal-Dependent Processes
In a way, one could argue that these processes represent
(conscious) control. They do not need to be controlled
because they are control. Suppression falls into this cat-
egory, and so does correction. Another example is plan-
ning (e.g., Gollwitzer, 1993). People try to affect their own
future behavior by planning their actions. As mentioned
before during the discussion of goal pursuit, when behavior
is habitual, a goal automatically activates the appropriate
means to achieve the goal. When this is not the case,
however, people may benefit from planning. One way of
selecting means is by forming implementation intentions
(Gollwitzer, 1993). With implementation intentions, antici-
pated situations are associated with goal-directed behav-
iors. Implementation intentions specify the when, where,
and how of goal-directed behavior (i.e., “If my colleague
offers me a cigarette after lunch, I will reject that offer”).
Research has shown that actively forming implementation
intentions can greatly help successful goal pursuit (for a
recent overview, see Gollwitzer, Parks-Stamm, Jaudas, &
Sheeran, 2008). In a telling experiment, for example,
student participants were asked to write a report during
Christmas break. Half of the participants were asked to form

implementation intentions by specifying the when and
where of their goal-directed behavior, whereas the other half
was not asked to form implementation intentions. Two-thirds
of the participants who formed implementation intentions
pursued their goal successfully, compared with one-third of
the participants who did not form these intentions. Although
implementation intentions lead to automatic goal-directed
behavior, the forming of implementation intentions them-
selves is generally a conscious and effortful process.
Concrete implementation intentions aside, the workings
of planning are fairly poorly understood. Wegner and Bargh
(1998, p. 455) talked about the “wobbliness in the causal
linkage from planning to acting” and used the example by
William James (1890, Vol. 2, p. 524), who planned to leave
his warm bed on a cold morning and failed to do so until
a lapse of consciousness made him suddenly get up. The
relation between a conscious thought about an action and
the action itself is discussed more generally later.
Control Versus Automaticity in a Single Paradigm
Various researchers have tried to pit automatic and controlled
processes against each other directly with (variations of)
the process dissociation procedure (PDP; Jacoby, 1991).
Their approach is different from most others in that the per-
spective is reversed. Rather than starting with explanatory
concepts such as “automatic” or “controlled” that are then
mapped onto (classes of) psychological phenomena, in this
approach the phenomenon is the starting point, followed
by an attempt to estimate the relative contribution of automatic
and controlled processes (Conrey, Sherman, Gawronski,
Hugenberg, & Groom, 2005; Payne, 2001, 2005).
The PDP has been developed by Jacoby (1991) and was
initially used to investigate memory. The logic behind it is
compelling: To pit automatic and controlled components of
a process against each other, an experiment must contain
conditions where they are congruent (i.e., they work in the
same direction), as well as conditions where they are incon-
gruent (i.e., they produce opposite effects). With these two
conditions and a few algebraic equations, the contribution
of automatic and controlled components can be determined.
The previously mentioned “shooter paradigm” provides a
nice example. In the shooter paradigm, a participant sees
pictures of Black and White men, holding either a gun or
something harmless. The task is generally to determine as
quickly as possible whether the person is holding a gun.
How does one determine the automatic and controlled
components of behavior in this paradigm? What now fol-
lows is almost literally taken from Payne (2001, p. 183),
who applied PDP to the shooter paradigm:
When a Black person holds a gun, the participant is
faced with a congruent trial. Both the automatic process
Control 257
(association between Black and gun), as well as the con-
trolled process (identification of the gun) should lead to
identification of the gun. Hence, the likelihood of saying
there was a gun on a congruent trial is a function of the
probability of control (C), plus the probability of an auto-
matic association between Black and gun, in case control
fails, (A (1  C)). Hence, congruent  C  A(1  C).
When a Black person holds something harmless, the
trial is inconsistent. A controlled response should lead to
correct identification of the tool, whereas the automatic
process (association between Black and gun) still steers
the participant toward perceiving a gun. The probability
that a person indeed identifies a gun on an incongruent trial
is as follows: incongruent  A(1  C).
With these two equations, automatic and controlled
components can be estimated separately. The estimate of
control is the difference between a “gun” response on con-
gruent versus incongruent trials, after which the automatic
estimate can be solved.
Control (C)  congruent  incongruent
Automatic (A)  Incongruent/(1  C)
In Payne’s work (e.g., Payne, 2001, 2005), the relative
contributions of automatic and controlled components in
the shooter paradigm were estimated under different cir-
cumstances and correlated with various other measures.
As one may have expected, time pressure reduces the con-
trolled component but not the automatic one. The auto-
matic component was related to explicit racial attitudes.
The more negative the attitude, the greater the automatic
bias. However, this pattern only emerged for people with-
out a motivation to control prejudice. People with such a
motivation showed the reverse pattern. Payne (2005) also
related his findings to people’s general ability to engage
in executive functioning. People with poor versus good
executive functioning showed the same level of automatic
stereotype activation but strongly differed in the extent
that they could control expressing racial bias. This effect
was found in the shooter paradigm, as well as in a task in
which participants had to form an impression of a Black
person on the basis of a biographical sketch.
Recently, others have proposed a more complex pro-
cess. In their quad-model, Conrey and colleagues (2005)
proposed four, rather than two, distinct components of per-
formance in the shooter paradigm. A decision may be influ-
enced by the association between Black men and guns (AC,
an automatic process), by the discriminability of the object
(D, a controlled process), the capacity to overcome bias and
to respond appropriately in case the man does not hold a
gun (OB, a controlled process), and finally, when the earlier
258 Automaticity and the Unconscious
three processes fail to drive behavior, by a general response
bias that can be influenced by many factors, such as whether
the person feels threatened (G, an automatic process). It is
not necessary to explain the algebra of the quad-model, but
the studies by Conrey et al. (2005) do show some merits
of their more fine-grained analysis with multiple controlled
and automatic processes. For instance, in one experiment
the two controlled processes (D and OB) responded differently
to the same contextual variable: Performing the shooter
task publicly negatively influenced discriminability (D) but
not the capacity to overcome bias (OB).
The Illusion of Conscious Control
Some readers may have raised eyebrows earlier because of
the notion of preconscious control. With control defined as
a goal and goal pursuit often taking place unconsciously,
preconscious control is a logical consequence. However,
one strong connotation of control is that consciousness is
involved. Isn’t the kernel of control the idea that I con-
sciously intend—or want—an action before it takes place?
The question can be phrased in another way. Where does
action start? Does this happen consciously, that is, with a
conscious decision? If so, we can indeed engage in con-
scious control. Or is it the case that the initiation of an
action is always unconscious? If this is true, conscious
control is, strictly speaking, nonexistent.
While walking to the kitchen after the sudden real-
ization one is thirsty, one can think about what to drink
(“let’s have some lapsang souchong tea”). Such conscious
thoughts often seem predictive of actual behavior. We are
often conscious of what we are about to do, and it feels
like conscious thought, or conscious decisions, shape
our actual behavior (see Wegner, 2002). This, however,
does not mean the preparation of behavior starts in con-
sciousness. If you end up having lapsang souchong, is the
moment you consciously decide to have lapsang souchong
the actual starting point? Was that conscious thought the
first step toward having lapsang souchong, rather than, say,
a glass of juice or a beer?
The answer is no. The unconscious preparation of even the
simplest action starts before we are conscious of the
action we are about to perform. Quite some time ago,
Kornhuber and Deecke (1965) did experiments in which
they asked their participants to perform a simple action,
such as flexing a finger. At the same time, they conducted
electroencephalograms to assess when the brain started to
prepare for the action. The outcome was that the first sign
of unconscious preparation preceded an action by about
800 milliseconds. This really is quite a lot of time, and it led
Libet to wonder whether conscious awareness of the deci-
sion to act appears as long in advance as well. If it does,
it would allow us to conclude that consciousness is indeed
the starting point for the action. However, if conscious
awareness of the decision to act precedes the action by
much less than 800 milliseconds, we have a problem.
We would have to conclude that the action does not start
in consciousness. Indeed, Libet and colleagues (Libet,
Gleason, Wright, & Pearl, 1983) showed exactly this. In
their famous experiments, they replicated the Kornhuber
and Deecke (1965) experiments while adding another mea-
sure: conscious awareness of the decision to act. It became
clear that conscious decisions follow unconscious prepara-
tion and only precede the actual execution of the action
by about 200 milliseconds. In other words, the unconscious
makes the decision to act.
In many cases, the unconscious communicates its deci-
sion to consciousness, making it feel as if consciousness
has decided (see, e.g., Norretranders, 1998; Wegner, 2002).
However, it did not. Such “feelings of will” are illusory
and, as work by Wegner and his colleagues has shown,
often result when conscious thought precedes correspond-
ing behavior by a natural time interval. For instance,
if I flex my finger about a second after I thought about
doing so, it may feel like a consciously willed behavior.
However, if I flex my finger 30 seconds after I thought
about doing so, it does not feel like consciously willed, as
we do not tend to see a causal relation between thought
and action that are separated by so much time (see, e.g.,
Wegner & Wheatley, 1999). Importantly, such effects do
not speak to the actual cause of behavior, because they are,
as we argue, unconscious. They do show, however, when
and why people so firmly believe in a decisive or causal
role of consciousness.
One could argue that this reasoning, as well as the find-
ings of Libet and colleagues, may not generalize across more
complex or more important behavior. However, there is no
a priori reason why it should not. Libet’s findings empha-
size the idea that conscious thought is always the result of
unconscious processes, irrespective of how important the
thoughts are. If you set yourself the goal to become dean
of Harvard at some point in the future, you will often be
consciously aware of this goal. However, the first moment
you were aware of this goal was not the starting point.
Apart from scientific evidence, there is also an appealing
logical argument. These days, most of us assume that con-
sciousness resides in the brain. This necessarily means that
conscious awareness is a function of other (unconscious)
processes in the brain, except if one maintains the belief of
a true “ghost in the machine.” It would be truly mystifying
if behavior would start consciously. Norretranders (1998,
p. 221) put it as such: “unless consciousness just hovers
freely in the air, it must be linked to processes in the brain,
and they must necessarily start up before consciousness

appears. It is not our consciousness that initiates, for only
the conscious is conscious.”
The fact that behavior starts unconsciously is important
for our understanding of automaticity. It follows that we
should treat the fact that behavior is unconscious as the
default. This in turn means that there really are two kinds
of behaviors, as described in the quote by Freud earlier in
this chapter. The essence is this: First, there are behaviors
of which we are never consciously aware in that the entire
process from initiation to completion is unconscious.
Second, there are behaviors of which we do become aware
(once or more often), somewhere between initiation and
final completion. In other words, there is true unconscious
behavior, and there is unconscious behavior that is charac-
terized by instances of conscious awareness.
WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS GOOD FOR?
At the time Wegner and Bargh wrote their chapter for the
previous Handbook of Social Psychology, many research-
ers were interested in the extent to which certain phe-
nomena were unconscious, or at least the extent to which
they could be unconscious. More than 10 years later, we
know that many social-psychological processes can take
place unconsciously. Stated differently, we now know that
consciousness does not seem to be necessary to guide or
steer a number of processes that are of interest to social
psychologists. Ironically, even control, traditionally seen
as the opposite of automaticity, can be automatic.
For quite some time, it was believed that consciousness,
or conscious control, was necessary for most, if not all,
relatively “smart,” flexible, and complex processes. This
turns out not be true, but the fact that these smart processes
can ensue unconsciously does not mean they are uncon-
trollable. After all, most of these processes are guided by
goals. Indeed, the focus of social-psychological research
seems to shift more and more from investigating the
conscious–unconscious distinction toward emphasizing
the relevance of goals. Consciousness is not crucial, but
goals are, because they guide attention. In other words,
phenomena for which we long assumed conscious guid-
ance was necessary turn out to be preconscious, but they
are goal-dependent.
Understanding the origin and function of conscious
experience is seen by some as the last great frontier
of science. Is there room left for an explanatory role of
consciousness? It has been popular among philosophers to
argue that there is no explanatory role and that conscious
experience is merely an epiphenomenon. Most scientists
believe consciousness does affect human behavior in some
way, but they do not yet agree on what consciousness does
What is Consciousness Good for? 259
exactly. These days, many neuroscientists and cognitive
psychologists seem to gravitate toward embracing global
workspace theory (Baars, 2002; Deheane & Naccache,
2001). Global workspace theory maintains that the goal of
sending information to consciousness is to create global
access. Different circuits in our brain are responsible for
different tasks, and these tasks can be perceptual, cogni-
tive, affective, motivational, motoric, and so on. These
circuits generally do their job unconsciously, but at times
the different circuits need to communicate with each
other.
A good example is verbal communication. Verbal com-
munication seems to be almost impossible without con-
scious awareness, and brief conscious access to verbal
information is indeed a way for other modules to “observe”
what is going on and to respond appropriately (Levelt, per-
sonal communication, August 6, 2008). There are many
other examples. Perception of an approaching car may
make immediate motoric adjustments necessary. A basic
need such as thirst may elicit motivational and behavioral
processes. In at least some such cases (but definitely not
all), it seems we become consciously aware of the output
of the first circuit (e.g., the perception of the car, the sen-
sation of thirst). In such cases, a specific unconscious cir-
cuit can tell other circuits to jump into action by putting
information into consciousness. That being said, global
workspace theory is plausible, but the evidence for it is
still far from rock solid. In fact, the direct evidence for the
theory is largely confined to experiments on basic visual
perception.
Social psychologists have mostly avoided studying the
function of consciousness in a direct way, but they have
been highly productive in an indirect way. Social psychol-
ogy has done more than any other discipline to investigate
the processes we do not need consciousness for. The list
of such processes is impressive, and this sometimes forces
us to draw humbling conclusions. However, the fact that
we cannot yet pin down the function of conscious expe-
rience does not mean we could just as well do without
it. Some time ago, I visited a conference on unconscious
processes. In many presentations, the relative importance
of unconscious processes, as well as the relative unimpor-
tance of conscious processes, were emphasized. At some
point, after I had yet again advocated the crucial role of
the unconscious, a colleague asked me a question (see
also Dijksterhuis, 2007). For me, it was a highly insightful
question.
Imagine the following. You can choose to have a per-
fect life. You and your loved ones are, and always will be,
healthy. You are as wealthy as you want to be. You have a
great love life and wonderful friends. You can really have
everything you desire. This can all be yours, but there
260 Automaticity and the Unconscious
is one catch. To get it all, you have to hand in conscious
experience. Would you do that?
I pondered on this for no more than a second, but before
I could say “no,” he already said, “me neither.”
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 Chapter 8
Motivation
JOHN A. BARGH, PETER M. GOLLWITZER, AND GABRIELE OETTINGEN
It is Friday afternoon. On Monday, you have an important
examination. Even though you have been aware of this
deadline during the week, you did not find the time to
study for the test. So you set yourself the goal to study
over the weekend. How do you arrive at a strong commit-
ment to attain this goal? You may even plan when to start
and how you will deal with potential disruptions. How do
you make effective plans for initiating goal striving and for
shielding it from getting derailed?
In the first part of this chapter, we address how people
may best use conscious thought to make goal pursuit effec-
tive. In the second part of the chapter, we discuss an alter-
native, unconscious route to effective goal pursuit. Think
now of another student who faces the same examination
on Monday. Arriving at home from school on Friday after-
noon, she walks by a picture of her father who had been
her model to perform well in school. Without conscious
thought, she pulls out her notebook, places it on her desk,
and gets started. In the second part of the chapter, we
discuss how this unconscious activation of goals can influ-
ence people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions.
THE GOAL CONCEPT IN THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF MOTIVATION
Social psychologists use the term “motivation” to describe
why a person in a given situation selects one response
over another or makes a given response with great ener-
gization or frequency. Imagine a person searching for
someone else in a crowd. She gets excited when she finds
that person, and then she runs toward him. Each of those
responses involves motivation, which can manifest itself
Preparation of this chapter was supported in part by Grant R01-MH60767 from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to JAB, by a
German Research Foundation Grant GO 387/14-2 to PMG, and by German Research Foundation Grants OE 237/10-1 and 237/12-1
to GO.
268
CH08.indd 268
cognitively (e.g., searching), affectively (e.g., excitement),
and behaviorally (e.g., running). To the question of what
drives motivation: The history of the psychology of moti-
vation is revealing ever more sophisticated answers. This
chapter discusses the field of motivation from its origins in
animal studies to its investigations into the human mind,
focusing on how humans in social contexts pursue both
conscious and unconscious goals.
Based on learning theory advanced by early animal psy-
chologists (Hull, 1943, 1952; Spence, 1956), the strength
of the tendency to respond was at first considered to be
a function of an organism’s skills (or habit strength),
its needs, and the incentive value of the outcome. For
example, how fast an animal runs toward a box contain-
ing food depends on its habit strength, its hunger, and the
quality and quantity of food. However, with the advance of
the cognitive revolution in psychology, these determinants
of motivation, as well as the concept of motivation itself,
became ever more elaborated.
The neobehaviorist and cognitive learning theorist
Tolman (1932, 1952) influenced the field through his
observations of mus norvegicus albinus, postulating
that various mental processes are “intermediate in the
causal equation between environmental stimuli and . . .
overt behavior” (Tolman, 1932, p. 2). These intermediate
processes entailed concepts of purpose (ends and means)
and expectations (e.g., mean expectations, end expecta-
tions, and mean–end expectations). The social psycholo-
gists Festinger (1942) and Atkinson (1957) drew on that
work in their research on what motivates humans to select
and perform tasks of varying difficulty. They suggested
that people weight the incentive value of the desired out-
come with the expectancy that it would actually occur.
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Social cognitive learning theorists (e.g., Bandura, 1982)
went a step further, factoring in whether one could suc-
cessfully perform the necessary behavior required to arrive
at a desired outcome (so-called efficacy or control beliefs).
These theorists also alluded to further relevant expectan-
cies, such as whether the situation by itself would pro-
duce the desired outcome (Heckhausen, 1977), whether
performing a given behavior would lead to the desired
outcome (Bandura, 1977, 1982), whether achieving the
desired outcome would be instrumental to accruing further
positive consequences (Vroom, 1964), whether the desired
outcome could be brought about somehow by the person’s
actions (Oettingen, 1996), and whether the future in general
would be bright (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978;
Scheier & Carver, 1987).
Adding these expectancy-related variables helped to
explicate in more detail what Hull and Spence tried to cap-
ture with the concept of habit strength, that is, the “can”
aspect (or feasibility aspect) of the motivation to make a
certain response: “Can the desired outcome be brought
about?” But the cognitive revolution also helped to explain
the “want” aspect (or desirability aspect) of the motivation
to make a certain response: “Do I really want the desired
outcome?” This desirability issue was captured by Hull
and Spence in two components, as the concept of need and
the concept of incentive.
With respect to need, the cognitively inspired psychol-
ogy of motivation ventured into the concept of motives
(for a summary, see McClelland, 1985b), defined as the
class of incentives that a person finds attractive (e.g.,
achievement, power, affiliation, or intimacy). More impor-
tantly, McClelland (1985a) discovered that depending on
whether this preference for certain classes of incentives
was measured implicitly (as assessed by the Thematic
Apperception Test) or explicitly (as assessed by attitude
questionnaires), it predicts the execution of different types
of motive-related responses: actions people spontaneously
engage in versus actions people decide to engage in after
thoughtful deliberation.
It was also found that whether an incentive is hoped
for or feared matters greatly. For instance, a person with
a strong achievement motive, longing for the pride associ-
ated with success, will choose a task of medium difficulty
to pursue; this level of difficulty provides the most infor-
mation about achievement level. However, a person who
abhors the shame associated with failure (Atkinson, 1958,
1964) will choose either an easy or a difficult task, which is
an effective strategy to avoid shame (easy tasks are likely
to be solved, and failure on too-difficult tasks can easily be
explained). Finally, researchers have differentiated among
types of incentives (Heckhausen, 1977). For instance,
in the realm of achievement, anticipation of positive
CH08.indd 269
The Goal Concept in the Psychology of Motivation 269
self-evaluations (e.g., “I did really well!”), positive
evaluations by others (e.g., praise by the teacher), higher-
order positive consequences (e.g., successful professional
career), and consequences that go beyond achievement
(e.g., having a good time with co-workers) can all motivate
people to do well on given tasks.
But the psychology of motivation has not only inves-
tigated a person’s readiness to make a certain response: It
has also explicated this readiness itself to predict whether
one response is chosen over another or is engaged in with
a high intensity or frequency. Most importantly in this
regard, Ajzen and Fishbein (1969) suggested that this read-
iness should be assessed in terms of a person’s intention
to make the response. Mischel (1973) went a step further
and argued that such intentions can be conceived as self-
imposed goals that imply standards that the person intends
to meet (with respect to quality and quantity criteria).
It is important to note here that this conceptualization of
the term “goal” is quite different from how the same term
was used by the behaviorists. According to the behavior-
ists (e.g., Bindra, 1959; Skinner, 1953), a goal is nothing
but a powerful incentive, defined as objects and events that
affect an organism’s behavior radically and reliably (e.g.,
food, sexual stimulation, or a sudden loud noise). Whether
an object or event is treated as a goal, however, depends
solely on the investigator ’s perspective on the organism’s
behavior. If the investigator selects a certain incentive as a
reference point for the description of a respective behavior,
this incentive becomes a goal. For example, Skinner (1953)
refers to the food that is provided as incentive to explore
a maze as the animal’s goal (or reason) to run through the
maze. However, a behaviorist researcher ’s statement that
food is a goal to the hungry organism means nothing more
than (1) it is known that food is an incentive to the organism,
and (2) the researcher has chosen to describe the behavior
of the organism in relation to food rather than in relation
to any other object or event. In the behaviorist tradition,
the reference point for goal-directed behavior is thus
not the goal set by the organisms themselves. Behaviorists
do not analyze internal goals or the processes leading to
goal setting. Skinner (1953) phrased this most cogently
when he referred to “goal directedness” as an effective and
easy-to-use term for the description of persistent, appropri-
ate, and searching behavior toward an incentive that results
from some kind of learning.
To the contrary, cognitive social learning theorists (e.g.,
Bandura, 1989; Mischel, 1973) considered goals as internal
and subjective processes and states, and this had tremendous,
transformational consequences for the study of motivation:
1. If one conceptualizes goal-directed responses in rela-
tion to subjective goals held by the individual (e.g., to
12/18/09 2:39:59 PM
 270 Motivation
get to know an attractive person), then one begins to
ask new questions, such as how people set themselves
such goals and how they strive to achieve them.
Noticing the unique nature of both of these problems,
Lewin (Lewin, Dembo, Festinger, & Sears, 1944)
suggested adopting a distinct theoretical perspec-
tive for goal setting versus goal striving. Present-day
researchers rediscovered Lewin’s approach (e.g., see the
action-phase model; Gollwitzer, 1990; Heckhausen &
Gollwitzer, 1987). Today, research on motivation
explicitly targets either the determinants and processes
of goal setting or the determinants and processes of
goal striving and successful goal attainment.
Conceptualizing goals as internal and subjective
has the additional advantage of differentiating the con-
tent of the goal from the responses performed in its
service. This distinction has led to research on how goals
are framed and how their framing facilitates different
responses. For example, it matters whether an achieve-
ment goal is framed as a learning goal or a performance
goal (e.g., “I want to learn from performing the task”
versus “I want to show my abilities”; Dweck, 1996).
2. Conceptualizing goals as subjective internal states also
raises the question of whether the mental representa-
tion of a goal can be activated outside of a person’s
awareness (as suggested in the auto-motive model;
Bargh, 1990). Given that goals are internal mental
representations, how do such mental representations
relate to the representations of other goals, subgoals,
and means of attainment (Kruglanski, 1996)? Such
considerations have been the focus of the psychology
of motivation over the past 10 years. New questions
then emerged (e.g., How does goal striving that is
nonconsciously activated compare with goal striving
that is consciously activated? Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-
Chai, Barndollar, & Trötschel, 2001; Oettingen, Grant,
Smith, Skinner, & Gollwitzer, 2006), and new answers
to old questions were found (e.g., How does striving
for a goal linked to several means differ from striving for
a goal where the same means can serve a host of goals?
Kruglanski & Kopetz, 2008).
Research on goals is now flourishing. This upsurge
of the goal concept becomes evident when perusing
recent relevant edited volumes (e.g., Heckhausen &
Heckhausen, 2008; Kruglanski & Higgins, 2007;
Morsella, Bargh, & Gollwitzer, 2009; Moskowitz &
Grant, 2009; Shah & Gardner, 2008) or the contents of
major conference programs, in which the goal concept
is now one of the most frequently appearing theoreti-
cal constructs. Accordingly, this chapter discusses the
recent advances in studying motivation in social psy-
chology by focusing on goals.
CH08.indd 270
The first part of the chapter reviews and discusses
research in the classic tradition of motivation psychology.
Here, the individual or self is considered an active, con-
scious agent, involved in setting goals and striving to
attain them. The second part turns to the research litera-
ture on automatic or nonconscious goal pursuit, which has
analyzed whether goals can also operate independently
of conscious selection and guidance. That review shows
that consciously set and unconsciously activated goals
alike lead to goal striving with features similar to those
shown in the conscious goal pursuit literature. It also pro-
vides a unifying framework for conscious and unconscious
goal pursuit by pointing out that unconscious motivational
mechanisms have the place of primacy in the evolution of
human motivation.
CONSCIOUS GOAL PURSUIT
This section on conscious goal pursuit is subdivided into
goal setting versus goal striving (goal implementation).
The discussion of goal setting first targets various deter-
minants of goal content and goal structure. For instance,
what determines whether people set themselves goals
in the achievement or the affiliation domain and whether
these goals are framed as learning versus performance
goals? The goal-setting discussion then moves to the ques-
tion of how people can strategically regulate the process of
goal setting so that they arrive at particularly strong goal
commitments.
Then the section on conscious goal pursuit switches to
a discussion of the issue of goal implementation. How do
content (e.g., cooperative vs. competitive) and structural
features (e.g., specific vs. vague standards) of goals affect
people’s success in striving for their goals, and what con-
textual variables (e.g., affective states, competing action
tendencies, power position) matter? The discussion ends
with an analysis of the self-regulation strategies people can
use to promote goal attainment (i.e., planning and persis-
tent acting toward the goal).
Goal Setting
What makes people set themselves goals of a certain con-
tent and structure, and how can they self-regulate their
goal setting? When trying to answer this question, it is
important to recognize that many goals are assigned by
others (e.g., employers, teachers, or parents). In this case,
it matters who assigns what goal to whom and how the
perceived message is delivered. Locke and Latham (1990,
2006) suggest that source variables, such as legitimacy and
trustworthiness, play important roles in the transformation
12/18/09 2:39:59 PM

of an assigned goal into a personal goal. For recipients of
such assigned goals, perceiving the goal as desirable and
feasible, redefining it as a personal goal, and integrat-
ing it with other existing goals are vital. Finally, relevant
message variables include the discrepancy between the
assigned goal and the recipient’s respective current goal
(e.g., when a low-calorie diet is suggested to a person with
a moderate dieting goal) and whether fear appeals are used
(e.g., information on the dramatic medical consequences
of health-damaging behavior). Anyone promoting a par-
ticular goal in others should also consider the processing
skills and motivation of the recipient as a moderator of
the effects of source, recipient, and message variables on
accepting assigned goals as personal goals.
But people arrive at personal goals in ways other than
by accepting the goals assigned by others: People also
set goals for themselves. Such goal setting may still be
influenced by others—for example, when goals are con-
jointly set (e.g., in participative decision making and
employee involvement) or when goals are adopted from
highly respected models (e.g., adopting standards for
self-rewards). Social context cues, such as normative
expectations of the social community, may also influ-
ence a person’s goal selection (Ajzen, 1985). So what are
the internal (personal) determinants of the content and
structure of the goals people set for themselves?
Goal Content
Assuming that people set themselves desirable goals (i.e.,
incentive valence of goal attainment is high), goal content
should be influenced by people’s needs, wishes, and higher-
order goals. Ryan, Sheldon, Kasser, and Deci (1996), for
instance, report that the content of people’s goals reflects
their needs for autonomy, competence, and social integra-
tion (see also Hagger, Chatzisarantis, & Harris, 2006).
For example, people may set themselves the goal to per-
form a given task independently, to acquire the necessary
skills to perform the task, or to become integrated into an
admired team. Interestingly, goal choice in line with these
needs is more pronounced when people are confronted
with reminders of mortality (Lykins, Segerstrom, Averill,
Evans, & Kemeny, 2007). With respect to the translation
of the power motive or need (i.e., influencing others is
highly attractive, as assessed implicitly by the Thematic
Apperception Test; Winter, 1991) into respective goals,
Schultheiss and Brunstein (1999) observed that an exercise
of imagining others perform well on a power-related task
produces more a motive-congruent setting of the goal to
succeed on this task.
Markus and Nurius (1986; Oyserman, Bybee, & Terry,
2006) suggested that people conceive of themselves not
only in terms of what they are (i.e., the self concept) but also
CH08.indd 271
Conscious Goal Pursuit 271
what they wish to become in the future (i.e., the possible
self ). These possible selves should give people ideas on
what kinds of personal goals they might want to strive for.
Once people have set themselves higher-order goals, such
as becoming a physician, a good parent, or a moral person
(Gollwitzer & Kirchhof, 1998), these higher-order goals
may determine the contents of lower-order goals as well.
The contents of such “be” goals determine the contents of
respective “do” goals (Carver & Scheier, 1998). “Be” goals
have been described by using terms such as “current con-
cerns” (Klinger, 1977), “self-defining goals” (Wicklund &
Gollwitzer, 1982), “identity goals” (Gollwitzer & Kirchhof,
1998), “personal projects” (Little, 1983), “personal striv-
ings” (Emmons, 1996), and “life tasks” (Cantor & Fleeson,
1994). The degree to which higher-order “be” goals deter-
mine the choosing of lower-order “do” goals depends on
the degree of commitment to the respective higher-order
“be” goals (Brunstein & Gollwitzer, 1996).
But the perceived desirability of a potential behavioral
goal also depends on the person’s attitude toward that goal.
As Ajzen and Fishbein (1980; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975)
have pointed out, attitude in theory is the sum total of the
possible positive and negative consequences associated
with the attainment of the behavioral goal, with each of
these consequences weighted by its perceived likelihood
of occurrence. In practice, people may not go through
such a comprehensive reasoning process to develop each
attitude. Furthermore, these consequences do not have to
be experienced; false suggestions that they might have
occurred (e.g., the false suggestion of a negative child-
hood event) suffice to affect a person’s behavioral goals
(Geraerts et al., 2008). Finally, as suggested by Bandura
(1977, 1997), feasibility concerns play an important role
in goal setting as well. It matters whether people feel that
they can make the responses that produce the desired goal.
Self-efficacy beliefs (or “control beliefs” as referred to
by Ajzen, 1985, 1991, in his theory of planned behavior)
need to be high for strong intentions (goal commitments)
to emerge. Again, people do not need to have made such
responses successfully in the past for high self-efficacy to
emerge; rather, the belief in their own skills suffices (e.g.,
beliefs based on observing similar others making similar
responses; Bandura, 1977).
Recent research has focused on the question of what
motivates people to reflect on the desirability or feasibility
(or both) of a given goal choice. For instance, Cioffi and
Garner (1996) found that requiring active choices of a goal
(i.e., answering affirmative items to do volunteer work) led
to thinking of more reasons such a decision could be attrac-
tive than did requiring only a passive choice to be made
(i.e., skipping items that affirmed the opposite choice).
Liberman and Trope (1998) reported that reflecting on a
12/18/09 2:40:01 PM
 272 Motivation
potential goal that is psychologically distant (e.g., acting
on the goal is required in the distant future rather than
near future) makes people focus on the goal’s desirability,
whereas a goal that is psychologically near (e.g., acting on
the goal is required soon) triggers feasibility concerns. But
considering a potential goal that is psychologically distant
not only may turn the person’s mind to the desirability of
this goal but actually may increase its perceived desirabil-
ity. Specifically, when Vasquez and Bühler (2007) varied
near versus far psychological distance by having people
imagine the performance of a future task from a first- or
third-person perspective, they observed that the impor-
tance of doing well (i.e., high desirability of goal attain-
ment) increased by taking a third-person perspective. The
latter perspective produced higher desirability that in turn
led to a stronger goal to do well on the task at hand (for
similar findings using a different psychological distance
manipulation, see Fujita, Trope, Liberman, & Levin-Sagi,
2006). So it appears that psychologically close versus
distant construals of a goal do more than affect to what
extent desirability or feasibility is considered; psychologi-
cally distant construals can also make a goal seem more
desirable.
Another mode of thought that affects a person’s readi-
ness to reflect on the desirability or feasibility of a goal is
counterfactual thinking (Epstude & Roese, 2008; McCrea,
2008). Failing to reach a set goal (e.g., not doing well
in a midterm examination after setting out to receive an
A) often triggers thoughts such as “If only I had studied
harder, I would have done better on the midterm exam!”
Such counterfactual thought in turn triggers thoughts on
the desirability and feasibility of studying harder for the
class, potentially leading to the goal to study harder for
this class in the future. But when it comes to adjusting
goals to internal and external demands, counterfactual
thinking is not the only form of thinking attentively, repeti-
tively, or frequently about one’s self and one’s world.
A summary article by Watkins (2008) points out many others,
for instance, rumination (or brooding on negative stimuli),
worry, mind wandering, chronic self-consciousness, and
mental simulation. Each of these forms of thinking may
produce a differential readiness to consider desirability
and feasibility of potential goals. Researchers have also
investigated whether a future outcome being perceived
as highly desirable leads to being overly optimistic about
its feasibility. The evidence is mixed, and the mechanisms
that lead to such overly optimistic expectations still need
further research (Krizan & Windschitl, 2007).
It is not only mode of thought that influences desir-
ability and feasibility considerations and assessments;
emotional states also play a role. Traditional analyses
of emotion (e.g., Frijda, 1986; Russell, 2003) emphasize
CH08.indd 272
the potential of emotions to elicit behavior directly: for
example, fear produces fight or flight or disgust leads to
rejection. Baumeister, Vohs, DeWall, and Zhang (2007)
have argued that behaviors can produce emotional out-
comes. For example, stealing may lead to feelings of guilt.
By cognitively anticipating such outcome emotions, people
can learn about the desirability of performing the respec-
tive behavior (e.g., pride may signal high desirability) and
about its feasibility (e.g., surprise may signal that the out-
come is more easily attained than originally expected). As a
consequence, when people deliberate whether to perform
a certain behavior, they may anticipate relevant outcome
emotions. These anticipated emotions in turn may provide
valuable feedback on whether to set the goal to perform
the behavior or not.
Goal Structure
The previous paragraph on goal setting described how
people arrive at goals of different content (e.g., to help a
colleague or to compete) and concluded that people set
goals that they perceive as desirable and feasible. Goals
with the same content may, however, have different struc-
ture. The next part of the chapter addresses relevant types
of goal structure and their determinants.
People prefer to interpret the behavior of others as
approach motivated, even when they recognize that their own
identical behaviors are motivated by avoidance (Miller &
Nelson, 2002). This interpretation bias implies that people
are capable of framing the same goal in terms of either
approach or avoidance (Elliot, 2008). For instance, a per-
son who wants to be a good student may frame the goal
of doing well in class as either approaching good grades
(earning As and Bs) or avoiding bad grades (no Cs and Ds).
Whereas both of these goals would be expected to energize
behavior, the direction pointed to in the first case is toward
positive stimuli, whereas in the second case it is away from
negative stimuli.
People with the trait disposition of extraversion prefer
to set themselves approach goals, whereas people with the
trait disposition of neuroticism prefer to set themselves
avoidance goals (Larsen & Augustine, 2008). These differ-
ential preferences for approach versus avoidance framing
are also supported by the evidence for state extraver-
sion and state neuroticism (Heller, Komar, & Lee, 2007).
Gray’s (1990, 1994) Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory
points to a further individual difference variable, that is,
reward sensitivity versus punishment sensitivity (see also
the behavioral approach system vs. behavioral inhibition
system scales; Carver & White, 1994). Moreover, whether
people set themselves approach versus avoidance goals in
the achievement and affiliation domains depends on their
motive dispositions of hope for success versus fear of
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failure (Elliot, 1997) and hope for affiliation versus fear of
rejection, respectively (Gable, 2006).
Higgins (1997; Scholer & Higgins, 2008) has suggested
that people may not only frame outcome goals in terms
of approach and avoidance but also may frame strategy
goals, such as how they want to strive for a given out-
come goal in terms of approach versus avoidance. For
instance, one may want to approach a desired end-state
either by promotion strategies (i.e., with eagerness) or
prevention strategies (i.e., with vigilance). Equally, when
one moves away from an undesired end-state, one can also
use either promotion strategies (eagerness) or prevention
strategies (vigilance). The framing of strategy goals in
terms of promotion versus prevention has been found to be
a consequence of whether people construe their self either
as an ideal self that they desire to be or as an ought self that
they feel compelled to be: ideal-self individuals prefer a
promotion framing, whereas ought-self individuals favor
a prevention framing.
Dweck (1996) has suggested a framing distinction
between performance goals and learning goals. Goals in
the achievement domain, for example, may either focus
on finding out how capable one is (performance goals)
or on learning from the task (learning goals). Molden and
Dweck (2006) argue that implicit theories on the nature of
ability determine the preference for performance versus
learning goals. If people believe that ability is fixed and
cannot be easily changed (i.e., hold an entity theory of
ability) they prefer to set performance goals. However, if
people believe that ability can be improved by learning
(i.e., hold an incremental theory of ability), they prefer to
set learning goals.
Another structural feature of goals is their level
of abstractness. People generally prefer to set themselves
abstract goals. They adopt concrete goals predominantly
when they run into problems attaining an abstract goal (see
action identification theory; Vallacher & Wegner, 1987).
However, people also vary to the extent to which they
typically think of their actions in low-level terms or pre-
fer high-level identifications (Vallacher & Wegner, 1989).
Importantly, this general preference for either an abstract
or a concrete level of identifying actions may also be
reflected in the choice of abstract versus concrete goals.
Finally, goals of any content (e.g., solving a math prob-
lem, writing a book, getting to know a stranger) can be
specified at different levels of difficulty. Three lines of
research identified determinants of difficulty preference.
First, Atkinson (1957) pointed out early on that whether
a person’s achievement motive is dominated by hope for
success or fear of failure is crucial for the level of difficulty
preferred. Individuals with hope for success prefer medium
levels of difficulty, whereas individuals with fear of failure
CH08.indd 273
Conscious Goal Pursuit 273
prefer either low or high levels of difficulty. Assuming that
low-difficulty tasks are associated with a high likelihood
of success, and assuming that failing at difficult tasks can
be attributed to the task rather than to one’s lack of ability,
choosing low- or high-difficulty levels is a self-protective
mechanism (Weiner, 1992). Second, Hollenbeck, Williams,
and Klein (1989) observed that commitment to difficult
goals was higher when goals were made public rather than
stayed private and when locus of control was perceived
as internal as compared with external. And third, Bandura
(1997) reports that having successfully achieved an earlier
goal stimulates the setting of ever more challenging goals;
this is assumed to be caused by a person’s heightened
sense of efficacy originating from just having successfully
attained the prior goal.
Self-Regulation of Goal Setting
Knowing the determinants of the content and the structure
of the goals people set for themselves still does not answer
the question of how people arrive at strong goal commit-
ments in the first place. Perceiving a goal as desirable and
feasible does not guarantee that one actually commits to
and strives for this goal (i.e., becomes committed to its
realization). For instance, someone may wish to learn to
play the violin because that person loves to make music
and feels capable of doing so, yet committing oneself to
realize this wish takes a further step. It is this further step
that is addressed next.
Various mental strategies advance the transition from
wishes and fantasies to goal commitments. The theory
of fantasy realization specifies three respective self-
regulation strategies (Oettingen, 2000): mental contrasting,
indulging, and dwelling. In mental contrasting, people first
imagine the fulfillment of a wish or fantasy (e.g., giving
a good presentation at a conference) and then reflect on
the present reality that stands in the way of attaining the
desired future (e.g., evaluation anxiety). Mental contrast-
ing is a problem-solving strategy that makes people rec-
ognize that they have not fulfilled their wish yet and that
they need to take action to achieve the desired future. As
a consequence, expectations of attaining the desired future
become activated and determine a person’s goal commit-
ment and subsequent striving to attain the desired future.
When perceived expectations of success are high, people
actively commit to realizing the desired future; when
expectations of success are low, people refrain from doing
so and thus venture on to alternative wishes and desired
futures. In this way, mental contrasting helps people dis-
criminate between feasible and unfeasible goals.
The theory of fantasy realization specifies two further
routes to goal setting. People may engage either in indulg-
ing (envisioning only the attainment of the wished-for
12/18/09 2:40:02 PM
 274 Motivation
future) or in dwelling (reflecting only on the present nega-
tive reality). Neither of these mental strategies produces
any experienced discrepancy between future and real-
ity; thus, the individual fails to recognize that actions
(making responses) are necessary to achieve the desired
future. Therefore, expectations of success do not become
activated, and goal setting does not reflect the perceived
likelihood of reaching the desired future. Individuals who
indulge and dwell show a medium level of goal commit-
ment, even though the resource-efficient strategy to follow
would be for no engagement in the case of low expecta-
tions of success and full engagement in the case of high
expectations of success. For example, when it comes to the
goal of giving a good presentation at a conference, both an
indulging and a dwelling person will show moderate prep-
aration, regardless of whether a successful performance is
perceived as within reach or as hardly possible.
Various experiments support these claims (e.g.,
Oettingen, 2000; Oettingen, Hönig, & Gollwitzer, 2000). In
one study (Oettingen, Pak, & Schnetter, 2001, study 4), first-
year students enrolled in a vocational school for computer
programming indicated their expectations of excelling in
mathematics. Next, they named positive aspects that they
associated with excelling in mathematics (e.g., feelings of
pride or increasing job prospects) and negative aspects
of reality, that is, potential obstacles (e.g., being distracted
by peers or feeling lazy). In the mental contrasting con-
dition, participants had to elaborate in writing two posi-
tive aspects of the future and two aspects of reality, in
alternating order beginning with the positive aspect of the
future. Participants in the indulging condition were asked
to elaborate four positive aspects of the future only; in the
dwelling condition, they instead elaborated four negative
aspects of reality only. As a dependant variable, participants
indicated how energized they felt with respect to excelling
in math (e.g., how active, eventful, or energetic).
Two weeks after the experiment, the participants’
teachers reported how much effort each student had invested
over the interim and provided each student with a grade for
that period. As predicted, only in the mental contrasting
condition did the students feel energized, exert effort, and
earn grades based on their expectations of success. Those
with high expectations of success felt the most energized,
invested the most effort, and received the highest course
grades; those with low expectations of success felt the
least energized, invested the least effort, and received
the lowest course grades. To the contrary, participants in
both the indulging and the dwelling conditions felt moder-
ately energized, exerted medium effort, and received medium
grades independent of their expectations of success.
Various studies pertaining to different life domains rep-
licated this pattern of results, for example, experiments
CH08.indd 274
on studying abroad, acquiring a second language, getting
to know an attractive stranger, finding a balance between
work and family life, self-improvement, and idiosyncratic
interpersonal wishes of great importance. Furthermore,
strength of goal commitment was assessed by cognitive
(e.g., making plans), affective (e.g., feelings of frustration),
motivational (e.g., feelings of energization), and behavioral
(e.g., amount of invested effort) indicators. These indica-
tors were measured via self-report or observations, either
directly after the experiment or weeks later. All of these
studies evidenced the same patterns of results: given high
expectations of success, participants in the mental contrast-
ing group showed the strongest goal commitment; given
low expectations, mental contrasting participants showed
least goal commitment. Participants who indulged in posi-
tive images about the future or dwelled on negative images
of reality showed medium commitment no matter whether
expectations of success were high or low. It is important to
note that the outcomes of mental contrasting do not occur
as a result of changes in the level of expectations (feasi-
bility) or incentive valence (desirability) but rather as a
result of the mode of self-regulatory thought (i.e., mental
contrasting, indulging, or dwelling), with mental contrast-
ing aligning strength of goal commitment to expectations.
Furthermore, the effects of mental contrasting depend on
the person perceiving the present reality as an obstacle,
that is, as standing in the way of realizing the desired future
(Oettingen et al., 2001, study 3).
Recent research shows that mental contrasting does
not have to pertain to the attainment of a positive future;
people can also fantasize about a negative future and con-
trast these negative fantasies with reflection on positive
reality. Oettingen, Mayer, Thorpe, Janetzke, and Lorenz
(2005) observed in a group of xenophobic high school stu-
dents that when negative fantasies (i.e., fears that social
conflicts would arise from foreign youth moving into their
neighborhood) are contrasted with reflections on a posi-
tive reality standing in the way of the feared future (i.e.,
youth having wonderful and exciting soccer matches with
foreigners), this produces expectancy-dependent goal
commitments as well (i.e., the goal of approaching the for-
eigners by investing time and effort in welcoming foreign-
ers in the neighborhood). Moreover, Oettingen, Mayer,
and Thorpe (in press) found that setting oneself the goal
to stop smoking can be facilitated by mentally contrasting
the feared future of negative health consequences with the
current positive reality of still having a healthy body.
The mediating processes of mental contrasting pertain
to energization (Oettingen, Mayer, Sevincer, et al., 2009).
Specifically, mentally contrasting a desired future with
obstacles of present reality leads to energization, which
in turn creates goal commitments strong enough to lead
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to effective goal striving and successful goal attainment.
Mediating effects of energization on goal commitment are
shown on physiological indicators of energization (e.g.,
systolic blood pressure) as well as on experiential indica-
tors (e.g., self-report of feeling energized). Mental con-
trasting also spurs planning, a known cognitive mediator
between expectations of success and goal commitment
(Oettingen & Stephens, 2009).
Mental contrasting, because it is a problem-solving strat-
egy, necessitates heightened cognitive activity. A recent
experiment attesting to this idea used continuous magne-
toencephalography, a brain imaging technique measuring
magnetic fields produced by electrical activity in the brain
(Achtziger, Fehr, Oettingen, Gollwitzer, & Rockstroh,
2009). Mental contrasting, as compared with indulging
or simply resting, produced heightened brain activity in
areas associated with working memory, episodic memory,
intention maintenance, action preparation, and vivid visu-
alization. That is, mental contrasting implies vividly imag-
ining a desired future, anticipating hindrances to realizing
this future, and making plans on how to overcome these
barriers. The brain activity associated with indulging, on
the other hand, did not differ from resting.
Given this latter finding, one might think that indulging
in the future could also potentially lead to strong goal
commitments—if individuals were to engage only in
highly positive fantasies about the future. But research
on engaging in positive versus negative fantasies about
the future speaks against this argument. Oettingen and
Wadden (1991) observed that obese women who would
spontaneously indulge in positive fantasies about their
weight loss were less successful in achieving a lower body
mass (after 4 months and 2 years) than were obese women
whose spontaneously produced fantasies were more nega-
tive. Moreover, Oettingen and Mayer (2002) observed that
people who indulge in positive fantasies (valence and fre-
quency) show comparatively weaker goal commitments (as
assessed by their efforts to strive for the goal) in the areas
of academic achievement (i.e., achieving a good grade in
a psychology class), professional achievement (i.e., find-
ing a job after graduation), interpersonal relations (i.e.,
finding a romantic partner), and health (i.e., recovering
from hip surgery). Importantly, it did not matter whether
the spontaneously produced positive fantasies pertained
to the desired outcome or to the ways of getting there. Also,
goal commitment in these studies was assessed 2 weeks or
even 2 years after the assessment of the spontaneously pro-
duced positive future fantasies.
At first, the reported findings seem to be in contrast
to research observing the facilitating effects of posi-
tive affect on performance in executive-functions tasks
(Dreisbach & Goschke, 2004; Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2008;
CH08.indd 275
Conscious Goal Pursuit 275
Kazén & Kuhl, 2005). However, these facilitating effects
evince for individuals who perform these tasks while
being in a positive affective state. Note that in the studies
reported earlier, performance was assessed long after the
hype produced by the positive affective state had van-
ished. Therefore, performance was a function of goal com-
mitment, and a binding goal commitment cannot emerge
when people indulge in their wishes and fantasies about
the future.
A further strategy of goal setting is suggested by
the mindset theory of action phases (Gollwitzer, 1990;
Heckhausen & Gollwitzer, 1987). This theory maintains
that setting goals means selecting one of many wishes and
deciding to realize it. The theory posits that goal pursuit
has multiple stages, called action phases, that people need
to successfully navigate to attain a goal: the predecision,
the preaction, the action, and the postaction phases. Each
phase is characterized by a distinct task that must be accom-
plished, and engaging in each of these tasks produces a
typical mindset that facilitates task completion. Setting
a goal is the result of navigating the predecisional phase.
Assuming that people generally entertain more wishes
than they have time or means to realize, they face the task
of having to decide among the wishes to accomplish at least
some of them. The deliberation of desirability and feasibil-
ity guides this decision. Accordingly, whenever people start
to deliberate their wishes, cognitive procedures become
activated that allow for open-minded processing of avail-
able information (Fujita, Gollwitzer, & Oettingen, 2007),
tune people toward processing information related to the
desirability and feasibility of their wishes (Gollwitzer,
Heckhausen, & Steller, 1990), and allow even-handed
(impartial) and objective (realistic) analysis of this infor-
mation (Armor & Taylor, 2003; Bayer & Gollwitzer, 2005;
Gagné & Lydon, 2001a, 2001b; Gollwitzer & Kinney,
1989; Taylor & Gollwitzer, 1995).
Mindset theory assumes that the transition from the pre-
decisional phase to the preaction phase takes the form of
a resolution that leads to a determination to act. Through
this resolution, the desired end-state specified by the
wish becomes a goal that the individual feels committed
to achieve. According to mindset theory, the desirability
and feasibility of a wish need to be fully and completely
deliberated before people can move from indecisiveness
to decisiveness. Accordingly, when people feel that they have
deliberated enough, they should be able to justify to them-
selves that they can now make such a move (i.e., “cross the
Rubicon”). Indeed, Gollwitzer, Heckhausen, and Ratajczak
(1990) observed that as-yet-undecided people were more
likely to make a decision after they had been asked to
list likely positive and negative, short-term and long-
term consequences of goal attainment and to judge the
12/18/09 2:40:03 PM
 276 Motivation
likelihood of goal attainment. Importantly, another strategy
helped people decide among wishes: When undecided
people were lured into planning the implementation of the
wish on the pretense that a resolution to act on the wish
had already occurred, they became more likely to make
and commit themselves to a decision.
Goal Striving
Once people have set themselves goals, it cannot be
assumed that attaining the goal is inevitable; rather, only
the first step has been taken. People need then to move
on and to engage in goal striving. Whether a desired goal
is attained depends on how well this goal striving is exe-
cuted. Successful goal striving depends first on what kind
of goals people have set for themselves; again, the relevant
variables are goal content and how this content is struc-
tured or framed. However, successful goal striving also
depends on coping effectively with a few typical problems:
initiating goal-directed actions, persisting in the face of dif-
ficulties, shielding the goal from distractions, disengaging
from ineffective means, and not overextending oneself.
This self-regulatory issue of what people can do to make
their goal striving more effective in the face of these prob-
lems (i.e., the effective self-regulation of goal striving) is
discussed in the section following those on goal content
and goal framing.
Goal Content
Goal content strongly affects the chances of implementing
a goal successfully. Ryan et al. (1996) have argued that
goals of autonomy, competence, and social integration
favor creativity, cognitive flexibility, deep processing
of information, and effective coping with failure. These
effects are assumed to be mediated by an intrinsic self-
regulation (see the self-concordance model by Sheldon &
Elliot, 1999), because the needs of autonomy, compe-
tence, and social integration are associated with intrinsic
goal striving in line with a person’s interests or core values
rather than with extrinsic goal striving in line with envi-
ronmental pressures or internal sanctions. Intrinsic goal
striving is preferred by individuals with positive self-
regard (Judge, Bono, Erez, & Locke, 2005), and it can
be facilitated from outside by teachers who provide
autonomy support (e.g., when law school faculty provide au-
tonomy support, grade point average improves; Sheldon &
Krieger, 2007). Moreover, intrinsic goal striving fosters not
only the attainment of behavioral goals but also the attainment
of goals that pertain to cognitive and affective responses (e.g.,
the goal to evaluate others in a fair, nonprejudicial manner
as assessed by implicit and explicit measures of prejudice;
Legault, Green-Demers, Grant, & Chung, 2007). The positive
CH08.indd 276
effects of intrinsic goal striving extend beyond the indi-
vidual. Gore and Cross (2006) observed that goals based on
intrinsic reasons implicating others (e.g., the people involved
make it fun or it is important to the people close to me) also
facilitate goal attainment.
Goal striving based on autonomy, competence, and
social integration needs has also been analyzed with respect
to subjective well-being (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Such goals
are observed to be positively associated with high well-
being and life satisfaction, whereas goals of making money,
becoming famous, and acquiring high status are negatively
related. The latter is particularly true for individuals who
feel highly efficacious, implying that people who suc-
cessfully attain materialistic goals are particularly at risk
for low well-being (Kasser & Ryan, 1993). More recent
research on the link between goal striving and well-being
has found that when it comes to striving for goals that sat-
isfy autonomy, competence, and social integration needs,
the balance of meeting these goals also matters (Sheldon &
Niemiec, 2006). People who experience balanced need sat-
isfaction report higher well-being than those with the same
sum score but high variability in need satisfaction.
Recent research also suggests that the two intrinsic
reasons for striving for academic success—having joy
and fun during striving versus feeling it to be important
to strive for academic success—have differential effects
on well-being (Burton, Lydon, D’Alessandro, & Koestner,
2006). Whereas striving for fun leads to high well-being
independent of the performance level achieved, striving
because it is personally important (also referred to as iden-
tified striving) leads to well-being that is contingent on the
achieved performance level. Imagine a scientist who writes
a manuscript because it is fun versus a scientist who
writes because writing is felt as important, and assume that
both scientists submit their manuscript for publication. The
Burton et al. (2006) research suggests that the latter should
be in a worse position to cope with a rejection letter than
the former.
Brunstein, Schultheiss, and Grässmann (1998) have
shown that the relation between a person’s progress toward
a personal goal and well-being is moderated by the fit
between the content of the goal and the person’s motive
disposition. For instance, people with strong achieve-
ment and power needs (measured as implicit motives by
the Thematic Apperception Test; McClelland, 1985b)
who have goals with the same theme report higher emo-
tional well-being when progressing toward their goals
than those whose needs and goals do not match. The same
is true of people with strong affiliation and intimacy needs
who have goals with the same theme. Differential con-
sequences of successful goal striving on well-being also
relate to friendship goals based either on compassion or on
12/18/09 2:40:04 PM

promoting a positive self-image. Whereas the former type
of goal striving produces feelings of closeness and con-
nectedness, the latter type leads to loneliness and feelings
of anxiety (Crocker & Canevello, 2008). Finally, a recent
meta-analysis on the relative consequences of striving
for cooperative, competitive, and individualistic goals for
achievement in adolescents suggests that higher achieve-
ment and more positive peer relationships are associated
with cooperative rather than competitive or individualistic
goal striving (Roseth, Johnson, & Johnson, 2008).
Goal Structure
In addition to goal content, structural features of set goals
affect whether goal striving is successful or not. For exam-
ple, goal striving is said to depend on the strength of goals
(intentions; Ajzen, 1985, 1991; Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980).
But most tests of this goal–behavior relationship involve
only correlational studies that preclude causal inferences.
A recent meta-analysis by Webb and Sheeran (2006) took a
closer look at this assumption by selecting studies where the
strength of the goal was manipulated relative to a control
group, and differences in subsequent goal-directed behavior
were observed. They found 47 experimental tests of the
intention (goal)–behavior relationship that actually used
an experimental manipulation of the strength of the goal
(intention). The meta-analysis showed that the medium-
to-large change in strength of intention (d ⫽ .66) led to a
small-to-medium change in respective behavior (d ⫽ .36).
But success in goal striving not only depends on the
strength of the goal; it also depends on what kind of aspi-
ration or standard is specified in the goal (i.e., whether
the person wants to achieve a lot or only a little). Locke
and Latham (2002, 2006) report that participants are more
likely to attain challenging goals spelled out in specific
terms than to attain moderately specific goals or chal-
lenging but vague (i.e., “do your best”) goals. This effect
has several prerequisites: frequent performance feedback,
strong goal commitment, low goal complexity, and avail-
ability to the individual of necessary skills and means.
What does not seem to matter is whether goal setting is
determined from outside (assigned goals), freely chosen
by the individual (self-set goals), or chosen in interaction
with others (participative goals). As potential mediators
of the goal-specificity effect, Locke and Latham point to
heightened persistence, attention to the execution of goal-
directed behaviors, greater readiness to plan the goal pur-
suit, and feedback and self-monitoring advantages.
Goal implementation is also affected by the structural
features of time frame and goal orientation (i.e., approach
vs. avoidance orientation, promotion vs. prevention, learn-
ing vs. performance orientation, low vs. high psychological
distance, and low vs. high identity relation). Note that
CH08.indd 277
Conscious Goal Pursuit 277
the earlier discussion of goal setting pertained to what
determines that a person sets goals with various structural
features. What follows is a discussion of the kinds of con-
sequences choosing one or the other structural framing has
for successful goal attainment.
Bandura and Schunk (1981) argue that the time frame
of a set goal can be broken into many small units or one
large unit. Children who were uninterested and performed
poorly in mathematics pursued a program of self-directed
learning (a total of 42 pages of instructions) under con-
ditions involving either a distal goal only (42 pages in
seven sessions) or the distal goal plus proximal subgoals
(6 pages per session for seven sessions). Additional proxi-
mal goals improved the children’s arithmetic scores by
providing more performance feedback, thus making it
easier to monitor progress in goal pursuit. However, this
feedback advantage may turn into a disadvantage when the
goals require inhibition (e.g., goals to refrain from chat-
ting in class), as people more readily discover failures that
may cause them to give up prematurely. Indeed, Cochran
and Tesser (1996) observed that the goal proximity effect
reverses for goals framed in terms of preventing failures.
Framing of orientation of social goals in terms of
approach and avoidance clearly affects their attainment. For
instance, striving for the goal of making new friends versus
striving for the goal of not being lonely produces quite differ-
ent outcomes. With respect to the outcome variable of satis-
faction with social bonds versus loneliness, the latter leads
to less favorable results than the former (Elliot, Gable, &
Mapes, 2006; Strachman & Gable, 2006). Recent research
suggests that these differences are mediated by differential
attention and memory processes, differential interpretation
and weighting of available information, and differential
evaluation of the progress made toward goal attainment.
Higgins (2000; Förster, Higgins, & Idson, 1998;
Shah, Higgins, & Friedman, 1998) reports that approach
goals benefit more from goal striving that uses eagerness-
related approach strategies (such as pulling things toward
oneself) than from vigilance-related avoidance strategies
(such as pushing things away from oneself), whereas the
reverse is true for avoidance goals. The assumed reason
for this is value from fit. Higgins (2000, 2006) argues that
people engage more in goal striving when the strategies
used match the goal orientation (i.e., eagerness strategies to
positive outcome focus and vigilance strategies to negative
outcome focus) than when there is a mismatch (i.e., vigi-
lance strategies to positive outcome focus and eagerness
strategies to negative outcome focus). This heightened
engagement in turn leads to higher perceived value and
strength of attraction to this outcome.
Framing goals in terms of learning versus performance
has been found to have different effects on achievement
12/18/09 2:40:04 PM
 278 Motivation
(Dweck, 1996). Learning goals lead to better achievement
than performance goals because the former allow for more
effective coping with negative feedback than the latter. For
people with performance goals, negative feedback signals
failure and lack of ability and thus causes them to give up
prematurely. People with learning goals, on the other hand,
view negative feedback as a setback and as a valuable cue
on how to focus on new strategies, thus furthering goal
attainment.
Elliot and Church (1997) observed that performance
goals are less detrimental when they are framed as
approach goals (e.g., “I want to get good grades”) rather
than avoidance goals (e.g., “I do not want to get bad
grades”). Recent studies by Darnon, Harackiewicz, Butera,
Mugny, and Quiamzade (2007), however, show that this
is only true when the achievement context does not allow
for the emergence of fear of failure (i.e., the task is easy or
the feedback on achievement is unambiguously positive).
Also, the effort that people put into performing a task (El-
Alayli, 2006) depends on whether the framing of the task
goal is in line with their naïve theories of whether the impli-
cated personal attribute is malleable (incremental theory)
or fixed (entity theory). This finding is in line with obser-
vations by Plaks and Stecher (2007), indicating that viola-
tions of both implicit theories lead to comparatively more
anxiety and impaired subsequent task performance (i.e.,
when entity theorists learn that performance has declined
and when incremental theorists learn that performance
has not improved despite having had access to a learning
opportunity).
Recent research on the framing of achievement goals in
terms of learning versus performance has also investigated
its influence on interactions in social achievement situa-
tions (Poortvliet, Janssen, Van Yperen, & Van de Vliert,
2007). People with learning goals are oriented reciprocally.
They give information openly, and they process received
information with a focus on those pieces of information
that fit well and add value to their chosen task strategy. On
the other hand, people with performance goals are oriented
exploitatively. They provide information to others reluc-
tantly, and they process received information with a sus-
picious attitude that leads them to focus on detecting and
disregarding low-quality information that might hurt their
task performance.
Psychological distance is another important structural
feature. Liberman, Trope, McCrea, and Sherman (2007)
had research participants indicate either why or how
another person would perform an activity (e.g., open a
bank account) and then asked them to guess when this per-
son would enact the activity. As it turned out, “why” con-
struals of the activity revealed longer time estimates than
“how” construals. Interestingly, this effect also applied to
CH08.indd 278
a person’s own behavioral goals. Again, “why” construals
led to more delayed enactment estimates than “how”
construals. This effect was replicated even when induced
by other means than “why” versus “how” construal (e.g., by
having participants think about implicated traits vs. means
or describing the activity in concrete, low-level terms, such
as “checking a paper for spelling and typing errors,” vs.
abstract, high-level terms, such as “proofread a paper”).
Most importantly, McCrea, Liberman, Trope, and Sherman
(2008) assessed actual enactment times of intended activ-
ity (i.e., returning a filled-out questionnaire to the experi-
menter on time) that was framed in terms of high versus
low psychological distance. Even though psychologi-
cal distance was again manipulated by various methods,
low psychological distance led to earlier enactment of
the intended activity than high psychological distance. It
appears, then, that framing a goal in terms of high versus
low psychological distance engenders the risk of procrasti-
nating about the goal pursuit.
Finally, it matters whether a person frames a given
task goal in terms of its identity-relatedness. For instance,
the task of solving a certain arithmetic problem can be
approached with the goal of solving it effectively or the goal
of identifying oneself as a mathematician. The latter
goal has been referred to as a self-defining goal or iden-
tity goal, as it specifies an identity as a desired end-state.
Self-completion theory (Wicklund & Gollwitzer, 1982) pro-
poses that people who are committed to identity goals can
undertake various activities to claim identity-goal attain-
ment, because many behaviors indicate the possession
of such identities. For a scientist, for example, such self-
symbolizing activities might include engaging in professional
duties (e.g., giving lectures), making positive self-descriptions
(e.g., “I discovered a new principle!”), exerting identity-
relevant social influence (e.g., advising students), or acquiring
respective skills, tools, and material symbols (e.g., program-
ming skills, fast computers, or a large office).
Failing to perform an identity-relevant activity or lack-
ing an identity symbol produces a state of incompleteness;
to restore completeness, people engage in self-symbolizing
efforts (summary by Gollwitzer & Kirchhof, 1998). People
then emphasize the possession of alternative symbols or
set out to acquire new identity symbols (e.g., engaging
in identity-relevant activities, Brunstein & Gollwitzer,
1996; describing oneself as having the required personal-
ity attributes, Gollwitzer & Wicklund, 1985; or showing
off relevant status symbols, Harmon-Jones, Schmeichel, &
Harmon-Jones, 2009). Importantly, affirming one’s gen-
eral self-integrity or bolstering one’s self-esteem are not
sufficient to offset incompleteness regarding an identity
goal; rather, one must acquire specific identity symbols
(Ledgerwood, Liviaton, & Carnevale, 2007).
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Research on self-completion theory has discovered that
a higher level of completeness is reached when a social
audience notices the individual’s self-symbolizing activi-
ties (Gollwitzer, 1986). In addition, incomplete individuals
are more concerned with finding an audience for their iden-
tity strivings than are completed individuals (Brunstein &
Gollwitzer, 1996). This self-symbolizing, however, has
its costs. Self-symbolizing individuals see others only in
terms of the potential to notice their compensatory efforts;
thus, they lack social sensitivity (Gollwitzer & Wicklund,
1985). Most interestingly, when people make public their
intention to acquire a certain self-definitional indicator
(e.g., when a person who wants to become a great stu-
dent publicly utters the behavioral intention to enroll in
an inspiring course), it turns out that actual efforts toward
completion are reduced (Gollwitzer, Sheeran, Michalski, &
Seifert, 2009). Apparently, when others take notice of a
stated identity-relevant behavioral intention, the superordi-
nate goal of claiming the identity is already reached; thus,
performing the intended behavior becomes less necessary.
This finding is in line with results of earlier self-completion
studies; public, positive self-descriptions claiming the
possession of an identity symbol produced the same sense
of self-definitional completeness as actual identity-relevant
achievements (Brunstein & Gollwitzer, 1996; Gollwitzer,
Wicklund, & Hilton, 1982). It is also consistent with the
general goal turnoff effect phenomenon discussed later in
this chapter.
Context Variables
Striving for a given goal depends on more than the con-
tent of the goal and its structural features. It also depends
on the context in which the person is situated. Although
context variables have not yet been analyzed with respect
to goal setting, research on context variables in goal striv-
ing differentiates various internal and external context
variables. Internal context variables relate to the person’s
affective state and the array of competing action tenden-
cies, whereas external variables are focused on the power
position of the goal striver.
Affective State In a series of studies, Tice, Bratslavsky,
and Baumeister (2001) focused on negative affect and
observed that feeling emotionally distraught (i.e., having
been asked to imagine that one has caused a traffic acci-
dent that killed a child) makes it difficult to follow through
with goals of not eating unhealthy food or delaying grati-
fication to attain better long-term rewards. Moreover, this
emotionally negative state intensifies procrastination: for
example, people did not use the time provided to study for
an upcoming test. In each study, it appeared that the reason
CH08.indd 279
Conscious Goal Pursuit 279
people did not act on their goals was simple: They felt that
inaction would alleviate their negative emotional states.
Positive affect, on the other hand, has been observed
to facilitate goal striving. In early childhood (2 to 4 years
of age), positive emotionality in children’s interactions
with their mothers facilitates the difficult self-regulation
required for tasks such as slowing down, lowering one’s
voice, or delaying the unwrapping of a received gift.
Research with adults has focused on how positive affect
achieves this positive effect. Kazén and Kuhl (2005;
Kuhl & Kazén, 1999) argue that even though decreases
in positive affect make it easier to maintain an intention in
working memory, it takes an increase in positive affect to
facilitate the successful behavioral implementation of dif-
ficult intentions (e.g., to do well on the Stroop task). Tamir
and Robinson (2007) report data suggesting that positive
moods (measured or induced) are associated with selec-
tive attention to reward stimuli. Gable and Harmon-Jones
(2008) observed that positive affect induced by imagin-
ing rewards (such as tasty desserts) produces the reduced
breadth of attentional focus, which facilitates focusing on
specific action tendencies and thus tenacious goal striving.
Apparently, positive affect makes people focus on reward-
ing stimuli that in turn produce a narrowing of attentional
focus that makes it easy to strive for the goal at hand.
Given that positive affect seems to foster goal striving
on well-structured tasks (e.g., Stroop and task-switching
paradigms), this does not imply that positive affect is
beneficial to striving for all kinds of tasks. Complex and
ill-defined tasks require that people anticipate potential
obstacles and hindrances. This is easier when people
experience negative affect. Not surprisingly, then, posi-
tive affect was found to be a hindrance for complex and
ill-defined tasks rather than a facilitator of goal attainment
(Markman, Lindberg, Kray, & Galinsky, 2007; Oettingen &
Mayer, 2002; Taylor, Pham, Rivkin, & Armor, 1998). And
people are found to prefer to be in negative emotional
states if those states better facilitate goal striving: Soldiers
entering battle or football players during a game prefer an
angry, aggressive (negative) mood rather than a relaxed,
positive mood (Tamir, 2009).
Competing Action Tendencies The success of goal striv-
ing depends on whether it stays undisturbed by competing
action tendencies. Kuhl’s action control theory (Kuhl &
Beckmann, 1994) postulates that for an ordered action
sequence to occur the striving for a current guiding goal
must stay shielded from other competing responses (e.g.,
the goal of making a phone call must not be derailed by the
competing response to tidy one’s desk). In such shielding,
Kuhl’s action control theory differentiates several control
mechanisms, such as attention control, emotion control,
12/18/09 2:40:06 PM
 280 Motivation
and environment control. High environment control, for
example, is achieved when the situation in which the focal
goal is to be enacted is freed from distractions. Whether and
how effectively these control mechanisms operate depends
on the current control mode of the individual: action ori-
entation is seen as beneficial, whereas state orientation is
seen as a handicap. The former is characterized by a con-
centration on planning and initiating goal-directed actions,
as well as responding flexibly to situational demands; the
latter is associated with failing to disengage from unattain-
able goals, dwelling on setbacks, or thinking unrealistically
about future successes. An individual’s orientation may be
influenced by situational variables (e.g., surprising events
or persistent failures), but it is grounded in one’s personal
disposition.
Interestingly, state-oriented individuals readily misper-
ceive assigned goals as self-generated (Kazén, Baumann, &
Kuhl, 2003); this finding has given rise to a new theoretical
perspective called Personality Systems Interaction theory
(Kuhl, 2000). This theory sees the control of goal-directed
action as a result of the interaction of various mental
subsystems (i.e., intention memory, extension memory,
intuitive behavior control, and object recognition) under
conditions of change from low to high positive affect ver-
sus change from low to high negative affect. From this per-
spective, action versus state orientation is understood as a
parameter that modulates the cooperation between these
systems, thus leading to different kinds of action control
with different outcomes.
The analysis of the question of what makes for effective
goal shielding has received much research attention. For
instance, Shah, Friedman, and Kruglanski (2002) observed
that high commitment to the focal goal facilitates goal
shielding (measured in terms of reduced accessibility of
a competing goal), whereas feeling anxious and sad hin-
ders it. Moreover, when people consider the progress they
have made toward the goal, there is less goal shielding, as
people open up to competing goals; this effect occurs even
when people are told merely to intend to make progress in
the future (Fishbach & Dhar, 2005). However, this nega-
tive effect of goal progress on goal shielding should only
be expected if the goal-directed actions taken (or intended)
are interpreted by the individual as completing the goal;
if the action is instead interpreted as indicating a strong
commitment to the focal goal, then improved goal shield-
ing would be expected (Fishbach, Dhar, & Zhang, 2006;
Koo & Fishbach, 2008). In line with this reasoning, Louro,
Pieters, and Zeelenberg (2007) report on the basis of diary
and experimental studies that the effects of perceived prox-
imity to the goal are moderated by the experience of posi-
tive or negative goal-related emotions. That is, when the
attainment of the focal goal is remote, positive emotions
CH08.indd 280
promote goal shielding whereas negative emotions hinder
it; in this case, positive emotions apparently indicate a
feeling of high goal commitment. When closer to the goal,
positive emotions decrease shielding of the focal goal
whereas negative emotions prompt increased goal shield-
ing; here, positive emotions apparently indicate a feeling
of high goal attainment.
Finally, from a cognitive, executive-functions perspec-
tive, goal shielding in the service of a focal goal must strike
a balance between two antagonistic challenges: on the one
hand, the focal goal must be shielded from interferences,
and thus distracting information should be inhibited; on
the other hand, the environment must be monitored for
potentially significant information that may necessitate
a goal switch (background monitoring). The benefits of
goal shielding (i.e., preventing interferences) incur costs
in terms of overlooking significant information occurring in
the background; the benefits of background monitoring
(i.e., noticing task-irrelevant but potentially significant
stimuli) incur costs in terms of increased susceptibility
to interference. How does the human brain handle this
dilemma? Using a prospective memory task paradigm,
Goschke and Dreisbach (2008) observed that goal shield-
ing is intensified at the cost of background monitoring
when the former is most needed (i.e., when goal striving
is at risk of being derailed) and background monitoring is
reinstated when goal striving runs smoothly (i.e., when
goal shielding is no longer needed).
Goal systems theory provides a further cognitive per-
spective on goal shielding (Kruglanski et al., 2002). The
theory has three major tenets. First, any given goal can
be connected to any sensible number of means. If a goal
is connected to six means, for instance, then the goal can
be attained through any of these means or any combina-
tion of them. Said differently, there may be many means
to a given goal (equifinality configuration), and there may
be many goals linked to a single means (multifinality
configuration). Second, it is always the active (focal) goal
that captures the means for its accomplishment. Given that
cognitive resources are limited, investing attention and
effort into a focal goal implies removal of resources from
a competing goal (allocational property). Attainment of
the focal goal becomes more likely, and attainment of the
competing goal becomes less likely. Third, not all means
of a given goal are equally substitutable (contextual depen-
dence property). Only contextually available means can
be considered for selection, and among these available
means the most salient, vivid, and accessible will win out.
Moreover, context matters, as some contexts render certain
means more desirable than others. Based on these consid-
erations, recent research shows that when a given means
for goal striving is perceived as serving multiple goals, it is
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less likely to be selected or valued as highly instrumental
than when it is perceived as serving only one goal (Zhang,
Fishbach, & Kruglanski, 2007). Accordingly, goal striv-
ing should be less vulnerable to disruptions (i.e., should be
associated with enhanced goal shielding) when it is based
on using means unique to that goal.
Power Position Researchers have focused on the contex-
tual variable of being in a position of power versus being
powerless. Power has been manipulated experimentally in
several ways: participants remember an incident in which
they had power over someone or someone had power over
them, they imagine or act in a powerful role (manager or
evaluator) or a powerless role (subordinate or worker), or
power is primed outside of awareness, for example, by hav-
ing participants perform a scrambled sentences task using
words related to having power (“authority” and “dominate”)
or to lacking power (“subordinate” and “obey”). These stud-
ies have shown that not only do powerful (as compared with
powerless) participants relate differently to people by treat-
ing them as a means to the attainment of their goals (i.e.,
objectivation; Gruenfeld, Inesi, Magee, & Galinsky, 2008)
but they also differ in the ways in which they strive for per-
sonal goals.
Guinote (2007) observed that people in power procras-
tinate less in pursuing their goals, they persist longer in
the face of difficulties, they show more willingness to try
different strategies to attain the goal, and they more readily
seize good opportunities to make goal-directed responses.
In addition, they more readily recognize whether a given
situation can be used to serve their goals and then allow
suitable situations to guide their behavior (Guinote, 2008).
All of this appears to be facilitated by a change in execu-
tive functioning. Smith, Jostmann, Galinsky, and van Dijk
(2008) report that powerful individuals are better than
powerless ones at updating goal-relevant information (i.e.,
new information is monitored for goal relevance, and rel-
evant information replaces old, irrelevant information
in working memory). They are also better at inhibiting
responses that may interfere with the present goal and at
planning by continuously switching between the main goal
and the respective subgoals. Finally, these powerful partic-
ipants show less goal neglect (i.e., forgetting to strive for
the goal; Kane & Engle, 2003) by actively maintaining the
goal in working memory. Future research could profitably
explore the extent to which these effects are mediated by
heightened efficacy beliefs or to which control beliefs are
likely to be stimulated by the power manipulations.
Self-Regulation of Goal Striving
The preceding discussion considered goal content and
structure, as well as contextual variables (e.g., relative
CH08.indd 281
Conscious Goal Pursuit 281
power), as determinants of successful goal striving and
goal attainment. The self-regulation approach to goal striv-
ing, on the other hand, focuses on how the individual can
master the problems inherent in goal striving. To attain the
set goal, the individual needs to seize opportunities to act,
ward off distractions, flexibly step up efforts in the face of
difficulties, bypass barriers, and compensate for failures and
shortcomings. Various theories address how the individual
can effectively solve these problems of goal striving.
Planning Goal Implementation As noted earlier, the
mindset model of action phases (Gollwitzer, 1990;
Heckhausen & Gollwitzer, 1987) conceives of goal pur-
suit as solving a series of consecutive tasks. The task
that follows goal setting is that of getting started with
goal-directed responses and then bringing goal striving
to a successful end. The model assumes that becoming
intensively involved with this task activates a functional
mindset, namely, the implemental mindset. This mindset
is characterized by several functional cognitive features
(see summary by Gollwitzer & Bayer, 1999). Participants
become closed-minded (no longer distracted by irrel-
evant information) and process information related to
goal implementation effectively (e.g., information on the
sequencing of actions; Gollwitzer et al., 1990). Moreover,
the desirability of the set goal becomes enhanced through the
favoring of pros over cons, and the feasibility of the set
goal is enhanced by an illusory optimism. This optimism
extends to an illusion of control over uncontrolled out-
comes (Gollwitzer & Kinney, 1989) and occurs even in
individuals who are depressed. Self-perception of impor-
tant personal attributes (e.g., cheerfulness, smartness, and
social sensitivity) is strengthened, while perceived vulner-
ability to both controllable and uncontrollable risks (e.g.,
developing an addiction to prescription drugs and losing a
partner to an early death, respectively) is lowered (Taylor &
Gollwitzer, 1995).
These cognitive features of the implemental mindset
mediate the positive effects that planning how to imple-
ment the goal has on the rate of goal attainment (Armor &
Taylor, 2003). Implemental mindsets also attenuate the
classic problems associated with goal striving, such as
doubting the attractiveness of the pursued goal (Gagné &
Lydon, 2001a, 2001b) and showing too much or too little
persistence (Brandstätter & Frank, 2002). Both the posi-
tive effects and the problems occur because people in
an implemental mindset feel less ambivalent about the
attitudes they hold toward common issues (objects,
persons, or ideas) of daily life (Henderson, de Liver, &
Gollwitzer, 2008); instead, they show heightened attitude
strength that more effectively translates their attitudes
into behavior.
12/18/09 2:40:07 PM
 282 Motivation
Planning can also be used to add implementation
intentions to set goals (or goal intentions). Set goals only
commit an individual to attaining the specified, desired
outcome; they do not commit the individual to when,
where, and how to act toward the goal. Such additional
commitments can be facilitated through the formation of
implementation intentions, having the basic format of “If
I encounter situation x, then I will perform the goal-
directed behavior y.” Thus, an implementation intention
that serves the goal intention to “get an A in Introductory
Psychology” would follow the form “if situation Y arises
(e.g., my roommates ask me to go out tonight), then I will
perform behavior Z (e.g., I will say that I will join them
next week when my exam is over).” Note that this type
of if–then planning commits the individual to acting in a
specific, goal-directed way (the “then” component of the
plan) whenever the critical cue selected in the “if” compo-
nent is encountered. In contrast, the more reflective way
of planning referred to as process simulation by Taylor et
al. (1998) only explores possible ways to achieve a goal;
it does not yet commit the person to one preferred way of
implementing a goal, as is the case with implementation
intentions (Faude-Koivisto, Würz, & Gollwitzer, 2008).
Implementation intentions have been shown to provide
benefits beyond those of goal intentions: A meta-analysis
by Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006) involving more than
8,000 participants in 94 independent studies reported an
effect size of d ⫽ .65. This medium-to-large effect size
(Cohen, 1992) represents the additional facilitation of goal
achievement by implementation intentions compared with
goal intentions alone. As goal intentions by themselves
already have a facilitating effect on behavior enactment
(Webb & Sheeran, 2006), the size of this effect is remark-
able. But how do implementation-intention effects on goal
attainment come about? Gollwitzer (1993, 1999) suggests
that the mental links created by implementation intentions
facilitate goal attainment on the basis of psychological
processes that relate to both the anticipated situation (the
“if ” part of the plan) and the intended behavior (the “then”
part of the plan). Because forming an implementation
intention implies the selection of a critical future situation,
the mental representation of this situation becomes highly
activated and hence more accessible (Gollwitzer, 1999).
This heightened accessibility of the “if” part of the plan
has been observed in several studies (e.g., Parks-Stamm,
Gollwitzer, & Oettingen, 2007; Webb & Sheeran, 2007,
2008; Wieber & Sassenberg, 2006). It puts people in a
good position to identify and take notice of the critical sit-
uation when they subsequently encounter it (e.g., Webb &
Sheeran, 2004). For instance, participants who formed
implementation intentions to collect a coupon were faster
to recognize words related to the location of the coupon
CH08.indd 282
(e.g., corridor or red door) compared with participants
who only formed the goal intention to collect the cou-
pon; and implementation-intention participants also were
more likely to collect the coupon subsequently (Aarts,
Dijksterhuis, & Midden, 1999).
Implementation intentions also forge a strong associa-
tion between the specified opportunity and the specified
response (Webb & Sheeran, 2007, 2008). These strong
links then automate the initiation of the goal-directed
response specified in the if–then plan; that is, action initia-
tion exhibits features of automaticity, including immediacy,
efficiency, and redundancy of conscious intent. Thus, peo-
ple no longer have to deliberate about when and how they
should act if they have already formed an implementation
intention—unlike people who have formed mere goal inten-
tions. Indeed, if–then planners act quickly (Gollwitzer &
Brandstätter, 1997, study 3), deal efficiently with cogni-
tive load (Brandstätter, Lengfelder, & Gollwitzer, 2001),
and even respond to the critical situational cue when it is
presented subliminally (Bayer, Achtziger, Gollwitzer, &
Moskowitz, 2009).
These component processes of implementation intentions
(enhanced cue accessibility and automation of respond-
ing) are the underlying reason if–then planning enables
people to effectively seize good opportunities to move
toward their goals. Forming if–then plans thus strategi-
cally automates goal striving (Gollwitzer & Schaal, 1998)
because people delegate control of goal-directed behav-
iors to preselected situational cues with the explicit pur-
pose of reaching their goals (i.e., a conscious act of will
produces subsequent automatic action initiation). Given
these special features of implementation intentions,
researchers have explored whether people benefit from
forming implementation intentions when they are con-
fronted with the most challenging problems of goal imple-
mentation: getting started, staying on track, calling a halt,
and not overextending oneself.
Numerous studies suggest that the problems of get-
ting started on goals can be solved effectively by forming
implementation intentions. For instance, Gollwitzer and
Brandstätter (1997, study 2) analyzed a goal intention (i.e.,
writing a report about how the participants spent Christmas
Eve) that had to be performed at a time period when peo-
ple are commonly busy with other things (i.e., during the
subsequent Christmas holiday). Still, research participants
who had furnished their goal intention with an implemen-
tation intention that specified when, where, and how they
wanted to start this project were about three times as likely
to actually write the report as mere goal intention partici-
pants. Similarly, Oettingen et al. (2000, study 3) observed
that implementation intentions helped people act on their
task goal of performing weekly math homework over
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1 month on time (e.g., at 10 AM every Wednesday over the
next 4 weeks).
Other studies have examined the ability of implemen-
tation intentions to initiate goal striving where there is an
initial reluctance because the activities involved are some-
what unpleasant. For instance, implementation intentions
improved the success rates for the goals of performing
regular breast examinations (Orbell, Hodgkins, & Sheeran,
1997) or cervical cancer screenings (Sheeran & Orbell,
2000), resuming functional activity after joint replacement
surgery (Orbell & Sheeran, 2000), eating a low-fat diet
(Armitage, 2004), recycling (Holland, Aarts, & Langendam,
2006), and engaging in physical exercise (Milne, Orbell, &
Sheeran, 2002). Moreover, implementation intentions
were found to help attainment of goal intentions where it
is easy to forget to act (e.g., regular intake of vitamin pills,
Sheeran & Orbell, 1999, or the signing of work sheets with
the elderly; Chasteen, Park, & Schwarz, 2001).
Many goals cannot be accomplished by simple, discrete,
one-shot actions but require that people maintain their
efforts over an extended period. Staying on track may
get difficult when certain internal stimuli (e.g., being anx-
ious, tired, and overburdened) or external stimuli (e.g.,
temptations and distractions) are not conducive to goal real-
ization but instead generate interference that could poten-
tially derail the ongoing goal. Implementation intentions
facilitate the shielding of such goal striving from outside
interference by suppressing it. For instance, imagine some-
one has the goal of being supportive to friends. When
the friend surprises the person with an outrageous request,
she could prevent the unwanted unfriendly response by
forming suppression-oriented implementation intentions.
Such suppression-oriented implementation intentions
may take various forms: “And if my friend approaches
me with an outrageous request, then I will not respond in
an unfriendly manner!” or “. . . , then I will respond in a
friendly manner!” or “. . . , then I’ll ignore it!” Experimental
research on this issue by Gollwitzer and Schaal (1998) and
Mischel and Patterson (1978) has indicated that in general
the “ignore” plans seem the most effective of the three pos-
sible suppression plans.
Suppression-oriented implementation intentions have
also been found to effectively shield ongoing goal striv-
ing from disruptive inner states. Achtziger, Gollwitzer, and
Sheeran (2008) report a field experiment concerned with
dieting (study 1) in which goal shielding was supported by
suppression implementation intentions geared at control-
ling potentially interfering inner states (i.e., cravings for
junk food). In addition, forming implementation intentions
geared at stabilizing the ongoing goal striving can protect
it from getting derailed by adverse inner states (e.g., inap-
propriate moods, ego depletion, or irritation; Gollwitzer,
CH08.indd 283
Conscious Goal Pursuit 283
Bayer, & McCulloch, 2005). Using again the example of a
person who is approached by her friend with an outrageous
request, assume that this person is also tired or irritated and
thus particularly likely to respond in an unfriendly manner.
If, in advance, this person has stipulated in an implementa-
tion intention what topic she will converse about with her
friend, the critical interaction may simply run as planned
and being tired or irritated will fail to hurt the interaction
with her friend.
Implementation intentions not only help people move
smoothly and effectively toward a goal but also can be used
to redirect misplaced goal striving. To justify themselves
and their choices, people often fail to readily relinquish
chosen means and goals that turn out to be faulty (Brockner,
1992). Such escalation phenomena (also referred to as
“throwing good money after bad”) can be controlled by
the use of implementation intentions that specify when and
how to consider a switch to a different means or a different
goal (Henderson, Gollwitzer, & Oettingen, 2007).
Finally, when task performance is regulated by imple-
mentation intentions, it becomes easier not to overextend
oneself. Student participants who used implementation
intentions to perform a first difficult task did not show
reduced performance on a subsequent difficult task.
Whether the initial task was controlling emotions while
watching a humorous movie (Gollwitzer et al., 2005) or
performing a Stroop task (Webb & Sheeran, 2003, study 1),
implementation intentions successfully preserved self-
regulatory resources as demonstrated by greater persis-
tence on subsequent difficult tasks (i.e., solving difficult
anagrams).
Implementation intentions have been shown to help
people solve the major problems of goal striving (i.e., get-
ting started, staying on track, calling a halt, and not over-
extending oneself). But do these benefits persist when
goal striving is limited by conditions that seem quite resis-
tant to change by self-regulatory strategies? Bayer and
Gollwitzer (2007) found that implementation intentions
geared toward high self-efficacy facilitated higher scores
on math and intelligence tests, even though such perfor-
mances are known to be limited by the individual’s capa-
bilities in these domains. Implementation intentions also
helped people succeed in sports competitions (i.e., if–then
plans pertaining to effective coping with critical internal
and external situations; Achtziger et al., 2008, study 2) and
negotiate with others the distribution of limited resources
(i.e., if–then plans to make fair and cooperative counterof-
fers; Trötschel & Gollwitzer, 2007), even though in such
competitive situations a person’s goal striving is signifi-
cantly constrained by the opponents’ behavior.
Moreover, implementation intentions were found to
help goal striving even in cases where effective goal
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 284 Motivation
striving is threatened by competing habitual responses;
this seems to be true no matter whether these automatic
competing responses are behavioral (e.g., habitual classifi-
cation responses in a Simon task, Cohen, Bayer, Jaudas, &
Gollwitzer, 2008; habitual littering, Holland et al., 2006; or
habitual coping with relationship threats, Lydon, Menzies-
Toman, Burton, & Bell, 2008), cognitive (e.g., habitual
stereotypical and prejudicial responses; Gollwitzer &
Schaal, 1998; Stewart & Payne, 2008), or affective (e.g.,
habitual disgust and fear responses; Schweiger Gallo, Keil,
McCulloch, Rockstroh, & Gollwitzer, 2009). The latter
findings suggest that forming implementation intentions
turns top-down control by a person’s goals into bottom-
up control by the situational cues specified in the “if ”
component.
This strategic switch from top-down control of one’s
actions by set goals to bottom-up control through speci-
fied situational cues is typical of habitual or automatic
behavior. In a recent functional magnetic resonance
imaging study conducted by Gilbert, Gollwitzer, Cohen,
Oettingen, and Burgess (2009), brain activity in lateral area
10 was observed to move toward medial area 10 when par-
ticipants switched from performing an executive-functions
task by the guidance of a goal intention to performing the
same type of task by the guidance of an implementation
intention; on the basis of an extensive meta-analysis on
various executive-functions tasks, it is known that lat-
eral and medial area 10 are implicated in top-down and
bottom-up action control, respectively (Burgess, Simons,
Dumontheil, & Gilbert, 2005). This switch in action con-
trol from top-down to bottom-up also explains why special
populations that are known to suffer from ineffective
conscious control of their thoughts, feelings, and actions
(e.g., heroin addicts during withdrawal and schizophrenic
patients, Brandstätter et al., 2001, studies 1 and 2; frontal
lobe patients, Lengfelder & Gollwitzer, 2001; and children
with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, Gawrilow &
Gollwitzer, 2008; Paul et al., 2007) benefit greatly from
forming implementation intentions when initiating goal-
directed actions or inhibiting unwanted habitual actions.
Various moderators of the effects of implementation
intentions on goal attainment pertain to characteristics of
the superordinate goal and the individual. One goal char-
acteristic that moderates the success of implementation
intentions is the extent to which it reflects the individu-
al’s actual interests and values. Koestner, Lekes, Powers,
and Chicoine (2002) have shown that the positive effects
of implementation intentions on goal attainment partially
depend on whether they are formed in the service of intrin-
sic (high autonomy) versus extrinsic (low autonomy) goals.
Implementation intentions that advance intrinsic goals are
more effective than those that advance extrinsic goals.
CH08.indd 284
Another characteristic of the goal that moderates the
effectiveness of implementation intentions is its difficulty.
Implementation intentions typically benefit difficult rather
than easy goals (Gollwitzer & Brandstätter, 1997), because
easy goals do not need the assistance of implementation
intentions to be successfully completed. Moreover, because
implementation intentions are subordinate to goal inten-
tions, the strength of implementation-intention effects is
positively related to the strength of the goal’s commitment
and activation state (Sheeran, Webb, & Gollwitzer, 2005).
Implementation intentions respect the status of the super-
ordinate goal (strength and activation), guaranteeing that
the goal striving produced by implementation intentions
is both tenacious and flexible. Recent research shows that
forming implementation intentions to use a certain oppor-
tunity for goal-directed action does not imply that other
suitable opportunities to move toward the goal are wasted;
the effective seizing of the specified opportunity does not
come at a cost to seizing alternative good opportunities to
act toward the goal (Gollwitzer, Parks-Stamm, Jaudas, &
Sheeran, 2008).
Researchers have raised the question of how to teach
people the goal-striving strategy of forming implementa-
tion intentions. To answer this question, it is important to
recognize that forming implementation intentions is a self-
regulation strategy for goal striving only and that effective
goal striving necessitates prior effective goal setting. An
effective self-regulation strategy that helps people meet
their goals would thus have to address goal setting and
goal striving in concert.
One such self-regulation strategy, called mental con-
trasting with implementation intentions (MCII), has been
developed and tested. To unfold their beneficial effects,
implementation intentions require strong goal commitments
to be in place (Sheeran et al., 2005, study 1), and mental
contrasting creates such strong commitments (Oettingen
et al., 2001). In addition, mental contrasting guarantees the
identification of obstacles that hinder goal striving. These
same obstacles can then be addressed with if–then plans by
specifying them as critical situations in the “if” component
that are linked to instrumental goal-directed responses in
the “then” component. As mental contrasting increases a
person’s readiness to make if–then plans (Oettingen et al.,
2001), people should be likely to follow through with the
formation of such plans. Accordingly, the mental con-
trasting part of the MCII self-regulation strategy prepares
people motivationally and cognitively to form implemen-
tation intentions so that they should find it easier to per-
form the implementation-intention part.
Indeed, in a recent intervention study with middle-aged
women (Stadler, Oettingen, & Gollwitzer, 2009), all par-
ticipants first were informed about the types of exercise
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appropriate for their gender and age group and the multiple
health benefits that accrue from regular exercise. In the
MCII group (as compared with the information-only
control group), participants also learned about the mental
contrasting technique with respect to the goal of exercising
regularly (e.g., going for a run three times per week); the
interventions then taught them to form three implementa-
tion intentions regarding the central personal obstacle dis-
covered during mental contrasting (e.g., feeling too tired
in the evening to go for a run) in the form of if–then state-
ments: one to overcome the obstacle generated by mental
contrasting (e.g., “If I feel exhausted when I get home from
work tonight, then I will put on my running shoes and go
for a jog in the neighborhood”), one to prevent this obstacle
(e.g., “If I hear the clock chime five o’clock, then I will
pack my things and leave the office to go for a run”), and
one to identify a good opportunity to act (e.g., “If the sun is
shining, then I will go for a 30-minute jog in the park”).
Next, participants were told to apply this MCII proce-
dure to the wish of exercising more by themselves when-
ever possible; they were free to choose whatever form
of exercising they wished, and they were encouraged
to anticipate those obstacles that were personally most
relevant. As dependent measures, participants maintained
daily behavioral diaries to keep track of the amount of time
they exercised every day. Overall, the MCII technique
enhanced exercise more than the information-only group;
this effect showed up immediately after the intervention,
and it stayed stable throughout the entire period of the
study (16 weeks after the intervention). More specifically,
participants in the MCII group exercised nearly twice as
much: an average of 1 hour more per week more than par-
ticipants in the information-only control group.
Persistent Striving for the Goal Persistence is another
powerful way to assure goal attainment. Various issues
make persisting toward a goal problematic, however.
Often, people have to accept short-term costs, they have
to escape alluring temptations that disrupt continued goal
striving, they have to cope with negative feedback, they
need to interpret where they stand on the way to the goal,
and they cannot exhaust their self-regulation resources. In
addition, some chronic beliefs or self-evaluations might
make persistent striving for the goal more difficult.
With respect to the issue of accepting short-term costs,
Mischel’s (1974) research on delay of gratification is prom-
inent. This research uses a standardized task paradigm.
A child is presented with a desired treat (e.g., pretzel sticks
or little marshmallows). Then a dilemma is posed: If the
child waits until the experimenter returns, she gets two of
the desired treats; if the child rings a bell, the experimenter
returns immediately but she gets only one treat. Various
CH08.indd 285
Conscious Goal Pursuit 285
effective strategies delay gratification, such as reducing
attention to the treats (e.g., hiding them, playing with dis-
tracting toys, and engaging in fun thoughts) and mentally
reconstructing the treats as objects instead of consumables
(e.g., pretending that the rewards are just pictures by put-
ting a frame around them). Mischel and Ayduk (2004)
argue that people have a better chance of delaying gratifi-
cation for the ultimate goal (i.e., getting the double treat) by
dealing with the treats through the cool “know” system of
information processing rather than the hot “go” system.
Trope and Fishbach (2000) also addressed the short-term
costs of striving for a rewarding but long-term goal. They
observed that simply anticipating such costs (e.g., the pain
associated with the goal to undergo a certain preventive
medical procedure) makes people more persistent in their
goal striving by instigating self-control strategies such as
applying self-imposed penalties for failure to move for-
ward on the goal or bolstering the value of persisting with
the goal, which in turn facilitates goal attainment (Trope &
Fishbach, 2000). A follow-up series of studies showed
that such self-control strategies compensate for a lack of
external control over the goal activity (Fishbach & Trope,
2004); in other words, externally imposed control and self-
control are interchangeable when it comes to striving for
goals that have long-term benefits but short-term costs.
Researchers have developed new insights into how
people deal effectively with alluring temptations that
threaten their goal pursuits. Certainly, people can always
make plans to suppress these alluring temptations
(Gollwitzer & Schaal, 1998; Mischel & Patterson, 1978).
But this strategy implies that people can and are willing to
anticipate what kind of temptation might disrupt their goal
striving so that they can target their if–then plans toward
them (e.g., by using mental contrasting or process simula-
tions; Oettingen et al., 2001; Taylor et al., 1998). Are there
any more general temptation-suppressing strategies than
if–then plans or implementation intentions?
Recent research hints at such strategies. For instance,
Fishbach, Friedman, and Kruglanski (2003) report that
exposure to goal-related stimuli reduces the cognitive
accessibility of temptation-related stimuli and exposure to
temptation-related stimuli activates their goals. The more
people are committed to their goals, the more pronounced
these deactivation and activation effects; in addition, the
strength of these activation and deactivation effects medi-
ates people’s intensity of striving for the goal. Fishbach and
Shah (2006) observed that whenever the conflict between
persisting on a goal and giving in to temptation is high (when
the attraction to temptations is high and people are strongly
committed to the goal, e.g., partying and studying for
college students), individuals start to offset the influence of
temptations by automatically avoiding temptation-relevant
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 286 Motivation
stimuli and by approaching stimuli related to the focal goal
(assessed in terms of faster pushing and pulling responses
to such stimuli, respectively). Research by Fishbach and
Zhang (2008) suggests another successful strategy in deal-
ing with temptations: keeping goal objects and objects
related to temptations spatially apart from each other (e.g.,
for a person who has the goal of studying hard this may be
textbooks vs. entertaining CDs). Fishbach and Zhang (2008)
observed that the combined presence of goal and tempta-
tion objects leads to a positive evaluation and preference
for temptation objects, whereas separating them facilitates
positive evaluation and preference for goal objects.
One of the most intractable problems in attaining goals
is how to persist in the face of negative feedback. What are
the strategies people can use to achieve such persistence?
First, people can step up efforts whenever difficulties are
encountered, thus warding off failures. The energization
theory of motivation (Brehm & Self, 1989; Wright, 1996)
proposes that the readiness to exert additional effort is
directly determined by the perceived difficulty of a task;
as perceived difficulty increases, so does effort expendi-
ture unless a task is perceived as unsolvable. Most impor-
tantly, there is a second limit to the increase of effort in
response to heightened test difficulty: potential motiva-
tion. Potential motivation is fed by need-related variables
(i.e., strength of the related need or higher-order goal, the
incentive value of the task, and the instrumentality of task
completion for need satisfaction or goal attainment). If
potential motivation is low, people do not find it worth-
while to expend more effort when an easy task becomes
more difficult. The upper limit of effort expenditure is low
and quickly reached. If potential motivation is high, how-
ever, an increase in difficulty is matched by investment of
effort up to high levels of difficulty.
Empirical tests of the theory have varied potential moti-
vation by offering high or low rewards for task completion,
making high rewards more or less likely, or describing the
task as diagnostic of an important scholastic skill or not
(Gendolla & Richter, 2006). Effort mobilization is usually
assessed by cardiovascular responses (i.e., heart rate and
systolic blood pressure). In general, low potential motiva-
tion curbs the linear relationship between task difficulty
and effort (i.e., participants with low motivation give up
striving when task difficulty moves from medium to high).
Energization theory has been used to understand the dif-
ferences between men and women in effort on sex-typed
tasks and to explore the effects of private versus pub-
lic performance conditions on effort (Wright, Murray,
Storey, & Williams, 1997; Wright, Tunstall, Williams,
Goodwin, & Harmon-Jones, 1995). The important mes-
sage of these findings is that people can facilitate ener-
gization in the face of difficulties by increasing potential
CH08.indd 286
motivation (e.g., through self-rewards); in turn, the achieved
energization helps to prevent failures from occurring.
Other theories are concerned with persistence in the
face of negative feedback. According to Bandura (1997;
Bandura & Locke, 2003), goals have no motivational conse-
quences per se. They only specify the conditions (standards)
that allow a positive or a negative self-evaluation. Meeting
the standard leads to positive self-evaluation, whereas not
meeting the standard leads to negative self-evaluation. The
individual is pushed by the negative self-evaluation asso-
ciated with the discrepancy and pulled by the anticipated
positive self-evaluation linked to closing the gap between
the status quo and the standard. Accordingly, goals stimu-
late effortful action only when people recognize that there
is still a discrepancy between the status quo and the stan-
dard (e.g., when people encounter difficulties that need to
be overcome). Bandura thus proposes obtaining frequent
feedback as a powerful measure to stimulate goal pursuit.
However, this works only when people feel self-efficacious
with respect to goal-directed actions; thus, they need to
improve relevant skills and competences as well.
Carver and Scheier (1998) propose a different model for
reducing discrepancies in goal striving. Based on cyber-
netic control theory, the central component of the analysis
is the negative feedback loop. Carver and Scheier (1998)
highlight the hierarchical structure of goal striving and
assume cascading loops. Goal-directed behavior is regu-
lated at the middle level (“do” goals), with actions at higher
levels (“be” goals) suspended until the individual becomes
self-aware. Discovery of discrepancies on the “be” level or
“do” level triggers lower-level goals or behaviors aimed
at reducing discrepancies in those levels, respectively. An
individual tries to close discrepancies only when outcome
expectations are high.
Attaining a goal does not necessarily lead to a posi-
tive affective response, nor does detecting a discrepancy
necessarily produce negative affect. Rather, the source of
positive or negative feelings in goal pursuit is the speed
of progress. The intensity of these feelings is regulated
again in a negative feedback loop. If the speed meets a
set criterion, positive feelings result; if it does not, then
negative feelings are the outcome. Recent extensions of
this control theory perspective on goal striving consider a
potential moderator variable: the effect of individual dif-
ferences in behavioral approach and withdrawal systems.
One person may be sensitive for positive stimuli and not
sensitive for negative stimuli (Carver, 2004); for another,
the reverse may be true.
It is important to note that both of these models for reduc-
ing discrepancies down to standards (i.e., Bandura’s model
and Carver and Scheier ’s model) construe goals as “cold”
mental representations of performance standards with no
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links to needs or incentives. This conceptualization of goals
makes it difficult to explain why motivation (see Brehm &
Wright’s notion of potential motivation) moderates the rela-
tion between task difficulty and effort. Moreover, according
to discrepancy theory, an increase in task difficulty should
reduce efforts at task completion, because an increase in
task difficulty should lead to reduced self-efficacy and less
positive outcome expectations. As Brehm and Wright have
repeatedly demonstrated, however, high potential motiva-
tion makes it worthwhile for people to mobilize additional
effort whenever heightened task difficulty threatens task
completion. Finally, Carver and Scheier ’s theory assumes
that positive discrepancies (i.e., moving toward a goal too
fast) are reduced as readily as negative discrepancies (i.e.,
moving toward a goal too slowly). However, from the per-
spective that goals represent a desired outcome, a person
should be less motivated to reduce positive discrepancies
than negative discrepancies (Gollwitzer & Rohloff, 1999).
Zhang, Fishbach, and Dhar (2008; see also Koo &
Fishbach, 2008) discovered that looking back on one’s past
striving for the goal can affect persistence in goal striv-
ing quite differently, depending on how past goal-directed
activities are interpreted. When people are highly commit-
ted to their goals, interpreting their past activities in terms
of lack of progress leads to superior goal striving com-
pared with when they interpret their past activities in terms
of having made good progress. However, when people are
only weakly committed to their goals, interpreting their
past activities in terms of lack of progress discourages goal
striving and interpretations in terms of having made good
progress encourages it. Apparently, for noncommitted peo-
ple, the latter interpretation leads to stronger goal commit-
ments, which in turn intensifies persistence.
Mental contrasting (i.e., contrasting fantasies about a
desired future with reflections on negative reality) also
facilitates effective coping with negative feedback. In
a series of studies, Oettingen and Kappes (2009) asked
participants to use mental contrasting regarding a feasi-
ble and desirable future before working on tasks testing
interpersonal or academic competencies. The researchers
observed that goal-relevant negative feedback was more
thoroughly encoded in the mental contrasting condition.
Moreover, despite strong and normative negative feed-
back, participants kept a positive self-view regarding rel-
evant competencies and skills and found optimistic causal
attributions for their setbacks. Findings by Houser-Marko
and Sheldon (2008) suggest that this pattern of dealing
with negative feedback (open-mindedness on the low level
but self-protectiveness on the high level) should facilitate
persistent goal striving. Indeed, Oettingen and Kappes
(2009) observed in a final study that participants who were
induced to mentally contrast a feasible desired future in
CH08.indd 287
Conscious Goal Pursuit 287
the interpersonal domain were most successful in solving a
subsequent analytical reasoning task.
After negative feedback, the next potential threat
to effective goal striving is exhausting self-regulatory
resources. Baumeister, Muraven, and Tice (2000) have
argued that the effortful and deliberate self-regulation of
thoughts, feelings, and actions uses up self-regulation
resources. The waxing and waning of these resources is
understood by applying a muscle metaphor. Accordingly, it
is predicted and found that people’s self-regulation perfor-
mance is relatively weak when self-regulation has recently
been exerted, even in a wholly different context (e.g.,
Fischer, Greitemeyer, & Frey, 2008; Inzlicht & Gutsell,
2007; Schmeichel, 2007). Like athletes conserving their
strength after exercise, people who have just exerted self-
regulation hold back on exerting self-regulation when they
anticipate further demands (DeWall, Baumeister, & Vohs,
2008).
However, just as regular exercise gradually improves
physical stamina, self-regulation exercises can gradually
make people chronically more able to sustain self-regulation
exertions (e.g., Gailliot, Plant, Butz, & Baumeister, 2007).
This research offers specific guidance to people who want
to bolster persistence. First, they should try to conserve
self-regulation resources when difficulties in persistent
striving for a given goal are anticipated. This is true for
any prior goal striving, as well as for striving for the goal
at hand (Webb & Sheeran, 2003). Second, people should
practice persistent striving wherever possible to improve
their stamina for it.
Finally, several individual difference variables have
been shown to affect persistent goal striving. Research on
self-handicapping has found repeatedly that men create
more handicaps (e.g., reduction of effort) for themselves
than do women when it comes to striving for goals such as
making good grades in an examination. The most impor-
tant mediator of this gender effect turns out to be the rela-
tive value placed on effort: Women evaluate the reduction
of effort more negatively than do men (McCrea, Hirt, &
Milner, 2008). Another individual difference relevant to
the exertion of effort is action orientation (a tendency
toward decisiveness and initiative) versus state orientation
(a tendency toward indecisiveness and hesitation; Kuhl &
Beckmann, 1994). Jostmann and Koole (2007) observed
no difference in performance between action- and state-
oriented individuals on easy executive-functions tasks;
however, the action-oriented individuals outperformed
state-oriented individuals when task demands increased,
because high task demands lead to more reduced cogni-
tive functioning in state-oriented individuals. Finally,
Park, Crocker, and Kiefer (2007) report that persistent
striving for academic task goals depends on the level of
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 288 Motivation
academically contingent self-esteem. Low levels of
contingent self-esteem lead to giving up on these goals,
whereas high levels of contingent self-esteem lead to fight-
ing back; the latter is accompanied by an increase in state
self-esteem and a strengthened desire to be perceived as
academically competent.
UNCONSCIOUS GOAL PURSUIT
As outlined in the first section of this chapter, traditional
models of human motivation have assumed an agentic, con-
scious self at the controls, making decisions about courses
of action to take and then guiding behavior along those
lines (e.g., Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Bandura, 1977, 1986;
Locke & Latham, 1990, 2002; Mischel, 1973; Mischel,
Cantor, & Feldman, 1996). In line with the action-phase
model of goal pursuit (Gollwitzer, 1990; Heckhausen &
Gollwitzer, 1987), Bandura (2006) distinguishes four
aspects of conscious human agency: People form inten-
tions that include action plans and strategies for realizing
them (intentionality), people anticipate likely outcomes
of prospective actions to guide and motivate their actions
(forethought), people are not only intenders and forethink-
ers but also self-regulators in the sense of controlling the
effective execution of the courses of action taken (self-
reactiveness), and finally, people are self-examiners of their
own functioning in the sense of evaluating their pursuits
(self-reflectiveness). Self theorists also have emphasized
the agentic (ego, volition) functions of the (conscious) self:
making choices and decisions, initiating and inhibiting
behavior, forming plans of action and carrying them out.
Through carrying out these functions, theorists hold that
“the self exerts control over itself and over the external
world” (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998,
p. 1252).
According to the traditional model, then, human goal
pursuits are internally generated and put into motion by a
central executive or “self,” are guided to completion by
processes accessible to conscious awareness, and are fol-
lowed by a conscious self-evaluation stage (see especially
Bandura, 1986). In the second section of this chapter, we
focus on an alternative route to human goal pursuit, one
that does not require instigation and guidance by an agentic
self and that can operate outside of conscious intention
and awareness. This alternative path, which emphasizes
an unconscious mode of goal pursuit, has two important
historical wellsprings within social psychology. First was
research demonstrating the power of external situational
variables in determining behavior, often shown to be more
powerful than internal causes such as attitudes, personality,
or values (e.g., Bem, 1972; Darley & Latane, 1968; Milgram,
CH08.indd 288
1963; Mischel, 1973; Ross & Nisbett, 1991). This research
had historical continuity (see especially Bem, 1967) with
the radical neobehaviorist tradition in which situational
variables were considered the exclusive causes of behavior
(Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). The second important wellspring
was the introduction of “dual process” models (e.g., Posner &
Snyder, 1975; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977), in which con-
scious mental processes were contrasted with “automatic,”
implicit, or unconscious ones. Research within this dual-
process framework amassed evidence of a second route
to the selection and guidance of higher mental processes
such as are involved in social judgment and behavior, a
route that is triggered directly by relevant environmental
stimuli and that bypasses the consciousness bottleneck
(see reviews in Bargh, 2007; Chaiken & Trope, 1999).
Much of this evidence has come from studies using
priming techniques. “Priming” refers to the passive, subtle,
and unobtrusive activation of relevant mental representa-
tions by external, environmental stimuli such that people
are not and usually do not become aware of the influence
exerted by those stimuli (Bargh & Chartrand, 2000; Higgins,
1996). This research has shown that one important reason
for the observed power of the situation in determining
behavior is that the mere, passive perception of environ-
mental events directly triggers higher mental processes
in the absence of any involvement by conscious, inten-
tional processes (see reviews in Bargh & Ferguson, 2000;
Dijksterhuis, Chartrand, & Aarts, 2007; Higgins, 1996). In
other words, much of the power of situational and contextual
stimuli comes from the direct, automatic, and unconscious
effect they have over social behavior, an effect relatively
independent from that of their dual-process partner,
conscious processes.
This emerging evidence that conscious, agentic self-
control is not necessary for the production and guidance of
purposive human behavior (and other higher mental pro-
cesses) raises an important issue for motivation research:
What then is in charge when the conscious self is not? To
address this question, an important new line of research
has focused on the mechanics of motivation in an effort
to specify the underlying cognitive, affective, and actional
systems that together generate and guide complex social
behavior (Aarts, Custers, & Marien, 2008; Bargh, 1990;
Higgins, 1997, 2000; Kruglanski et al., 2002). Much prog-
ress has been made on this front through reconceptualiz-
ing motivations and goals in terms of cognitive structures
and then applying what is already known about how such
structures become active—that is, from the perception
of external stimuli relevant to the goal (Bargh, 1990) or
from internal activation spreading along associative net-
works (Kruglanski, 1996). Accordingly, this research has
been able to take advantage of concurrent advances in
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knowledge regarding conceptual priming (Bargh, 2006;
Higgins, 1996) and accessibility or likelihood of concept
activation (Bruner, 1957; Higgins, 1996), applying that set
of logic and principles to the case of goal representations.
This approach has been successful in illuminating (1)
how motivational structures can operate without need
of explicit activation and guidance by an agentic, con-
scious self (see Bargh, 2005); (2) the internal operating
dynamics of active goal structures (i.e., means–ends
relations, Fishbach et al., 2006; McCulloch, Ferguson,
Kawada, & Bargh, 2008; Shah et al., 2002); and (3) the
dynamic relations between competing and complementary
goal structures (Fishbach et al., 2003; McCulloch, Aarts,
Fujita, & Bargh, 2008). Perhaps as importantly, the new
cognitive approach was built on the theoretical legacy of
Kurt Lewin (e.g., 1926, 1935), affording a continuity with
the rich empirical base of classic motivational theory.
For example, the dynamics of goal pursuit first identified
by Lewin and his students Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina such
as perseverance toward the goal, resumption of incomplete
goals, and the “turnoff” effect of completed goals have all
been replicated by the modern research, and these dynamic
effects have been recouched in knowledge-accessibility
terms (see Bargh et al., 2001; Förster, Liberman, & Higgins,
2005; Liberman, Foerster, & Higgins, 2007). In addition,
the general approach to the underlying cognitive, affec-
tive, and neural mechanics of motivation is much in the
Lewinian spirit, as Lewin himself (1935, 1951) strove to
describe motivational dynamics in terms of the physical
science of his day (e.g., “fields of forces,” vectors, and
graph theory)—it is just that today the underlying science
to which these motivational concepts are pinned is not
19th-century physics but 21st-century cognitive science
and neuroscience.
The remainder of this chapter comes to grips with the
emerging fact that the conscious, agentic self plays less of
a role in the production of human behavior and the guid-
ance of the other higher mental processes than traditional
models have assumed. It accounts for and explains recent
findings showing that the same outcomes are attained
when goals operate entirely unconsciously as when they
are pursued consciously and that they have the same phe-
nomenal qualities during operation as originally noted by
Lewin—findings blatantly inconsistent with models that
place the agentic, conscious self exclusively at the helm.
Several other lines of new findings appear to run coun-
ter to the notion of an agentic self in control, and these
may be better accounted for by the present approach. Often
the effect of an active goal on behavior and judgment is
shown to produce effects that are unwanted or undesirable
at the level of the individual person. How can this be if
the agentic self, with its associated values and beliefs, is in
CH08.indd 289
Unconscious Goal Pursuit 289
control? Based on evolutionary considerations, as well as
rising from the recent cognitive-motivation research evi-
dence alluded to earlier, it seems that the level of proximal
control over behavior and higher mental processes may be
not the self but, rather, the currently active goal.
This new approach can also help account for emerg-
ing evidence of the remarkable transformational power
of currently active goals over the rest of the cognitive and
affective machinery of the mind. That is, the findings sug-
gest the dominance of motivational processes—the active
goal—over even presumably hardwired, chronic, “auto-
matic” processes. The active goal is not just in charge; it is
so much in charge that it is capable of temporarily “rewir-
ing” the cognitive apparatus to better achieve its ends.
Chronic, automatic processes are found to be inhibited and
shut down if they conflict with the active goal—and are
found to be created where they did not previously exist, if
this automaticity helps to attain the goal (e.g., by increas-
ing the efficiency, speed, or reliability of the process). Such
findings cause us to rethink the assumed “wired-in” nature
of automatic processes, long assumed in classic models of
skill acquisition to develop only gradually over time
through frequency and consistency of use (see Bargh &
Chartrand, 1999; Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977); they point
instead to a highly plastic cognitive architecture that can
flexibly adapt to best serve the attainment of the active
goal (see especially Hassin, 2005). By revealing such
heretofore unknown features of the human motivational
system, the new social cognitive approach to motivation is
shown to be more than merely a redescription of past moti-
vational theory and variables in the language of cognitive
psychology—it is causing us to rethink the fundamental
nature of cognitive and affective processes.
The Primacy of the Unconscious
The primacy of conscious thought in the ways people
historically have thought about the mind is illustrated
today in the words we use to describe other kinds of
processes—all modifications or qualifications of the starting
point, “conscious” (i.e., “unconscious,” “preconscious,”
and “subconscious”). When considering the causal forces
underlying one’s mental life and overt behavior, one’s
introspections naturally focus exclusively on those influ-
ences of which one is consciously aware, and these serve
as a first-pass or starting point for theoretical assumptions
about the phenomenon in question (see Bargh, 1997). This
natural tendency characterized the assumptions of many of
the most influential philosophers of the past (most notably
Descartes and John Locke, but with important exceptions
such as Aristotle, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer; see Arendt,
1978; Gottlieb, 2000) just as it operates in us today.
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 290 Motivation
However, scientific psychology learned a century ago to
be skeptical of the relatively superficial answers provided
by introspection (e.g., Watson, 1912; also Nisbett & Wilson,
1977). Therefore, it does not appear to be solely a fond-
ness for tradition or historical inertia that accounts for the
continued assumption of largely conscious control over
the higher mental processes. Accordingly, there seem to
be additional reasons for the continuing presumption of
conscious primacy, and one of the more important of these
is the rather narrow and restricted view of unconscious
processes held by mainstream contemporary cognitive
science.
In cognitive psychology, unconscious information
processing has been equated with subliminal informa-
tion processing—to wit, how good is the mind at extract-
ing meaning from stimuli the presence of which one is not
consciously aware (e.g., Greenwald, Klinger, & Schuh,
1995)? A special issue of the American Psychologist
(Loftus & Klinger, 1992) once posed the question, “Is the
unconscious smart or dumb?” Because subliminal-strength
stimuli are by definition relatively weak and of low inten-
sity, the mental processes they drive are necessarily mini-
mal and unsophisticated—associationist only with minimal
flexibility. No surprise then that the consensus reached by
the contributors and issue editors was that the unconscious
was rather dumb, capable only of highly routinized activi-
ties and of doing little without the aid of consciousness
(Loftus & Klinger, 1992).
From the cognitive psychology perspective that uncon-
scious equals responses to subliminal stimuli (at least
operationally), it is understandable that one might find it
difficult to accept that such a dumb system could be respon-
sible for the production of so much in the way of complex,
sophisticated judgmental and behavioral phenomena. But
this “subliminal” definition is historically inaccurate at best
and potentially misleading at worst. The pioneering work
of Werner (1956) on perceptual microgenesis revealed that
within the set of subliminally presented stimuli there could
be variations in the extent and sophistication of the mental
responses obtained, as a function of the duration or inten-
sity of the stimulus presentation. More recently, Ruys and
Stapel (2008) reintroduced this concept of microgenesis as
an approach to the issue of “unconscious emotion.” They
showed that “superquick” subliminal presentations of
emotional stimuli produced only global mood and valence
effects on responses, but that “quick” (still subliminal but
longer in duration than “superquick”) presentations pro-
duced emotion-specific responses (e.g., specific anger or
disgust reactions, instead of merely a global negative mood).
In other words, dramatically different conclusions about
the sophistication of unconscious emotion processes would
have been drawn from their subliminal versus their “even
CH08.indd 290
more” subliminal presentation conditions, even though both
were “subliminal.”
The study by Ruys and Stapel (2008) provides a dra-
matic empirical confirmation that the reason the uncon-
scious appears “dumb” (when defined in terms of responses
to subliminal stimuli) is that subliminal stimuli are weak
by definition and thus have only weak effects—increasing
their intensity while still keeping them subliminal increases
the strength and sophistication of their effects. The reason
for the apparent dumbness of the unconscious revealed by
subliminal stimulation studies is therefore not the actual
information processing powers of the unconscious itself but
the weakness of the stimuli used to discover those powers.
Second, dividing stimuli into dichotomous classes of sub-
liminal versus supraliminal is too simplistic an approach
even to how subliminal stimuli are processed, because dif-
ferent outcomes are produced for more versus less intense
stimulus presentations within the set of subliminal stimuli.
Therefore, it is impossible to draw unambiguous conclu-
sions regarding the capabilities of unconscious information
processing from studies that merely compare “subliminal”
stimuli with those of which the participant is consciously
aware.
Importantly as well, the definition of the unconscious
in terms of processing subliminal-strength stimuli was
not the original, historic one. In On the Origin of Species,
Darwin (1859) used the term to refer to “unconscious
selection” processes in nature, contrasting them with the
intentional and deliberate selection long engaged in by
farmers and animal breeders to develop better strains of
corn, fatter cows, and woollier sheep. Freud as well (see
Brill, 1938; Goldsmith, 1934) used the term to refer to
behavior and ideation that were not consciously intended
or caused—for example, “Freudian slips” and nearly
all the examples Freud gives in The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life (1901/1914) involve unintended behavior,
the source or cause of which was unknown to the individ-
ual performing the actions (often Freud himself). For both
Darwin and Freud, then, the term “unconscious” referred
to the unintentional nature of the behavior or process, and the
concomitant lack of awareness was not of the stimuli that
provoked the behavior but of the influence or consequences
of those stimuli (see also Bargh, 1992).
This expanded and enhanced view of the unconscious
is also more compatible with theory and evidence in the
field of evolutionary biology than is the subliminal-only
view of cognitive psychology. As did Darwin and Freud,
evolutionary biologists also think of the unconscious more
in terms of its unintentional rather than its unaware qual-
ity. In his seminal book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins (1976)
noted the countless awe-inspiring and intelligent designs in
nature that arose merely through “blind” natural selection
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processes. He called nature the “blind watchmaker, the
unconscious watchmaker” because no conscious, inten-
tional guiding hand produced these intelligent designs (see
also Dennett, 1991, 1995).
It is this original, “unintentional” definition that has
guided contemporary social-psychological research on
unconscious phenomena over the past 30 years, with its
focus on the effects of mental processes of which the indi-
vidual is unaware, not on the effects of stimuli of which
one is unaware. The seminal article of Nisbett and Wilson
(1977) first posed the question “To what extent are people
aware of and able to report on the true causes of their
behavior?” Since then, there has been much research on
the extent to which people are unaware of the important
influences on their judgments and decisions and of actual
causal reasons underlying their behavior. This research
effort has produced widespread agreement that higher
mental processes such as are involved in social judgment,
social behavior, and goal pursuit are driven by uncon-
scious, as well as conscious, processes (see Dijksterhuis,
this volume). For example, the 1999 collection of dual pro-
cess models in social psychology by Chaiken and Trope
includes 28 different models, applying the dual-process
notion to a range of empirical phenomena.
What a difference this change in operational definition
makes! If we shift the operational definition of the uncon-
scious from the processing of stimuli of which one is not
aware to the influences or effects of stimulus processing of
which one is not aware, suddenly the power and scope
of the unconscious in daily life become apparent. Defining
the unconscious in terms of the first leads directly to the
conclusion that it is dumb as dirt (Loftus & Klinger, 1992);
defining it in terms of the second instead reveals it to be
highly intelligent and adaptive.
Moreover, just as had Freud in Psychopathology (1914),
contemporary social-psychological theorists are finding
the concept of unconscious motivation useful in explain-
ing why people behave in ways that seem to run against
their self-interest and self-values. Jost, Pietrzak, Liviaton,
Mandisodza, and Napier (2008) did so in the case of sys-
tem justification effects, in which the current status quo
regarding political power and division of resources is
perceived as fair and legitimate, even among those who
are low status and for whom the system operates against
their self-interests (see also Frank, 2004). Jost et al. (2008)
appeal to the operation of an unconscious system justifica-
tion motive to help account for these “relatively puzzling
cases of conservatism, right-wing allegiance, and outgroup
favoritism among members of low-status groups,” which
become more understandable if people are “not even aware
of the extent to which they are privileging the status quo
and resisting change” (p. 596).
CH08.indd 291
Unconscious Goal Pursuit 291
Jost et al. (2008) also note how operation of this
unconscious system justification motive may often pro-
duce effects that violate social norms, such as stereotypical
beliefs and discrimination against minority and low-status
groups, “and thus may interfere with social desirability
concerns at a conscious level” (p. 596). In other words, the
unconscious system justification motive is posited to pro-
duce outcomes that are negative and unwanted at the level
of the individual person—an analysis entirely consistent
with the position advanced here, that the locus of control
over behavior and judgment is not the conscious self as
much as it is the currently active goal.
Indeed, among the original clues to the existence of
unconsciously motivated social behavior were highly pub-
licized cases of political corruption (examples in Bargh &
Raymond, 1995) and U.S. Supreme Court cases of sexual
harassment (discussed in Fitzgerald, 1993), in which the
perception of potential conflict of interest or of misuse
of power was strong in the media and public but not to
the perpetrators themselves, who seemed genuinely unable
to appreciate what all the fuss was about. The behavior
seemed perplexing to many because often its detection
could easily have been avoided, yet the offending behavior
was conducted in full public view.
Indeed, the blatant nature of many of these cases com-
bined with the strong protestations of innocence—or, more
to the present point, of a seeming lack of awareness of hav-
ing done anything wrong—led to the prediction that at least
some of the harassment or corrupt behavior was driven by
unconscious motives (for sex, wealth, etc.), activated
by the situation of having personal power, and then oper-
ating without the person’s conscious awareness. Bargh,
Raymond, Pryor, and Strack (1995) then showed empiri-
cally, through priming techniques, that power did auto-
matically trigger the sex motive in those participants most
likely to possess sexual harassment tendencies. Attraction
toward a female confederate was significantly higher for
these participants when power had been primed, com-
pared with when it had not been, and they were unaware of
the influence of power over their attraction. Here, as in the
case of system justification effects, the unconscious opera-
tion of motives (triggered by the power-related features of
the situation) produced behavioral outcomes that were pre-
sumably unwanted and undesired at the level of the indi-
vidual self-concept.
If a goal is capable of operating independently of any
conscious intention or awareness of its operation, then
active goals and conscious intentions cannot be the same
things (Bargh, 1990). This is most obvious in the case of
addictions, in which there is a strong goal (need state)
to smoke the cigarette, down the drink, or take the pill,
even when the addict knows doing so is against his or her
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 292 Motivation
long-term interests and no longer wants (at the level of
the self) to engage in this behavior (e.g., Baker, Piper,
McCarthy, Majeskie, & Fiore, 2004; Loewenstein, 1996).
Other examples include encapsulated bodily systems such
as breathing that insist on operation even when doing so, as
when underwater, is fatal to the individual (see Morsella,
2005, for this and further examples).
While they are dramatic and extreme, these cases do
illustrate the general principle that the individual person or
self comprises many different, often conflicting, motives
and goals—for example, self-interest versus empathic
concern for others, short-term pleasure versus long-term
health and happiness, and competition versus coopera-
tion with others (Elster,1990; Miller, 1999; Sen, 1978; see
Mansbridge, 1990). As a consequence, it is often the case
that the operation of one goal in pursuit of its own agenda
produces outcomes unwanted by other aspects of the self
system. The important point here is the apparent absence of
any coherent “self” guiding operations—the coherence
and control are one step lower in the hierarchy, at the level
of the currently active goal.
That the active goal is in charge (of selective attention,
evaluation, and behavior) is most obvious in the case of
unconscious goal pursuit, in which goals are shown to
operate independently of conscious awareness. Cognitive
neuroscience research has supported the structural disso-
ciation that is strongly implied by the unconscious goal
pursuit evidence, finding that the operation of a goal pro-
gram and one’s awareness of its operation are located in
distinct, separate anatomical structures within the frontal
cortex. Conscious intentions appear to be represented in
the prefrontal and premotor cortex, yet it is the parietal
cortex that houses the representation used to guide action
(Frith, Blakemore, & Wolpert, 2000)—making it struc-
turally possible to have one (e.g., goal operation) in the
absence of the other (e.g., awareness of pursuing that
goal). Behaviorally, the phenomenon of “environmental
dependency syndrome” (Lhermitte, 1983, 1986) is addi-
tional evidence of the same dissociation. In this disorder,
the behavior of patients with lesions in the same region
of the frontal lobes is found to be almost entirely at the
mercy of situational cues—gardening in a public park (for
hours) after seeing a rake, giving medical examinations
to others in a doctor ’s office—with the patients oblivious to
the unusual nature of their behavior.
The Natural Unconscious of Evolutionary Biology
The preceding analysis suggests that it may be beneficial to
depart from the traditional model of motivational science,
with its agentic, autonomous, and conscious self argued to
be in control of executive processes and goal pursuits. In
the rest of the natural sciences, especially neurobiology, the
CH08.indd 292
assumption of conscious primacy is not nearly as prevalent
as in psychology. Complex and intelligent design in living
things is assumed to be driven not by conscious processes
on the part of the plant or animal but instead by “blindly”
adaptive processes that accrued through natural selection
(Dennett, 1995).
This is not to say that human consciousness plays no
important causal or moderating role over the operation of
the higher mental processes. It is rather that this conscious
capacity is not necessary to achieve the sophisticated,
adaptive, and intelligent behavioral guidance demonstrated
in the emerging literature on unconscious processes. As
Dawkins (1976) contended, unconscious processes are
smart and adaptive throughout the living world, and since
his writing social cognition research has shown that this
principle extends to humans, producing a stream of find-
ings regarding complex human judgmental, motiva-
tional, and behavioral phenomena that operate outside of
awareness.
Because these findings did not make sense given the
dumb unconscious perspective of the cognitive science
mainstream (i.e., how could a processing system so
dumb accomplish so much in the way of adaptive self-
regulation?), one had to look outside of psychology to
understand them and their implications for the human
mind. As it turns out, when placed in the broader context
of the natural sciences, especially evolutionary biology,
the widespread discoveries of sophisticated unconscious
higher mental processes not only make more sense but turn
out to have been predicted on a priori grounds (Dawkins,
1976; Dennett, 1991, 1995).
First, consciousness, or the conscious mode of thought,
was a late development in hominid evolution (Corballis,
2007; Deacon, 1997; Dennett, 1991; Donald, 1991). Among
the evidence supporting this conclusion is anthropological
data on skull (brain) sizes and evidence of tool use. Brain
size remained constant after the hominid divergence from
the chimpanzee genetic line but suddenly began to expand;
at the same time, evidence for tool use and primitive
forms of speech and communication appeared for the first
time. Because millions of years of hominid development
preceded the advent of consciousness, some other (i.e.,
unconscious) system must have guided hominid behav-
ioral responses over those eons of time.
According to this logic, one should be able to find
evidence in humans of these original unconscious mech-
anisms underlying, and guiding, even the higher men-
tal processes of judgment, social behavior, and goal
pursuit. And evidence of these unconscious mechanisms
has indeed accrued over the past quarter century: auto-
matic evaluations and preferences, automatic influences
of the perceived environment on behavioral responses, and
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an automatic mode of goal pursuit (see reviews in Bargh,
2007; Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). This evidence supports
the present evolutionary approach to motivation, in which
unconscious processes are considered primary (see also
Dijksterhuis, this volume; Neuberg et al., volume 2).
Unconscious Behavioral Guidance Systems
A second prediction from the preceding evolutionary
considerations is that each of the varieties of automatic
or unconscious processes discovered by recent research
should be found to be directly connected to overt actional
response tendencies; that is, to produce behavioral output
entirely through unconscious means. This prediction fol-
lows from the principle that the forces of natural selection
can only operate on overt behavior, not internal states such
as thoughts or feelings (Mayr, 1976). If it turned out that
these automatic processes were found not to be directly
connected to behavioral responses, this would falsify the
argument that the varieties of automatic processes discov-
ered by social cognition research are manifestations of an
unconscious behavioral guidance system that existed before
the advent of consciousness. Again, however, the evidence
(reviewed later) has come in on the side of unconscious
primacy. Each of the main forms of automatic processing
relevant to social psychology—on evaluation, perception
and categorization, social behavior, and goal pursuit—have
been shown to directly (i.e., without need of conscious
involvement) produce behavioral response tendencies
(Bargh, 1997; Bargh & Morsella, 2009).
Preferences
First, evolutionary forces have shaped our tendencies
to approach or avoid certain aspects of our environment.
Such approach and withdrawal responses are found through-
out the animal kingdom; even single-celled paramecia have
them (Schneirla, 1959). Cacioppo, Gardner, and Berntson
(1997) concluded that humans have a general default
tendency to approach rather than withdraw from stimuli,
which encourages exploratory behavior and thus gain of
useful information about the environment. However, this
has the downside of putting the individual in the vicinity
of negative stimuli and thus at risk. The adaptive solution
achieved by our species is that negative stimuli when pres-
ent elicit a stronger, withdrawal response, dominating and
inhibiting approach tendencies. Thus, “with both a positiv-
ity offset and a negativity bias [humans] enjoy the benefits
of exploratory behavior as well as the self-preservative
benefits of a predisposition to avoid or withdraw from
threatening events” (Cacioppo et al., 1997, p. 13).
Evolutionary forces have helped to shape a person’s spe-
cific preferences as well. People are often guided by “feel-
ings,” “intuitions,” and “gut reactions,” which prioritize
CH08.indd 293
Unconscious Goal Pursuit 293
what is important to do or attend to (Damasio, 1996;
Schwarz & Clore, 1996). These “guides” do not arise out
of thin air, however, as our modern preferences are derived
from those that served adaptive ends in the past. For
example, our strong human preference for sweet and fatty
foods evolved because of their high energy value during
those eons of time in which they were in relatively short
supply, yet we find it hard to resist them today even though
they are available now in relatively ample quantities and we
are now aware of the long-term costs associated with eating
too much of them (e.g., Brownell & Horgen, 2004; Rozin &
Geier, 2007).
In general, default preferences as to what is good and
what is bad in our environment represent hard-earned
knowledge gained during our long-term evolutionary
past. These evolved preferences are fed upward as a start-
ing point, appearing as a priori knowledge, the source of
which we are unaware (Dennett, 1995). Donald Campbell
(1974), a champion of the evolutionary approach to epis-
temology, called these “shortcut processes” because they
spare us from having to figure out, each of us individually
from scratch, which are the good and helpful things and
which are the dangerous.
Recent evidence has supported the assertion that con-
scious preferences are based on prior unconscious prefer-
ences. In a study of voters whose explicit, self-reported
preference in the 2008 U.S. presidential election was
“undecided,” Galdi, Arcuri, and Gawronski (2008) showed
that the eventual conscious preference of these undecided
voters could be predicted from measures of their automatic
or unconscious attitudes toward the candidates. That is,
for undecided voters, the favorability of automatic asso-
ciations to the candidate at time 1 predicted subsequent
conscious attitudes at time 2. For voters who had already
made up their minds, only consciously expressed attitudes
at time 1 predicted conscious attitudes at time 2 (nearly
perfectly); automatic associations to the candidate at
time 1 were unrelated to consciously expressed attitudes
at time 2.
In another demonstration of this phenomenon,
Duckworth, Bargh, Garcia, and Chaiken (2002) found that
the automatic preferences toward novel attitude objects
measured in one group predicted the explicit self-reported
preferences toward those same stimuli in another group,
even though in the unconscious condition the objects were
presented for only 250 milliseconds, whereas participants
in the conscious condition took on average about 8 full
seconds to give their preference.
Consistent with the hypothesis that these preferences
are part of an unconscious behavioral guidance system,
attitudes toward a wide variety of objects and events
were found to become automatically activated by the
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 294 Motivation
mere presence of the attitude object in the environment (see
reviews in Fazio, 2001; Ferguson, 2007). These automatic
preferences are activated immediately, do not require the
conscious intention to evaluate stimuli (Bargh, Chaiken,
Govender, & Pratto, 1992), and occur even for novel
stimuli such as nonrepresentational (i.e., abstract) art and
spoken nonsense words (Duckworth et al., 2002). From
the accumulating evidence then, it appears that all incom-
ing stimuli elicit an initial positive or negative evaluation,
even those stimuli with which one has no prior conscious
experience.
Under the present argument that the unconscious
evolved as a behavioral guidance system, a source of adap-
tive and appropriate actional impulses, these unconsciously
activated preferences should be found to be directly con-
nected to behavioral mechanisms. Several studies have
now established this connection: Immediate and unin-
tended evaluation processes are directly linked to approach
and avoidance behavioral predispositions. Chen and Bargh
(1999; see also Kawakami, Dovidio, Moll, Hermsen, &
Russin, 2000; Neumann, Förster, & Strack, 2003) showed
that participants are faster to make approach movements of
the arm (pulling a lever toward oneself) when responding to
positive attitude objects and faster to make avoidance
movements (pushing the lever away) when responding to
negative attitude objects. This was true even though their
conscious task in the experiment was not to evaluate the
objects but merely to “knock off the screen” the names of
these objects as soon as they appeared.
Thus, humans automatically evaluate environmental
stimuli as either good or bad and further possess corre-
sponding muscular, behavioral tendencies to approach or
to withdraw from those stimuli, without the involvement
of conscious awareness or intent. This is compelling evi-
dence in support of the hypothesis that automatic forms of
social cognition arose through natural selection pro-
cesses to afford humans adaptive, unconscious guidance
of behavioral responses to the environment (Bargh &
Morsella, 2009). Again, the discovery of automatic atti-
tude activation and its automatic connection to behavioral
tendencies—both of which were unheard of 30 years ago—
was surprising at the time from the perspective that actions
and behavior are always a function of conscious intent and
guidance (e.g., Bandura, 1986; Locke & Latham, 2002) but
is unsurprising from the unconscious-first perspective of
evolutionary biology (Bargh & Morsella, 2008; Dawkins,
1976).
Social Perception
Theorists have long noted that what other people are doing
within a situation is important information as to what we
ourselves should be doing, especially when ambiguity or
CH08.indd 294
uncertainty exists as to the situational norms and appropriate
responses (e.g., Asch, 1961; Meltzoff, 2002; Tomasello,
Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). Asch (1961), for
instance, argued that much conformity behavior was driven
by the cuing or informational value of the perceived behav-
ior of others. As a default option or starting point for your
own behavior, “blindly” or unconsciously adopting what
others around you are doing makes good adaptive sense,
especially in new situations and with strangers.
In many species, the perception of the behavior of
conspecifics (fellow members of the same species) auto-
matically causes the animal to behave in the same way,
producing precise coordination of movement within
the group, as in schools of fish or herds of antelope (see
Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001). Humans possess this same
tendency, with the behavior of others automatically creat-
ing behavioral impulses or tendencies to act in the same
way. Developmental researchers have highlighted this
perception–behavior link as an important, innate basis
of imitation and mimicry and thus of vicarious learning of
appropriate behavioral responses to events by merely wit-
nessing the behavior of one’s adult caretakers and older
children (Meltzoff, 2002; Tomasello et al., 2005). And
cognitive neuroscience research has confirmed the exis-
tence of a direct anatomical connection between perceptual
and behavioral representations of the same actions with
the discovery of “mirror neurons” in the premotor cortex,
which become active both when one perceives a given type
of action by another person and when one engages in that
action (see Frith & Wolpert, 2003).
Thus, what other people are doing in the current situ-
ation and environment is another important input to the
unconscious behavior guidance system, with the perceived
behavior of others directly and unconsciously creating ten-
dencies to act in that same way. We naturally take on the
physical postures and gestures of others without realizing
it (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), but the perception–behavior
link extends to include the content of more complex,
abstract representations—such as trait concepts and social
stereotypes—that are automatically activated during percep-
tual activity (see reviews in Chartrand, Maddux, & Lakin,
2005; Dijksterhuis et al., 2007; Dijksterhuis & Bargh,
2001). For example, priming the concept of “elderly”
causes college students both to move more slowly
while leaving the experimental session (Bargh, Chen, &
Burrows, 1996) and to have poorer memory for the fea-
tures of a room they just left (Dijksterhuis, Aarts, Bargh, &
van Knippenberg, 2000)—both effects predicted from the
content of the elderly stereotype activated through percep-
tual activity (i.e., priming).
The evolved, innate basis of these ubiquitous perceptual
priming effects on behavior is revealed by their presence
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soon after birth, underpinning the infant’s imitative
abilities. In a review of 25 years of infant imitation
research, Meltzoff (2002) concluded that young children
learn much about how to behave by mere passive imita-
tion of fellow children and their adult caretakers: infants
in particular are open to such imitative tendencies, having
not yet developed cognitive control structures to suppress
or inhibit them. Further evidence of the adaptive nature of
these tendencies comes from the work on automatic mim-
icry tendencies in humans by Chartrand and colleagues
(e.g., Chartrand et al., 2005); those studies have found not
only that people do tend to adopt the physical behavior
(posture, facial gestures, and arm and hand movements)
of strangers with whom they interact, without intending
to or being aware they are doing so, but also that this
unconscious imitation tends to increase liking and bonding
among individuals—serving as a kind of natural “social
glue” for new acquaintances and group members.
Baillargeon (2008) has argued that priming is itself
an adaptation, as it helps to cue the very young child to
selectively attend to the currently important features and
dimensions of the world (see Higgins & Bargh, 1987, for
a similar functional argument regarding priming in the
case of adults). Baillargeon’s research has shown that even
8-month-old infants show priming effects. According to
Piaget (1955), this is much too young to possess the con-
cept of object permanence. Indeed, in a control condition,
8-month-olds do not act surprised when a doll is placed in
a box and a differently colored version of the same doll
then emerges from that box. However, if one first shows
these infants a collection of different-colored dolls, thus
cuing (priming) “color” as a relevant doll dimension for
the moment, the infants suddenly show evidence of object
permanence, as now they are surprised when a doll of a
different color emerges from the same box.
Ambady, Shih, Kim, and Pittinsky (2001) have shown
stereotype-priming effects on the behavior of children as
young as 5 years. The cultural stereotype of Asian Americans
is that they are superior to other social groups in mathe-
matical ability, but the cultural stereotype of girls and
women is that they are inferior to men in this regard.
Ambady et al. (2001) first primed Asian American pre-
school children with drawings emphasizing either their
Asian American identity or their gender and then gave
them an age-appropriate math test to work on. When their
Asian American identity had been primed, Asian American
girls outperformed the other children on the test, but when
their female identity had been primed, they underper-
formed relative to the other children (thus showing evi-
dence of “stereotype threat” on their math performance).
That such cultural-stereotype priming effects are obtained
in children as young as 5 years of age is further evidence of
CH08.indd 295
Unconscious Goal Pursuit 295
the innate, evolved nature of contextual priming influences
on behavior (as well as the rapidity and thoroughness with
which young children absorb the attitudes and beliefs of
their culture).
Goals and Motivations
The third component of the unconscious behavior guidance
system is purposive and motivational. Purposive behavior
and goal pursuits are widespread in the world of living
things (e.g., Mayr, 1976); thus, in evolutionary biology,
goal pursuit is not considered to require human conscious-
ness or its equivalent; for most organisms, goal-directed
behavior is achieved entirely through unconscious means
(Dawkins, 1976). Theory and research in the field of evo-
lutionary psychology has held that evolutionarily relevant
goals are of unconscious origin, because reproduction and
survival were paramount concerns to hominids for eons of
time before the development of consciousness (Barrett &
Kurzban, 2006; Buss & Schmitt, 1993; Donald, 2001;
Neuberg et al., volume 2).
While theorists differ somewhat as to the set of evolved
goals they posit, general consensus exists that self-protection
(including avoidance of disease and contamination) and
mating are fundamental human motives, along with a need
to understand or comprehend environmental events and to
belong to social groups and have supportive social relation-
ships (e.g., Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Fiske, 2004; Haidt,
2001; Neuberg, Kenrick, Maner, & Schaller, 2004).
Moreover, an emerging domain of research has shown that
these evolved goals can become active (i.e., primed) and
then operate entirely unconsciously, outside of conscious
awareness or intention, to influence selective attention,
judgment, and social behavior in present-day contexts
(e.g., Haidt, 2001; Huang & Bargh, 2008; Neuberg et al.,
2004; Schaller, Park, & Faulkner, 2003).
The goal-priming literature (for review see Dijksterhuis
et al., 2007) has shown that goals can be activated with-
out the individual knowing about or intending it—either
through subliminal presentation of goal-relevant stimuli
or through subtle and unobtrusive supraliminal presenta-
tion. Various environmental triggers have been demon-
strated: not only verbal stimuli semantically related to the
goal (as in many studies) but also material objects such as
backpacks and briefcases (Kay, Wheeler, Bargh, & Ross,
2004), scents such as cleaning fluids (Holland, Hendriks, &
Aarts, 2005), power-related features of a situation such as
a professor ’s desk chair (Chen, Lee-Chai, & Bargh, 2001),
and the names of significant others (Fitzsimons & Bargh,
2003; Shah, 2003).
Moreover, a range of goals have been studied and shown
capable of unconscious operation: information processing
goals such as impression formation (Chartrand & Bargh,
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 296 Motivation
1996; McCulloch, Ferguson, et al., 2008), achievement and
task performance goals (Bargh et al., 2001; Hassin, 2005),
and interpersonal goals such as helping and cooperation
(Bargh et al., 2001; Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2003). These
studies have shown further that once activated outside the
person’s knowledge, these goals operate autonomously,
without any conscious guidance, to direct cognition and
behavior toward the desired end-state (see reviews in Bargh,
2005; Bargh & Ferguson, 2000; Chartrand & Bargh, 2002;
Dijksterhuis et al., 2007; Ferguson, Hassin, & Bargh, 2008;
Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2004).
Similarity of Conscious and Unconscious
Goal Pursuits
From the assumption of the historical primacy of uncon-
scious motivational structures, a further prediction can
be made. Evolution is an incremental process; new pro-
cesses and abilities are not created de novo but are cob-
bled onto and use existing processes to the extent possible
(see Allman, 2000; Bargh & Morsella, 2008). Thus, it is
likely that when conscious processing capabilities evolved
they used relevant existing unconscious mental structures;
in the case of goal pursuit, the assumption would be that
conscious forms of goal pursuit use preexisting uncon-
scious motivational processes and brain structures. This
leads to the prediction not only that one should observe
a high degree of similarity in the outcomes of conscious
and unconscious pursuit of the same goal but also that the
two modes should share phenomenal qualities of the goal
pursuit process—such qualities as persistence in the face
of obstacles, resumption and completion of interrupted
goal pursuits, self-evaluation following the goal pursuit
attempt, and temporary inhibition of the goal following
the attempt (see Atkinson & Birch, 1970; Heckhausen,
1991; Lewin, 1935). Moreover, at the level of neurophysi-
ology, the unconscious-primacy hypothesis would predict
that the observed similarities should extend to the use of
the same underlying brain regions.
Regarding the prediction of similar outcomes of
goal pursuit, recent studies have shown that unconscious goal
pursuit produces the same outcomes as when that goal is
pursued consciously (reviews in Dijksterhuis et al., 2007;
Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2004). The goal concept, once acti-
vated without the participant’s awareness, operates over
extended periods (also without the person’s conscious
intent or monitoring) to guide thought or behavior toward
the goal. For instance, primed, unconscious goals to form
an impression of a target person operate without the par-
ticipant’s knowledge and compute the evaluation as if the
person consciously and intentionally had the goal to form
an impression (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996).
CH08.indd 296
Goals for types of interpersonal behavior, as well as
information processing goals, are capable of unconscious
operation. In one study, unobtrusive priming of the goal of
cooperation caused participants playing the role of a fish-
ing company to put more fish back into a lake to replenish
the fish population (compared with a nonprimed control
condition), the same effect as when, in the same study,
another group of participants were explicitly instructed to
cooperate (Bargh et al., 2001). Although the goal-priming
manipulation produced the same effect on behavior as did
conscious (explicitly instructed) pursuit of the same goal,
only in the latter case were participants aware of having the
goal to cooperate. Postexperimental reports of how coop-
erative they had just been on the task were significantly
correlated with actual degree of cooperation in the con-
scious goal pursuit condition but were uncorrelated with
actual behavior in the unconscious goal pursuit condition.
The goal-primed participants thus gave every appearance
of pursuing the cooperation goal without knowing they
were doing so.
Second, regarding the prediction of similar underlying
processes, not only do unconsciously operating goals
produce the same outcome as when consciously pursued
but they do so following the same processing stages.
McCulloch, Ferguson, et al. (2008) have shown this in the
case of the impression formation goal. Compared with a
nonprimed control group, priming the impression forma-
tion goal caused participants (1) to be faster to encode
behaviors in trait-categorical terms, (2) to be more likely to
form associations between behaviors, and (3) to notice and
remember impression-inconsistent behaviors, all known
subprocesses of conscious impression formation (e.g.,
Hamilton, Katz, & Leirer, 1980; Srull & Wyer, 1989).
Priming a goal, therefore, puts the means to attain the goal
(i.e., component subgoals) into active operation as well
(see Shah & Kruglanski, 2003, for the reverse means-to-
goal priming effect).
Once active, the goal directs one’s attention toward
some (i.e., goal-relevant) stimuli and away from others;
the world is filtered through the goal’s “eyes.” The active
goal’s effect on selective attention has long been known
in the case of consciously pursued goals (Anderson &
Pichert, 1978; Bruner, 1957; Hastie & Park, 1986), but
recent research shows this effect occurs in unconscious
goal pursuit as well (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996, study 2;
Maner et al., 2005; McCulloch, Ferguson, et al., 2008;
Neuberg et al., 2004). For example, an unconscious impres-
sion formation goal causes greater selective attention to
behavioral information inconsistent with the target’s gen-
eral pattern of behavior (Chartrand & Bargh, 1996, study
2; McCulloch, Ferguson, et al., 2008), and an uncon-
scious mating goal drives greater selective attention to the
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potential romantic partners shown on a videotape (Maner
et al., 2005; Neuberg et al., 2004).
Third, regarding the prediction that the same phenom-
enal qualities should occur during goal pursuit, whether it
be unconscious or conscious, research has supported this
as well. Unconscious goal pursuit is shown to possess the
same phenomenal qualities previously demonstrated and
ascribed to conscious, deliberate goal pursuit (Bandura,
1977, 1986; Gollwitzer & Moskowitz, 1996; Heckhausen,
1991; Lewin, 1926). These include persistence in the face
of obstacles, resumption of interrupted goal pursuits in the
face of intrinsically more attractive activities, and evalu-
ative and motivational consequences of the goal pursuit
attempt (see reviews in Bargh & Huang, 2009; Chartrand &
Bargh, 2002; Ferguson, Hassin, & Bargh, 2008). Kawada,
Oettingen, Gollwitzer, and Bargh (2004) have demon-
strated another similarity: Both conscious and unconscious
goals, when active, are “projected onto” (i.e., attributed to)
other people in the course of impression formation.
The affective (mood) and motivational consequences
of conscious and unconscious goal pursuit are also the
same. The consequences of conscious goal attempts for affec-
tive experience (mood) and the future strength of that goal
have long been established (e.g., Bandura, 1977; Carver &
Scheier, 1981; Heckhausen, 1991). Success at the attempt
produces positive mood and increased tendencies to pursue
that goal in the future; failure produces the opposite conse-
quences. Research on unconscious goal pursuit has shown
that the same consequences accrue for goal attempts the indi-
vidual is not even aware of making (Bongers, Dijksterhuis, &
Spears, 2009; Chartrand & Bargh, 2002). In the Chartrand
study, participants were given an anagram task that was easy
or impossible to solve; the importance of this task was down-
played by the experimenter as a “filler task” within the larger
study. However, for participants previously primed with the
achievement (high performance) goal, but not for control
group participants, working on the easy anagram task (suc-
cess condition) resulted in improved mood and increased
motivation to work on a subsequent verbal task, and work-
ing on the difficult anagram task produced depressed mood
and lower effort on the subsequent task.
Thus, successful goals become stronger (more likely to be
pursued again by the individual) and unsuccessful goals
become weaker, all without the individual’s knowledge or
consent. Presumably, this change in future goal strength
is driven by the positive versus negative affect associated
with the goal; that is, its “incentive value.” This research
by Bongers et al. (2009) and Chartrand and Bargh (2002)
suggests that the incentive value can be changed automati-
cally, without conscious involvement or awareness, as the
result of success versus failure at goals individuals do not
even know they are pursuing.
CH08.indd 297
Unconscious Goal Pursuit 297
More direct evidence of unconscious changes in goal
strength has emerged from cognitive neuroscience studies
of the brain regions involved in motivated behavior. This
research also bears on the earlier prediction that conscious
and unconscious goal pursuits use the same underlying
brain regions and structures. In a functional magnetic reso-
nance imaging study of motivation-relevant brain regions,
Pessiglione et al. (2007) showed that subliminal reward
cues moderated the amount of effort participants gave on
a handgrip squeezing task; the higher the value of a coin
flashed subliminally at the beginning of the trial, the more
effort participants expended on that trial. The researchers
also included conditions in which the incentive was con-
sciously perceived by participants, and their imaging
data revealed that the same region of the basal forebrain
moderated task effort level in both the conscious and the
unconscious incentive conditions. Pessiglione et al. (2007)
concluded from their findings that “the motivational pro-
cesses involved in boosting behavior are qualitatively simi-
lar, whether subjects are conscious or not of the reward at
stake” (p. 906).
Similarly, recent experimental work by Custers and
Aarts (2005, 2007) has shown that conditioning a positive
affective response to the name of a particular goal increases
the chances the individual will pursue that goal over other
possible alternatives, again without the participant being
aware of this influence on their choice of goals. Aarts et al.
(2008) showed that both the goal of high performance
(exertion) and the incentive attached to that goal could
be manipulated unconsciously; participants subliminally
primed with the goal of exertion outperformed a control
group in a handgrip squeezing task, but those primed
simultaneously with both the exertion goal and the positive
stimuli performed the best. Moreover, the complementary
effect is found to occur when negative stimuli are paired
with a goal; this increases the likelihood of disengagement
from the goal (Aarts, Custers, & Holland, 2007). Thus,
both the goal itself and the incentives associated with the
goal can be triggered through unconscious means and will
then influence task performance just as if they had been
consciously perceived and chosen. These studies provide
further support for the hypothesis that the same underlying
mechanisms and processes are involved in conscious and
unconscious goal pursuit.
Autonomy of Active Goals
Unconscious goal pursuit therefore produces the same
outcomes and with the same processing stages and phe-
nomenal, subjective qualities of goal pursuit as established
previously for conscious goal pursuit. This high degree of
similarity is consistent with the proposition that conscious
goal pursuit uses preexisting, unconscious motivational
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 298 Motivation
structures. However, the research on unconscious motivation
indicates that there should be an additional important qual-
ity shared by conscious and unconscious goal pursuit—
autonomy of goal operation, once the goal becomes
activated.
If conscious and unconscious goal pursuits use the same
underlying motivational system, then the autonomy of oper-
ation clearly demonstrated in the case of unconscious goal
pursuit (in which the goal guides cognition and behavior
toward the desired end-state without deliberate conscious
knowledge or guidance) should hold in the case of con-
scious goal pursuit. In other words, even those goals one
intends to pursue, and of which one is aware, should “self-
ishly” pursue their agenda once activated, even if doing so
runs against the self-interests of the individual.
In a test of this prediction, Bargh, Green, and Fitzsimons
(2008) hypothesized that conscious and unconscious goal
pursuit would share another important feature, that of
autonomous operation once active. Note that up to now,
potential similarities between the two modes of goal pur-
suit had been assessed by testing whether unconscious goal
pursuit possesses qualities that had been already estab-
lished for the case of conscious goal pursuit (Chartrand &
Bargh, 2002; Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2004). Bargh et al.
(2008) made the reverse assertion: that conscious goal
pursuit should be found to share a quality previously dem-
onstrated only for unconscious goal pursuit—namely, that
of operating on any relevant, applicable information in the
environment regardless of whether the individual intends
or is aware of this operation. In the case of conscious
goals, the person is aware of pursuing them with regard
to a specific target or set of targets; however, it should be
kept in mind that just as unconscious goals operate on all
perceived information to which they are applicable, con-
scious goals will, too—even information that was not the
originally intended focus of the goal.
Bargh et al. (2008) tested this hypothesis in two experi-
ments by having participants watch a videotape of an
ostensible job interview (in the control condition, partici-
pants were told it was of two people getting acquainted).
They were told that the job in question was either a crime
reporter for the New York Daily News or a restaurant waiter
position. The two jobs were pretested so that the desired
personality characteristics were opposite of each other: the
ideal crime reporter is tough and aggressive, while the ideal
waiter is deferential and polite. During the taped interview,
the two participants were interrupted several times by sec-
retaries and co-workers, as in an actual busy office situ-
ation. The behavior of one of these interrupters (“Mike”)
varied across the two experimental conditions. In one tape,
Mike was polite and deferential after interrupting; in the
other, he was rude and aggressive. After the tape had been
CH08.indd 298
presented, participants were given a surprise impression
task in which they were asked not about the job candidate
(on which they had been consciously focused) but simply
how much they liked Mike.
Under the hypothesis that the active conscious goal
of evaluating a specific type of job candidate would also
be applied to other people encountered at the same time,
Bargh and colleagues (2008) expected that participants in
the control and waiter-goal conditions would like “polite
Mike” more than “rude Mike” but that those in the reporter-
goal condition would like rude Mike better. Results con-
firmed this prediction. Because Mike’s behavior matched
the qualities that the active goal was looking for, and that
would be evaluated positively by the active goal (see
Ferguson, 2008; Ferguson & Bargh, 2004), participants in
the reporter-goal condition showed a significant reversal
of preferences compared with the other two conditions:
they liked rude Mike more than polite Mike.
In a third study, some participants were instructed to
help another participant (actually a confederate) with
an experimental task, while others were not assigned
this “helper” role. Consistent with the autonomous-goal
hypothesis, participants who were concurrently helping
someone (compared with those who were not) showed a
greater willingness to donate money to a charity and to
commit their time to helping a stranger who stopped by the
experimental room to ask if the participant would fill out
a lengthy questionnaire. Note that these are costs that one
would not choose to incur were it not for this unintended
influence of the active goal (as shown by the control and
deactivated-goal conditions of that study), just as one
would normally prefer a polite to a rude person.
These findings support the hypothesis that conscious
and unconscious goals, once activated, operate autono-
mously in an open-ended fashion on all relevant infor-
mation in the environment, even information that was
not the original intended focus of the goal pursuit (in the
case of conscious goals). Intended goal pursuits thus can
have unintended consequences. As shown by the results of
the control condition, people do not normally find rude,
aggressive people likable, and it is doubtful they would
like “rude Mike” under normal circumstances—but one
would tend to like him if one was concurrently evaluating
others for some purpose in which rudeness and aggressive-
ness happen to be useful traits.
Thus, the similarity between conscious and uncon-
scious forms of goal pursuit extends to autonomy of
operation once activated. Even goals that are consciously
chosen (or explicitly given to us by another person, such as
through experimental instructions) and of which the indi-
vidual is aware of pursuing nonetheless operate to attain
their desired end-states whether or not these outcomes are
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intended or desirable at the level of the individual (self).
This is evidence that the locus of proximal control over
thought, judgment, and behavior may not reside in a con-
scious, agentic self (e.g., Baumeister et al., 1998) so much
as in the operation of the currently active goal.
An Important Difference: Awareness
of the Goal Pursuit
There is one critical difference between conscious and
unconscious goal pursuit: unlike unconscious goal strivers,
conscious goal strivers know why they do what they do.
In study 2 of Bargh et al. (2001) the goal of cooperation
was primed (unconsciously activated) in one condition and
given explicitly (consciously pursued) in another. Following
a “resource commons” game in which their degree of coop-
eration was measured, all participants were asked to rate
how committed they had been to the goal of cooperation
during the task. For participants with the conscious goal
of cooperation, these ratings correlated significantly with
their actual degree of cooperative behavior—but for those
pursuing the goal unconsciously (i.e., in the goal-priming
condition), these ratings were unrelated to the amount of
cooperation they had just exhibited on the task. Even though
the cooperation prime produced significantly more coop-
eration than found in the control group, those participants
pursuing the unconscious cooperation goal were unable
to report with any accuracy on how cooperative they had
been on the task, even though they were asked immediately
after completing the task. Accurate introspective access to
the meaning and purpose of behavioral responses thus may
require conscious awareness of the goal being pursued.
Awareness of goal pursuits may also be important for
accurate attribution of the emotional states that result from
the goal pursuit. In studies of unconscious achievement
motivation, it has been shown that success versus failure
at the task produces a positive versus a negative mood,
with the person unaware of the actual source of the mood
and thus liable to misattribute it to some plausible cause of
which they are aware (Bongers et al., 2009; Chartrand &
Bargh, 2002). Similarly, Oettingen and colleagues (2006) have
shown that when goals are not consciously adopted (i.e., are
unconsciously activated) and not explained by the situational
context (i.e., are norm violating), people find themselves in
an “explanatory vacuum” when attempting to interpret their
behavior, which in turn leads to the experience of negative
affect (see McGraw, 1987), the actual source of which they
are unaware (and are thus again likely to misattribute).
The Selfish Goal
As Bargh and Huang (2009) noted, the observed relation
between goals and the individuals holding them, with goals
CH08.indd 299
Unconscious Goal Pursuit 299
operating autonomously within their individual hosts, is
strikingly similar to Dawkins’s (1976) famous demonstra-
tion in The Selfish Gene that across the domain of living
organisms the locus of control over behavior is at the level
of the gene, not the individual organism. If even con-
sciously pursued, as well as unconsciously pursued, goals
operate autonomously and independently once activated,
then one can speak of the “selfish goal” pursuing its own
agenda just as the “selfish gene” is ultimately concerned
with its own propagation. Dawkins (1976) described how
our genes have designed us (through the blind process of
natural selection) to be their “survival machines” on which
they depend for their propagation into future generations—
thus making genes, not individual organisms, the basic unit
of natural selection. Analogously, active goals are argued
here to be the unit of control over higher mental processes,
not the self or individual person, and active goals single-
mindedly pursue their agenda independent of whether
doing so is in the overall good of the individual person.
That goals are to the self as genes are to their host organ-
ism is more than a metaphor. Evolutionary biologists and
psychologists, as well as philosophers of science, consider
motivations to be the crucial link between genetic influ-
ences and adaptive behavior (Campbell, 1974; Mayr, 1976;
Neuberg et al., 2004; Pinker & Bloom, 1990, p. 468; Popper,
1972; Symons, 1992, p. 138; Tetlock, 2002; Tomasello
et al., 2005; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 99). The close cor-
respondence between genes and goals is attested to by the
prevalence of goal-directed behavior in the organic world,
which of course largely lacks the strategic, conscious infor-
mation processing capabilities of humans. As evolutionary
theorist Ernst Mayr (1976, p. 389) stressed, “the occurrence
of goal-directed processes is perhaps the most characteristic
feature of the world of living organisms (p. 389).” For
example, a predator stalking its prey or the prey fleeing
from the pursuing predator, a bird starting on its migration,
an insect selecting its host plant, a male displaying to a
female—all are acting purposefully yet unconsciously.
Why do genes require the proxy of goals and motives?
The latter are necessary stand-ins because the rate of
genetic change is slow, too slow for direct genetic controls
over behavior to adapt quickly enough to constantly chang-
ing and shifting environmental conditions. Life offers too
many possible eventualities for all of them to be antici-
pated by specific genetic instructions; thus, genes have to
“instruct” their host organisms not in specifics but in the
generally useful strategies and tactics of life. Therefore,
evolution has shaped us to be open-ended systems (Mayr,
1976), with goal programs serving as the “local agents” in
the present to carry out genetic instructions from the dis-
tant past but to do so adaptively, in the context of current
environmental conditions and contingencies.
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 300 Motivation
Mayr (1976, p. 23) identified two types of inherited
behavior programs in the organic world: open and closed.
Closed programs are those containing a nearly complete set
of ready-made responses to particular stimuli in the environ-
ment; these characterize organisms with short life spans or
highly stable and unchanging environments who have little
time or need to benefit from experience or adapt to local
variations. Because humans, on the other hand, enjoy longer
life spans and a long childhood under the supervision and
protection of caregivers, most genetic behavior programs
(goals) in humans are open. This is a great advantage to suc-
cessful adaptation, because it allows the general tendencies
furnished genetically to be fine-tuned to the specific local
conditions into which the infant happens to be born. A well-
known example of an open-ended program in humans is the
young child’s ability to quickly learn the local language and
absorb the local culture; infants can be taken to any location
on earth and over time learn that language and that culture
as well as if they had been born there (Pinker, 1994).
The open-ended nature of human goal pursuit is further
illustrated by the readiness and ability of unconsciously
activated goals to operate on whatever goal-relevant input
occurs in the environment. The unconsciously active goal
operates on whatever goal-relevant information happens
to occur next in the experimental situation, which could not
be known to the participant beforehand—just as genetic
influences from the distant past programmed us through
open-ended motivations to be capable of adapting to local
conditions far into a future that could not have been antici-
pated in any detail (Dawkins, 1976). Moreover, based on
the striking similarity of outcomes and process between
conscious and unconscious goal pursuit, and evidence
that consciously pursued goals are also characterized by
autonomy of operation once active (Bargh et al., 2008), the
principle of autonomous operation appears to holds for all
goal pursuits, conscious and unconscious alike.
The Selfish Goal, in Control
If the currently active goal is the proxy of genetic influences
and the most proximal locus of control over behavioral
responses, then it should be capable of recruiting and direct-
ing other psychological systems and processes in the service
of that goal. Accordingly, one should find that the active goal
drives selective attention to the goal-relevant aspects of the
environment, evaluation of environmental stimuli (objects,
people, and events) in terms of whether they help or hin-
der the goal pursuit, and perceptual interpretation of stimuli
in manners best suited to attainment of the goal. In other
words, the active goal tends to take the helm of one’s mental
machinery and “adjust its settings” in a single-minded way
to maximize the chances of goal attainment.
CH08.indd 300
Attention
Bruner (1957) was facing a similar situation 50 years ago
when seeking to explain how the “New Look” findings of
motivational and value-driven biases in perception could
occur in terms of basic underlying psychological processes.
Bruner ’s efforts gave us the extremely useful notions of
goal-directed (selective) attention, in which the active goal
drives what one attends to in the busy world, and of cat-
egory accessibility, the theoretical mechanism by which
goals could exert this influence on attention. An active goal
(e.g., to find something to eat) caused the mental repre-
sentations relevant to attaining the goal (e.g., restaurants
and bodegas) to become somewhat more active than usual and
thus more ready to become activated by corresponding
stimuli in the environment.
This selective attention process can be quite striking in
its ability to filter incoming stimuli so that we notice what
is relevant to the goal and do not notice what might distract
us from the goal pursuit. The power of the effect of active
goals on attention is such that salient, unusual events can
be missed entirely, as in “attentional blindness” research
(Mack, 2003; Most, Scholl, Clifford, & Simons, 2005;
Simons & Chabris, 1999; see also related earlier work by
Neisser, 1979; Neisser & Becklen, 1975). In one such study,
participants given the explicit, conscious task of counting
the number of ball tosses between characters on a computer
display failed to notice a gorilla walking right through the
ball-tossing game while they were busy counting tosses.
Need states, such as hunger and thirst, drive selective
attention to stimuli that will satisfy the need; the stronger
the need, the stronger the attentional bias (e.g., Aarts,
Dijksterhuis, & de Vries, 2001; Lavy & van den Hout, 1993).
For example, participants who had fasted for 24 hours were
faster at detecting food-related words in a display than those
who had fasted for 10 hours, who were faster than nonfast-
ing participants; moreover, having a snack right before the
experiment eliminated the effect (Lavy & van den Hout,
1993). In summarizing this research, Strack and Deutsch
(2004) concluded that need states become strongly linked
in memory with the behaviors and situations in which
the need was satisfied so that subsequent experiences of
that need activate an attentional bias, or perceptual readi-
ness (Bruner, 1957), for those same situational features.
Evaluation
Goal and need states not only drive selective attention to
relevant environmental stimuli but also cause those stimuli
to be automatically evaluated as positive or negative. Lewin
(1935, p. 78) held that the evaluation or valence of an envi-
ronmental object or event was a function of whether it
helps or hinders attainment of current goals or satisfaction
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of current needs. For example, a state of food deprivation
(hunger) causes both greater selective attention to food
cues and more positive automatic evaluations of them
(Drobes et al., 2001). Because automatic positive evalu-
ations are directly linked to approach motivations toward
the stimulus and negative automatic evaluations to avoid-
ance motivations toward the stimulus (e.g., Chen & Bargh,
1999; Kawakami et al., 2000; Lewin, 1935), changes in
evaluation caused by the active goal or need state would
direct the individual toward goal-helpful stimuli and away
from goal-hindering stimuli.
This implies that changes in goal or need state should
produce corresponding changes in automatic evaluation
of goal-relevant stimuli. Supporting this prediction is evi-
dence reviewed by Fazio and Olson (2003) that the results
of the well-known Implicit Association Test (Greenwald,
McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) measure of an individual’s
automatic attitudes can be moderated by current goal or
need states. For example, Sherman, Rose, Koch, Presson,
and Chassin (2003) had long-term cigarette smokers (many
of whom wanted to quit) abstain from cigarettes for several
hours before the experimental session. One group was
allowed to smoke just before the experiment (thus satisfy-
ing the need), while another group was not (the need was
still strongly present). Automatic attitudes toward smok-
ing and smoking-related stimuli (cigarettes, ashtray, and
matches) were found to be negative in participants without
the strong need to smoke but positive for those participants
in whom the need was present.
Similar results have been obtained with a different
measure of automatic attitudes, the sequential priming
task. Ferguson and Bargh (2004) showed that active goal
pursuits temporarily cause stimuli (e.g., the letter C) to be
automatically evaluated as positive if they help to attain the
currently active goal (e.g., find as many letter Cs as pos-
sible in a page of text). Importantly, when the goal task has
been completed (i.e., the goal is now inactive), the valence
of that attitude object reverted to its default state. Ferguson
(2008) has coined the term evaluative readiness to refer
to the tendency of active motivational states to assign
valences to environmental objects and events on the basis
of whether they help or hinder the active goal pursuit.
Brendl, Markman, and Messner (2003) have demon-
strated a complementary effect: In their studies, activat-
ing a need caused objects unrelated to satisfaction of the
need to be less positively evaluated than otherwise. Thus,
the autonomous active goal keeps the individual on track
toward attainment of the goal by reducing positivity and,
in turn, strength of approach motivation toward stimuli that
might distract or divert the individual away from the goal.
Goal-driven evaluations are also powerful determi-
nants of our impressions of other people and social groups.
CH08.indd 301
Unconscious Goal Pursuit 301
The warm–cold dimension of interpersonal behavior has
long been known to be critical in impression formation; the
presence of “warm” versus “cold” in an otherwise identical
description of a target individual dramatically alters the
perceived likability of the individual (Asch, 1946; Kelley,
1951). Moreover, Fiske and colleagues have shown that
the warmth dimension and competence are the two basic
dimensions of all outgroup stereotypes around the world,
with warmth being the primary of the two (e.g., Fiske,
Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002). Warmth judgments turn out
to be a function of whether the individual or group is seen
as not being an obstacle or threat to obtaining one’s own
goals: “Outgroups are seen as relatively warm and nice
to the extent that they do not compete with others” (Fiske
et al., 2002, p. 881), and “a primary source of negative affect
toward out-groups results from perceived incompatibility of
their goals with in-group goals” (Fiske & Ruscher, 1993).
The active goal’s effect on evaluations is so power-
ful that it can modify our feelings toward the significant
others in our lives. Given the power of the active goal to
transform the valence of external stimuli to suit the needs
of the goal pursuit, it may be the case that at least part of
our positive feelings toward our friends is that they gener-
ally facilitate our important goal pursuits. Such an effect
has been demonstrated by Fitzsimons and Shah (2008).
They asked participants to identify a set of friends who
helped them achieve academically and a set who did not.
These participants were then nonconsciously primed with
the achievement goal (or not, in the control condition); the
achievement-primed participants consequently evaluated
their academic-helper friends more positively than their non-
academic-helper friends. Control participants who did not
have the achievement goal currently active did not exhibit
the same momentary favoritism for goal-instrumental
friends.
These findings are reminiscent of the successful inter-
vention by Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, and Sherif (1961)
in the classic Robbers’ Cave study. Boys attending a
summer camp were arbitrarily divided into two groups,
the Rattlers and the Eagles, each with their own cabin and
T-shirts. Soon the two groups were warring, raiding the
other group’s cabin and behaving in a generally antago-
nistic manner toward the other group. Sherif et al. (1961)
restored harmony and friendship at the camp by giving
both groups a common goal for which everyone’s help and
cooperation was needed. Sharing this goal dramatically
changed the feelings of the Rattlers and Eagles toward one
another, making friends out of summerlong enemies.
Perception
A long-standing research tradition in social psychology
has established the phenomenon of motivated perceptual
12/18/09 2:40:17 PM
 302 Motivation
interpretation of events (Bruner, 1957; Hastorf & Cantril,
1954; Kunda, 1990). Motivated biases in perception are so
commonplace in daily life as to be unremarkable—in sport-
ing events, fans of both teams involved are convinced that
the referees are against their team (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954);
similarly, the fervently expressed belief of political party
members on both sides of the aisle is that the media coverage
of an election is biased against their candidate. Self-protective
biases operate to transform ego-threatening outcomes (e.g.,
failure on a test) into more palatable versions that exonerate
oneself and put the blame instead on forces outside personal
control or responsibility (e.g., Bradley, 1978; Crocker &
Park, 2004; Sinclair & Kunda, 2000).
Motivational states are found to bias perception of
ambiguous events across a range of domains, always in
the furtherance of goal pursuit. In the classic study by
McClelland and Atkinson (1948), for example, participants
deprived of food (compared with nonhungry participants)
were more likely to report that briefly presented slides con-
tained objects associated with eating (e.g., plates), when
in actuality all participants were exposed to blank slides.
Similarly, participants in an ostensible “taste-testing”
study by Balcetis and Dunning (2006) were told that the
computer running the study would determine whether they
would drink fresh orange juice or an unappealing veggie
smoothie and would signal this outcome by flashing a letter
for one drink or a number for the other drink. All partici-
pants were then exposed to an ambiguous cue for 400 ms,
one that could be interpreted either as the letter B or
the number 13. Participants for whom a letter signaled the
desirable drink were more likely to report seeing
the letter B, whereas those for whom a number signaled the
desirable drink were more likely to perceive the number 13.
Research on evolved goals has shown that an active mat-
ing goal increases the perceived attractiveness of potential
partners (Maner et al., 2003; Maner, Gailliot, & DeWall,
2007; Neuberg et al., 2004) and even increases the degree of
arousal perceived in the faces of attractive women (Maner
et al., 2005). Commitment to a close relationship (the per-
son is motivated to maintain the relationship) produces an
increase in positive illusions concerning the relationship
(Lemay & Clark, 2008; Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996).
In each of these cases, the goal’s effect on perception
increases the probability of goal attainment, for example
by keeping the individual in a relationship despite evidence
that might lead to a breakup if viewed more objectively.
Overriding Chronic, Automatic Processes
The executive power of the active goal is indicated further
by its ability to override chronic, automatic encoding ten-
dencies. The principle that the current goal can dominate
otherwise automatic processes was first proposed by Posner
CH08.indd 302
and Snyder (1975) and tested in a series of experiments by
Neely (1976, 1977). These studies showed that category
labels such as “body” and “furniture” automatically acti-
vated their associated categories and thus primed the cat-
egory members (i.e., names of parts of the body or kinds of
furniture); in a sequential priming task (prime-target pairs
on each trial), participants were faster to respond (make
lexical decisions) to body-part names (e.g., heart and leg)
when “body” was the prime compared with “furniture”
and with types of furniture (e.g., chair and table) when
“furniture” was the prime compared with “body.” Thus,
the chronic automatic effect of presenting a category label
is to activate members of that category.
However, what if the current state of the world is such
that the usual rules do not apply? This situation was cap-
tured in the Neely (1977) paradigm by a condition in which
on 80% of the trials “body” was followed by names of
types of furniture (and only 20% by body parts), and “fur-
niture” was followed by names of parts of the body (and
only 20% of trials by types of furniture). In this condition,
the long-term automatic association between category
label and category members would lead the participant
astray by activating the wrong set of targets and thereby
slow responses. This is indeed what occurred in the condi-
tion in which the time gap between prime and target (i.e.,
stimulus onset asynchrony) was too short (250 ms) for a
strategic, task goal–driven process to guide responses on
that trial. But in a condition where the stimulus onset asyn-
chrony was long enough to permit a strategic, goal-driven
response (750 ms), it was found to override the “hard-
wired” automatic generation of same-category responses.
That is, participants in this condition actually responded
faster to the prime-target mismatch trials (e.g., “body” to
“table”) than the match trials (e.g., “body” to “heart”). The
task goal to respond as quickly as possible to the target
words adapted quickly to the reversed contingencies of
the situation and caused the normally automatic encoding
effect to be inhibited, and the novel contingency to become
(temporarily) automatic.
Logan and Zbrodoff (1979) demonstrated the same
effect in a spatial paradigm in which participants responded
as quickly as they could on each trial as to whether a pre-
sented target word appeared above versus below a fixa-
tion point on the screen. On some trials the actual words
“above” or “below” were presented, and not surprisingly,
participants were faster than usual to make the above or
the below response when the word “above” appeared
above the fixation point or the word “below” appeared below
the fixation point. (The design of this experiment is concep-
tually identical to the classic Stroop (1935) color-naming
paradigm, in which naming a presented word’s color
is faster if the presented word is the color name itself,
12/18/09 2:40:18 PM

e.g., the word “red” presented in red.) But what if on
the majority (80%) of trials the reverse contingency is true: the
word “above” appears below the fixation point and the word
“below” appears above it? Here again, participants are
faster to respond “above” when the word “below” appears
above the fixation point than when the word “above”
appears there, and vice versa.
In another demonstration of an active (unconscious) goal
overriding automatic, habitual responding, Sassenberg and
Moskowitz (2005) primed a “think different” goal of gen-
erating creative solutions to a problem. Participants in the
think-different condition, compared with a control group,
indeed generated more unusual uses for a given object and
more uncommon answers in a free-association task instead
of the habitual or automatically generated ones. In each of
these studies, the currently active goal (i.e., the explicit task
goal given to participants by the experimental instructions)
dominates otherwise automatic, chronic responses if the
latter interfere with the attainment of the goal. (For more
on the neural mechanics of how a current task goal over-
rides automatically suggested alternative responses, see
Cohen, Dunbar, & McClelland, 1990.)
The principle that the active goal can temporarily “recon-
figure” the automatic (immediate, efficient) responses
made to environmental stimuli, if this helps to attain the
goal, extends to complex social information process-
ing situations. For example, much evidence points to the
automatic manner in which other people are encoded or
categorized in terms of their race, age, and gender (e.g.,
Bargh, 1999; Brewer, 1988). However, if doing so hinders
the successful completion of the active goal, this does not
happen. Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides (2001, study 2)
gave participants the explicit goal of coalition detection
and subsequently presented them with a situation in which
allied targets were visibly linked by shirt color. The experi-
menters found that participants encoded targets using the
most useful information current to that context, which in
this case was target shirt color, not their race (race did not
designate targets’ group affiliations). The goal of coalition
detection overrode the usual automatic encoding of people
in terms of racial categories, because race was not diagnostic
of ingroup membership in this context.
As described earlier, implementation intentions are
also examples of the power of the active goal to override
habitual, automatic responses. Much research has shown
implementation intentions to facilitate goal striving even
when it is threatened by strongly competing habitual
responses (e.g., Cohen et al., 2008; Gollwitzer & Schaal,
1998; Holland et al., 2006; Lydon et al., 2008). Through the
formation of strategic implementation intentions, one can
strategically switch from top-down control of one’s actions
by active goals to bottom-up control by situational cues,
CH08.indd 303
Unconscious Goal Pursuit 303
temporarily creating “habit”-like behavioral responses that
aid in goal pursuit instead of threaten it.
Moskowitz, Gollwitzer, Wasel, and Schaal (1999) pro-
vided a particularly compelling demonstration of the active
goal dominating antagonistic automatic processes. In their
studies, all participants showed evidence of automatic
stereotype activation on the mere perception of minority
group features. However, those participants who possessed
a chronic motivation to treat others in an egalitarian fash-
ion were found to inhibit or shut down the automatically
activated stereotype almost immediately after it became
active, such that the stereotype did not influence their per-
ceptions of the minority group members. The active egali-
tarian goal overrode the otherwise automatic tendency to
categorize people in terms of the group stereotype, because
such stereotypic treatment would run counter to the active
goal’s aim of thinking about people the same regardless of
their race, gender, or ethnicity.
Temporary Creation of Automatic Processes
Treating other people fairly is a positive social goal, but
in line with the notion that the self comprises many, often
conflicting goals, people also have strong goals to protect
their self-esteem. If this self-protective goal is active, for
example, following a threat to self-esteem (e.g., failure at a
task), it can instead cause the stereotyping of minority group
members, even under conditions known to normally
prevent such stereotyping. In a series of experiments by
Spencer, Fein, Wolfe, Fong, and Dunn (1998), automatic
stereotyping effects were shown to be blocked by atten-
tional load (secondary task) manipulation, replicating
earlier work by Gilbert and Hixon (1991). The secondary
task thus created conditions under which it was normally
difficult for automatic stereotyping of minority group
members to occur.
However, Spencer et al. (1998) then threatened the self-
esteem of some participants through bogus task-failure
feedback to trigger a goal of restoring positive self-regard.
As one common method of restoring self-esteem is to deni-
grate others, especially minority group members, the active
self-protective goal was expected, and found, to cause
automatic stereotyping effects to reemerge. Participants
who had been told they had failed on the task thus showed
automatic stereotyping effects under conditions known to
prevent such stereotyping under normal conditions. The
active goal of restoring positive self-esteem thus created
automatic effects where none existed without the goal.
Lakin, Chartrand, and Arkin (2008) reported a similar
effect, in which socially excluded individuals subsequently
become more likely to mimic and imitate interaction partners.
The exclusion presumably triggered the need-to-belong goal
(Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Fiske, 2004) and the mimicry
12/18/09 2:40:18 PM
 304 Motivation
behavior as a means to that end (mimicry has been shown to
increase bonding and liking among individuals; Chartrand &
Bargh, 1999), without the participant’s awareness of either
the mimicry behavior or the reason for it.
The original demonstration of such “strategic auto-
maticity” was the research on implementation intentions
(Gollwitzer & Brandstätter, 1997), in which an active goal
creates temporarily automatic processes in service of the
goal pursuit. Forming implementation intentions turns
top-down conscious control into bottom-up automatic or
unconscious control by the situational cues specified in the
“if” component of an if–then implementation intention.
Completed Goals Turn Off Regardless
of the Individual’s Best Interests
It has been argued here that the operation of the active goal
is autonomous from the interests and values of the indi-
vidual person or agentic self. Another class of motivational
phenomena consistent with this hypothesis is the goal
turnoff effect: Once a goal pursuit attempt is completed,
the goal deactivates (e.g., Atkinson & Birch, 1970; Lewin,
1926) and then inhibits the mental representations used to
attain the goal (Förster et al., 2005; Liberman, Foerster,
et al., 2007). In the case of unconscious goal pursuit, it is
clear that the deactivation of the goal must occur indepen-
dently of conscious intention and awareness (because the
individual was not even aware the goal was active). Thus,
several studies have found that once an unconscious goal
is satisfied, its influence on cognition and behavior disap-
pears (e.g., Kawada et al., 2004).
The same goal turnoff effect occurs for conscious
goals—even for positively valued, prosocial goals such as
helping another person (Bargh et al., 2008, study 3). The
goal turnoff effect is part of the autonomous operation of
the active goal and is not under the individual’s (or self ’s)
awareness and control; this can be seen most clearly in
studies where an unequivocally positive goal deactivates
after fulfillment, actually inhibiting the individual from
continuing to behave in this positive fashion. A dramatic
example of this phenomenon is found in recent research on
“moral credentials.”
Monin and Miller (2001) found that participants who
were given the opportunity to disagree with blatantly sexist
comments (thus fulfilling their goal to be egalitarian and
nonsexist) were later more willing (compared with a control
condition) to recommend a man over a woman for a stereo-
typically male job. According to the authors, after partici-
pants had been allowed to establish their moral credentials
in the first part of the experiment, they stopped pursuing this
goal in a subsequent part. Thus, after the egalitarian goal was
fulfilled, it shut off, leaving “host” individuals vulnerable to
behaving in a manner contrary to their egalitarian values.
CH08.indd 304
The “Macbeth effect” (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006)
provides another illustration of the goal-completion
effect running against the individual’s presumed values
and behavioral intentions. In this study, participants were
induced to consider performing some unethical behaviors
and were then given a choice among several small gifts for
taking part in the study. Compared with a control condition,
these participants were more likely to choose a package of
antiseptic tissue wipes than other items. Most importantly,
those who were given an opportunity to wash their hands
after contemplating the unethical behavior subsequently
were less likely to help a stranger. Considering an unethical
act thus triggered the participants’ goal to cleanse them-
selves in any way possible (i.e., morally or physically),
and satisfying that goal by washing of the hands (physical
cleansing) turned off the goal and made it less likely they
would engage in ethical behavior (moral cleansing).
When morally threatened participants washed their
hands, the selfish goal was fulfilled—and therefore no
longer on the lookout for opportunities to restore its host’s
moral self. Consequently, morally restored participants
were more likely to decline helping a person in need. Once
again, as with the moral-credentialing effect, the effect of
completion of the cleansing goal runs counter to the pre-
sumed conscious intentions of the individual. As one of
the Macbeth-effect study’s authors asked rhetorically in an
online interview, “Do you really want your past sins to be
easily washed away, which discourages you from engaging
in ethical behaviors to help others?” (Hirshon, 2006, p. 1).
In Bargh et al. (2008), study 3, in which the conscious
goal to help one’s experimental-task partner carried over
to helping strangers who interrupted the experiment, a
condition was included in which the conscious helping
goal was completed before any further requests for help.
Because it had been completed, the helping goal “turned
off,” so in this condition the participant no longer tended
to help those who asked for it. Completing the pursuit of
the helping goal caused the individual to subsequently
become less likely to help others in need—less prosocial
and altruistic—a tendency running against the likely self-
concepts of the participants that they are helpful to those
in need.
In summary, traditional models of motivation in which
a conscious, agentic self is posited to be the ultimate con-
troller of individual human behavior need to take into
account the accumulating evidence to the contrary. For one
thing, conscious intentions and awareness are not neces-
sary to put motives and goals into operation or to guide
them to completion. For another, once activated, these
goals operate to produce the same outcomes and with
the same signature set of phenomenal qualities as when
consciously pursued. Third, all goals, whether consciously
12/18/09 2:40:19 PM

or unconsciously pursued, operate autonomously from
control by the individual person or self—they operate on
all relevant information in the environment, even on target
people or events for which their operation is unintended by
the individual and might produce unwanted consequences.
As part of their operation, they turn off after completion
even if this causes the individual to be less likely during
that time to act in line with important (e.g., prosocial and
egalitarian) self-values.
The evidence thus points to the existence of uncon-
scious motivational structures that guided human behav-
ior before the development of conscious psychological
processes (Bargh & Huang, 2009; Bargh & Morsella,
2009). The striking similarities observed in the outcomes
and qualities of unconscious versus conscious goal pursuit
suggest that the later-developing conscious route to goal
pursuit used preexisting unconscious motivational pro-
cesses and structures. Moreover, this approach to human
motivation in which unconscious, not conscious, processes
are given primacy of place fits well with the long-term
perspective of evolutionary biology, in which unconscious
processes capably and adaptively drive the behavior of
all living organisms (e.g., Mayr, 1976). It is a strength
of the unconscious-primacy viewpoint that it is in harmony
with research and evidence in the other natural sciences, as
opposed to existing in anomalous detachment.
The other important themes emerging from the research
on unconscious motivation are the autonomy of active
goal operation and the power of the active goal to trans-
form cognitive and affective processes—even habitual and
automatic ones—in the furtherance of the goal pursuit.
Autonomy of operation appears to be yet another feature of
goal pursuit that characterizes both conscious and uncon-
scious goal pursuit: active goals operate independently to
pursue their own agendas and thus can produce outcomes
that are unintended and even unwanted at the level of the
individual person (hence the notion of the “selfish goal”;
Bargh & Huang, 2009). Moreover, while in operation the
goal has great power over other psychological systems
such as evaluation and perceptual interpretation, driv-
ing the outcomes of these processes toward those helpful
to the goal pursuit; this power appears to be so strong that
otherwise automatic (immediate, efficient) effects (e.g.,
stereotype activation) can be prevented from occurring
and normally nonautomatic effects can be made to operate
automatically.
It must be stressed that the notion of the “selfish goal”
in no way implies “selfishness” at the level of the indi-
vidual person, mainly because the individual or self is
composed of many goals—self-interested ones to be
sure, but also prosocial and morally principled ones (e.g.,
Mansbridge, 1990; Miller, 1999). Prosocial goals such as
CH08.indd 305
Summary 305
cooperation, helping, and putting the welfare of others over
one’s own have been shown to operate automatically and
unconsciously, testifying to their innate or well-practiced
nature (see Bargh et al., 2001, study 2; Chen et al., 2001;
Tomasello et al., 2005). Because selfishness means put-
ting one’s own welfare and needs above those of other
people (Elster, 1990; Jencks, 1990), unconsciously operat-
ing goals for cooperation and for ensuring the welfare of
another person (see Clark & Mills, 1993) show that “self-
ish” goals (in terms of their single-minded pursuit of their
own agendas) do not necessarily produce “selfish” indi-
viduals (in terms of pursuing outcomes that benefit others
more than oneself).
That goals can be selfish without making their host indi-
viduals behave selfishly is a nice thought on which to end
this section, because it shows yet again that the active goal is
the unit of autonomous behavior control, not the individual
human (or self)—just as Dawkins (1976) and others had
shown earlier that the gene is the unit of natural selec-
tion, not the individual organism. The active goal pursues
its agenda regardless of whether this fits the agenda of its
individual host, just as selfish genes pursue their own
propagation whether or not this is good for their host
organisms.
SUMMARY
These are halcyon days for the scientific study of human
motivation. Research under the traditional model, in which
the individual consciously sets goals to attain, commits
to, and then strives for them, is flourishing. Important
advances have been made in our knowledge of effective
ways to set goals, such as mental contrasting, in which the
individual’s present circumstances (e.g., obesity) are con-
trasted with a future state (e.g., a healthy, trim physique)
that the person desires to attain. Goal-striving research has
focused on effective ways to overcome problems such as
getting started; implementation intentions in which
the individual forms a concrete if–then plan to carry out the
desired action have been shown to be quite effective in
this regard. Other threats to successful goal striving have
received research attention as well, such as knowing when
to disengage from a fruitless goal pursuit, ego depletion
effects (self-control as a limited resource), and overcoming
short-term temptations for the greater long-term good.
This ongoing research on conscious goal pursuit has
been complemented by an increasing focus on the uncon-
scious mode of goal pursuit, in which goal representations
become activated automatically by relevant environmental
stimuli and then operate, without conscious guidance or
awareness, over extended periods to guide cognition, affect,
12/18/09 2:40:19 PM
 306 Motivation
and behavior toward the desired end-state. This research
has led to the conclusion, in line with dominant models
in evolutionary biology, that unconscious motivational
structures existed before the emergence, over evolution-
ary periods, of conscious forms of thought and information
processing and that the conscious mode of goal pursuit
likely uses those preexisting processes and structures. This
is shown by the high degree of similarity recent research
has found between conscious and unconscious modes of
goal pursuit in the outcomes they produce, the phenomenal
or experiential qualities associated with the goal pursuit,
and the brain regions supporting them.
Taken together, the two lines of research have advanced
our knowledge of human motivation not only by revealing
a unifying single (or at least highly similar) mechanism
underlying both conscious and unconscious goal pursuit but
also by pointing to what is perhaps the key functional dif-
ference between conscious and unconscious thought. It is
clear from the different focuses and agendas of the research
on conscious versus unconscious motivation that the former
has been concerned mainly with planning—the creation,
establishment, and maintenance of new set goals, with top-
ics such as how new goals are chosen, how one becomes
committed to them, and how one overcomes obstacles and
difficulties in their way. The research on unconscious goal
pursuit, on the other hand, has focused on existing goal rep-
resentations and how they are capable of operating outside
of conscious knowledge and guidance.
Planning, after all, still seems to be a uniquely human
activity—some have argued that it is the ability that distin-
guishes us from all other species, including our closest pri-
mate neighbors (e.g., Byrne & Bates, 2007; among other
candidates being actively debated are theory of mind capa-
bilities and an innate cooperation motive; see Tomasello
et al., 2005). Such mental time travel appears to be the spe-
cial domain of conscious thought, giving us the ability to
escape or transcend our immediate present circumstances
by planning for the future or remembering the past (Bargh,
1997). Unconscious processes make this time travel pos-
sible by keeping the individual adaptively in touch with
the present, “minding the store” while consciousness is
away, thanks to the various unconscious behavioral guid-
ance systems as discovered by social cognition research
over the past quarter century.
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Chapter 9
Emotion
DACHER KELTNER AND JENNIFER S. LERNER
Conceptions of human nature derive from beliefs about
human emotion. Are humans competitive and aggressive
by nature or cooperative and kind? Do people seek to max-
imize personal desire or to enhance the welfare of others?
What is the nature of human rationality? What is the path
to the good life? Answers to these age-old questions hinge
on an understanding of the emotions.
Western constructions of emotions have been guided by
the Romanticism thesis, which dates back to Plato and found
its clearest expression in the writings of Rousseau (Oatley,
Keltner, & Jenkins, 2006; Solomon, 1976). The romanticism
thesis holds that emotions are powerful, involuntary forces
and that the experience of emotion guides patterns of rea-
soning, self-expression, and social behavior that are vital
to healthy social communities. For many theorists, such as
Kant, the power of emotions, in particular to shift reason-
ing in context-specific fashion, necessitated that emotions
play minor roles in moral judgment, ethical conduct, and
social organization. For others, such as Rousseau, Hume,
and Darwin, these same properties qualified emotions as
a source of moral intuition and ethical behavior and thus
deserving of a privileged place in social life.
Founding figures in psychology—Darwin and James—
focused their theoretical energies on the nature of emotion.
The psychological science that would follow, however, would
have little systematic to say about emotion (this is only the sec-
ond Handbook of Social Psychology chapter devoted to the
topic). During the heyday of behaviorism and learning
theory, emotions resided inside the proverbial “black box
of the mind,” outside the purview of observable measure-
ment and undeserving of scientific inquiry. Reacting against
drive-based, psychodynamic approaches to the human
mind, B. F. Skinner (1948) inveighed that emotions “are the
This chapter was prepared with support from the National Science Foundation (PECASE SES0239637), the National Institute of Mental
Health, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Metanexus Institute, and the Fetzer Institute.
317
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
fictional causes to which we ascribe behavior” and “use-
less and bad for our peace of mind and our blood pressure”
(p. 92). The cognitive revolution that followed behaviorism
made significant progress in showing how cognitive pro-
cesses could fully account for seemingly “hot” emotional
processes such as prejudice, attraction, and group hatred.
In the last 30 years, however, a robust science of emotion
has emerged, one that appears to represent a paradigm shift
in thinking about human nature (Damasio, 1994; Davidson,
Scherer, & Goldsmith, 2003; Frank, 1988; Keltner, 2009;
LeDoux, 1996). The sources of this new science of emotion
are numerous. Developmental psychologists began to docu-
ment emotions as central to parent–child attachment and to
children’s navigation of their environment before language
acquisition (Barrett & Campos, 1987; Campos, Campos, &
Barrett, 1989; Cohn & Tronick, 1983). Neurological stud-
ies of split-brain patients discovered that one hemisphere of
the brain (the right) preferentially responds to the emotional
content of stimuli (Gazzaniga, 1985). Ethological studies
of different hunter-gatherer cultures revealed striking uni-
versalities in the expression of emotion and the prominent
place of emotions in social interaction (Eibl-Eibesfeldt,
1989; Konner, 2003). And in the early 1980s, cognitive
psychologists began to document how emotions shape
memory (Bower, 1981), as well as judgment and decision
making (Isen, 1987; Schwarz & Clore, 1983).
The study of emotion now claims a central position in
social psychology (e.g., Tiedens & Leach, 2004; Zajonc,
1998). As social-psychological studies have advanced an
understanding of the emotions, they have yielded answers
to some of the age-old questions about human nature.
This review focuses on the classic and contemporary ques-
tions that frame recent findings in this new science of
318 Emotion
emotion. The first section addresses definitions of emotion
from taxonomic, cross-cultural, and functional perspectives.
The second section considers the extent to which emotions
are universal and culturally specific. The next two sec-
tions ask how emotions are shaped by cognitive and social
processes and, in turn, shape cognitive and social processes.
In the concluding section, the contributions emotions make
to happiness are considered.
WHAT IS AN EMOTION?
In 1884, James famously titled an essay in the journal Mind,
“What Is an Emotion?” A consensual answer to this ques-
tion has been hard to reach. Debates have flared regarding
which emotions are “basic,” that is, elemental, evolved,
and genetically encoded in the nervous systems, and which
emotions are secondary, or constructed from other emotions
(Ekman, 1992; Ortony & Turner, 1990). More recently,
controversies have arisen regarding the boundaries between
emotions and whether or not (or to what extent) emo-
tions are discrete entities or “natural kinds” (Barrett, 2006;
Ekman & Davidson, 1994; Keltner, Ekman, Gonzaga, &
Beer, 2003; Panksepp, 1998).
One answer to James’s question is to differentiate emo-
tions from other kinds of affective experience. The consen-
sus now is that affective experiences, which involve feelings
of good or bad (Russell, 2003), can be studied at four lev-
els of analysis (Kahneman, 1999; Rosenberg, 1998). At the
broadest level, emotional traits refer to general styles of
emotional responses that persist across context and time
(Larsen & Ketelaar, 1989; Shiota, Keltner, & John, 2006).
For example, people who experience trait-like gratitude
tend to feel grateful at different points and in different situ-
ations throughout their lives (McCullough, Emmons, &
Tsang, 2002). People who report such trait-like tenden-
cies for particular emotions show a subjective, expressive,
and physiological profile that closely resembles that of the
momentary emotion or emotional state (Gross, Sutton, &
Ketelaar, 1998; Lazarus, 1991; Malatesta, 1990).
At a second level of analysis, moods are assumed to be
longer lasting, less focused on a particular cause, and less
context bound than specific emotions (Watson & Tellegen,
1985). For example, anger, an emotion, has a specific
source (a slight at work or a humiliating comment from
a spouse), whereas irritability, a mood, is less defined by a
clear cause or intentional object. Numerous studies have
characterized the temporal stability of positive and nega-
tive moods and their covariation with personality traits,
such as extraversion and agreeableness, and subjective
well-being (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005; Watson &
Clark, 1992).
Emotions, which represent a third level of analysis, are
assumed to be briefer, more context specific, and more
focused on a particular cause or intentional object than on
positive moods and traits (Ekman, 1992; Schwarz, 1990).
How specific positive emotions, such as gratitude, differ
from related mood-like experiences, such as feeling appre-
ciative, and coalesce into trait-like tendencies, such as a
grateful disposition, has emerged as an essential question
for the field (e.g., McCullough et al., 2002).
Sensory experiences of pleasure and pain represent the
final, most specific level of analysis (Kahneman, 1999).
Sensory experiences, such as an itch or the taste of a Belgian
beer, are likely to have unique temporal dynamics (e.g.,
Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993) that, when filtered through
an individual’s social goals and aspirations, can evolve into
emotional experiences. For example, Rozin (1996) has
offered an evolutionary account of how “distaste” for nox-
ious smells and tastes (a sensory experience) evolves into
“disgust,” an emotion felt toward contaminating actions and
traits.
Building on this basic conceptualization of emotion,
Table 9.1 presents definitions of emotion from leading fig-
ures in the field, including those who have studied emo-
tions through the lens of cultural constructivist assumptions
(e.g., Lutz & White, 1986; Frijda & Mesquita, 1994) and
evolutionary theory (Ekman, 1992; Tooby & Cosmides,
1990). Across these definitions, differences emerge: Many
prioritize the physiological basis of emotion, for example,
but some do not. Areas of convergence also appear; most
theorists assume that emotions orient people to respond to
ongoing events in their environment and that in this sense,
emotions are “relational.” In addition, these theorists tend to
assume that emotions involve multiple responses. Thus, any
attempt to answer James’s question, “What is an emotion?”
must consider the multiple components of emotion.
Components of Emotion
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,
Darwin (1872/1998) presented his principle of serviceable
habits, which holds that the expressions of emotion that peo-
ple observe today derive from habitual patterns of behavior
that proved useful in the evolution of humans’ mammalian
predecessors. For example, sneering is a behavioral vestige of
snarling and preparing to bite, and affectionate embrace and
soothing touch evolved from patterns of protective physical
contact.
Darwin’s rich descriptions of more than 30 emotions
presage the notion that emotions involve multiple bodily
systems (Gross, 1998; Levenson, 1999). Darwin himself
focused on facial muscle action, vocalization patterns, ges-
ture, postural shifts, and gaze activity, as well as autonomic

Table 9.1 Definitions of Emotion
Source Definition
James, 1884 “My thesis. . . is that the bodily
changes follow directly the
perception of the exciting fact,
and that our feeling of the same
changes as they occur is the
emotion.”
Arnold & Gasson, 1954 “An emotion or an affect can be
considered as the felt tendency
towards an object judged
suitable, or away from an
object judged unsuitable,
reinforced by specific bodily
changes.”
Lutz & White, 1986 “Emotions are a primary idiom
for defining and negotiating
social relations of the self in a
moral order.”
Barrett & Campos, 1987 “We conceive of emotions
as bidirectional processes of
establishing, maintaining,
and/or disrupting significant
relationships between
an organism and the (external
or internal) environment.”
Tooby & Cosmides, 1990 “An emotion corresponds
to a distinctive system of
coordination among the
mechanisms that regulate each
controllable biological process.
That is, each emotional state
manifests design features
‘designed’ to solve particular
families of adaptive problems,
whereby psychological
mechanisms assume unique
configuration.”
Lazarus, 1991 “Emotions are organized
psychophysiological reactions
to news about ongoing
relationships with the
environment.”
Ekman, 1992 “Emotions are viewed as
having evolved through their
adaptive value in dealing
with fundamental life-tasks.
Each emotion has unique
features: signal, physiology,
and antecedent events. Each
emotion also has characteristics
in common with other emotions:
rapid onset, short duration,
unbidden occurrence, automatic
appraisal, and coherence among
responses.”
Frijda & Mesquita, 1994 “Emotions . . . are, first and
foremost, modes of relating to
the environment: states
of readiness for engaging,
or not engaging, in
interaction with that
environment.”
What is an Emotion? 319
responses such as facial coloring and fainting (see Table 9.2
for his analyses of four emotions). Contemporary analyses
of emotion presuppose that emotions involve not only dis-
play behavior and physiological response but also specific
appraisals and action tendencies, conceptual knowledge,
language, and experience.
In general, empirical studies of the components of emo-
tion have engaged in the surprisingly complex task of
characterizing the response profiles of different emotions
(which in Darwin’s eyes would reveal their evolution-
ary origins). This descriptive task translates to empirical
attempts to answer two questions. First, within a response
system, say facial muscle action, how do the emotions dif-
fer? Ultimately, this kind of work speaks to the question of
how many emotions are signaled, for example, in the face
and voice, or registered in specific patterns of physiologi-
cal response. Second, how do the components of emotion
relate to subjective experience? Data relevant to this ques-
tion inform age-old questions about the subjective qual-
ity of affective experience, which is considered in a later
Table 9.2 Darwin’s Descriptions of Four Emotions
Emotion Expressive Behaviors
Devotion (reverence) Face upward, eyelids upturned,
fainting, pupils upward and
inward, humbling kneeling
posture, hands upturned
Laughter Tears, deep inspiration,
contraction of chest, shaking
of body, head nodding to and
fro, lower jaw quivering up
and down, lip corners drawn
backward, head thrown
backward, shaking, head and
face red, muscle around eyes
contracted, lip pressing and biting
Rage Uncovered teeth, hair bristled,
face reddened, chest heaving,
nostrils dilated, quivering,
trembling, teeth clenched,
respiration labored, gestures
frantic, veins on forehead and
neck distended, body erect, bent
forward, rolling on ground and
kicking, screaming (children),
brow furrowed, glaring,
protruding lips, retracted lips,
tossing arms about, shaking fist,
hissing
Terror (intense fear) Pallor, nostrils flared, gasping,
gulping, protruding eyeballs,
pupils dilated, hands clenched
or opened, arms protruded,
sweat, prostration, body relaxed,
eyebrow corners tightened and
raised, upper eyelids raised, lip
corners pulled sideways
320 Emotion
section. Within the literatures on the different components
of emotion, theoretical issues, tensions, and advances have
arisen that frame the ensuing reviews.
Emotion-Eliciting Appraisals: Discrete Versus
Dimensional Approaches and the Automaticity
of Emotion
Emotions are rooted in appraisals. At the most general
level, emotion appraisals involve evaluative judgments of
whether an event is good or bad and whether people’s cur-
rent actions and environment correspond to their personal
goals and expectations (Carver & White, 1994; Davidson,
2004; Higgins, 1997; Russell, 2003). The study of emotion-
eliciting appraisals, or the “meaning making” processes
that give rise to different emotions (Clore & Ortony, 2008;
Roseman, 1991, 1984; Roseman, Spindel, & Jose, 1990;
Roseman, Wiest, & Swartz, 1994; Scherer, 1997; Scherer &
Wallbott, 1994; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985), was the intellec-
tual offspring of two literatures: (1) research on stress and
health, particularly Lazarus’s (1991) reframing of specific
stresses as emotion appraisals, and (2) the study of attribu-
tion, achievement motivation, and emotion (Weiner, 1985)
and its documentation that successes and failures could
lead to different emotions depending on how outcomes are
interpreted.
Discrete approaches to emotion appraisals focus on the
coherent themes, or core-relational themes, in Lazarus’s
words (1991), that give rise to the experience of emo-
tions and that differentiate emotions from one another. For
example, people feel anger when they appraise an unjusti-
fied offense against themselves or someone close; they feel
compassion when they feel moved to help someone who is
suffering. These core-relational themes are thought to result
from two stages of appraisal: in the first, people appraise
whether an event is congruent or incongruent with their
goals; in the second, people consider a causal attribution
for the event, potential responses, and future consequences
of different courses of action (e.g., Folkman & Lazarus,
1989).
Discrete approaches to appraisal help to illuminate
sources of individual variation in emotion—for example,
why an angry person appraises ongoing events in ways that
lead to a life rife with frustration and hostility (Rosenberg,
1998). Discrete emotion-eliciting appraisals can be cap-
tured in spontaneous discourse and relate to emotion-
specific experiences and facial expressions (Bonanno &
Keltner, 2004). Yet discrete approaches to appraisal fail to
yield simple explanations of the similarities among emo-
tions (e.g., between anger and fear) and do not readily explain
rapid transitions between emotional states (Ellsworth,
1991).
By contrast, dimensional approaches to appraisal pre-
suppose that core dimensions of appraisal, when combined,
give rise to specific emotions (e.g., Ellsworth & Smith,
1988; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985). In their review of numer-
ous studies of the semantic content of emotions, Smith and
Ellsworth (1985) derived eight dimensions that capture the
appraisal processes that lead to various emotions (see also
Scherer, 1997). These appraisal dimensions can be thought
of as the basic units of meaning that people ascribe to events
(see Table 9.3).
Guided by dimensional approaches, studies of emotion-
related recall (Ellsworth & Smith, 1988; Smith & Ellsworth,
1985) have documented that each emotion is defined by a
fairly distinct pattern of appraisal (for critiques of this meth-
odology, see Parkinson & Manstead, 1992). For example,
interest is associated with appraisals of increased pleasant-
ness, the desire to attend, the sense that situational factors
are producing events, a perceived need to expend effort,
moderate certainty about future outcomes, and little sense
of obstacles or the illegitimacy of events.
Moreover, certain appraisal dimensions are central to the
differentiation of clusters of emotions (Smith & Ellsworth,
1985). For example, agency, a combination of control and
responsibility, differentiates anger, sadness, and guilt. In the
face of a negative event, blaming others produces anger,
believing that the situation is responsible produces sadness,
and self-blame produces guilt (see also Weiner, 1985).
Dimensional accounts of emotion appraisal have gen-
erated several lines of inquiry. They identify mechanisms
Table 9.3 Dimensions of Emotion-Related Appraisal
Dimension Definition
Attention Degree to which you focus on
and think about the stimulus
Certainty Degree to which you are certain
about what is going to happen
Control coping Extent to which you have control
over outcomes in the environment
Pleasantness Degree that the event is positive
or negative
Perceived obstacle Extent to which the pursuit of
your goals is blocked
Responsibility Extent to which other people,
you, and situational factors are
responsible for events
Legitimacy Extent to which the event is
fair and deserved or unfair and
undeserved
Anticipated effort Extent to which you must expend
energy to respond to the event
Adapted from Smith & Ellsworth, 1985.

by which emotions influence different cognitive processes
(see the section on emotion and reason) and pinpoint likely
emotional processes associated with different central ner-
vous system regions (see Davidson, Pizzagalli, Nitschke, &
Kalin, 2003; Ochsner, 2008). For example, the experience
of anger involving high levels of agency has been associ-
ated with activation in the left-frontal regions of the cortex,
an area of the brain thought to facilitate approach-related
behavior (Harmon-Jones, Sigelman, Bohlig, & Harmon-
Jones, 2003). Dimensional accounts also illuminate likely
areas of cultural variation in emotion-related appraisals. For
example, based on how cultures vary in their conceptions
of human agency (Morris & Peng, 1994), similar events are
likely to trigger different emotions in members of different
cultures, probably because of differences in appraisal.
Discrete and dimensional approaches both assume that
emotion-eliciting appraisals begin with simple appraisals
and proceed to complex meaning-making attributions.
Along these lines, a critical question that has emerged con-
cerns automaticity: which emotion-eliciting appraisals are
automatic—that is, fast, beyond deliberative control, and
preconscious—and which are more deliberative, controlled
processes. Inspired by Zajonc’s theorizing (1980), research-
ers now widely assume that an automatic, preconscious
appraisal produces an evaluation of whether a stimulus
is good or bad (LeDoux, 1996; Mischel & Shoda, 1995;
Russell, 2003; Winkielman, Zajonc, & Schwarz, 1997). This
system gives rise to automatic affective reactions that moti-
vate rapid approach or avoidance responses and core feelings
of positivity or negativity (Barrett, 2006; Russell, 2003).
Indeed, rapid exposure below conscious awareness to
certain classes of stimuli triggers primary appraisals and
core positive or negative feelings. Zajonc found that expo-
sure to positive or negative stimuli at presentation rates that
prevented conscious recognition of the stimulus colored
participants’ evaluations of subsequently presented stimuli
(Murphy & Zajonc, 1993). Subliminally presented photos of
smiles or anger displays trigger emotion-related facial expres-
sions, subjective experience, and physiological response in
the perceiver (Dimberg & Öhman, 1996; Öhman & Dimberg,
1978). In one study, snake phobics, but not control partici-
pants, showed a galvanic skin response when presented with
photos of snakes so quickly that the images could not be con-
sciously recognized (Öhman & Soares, 1994).
Subsequent work has begun to characterize the stimulus
features that generate positive or negative primary apprais-
als. Positive as opposed to negative appraisals are generated
by smooth rather than sharp-edged objects, light rather than
dark objects, high rather than low pitch (Huron, 2006), and
high versus low physical location (Clore & Ortony, 2008).
Ito, Larsen, Smith, and Cacioppo (1998) have documented
that brain activity associated with primary appraisals of
What is an Emotion? 321
negatively valenced stimuli may be of greater magnitude
than those of positive stimuli.
Inspired in part by this literature, LeDoux (1996) argued
that the amygdala, an almond-shaped region in the mid-
brain, is centrally involved in generating primary apprais-
als that give rise to emotion before conscious recognition
and categorization of a stimulus (for a recent review, see
Phelps, 2006). He grounds this claim in neuroanatomy: the
amygdala receives inputs from sensory processing systems
via the thalamus that are faster than the inputs that arrive
from the hippocampus and cortex, where the semantic
classification of the stimulus may originate. Once acti-
vated, the amygdala, via projections to the hypothalamus,
regulates emotion-related behavior through activation of
the autonomic nervous system, a branch of the peripheral
nervous system considered in detail later (Adolphs, Tranel,
Damasio, & Damasio, 1994; Aggleton, 2000).
Moreover, recent human imaging studies indicate that
the amygdala is involved in primary evaluative appraisals
(Baxter & Murray, 2002). The amygdala (along with other
brain regions) becomes more active in response to sad film
clips (Levesque et al., 2003), erotic film clips (Beauregard,
Levesque, & Bourgouin, 2001), disturbing slides (Phan,
Wager, Taylor, & Liberzon, 2004), and unpleasant tastes
and odors (Zald, 2003). People show increased amygdala
activation to faces of individuals from ethnic groups other
than their own (Hart et al., 2000), and amygdala activation
predicts whether people will recall emotionally evocative
stimuli (Canli, Zhao, Desmond, & Gabrieli, 1999).
The literature on emotion appraisals is rich in theo-
retical development, but several areas of inquiry await
empirical attention. Given critiques of self-report mea-
sures as assessments of online appraisals (Parkinson &
Manstead, 1992), methods are needed to study the con-
tents of appraisal processes as they occur. In addition, new
questions have arisen concerning the semantic content of
primary appraisals: Are primary appraisals attuned to the
valence of a stimulus, its novelty, its salience, or its inten-
sity? Are other dimensions, such as agency, involved in
automatic, primary appraisals? Can discrete emotions be
generated through automatic appraisals? To what extent
do primary appraisals give rise to conscious experiences
(Clore & Ortony, 2008; Winkielman, Knutson, Paulus, &
Trujillo, 2007)? Answers to these questions will shed light
on how emotions arise.
Signaling Behavior: New Emotions, New Signaling
Systems, and the Grammar of Social Interaction
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,
Charles Darwin limned the expressive signatures of doz-
ens of emotions (Darwin, 1872/1998; Matsumoto, Keltner,
322 Emotion
Shiota, O’Sullivan, & Frank, 2008). He drew comparisons
between human and nonhuman emotional display to chal-
lenge creationists’ claims that God graced humans with
special facial muscles that allow us to express uniquely
human emotions.
The study of signaling behavior has enabled the devel-
oping science of emotion (Ambady, this volume, Ekman,
1993). Comparisons of human and nonhuman emotional
display reveal the evolutionary origins of specific emo-
tions, for example, that embarrassment evolved out of
appeasement processes in nonhuman primates (Beer,
Heerey, Keltner, Knight, & Scabini, 2003; Keltner &
Buswell, 1997; Miller & Leary, 1992), that laughter and
smiling evolved out of distinct affiliative displays in other
primates (Preuschoft, 1992; van Hooff, 1972), and that
human emotion vocalization resembles other mammals’
vocalizations related to food, sex, affiliation, caretaking,
and play (Snowdon, 2003). Studies of the perception and
the production of emotional display have been central
to affective neuroscience (Keltner, Ekman, et al., 2003).
Emotional displays serve as building blocks for social
relationships—a theme of the section on the social con-
struction of emotion.
The study of emotional display is a descriptive enterprise:
encoding studies ascertain which signaling behaviors covary
with which distinct experiences, and decoding studies deter-
mine whether observers can make accurate inferences about
emotion from nonverbal displays (Ekman, 1993; Ekman,
Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1982; Keltner, 1995; Matsumoto et al.,
2008). Initially, and controversially, studies of emotional
display largely focused on displays of five negative emo-
tions in the face and on one display of positive emotion, the
smile. In the last 15 years, previously unstudied emotions
(e.g., love, pride, gratitude, and embarrassment) have been
shown to have distinct displays, and signaling systems
such as touch have been investigated, revealing emotional
displays to be central to the formation and maintenance of
relationships.
Facial, Postural, and Gestural Displays of Emotion
The 30 to 40 facial muscles beneath the skin’s surface are
involved in numerous actions: breathing, eating, swallow-
ing, speaking, prosodic vocalization, and expressing emo-
tion. Of the tens of thousands of possible configurations of
the facial muscles, a limited set express emotion (Ekman,
1993). Emotion-specific facial muscle movements tend to
be brief (lasting between 1 and 5 seconds), symmetrical,
and hard to produce voluntarily (Dimberg, Thunberg, &
Grunedal, 2002; Ekman, 1993; Frank, Ekman, & Friesen,
1993). A genuine smile of pleasure, for example, is marked
by these properties and serves as a reliable indicator of
positive emotion; by contrast, polite smiles that mask
negative emotions do not tend to possess these temporal
and morphological properties and are less reliable indica-
tors of positive states.
Initial encoding studies documented distinct facial
expressions of anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and
happiness (Ekman, Friesen, & Ancoli, 1980; Hess, Banse, &
Kappas, 1995; Matsumoto, 1987). More recently, encoding
studies have measured gaze, head, and postural activity to
chart the displays of other emotions. Embarrassment is sig-
naled by gaze aversion, a controlled smile, head turns (typi-
cally down and to the left), and face touches (Harris, 2001;
Keltner, 1995; Miller & Leary, 1992). A brief pattern of
smiling, mutual gaze, affiliative hand gestures, open posture,
and forward leans predicts increased self and partner reports
of romantic love, but not desire, as well as peripheral oxy-
tocin release (Gonzaga, Keltner, Londahl, & Smith, 2001;
Gonzaga, Turner, Keltner, Campos, & Altemus, 2006). In
contrast, this same research finds that sexual desire is sig-
naled in puckers, lip licks and wipes, and tongue protru-
sions. Pride is reliably signaled with expansive posture, head
movements up and back, and upward arm thrusts (Tracy &
Matsumoto, 2008; Tracy & Robins, 2004). Sympathy corre-
lates with oblique eyebrows, forward leans, and concerned
gaze (Eisenberg et al., 1989), although this pattern of behav-
ior is not reliably decoded as sympathy (Haidt & Keltner,
1999).
Dozens of decoding studies have likewise documented
that several facial expressions of emotion—the six origi-
nally investigated by Ekman and colleagues (1982), as well
as contempt, embarrassment, laughter, pride, shame, love,
desire, and awe—are reliably judged by observers, at least
in prototypical forms (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002; Haidt &
Keltner, 1999; Keltner, 1995; Tracy & Robins, 2004).
Vocal Displays of Emotion
Few species communicate with as much precision and mean-
ing as humans do with the voice: people tease, laugh, exhort,
flirt, criticize, soothe, and engage the attention of infants
with subtle and brief variations in vocal tone (Bachorowski,
1999; Bachorowski & Owren, 2001; Scherer, 1986).
Researchers can capture more than 20 acoustic properties
of speech, including speech rate and fluency, number of syl-
lables per second, syllable duration, number and duration
of pauses, pitch and pitch variability and range, perceived
tempo, loudness, and perceived rhythm (Bachorowski,
1999; Scherer, Johnstone, & Klasmeyer, 2003).
Most evidence regarding the vocal display of emotion
derives from decoding studies (Banse & Scherer, 1996;
Scherer et al., 2003). In one line of research, people, often
trained actors, express different emotions in the voice
while reading nonsense syllables or relatively neutral text.
Other studies have had participants communicate emotions

through vocal bursts, which are brief, nonword utterances
that arise between speech incidents, such as shrieks, groans,
or sighs.
This research has revealed the human voice to be rich
with information about emotion. In recent reviews of more
than 60 studies of this kind, Juslin and Laukka (2003) con-
cluded that hearers can judge five emotions in the voice—
anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and tenderness—with
accuracy rates that approach 70% (see also Scherer et al.,
2003). More recent studies have documented similarly high
rates of identification of emotion vocal bursts conveying
admiration, achievement, amusement, boredom, contempt,
contentment, elation, pleasure, and relief (Sauter & Scott,
2007).
Tactile Displays of Emotion
Touch is central to species-characteristic patterns of sooth-
ing, flirtation, greeting, play, and proximity maintenance
(Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989; Hertenstein, 2002). With the evolu-
tion of the skin and the increasing dexterity of the hand in
humans, touch took on several functions related to emotion.
First, touch soothes. Married women anticipating an electric
shock showed decreased threat-related activity in the brain
when holding the hand of a spouse but not that of a stranger
(Coan, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006). Rat pups that are han-
dled extensively by their mothers (rat dams) show reduced
levels of corticosterone, a stress-related hormone, in the
bloodstream, later in development (Francis & Meaney,
1999). Second, touch rewards and punishes: the experi-
ence of gentle touch triggers activation in the orbitofrontal
cortex, a brain region involved in the representation of sec-
ondary rewards (Rolls, 2000). Touch also signals safety
and danger to developing infants (Hertenstein, Verkamp,
Kerestes, & Holmes, 2006). Finally, touch enables recipro-
cal altruism (De Waal, 1996); in humans, friendly patterns
of touch increase compliance to requests (Willis & Hamm,
1980) and cooperation toward strangers in economic games
(Kurzban, 2001).
Touch conveys a great deal of information about emo-
tions. In one study, an encoder (or toucher) and decoder
(or touchee) sat at a table separated by a black curtain, which
prevented all communication other than touch (Hertenstein,
Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006). With brief touches
to the forearm, participants in the United States and Spain
could reliably communicate anger, disgust, fear, love, sym-
pathy, and gratitude (but not pride, embarrassment, or sad-
ness) at levels of accuracy comparable to those observed in
studies of the face and voice.
In summary, assuming that specific signal behavior is
a defining characteristic of emotion (Ekman, 1992; Izard,
1971), the recent science of emotional display reveals a
large array of states that can be readily signaled in fleeting
What is an Emotion? 323
facial expressions, vocalizations, posture, gesture, gaze, and
touch. In this research, various emotions, including grati-
tude, pride, shame, embarrassment, love, desire, sympathy,
and awe, have emerged as objects of empirical inquiry.
The characteristics of displays of such emotions suggest
their evolutionary origins—for example, the likelihood that
shame and pride originated in nonhuman displays of domi-
nance and submission (Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008).
Autonomic Physiology:
The Controversial Search for Emotion Specificity
James’s own answer to his question “What is an emotion?”
has proven to be one of the most controversial (Cacioppo,
Berntson, Larsen, Poehlmann, & Ito, 2000; Cacioppo, Klein,
Berntson, & Hatfield, 1993; Larsen, Berntson, Poehlmann,
Ito, & Cacioppo, 2008; Levenson, 1992, 2003). James argued
that emotions are defined by distinct “reverberations in the
viscera,” or patterns of activation in the autonomic nervous
system. This claim translates to two hypotheses: first, that
each emotion is associated with a distinct activation pattern
in peripheral physiology, and second, that the experience of
emotion is based on the interoception of peripheral physi-
ological response.
James’s thesis is anatomically plausible (see Table 9.4).
The autonomic nervous system involves approximately 20
bundles of neurons originating in the spinal cord that receive
signals from regions of the cortex, the amygdala, and the
hypothalamus and that activate different target organs,
glands, muscles, and blood vessels distributed throughout
the body. Notably, the autonomic nervous system controls
several responses that people routinely report during emo-
tional experiences: tears, dry mouth, goose bumps, blushing,
fainting, increased blood pressure, sexual arousal, changes
in breathing, and cooling or heating up of the skin, to name
just a few.
Are autonomic responses emotion specific? Hypotheses
regarding this question can be arrayed on a continuum
(Larsen et al., 2008; Levenson, 1992), with James’s thesis of
autonomic specificity on one end and, on the other, the claim
that there is no emotion specificity (e.g., the early claims of
Cannon, 1927, and Schachter and Singer, 1962). This latter
view might hold, for example, that all negative emotions
involve elevated activation in the sympathetic branch of
the autonomic nervous system, which involves responses
such as increased heart rate and patterns of vasoconstric-
tion that enable fight-or-flight behavior (see Table 9.4
for other responses). Resolving this question would require
the study of many indexes of autonomic activation and
many emotions. Although empirical data lag in this area,
recent studies suggest that different regions of the auto-
nomic nervous system covary with different emotions.
324 Emotion

Table 9.4 Effects of the Activation of the Parasympathetic and Moving Facial Muscles Generates Autonomic
Sympathetic Branches of the Autonomic Nervous System
Responses That Differentiate Negative Emotions
Activation of
In one set of studies, Levenson, Ekman, and Friesen (1990)
Parasympathetic compared patterns of autonomic activity (largely sympathetic)
Activation of Organ Nerves Sympathetic Nerves
associated with the facial muscle configurations associated
Heart muscle Decrease of heart Increase of heart rate with anger, disgust, fear, and sadness (Ekman, Levenson, &
rate Friesen, 1983). Moving muscles into these configurations
Decrease of Increase of (known as the directed facial action task) often triggered the
contractility contractility
experience of the target emotion and some degree of auto-
Blood vessels: nomic specificity. Large increases of heart rate occurred for
arteries
fear, anger, and sadness but not for disgust. Finger tempera-
Trunk, limbs 0 Vasoconstriction
ture was greater for anger than for fear, suggesting that anger
Skin of face Vasodilation Vasoconstriction
is associated with increased blood flow to the hands (perhaps
Visceral domain 0 Vasoconstriction to aid in combat), whereas blood remained near the chest dur-
Skeletal muscle 0 Vasoconstriction ing experiences of fear, presumably to support flight-related
Erectile tissue Vasodilation Vasoconstriction locomotion (a finding not consistently replicated across stud-
Cranium 0 Vasoconstriction ies; see Cacioppo et al., 2000).
Blood vessels: 0 Vasoconstriction
veins
Blush
Gastrointestinal tract
The blush involves the spontaneous reddening of the face,
Circular muscle Increased motility Decreased
motility ears, neck, and upper chest produced by increased blood
Sphincters Relaxation Contraction
volume in the subcutaneous capillaries in those regions
(Leary, Britt, Cutlip, & Templeton, 1992). By contrast,
Urinary bladder Contraction Relaxation
a flush is a nonsocial response associated with physical
Reproductive
organs
exertion, temperature changes, or alcohol consumption
(Leary et al., 1992). Mark Twain’s famous observation—
Seminal vesicles 0 Contraction
“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”—is
Vas deferens 0 Contraction
not quite apt: Some nonhuman primates show reddening
Uterus 0 Contraction
in the face, perhaps as an appeasement gesture (Hauser,
Pupil Constriction Dilation 1996). Twain was prescient, however, in highlighting the
Tracheobronchial Contraction Relaxation centrality of the blush to human social life (Leary et al.,
Muscles 1992; Miller, 1996, 2004).
Piloerector muscles 0 Contraction The situations that produce the blush, which range from
Salivary glands Strong secretion Weak secretion the proverbial faux pas to sudden exposure of the body,
Lachrymal glands Secretion 0 involve negative, self-focused attention (Leary et al., 1992).
(tears) People report that they are more likely to blush when embar-
Sweat glands 0 Secretion rassed than when feeling shame or guilt (Miller & Tangney,
Digestive Secretion Decreased 1994). Shearn, Bergman, Hill, Abel, and Hinds (1990) have
glands secretion documented that the blush associated with embarrassment is
Metabolism distinct from the autonomic profile of fear. In this research,
Liver 0 Glycogenolysis participants’ cheek blood flow and cheek skin temperature
Fat cells 0 Free fatty acids in increased more when, in the presence of four confederates,
blood they were embarrassed by a videotape of themselves sing-
Pancreas Secretion of insulin Decreased secretion ing “The Star-Spangled Banner” than when they watched
of insulin the frightening shower scene from the film Psycho (see also
Adrenal medulla 0 Secretion of Shearn, Bergman, Hill, Abel, & Hinds, 1992).
adrenaline,
noradrenaline
Taken together, the findings from the directed facial action
Lymphoid tissue 0 Depression of
task and studies of the blush rebut a one-arousal-fits-all
activity (e.g., of model of autonomic activity and negative emotions (see
natural killer cells) also Stemmler, 1989). All negative emotions do not involve
Adapted from Janig, 2003. a similar pattern of elevated sympathetic nervous system

arousal; meaningful differences in autonomic response are
observed among fear, anger, disgust, and embarrassment.
Parasympathetic Response and Positive Emotion
Early studies of emotion and autonomic nervous system
activity could be charged with a fight-or-flight bias—a focus
on anger, fear, and sympathetic activation. How are posi-
tive emotions embodied in autonomic response? One possi-
bility is that positive emotions covary with the cessation of
elevated sympathetic autonomic response (Tomkins, 1984),
a claim that has some empirical support (Fredrickson &
Levenson, 1998). New studies suggest that activation of the
vagus nerve—a branch of the parasympathetic autonomic
nervous system—may be involved in positive emotion
(Porges, 1998).
Based on comparisons of the autonomic nervous systems
of different species, from fish species to humans, Porges
(1998) has made a case for three stages in the evolution
of the autonomic nervous system, which evolved differ-
ent bundles of neurons to enable the increasingly complex
social behavior of different species. A first stage produced
the dorsal vagal complex, located in the brainstem, which is
present in all reptiles and mammals. It regulates basic pro-
cesses common to reptiles and mammals, including diges-
tion and immobilization responses when attacked. Next
to emerge in phylogenetic evolution was the sympathetic
nervous system, which emerges in several neural bundles
in the middle of the spinal cord and controls fight-or-flight
behavior. The last portion of the autonomic nervous system
to evolve, and only in mammals, is the ventral vagal com-
plex. It is controlled by the 10th cranial nerve, known as
the vagus nerve. As Porges points out, the vagus nerve also
controls several behaviors critical to social interaction and
attachment, such as facial muscle actions, head movements,
and vocalizations. The ventral vagal complex also influ-
ences cardiac output in ways that allow people to rapidly
adapt to changing social circumstances and, in particular,
in ways that allow people to be calm and in close proximity
with others.
Researchers measure activation in the vagus nerve by
first assessing heart rate and then filtering out respiratory
and sympathetic influences to yield an index of parasym-
pathetic influence on heart rate (Berntson, Cacioppo, &
Quigley, 1993). Select empirical studies suggest that acti-
vation in the vagus nerve may be associated with posi-
tive emotion. Resting cardiac vagal tone was associated
with increases in spontaneous positive emotion during the
Rorschach test (Kettunen, Ravaja, Naatanen, & Keltikangas-
Jarvinen, 2000) and increased reports of positive emotion
in response to emotionally evocative film clips (Oveis et al.,
2009). College students prone to mania reported extremely
high levels of positive emotion in response to positive and
What is an Emotion? 325
negative films clips and accompanying high levels of vagal
response (Gruber, Johnson, Oveis, & Keltner, 2008).
Emotion and Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal
Axis Activation, Oxytocin, and Immune System
Response
Specific emotions also appear to map onto specific neuroen-
docrine and immune system responses (Kemeny & Shestyuk,
2008). One active area of inquiry concerns the hypotha-
lamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the stress-related
hormone cortisol. The HPA axis is regulated by neurons in
the hypothalamus and the amygdala. Through the release of
hormones, these regions of the brain stimulate the adrenal
glands, which release cortisol into the bloodstream, to act
on organs to facilitate fight-or-flight responses to stress. A
recent meta-analysis of 208 studies found that the stress-
ful events that most robustly trigger the release of cortisol
involve negative self-evaluations (Dickerson & Kemeny,
2004). Lerner, Dahl, Hariri, and Taylor (2007) demonstrated
that fearful facial expressions, but not angry and disgusted
expressions, were associated with increased cortisol in
response to a stressful task.
What cortisol is to fear-related stress, oxytocin is to
attachment-related affect (Taylor, 2002; Taylor, Klein,
Lewis, Gruenewald, Gurung, & Updegraff, 2000). Oxytocin
is a peptide of nine amino acids that is produced in the hy-
pothalamus and released into both the brain and the blood-
stream. Receptors for this peptide are found in the olfactory
system, limbic–hypothalamic system, brainstem, and regions
of the spinal cord that regulate the autonomic nervous
system, especially the parasympathetic branch (Morberg,
2003). Oxytocin is involved in uterine contractions, lactation,
maternal bonding, and sexual interaction (Carter, 1998).
In nonhuman species, oxytocin regulates pair-bonding
and caregiving behavior. Comparisons between prairie voles,
which display pair-bonding, and closely related montane
voles, which do not, have revealed differences in the location
of oxytocin receptors in the brains of each species (Carter,
1998; Insel, 1993; Insel, Young, & Zuoxin, 1997). Injections
of oxytocin or oxytocin agonists into these two species
promote preferences for single partners or nonmonoga-
mous behavior, respectively (Williams, Insel, Harbaugh, &
Carter, 1994). Injections of oxytocin increase attachment-
related behaviors in primates (Holman & Goy, 1995),
voles (Witt, Carter, & Walton, 1990), and rats (Nelson &
Panksepp, 1996).
Oxytocin influences the attachment-related emotions,
such as love or compassion, by reducing anxiety (Carter &
Altemus, 1997; Taylor et al., 2000) and making social
contact pleasant (Insel et al., 1997; Panksepp, 1998). In
studies of lactating women, for example, oxytocin reduced
the activity of the HPA axis (Carter & Altemus, 1997).
326 Emotion
Soothing touch and sexual behavior lead to the release of
oxytocin (Murphy, Seckl, Burton, Checkley, & Lightman,
1987). Participants playing a trust game who received
oxytocin nasally were more than twice as likely as com-
parison participants to trust strangers (Kosfeld, Heinrichs,
Zak, Fishbacker, & Fehr, 2005). Gonzaga and colleagues
(2006) have documented that nonverbal displays of love,
but not sexual desire, covary with oxytocin release.
Proinflammatory Cytokines
Metaphors often describe emotions as kinds of disease—
“I’m sick with love,” for example, or “I’m dying of envy.”
New research on the immune system suggests a biological
basis to these metaphors. Proinflammatory cytokines (PICs)
are released in immunological cells to enable immune
response and to activate “sickness behaviors”—increased
sleep and inhibited social, exploratory, and aggressive
behaviors (Kemeny & Shestyuk, 2008). These behaviors
resemble the submissive behaviors seen in species other
than humans, suggesting that PICs might be systematic-
ally involved in the submissive emotions, such as shame.
Consistent with this thesis, Dickerson, Gruenewald, and
Kemeny (2004) found that induced shame was associated
with increases in PICs whereas guilt and other negative
emotions were not.
The debate over emotion specificity in peripheral physi-
ology has evolved in its methods and answers (Levenson,
2003). The empirical data suggest that general arousal mod-
els of emotion and autonomic and neuroendocrine response
are inadequate (Kemeny & Sheystuk, 2008; Levenson,
2003), as the autonomic responses for high-arousal nega-
tive emotions (fear and anger) differ in discernible ways.
The blush covaries with self-conscious emotion but not fear.
Positive emotions may preferentially activate the vagus
nerve. Prosocial emotions may map onto oxytocin release
and submissive emotions onto immune-related responses.
Several other branches of the autonomic nervous system—
goose bumps and activation in the digestive and sexual
organs, for example—await empirical attention. These
studies, and the research they anticipated, provide prelimi-
nary support for James’s counterintuitive speculations.
Language, Concepts, and Discourse:
The Construction of Emotion
Emotions are not only experiences embodied in the periph-
eral branches of the nervous system but also experiences that
people represent with language, concepts, and discourse—
or what is known as emotion knowledge (Niedenthal, 2008).
As evidence of this emotion knowledge, simply moving
emotion-related facial muscles influences categorization
of other facial expressions, recall of emotional memories,
judgments of ensuing stimuli, and identification of emotion-
related concepts (Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman,
Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005). In other words, activation
of one component of an emotion (specific facial muscles)
triggers activation of emotion concepts. Drawing on this
framework, the study of emotion knowledge offers a win-
dow onto the study of how emotions are constructed.
One layer of emotion knowledge is a culture’s emo-
tion lexicon. Words used to describe emotions clarify
the intentional object—or perceived cause—of an experi-
ence (Schwarz, 1990). Many words and concepts used
to describe emotions have a rich metaphorical content.
Emotions have been represented as natural forces (“being
swept away”), as opponents (“we wrestle with anger”), as
diseases (“sick with grief ”), as fluids (“bubbling over with
joy”), and as animals or living organisms (“my love will
wither and die”; Kövesces, 2003; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).
The emotion lexicon can be organized into concepts
and categories (Romney, Moore, & Rusch, 1997; Shaver,
Schwartz, Kirson, & O’Connor, 1987). At the superordinate
level, emotion knowledge distinguishes between positive
and negative, or good and bad. At the next, basic level of
knowledge, emotion concepts, such as love, joy, surprise,
anger, sadness, and fear, are formed. In light of the literature
on prototypes and language use (Rosch, 1973), one might
expect such words to be most readily used in the descrip-
tion of emotional experience. At the subordinate level of
analysis, more specific states exist; for example, the basic
emotion concept “love” embodies love, compassion, lust,
and longing.
People also represent emotional experiences in narra-
tives or scripts (e.g., Johnson-Laird & Oatley, 1989; Russell,
1991; Shaver et al., 1987). Emotion narratives tend to take
the form of prototypes, with lists of more central and more
peripheral features of the narrative: characteristic causes,
thoughts, feelings, actions, and expressive signs and con-
sequences (e.g., see Table 9.5, which portrays a prototype
for sadness). Narrative data are often a first step in differ-
entiating emotions; for example, they have clarified distinc-
tions among embarrassment, shame, and guilt (Keltner &
Buswell, 1996; Miller, 1992; Miller & Tangney, 1994;
Parrott & Smith, 1991; Tangney, Miller, Flicker, & Barlow,
1996). Humans construct emotion narratives in other modal-
ities, including through visual art (Oatley et al., 2006), music
(Juslin & Laukka, 2003), dance (Hejmadi, Davidson, &
Rozin, 2000), and fiction and poetry (Oatley, 2003).
Finally, people actively represent emotions in emotion
discourses, or acts of communication that take the form of
gossip, teasing, jokes, satire and irony, songs, and poetry
(Abu-Lughod, 1986; Griffin, 1994; Heath, Bell, & Sternberg,
2001; Lutz, 1990). Researchers have made headway in illumi-
nating how emotion is represented in discourse in children’s

Table 9.5 A Prototype of Sadness
Features of Emotion Specific Elements of Sadness
Causes Death, loss, not getting what one
wants
Feelings Helpless, tired, run down, slow
Expression Drooping posture, saying sad
things, crying, tears
Thoughts Blaming, focusing on and
criticizing self, irritable
Actions Negative talk to others, taking
action, suppressing negative
feelings, disposing of present
possessions and acquiring new
ones
Adapted from Cryder, Lerner, Gross, & Dahl, 2008; Lerner, Gonzalez, Small, &
Fischoff, 2003; Shaver et al., 1987.
books (Tsai, 2007; Tsai, Louie, Chen, & Uchida, 2007), music
(Juslin & Laukka, 2003; Snibbe & Markus, 2005), advertise-
ments (Tsai, 2007), parenting manuals (Shields, 1991), and
teasing (Keltner, Young, Oemig, Heerey, & Monarch, 1998).
In the most general sense, expressing emotions through
language brings many benefits, such as relationship build-
ing (Clark & Finkel, 2004); indeed, people seem almost
reflexively inclined to share their emotions with others
(Rimé, Finkenauer, Luminet, Zech, & Philippot, 1998;
Rimé, Mesquita, Philippot, & Boca, 1991). How do con-
cepts, words, narratives, and discourses shape emotional
response? Three recent, distinct literatures seek differ-
ent answers to this age-old question, which dates back to
Aristotle’s ideas about how the dramatic expression of emo-
tion leads to catharsis, or insight into the nature of one’s
emotions (Oatley et al., 2006).
The first literature, which originates in claims about the
social construction of emotion, holds that representations of
emotion channel individuals into identity-based profiles
of emotional response (e.g., Abu-Lughod, 1986; Briggs,
1970). As an example, consider how emotion is gendered in
emotional discourse (Citrin, Roberts, & Fredrickson, 2004;
Shields, 1991). Mothers talk about emotions, with the excep-
tion of anger, more with daughters than with sons (Fivush,
1991). These different emotion discourses socialize girls and
boys into different patterns of emotional response. Females
report higher levels of other-oriented positive emotions
(e.g., love) than males, who in turn report higher levels of
achievement-oriented emotions than women, such as pride,
that separate self from other (Shiota et al., 2006). Females
are assumed to express more submissive emotions, such as
embarrassment, while males are assumed to express more
dominant emotions, such as anger (Plant, Hyde, Keltner, &
Devine, 2000). Women systematically show greater sensi-
tivity to social contextual cues when interpreting emotion
What is an Emotion? 327
(Roberts & Pennebaker, 1995) and greater attunement
to the emotions of others (Hall, Carter, & Horgan, 2000).
Discourses about emotion, this first literature suggests,
channel women and men into different emotional styles that
place them into different roles within the social moral order
(Citrin et al., 2004; Fischer, 2000; Tiedens, Ellsworth, &
Mesquita, 2000).
A second literature centers on the question of how emo-
tion representations shape the impact of powerful emotional
events on social adjustment. Dozens of studies have docu-
mented that expressing deeply emotional, often traumatic
experiences in emotion-centered writing yields health
benefits (Pennebaker, 1989, 1997; Pennebaker & Seagal,
1999; Pennebaker, Mehl, & Niederhoffer, 2003). People
who write about the most difficult emotions associated with
bereavement, divorce, the experience of earthquakes, and
the attacks of September 11, 2001, compared with people
who write in more factual fashion about the same trauma,
benefit in myriad ways. They are less likely to visit the
doctor, they experience more life satisfaction, they show
enhanced immune function, they report fewer absentee
days at work or school, and perform better in school if they
are college students (Pennebaker, 1997).
Expressing emotion in written form enables people
to reflect on their emotions, to look at them from an out-
side perspective, and to gain insight into the causes and
implications of emotional experience (Pennebaker, 1997).
Similarly, putting feelings into words reduces the anxiety
and uncertainty associated with an emotion (Wilson &
Gilbert, 2008) by specifying its causes and relevance to the
self (Keltner, Locke, & Audrain, 1993; Wilson & Brekke,
1994; Wilson, Centerbar, & Brekke, 2002). Representing
emotional experiences in words (e.g., through reappraisal
instructions) reduces the sympathetic autonomic arousal
associated with emotional suppression (Gross, 1998) and
activates frontal lobe regions of the brain (e.g., the ven-
tromedial prefrontal cortex), which down-regulate limbic-
based emotional responses (Ochsner, 2008). Representing
negative emotions from an abstract perspective (focusing
on why an event occurred rather than how) reduces stress-
related cardiovascular response (Ayduk & Kross, 2008).
Rumination, by contrast, offers no perspective, no distance,
no third-person perspective on emotional events, and it tends
to prolong experiences of emotion, both negative and posi-
tive (Lyubomirsky & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1995; Morrow &
Nolen-Hoeksema, 1990).
A third area of inquiry asks whether people’s represen-
tations of emotional events capture experiences in the past
or future. Emotion representations removed temporally
from actual experiences often fail to capture the content or
duration of that experience. For example, people anticipate
experiencing more intense emotions associated with a future
328 Emotion
event than they recall experiencing them in retrospect (Van
Boven & Ashworth, 2007).
The literature on affective forecasting reveals that peo-
ple mispredict the impact of emotional events on their well-
being (Gilbert, Lieberman, Morewedge, & Wilson, 2004;
Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998).
People routinely under- and overestimate the influences of
emotional events—such as a breakup with a romantic part-
ner or the failure of an academician to get tenure—on their
well-being. Lay theories about the impact of emotional
events overlook the human capacity to respond with resil-
ience (Gilbert et al., 1998) as well as the effects of other
events on personal satisfaction (Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers,
Gilbert, & Axson, 2000).
Studies of the recollection of emotion reveal similar dis-
junctions between emotion representation and actual expe-
rience. People under- or overreport past emotions in ways
that fit their current circumstances (Levine & Pizarro, 2004;
Levine & Safer, 2002). Bereaved individuals’ reports of past
grief, for example, were more highly correlated with their
current grief than with actual levels of the past grief being
reported on (Safer, Bonanno, & Field, 2001). Romantic
partners who had become more attached to their partner
over time recalled having more positive initial evaluations
of their partner than was actually the case, while those who
became less attracted to their partner over time recalled
initial feelings that were more negative than they actually
experienced (McFarland & Ross, 1987).
Experience of Emotion: Bottom-Up and
Top-Down Processes
Ironically, the component that may well define emotion—
subjective experience—is in serious need of rigorous data
and theoretical development (Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, &
Gross, 2007). On the one hand, numerous self-report mea-
sures of emotional experience have been validated, including
measures of global positive and negative moods (Watson,
Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), anger (Spielberger, 1996), shame
and guilt (Tangney, 1990), embarrassment (Miller, 1995),
fear (Spielberger, 1983), gratitude (McCullough et al., 2002),
and various positive emotions (Shiota et al., 2006). In addi-
tion, methods have been developed to capture the online,
in-the-moment experience of emotion—for example, with
experience sampling techniques (Bolger, Davis, & Refaeli,
2003). Yet the empirical study of emotional experience faces
enormous challenges. As considered earlier, self-reports of
emotion are prone to powerful memory biases (Levine &
Pizarro, 2004; Safer et al., 2001), and several measures of
emotion (e.g., autonomic physiology, facial expression,
and self-report) inconsistently correlate with one another
(e.g., Lang, Greenwald, Bradley, & Hamm, 1993; Mauss,
Levenson, McCarter, Wilhelm, & Gross, 2005). Cross-cultural
studies of emotion experience are hindered by the difficulty
of finding equivalent terms to capture the feeling of interest
across cultures.
Several theories have attempted to explain subjective
emotional experience (Barrett et al., 2007; Lambie & Marcel,
2002; Reisenzein, 1983). One school of thought follows
bottom-up assumptions: The experience of emotion closely
tracks somatovisceral changes in the musculature of the
body or in different peripheral physiological systems (e.g.,
Damasio, 1994; Matsumoto, 1987). According to this view,
emotional experience guides social action, with somatovi-
sceral changes serving as input into the online assessment
of the individual’s adaptation to the environment (for analo-
gous argument about self-representation, see Sedikides &
Skowronski, 1997).
This approach presupposes fairly sensitive interorecep-
tive processes, an assumption that has been challenged
since Cannon (1927) first critiqued James’s account of auto-
nomic specificity. It also assumes that emotional experience
closely tracks activation in bodily movement, facial muscle
contraction, or changes in peripheral physiology. More than
20 studies do indicate that experiences of specific emotions
(e.g., anger, disgust, embarrassment, love, and desire) covary
with emotion-specific facial muscle movements (Gonzaga
et al., 2001; Hess et al., 1995; Keltner & Bonanno, 1997;
Matsumoto, 1987; Ruch, 1995; for review, see Matsumoto
et al., 2008). However, studies of the covariation between
peripheral physiology and emotional experience yield less
coherent results: some find associations between auto-
nomic response and emotional experience (e.g., Dickerson
et al., 2004; Eisenberg et al., 1989; Shearn et al., 1990), but
many others do not (Cacioppo et al., 2000). Given more
refined measures of peripheral physiology and a focus on
more specific emotions, one might expect more robust and
precise associations to arise between emotional experience
and behavioral and physiological responses.
A second, more top-down approach to emotional expe-
rience holds that the experience of emotion is more of
a conceptual act, constructed in top-down, knowledge-
based processes grounded in language and representation
(e.g., Barrett, 2006; Russell, 2003). Rapid, primary appraisals
of a stimulus’ goodness or badness, or harm or benefit, trigger
a diffuse “core affect” that causes an individual to experience a
broad, valenced emotional state. In this view, more specific
emotions (such as sadness, guilt, compassion, or love) arise
from situation-specific interpretations and categorizations.
Summary of the Components of Emotion
The scientific answer to James’s question “What is an
emotion?” is that emotions are complex, multidimensional

phenomena. Emotions involve appraisals, some automatic,
which give rise to distinct experiences. More than 15 emo-
tions are signaled in different facial, postural, vocal, and
tactile behavior, which in their forms and variations provide
clues to the evolution of emotion and the influence of culture
on emotional response. Clusters of emotion involve specific
autonomic, neuroendocrine, and immune system responses.
Emotions are represented in a rich language of words, meta-
phors, discourses, and theories that reveals how cultures
construct emotions and how expression shapes emotional
response. Although the experience of emotion can be readily
measured, it remains mysterious, as contrasting theoretical
perspectives can seem plausible.
Taxonomy of Emotions and Emotion Functions
The study of emotion has historically emphasized taxono-
mies, with a particular focus on examining which affective
states should be considered emotions. In an early wave
of emotion research and theory (e.g., Ortony, Clore, &
Collins, 1988; Ekman & Davidson, 1994), scholars devel-
oped criteria to answer this question, for example, that an
emotional state be brief and involuntary and that it should
have a distinct eliciting appraisal, signal, and physiological
profile (Ekman, 1992). The field focused on six or seven
negative emotional states and a general state of happiness.
As the field of emotion has evolved, researchers have turned
their attention to new states, such as the self-conscious emo-
tions (e.g., Kemeny & Sheystuk, 2008; Tangney & Fischer,
1995) and the positive emotions (Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006;
Fredrickson, 1998, 2001; Shiota et al., 2006).
Tables 9.6 and 9.7 synthesize theoretical claims about
negative emotions and positive emotions, respectively. The
definitions focus on two components of each emotion.
The first is an appraisal tendency for the emotion, or the
core subjective meaning of each emotion, which should
relate systematically to the content of emotional experience
and the influence of emotions on cognitive processes such as
causal attribution, memory, risk assessment, and expectation.
Because emotions dispose individuals toward goal-based
actions (e.g., Fridlund, 1992; Frijda, Kuipers, & ter Schure,
1989), the second component is an action tendency for each
emotion (Frijda, 1986; Rodriquez Mosquera, Fischer, &
Manstead, 2004) or the organizing principle that motivates
specific signaling behaviors, as well as supportive physiolog-
ical response (Levenson, 2003).
The emotions in Tables 9.6 and 9.7 are classified as
negative and positive, respectively, based on the scientific
consensus that has arisen concerning the valence of their
experience (Russell, 2003). The negative or positive valence
of the emotion most typically reflects relative progress (or
lack thereof) in meeting goals (Carver & White, 1994;
What is an Emotion? 329
Higgins, 1997) and the tendency to avoid or approach (e.g.,
Davidson, 2000, 2004). This theoretical synthesis necessar-
ily simplifies, and the complexities that are ignored present
interesting avenues of empirical inquiry.1 The taxonomies
neglect the many nuances of states within a particular emotion
category; for instance, empirical and theoretical treatments
have identified many forms of disgust (Rozin, 1996),
embarrassment (Tangney, 1992), and awe (Keltner & Haidt,
2003). Relations among the subtypes of an emotion repre-
sent an important area for future theoretical development
(see Rozin, 1996). The taxonomies heuristically posit single
appraisal and action tendencies for each emotion, when in
actuality, emotional experience is certain to involve com-
plex combinations of appraisal and action tendencies.
Importantly, much of emotional experience, perhaps even
most, involves experiences of mixtures of emotions (Larsen,
McGraw, Mellers, & Cacioppo, 2004; Schimmack, Oishi, &
Diener, 2002). A better understanding of these mixed emo-
tions requires precise measures of distinct emotions.
As evident in Tables 9.6 and 9.7, the field of emotion
has evolved dramatically in the last 20 years. With these
developments, a consensus has emerged that emotions serve
important functions; most typically, emotions enable indi-
viduals to meet particular threats, challenges, and oppor-
tunities within their social environment (Consedine, 2008;
Keltner & Gross, 1999; Mesquita, 2003; Oatley & Jenkins,
1992). Within an evolutionary framework, it is assumed
that emotions enable individuals to meet specific problems
and opportunities that increase their chances of physical
survival, reproduction, and gene replication (Keltner &
Haidt, 2001; Nesse, 1990; Simpson & Kenrick, 1998;
1 In one example of a possible oversimplification, decades of
research and theorizing have classified anger as a negative emo-
tion (Lazarus, 1991). Yet Lerner and Tiedens (2006) have argued
that anger does not follow many typical patterns associated with
negative emotions. For example, rather than triggering pes-
simism, it triggers optimism about one’s outcomes (Lerner &
Keltner, 2000, 2001; Lerner et al., 2003), and rather than trig-
gering careful thought, it triggers careless thought (Bodenhausen,
Kramer, et al., 1994; Lerner et al., 1998; Tiedens & Linton,
2001). Anger even resembles happiness in terms of hemispheric
laterality; both state and trait anger are associated with relatively
greater left frontal cortical activity than right frontal activity (for
a review, see Harmon-Jones et al., 2003). To reconcile these find-
ings, Lerner and Tiedens (2006) proposed assessing the positivity
of anger across a temporal dimension. Specifically, they pro-
posed that anger would be experienced as relatively unpleasant
and unrewarding when reflecting back on the source of one’s
anger but may be experienced as relatively pleasant and reward-
ing when looking forward due to the belief that one can change
the situation for the better.
330 Emotion

Table 9.6 A Synthesis of Theoretical Accounts of Negative Emotion Table 9.7 A Synthesis of Theoretical Accounts of Positive Emotion

Emotion Appraisal Tendency Action Tendency Emotion Appraisal Tendency Action Tendency

Anger Offense against self 1 Restore justice, Contentment Pleasing stimulus1 Savoring 2,3
hold individuals Enthusiasm Reward likely1 Goal approach 4
responsible 2–4
Love Perceived Affection6
Contempt Other violates role, Lower the reputation commitment 5
duty, obligation5 of perpetrator
Sexual desire Sexual cue or Sexual release
Disgust Contact with impure Push away 6–8 opportunity 7,8
object or action6
Compassion Undeserved Prosocial approach11
Embarrassment Self has transgressed Apologize10 suffering9,10
a social convention9
Gratitude Unexpected gift Promote
Envy Other is superior to Reduce status of reciprocity 12,13
self11 other
Pride Self-relevant Status display
Fear Imminent threat to Flee, reduce achievement 14
self12 uncertainty13,14
Awe Self is small vis-à- Devotion, reverence16
Guilt Self has violated Remedy harm vis something
moral standard vast, beyond current
regarding harm15 understanding15
Jealousy Other threatens Protect source of Interest Novel opportunity 17 Exploration18
source of affection16 affection from others
Amusement Recognize Play 20
Sadness Irrevocable loss17 Acquire new incongruity 19
goods7,13,18
Relief Cause of distress Signal safety
Shame Self has transgressed Hide, avoid scrutiny ends21
aspiration or ideal19
Source: 1. Berridge, 2003; 2. Fredrickson, 1998; 3. Wood, Heimpel, & Michaela,
Source: 1. Lazarus, 1991; 2. Lerner et al., 1998; 3. Small & Lerner, 2008; 4. Small,
2003; 4. DePue & Collins, 1999; 5. Gonzaga et al., 2001; 6. Hazan & Shaver, 1987;
Lerner, & Fischoff, 2006; 5. Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999; 6. Rozin &
7. Diamond, 2003; 8. Buss, 1992; 9. Davidson & Harrington, 2001; 10. Nussbaum,
Fallon, 1987; 7. Lerner, Small, & Loewenstein, 2004; 8. Han, Lerner, & Zeckhauser,
1996; 11. Taylor, 2002; 12. McCullough, Kilpatrick, Emmons, & Larson, 2001; 13.
2008; 9. Miller & Tangney, 1992; 10. Keltner & Buswell, 1997; 11. Salovey, 1991;
Trivers, 1971; 14. Tracy & Robins, 2007; 15. Keltner & Haidt, 2003; 16. Woodruff,
12. Öhman, 1986; 13. Raghunathan & Pham, 1999; 14. Tiedens & Linton, 2001;
2002; 17. Izard, 1977; Reeve, 1989; Silvia, 2005; 18. Panksepp, 1998; 19. Ruch, 1993;
15. Baumeister, Stillwell, & Heatherton, 1994; 16. DeSteno & Salovey, 1996; 17.
20. Pelligrini, 1992; 21. Tomkins, 1984.
Lazarus, 1991; 18. Cryder et al., 2008; 19. Tangney, 1991.

Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). Within a cultural constructiv-
ist framework, researchers assume that emotions help to
reify and embody important facets of cultures, such as
roles, ideologies, and values (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Citrin
et al., 2004). Finally, functional arguments add an impor-
tant interpretive context for understanding the origins, pur-
pose, and design of different components of emotion, such
as signal behavior, autonomic response, or the subjective
feeling of emotion (e.g., Levenson, 1999).
Functionalist analyses open many areas of inquiry. Why
do humans have emotions? What are the deepest origins of
emotion in biological and cultural evolution? What are the
systematic dysfunctions associated with excesses or defi-
cits in emotion (e.g., Keltner & Kring, 1998; Rottenberg &
Johnson, 2007)? Table 9.8 synthesizes hypotheses concern-
ing the functions of emotions at four levels of analysis (see
Keltner & Haidt, 2001; Fischer & Manstead, 2008). First, at
the individual level of analysis, the subjective experience of
an emotion and its accompanying memories and cognitive
tendencies signal particular conditions in the world to the
individual (e.g., Clore, 1994; Johnson-Laird & Oatley, 1989;
Schwarz & Clore, 1983). For example, they signal whether
a situation is benign or dangerous, albeit sometimes incor-
rectly. These informative properties of the subjective quality
of emotion are thought to be guides for specific courses of
action (Damasio, 1994; Frijda, 1988).
At the level of the dyad, emotions provide rapid and reli-
able information to others and thus coordinate brief social
interactions (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989; Keltner & Kring, 1998;
Kring, 2008; Öhman, 1986). Emotional displays provide
information about stimuli in the environment and about
others’ states and dispositions; they also serve as incentives
and elicitors of action.
Third, at the level of the group, emotional experiences
and displays help to define group roles, boundaries, and
identities within and across groups (Citrin et al., 2004;
Mackie, Devos, & Smith, 2000; Mackie, Silver, & Smith,
2004; Rodriguez Mosquera et al., 2004). In one recent line of
empirical inquiry, Cortes, Demoulin, Rodriguez, Rodriguez,
and Leyens (2005) found that group members define their

group in contradistinction to others by attributing more
complex or “secondary” emotions (e.g., shame and com-
passion) to the ingroup than to the outgroup. The emotional
display and experience of status-relevant emotions, such as
embarrassment and contempt, shape how individuals nego-
tiate rank within social hierarchies (e.g., Hall, Coats, &
LeBeau, 2005; Tiedens et al., 2000).
Finally, at the cultural level of analysis, emotions embody
cultural values, concerns, and ideologies (e.g., Rodriquez
Mosquera et al., 2004). The experience and expression of
sympathy, for example, are imbued with commitments to
culturally proscribed values regarding caretaking and gen-
der identity (Lutz, 1990). The likelihood that an individual
smiles with affection is shaped by gender identity and the
commitment to being oriented toward others (LaFrance &
Banaji, 1992). The experience, enactment, and expression
of specific emotions reflect an engagement with a set of
cultural values and commitments. Deviations from cultur-
ally valued emotions, by implication, are likely to lead to
feelings of cultural disengagement, anomie, and depres-
sion (Tsai, Knutson, & Fung, 2006).
If we were to review the empirical literature on emotion
only 25 years ago, we would have found numerous stud-
ies of facial expressions that concentrated on a limited set
of emotions: anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and
happiness. Since then, the field of emotion has expanded
dramatically, incorporating dozens of states, measures of
multiple systems, and theories of many specific emotions
(see Fredrickson, 1998; Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Rozin &
Fallon, 1987; Tracy, Robins, & Tangney, 2007). Studies of
emotion have made inroads in every conceivable area in
Table 9.8 Functions of Emotion at Four Levels of Analysis
Level of Analysis Functions
Individual Inform individual of problems or
opportunities
Prepare individual for action
Dyadic Signal mental states
Reward or punish prior action
Evoke complementary or
reciprocal behavior
Group Define group boundaries and
members
Define group roles and identities
Motivate collective action
Culture Define cultural identity
Identify norms and values
Reify cultural ideologies and
power structures
Universals and Cultural Variations in Emotion 331
psychological science, from conceptions of psychological
disorder to judgment and decision making.
UNIVERSALS AND CULTURAL
VARIATIONS IN EMOTION
To ascertain whether members of different cultures express
emotion in universal fashion, Darwin sent queries to 36
missionaries stationed in different corners of the British
Empire, asking whether they had seen emotional expres-
sions unknown to Victorian England. They had not.
When anthropologist Lutz (1988) did her ethnographic
research with the Ifaluk, a people on a Micronesian island,
she documented radically different meanings of emotion:
a child’s enthusiasm was not encouraged, as in the West,
but frowned on for its impertinence and immodesty. These
contrasting observations highlight a central tension in the
study of emotion: How are emotions universal, and how do
they vary across cultures (for reviews, see Mesquita, 2001,
2003; Mesquita & Frijda, 1992)? This area of research
has engaged founding figures in the field, from Darwin to
Asch (see Keltner, Ekman, et al., 2003, for history), and
been the source of impassioned debate (e.g., Ekman, 1994;
Russell, 1994).
The study of cultural variations and universality in
emotion brings into focus contrasting predictions of evo-
lutionist and constructivist approaches to emotion, sum-
marized in Table 9.9 (see Abu-Lughod, 1986; Hochschild,
1983, 1990; Keltner & Haidt, 1999; Mesquita, 2003;
Oatley, 1993; Oatley & Jenkins, 1992). Evolutionists and
constructivists alike start from the assumption that emo-
tions are solutions to basic problems of social living. From
there, the approaches diverge in essential ways. Within an
evolutionary framework, emotions are genetically encoded
biological processes that emerged in hominid evolution
as adaptations to problems or opportunities specific to
the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Emotions
Table 9.9 A Comparison of Evolutionary and Cultural Approaches
Evolutionary
Question of Interest Approach Cultural Approach
What is an emotion? Genetically encoded Language, discourse,
beliefs, roles
What are the origins of Environment Practices,
emotions? of evolutionary institutions, values
adaptedness
Function Individual: Action Reify roles, values
readiness
Dyadic: Social Reify identities,
coordination ideologies
332 Emotion
are species-characteristic patterns of action and therefore
universal.
For constructivists, emotions are words, concepts, rep-
resentations, and metaphors. Emotions are forms of dis-
course that emerge within culturally specific institutions,
values, technologies, narratives, and social practices. What
is most striking are pronounced cultural differences in emo-
tion that reflect culturally specific concerns about identity,
morality, and social structure (Averill, 1980; Mesquita,
2003; Shweder & Haidt, 2000).
As empirical data have been gathered, the field has
moved from either–or assertions about universality and cul-
tural variation (e.g., Haidt & Keltner, 1999; Mesquita, 2003;
Rodriguez Mosquera et al., 2004; Russell, 1991, 1994). New
evidence suggests that some emotions, such as shame or
sympathy, may prove to be more variable across cultures than
other emotions, such as anger and disgust (Haidt & Keltner,
1999; Russell, 1991). Work by Tsai and colleagues reveals
that some components of emotion (e.g., autonomic response)
may vary less across cultures than do self-reports of the
experience of emotion (for relevant studies, Tsai, Chentsova-
Dutton, Friere-Bebeau, & Przymus, 2002; Tsai & Levenson,
1997; Tsai, Levenson, & Carstensen, 2000; Tsai, Levenson, &
McCoy, 2006). With these considerations as a backdrop, the
literature on the universality and variability of emotion is
framed by four generative ideas.
Potential Versus Practice
Empirical attempts seeking to document universality or cul-
tural variability in emotion are guided by different assump-
tions (Mesquita, 2001). Those interested in universality
(evolutionists) focus on the “potential” for emotion; that is,
given a highly controlled stimulus, do members of different
cultures show similar experiences, expressions, and physi-
ological response? Those interested in cultural variation
tend to focus on the actual “practice” of emotion; that is,
how do emotions arise, and how are they experienced and
expressed in daily living?
As one example, anger in East Asian cultures is thought
to be highly muted, given its likely disruption of social har-
mony (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, 1994). In contrast, in the
Ifaluk, anger, or song, is a highly public, dramatized display
of expressing grievances and remedies through apology and
reconciliation. Given these observations, constructivists
would highlight the profound differences between the cul-
tures in the actual expression of anger; evolutionists would
likely see similarities in the potential of emotion—that
anger across the two cultures is organized around similar
appraisal themes and expressive behaviors (but intensified
in the Ifaluk) and functions to restore just relations when
they have gone awry.
This distinction between potential and practice illumi-
nates how emotion-eliciting appraisals are both univer-
sal and culturally variable. At the most abstract level of
analysis, the appraised antecedents of emotion are similar
across cultures (Mauro, Sato, & Tucker, 1992; Mesquita &
Ellsworth, 2001; Mesquita & Frijda, 1992; Scherer, 1997).
For example, in an early study, young Americans and
Malaysians described events that made them feel emotions
such as fear, disgust, and joy (Boucher & Brandt, 1981).
New participants from both cultures showed high levels of
agreement in predicting which emotions would be produced
by these events, even for events generated by individuals
from a different culture. There appears to be a high degree
of universality in the core appraisals that, in the abstract,
give rise to emotions such as anger, embarrassment, or grat-
itude in different cultures.
In practice, cultural variations in the actual events that
elicit specific emotions are readily documented and often
profound. For example, in Hindu India, people are angered
by several events that would not elicit much anger in
Western European cultures (Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, &
Park, 1997). These include when a child cuts his hair after
the death of his father, when a woman eats with her hus-
band’s elder brother, when a husband cooks for his wife
or massages her legs, and when upper-caste individuals
come into physical contact with lower-caste individuals. In
the West, jealousy tends to be felt when the sexual atten-
tion of a primary partner turns toward someone else (Buss,
1994; DeSteno & Salovey, 1996; Harris, 2003; Harris &
Christenfeld, 1996). Ethnographic work with the Toda of
India, in contrast, found that jealousy is not associated with
a sexual partner having intercourse with an ingroup mem-
ber, but only with an outgroup, non-Toda male (Hupka,
1991).
In the abstract, making progress toward personal goals
has the potential to elicit positive emotions across cultures;
in practice, those goals and conceptions of progress vary
dramatically. For example, members of interdependent
cultures, such as the Japanese, Surinamese, and Turkish,
tend to experience positive emotions in socially engag-
ing situations, such as in informal exchanges with friends
(Kitayama, Karasawa, & Mesquita, 2003; Kitayama,
Markus, & Kurokawa, 2000). By contrast, Americans
and Dutch people are more likely to experience positive
emotions in relatively disengaged situations, for example,
in activities oriented toward personal accomplishments
(see also Frijda & Mesquita, 1994). Evolutionists are right
in arguing that in the abstract across cultures emotions
arise in response to similar events and serve similar func-
tions; constructivists are right in concluding that in practice
the specific events that trigger emotion often vary dramati-
cally in different cultures.

Prototypes and Variations
Analyses of emotion-related appraisal, facial expression,
and knowledge have found it useful to view emotions from a
prototype perspective, as introduced earlier (e.g., Ekman,
1992; Fehr & Russell, 1984; Shaver et al., 1987). This argu-
ment holds that each emotion is defined by a constellation of
central features, which reliably occur with an experience
of a specific emotion, as well as peripheral features that less
systematically occur with the emotion (and are less power-
ful in discriminating one emotion from close relatives). The
appraisal processes that give rise to emotions involve more
central and more peripheral features (for such an analysis
of awe, see Keltner & Haidt, 2003). Emotion-related dis-
plays involve more central and more peripheral actions:
For example, Ekman has detailed prototypical displays of
anger—the furrowed brow, glare, and tightened and pressed
lips—as well as variations that involve more peripheral
facial muscle movements, such as the tightened lower eyelid
(Ekman, 2004). Representations of specific emotions have
more central and peripheral features (Shaver et al., 1987).
One intriguing possibility is that emotions show greater
universality in their central features and greater cultural
variability in their peripheral features. This claim helps
to synthesize the evidence for universality and cultural
variation in emotional display. The communication of each
emotion involves facial muscle actions, bodily movements,
acoustic markers, gestures, and tactile behaviors. Some dis-
play behaviors occur more reliably with an emotion; others
less reliably so. For example, more central actions of the
prototypical embarrassment display are gaze down, head
turns and movements down, and a controlled smile; more
peripheral elements of the display are face touches, head
shakes, and shoulder shrugs (Keltner, 1995).
Fairly strong evidence exists for the universality of
prototypical emotional displays. Japanese and American
students’ facial muscle movements in response to evoca-
tive film clips demonstrated correlations that ranged from
0.86 to 0.96 (Ekman, 1972). A recent review of 25 stud-
ies involving participants from more than 35 cultures found
that people in different cultures show similar prototypi-
cal facial displays of anger, contempt, disgust, fear, pride,
sadness, surprise, and happiness in comparable situations
(see Matsumoto et al., 2008). Unsighted athletes from dif-
ferent cultures show remarkably similar facial expressions
of emotions such as anger, sadness, shame, and pride fol-
lowing victory and loss (Matsumoto & Willingham, 2006;
Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008). Ethological studies of sev-
eral preindustrial cultures uncovered similar prototypical
displays of anger, embarrassment, fear, sadness, surprise,
and several varieties of smiles and laughs (Eibl-Eibesfeldt,
1989). Meta-analyses of more than 200 data sets find strong
Universals and Cultural Variations in Emotion 333
evidence of universality in the recognition of prototypical
facial displays (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002; Matsumoto
et al., 2008) and emotion-specific vocalizations (Juslin &
Laukka, 2003; Sauter & Scott, 2007). Even chimpanzees
reliably differentiate among five human facial expressions
(Parr, 2003). These findings follow from evolutionary
accounts of emotional display: Humans across radically
different cultures share the same facial musculature, vocal
apparatus, and sensory receptors in the skin and signal emo-
tion in prototypical displays in similar fashion.
At the same time, cultures vary in ritualized displays
or emotion accents, which involve peripheral features of
emotional displays that acquire culture-specific meaning
(Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002). For example, throughout
much of Southeast Asia, the tongue bite and shoulder shrug
are ritualized displays of embarrassment. The tongue bite and
shoulder shrug are peripheral components of the embarrass-
ment display: exaggerated versions of the inhibitory muscle
actions around the mouth (the tongue bite) and constricted,
size-reducing posture (the shoulder shrug). In an emotion
recognition study, Indian participants readily perceived the
expressions that included the tongue bite as embarrassment,
whereas U.S. participants saw no reliable emotion in the
display (Haidt & Keltner, 1999). These findings dovetail
with constructivists’ claims that, as with the phonemes of
language, cultures select and arrange the elements of emo-
tional expression in culturally specific ways.
Empirical studies likewise find that certain appraisals are
central to each emotion and others are more peripheral (e.g.,
Smith & Ellsworth, 1985), as well as that certain themes are
central to the knowledge about an emotion and other themes
are more peripheral (Shaver et al., 1987). The same may be
true for other components of emotion (e.g., peripheral phys-
iological response), and the foregoing analysis suggests that
there is likely to be greater universality to the central fea-
tures of an emotion and greater variability to the peripheral
features.
Focal Emotions Within Cultures
Early in the anthropological study of emotion, scholars
claimed that cultures vary in how prominent, or hypercog-
nized, different emotions are in the language and discourse
of the particular culture (Lutz & White, 1986). Distinctions
were drawn between “shame” and “guilt” cultures (Benedict,
1946). Romantic love seems to be a highly salient emotion
in the West. Tahiti has no word for guilt and, perhaps, no
occurrence of it.
Cultural psychologists have drawn on these observa-
tions to propose that cultures vary in which emotions are
focal (Mesquita, 2003; Rodriguez Mosquera et al., 2004).
Members of a particular culture, the implication is, may be
334 Emotion
more or less prone to regularly feel and express emotions
such as anger, compassion, gratitude, or awe. The proximal
sources of variations in focal emotions are cultural differ-
ences in self-construals, values or concerns, or epistemolo-
gies (Markus & Kitayama, 1994). One would expect focal
emotions to be more readily elicited, experienced more
intensely, represented in a richer lexicon, and signaled in
more intense display behavior. Preliminary findings lend
credence to these assertions.
For example, Rodriguez Mosquera and colleagues (2000)
have documented that in cultures that prioritize concerns over
honor (e.g., respect and face), honor-protecting emotions
such as shame or anger are more focal. In relevant empiri-
cal studies, individuals from high honor cultures (Spaniards)
responded with greater shame and anger when insulted than
did individuals from other cultures, because these emotions
protect honor and “face.”
According to self-construal theories, emotions that fold
people into harmonious, cooperative relations should be
more focal in more interdependent cultures (see Markus &
Kitayama, 1991). For example, self-conscious emotions
such as shame and embarrassment express modesty and a
sense of place within a social collective and can be thought
of as highly interdependent emotions (Keltner & Buswell,
1997). In keeping with the analysis here, self-conscious
emotions are indeed more focal in interdependent cul-
tures (Goetz & Keltner, 2008). For example, in China at
least 113 words are related to shame and embarrassment
(Li, Wang, & Fischer, 2004). Olympic athletes from inter-
dependent cultures showed stronger shame displays in
response to losing than did individuals from independent
cultures (Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008).
Cultures also vary according to which components of
emotion are focal. Compared with Western European par-
ticipants, East Asian participants were found to be more
sensitive to emotion-related nonverbal vocalizations (Ishii,
Reyes, & Kitayama, 2003). Consistent with claims about
cultural variation in dialectical thought, East Asians are
more likely to report the simultaneous experience of contra-
dictory emotions (Kitayama et al., 2000; Schimmack et al.,
2002).
Idealization
A final area of inquiry is guided by the assertion that mem-
bers of different cultures value specific emotions differ-
ently according to how those emotions enable individuals
to more readily enact culturally valued concerns related to
social organization (Tsai, 2007). Cultures idealize different
emotions.
This thesis helps to synthesize several areas of research.
In the United States, emotions such as excitement and
enthusiasm are more highly valued than emotions such
as contentedness and modesty. Early work by Matsumoto
(1989, 1990) found that Americans rated negative emotions
as more appropriate than the Japanese did when expressed
toward ingroup members, consistent with individualistic val-
ues of the expression of the true self around intimates. The
Japanese, in contrast, rated the expression of negative emo-
tion as more appropriate than Americans did when directed
toward outgroup members, consistent with the interdepen-
dent, collectivist emphasis on ingroup harmony.
Cultural differences in ideal emotions are likely to
explain cultural variation in emotion regulation. Members
of interdependent cultures are more likely to regulate many
emotions, in particular negative emotions, which impose
on others, thus disrupting social harmony (Markus &
Kitayama, 1991). Early work found that the Japanese
regulate with polite smiles the display of negative emo-
tion in the presence of an authority figure more so than
do Americans (Friesen, 1972). Conceptually similar work
by Tsai, Levenson, and colleagues (2006) has found that
Asian Americans are more likely to regulate their emo-
tional expression than Western European or American
students. And in a recent study of 19 cultures, Matsumoto
and colleagues (2008) documented that individuals from
interdependent cultures report higher levels of emotion
regulation than members of independent cultures. These
differences in emotion regulation flow from cultural ideals
about social harmony versus self-expression.
The debate over the universality and the cultural vari-
ability of emotion has long been an intellectual battle-
ground for evolutionists and constructivists. The many
new studies of emotion and culture are framed nicely by
provocative ideas and findings that should buoy the spirits
of evolutionists and constructivists alike. In the abstract,
certain responses of emotion are universal, whereas in
practice, cultures construct quite different emotions. The
more prototypical features of an emotional response are
likely to be universal, whereas the more peripheral fea-
tures are more likely to vary. Some emotions appear to be
more focal in specific cultures, and cultures vary in which
emotions, and which styles of emotional expression, are
valued. Emotions are universal and, at the same time, cul-
turally variable.
EMOTION AND REASON
In Western thought, emotions have widely been viewed
as lower, less sophisticated ways of perceiving the world
when juxtaposed with loftier, principled forms of reason
(Calhoun & Solomon, 1984; Nussbaum, 2001). Emotions,
this view continues, subvert rational judgments and decisions

about matters of justice, causality, right and wrong, and
the good life, and they should be extirpated from the mind
and social exchange (Nussbaum, 1996; Oatley, 2004). For
example, Kant (1960), in writing about judgments related
to justice, suggested that emotions such as “sympathy” be
considered unreliable because of their subjective nature,
claiming such emotions reduce humans to “tender-hearted
idlers.” The rare exception was 18th-century moral philoso-
pher Hume, who contended that emotions should guide rea-
soning (Hume, 1739/1978).
This dualistic perspective on emotion and reason has
been countervailed by 25 years of research on the inter-
play between emotion and cognitive processes (Clore,
1994; Clore & Gasper, 2000; Clore, Gasper, & Garvin,
2001; Clore & Parrott, 1991; Forgas, 1995, 1998, 2000, 2003;
Fredrickson, 2001; Isen, 1987). This literature can be traced
back to an influential article by Simon (1967), who argued
that emotions solve a general problem faced by intelligent
agents: Emotions set priorities among the many goals and
stimuli that impinge on individuals at any moment (see also
Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987, 1996; Winkielman et al.,
1997). Research by Bower (1981) on mood and memory
and Isen (1987) on positive affect and judgment were early
empirical inspirations to the studies that would follow.
As the literature has developed, several conceptual dis-
tinctions have become clear. A first is between the inciden-
tal and the integral influences of emotion on reasoning.
Incidental effects occur when an emotion triggered by one
event influences judgments in an unrelated domain. In the
studies that follow, people prove to quite consistently fail
to understand that incidental emotions are not relevant to a
judgment at hand. As a result, emotions can influence unre-
lated judgments in profound ways. Integral effects refer to
the influences of emotion on judgments of the object that
elicited the emotion (Forgas, 1995). Trait- and state-based
approaches can be taken to characterize the incidental
and integral influences of emotion on cognitive processes
(Lerner & Keltner, 2001).
A second, concerns the nature of the influence on judg-
ment. Processing style accounts posit that emotions engage
qualitatively different kinds of processing, which account
for influences of emotions on cognition. Anger triggers more
automatic forms of reasoning and sadness more controlled
forms, accounting for why these two emotions lead to dif-
ferent likelihoods of relying on stereotypes (Bodenhausen,
Kramer, & Süsser, 1994). Positive emotions trigger more
associative, creative, or broadening patterns of thought
(Fredrickson, 1998; Isen, 1987). Fear triggers a narrowing
of attention or vigilance to threat (Mathews & MacLeod,
1994; Mineka & Sutton, 1992).
Informational accounts, by contrast, presuppose that
emotions involve specific kinds of information that feed
Emotion and Reason 335
directly into cognitive processes (Forgas, 1995; Lerner &
Keltner, 2001; Schwarz, 1990). Emotions are fast, embodied
gut feelings that feed into important judgments. Framed by
these concerns, the study of emotion and reason reveals that
almost every cognitive process—attention, evaluative judg-
ments, probability estimates, perceptions of risk, outgroup
biases, and moral judgment—is shaped by momentary emo-
tions in systematic and profound ways (Clore & Gasper,
2000; DeSteno, Petty, Rucker, Wegener, & Braverman,
2004; Forgas, 1995, 2000).
Emotion and Selective Attention
Jean Paul Sartre (1957) wrote of the “magical transforma-
tion” that emotions bring about in the perceptual world:
that they direct attention to select classes of stimuli in the
environment. The most fully researched effects of emo-
tions on attention concern fear. Fear and anxiety narrow
attention, leading to the selective perception of threats and
dangers (Mathews & MacLeod, 1994; Mineka, Rafaeli, &
Yovel, 2003). For example, in the dot probe paradigm,
participants are presented with two words, one threatening
(e.g., “disease”) and the other neutral (e.g., “table”), on a
screen, which then are replaced by a dot (Mathews, 1993;
Mathews & Klug, 1993). Participants press a button when
the dot appears. Highly anxious individuals demonstrate
shorter reaction times to the appearance of the dot above
threatening words when compared with nonanxious indi-
viduals and when compared with neutral words. In studies
using the dichotic listening paradigm, highly anxious indi-
viduals more readily have their attention drawn away from
the message they are asked to track in one ear when threat-
ening words are presented to the other ear (Mathews &
MacLeod, 1994). In studies using the Stroop paradigm, the
slowing of color naming is greatest with words that cor-
respond to the individual’s greatest anxiety: people with
social phobias are slowed by words about confidence;
people with eating disorders are slowed by words for food
(Mathews & Klug, 1993).
In a similar vein, work by Niedenthal and col-
leagues (Niedenthal, 2008; Niedenthal & Halberstadt,
2000; Niedenthal & Setterlund, 1994) has found that cur-
rent emotions lead individuals to more quickly categorize
other stimuli that are congruent with the current emotional
state. In lexical decision studies, people in happy moods
were found to be faster at identifying happy words than sad
words, whereas sad individuals were happier at identify-
ing sad words than happy words (Niedenthal & Setterlund,
1994). People feeling anger identified anger faces more
quickly compared with appropriate controls (Niedenthal
& Halberstadt, 2000). Emotions bias selective attention,
perception, and categorization in an emotion-congruent
336 Emotion
fashion, which raises interesting questions about the duration
of emotions and moods (which should be extended by these
effects of affect on selective attention). This is a likely place
where regulation strategies should alter the course of an
emotion episode.
Emotions and Evaluative Judgments
Momentary emotions wield powerful influences on evalua-
tive judgments, a robust empirical generalization accounted
for by a feelings-as-information perspective (Clore, 1992;
Clore & Gasper, 2000; Clore & Parrott, 1991; Schwarz,
1990; Schwarz & Clore, 1983). This perspective assumes
that emotions provide rapid signals about objects in the
environment and that these momentary feelings feed into
ongoing judgments about issues that are too complex to
review and synthesize all relevant evidence.
In a seminal study, Schwarz and Clore (1983) asked
people in Illinois either on a cloudy day or on a sunny day
“All things considered, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you
with your life as a whole these days?” Participants either
rated their life satisfaction or did so after first responding to
the question “How’s the weather down there?” Participants
reported greater life satisfaction on a sunny day than on
a gloomy day, consistent with a robust literature showing
that current feelings determine levels of subjective well-
being (Lucas & Diener, 2008). The joys of the sunny day
only influenced evaluations of life satisfaction, however,
when participants did not attribute their current feelings to
the weather (e.g., Martin, 2000). Subsequent studies have
revealed that current moods and emotions exert power-
ful influences on evaluative judgments of life satisfaction
(Lucas & Diener, 2008), political leaders (Forgas & Moylan,
1987), and consumer choices (Han, Lerner, & Keltner,
2007).
Emotions, Judgment, and Decision Making
An appraisal tendency framework has been offered to
account for the effects of discrete emotions on judgment and
decision making (Han et al., 2007; Lerner & Keltner, 2000,
2001; Lerner & Tiedens, 2006; Tiedens & Linton, 2001).
An appraisal tendency framework assumes that each
emotion is defined by a core appraisal: Compassion, for
example, involves appraisals of the undeserved suffering;
pride involves appraisals of strength of the self vis-à-vis
others (see Tables 9.6 and 9.7). Specific emotions influ-
ence judgments, it is posited, in a manner consistent with
the emotion’s underlying appraisal tendency, but only in
domains related to the appraisal. For example, fear should
influence judgments of certainty and risk, the judgment
domains most closely related to its underlying appraisal
tendency, but not judgments of blame or fairness, which
are more closely related to anger.
Several studies guided by this perspective have revealed
the extensive influences of specific emotions on judgments
and decisions (Lowenstein & Lerner, 2003). People feel-
ing sad were more likely to attribute ambiguous events
to situational causes and to judge future events produced
by situational factors (e.g., lightning sets your house on
fire) as more likely than people feeling anger, who attrib-
uted the same events to the actions of others and judged
future events produced by others’ actions to be more likely
(Keltner, Ellsworth, & Edwards, 1993). Fear amplifies the
expectation of pessimistic life outcomes and risk com-
pared with anger (Lerner, Gonzalez, Small, & Fischoff,
2003; Lerner & Keltner, 2001). Anxious decision-makers
preferred uncertainty-reducing options, whereas sad
decision-makers preferred the reward-seeking option
(Raghunathan & Pham, 1999). Momentary anger increases
the reliance on heuristic cues because of the underlying
appraisal of certainty (Tiedens & Linton, 2001; see also
Bodenhausen, Sheppard, & Kramer, 1994). When angry,
individuals judge unfair actions to be more likely in their
future, whereas when sad, individuals judge losses to be
more likely (DeSteno, Petty, Wegener, & Rucker, 2000).
Positive Emotions Broaden and Build
Early in the study of emotion and judgment, Isen (1987)
argued that happiness prompts people to think in more flexible
and creative ways. People induced to feel happiness through
trivial events, for example, in receiving candy, watching a
pleasurable film clip, or finding a dime in a public telephone,
were more likely to find creative solutions to novel problems,
to produce unusual associations to words, and to categorize
objects in inclusive or novel ways (Isen, 1987).
In an important extension of this work, Fredrickson
(1998, 2001) has argued that the overarching function of pos-
itive emotions is to broaden and build thought repertoires.
These basic broadening effects of positive emotion enable
more creative and flexible thought, which help the individual
in forming important bonds and exploring the environment.
Relevant research has documented how positive emotions
such as joy, amusement, contentment, and relief facilitate
global visual processing relative to local processing, counter
the outgroup homogeneity effect, and prompt self-expansion
in interpersonal relationships (Fredrickson, 2001; Johnson &
Fredrickson, 2005; Waugh & Fredrickson, 2006).
Emotions as Moral Intuitions
Moral judgments of an action as right or wrong, a person of
good character or not, or a punishment as just or not have

long been assumed to be founded on higher-order cognitive
processes (Haidt, 2001). The individual in the act of mak-
ing a moral judgment is assumed to be guided by a priori,
abstract principles (e.g., conceptions of rights or equality)
that apply to all contexts and individuals. Moral judgments
hinge on the development of basic cognitive processes,
such as the capacity to take another ’s perspective.
A different view has emerged, one that prioritizes emo-
tions as important intuitions, or fast, automatic judgments
of right and wrong (Damasio, 1994; Greene & Haidt,
2002; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen,
2001; Haidt, 2007). This view flows readily from appraisal
accounts of emotion, which identify morally significant
themes (e.g., harm and fairness) involved in specific emo-
tions, as well as evolutionary proposals that emotions
orient cognitive processes to solving problems of social
organization. The claim that emotions act as moral intu-
itions has found expression in the somatic marker hypoth-
esis (Damasio, 1994) and Haidt’s (2001, 2003, 2007)
two-system view of moral judgment. Table 9.10 summa-
rizes claims about relations between specific emotions and
moral concerns. “Moral concern” refers to the principles or
rules that govern judgment and action with respect to mat-
ters of the distribution of resources, punishment, and judg-
ments of character and virtue (Haidt, 2001, 2007; Rozin,
Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999; Shweder et al., 1997;
Vasquez, Keltner, Ebenbach, & Banaszynski, 2001).
One of the most widely investigated emotion–morality
associations is that between disgust and purity. Feeling dis-
gusted by apparent purity violations correlates with greater
moral condemnation of those violations (Haidt & Hersh,
2001; Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993). Participants induced
through posthypnotic suggestion to experience pangs of
disgust in response to an innocuous target word (“take” or
“often”) reported greater feelings of disgust when the word
was embedded in descriptions of moral violations and greater
moral condemnation of those violations (Wheatley & Haidt,
2005). Opposition to two purity-relevant behaviors, meat
consumption and cigarette smoking, coincided with greater
disgust toward those behaviors and was better predicted by
felt disgust than by perceived health risks (Rozin & Singh,
1999).
In one of the most systematic studies of emotion and
moral judgment, Rozin and colleagues (1999) documented
fairly clear associations between anger, contempt, and dis-
gust and three moral domains: autonomy (rights, justice,
and freedom), community (duties and obligations), and
purity, respectively. In their research, participants consis-
tently selected anger faces to label violations of autonomy
(e.g., “A person is seeing someone steal a purse from a
blind person”), contempt faces to label violations of com-
munity (e.g., “A person is hearing an 8-year-old student
Emotion and Reason 337
Table 9.10 Emotions and Their Associated Moral Concerns
Emotion Moral Concern
Anger Rights, freedoms, retributive
justice
Compassion Harm, need
Contempt Community role, position within
hierarchy
Disgust Purity, both sexual and spiritual
Gratitude Reciprocity, equality
Guilt Duty, obligation
Shame Own character flaws
Awe, elevation Other ’s virtue
speak to the teacher in the same way that student talks to
friends”), and disgust faces to label purity violations (e.g.,
“A person is eating a piece of rotten meat”).
Weiner and colleagues have documented how anger and
sympathy lead to different punitive judgments of moral
transgressions (Rudolph, Roesch, Greitemeyer, & Weiner,
2004; Weiner, Graham, & Reyna, 1997). Individuals
angered by moral transgressions prefer the most venge-
ful form of punishment—retributive punishment (see also
Carlsmith, Darley, & Robinson, 2002; Harmon-Jones et al.,
2003; Lerner, Goldberg, & Tetlock, 1998). When angry,
people blame others, attributing violations to stable, con-
trollable, and internal causes (Quigley & Tedeschi, 1996).
In contrast, participants who feel sympathy in response to
the same crime prefer less severe forms of punishment,
ones that protect the criminal and society, namely, utilitar-
ian punishment (Weiner et al., 1997).
Emotional Components of Prejudice
Long ago, Gordon Allport (1954) argued that emotion orga-
nizes the content of different forms of prejudice. Empirical
research has begun to provide data fitting with this asser-
tion: that biases toward outgroups are colored by different
emotions (Alexander, Brewer, & Herrmann, 1999; Cottrell &
Neuberg, 2005; DeSteno, Dasgupta, Bartlett, & Cajdric,
2004; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002; Mackie et al.,
2000; Tapias, Glaser, Vasquez, Keltner, & Wickens, 2007).
Stereotypes of competence and warmth trigger feelings of
pity, contempt, and envy in systematic ways (Fiske et al.,
2002). Perceptions of relative outgroup strength generate
different negative emotions, such as anger, disgust, or fear
(Mackie et al., 2000).
Outgroups trigger different threat appraisals, which
account for the emotional component of distinct preju-
dices (Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005). Prejudice toward African
Americans has been associated with anger, in terms of
self-reported emotion (Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005; Tapias
338 Emotion
et al., 2007), and measured changes in facial musculature, where
Whites who viewed African American faces showed changes
in the corrugator supercilii muscle associated with anger
(Vanman, Paul, Ito, & Miller, 1997; Vanman, Saltz, Nathan, &
Warren, 2004). Prejudice against gays has been found to be
systematically associated with increased disgust, which may
be accounted for by the centrality of impurity to both gay
stereotype (e.g., “diseased,” “abnormal,” and “inappropriate
sexuality”) and disgust (Rozin et al., 1999; Vasquez et al.,
2001). People asked to describe their spontaneous reactions
toward homosexuality indicate feeling “disgust” (Haidt &
Hersh, 2001). Individuals predisposed toward experienc-
ing disgust tend to report prejudice toward gays (Haidt,
McCauley, & Rozin, 1994; Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley,
2000; Van de Ven, Bornholt, & Bailey, 1996).
Moderators of the Influences on Emotion
and Cognition
The empirical literature suggests that emotions influence
numerous cognitive processes—selective attention, evalu-
ative judgments, perceptions of risk and estimates of value,
causality, moral judgments of right and wrong, and biases
toward different outgroups. Emotions might be thought of
metaphorically as social sensory systems, guiding cogni-
tive processes to significant classes of stimuli in the social
environment, presumably laying the groundwork for par-
ticular courses of action (e.g., anger attunes the individual
to matters of injustice and courses of action that potentially
remedy injustice).
These different literatures raise an essential question:
What processes moderate the influences of emotion on cog-
nition? The most systematic answer to this question has been
provided by Forgas (1995) in the affect infusion model. This
model posits that emotions infuse into a cognitive process to
the extent that the task is complex, involves constructive pro-
cessing, and is not based on preexisting knowledge structures
(e.g., prototypes). When judgments are less complex and pre-
existing schema or prototypes are salient, emotions influence
cognition to a reduced extent. Other processes that mitigate
the influences of emotion on cognition include accountability
(Lerner et al., 1998) and the degree to which the individual has
labeled the current state in words and narrative (Clore et al.,
2001; Keltner, Locke, & Audrain, 1993).
SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF EMOTION
Emotions arise in social contexts and shape and are shaped
by social dimensions of the situation—hierarchical con-
cerns, interdependence, familiarity, intimacy (Clark &
Finkel, 2004; Fischer & Manstead, 2008; Keltner & Haidt,
1999; Tiedens & Leach, 2004). Early ethological analyses
of social behavior in preindustrialized cultures revealed
that brief emotional displays are a grammar of social inter-
actions (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989). Brief displays of coyness
and desire, for example, are the basic elements of flirtatious
interactions; flashes of anger, contempt, and embarrass-
ment constitute negotiations of rank. Constructivists have
long contended that emotions embody culturally specified
roles and social identities (Averill, 1980; Hochschild, 1983,
1990; Lutz & White, 1986; Markus & Kitayama, 1994).
In the expression of sympathy for a vulnerable child, for
example, a woman assumes culturally based gender identi-
ties and roles (Citrin et al., 2004; Clark, 1990).
Two empirical traditions have emerged as responses to
arguments that emotions are socially constructed. A first
pertains to how social contextual factors—status, familiar-
ity, intimacy, power, social class—shape emotional response.
Emotions vary dramatically in interactions among friends
versus among those of strangers, among bosses versus
among subordinates, and in informal versus in formal set-
tings. New studies, as the next section shows, are revealing
how this is so.
A second emergent interest reverses the causal direction
and asks how emotions give rise to specific social relation-
ships. Here, the concern is in documenting how specific
emotions or emotional processes create specific patterns
of relationships. Expressions of gratitude, for example,
have been theorized to give rise to cooperative relations
among nonkin (Nesse, 1990; Trivers, 1971). As codes of
etiquette spread through 17th- and 18th-century Europe,
embarrassment at others’ lack of manners created social
boundaries between those in the court and those outside
(Elias, 1939/1978). Certain emotions, for example, expres-
sions of contempt, are especially powerful in predicting the
demise of marriages (Gottman, 1993). With advances in
the study of interdependent data of participants, such as cou-
ples or friends in dyadic interactions (Gonzalez & Griffin,
1997), new studies are revealing that fleeting expres-
sions of emotion do indeed shape the course of different
relationships.
Social Contextual Shaping of Emotion
Experience sampling and diary studies reveal that people’s
emotional profiles shift dramatically according to whether
they are with friends or acquaintances, family or work col-
leagues, higher-status individuals or subordinates, or are
in formal or less formal contexts (e.g., Bolger et al., 2003;
Moskowitz, 1994). Early experimental studies converge on
a similar theme. With the increasing sociality of the con-
text, certain kinds of emotional behaviors—smiling, for
example—are amplified (Fridlund, 1992; Kraut & Johnson,
1979). More recent empirical studies have documented how

two pervasive dimensions to the social context—power and
affiliation—shape momentary emotion.
Status, Power, and Emotion
Social status and power refer to different facets of the indi-
vidual’s relative rank, or position, vis-à-vis others, and rel-
ative capacity to alter the states of other individuals (Fiske,
1993; Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). Almost all
relationships are imbued with power concerns, from inter-
actions among school children on the playground to work
colleagues jockeying in meetings. Power dynamics influ-
ence emotions in several important ways.
Power influences the overall valence of emotional expe-
rience. High-power individuals are prone to experience
more positive emotions than are low-power people (Collins,
1990; Langner & Keltner, 2008). In contrast, low-power
individuals tend to experience increased negative emotion.
Children of low sociometric status report higher levels of
negative moods, guilt, and depression (Hecht, Inderbitzen, &
Bukowski, 1998). Lower socioeconomic status also relates
to increased negative mood in adults (e.g., Link, Lennon, &
Dohrenwend, 1993). Select studies yield relations between
status and more specific negative emotions: In a study that
manipulated status, low-status individuals reported more
guilt and sadness in response to negative events, whereas
high-status individuals reported more anger (Tiedens et al.,
2000).
Power also influences the expression of emotion. High-
power people express their positive emotions more read-
ily in facial display (Hecht & LaFrance, 1998) and have
been found to express more dominant emotions, such as
anger and contempt (Keltner et al., 1998). High-power
individuals show greater coherence between expression
and experience of emotion (Hecht & LaFrance, 1998). The
coherence between experience and expression contributes
to social adjustment and physical health (Gross, 1998;
Gross & John, 2003), suggesting that power-related influ-
ences on emotional coherence may contribute to the poor
health outcomes of low-power individuals (see Adler et al.,
1994).
Perhaps more provocatively, high-power individuals are
less sensitive to the emotions of others. High-power indi-
viduals are less accurate in judging posed displays of emo-
tions (Galinsky, Magee, Inesi, & Gruenfeld, 2006), as well
as the spontaneous displays of emotion of an interaction
partner (Gonzaga, Keltner, & Ward, 2008). High-power
individuals also react less to others’ emotions. Anderson,
Keltner, and John (2003) found that low-power friends
assimilated more to their higher-power friends in their
emotional responses than vice versa. In negotiation studies,
lower-power negotiators conceded more to angry oppo-
nents than to happy ones, whereas high-power negotiators
Social Construction of Emotion 339
did not adjust their demands to their opponent’s emotion
(Van Kleef, De Dreu, Pietroni, & Manstead, 2006). High-
power individuals have been shown to be less emotionally
reactive to the suffering of another: In a study of conversa-
tions between two strangers, high-power individuals’ expe-
riences of compassion decreased as their partner disclosed
more distressing experiences (Van Kleef et al., 2008).
The tendency for high-power individuals to respond less
empathically to the emotions of others is certain to give rise
to problems in relationships—an area ripe with interesting
possibilities. For example, leaders who avoid empathy fail-
ures are more likely to maintain the respect and status of
their group members (Coté & Miners, 2006; Keltner, Van
Kleef, Chen, & Kraus, 2008). Empathy failures may cost
high-power individuals in more intimate relationships as
well.
Affiliation, Warmth, and Emotion
Affiliation or warmth is a basic dimension of social rela-
tionships, and it shapes emotional response in profound
ways (Clark & Finkel, 2004). Affiliation or warmth leads
to the convergence, or mimicry, of emotional responses
(Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994). In remarkable work
on the acoustics of laughter, for example, Bachorowski and
colleagues documented that within milliseconds the laughs
of friends as opposed to those of strangers begin to mimic
one another (e.g., Smoski & Bachorowski, 2003).
The degree of affiliation increases the likelihood of
convergent autonomic physiology. For example, Shearn
and colleagues (1992) brought two friends or two strang-
ers to the laboratory and induced embarrassment in one of
the participants. Friends showed a greater empathic blush
at their friends’ mortification than did strangers (see also
Miller, 1987; Provine, 1992).
These studies suggest that as individuals form more inter-
dependent relationships their emotions converge. Increased
affiliation is certain to influence other facets of emotional
response, including which emotions are experienced, the
intensity of emotional response (Fridlund, 1992), the accu-
racy with which individuals identify emotions in others,
and the degree to which individuals regulate their emotions
(Butler, Wilhelm, & Gross, 2006).
Emotions Create Patterns of Social Relationships
Anthropologists have offered rich characterizations of how
emotions establish relationships, helping individuals “nego-
tiate the social and moral order” (Abu-Lughod & Lutz,
1990). For example, in Abu-Lughod’s provocative analy-
sis of emotion, poetry, and ritual in a Bedouin community
in Egypt, the ritualized expression of hasham—a form
of embarrassment and modesty—in submissive gesture,
340 Emotion
facial and postural display, and patterns of dress—enables
hierarchical relations among group members (1986). The
experience and expression of emotion helps individuals
act out certain roles and identities and signal or mark the
parameters of particular social relationships.
Emotion and the Establishment of Status Relations
In nonhuman species, ritualized displays of dominance
(deep vocalizations and postural expansion) and submis-
siveness (head bobbing and cowering) are less costly than
direct aggressive encounters and have evolved as a means
by which individuals negotiate rank (Krebs & Davis,
1993). Emotions contribute to the formation of status rela-
tions in humans in similar fashion.
Emotions evoke social inferences that clarify status
relations among individuals. Emotional displays convey
information about the sender ’s relative status and power
vis-à-vis the receiver: displays of anger, for example, sig-
nal elevated status (Knutson, 1996), whereas displays of
embarrassment mark relative submissiveness (Keltner,
1995). People assume that high-power people respond to
difficulties with anger (Tiedens et al., 2000). Even more
on point, another study found that participants attributed
more elevated status to an individual who displays anger
compared with other emotions (Tiedens et al., 2000).
Quite remarkably, the same individual displaying anger in
the face was assumed to be larger physically than when
displaying a submissive emotion such as embarrassment
(Ketelaar, 2004). Other things being held constant, indi-
viduals who express more powerful emotions (e.g., anger
and pride) are afforded more status within hierarchies;
individuals who express more submissive emotions (e.g.,
embarrassment) are afforded less status.
Specific interactions—humans’ status contests—are
likely to ritualistically evoke patterns of emotions that
establish rank relationships. Teasing is one such interaction
(Keltner & Haidt, 2001). In one study, high- and low-power
fraternity members took turns in a round-robin design teas-
ing one another by making up nicknames and embarrassing
stories about one another (Keltner & Kring, 1998). High-
power members tended to display anger and contempt,
emotions associated with high power. In contrast, the low-
power members were more likely to show submissive emo-
tions such as embarrassment.
Emotion and the Establishment of Intimate Bonds
Particular emotional exchanges help to establish inti-
mate bonds (e.g., Clark & Mills, 1979). Sexual desire and
romantic love are the sine qua non of short- and long-term
reproductive relations (Buss, 1992; Ellis, 1992; Ellis &
Malamuth, 2000; Gonzaga et al., 2001). Brief displays of
sympathy are a foundation of communal relations (Clark &
Mills, 1979). Specific emotions produce particular relation-
ship orientations—motivations to be monogamous, to trust,
to reciprocate, and so on—that are vital to the maintenance
of the relationship.
Early empirical studies, for example, documented that
the degree of emotional mimicry predicted later reports of
closeness in various relationships (Hatfield et al., 1994).
More recent empirical studies have found that emotional
convergence over time predicts increased friendship. In
one illustrative study, friends came to the laboratory at
two different times during the year and reported their
emotional reactions to different evocative stimuli, such
as humorous or disturbing film clips (Anderson et al.,
2003). The emotions of friends converged over the
course of the year: they became more similar in valence
and intensity.
Early empirical studies of emotion largely focused on
individuals extracted from the social context. As a result,
claims about the social construction of emotion, about
how emotions vary across relationships, and about how
emotions give rise to different relationships extended well
beyond what was empirically known. With the rise in inter-
est in the study of relationships, and advances in statisti-
cal approaches to interdependent data of people in dyadic
interactions, studies of emotions in social relationships are
remedying this state of affairs. Dimensions of the social
context—status and affiliation—shape emotions in impor-
tant ways. Patterns of emotional exchange give rise to spe-
cific enduring relationships.
This literature on the social construction of emotion is
in its infancy, and its progress will depend on new kinds of
data—dyadic data, longitudinal studies, and careful stud-
ies of people in particular relationships. The promise of this
line of inquiry is great and has profound implications for
emotion theory. Models of emotion appraisal will need to
incorporate social contextual factors as basic elements of
emotion-related appraisal. Emotion-related physiological
responses, for example, oxytocin release or vagus nerve
activation, which are both associated with more prosocial
emotions, are certain to prove highly sensitive to features of
the social context. Emotions will prove to be integral to the
social order, rather than disruptive of it.
EMOTION AND HAPPINESS
Cultural theories of happiness involve different claims
about the place of emotion in social life (McMahin, 2006;
Oatley, 2004). In many traditions, happiness is believed to
be orthogonal to emotional experience: In classical Greek
thought, happiness derives from virtuous action; for medi-
eval Christian scholars, happiness was to be found in the

afterlife, in communion with God when the soul is liberated
from the earthly passions of living. More skeptical stances
in other ways of knowing presuppose that the emotions are
impediments to happiness, a position found in the writings
of the stoics, the Puritans, and some strains of Buddhism.
A third view, perhaps more in keeping with the social-
psychological study of emotion, is that individual and col-
lective happiness require the experience and expression
of emotions, from sympathy to love to anger. This view
has its advocates in writers such as Hume, Rousseau, and
Darwin.
What is robustly clear in the empirical literature is that
the balance of negative to positive emotions is a power-
ful determinant of happiness, or subjective well-being
(Bentham, 1996; Lucas & Diener, 2008; Lyubomirsky et al.,
2005). This is not a surprising relationship given the degree
of semantic overlap between measures of well-being
(“I feel satisfied with my life”) and emotion (“I feel happy,
content, proud,” etc). Still, the relationship is robust: Self-
reports of increased positive emotion and reduced negative
emotion strongly predict overall well-being, in particular
for Western Europeans (Lucas & Diener, 2008). Studies
of really happy people find, on average, that they experi-
ence about three positive emotions for every negative one
(Fredrickson, 2001). Studies of really happy marriages
find that five positive emotions transpire for every nega-
tive one (Gottman, 1993).
A synthesis of 250 studies of state and trait positive
affect found that increased positive emotion promotes
greater marital satisfaction, better outcomes at work, and
improved physical health (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005). For
example, the degree of positive emotion expressed in the
face as captured in a college yearbook photo (measured in
the activity of the orbicularis oculi and zygomatic major
muscles) predicted less daily anxiety and distress, greater
warmth felt toward others, increased sense of accomplish-
ing goals, warmer responses evoked in strangers 20 years
later, and increased marital satisfaction and overall well-
being 30 years later (Harker & Keltner, 2001).
Positive emotion makes for greater success at work. For
example, in one study, highly cheerful undergraduates com-
pared with less cheerful peers made on average $25,000
more per year on entering into the workforce (Diener,
Nickerson, Lucas, & Sandvik, 2002). A preponderance of
positive emotion promotes more robust physical health and
longevity. One well-known study found that nuns who in
personal narratives at age 20 reported greater happiness
were 2.5 times less likely to die between the ages of 80 and
90 than were nuns who reported in their narratives being
less happy (Danner, Snowdon, & Friesen, 2001). Being
happy at age 70 was found to add 20 months, on average, to
an individual’s life expectancy (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005).
Emotion and Happiness 341
These kinds of results beg for data that explain how pat-
terns of emotion contribute to happiness and health. One
central hypothesis is that positive emotions buffer against the
toxic effects of chronic anxiety and stress (e.g., Fredrickson &
Levenson, 1998; Taylor et al., 2000). The effects of chronic
stress are well known and include damaging different organs
and branches of the nervous system, as well as undermining
personal well-being. The buffering hypothesis suggests that
positive emotions enable people to respond with resilience to
the stresses and trauma that can lead to disease and despair.
For example, in longitudinal research, individuals who
reported higher levels of positive emotion responded with
reduced traumatic symptoms, anxiety, and health problems
to the September 11 terrorist attacks (Fredrickson, Tugade,
Waugh, & Larkin, 2003). In research on bereavement, mea-
sures of laughter and smiling gathered in a semistructured
interview about the deceased spouse 6 months after loss
predicted reduced grief as assessed in independent inter-
views conducted at 6, 14, and 25 months after loss, whereas
increased expressions of anger, disgust, and fear in the face
predicted increased grief at these assessments (Bonanno &
Keltner, 1997).
Positive emotions are vital to adjustment to trauma
for numerous reasons. Positive emotions build strong
relationships, so essential to adaptive responses to stress
(Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Fredrickson, 1998, 2001).
Positive emotions enable more creative, resilient, insight-
ful patterns of thought (Fredrickson, 2001). Positive emo-
tions enhance immune function (Kemeny & Shestyuk,
2008) and reduce stress-related cardiovascular arousal
(Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998).
A second line of inquiry has begun to explore how the
cultivation of more prosocial emotions gives rise to boosts
in well-being. These sorts of interventions are all the more
relevant given claims that upward of 40% of individual
variation in happiness is due to freely chosen practices,
actions, and thought patterns (Lyubomirsky, 2007). The rel-
evant evidence fits with age-old wisdom: The cultivation
of different positive emotions is a pathway to happiness.
Reflecting on reasons for being grateful leads to increased
happiness and fewer problematic health symptoms mea-
sured several weeks later (Emmons, McCullough, & Tsang,
2003). Forgiving someone increases well-being and pro-
motes reduced stress-related physiology (Lawler et al.,
2003). Practicing mindfulness meditation, with a focus on
being mindful of breathing and extending loving kindness
to others, boosts happiness several weeks later, as well as
the relative left hemispheric lateralization in the brain, a
pattern of activation associated with increased well-being
(Fredrickson, Cohn, Coffey, Pek, & Finkel, 2008; Davidson,
Kabat-Zinn, et al., 2003). The positive emotions can be cul-
tivated and are a pathway to more general well-being.
342 Emotion
SUMMARY
Answers to age-old questions about human nature involve
assumptions about the emotions. As the empirical science of
emotion has matured, long-standing notions that emotions
are disruptive, irrational forces that undermine the social
order have given way to a much different view. Emotions
involve highly sophisticated systems—display, physiology,
language, representation, and experience—that enable peo-
ple to adapt to changing social circumstances and fold into
different relationships. More specific empirical literatures
reveal emotions to be both universal (as evolutionists hold)
and culturally variable (as constructivists contend) and to
be central elements of humans’ most important judgments
and decisions. In addition, emotions are shaped by, and
shape, social interaction, and the balance of emotions gives
rise to the sense of the life well lived.
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 Chapter 10

Attitudes
MAHZARIN R. BANAJI AND LARISA HEIPHETZ

From the simplest and most ordinary acts to the highly
complex and rare ones our species can perform—eating a
fruit or spitting out a chili pepper, gazing intently into an
infant’s face or scrupulously avoiding a neighbor, saving
a life or taking one at a moment’s notice—we are crea-
tures of preferences. Bundles of preferences characterize
every living organism; without them, plants would not turn
toward the Sun and cockroaches would not run away from
it. In us, preferences exist not only in these built-in forms
shared with other living beings but in distinctly human
ways, such as the consciously molded attitudes we convey
through artistic expression, the moral codes by which we
judge our worth and our failings, or the words we craft to
describe imagined utopias.
The group that gave this concept scientific birth in the
early 20th century chose attitude as the name to refer to
such preferences. So intently did the pioneers focus on a
study of attitudes that the field of social psychology came
to be synonymous with the study of this single concept
(Bogardus, 1931; Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918). It is, in
this sense, the oldest of the children displayed in the family
photographs that constitute these handbooks, the oldest
child that is assured front and center seat in every previ-
ous photograph taken (see Gilbert, Fiske, & Lindzey,
1998; Lindzey, 1954; Lindzey & Aronson, 1969, 1985;
Murchison, 1935).
Why does the study of attitudes have this status? What
made the first social psychologists decide, even as they
were still marking the boundaries of their new country,
that evaluations along the good-bad continuum should
be the central concept? To these pioneers, understanding
the predisposition to treat entities with favor or disfavor
seemed even more basic to understanding social relations
than the faculties of thought and knowledge. Writing in
the first handbook, Gordon Allport (1935) provided some
insight when he says that the popularity of the attitude
concept “is not difficult to explain. It has come into favor,
first of all, because it is not the property of any one
psychological school of thought . . . furthermore, it is a
concept which escapes the ancient controversy concerning
the relative influence of heredity and environment . . . The
term is likewise elastic enough to apply either to the dispo-
sitions of single individuals or to broad patterns of culture”
(p. 798). Indeed, as Ross, Lepper, and Ward (this volume)
point out, the study of attitudes has continued to be a cor-
nerstone of social psychology.
A hundred years after the study of attitudes came to be a
legitimate science, Mitchell (2009) has offered an intrigu-
ing pair of observations: First, a small set of concepts
involving preferences and attitudes, as well as an under-
standing of the minds of others and ourselves (see Epley &
Waytz, this volume), have been the core concerns of social
psychology. Second, although this cluster of self, mind
perception, and attitude has seemed to be a somewhat arbi-
trary grab bag, it may not be so at least in one sense; it
now appears that these processes share a common neural
substrate in the medial prefrontal cortex.
So vast is the topic of attitudes—covering as it does all
forms of preferences and evaluations, measured in a diver-
sity of ways, toward all manner of things, events, ideas and

Our thanks to Claire McGuire, who shared with us an unabridged, unpublished version of the 1985 handbook chapter on attitudes by
William McGuire; it inspired us even as we became aware of our own more modest treatment. We are especially grateful to experts
and friends for pointing out relevant works and/or providing comments and corrections with lightning speed: Sanden Averett, Wil
Cunningham, Susan Fiske, Daniel Gilbert, Richard Hackman, Andrea Heberlein, John Jost, Jason McCoy, Brian Nosek, Bill Swann, and
Talee Ziv.
We were supported by the National Science Foundation (grant #BCS-0642448) and a National Science Graduate Fellowship while we
worked on this chapter.

353

CH10.indd 348 10/5/09 7:19:21 PM


people—that even before the research had acquired today’s
sprawl, some questioned the value of a term that seemed
to be so undiscriminating in scope (McDougall, 1933).
It is hardly surprising, then, that different periods of the
last century have been partial to particular aspects of
the concept of attitude, attending more to the questions
of structure, function, or mechanisms of change. Likewise,
different questions have varied in dominance, depending
on the availability of new technologies and innovations
such as census tracking, surveys, telephones, the computer,
and the Internet, not to mention the ability to measure elec-
trical activity and blood oxygenation levels.
Moreover, at different periods in American history, ideol-
ogy and propaganda, consumer behavior, and intergroup rela-
tions have differentially grabbed interest and dictated where
the most precious attitudes may be excavated. (For previous
chapters on the topic of attitudes in earlier handbooks in this
series, see Allport, 1935; Eagly & Chaiken, 1998; Green,
1954; McGuire, 1968, 1985; Petty & Wegener, 1998; for
major volumes devoted to the concept of attitudes published
since the late 1980s, see also Albarracin, Johnson, & Zanna,
2005; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Gawronski, 2007; Maio &
Olson, 2000; Petty, Fazio, & Brinol, 2008; Petty & Krosnick,
1995; Pratkanis, Breckler, & Greenwald, 1989). Because the
research covered here must necessarily be limited to works
appearing since the publication of the last handbook in 1998,
this chapter mentions some of the foundational research
topics that must be largely set aside. There is no danger in
doing so, however, given the remarkable treatment these sub-
jects have received in previous handbooks and other current
volumes.
The experimental analysis of attitudes, as well as its
classical and modern history, could not have had a more
painstaking reviewer than William J. McGuire, who
wrote both the 1969 and 1985 chapters on the subject and
even attempted to predict what the two decades beyond
would hold. The 1998 handbook was the first to include
two chapters on attitudes: one focusing on the basics of
structure and function (Eagly & Chaiken, 1998) and the
other focusing on persuasion and attitude change (Petty &
Wegener, 1998). They likewise provide excellent closure
on the first century’s contributions.
LANDMARKS
The earliest decades of attitude research, the 1920s and
1930s, were marked by a strong commitment to mea-
surement (Bogardus, 1925; Guttman, 1941; Likert, 1932;
Thurstone, 1928a; see Himmelfarb, 1993). From these
early contributors psychologists have the staples of formal
scaling techniques. If this era of attitude research made
CH10.indd 349
Landmarks 354
no other contributions, modern researchers should still
be grateful. These measurement men achieved the previ-
ously unthinkable; for the first time ever, they took the
ephemeral mental quality of favoring and disfavoring and
rendered it the subject of scientific study. Writing under
the title “Attitudes Can Be Measured,” Thurstone (1928a)
intended to erase all doubt about whether feelings toward
things could be measured by comparing them with physi-
cal objects such as tables: “We say without hesitation that
we measure a man when we take some anthropometric
measures of him . . . his height or weight or what not. Just
in the same sense we shall say here that we are measuring
attitudes” (p. 530).
Eighty years later, psychologists must show whether
they have delivered on this remarkable first attempt to mea-
sure the immeasurable—people’s likes and dislikes. This
chapter engages the question of measurement more so than
some others because the decades since the 1980s have wit-
nessed a surge of measures that involve response latencies
and other ways of inferring preferences (Bargh, Chaiken,
Govender, & Pratto, 1992; Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, &
Kardes, 1986; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). In
addition, researchers have developed and enhanced mea-
sures of physiology (Blascovich & Mendes, this volume)
and brain activity (Lieberman, this volume). Since the pub-
lication of the last handbook, the very first studies of atti-
tudes using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
have appeared (Cunningham, Johnson, Gatenby, Gore, &
Banaji, 2003; Hart et al., 2000; Phelps et al., 2000). In the
time since these first tentative fMRI experiments, there is
already a trajectory pointing out the subcortical and corti-
cal systems that support attitude formation, which may be
involved in the subjective experience of preference, and
the control exerted by conscious processes to modulate
less conscious ones.
After the 1930s, measurement ceased to be as intense a
focus, although there were consistent contributions moti-
vated by various factors, including concerns about threats
to validity, the specificity of measures (Ajzen & Fishbein,
1980), recognition of the interdependence of theory and
method (Ostrom, 1989), and statistical advances (Bentler,
1980). This new century returns to the fore a set of epis-
temological questions concerning how scientists may
know the nature of preferences. Such a focus is possible
because the field as a whole has turned toward the study
of the cognitive unconscious (see Gilbert, 1991; Hassin,
Uleman, & Bargh, 2005; Uleman & Bargh, 1989). This
chapter describes dozens of experiments concerning
unconscious attitudes as a substantial contribution of the
attitude literature.
The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the grand era of atti-
tude research with one stream of work beginning at Yale
10/5/09 7:19:22 PM
 355 Attitudes
University and expanding to Ohio State University. Early
research using behaviorist learning theory as a model for
understanding attitude change emerged out of the World
War II program of Hovland, Lumsdaine, and Sheffield
(1949), and prospered in the work of Hovland’s student
William McGuire (1960, 1961). In the decades that fol-
lowed, these ideas gave birth to the notion of cognitive
responses as determinants of attitude change, and a series
of edited volumes on attitudinal foundations, structure,
function, strength, and implicit measures have appeared,
continuing to this day (Greenwald, Brock, & Ostrom, 1968;
Petty & Krosnick, 1995; Petty et al., 2008; Petty, Ostrom, &
Brock, 1981; Pratkanis et al., 1989). Two significant dual-
process models of attitude change were offered by Petty
and Cacioppo (1984) and Chaiken and Eagly (1983; see
also Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). Their theories may be
viewed as precursors to the spurt of later research on dual-
process accounts of attitudes, that is, processes that divulge
their conscious and unconscious components (Albarracin &
Vargas, this volume; Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Devine,
1989; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2007; Lieberman,
Gaunt, Gilbert, & Trope, 2002; Payne, Burkley, & Stokes,
2008; Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000).
A second stream of attitude research that developed in
the 1950s and 1960s came from the ideas of Fritz Heider,
Charles Osgood, and Leon Festinger, each of whom was
uniquely inspired by the idea of the consistency between
mental components and the complex processes that are set
in motion to achieve mental alignment (see Abelson et al.,
1968). Even today, the sophistication of the theorizing and
the quintessential style of research on cognitive dissonance
capture the imagination of students, so counterintuitive the
ideas and so extravagant the experiments. These scholars
emphasized attitude change and the bidirectional relationship
between attitudes and behavior. Perhaps it was the public’s
engagement in social change during the 1960s that kept this
interest in questions of attitude change alive, and psycholo-
gists studied transformations of all kinds of preferences—
those toward widgets, robots, and Fidel Castro being not the
strangest of them all. The idea of cognitive-affective consis-
tency and its consequences displayed in some of the most
prominent psychological research of that time continue to
have direct bearing on modern work on cognitive dissonance
(see Cooper, 2007; Harmon-Jones, 1999).
The study of attitude change and persuasion is not lim-
ited to the most well-known laboratories. This topic has
dominated research since the mid-20th century, and this
is visible in the much larger proportion of pages devoted to
this subject in most previous reviews of the concept in this
handbook’s predecessors. For readers who are interested in
the question of persuasion, several noteworthy treatments are
available in the 2005 Handbook of Attitudes by Albarracin,
CH10.indd 350
Johnson, and Zanna (specifically see chapters by Brinol &
Petty, 2005; Johnson, Maio, & Smith-McLallen, 2005;
Prislin & Wood, 2005; Wegener & Carlston, 2005; Wyer
and Albarracin, 2005).
If attitudes are predispositions to act favorably or unfa-
vorably, then the attitudes that one has should predict one’s
behaviors. From the 1930s on, however, studies showed the
weak prediction of behavior from attitude (e.g., LaPiere,
1934). This conception escalated in the writings of Wicker
(1969), who provided an analysis of 42 studies that pro-
duced a low overall attitude-behavior correlation. Over the
past several decades, scholars have devoted a great deal
of attention to figuring out when attitudes and behaviors
are related and when they are not. Research shows that
the attitude-behavior relationship depends on the person, the
situation, the attitude (e.g., how much knowledge people
have about the attitude object), and the measurement
match between attitudes and behavior (e.g., are researchers
measuring specific attitudes and specific behaviors or spe-
cific attitudes but general behaviors; see Ajzen & Fishbein,
1975, 1977; Fabrigar, Petty, Smith, & Crites, 2006; Fazio &
Zanna, 1981; Kelman, 1974; Lord, Lepper, & Mackie,
2008; Smith, Terry, & Hogg, 2006).
The engagement with questions of persuasion and atti-
tude change has slowed down relative to the intensity of
such work in the decades of the 1960s to 1990s, whereas
other areas of interest have grown. Fortunately, a pair of
chapters on the topic of attitudes is offered in this hand-
book, and other experts fully cover persuasion and attitude
change (see Albarracin & Vargas, this volume).
When considering the structure of attitudes, a domi-
nant way of thinking of evaluations as consisting of three
components—affect, cognition, and behavior—has been a
guiding force for much of the century; only in recent years
has this perspective faded as the preferred way of thinking.
Because of the influence of this tradition, studying what
Eagly and Chaiken (1993) refer to as intra-attitudinal
structure has involved a close look at the interrelation-
ships among these three variables, with a focus on beliefs
as the building blocks of attitudes. A second way to study
attitude structure has involved looking at interattitudinal
structure—that is, the relationship between and among
multiple attitudes—and here focus has been directed to the
consistency among various evaluations. Among the impor-
tant analyses of intra-attitude structure, a primary one has
been on the question of how attitudes are represented, and
specifically their possibly bipolar structure (Judd & Kulik,
1980; Sherif, Sherif, & Nebergall, 1965; for an argument
against the view of attitudes as bipolar, see Kerlinger,
1984). The remainder of the research on intra-attitudinal
structure has been consumed with the all-important question
of the role of beliefs, conceived of as associations between
10/5/09 7:19:22 PM

an attitude and its various attributes, and their ability
to predict attitudes. A prominent contribution here is
Fishbein’s expected-value model (1963), which conceptu-
alizes attitudes as a function of beliefs, particularly their
subjective probabilities. In this model, attitudes consist
of evaluations of particular beliefs. The idea that attitudes
are a function ofthe totality of the evaluative beliefs about
the attitude object may seem so obvious as to be banal,
but this assertion allowed empirical prediction of attitudes
from knowledge of beliefs. A theory of mathematical preci-
sion, one might even say an aesthetic theory, is Anderson’s
account of information integration (1971, 1981); this model
of some generality was also applied to the analysis of atti-
tudes. Multiplying expectancies with values was deemed
insufficient to explain the relationship between beliefs and
attitudes, and the theory focused instead on the value of the
incoming information and its integration into the current
attitude.
A final landmark from the first century concerns the
basic question of pragmatics: Why do people have atti-
tudes? As the first to explicitly theorize about attitude func-
tions, M. B. Smith (1947) laid out several objectives that
evaluations can accomplish (see Kruglanski & Stroebe,
2005). For instance, attitudes can serve the function of
appraisal, informing individuals as to whether approach or
avoid is the correct response. However, different attitudes
may serve this function to different degrees; this role is ful-
filled more by readily accessible attitudes, and this concept
of attitude accessibility has dominated current thinking
(Fazio, 2000).
Katz (1960) proposed four functions of attitudes that
have intuitive appeal even today. They include a utilitarian
function, a knowledge function, an ego-defensive function,
and a value-expressive function. Utilitarian attitudes are
those that help individuals obtain rewards and avoid pun-
ishments. For example, holding a positive attitude toward
capital punishment might create a feeling of belonging
within a certain ideological group while avoiding poten-
tial rejection from these socially significant others. Indeed,
Kelman (1958) pointed out that attitudes can foster identi-
fication with social groups, and Shavitt and Nelson (1999;
see Shavitt, 1989) added that attitudes toward specific
issues assist in conveying critical information about our-
selves to others. Attitudes that meet the second, or knowl-
edge, function allow an understanding of the situations in
which one finds oneself. Those that meet the third, ego-
defensive, function (or externalization; Smith, Bruner, &
White, 1956), protect the individual from psychic threats.
Katz (1960) associated this purpose primarily with preju-
dice, arguing from psychodynamic principles that indi-
viduals may project feelings of inferiority onto stigmatized
outgroups (see Fein & Spencer, 1997). An attitude toward
CH10.indd 351
Definitions of Attitude 356
the self, better known in the field as self-esteem, is another
example of an ego-enhancing preference that keeps the
self “lifted” and able to function in a world that constantly
demands comparisons with others.
Finally, attitudes that help individuals express their core
values or foundational aspects of themselves are assumed to
serve the fourth, or value-expressive, function. These atti-
tudes may be inherently rewarding insofar as expressing
one’s core values is gratifying. Just such a process may be at
work in the process of self-affirmation, which among other
consequences demonstrates the power of value-expression
to diminish feelings of self-threat (e.g., eliminates dissonance
effects; Steele & Liu, 1983). Value-expressive attitudes are
privileged in other ways as well; research has shown that
such attitudes are particularly resistant to change (Maio &
Olson, 1995) and promote commitment to relevant behav-
iors (e.g., volunteerism; Lydon & Zanna, 1990; Murray,
Haddock, & Zanna, 1996). The final section of this chapter
takes on the question of ideology; underlying that discus-
sion is the assumption that “thick” attitudes such as ideol-
ogy, composed as they are of several strands of individual
attitudes, especially may serve a value-expressive function.
DEFINITIONS OF ATTITUDE
Definitions are hair-raising, in the sense of creating excite-
ment and terror. Allport (1935) offered 16 definitions of
attitude that others before him had generated, only to slip
in a 17th of his own that has been so well-cited that any stu-
dent of attitudes is able to recite it even when half asleep:
“A mental and neural state of readiness, organized through
experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon
the individual’s response to all objects and situations with
which it is related” (p. 810).
McGuire (1968) regarded definitions to be “stifling and
yet, since we have to use words when we talk, it probably
helps to sketch out occasionally what we mean by our terms”
(p. 142). Instead of providing a new one, he brilliantly side-
stepped the issue by using Allport’s definition and dissect-
ing each of its terms and phrases not only to focus on the
various meanings of “mental and neural” and “organized”
but also to riff on the philosophical orientations, from posi-
tivist to interactionist, that a phrase such as “readiness to
respond” evokes. In the 1985 handbook chapter, McGuire
is no more forthcoming regarding a definition, offering only
that empirical investigations have used as a working defini-
tion of attitude “responses that locate ‘objects of thought’
on ‘dimensions of judgment’” (p. 239).
Eagly and Chaiken (1993, 1998) provided a simple and
intuitive definition that wins on ease and broad endorse-
ment. According to them, an attitude is “a psychological
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 357 Attitudes
tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity
with some degree of favor or disfavor” (1993, p. 1). Others
have agreed that the concept of evaluation is central to the
definition of attitude, noting that “[a]ttitudes have been
defined in a variety of ways, but at the core is the notion
of evaluation” (Petty, Wegener, & Fabrigar, 1997, p. 611).
Likewise, Crano and Prislin (2006) brought together diverse
characterizations of attitudes through their definition:
“Attitudes are the evaluative judgments that integrate and
summarize . . . cognitive/affective reactions” (p. 347).
Among the changes that the concept of attitude has under-
gone over the century, none is as clear as the stripping away
of all ancillary items to leave the core idea of “favor and
disfavor” intact.
The major objection to such a definition comes from
those who endorse the position that attitudes have been
mischaracterized as entities of some permanence. The
boldest criticism of the standard view of attitudes is
found in the position of Schwarz and Bohner (2001), who
take their lead from theories of situated cognition (e.g.,
Barsalou, 2005; Smith & Semin, 2004). Their view can be
summarized as follows: Attitude theorists have tradition-
ally defined their construct as if it represents fixed “things”
that sit in memory waiting to be pulled out, used, and put
back in place. Instead, Schwarz and Bohner claim that atti-
tudes are more parsimoniously conceived of as evaluations
that are “formed when needed, rather than enduring personal
dispositions” (Schwarz, 2007, p. 639; see also Wilson &
Hodges, 1992). The intuitive appeal of the standard defini-
tion that attitudes represent “a tendency,” that is, a thing of
stability, he argues, comes from the appeal of all disposi-
tional accounts such as the fundamental attribution error
(Ross, 1977). Instead, in line with other commentaries
that are consistent in their rendition of the attitude concept
(e.g., Lord & Lepper, 1999; Smith & DeCoster, 2000;
Zaller & Feldman, 1992), Schwarz favors the idea of atti-
tude construal—the view that attitudes do not necessarily
exist in some preformed state but can be built, created,
generated, on the spot, in fine-tuned response to contextual
demands. Attitudes, conceived of in this way, are viewed as
potentially adaptive reactions to environmental demands.
Such a view is in synch with mounting empirical evidence
pointing toward attitude variability across time and situa-
tions, often producing large differences with minimal vari-
ation in the instantiation of the attitude object.
An argument of this nature is not entirely new to psy-
chology. A similar challenge was put forth in the influen-
tial view Mischel (1968) offered concerning the concept of
personality. Mischel argued that, to a large extent, the idea
of personality, the very essence of a person, the dimensions
that are assumed to lie in the disposition of the person
and that seemingly provide stability, may be a mirage
CH10.indd 352
created by other factors inherent in the viewer ’s perceptual
and reasoning systems. Given the data using implicit mea-
sures of attitudes that have accumulated since the 1980s,
this is an attractive way of thinking about preferences.
Attitudes are extraordinarily malleable: Implicit pref-
erence for Whites decreases in the presence of a Black
experimenter (Lowery, Hardin, & Sinclair, 2001) and a
likable experimenter who is perceived as holding egalitar-
ian views (Sinclair, Lowery, Hardin, & Colangelo, 2005).
Implicit racial preferences also change depending on the
stimulus materials: Participants who viewed a photograph
of African Americans taken in front of a church showed
less bias than those who saw a photograph taken on an
urban street corner (Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 2001), and
participants who saw pictures of popular Blacks before
taking an Implicit Association Test (IAT) showed less
racial bias than those who did not view the positive pic-
tures (Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001). Emphasizing sex
rather than race can also decrease bias (Mitchell, Nosek, &
Banaji, 2003). Malleability is not limited to racial attitudes;
context also influences evaluations of everything from ciga-
rettes to Bill Clinton, Mike Tyson, chocolate, and the beach
(see Ferguson & Bargh, 2004; Ferguson, Bargh, & Nayak,
2005; Pratto & Shih, 2000; Seibt, Hafner, & Deutsch, 2007;
Sherman, Rose, Koch, Presson, & Chassin, 2003). These
data support a constructionist-contextualist view that is
counterintuitive; it seems easier to imagine preferences as
enduring because that is the intuitive, self-reflective sense
most people have of their own preferences.
In response to such evidence regarding the malleability
of attitudes, Fazio (2007) has offered a persuasive coun-
terpoint to the radical notion of attitudes-as-constructions.
Although fully open to the idea of the flexibility of atti-
tudes, he points out that an extreme “attitudes as on-the-
spot constructions” view must deal with the opposing
evidence that some attitudes seem to consistently pop out
in the same form across time and situations. Given that
human beings do learn, and learning means remembering
in some form, why should attitudes not reveal some stabil-
ity? They are, after all, products of repeated experiences
that reinforce particular object-attribute pairings and pro-
vide similar responses to the same stimulus over repeti-
tions. Thus, a strong constructionist view must answer the
question of why savings in memory would explain other
aspects of mental function (e.g., semantic knowledge) but
not involve simple learning and retrieval of preferences.
Greenwald and Banaji (1995) attempted to reflect the
field’s engagement with relatively less conscious and less
controlled forms of attitudes by offering a definition of
implicit attitudes as “introspectively unidentified (or inac-
curately identified) traces of past experience that mediate
attributions of qualities to members of a social category”
10/5/09 7:19:27 PM

(p. 15). Unlike the Allport definition, no student, however
awake, has been known to recite this definition, but with
it, the assumption inherent in the way attitudes were tradi-
tionally measured—that they must be consciously accessed
contents of the mind—was explicitly set aside.
ATTITUDES ARE BASIC
The introductory material that sets the background to this
chapter closes with a selection of empirical discoveries,
each of which points to the basic nature of attitudes.
Together, the nuggets that follow show that the evaluative
dimension of information has robust orienting power, and
that the human predisposition to evaluate is fundamental
to all aspects of social behavior. Readers may use this as a
starter list and add their own favorite demonstrations that
reveal the fundamental nature of attitudes and why they
remain social psychology’s “most central and indispens-
able construct” (Allport, 1935).
In the mid-twentieth century, Osgood, Suci, and
Tannenbaum (1957) analyzed the structure of ordinary
words’ meanings along three dimensions: evaluation (good-
bad), potency (strong-weak), and activity (active-passive).
They found that the first dimension, captured through
poles as warm-cold, good-bad, and favorable-unfavorable,
accounted for most of the variance in meaning more than
twice that of the other two dimensions.
Zajonc’s (1980) influential view that “preferences need
no inferences” alerted scientists to the possibility that even
when an evaluative response is not requested, the good-bad
dimension of information “pops out” and cannot be set aside;
it is automatically detected, engages, and registers in some
way. Bargh, Chaiken, Raymond, and Hymes (1996) showed
that such is the case by asking for mere pronunciation of
words and demonstrating an evaluative priming effect even
so (see Giner-Sorolla, Garcia, & Bargh, 1999, for a simi-
lar effect with pictures). In the original article (Fazio et al.,
1986), evidence for evaluative priming led to a reconcep-
tualization of attitudes as simple associations between an
object and its evaluation. This was based on their previous
research (Fazio, Chen, McDonel & Sherman, 1982; Fazio,
Powell, & Herr, 1983).
Because a “need to evaluate” is regarded to be universal,
Jarvis and Petty (1996) developed a measure of it, showing
that the tendency to evaluate is a highly consistent and reli-
able single factor. Individual differences in the need to eval-
uate (measured by face valid items such as “It bothers me to
remain neutral”) are meaningful predictors of behavior.
In early research on brain activity, Cacioppo, Crites,
Berntson, and Coles (1993; Cacioppo, Crites, & Gardner,
1996) provided the first evidence using the late positive
CH10.indd 353
Attitudes Are Basic 358
potential (LPP) of the event-related brain potentials (ERP)
showing that evaluative responses (e.g., answering the ques-
tion, Is this good or bad?) are qualitatively distinguishable
from nonevaluative responses (e.g., answering the ques-
tion, Is this a vegetable or not?). The former showed sig-
nificantly larger spread over the right scalp region, whereas
the latter showed equal spread over right and left scalp
regions.
In line with classic Eastern and Western notions of the
three spheres of thought, feeling, and action, the earli-
est framework for grappling with the concept of attitude
involved a similar tripartite configuration. Attitudes were
assumed to consist of affective, cognitive (belief), and
conative (behavioral) components, a view that “came early
and stayed late” (McGuire, 1968; cf. Brown, 1965; Krech &
Crutchfield, 1948; Sherif & Cantril, 1945). In recent years,
this conceptualization has been given up in favor of one
that privileges the feeling component, and such a view
has been helped by discoveries that demonstrate the pri-
macy of this factor. For example, the affective component
of attitudes is more readily accessible than other compo-
nents (Verplanken, Hofstee, & Janssen, 1998), and when
beliefs and feelings toward presidential candidates are in
conflict, feelings are stronger predictors of voting (Lavine,
Thomsen, Zanna, & Borgida, 1998).
To investigate the automatic nature of preferences,
Glaser (1999) and Gregg (2000) attempted to derive a
series of nonsense syllables (e.g., RAS, FEQ, DAT) that
should carry no particular evaluation and serve as the per-
fect material that could, via association, be imbued with
positive and negative meaning. To their surprise, they
discovered that it was nearly impossible to find nonsense
words that did not evoke some relative positive or negative
evaluation.
Increasingly, the idea that social judgments across a
variety of domains can be meaningfully separated into
goodness/warmth and agency/competence dimensions has
proved to be useful (see Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002).
Its appeal draws from supporting empirical evidence and
the intuition that even in the late Pleistocene, social inter-
action must surely have required two basic assessments:
how good is the other (i.e., is help or harm likely?) and how
competent is the other (i.e., how effective will action based
on intention be?). Items that belong to the warmth category
(sincere, generous) are more readily accessible, spontane-
ously generated, and regarded as more important in assess-
ing others than items that belong to the competence category
(intelligence, foresight; Wojciszke, Bazinska, & Jaworski,
1998). This is different from the assumption made by some
intergroup theorists, who argue that competence, but not
warmth, is associated with high status (e.g., Fiske et al.;
Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004).
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 359 Attitudes
OVERVIEW OF REMAINING SECTIONS
The remainder of the chapter presents an overview of the
attitude literature, focusing on the contributions that were
offered between 1995 and 2010. These analyses have been
conducted almost entirely with human subjects, using lan-
guage and pictures as the primary vehicle to probe and
elicit evaluations, and staying close to questions of mea-
surement, structure, and change. Many of the theoretical
questions originate in the need to make sense of the over-
lapping and divergent patterns of data across implicit and
explicit measures of attitude, and this chapter describes
both types of measures in depth.
The next section on measurement carries substan-
tial detail because a cluster of new conceptual questions
about the nature of attitudes has emerged through atten-
tion to methods. To signal its importance, a new entry in
this chapter concerns the origins of attitudes, highlighting
some of the research on the development of preferences
in infants and young children. The remaining pages ana-
lyze self-attitudes (e.g., self-esteem), attitude dissociations
and malleability, and ideological systems. Clear overlap
exists between some of these topics and other chapters in
this handbook, and readers are referred to the appropri-
ate experts in those areas. Between 1995 and 2010 alone,
more than 13,000 articles on the topic of attitudes have
appeared. The remainder of the chapter presents a small
sample of them to demonstrate the progress that has been
made on this fundamental orientation to evaluate.
MEASURING ATTITUDES: CONCEPTUAL
ISSUES AND SPECIFIC TECHNIQUES
Everybody loves a good theory. Theories represent the core
of creating new knowledge because theories provide expla-
nations. They help people understand why they might have
attitudes at all, why preferences express themselves as they
do, what evaluations are related to, and how attitudes dictate
actions. But theories that make people rub their bellies with
satisfaction are not easy to come by, and in the last 50 years,
only a handful of attitude theories or models have guided
substantial programs of research and survived experimen-
tal wear and tear: Festinger ’s (1957) theory of cognitive
dissonance, Ajzen and Fishbein’s (1980) theory of rea-
soned action, and Fazio’s (1990) MODE model to explain
attitude-behavior consistency; Petty and Cacioppo’s (1981;
1986) Elaboration Likelihood Model; and Chaiken’s (1980;
Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989) Heuristic-Systematic
Model of attitude change.
Even within this top-notch collection, nobody will claim
to have grand (or even grandish) unifying theories of attitudes.
CH10.indd 354
Rather, these accounts provide excellent explanations for
miniature pieces on the attitude landscape. The contribu-
tions of laborers in attitude villages are primarily in the
form of new discoveries. To a large extent, their tractabil-
ity and quality depend on the methods, increasingly the
technologies, scientists are able to invent or adopt to study
attitudes. Some have argued that the lack of a primary
focus on theory building is hardly an embarrassment. Quite
the contrary, in the other natural and life sciences, theo-
retical contributions are rarely significant enough or fre-
quent enough to deserve the highest recognitions. Instead,
advances that are regarded as the most important typically
involve the development of a method or technology and
the new discoveries that these inventions permit.
Greenwald (2004) offered such a view, noting the addi-
tional difficulty that theoretical differences are rarely suc-
cessfully resolved, often resembling the argument about
whether the parrot is alive or dead in Monty Python’s
sidesplitting skit. Suggesting that perhaps Lewin’s famous
dictum may be usefully reversed to read that there is “noth-
ing so theoretical as a good method,” Greenwald’s asser-
tions are not meant to claim that theory is unimportant;
rather, the point is to convey that method development and
empirical discoveries more often lead to, rather than fol-
low, theory development. If this is the case, the importance
of each individual contribution need not be judged solely
on the grounds of advance in theory.
The following section is divided into four parts. First,
traditional methods that have relied on posing questions
that require introspectively rich answers using verbal self-
report are examined. Here, the chapter focuses on improve-
ments that have been made to methods that have existed for
several decades. Next, in a departure from previous hand-
book chapters, this one focuses on measures of implicit
attitude. For those whose interests have included questions
of method and technique, the last decade of the 20th cen-
tury has been rich in discovery and invention. Thus, the
section on implicit attitude measures is longer than most
and is divided into three parts: measures based on response
latency, autonomic responses, and neural activity, including
earlier work using ERPs and more recent work focusing
on fMRI as indicators of attitudes.
Advances in Survey-type Measures of Attitudes
Most commonly, psychologists have measured behavior
via verbal self-reports of mental states, the exception being
those who could not, such as those working with babies
and nonhuman animals. The study of attitudes has been no
exception; verbal self-reports are of great interest because
they provide an assessment of the knower ’s subjective
assessment of preferences, opinions, beliefs, or values. For
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 Measuring Attitudes: Conceptual Issues and Specific Techniques 360
much of what the psychologist seeks to understand, there is
little of greater value than what is elicited through simple
questions such as: What do you like? How much do you
like it? Do you like this better than that?
Early measures, including Thurstone’s (1928b) Equal-
Appearing Intervals Method, Likert’s (1932) Method of
Summated Ratings, and Osgood et al.’s (1957) Semantic
Differential, all relied on participants circling, marking,
checking off, and otherwise offering some behavioral indi-
cator of their accessible mental states. These three mea-
sures provide the foundation for most self-report measures
that are used even today. Their advantage is a relatively
low rate of random error variance because of the large
number of items that usually compose each scale or test.
However, because building a true Thurstone or Likert scale
from scratch can be difficult and expensive, psychologists
have rendered some scales simpler and easier to use.
Those who attempt to construct scales that measure traits,
such as “the need for evaluation” scale (Jarvis & Petty,
1996), need to follow the standard components of scale
construction, paying particular attention to reliability and
validity. However, experimental psychologists who study
attitudes tend to be more interested in constructing inde-
pendent variables and presenting particular stimuli. Posing
questions that measure attitudes has been largely a matter
of keeping them simple and clear. If one is interested in the
effects of misattributing one’s affective state to life overall
rather than the beautiful or dreary weather on a particular
day, the question is posed as directly as possible: “How
happy do you feel about your life as a whole?” (Schwarz &
Clore, 1983, p. 519). It is remarkable how much valuable
information can be learned by posing a single, simple ques-
tion if the idea underlying the questioning is important
and clever.
The bulk of the attention to the question of how best
to measure deliberately reportable attitudes has come from
social scientists, including sociologists, political scien-
tists, and psychologists, all of whom are interested in the
designs of surveys. Agreement exists that a paradigm shift
has occurred in survey measurement, with the emphasis
having shifted from the statistical models of sampling errors
(with a focus on the effects of survey errors on estimates) to
a psychological concern with the interpretation of ques-
tions, the reasons for nonresponses, and the effects of con-
text on responses (with a focus on the causes of errors on
surveys; see Tourangeau, 2003). The influence of models of
cognition, including social cognition, is evident in the ques-
tions that have been posed about the self-report data. These
models shifted the focus to understanding the mind of the
respondent and the natural correlates of self-report data,
including age, culture, and context effects of every form
(see Schwarz, 1996; Schwarz & Sudman, 1996; Sudman,
CH10.indd 355
Bradburn, & Schwarz, 1996). The question of data analysis
is paramount in understanding the data obtained by all
measures, and detailed coverage of this topic is provided
by Judd and Kenny (this volume).
In a comprehensive chapter on attitude measures,
Krosnick, Judd, and Wittenbrink (2005) detail the consider-
ations that must go into creating self-report scales (see also
Krosnick & Fabrigar, in press), with issues of reliability
and validity of paramount importance. There are, indeed,
ways to improve the reliability and validity of self-report
scales. Open-ended questions, though requiring a great deal
of care at the coding stage, are typically more reliable and
valid than close-ended questions. Researchers who desire
close-ended questions should choose a proper number of
points. Scales with too few (e.g., 2–3) or too many (e.g.,
more than 11) points from which to choose have less reli-
ability than scales with approximately 4 to 10 points, and
validity, which increases quickly with each additional point
in short measures, begins to flatten for long scales. A mod-
erate number of points make it easier to label each one, a
practice that improves interpretability, and scales of moder-
ate length also decrease error variance because of question
order.
Likewise, creators of a self-report scale must pay
attention to the absolute versus relative manner in which
attitude questions are posed. Here one is reminded of
William McGuire, who when asked, “How was your trip
to London?” would reply, “Compared to what?” Attitude
questions are often posed without sufficient comparison
context, and although both types are appropriate, relative
questions can reduce error variance by giving all respon-
dents a fixed comparison. In some cases, relative scales
predict reported behavior, domain knowledge, and peer
reports of attitude and behavior better than absolute scales
(Olson, Goffin, & Haynes, 2007).
Rather than providing participants with a numeric scale,
some measures may be more suited to including a set of
response options. For example, rather than asking partici-
pants to rate how likely they are to vote for each candidate
in an election, researchers may provide the names of all
the candidates and ask participants to select the one for
whom they will most likely cast their ballot. When many
responses are present, however, participants may be more
likely to select from the first few options presented to
them, either because they are uninterested in the question
or because the various options become difficult to remem-
ber. Though this difficulty can be attenuated through
the use of counterbalancing, doing so introduces error
variance that may not be completely random. It is helpful
to take steps to prevent order effects from turning into a
problem in the first place, such as shortening the length
of the questionnaire to increase participant motivation and
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 361 Attitudes
providing response options that are easy to remember
and understand (Krosnick et al., 2005).
Although most social psychologists rarely conduct
research using random probability samples (because their
interest is in a psychological process rather than where
the country stands on a particular issue), obvious con-
nections exist between those who study the processes of
attitude formation and change, and those whose concern
is measuring respondents’ positions on the big issues of
the day. Studying the content of a particular attitude and its
changing nature, such as why changes in death penalty atti-
tudes are rapid at particular moments in history, often pro-
vides useful information not only about such attitudes per
se but about the process of attitude change itself. However,
concerns involving the administration and interpretation
of data from large samples selected to randomly reflect
the population (e.g., of all Americans) are also a part of the
study of attitudes.
Interviews conducted in person, over the phone, or online
are a part of the data-gathering machine, and researchers
have given the limits and flexibilities of these a great deal
of thought. Recent attempts have focused almost exclu-
sively on the manner in which the respondent understands
the question—its syntax, semantics, and pragmatics—
as well as cognitive biases in encoding and memory (see
Tourangeau, Rips, & Rasinski, 2000). For example, a
particular difficulty with phone surveys involves their
auditory nature and the inability of participants to reread
options. Because of other concerns, such as the lack of
response in random-digit-dialing sampling, researchers
often deem in-person administration to be superior when
resources permit. To obtain large sample sizes, researchers
may also conduct studies via the Internet, where it is possi-
ble to obtain responses from several thousand participants
simultaneously. Internet sampling provides the added ben-
efit of demographic diversity in all regards except socio-
economic; participants from any state and almost any
country may complete an online measure (Gosling, Vazire,
Srivastava, & John, 2004; Kraut et al., 2004; Reis &
Gosling, this volume). Until Internet fatigue in responding
to surveys sets in, as it did with the telephone, this technol-
ogy is a useful way to generate both random and nonrandom
samples.
None of the issues raised here is rocket science; yet
without attention to these empirically derived solutions
and improvements to survey measurement, the ability to
obtain an accurate read of preferences can be poor. Among
the most interesting research on attitudes, with vast impli-
cations for survey research, is work on the cognitive
processes that inform the posing of questions, the effects
of context, and the limits of respondents (see Sirken et al.,
1999). Such work has simultaneously provided a deeper
CH10.indd 356
understanding of the nature of attitudes and suggested
improvements in survey measures of attitudes.
Measures of Automatic Attitudes
Psychologists have sought and used indirect attitude mea-
sures for decades. Unobtrusive measures have always
been of interest in social psychology because of engage-
ment with topics that naturally breed a concern to appear
socially desirable (Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, & Sechrest,
1966). What is distinct about the modern era of interest in
unobtrusive measures is a simpler worry about the lack of
access to the contents of the mind. This concern is based
on discoveries about the mind’s two modes of operation:
the conscious, deliberate, explicit, aware, intended, con-
trolled aspects, as well as the less conscious, mindless,
implicit, unaware, unintended, and automatic aspects. This
chapter tends to use the terms “deliberate” or “automatic”
to refer to attitudes appearing to be under the respondent’s
control to a greater or lesser extent. On the other hand, terms
such as “conscious” or “nonconscious” and “explicit” or
“implicit” refer to attitudes that are more or less within the
respondent’s perimeter of conscious awareness.
Speaking of the mind’s two modes of operation pro-
vides a way of speaking about data that points to disso-
ciations in the attitudes that emerge based on variations in
methods used to measure attitudes; it is not meant to imply,
except where directly stated, that the underlying represen-
tations are independent. Questions of whether the implicit
and explicit versions of attitude toward an attitude object
are two representations or a single one are difficult to test
(see Conrey, Sherman, Gawronski, Hugenberg, & Groom,
2005; Greenwald & Nosek, 2008), although in some cases, as
described later, neural data may give some indication.
In many circumstances, the most appropriate measure
of attitude or preference is obtained by asking participants
for a verbal self-report. Preferences do not have a right or
wrong answer in many situations—one can express a pref-
erence pro or con for anchovies or liver, for bell-bottoms
or dreadlocks, for socialism or libertarianism. In each such
case, because the person’s expressed preference and some-
times the reasons for that preference are of interest, a per-
fectly good avenue is to ask the traditional direct questions
(e.g., Why do you like liver?).
The difficulty with relying solely on self-report mea-
sures stems from two sources. First and most obviously,
not all attitudes are equally socially desirable. One would not
be caught dead confessing a love of liver in a junior high
cafeteria, much less speaking one’s mind about condom
use. In ways that psychologists do not understand fully,
the attitudes people express are ones they are often “try-
ing out” or representing in ever-so-slightly different ways
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 Measuring Attitudes: Conceptual Issues and Specific Techniques 362
because of the situations in which they find themselves.
Such attitudes may or may not predict later expressions or
behaviors.
Because social psychologists have always gravitated
toward studying the contents of consciousness that mat-
ter to people, this question of reaching the core of what a
person “really thinks” has been a perennial worry. In the
course of ordinary experimentation, researchers use sev-
eral procedures to reduce the effects of social desirability:
They create environments in which all attitudes are equally
easily expressed, provide assurances and evidence that
the reports are anonymous, measure the attitude unobtru-
sively, and mask the true purpose of the questioning (see
Campbell, Kruskal, & Wallace, 1966; Crosby, Bromley, &
Saxe, 1980; Devine, 1989; Dovidio & Fazio, 1992; Fazio,
Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995; Gaertner & Bickman,
1971; Jacoby, Toth, Lindsay, & Debner, 1992; Milgram,
Mann, & Harter, 1965; Nuttin, 1985; Schwarz & Clore,
1983; Webb et al., 1966; Word, Zanna, & Cooper, 1974).
Even more interesting is the second threat to the assump-
tion of introspective ability. The issue was brought home
most strikingly by Nisbett and Wilson (1977), who showed
that human beings may not know and, therefore, may be
unable to report the reasons for their behaviors. Through
argument and evidence, Nisbett and Wilson offered a major
blow to standard assumptions about introspective access.
People do not know, these psychologists showed, why they
are better able to fall asleep some nights, why they fear
particular objects, why they are willing to accept greater
amounts of physical pain in the form of electric shocks,
or why they prefer one item or sound to another. Furthermore,
once people change their mind about issues such as busing,
they misremember their previous attitude as matching their
current one. Even people with the best of intentions may
be unable to provide accurate information about their own
attitudes because they simply do not know.
Looking at the same question from another angle,
one can ask why psychologists should expect that people
ought to know their preferences in many or most situa-
tions. Scientists do not make such assumptions about other
aspects of human beings. They do not think that a good
way to know about somebody’s blood pressure is to ask
them what it is; most people could not provide an honest
and accurate answer even if they wished to.
Nisbett and Wilson’s statement (1977) was well ahead of
its time, offered as it was before any of the attitude measures
described here were invented. By now a significant amount
of research and theorizing has focused on exactly the ques-
tions they posed: What can people know about their attitudes
and, more importantly, what can they not know? The interest
in this epistemological question also originated because
of data about the split between conscious and unconscious
CH10.indd 357
ways in which the mind works. Verbal self-report measures
are a fine way to tap the conscious aspects of the mind’s
functioning, but if, indeed, a large amount of cognitive
and affective processing happens without reliance on
some facet of consciousness (as Bargh & Chartrand, 1999
have indicated), how should such content be accessed and
understood? These questions have been asked about all
aspects of social cognition, and this chapter pays close
attention to the discussion as it has affected the measure-
ment of attitudes.
Researchers have often examined hidden attitudes
while studying prejudice and intergroup relations. Social
scientists discovered dramatic transformations of atti-
tudes toward members of social groups, especially those
that are stigmatized, over time. For example, the attitudes
and stereotypes expressed about Black Americans, Asian
Americans, and Jews are vastly different today than they
were even a few decades ago (Katz & Braly, 1933; Devine &
Elliot, 1995; Madon et al., 2001). Behavioral shifts reflect
these attitude changes, but not to nearly the same extent as
one might predict.
Group differences in access to housing, education, health
care, jobs, and political power have raised questions about
why such discrimination continues when, in fact, attitudes
show much weaker evidence of animus. Might measures of
attitude be limited to particular aspects of evaluation that
are visible, leaving aside important determinants of behav-
ior that are untapped (Crosby et al., 1980; Fazio & Dunton,
1997; Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986; Greenwald & Banaji,
1995; Wilson & Brekke, 1994)?
Such concerns are not new, and alternatives to standard
measures of social attitudes have been of interest for many
decades. For example, in the “bogus pipeline” technique
(Jones & Sigall, 1971), participants are led to believe that
the researcher has a foolproof way of detecting the truth-
fulness of their answers by tapping into physiological
processes. This is typically accomplished by attaching
physiological sensors to participants and convincing them
that these sensors function as lie detectors. If attitudes are
solicited under such circumstances, it is assumed that the
subject will not lie because of a belief that the experimenter
would ferret out the right answer anyway. A meta-analytic
review indicates that bogus pipeline procedures elicit more
honest responses than do control conditions, particularly
when participants are asked to guess the physiological out-
put of the “lie detector test” (Roese & Jamieson, 1993).
That is, participants who were connected to an apparatus
that they believed was capable of determining their true
attitudes responded in a less socially desirable way than
participants who were not connected to such an appara-
tus. Furthermore, participants who were presented with a
Likert-type scale asking them to report what they believed
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 363 Attitudes
the apparatus had recorded were even less likely to respond
in a socially desirable manner.
However, self-presentation concerns are not the only
reason to be interested in implicit measures (Nosek, 2007).
As noted earlier, the thornier problem of attitude measure-
ment remains the issue of measuring what is unknown to
the respondent. The remainder of the tests described in this
section, and the work that has commanded the greatest
attention by far, falls into the category of measures that
assume that respondents do not and cannot, by and large,
have access to particular preferences they hold and act on.
The assumption is that this state of affairs in the realm of
attitudes is similar to what is true of other mental faculties
such as perception, attention, memory, and reasoning, all
of which are subject to veiled access.
Measures of Implicit Memory as a Model
for Measures of Implicit Attitudes
Students of memory know that their field changed in sig-
nificant ways starting in the late 1970s. Evidence converged
from patients with striking memory disorders, as well as from
the more mundane behavior of ordinary college students,
showing the existence of entirely new forms of memory
never previously seen. If there was any doubt that the mind
is only as knowable as the techniques or technologies avail-
able to know it, these studies provided the evidence. For 100
years, since Ebbinghaus, the gramophone needle of mea-
surement had been stuck in a single groove of repeatedly
asking one form of question: to recollect what had happened
before. But beginning in the 1970s, even though they were
interested in the same thing (memory for an event), scien-
tists did not just ask for recollections of times past. Instead,
they asked what seemed like odd questions to understand
memory: “Do you see this to be a word or nonword?” (lexi-
cal decision task); “What, if anything, did you see flash by?”
(perceptual identification); “Can you complete this frag-
ment to make a meaningful word?” (word-fragment com-
pletion); and even, “How much do you like this?” (Jacoby,
1993; Richardson-Klavehn & Bjork, 1988; Roediger, 1990;
Roediger & McDermott, 1993; Schacter, 1987).
Following on the heels of substantial research using lex-
ical decisions to understand semantic memory (Meyer &
Schvaneveldt, 1971; Neely, 1977; Posner & Snyder, 1975),
these new tasks transformed how episodic memory, or
memory for events, was studied. If subjects had seen the
information before, whether they consciously remembered
seeing it or not, they were faster to say it was a word, more
likely to see it even though it whizzed by at high speed,
and more likely to use the word to fill in the blanks. These
tests served as indices of what was saved in memory and
whether the person was able to recollect it when asked,
“What do you remember?”
CH10.indd 358
A growing repertoire of measures expanded the very
notion of what memory is. At least on the surface, the newly
discovered types of memory bore faint resemblance to the
familiar meaning of this construct, but these new measures
were revealing intriguing dissociations between different
measures of memory. What the measures of conscious rec-
ollection were detecting seemed dull when probed by indi-
rect measures and vice versa. From such discoveries, the
same construct of memory came to be expanded to include
varyingly named extensions such as unconscious memory,
implicit memory, automatic memory, indirect memory, and
procedural memory.
Evaluative Priming
Starting in the 1980s, Gaertner and his collaborators (e.g.,
Dovidio, Evans, & Tyler, 1986; Gaertner & McLaughlin,
1983), Fazio and his colleagues (see Fazio et al., 1986),
and Chaiken and Bargh (1993; see Bargh et al., 1992;
Duckworth, Bargh, Garcia, & Chaiken, 2002) developed and
used a measure of evaluative (attitude) priming. Evaluative
priming tasks are based on the assumption that, if an object
(e.g., candy) elicits a positive evaluation, it should facilitate
responses to other positive things such as “good” and “pleas-
ant” because the two sets of stimuli are evaluatively con-
gruent. Likewise, if an object (e.g., Brussels sprouts) elicits
a negative evaluation, it should facilitate responding to
other negative items such as “bad” or “unpleasant” because
of the shared negativity. Importantly, priming effects should
hold only in relevant domains. That is, evaluative priming
should be seen in situations where participants are asked to
decide whether something is “good” or “bad,” but facilita-
tion should not be seen in other kinds of judgments (e.g.,
“object” or “person”; see Wittenbrink, 2007).
Response latencies, that is, the time taken to respond to
a word measured in milliseconds, provides an indirect mea-
sure of attitude strength. Participants see primes (attitude
objects such as candy or Brussels sprouts) for a short dura-
tion (e.g., 200 ms). Primes are followed by targets (evalu-
ative words such as “good” or “bad”), and the participants
then have the job of determining whether the target word
describes the prime. If participants hold a strong associa-
tion between the prime and the target word, they ought to
respond faster that the word describes the prime than if they
hold only a weak association between the two.
Moreover, if evaluation is a strong driver of judgment,
the priming result should be obtained even when the judg-
ment is itself nonevaluative, such as when the task the
subject performs does not involve a good-bad decision but
is, for example, a simple pronunciation task (see Bargh
et al., 1996; Giner-Sorolla et al., 1999). Results obtained
through priming techniques may be influenced by factors
such as attitude strength or accessibility, the representation
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 Measuring Attitudes: Conceptual Issues and Specific Techniques 364
of the prime (whether it is a picture or a word), and task
instructions (Wittenbrink, 2007).
Psychologists have created several variations on
this basic priming paradigm. In some work (e.g., Giner-
Sorolla et al., 1999, Study 2), participants are exposed
to a prime and are then asked to pronounce a word that
appears immediately afterward. In studies such as this,
participants are not required to make an explicit evalua-
tive judgment. The crucial dependent variable is the length
of time participants take to pronounce the words, which is
shorter when the word is evaluatively congruent with the
prime. In other variations, primes are presented in such a
way that participants are unaware of what they have seen
(either because the prime appeared for too short a time or
because it was immediately covered by another object on
the screen). Nevertheless, even in these cases, the primes
have been found to influence evaluative judgments (e.g.,
Croizet, 1998; Greenwald, Klinger, & Liu, 1989; Otten &
Wentura, 1999; Weinberger & Westen, 2008).
Consider a typical priming experiment: participants are
told that they will be taking part in a study on “word recog-
nition and meaning,” and will be asked to perform several
word judgment tasks of increasing complexity (Fazio et al.,
1986). Participants are seated in front of a computer, and
their first task is to decide whether particular words are
“good” or “bad” using unique keys on a keyboard to
answer as quickly and accurately as possible. After com-
pleting this task, they are excused for a short break while
the experimenter selects 16 of the 70 words to which they
have responded. These special 16 are chosen on the basis of
each participant’s reaction time: The four words that they
have most quickly judged to be good or bad are chosen
as instances of strong primes. Likewise, the four that they
were slowest to label good or bad serve as weak primes.
Participants then reenter the room and are given a sec-
ond task. They will again see words to be judged as good
or bad, but this time, each adjective will be preceded by
a “memory word” (either 1 of the 16 surreptitiously cho-
sen words or a nonsense string such as BBB). Participants
must pronounce the word or string aloud while making
their judgment. The results are clear: Participants are faster
to judge words as “good” or “bad” in the second task if
they are busy pronouncing a word of the same valence,
particularly when the “memory word” is a strong rather
than a weak prime. A participant who has quickly judged
the word “cake” to be positive in the first task, for example,
is significantly faster to rate the word “delightful” as good
when pronouncing the word “cake.”
The magnitude of such priming effects seem to influence
a plethora of behaviors. For example, an implicit prefer-
ence for White over Black, as indicated by performance on
tasks such as those described earlier, predicts the degree of
CH10.indd 359
bias in nonverbal behavior suggestive of racial discomfort
among a sample of Whites interacting with Blacks (Fazio
et al., 1995). Furthermore, racial cues can prime an associ-
ation with violent objects. For example, White participants
tended to misidentify harmless tools carried by Blacks as
guns, though they made this mistake significantly less often
when examining White targets (Payne, 2001). Even people
with the best of intentions are prone to errors such as this,
perhaps because stereotypes (e.g., Blacks are violent) are
automatically activated in the presence of a relevant group
member, regardless of one’s level of prejudice or stereo-
type endorsement (Devine, 1989). Evaluative priming is
not confined to the racial realm but also predicts social dis-
tance from other stigmatized groups (e.g., obese people;
Bessenoff & Sherman, 2000), as well as nonintergroup
experiences such as anxiety during an interview (Spalding &
Hardin, 1999). As Wittenbrink (2007) points out, priming
techniques generally predict such behaviors better than do
self-report measures.
Not all priming methods rely on presentations that are too
quick for conscious processing. In the Affect Misattribution
Procedure, participants view photographs of smiling or
scowling faces and then rate Chinese pictographs as either
“more pleasant than average” or “less pleasant than aver-
age.” Participants who saw scowling faces tended to
rate the pictographs less favorably even when they were
specifically instructed that the photographs they had pre-
viously seen might bias their responses (Payne, Cheng,
Govorun, & Stewart, 2005). These findings demonstrate
that even conscious priming, which the participant has
been told is a source of bias, can have a strong influence on
attitudes, even attitudes toward unrelated objects.
Implicit Association Test
The IAT, like evaluative priming, estimates the strength
of association between concepts (the attitude objects) and
attributes (Greenwald et al., 1998). When the attribute
involved is the good-bad or pleasant-unpleasant dimen-
sion, the resulting outcome is deemed to be a measure of
implicit attitude. When the attribute involved represents a
stereotype (e.g., violent/nonviolent), the resulting outcome
is considered a measure of belief (see Banaji, 2001).
Used prominently in the study of attitudes toward social
groups, an example of the IAT as a measure of attitudes
toward people of different ages would unfold in the fol-
lowing manner (for details on constructing an IAT, see
Lane, Banaji, Nosek, & Greenwald, 2007): Participants
would first classify pictures of faces by pressing one key
if the face is that of a young person and a different key if
the face is that of an elderly person. Next, participants
would respond to various words by pressing one key if
the word is positive (e.g., joy, love) and a different key if the
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 365 Attitudes
word is negative (e.g., terrible, agony). In the following
block of trials, participants would see either a word or a
picture of a face. They would be asked to press one key if
they see either a positive word or a young face and a differ-
ent key if they see either a negative word or an elderly face.
In the last block of the IAT the pairing would be reversed;
now participants would be asked to press one key if they see
either a positive word or an elderly face and a different key
if they see either a negative word or a young face. The order
of blocks is counterbalanced across participants such that
some are first asked to pair good⫹young/bad⫹old, whereas
others are first asked to pair good⫹old/bad⫹young. The
IAT score is obtained by subtracting mean reaction times
to the unexpected or counterstereotypical pairing (in this
case, good⫹old/young⫹bad) from mean reaction times to
the opposite pairing. In this case, positive scores reflect a
tendency to respond faster when young is paired with good
and old is paired with bad. Greenwald, Nosek, and Banaji
(2003) have offered a new scoring algorithm based on data
of thousands of participants.
To someone whose conscious attitude toward the
elderly is negative, the typical age attitude result on the
IAT should come as no surprise. Most people who have
taken the test show some level of elderly/bad association;
however, for the vast majority who do not sense in them-
selves any negative attitude toward the elderly—especially
those who are elderly themselves—the IAT result can be
surprising and not necessarily acceptable. In an attempt
to raise awareness about dissociations between explicit
and implicit attitudes and beliefs (discussed further in the
Attitude Dissociations section later in this chapter), sev-
eral tests that often divulge such dissociations are avail-
able online at: http://implicit.harvard.edu. To date, more
than 10 million tests have been administered.
Although it has been used as a measure of implicit
attitudes, the IAT can easily be adapted to provide a mea-
sure of implicit beliefs. Such a test may involve comparison
of performance in male-female concepts with strong-
weak attributes or Black-White concepts with scholar-
athlete attributes. Likewise, the IAT can be turned into a
measure of implicit self-attitude by measuring the asso-
ciation of self with the good-bad dimension (Greenwald
et al., 2002; see the section entitled, “The Attitude Toward
Oneself“).
In the years after its development, the IAT was used to
study intergroup attitudes more than other types of evalu-
ations; however, it is increasingly visible in other research
programs, including those concerning consumer behavior
(Janiszewski, 1988; Maison, Greenwald, & Bruin, 2004;
Shapiro, 1999) and attitudes of interest to clinical psycholo-
gists. For example, the test has been used to study atti-
tudes in clinical samples toward phobia-producing stimuli
CH10.indd 360
(Teachman, Marker, & Smith-Janik, 2008), in psychopaths
toward violence (Gray, MacCulloch, Smith, Morris, &
Snowden, 2003), and in adolescents toward self-harm
(Nock & Banaji, 2007). Researchers have also used the IAT
to study happiness (Walker & Schimmack, 2008), alcohol
consumption (Ostafin & Palfai, 2006), smoking (Robinson,
Meier, Zetocha, & McCaul, 2005), and achievement
(Brunstein & Schmitt, 2004), among other topics.
Questions of validation have been addressed most
reassuringly though through studies of the relationship
between IAT scores and behaviors that satisfy the desire
for ecological validity. The IAT has been shown to predict
a vaiety of such outcomes including the voting behaivor of
undecided voters (Arcuri, Castelli, Galdi, Zogmaister, &
Amadori, 2008); political attitudes toward enlarging a U.S.
military base (Galdi, Arcuri, & Gawronski, 2008); actual
suicide attempts (Nock, Park, Finn, Deliberto, Dour, &
Banaji, in press); response to treatment for panic disor-
der (Teachman, Marker, Smith-Janik, in press); adoles-
cents’ development of alcohol and drug addiction (Thrush,
Wiers, Ames, Grenard, Sussman, & Stacy; 20007; Wiers,
Houben, & de Kraker, 2007); hiring of ethnic minorities
in an Arab vs. Swedish applicant pool (Rooth, 2009);
intent to change jobs (von Hippel, Brener, & von Hippel,
2008); and nation-level gender differences in 8th grade
science and math achievement (Nosek, et al, 2009).
Among the questions of interest has been the relation-
ship between measures of implicit and explicit attitudes.
These two families of measures can be quite dissociated
from each other (the signature result from this area of
research), but the domain in which they are implemented
predicts the degree of association that will be obtained. In
some domains, such as voting behavior close to an elec-
tion, implicit and explicit evaluations are substantially
correlated, but in many domains, such as intergroup atti-
tudes, a two-factor solution offers the best fit (e.g., ethno-
centrism; Cunningham, Nezlek, & Banaji, 2004). Nosek’s
extensive research on the topic of implicit-explicit conver-
gence and divergence (see Nosek, 2005, 2007; Nosek &
Smyth, 2007) shows that this relationship varies as a func-
tion of self-presentation demands, evaluative strength of
the attitude, dimensionality (i.e., whether the measured
attitude consists of two distinctive poles), and evaluative
distinctiveness (i.e., how much one perceives the attitude
to differ from the average attitude of the group).
The IAT is easily adaptable, and researchers have created
many variations. To overcome the limitation of relying on
two distinct categories (e.g., Black and White), the Go/No-
go Association Task (Nosek & Banaji, 2001) presents partic-
ipants with one target item (e.g., Black faces) and numerous
distracter items (e.g., Latino, Asian, and White faces) to
which they must inhibit a response. Other variants present
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 Measuring Attitudes: Conceptual Issues and Specific Techniques 366
participants with only one category (e.g., Black faces;
Karpinski & Steinman, 2006) or ask subjects to categorize
according to both category and attribute at the same time. In
the latter case, participants may see a picture of a face and
a word presented together in the middle of the screen
and be asked to press one of four keys: one key if they see a
picture of a Black face paired with a positive word, another
key if they see a picture of a White face paired with a nega-
tive word, and so on (Bar-Anan, Nosek, & Vianello, 2009).
Similarly, another variant presents stimulus items in this same
way but includes neutral categories such as “furniture,” as
well as more traditional categories (e.g., faces and positively
or negatively valenced words; Blanton, Jaccard, Gonzalez, &
Christie, 2006). In other variations, the number of blocks
and trials has been reduced (Sriram & Greenwald, 2009;
Teige-Mocigemba, Klauer, & Rothermund, 2008) to further
shorten the duration of the IAT and make it appropriate for
inclusion in large-scale data-gathering exercises involving
multiple sites. Another variant of the IAT asks participants
to respond by moving a joystick, thus indexing unconscious
preference through automatic behaviors (Schnabel, Banse, &
Asendorpf, 2006). Finally, the IAT has been adapted for use
with children as young as 6 (Baron & Banaji, 2006).
Other Response Latency Measures
of Implicit Attitudes
In addition to evaluative priming and the IAT, which are the
two most widely used measures of unconscious attitudes,
researchers have developed numerous other measures. The
first of these, developed in the late 1970s, is quite similar to
a derivation of the IAT. Known as the Eriksen Flanker Task
(Eriksen & Schultz, 1979), this measure asks participants
to respond to a stimulus surrounded by distracter items.
Congruent sets consist of items (e.g., arrows) pointing in
the same direction, whereas incongruent sets contain dis-
tracter items pointing in different directions. Participants
are expected to respond faster to congruent rather than
incongruent sets, indicating the orientations that they find
most related.
A second task adapts the original Stroop task to the
study of attitudes. Known as the Emotional Stroop Task
(e.g., Mogg, Mathews, & Weinman, 1989; Pratto & John,
1991), this measure requires participants to pronounce
the color in which a word is written rather than saying the
word itself. Positive and negative words are presented,
and the response latency to name the color in which the
word is written is used as an index of attention resources.
Participants are slower to respond with the color name
when undesirable traits are presented, indicating that such
words require more attention than desirable trait labels
(Pratto & John, 1991). This task could, therefore, be used
to determine which of two stimuli a participant favors,
CH10.indd 361
based on the expectation that a participant will respond
with the color name faster when they evaluate a particular
stimulus as positive (de Houwer, 2003).
Another test, the Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (de
Houwer, 2003), uses differently colored words to determine
participants’ evaluations of stimulus items. Instead of pairing
attributes with categories, this task utilizes white and colored
words. Participants are asked to categorize the white words
based on their valence and the colored words based on their
color, the expectation being that participants will respond
more quickly when the white and colored words assigned to
the same key share valence. For example, a participant may
be asked to respond with one key whenever a positive white
word or any blue word appears, and to respond with another
key when a negative white word or any green word appears.
In this case, participants should be faster to categorize the
word “joy” written in blue and the word “vomit” written in
green, because “joy” is paired with positive white words and
“vomit” is paired with negative white words.
Finally, another task based on response times engages
the participant physically. Using Evaluative Movement
Assessment (Brendl, Markman, & Messner, 2005),
researchers ask participants to categorize stimuli by mov-
ing a joystick toward or away from their own body. For
instance, participants may be required to pull a joystick
toward themselves if they see positive words and away
from themselves if they see negative words. This measure
allows researchers to measure attitudes toward several dif-
ferent objects using one scale that is centered on a neutral
point. That is, because the crucial dependent measure is a
difference in reaction times (how long the participant took
to push or pull the joystick in response to the same word),
the true zero point reflects no difference in reaction time.
Criticisms of Response Latency Measures
The measures described earlier have not been immune
from criticism, and critics have posed three main clusters of
challenges: psychometric properties, procedural features,
and predictive validity. It has been argued that response
latency measures do not necessarily correlate highly with
each other (Bosson, Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000) and that
response latency measures lack a nonarbitrary zero point
(Blanton & Jaccard, 2006). Yet others have questioned the
proper interpretation of the scores from such tests, draw-
ing a distinction between the individual’s own attitude ver-
sus cultural learning (Karpinski & Hilton, 2001; Olson &
Fazio, 2004), and posed alternative explanations in terms
of greater familiarity or greater salience as the determining
reason for the obtained outcome rather than attitude per
se (Brendl, Markman, & Messner, 2001; Rothermund &
Wentura, 2004). These debates have enhanced an under-
standing of the IAT and other response latency measures
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 367 Attitudes
that share its properties. (Some definitive responses, as
well as ongoing debates, can be found in Banaji, 2001;
Banaji, Nosek, & Greenwald, 2004; Dasgupta, McGhee,
Greenwald, & Banaji, 2000; Greenwald, Nosek, Banaji, &
Klauer, 2005; Greenwald, Nosek, & Sriram, 2006;
Greenwald, Rudman, Nosek, & Zayas, 2006; Lane et al.,
2007; Nosek & Hansen, 2008; Ottaway, Hayden, & Oakes,
2001; and Rudman, Greenwald, Mellott, & Schwartz,
1999.) Perhaps not surprisingly, these measures being so
counter to the standard method of measuring attitudes,
some have posed questions about the predictive validity of
response latency measures. What can scientists learn about
meaningful human behavior by knowing that individu-
als respond to some words or pictures faster than others?
Given the hundreds of studies that are now available using
such methods, a great deal is now known about the various
forms of validity of the measures. Response latency mea-
sures correlate with neural activation patterns, fall into line
with expected “known-groups” differences in attitude, and
predict nonverbal responses of friendliness, the choice of
a partner, performance ratings, and the treatment of others
(Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, & Banaji, 2009; Jost
et al., in press).
Other Indirect Measures of Attitudes
Another commonly-used group of indirect attitude mea-
sures are linguistic in nature. Language reveals much about
thoughts and emotions, and some of these revelations are
unconscious and unintended. In a thorough review of the rev-
elations language provides about preferences, von Hippel,
Sekaquaptewa, and Vargas (2008) suggest that people’s
words may reveal more about themselves than they might
know. For example, the number of plural pronouns (we, us)
as compared with the number of singular pronouns (I, he,
she) participants used when writing about relationships has
proved to be a strong predictor of their friendship quality
(Agnew, van Lange, Rusbult, & Langston, 1998), and prim-
ing people with plural pronouns causes them to feel greater
interdependence (Brewer & Gardner, 1996; Gardner,
Gabriel, & Lee, 1999). Likewise, people may reveal their atti-
tudes through their choice of adjectives, relying on broader
adjectives to describe attitude-consistent behaviors. For
example, if a favored in-group member behaves positively,
people may say that the action is nice, which is perceived
to be a stable quality. However, if a disliked group member
performed the same action, individuals might label it “gen-
erous” (if the person has just offered them money) or “help-
ful” (if they have just opened a door for someone), implying
that the outgroup member is not “nice” in general but per-
forms only specific positive behaviors (Hamilton, Gibbons,
Stroessner, & Sherman, 1992). People may also refer to
the ingroup member as “nice” and say that the outgroup
CH10.indd 362
member “sometimes lets me borrow money from him,”
again implying that similar others are stably nice, whereas
dissimilar others may only do nice things on occasion
(Walton & Banaji, 2004).
Although this section provides an extensive list of implicit
behavioral measures of attitude currently in use, the list is
not complete. Other such measures include the name-letter
effect (e.g., Koole, Dijksterhuis, & van Knippenberg, 2001;
Nuttin, 1985), the stimulus response compatibility task
(Mogg, Bradley, Field, & de Houwer, 2003), the implicit
association procedure (Schnabel, Banse, & Asendorpf,
2006), the single association test (Blanton et al., 2006), the
approach-avoid task (Rinck & Becker, 2007), the implicit
relational assessment procedure (e.g., Barnes-Holmes,
Hayden, Barnes-Holmes, & Stewart, 2008), and the word
association task (Stacy, Leigh, & Weingardt, 1997). All
together, the development of such measures has been an
extensive preoccupation of scientists interested in attitudes
and other aspects of social cognition.
Measures of the Autonomic Nervous System
The rapid blink of an eye, the rush of sweat to the palms,
and the hastening of a heartbeat are, according to some psy-
chologists, useful indicators of a person’s attitude toward
the thing that is responsible for such bodily responses.
Blascovich and Mendes (this volume) thoroughly review
common physiological measures and describe several ways
in which researchers have used these techniques to study
attitudes. This section elaborates on the ways in which sci-
entists have applied biological psychology to the study of
preferences.
In spite of the obvious advantage of stealth, physiologi-
cal measures did not fare well enough to become broadly
used as a means of measuring attitudes for a variety of rea-
sons, including the inability to distinguish positive from
negative responses. For many decades they played a more
minor role in understanding attitudes, and such techniques
have even been viewed as the poor cousins of more expen-
sive measures of brain activity. However, because physi-
ological measures provide an intriguing glimpse into the
structure and functions of attitudes, this section describes
some of the more commonly used physiological techniques
in the hopes of enhancing understanding of this important
methodology.
Cacioppo and colleagues (Cacioppo, 1982; Cacioppo &
Sandman, 1978) used such measures quite early and exten-
sively to understand the nature of attitudes (Cacioppo, Petty,
Losch, & Kim, 1986; Cacioppo & Sandman, 1981; Ito &
Cacioppo, 2007), and Blascovich and Mendes have added
substantially to the continued application of these methods
in many aspects of social cognition, including attitudes (see
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 Measuring Attitudes: Conceptual Issues and Specific Techniques 368
Blascovich & Mendes, this volume). Like other measures
of implicit attitudes, physiological recordings allow
researchers to gain access to attitudes that participants may
be unwilling or unable to report. Unlike other techniques,
physiological measures also allow for continuous record-
ings and, therefore, may provide an index of attitude shifts
over a brief time span (Cunningham, Packer, Kesek, & van
Bavel, 2008).
One of the earliest measures of physiological respond-
ing is electrodermal activity (EDA, also known as skin
conductance response [SCR] or galvanic skin response).
EDA measures the amount of sweat produced by the
eccrine glands, which are found throughout the body but
are heavily concentrated on the hands and feet (for more
details on this method, see Mendes, 2008). Among the
first experiments to use EDA as an attitude measure dem-
onstrated that participants showed greater EDA increases
when interacting with a Black rather than a White experi-
menter (Rankin & Campbell, 1955). Later researchers have
pointed out that physiological responses can be nonspecific
and may indicate general levels of arousal; in Rankin and
Campbell’s (1955) study, for instance, it is not possible to
determine whether increases in EDA signaled a positive
or negative evaluation (Krosnick et al., 2005; Mendes,
2008). However, physiological changes can provide infor-
mation about particular attitudes in constrained settings.
For instance, if the experimental situation is limited to fear,
EDA activity may be used as an index of fear responding;
in other situations, the same marker may simply indicate
greater arousal or attention to particular stimulus items.
Since the development of EDA measures, psycholo-
gists have continued to adopt an increasing number of
techniques used by physiologists. For instance, partici-
pants evaluated ideographs more favorably when they
were presented during arm flexion than during arm exten-
sion (Cacioppo, Priester, & Berntson, 1993). It has also
been shown that physical approach behaviors (e.g., pull-
ing a lever toward oneself) improved interracial attitudes
compared with avoidance behaviors (e.g., pushing a lever
away; Kawakami, Phills, Steele, & Dovidio, 2007).
Though EDA is often used as an index of arousal
in response to a particular stimulus, it is a poor indica-
tor of valence. Individuals may show an increase in EDA
because they are looking at something they really like or
something they really do not like, and it is impossible to
differentiate these responses by examining EDA alone
(Cunningham et al., 2008). For this reason, other measures
are necessary to accomplish such a task. Facial electro-
myography (EMG) can reveal negative or positive affect
associated with a particular target, even when indepen-
dent judges are unable to detect an evaluative response
(see Krosnick et al., 2005). EMG measures electrical
CH10.indd 363
activity created in response to muscle contraction, with
stronger contraction force resulting in higher measure-
ments (Hess, 2008).
From EMG, much has been learned about the uncon-
scious nature of attitudes. Participants in one study, for
example, showed more cheek area activity (associated with
smiling) when exposed to a smiling face, even when they
did not consciously process the stimulus. Likewise, partici-
pants showed greater brow activity in response to an angry
face as compared with a neutral-face baseline (Dimberg,
Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000). Such facial expressions
can indicate positive (in the case of smiling) or negative
(in the case of frowning) attitudes. People continue to be
influenced by faces seen long enough to be processed con-
sciously; when viewing positively evaluated targets, partic-
ipants engaged in more facial mimicry than when viewing
negatively evaluated targets. In fact, negative targets can
elicit opposing facial expressions (e.g., zygomaticus major
activity, associated with smiling, in response to a sad
expression; Likowski, Muhlberger, Seibt, Pauli, & Weyers,
2008). The relationship here is reciprocal; not only do peo-
ple mimic those they like, but they can facilitate liking by
copying others. In one study, participants who interacted
with a mimicking confederate later reported more liking
of their interaction partner than did those who interacted
with a nonmimicking person (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999,
Study 2).
Although EMG is a powerful measure because of its
capacity to index microscopic activity that cannot be
detected by the naked eye, other researchers have focused
on changes that are even more difficult to see, diving
beneath the skin to explore the autonomic nervous system.
In one study, researchers measured ventricular contractility
(the time from the beginning of the left ventricular contrac-
tion to the opening of the aortic valve of the heart), cardiac
output (the amount of blood being pumped by the heart),
and total peripheral resistance (the overall amount of vaso-
constriction or vasodilation occurring in regions outside
the brain and heart) during interactions with expectancy-
violating partners (e.g., an Asian confederate speaking with
a Southern accent). They found that participants interact-
ing with an expectancy-violating partner exhibited less
ventricular contraction, lower cardiac output, and greater
total peripheral resistance than did participants interact-
ing with a non-expectancy-violating confederate (Mendes,
Blascovich, Hunter, Lickel, & Jost, 2007). These reactions
are consistent with threat responses and indicate that par-
ticipants interacting with unexpected others felt threatened
rather than challenged by the interaction. Participants whose
expectations had been violated also exhibited less positive
affect and rated their partners less positively than partici-
pants whose partners matched expectations, indicating that
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 369 Attitudes
people may hold more positive attitudes toward individuals
whose behaviors are in line with their expectations.
It is clear that measures of autonomic arousal can pro-
vide a rich picture of attitudes when used and interpreted
properly by experts who understand their virtues and
limits, as is true of most modern measures of attitudes.
Psychologists will most likely make greater use of physi-
ological measures in conjunction with response latency
tests, as well as direct measures of brain activity as a means
of studying attitudes in the future.
Measures of Neural Activity
With the ability to measure the brain’s electrical activity
and blood flow/oxygenation levels, neuroscientists have
looked directly at the boss of the autonomic nervous system.
Developments in social neuroscience have included atten-
tion to understanding ordinary preferences, fear, and valence
effects, all of which are relevant to understanding attitudes
(see Lieberman, this volume). Together with behavioral
measures that have attempted to elaborate on the responses
participants give to direct questions, neural activity pro-
vides yet another way of looking at dissociations between
conscious and less conscious attitudes. Because fMRI and
other technologies used to study the brain are relatively new,
scientists’ understanding of the data presented here will
likely grow exponentially in the years to come. Thus, the
findings described here should be taken as a starting place
for future work, not a final say on the role of neural activity
in evaluation.
ERPs have been used for quite some time to determine
the consistency and affective valence of attitudinal reports.
ERPs measure brain activity in response to specific events.
Notably, ERPs are capable of measuring rapid neural
changes, providing the only noninvasive measure to date
of recording neural firing. Neuronal activity results in mea-
surable electrical activity at the scalp, and ERPs correlate
this activity-specific stimuli or behavior. ERP waveforms
contain multiple components, or deflections in either the
positive or negative direction (not valence), and the magni-
tude of these deflections can provide information concern-
ing the strength of the stimulus’s influence (Bartholow &
Amodio, 2008; Berger, 1929; Moruzzi & Magoun, 1949).
One such deflection is the P300 (e.g., a positive deflec-
tion occurring at a latency of about 300 ms). Judgments
concerning evaluatively inconsistent objects (e.g., expo-
sure to a series of negative objects after exposure to posi-
tive traits) tend to elicit a larger amplitude P300-like wave
(Cacioppo, Crites, Berntson, & Coles, 1993). Such judg-
ments also elicit an N400 wave not found when partici-
pants viewed evaluatively congruent stimuli, a result that
replicates findings from the semantic literature, suggesting
CH10.indd 364
that the N400 indicates the presence of semantically
incongruent targets (Morris, Squires, Taber, & Lodge, 2003).
Furthermore, evaluatively inconsistent stimuli also
elicit LPPs of greater amplitude than evaluatively consis-
tent stimuli. Participants were asked to accurately report or
misreport their attitudes. LPP amplitudes were higher when
participants accurately reported their attitudes, suggesting
that examining this waveform may provide a measure of
attitudes that participants are unable or unwilling to report
(Crites, Cacioppo, Gardner, & Berntson, 1995). The LPP
waveforms that occur when participants respond to evalua-
tively incongruent stimuli are lateralized, and evidence sug-
gests that this waveform is greater over the right, rather than
the left, hemisphere (Cacioppo et al., 1996). The LPP can also
be lateralized differently depending on the evaluation
itself: Concepts rated as bad tended to elicit right-lateralized
waveforms, whereas those rated as good elicited left later-
alization (Cunningham, Espinet, DeYoung, & Zelazo,
2005). Positive and negative attitudes also elicit different
patterns of EEG activation (Pizzagalli, Koenig, Regard, &
Lehmann, 1999).
Although ERPs have taught scientists much about atti-
tudes, particularly because they offer good temporal reso-
lution, imaging via fMRI complements ERP research by
providing spatial resolution. The ability to view where
in the brain activity is concentrated during specific tasks,
possible because of fMRI, has produced a revolution in
cognitive and social neuroscience. Because brain regions
that are more active require more oxygen than areas that
are relatively inactive, a greater volume of blood flows to
the more active regions. fMRI technology measures and
records the difference in blood oxygenation levels in vari-
ous brain regions. These measurements can be taken when
individuals are asked to consciously and deliberately reflect
on particular aspects of an attitude object, as well as when
participants are responding to stimulus items too quickly
to reflect consciously on them (Cunningham & Zelazo,
2007). Stanley, Phelps, and Banaji (2008) have offered a
three-tier model involving the amygdala, the anterior cin-
gulated cortex (ACC), and the dorsolateral prefrontal cor-
tex (dlPFC) to describe the neural basis of implicit attitudes
(see Lieberman, this volume, for diagrams of brain regions
involved in social cognition). According to this model, the
amygdala is involved in the automatic evaluation of social
stimuli, whereas the ACC is involved in detection of implicit
preferences and the dlPFC takes part in regulating them.
The amygdala is uniquely situated to modulate cogni-
tive input and automatic behaviors. It receives information
from multiple neural structures, including low-level sen-
sory areas, as well as those regions responsible for memory
and higher cognitive processes. Because of the direct route
between the amygdala and the thalamus, the amygdala can
10/5/09 7:19:38 PM

process information sooner than the cortical sensory areas
(LeDoux, 1996). Output from the amygdala travels far
and wide (i.e., several inches!), to destinations as varied
as the brainstem and hypothalamus to early sensory corti-
ces and cortical association areas. Its projections into the
orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) allow individuals to compare
expected rewards and punishments with the circumstances
in which they presently find themselves. If a conflict is
detected, the ACC kicks into gear to monitor the situation.
The lateral PFC may also become involved, bringing its
expertise in reprocessing and exerting conscious control
(Cunningham, Zelazo, Packer, & van Bavel, 2007).
Indeed, attitude researchers have focused on the amyg-
dala in large part because of its important role in evalua-
tion. This research indicates that greater amygdala activity
is associated with the presentation of emotionally valenced
(e.g., fearful) faces conditioned with an aversive stimulus,
even when participants are not consciously aware of these
stimuli (Morris, Ohman, & Dolan, 1998; Whalen et al.,
1998; Williams et al., 2006). This important work suggests
that brain activity, particularly in the amygdala, can pro-
vide information about evaluations of which the partici-
pant is unaware. Analyses of brain activity more generally,
and of the amygdala in particular, have provided evidence
about the malleability of attitudes (Harris & Fiske, 2006,
2007). The importance of the amygdala is so great that
damage to this area severely compromises the ability to
acquire classically conditioned preferences (Davis, 1997).
Other brain regions may respond to different aspects of
evaluation. For example, although the amygdala is involved
in automatic evaluation of social stimuli, it is the ACC that
is implicated in the detection of implicit attitudes and the
dlPFC that may regulate them (Stanley et al., 2008). The OFC
is receiving specific attention in the study of attitudes;
whereas the left posterior regions of the OFC are associated
with determining the value of a particular object, medial
anterior areas of this region are involved in making deci-
sions based on that value (Cunningham, Kesek, & Mowrer,
in press). The ventral striatum, located just above the amyg-
dala, may help people learn fear (Davis & Whalen, 2001).
Like LPPs, patterns of brain activation may be lateralized;
areas of the right inferior frontal cortex and anterior insula
seem to be activated to a greater extent when processing
negative rather than positive information (Cunningham
et al., 2008).
Patterns of activation in other brain areas show that
evaluation can be unconscious. In one study, participants
were scanned while making evaluative (good or bad) or
nonevaluative (abstract or concrete) judgments about rap-
idly presented stimuli. After scanning, participants were
asked to reflectively rate each stimulus on several evalu-
ative dimensions (e.g., positive or negative) and to report
CH10.indd 365
Origins of Attitudes 370
how much their attitude had changed now that they were
permitted more time to come to a decision. Activity in
the bilateral amygdala, OFC, and right insula was related
to attitude ratings for both evaluative and nonevaluative
judgments. Emotionality ratings were correlated with acti-
vation in brainstem regions, areas that are associated with
automatic processes. Their activation provides further sup-
port for the premise that aspects of evaluation function at
unconscious levels (Cunningham, Raye, & Johnson, 2004).
Given the coordination among different brain regions, it is
impossible to locate attitudes in only one area. Forming,
expressing, and controlling attitudes requires cooperation
among different brain regions, none of which is capable of
doing the job alone.
As described earlier, researchers use a variety of tech-
niques to study automatic attitudes. These methods share
several commonalities, foremost among which is that they
do not seek a reflective response to a traditionally posed
question. Furthermore, many measures of automatic atti-
tudes make assumptions about the associative nature of
learning and memory, and rely on responses given quickly
to tap automatic cognition. De Houwer (2008) argues that
implicit measures have in common their ability to predict
particular outcomes under certain conditions (e.g., circum-
stances under which participants cannot control the expres-
sion of a particular attitude). That is, measures of automatic
attitudes may be related through their functional properties,
and measures may be automatic along particular dimen-
sions but not others (de Houwer, 2006). The IAT, for exam-
ple, can be considered automatic in that participants cannot
easily control their responses, but it cannot be considered
implicit in that participants are often aware of what each
IAT is intended to measure, whereas linguistic measures of
attitudes meet the implicit criterion on this dimension.
However, it is clear that the methods are not inter-
changeable. Though implicit measures may have simi-
lar functions, they differ structurally and in the specific
aspects of attitudes they tap (de Houwer, 2008). Although
response latency measures offer information concerning
implicit associations, physiological and neuroscientific
methods provide extensive information on physical cor-
relates of particular attitudes. Thus, the decision of which
measure to use depends on the type of study and the vari-
ables of interest, as well as increasingly on expertise and
availability of resources.
ORIGINS OF ATTITUDES
By the time one is old enough to read chapters such as
this one, the mind is stuffed with a near-infinite number
of attitudes toward everything imaginable, with tastes and
10/5/09 7:19:38 PM
 371 Attitudes
distastes ranging from Shropshire cheese to Schopenhauer.
But where do these attitudes come from and what do psy-
chologists know about their earliest forms?
Although acknowledging that people can acquire atti-
tudes through potentially nonsocial sources such as classical
conditioning (discussed later), social psychologists typi-
cally assume that many preferences derive from different
parts of the social world, from the words and behaviors of
other beings, and from the events that unfold in the world.
Individuals “get” attitudes from others directing infor-
mation toward them explicitly (“Hey, wanna read some
Schopenhauer together?”) or because the experiences that
produce them are simply there for the taking (“I tasted some
Shropshire cheese at Fromaggio’s and now I’m addicted.”).
The sources of attitudes may be agents in close proximity,
such as associates, caregivers, friends, schools, and neigh-
borhoods, or they may sit far away and reach distant indi-
viduals through new technologies, such as television and the
Internet. From such sources people acquire attitudes toward
the shape of bodies, the design of clothes, and the beat of
music. People build preferences from blogs, chat rooms,
and Twitter. The study of attitudes as it exists today provides
prima facie evidence of the vast and deep ways in which the
social world presents, creates, imposes, cajoles, and sneaks
in attitudes of all forms all the time.
One can learn social attitudes in many ways: from
parents (Sinclair, Dunn, & Lowery, 2005; Tenenbaum &
Leaper, 2002), peers (Poteat, 2007; van de Gaer, Pustjens,
van Damme, & de Munter, 2007), and the media (Levina,
Waldo, & Fitzgerald, 2000; Hargreaves & Tiggemann,
2003), to name just a few sources. Of course, one’s cultural
tradition (Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, 2006; Hayes & Lee,
2005; Sahar & Karasawa, 2005), the process of attitude
contagion (Alexander, Piazza, Mekos, & Valente, 2001;
Cohen & Prinstein, 2006), and social learning (Bandura,
1977) all contribute to attitude formation as well.
To study attitudes, then, has been to study the processes
of preference acquisition and change. Because this is the
case, this chapter focuses on some of the lesser studied top-
ics and approaches, as well as those that are in early stages
of growth, in the hope that their presence here will facili-
tate greater attention. Importantly, developmental mea-
sures, especially those used with infants, are quite restricted
because of infants’ limited capacities to express themselves.
Such measures are thus open to multiple interpretations,
some of which are presented later.
The predominant understanding of attitudes concerns
the structure of existing preferences and the processes of
attitude change in adult humans. Working with existing and
well-developed attitudes meant forfeiting analyses of their
formation and change; thus, investigators often created new
attitudes in the laboratory to have “clean” ones to dissect. But
CH10.indd 366
some fundamental questions about the origins of attitudes
have remained unattended for three reasons, and understand-
ing what these reasons are may be instructive.
First, practical considerations can interfere with the col-
lection of the necessary data. Scientists know little about the
manner in which infants and young children acquire pref-
erences. Yet to understand anything of consequence one
must reach back to the earliest stages of development of
the organism for clues to its ontology. Whether it is the uni-
verse or the human body, the original or first state is crucial.
The least persuasive reason is the most likely for the absence
of such data. Adults prove to be more convenient samples
to study than infants and young children. A related reason
is that carving up the field as psychologists have, the study
of attitudes and social cognition has not been at the center of
the developmentalists’ interest, just as developmental ques-
tions concerning social behavior have been largely absent
in the laboratories of social cognitionists, a situation that
may now be changing (see Olson & Dweck, 2008).
A second reason that the question of origins appears
to have been neglected is political. Examining the origins
of attitudes necessarily involves studying the connection
between evolutionary and biological, as well as social,
forces. Though some psychologists have tackled the ques-
tion of evolutionary influences on social behavior (e.g.,
Pinker, 2002), many have been wary of considering such
explanations for topics such as group differences in math-
ematical ability or intelligence. Who can blame them, given
the close association between the early analyses of herita-
bility and racial imperialism included among other politi-
cally dubious uses of science?
William McGuire, writing in a precursor chapter on
this topic, notes that “[a] man of this writer ’s generation
considers the possibility that there may be a genetic com-
ponent in attitude determination only with trepidation”
(McGuire, 1968, p. 161). Scientists should now be able to
overcome political resistance to pursuing intellectual mat-
ters of importance so that such trepidation is legitimately
nonexistent. As psychology and other life sciences inter-
act and even meld, integrative analyses of attitudes may
also prosper. Such analyses will permit a more seamless
view of what is in the body and outside it, and they will
surely reveal how people’s preferences have been shaped
by the biological and cultural history of the human spe-
cies, as well as the highly influential immediate situations
in which individuals find themselves.
Such analyses should now proceed without their misuse
by eugenicists, a misuse in which psychology has played
no small role. In addition, psychologists can no longer turn
a blind eye to the fact that attitudes, like any other aspect
of human nature and culture, have an evolutionary his-
tory. Much can be learned from the open-mindedness of
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the early commentaries in social psychology. Allport’s first
chapter on attitudes in the 1935 handbook remarks on the
favored status of the attitude concept by stating, “It is a
concept which escapes the ancient controversy concern-
ing the relative influence of heredity and environment”
(p. 798). This chapter treats it as such conceptually, in the
hope that the next handbook will contain more solid evi-
dence about the origins of attitudes that can be obtained
only by paying heed to analyses not only of adult humans
but to other species and younger humans as well.
A third reason for ignoring the question of origins is the
more understandable one of the lack of availability of meth-
ods. Recent research has shown just how much progress
new techniques permit. Methods to understand the minds
of adults and children using both behavioral and brain mea-
sures will surely play a major role in new understandings of
the attitude concept. In the time between Gregor Mendel’s
discoveries of the laws of heredity in 1866 and their redis-
covery at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the
sequencing of the human genome in 2003, a new era of
understanding the role of heredity in the nature of prefer-
ence has opened.
Social psychology focuses on the social environment,
and this will naturally lead scientists working in this field to
be appropriately skeptical of any simple genetic reduc-
tionism in understanding attitudes and all things important.
They should continue to be unconvinced when it comes to
understanding attitudes for obvious reasons, including the
more general indictment that Lewontin provides in his
book The Triple Helix (2002, p. 17): “Any computer that
did as poor a job of computation as an organism does from
its genetic ‘program’ would immediately be thrown into
the trash and its manufacturer would be sued by the pur-
chaser.” The same can be said for theories of environmental
input as well, but because there is always the fascination
that the genetic code will explain everything, it is partic-
ularly important to be aware of the bias to overattribute
causal importance to genetic factors.
Nevertheless, it remains important to examine the bio-
logical and social roots of preferences. Naïve theories about
the heritability of attitudes go in two opposing directions.
The visible preferences of children and parents are clearly
shaped by their different age cohorts, making it easy to see
differences in attitudes. “I am so not like my mother” is a
routine expression, especially when speaking about tastes
in music, attire, and views of parenting. Just as much, gen-
erational similarity also comes through: “He and his daugh-
ter both scrunch up their faces when they are served carrots;
it must be genetic.”
It would be nice if the research evidence pointed a way
out, ruling clearly in favor or not in favor of the partial heri-
tability of attitudes, but that is not the current situation. A few
CH10.indd 367
Origins of Attitudes 372
scattered studies measuring the heritability factor of attitudes
suggest two conclusions. First, heritable attitudes seem to
be psychologically more robust and accessible (Bourgeois,
2002; Crelia & Tesser, 1996; Tesser, 1993). Genetic influ-
ences on attitudes may emerge earlier and seem to be more
consequential (e.g., people tend to prefer those who share their
attitudes over those who do not, and this effect appears to be
slightly stronger for attitudes that are more heritable). More
heritable preferences may also be less prone to change; par-
ticipants in a group discussion showed less attitude change
when discussing evaluations estimated to be more heritable.
The influences of heritable attitudes appear earlier than pre-
viously thought, showing up during early adolescence in
some studies (Abrahamson, Baker, & Caspi, 2002).
Second, attitudes vary greatly in what is considered to be
their heritability factor (e.g., Olson, Vernon, Harris, & Jang,
2001; Crelia & Tesser, 1996; Tesser, 1993). For example,
relatively high heritability coefficients have been calculated
for attitudes toward a variety of objects, including the death
penalty, jazz, apartheid, and censorship (Tesser, 1993).
Attitudes toward abortion are highly heritable, whereas atti-
tudes toward easy access to birth control are only weakly
heritable (Olson et al., 2001). Political attitudes appear to
be more heritable than political party identification (Alford,
Funk, & Hibbing, 2005), and conservatism seems to be
more highly heritable than religious attitudes (Abrahamson
et al., 2002). In general, 40% to 50% of the variability in
ideological attitudes may be because of genetic factors
(Alford et al., 2005; Bouchard et al., 2003; Carmen, 2007).
This may be explained by the heritability of other cognitive
and motivational factors that underlie political orientation
(e.g., orientations toward uncertainty and threat; Jost, 2006,
but see also Alford & Hibbing, 2007).
Heritability research faces many difficulties. For one,
no explanation exists for why some attitudes are or should
be more heritable than others, nor do psychologists know
what mechanism(s) might be responsible for transmitting
some attitudes from parent to child. In addition, studies of
heritability have mostly used twin samples (e.g., Eaves,
Eysenck, & Martin, 1989), which present well-known inter-
pretational difficulties. For example, monozygotic twins
are treated more similarly by significant others (Eaves
et al., 1989) and may, therefore, show a stronger resem-
blance because of environmental and not genetic factors.
This may be true even for identical twins reared apart
because of shared features that may elicit similar treatment
(e.g., because physical attractiveness is known to play a
role in how one is treated, e.g., Dion, Berscheid, & Walster,
1972). Furthermore, attitudes may incorrectly reveal a
high heritability coefficient when all members of a group
have been exposed to the same environmental input. For
instance, if all members of a particular geographic region
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 373 Attitudes
have consumed the same propaganda, they will likely show
similar attitudes toward the object in question, leading to
a high heritability estimate despite the fact that the atti-
tude was socially transmitted (Olson et al., 2001). Because
genes can influence individuals’ responses to their environ-
ment, genetic and environmental influences are difficult to
separate (Eaves et al., 1989).
Primates
To understand the attitudes people have and why, psycholo-
gists may look toward nonhuman primates, those closer to
humans in the ancestral chain, as well as those much further
away. Understanding nonhuman primates alongside people
provides yet another path toward deeper knowledge of
the origins of attitudes and preferences. Because attitudes,
linked as they are to enabling survival, are so fundamental
to the existence of every species, comparative studies may
also help those theorists whose primary task is to broadly
understand evolutionary processes that are psychological in
nature. Exploring the social attitudes of primates is currently
beyond the scope of this chapter because the research lies
in disparate areas and needs concerted study and analysis
before review here. It also needs the expertise of those who
are primatologists and other behavioral scientists, and such
collaborations have recently begun to occur. For example, a
study with common marmoset monkeys showed that they
will provide food to genetically unrelated others, even if the
others cannot reciprocate (Burkart, Fehr, Efferson, & van
Schaik, 2007). In other research, Santos and colleagues have
shown that the complex mental operations that are involved
in producing the effects of cognitive dissonance in humans
can also be detected in capuchin monkeys (Egan, Santos, &
Bloom, 2007). Where humans obviously differ is in the abil-
ity to be aware of preferences that are beneficial versus those
that are harmful and make decisions that are opposed to the
dictates of simpler strategies of reproductive fitness. In fact,
scholars writing about evolutionary theory have tended to
even-handedly analyze behaviors mindful of their long-
standing existence in the history of the species, as well as
the demands of culture and social environments in shaping
them (e.g., Griskevicius, Goldstein, Mortensen, Cialdini, &
Kenrick, 2006; Schmitt, Realo, Voracek, & Allik, 2008;
Schwartz & Rubel, 2005). This work is highlighted here
because it is likely to become a shared space for collabo-
ration between social psychology and primatology (e.g.,
Mahajan, Martinez, Diesendruck, Banaji, & Santos, 2009).
Infants and Young Children
Psychologists know little about the social attitudes of
infants and a bit more about such attitudes in children;
CH10.indd 368
what they do know is restricted to a small number of
attitude domains. This situation appears to be changing,
with a more focused interest in understanding the minds of
infants and young children as they develop the ability for
social cognition.
Researchers typically use one of several measures when
studying infants. Looking time is among the most com-
mon, especially with infants who are not old enough to
reach for objects. Psychologists have used looking time as
an indication of the ability to differentiate different classes
of objects. For instance, if infants see nine female faces in
a row and then gaze longer at the tenth face if it is male,
that is evidence that the infant recognizes the tenth face as
different from the first nine. Psychologists have also used
looking time to index familiarity and preference. These
two constructs are difficult to differentiate among young
infants, who cannot give other indications of whether they
are looking longer at a particular object because it is famil-
iar or because they like it. Children who are old enough to
grasp may provide evidence in favor of one or the other
interpretation because they are likely to reach for the object
they prefer.
Even in early infancy, the roots of mature social pref-
erences are visible. A standard measure of preference is
to examine the people or objects toward which a baby ori-
ents. Such studies show that minutes after birth, infants
show a preference for facelike configurations over equally
complex but nonsocial patterns (Johnson, Dziurawiec,
Ellis, & Morton, 1991; Mondloch et al., 1999; Valenza,
Simion, Cassia, & Umilta, 1996). Infants also prefer attrac-
tive over unattractive human (Ramsey, Langlois, Hoss,
Rubenstein, & Griffin, 2004) and animal (Quinn, Kelly,
Lee, Pascalis, & Slater, 2008) faces. These findings sug-
gest that the origins of the “what is beautiful is good” ste-
reotype (Dion et al., 1972) are formed in early infancy.
Surprisingly, infants also respond differently to sounds
heard while in utero compared with more novel sounds. In
one study, a group of pregnant women read Dr. Seuss’s
delightful story The Cat in the Hat out loud, whereas
another group of pregnant women read a version where
the words “cat” and “hat” were replaced with “dog” and
“fog,” respectively. Newborns were able to listen to one
or the other version depending on how they sucked on a
pacifier; for instance, if they sucked more vigorously,
a recording apparatus played a tape of a woman reading
the “cat in the hat” version, whereas if they sucked less
vigorously, the apparatus played a recording of the “dog
in the fog” version. Infants in both conditions altered
their sucking behavior to produce the more familiar story
(DeCasper & Spence, 1986).
As any parent knows, infants also show strong prefer-
ences for the face and voice of their primary caregivers
10/5/09 7:19:42 PM

(Pascalis, de Schonen, Morton, Deruelle, & Fabre-Grenet,
1995). Though it is often assumed that newborns orient
toward women, research shows that 3- to 4-month-old
infants whose primary caregiver is a male individual prefer
men’s faces (Quinn et al., 2002), suggesting the openness
of the mind to literally turn toward that which is famil-
iar. So far, only these two dimensions of preference—that
toward faces, particularly attractive ones, and that toward
sounds heard in utero—have been identified as requiring
no learning; they are present at birth (see Pascalis & Slater,
2003; Slater, 2002).
Though newborns do not distinguish among racial ingroup
and outgroup faces, infants as young as 3 months exhibit
a marked preference for faces of same-race targets (Kelly
et al., 2005, 2007a). This preference grows stronger as infants
age; by 9 months, babies in one study were no longer able to
distinguish faces of racial outgroup members (Kelly et al.,
2007b). Importantly, many experiments examining looking
preference have focused on babies who had not been exposed
to racially diverse faces before seeing other-race faces in the
study (Bar-Haim, Ziv, Lamy, & Hodes, 2006; Kelly et al.,
2005). Thus, similar to a preference for faces of the same sex
as the primary caregiver, an own-race preference may indi-
cate a preference for familiar stimuli.
Providing evidence of very early learning and prefer-
ence formation, these remarkable results suggest that later
preferences for the familiar may have their roots in expe-
riences that occur even before the first year of life. Yet,
caution is needed when interpreting findings from studies
that use preferential looking as an indication of preference;
after all, looking times can reflect alternative processes of
surprise, intrigue, and expectancy violation. Bypassing this
limitation by using the Child IAT mentioned in the mea-
surement section, some evidence suggests that 6-year-old
White children show a preference for Whites of the same
magnitude as the preference found among 10-year-olds
and adults. Explicit race attitudes follow a quite different
course, with the strongest ingroup preferences expressed
at age 6, weaker at age 10, and nonexistent in the adult
sample (Baron & Banaji, 2006).
That attitudes formed even at such a young age are
socially constructed is poignantly seen in the following
result. The previous finding, if it reflects a mere prefer-
ence for one’s own group, should be visible in children of
all social groups equally. Such is not the case, however,
with the evidence showing that children from disadvan-
taged social groups (Hispanic and Black Americans) do
not show implicit ingroup preference, on average, when
the comparison is their group versus the dominant group
(Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, 2008). Indeed, such is also
the case among adults; 40% to 50% of Blacks show a pro-
White bias on the IAT (Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004).
CH10.indd 369
Origins of Attitudes 374
Results such as these have challenged existing views
that attitudes emerge from protracted social learning in
which children converge on adult forms of attitudes over
a long period of development (Dunham & Banaji, 2008).
Instead, even the first studies show that complex attitudes,
such as those toward social collectives, exist in adult-
like form in the earliest years in which such tests can be
administered. Other work shows that children, like adults,
often prefer members of their own group even when the
group is not socially meaningful (e.g., groups that are dif-
ferentiated based on the color of the shirt participants are
asked to wear; Baron & Carey, 2009; Bigler, Spears
Brown, & Markell, 2001). This suggests a strong conti-
nuity for attitudes—at least those related to intergroup
evaluations—across development.
Preference for the familiar is not limited to race. In fact,
accent may trump race in certain circumstances. In a series
of studies, infants were permitted to grasp objects that
were presented to them simultaneously by speakers of dif-
ferent languages or accents. The results indicate an early
preference for familiar sounds: 10-month-old Americans
prefer English speakers to French speakers (80% reach for
the toy offered by the English speaker), whereas French
babies show the opposite and symmetric preference for
their familiar sounds (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007).
White children at age 5, showed a preference for a white
other over a black other; however, when race and accent
are explicitly confounded, such that the standard American
English speaker is Black and the English speaker with
French accent is White, accent proves more influential
than race and children prefer the Black speaker (speak-
ing standard English) over the White speaker (speaking
English with a French accent; Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus, &
Spelke, under review).
Children’s preference for the familiar may be
explained by one of psychology’s best-known findings:
the mere exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968). Simple expo-
sure to a neutral object can cause people to rate it more
favorably, even when the exposure happens too quickly
for conscious processing. This effect may rely on the fact
that it is easier to process a familiar rather than an unfamiliar
stimulus (Seamon, Brody, & Kauff, 1983). Supporting
this perspective, recent work has found that people show
more liking for objects that are preceded by primes
that facilitate processing and less liking for objects that
are preceded by primes that inhibit easy processing
(Reber, Winkielman, & Schwarz, 1998; Schwarz & Clore,
2007; Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003).
Social Learning
Social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) continues to be the
dominant account of how children acquire attitudes: by
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 375 Attitudes
observing others. Indeed, new evidence suggests that
children may use this strategy to learn attitudes toward
novel objects. In one set of studies, children preferred
unfamiliar stimulus items (e.g., blicket, spoodle) chosen
by another person of their same sexgender and age. For
example, 3-year-old girls who heard that an unfamiliar girl
liked to play with blicket whereas an unfamiliar boy liked
to play with spoodle said that they would rather play with
blicket (Shutts, Banaji, & Spelke, in press). Young children
also learn attitudes from older people, particularly their
caregivers. As discussed earlier, part of this link may be
because of genetics, especially for attitudes that are par-
ticularly heritable. However, a social learning explanation
also seems likely.
Researchers have found an association between chil-
dren’s and parents’ attitudes across multiple domains. For
example, mothers’ hostile attitudes predict the development
of similar attitudes in their children (Raikkonen, Katainen,
Keskivaara, & Kelikangas-Jarvinen, 2000). Furthermore,
parents’ attitudes toward racial minorities and nontraditional
women predict their children’s attitudes toward these targets
(Sinclair, Dunn, & Lowery, 2005; Tenenbaum & Leaper,
2002), and parental prejudice also influences the frequency
and quality of young children’s interracial interactions
(Towles-Schwen & Fazio, 2001). In the only such study to
date, children’s implicit racial bias was found to be corre-
lated with that of their parents, particularly for those who
are highly identified with their caregivers (Sinclair, Dunn, &
Lowery, 2005). Thus, levels of prejudice may be transmitted
from older family members to future generations.
Classical Conditioning
First introduced by Pavlov (1927), classical conditioning is
among the most basic forms of learning. It refers to the pro-
cess whereby a person develops positive or negative associ-
ations with a previously neutral object through association
of inherently positive or negative attributes. For example, a
particular dress may gain positive associations through its
pairing with an attractive model in advertisements, whereas
African Americans may be subjected to negative evalu-
ations stemming, in part, from their negative portrayal in
the media (e.g., the repeated pairing of Black male indi-
viduals with violence). Attitude acquisition through clas-
sical conditioning remains a contentious issue, however,
in part because some researchers have found significant
effects only in situations where participants were aware
that a conditioning paradigm was being used (see Olson &
Fazio, 2001). Such results call into question the validity of
some other findings by suggesting that the effects may be
because of demand characteristics rather than classical con-
ditioning per se. However, evidence of classical condition-
ing can be present even when participants did not report
CH10.indd 370
knowledge of the paradigms used in the study, suggesting
that not all conditioning effects are due to demand charac-
teristics (Baeyens, Eelen, & van den Bergh, 1990; Olson &
Fazio, 2001).
Of course, classical conditioning accounts for acquisition
of both positive and negative attitudes, and can be used for
virtuous and nefarious purposes. Classical conditioning as
a form of learning is understood quite well, based as it is
on data from several species, including humans, and using
fear as the attitude that is induced. In classical conditioning
models, people learn fear in much the same way as they may
learn positive associations. For instance, what if every time
participants heard a bell they received an electric shock?
They would learn to fear the bell, even on trials where it was
not immediately followed by physical pain. Such results are
of great importance because fear is one of the most devastat-
ing emotions an organism can experience. At extreme levels,
fearful attitudes can significantly impair daily functioning
(Rapaport, Clary, Fayyad, & Endicott, 2005).
Unfortunately, it may be easier for humans to associate
fear with outgroup members, particularly those of another
race. In one experiment, participants showed longer-
lasting fear to racial outgroup faces that had previously
been paired with an electric shock. That is, when Whites
saw a Black face and were then shocked, they showed
a larger SCR (see the section entitled, “Measures of the
Autonomic System”) than when they received an electric
shock paired with a White face. Blacks showed a similar pat-
tern; they, too, had a more persistent fear response to racial
outgroup (in this case, White) faces. These findings suggest
that images of racial outgroup members may function as
prepared stimuli, or stimuli that are more readily associated
with fear (Olsson, Ebert, Banaji, & Phelps, 2005).
Recent research has supplemented this Pavlovian model
of fear learning with evidence suggesting that people can
acquire an attitude of fear toward objects that have been
associated with pain in others. That is, fear may be acquired
through a social learning (Bandura, 1977) process. Partic-
ipants who view a video of another person receiving
shocks linked with particular images, for example, show
signs of fearing those images but not similar ones of a
different color (Olsson, Nearing, & Phelps, 2007). This
process may be evolutionarily adaptive; the ability to
learn from others’ misfortunes may come in handy if one
has seen a family member attacked by a bear and later
encounters another furry creature wandering in the woods.
However, this process also has drawbacks, particularly if it
is overactivated. For instance, learning to fear all middle-
aged men after being robbed by one is not adaptive.
Neural evidence suggests that classical and observa-
tional fear learning may not be as different as they first
appear. The amygdala, a brain region that is known for
10/5/09 7:19:43 PM

emotional processing and is particularly involved in fear,
is recruited both when subjects watch someone else receiv-
ing shocks and when they receive shocks themselves
(Olsson et al., 2007). This finding may explain why obser-
vational learning is as effective as classically conditioned
fear when the stimulus is consciously available (Olsson &
Phelps, 2004). Notably, though amygdala activation was of
comparable magnitude when participants were anticipat-
ing pain and when they actually received a shock, other
brain regions were not similarly activated. The ACC
and the anterior insula both exhibited greater activation
during the test than in the observation phase of the experi-
ment (Olsson et al., 2007); thus, it appears that the amyg-
dala responds to anticipation of pain differently than do
other brain regions.
In summary, despite controversy surrounding the influence
of demand characteristics in classical conditioning exper-
iments, this paradigm remains a powerful tool to examine
the formation of various attitudes, particularly fear. From
studies of classical conditioning, psychologists know
that people can be taught to fear almost anything through
association with a potent negative stimulus. Indeed, some
objects (e.g., images of racial outgroup members) are quite
easily associated with fear, an association that can be dif-
ficult to unlearn.
Other stimulus items, in contrast, are quite easily associ-
ated with positive characteristics. One such target is the self.
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD ONESELF
Human beings have a capacity that is the envy of every
chimpanzee—the ability to look into and evaluate the con-
tents of their own minds. Remarkably, this capacity can be
turned on not only when evaluating all possible entities that
exist in the world “out there” but also to evaluate one’s own
worth along a subjectively meaningful good-bad continuum.
Self-esteem can be considered a primary attitude—an
evaluation of oneself. How good am I? Do I approve of what
I have done? These questions can be posed and answered
by engaging a conscious and third-person–like feeling for
oneself, an experience about which the self-esteem litera-
ture has taught scientists a great deal (Baumeister, 1993;
Crocker & Major, 1989; Gray-Little & Hafdahl, 2000; Leary,
1999, 2004; Major, Kaiser, & McCoy, 2003; Rosenberg,
1965; Swann, Chang-Schneider, & Larsen McClarty, 2007;
Twenge & Campbell, 2001). Swann and Bosson (this volume)
thoroughly review the self-esteem literature. This chapter
offers a brief glimpse into a perspective that views self-
esteem as an attitude.
The research findings detailed in the articles referenced
earlier overwhelmingly demonstrate that if there is a single
CH10.indd 371
The Attitude Toward Oneself 376
object toward which attitude is resoundingly positive,
that object is the self. Self-evaluations achieve consistency
during early adulthood and remain high before declining
after age 60 (Trzesniewski, Donnellan, & Robins, 2003).
Additional variations across people and within the same
person from circumstance to circumstance, perhaps even
moment to moment, have been investigated thoroughly,
making self-esteem a topic from which it is possible to
learn much about the nature of attitudes.
As with the measurement of attitudes in general, attempts
to create new measures of implicit self-esteem have also
grown in recent years. One such family of measures involves
looking at the degree to which one imbues the things and
people who have come to be associated with oneself with
positive regard (see Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Known as
the name-letter effect, one technique measures the uncon-
scious liking people show for the letters, and especially
the initials, of their own name (developed by Nuttin, 1985;
Krizan & Suls, 2008). Such preference can lead people to
prefer products whose brand name starts with the same let-
ter as their own name (Brendl, Chattopadhyay, Pelham, &
Carvallo, 2005) and even to marry people whose first or
last name resembles their own (Jones, Pelham, Carvallo, &
Mirenberg, 2004). People are not only attracted to those
who share their names but also to individuals with the same
birth dates. One study showed that participants judged his-
torical characters such as Rasputin less harshly when led to
believe that they shared a birthday with the unsavory char-
acter (Finch & Cialdini, 1989).
Measures of implicit self-esteem look so different from
traditional (explicit) measures that the question of what
implicit measures might predict has acquired priority. In
research with a clinical focus, measures of implicit self-
esteem have been shown to relate to narcissism (Zeigler-
Hill, 2006), symptoms of depression (Franck, de Raedt, &
de Houwer, 2007), and poor body image (Buhlmann,
Teachman, Gerbershagen, Kikul, & Rief, 2008). Such mea-
sures show more reliability than self-report questionnaires
(Farnham, Greenwald, & Banaji, 1999) and may decrease
self-presentation concerns.
Although some researchers have found high correlations
between implicit and explicit self-esteem, most others report
that two constructs are unrelated (see Dijksterhuis, Albers, &
Bongers, 2008; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000), and there are
cases in which the two forms of self-attitude are sharply dis-
sociated. For example, stressful life events may influence
implicit and explicit self-esteem differently, at least under
some circumstances. Recent Asian American immigrants,
for instance, show a quick recovery in explicit self-esteem
but persistently lowered implicit self-esteem after arriving in
the United States (Hetts, Sakuma, & Pelham, 1999). Thus,
it seems safest to say that, on average, implicit and explicit
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 377 Attitudes
self-esteem are weakly correlated. As with other attitudes
in the intergroup context, where this weak correlation has
also been found, the conclusion is that implicit and explicit
forms of self-esteem are related but sufficiently unique to be
regarded as distinct.
Unambiguously high self-esteem is associated with a
number of positive outcomes. Related to research concern-
ing the social origins of self-esteem (e.g., Murray, Griffin,
Rose, & Bellavia, 2006), positive self-regard is associated
with healthy social relationships and relationship satis-
faction (e.g., Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 2000; Neyer &
Asendorpf, 2001), as well as positive evaluations by others
(e.g., Robins, Hendin, & Trzesniewski, 2001). High self-
esteem also predicts occupational success (e.g., Judge &
Bono, 2001), subjective well-being (e.g., Diener & Diener,
1995), and positive responses to failure (Di Paula &
Campbell, 2002).
Consistently low self-regard is associated with a num-
ber of negative outcomes, including depression and other
health problems (e.g., Franck et al., 2007; Roberts, Gotlib, &
Kassel, 1996; Whisman & Kwon, 1993). People with low
self-esteem react more strongly to failures (Brown &
Dutton, 1995), experience a greater reduction in motiva-
tion after a lack of success (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000),
and exhibit more anxiety during a confrontational inter-
view (Spalding & Hardin, 1999). In fact, low self-esteem
can prospectively predict depressive symptoms (Orth,
Robins, & Roberts, 2008), as well as criminal behavior and
reduced economic prospects (Trzesniewski et al., 2006).
Some outcomes may be preferentially linked with
implicit self-esteem. For example, though depressed indi-
viduals tend to exhibit low explicit self-esteem, their
implicit self-esteem remains at levels comparable with a
nondepressed population (de Raedt, Schacht, Franck, &
de Houwer, 2006). Though this finding is surprising in
light of cognitive theories of depression, de Raedt and col-
leagues suggest that it is in line with findings suggesting
that depressed people do not lack positive self-schemas.
Perhaps implicit measures tap these underlying represen-
tations, which depressed individuals may not activate nor-
mally. The dissociation is also evident in narcissism, which
is associated with high explicit paired with low implicit
self-esteem (Zeigler-Hill, 2006; but see also Campbell,
Bosson, Goheen, Lakey, & Kernis, 2007).
Given the numerous benefits of high self-esteem, one
may wonder where this elixir comes from. Though peo-
ple show robust and high self-esteem cross-culturally,
this construct is clearly not invariable across individuals
and situations. Self-esteem is shaped by others’ favorable
(or unfavorable) opinions (e.g., Murray et al., 2006) and
people’s own upbringing, with overprotective parent-
ing linked to low implicit self-esteem and nurturing
CH10.indd 372
parenting linked to high self-esteem (de Hart, Pelham, &
Tennen, 2006). Self-esteem can also arise from the ways
in which people respond to contingencies of self-worth
(e.g., appearance, relative performance in competitions),
and early childhood experiences can determine responses
to events in these domains (Crocker & Park, 2003). Self-
esteem is also malleable across situations; for example,
evaluative conditioning has been shown to increase
self-esteem across a number of studies (Baccus, Baldwin, &
Packer, 2004; Dijksterhuis, 2004). The debate on whether
attitudes are stable or constructed lives on in debates about
self-attitudes, with evidence on both sides. On the one
hand, attitudes toward the self do show stability, as well as
individual differences that are reliable. On the other hand,
however, self-esteem is critically influenced by people and
events in the social world, in predictable and lawful ways.
From reading most of the work on self-attitudes, it is
easy to draw the conclusion that increasing positive self-
regard is something to which all should strive. In con-
trast, high rather than low self-esteem can be the cause of
violence and aggression (Baumeister, Smart, & Boden,
1996). Furthermore, high self-esteem is related to preferring
a novel ingroup to an equivalent outgroup member, sug-
gesting a link to discrimination (Gramzow & Gaertner,
2005; but see Brewer, 1999). These lines of research have
begun to question the value of the strong American belief
in pumping up positive self-regard by showing that high
self-esteem may not be the panacea it is made out to be in
the Western world.
In conclusion, although psychologists have not tradi-
tionally considered self-esteem an attitude, it does, indeed,
fall into this category. Scientists have learned that self-
attitudes are likely to be robustly positive; that self-esteem,
like other attitudes, has both implicit and explicit compo-
nents; and that these factors may differentially influence
behavioral outcomes. Self-esteem can vary within as well
as between individuals, and those people with high explicit
self-esteem do not necessarily show correspondingly high
levels of implicit self-esteem. The next section further
addresses this topic of attitude dissociations.
ATTITUDE DISSOCIATIONS
This chapter, more than others on the topic of attitudes,
has focused on the implicit preferences that people can-
not or will not report. Here, the topic of dissociations
between conscious and less conscious forms of attitudes
is addressed in greater detail, using the domain of inter-
group attitudes as a case study simply because the bulk
of the available research is focused there (see Yzerbyt &
Demoulin, volume 2, and Dovidio & Gaertner, volume 2,
10/5/09 7:19:44 PM

for a more comprehensive review of work conducted on
intergroup relations).
As with human memory, implicit and explicit attitudes
are assumed to be formed in different ways and expected
to be susceptible to different influences; that is among the
causes of their divergence (Craemer, 2007; Payne et al.,
2008). As beliefs and values about intergroup relations
have changed, in particular, the social unacceptability of
expressing negativity toward groups other than one’s own,
such attitudes have offered up a perfect place to observe
disparities between expressed and elicited attitudes.
There is no better starting place than an article that
appeared in 1989 and set off a flood of research on the
question of dissociations in automatic and controlled
intergroup attitudes. In her dissertation research, Patricia
Devine showed that on a measure that elicited attitudes
through subliminal exposure of race primes, Whites who
consciously endorsed prejudicial views of Black Americans
responded in essentially the same way as those who did
not. On other measures, where greater control over the atti-
tude expression was possible, the results looked quite dif-
ferent (Devine, 1989). Devine’s work was consistent with
existing proposals of aversive racism (Gaertner & Dovidio,
1986), which also spoke of a split between older forms of
prejudice that were explicit and blatant, and newer versions
that formed in response to shifts in American culture that
precluded such expressions. As sociologists have shown,
values of fairness and equality have undermined endorse-
ment of prejudice and discrimination, leading to a visible
shift in intergroup attitudes (Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, &
Krysan, 1997). From such observations and the ability of
a generation of methods to understand consciously inac-
cessible intergroup attitudes, a wealth of data now exist on
the dissociation between two fundamentally different forms
of attitudes that can be elicited from the same individual
toward the same group, depending on the probe that is used
(Dovidio, Kawakami, Smoak, & Gaertner, 2008; Fazio et al.,
1986; Hofmann, Gschwendner, Nosek, & Schmitt, 2005).
When examining attitudes toward stigmatized groups,
the data reveal stronger negative attitudes on implicit mea-
sures than those expressed on explicit ones. In many cases,
the effect size showing implicit group preference (usually
one’s own) can be two to three times the size obtained on
self-report measures. Situational factors can influence the
discrepancy between conscious and unconscious attitudes
and their different influences on behavior. For example,
different kinds of tests can predict different behaviors.
Implicit measures tend to predict nonverbal behaviors such
as leaning toward or away from one’s conversation partner,
whereas explicit questionnaires predict verbal behaviors
(Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2002). The difference
between explicit and implicit attitudes has been taken as a
CH10.indd 373
Attitude Dissociations 378
signature result of modern research on two attitudinal sys-
tems and has been reported in dozens of articles, making
it impossible to refer to more than a handful of them (for
reviews, see Fazio & Olson, 2003; Greenwald & Nosek,
2008; Hofmann, Gawronski, Gschwendner, Le, & Schmitt,
2005; Wilson et al., 2000). Among the underlying changes
that such a result has silently produced is a shift in thinking
about the “prejudiced personality” as an aberrant and path-
ological mental state to one that is ordinary and best under-
stood as a continuum of individual difference (Dovidio &
Gaertner, 2004).
Findings that are relevant to the question of dissocia-
tion do not come only from the intergroup literature, and
the dissociation (or lack thereof) in other domains has
sometimes proved to be surprising. For example, as might
be expected, implicit and explicit attitudes toward abortion
are highly correlated. In other cases, however, attitudes
that might be expected to correlate are instead dissociated.
There is little relationship, for instance, between whether
people say they prefer pants or skirts and the implicit pref-
erence they show for one type of clothing over the other
(Nosek, 2007).
From the basic finding that implicit and explicit prefer-
ences can diverge, several questions about the very nature of
attitudes have emerged. Does the result really indicate two
(or more) systems of thought composed of separate rep-
resentations, or do the methods of retrieving the attitude
merely tap different sides of the same underlying evalua-
tion? How is such a dissociation to be computed? Is one of
these attitudes the “truer” one? How do the attitudes predict
behavior? For those who have argued that implicit mea-
sures are not measures of attitude at all, this is an impor-
tant question. Explicitly stated attitudes have been studied
for long enough that psychologists know something about
their nature—what goes into forming them, their malle-
ability, their function. But what about implicit attitudes? If
they are so automatic, are they rigid and unbendable?
In most cases, a clear, simple, and often large differ-
ence exists between the mean values of the implicit atti-
tude and the explicit one. When these data are the focus,
there is no question that a dissociation is evident. Its spe-
cific nature takes on some interesting forms. For instance,
White Americans report much less ingroup preference
on explicit than on implicit measures; in contrast, Black
Americans report greater ingroup preference and lesser
outgroup preference on explicit measures. This is not
uncommon among other stigmatized groups; the elderly
show the same implicit preference for “young” over “old”
as their younger counterparts, and gay and lesbian individ-
uals do not show a strong preference for their own group;
indeed, approximately 40% show a preference for straight
over gay (Jost et al., 2004; Nosek, Fitzsimons, & Kay,
10/5/09 7:19:44 PM
 379 Attitudes
2007). From such findings it is possible to see the different
sources of influence that bear down on these two expres-
sions of preference.
The question of dissociation takes on a different meaning
when attitudes toward targets other than stigmatized group
members are examined. Attitudes toward more neutral tar-
gets vary greatly depending on the domain of the attitude,
but importantly, the correlation is hardly ever at zero or neg-
ative. In many cases, the correlation between implicit and
explicit attitudes is substantial (see Nosek, 2005). In other
words, the stronger the stated preference for X over Y, the
stronger the implicit preference for X over Y.
Although strong positive correlations are obtained on
attitude topics such as Black-White, Coke-Pepsi, and cats-
dogs, weak correlations are evident for topics that typically
do not represent intergroup contexts such as hot-cold and
future-past (Nosek, 2007). Although self-presentation con-
cerns do play a role with those attitudes that are strongly
susceptible to social desirability, measures tapping these
attitudes tend to show lower implicit-explicit correlations.
This is hardly the only factor accounting for the interrela-
tionship, however (notice the low correlation for hot-cold
and the strong correlation for Black-White).
Other factors, such as the distinctiveness of the atti-
tude (i.e., perceived difference of one’s own attitude
compared with that of others), the degree of personal
experience with the attitude object, and the clarity of
two poles (where the two ends of the spectrum are true
opposites), influence the degree of correlation as well.
Furthermore, attitudes that are well elaborated and high
in importance produce stronger implicit-explicit correla-
tions. From such data it is difficult to maintain a “sepa-
rate system” view of these two forms of attitude. How to
think about their association and dissociation will surely
be sorted out in the future as new ways of dividing them
become available.
AUTOMATIC ATTITUDE MALLEABILITY
The dissociation between conscious and unconscious atti-
tudes is evident when one examines the literature on
attitude change. Researchers working with explicit attitudes
typically ask questions such as: What makes a message per-
suasive? What makes people resistant to persuasion? (see
Albarracin & Vargas, this volume). Those studying implicit
attitudes ask different questions: Can something that is
inherently outside the purview of conscious awareness and
control even be a candidate for thinking about change?
If so, do the interventions differ from those that facilitate
change? How do subtle changes in the environment influ-
ence automatic attitudes? The differences between these
CH10.indd 374
questions reflect a basic contrast between the assumptions
concerning conscious and unconscious attitudes. Certainly,
research revealing neuroplasticity—that is, the ability of the
brain to rewire and reconstruct itself to meet new demands
or in response to new learning—suggests that change need
not be consciously willed. It is in the nature of the demands
made on the brain, on the new behaviors that are performed
that lead to change, regardless of whether such change is
consciously willed.
In the early years of research on implicit attitudes,
there was, indeed, the sense that their lack of openness
to conscious awareness and control must mean that they
would be rigid in response to change (Banaji, 2003). That
assumption turned out to be false. Evidence since the late
1990s has accumulated at a rapid rate to show that implicit
attitudes shift readily in response to contextual variables,
motivational states, and cognitive factors (see Blair, 2002;
Dasgupta, 2009; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Such
evidence has found a home in theoretical models that have
moved beyond the simple dual-process idea and probed
deeper into the nature of implicit social cognition, espe-
cially the rapid responses that intergroup contexts elicit
(Conrey et al., 2005; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006).
For example, attitudes toward Black Americans varied
significantly when the background of the photo represented
poor rather than middle-class neighborhoods (Wittenbrink,
Judd, & Park, 2001). Furthermore, Black female individuals
elicited more positive attitudes when thought of as female
rather than as Black (Mitchell, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003).
Exposure to positive Black exemplars (Denzel Washington,
Martin Luther King, Jr.) and negative White exemplars
(Timothy McVeigh, Jeffrey Dahmer) led to lower anti-
Black bias (Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001; see also Lowery
et al., 2001). White participants also exhibited less preju-
dice toward Black targets when subliminally primed with
pairings of Black-good and White-bad (Olson & Fazio,
2006), when participating in a session run by a Black exper-
imenter (Lowery et al., 2001), and when taking the IAT in
the presence of a likable experimenter who was perceived
as holding egalitarian views (Sinclair, Lowery, Hardin, &
Colangelo, 2005). Malleability is not limited to racial atti-
tudes; context also influences evaluations of everything
from cigarettes to Bill Clinton, Mike Tyson, chocolate, and
the beach (see Ferguson & Bargh, 2004; Ferguson, Bargh, &
Nayak, 2005). Such work is difficult to conduct using
explicit measures because participants’ self-reported atti-
tudes are quite sensitive to situational concerns.
The malleability of implicit attitudes extends to the neu-
ral level. Perceptual processing of fearful or threatening
stimuli is associated with greater amygdala activation that
is attenuated by cognitive processing of these same stim-
uli (Hariri, Mattay, Tessitore, Fera, & Weinberger, 2003).
10/5/09 7:19:45 PM

A series of shocking studies showed that outgroup members
perceived as cold and incompetent (e.g., the homeless)
are processed differently in the medial prefrontal cortex, a
brain region heavily involved in social cognition, than are
ingroup members (Harris & Fiske, 2006, 2007). Asking
participants to make individuating judgments about the
targets (e.g., “Does this person like broccoli?”) dampened
this effect, demonstrating that cognition can override auto-
matic neural responses.
One explanation for implicit attitude malleability comes
from those theorists who stress that measures of implicit
attitudes are not necessarily tapping only unconscious eval-
uations (Conrey et al., 2005; Payne, Lambert, & Jacoby,
2002). In other words, the degree of possible cognitive con-
trol in a particular social context should account for the flex-
ibility observed in such shifts. Another view sympathetic to
connectionist ways of reasoning accounts for the flexibility
of implicit attitudes by thinking of them as large networks of
associative learning (based on direct experience, mass media,
and significant others; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006;
Smith & DeCoster, 2000). Which aspects are activated
depends on the match or goodness-of-fit between preexist-
ing associations and the configuration of external inputs.
Simple exposure or practiced associations between group
and attribute demonstrate the mechanism by which such
learning effects may occur, both in creating and in chang-
ing attitudes. For example, simply seeing faces of one’s
own group may create negative outgroup attitudes. White
participants who were exposed to White faces showed
more negative implicit and explicit attitude toward Blacks
as compared with participants who did not see pictures of
faces. Though both implicit and explicit attitudes changed
as a result of seeing White faces, the change in implicit atti-
tudes was somewhat weaker than the corresponding change
in the explicit ones (Smith, Dijksterhuis, & Chaiken, 2008).
Though conscious and unconscious attitudes may change
in the same direction, the magnitude of the change may not
be equivalent. Such changes in intergroup attitudes can be
influenced by ideology, the final topic of this chapter.
IDEOLOGY
If an attitude is a strand of feeling, then an ideology is a
rope of intertwined attitudes and related fibers. Ideology
has been defined as “patterns or gestalts of attitudes”
(Billig, 1984, p. 446), “an organization of opinions, atti-
tudes, and values—a way of thinking about man and soci-
ety” (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford,
1950, p. 2), and “an interrelated set of attitudes and values
about the proper goals of society” (Tedin, 1987, p. 65).
Expressions of attitudes indicate the presence of ideology
CH10.indd 375
Ideology 380
in a variety of ways, from the intuitive expectation that
those who hold attitude X (“abortion is wrong”) are also
likely to hold attitude Y (“my faith brings me great joy”) to
the constant clash of opinions that occur at the intersection
of the left versus right of the political spectrum.
This being the case, it may surprise readers to know that, in
the 1960s, a decade when America seemed to be particularly
politicized, several prominent social scientists proclaimed that
the “end of ideology” had come (Bell, 1960/2000; Converse,
1964; Lipset, 1960; Shils, 1968). The basis for the claim
came in the form of some good arguments and some flimsy
ones: the minds of ordinary citizens (read: unsophisticated
types, unlike the elites) did not possess logically ordered
attitudes; many Americans gave “I have no idea” answers to
political questions, and when they did not, they seemed unable
to give accurate reasons for holding the attitudes. Attitudes
changed willy-nilly, including in response to the mere order
of question presentation; little coherence existed between the
affective and cognitive components of attitude, and respon-
dents showed little consistency across attitudes that should be
related (McGuire, 1985).
These arguments, and the evidence supporting them,
formed the core of the position that ideology was overrated
and did not wield significant influence in most people’s
mental lives. Some counterarguments were offered, how-
ever. Situations, critics argued, have the power to moderate
attitude expressions. And what if the measures are not sen-
sitive enough to reveal attitude consistencies? And (a radi-
cal question!) what if the elites and the common folk are
not so different, after all (Judd & Milburn, 1980; Milburn &
Judd, 1981)? Nevertheless, McGuire (1982) concluded his
discussion about the situation by clearly siding with the
end-of-ideology position: “One can hope that these dialec-
tical confrontations of thesis with antithesis will arise to a
new and improved synthesis, though a puritanical observer
might wish that the workers would show more embarrass-
ment while waiting for it to emerge” (p. 90).
Twenty-five years later, an answer emerged, less in the
form of a synthesis and more in the form of an out-and-out
challenge to the end-of-ideology position. Jost (2006), a
former student of McGuire’s, has argued that ideology is
alive and well, and very much a part of the lives of both
“ordinary” Americans and elites (see also Abramowitz &
Saunders, 1998). Jost’s evidence comes from statistics
about the number of individuals who regularly listen to
explicitly ideological talk radio and television shows, the
large number of American survey respondents (two thirds
to three fourths) who identify themselves somewhere on the
liberal-conservative continuum, and the fact that ideologi-
cal self-placement predicts many other attitudes, beliefs,
opinions, and behaviors (see also Jost, Federico, & Napier,
2009; Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008).
10/5/09 7:19:47 PM
 381 Attitudes
Starting with these observations, Jost and colleagues
have accumulated evidence revealing the presence of ide-
ology in everyday life (see, for example, Jost, 2006, 2007;
Jost, Federico, & Napier, 2009; Jost, Fitzsimons, & Kay,
2004; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003a, 2003b,
Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008). Through this work, they
have also expounded on the left-right distinction and the
psychological differences that characterize the two attitu-
dinal positions. Given its novelty, Jost’s argument, as well
the broader accumulation of information about the network
of conscious and unconscious attitudes that constitute ide-
ology, are worth examining.
The simplest prediction states those who identify with
left-wing ideology tend to adopt more liberal positions on
specific issues, respond more favorably toward liberal can-
didates, and vote for liberal politicians; the reverse should
be true for those on the right (e.g., Conover & Feldman,
1981; Jost, 2006; Kerlinger, 1984). The left and right ideo-
logical stances are differentiated along two dimensions:
those who identify as liberal tend to show less tolerance
of inequality and more tolerance of change than those who
identify as conservative (Jost, Fitzsimons, & Kay, 2004).
The very definition of conservatism implies a desire to
keep things as they are, and indeed, liberals and conser-
vatives think differently about modern social structures.
Individuals who see inequality as group based tend to iden-
tify with their country’s more liberal party, whereas those
who see inequality as meritocracy based tend to identify
with more conservative ideologies (Jost, 2006; Napier &
Jost, 2008; Sibley & Wilson, 2007).
The left-right divide also indicates a difference in ori-
entation toward the status quo, which right-leaning people
tend to support and left-leaning people tend to oppose (Jost
et al., 2009). Conservatives are more likely to oppose poli-
cies such as affirmative action, for example, and preju-
dice seems to play a large part in this stance despite the
“principled” (race-neutral) objections conservatives say
they are making (Federico & Sidanius, 2002; Sidanius,
Pratto, & Bobo, 1996). Rationalizations for inequality can
partially account for the greater happiness of conserva-
tives as compared with liberals; explaining inequality in
ways that do not challenge current social structures medi-
ates the relationship between political orientation and
subjective well-being, and increasing economic inequal-
ity widens the gap between liberals’ and conservatives’
happiness, perhaps because liberals are more troubled by
such disparity (Napier & Jost, 2008). Though conserva-
tives sometimes argue that liberals are just oversensitive,
liberals are, in fact, more accurate at identifying preju-
dicial attitudes. When asked to determine behaviors that
are indicative of racism, liberals more accurately select
those that correlate highly with multiple measures of
CH10.indd 376
racial bias (e.g., the IAT and explicit self-report scales;
Livingston, 2009).
Though conservatives show a great deal of tolerance for
social inequality, they do not show the same level of accep-
tance toward ambiguity and lack of structure. Liberals tend
to be more open to new experiences (Jost, 2006) and novel
stimulus items, including works of art (Wilson, 1973), for-
eign films, and foreign travel. They engage in more cogni-
tive complexity and have a lower need for closure than do
conservatives. And while liberals show higher preferences
for poetry (which is often ambiguous) and tattoos (which
may reflect social change and the greater acceptability of
modifying one’s body), conservatives show high opinions
of fraternities, sororities, sports utility vehicles, watching
television, and drinking alcohol (Jost et al., 2008).
Perhaps stemming from a distaste of ambiguous situa-
tions, conservatives tend to experience more fear of threat
and loss, a higher need for order, and a greater anxiety
concerning death than do many liberals (Jost et al., 2009).
They are more likely to believe that the world is danger-
ous (Duckitt, 2001), a belief that pairs with social confor-
mity to influence authoritarian attitudes. Authoritarianism,
together with social dominance (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001),
has been found to influence intergroup attitudes; thus, one’s
political orientation can have a strong impact on one’s atti-
tudes and behaviors toward members of other groups
(Duckitt, Wagner, du Plessis, & Birum, 2002). In line with
this finding, conservatives tend to form more negative atti-
tudes toward people engaging in behavior they perceive to
be immoral (Haidt & Hersh, 2001). And, as expected from
the very definition of what it means to be liberal and con-
servative, liberals tend to prefer social change more than
their conservative counterparts (Jost et al., 2008).
It is important to note that this research does not make
claims about causality, which can be bidirectional. People
frequently form their political attitudes on the basis of
already-established beliefs about the social structure within
which they find themselves. The influence of attitudes can
go both ways, however; one’s attitudes toward inequality
and the status quo can influence political affiliation, and
political ideology can influence attitudes toward novel stim-
ulus items. For example, liberals may favor foreign travel
because of their general openness to new experiences, and
such travel likely provides the experiences that feed into the
further adoption of liberal attitudes.
Several scholars have taken exception to these broad
characterizations of liberals and conservatives. Greenberg
and Jonas (2003) point out that extremism is not limited to
conservatives. However, liberal extremism is much less com-
mon than extremism on the right side of the political scale.
Furthermore, though the exceptions pointed out by Greenberg
and Jonas—for example, political conservatives who appear
10/5/09 7:19:48 PM

to be seeking change—do exist, they are exceptions that
prove the general rule, and many examples of conservative
“change” are actually attempts to undo liberal changes (Jost,
Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003a).
Others have pointed out that conservatives may hold to
broader moral convictions than do liberals (e.g., Haidt &
Graham, 2007). Liberals tend to explain their judgments of
right and wrong by referencing autonomy, or the idea that
everyone has the right to do whatever they please as long as
they are not hurting anyone, and by the fairness/reciprocity
principle, which states that it is right to treat others well.
Although conservatives also rely on these two ethics, three
others are also foundational to their thinking: ingroup/
loyalty (e.g., it is wrong to perform actions that offend
one’s community), authority/respect, and purity/sanctity
(e.g., it is wrong to do things that are not in line with God’s
plan for humans; Haidt & Hersh, 2001).
Even more so than individual attitudes, the umbrella
status of ideology prompts the question of origins. Where
do particular orientations come from? Cultural influences
are an obvious input, as are early developmental influ-
ences. For example, people who were highly reactive as
4-month-old infants (e.g., those who exhibited strong
emotional responses) tend to hold more positive attitudes
toward religion and less positive attitudes toward risk than
others when they reached the age of 15 years. Low-reactive
infants, in contrast, grow into adolescents who hold favor-
able attitudes toward visiting new places and not worrying
excessively about unrealistic events (Kagan & Snidman,
2004). The highly influential constellation of attitudes that
compromise ideology may originate in infancy and even
earlier, in the structures of one’s culture that were estab-
lished long before one’s birth.
SUMMARY
Attitudes—the fundamental orientation to evaluate people,
other living beings, things, events, and ideas along a good-
bad dimension—have been studied with vigor through
much of the 20th century. This chapter focuses in some
depth on the question of measurement and the conceptual
issues it has raised in recent decades. It also attempted to
show the rich and varied ways in which psychologists have
probed attitudes, changing in the process the very way in
which we understand this concept today. The most promi-
nent lessons from recent decades have been the benefit of
a simpler definition, treating the concept alongside other
mental constructs especially memory, tapping its less con-
scious aspects, and allowing new methods to reveal its
nature rather than abiding to a preconceived notion of what
attitudes should be.
CH10.indd 377
References 382
This chapter introduces work on the origins of attitudes
for the first time. Research on nonhuman primates and
infants is just beginning, and the early returns indicate that
it will teach us much about unique attitudes that charac-
terize human minds and that can grow only in complex
social environments while also supporting the idea of the
continuity of life. Research on young children has been
surprising in revealing the presence of implicit intergroup
attitudes that are just as fully formed as in adults, even
though explicit attitudes vary across development. If the
number of seemingly spontaneous symposia and confer-
ences are an indication, research at the intersection of
social, cognitive, and developmental psychology will con-
tinue to generate interest and break down silly boundaries
that currently separate areas of psychology.
The large remainder of the chapter focuses on the bread
and butter work of social psychologists who study attitudes,
starting with the self, and looking outward to attitudes
toward social groups. Here the main lessons have been the
dissociations between conscious and unconscious forms of
attitudes, as well as their malleability. That attitudes are
not always consciously accessible or controllable, but nev-
ertheless guide behavior, has been a theme of much of the
work that is reviewed. Questions of how control may be
asserted over attitudes that are consciously desired but out
of reach and the ethics of changing less visible attitudes
will require attention in the future. In this century, most of
which lies ahead, psychologists have much to understand
about the preferences people have, routinely acquire, and
rely on to muddle through their ordinary lives. They will,
no doubt, also speak about the extraordinary effects that
even the most ordinary preferences create in shaping the
quality of lives. Indeed, what social psychologists have
learned about preferences has always been of general inter-
est because this simplest orientation to evaluate as good
and bad underlies so much of individual and group happi-
ness, safety, and progress.
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Chapter 11
Attitudes and Persuasion
From Biology to Social Responses to Persuasive Intent
DOLORES ALBARRACÍN AND PATRICK VARGAS
This [attitude] concept is probably the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology.
One of the authors of this chapter recently commented to
a colleague, “If I read one more paper that opens with that
Allport quote about attitude as the ‘most distinctive and
indispensable concept’ in social psychology, I’m probably
going to scream.” The Allport Quote is used in empirical
articles, book chapters, conference presentations, hand-
books, and lectures worldwide. Alas, here we are, open-
ing with The Quote. Why? Because Allport’s claim is as
profoundly true today as it was when he first wrote it more
than 70 years ago.
Despite being almost a cliché, The Quote can be used
to illustrate several important, basic points about attitudes.
First, attitudes are evaluations: one of us expressed an
attitude—an intense dislike of clichés (which, forgive
us for being hypocritical, may unintentionally emerge in
our writing). Second, attitudes are important because we
hold them toward a variety of different objects—people,
places, things, ideas, actions, and so forth. Third, attitudes
continue to be at the center of social psychology because
they are complex and difficult to study. We may like some
aspects of an attitude object, but not others (The Quote,
itself, is good; its overuse is bad). Fourth, attitudes keep
us interested because they may be measured and expressed
in a variety of ways—behaviorally, affectively, cogni-
tively, implicitly, and explicitly. Fifth, attitudes are formed
and changed in a variety of different ways, with varying
amounts of cognitive deliberation (e.g., repeated expo-
sure to stimuli may be outside of conscious awareness or
subject to careful cognitive deliberation) and awareness of
We thank Andrew Miller for invaluable assistance with this chapter. The research was facilitated by support from the National Institutes
of Health (grants K02-MH01861 and R01-NR08325).
394
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
—Allport (1935)
the source of change. These basic claims about attitudes
are relatively uncontested but represent only a tiny fraction
of the extant research on attitudes and persuasion.
Not surprisingly, the complex nature of attitudes has
intrigued scholars for several millennia, often in the context
of persuasion. Aristotle, for example, defined rhetoric as the
“art of discovering, in a particular case, the available means
of persuasion.” In his view, speakers use their personal
character to make their speech credible (ethos), stir emo-
tions in their audience (pathos), and prove a real or apparent
truth by means of persuasive arguments (logos). Because
of this combination of power, emotion, and argumentation,
Aristotle was quite disapproving of many of the persuasive
messages used by the sophists of his day. In modern times,
social psychologists have studied similar phenomena but
have often replaced disdain with admiration for the human
ability to elicit compliance without a need for coercion.
Politicians were on the radar for Aristotle and remained
there for contemporary scientists interested in persuasion.
Psychologists developed experimental methods for study-
ing persuasion during the first part of the 20th century when
events leading up to World War II made the experimen-
tal study of persuasion a topic of paramount importance.
Following the practices of the Roman conglomerate, both
Lenin and Stalin set in motion political and social propa-
ganda that controlled and unified an empire of otherwise
divided nations that shared no cultural heritage. Millions
of consistently designed posters from the Soviet era sur-
vive as a testament of a brilliantly orchestrated persuasion

machine. And, of course, the Soviet propaganda inspired
Hitler ’s ministers to systematically persuade German citi-
zens of various aspects of Nazi ideology, including the need
to isolate and exterminate “undesirable” ethnic groups.
Social psychologists started to methodically study per-
suasion in an attempt to understand how to create American
propaganda that could be as effective as the Bolsheviks’
and the Nazis’, though this time in the service of honorable
values. During the 1950s and 1960s, Yale University
Professor Carl Hovland received government funding to
identify methods to strengthen and maintain American
troops’ morale. Some of these methods may still be used
on U.S. troops, but Hovland’s theory of persuasion has
probably been more long lasting. According to Hovland
and Weiss (1951), a message is persuasive when it pro-
vides recipients with some concrete or symbolic reward.
For example, recipients are more persuaded by a credible,
trustworthy, or attractive communicator because approval
by such sources is intrinsically rewarding.
The theory of persuasion put forth by Hovland and his
collaborators was gradually replaced by theories of the
cognitive processes that accompany persuasion. Attentive
message recipients are rarely passive consumers. They tend
to be cognitively active: processing and transforming infor-
mation, and generating their own take on it (Brock, 1967;
Greenwald, 1968). A message may state that President
G. W. Bush was an effective commander-in-chief, but
critical message recipients may be overwhelmed by their
recollection of evidence to the contrary. Message recipients
have been also known to engage in different forms of
processing that different psychologists term “systematic,”
“peripheral,” “elaborative,” “associative,” and so on. These
persuasion processes are an important consideration in this
chapter, as are the psychological evaluations that result
from mere observation of environmental events (e.g., an
object that produces positive consequences).
The study of attitudes in persuasion and other contexts,
however, would be incomplete if we ignored the fact that
our evaluations are also shaped by biology. Many of the
methods to study these correlates have become more
widely available in recent decades, and methods that did
not exist in prior decades can now be used to study atti-
tudes. This chapter also makes reference to lines of inquiry
related to the brain correlates of attitudes and connections
with the biological bases of personality as studied in the
fields of personality psychology and behavior genetics.
DEFINING ATTITUDES
There is no need of social psychological research to
appreciate the astonishing diversity of human attitudes.
Defining Attitudes 395
Different individuals and social groups vary in their food
preferences, their endorsement of women’s participation in
political and work life, and their preferences for different
forms of art. Beyond a basic enjoyment of babies, national
symbols, and sweet tastes, there seems to be more attitude
variance than invariance. Over the course of many decades,
similar observations have fueled a quest for knowledge
about environmental influences on individuals’ likes and
dislikes. Moreover, in recent years, we have learned more
about the interaction between environmental influences and
the biological and genetic bases that shape attitudes. This
edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology arrives at a
time when this realization is acute.
Attitudes are implicit or explicit object evaluations and,
therefore, have implications for all areas of social life. This
chapter describes attitudes as stemming from biological
and environmental sources (cf. “nature” and “nurture”),
as depicted in Figure 11.1. Biological sources entail the
genetic and biological bases of general patterns of affective
valence and arousal. Environmental sources may be either
active or passive, and influence affective, cognitive, and
behavioral responses. A seemingly passive environment
triggers cognitive processes that often, but not always,
require little attention to or involvement with the attitude
object. A seemingly active environment can elicit those
same processes but entails awareness of influence intent
and may arouse corresponding defense mechanisms (e.g.,
resistance and reactance). For example, if you observe that
an object has positive attributes, this rarely leads you to
resist liking the object; however, receiving a call from a
telemarketer who tries to persuade you to donate money
to the Atlantic Paranormal Society does tend to generate
resistance to persuasion. The cognitive processes elicited
when people are and are not aware of influence attempts
are the subjects of this chapter.
Biological Sources:
Personality, Genes, and
Neurotransmitters that Alter
General Affective Arousal and Valence
Attitudes
Environmental Sources:
Cognitive and Affective Reactions to
Seemingly Passive and Active
Environments
Figure 11.1 Sources of attitudes.
396 Attitudes and Persuasion
BIOLOGICAL SOURCES OF ATTITUDES:
HOW BIOLOGY AND GENES INFLUENCE
AFFECTIVE VALENCE AND AROUSAL
There is a kernel of truth to the “snips and snails, and puppy
dogs’ tails” versus “sugar and spice, and everything nice”
nursery rhyme. Boys and girls are different; they obviously
differ biologically, and they also tend to differ attitudinally.
But to what extent do biological differences influence
psychological and attitudinal differences? From the 1960s to
the 1990s, many physicians and psychologists believed that
psychological sex differences were entirely socially con-
structed, that people were “psychosexually neutral at birth,”
(Diamond & Sigmundson, 1997, p. 298). The heartbreaking
case of David Reimer helped disprove that theory.
Reimer was born a boy who, at the age of 8 months,
had his penis destroyed in a circumcision operation. As
experts advised about the convenience of raising him
as a girl, Reimer ’s testes were removed at 22 months as
part of a male-to-female sex “reassignment” effort. For
years this case was reported in the popular media (using
pseudonyms Joan/John) as a success; “Joan” was said
to be successfully developing as a normal woman. “The
effect[s] of such reports were widespread for theory and
practice. Sociology, psychology, and women’s study texts
were rewritten . . .” (Diamond & Sigmundson, 1997, p. 299)
to suggest that genetic influences on psychological sex
differences were minimal. The truth, though, is that
Reimer ’s childhood was far from normal. In terms of atti-
tudes, young Joan was more like a John: s/he didn’t like
makeup, expressed a desire to shave, preferred boys’ toys
to girls’, liked to dress up in men’s clothing, enjoyed play-
ing soldier, and preferred hanging around other boys.1
Of course, we do not intend to suggest that psychosexual
identity can be subsumed by the attitude concept, but this
case overwhelmingly suggests that important biological
influences on attitudes exist.
Biological influences on attitudes may be dramatically
observed in unusual cases, such as Reimer’s, or where mono-
zygotic twins have been separated near birth. Monozygotic
twins share the same genetic material, so when they have
been raised apart from one another they provide an excel-
lent natural experiment for examining the influence of
genes and environments on psychological characteristics.
Such cases are quite rare, but a study of 100 monozygotic
twins reared apart has been ongoing since 1979 (Bouchard,
Lykken, McGue, Segal, & Tellegen, 1990). On measures
1 Atage 14, Reimer chose to resume living as a male, and at 32, he
chose to reveal his identity to help others avoid similar suffering.
Tragically, Reimer committed suicide in 2004.
of psychological interests, monozygotic twins reared apart
obtained an average correlation of .41; monozygotic twins
reared together averaged .49. On measures of social atti-
tudes, monozygotic twins reared apart obtained an average
correlation of .45; monozygotic twins reared together aver-
aged .43 (Bouchard et al., 1990). Thus, substantial evidence
has been reported that attitudes may be influenced by biol-
ogy, but these studies address the issue at a molar level.
Next, we consider biological influences on attitudes at more
molecular levels, and we begin with a consideration of atti-
tudinal structure and its relation to personality.
The structure of an attitude can be understood using
models of affective feelings. A popular model of the struc-
ture of affect and emotions incorporates the dimensions
of positive versus negative valence and high versus low
arousal (Bradley, Codispoti, Cuthbert, & Lang; 2001;
Russell, 2003; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985; for reviews, see
Clore & Schnall, 2005; Schimmack & Crites, 2005). We
may feel sad, angry, content, or excited, and these four
states vary not only in their negative or positive valence
but also in their associated arousal (Russell, 2003). Arousal
has proved to be an elusive term but generally comprises
autonomic activation and may be measured by changes in
skin conductance, heart rate, or brain waves (see Bradley &
Lang, 2007; Cacioppo, Berntson, & Crites, 1996). Feelings
of anxiousness, tension, alertness, and excitement share
high autonomic activation or arousal (e.g., high heart and
breathing rate), whereas feelings of sadness and content-
ment share low autonomic activation or arousal (e.g., lower
heart and breathing rate; somnolence).
Given that attitudes are valenced responses (positive vs.
negative), they can also be mapped onto a model with
valence and arousal as distinct dimensions. This model is
graphically depicted in Figure 11.2. On the valence axis,
individuals may dislike or like a presidential candidate, and
may dislike or like a particular food. Furthermore, attitudes
can be mapped onto the arousal dimension because they
vary in importance, confidence, or the degree to which
they elicit strong emotional responses such as excitement
(see Cuthbert, Schupp, Bradley, Birbaumer, & Lang, 2000;
Fabrigar, MacDonald, & Wegener, 2005; Lang, Öhman, &
Vaitl, 1988). For example, highly involving objects such
as abortion, God, and marijuana legalization often trigger
strong attitudes that are infused with feelings and con-
nect to other important attitudes, such as self-esteem (the
evaluations of oneself as a person; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993;
Fabrigar et al., 2005). These attitudes are often reported as
extreme when individuals complete attitude scales (Judd &
Brauer, 1995), are held with high confidence (Abelson,
1988), are easy to recall (Judd & Brauer, 1995), and are fer-
vently defended against external attacks (Johnson, Maio, &
Smith-McLallen, 2005; Petty, Tormala, & Rucker, 2004).
 Biological Sources of Attitudes: How Biology and Genes Influence Affective Valence and Arousal
 
Valence


Arousal



Figure 11.2 Dimensions of valence and arousal.
Adhering to a valence/arousal model does not require
dogmatic adherence to a circumplex (see also Remington,
Fabrigar, & Visser, 2000). For example, objects with
extremely positive and negative valence are often important
and generate high autonomic arousal (for a review, see
Bradley et al., 2001). In this case, high positive and nega-
tive valences are associated with high arousal, whereas
neutral valences are associated with low arousal. If one
were to map objects onto independent valence and arousal
dimensions, they probably would not be evenly distrib-
uted among all four quadrants but rather in a U-type of
pattern (see Bradley et al., 2001; Remington et al., 2001;
Figure 11.3). Nevertheless, these two dimensions have
interesting applications in the attitude literature and con-
nect with stable response patterns that are grounded in biol-
ogy and genetics.
Interestingly, considerable research indicates that specific
structures in the brain respond to stimuli in ways that sug-
gest that valence and arousal are not easy to separate. In
particular, the amygdala. an almond-shaped group of
neurons located deep in the medial temporal lobes of the
brain, plays an important role in evaluation (Hamann, Ely,
Hoffman, & Kilts, 2002; Irwin et al., 1996). The amygdala
is particularly engaged during affective judgments of emo-
tional pictures, words, and odors (Cunningham, Raye, &
Johnson, 2004; Phan et al., 2004; Royet, Plailly, Delon-
Martin, Kareken, & Segebarth, 2003), when the target
objects are negative (vs. positive) stimuli (Cunningham,
Johnson, Gatenby, Gore, & Banaji, 2003; Morris et al.,
1996; Reekum et al., 2007), and when the stimuli have
397
Valence


Arousal
Figure 11.3 Hypothetical distribution of valence and arousal.
emotional meaning (Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Lee,
1999). Moreover, the amygdala is connected with the insula
and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and these three
structures can collectively respond to both valence and
arousal (Cunningham et al., 2004; Cunningham & Zelazo,
2007; Rempel-Clower, 2007; Wright et al., 2008). The visual
cortex also appears to respond to both valence and arousal,
as judged from a functional magnetic resonance imaging
study revealing greater activation when participants viewed
pleasant and unpleasant images, compared with neutral
images (Lang et al., 1998).
Personality as the Biological Core of Stable
Valence and Arousal Patterns
Being stable patterns of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors
(Allport, 1937; Cattell, 1946; McCrae & Costa, 2008;
Mischel & Shoda, 2008), personality cuts across objects
and times, and may influence and be influenced by
specific attitudes. The general assumption, however, is
that personality is, in part, biologically driven, and it is not
difficult to see how personality connects with the valence
and arousal dimensions in Figure 11.2. For example,
Eysenck (Eysenck, 1967; Eysenck, Eysenck, & Educational
and Industrial Testing Service, 1975) characterized person-
ality as linked to biological and genetic factors manifested
in the three major traits of neuroticism, extraversion, and
psychoticism. Neuroticism is the disposition to experience
negative affect, and it appears to be relatively stable over
the lifetime (Eysenck, 1967; John & Srivastava, 1999).
398 Attitudes and Persuasion
This trait has been found to predict the onset of depres-
sion and anxiety (Angst & Clayton, 1986; Boyce, Parker,
Barnett, Cooney, & Smith, 1991; Hirschfeld et al., 1989;
Kendler, Neale, Kessler, Heath, & Eaves, 1993), and cor-
relates with negative attitudes toward a variety of objects.
For example, neuroticism reportedly correlates with feeling
dissatisfaction after eating chocolate (Müller, Dettmer, &
Macht, 2008), sexual guilt in both men and women (r  .31
in both cases; p < .05; Heaven, Fitzpatrick, Craig, Kelly, &
Sebar, 2000), and women’s dissatisfaction with sexual
experiences (r  .36; p < .05; Heaven et al.). Neuroticism
also correlates with negative evaluations of medical treat-
ments and of physical symptoms (r  .14, p < .05; and
r  .46, p < .001; Cox, Borger, Asmundson, & Taylor,
2000), as well as negative attitudes toward working with
patients with AIDS (b  .21, p < .001; Knussen & Niven,
1999). Moreover, neuroticism has been linked to negative
attitudes toward work (for a review, see Tokar, Fischer, &
Subich, 1998), beliefs that work interferes with personal
relationships (Mughal, Walsh, & Wilding, 1996), and per-
ceived stress associated with work (Decker & Borgen,
1993: Spector & O’Connell, 1994). There are times, how-
ever, in which neuroticism correlates with positive atti-
tudes. For example, despite the reported guilt elicited by
eating chocolate, neuroticism is associated with favorable
attitudes toward chocolate (r  .27; p < .001; Müller
et al., 2008) as well as illicit substance use (r  .30; p < .001;
Francis, 1996). Overall, these patterns suggest that neu-
roticism correlates with negative attitudes about all objects
except for those that are instrumental to improving nega-
tive feelings (e.g., chocolate).
Although, by definition, neuroticism entails negative
affect and consequently negative attitudes, neuroticism
can also entail high levels of anxiety (Eysenck, 1967).
Hence, the higher arousal of neurotics could influence
attitude properties related to arousal. Up to now, however,
almost no research has related neuroticism to attitude
extremity or arousal. One exception to the absence of
research in this area comes from an analysis of reactions
to different types of advertisements. Over two studies,
Mooradian (1996) found that, as one might expect, pre-
senting positive and negative ads yielded, respectively,
more positive and negative attitudes toward the ads (asso-
ciations between neuroticism and attitude extremity for
positive and negative ads, respectively,   .10 and .07;
p < .001). Although preliminary, these results suggest a need
to further research the relations between neuroticism and
negatively valenced attitudes, and how neuroticism relates
to sensitivity to valence, as well as attitude extremity
and importance. Even when neuroticism is more likely
to implicate valence than arousal, the effects of arousal
should not be ignored.
Not surprisingly, traits predominantly related to arousal
(e.g., extraversion/introversion, impulsivity) are also related
to valence and purportedly have a biological substrate. For
example, extraversion comprises sociability and risk tak-
ing but also optimism and is contrasted with introversion,
which comprises introspection and reservation but also pes-
simism (Taub, 1998). Eysenck (1967, 1975) conceptualized
extraversion as a result of “cortical excitation” and
“inhibition” (see Pavlov, 1928), which was initially defined
as the degree of engagement of the ascending reticular acti-
vating system of the brain (Moruzzi & Magoun, 1949), and
later as resulting from a limbic-arousal system, a mono-
amine-oxidase system, and a pituitary-adrenal system
(Eysenck, 1990a, 1990b). In summary, traits associated
with arousal (and valence) have been linked to various bio-
logical systems that may also influence attitudes.
As a radical biological theorist of personality, Eysenck
(1967) devoted intense effort to precisely tie extraversion
to corresponding responses in a particular arousal system.
For example, Eysenck proposed that deficits in arousal
underlie extraverts’ search for external stimulation (see
also Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985; Ludvigh & Happ, 1974;
Shigehisa & Symons, 1973). Consistent with this hypoth-
esis, past research has demonstrated that extraverts have
lesser cerebral blood flow during resting states than do
introverts (Fischer, Wik, & Fredrikson, 1997; Mathew,
Weinman, & Barr, 1984). Although individual differ-
ences in extraversion have traditionally been linked to
high experienced arousal, this research points to a corre-
spondingly underactive brain during rest (but see Posner,
Russell, & Peterson, 2005, for the relation between experi-
enced and physiological arousal).
One particularly fruitful approach to understanding the
arousal dimension of affect and attitudes is Reinforcement
Sensitivity Theory (Gray, 1970, 1972, 1982, 1991; Gray &
McNaughton, 2000). According to the theory (Gray, 1991;
Gray & McNaughton, 2000), different regulatory systems
underlie responses to reward and punishment: (1) the behav-
ioral approach system (BAS), (2) the behavioral inhibition
system (BIS), and (3) the fight-flight-freezing system. First,
the BAS is engaged by positively valanced stimuli, rewards,
or relief from punishment, and regulates approach behav-
iors (Gray, 1991; Gray & McNaughton, 2000). Associated
characteristics involve impulsivity, risk taking, and predis-
position for mania (Gray, 2000). Second, the BIS is engaged
by conflicting goals leading to the need to inhibit one of
these goals (Gray, 1991; Gray & McNaughton, 2000). This
system is presumably sensitive to punishment, nonreward,
and novelty, and is involved in reducing negative or pain-
ful outcomes by inhibiting movement toward goals (Gray,
1991; Gray & McNaughton, 2000). Associated psychopa-
thology includes high anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder,
 Biological Sources of Attitudes: How Biology and Genes Influence Affective Valence and Arousal
and obsessive-compulsive disorder (Gray & McNaughton,
2000). Third, the fight-flight-freeze system regulates escape/
avoidance behavior and is engaged by aversive stimuli.
Associated characteristics and disorders include fear, avoid-
ant personality disorder, phobias, and panic attacks (Gray &
McNaughton, 2000).
Even though BAS and BIS closely align with approach to
positive stimuli and avoidance of negative stimuli, scholars
have debated whether the BAS system is related to only posi-
tive emotions and approach behavior, or instead to both pos-
itive and negative emotions, as well as active approach
and avoidance. Empirical evidence supports both of these
claims. On the one hand, self-reported BAS is associated
with greater left frontal cortical activity, approach behavior,
and positive affect, whereas self-reported BIS is associated
with greater right frontal cortical activity and negative affect
(Sutton & Davidson, 1997). On the other hand, arousal
seems to be associated with asymmetric frontal activity that
responds to both elation and anger (Harmon-Jones & Allen,
1998; Hewig, Hagemann, Seifert, Naumann, & Bartussek,
2006). This finding suggests that approach can also involve
negative emotions.
More generally, impulsivity and particularly the hyper-
active/impulsive form of attention-deficit/hyperactivity
disorder (ADHD) are linked to generalized low arousal,
as judged by slower blood flow in the brain (Fischer et al.,
1997; Mathew et al., 1984) and reduced activity in fron-
tal and striatal regions that are responsible for impulse
control (Amen & Carmichael, 1997; Lou, Henriksen, &
Bruhn, 1984; Lou, Henriksen, Bruhn, Borner, & Nielsen,
1989; Rubia et al., 1999). At the same time, this low
baseline arousal (which is not always found, see e.g.,
Zuckerman, 1990) may render a predisposition to experi-
ence arousal in the presence of external and, in particular,
interesting stimuli. High-sensation seekers, for example,
manifest greater increases in both heart rate and ampli-
tude of event-related potentials than low-sensation seek-
ers in the presence of interesting stimuli (e.g., r  .67;
Pierson, Le Houezec, Fossaert, Dubal, & Jouvent,
1999; Smith, Perlstein, Davidson, & Michael, 1986;
Smith, Davidson, Smith, Goldstein, & Perlstein, 1989;
Zuckerman, Simons, & Como, 1988; but see de la Pena,
1992, for a review of inconsistent findings). In this light,
highly impulsive individuals may be highly aroused by
certain stimuli, and hence their attitudes may be more
extreme, more confident, or perceived as more important.
Up to now, however, researchers have neither theorized
about nor researched the attitude strength implications
of individual differences in traits associated with sta-
ble valence and arousal patterns. This mission seems
imperative for the upcoming generation of attitude
research.
399
Genetics and Neurotransmitters
Although pinpointing one gene that explains a particular
behavioral pattern currently seems like an impossible
endeavor, research has identified some important genetic
markers for the traits of neuroticism and impulsivity
(for a summary, see Table 11.1). To begin, quantitative
genetic studies have shown that about 40% of the vari-
ance in neuroticism has a genetic basis (Jang, Livesly, &
Vernon, 1996; Loehlin, 1992). Identifying specific genes
for neuroticism, however, has been challenging, and
efforts have concentrated on genes related to the trans-
port and reception of serotonin. The results from these
attempts have not always been consistent and together
suggest small associations. For example, two studies com-
pared individuals with extremely high and low levels of
neuroticism. Although one of these studies revealed five
loci that differed across individuals with high and low
levels of neuroticism (Fullerton et al., 2003), the other
found no significant differences in these loci (Nash et al.,
2004). A more recent study with eight DNA pools from
participants with extreme neuroticism scores provided a
whole-genome analysis of associations with neuroticism
(Shifman et al., 2008). This second study found no single
locus that accounted for more than 1% of the variance in
neuroticism but did identify a polymorphism of the
PDE4D gene (rs702543) associated with neuroticism (1%
of the variance). Although this gene has been consistently
implicated in major depression (Scott, Perini, Shering, &
Whalley, 1991; Zhang et al., 2002), its low explanatory
power in this study suggests that multiple loci likely sup-
port differences in neuroticism.
As abnormalities in the central serotoninergic system
play a critical role in the cause of major depression and
anxiety disorders (Coccaro & Murphy, 1990; Maes &
Metzer, 1995), it is not surprising that neuroticism has
been linked to the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR).
The serotonin transporter influences serotoninergic
Table 11.1 Summary of Trait Heritability and Associated Genes
Neuroticism Impulsivity
% of trait 40% 40–60%
explained by
heritability
Genes that PDE4D (phosphodiesterase D4 (dopamine transporter
have been 4 D gene) gene)
identified as 5-HTTLPR (serotonin DRD2 and DRD4
related transporter gene) (dopamine receptor genes)
DAT1 (dopamine
transporter gene)
CNTRF (ciliary
neurotrophic factor gene)
400 Attitudes and Persuasion
neurotransmission by affecting reuptake of synaptic
serotonin, which varies among individuals and is abnor-
mal in individuals who suffer from anxiety and depres-
sion (Metzer & Arora, 1988; Owens & Nemeroff, 1994).
Although this gene and dysregulation of the serotoninergic
system would seem to be excellent candidates for explain-
ing neuroticism, studies have failed to provide consistent
supportive evidence. Lesch et al. (1996) reported that dif-
ferences in the 5-HTTLPR accounted for 3% to 4% of the
variability in neuroticism in two predominantly male sam-
ples with extreme neuroticism scores. However, five subse-
quent studies (Ball et al., 1997; Ebstein et al., 1997; Flory
et al., 1999; Jorn et al., 1998; Nakamura et al., 1997) have
failed to replicate this finding, casting a shadow of doubt
on whether the serotonin transporter gene is involved at
all. All in all, the PDE4D and 5-HTTLPR genes are likely
to play some role in negative affectivity and should be
examined in relation to negative attitudes as well.
Like neuroticism, an estimated 40% to 60% of the
variance of impulsivity is inherited (Bouchard, 1994;
Fulker, Eysenck, & Zuckerman, 1980; Loehlin, 1992;
Rietveld, Hudziak, Bartels, van Beijsterveldt, & Boomsma,
2004), although the genetic influence is attenuated by
such factors as religious upbringing (Boomsma, de Geus,
van Baal, & Koopmans, 1999). Furthermore, many specific
attitudes related to impulsivity have considerable herita-
bility. For example, high heritability has been observed in
attitudes toward alcohol (51%; Perry, 1973), extreme and
dogmatic attitudes (more than 50%; Martin et al., 1986), as
well attitudes toward roller coasters, practicing sports, the
death penalty for murder, abortion on demand, and reading
books (Olson, Vernon, Harris, & Jang, 2001). Moreover,
attitudes with high heritability indexes are also highly
accessible, highly resistant to change, and more frequently
sought out in selecting attractive others (Olson et al.;
Tesser, 1993). These attitude properties seem to align well
with the arousal dimension of affect and attitudes, indi-
cating that not only valence but also strength/arousal are
likely to be biologically based.
To date, the genetic basis of impulsivity has been at
least partially established. Alleles of the dopamine recep-
tor D4 (DRD4) gene are associated with the trait of nov-
elty seeking, which correlates with impulsive sensation
seeking (e.g., r  .15; Bailey, Breidenthal, Jorgensen,
McCracken, & Fairbanks, 2007; Ebstein et al., 1996). The
long allele correlates with high levels of sensation seeking
and the short allele with low-to-moderate levels of this
trait (Ebstein et al., 1996). However, this finding has been
replicated in about half of the studies that have tested this
association (Prolo & Licinio, 2002) and is yet to be con-
nected with attitudes. Both the trait of novelty seeking
and the gene itself could correlate with positive attitudes
toward novel and existing stimuli, but a study of these
associations will probably benefit from large samples and
a multigene approach.
Other genes also contribute to explaining impulsivity, even
though their explanatory power is much lower than the 40%
to 60% estimated heritability of the trait. Comings, Saucier,
and MacMurray (2002), for example, found that four dopa-
mine receptor genes contributed around 5% of the variance in
novelty seeking. Along the same lines, DRD2 and DRD4 have
been associated with novelty seeking (Noble et al., 1998),
as well as drug and alcohol abuse disorders, ADHD, and
pathological gambling (Comings, Saucier, & MacMurray,
2002; Ebstein & Kotler, 2002). The DRD4 gene interacts
with parenting quality to influence the presence of ADHD
in children (Sheese, Voelker, Rothbart, & Posner, 2007).
The dopamine transporter gene, DAT1, has also been impli-
cated in the cause of ADHD, which frequently involves high
impulsivity. Studies of affected children and their parents
have identified a significant correlation between a 10-repeat
allele of the DAT1 gene and ADHD (Cook et al., 1995; Daly,
Jawj, Fitzgerald, & Gill, 1999; Gill, Daly, Heron, Hawi, &
Fitzgerald, 1997; Waldman et al., 1998). Moreover, in some
studies (Waldman et al.,) but not in others (Farrow, Levy,
& Silberstein, 2005), this association was stronger for the
hyperactive impulsive form of ADHD than for the solely
inattentive form. In summary, associations of the dopamine
receptor and transporter genes with impulsivity support the
hypothesis of abnormal (accelerated) dopamine transport
and reuptake in impulsivity (Barkley, 1998; Farrow et al.,
2005; Swanson & Castellanos, 2002). The increased reup-
take presumably decreases the time for dopamine to act
on the synapse and may explain the general finding of under-
active brains in ADHD and perhaps impulsivity more gen-
erally (Farrow et al., 2005). Overall, fast dopamine reuptake
may generate a preference for attitude objects that increase
dopamine production, including drugs, roller coasters, and
risky sexual situations.
Genes related to the general efficiency and health of
neurons may also play a role in impulsivity. A large study
of patients with ADHD tested the premise of deficient
neurotrophic factors in this condition (Ribasés et al., 2008).
These factors constitute a family (i.e., the nerve growth
factor and the ciliary neurotrophic factor) that controls the
growth and proper development of nerves. Within this fam-
ily, one gene (CNTRF) is reportedly associated with both
adult and childhood ADHD, and two genes (NTF3 and
NTRK2) are reportedly associated with childhood ADHD
(Ribasés et al.). The effect sizes for these associations
ranged from an odds ratio (OR) of 1.38 to 1.52, with addi-
tive effects yielding an OR of 2.04 (Ribasés et al., 2008),
and may in the future be examined for specific attitudes
in addition to self-reported personality traits.
 Inadverted Environmental Influences: Attitudes in Response to a Seemingly Passive Environment
Summary
The personality traits of neuroticism and impulsivity/
extraversion influence the valence and arousal levels of
chronic affective reactions. Both neuroticism and impulsivity
have been associated with attitudes about specific objects,
such as mostly negative attitudes for neuroticism and attitudes
that are more reactive to external information for impulsivity.
Small correlations exist between neuroticism and the sero-
tonin transporter gene, as well as between impulsivity and the
dopamine receptor and transporter genes. Despite their small
size, these associations represent a critical first step in under-
standing how genes might influence attitude valence and
arousal by exerting an influence on stable affective responses
such as those encompassed by neuroticism and impulsivity.
INADVERTED ENVIRONMENTAL
INFLUENCES: ATTITUDES IN RESPONSE
TO A SEEMINGLY PASSIVE ENVIRONMENT
Despite biological and genetic contributions, attitudes are
undeniable results of the environment even when we fail
to advert, or attend to, its influence. In 1957, in Ft. Lee,
New Jersey, moviegoers watching William Holden and
Kim Novak star in Picnic were ostensibly shown messages
such as, “Eat popcorn,” and “Drink Coca-Cola,” during the
screening of the film (see McConnell, Cutler, & McNeil,
1958). The presentation of these messages was said to have
been just 1/3,000th of a second, well below the threshold
of conscious visual perception (i.e., the limen). Although
the brief presentation made it impossible for the innocent
moviegoers to have noticed the messages, James M. Vicary
and Frances Thayer, architects of this early effort at sub-
liminal persuasion, claimed that the presentation of these
messages increased popcorn sales 58% and cola sales 18%
over the course of 6 weeks.
These early subliminal persuasion effects were, how-
ever, pure fiction. Attempts to replicate Vicary’s claims
under controlled conditions were unsuccessful. In an inter-
view published in June 1962 in Advertising Age, Vicary
admitted to making up the story to drum up publicity for
his marketing firm (Danzig, 1962). Despite the fraud in
Vicary’s claims of subliminal persuasion, it is clear that
attitudes can be formed and changed outside of conscious
awareness (Clore & Schnall, 2005; Kruglanski & Stroebe,
2005; but see Cacioppo, Marshall-Goodell, Tassinary, &
Petty, 1992). A lack of awareness may be present at dif-
ferent stages of the persuasion process. People may be
unaware of the presence of a persuasive stimulus, they
may be unaware of cognitive processes that mediate atti-
tude formation and change, and they may be unaware
401
that their attitudes have actually changed (see Chartrand,
2005). Unfortunately, extant research is not so easily clas-
sified. In some cases, people may be unaware of more than
one stage: People presented with subliminal stimuli are
obviously unaware of the presence of a stimulus and
are presumably unaware of cognitive processes engaged
by the unseen stimulus, but it is unclear whether they lack
awareness of attitudinal change. This section reviews the-
ory and research addressing issues of attitude change when
people interact with a seemingly passive environment,
when there is no obvious intent to persuade. “No obvious
intent to persuade” may be reflected in a variety of differ-
ent ways, from subliminal persuasion to mere exposure to
evaluative conditioning (EC) to direct experience with an
object. We begin with the most obvious instance of a seem-
ingly passive environment, where people are unaware of
the existence of a stimulus.
Subliminal Persuasion and Priming
Subliminal persuasion sounds like a sexy topic to the
layperson, but for psychologists, even assessing whether a
stimulus is subliminal engenders controversy. Colloquially,
subliminal has been used to refer to unnoticed, disguised,
masked, and genuinely imperceptible stimuli (Pratkanis &
Greenwald, 1988). The term “subliminal” evokes the limen,
defined as the point at which a stimulus evokes a sensation.
Unfortunately, the concept of a point, or absolute threshold
for the presence of some phenomenological sensation, is
dubious. Thresholds tend to be normally distributed, and
they vary both interpersonally and intrapersonally (Stevens,
1951). Various approaches to operationalizing subliminal
presentations have been suggested (e.g., signal detection
theory; Synodinos, 1988), but the contemporary consensus
has settled on simple self-report. A stimulus is considered
subliminal when participants claim to be unable to per-
ceive it, especially in the presence of incentives for correct
reports (Cheesman & Merikle, 1986; Fowler, Wolford,
Slade, & Tassinary, 1981; Greenwald, 1992; Kihlstrom,
1987, 1999; Merikle, 1988).
Until recently, evidence for subliminal persuasion had
been weak at best. Null effects (Champion & Turner, 1959; de
Fleur & Petranoff, 1959; George & Jennings, 1975; Greenwald,
Spangenberg, Pratkanis, & Eskenazi, 1991; Merikle, 1988;
Pratkanis, Eskenazi, & Greenwald, 1994; Smith &
Rogers, 1994; Vokey & Read, 1985), failures to replicate
(e.g., Hawkins, 1970, a significant effect; Beatty & Hawkins,
1989, no effect), and methodological problems (for reviews
see Moore, 1982, 1988; Pratkanis & Aronson, 1992) are
legion. A meta-analysis of 23 studies obtained a nontrivial
effect of subliminal advertising (r  .06; Trappey, 1996),
but this analysis must be treated with caution because it
402 Attitudes and Persuasion
included work with critical methodological problems (e.g.,
treating disguised and unnoticed objects as “subliminal”).
A trio of recent articles has demonstrated some effect of
subliminally presented stimuli on attitudes and behavior. In
one study, participants watched an 18-minute segment of
an adult cartoon (The Simpsons). Experimental participants
were subliminally exposed to the word “thirsty” and a pic-
ture of a can of Coca-Cola 12 times each for 33 ms at each
presentation. Control participants were exposed to blank,
white screens at the same exposure rate and intervals as
experimental participants. Before the manipulation, exper-
imental and control participants reported being equally
thirsty; after the manipulation, experimental participants
reported being significantly more thirsty than control par-
ticipants. In a follow-up study, the researchers eliminated
the possibility of “thirsty” operating as a semantic prime
by using images of a sweaty athlete and a can of Coca-
Cola. Similar results obtained (Cooper & Cooper, 2002).
Other researchers experimentally manipulated thirst by
having all participants eat cookies and then having half of
the participants drink a glass of water (Strahan, Spencer, &
Zanna, 2002). Next, participants were subliminally (16 ms
exposures) presented with either thirst-related, or unrelated,
words via computer-mediated lexical decision task. There
was an effect of the thirst manipulation on self-reported
thirst, but contrary to Cooper and Cooper (2002), no effect
of subliminal priming on self-reported thirst. However, in an
ersatz taste test after the priming manipulation, thirsty partic-
ipants who had also been primed with thirst drank the most
Kool-Aid. In a follow-up study, thirsty participants were
subliminally primed with either thirsty or neutral words, and
then shown advertisements for thirst-quenching and electro-
lyte-replacing beverages. Thirst-primed participants liked,
and took more coupons for, the thirst-quenching beverage
compared with participants primed with neutral words.
Conceptually similar results obtained when participants who
were primed with a sad face, and expected to interact with
others, preferred a mood-restoring music CD. In all cases,
subliminal priming led to greater persuasion when partici-
pants were motivated to engage in a related behavior.
Other work showed that subliminal priming of brands
could influence preferences for branded items. Karremans,
Stroebe, and Claus (2006) also manipulated participant
thirst and subliminally primed either a particular brand of
beverage or a neutral word. Again, thirsty participants were
most influenced by the priming manipulation. Thirsty
participants who received the neutral prime showed vir-
tually no preference for one beverage over another, but
thirsty participants who received the brand prime pre-
ferred the primed brand. Thus, subliminal persuasion
seems to be most effective when a related motive is
already aroused.
In other research, the subliminal presentation of a
significant other ’s name has been shown to have variable
effects on achievement behavior depending on whether
the other is close and values achievement (Fitzsimons &
Bargh, 2003). Specifically, when the word “dad” (vs.
a control prime) was subliminally presented, individuals
who felt close to their dad and also believed their dad
to value achievement exhibited greater persistence and
quicker identification of achievement-related words in a
lexical decision task. In contrast, individuals who felt close
to their father but felt no paternal pressure to achieve per-
formed worse at these tasks (Shah, 2003).
The behavioral effects of a subliminal prime seem to
be contingent on a preexisting motivation to engage in
this behavior. In one study, the masked, 33-ms presen-
tation of achievement primes increased willingness to
resume an achievement task only in participants with high
self-reported achievement motivation. The prime, how-
ever, had reversed effects in participants with low self-
reported achievement motivation, who appeared to inhibit
achievement goals and performed worse in the presence
than in the absence of a prime (Hart & Albarracín, 2009).
Thus, these results provide evidence that personal dispo-
sitions interact with subliminal environmental stimuli to
produce changes in participants’ responses.
There is also evidence of more indirect subliminal
persuasion by which subliminal exposure to a source can
increase persuasion to a message later delivered by that
source. In two studies, participants were either not exposed,
subliminally exposed, or supraliminally exposed to a face
that later turned out to be the source of a persuasive message
(Weisbuch, Mackie, & Garcia-Marques, 2003). Participants
who were subliminally exposed to the source were more
persuaded by the arguments, and this effect was not medi-
ated by explicit liking of the source. Moreover, participants
who were supraliminally exposed to the source were also
more persuaded by the arguments, but this effect was medi-
ated by explicit liking of the source and disappeared when
participants were informed that they had previously been
exposed to the source. Thus, Weisbuch et al. (2003) specu-
lated that participants misattributed the positive responses
coming from the familiar source to the persuasive message.
Subtle influences on attitudes and behaviors are some-
times general rather than specific to an object. For example,
general action and inaction primes (e.g., “go” vs. “rest”)
influence the amount of motor or cognitive output
irrespective of the type of behavior in question, with the
same stimuli producing trivial and important motor and
cognitive manifestations normally viewed as parts of dif-
ferent systems (Albarracín, Handley, Noguchi, McCulloch,
Li, Leeper et al., 2008; Hart & Albarracín, in press). A series
of experiments by Albarracín and colleagues (Albarracı́n,
 Inadverted Environmental Influences: Attitudes in Response to a Seemingly Passive Environment
Handly et al., 2008; Albarracı́n, Wang et al., 2009) exam-
ined the effects of instilling general action and inaction goals
using word primes such as “action” and “rest.” Some of
the experiments showed that the same stimuli, presented
either subliminally or supraliminally, influenced motor
output, such as doodling on a piece of paper and eating,
as well as cognitive output, such as recall and problem
solving. Two experiments supported the prediction that
these diverse effects can result from the instigation of
general action and inaction goals. Specifically, these last
two studies confirmed that participants were motivated to
achieve active or inactive states and that attaining them
decreased the effects of the primes on behavior. Although
these effects entailed a cognitive representation of action
and inaction, they are clearly relevant to the arousal
dimension of attitudes and may, under certain conditions,
contribute to making stimuli more arousing.
In conclusion, despite accumulating evidence that
subliminally presented stimuli can influence behavior (e.g.,
Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996), there remains no good evi-
dence for subliminal persuasion operating as powerfully as
Vicary imagined it. Subliminally presented stimuli are at best
a weak persuasive force. They seem to have their greatest
influence when people are already predisposed toward
a related course of action (e.g., when a related motive is
aroused), and when the opportunities for that action are
readily apparent and easily performed. Subliminally primed
individuals who face physical impediments or psycho-
logical distractions to the related actions are (presumably)
unlikely to show evidence of subliminal primes, and sim-
ply priming a command (eat popcorn) does not seem likely
to cause a movie patron to get up, leave the ongoing film,
and buy a box of popcorn. Moreover, most of the current
evidence on subliminal priming occurs in simple contexts,
when primes are presented alone on an otherwise blank
screen. Whether primes can be effectively embedded in a
context where they compete for attention with other words
and images remains largely an empirical question.
Mere Exposure
Attitudes toward a stimulus may become more favorable
with increasing frequency of exposure to the stimulus
(Zajonc, 1968).2 In a classic example of the mere exposure
2 Notably,
attitude change caused by mere exposure is different
from attitude change caused by message repetition. In the mere
exposure paradigm, participants are repeatedly presented with
an attitude object and there is no obvious intent to persuade.
In the message-repetition paradigm, participants are repeatedly
provided with information about the attitude object, and thus the
intent to persuade is clear (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993).
403
paradigm, and an unambiguous case of no obvious intent
to persuade, Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc (1980) subliminally
presented 10 different polygons, 5 times each, to partici-
pants. The researchers informed participants that “slides
would be shown on the screen at durations so brief that one
could not really see what was being presented . . .” (p. 557).
After the presentation of stimuli, participants were shown
pairs of polygons, one old and one new, and asked to indi-
cate which one they had been shown earlier and which one
they preferred. Recognition of the polygons was just below
chance (48%), but preference for old polygons was sub-
stantially higher than chance (60%).
Fifty years of mere exposure research has yielded an
enormous amount of information, so here we describe just a
few important conclusions and the current state of the area.
In summarizing 208 empirical studies from 134 articles pub-
lished between 1968 and 1987, Bornstein (1989) obtained
a moderate effect size of .26. The effect emerges for all
types of stimuli: auditory (r .24), ideographs (r  .22),
nonsense words/syllables (r .24), photographs (r  .37),
meaningful words/names (r  .49), polygons (r  .41), and
real people/objects (r  .20), except for abstract paintings,
drawings, and matrices (r  –.03). Moreover, the effect
tends to be stronger when a heterogeneous (r  .30) ver-
sus homogeneous (r  –.02) pool of stimuli are presented,
when exposure times are shorter (especially less than 1 sec-
ond, r  .41), when stimuli are more complex (no effect
size reported, but six of nine studies found more favorable
attitudes for complex stimuli compared with simple stim-
uli), when the maximum number of stimulus presentations
is up to nine (r  .21), when there is some delay between
stimulus exposure and evaluation (r  .22), and when the
participants are adults (r  .30) instead of children (aged
12 or younger, r  .05).
Explanations of the processes underlying the mere
exposure effect have varied, with initial debate focusing
on the extent to which higher-order cognition is involved.
Demand effects (Stang, 1974), belief formation (Grush,
1976), and a combination of positive habituation and bore-
dom (Berlyne, 1970) were all proposed as explanations
underlying mere exposure effects. However, after the sub-
liminal demonstration (Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980), in
which participants could not possibly have intentionally
thought about stimuli they had not even seen, delibera-
tive cognition about the stimuli was reduced to a sufficient
but not necessary cause. Bornstein (1989) suggested that
adding notions of implicit cognition to the habituation and
boredom model would help account for nearly all of the
major conclusions (noted earlier) in his meta-analysis. But
a more parsimonious contender came to light. Perceptual
fluency—the notion that previously encountered stimuli are
easier to perceive and process (Jacoby, Kelley, Brown, &
404 Attitudes and Persuasion
Jasechko, 1989), and that this ease is misattributed as liking
(Bornstein & D’Agostino, 1994; Smith, 1998)—emerged
as a likely candidate for explaining mere exposure effects.
More recent work, however, has cast some doubt on the
perceptual fluency/misattribution account, at least insofar
as it requires intentional cognitive processing. If liking
is due to misattributed perceptual fluency, individuals
should make negative adjustments to their liking ratings
when they believe they have previously seen the stimuli
(Bornstein & D’Agostino, 1994). However, evidence is
accumulating that the opposite holds true, that people pre-
fer stimuli that they recognize (Anand & Sternthal, 1991;
Brooks & Watkins, 1989; Fang, Singh, & Ahluwalia,
2007; Newell & Shanks, 2007; Szpunar, Schellenberg, &
Pliner, 2004; Whittlesea & Price, 2001; but see Weisbuch
et al., 2003). Furthermore, repeated exposure to stimuli
also increases liking of novel stimuli and has positive
effects on mood (Monahan, Murphy, & Zajonc, 2000), nei-
ther of which can be explained by the perceptual fluency/
misattribution hypothesis but can be explained by a more
generalized, automatic effect of fluency.
The role of fluency in evaluative judgments has also
been proposed to be potentially independent of inten-
tional information processing (Winkielman & Cacioppo,
2001; Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003).
Winkielman and his colleagues have argued that percep-
tual or conceptual fluency, or both, may or may not be
consciously recognized. According to the hedonic fluency
model, any mental process that is fast and effortless engen-
ders a positive affective response. Fluent processing, there-
fore, engenders positive affect, which is physiologically
detectable (Harmon-Jones & Allen, 2001; Winkielman &
Cacioppo, 2001) and may be transferred to evaluative
judgments of previously seen stimuli, as well as novel
stimuli and self-reported mood (Monahan et al., 2000).
A meta-analysis of 90 studies examining the effect of per-
ceptual fluency on affective judgments obtained a medium
effect size (Cohen’s d  .50). The effect was moderated by
participants’ awareness of the experimental manipulation,
such that aware participants tended to discount fluency and
use other inputs to form attitudes, and the valence of the
stimuli, such that neutral and positive stimuli produced
larger fluency effects than negative stimuli (Warth, 2008).
After 50 years of research on the mere exposure effect,
the final word on explaining the effect may be near. The
hedonic fluency model allows for both conscious and non-
conscious effects of perceptual fluency on evaluative judg-
ments. Repetition facilitates ease of processing, which, in
turn, signals a positive state of affairs and induces gener-
alized positive affect. This positivity may then influence
evaluations of previously presented and novel stimuli, as
well as a person’s mood. Recently, however, Zajonc (2001)
proposed that the mere exposure effect may be caused by a
simple conditioning effect.
Evaluative Conditioning
Just as Pavlov’s dog came to salivate at the ring of a bell, so
can attitudes be formed via the repeated pairing of stimuli.
Pavlovian conditioning occurs when a conditioned stim-
ulus (CS; such as a bell) is consistently presented before
an unconditioned stimulus (US; such as food), and the CS
eventually provokes a response that was initially provoked
only by the US (such as salivation). EC may be procedur-
ally similar to Pavlovian (classical) conditioning (Martin &
Levey, 1978, 1994; Levey & Martin, 1975), in which the
US is an evaluatively valenced object and the CS is an
evaluatively neutral object. EC is said to occur when the
CS takes on the valence of the US. As noted later, how-
ever, EC also differs from classical conditioning in several
important ways (de Houwer, Thomas, & Baeyens, 2001).
In an attempt to explain the mere exposure effect,
Zajonc (2001) proposed that the repeated stimuli are the
conditioned stimuli and the lack of aversive experience
throughout the experimental paradigm serves as a US.
According to this account, novel stimuli elicit both
approach and avoidance responses. When no aversive
experience is paired with the CS, “avoidance and escape
drop out, leaving only approach responses” (p. 226).
However, Pickering and Gray (1999) noted that novel
stimuli and stimuli indicating punishment or frustration
activate the BIS (i.e., anxiety), whereas reward and stimuli
indicating relief from punishment activate the BAS. Thus,
Monahan et al.’s (2000) single exposure condition should
have evoked anxiety and correspondingly more negative
explicit ratings of mood and novel stimuli. Contrary to this
possibility, however, participants in the single-exposure
condition did not rate the stimuli any more negatively
than those in the control (no exposure) condition. The con-
ditioning explanation for mere exposure effects requires
further testing.
EC effects are not large (de Houwer, Baeyens, & Field,
2005) but seem to generalize across all five senses: visual
(Levey & Martin, 1975), auditory (Eifert, Craill, Carey, &
O’Connor, 1988), haptic (Hammerl & Fulcher, 2005), gus-
tatory (Zellner, Rozin, Aron, & Kulish, 1983), and olfactory
(Todrank, 1993). EC has also been demonstrated across
sensory modality, such as visual-auditory (Blair & Shimp,
1992), visual-olfactory (Hermans, Baeyens, & Natens,
2000, cited in De Houwer et al., 2005), and visual-gustatory
(Johnsrude, Owen, Zhao, & White, 1999). EC takes place
regardless of the order in which the CS and US are paired:
when the CS is presented before the US (Levey & Martin,
1975), when the CS and US are presented simultaneously
 Inadverted Environmental Influences: Attitudes in Response to a Seemingly Passive Environment
(van Reekum, van den Berg, & Frijda, 1999), and when the
US is presented before the CS (Stewart, Shimp, & Engle,
1987). Moreover, EC has been verified through observa-
tional learning (Baeyens, Eelen, Crombez, & De Houwer,
2001), using both subliminal and supraliminal stimulus pre-
sentation (e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2004), with both explicit and
implicit attitude measures (Olson & Fazio, 2001, 2002),
and both with and without contingency awareness (Olson &
Fazio, 2001, 2002; Pleyers, Corneille, Luminet, & Yzerbyt,
2007).
One of the ways in which EC differs from classical con-
ditioning is the hypothesized necessity of contingency
awareness. Classical conditioning effects are predicated on
human learning and contingency awareness. If one does not
recognize that an electric shock always follows the ring-
ing bell, one should not develop a cringe response to the
ringing bell. Current evidence suggests that EC occurs with
awareness (e.g., Purkis & Lipp, 2001) and without aware-
ness (Davey, 1994; Hammerl & Fulcher, 2005; Field &
Moore, 2005). Nierman (2008) meta-analyzed 50 EC stud-
ies and found mean-weighted effect sizes of d  .65 for
contingency-aware respondents and d  .27 for contingency-
unaware respondents. As contingency awareness affects
EC but does not completely eliminate it, EC may really
belong at the intersection of active and passive persuasion
processes. A second way in which EC differs from classical
conditioning is that classical conditioning disappears when
the CS is no longer paired with the US (Hamm & Vaitl,
1996). In contrast, EC effects appear to resist extinction,
even after 5 and 10 presentations of the CS without the US
(Baeyens, Crombez, van den Bergh, & Eelen, 1998; Diaz,
Ruiz, & Baeyens, 2005; but see Lipp & Purkis, 2006).
As with mere exposure effects, the mechanisms under-
lying EC effects are not yet entirely understood. Several
models have been put forth. One theory involves a holistic,
or Gestalt, principle in which the CS takes on the valence
of the US simply by virtue of their spatiotemporal contigu-
ity (Martin & Levey, 1978, 1994; Walther, Nagengast, &
Trasselli, 2005). Others have proposed two different sys-
tems at work for classical conditioning and EC (Baeyens &
de Houwer, 1995; Baeyens, Eelen, & Crombez, 1995).
According to this line of thought, classical conditioning is
driven by an expectancy or signal learning system that initi-
ates preparatory responses (e.g., the cringe), whereas EC is
driven by a less sophisticated referential system that responds
to paired events. The referential system is hypothesized to
automatically average the valence of the paired events.
Others have proposed that multiple cognitive processes,
both implicit (automatic, associative) and explicit (propo-
sitions about stimulus contingencies), may be simultane-
ously involved in EC effects (de Houwer et al., 2005; de
Houwer, 2007). The multiple processes perspective has
405
also been used to propose an explanation for conflicting
results regarding contingency awareness and extinction (de
Houwer, 2007). EC effects driven by associative processing
might arise outside of contingency awareness, but those
driven by propositional processes would almost certainly
be subject to contingency awareness. Similarly, EC effects
driven by propositional processes might be more susceptible
to extinction because participants are actively monitoring
stimulus presentation and forming rules about stimulus
pairings. To date, however, these ideas are speculative, so
the topic remains an active and rich area of study.
Implicit Attitudes
Implicit attitudes have been conceptualized as automatic,
highly stable and resistant to change, developed over the
long term, and largely because of socialization (e.g., Wilson,
Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). Consistent with such a con-
ceptualization, some research has found changes in explicit
(more deliberate, conscious attitudes) but not implicit
attitudes (e.g., Gawronski & Strack, 2004). However, there
is also evidence that implicit attitudes can be changed
without a corresponding change in explicit attitudes (e.g.,
Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001; Karpinski & Hilton, 2001;
Olson & Fazio, 2006), and evidence that explicit attitudes
change more slowly than implicit attitudes in the face of
counterattitudinal information (Rudman, Phelan, & Heppen,
2007; Rydell & McConnell, 2006; Rydell, McConnell,
Strain, Claypool, & Hugenberg, 2007). A meta-analysis of
126 studies examining correlations between the Implicit
Association Test and explicit attitude measures obtained
an average r of .24 (Hoffmann, Gawronski, Gschwendner,
Le, & Schmitt, 2005). These dissociations hence suggest
that implicit and explicit attitudes are, indeed different, but
the chapter on implicit attitudes (Banaji & Heiphetz, this
volume) can provide readers with much more information.
Differences between implicit and explicit attitudes
have also been observed in studies using neuroimaging.
At least three structures appear to participate in automatic
evaluations, namely the amygdala, the insula, and the orbito-
frontal cortex (Bechara et al., 1999; Cunningham et al.,
2004; Hamann et al., 2002; Irwin et al., 1996; Kringelbach &
Rolls, 2004; Lane, Fink, Chau, & Dolan, 1997; Morris et al.,
1996; Petrides, 2007; Phan et al., 2004; Reekum et al., 2007;
Rempel-Clower, 2007; Royet et al., 2003; Sergerie,
Lepage, & Armony, 2006; Taylor, Phan, Decker, & Liberzon,
2003; Wright et al., 2008). Correspondingly, the ACC is
believed to be involved in controlled evaluations (Critchley,
2005; Cunningham et al., 2003, 2004; Taylor et al., 2003).
Activations of the ACC, involving both the ventral ACC
(BA 24) and the dorsal ACC (BA 32), have been observed
in functional neuroimaging studies that span a wide range of
406 Attitudes and Persuasion
cognitive contexts including selective attention and memory,
and evaluation of stimuli (Cabeza & Nyberg, 1997; Egan
et al., 2003; Hariri, Mattay, Tessitore, Fera, & Weinberger,
2003; Lane, Chua, & Dolan, 1999; Papez, 1937). There is
also specific evidence of anterior cingulate activity while
evaluative (vs. nonevaluative) judgments of visual stimuli
are requested (as well as activity in the temporal pole and the
frontal operculum; Lane et al., 1997). Furthermore, a recent
study that carefully separated explicit evaluative judgments
from implicit responses to positive and negative stimuli
revealed that the amygdala was involved in spontaneous
responses, whereas the orbitofrontal cortex was involved in
explicit evaluative judgments (Wright et al., 2008).
These brain functional processes have also been inves-
tigated using training to produce automation in real time.
Participants who practiced evaluating visual stimuli became
faster with time and were also more likely to make evalu-
ative judgments spontaneously after the practice (Hong,
Albarracín, Wright, & Liu, 2008). Moreover, in a study
using functional magnetic resonance imaging, practicing
evaluation had effects on brain activation in various regions.
Specifically, there were posttraining increases in the activa-
tion of brain regions associated with automatic evaluative
processing (e.g., the amygdala, the insula, and the orbito-
frontal cortex), regions associated with controlled evaluative
processing (e.g., the temporal pole, the ACC, and the frontal
operculum), and late visual regions (e.g., the posterior fusi-
form, the superior occipital lobe, and the parietal occipital
lobe). Moreover, evaluation proceduralization was reflected
by increased activity in areas associated with procedural
learning (e.g., the striatal regions, the lateral cerebellum, the
precuneus, and the inferior frontal cortices) and decreased
activity in areas associated with declarative learning (e.g.,
the medial temporal lobe, the ventromedial prefrontal cor-
tex, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex). Of all these
regions, however, only evaluative regions correlated with
the increase in evaluative speed that followed training.
In terms of purely psychological models, implicit
and explicit attitudes are thought to reflect the operation
of associative and propositional processes, respectively
(Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Implicit attitudes,
typically measured using response-time tasks assess-
ing the ease with which people can associate attitude
objects with positive or negative stimuli (but see Vargas,
Sekaquaptewa, & von Hippel, 2007), are hypothesized to
reflect automatically retrieved affective responses that are
linked to attitude objects. These responses are not assumed
to reflect personal endorsement, but only evaluative
thoughts that are linked with the object under consider-
ation. Thoughts linked to an object may also be dependent
on the context; for example, “lamb” may be associa-
tively linked to “wool” on a cold day but to “dinner”
in a restaurant. Explicit attitudes, typically measured by
self-report, are hypothesized to reflect the operation of a
superordinate reflective system that transforms associative
evaluative responses into propositions (e.g., “I like lamb”)
subject to syllogistic reasoning to appraise their legitimacy
(see Albarracín, Hart, & McCulloch, 2006; Albarracín,
Noguchi, & Earl, 2006; Hart & Albarracín, 2009; Senay,
Albarracín, & Noguchi, in press). In many cases, initial,
automatic evaluative responses will be deemed valid and
serve as the basis for explicit attitudes (i.e., implicit and ex-
plicit attitudes will be correlated); however, the engage-
ment of reflective processing of propositional statements
may produce implicit-explicit dissociations when the initial
explicit evaluative response is deemed invalid.
Implicit attitude change, according to Gawronski and
Bodenhausen’s (2006) associative-propositional-evaluation
(APE) model, can occur when the evaluative associations
for a given object change (as in EC research, reviewed
earlier), and when contextual cues cause a different
pattern of evaluative associations to come to mind. For
example, implicit prejudice against African Americans
may decrease by exposing White participants to either
admired African Americans and disliked Whites (vs. dis-
liked African Americans and admired Whites; Dasgupta &
Greenwald, 2001). Explicit attitude change, according to
the model, can occur when the evaluative associations for
a given object change (see prior review of EC research),
when the propositions considered to be relevant change
(e.g., when new information about an object is learned;
Petty & Wegener, 1998), when people reassess their extant
cognitions about an object (Wilson, Dunn, Kraft, & Lisle,
1989), and when efforts to achieve cognitive consistency
change (e.g., when one of two dissonant propositions is
rejected, or when an additional proposition helps resolve
the dissonance; Gawronski & Strack, 2004). Finally, this
APE model allows for influence attempts to interact with
associative and propositional processing in a variety of dif-
ferent ways that are beyond the scope of this chapter.
The APE model is not the only model proposed to
explain the formation of implicit and explicit attitudes.
According to Bassili and Brown’s (2005) potentiated
recruitment framework, implicit and explicit attitudes both
emerge from interconnected microconcepts (“molecular
elements of knowledge that yield meaning when assembled
into networks with other microconcepts” [p. 552]). Which
microconcepts are activated, and hence which attitude is
evoked, depends on four sources of potentiation: recent
experience/information, context, spreading activation
among microconcepts, and present cognitive activity. The
potentiated recruitment framework posits that the primary
difference between implicit and explicit attitudes is not
that they are the result of different cognitive processes, but
 Inadverted Environmental Influences: Attitudes in Response to a Seemingly Passive Environment
whether deliberative cognitive processing is involved in
producing an output attitude.
The metacognitive model of attitudes (Petty, 2006;
Petty & Briñol, 2006; Petty, Briñol, & DeMarree, 2007; Petty,
Wheeler, & Tormala, 2003) was proposed to account for
differences in implicit and explicit attitude change. Like
the associative-propositional evaluation and the potenti-
ated recruitment framework, this approach assumes that
contemporary implicit measures tap automatic associative
evaluations, whereas traditional explicit measures rely
on more deliberative information processing involving
attitude validity appraisals. According to the metacognitive
model, explicit attitudes show greater change than implicit
ones when new evaluative associations are accepted
and old evaluative associations are rejected, such as
when one accepts the idea that classical music is good
and rejects the old, negative attitude as invalid. In con-
trast, implicit attitudes show greater change than explicit
ones when new evaluative associations are consciously
rejected, such as when one learns that listening to classical
music causes brain damage, and then rejects that informa-
tion. In this example, the brain damage message remains
associated with classical music, despite the conscious
rejection of that information, and this association should
be reflected in implicit measures. Thus, the metacognitive
model differs from the associative-propositional-
evaluation model (but is similar to the potentiated recruit-
ment framework) in that the formation of attitudes
depends not on associative versus propositional processes,
but rather on the strength of the evaluative associations
and whether the associations are perceived to be valid.
Moreover, the metacognitive model allows for both affec-
tive (e.g., “I feel good about my attitude toward classical
music.”) and cognitive (e.g., “My attitude toward classi-
cal music is correct.”) validation of evaluative associa-
tions. The metacognitive model differs from other models
in that it allows for both attitudes and validity assessments
to be stored in memory rather than constructed online as
proposed in the APE model.
The metacognitive model differs from other models in
allowing for some degree of implicit-explicit ambivalence
when either explicit or implicit attitudes (but not both)
change. Petty, Tormala, Briñlol, and Jarvis (2006) induced
participants’ positive or negative attitudes toward initially
neutral stimuli. Then, some participants were provided
with new information that caused them to change their
explicit attitudes toward the targets. These participants’
new explicit attitudes were indistinguishable in direction
and reported ambivalence from those of participants who
did not receive the new information. However, the recipi-
ents of new information did show evidence of implicit
ambivalence, as manifested by more moderate responses
407
on implicit attitude measures and more careful processing
of attitude-relevant information. These findings suggested
that the old explicit attitude continued to have an influence
at the implicit level.
The study of implicit attitudes takes us back to the
issue of what aspects of the attitude and the environment
enter awareness (Fazio & Olson, 2003; Vargas et al., 2007;
Vargas & von Hippel, & Petty, 2004; von Hippel, Sekaqua-
ptewa, & Vargas, 2008). Consider, for example, the implicit
formation of attitudes (where attitudes are formed outside of
conscious awareness but are explicitly available). Evidence
has been reported that attitudes can be formed outside of con-
scious awareness via exposure to value-charged information
(Betsch, Plessner, Schwieren, & Gütig, 2001). In one study,
participants were instructed to focus on a series of advertise-
ments while the bottom of the screen flashed stock values.
Stocks with higher summative values were rated most highly
despite participants’ inability to consciously estimate sums.
In a follow-up study, participants formed attitudes either
implicitly or explicitly. Implicitly formed attitudes appeared
to be based on a summative assessment of the stimuli,
whereas explicitly formed attitudes appeared to be based on
an averaging assessment of the stimuli (Betsch, Kaufmann,
Lindow, Plessner, & Hoffmann, 2006).
In the end, one of the most important puzzles related
to implicit attitudes, as well as priming, may concern how
we move from fragmentary environmental cues to a first-
person propositional discourse (i.e., how we think and
talk to ourselves; Albarracín, Hart, & McCulloch, 2006;
Albarracín, Noguchi, & Earl, 2006; Hart & Albarracín, in
press; for similar points of view, see Hummel & Holyoak,
2005). On the one hand, the argument that propositional
and associative processes are qualitatively different implies
a great gap between associating a presidential candidate
with pleasant objects such as babies and learning that a
presidential candidate supports pro-environment policies.
On the other hand, the processes involved in understand-
ing a verbal proposition are not diametrically different
from those underlying simpler associations. For example,
different word prime orders (e.g., “act-nice” vs. “nice-act”)
evoke different logical structures (a command vs. a com-
pliment) in an unintentional way (Albarracín, Noguchi, &
Earl, 2006; for related findings, see Hart & Albarracín, 2009).
From this point of view, propositions are understood by
means of associative processes much like those observed
in simple automatic associations between an object (e.g., a
snake) and an attribute (e.g., bad).
Direct Experiences
Having direct experience with an attitude object is perhaps
the most basic, and obvious, way in which we form attitudes.
408 Attitudes and Persuasion
Direct experience is implicit in much of the research
reviewed in this section and appears to strongly influence
the likelihood that an attitude would be sufficiently arous-
ing as to be activated when the object is encountered. In
one study, some participants were allowed to play with
examples of five types of puzzles (direct experience); how-
ever, other participants were presented with examples of
the types of puzzles already solved by another person (no
direct experience  no action). All participants later indi-
cated how interesting they found each type of puzzle. After
that, they were all allowed to play with the puzzles for up
to 15 minutes. The results from this study indicated that
attitudes (the interest ratings) were stronger predictors of
actual behavior in the direct than indirect experience con-
dition (Regan & Fazio, 1977).
Fazio and his colleagues (1983) have suggested that
direct experience produces high attitude-behavior correla-
tions because attitudes formed from direct experience are
easier to retrieve from permanent memory. Thus, direct
experience may be analogous to repeatedly expressing
or reporting one’s attitude. A meta-analysis of the behav-
ioral impact of recently formed attitudes (Glasman &
Albarracín, 2006; see also Kraus, 1995) confirmed this
possibility. That is, direct experience and repeated expres-
sion/report of the attitude were correlated with faster
reporting of attitudes (for direct experience, r  .60; for
repeated expression, r  .24; Glasman & Albarracín,
2006). Moreover, the influence of direct experience and
attitude report on the attitude-behavior relation was medi-
ated by response speed (from direct experience to response
speed, r  .43; from response speed to the attitude-behavior
correlation, r  .82).
Direct experience may also have a motivational effect,
leading people to form an attitude while the experi-
ence develops. For one thing, direct experience does not
improve attitude-behavior correspondence when the bases
for attitudes and the behavior are different. For example,
an attitude based on experienced feelings, such as how
much pleasure is associated with a video game (an affec-
tive experience), does not predict the use (or lack of use)
of this video game for career advancement or learning pur-
poses (an instrumental behavior; Millar & Tesser, 1986).
Indeed, the attitude behavior correlation is r  .59 when
the experience with the attitude and the predicted behavior
are similar (both instrumental or both affective), but
r  .39 when the two are dissimilar; Glasman &
Albarracín, 2006). Second, as Hoch and Ha (1986; see also
Ha & Hoch, 1989; Wooten & Reed, 1998) and Albarracín
and McNatt (2005) demonstrated, acquiring direct experi-
ence with the object is as important in guiding behavior
as receiving information that is unambiguous and con-
sistent (i.e., evaluative diagnosticity; Reed, Wooten, &
Bolton, 2002). When all else is equal, direct experience
should stimulate the use of a resulting summary attitude as
a basis for future behavior. However, direct experience
can sometimes provide mixed evidence about the desir-
ability of an object (e.g., people are presented with neu-
trally valenced information, Reed et al., 2002, or products
with standard qualities, Hoch & Ha, 1986). In these condi-
tions, direct experience actually hinders attitude-behavior
correspondence (Albarracín & McNatt, 2005; Glasman &
Albarracín, 2006).
The ubiquity of broadband Internet has facilitated
virtual simulations of experiences. For example, one
no longer has to actually get a haircut to experience the
new look. Instead, one can purchase computer programs
that digitally alter one’s image in accordance with the
planned hairstyle. In a study of virtual direct experience
(Griffith & Chen, 2004), some products, such as movies
and music, were easy to experience in a digital fashion.
Participants were simply presented with ads about these
products and did or did not view the product. Other prod-
ucts, such as clothes and apparel, are more difficult to
experience virtually. Still, the researchers created movie
clips of the actual experience of, for example, view-
ing objects with a fictitious pair of sunglasses. Thus, for
these products as well, some conditions allowed for view-
ing (virtual experience present), whereas others did not
(virtual experience absent). The results from this study
indicated that when the experience was easy to digitalize,
virtually experiencing and not experiencing the product
had different effects. Participants had more positive eval-
uations and stronger intentions to buy the product after
the virtual viewing than in the absence of virtual viewing.
However, these effects disappeared when the products
were difficult to digitalize, in which case, attitudes and
purchasing intentions were the same with and without the
virtual experience.
Summary
Most of the processes studied by attitude researchers have
concerned the influence of environmental information on
attitudes, ranging from subliminal persuasion to the effects
of direct experience. Both implicit attitudinal responses
and explicit propositions about objects are affected when a
person interacts with the surrounding world, and scholars
have attempted to understand the nature of these influ-
ences. Sometimes attitudes form through mere exposure,
with repeated presentation of a stimulus but little direct
contact with the object. Other times, attitudes form and
change through direct and even virtual experience, and these
attitudes appear to be highly consequential for future
behavior.

ATTITUDES IN REACTION TO A SEEMINGLY
ACTIVE ENVIRONMENT
More than half of Americans believe that primates deserve
the same rights as human children, according to a survey
commissioned by The Doris Day Animal League, a group
devoted to furthering the cause of animal rights. In 1999,
two thirds of Americans wanted Congress to consider a
second impeachment trial against then-President Clinton,
according to a survey commissioned by the right-wing
Newsmax website. And two thirds of likely voters support
privatizing social security accounts, according to a sur-
vey commissioned by the libertarian Cato Institute. All
of these findings have been presented as “facts” but were
essentially purchased by the groups funding the surveys
(Mooney, 2003). And the report on these suspect survey
practices was published by an admittedly left-leaning peri-
odical, The American Prospect.
Although environmental influences are often unde-
tected, people are often aware that information sources
frequently spin the facts. Therefore, information recipients
are used to selecting information, questioning source
credibility, and suspecting persuasive, if not overly manip-
ulative, intent (although we tend to do so most often when
we are faced with undesirable conclusions; see Hart et al.,
2009; Kunda, 1990). Social psychologists have been pro-
lific in tackling these phenomena in the context of selective
exposure, communicator-based persuasion, psychological
reactance, forewarning of influence, resistance to persua-
sion, and communication pragmatics.
Selective Exposure
The availability of diverse information in an environment
does not guarantee that a person’s attitudes will be equally
diverse. A former United States vice president, for example,
reportedly requested that the television always be tuned to
a conservative news channel before he entered a hotel room
(Dick Cheney’s Suite Demands, 2006). In selective expo-
sure research, the classic assumption to explain such reac-
tions is that people are motivated to defend their attitudes
from challenges (e.g., Festinger, 1957; Olson & Stone,
2005). Selective exposure enables people to defend their
attitudes by avoiding information likely to challenge them
and seeking information likely to support them. Selectivity
of this type is known as a congeniality bias.
A recent meta-analysis assessed whether exposure to
information is guided by defense or accuracy motives (Hart
et al., 2009; see also Noguchi, Durantini, Albarracín, &
Glasman, 2007). The studies examined information pref-
erences in relation to attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors in
situations that provided choices between congenial
Attitudes in Reaction to a Seemingly Active Environment 409
information, which supported participants’ preexisting
attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors, and uncongenial informa-
tion, which challenged these tendencies. Although analy-
ses indicated a moderate preference for congenial over
uncongenial information (d  .36), this congeniality bias
was moderated by variables that affect the strength of
defense and accuracy motivation. In support of the impor-
tance of defense motivation, the congeniality bias was
weaker when participants’ attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors
were supported before information selection; when par-
ticipants’ attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors were not relevant
to important values or not held with conviction; when the
available information was low in quality; when partici-
pants’ closed-mindedness was low; and when confidence
in the attitude, belief, or behavior was high. In support of
the importance of accuracy motivation, an uncongeniality
bias emerged when uncongenial information was relevant
to accomplishing a current goal.
Confidence in how one interacts with active environments
seems to be a powerful influence on information selec-
tion. History presents abundant examples that people who
strongly advocate and defend a given attitudinal position
often change this position, becoming “converted” to points
of view that are opposite to the ones they initially held.
One reason for such changes is the degree to which indi-
viduals perceive that they can defend their attitudes from
attack (Albarracín & Mitchell, 2004; Albarracín, Wang, &
Albarracín, in press). Presumably, people who are confident
that their attitudes will survive future challenges are more
willing to examine evidence that both supports and contra-
dicts their prior attitudes (e.g., r between prior attitudes and
selection of consistent material  .35 for high trait defen-
sive confidence, from Albarracín & Mitchell, 2004, study
3; see also J. Albarracín et al., in press). In contrast, people
who doubt their defensive ability prefer proattitudinal infor-
mation over materials that challenge their prior perspectives
(e.g., r between prior attitudes and selection of consistent
material  .80 for low trait defensive confidence, from
Albarracín & Mitchell, 2004, study 3; see also Albarracín,
2002; J. Albarracín et al., in press; see also Byrne, 1961;
Olson & Zanna, 1982; for related views in other domains,
see Tesser, 2001). Although denial may in many ways be
a relatively primitive defense mechanism, avoiding coun-
terattitudinal information preserves the attitudes of people
who doubt their defensive abilities (Albarracín & Mitchell,
2004; J. Albarracín et al., in press).
Source Credibility
Other demonstrations of reactions to a seemingly active
environment involve the effects of source credibility. Initial
work on persuasion suggested that persuasion increases
410 Attitudes and Persuasion
in the presence of source reinforcers such as expertise,
trustworthiness, and likability (see Cialdini, 2001; Hovland &
Janis, 1959; Johnson, Maio, & Smith-McLalle, 2005). In
fact, the power of variables such as source credibility is such
that the influence of experts facilitating behavioral interven-
tions to reduce HIV infection exceeds that of peers in almost
every population group (women and men, ethnic majority
and minority; Durantini, Albarracín, Earl, & Mitchell, 2006;
e.g., behavior change mean d  .46 vs. .14 for experts vs.
peers in adult samples). Moreover, these expertise effects
are more stable across populations than the effects of the
content of behavioral interventions (Albarracín, McNatt,
et al., 2003; Albarracín, Gillette, et al., 2005; Albarracín,
Durantini, & Earl, 2006) and are mediated by the creation
of positive behavioral norms. For example, among female
and African American samples, source expertise correlated
an average r of .50 with social norms, and social norms cor-
related an average r of .65 with behavior change.
Source characteristics are often used as simple cues to
either accept or reject a communication without much scru-
tiny of the offered arguments (Chaiken, 1987; Livingston,
2001; Petty & Wegener, 1998). That is, by applying the
heuristic that “experts can be trusted,” people can circumvent
effortful decisions about the validity of the actual message
arguments (Chaiken, 1987). This heuristic mode of process-
ing requires an accessible heuristic and a readily available
cue but can otherwise be applied under varying conditions
of motivation and ability to process the communication
(Chaiken, 1987; for a review, see Johnson et al., 2005).
Despite the importance of heuristic influences of
source credibility, the processes triggered by a credible or
trustworthy source turn out to be fairly complex (Petty &
Wegener, 1998). For example, source credibility has a much
stronger influence on attitudes when message recipients form
attitudes toward new topics than when they change attitudes
toward well-known topics (e.g., mean d  .73 and .33;
Kumkale, Albarracín, & Poyner-del Vento, in press). In addi-
tion, the effect of source credibility depends on when the
information is presented. When the source is presented before
the message arguments, expertise can bias the way in which the
arguments are processed (Heesacker, Petty, & Cacioppo, 1983;
Kumkale & Albarracín 2004; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986;
Petty & Wegener, 1998; see also Albarracín, Wallace, &
Glasman, 2004). Recipients are likely to dismiss arguments
coming from a noncredible source but attend to those coming
from a credible one (Kumkale & Albarracín, 2004; Petty &
Cacioppo, 1986).In contrast, when presented after the mes-
sage arguments, the source can offer a heuristic for accepting
or rejecting the message. In this situation, the effect of the
source is fairly superficial and short lived because the source
information is not integrated into the message representation
(Kumkale & Albarracín, 2004).
Other moderators of the effects of source credibility
are involvement and amount of source information
available. For example, in one study, participants were
presented with an educational policy that would either
affect them or not. In addition, the source description,
which was either 1 page or 50 words in length, intro-
duced an expert in testing (high-credibility condition)
or an expert in fitness (low-credibility condition). As
expected, the influence of the source depended on both
involvement and description length. Brief source descrip-
tions had greater impact than argument quality when
involvement was low, but long descriptions had the same
impact as the communication arguments when involve-
ment was high. In other words, long source descriptions
were processed as a persuasive argument, requiring high
processing motivation (Pierro, Mannetti, Erb, Spiegel, &
Kruglanski, 2005).
Despite considerable reliance on personal source
information, the actual message presented by a source may
be more revealing than message recipients’ attributions
about source credibility. People believe that facial cues
such as deviated gaze provide access to a source’s deception
but are better at judging credibility in the absence of such
cues (DePaulo, Stone, & Lassiter, 1985; Zuckerman,
DePaulo, & Rosenthal, 1981; Zuckerman & Driver, 1985).
More useful information about deception is transmitted in
speech errors and hesitations than in facial expressions.
Although very strong motivation to lie appears to pro-
duce facial cues that experts at lie detection can identify
(DePaulo & Friedman, 1999), people who lack objective
information about a source are generally better off turning
to the message for reliable credibility information.
Belief and Evaluations of the Content
of Persuasive Messages
Propositional reasoning has been a classic topic for social
psychologists who study persuasion. For example, Hovland
(1959), McGuire (1968, 1985), and Wyer (1974) all con-
tributed to the current understanding of the sequence of
activities that take place when people process a persua-
sive message (see Albarracín, 2002; Johnson et al., 2005;
Kruglanski & Stroebe, 2005; Wyer & Albarracín, 2005).
Hovland proposed that the processing of a persuasive mes-
sage involves three phases: (1) attention, (2) comprehen-
sion, and (3) acceptance of the message content. Attention
and comprehension concern learning or content retention,
whereas acceptance involves motivation (e.g., rewards) to
accept or reject the message conclusion.
Hovland’s (1959) distinction of these three phases of
influence was critical to analyze a number of phenomena.
For example, extreme fear appeals increase attention to the

message content but defeat themselves by inducing anxiety
(Janis & Milholland, 1954). Consistent with this idea,
research on the effects of campaigns to reduce HIV risk
and improve attitudes toward protection has demonstrated
greater efficacy when fear-inducing arguments are absent
rather than present (Albarracín, McNatt, et al., 2003;
Albarracín, Gillette, et al., 2005; Earl & Albarracín, 2007).
Brain activity, as measured by event-related potentials,
suggests that fear-inducing messages cause people to avert
their attention away from the message (Ruiter, Kessels,
Jansma, & Brug, 2006).
McGuire (1968, 1972) developed Hovland’s (1959)
theorizing by capitalizing on a cognitive perspective that
delineates a series of information-processing stages (see
Albarracín, 2002; Johnson et al., 2005; Kruglanski &
Stroebe, 2005; Wyer & Albarracín, 2005). These stages
include: (1) exposure (i.e., E ), (2) attention (A). (3)
comprehension (C). (4) yielding (Y). (5) retention (R). and
(6) behavior (B). Messages can be effective only if pre-
sented to potential recipients, who themselves attend to
and comprehend the conclusions and arguments discussed
in the message. Recipients must also agree with the con-
clusion of the communication, retain this yielding over a
period of time, and behave in the manner recommended by
the communication. As a result, the success of the message
can depend on its behavioral impact. That is,
PI  PE  PA  PC  PY  PR  PB [1],
where PI is the probability of influence of the persuasive
message, and the remaining probabilities are associated
with the previously defined stages.
Later, McGuire (1968) generated a simpler version of
his stage model (see Albarracín, 2002; Johnson et al., 2005;
Kruglanski & Stroebe, 2005; Wyer & Albarracín, 2005).
With the methods available at the time, he observed
difficulties in measuring attention and comprehension
as separate processes, and synthesized these processes as
well as exposure under the overall label of “reception” (R).
With this reduction,
PI  PR  PY [2],
where the probability of influence is a multiplicative
function of the probability of receiving the message and the
probability of yielding to the message. This two-step model
has important empirical implications. In particular, when
a situational or personal factor has the same influence on
both reception and yielding, the factor ’s influence should
be monotonic. In contrast, when a factor has opposite
influences on reception and yielding, the factor ’s influ-
ence should be curvilinear. For example, more intelligent
Attitudes in Reaction to a Seemingly Active Environment 411
people presumably attend to a message and understand
its arguments but also counterargue more than less intelli-
gent people. Ultimately, these opposite influences predict
that people of moderate intelligence should be more per-
suadable than people of either low or high intelligence (see
Johnson et al., 2005; Kruglanski & Stroebe, 2005; Wyer &
Albarracín, 2005).
Wyer (1974) further elaborated McGuire’s (1972) model
using conditional probabilities (see Albarracín, 2002;
Johnson et al., 2005; Kruglanski & Stroebe, 2005; Wyer &
Albarracín, 2005). In the new context, the probability of a
message’s influence is a function of the probability of
being influenced given that one receives the communi-
cation plus the probability of being influenced when one
does not receive it. That is,
PI  PR PI/R  PR' PI/R [3].
The probability of being influenced, assuming that one
receives the communication, can be rewritten as the probabi-
lity of yielding. Yielding, in turn, depends on the prob-
ability of yielding when one successfully counterargues
the communication (PY /CA), as well as the probability of
yielding when one fails to refute it (PY/CA'). Then, Equation
3 can be restated as follows:
PI  PR(PCA PY/CA  PCA'PY/CA)  PR' PI/R [4].
In this equation, the parenthetical term is a function of
the strength of the arguments in the message (see Petty &
Cacioppo, 1986). Stronger arguments should induce less
counterarguing, and thus be more persuasive, but other
factors may influence yielding and counterarguing as
well. For example, the affect recipients experience for
reasons unrelated to the persuasive message can increase
or decrease yielding (see e.g., Albarracín & Wyer, 2001;
Albarracín, 2002), making the message persuasive irre-
spective of counterarguing (PY/CA  PY/CA').
Since 2000, researchers have tried to specify with greater
detail the processes involved in yielding (Albarracín, 2002;
Albarracín & Wyer, 2000, 2001; Brown & Albarracín, 2005;
Crano & Prislin, 2005). In some formulations, the implica-
tions of both message-related and knowledge-based beliefs
and evaluations combine to form an attitude (A). This com-
bination may be done in the manner postulated by Fishbein
and Ajzen (1975; see Albarracín, Johnson, Fishbein, &
Muellerleile, 2001; Ajzen & Fishbein, 2005). That is,
A  be [5],
where A is attitude, b is a belief in an outcome or attribute,
and e is the evaluation of this outcome or attribute. This
412 Attitudes and Persuasion
attitude, together with other possible factors (e.g., social
norms or perceptions of control; see Ajzen & Madden, 1986;
Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) then influences the recipients’
intention to perform the behavior (e.g., average r between
attitude and intention  .58; Albarracín et al., 2001). Later,
this intention provides the basis for their future actions (see
also McGuire, 1985; e.g., average r between intention and
behavior  .45; Albarracín et al., 2001).
One question relevant to message processing is whether
outcome-specific beliefs are formed before the outcomes
are evaluated or afterward. Over three experiments,
Albarracín and Wyer (2001) found that people who are
able to think about the arguments contained in the message
first form beliefs and evaluations of behavioral outcomes
and then integrate the implications of these cognitions into
their attitudes. In one of these studies, for example, the time
taken to report outcome-specific beliefs and evaluations
was analyzed as a function of presentation order and type
of reported cognition (beliefs vs. evaluations). Outcome
beliefs and outcome evaluations were, on average, reported
equally quickly, but evaluations were made more quickly
when beliefs had been reported beforehand than when they
had not. Thus, these findings provided some support for
the hypothesis that outcome beliefs are formed before out-
come evaluations (see also Gilbert, 1991).
Details about the type and order of cognitions that
follow a persuasive message nicely complement classic
findings from the elaboration likelihood model (ELM;
Petty & Cacioppo, 1981, 1986). The ELM is a theory about
how cognitive processes mediate the relation between
persuasive stimuli and actual persuasion. According to this
model, message recipients’ cognitive responses to persua-
sive messages can vary along a continuum of elaboration
likelihood. When people are both motivated and able to
think carefully about the message (i.e., they engage in high
elaboration), they tend to scrutinize central issues, such as
the quality of the arguments presented in a message. This
processing is also known as the “central route” to persua-
sion. If people lack either motivation or ability (i.e., they
engage in low elaboration), they tend to rely on factors
other than their thoughts about the central issues, such
as characteristics of the person delivering the message.
This processing is also known as the “peripheral route”
to persuasion. Both central and peripheral routes (or high
and low elaboration, respectively) can lead to persuasion,
but central route processing generally leads to stronger
attitudes that are more carefully integrated with extant
cognitive structures, more resistant to subsequent persua-
sive attacks, and more likely to guide behavior.
The ELM has been used to organize different
approaches to studying attitude change into high- and
low-effort processes (Petty & Wegener, 1998). High-effort
processes include message-learning approaches and
expectancy value approaches, such as those described ear-
lier, as well as information integration theory (Anderson,
1971, 1981), and even cognitive dissonance theory. Low-
effort processes include classical conditioning and EC,
self-perception theory (Bem, 1972), and mere exposure.
In addition, the ELM has been used to organize different
ways in which persuasion-related variables (source,
message, recipient, context) can impact attitude change
(Petty & Wegener, 1998). First, persuasion-related vari-
ables may serve as “arguments relevant to determining the
merits of an object or position,” such as when an attractive
source endorses a cosmetic product. The source’s attrac-
tiveness may serve as an argument supporting the efficacy
of the product (Shavitt, Swan, Lowery, & Wänke, 1994).
Second, variables may also bias attitude-relevant informa-
tion processing, such as when an attractive source causes
people to interpret neutral information more favorably.
Third, variables can serve as peripheral cues, such as when
an attractive source is judged reason enough to buy a product
(Cialdini, 1987). And fourth, variables can influence the
amount of cognitive elaboration in which people engage,
such as when an attractive source causes people to attend
more carefully to the central arguments in a persua-
sive message (DeBono & Harnish, 1988; Puckett, Petty,
Cacioppo, & Fisher, 1983). In general, the ELM framework
has been an exceptionally powerful and robust approach to
the study of persuasion.
Power, Authority, and Social Influence
Power has been conceptualized as the ability to influence
another via control of resources or punishments (for
reviews see Fiske, volume 2; French & Raven, 1959;
Kelman, 1958; Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003; for
an alternate perspective see Turner, 2005). Although power
may belong to the persuading agent, the message recipi-
ent, or both, most research on the relation between power
and persuasion has focused on the power of the persuad-
ing agent (e.g., Festinger & Thibaut, 1951) and how that
power affects attitude change.
French and Raven (1959) differentiated five sources of
power. Legitimate power reflects the recipient’s belief that
the influencing agent has a right to direct behavior, as when
a police officer directs traffic. Referent power reflects the
recipient’s liking of, or “feeling of oneness” (p. 161), with
the agent, exemplified by the power of an admired celebrity
to influence purchasing decisions. Expert power reflects
the recipient’s belief that the agent has superlative skills or
knowledge, or both, as in a typical student–teacher relation-
ship. Reward and coercive power reflect the agent’s abil-
ity to administer rewards and punishments, respectively.

A sixth source, informational power. is not derived from
perceptions of the source but rather the information deliv-
ered by a source, such as the quality of the arguments
(Deutsch & Gerard, 1955; Raven, 1965).
Kelman (1958, 1961, 1974, 2006) proposed three
processes of influence. Compliance is a form of pub-
lic acceptance in which recipients change their attitudes
to gain a favorable (or prevent an unfavorable) response
from the agent. Attitude change because of compliance is
unlikely to be permanent, being present only in front of the
agent and potentially producing private rejection (Brehm &
Brehm, 1981). Identification may elicit private acceptance
through the recipient’s desire to “establish or maintain a
positive self-defining relationship to another person or
a group,” (Kelman, 1958, p. 53). Attitude change because
of identification is likely to persist to the extent that the
relationship with the agent is salient. Internalization elicits
private acceptance because the recipient finds the ideas or
behaviors, or both, intrinsically appealing and consistent
with the recipient’s values. Attitude change because of
internalization persists beyond the recipient’s relationship
with the agent.
Although relatively little work has been done on the
effect of the power of the message recipient, there has
been work on the influence of power on the power holder.
Drawing on research on BIS/BAS, and Higgins’s (1997,
1999) work on regulatory focus, Keltner et al. (2003)
proposed that increased power activates approach-related
tendencies (e.g., increased sensitivity to rewards, posi-
tive affect, automatic social cognition), and that decreased
power activates avoidance tendencies (e.g., increased sen-
sitivity to punishment, negative affect, controlled social
cognition). Message recipients who feel powerful may
become more confident in their prior attitudes or become
more likely to agree with the message advocacy (Briñol,
Petty, Valle, Rucker, & Becerra, 2007). Recipients made
to feel powerful before the persuasive attempt resisted
persuasion because they felt confident in their preexisting
ideas. In contrast, recipients made to feel powerful after a
persuasive attempt were more persuaded because they felt
confident in the new ideas engendered by the persuasive
message.
The source of information people use as a basis for behavior
also appears to vary with the actual social power (access
to resources) of an audience (Albarracín, Durantini, &
Earl, 2006; Albarracín, Gillette, et al., 2005; Albarracín,
Kumkale, & Johnson, 2004; Durantini et al., 2006). For
example, the less power a population has (ethnic minor-
ity, women, impoverished groups), the more important
skills and actual resource provision become (Albarracín,
Gillette, et al., 2005). For example, ethnic minority audi-
ences increase their condom use behavior more when they
Attitudes in Reaction to a Seemingly Active Environment 413
undergo training in skills (e.g., planning) that allow them
to overcome environmental obstacles than when they
do not (for audiences with African background, average
d  .58 vs. .16 when this training is and is not present;
Albarracín, Gillette, et al., 2005). These aspects, however,
are not as important to the less deprived ethnic major-
ity groups (for audiences with European background,
average d  .35 vs. .05 when this training is and is not
present; Albarracín, Gillette, et al., 2005). In addition,
samples with lower social power change their behavior
more in response to expert than lay sources, presum-
ably because professional experts are a door to resources
(Durantini et al., 2006). Specifically, when experts (e.g.,
physicians, nurses, and psychologists) deliver a behavior-
change program, the average behavior-change d values
are .44 and .35 for predominantly African-background
and female audiences, respectively (Durantini et al.,
2006). In contrast, when lay community members (e.g.,
peer counselors) deliver a behavior-change program, the
average behavior-change d values are .14 and .15 for
predominantly African-background and female audi-
ences, respectively (Durantini et al., 2006).
Even the style of the message itself may be characterized
as powerful or powerless, independent of the quality or
substance of the arguments. A powerless message may
include tag questions (e.g., “isn’t that right?”), as well as
verbal and nonverbal hesitations (e.g., “let’s see here” and
“um”), which are absent in powerful messages. Important
for our analysis, powerless messages tend to evoke less
favorable attitudes than powerful ones (Areni & Sparks,
2005; Sparks & Areni, 2008).
Finally, power is closely related to authority, another
characteristic that can have a profound influence on attitu-
dinal and behavioral change. An authority is a figure who
has acquired special status through experience, education,
special talents, or other means (Cialdini, 2001). An author-
ity may not have the ability to directly administer rewards
or punishments (e.g., the author of a book on astronomy)
but may nevertheless be perceived as a legitimate source of
information and behavioral guide. Milgram’s (1963, 1974)
famous research on obedience to authority demonstrated
the profound impact of authorities on behavior, if not
attitudes (see also Bickman, 1974; Doob & Gross, 1968;
Hofling, Brotzman, Dalrymple, Graves, & Pierce, 1966;
Lefkowitz, Blake, & Mouton, 1955). Despite much past
research in this area, relatively little work has been done
in recent years, and many of Kelman’s hypotheses about
power remain untested (Kelman, 2006). As operation-
alizations of authority are relatively easy to create (e.g.,
uniforms, titles; see Cialdini, 2001), the attitudinal impact
of authority is an area that should continue to attract
attention in the years to come.
414 Attitudes and Persuasion
Psychological Reactance
Perhaps the most provocative statement about people’s
attitudinal responses to a seemingly active environment
comes from the theory of psychological reactance (Brehm,
1966; Brehm & Sensenig, 1966). According to this view,
when a person feels free to enact a given behavior, elimi-
nating or threatening to eliminate this freedom can instill
psychological reactance. For example, constraints to freely
choosing between A and B may arise if one is told to choose
A as opposed to B. The reactance associated with a mild
constraint (on a single choice) may increase consideration
of A as potentially better than B. The reactance associated
with a high degree of constraint, however, may trigger
rejection of A over B. In Brehm and Sensenig’s (1966)
classic study, participants were asked to choose between
pairs of paintings and were told that another person had
written his or her choices of paintings. In the control
condition, the note simply stated, “I prefer A (or B);” in the
threat condition, the note stated, “I think we should both
choose A (or B).” In addition, the threat condition could
be about only one pair (low implication) or all pairs (high
implication). The results from this seminal study indicated
persuasion in the threat conditions. When the note simply
stated a preference, then participants were likely to go along
with it. In the threat conditions, however, the pattern dif-
fered. Participants were equally likely to choose A or B in
the low-implication condition (OR  .67) but more likely
to choose B in the high-implication condition (OR  .47).
In summary, unambiguous reactance emerged when the
choices on all pairs of paintings were constrained.
Considerable evidence has accumulated in support of
psychological reactance. In particular, there is little defi-
ance when people reaffirm their freedom by channels other
than resistance, including restoration of their freedom by
another (Worchel & Brehm, 1971), prior exercise of their
freedom (Snyder & Wicklund, 1976), and exercise of
choice with respect to the form of compliance (Heilman &
Garner, 1975). Nonetheless, it is possible that people’s defi-
ance is a public maneuver to avoid the impression of being
easily manipulated (Brehm & Mann, 1975; Heilman &
Garner, 1975). This possibility has received mixed support,
going from finding similar effects of coercion on publicly
and privately expressed decisions (Brehm & Mann, 1975)
to finding reduced reactance only when the manipulator
is aware of other free choices by the actor (Baer, Hinkle,
Smith, & Fenton, 1980).
Anticipated regret has also been implicated in defi-
ance of coercion, but there has been no support for this
possibility. Crawford, McConnell, Lewis, and Sherman
(2002) observed that anticipated regret could explain the
phenomenon if people expect greater regret from following
somebody else’s rather than their own decisions. According
to predictions, participants who reported regret anticipated
greater regret about negative outcomes following defiance
than compliance. Nonetheless, these participants actually
complied with the other person’s choices, whereas nonre-
porters displayed the typical reactance effect. In summary,
although cognitive mechanisms coexist with a pure inter-
personal effect, research to date has failed to substantiate a
role for anticipated regret.
Cognitive mechanisms that have received support, how-
ever, include counterarguing and perceptions of source
credibility. Silvia (2006) investigated these processes by
manipulating the order of presentation of the coercion
(see earlier section on Source Credibility; Kumkale &
Albarracín, 2004). Two persuasive messages were designed
to persuade recipients of a choice of major. Half of the
participants were instructed to agree with the recommen-
dation at the beginning of the message and half at the end
of the message. When the freedom-threatening statement
was at the beginning, the influence of the threat versus
control message was mediated by counterarguments
and perceptions that the source was untrustworthy and
inexpert. At the moment, it is not clear whether these cog-
nitive responses comprise a motivated attempt to regain
freedom or a cold inference based on an unfavorable
impression of the communicator. Given current atten-
tion to cold and hot reasoning processes, however, future
work is likely to provide further answers to this important
question.
Silvia (2006) also found a direct influence of the threat
on agreement when the coercive statement was at the end.
However, interpretational ambiguities exist with a direct
effect when only counterarguments are measured (“Were
you criticizing the essay while you were reading it?”).
Without requesting cognitive responses more broadly, it
is unclear whether message recipients were consciously
aware of the persuasive intent, and if so, whether they
were aware of their reactance to it. In a study of organ
donation (Reinhart, Marshall, Feeley & Tutzauer, 2007),
loss-frame messages emphasizing the number of lost lives
in the absence of donation were compared with gain-
frame messages emphasizing the number of saved lives
in the presence of donation. In this study, both reported
psychological reactance (“It irritates me that the message
told me how to feel about organ and tissue donation,”
Reinhart et al., 2007, p. 251) and perceived persuasive
intent (“The creator of this message tried to manipulate me
in ways I did not like,” Reinhart et al., 2007, p. 251)
mediated the influence of framing on favorable reactions
to the message (a mixture of feelings about and per-
ceived importance of the issue, and attitudes toward the
message).

It is nevertheless unlikely that reactance requires aware-
ness. Contrary to Reinhart et al.’s (2007) studies, which
were conducted with undergraduates, other studies suggest
that reactance may emerge with a lack of awareness. Studies
conducted in the general population have recently uncovered
reactance-type effects without any evidence of awareness of
experienced reactance. For example, a field study conducted
by Albarracín, Durantini, Earl, Gunnoe, and Leeper, (2008)
showed that when health-promotion counseling was offered
by deemphasizing the likelihood of behavior change, enroll-
ment in the program was greater than when behavior change
was emphasized (e.g., 60% vs. 41% enrollment). However,
items measuring the degree to which the offer was imposing
failed to mediate the effect of the program introduction on
enrollment. Moreover, as being subliminally exposed to the
name of a controlling significant other seems to elicit reac-
tance (Chartrand, Dalton, & Fitzsimons, 2007), reactance
may unfold in an automatic fashion.
Forewarning of Influence Intent
People who are forewarned of an upcoming influence
attempt are sometimes more likely to resist this
influence (for more on influence, see Hogg, volume 2). For
example, Dean, Austin, and Watts (1971, study 1) either
did or did not inform participants that they would rate how
persuaded they were after receiving a message (i.e., a fore-
warning of persuasive intent). The importance of the topic
(presidential elections vs. a health issue) varied, as did the
high or low status of the source. Interestingly, forewarning
decreased persuasion by the high-status source but not by
the low-status source.
A meta-analysis of the forewarning literature (Wood &
Quinn, 2003), however, has clarified the contribution of
involvement to forewarning effects. In this meta-analysis,
there was an average shift in line with the expected message
of d  .37, but the effect was highly variable. Three pooled
studies indicated that forewarning produced resistance
(a boomerang effect of the message) when involvement
was high but slight agreement when involvement was low.
According to the authors, while one awaits a believed-to-
be-persuasive message, both resisting and agreeing can
serve to reduce the threat posed by impending attacks
against personal attitudes. This moderating effect raises
questions about the processes elicited by forewarning.
Resistance may actively recruit counterarguments, thus
requiring motivation to produce specific thoughts (Petty &
Cacioppo, 1986). Alternatively, people may need involve-
ment to reject the message without further elaboration.
For example, if identifying and then discounting the influ-
ence each require increasing levels of ability (Albarracín
& Kumkale, 2003; Gilbert, 1991; Gilbert, Tafarodi, &
Attitudes in Reaction to a Seemingly Active Environment 415
Malone, 1993), then low involvement may produce a posi-
tive effect via identification, whereas high involvement
may produce a negative effect via discounting. Following
Albarracín and Kumkale’s (2003) logic, future research may
reveal that further decreases in motivation or ability to think
about this influence actually eliminates forewarning effects.
Resistance to Persuasion
Perceiving persuasive intent is generally sufficient for a
host of resistance processes to unfold. Audiences aban-
don the communicator and avoid similar messages in the
future (Festinger, 1964; Hart et al., 2009), and actively
counterargue the message in an attempt to resist its influ-
ence (Sagarin & Cialdini, 2004; Wegener & Carlston,
2005). Interestingly, the initial research on attempts to
counter an external influence had the objective of studying
experimental participants who act contrary to the exper-
imenter ’s hypothesis (Weber & Cook, 1972). Masling
(1966) described this effect as a participant’s “screw you”
reaction to the suspicion that the experimenter is attempt-
ing to control their minds. In a classic set of two studies
(Christensen, 1977), participants were induced to suspect,
actually experience, or neither suspect nor experience
psychological manipulation. In the suspicion condition,
the experimenter stated that psychological experiments
often include procedures to manipulate behavior with-
out the participants’ knowledge. In the experience condi-
tion, participants were asked to copy telephone numbers.
While participants wrote numbers, the experimenter told
them that fast copying was indicative of an obsessive-
compulsive personality disorder, which they later learned
was a calculated strategy to diminish their performance.
The third condition had neither instructions nor experi-
ence manipulations. Participants in these three conditions
then underwent a verbal conditioning task (Taffel, 1955)
during which the experimenter attempted to condition
some responses by repeating “good.” The experimenter ’s
statements should normally increase the occurrence of the
reinforced responses, but participants’ resistance may actu-
ally eliminate this effect. As expected, participants were
conditioned only when participants did not have a recent
manipulative experience.
The fascinating phenomenon of resistance to an
external influence eventually received the attention of
social psychologists. For example, McGuire (1964)
directly manipulated the motivation to self-defend from a
persuasive message by having participants counterargue
weak forms of the message before a subsequent stronger
attack. According to him, the process of counterarguing
should not only increase refutational ability but also the
motivation to self-defend from the attack. Although the two
416 Attitudes and Persuasion
processes could not be disentangled in McGuire’s work,
the refutational practice did, in fact, decrease vulnerability
to a subsequent attack.
Recent work by Sagarin, Cialdini, Rice, and Serna
(2002) has advanced our understanding of the role of
motivation in defending our attitudes against influence
attempts. Participants received training for discriminating
between legitimate and illegitimate sources based on
whether the source has expertise in a particular domain.
This treatment was designed to leave participants aware
that there was a potential influence source, able to
discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate sources,
and also willing to make this discrimination. As predicted,
the treatment increased persuasion for legitimate sources
and decreased it for illegitimate sources. Other studies of
the same series confirmed that the perception of undue
manipulative intent decreased persuasion directly and
by mediating influences on specific counterarguments
of the message content. This conclusion was also consis-
tent with independent findings that distrusting a source
engenders automatic semantic associations that are
incongruent with the source’s message (Schul, Mayo, &
Burnstein, 2004).
Sources of influence may also be rejected when they are
perceived as being hypocritical. More than 1,500 inner-city
high-school students were assigned to different conditions of
an HIV prevention-intervention trial: The key conditions
were a teacher-led intervention and a student-led interven-
tion (Fisher, Fisher, Bryan, & Misovich, 2002). Findings
revealed that, compared with the teacher-led interven-
tion, the peer-led intervention was more effective at the
3-month follow-up but less effective at the 1-year follow-
up. Apparently, over the course of a year, the student inter-
ventionists were perceived as hypocritical because they
displayed some of the behaviors they had previously tried
to discourage in their peers. This perception of the source
as hypocritical presumably decreased the effectiveness of
the peer-led intervention.
Reflecting on Resistance and
Cognitive Dissonance
Another interesting facet of reacting against a seemingly
active environment is that the influence source provides
an anchor for reflecting about attitudes. Rucker and Petty
(2002) presented participants with a strong ad promoting a
pharmaceutical product and instructed participants either
to list negative thoughts (for an introduction to the tech-
nique to induce biased thoughts, see Killeya & Johnson,
1998) or to simply list their thoughts about the message.
Presumably, participants who listed only negative thoughts
attempted to resist the communication to a greater extent
than those who were free to list any (positive, negative,
and/or neutral) thoughts. Findings indicated that partici-
pants were persuaded regardless of what thoughts they
listed, probably because the ad was difficult to refute.
However, participants who attempted to resist the message
(and failed) were more confident in their favorable attitude
toward the product than those who did not make an effort
to resist persuasion (see also Schwarz et al., 1991). In other
words, confidence was established in relation to prior reac-
tions to the message.
Research conducted by Albarracín, Cohen, and Kumkale
(2003) also suggests that message recipients consider the
degree to which a prior message was persuasive. In this
research, participants received a message that recom-
mended either abstinence from or moderation in the use of
a new alcohol-type of product. After reading these mate-
rials, participants either tried the product or performed a
filler task before reporting their intentions to drink in the
future. As predicted, participants who did not try the prod-
uct reported similar intentions to drink when they received
the moderation message and when they received the absti-
nence message (d  .03). In contrast, when participants tried
the product after receiving the message, recipients of the
abstinence message had significantly stronger intentions to
drink than recipients of the moderation message (d  .76).
One interpretation of these results is that participants
inferred their intentions after considering their trial behavior
vis-à-vis an external influence (the message recommenda-
tion). Apparently, trying the product after a strong recom-
mendation led participants to conclude that they truly liked
the forbidden product. Another potential interpretation is
that the discrepancy made people anxious and thus more
likely to resolve these feelings by justifying their drinking
behavior (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). Although this par-
ticular interpretation seemed less plausible than the self-
perception account based on additional data, both processes
are relevant to situations in which the recipient’s behavior
contradicts an earlier persuasive message.
Reactions to perceived influence intent are in many ways
similar to phenomena identified in the context of cogni-
tive dissonance. In Festinger and Carlsmith’s (1959) classic
study, male participants worked for 1 hour on boring tasks
such as turning spools on a board. Immediately after this task,
participants were told that the experimenter was investigat-
ing the effects of expectancies on performance. They were
further informed that they were in a control condition that
did not receive any information before beginning the tasks.
However, they learned that other participants were to receive
information designed to create a positive expectation about
the task. The positive expectations were ostensibly instilled
by asking the participants to tell another student that the task
was enjoyable. Importantly, participants were offered either

$1 or $20 for providing a positive evaluation of the task to the
other participant (actually an experimenter’s accomplice).
Results of how enjoyable the task was to the partici-
pants depended on the amount of money they received
in exchange for lying. Participants who were paid $1 for
describing the experiment as enjoyable rated the tasks as
more enjoyable than did participants who were paid $20.
Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) argued that participants
who lied experienced dissonance created by the cognitions
“The tasks were boring” and “I told someone the tasks
were enjoyable.” Those who were paid $20, however, had
an important consonant cognition in “I was paid a lot of
money to tell someone the tasks were enjoyable.” This
awareness of an environmental influence was sufficient to
reduce the dissonance magnitude and the associated influ-
ence of the behavior on private reports.
Cognitive dissonance theorists gave arousal and
perceived self-determination central roles in attitude change
(Olson & Stone, 2005), and highlight how awareness of a
reward’s influence can increase the level of arousal associ-
ated with an object. In particular, arousal measured with
skin conductance is greater when participants undergo
typical dissonance manipulations and have no opportunity
to reduce this dissonance (Croyle & Cooper, 1983; Elkin &
Leippe, 1986). This finding has received repeated support
(see Harmon-Jones, Brehm, Greenberg, Simon, & Nelson,
1996) and is generally taken as an indication that affective
feelings are necessary for the experience and consequences
of cognitive dissonance. Even more definitive, however,
has been evidence from studies using misattribution para-
digms (Zanna & Cooper, 1974). For example, in one study,
participants engaged in belief-discrepant behavior, and for
some, physiological measures of arousal were obtained
(Croyle & Cooper, 1983). When physiological measures
were obtained, participants’ beliefs were not affected by
their behavior, presumably because they attributed their
experienced arousal to the elaborate measurement appara-
tus. In contrast, when no such measures were obtained, par-
ticipants supposedly attributed their feelings to the behavior
and changed their beliefs accordingly. Participants were
either instructed to write a counterattitudinal essay (low
choice) or politely asked to write a counterattitudinal essay
(high choice). Also, all participants were given a placebo
tablet. Some were informed that the pill would “produce a
reaction of tenseness,” others that the pill would “produce
a reaction of relaxation,” and others that the pill had no
side effects (Zanna & Cooper, 1974, p. 705). Participants
in the low-choice conditions showed minimal attitude
change; for low-choice participants, writing the essay was
not a counterattitudinal behavior because they were able to
make an external attribution for their dissonant behavior
(e.g., “the experiment required that I write that essay”).
Attitudes in Reaction to a Seemingly Active Environment 417
Participants in the high-choice conditions showed vary-
ing degrees of attitude change. Those in the “tenseness”
condition showed minimal attitude change; they, too, were
able to make an external attribution (to the placebo) for the
physiological arousal induced by their dissonant behavior.
Those in the “no side effect” condition showed moderate
attitude change, consistent with other research on cognitive
dissonance. Finally, those in the “relaxation” condition
showed a great deal of attitude change; they “showed an
increased need to deal with their arousal by changing their
opinions” (Zanna & Cooper, 1974, p. 707).
Communication Pragmatics
A final fascinating aspect of reactions to seemingly active
environments entails the use of the actual content of a
communication as a source of information about the influ-
ence source. In a study conducted by Rosen, Cochran, and
Musser (1990), participants read recommendation letters
about a job applicant, as well as the applicants’ (posi-
tive) self-descriptions. These self-descriptions positively
influenced impressions of the applicant only when the
recommendation letters were favorable. In contrast, these
descriptions negatively influenced these impressions
when the recommendation letters were unfavorable.
Presumably the self-descriptions were perceived as deceit-
ful or manipulative when they contradicted other informa-
tion about the source of these self-descriptions.
Wyer, Budesheim, and Lambert (1990) provided a sys-
tematic analysis of communication pragmatics. In this
framework, people are supposed to spontaneously form
impressions of communicators, even in the absence of
instructions to do so. For this reason, the descriptions a
speaker provides about another person often say more about
the speaker than the target person. Disparaging others, for
example, creates the impression that the speaker is intol-
erant and unfriendly. Interestingly, however, the content
of a communication has different pragmatic implications
depending on the source type. Gruenfeld and Wyer (1992)
examined the influence of affirmations and denials in differ-
ent communication contexts. In this work, message sources
were manipulated to be either a newspaper or a volume that
records archival knowledge. Both sources affirmed and
denied propositions that participants would normally assume
to be untrue (e.g., the presidential candidate did not have an
affair). When the message source was a newspaper, affirming
and denying statements were taken as informative, resulting
in participants’ beliefs in both the affirmed and denied reports
(d for difference between affirmations and denials  .08).
In contrast, when the ostensible source was an archive,
only affirming statements informed beliefs (d for differ-
ence between affirmations and denials  1.12). Presumably,
418 Attitudes and Persuasion
recipients believed newspapers to make statements for a
reason but archives to provide redundant information. In this
context, recipients believed that the newspaper denials were
attempts to manipulate public opinion.
Summary
A seemingly active environment can elicit attributions of
influence intent and, therefore, self-defense (e.g., resistance
and reactance theory). Many of these processes have been
studied in prior decades and have also received research
attention in recent years. Strong messages recommending
a behavior have been recently shown to influence attitudes
only in relation to the behavior of the recipient. The actual
arguments of a persuasive message, which were tradition-
ally conceptualized as mere information, are now known
to provide pragmatic information as well. These and many
more findings now provide a more complete picture of
social influence and persuasion mechanisms that should
continue to emerge in the next decade.
SUMMARY
Psychologists have made considerable progress under-
standing environmental influences on attitudes and are
now making strides toward understanding biological
and genetic influences as well. This chapter summarizes
some of the ways in which genes can influence general
affectivity (i.e., neuroticism and impulsivity), and there-
fore attitude valence and related arousal, but most of this
work remains to be done. This chapter also reviewed
environmental influences, an area in which many impor-
tant and influential findings have accrued for more than
a century of attitude research. The last decade has been
dedicated to elucidating some of the details of these pro-
cesses but has been relatively silent about the larger con-
nections between the processes triggered by seemingly
passive environments and reactions to persuasive intent.
We hope that future researchers will address these broad
questions, as well as the vast set of questions related to
gene-environment interactions. Both scholars and practi-
tioners will benefit from continued progress in this classic
yet vibrant inquiry domain.
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Chapter 12
Perceiving People
C. NEIL MACRAE AND SUSANNE QUADFLIEG
Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters.
The human face (and to a lesser extent body) is with-
out rival as a stimulus in the person perception process.
Daily experience attests that even the briefest of glances
at an individual is sufficient to furnish a wealth of per-
son-relevant information. From minimal visual cues, one
can quickly decode the sex, age, emotional status, gaze
direction, and sometimes even the intentions of a target.
Moreover, if the person is familiar (e.g., Elvis Presley),
identity-relevant knowledge also rapidly comes to mind
(e.g., singer, actor, American, You Ain’t Nothin’ but a
Hound Dog). Such is the dexterity with which perceivers
can access person knowledge following the registration
of facial cues, Haxby, Hoffman, and Gobbini (2000) have
argued that, “face perception may be the most developed
visual perceptual skill in humans” (p. 223).
Of course, that the face occupies a pivotal position in
social cognition is not a recent revelation. More than 2,000
years ago, Cicero (106–43 BCE) noted that “all action is of
the mind and the mirror of the mind is the face.” Endorsing
this prescient observation, contemporary researchers have
sought to unravel the mysteries of human face processing
and shed insight on the processes that support person under-
standing. Although social psychologists have made consider-
able contributions to this literature (see Zebrowitz, 1997), for
the most part, work on face processing has been conducted
by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. As a result of
their endeavours, much is now known about the mental and
neural operations that support face processing, the nature of
person identification, and the extent to which person recogni-
tion is compromised following insult to the brain (see Bruce
& Humphreys, 1994; Farah, Wilson, Drain, & Tanaka, 1998;
Haxby et al., 2000; Haxby, Hoffman, & Gobbini, 2002).
Notwithstanding the significant strides that cognitive
psychologists and neuroscientists have taken toward delin-
eating the operations that underpin person perception, only
428
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
—Shakespeare (Macbeth, Act I, Scene 5: Durband, 1985)
recently has this work captured the attention of experimental
social psychologists. A surprising paradox may account for
this oversight—the paradox of the missing persons (see
Gilbert & Hixon, 1991). Despite person perception constitut-
ing a central area of inquiry in social psychology for decades,
two elements have surprisingly been absent in explorations of
this topic—persons and perception. That is, despite the prior-
ity given to perceptual processes in contemporary accounts
of face processing (Bruce & Young, 1986; Haxby et al.,
2000, 2002), work in social psychology has tended to over-
look the importance of these operations (but see Zebrowitz,
1997), focusing instead on the cognitive and behavioral
aspects of person construal (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000).
This oversight can arguably be traced to a couple of fac-
tors. First, the dominant theoretical (and empirical) pursuit
in social–cognitive research has been to explicate the man-
ner in which category-based knowledge (i.e., stereotypes)
affects impressions, memories and actions, outcomes that
tap the products of postperceptual operations (Bodenhausen
& Macrae, 1998; Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990).
Second, a favored technique for exploring person perception
has been to present participants with triggering verbal stimuli
(e.g., category labels), a strategy that necessarily obscures the
role played by perceptual operations in the detection, clas-
sification, and identification of social targets (but see Blair,
Judd, & Chapleau, 2004; Cloutier, Mason, & Macrae, 2005;
Gilbert & Hixon, 1991; Livingston & Brewer, 2002; Macrae,
Bodenhausen, & Milne, 1995; Maddox & Gray, 2002;
Quinn &Macrae, 2005). Yet these operations patently exert a
significant influence on the course and products of the
person-perception process (Bruce & Young, 1998).
The primary objective of the current chapter is therefore
to provide an overview of how contemporary research in
social psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neu-
roscience can inform understanding of critical components

of the person perception process. In this respect, our
treatment of person perception will be unashamedly literal;
we will focus on persons and perception. In so doing, we
hope our approach will not further muddy already murky
waters. As Gilbert (1998) observed in this very chapter
in a previous edition of the Handbook, “Social psycholo-
gists have studied person perception for more than half a
century, and for more than half a century have bemoaned
the deficiencies of the phrase” (pp. 89–150). The prob-
lem can be summarized as follows. Although the object
of inquiry is unquestionable (i.e., people), the processes
through which knowledge about the object can be acquired
(i.e., perception) has seemed less relevant, at least to social
psychologists. As a result, the term person perception has
often been applied to refer to how the hidden goals, beliefs,
and intentions that guide human behavior are identified,
but rarely to elucidate the operations that enable people to
recognize inverted faces in poorly illuminated restaurants.
Accordingly, an extensive social-psychological literature
now charts how people identity and decode the myriad fac-
tors (e.g., dispositions, intentions, beliefs) that shape social
interaction (Gilbert, 1998). For the most part, however,
this work considers the perception of personality, not the
perception of people.
Given that even highly sophisticated judgments or attri-
butions about others are fueled by inputs that derive from
the workings of early perceptual operations, our goal in
this chapter is to consider the perceptual processes through
which person understanding emerges. Hence we attempt
to elucidate how perceptual operations contribute toward
the abstraction of both variant (e.g., emotional expression,
gaze direction) and invariant (e.g., sex, identity) aspects of
person knowledge from available physical cues (Bruce &
Young, 1986; Burton, Bruce, & Johnston, 1990; Haxby
et al., 2000, 2002). In this respect, following a description
of the different classes of person knowledge that can be
extracted from facial and bodily cues, we switch attention
to a consideration of the basic processing operations and
associated neural structures that support person percep-
tion. In so doing, our objective is to furnish an integrative
account of contemporary research exploring the dynamics
of person construal.
DECODING PERSON CUES
Consider for a moment the last time you stood in line to
secure tickets at the cinema. Besides thinking about which
movie to view or whether or not to purchase popcorn and
a fizzy drink, one’s colleagues in the queue can be a con-
stant source of entertainment. For example, depending on
the time of day, one is likely to see groups of teenage girls
Decoding Person Cues 429
excited by the mere passing of pimply boys, couples falling
in love or drifting apart, divorced dads trying valiantly to
amuse their estranged kids, or bewildered senior citizens
trying to get to grips with the self-service ticket device.
But how is it that one comes to know these things about
other people? What does it take to discern that someone is
male or female, excited or confused, estranged or in love?
Research exploring the perceptual determinants of person
understanding provides answers to these questions.
Types of Person Cues: Faces and Bodies
in Motion
In recent years, accumulating evidence has demonstrated
that the human visual system is exquisitely adapted for
the perception of conspecifics. Not only do human faces
attract most of our attention when we perceive other people
(Fletcher-Watson, Findlay, Leekam, & Benson, 2008), but
we also possess the capacity to identify a virtually unlimited
number of individuals as we navigate our social environ-
ments and relationships (Haxby et al., 2000). The building
blocks of these abilities appear early in life. From birth,
infants display a preference for facelike stimuli over other
visual patterns, and during the first 3 months of life, they
progressively hone their face-processing skills (Morton &
Johnson, 1991; Simion, Leo, Turati, Valenza, & Dalla
Barba, 2007). Between 3 and 7 months of age, infants gain
the ability to distinguish the face of their mother from the
faces of strangers and begin to categorize people accord-
ing to sex and emotional expression (Nelson, 2001). In
addition, from 4 months onward, infants develop a tem-
plate for perceiving the prototypical configuration of faces
(i.e., two lateralized eyes over a centralized nose over a
mouth), as evidenced by the emergence of the face inver-
sion effect (FIE; Fagan, 1972).
The FIE, a phenomenon that is also reliably observed
among healthy adults, refers to the observation that when
faces and objects are inverted (i.e., rotated through 180
degrees), recognition performance decreases more dramati-
cally for the former than the latter stimuli (Yin, 1969). This
effect has been attributed to the different types of informa-
tion that can be extracted from available facial cues. During
processing, not only do perceivers extract information relat-
ing to single facial features (e.g., mouth, nose, eyes, ears,
chin, cheekbones—feature-based information), they also
encode information pertaining to the spatial arrangement
or configuration of facial features (i.e., configural informa-
tion; see Maurer, Le Grand, & Mondloch, 2002; Rossion &
Gauthier, 2002). After faces are inverted, whereas the pro-
cessing of single features proceeds as normal, the extraction
of configural (i.e., relational) information is compromised.
Because inversion impedes recognition performance for
430 Perceiving People
faces more severely than other classes of object (Maurer
et al., 2002), the FIE has been taken as evidence that person
recognition is reliant on the extraction of configural infor-
mation from facial cues.
The observation that face recognition is highly depen-
dent on configural information gains further support from
a related memorial phenomenon, the face composite effect
(FCE). This effect derives from the demonstration that
when the top and bottom halves of a face comprise dif-
ferent people (e.g., top half
your mother; bottom half

your aunt), participants experience difficulty reporting
the identity of the person portrayed in the top half of the
face (Hole, 1994). It is assumed that the FCE occurs
because the extraction of configural information prompts
participants to fuse the two parts of the composite stimu-
lus into a novel person, thereby impairing their ability to
recognize the identity of each of the constituent elements.
Corroborating this viewpoint, recognition performance
is enhanced when the processing of configural informa-
tion is impaired by misaligning the top and bottom halves
of the novel composite face (Young, Hellawell, & Hay,
1987).
It is important to note that not only faces appear to enjoy
a privileged status during stimulus processing; so, too,
do human bodies. Compared with other classes of objects,
human bodies capture a disproportionate amount of atten-
tion during stimulus processing (Downing, Bray, Rogers, &
Childs, 2004). Like faces, bodies are constituted of a set
of common elements (e.g., two arms, two legs, a trunk)
that are arranged in a typical configuration (e.g., arms
located in the upper and legs located in the lower half of
the trunk). Hence, similar to face recognition, body identi-
fication requires individuals to make fine-grained percep-
tual distinctions based on the shape and configuration of
various parts. In this respect, it is interesting to note that,
like person identification, stimulus inversion impairs body
recognition (i.e., the recognition of static body postures),
thus revealing that core aspects of person perception (i.e.,
face and body recognition) rely on the extraction of con-
figural information from available stimulus cues (Reed,
Stone, Bozova, & Tanaka, 2003; Reed, Stone, Grubb, &
McGoldrick, 2006).
As primary sources of person-related knowledge, both
faces and bodies convey additional information when they
are in motion. Studies employing animated point-light (PL)
displays have demonstrated that socially relevant informa-
tion can readily be gleaned from people’s patterns of move-
ment. In work of this kind, movement is portrayed via the
relative motion of a small number of PL markers that are
positioned on the head and the joints of the body. Importantly,
when presented as static images, the depicted assem-
bly of lights appears entirely meaningless to perceivers.
When, however, the stimuli are shown in motion, naïve
observers can readily recognize a human form and asso-
ciated movements (Blake & Shiffrar, 2007). This percep-
tion of PL motion remains remarkably robust even when
dynamic noise (i.e., additional lights) is added to the
display (Hiris, Humphrey, & Stout, 2005). Mirroring
the effects reported with static faces and bodies, the abil-
ity to detect motion is impaired when PL animations are
inverted (Hiris, Krebeck, Edmonds, & Stout, 2005). PL
animations are of theoretical interest because they convey
patterns of motion with little or no form-related informa-
tion and the visual details that usually accompany person
perception (e.g., clothing, emotional expression, facial
attractiveness). As such, they give an important insight
into the impact that motion cues alone exert on the process
of person construal. Given the role that motion cues play
in the person perception process, it is unsurprising to learn
that the ability to detect PL depictions of human movement
emerges early in life and remains intact across the lifespan.
At 4 months of age, infants prefer looking at a sequence of
dots that depict human motion rather than random move-
ment (Fox & McDaniel, 1982). In the elderly, the ability to
perceive human motion from PL animations is relatively
stable despite significant age-related deficits in percep-
tual processing (Gilmore, Wenk, Baylor, & Stuve, 1992;
Norman, Payton, Long, & Hawkes, 2004).
Taken together, these lines of research tell an emerging
tale. Perceiving others offers a wealth of visual information
that is potentially relevant for both person understanding
and social interaction. Usually a mere glance is sufficient
for a perceiver to extract information about a person’s
facial features and expression, hairstyle, body shape,
height and posture, gaze direction, head–body orienta-
tion, and facial and bodily movements. In combination,
these static forms and dynamic motion cues can be used to
infer conceptual “person knowledge” about other social
agents. Such knowledge can be variable across situations
(e.g., when inferences concern a person’s emotional state)
or stable across different processing contexts (e.g., infer-
ences regarding a person’s identity). Attention now turns
to a consideration of these classes of person knowledge
and how they fuel the person perception process.
Extracting Variant Person Knowledge
Many person inferences are dependent on the situation in
which they emerge. Most prominently, for example, deter-
mining a person’s direction of attention or emotional state is
a dynamic, context-specific problem. In addition, evaluating
the person’s personality and attractiveness can also be shaped
by the detection of specific contextual cues. The following
paragraphs summarize what is currently known about

how perceivers extract variant person knowledge about
others.
Social Attention
Direction of gaze (in combination with head–body direc-
tion) is a crucial medium through which people transmit
important social information. According to Baron-Cohen
(1995), detecting the presence of eyes and determining
where they are looking is one of the primary objectives of
the brain (see Brothers, 1990). As Langton, Watt, and Bruce
(2000) reported, “Humans and many other species tend to
look at things in their environment that are of immediate
interest to them. You might be the recipient of another ’s
gaze, for instance, because you are a potential meal, a mate
or simply because you are someone with whom they would
like to interact” (pp. 51–52). Given the informational value
of gaze cues, it makes good sense that people should be
sensitized to eye gaze in others. As gaze direction signals
the appearance and relative importance of objects in the
environment (e.g., friends, food, speeding vehicles), con-
siderable adaptive advantages can be gleaned from an
information-processing system that is finely tuned to gaze
direction and interpretation. Importantly, the structure of
the human eye facilitates just such a task. Comprising a
small dark area (i.e., the pupil and iris) surrounded by
a region of white (i.e., the sclera), the eye is well adapted to
signal gaze direction, hence social attention (see Frischen,
Bayliss, & Tipper, 2007). Practically speaking, gaze cues
can readily signal whether an object of significance has
appeared in the immediate environment (e.g., the boss)
or if one is the target of another person’s attention (i.e.,
direct gaze). Although perceivers are highly accurate at
decoding the gaze direction of others, this ability can be
compromised when the eyes are inverted in facial images,
a finding that suggests configural operations support the
processing of gaze cues (Jenkins & Langton, 2003).
The ability to decode and interpret gaze cues emerges
early in life. Almost from birth, infants show a fascination
with eyes over other regions of the face (Farroni, Csibra,
Simion, & Johnson, 2002; Morton & Johnson, 1991) and,
by the age of 4 months, infants can discriminate direct from
averted gaze (Vecera & Johnson, 1995). By the time they
are between the ages of 9 and 18 months, young children
begin to read the eyes in terms of goal direction, attending
immediately to the eyes when the intentions of an actor are
ambiguous (Phillips, Baron-Cohen, & Rutter, 1992). Among
adults, it has been demonstrated that, under conditions of
direct gaze, the processes supporting person perception are
optimized. Consequences of mutual gaze include that faces
with direct compared with averted gaze are more likely to
be remembered (Hood, Macrae, Cole-Davies, & Dias, 2003;
Mason, Hood, & Macrae, 2004) and to be categorized more
Decoding Person Cues 431
rapidly according to sex (Campbell, Wallace, & Benson,
1996; Macrae, Hood, Milne, Rowe, & Mason, 2002).
Faces with direct gaze and neutral expression are also rated
as more attractive when sexually relevant for the perceiver
and more likeable (regardless of sexual relevance) than faces
with averted gaze (Mason, Tatkow, & Macrae, 2005). One
possibility is that effects of this kind are elicited by direct
eye contact capturing a perceiver ’s attention and delaying
his or her disengagement from a face (Baron-Cohen, 1995;
Senju & Hasegawa, 2005; von Grünau & Anston, 1995).
Aside from the processing benefits emerging from mutual
eye contact, averted gaze also plays a significant role in social
cognition. When a target displays averted gaze, perceivers
can readily follow the direction of the eyes to ensure that both
self and other are attending to the same object (or person) in
space, a phenomenon referred to as joint attention. Although
infants reliably establish joint attention from around 9 months
(Cleveland & Striano, 2007), even at 3 months they display a
reflexive gaze-triggered orienting response (Hood, Willen, &
Driver, 1998). This orienting response has been explored
extensively in adults. In the favored experimental para-
digm, participants are presented with gaze cues (i.e., averted
eyes) that orient attention either “toward” or “away from”
targets that appear at peripheral locations. Participants’ task
is simply to respond to the cued or noncued targets. Using
this type of methodology, an extensive literature has dem-
onstrated that congruency between the gaze cue and target
location facilitates responding, thereby revealing that gaze
cues trigger reflexive shifts in visual attention (Driver et al.,
1999). Interestingly, although faces that correctly signal tar-
get location via gaze cues are perceived to be more trustwor-
thy than faces that look in the opposite direction, reflexive
shifts in attention are not modulated by the trustworthi-
ness of the cue providers (Bayliss & Tipper, 2006). That is,
spatial cueing and person evaluation are decoupled.
Recently, the relationship between attentional cueing
and the interplay of gaze, head and bodily orientation has
been targeted in a number of investigations. This work has
demonstrated that gaze-triggered shifts in attention are more
pronounced when gaze and head orientation signal differ-
ent locations than when the cues are congruent (Hietanen,
1999). Similar results have been observed when gaze and
bodily orientation signal different locations (Hietanen,
2002). Taken together, these findings suggest that inferring
another person’s direction of attention involves the inte-
grated perception of eye, head, and body position, although
gaze cues play a dominant role in signalling the appearance
of objects in the environment (Frischen et al., 2007).
Emotional Status
People’s attempt to make sense of their immediate social
environment is also tightly associated with the goal of
432 Perceiving People
understanding the emotional states of others. Is the dentist
smiling because she is friendly or nervous? Why is the
man on the park bench crying? Many studies suggest that
perceivers routinely use a range of static and dynamic cues
(i.e., facial and bodily) to infer the emotional states of other
social agents. Although it appears to be generally the case
that judging emotional intensity relies strongly on motion
cues (Atkinson, Dittrich, Gemmell, & Young, 2004), accu-
rate identification of a specific emotion appears to depend
critically on the structural combination of facial and bodily
features. For instance, extensive research has demon-
strated that humans are able to recognize at least seven
basic expressions of emotion from facial expressions (i.e.,
happiness, fear, surprise, anger, sadness, disgust, and con-
tempt) with high accuracy and consistency (Ekman, 2003).
Although some facial features are particularly salient for
the detection of specific emotions (e.g., wide eyes for sur-
prise, knitted eyebrows for sadness, smile for happiness,
frown for anger), the ability to decode emotional expres-
sions commonly requires the integration of several facial
features (Ellison & Massaro, 1997). For example, gaze
direction appears to play a prominent role in emotion rec-
ognition. In particular, expressions of anger are perceived
more accurately, categorized more quickly, and rated
as more intense when eye gaze is directed “toward” than
“away from” the perceiver. Interestingly, the opposite is
true for expressions of fear (see Adams & Kleck, 2003;
Sander, Grandjean, Kaiser, Wehrle, & Scherer, 2006).
Findings such as these suggest that the perception of facial
emotions is influenced by the potential behavioral intent
of the cue provider to approach or avoid the perceiver.
According to this line of reasoning, whereas direct gaze
is thought to enhance the perception of approach-oriented
emotions such as anger and joy, averted gaze is assumed
to enhance the perception of avoidance-oriented emotions
such as fear and sadness (Adams & Kleck, 2005).
Further evidence speaking to the idea that perceivers
integrate information from several facial features for effi-
cient emotion recognition comes from studies investigating
the mechanisms that subserve the decoding of emotional
expressions. Perceivers have been shown to exhibit both a
face inversion and a face composite effect for emotion rec-
ognition, thereby suggesting that the processing of config-
ural information contributes to the interpretation of facial
expressions (Durand, Gallay, Seigneuric, Robichon, &
Baudouin, 2007). Beyond the integration of static features
to determine the emotions of others, specific motion cues
also seem to play an important role for emotion perception.
For example, whereas anger seems to be conveyed by a
downward movement of the forehead and a compression
of the mouth, surprise is associated with a rapid upward
movement of the brow coupled with a downward movement
of the jaw (Bassili, 1979). In this respect, even quite subtle
facial motion has been shown to enhance the identification
of facial emotions (Ambadar, Schooler, & Cohn, 2005;
Bould & Morris, 2008).
Recent data have also demonstrated that the perception
of basic facial expressions can be modulated by contex-
tual cues. Specifically, identification is shaped both by the
context in which facial expressions are encountered and
the bodily posture that accompanies emotional expression
(Aviezer et al., 2008; Ekman, 1965). Put simply, facial
expressions are categorized most rapidly when they are
paired with emotionally congruent body postures (Meeren,
van Heijnsbergen, & de Gelder, 2005; Van den Stock,
Righart, & de Gelder, 2007). In addition, although per-
ceivers can read emotions from static postures at a level
above chance (Coulsen, 2004; Ekman, 1965; Wallbott,
1998), bodily cues in motion significantly enhance emo-
tion recognition (Atkinson et al., 2004; Chouchourelou,
Matsuka, Harber, & Shiffrar, 2006; Clark, Bradshaw,
Field, Hampson, & Rose, 2005; Pollick, Lestou, Ryu, &
Cho, 2002). Even the motion of isolated body parts, such
as the manner in which an arm is moved while drinking,
waving, or lifting, can be sufficient to infer the emotional
states of others (Pollick et al., 2002; Pollick, Paterson,
Bruderlin, & Sanford, 2001). In particular, research indi-
cates that the bodily movements that accompany anger
or elation tend to be faster, more energetic, and spatially
expansive than those that signal passive emotions such
as contempt, sadness, and boredom (Camras, Sullivan, &
Michel, 1993; Montepare, Koff, Zaitchik, & Albert, 1999;
Wallbott, 1998). In addition, exaggerated motion cues are
generally associated with the perception of elevated emo-
tional intensity across diverse kinds of emotions (Atkinson
et al., 2004).
Personality Traits
It is well established that people are highly attuned to
drawing personality inferences when perceiving others. An
outer appearance that signals the possession of a certain
characteristic or trait can have far-reaching consequences
in many domains of everyday life. Take facial character-
istics, for example. It has been shown that assessments of
dominance are related to cadets’ level of attainment (i.e.,
rank) in the military (Mueller & Mazur, 1996), judgments
of competence are predictive of people’s political voting
decisions (Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, & Hall, 2005),
and ratings of power-related traits in chief executive offi-
cers are associated with company profits (Rule & Ambady,
2008). Beyond face-based inferences, increased body
height—a feature that is tightly associated with social
dominance (Roberts & Herman, 1986; Young & French,
1998)—has been demonstrated to be positively related to

increased income and occupational success (Judge &
Cable, 2004). Finally, wearing revealing clothes, a signal
of immodesty and apparent promiscuity, has been shown
to cause laypeople, judges, police officers, and prosecu-
tors alike to hold victims of rape to be responsible for their
assault (Lennon, Johnson, & Schulz, 1999). These brief
examples reveal that, despite conventional societal wis-
dom that is it inappropriate to judge a book by its cover,
social perceivers rarely heed this advice.
Numerous lines of research (Albright, Kenny, & Malloy,
1988; Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992; Behling & Williams,
1991; Borkenau & Liebler, 1992; Kenny, Horner,
Kashy, & Chu, 1992; Norman, & Goldberg, 1966; Secord,
Dukes, & Bevan, 1954) have provided compelling evi-
dence that trait judgments can readily be drawn from a
person’s physiognomy (i.e., facial features), outer appear-
ance (i.e., clothing), or demeanor (i.e., posture, walking
style). Of particular importance, people tend to agree on
the traits and qualities they attribute to others, a phenom-
enon that has been termed consensus at zero acquaintance.
Remarkably, this consensus can even be observed cross-
culturally, suggesting that some trait inferences may have
a universal basis (Albright et al., 1997; Secord & Bevan,
1956). Notwithstanding this observation, however, some
traits are more inferable than others and elicit higher con-
sensus across perceivers (Funder & Colvin, 1998; Kenny
et al., 1992; Norman & Goldberg, 1996). For example,
while judging a person’s extraversion and conservatism
from appearance cues elicits high consensus across per-
ceivers, judgments of neuroticism or openness reveal little
or no agreement (Beer & Watson, 2008).
Given people’s ability to infer traits from person cues,
an obvious question arises. Exactly which features do peo-
ple use to guide their judgments? At present this issue is
poorly understood, although it is apparent that the selection
of features is clearly trait-dependent. For example, people
are deemed to be highly extraverted when they have a
round face, stylish hair, wear extravagant clothing, show
a friendly expression, display frequent and rapid body move-
ments, and walk in a relaxed manner (Borkenau & Liebler,
1992). To elucidate further the process of trait ascription fol-
lowing person perception, recent studies have explored the
persistence of these inferences and the extent to which
they can be drawn under impoverished viewing conditions.
This work has demonstrated that a mere 100 ms exposure
to an unfamiliar face is sufficient for participants to draw
likeability, trustworthiness, competence, and aggressive-
ness inferences about the target that are similar to those
generated under longer viewing times (Willis & Todorov,
2006). For threat—but not intelligence—judgments,
the same effect has been reported for exposure times as
brief as 39 ms, indicating that personality traits that have
Decoding Person Cues 433
obvious importance to perceivers may be gleaned from
facial cues with particular rapidity (Bar, Neta, & Linz,
2006). Some recent work has also suggested that faces
may automatically be screened for trustworthiness, regard-
less of the goals or intentions of the perceiver (Engell,
Haxby, & Todorov, 2007; Todorov, Baron, & Oosterhof,
2008; but see Santos & Young, 2005). As in other domains
of face processing, facial inversion impedes the extraction of
personality-related information, a finding that further
underscores the importance of configural information to
core aspects of person perception (Santos & Young, 2008).
Beyond facial features, initial work using PL displays
has revealed that inferences regarding a person’s extra-
version, warmth, and trustworthiness can also be drawn
from patterns of body movement alone (e.g., Heberlein,
Adolphs, Tranel, & Damasio, 2004; Heberlein & Saxe,
2005; Montepare & Zebrowitz-McArthur, 1988). Further
research is required, however, to clarify how quickly these
motion-based inferences are drawn and whether they occur
in a mandatory fashion similar to facial evaluations.
Physical Attractiveness
It has long been established that the ascription of personal-
ity traits can also be influenced by a person’s attractive-
ness. Socialized on a diet of Hollywood fare, one quickly
learns that attractive people live in elegant houses, drive
expensive cars, and lead unblemished and perfect lives. Put
simply, that which is beautiful is also healthy, wealthy, and
wise (Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972). Tempting though
it may be to source this belief to the shallower facets of
contemporary society, in reality even the ancient Greeks
equated beauty with the possession of positive qualities.
Generally speaking, the benefits of looking good are plenti-
ful. Attractive people are seen to possess more desirable
characteristics and are treated more positively than their
less attractive counterparts, a phenomenon that has been
labeled the beauty-is-good stereotype (Dion et al., 1972;
Eagly, Ashmore, Makhijani, & Longo, 1991). Even under
conditions in which no explicit evaluation of an individual
is required, heightened attractiveness elicits feelings of pos-
itivity (Olson & Marshuetz, 2005; van Leeuwen & Macrae,
2004). Coupled with beautiful people attracting bundles of
positivity, unattractive persons are commonly viewed and
evaluated in an unfavorable manner. For example, they are
deemed to be less sociable, altruistic, and intelligent than
their attractive counterparts (Griffin & Langlois, 2006).
The force of these stereotypes can be clearly quantified
across the life span. Attractive kids elicit more attention
and affection and are punished less severely than unattract-
ive children (Dion, 1972; Langlois, Ritter, Casey, & Sawin,
1995). In adulthood, heightened attractiveness is related
to increased mating opportunities (Epstein, Klinkenberg,
434 Perceiving People
Scandell, Faulkner, & Claus, 2007), better employment
prospects (Dubois & Pansu, 2004), advantageous work
evaluations (Hamermesh & Parker, 2005), increased earn-
ing potential (Frieze, Olson, Russell, 1991), and longev-
ity (Henderson & Anglin, 2003). As Langlois et al. (2000)
concluded on the basis of an integrative meta-analysis of
such research findings, “The effects of facial attractiveness
are robust and pandemic . . . attractiveness is a significant
advantage for both children and adults in almost every
domain of judgment, treatment, and behavior” (p. 404).
But what exactly does heightened attractiveness actually
mean? In addressing this issue, much attention has been
dedicated to uncover whether stable facial and bodily mark-
ers of physical beauty can be identified. Although recent
work provides evidence that beyond shared standards of
facial beauty, personal taste also significantly impacts judg-
ments of attractiveness (Hönekopp, 2006), it appears that
such judgments are partially consistent across sex, culture,
race, and even age (Langlois et al. 2000; Rhodes, 2006;
Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999). Already newborns prefer
looking at attractive rather than unattractive faces and young
children agree with adults about which faces are attractive
(see Ramsey, Langlois, Hoss, Rubenstein, & Griffin, 2004;
Slater, Bremner, Johnson, Sherwood, Hayes, & Brown,
2000). Findings such as these suggest that beliefs about
attractiveness are far from idiosyncratic and may even be
partially innate (i.e., not attributable to the assimilation of
cultural standards of beauty).
Specific facial attributes that have been consistently linked
to increased attractiveness are bilateral facial symmetry and
the extent to which a face conforms to a spatially aver-
aged prototype of a population (Rhodes, 2006; Thornhill &
Gangestad, 1999). When facial symmetry is ampli-
fied experimentally, attractiveness generally increases, as
long as the manipulation does not introduce structural
abnormalities (Perrett, Burt, Penton-Voak, Lee, Rowland, &
Edwards, 1999; Rhodes, Proffitt, Grady, & Sumich,
1998). Similarly, individual faces can be made more (or
less) attractive by moving their configurations closer to
(or further from) an average same-sex template, and faces
that naturally lie closer to this template are deemed to be
more attractive than less typical faces (Rhodes, 2006). In
addition, sexual dimorphism (i.e., high femininity in female
faces and high masculinity in male faces) has been associ-
ated with increased facial attractiveness. Sexually dimor-
phic features in males correspond to thick brow ridges,
thin lips, a large square jaw and small eyes, whereas they
are constituted by a small lower facial area, fuller lips, and
smaller chins in females (Rhodes, 2006). Finally, the lumi-
nance difference between the darker regions of the eyes and
mouth and the surrounding lighter skin has been identified
as a marker of facial attractiveness. Whereas female faces
are considered to be more attractive when this luminance
difference is increased (as is often artificially done by
applying cosmetics on the lips and eyes), male faces are
rated as more attractive when the luminance difference is
decreased (Russell, 2003). Further components of facial
attractiveness include a healthy skin and dental appear-
ance, a pleasant expression, youthfulness, and good
grooming (Deffenbacher, Vetter, Johanson, & O’Toole,
1998; Jones, Little, Burt, & Perrett, 2004; Rhodes, 2006;
Willis, Esqueda, & Schacht, 2008).
Regardless of the specific cues that signal facial beauty,
research has indicated that in adulthood the perception
of facial attractiveness occurs rapidly. Even when faces
are presented for less than 110 ms, participants are able
to judge the attractiveness of a target (Locher, Unger,
Sociedade, & Wahl, 1993; Olson & Marshuetz, 2005).
Supporting this ability is the extraction of configural infor-
mation from faces (Bruce & Young, 1986). Participants
required to evaluate the attractiveness of the top half of
a face were found to report increased rating of attractive-
ness when this portion of the stimulus was aligned with an
attractive compared with an unattractive bottom half,
an effect that indicates that attractiveness judgments entail
the integration of facial features into a unique whole
(Abbas & Duchaine, 2008).
In addition to facial cues, bodily information also con-
tributes to assessments of attractiveness. Although little is
known about the precise manner in which facial and bodily
cues influence overall assessments of beauty, initial evi-
dence suggests that these cues contribute independently to
people’s judgments (Peters, Rhodes, & Simmons, 2007).
The importance of bodily attractiveness becomes most
apparent when considering perceptions of the overweight.
Men and women who deviate from societal standards
of bodily attractiveness by being overweight are seen as
flawed not only in their appearance but also in terms of
their personality (DeJong & Kleck, 1986; Hebl & Turchin,
2005). Participants ascribe more negative traits (e.g., lazy,
incompetent, boring, undisciplined) to overweight than aver-
age-weight individuals (Brochu & Morrison, 2007; Puhl,
Moss-Racusin, Schwartz, & Brownell, 2008), an outcome
that precipitates serious discrimination in health, work, and
educational settings (Puhl & Brownell, 2001).
Interestingly, body-shape inferences are strongly depen-
dent on cultural influences, such that increased body fat is
considered to be attractive in some societies (Anderson,
Crawford, Nadeau, & Lindberg, 1992). In current Western
societies, however, men are deemed to be most attractive
when they are tall, muscular with broad chests, low in body
fat, and possess a general air of physical fitness (Fan, Dai,
Liu, & Wu, 2005; Hönekopp, Rudolph, Beier, Liebert, &
Müller, 2007; Weeden & Sabini, 2005). Women, in contrast,

are considered to be to be most attractive when they possess
a small waist-to-hip ratio (WHR; a measure of body shape,
computed by dividing a person’s waist circumference
by his or her hip circumference) and a body mass index
(BMI; a measure of body weight computed by dividing a
person’s weight in kilograms by the square of his or her
height in meters) at the lower end of the normal range
(Furnham, Swami, & Shah, 2006; Singh, 1993; Weeden &
Sabini, 2005). The contribution of breast size to percep-
tions of attractiveness of women remains open to debate.
Although some data suggest that female attractiveness is
associated with large breasts (Singh & Young, 1995), other
studies reveal the opposite effect (Furnham & Swami,
2007). Additional research suggests that larger breasts
enhance ratings of attractiveness only when they are paired
with a body possessing a low WHR (Furnham, Dias, &
McClelland, 1998). Of course, conceptions of ideal breast
size have fluctuated dramatically in history and depend
critically on the sex of the perceiver (Furnham, Hester, &
Weir, 1990; Mazur, 1986). For these reasons, it is unlikely
that breast size in a reliable marker of female attractiveness
across different perceivers (Furnham & Swami, 2007).
Beyond mere body shape, a person’s posture and manner
of movement have also been associated with attractive-
ness. For example, a slumped posture is known to reduce
ratings of physical attractiveness (Osborn, 1996), whereas
in women a feminine walking style with swaying hips and in
men a masculine pattern of movement with swaggering
shoulders increases perceived attractiveness (Johnson &
Tassinary, 2007).
Extracting Invariant Person Knowledge
Contrary to the extraction of variant person knowledge,
some pivotal inferences about others result in relatively
stable representations regardless of the situation-specific
person cues that may be present. Such stable representa-
tions, for example, target categorical person knowledge
such as a person’s sex or race but also his or her identity.
Categorical Knowledge
To balance the perceptual demands of individuated (i.e.,
person-specific) processing with the goal of making sense
of others rapidly and efficiently, perceivers regularly rely
on categorical knowledge structures to simplify the person
perception process. As a result, impressions and evalua-
tions of others are influenced not only by a person’s spe-
cific appearance but also by the social categories to which
he or she belongs and the stereotypes associated with these
groups. Dominant stereotypes in Western society, for exam-
ple, target a person’s sex, race, and age and typically com-
prise beliefs regarding the traits and behaviors associated
Decoding Person Cues 435
with membership in these groups (Brewer, 1988; Fiske &
Neuberg, 1990). Compared with men, women are believed
to be less intelligent, competent, and ambitious. However,
if they are communal and conform to traditional female
roles, women are deemed to be wonderful (Rudman, 2005).
Similarly, African Americans are stereotypically assumed to
be lazy, criminal, and uneducated but also musical and ath-
letic (Devine & Elliot, 1995), whereas Asian Americans are
considered to be intelligent, industrious, conservative, and
shy (Lin, Kwan, Cheung, & Fiske, 2005). In addition, ste-
reotypes about age groups suggest that lovable, dependent,
and weak infants will turn into belligerent, moody, and irre-
sponsible adolescents before they suffer physical and mental
decline including tiredness, forgetfulness, and self-pity by
the time they reach old age (Angus & Reeve, 2006; Perdue &
Gurtman, 1990; Zebrowitz & Montepare, 2000).
As consensual beliefs about individuals based on
knowledge of the groups to which they belong, stereotypes
are ingrained in the very fabric of society (Fiske, 1998;
Lippmann, 1922), are acquired in early childhood (Hill &
Flom, 2007; Poulin-Dubois, Serbin, Eichstedt, Sen, & Beissel,
2002), and are notoriously resistant to modification or
change. Given that the indiscriminate application of ste-
reotypes often promotes judgmental inaccuracy, societal
inequality, and intergroup conflict (Fiske, 1998), major
research efforts have centered on elucidating the mechanisms
that support social stereotyping. In this respect, three sequen-
tial steps have been identified: (a) social categorization—
perceivers’ propensity to classify others according to
salient categorical markers (Allport, 1954; Brewer, 1988;
Fiske & Neuberg, 1990), (b) stereotype activation—
the extent to which associated stereotypic knowledge is
accessible in a given situation, and (c) stereotype appli-
cation—whether this information serves as the basis
of person understanding (Devine, 1989; Gilbert & Hixon,
1991, Kunda & Sinclair, 1999).
Naturally, a perceiver ’s propensity to classify others
according to meaningful social groups depends on the ease
with which this information can be extracted from available
visual cues. Although some group memberships are made
visible through choice (e.g., sports fans dressed in the col-
ors of their team), others are identifiable through unavoid-
able visual markers. Critically, the “big three” categories
in person perception (Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg,
1990)—sex, race, and age—can easily be gleaned from
salient biological cues. Unsurprisingly, therefore, these
categories dominate people’s perceptions of others
across a range of social situations (van Knippenberg &
Dijksterhuis, 2000).
Notwithstanding the fact that a person’s face and body
offers numerous clues to his or her sex, the relative contri-
bution of these cues to the process of sex categorization is
436 Perceiving People
still poorly understood. Recent evidence on sex judgments
suggests that when perceivers are directly requested to
report the sex of a target, hair cues alone are sufficient
to perform this task with both accuracy and rapidity (Goshen-
Gottstein & Ganel, 2000; Macrae & Martin, 2007; Martin &
Macrae, 2007). Even when cues from hairstyle, makeup,
and facial hair are minimized, however, sex categorization
remains a relatively easy task (Burton, Bruce, & Dench,
1993). This ability to distinguish the sexes is likely a con-
sequence of the structural changes in facial appearance that
occur during puberty. Whereas testosterone stimulates the
growth of the jaw, cheekbones, and brow ridges in men,
estrogen inhibits this development in women and contrib-
utes to an increase in lip size (Thornhill & Møller, 1997). As
a result of these structural differences, the isolated presen-
tation of certain adult face features can be sufficient for per-
ceivers to identify sex at levels above chance, with the eye
and brow region being most predictive of sex, followed by
the mouth and the nose (Brown & Perrett, 1993; Roberts &
Bruce, 1988). Furthermore, at least among Caucasians,
male faces postpuberty tend to be darker and redder than
female faces (Jablonski & Chaplin, 2000), a difference in
skin tone that perceivers also successfully exploit to classify
targets according to sex (Hill, Bruce, & Akamatsu, 1995;
Nestor & Tarr, 2008). In summary, although isolated facial
features are sufficient to determine a person’s sex, research
has indicated that sex categorization may often rely on the
integration of several features (Baudoin & Humphreys,
2006; Bruce et al., 1993; Brown & Perrett, 1993; Roberts &
Bruce, 1988; Schyns, Bonnar, & Gosselin, 2002).
Faces, of course, are not the only marker of sex; men
and women can also be differentiated on the basis of bodily
cues. Apart from primary markers such as breasts, body
shape can also be used to identify the sex of individuals
(Johnson & Tassinary, 2005). After puberty, females tend
to deposit more fat on the hips than men so on average they
end up with a lower WHR. In addition, the average ratio
between hip width and body height is larger for females
than males, and because men have a greater shoulder width,
ratios of shoulder to hip width can also signal a person’s
sex (Pollick, Kay, Heim, & Stringer, 2005). Taken still
further, men and women can also be differentiated on the
basis of their patterns of facial and bodily movement, espe-
cially when viewed from the front (Hill, Jinno, & Johnston,
2003; Hill & Johnston, 2001; Kozlowski & Cutting, 1977;
Pollick et al., 2005). It is worth noting, however, that sex
classification from motion cues has been shown to be quite
malleable and subject to adaptation based on one’s prior
viewing history (Jordon, Fallah, & Stoner, 2006). In addi-
tion, perceivers fail to extract sex-specific cues from dynamic
arm movements; despite the fact that computational neural
networks are able to perform this task (Pollick et al., 2002).
Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that recent data suggest that
body shape typically guides people’s sex judgments more
strongly than motion cues (Johnson & Tassinary, 2005).
Much like sex, perceivers are also remarkably adept at
extracting a person’s age (George & Hole, 1995, 2000).
Again, however, the relative contribution of various age-
specifying features to person categorization remains open to
debate (Burt & Perrett, 1995; George & Hole, 1995, 1998).
From birth to early adolescence, faces are characterized
by a forward-sloping forehead, larger lower-placed eyes,
a smaller and less protruding chin, and lighter skin. Facial
aging, in contrast, is characterized by leathery, crinkled,
open-pored, and blemished skin; lengthened ears and nose;
dropped eyelids; a less angular jaw; a stronger double chin;
and thinned, graying hair (Berry & McArthur, 1986; Bruce &
Young, 1998). Surprisingly, age perception is relatively unim-
paired by facial inversion, suggesting that isolated category-
specifying features (e.g., skin texture) may be sufficient to
drive age categorization (George & Hole, 2000). Beyond
facial cues, human development triggers changes elsewhere
in the body. Compared with adults, infants are obviously
shorter and chubbier and possess disproportionately large
heads and short limbs. As such, children are easily identi-
fied on the basis of their body shape. Complementing these
static feature-based cues, facial and bodily motion can also
signal a person’s age (Berry, 1990; Montepare & Zebrowitz-
McArthur, 1988). Whereas young children are characterized
by a toddling walk, adults have a style that involves swaying
hips, bent knees, swinging arms, and an increased walking
pace, markers that all diminish as one ages. Using these
age-related differences in human motion, perceivers seem
to be able to establish the relative vintage of an individual
(i.e., young or old; see Montepare & Zebrowitz-McArthur,
1988), although they remain relatively poor at judging a
target’s absolute age from motion cues alone.
Although the biological markers that signal a person’s
age and sex have received considerable empirical attention,
exploration of the features that drive racial categorization
has been less commonplace, probably because the iden-
tity of the critical category-specifying cue seems obvious.
Without much thought, skin tone indicates whether a per-
son is of African, Asian, or Caucasian descent (Maddox,
2004). Beyond color cues, however, the shape of facial
features also plays a prominent role in race categorization.
For example, Asians are associated with the possession of
almond eyes, and individuals of African descent are rec-
ognized on the basis of nose shape and hair texture (Blair,
Judd, Sadler, & Jenkins, 2002).
Triggered by readily available person cues, the effects of
stereotyping on person perception can be pervasive and per-
nicious. For instance, corroborating traditional age-related
stereotypes, faces of elderly individuals are rated as less

energetic and likeable than younger adults (Ebner, 2008).
Similarly, people are believed to be stronger and happier
when they display a youthful gait rather than when their
gait resembles that of an elderly person (Montepare &
Zebrowitz-McArthur, 1988). In addition, even across age
and racial groups, faces with childlike qualities such as
large eyes, a small nose, thin eyebrows, and a small chin
are believed to be submissive, dependent, naïve, and par-
ticularly lovable (Berry & McArthur, 1986; Zebrowitz &
Montepare, 1992; Zebrowitz, Montepare, & Lee, 1993).
Intriguingly, these effects extend into adulthood, such that
babyfaced individuals are less likely to be convicted of
intentional wrongdoing in both real and simulated trials than
persons with mature facial features (Berry & Zebrowitz-
McArthur, 1988; Zebrowitz & McDonald, 1991).
What is perhaps most striking about the stereotyping
process is that it often occurs without perceivers’ intention
or conscious awareness (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000).
Given the observation that stereotyping is readily elicited
upon perceiving others, it has been argued that stereotype
contents are automatically and unavoidably activated dur-
ing the person perception process (e.g., Allport, 1954;
Bargh, 1999; Brewer, 1988; Chen & Bargh, 1994; Devine,
1989; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). Accumulating evidence has
suggested, however, that the link between person percep-
tion and stereotype activation is not as rigid as was initially
assumed (Allport, 1954; Bargh, 1999). For instance, the
magnitude of category-based person perception is sensitive
to perceivers’ immediate processing goals. Passive regis-
tration of a face or encoding a face with a perceptual pro-
cessing objective in place (e.g., dot detection) fails to elicit
category activation (Livingston & Brewer, 2002; Macrae,
Quinn, Mason, & Quadflieg, 2005; Quinn & Macrae, 2005;
Wheeler & Fiske, 2005). It seems to be the case that active
semantic encoding of a face is necessary to trigger person
categorization (Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, Thorn, &
Castelli, 1997). Under such processing conditions, however,
the extraction of category-specifying facial cues has been
shown to be a highly efficient, unintentional process that is
resistant to stimulus degradation and impoverished viewing
conditions (Cloutier, Mason, & Macrae, 2005; Cloutier &
Macrae, 2007; Macrae et al., 2005; Santos & Young, 2005).
Extending this line of investigation, recent evidence has
demonstrated that person categorization is a dynamic pro-
cess in which multiple social categories can simultaneously
be activated until a stable (i.e., dominant) construal emerges
(Macrae & Martin, 2007; Martin & Macrae, 2007). For
example, on their way to identifying targets correctly accord-
ing to sex, perceivers have been shown to entertain simulta-
neously both categorical solutions (i.e., male and female) for
atypical targets (i.e., long-haired males and short-cropped
females; see Freeman, Ambady, & Rule, 2008).
Decoding Person Cues 437
Intriguingly, once a face has been categorized as
belonging to a certain group, the social categorization itself
can in turn influence the perception of a face (e.g., Corneille,
Huart, Becquart, & Bredart, 2004; Huart, Corneille, &
Becquart, 2005). When, for example, racially ambiguous
faces are labeled as Black, participants judge skin tone
to be darker than when the identical faces are labeled as
White (Levin & Banaji, 2006). Similarly, when the group
membership of faces is made obvious through the addition
of stereotypical African American rather than Hispanic
hairstyles, identical faces are perceived to be darker and
to contain deeper eyes and a wider mouth (MacLin &
Malpass, 2003). Findings such as these demonstrate the
complex influence that categorical forces can exert on
the products of the person perception process.
A second line of research has demonstrated that even
after person categorization has successfully occurred,
stereotype activation and application do not necessarily
occur. For example, although social categorization can
still be accomplished following the removal of a dominant
category-specifying cue (e.g., hairstyle for sex judgments),
stereotype activation is significantly reduced under these
conditions (Martin & Macrae, 2007). Additionally, manip-
ulating the facial maturity of male and female faces reveals
that only mature-faced males and babyfaced females are
judged in accordance with sex stereotypes (e.g., women
are warmer and less powerful than men). For males and
females equivalent in facial maturity or mature-faced
women and babyfaced men, stereotypic judgments are typ-
ically weakened or even reversed (Friedman & Zebrowitz,
1992). In a similar vein, in the context of simulated elec-
tions, it has been shown that, in line with gender stereo-
types, male candidates are preferred when the politically
relevant topic demands masculine characteristics (e.g.,
competitiveness), whereas females are preferred when
the topic calls for feminine qualities (e.g., sociability).
Interestingly, for gender-atypical candidates (i.e., femi-
nine men and masculine women) these effects are reversed
(Lammers, Gordijn, & Otten, 2008). There is further evi-
dence that stereotype activation and application are sensi-
tive to the extent to which individuals possess facial features
that are deemed to be typical of the groups to which they
belong (Livingston & Brewer, 2002; Locke, Macrae, &
Eaton, 2005; Maddox & Gray, 2002). Faces with more
Afrocentric features have been shown to elicit stronger
activation and application of the African American stereo-
type than faces with less prototypical features (Blair et al.,
2002; Maddox, 2004). This form of feature-based stereo-
typing has also been observed in criminal-sentencing
decisions, such that targets with Afrocentric features are
punished most severely (Blair et al., 2004; Eberhardt,
Davies, Purdie-Vaughns, & Johnson, 2006).
438 Perceiving People
Not only does the appearance of the cue provider
modulate stereotyping, so, too, can the circumstances or
context under which individuals are encountered (Barden,
Maddux, Petty, & Brewer, 2004; Macrae et al., 1995;
Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 2001). For example, viewing
an Asian woman performing a typical female activity (e.g.,
applying cosmetics) or a typical Asian activity (e.g., eating
with chopsticks) was sufficient to prompt either the sex or
the race of the target respectively to dominate the categori-
zation process (Macrae et al., 1995). Similarly, stereotype
activation is amplified when an African American target is
encountered in an expected rather than unexpected setting
(e.g., street corner vs. outside a church; see Wittenbrink
et al., 2001). Capturing a similar effect, when clothing
assigns stereotype-congruent or incongruent roles toward
a Black individual (i.e., dressed as a criminal or a lawyer
in prison), the typical pattern of racial stereotyping can be
reversed (Barden et al., 2004). Finally, an encounter with
an Asian assistant during an experiment has been shown to
trigger stereotype activation only when participants were
not required to perform a concurrent mental activity (i.e.,
digit rehearsal), even though the assistant’s race could be
reported after the experiment was completed (Gilbert &
Hixon, 1991). Collectively, these findings indicate that
although category-based perception of others is often done
unintentionally (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000), the acti-
vation and application of stereotypes on the basis of these
categories is nevertheless moderated by a variety of factors,
including the appearance of the target, the goals of the per-
ceiver, and the context in which a person is encountered.
Person Identity
Besides drawing inferences about strangers on the basis
of their idiosyncratic appearance or social group member-
ships, person perception often comprises the recognition
of familiar individuals (e.g., friends, colleagues, family
members). Surprisingly, however, the process of person
identification has not loomed large in theoretical accounts
of person perception (Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg,
1990). Instead, most work on this topic has been under-
taken by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists (e.g.,
Bruce & Young, 1986; Haxby et al., 2000). Integral com-
ponents of person recognition include the perception of a
familiar appearance, an emotional response that is asso-
ciated with the person, and the spontaneous retrieval of
person-specific semantic knowledge (Gobbini & Haxby,
2007). Appearances become familiar as individuals meet
across a range of situations, under various viewing con-
ditions, and with different portions of the face and body
in view. Through repeated exposure, perceivers come to
recognize others under a varied set of viewing conditions,
over long distances, within crowds, and even after partial
changes in their appearance (e.g., new haircut, aging, change
of clothing). Indeed, it has been demonstrated that for
familiar faces, changes in viewpoint, illumination, and dis-
tance from the viewer cause little in the way of difficulty,
although such changes significantly diminish recognition
performance for newly learned faces (Hancock, Bruce, &
Burton, 2000).
Despite these observations of increased perceptual flu-
ency for familiar faces, it is not entirely clear how person
perception changes after targets become familiar. For
example, the extraction of featural and configural informa-
tion supports the processing of both familiar and novel faces
(Collishaw & Hole, 2000). The only reports of qualitative
differences in face processing with regard to familiarity
comes from studies that have explored the relative salience
of different parts of the face (Ellis, Shepherd, & Davies,
1979; Young, Hay, McWeeny, Flude, & Ellis, 1985). This
work suggests that for the recognition of newly learned
faces, external features such as hairstyle, and outer facial
contours are important, whereas the recognition of familiar
faces is supported by internal features, notably the eyes,
mouth, and nose (Haig, 1986; O’Donnell & Bruce, 2001;
Sadr, Jarudi, & Sinha, 2003; Schyns et al., 2002). Further
evidence suggests that familiar targets can also be recognized
on the basis of their head, face, or body movements—that is,
by the way they smile, move their arms, or walk (Cutting &
Kozlowski, 1977; Hill & Johnston, 2001; Hill & Pollick,
2000; Lander, Chuang, & Wickham, 2006; Stevenage,
Nixon, & Vince, 1999; Troje, Westhoff, & Lavrov, 2005).
The relative importance of motion cues for person identifi-
cation increases as a function of a viewer’s visual experience
with the target of interest (O’Toole, Roark, & Abdi, 2002).
Under nonoptimal viewing conditions, motion cues can even
enhance recognition performance (Knappmeyer, Thornton, &
Bülthoff, 2003; Lander & Chuang, 2005), although it is
worth noting that movement-based identification appears to
be viewpoint-dependent. To identify a friend by his or her
gait, for example, is easier from frontal or half-profile views
than from profile views (Jokisch, Daum, & Troje, 2006).
Apart from integrating form and motion cues to establish
visual familiarity, researchers assume that person recogni-
tion requires an additional sense of felt familiarity and the
spontaneous activation of biographical knowledge about
the target in question (e.g., Lynden is a psychologist who
comes from New Zealand). The assumption of felt famil-
iarity derives from patient studies demonstrating that the
co-occurrence of visual and emotional familiarity can be dis-
sociated. That is, patients suffering from prosopagnosia—
a disorder leaving them unable to recognize familiar
faces—display increased skin conductance to familiar but
not unfamiliar faces, thereby demonstrating intact (albeit
covert) emotional recognition of known others (De Haan,

Bauer, & Greve, 1992; Tranel & Damasio, 1985). In direct
contrast, patients suffering from Capgras’s syndrome do
not show any skin conductance differences in response
to familiar or unfamiliar faces (Ellis, Young, Quayle, &
De Pauw, 1997). Interestingly, these individuals continue
to recognize familiar others but deny their authenticity,
claiming that relatives or friends have been replaced by a
duplicates (Capgras & Reboul-Lachaux, 1923; Hirstein &
Ramachandran, 1997). Driving this effect is a lack of felt
familiarity (e.g., emotional recognition) when known tar-
gets are encountered. This observed double dissociation
between visual and emotional familiarity suggests that
both processes contribute to person identification in an
important way.
Arguably the hallmark of person identification is the
retrieval of specific facts or details about known targets. An
extensive literature confirms that prior experience with a
target influences person perception such that, once detected,
familiar individuals trigger the spontaneous retrieval of
biographical knowledge. For example, when asked to judge
the traits of target individuals from photographs, perceiv-
ers’ responses continue to be influenced by learning expe-
riences from the past (e.g., information associated with
the faces), even though the precise target-specific details
have been forgotten (Uleman, Blader, & Todorov, 2005).
Similarly, affective person-related knowledge gleaned from
minimal information (i.e., reading that someone engages in
a disgusting behavior) is spontaneously reactivated when
the associated face is encountered on a subsequent occasion
(Todorov, Gobbini, Evans, & Haxby, 2007).
Under certain circumstances, however, the spontaneous
retrieval of person-related knowledge seems to be impaired
even though visual and emotional familiarity with an indi-
vidual has been established. For example, the so-called
butcher-on-the-bus phenomenon refers to the observation
that when one encounters a known target in an atypical set-
ting, one may acknowledge that the target is familiar yet
be unable to bring any target-specific knowledge to mind
because of the power of the unfamiliar context (Mandler,
1980; Yovel & Paller, 2004). A similar dissociation of
familiarity and person knowledge has been reported in
some patients suffering from memory loss. Although these
patients are able to judge the familiarity of others, such is
their impaired ability to access associated semantic knowl-
edge that person identification is severely compromised
(De Haan, Young, & Newcombe, 1991).
On occasion, unfamiliar targets are deemed to be familiar
because they resemble friends, family, or celebrities in
their appearance or mannerisms. A consequence of this
similarity can be that these strangers are ascribed the
same traits, attributes, and characteristics as the targets
they resemble (Chen & Andersen, 1999). For example,
Decoding Person Cues 439
when the face of a stranger reminds one of a good friend,
traits descriptive of the friend are readily attributed to the
unknown other (White & Shapiro, 1987). Similarly, when
exposed to photographs of a few short-faced professors
who were known to be fair and a few long-faced profes-
sors who were considered to be unfair, college students
subsequently judged an unknown short-faced professor
to be more reasonable than an unknown colleague, even
though they were unaware of the relationship between
facial length and fairness (Hill, Lewicki, Czyzewska, &
Schuller, 1990). Physical resemblance to self also seems to
influence the person perception process. Recent evidence
suggests that ratings of trust are elevated when strangers
resemble self (DeBruine, Jones, Little, & Perrett, 2008).
Finally, of course, sometimes targets are encountered on
numerous occasions yet no specific target-related knowl-
edge is acquired (i.e., the woman one sees on the bus every
morning). What happens, then, when these familiar yet
unknown others are perceived? Perceivers seem to regard
perceptually familiar people as more likeable compared with
unfamiliar targets (Moreland & Zajonc, 1982), an effect that
is likely driven by the misattribution of positive affect
elicited by increased perceptual fluency (Winkielman &
Cacioppo, 2001). Recent work also suggests that percep-
tually familiar individuals tend to be construed in an even
stronger stereotype-related manner than unfamiliar others
(Smith et al., 2006), perhaps reflecting perceivers’ need to
make sense of frequently encountered targets.
In the Eye of the Beholder
It has long been acknowledged that person perception is
influenced by not only the attributes of the cue provider
but also the characteristics of the perceiver. That is, the
eye of the beholder modulates the perception of attentional
focus, emotion, personality, attractiveness, and social group
membership. For example, compared with males, females
display stronger reflexive gaze cueing effects (Frischen
et al., 2007), especially when the gaze cues are provided by
personally familiar targets (Deaner, Shepherd, & Platt,
2007). In addition, for individuals high in trait anxiety,
gaze cueing is facilitated when the cue provider displays
a fearful rather than neutral expression (Mathews, Fox,
Yiend, & Calder, 2003). These findings suggest that even
low-level processing operations—such as reflexive gaze-
triggered shifts in visual attention—are modulated by the
characteristics of the perceiver.
In a similar vein, despite the classic demonstration that
individuals from all corners of the world can identify basic
emotions at levels better than chance (Ekman, 1999), there
is also evidence that emotion recognition is enhanced when
perceivers judge individuals from either their own culture
440 Perceiving People
(Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002) or cultures with which they
are familiar (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2003). The accuracy
of emotion recognition is also profoundly influenced
by the sex and age of perceivers. Women appear to be
more accurate at recognizing emotions than men (Hall &
Matsumoto, 2004), and as adults get older, they display
decrements in their ability to identify emotions from visual
cues (Ruffman, Henry, Livingstone, & Phillips, 2008).
Intriguingly, a perceiver ’s own emotional state also influ-
ences recognition performance such that congruent emo-
tions are identified most readily in others (Niedenthal,
Halberstadt, Margolin, & Innes-Ker, 2000).
Unsurprisingly, judging the attractiveness of others
is also dependent on the characteristics and status of
the perceiver. For example, a person’s preference for specific
personality traits can elevate the attractiveness of faces that
appear to display the desirable characteristics in question
(see Little, Burt, & Perrett, 2006). When familiar others
are the targets of interest, attractiveness is moderated by
how much one likes and respects the to-be-judged target
(Kniffin & Wilson, 2004; Paunonen, 2006). In addition,
hormonal changes in men and women can modulate rat-
ings of the attractiveness of potential partners (Jones et al.,
2008; Welling et al., 2008).
Finally, perceiver-related factors also modulate the con-
sequences of category-related processing. Most notably,
perceivers show better memory for own-race than other
race faces (e.g., Meissner & Brigham, 2001), an effect that
seems to arise because categorical face processing reduces
both the search for unique, individuating characteristics in
other-race faces and the motivation to process these stimuli
(Bernstein, Young, & Hugenberg, 2007). In addition, the
link between person perception and stereotype activation is
moderated by preexisting prejudiced beliefs (Devine, 1989).
Compared with prejudiced persons, egalitarian individuals
show diminished stereotype activation from available
category-specifying cues (Johns, Cullum, Smith, & Freng,
2008). Even factors such as a perceiver ’s hormonal status
can modulate the activation of gender stereotypes (Macrae,
Alnwick, Milne, & Schloerscheidt, 2002). Taken together,
this body of work confirms that the manner in which people
construe others is shaped not only by the available visual
(e.g., facial, bodily) cues but also by a host of perceiver-
related factors that moderate the course and products of the
person perception process (see Zebrowitz, 2006).
PERSON PERCEPTION IN THE BRAIN
Given the insight that perceptual operations exert a signifi-
cant influence on the detection, classification, evaluation,
and identification of conspecifics, recent work in social
cognition has extended to a consideration of how person
perception is implemented in the brain. Complementing
research exploring the mental processes that underlie per-
son processing, this work has sought to illuminate the neural
operations that support the perception of conspecifics. To
elucidate the neural networks underlying person perception,
a wide range of neuroscientific methods have been used (see
Table 12.1 for a short description of these methods).
Data obtained through the use of these approaches has
provided significant insights into the cognitive, evaluative,
and neural processes that support core aspects of person
perception. Before considering these insights, however,
a brief neuroanatomical orientation may be useful. At a
global level, the brain is subdivided into four structures:
the frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes (see
Figure 12.1). Anterior refers the front of the brain, whereas
posterior refers to the rear. The terms superior and inferior
mean up and down, respectively. Structures situated close
to the midline of the brain (i.e., where the two hemispheres
meet) are termed medial structures; those located toward
the side of the brain are termed lateral structures. Finally,
dorsal regions reside toward the top of the brain (i.e.,
above the forebrain axis), and ventral regions are located
toward the bottom (i.e., below the forebrain axis).
Table 12.1 Neuroscientific Methods at a Glance
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): A noninvasive
imaging technique measuring brain activity by recording oxygen levels
in the brain’s blood vessels.
Positron emission tomography (PET): An imaging technique used in
conjunction with the injection of small amounts of radioactive tracers
to study brain anatomy and brain activity.
Magnetoencephalography (MEG): A noninvasive imaging technique
measuring the magnetic fields produced by electrical activity in the brain.
Electroencephalography (EEG): The noninvasive recording of
electrical brain activity produced by placing electrodes on the scalp.
Event-related potential (ERP): The noninvasive recording of electrical
brain activity following the presentation of a stimulus by placing
electrodes on the scalp.
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS): A noninvasive
method to stimulate cells in the brain via rapidly changing magnetic
fields. Depending on the kind of stimulation, an increased or decreased
excitability of cells can be evoked.
Intracranial cell recordings: Recordings of the electrical activity of cells
via electrodes implanted in the brain.
Brain lesion studies: Assume that the function of an area of the brain
can be inferred from the behaviors that people can no longer perform
after their brain was damaged in a certain region (i.e., after they had a
circumscribed brain lesion).
The Neuroanatomy of Person Perception
A primary objective of neuropsychological investiga-
tions has been to map cognitive functions onto precise

Dorsal
Parietal
Lobe
Frontal
Posterior Lobe Anterior
Occipital
Lobe Temporal
Lobe
Ventral
Figure 12.1 The human brain.
neuroanatomical regions. Unsurprisingly, the neuroanatomy
of person perception is tied closely to the structures that
support basic visual processing. Visual processing com-
mences when light-sensitive photoreceptor cells in the eye
are stimulated and the resultant signal is transmitted to the
brain along the optic nerve. The majority of fibers in the
optic nerve terminate in the lateral geniculate nucleus
(LGN) from where the visual information is then projected
to the primary visual cortex (also called the striate cortex)
in the occipital lobe of the brain. Accordingly, this path-
way is termed the primary geniculostriate visual pathway.
From the primary visual cortex, information is distributed
through visual-association cortices (also called extrastri-
ate cortices) onto two visual pathways, often referred to as
the dorsal and ventral visual streams (Goodale & Milner,
1992). Both streams analyze the incoming visual signal but
with regard to divergent properties. Whereas the ventral
processing stream plays a dominant role in the identifica-
tion and recognition of stimuli and extends anatomically
toward the inferior temporal lobe; the dorsal processing
stream is implicated in the localization of stimuli and coor-
dination of visually guided actions and extends thoughout
the posterior parietal cortex. Importantly, the two path-
ways are not completely independent, thereby ensuring
that information about both the identity and location of an
object (including another person) can be extracted from
the available visual signal (Schwarzlose, Swisher, Dang, &
Kanwisher, 2008; see Figure 12.2).
Mirroring the detection of cheeseburgers, tables, and
penguins, the perception of social agents recruits neural
networks dedicated to the processing of visual information.
It is worth noting, however, that person perception poses
some interesting challenges for the visual system. Human
faces and bodies are complex three-dimensional stimuli
comprising multiple features that vary in shape and sur-
face characteristics (i.e., texture, spatial frequency, lumi-
nance, and color distribution). The particular configuration
of these features can be used to distinguish people from
Person Perception in the Brain 441
Dorsal
Stream
Thalamus
(LGN)
Striate
Cortex
Ventral
Stream
Figure 12.2 Visual pathways in the human brain.
objects and friends from strangers and to trigger applicable
social category memberships. Complicating matters some-
what, facial and bodily features and their relationships
change both slowly (i.e., over time through aging) and rap-
idly (i.e., changes in emotional expressions or actions), and
their perception depends crucially on the conditions under
which they are encountered (e.g., distance from observer,
lighting conditions). Despite these complicating factors, an
extensive literature has documented how a circumscribed
network of regions responds following the perception of
faces and bodies.
The Neural Correlates of Face Perception
That there may be a neural network dedicated to face pro-
cessing was first suggested by observations of prosopag-
nostic patients. Following damage to the temporal cortex,
although these patients were adept at identifying objects
they were demonstrably impaired at recognizing familiar
faces (Hecaen & Angelergues, 1962). Further evidence
for a dedicated face-processing system was garnered from
single-cell recording studies in nonhuman primates, which
revealed that cells in the superior temporal sulcus (STS)
respond selectively to faces (Perrett, Rolls, & Caan, 1982).
Since these early studies, accumulating evidence suggests
that a distributed neural system of multiple, bilateral brain
regions underlies face processing. According to Haxby and
colleagues (2000; Gobbini & Haxby, 2007), for example,
brain regions involved in face perception can be divided
into two distinct neural subsystems: a core system of
brain regions that subserve the visual analysis of faces
and an extended system of brain regions that support the
construal of person knowledge (see Figure 12.3). On the
basis of the coordinated collaboration of the regions within
these subsystems, diverse aspects of face perception can be
accomplished.
Cortical regions comprising the core system of face percep-
tion include the occipital face area (OFA) and the fusiform face
area (FFA), both located in the ventral extrastriate cortex,
442 Perceiving People

IPS

Striate & pSTS

Extrastriate
Cortices OFA AMY OFC
FFA
aTL

CORE NEURAL SYSTEM: EXTENDED NEURAL SYSTEM:

OFA: featural analysis of faces
FFA: configural analysis of faces
pSTS: analysis of facial movements
IPS: spatially directed attention
aTL: person knowledge
OFC: facial attractiveness
AMY: person evaluation
Figure 12.3 Brain regions implementing face
perception. AMY
amygdala; aTL
anterior
temporal lobe; FFA
fusiform face area; IPS

intraparietal sulcus; OFA
occipital face area;
OFC
orbitofrontal cortex; pSTS
posterior
superior temporal sulcus.

as well as the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS).
Although all three of these regions analyze the visual
appearance of faces, they do so differentially (Haxby et al.,
2000). In particular, whereas the OFA and FFA contribute
mainly to the encoding of facial features and their struc-
tural configuration, the pSTS is involved in the percep-
tion of changeable aspects of facial appearance (i.e., facial
movements) coming from the head, eyes, and lips. How
do we know, however, that the OFA, FFA, and pSTS have
different functional contributions toward face processing
when they all reliably activate in neuroimaging studies when
participants view faces compared with other common
objects or nonsense (control) stimuli (Gauthier et al.,
2000; Haxby et al., 1999; Ishai, Schmidt, & Boesiger,
2005; Kanwisher, McDermott, & Chun, 1997; Yovel &
Kanwisher, 2005)?
With regard to the OFA, it has been noted that acti-
vation in this region is similarly strong to upright and
inverted faces (Haxby et al., 1999; Yovel & Kanwisher,
2005) suggesting that disruptions to configural processing
do not interfere with the processing of facial information
that is undertaken in this area. Given that the perceptual
analysis of facial features can still be accomplished for
inverted faces and that temporally disrupting activity in the
OFA using repetitive transmagnetic stimulation (rTMS)
has been demonstrated to interfere with the accurate per-
ception of face parts but not their configuration (Pitcher,
Walsh, Yovel, & Duchaine, 2007), it has been concluded
that activity in the OFA mainly reflects the visual analysis
of facial features.
In contrast, the FFA has been reported to show both face-
inversion (i.e., an elevated blood oxygen level–dependent
response for upright than inverted faces) and face com-
posite effects (i.e., an adaptation across two identical top
halves of a face only when the bottom half of the face
is also identical), thereby indicating that FFA activity is
associated with the integration of face parts into holistic–
configural wholes (Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006). That the
FFA is not only involved in the configural processing of
faces was demonstrated in a study in which participants
were required to complete successive discrimination tasks
on face pairs that differed in either their individual com-
ponents (i.e., nose, mouth, eyes) or the configuration of
these parts (i.e., the spacing among face parts; Yovel &
Kanwisher, 2004). In both conditions, a similar FFA response
was observed indicating that the FFA is also involved in the
representation of face parts. FFA activity can be reduced,
however, when participants are asked to pay particular
attention to a changeable aspect of the face, notably gaze
direction (Hoffman & Haxby, 2000). These findings sug-
gest that the FFA does not play a central role in all aspects
of face perception but rather in the perception of invariant
aspects of facial appearance. In line with this assumption,
the FFA has been found to play a major role in encoding
structural information that contributes to the analysis of
sex and race-related facial properties (Cloutier, Turk, &
Macrae, 2007; Golby, Gabrieli, Chiao, & Eberhardt, 2001;
Kim et al., 2006; Ng, Ciaramitaro, Anstis, Boynton, &
Fine, 2006).
In contrast, paying particular attention toward eye gaze
in static faces—or actually perceiving movements of the
eyes or the mouth in dynamic stimuli—has consistently
been found to increase activation in the pSTS (Campbell
et al., 2001; Cloutier et al., 2007; Hoffman & Haxby,
2000; Puce, Allison, Bentin, Gore, & McCarthy, 1998;
Schuermann et al., 2005). As a convergence zone for the
dorsal and ventral visual streams, the pSTS is thought to
be well equipped to integrate form and motion information

emanating from a person’s face to encode changeable
aspects of person knowledge.
Thus, through the combined efforts of the OFA, FFA,
and pSTS the representation of specific individual faces
can be accomplished (Giese & Poggio, 2003; Rossion,
2008). The visual analysis of faces undertaken in this core
neural network provides information that can be used to
generate broader person-related inferences, such as judg-
ing or interpreting the attractiveness, identity, personality,
emotional status, and gaze direction of other social agents.
To compute these inferences, additional brain regions
are recruited (i.e., extended system) that work in con-
cert with the core face-processing system (Haxby et al.,
2000). Interestingly, although researchers agree as to
which regions comprise the core face-processing system,
less conformity has been achieved with regard to the areas
that constitute the extended system. To date, the follow-
ing regions have been deemed to comprise part of this
network.
An important region contributing to the processing
of eye gaze is the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), located on
the lateral surface of the parietal lobe. In tandem with the
pSTS, the IPS is involved in the processing of gaze cues
that signal the direction of social attention. Neuroimaging
data show that IPS activity is increased when faces dis-
play averted gaze (Hoffman & Haxby, 2000; Pelphrey,
Singerman, Allison, & McCarthy, 2003; Wicker, Michel,
Henaff, & Decety, 1998), suggesting that this region sup-
ports inferences about the spatial location of other people’s
attention.
Observing another person’s face also provides crucial
information about what the person is feeling. Following
discrete patterns of brain damage, two intriguing types of
patients have been identified. Whereas some individuals
display a deficiency in face recognition yet a spared capac-
ity to read facial expressions of emotion, others exhibit the
opposite effects (e.g., impaired emotional processing and
intact face recognition; see Posamentier & Abdi, 2003).
Informed by such double dissociations, it has been sug-
gested that partly separable neural networks subserve the
detection and analysis of facial affect and the structural
encoding of facial features. Indeed, neuroimaging stud-
ies have revealed that, compared with neutral faces, emo-
tional faces elicit not only an increased response in core
regions of the face-processing system but also a concomi-
tant increase in activity in the amygdala (Vuilleumier &
Pourtois, 2007).
The amygdala is an almond-shaped mass of nuclei
located deep within the medial temporal lobes. If damaged,
the normal enhancement of FFA activation toward emo-
tional faces disappears, strongly suggesting a direct modu-
latory influence of the amygdala on the FFA (Vuilleumier,
Person Perception in the Brain 443
Richardson, Armony, Driver, & Dolan, 2004). Interestingly,
increased amygdala responsivity toward emotional faces
can persist under conditions of reduced attention or aware-
ness, such as when faces are shown at ignored locations
(A. K. Anderson, Christoff, Panitz, De Rosa, & Gabrieli,
2003), when they are masked (Whalen et al., 1998),
or when they are presented in the blind field of patients
with damage to the primary visual cortex (Pegna, Khateb,
Lazeyras, & Seghier, 2005). These findings have raised the
question of how visual information can reach the amyg-
dala despite attenuated inputs or even destruction of the
primary visual cortical pathway. It is now believed that
the amygdala can receive “quick and dirty” visual input
from retinal projections through the superior colliculus and
the pulvinar nucleus (LeDoux, 1996; Morris, Öhman, &
Dolan, 1999; Williams, Palmer, Liddell, Song, & Gordon,
2006). Converging evidence for this viewpoint comes
from studies demonstrating that rapid emotional face pro-
cessing can be driven by coarse visual input based on low
spatial frequency information contained within faces. For
example, when fearful faces are presented either intact or
filtered such that they contain only low spatial frequency
information, amygdala activity is observed for both types
of stimuli. In contrast, only intact faces trigger activation of
FFA. What this implies is that emotional processing in the
amygdala is independent of the face-processing opera-
tions that occur in extrastriate visual cortex (Vuilleumier &
Pourtois, 2007). Collectively these studies suggest that
although emotional face processing typically relies on the
interplay of regions in the core face-processing system and
the amygdala, it can nevertheless be preserved in a rudi-
mentary way even when the complex structural encoding
of faces is compromised.
It is worth noting, however, that the vast majority of
investigations of emotional face processing have explored
perceptions of fearful expressions. This may be somewhat
problematic because recent work suggests that the neural
network that implements fear perception does not neces-
sarily generalize to other emotions (Morris et al., 1996).
In particular, the critical role of the amygdala may be
restricted to facial expressions that signal danger or fear.
Patients with bilateral amygdala damage have been found
to be selectively impaired at recognizing fearful expres-
sions (Adolphs et al., 2005). In contrast, the perception of
disgust appears to be selectively related to activation in the
insula (Calder, Keane, Manes, Antoun, & Young, 2000;
M. L. Phillips et al., 1997). Further research is therefore
required to elucidate the functional contribution of distinct,
emotion-specific activations with the implementation of
face processing more generally.
Further underscoring the pivotal status of the amyg-
dala to social–cognitive functioning, recent research has
444 Perceiving People
documented that this structure also plays a pivotal role in
core aspects of trait ascription. Faces that are considered
to be particularly untrustworthy elicit an elevated amyg-
dala response (Engell et al., 2007; Todorov et al., 2008;
Winston, Strange, O’Doherty, & Dolan, 2002) and patients
with damage to this structure consider trustworthy faces (as
rated by healthy individuals) to look quite untrustworthy
(Adolphs, Tranel, & Damasio, 1998). Interestingly, prosop-
agnostic patients who are unable to perceive the identity
of faces report normal judgments of trust (Todorov &
Duchaine, 2008). These data suggest that mirroring the
separable networks for the analysis of facial affect and
the structural encoding of facial features, the extraction
of identity-related information and trait knowledge from
facial cues may also be dissociable. Additionally, these
data, taken together with work on the processing of emo-
tional faces, imply that activity in the amygdala seems to
reflect higher vigilance toward potentially challenging
(i.e., fearful or untrustworthy) interaction partners rather
than encoding specific emotional states or personality
traits in others.
Beyond trait judgments, explorations of facial attrac-
tiveness have revealed that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)
is a reliable contributor to important aspects of person per-
ception. Activity in this area tracks with the relative facial
attractiveness of faces, even when participants’ task is
simply to classify the stimuli according to sex (O’Doherty
et al., 2003; Winston, O’Doherty, Kilner, Perrett, & Dolan,
2007). Interestingly, however, whereas for heterosexual
women and homosexual men attractive male faces elicit
stronger OFC activation than attractive female faces, in
heterosexual men and homosexual women, attractive
female faces evoke stronger OFC activation than attractive
male faces. These findings suggest that the OFC responds
not only to the attractiveness of a face per se but particu-
larly to attractive faces that are sexually relevant for a par-
ticular perceiver (Ishai, 2007; Kranz & Ishai, 2006). These
findings support previous data showing that the OFC plays
a crucial role in the evaluation of sensory signals and their
reward value to guide a perceiver ’s responses to his or her
environment (for a review, see Rolls, 2000).
Preliminary research has also explored the neural struc-
tures supporting the extraction of categorical information
from facial cues. Whereas behavioral researchers have
made noticeable progress at elucidating how each of the
three aspects of the stereotyping process (social categoriza-
tion, stereotype activation, stereotype application) unfold,
neuroimaging studies have focused almost exclusively on
exploring the first step, the social categorization of others.
Interestingly, behavioral findings suggesting that passively
viewing a face or making a superficial perceptual judg-
ment is insufficient to reliably trigger social categorization
(Macrae et al., 2005; Quinn & Macrae, 2005), effects that
have been mirrored by the patterning of activity in the
amygdala. Whereas amygdala activity tracks with racial
status (i.e., exhibits increased responses for faces that do
not match the perceiver ’s own race) when participants are
making socially meaningful judgments of the targets such
as judging their age or sex (e.g., Hart et al., 2000; Ronquillo
et al., 2007; Wheeler & Fiske, 2005), activity in this region
is insensitive to target race when faces are processed at a
superficial visual level (i.e., during a dot detection task or
a perceptual matching task; Cunningham et al., 2004; Phelps
et al., 2000; Wheeler & Fiske, 2005). Intriguingly, however,
the more individuals associate their racial ingroup with
positivity and the outgroup with negativity as measured by
the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the stronger amygdala
activity differentiates between different race faces even
under mere perceptual processing conditions (Cunningham
et al., 2004; Phelps et al., 2000). These findings suggest
that if perceivers consider race to be a particularly impor-
tant dimension for construing others, amygdala activity is
insensitive to the prevailing encoding context.
Despite recent advances in understanding the neural
underpinnings of social categorization, the exact func-
tional contribution of the amygdala to race-based person
perception remains unclear. For example, is this structure
responding to lower-level perceptual differences between
faces or differences in the features that signal the relative
trustworthiness of individuals who differ from self in terms
of race? What appears to be apparent is that the observed
amygdala activation is unlikely to reflect processes of ste-
reotype activation or application given that none of the
studies required participants to draw stereotypic infer-
ences while perceiving the faces nor were they able to
demonstrate that a relationship exists between participants’
explicit stereotypic beliefs (as tapped into by the Modern
Racism Scale) and the magnitude of amygdala response to
outgroup members (Cunningham et al., 2004; Phelps et al.,
2000; Wheeler & Fiske, 2005). Furthermore, although it
is well established that faces with more Afrocentric fea-
tures elicit stronger activation of the African American
stereotype than faces with less prototypical features (Blair
et al., 2002), a recent neuroimaging study failed to find dif-
ferences in amygdala activation toward light-skinned and
dark-skinned Black faces (Ronquillo et al., 2007).
Alternatively, it has been argued that the amygdala may
be involved in rapid group-based automatic affective evalu-
ations (Amodio, 2008). Patient data suggest, however, that
automatic category-related evaluative associations remain
normal even when recruitment of the amygdala is impos-
sible because of brain damage (Phelps, Cannistraci, &
Cunningham, 2003). In sum, the precise contribution of
the amygdala to social categorization requires further
 Person Perception in the Brain 445

The Neural Correlates of Body Perception

empirical attention. Underscoring this recommendation is
the observation that for age rather than race judgments, the
amygdala seems to display a larger response to faces of
ingroup (i.e., faces of the perceiver ’s own age group) than
outgroup members (i.e., faces that are either significantly
younger or older than the perceiver; Wright et al., 2008).
This observation challenges the generalized assumption
that amygdala activity merely signals a higher vigilance
toward outgroup members.
Finally, beyond the amygdala, one of the most impor-
tant regions in the extended face-processing system is the
anterior temporal lobe (aTL). In contrast to the conflict-
ing findings that have been reported in the OFA and FFA
(Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006), converging evidence suggests
that the aTL plays a pivotal role in the detection of facial
identity (see Gobbini & Haxby, 2007). Neuroimaging
investigations have repeatedly demonstrated that the per-
ception of familiar faces, either because they are personal
acquaintances or famous celebrities, is associated with
elevated activity in the aTL (Kriegeskorte, Formisano,
Sorger, & Goebel, 2007; Leveroni et al., 2000; Sugiura
et al., 2001). Most tellingly, following damage to this
structure, the ability to identify familiar faces deteriorates
dramatically (Evans, Heggs, Antoun, & Hedges, 1995;
Gainotti, Barbier, & Marra, 2003). It has been speculated
that the crucial contribution of the aTL toward person per-
ception is based on its representations of specific semantic
and biographical knowledge about others that is accessed
when a familiar face is encountered (Gobbini & Haxby,
2007; Haxby et al., 2000). Additionally, a weaker amyg-
dala response has been noted to accompany the percep-
tion of familiar than unfamiliar faces. It has been argued
that this lack of activation reflects a lower level of vigi-
lance toward familiar others than strangers (Gobbini &
Haxby, 2007).
Like the human face, the human body and its associated
parts are a rich source of socially relevant information
about others. Although the neural network supporting body
perception has received less attention than the correspond-
ing face-processing system, evidence has recently emerged
revealing that cortical regions specialized for visual body
perception can be dissociated from areas involved in face
or object processing. Cells responding selectively to the
shapes of monkey and human bodies or body parts were first
demonstrated by single-cell recording studies targeting the
temporal cortex of monkeys (Desimone, Albright, Gross, &
Bruce, 1984; Wachsmuth, Oram, & Perrett, 1994). Since
the collection of additional data on the neural correlates
of body perception in humans, it has become apparent
that, like face processing, a core and an extended neural
system subserving body perception can be distinguished
(see Figure 12.4). The core neural system, which is dedi-
cated to the visual analysis of the human body and its
parts, receives inputs from early visual areas that deal with
form and motion processing. An extended neural network
of regions then uses the outputs of the core system to draw
body-based inferences (Giese & Poggio, 2003; Lange &
Lappe, 2006; Peelen & Downing, 2007).
The core neural system of body perception comprises
the extrastriate body area (EBA), the fusiform body area
(FBA), and the pSTS. The EBA is located bilaterally in the
posterior inferior temporal sulcus in close proximity but
slightly superior to the OFA (Peelen & Downing, 2005a;
Spiridon, Fischl, & Kanwisher, 2006). Activity in this area
is strongly and selectively enhanced to a variety of static
images of headless human bodies and body parts com-
pared with images of faces and objects or their constituent
elements (Downing, Chan, Peelen, Dodds, & Kanwisher,
2006; Downing, Wiggett, & Peelen, 2007; Peelen & Downing,

Parietal
Cortex

PMC
Striate & pSTS
Extrastriate
Cortices EBA AMY
FBA

CORE NEURAL SYSTEM: EXTENDED NEURAL SYSTEM:

EBA: featural analysis of bodies
FBA: configural analysis of bodies
pSTS: analysis of body movements
AMY: person evaluation
PMC & Parietal Cortex: action
interpretation & personality
inference
Figure 12.4 Brain regions implementing body
perception. AMY
amygdala; EBA
extrastriate
body area; FBA
fusiform body area; PMC
pre-
motor cortex; pSTS
posterior superior temporal
sulcus.
446 Perceiving People
2005a; Pourtois, Peelen, Spinelli, Seeck, & Vuilleumier,
2007). Importantly, the increased response in the EBA
generalizes to line drawings, stick figures, silhouettes, and
PL animations of bodies, indicating that EBA activity is
elicited irrespective of the specific visual features of body-
related images (Downing, Jiang, Shuman, & Kanwisher,
2001; Peelen, Wiggett, & Downing, 2006). Furthermore,
when a temporal inactivation of the EBA is induced
by rTMS, body and body-part recognition is impaired
(Urgesi, Berlucchi, & Aglioti, 2004; Urgesi, Calvo-Merino,
Haggard, & Aglioti, 2007).
Although the EBA is thought to be involved in the
visual analysis of human bodies and their parts, the exact
functional significance of this region remains open to
debate. On the one hand, EBA activation has been found
to adapt more strongly to succeeding images depicting
relatively similar than dissimilar body postures, thereby
suggesting that it may play an important role in encoding
and visually analyzing static “snapshots” of bodies and
their parts (Downing, Peelen, Wiggett, & Tew, 2006).
On the other hand, however, the right EBA in particular
has also been associated with the encoding of the ori-
entation of bodies and their parts such that activity is
increased when bodily information is presented in an
allocentric (i.e., consistent with looking at someone
else’s body) compared with an egocentric perspective
(i.e., consistent with looking at one’s own body; Chan,
Peelen, & Downing, 2004; Saxe, Jamal, & Powell,
2006). Finally, it is still a matter of debate whether the
EBA is involved in the body-based identification of indi-
viduals as originally suggested (Downing et al., 2001;
Urgesi, Candidi, Ionta, & Aglioti, 2007, but see Kable &
Chatterjee, 2006). Perceiving one’s own body parts and
those of familiar others has been shown to increase
activity not in the EBA but rather in the aTL (Chan et al.,
2004). This finding corroborates work on face processing
demonstrating that the aTL represents specific semantic
and biographical knowledge about others. Given the rela-
tive paucity of work on this topic, however, additional
data are required to increase understanding of whether
and how the EBA and the aTL contribute to the percep-
tion of identity-specific bodily cues.
A second body-selective area that is anatomically dis-
tinct from the EBA has been located in the posterior fusi-
form gyrus adjacent to, and overlapping with, the FFA
(Peelen et al., 2006). Similar to the EBA, the FBA responds
selectively to whole headless bodies and body parts, as
well as schematic, stick figure, and PL-animated depic-
tions of the body (Peelen & Downing, 2005b; Peelen et al.,
2006; Schwarzlose, Baker, & Kanwisher, 2005). Despite
their similar response properties during body perception,
activity in EBA and FBA can nevertheless be dissociated.
When stimulated with body images of varying completeness
(i.e., fingers, hands, arms, torsos, whole bodies), the EBA
responds more specifically toward body parts than the
FBA, whereas the FBA displays a relative bias for more
complete images of the body (Taylor, Wiggett, & Downing,
2007). On the basis of these findings, it has been suggested
that the EBA deals with the encoding and representation of
body parts, whereas the FBA processes the configuration
of body parts into wholes, hence constructs a holistic rep-
resentation of the body (Peelen & Downing, 2007).
Although the EBA and FBA play a prominent role
in the encoding of static bodies and their associated parts,
the pSTS is implicated in the processing of bodily related
motion (Blake & Shiffrar, 2007; Giese & Poggio, 2003;
Michels, Lappe, & Vaina, 2005; Puce & Perrett, 2003). When
pSTS activity is disrupted, either temporarily following
rTMS or more permanently because of a stroke, a person’s
ability to perceive bodily motion is significantly impaired
(Grossman, Batelli, & Pascual-Leone, 2005; Saygin, 2007).
In contrast to activity in the EBA and FBA, which increases
toward bodies relative to objects regardless of whether they
are stationary or not, activity in the pSTS increases more to
the former than latter stimuli only when they are in motion
(Grossman & Blake, 2002; Saxe, Xiao, Kovacs, Perrett, &
Kanwisher, 2004). Robust and selective pSTS activation
has also been observed toward complex human motion in
movie sequences (Beauchamp, Lee, Haxby, & Martin, 2002;
Hasson, Nir, Levy, Fuhrmann, & Malach, 2004; Pelphrey,
Mitchell, Mckeown, Goldstein, Allison, & McCarthy,
2003), toward PL-animated bodily movements (Grèzes
et al., 2001; Grossman et al., 2000; Grossman, Blake, &
Kim, 2004; Pyles, Garcia, Hoffman, & Grossman, 2007),
and toward bodily silhouettes depicted with implied move-
ment (Peuskens, Vanrie, Verfaillie, & Orban, 2005).
Whether pSTS activation toward human bodily move-
ments can be reliably distinguished from activation toward
facial movements is still a matter of debate. During the
passive viewing of face versus body movements, over-
lapping but discrete foci of activation in the pSTS have
been shown (Pelphrey, Morris, Michelich, Allison, &
McCarthy, 2005; Wheaton, Thompson, Syngeniotis,
Abbott, & Puce, 2004). In contrast, when subjects have
been asked to search for the same type of motion pattern
in bodily and facial movements, no significant differ-
ence in the loci of activation in pSTS has been reported
(Thompson, Hardee, Panayiotou, Crewther, & Puce,
2007). Thus, under which processing conditions pSTS
activity distinguishes between facial and bodily move-
ments is an issue that requires clarification.
Similar to the extended face-processing network,
additional brain regions support the perception of bodies
(Decety & Grèzes, 1999; de Gelder, 2006; Rizzolatti,

Fogassi, & Gallese, 2001). For example, perceiving whole
bodies or body parts conveying various emotional states
(such as anger, happiness, and fear) evokes an elevated
response in the core body perception system (i.e., EBA,
FBA and pSTS—see Gallagher & Frith, 2004; Grèzes,
Pichon, & de Gelder, 2007; Hadjikhani & de Gelder,
2003; Pichon, de Gelder, & Grèzes, 2007). Importantly,
modulation of this system is accompanied by amygdala
activity in response to emotionally expressive body pos-
tures or movements (de Gelder, Snyder, Greve, Gerard, &
Hadjikhani, 2004; Gallagher & Frith, 2004; Hadjikhani & de
Gelder, 2003; Peelen, Atkinson, Andersson, & Vuilleumier,
2007; Pichon et al., 2007). More specifically, the magni-
tude of emotional modulation in the core system appears to
be directly related to a concomitant response in the amyg-
dala, such that individuals displaying a stronger amygdala
response toward emotional bodies also show stronger
modulation in the core system subserving body perception
(Peelen et al., 2007). Surprisingly, however, the amygdala
does not appear to be strictly necessary for the normal rec-
ognition of bodily expressions. In contrast to data obtained
for emotional face processing, bilateral amygdala lesions
do not seem to interfere with the successful identification of
emotions from expressive bodily cues (Adolphs & Tranel,
2003; Atkinson, Heberlein, & Adolphs, 2007). This finding,
however, does not address the issue of whether the amyg-
dala is implicated in the automatic appraisal of emotionally
expressive bodily cues. It has recently been demonstrated
that compared with nonemotional stimuli, emotional body
images presented in the blind field of a patient with dam-
age to the striate cortex activate the pSTS, even though the
patient is unaware of the presented body posture (de Gelder &
Hadjikhani, 2006). Similar to work on facial expressions,
these findings suggest that emotional body postures may
also be processed through subcortical visual pathways that
include the amygdala (de Gelder, 2006).
In contrast to the perception of emotions from bodily
cues, perceiving others in action (i.e., during the exhibition
of intentional motor behavior) has been tightly linked to
activation in the premotor and parietal cortices. Activity in
each of these areas increases selectively during action per-
ception compared with the perception of static displays of
bodies or their parts (Buccino et al., 2001; Chong, Williams,
Cunnington, & Mattingley, 2008; Saygin, Wilson, Hagler,
Bates, & Sereno, 2004; Wheaton et al., 2004). The func-
tional significance of this frontoparietal network seems to
lie in retrieving the meaning of actions performed by other
social agents. Studies applying rTMS have demonstrated
that the temporal deactivation of the frontoparietal net-
work significantly impairs people’s ability to discriminate
and understand actions (Pobric & Hamilton, 2006; Urgesi,
Candidi, et al., 2007).
Person Perception in the Brain 447
One strategy through which people can understand and
interpret the behavior of others is to use their own “motor
knowledge” as a guiding framework (i.e., motor simula-
tion). That is, incoming bodily related visual information
from others can be mapped onto one’s own motor repre-
sentation of the action in question (Decety & Grèzes, 1999;
Rizzolatti et al., 2001). As it turns out, the PMC and parietal
cortex are involved in both the perception and execution
of action (Grèzes, Armony, Rowe, & Passingham, 2003;
Grèzes & Decety, 2001; Iacoboni et al., 1999; Molnar-
Szakacs, Iacoboni, Koski, & Mazziotta, 2005; Rizzolatti &
Craighero, 2004). Providing further evidence that action
perception is subserved by motor simulation is the obser-
vation that activity in the critical frontoparietal network is
elevated when perceivers observe actions that can be easily
mapped onto their own motor representations. Specifically,
individuals show stronger activity in premotor and parietal
cortices during the perception of actions they regularly per-
form themselves compared with actions they rarely enact
(Calvo-Merino, Glaser, Grèzes, Passingham, & Haggard,
2005; Calvo-Merino, Grèzes, Glaser, Passingham, &
Haggard, 2006).
Although humans are highly adept at using bodily cues
to draw rapid inferences about the actions of conspecif-
ics, they can also use this information to infer the person-
ality of others. Such trait judgments have received less
experimental attention than action-related inferences; nev-
ertheless, there is preliminary evidence to suggest that per-
sonality judgments from body cues (i.e., whether a person
is friendly or outgoing) are also associated with activity
in the frontoparietal network. Convergent evidence from
lesion and neuroimaging studies suggests that the frontal
operculum, located in the left PMC, and the left inferior
parietal cortex contribute to personality judgments from
body cues (Heberlein et al., 2004; Heberlein & Saxe,
2005).
The Temporal Character of Person Perception
Aside from exploring the neuroanatomy of person per-
ception (i.e., the “where” question), scientific attention
has also targeted the temporal aspects of this process (i.e.,
the “when” question). Recordings of event-related elec-
trical potentials (ERPs) or event-related magnetic fields
(ERMFs) are powerful and widely used methods to inves-
tigate the time course of visual categorization in the human
brain. Numerous studies using these techniques have
revealed that pictures of faces or bodies elicit distinct elec-
trical and magnetic activity that distinguishes them from
other classes of visual object (de Gelder, 2006; Rossion &
Jacques, 2008). Importantly, these measures can address
the question how early in the visual processing stream
448 Perceiving People
faces and bodies can be discriminated from other types of
stimuli.
The Time Course of Face Perception
Recordings of ERPs and ERMFs show enhanced responsiv-
ity to faces relative to a variety of other objects with peaks
at approximately 100 ms (Herrmann, Ehlis, Muehlberger, &
Fallgatter, 2005; Liu, Harris, & Kanwisher, 2002; Pegna,
Khateb, Michel, & Landis, 2004), 170 ms (Bentin, Allison,
Puce, Perez, & McCarthy, 1996; Eimer & McCarthy, 1999;
Itier & Taylor, 2004a), and 250 ms (Bentin & Deouell,
2000; Schweinberger, Huddy, & Burton, 2004) after stimu-
lus onset. In ERP studies, the positive potential that peaks
at 100 ms (the “P100”) after the onset of a face is typi-
cally observed at electrodes near the medial occipital pole
(Eimer, 2000) and is thought to be generated by activity in
visual areas located in the striate and extrastriate cortices
(Di Russo, Martinez, Sereno, Pitzalis, & Hillyard, 2002).
The P100 is known to be particularly sensitive to low-level
properties of visual stimuli, such as luminance, contrast,
color, or spatial frequency. Increased P100 amplitude for
faces compared with objects has not been consistently
observed and is notably absent in studies that carefully
control the low-level visual properties of the stimuli. As
such, the P100 is thought to be sensitive to low-level cues
that may be associated with, but are by no means exclusive
to, faces (Rossion & Jacques, 2008).
Compared with the P100, most ERP studies find a much
more robust face-related effect in the negative potential
that peaks at occipitotemporal sites around 170 ms (the
“N170”) after stimulus onset. Source localization studies
have usually identified brain regions in the core system that
gives rise to this N170 effect (Deffke et al., 2007; Itier &
Taylor, 2004b). In healthy individuals, a larger N170 has
been reported for faces compared with other objects. In
addition, the N170 emerges for a diverse range of facial
stimuli, including schematic, sketched, painted, drawn,
and photographed faces, thus indicating that the effect
is unlikely to be driven by low-level visual properties of
faces (Sagiv & Bentin, 2001; Rossion & Jacques, 2008).
Interestingly, patients who are selectively impaired at rec-
ognizing facial configurations display no face-specific
N170 effect (Bentin, DeGutis, D’Esposito, & Robertson,
2007; Eimer & McCarthy, 1999; Kress & Daum, 2003).
Of theoretical interest, the N170 is substantially
increased (although delayed) when faces are inverted
(Bentin et al., 1996; Itier, Latinus, & Taylor, 2006). Quite
why this effect emerges is unclear. Some recent data sug-
gest that, following inversion, there is greater recruitment of
eye-selective neurons in addition to face-selective neurons
and that this increase promotes the generation of the N170
inversion effect (Itier, Alain, Sedore, & McIntosh, 2007).
Lending support to this viewpoint, previous research has
suggested that the N170 is particularly sensitive to infor-
mation coming from the region of the eyes. For example,
when presented in isolation, static eyes elicit a larger N170
than static whole faces (Bentin et al., 1996; Puce, Smith, &
Allison, 2000). In addition, when schematic faces are pre-
sented with a pair of small objects substituted for the eyes,
no N170 effect is observed (Bentin, Golland, Flevaris,
Robertson, & Moscovitch, 2006). It has therefore been
proposed that face-selective and eye-selective neurons con-
tribute to the emergence of the N170, with eye-selective
neurons playing a prominent role in specific task contexts,
such as when configural processing is disrupted and fea-
tural strategies need to be adopted (Itier et al., 2007) or
when eyes provide valuable information about objects in
the environment (Puce et al., 2000).
Whether the N170 is modulated by the expressed emo-
tionality of a face remains open to debate. Whereas some
studies have reported an emotion-based modulation of the
N170 (Batty & Taylor, 2003; Blau, Maurer, Tottenham, &
McCandliss, 2007; Sprengelmeyer & Jentzsch, 2006),
others have failed to reveal such an effect (Ashley,
Vuilleumier, & Swick, 2004; Eimer & Holmes, 2002;
Eimer, Holmes, & McGlone, 2003). What has been reli-
ably shown, however, is that a frontocentral positivity
as early as 120 ms after stimulus onset and a later more
broadly distributed positivity beyond 250 ms are modu-
lated by emotional facial expressions (Eimer & Holmes,
2002; Holmes, Vuilleumier, & Eimer, 2003; Vuilleumier &
Pourtois, 2007; Williams et al., 2006). Previous work
which has reported sustained positive ERP deflections
beyond 250 ms after stimulus onset for nonfacial emo-
tional stimuli suggest that these late effects are not face-
specific (Eimer & Holmes, 2007). In contrast, the early
(i.e., 120 ms) face-specific ERP component indicates that
some information about the affective significance of faces
can be extracted rapidly and before the perceptual analy-
sis differentiating faces from other objects is fully com-
pleted in the core neural system as indexed by the N170
(Vuilleumier & Pourtois, 2007). Again, further research
is required to establish whether comparable ERP effects
are triggered by different emotional expressions (Eimer,
Holmes, & McGlone, 2003) or whether diverse emotional
expressions give rise to distinct modulations of ERP wave-
forms (Ashley et al., 2004; Batty & Taylor, 2003; Pourtois,
Grandjean, Sander, & Vuilleumier, 2004; Williams et al.,
2006).
Although the occipitotemporal N170 appears to be
an early, reliable index differentiating face from object
perception, the component is insensitive to differences
in facial familiarity (Bentin & Deouell, 2000; Herzmann,
Schweinberger, Sommer, & Jentzsch, 2004; Tanaka, Curran,
 Implications for Social-Psychological Treatments of Person Perception 449
Porterfield, & Collins, 2006), face category (Caldara,
Thut, Michel, Bovet, & Renault, 2003; Ito, Thompson, &
Cacioppo, 2004; Mouchetant-Rostaing, Giard, Bentin,
Aguera, & Pernier, 2000; Mouchetant-Rostaing & Giard,
2003), or facial attractiveness (Schacht, Werheid, &
Sommer, 2008; Werheid, Schacht, & Sommer, 2007).
These findings suggest that the N170 reflects the process-
ing of faces with regard to their common structural proper-
ties rather than the representation of a unique face.
Convergent data on reliable sex-, age-, and race-related
ERP effects are rare. Initial evidence suggests that at cen-
tral scalp locations around 150 to 250 ms after the appear-
ance of a face, category-related processing effects emerge
(Mouchetant-Rostaing et al., 2000; Mouchetant-Rostaing &
Giard, 2003; Ito et al., 2004). Further research is required
to illuminate whether category-related ERP differences can
be demonstrated when low-level properties of the stimuli
and people’s processing goals are controlled. Interestingly,
a reliable ERP component that responds toward facial
familiarity has been observed. Facial familiarity elicits a
negative potential that emerges at inferior temporal sites
around 250 ms (i.e., the “N250”) after stimulus onset. This
component is sensitive to different types of familiar faces,
including famous faces, personally known faces, and exper-
imentally learned faces (Herzmann et al., 2004; Tanaka
et al., 2006). Finally, only few ERP studies have targeted
the processing of facial attractiveness. Although early ERP
markers of facial attractiveness have been reported, repli-
cable ERP differences between attractive and unattractive
faces seem to occur relatively late in the processing stream
between 400 and 600 ms after the onset of a face (Schacht
et al., 2008; Werheid et al., 2007).
The Time Course of Body Perception
Complementing work on face processing, researchers
have recently begun to investigate the temporal dynamics
of body and body part perception. When the perception of
photographic images of headless whole bodies as well as
body silhouettes and stick figures is compared with the
perception of pictures displaying faces and objects, a body-
specific negative component peaking at occipitotemporal
electrode sites at 190 ms (N190) after stimulus onset has
been observed (Thierry et al., 2006). What these data sug-
gest is that there is approximately a 20-ms difference for the
categorization of visual inputs as comprising faces or bod-
ies (Gliga & Dehaene-Lambertz, 2005). In a similar vein,
intracranial cell recording studies have revealed highly
selective responses to headless bodies in the EBA starting
at around 190 ms (Pourtois et al., 2007) and hand-selective
responses in mainly occipitotemporal areas emerging 200
to 250 ms after stimulus onset (McCarthy, Puce, Belger, &
Allison, 1999). The perception of anatomically impossible
body or body part configurations relative to possible
configurations has also been found to elicit ERP differences
as early as 190 ms after stimulus onset (Overney, Michel,
Harris, & Pegna, 2005). Finally, a negative occipitotemporal
ERP component related to the detection of the familiar form
of a human figure from PL animations has been observed
around 180 to 200 ms after the appearance of a stimulus
(Hirai, Fukushima, & Hiraki, 2003; Jokisch, Daum, Suchan, &
Troje, 2005). Collectively, these findings suggest that similar
to the face-specific N170, the N190 indexes the form-related
structural processing of the human body and its parts and is
likely to be generated by the EBA, FBA, or both.
There is also preliminary empirical evidence that
perceiving instrumental body actions performed with and
without an emotional expression elicits faster processing of
emotional actions at parietooccipital sites as early as 110 ms
after stimulus onset (van Heijnsbergen, Meeren, Grèzes, &
de Gelder, 2007). A study investigating the simultaneous per-
ception of emotional expressions from facial and body cues
has revealed that as early as 110 ms after stimulus onset, a
larger occipital positivity is elicited toward face–body pairs
with emotionally matching (i.e., fearful facial expression
and fearful body posture) rather than mismatching expres-
sions (i.e., angry facial expression and fearful body posture;
Meeren et al., 2005). Similar to insights gained for emotional
face processing, these results suggest that emotional body
cues are processed even before the structural body analysis
as indexed by the N190 has been completed.
Finally, only a few studies have targeted the temporal
dynamics underlying the perception of body motion and
action understanding. Thus far, it has been demonstrated that
the perception of whole bodies depicted with implied motion
relative to stationary bodies (i.e., running vs. standing) is
associated with an increased ERP positivity at occipitopa-
rietal electrodes at 260 ms after stimulus onset, an effect
that cannot be attributed to low-level visual differences
between the stimuli (Lorteije et al., 2006). In addition, when
observed body motion comprises a meaningful action that
ends either erroneously or correctly, unexpected action slips
are marked by a larger ERP positivity at parietal electrode
sites around 300 ms after the error was perceived (De Bruijn,
Schubotz, & Ullsperger, 2007). Further research is neces-
sary to replicate and extend the role of these ERP indices
with respect to action perception and understanding.
IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL-
PSYCHOLOGICAL TREATMENTS
OF PERSON PERCEPTION
Despite the priority given to perceptual processes in contem-
porary accounts of face recognition (e.g., Bruce & Young,
450 Perceiving People
1986; Haxby et al., 2000, 2002), work in social cognition
has tended to overlook the importance of these operations
(but see Zebrowitz, 1997), focusing instead on the cogni-
tive and behavioral aspects of person construal (Macrae &
Bodenhausen, 2000). As noted at the beginning of the
chapter, this oversight can be traced to a couple of factors.
First, the dominant empirical pursuit in social–cognitive
research has been to investigate person construal at the stages
of stereotype activation and application (Bodenhausen &
Macrae, 1998; Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990;
Kunda & Spencer, 2003; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000),
stages that take place after a target has been detected
and categorized. Second, a favored technique for eliciting
categorical thinking has been to present participants with
verbal stimuli (e.g., category labels, forenames), a meth-
odology that necessarily obscures the role played by per-
ceptual operations in the registration, classification, and
recognition of social targets (but see Blair et al., 2004;
Gilbert & Hixon, 1991; Livingstone & Brewer, 2002;
Macrae et al., 1995, 1997; Maddox & Gray, 2002). Yet,
as we have shown, these operations patently exert a sig-
nificant influence on the course and myriad products of the
person perception process (Bruce & Young, 1998).
Underlying people’s understanding of others are per-
ceptual operations that abstract both variant (e.g., emo-
tional expression, gaze direction) and invariant (e.g., sex,
identity) aspects of person knowledge from available facial
cues (Bruce & Young, 1986; Burton, Bruce, & Johnston,
1990; Haxby et al., 2000, 2002, Tarr & Gauthier, 2000).
In this respect, it is interesting to note that contemporary
models of face processing confront the same challenge
as social–cognitive approaches to person perception—
namely, to establish how and when perceivers construe tar-
gets (e.g., Albert Einstein, Uncle Dave) as unique entities
(i.e., person individuation) rather than instances of generic
social groupings (i.e., person categorization). Interestingly,
the solutions reached by the respective fields are quite
distinct, with each emphasizing the importance of differ-
ent operations in the information-processing stream (e.g.,
Bruce & Young, 1986; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). Whereas
social–cognitive research underscores the importance
of memorial operations (e.g., category-based vs. person-
based retrieval) in the person perception process (Fiske &
Neuberg, 1990; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000), work in
face processing emphasizes the perceptual operations
through which people abstract categorical and identity-
related information about others (Bruce & Young, 1986;
Farah et al., 1998; Haxby et al., 2000, 2002).
Dominating both research and theorizing in social psy-
chology for almost 5 decades has been the assumption
that category-based responding drives person perception
(Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). Since Allport’s
(1954) seminal writings, researchers have sought to
demonstrate the cognitive benefits that accrue from the adop-
tion of a categorical conception toward others. Although
the reported effects are many, the findings can be summa-
rized succinctly and easily—categorical thinking stream-
lines most aspects of person perception, including decision
making, memorial functioning, attentional processing, and
impression formation (see Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000).
Given these economizing effects, categorical thinking has
been characterized as an indispensable cognitive tool in the
person perception process (Bodenhausen & Lichtenstein,
1987; Bodenhausen & Wyer, 1985; Gilbert & Hixon, 1991;
Macrae, Milne, & Bodenhausen, 1994; Pendry & Macrae,
1994). As Gilbert and Hixon (1991) have put it, “the ability
to understand new and unique individuals in terms of old
and general beliefs is certainly among the handiest tools in
the social perceiver ’s kit” (p. 509). In no sense does con-
temporary work on face processing dispute this viewpoint;
clearly the application of generic knowledge structures
simplifies otherwise complex and effortful aspects of the
person perception process. What is questionable, however,
is whether cognitive economy is the only determinant of
people’s preference for category-based solutions to the
puzzle of person construal (Allport, 1954). As an extensive
literature in face processing has demonstrated, early per-
ceptual processes (and their associated products) also play
an important contributory role to the generation of cate-
gorical thinking (Blair et al., 2004; Livingstone & Brewer,
2002; Mason & Macrae, 2004).
Several lines of evidence point to perceptual process-
ing as an important determinant of categorical thinking.
First, perceivers can extract category-cueing material from
faces more rapidly and accurately than identity-triggering
information. Second, at least for intact stimuli, the opera-
tions that extract category-cueing information demonstrate
a resistance to manipulations that impair face processing,
such as stimulus orientation and degradation (Maurer
et al., 2002; Valentine, 1988). This observation is important
because it highlights the perceptual efficiency of categori-
cal thinking. Even when perceivers are presented with stim-
uli in suboptimal conditions, the face-processing system is
still capable of extracting categorical knowledge in a rapid
and accurate manner. Third, category activation is sensitive
to the typicality of group members. In particular, categori-
cal thinking is moderated by the extent to which individu-
als possess physical features that are deemed to be typical
of the groups to which they belong (see Blair et al., 2004;
Livingstone & Brewer, 2002; Maddox & Gray, 2002).
What the aforementioned findings suggest is that,
given appropriate triggering cues, category-based respond-
ing may be the predominant social–cognitive outcome
at all stages of the person perception process. Before the

cognitive efficiencies that accrue from the application of
category-based knowledge structures in memory (Allport,
1954; Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Macrae &
Bodenhausen, 2000), perceptual operations may already be
preferentially extracting category-cueing information from
faces, especially in challenging task environments. Little
wonder, therefore, that categorical thinking should exert
such a potent influence on person construal. The process-
ing architecture that supports social–cognitive functioning
(Haxby et al., 2000, 2002) would appear to be biased
toward category-based responding at all stages of the per-
son perception process. In this respect, person construal
may simply reflect the mind’s evolved strategy of impos-
ing a categorical solution on a broad range of problems in
perception and cognition (Harnad, 1987).
Given the perceptual efficiency of category-based con-
strual, does this imply that the products of the person per-
ception process are inevitably dominated by that which
can be computed most easily—categorical judgments? In
addressing this important issue, two observations are wor-
thy of mention. The ultimate benefit of categorical thinking
lies in the fact that preexisting knowledge structures can be
used to guide information processing and response genera-
tion, especially when other sources of person knowledge are
absent, ambiguous, or difficult to acquire (Allport, 1954;
Bodenhausen & Macrae, 1998; Brewer, 1988; Fiske &
Neuberg, 1990; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). It is unsur-
prising, therefore, that categorical construal is triggered by
basic featural cues (Blair et al., 2004; Livingstone & Brewer,
2002) and is more resistant to disruption than person-based
construal. Such functional properties would be expected of
a process that streamlines information-processing and
response generation. Ease of categorical construal, how-
ever, does not extend to all processing contexts and social
targets. Indeed, there are conditions under which individu-
ated responses reliably dominate people’s outputs (Fiske &
Neuberg, 1990; Kunda & Spencer, 2003).
Any object, including a person, can be identified at
multiple levels of abstraction (e.g., woman vs. one’s cur-
rent partner). It is assumed, however, that objects are first
perceptually identified at what is termed the entry level of
categorical representation (Jolicoeur, Gluck, & Kosslyn,
1984). This is the level at which a name can be generated
or matched most rapidly to an object. Importantly, for some
social targets, particularly highly familiar or relevant oth-
ers, person recognition is believed to be automatized at the
individual or exemplar-based level (Tanaka, 2001; Turk,
Rosenblum, Gazzaniga, & Macrae, 2005). Thus, although
category-based responding may be the least demand-
ing option at all stages of the person perception process,
the face-processing system nevertheless retains the flex-
ibility to generate person-based responses under specific
Person Perception: One Process or Several? 451
circumstances (e.g., goal-based processing) and for certain
targets (e.g., familiar or important others). In this way,
perceivers are able to negotiate the complex demands
imposed by everyday social interaction (Brewer, 1988;
Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Kunda & Spencer, 2003; Macrae &
Bodenhausen, 2000).
Notwithstanding the inherent flexibility of the face-
processing system (Bruce & Young, 1986, 1998; Haxby
et al., 2000, 2002; Tarr & Gauthier, 2000), why is it that per-
ceivers so readily adopt a categorical stance when interact-
ing with others? Aside from the cognitive economies that
accrue from this mode of thought (Macrae & Bodenhausen,
2000), perceptual factors also likely contribute to this pref-
erence for categorical thinking. Generally speaking, clas-
sifying a person by category is less perceptually taxing
than individuating that same target from other members
of the group (Tarr & Cheng, 2003; Tarr & Gauthier, 2000).
This ease of perceptual processing is undoubtedly impor-
tant when one can use generic categorical representations
in memory to guide cognition and action (Bodenhausen &
Macrae, 1998; Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990;
Kunda & Spencer, 2003). It is perhaps no accident,
therefore, that perceivers are most likely to think categori-
cally about individuals who belong to groups for which
strong beliefs and expectances are held (e.g., race and
sex stereotypes—Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990);
groups that are characterized by the possession of salient
perceptual features (e.g., skin tone, hairstyle).
PERSON PERCEPTION: ONE PROCESS
OR SEVERAL?
Humans are remarkably skilled at understanding other
social agents. From only a few visual cues, people are
able to formulate detailed impressions of others (Brewer,
1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990), identify the sex, emo-
tional status, and identity of conspecifics (Bruce & Young,
1986); and infer the hidden internal states (e.g., goals,
intentions) that give rise to purposive behavior (Baron-
Cohen, 1995; Gallagher & Frith, 2004). When one con-
siders the challenges inherent in daily social exchange,
these social–cognitive abilities are striking. So why
are social perceivers so adroit at understanding others?
In social cognition, two basic processes are believed
to subserve person perception—categorization and
individuation (see Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). At least as
operationalized in the social–cognitive literature, catego-
rization and individuation are typically indexed through
the differential products of memory retrieval (Kunda &
Spencer, 2003; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000; Macrae et al.,
1999), a strategy that gives credence to the viewpoint that
452 Perceiving People
person construal is guided by the operation of two distinct
cognitive processes.
Before the retrieval of information from long-term
memory, however, a great deal of social–cognitive pro-
cessing has already taken place. Most notably, perceivers
have resolved the perceptual puzzle of identifying social
agents from available visual cues. Capturing, as they do,
different solutions or outcomes to the problem of person
construal (e.g., group member vs. unique entity), categori-
zation and individuation also operate at these early stages
of person perception (Bruce & Young, 1986; Haxby et al.,
2000, 2002; Tarr & Cheng, 2003; Tarr & Gauthier, 2000).
Importantly, however, rather than reflecting the operation
of dual cognitive processes, during the early perceptual
stages of person construal, categorization and individua-
tion are believed to index different products or outcomes of
a common processing mechanism (see Mason & Macrae,
2004). Such a viewpoint is consistent with recent models of
object recognition (Tarr & Cheng, 2003; Tarr & Gauthier,
2000). Tarr and Cheng (2003), for example, have proposed
that recognition across all object categories (e.g., birds,
cars, people) is supported by a single processing system
that is tuned by a combination of experience and instruction
(Diamond & Carey, 1986; Haxby et al., 2000, 2002;
Tanaka, 2001; Tarr & Gauthier, 2000). Within this system,
regions of ventral temporal cortex are engaged when peo-
ple make subordinate-level (i.e., individuated) judgments
about stimuli for which they have acquired prior percep-
tual experience. This includes, but is not restricted to, faces
(Tarr & Cheng, 2003; Tarr & Gauthier, 2000).
If a single (albeit modular) system is sufficient to recog-
nize all types of objects at varying levels of specificity, it
seems reasonable to conclude that categorization and indi-
viduation may reflect different social–cognitive products of
this system. Adopting such a viewpoint, Mason and Macrae
(2004) have argued that categorization (i.e., category-based
representations) and individuation (i.e., person-based repre-
sentations) are perceptual solutions to the problem of per-
son construal that simply make different demands on the
distributed neural network that subserves face processing
(see Haxby et al., 2000, 2002). Specifically, as individua-
tion relies on the extraction of more complex information
(i.e., configural information) from the face than categoriza-
tion (Diamond & Carey, 1986; Farah et al., 1998; Maurer
et al., 2002; Rossion & Gauthier, 2002), greater activity
is observed in regions of ventral temporal cortex during
the former than latter construal. Together with findings
from brain imaging investigations (Dubois et al., 1999;
Mason & Macrae, 2004; Rossion, Schiltz, Robaye, Pirenne, &
Crommelink, 2001), recent behavioral research also sug-
gests that categorization and individuation are realized
through a single processing mechanism (see Calder et al.,
2000; Ganel & Goshen-Gottstein, 2002; Rossion, 2002).
As Ganel and Goshen-Gottstein (2002) have reported,
“as for the processing of sex and identity . . . results . . .
indicate that these facial dimensions are processed by a
single system at both a functional level of description and at
a neuroanatomical level (p. 865)”. This viewpoint does not
imply, however, that classic dual-process models in social
cognition are necessarily incorrect in their assertion that cat-
egorization and individuation are distinct cognitive processes
(Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). Such a statement may be accurate
when one considers later stages in the person perception pro-
cess, stages in which perceivers organize target-relevant infor-
mation in memory, allocate attention to current processing
concerns, and generate target-related inferences (Macrae &
Bodenhausen, 2000; Mason & Macrae, 2004). What is
needed is additional research that specifies the precise
nature of the underlying perceptual, cognitive, and neural
operations that guide person construal at all stages of the
person perception process.
SUMMARY
To negotiate the intricacies of everyday interaction, perceiv-
ers require information-processing routines that simplify
the complexities of the person perception process. To gain
a comprehensive understanding of the process and products
of person construal, integrative theorizing and experimen-
tation is required. Although neuroscience research provides
valuable information about the temporal characteristics
and neuroanatomy of person perception, it has little to say
about the precise stimulus cues that people use to construe
others, the extent to which the process of construal is mod-
ulated by processing goals and individual differences, and
the degree to which early visual operations guide the gen-
eration of people’s postperceptual products, such as impres-
sions and memories. Social cognition research, however,
speaks directly to these fundamentally important questions.
Only by using a range of complementary techniques and
approaches, we suspect, will it be possible to elucidate the
richness of the person perception process.
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Chapter 13
Nonverbal Behavior
NALINI AMBADY AND MAX WEISBUCH
In a much-cited essay, the experimental psychologist and
vision scientist Nicholas Humphrey (1976) argued that
our success as a species is due to our social intellect and
that our brain and intellect have evolved for social process-
ing. Our success and survival, according to Humphrey, are
due not to our technology or ability to create and use tools
but rather to our ability to function as social beings. He
argued that the function of our superior intellect is to create
and preserve social bonds and community: Indeed, there is
increasing acknowledgment across disciplines that human
cognition evolved, in part, to cope with increasing social
demands (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; Dunbar, 1998; Taylor
et al., 2000).
In this chapter, we argue that the ability to communicate
nonverbally is at the core of this social intellect. The social
intellect involves the abilities to infer others’ motives, inten-
tions, character traits, and emotions and, in turn, to commu-
nicate one’s own motives, intentions, character traits, and
emotions. Underlying these specific abilities is the broad,
generalized ability to understand nonverbal behavior and
to use nonverbal behavior to communicate.
Nonverbal behavior and communication are hence foun-
dational to social perception, cognition, interaction, and
behavior. Beyond evolutionary adaptations to social life
that occur on the scale of millions of years, humans exhibit
the extraordinary ability to adapt to their social context over
much shorter timescales; this adaptation is also undergirded
by nonverbal behavior. Such short-term social adaptiveness
lies at the heart of many influential social-psychological
theories, including theories of affiliation (Baumeister &
Leary, 1995), theories of social influence (Deutsch &
Gerard, 1955; Heider, 1958), and theories of prejudice and
ingroup bias (Dovidio & Gaertner; Yzerbyt & Demoulin,
volume 2), to name a few. Although spoken language can
be deployed to solve some problems of social complexity,
nonverbal communication is the speediest, most effortless,
and historically developed means for adapting to the social
world. Whether occurring over millions of years through
464
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
natural selection, over the course of a single lifetime via
socialization, or over the course of minutes in moving from
one social interaction to another, social adaptation is heav-
ily grounded in nonverbal behavior.
Evidence for the role of nonverbal behavior in social
adaptation comes from several sources. While humans do not
develop linguistic capabilities until well into their first year
of life, at birth humans respond to and produce nonverbal
behavior. For instance, newborns are able to imitate certain
facial expressions (Meltzoff & Moore, 1983; Sagi &
Hoffman, 1976). Shortly after birth and well before lan-
guage development, infants learn to produce and interpret
a range of psychologically meaningful nonverbal behav-
iors (Walker-Andrews, 2008). After the development of
language, nonverbal sensitivity only increases such that
following infancy children continue to be socialized via
the nonverbal behavior of caregivers and peers (Feinman,
1982; Walden & Ogan, 1988). Not only does nonverbal
behavior serve as the starting point for social cognition in
humans, but it also is the communicative means by which
we are connected to our evolutionary ancestors. Across
the animal kingdom but especially in the primates, the
importance of nonverbal behavior to social life cannot be
underestimated—many scholars regard nonverbal commu-
nication as the social glue that supports primate affiliation
and alliances (Hauser, 1996; Preston & de Waal, 2002).
The ontogenetic and evolutionary primacy for the role
of nonverbal behavior in social cognition suggests that the
production and perception of nonverbal behavior should
occur early in cognitive processing, even among adults.
The machinery is certainly there to allow for such early
processing. For example, as compared with semantic
(verbal) stimuli, image-based stimuli are more efficiently
and enduringly matched to conceptual categories (Paivio,
1971; Paivio & Csapo, 1973; Seifert, 1997). Recent models
of cognition suggest that much thought occurs via per-
ceptual rather than semantic representations (Barsalou,
1999). And the production of nonverbal behavior stands

in contrast to the production of verbal behavior in terms
of the consumption of cognitive resources: Whereas pro-
ducing verbal behavior by speaking or writing is resource
consuming, stopping nonverbal behavior is resource con-
suming (Richards & Gross, 2000; Richeson & Shelton,
2003). The ontogenetic, evolutionary, and cognitive-
processing primacy of nonverbal behavior has important
consequences for social psychology, many of which are
reviewed in this chapter.
Nonverbal Behavior
The purpose of this chapter is to provide a thorough
review of the existing literature on nonverbal behavior and
nonverbal communication. In doing so, it is important to
define and clarify several constructs.
Nonverbal behavior has been defined broadly as any
behavior that is not linguistic (DePaulo & Friedman,
1998). However, this broad definition includes activities
such as lifting weights, driving a car, and using a hammer,
and these activities are normally not what social psychol-
ogists mean when they use the term “nonverbal behavior.”
The broad definition also runs the risk of including just
about any behavior that can be conceived, which in turn
creates a concept that may not be useful. Instead, nonver-
bal behavior is here defined as perceptible non-linguistic
behavior that is not instrumental to manipulating the
physical state of the world. By excluding the manipula-
tion of nonsocial objects, our definition of nonverbal
behavior includes the subtle facial expressions, body lan-
guage, social touching, vocal acoustics, and interpersonal
distance that are normally intended by the term within
psychology. Nonverbal communication refers to the send-
ing and receiving of thoughts and feelings via nonverbal
behavior.
Traditionally, nonverbal behavior research has been
divided into encoding (the production and communication
of nonverbal behavior) and decoding (the recognition and
interpretation of nonverbal behavior). Because the terms
“encoding” and “decoding” suggest deliberate action on
the part of the encoder and the decoder and because recent
work points to the automaticity of these processes, we use
the terms nonverbal production for encoding and nonver-
bal perception for decoding.
Another traditional distinction within the literature
on nonverbal behavior is that between micro-level and
macro-level nonverbal behaviors. Micro-level nonverbal
behaviors are individual behaviors, sometimes referred to
as “cues” such as smiles, eyebrow raises, forward leans,
and finger tapping. Macro-level nonverbal behaviors gen-
erally refer to constellations of behavior that are imbued
with broader psychological meaning, such as displays of
Nonverbal Production 465
warmth, dominance, or immediacy. Both levels of nonverbal
behavior are reviewed in this chapter, but more emphasis is
placed on macro-level behavior. This emphasis reflects the
literature and the idea that macro-level behaviors are often
more likely to exhibit validity and to generalize across peo-
ple, cultures, and time (Ambady, Bernieri, & Richeson, 2000;
Weisbuch, Slepian, Clarke, Ambady, & Veenstra-Vander
Weele, in press; Zebrowitz & Collins, 1997).
In this chapter, we first discuss the production of
nonverbal behavior, including theories regarding non-
verbal behavior. We address several issues, includ-
ing cross-species displays of nonverbal behavior, the
automaticity and control of nonverbal expression, and
the role of contextual and cultural cues in the production of
nonverbal behavior. We also consider nonverbal behavior
in infancy and the role of individual differences in nonver-
bal production. Finally, we suggest that nonverbal behav-
ior undergirds basic cognitive processing and thinking.
We then turn our attention to the perception of nonverbal
behavior, focusing on automaticity and control in nonver-
bal perception. We examine how nonverbal perceptiveness
might reflect basic social intelligence. We conclude by
describing the critical role that nonverbal behavior plays in
social influence.
NONVERBAL PRODUCTION
From impression management and leadership to socializa-
tion and culture, the production of nonverbal behavior is
the foundation for many social processes. Although this
idea may be counterintuitive for a species in which lan-
guage is vital for survival and for scholars accustomed
to communicating research findings in words, nonverbal
communication is the only means of social organization in
other species and is the primary way that preverbal infants
exert social influence. Behavior that serves as the architec-
ture of social life for our ancestral cousins and for our own
early development might reasonably underlie many social-
psychological processes.
Theories on the Production of Nonverbal
Behavior
Theories of Nonverbal Leakage
Perhaps the most prominent theory of nonverbal produc-
tion, initially offered by Charles Darwin, resembles what
many people today probably think: Nonverbal behavior
reveals emotion. Indeed, although the history of theories on
nonverbal communication dates back at least to Confucius
(Knapp, 2006), most modern theories are roughly built on
466 Nonverbal Behavior
evolutionary principles, so it seems appropriate to start
with Darwin. In his book The Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals, Darwin (1872) describes the many sim-
ilarities (and differences) between nonverbal expressions
in humans and those in other animals. One important pos-
tulate in this book was that biological mechanisms associ-
ated with emotions directly influence nonverbal behavior.
For example, Darwin writes, “terror causes the body to
tremble. The skin becomes pale, sweat breaks out, and
the hair bristles” (p. 90). Paul Ekman, Sylvan Tomkins,
and Carroll Izard were heavily influenced by Darwin’s
approach and argued that subcortical brain structures asso-
ciated with emotion directly caused particular patterns of
facial expression (e.g., Ekman & Friesen, 1969a). By this
view, specific facial expressions are directly caused by spe-
cific emotions, and this relationship is universal. Hence,
the same facial expression should index the same emotions
across cultures.
Unlike Darwin, who simply sent questionnaires to col-
leagues around the world (“do people in your area raise
their eyebrows in fear?”), Ekman and his colleagues trav-
eled to different cultures, asked individuals in these cul-
tures to pose emotion expressions, and asked individuals in
still other cultures to identify the emotions. For example,
they traveled to Papua, New Guinea, to visit a group of
people who had never been exposed to other cultures.
Ekman (1971) provided some of these individuals with
scenarios (e.g., a dead pig on the ground) and videotaped
them as they expressed the emotion they would feel in that
circumstance. The facial expressions in these videotapes
were remarkably similar to American emotion expressions,
and Americans were able to correctly identify the emo-
tion in these expressions. Likewise, the tribesmen in New
Guinea were able to identify the emotions of Americans.
A recent meta-analysis examined cross-cultural facial
expressions in 162 samples, with picture sets and rat-
ers from a great number of countries ranging from New
Guinea to Malaysia to Germany to Ethiopia. Supportive of
universality in facial emotion, in only 3% of these cross-
cultural samples was even a single emotion recognized at
rates below chance (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002). These
findings are consistent with the broader theory—that
specific emotions directly cause corresponding and hard-
wired facial expressions.
Theories of Nonverbal Influence
The second major perspective regarding the produc-
tion of nonverbal behavior is not restricted to emotion
but extends to all aspects of social influence and com-
munication. Although this perspective and the nonverbal
leakage perspective share the premise that evolutionary
forces guide the production of nonverbal behavior, only
nonverbal influence theories suggest that all forms of non-
verbal communication, including emotional expression,
primarily support the interests of the expresser. Nonverbal
expressions, whether facial, vocal, or otherwise, are said
to be signals that influence conspecifics’ actions. This
influence can occur either because the nonverbal display
signals something about the upcoming behavior of the
expresser or because the display itself has direct affec-
tive consequences for perceivers. Signals that do not
influence others’ behavior cannot contribute to survival
and/or reproduction; hence, these signals are not selected.
For example, threatening facial and vocal expressions
would not have remained in existence if these did not pro-
voke appeasement in conspecifics (Fridlund, 1994; Owren,
Rendall, & Bachorowski, 2005). By the same token, only
to the extent that threatening displays reliably predicted a
powerful attack should perceivers have evolved appease-
ment to the display. Consequently, an evolutionary arms
race emerges between expressers and perceivers. On the
one hand, perceivers must learn to discriminate between
reliable and unreliable nonverbal predictors of behavior.
On the other hand, expressers benefit if the display gains
what they want even (and perhaps especially) when it does
not predict their behavior. Thus, as perceivers are increas-
ingly able to discriminate between reliable and unreliable
signals (over evolutionary time), expressers should alter
these signals.
Models of nonverbal influence do not stipulate a one-
to-one relationship between internal states and nonverbal
behavior. In fact, Fridlund’s (1994) influential model sug-
gests that it would be detrimental to an expresser if others
could always “see” the expresser’s internal state (see also
Hauser, 1996). More conservatively, Owren and colleagues
(2005) argue that a relationship between internal state and
expression will exist at times, if only because an internal
goal prompts the influence attempt in the first place.
Thus, according to one model, nonverbal behavior func-
tions to reveal, and according to another model, nonver-
bal behavior functions to influence. Both models are built
on Darwinian principles, and both posit that nonverbal
behavior is a powerful tool for understanding human social
evolution. Hence, a good place to begin to understand the
utility and ubiquity of nonverbal behavior is with a com-
parison of humans with our primate relatives.
Nonverbal Cues in Humans and Other Species
All primates (including humans) share certain needs,
and all primates are social creatures, surviving in
groups. Moreover, human brain structures bear consider-
able similarity to those of other primates, particularly in
the subcortical areas. These primitive brain areas play an

important role in human and nonhuman behavior alike. In
this section, the production of nonverbal behavior is exam-
ined with respect to similarities and differences between
humans and other creatures. Specifically, human displays
of dominance and affiliation are compared with those of
other primate species.
Social Status and Dominance
Although there are far too many nuances in social behavior
to provide a complete description with only two factors,
status (or potency) and affiliation (or warmth) consistently
emerge as the two underlying factors in studies of social
perception (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007; Rosenthal, Hall,
DiMatteo, Rogers, & Archer, 1979). So it is no coincidence
that nonverbal behavior plays an important role in vertical
(status) and horizontal (affiliation) social relations across
species.
The role of nonverbal dominance is so important among
some primate species that it at times eclipses real physical
dominance in demarking social structure. Consequently,
leading primatologists make use of the terms real domi-
nance to describe when one ape physically dominates
another (as in a fight) and formal dominance to describe
the nonverbal rituals associated with dominant and sub-
missive animals (de Waal, 1982). Normal vertical inter-
actions among chimpanzees always illustrate formal
dominance but sometimes do not illustrate real dominance.
Formal dominance may be observed when chimps greet
one another, especially after a conflict. In these interac-
tions, lower-status chimps repeatedly bow and emit a
sound called a “pant-grunt” while timidly looking up at the
more dominant ape. At the same time, the higher-status ape
makes itself look bigger by stretching and standing its hair
on end (Tomasello & Call, 1997).
Across primates, making oneself look bigger consis-
tently emerges as a dominant greeting. Beyond stretching
and putting hair slightly on end, alpha males often walk
around in an exaggerated manner, as if they are bigger
than they actually are. More generally, access to food,
water, space, and sexual partners is highly but imperfectly
correlated with nonverbal indicators of dominance such
as interpersonal distance and movement, withdrawal and
approach, and staring versus gaze avoidance (Bernstein,
1981). Finally, primate dominance signals include non-
linguistic vocal acoustics, such as high-frequency calls to
signal subordinate status (de Waal, 1988; Hauser, 1993;
Hayaki, 1990).
With this in mind, a recent meta-analysis provided
a thorough investigation of human dominance displays
(Hall, Coats, & Smith-LeBeau, 2005). This meta-analysis
included studies that measured the different nonverbal
cues exhibited by people varying in verticality. In this
Nonverbal Production 467
meta-analysis of 74 studies, the nonverbal behaviors
exhibiting a meaningful relationship with verticality
were increased facial expressiveness, postural expansion,
decreased interpersonal distance from other people, and
louder voice. Note that postural expansion (making one-
self appear larger), decreased interpersonal distance, and
louder voice are also dominance cues among apes. In other
domains, cross-species similarity is modulated by the
emergence of language. One illustrative example regards
eye gaze. Submissive nonhuman primates hold gaze less
than dominant creatures. Among humans the relationship
is more complex: Submissive humans hold gaze less while
speaking than while listening, whereas dominant people
do not (Exline, Ellyson, & Long, 1975).
Despite the existence of some apparent overlap between
humans and other primates with respect to nonverbal dom-
inance displays, it is an oversimplification to claim that
all primates express dominance similarly. For example,
whereas macaques display submissiveness with a stereo-
typic facial expression that includes bared teeth (domi-
nant macaques never display this face), this same facial
expression is not always associated with submissiveness in
chimps. Likewise, the relationship between facial expres-
siveness and dominance appears to be unique to humans.
Nonetheless, striking similarities appear between human
dominance displays and dominance displays of other pri-
mate species, as highlighted with respect to postural expan-
sion, interpersonal distance, and vocal volume.
What functions might explain the ubiquity of domi-
nance displays? Many scholars have argued that dominance
displays reduce the need for actual physical aggression
or more destructive displays of dominance. For example,
Nelson (1984) observed more than 600 encounters in which
an intruding pigeon attempted to take the territory of a male
pigeon—in not one of these instances did Nelson observe
an injury, and in the vast majority, territorial males won
conflicts against intruders in the absence of fighting. A sin-
gle type of display, the neck stretch, was highly effective in
that intruders fled away in response to this display on 43%
of the occurrences. Neck stretches are not common domi-
nance displays in humans, but this example helps to illus-
trate that all species have some form of dominance display
and these displays can function to help individuals avoid
risk (in having to exert real power) and can help the group
avoid harm.
Affiliation
Given the hierarchical nature of most primate social struc-
ture, vertical relations are clearly important. However, so
are horizontal relations. Social exclusion typically meant
death for our ancestors and still means as much for many
of our primate cousins (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Leary,
468 Nonverbal Behavior
volume 2). Social bonding, friendships, and coalitions are
the glue that holds people together in social groups. As
with the vertical dimension of social relations, this hori-
zontal dimension is supported by nonverbal behavior in
both human and nonhuman primates.
Without a doubt, touch and grooming are the most impor-
tant affiliative cues among nonhuman primates. In many
ape groups, grooming is as valuable a commodity as food
and it can be predicted on the basis of relationship status
(de Waal, 1982; Furuichi, 1989; Gouzoules & Gouzoules,
1987; Nishida, 1987; Seyfarth, 1980). Grooming is also
associated with forming bonds. Previously groomed entities
are especially likely to help their former groomers in con-
flicts (Hemelrijk, 1994; Schino, 2007; Seyfarth & Cheney,
1984), to provide food to their former groomers (de Waal,
1982), and to share body warmth with former groomers
in the cold (Cheney & Seyfarth, 2007). Moreover, getting
groomed helps to reduce stress (Gust, Gordon, Brodie, &
McClure, 1994).
Although grooming is clearly the most predominant
affiliative behavior in nonhuman primates, there are other
important affiliative nonverbal cues. For example, most
primate species exhibit identifiable cues that are reliably
used to recruit allies. Baboons emit certain vocaliza-
tions to indicate their support for individuals involved in
a conflict—announcing they will intercede if necessary
(Cheney & Seyfarth, 2007). And among chimpanzees,
two facial expressions are reliably associated with affilia-
tive behavior: the relaxed, open-mouth face (“playface”),
which increases affiliative behavior and play, and the
silent, bared-teeth face (“fear grin”), which also increases
affiliation (Waller & Dunbar, 2005). In general, affilia-
tive nonverbal displays among primates function to help
create and maintain affiliations and horizontal group
structure.
Although humans do not typically groom one another
for hours on end, we do touch one another. Indeed, physi-
cal touch is an important mechanism for the provision of
social support and the acknowledgment of interpersonal
relationship. Touch increases with interpersonal intimacy
(Guerrero & Anderson, 1991), and interactions involv-
ing touch appear to be more intimate (Burgoon, Buller,
Hale, & de Turck, 1984). In the absence of touch, close
interpersonal distance often signals affiliation (Burgoon,
1991; Mehrabian, 1969). Beyond touch and interper-
sonal distance, affiliation is thought to be illustrated by a
constellation of nonverbal cues sometimes labeled “non-
verbal involvement” (Edinger & Patterson, 1983) and
sometimes labeled “nonverbal immediacy” (Anderson,
1985). The particular constellation said to account for
immediacy typically includes touch, close interpersonal
distance, gaze, and forward lean. Finally, the degree to
which individuals’ nonverbal behavior is synchronized
during interaction is measureable and is related to apparent
affiliative motives (e.g., Bernieri, Reznick, & Rosenthal,
1988).
Issues in Examining Nonverbal
Cues Across Species
Scholars of both human and animal behavior note that non-
verbal communication is complicated for several reasons.
First, individual nonverbal cues only rarely have decon-
textualized meaning. Just as a human smile may indicate
disparagement when it is flashed during an insult, ingratia-
tion when it is shown while confessing to a misdeed, or
joy when it is shown on learning of a promotion, a chim-
panzee’s outstretched arm may be used to ask for food, to
garner support, or to suggest forgiveness (de Waal, 1982).
Despite the existence of the context-general cues reviewed
in the preceding sections, a great deal of growth in under-
standing nonverbal communication may be accomplished
by examining homologues in the context-specific meaning
of nonverbal cues. For example, do the meanings of non-
verbal behavior in humans and in chimps both change
when moving from an interaction with kin to an interaction
with a higher-status individual? This type of analysis may
reveal even greater similarity among species than previ-
ously thought.
A second issue regards the importance of facial expres-
sions in nonverbal communication across primates. The
continuity between nonverbal behavior in humans and that
in the great apes (chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans)
is highlighted by nearly identical sets of facial muscles
(Burrows, Waller, Parr, & Bonar, 2006) such that the activa-
tion of similar facial muscles appears to produce roughly the
same expressive facial appearance in both species (Waller,
Vick, Parr, Bard, & Pasqualini, 2006). Facial expressions
serve important social functions among primates—even
among monkeys, who have much less muscular control over
their faces than humans and the great apes (Hauser, 1996).
A particularly interesting (and given the findings, cruel)
investigation illustrates the importance of facial expres-
sion in monkeys. Izard (1971) removed rhesus monkeys
from their social group, lesioned the eighth cranial nerve
(rendering control over facial expression impossible, save
eye movement), and returned them to the social group.
These individuals subsequently experienced fewer and
lower-quality social interactions, dropped in dominance
rank, and were involved in more conflict. Unfortunately,
similar interpersonal difficulties are experienced by indi-
viduals with certain physical and neurological diseases.
For instance, patients with Parkinson’s disease experience
“facial masking” and gradually lose control over their
facial expressions. Even physicians who should know

better underestimate Parkinson’s patients’ sociability and
overestimate their neuroticism (Tickle-Degnen & Lyons,
2004), highlighting the corresponding importance of facial
expression in humans.
In sum, nonverbal cues clearly play a role in structuring
social life for nonhuman primates. Dominance displays in
some primates are more central to social hierarchy than are
actual exhibitions of power (aggression), and such displays
appear to save lives and increase the survival likelihood of
individual animals. Moreover, many similarities appear
between human and nonhuman primate displays of nonverbal
dominance. Similarly, affiliation displays play a key role in
maintaining and revealing social cohesion among both human
and nonhuman primates. Although the evidence for homolo-
gous affiliative cues is tenuous at best, there are loosely
related homologues. Finally, despite differences in the mean-
ing of particular facial expressions between chimpanzees and
humans, the two species appear to have nearly identical facial
musculature and expressive appearance. The implications of
these similarities are yet to be realized, but it is likely that they
will reveal more similarities than differences in the produc-
tion of nonverbal behavior among primate species.
More broadly, the study of nonverbal behavior provides
an important bridge for comparative studies involving
humans and other primates. Although primatologists have
been interested in social interaction for decades, they often
rely on linguists for their social theories concerning humans.
Likewise, most mainstream social-psychological articles do
not include references to other primates; if they do, it is usu-
ally only in passing to note that humans are also animals.
The bridge provided by nonverbal behavior is wide enough
for researchers in many areas of social psychology to look
toward primatology. For example, a great deal of research
focuses on the if, when, why, and how in the use of decep-
tion in primates (Hauser, 1996). Clearly, such effects would
be informative to social psychologists interested in self-
presentation and impression management, and these psy-
chologists may impart some wisdom to the primatologists.
The use of grooming in most primates, of sexual touching
in bonobos, and of the “playface” in chimpanzees to form
alliances and social friendships and to gain compliance
should be of interest to social psychologists involved in rela-
tionships research, research on social influence, and group
dynamics. For those researchers who understand that humans
are socially intelligent primates, the examination of our
primate cousins’ nonverbal behavior should be invaluable
to understanding certain aspects of human social behavior.
Automaticity and Control in Nonverbal Behavior
That we share certain behavioral patterns with other pri-
mates does not imply that this behavior is automatic.
Nonverbal Production 469
Primates can exhibit strategic nonverbal behaviors—for
example, de Waal (1982) described a chimpanzee named
Yeroen who endured a shallow wound after a relatively
tame tussle with another chimp named Nikkie. Initially, it
was puzzling to the research group that Yeroen wobbled
pitifully despite the lack of damage to his body. It soon
became clear, however, that Yeroen would only limp when
within the visual field of Nikkie—outside of Nikkie’s
visual field, Yeroen walked normally. Although it is some-
times difficult to interpret chimpanzee behavior, in this
instance it appears that Yeroen altered his nonverbal behav-
ior (gait) in a strategic move, suggesting that this behavior
was regulated. Likewise, not all nonverbal behaviors are
“automatic.”
Still, nonverbal behavior is foundational to understand-
ing the occurrence and consequences of automatic cogni-
tive and behavioral processes as they occur in the natural
world. Beyond the growing influence of the Internet, social
interaction always includes nonverbal behavior and this
behavior has important social consequences: People place
considerable emphasis on nonverbal behavior in draw-
ing inferences about others, perhaps more emphasis than
on verbal behavior (Argyle, Alkema, & Gilmour, 1971;
Argyle, Salter, Nicholson, Williams, & Burgess, 1970).
People (and perhaps Yeroen) could thus enjoy substan-
tial social gains by controlling nonverbal behavior in
ways that create desired impressions. To understand self-
presentation, then, is to understand automatic versus con-
trolled processes, and to understand these processes in a
social context is to understand automaticity in nonverbal
communication.
Types of Automatic Nonverbal Behavior
The early part of the 20th century bore witness to a small
group of researchers examining the spontaneity of non-
verbal behavior. For example, Landis (1924) observed the
nonverbal behavior of unknowing participants who were
forced to sniff ammonia, look at pornographic materials,
and cut off the heads of live rats. Some participants even had
firecrackers dropped underneath their chairs. Fortunately
for modern-day participants, such experiments are gener-
ally no longer possible, at least not in the United States.
Despite a lack of access to these rather abusive means of
eliciting spontaneous nonverbal behavior, contemporary
researchers have made a great deal of progress in under-
standing the many nuances of automaticity (Dijksterhuis,
this volume). One way to simplify the complexity of this
topic is to break it into four types of “conditional auto-
maticity” (Bargh, 1994). A lack of controllability refers
to processes that cannot be consciously regulated even if
one tries, a lack of intentionality refers to processes that
begin without our conscious permission, efficiency refers
470 Nonverbal Behavior
to processes that do not consume cognitive resources, and
awareness refers to subjective knowledge of the process or
its behavioral influence.
Unintentional and Uncontrollable Nonverbal Behav-
iors Perhaps the strongest form of automatic behavior is
behavior that cannot be stopped or initiated consciously.
Most studies of automatic social behavior include behav-
iors that can be consciously initiated or that can be con-
sciously stopped. For example, although thinking about
elderly people automatically activated slower walking in
one study (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996), walking slowly
is something that healthy adults can do or stop doing if
they try. In contrast, less than 10% of the population can
produce the raising and pulling together of the brows that
occurs spontaneously with fear (DePaulo, 1992), blushing
appears to be uncontrollable (Castelfranchi & Poggi, 1990;
Leary, Britt, Cutlip, & Templeton, 1992; Timms, 1980),
and some argue that the Duchenne smile (Ekman,
Davidson, & Friesen, 1990), especially the contraction of
the outer strands of the eye muscles, cannot normally be con-
sciously controlled (Frank, Ekman, & Friesen, 1993). And
although most people can consciously control the direc-
tion of their gaze when so inclined, this conscious control
is short-circuited in the presence of another’s gaze—one’s
own gaze uncontrollably orients in the direction of another’s
gaze (Driver et al., 1999). Of special importance for self-
presentation and social influence, these difficult-to-control
behaviors have substantial social consequences. For exam-
ple, people like those who display Duchenne as opposed
to non-Duchenne smiles (Frank et al., 1993) and blushing
appears to ameliorate self-presentational damage created
by untoward behavior (Leary et al., 1992).
Although only a few individual nonverbal behaviors are
normally outside of conscious control, others may often be
initiated unintentionally. Indeed, involuntary and voluntary
facial actions appear to be innervated by different neurons
(Ekman, 1984; Fridlund, 1994; Rinn, 1984). Moreover,
certain stimuli evoke stereotypic facial expressions even
when presented subliminally, short-circuiting the possi-
bility of intentionality (Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed,
2000). And people spontaneously respond to various posi-
tive and negative stimuli with the expected facial expres-
sions (e.g., Ekman et al., 1990). Thus, facial expressions
may often be uncontrollably elicited.
From the discussion so far, it should be clear that cer-
tain nonverbal behaviors are always uncontrollable and
unintentional and others can often be elicited without our
conscious volition. Yet many nonverbal behaviors are con-
trollable under some circumstances. At any moment, we
can easily change the way we walk, how close we stand to
others, and our posture, and even untrained children can
roughly pose emotional faces (Mazur, 2005). Moreover,
symbolic gestures (e.g., the “peace” sign) are rarely unin-
tentional. Nonetheless, for every nonverbal behavior we
control there is another that cannot be simultaneously con-
trolled, suggesting that at any point in (social) time people
exhibit spontaneous nonverbal behavior.
Efficiency in Nonverbal Behavior Social interaction
places various demands on cognitive resources (Ambady &
Gray, 2002; Gilbert, Jones, & Pelham, 1987). In conversa-
tion, we have to (1) keep track of what the other person
is saying, (2) keep what we want to say in mind until we
speak, and (3) generate spoken responses, all of which
consume cognitive resources. Within and beyond the con-
versation, people engage in active social perception pro-
cesses, such as attending to others’ nonverbal behavior to
evaluate the impression one is creating, keeping an eye
on the broader social environment, trying to avoid biases
in forming judgments, and engaging in perspective taking
to facilitate the flow of conversation. These many demands
would seem to require us to be social superheroes, and yet
without much conscious effort we are able accomplish
meaningful and smooth-flowing social interaction.
One asset in our superhero arsenal may be that nonver-
bal behavior can proceed spontaneously, without the use
of cognitive resources, whereas stopping it or changing it
takes effort. For example, in one study, suppressing non-
verbal expressions during an enjoyable film reduced mem-
ory for the film itself (Richards & Gross, 2000). Moreover,
people who chronically suppress nonverbal behavior
exhibited worse memory than did nonsupressors (Richards &
Gross, 2000).
Efforts at control are probably most pronounced in
situations in which it is important to create a particular
impression. For example, White people with negative
associations toward Black people may feel compelled
to effortfully control their nonverbal behavior. Indeed,
Richeson and Shelton (2003) demonstrated that White
people who held negative implicit associations toward
Black people suppressed nonverbal behavior (reducing
limb, bodily, and eye movement) during an interaction
with a Black person and subsequently exhibited height-
ened interference on a Stroop task that indexes reductions
in attentional control. Similarly, Black people exhibited
more control (trying to appear more engaged) and more
of a deficit in executive function in interacting with mem-
bers of another race than with members of their own race
(Richeson, Trawalter, & Shelton, 2005; Shelton, Richeson, &
Salvatore, 2005).
Together, these results suggest that nonverbal communi-
cation normally proceeds effortlessly and that consciously
stopping or altering nonverbal behavior requires resources

from a limited pool of cognitive or self-regulatory resources.
Perhaps contributing to these effects is the extra effort that
people have to spend just to consciously identify their non-
verbal behavior, as described in the next section.
Awareness of Nonverbal Behavior The poet Robert
Burns (1853) wrote, “Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursel’s as others see us!” The ability to see ourselves
as others do is particularly challenging in the domain of
nonverbal behavior. We cannot see our own facial expres-
sions, perceive our bodily movements and gestures, or hear
our own voices as others do (Ekman & Friesen, 1969b).
People may be aware that they are expressing joy in their
face, that they are gesturing with their arms, or that their
voice has escalated several octaves, but more fine-grained
awareness is difficult. Accordingly, recent research suggests
that most people exhibit comparatively little awareness of
their nonverbal behavior. For example, people appear to be
moderately accurate in estimating how much they smile
but are not good at estimating behaviors such as nodding,
gazing, gesturing, and self-touch (Hall, Horgan, & Carter,
2002; Hall, Murphy, & Schmid-Mast, 2007).
More broadly, Barr and Kleck (1995) examined the
relationship between facial expressiveness reported by
participants and that reliably judged by raters. Participants
reported being more facially expressive than they appeared
to observers, even when they had been previously told to
attend to their own facial expressions; when later shown
film of their own facial responses, the vast majority
admitted that they appeared much less expressive than
they remembered. In replication of these effects, people
who were trying to maintain a neutral facial expression
while tasting a disgusting drink overestimated the extent
to which disgust was revealed (Gilovich, Savitsky, &
Medvec, 1998). On balance, it seems that people are gen-
erally unaware of their nonverbal behavior.
Summary: Automaticity and Control
in Nonverbal Behavior
In sum, as with most social activity, the production of
nonverbal behavior is neither fully automatic nor fully
controlled. Unlike most social activity, however, some
nonverbal behaviors are nearly impossible to consciously
start or stop and nonverbal behavior is often initiated and
executed without intention. Moreover, people are surpris-
ingly unaware of the form that their nonverbal behavior
takes.
Although some nonverbal behaviors can be controlled,
particularly in the service of impression management and
meeting social norms (DePaulo, 1992), the control of non-
verbal behavior appears to be taxing and reduces capacities
for the performance of other tasks (Richeson & Shelton,
Nonverbal Production 471
2003). For instance, individuals who were prevented from
gesturing showed worse memory on a task compared with
those allowed to gesture, suggesting that inhibiting non-
verbal behavior functions as a cognitive load (Goldin-
Meadow & Wagner, 2005).
For scholars interested in automatic and controlled
processes, nonverbal behavior provides a unique play-
ground. The production of nonverbal behavior has socially
meaningful consequences that have existed for millions of
years. Human evolution planned for social interaction, and
the many automatic social processes that we share with
less cortically advanced species should be observable in
nonverbal behavior. The implication is that a sound way
to understand socially situated automatic behavior is via
examining nonverbal behavior. Yet not all socially adap-
tive behavior need be automatic, as described in the next
section.
Context and Culture in the Production
of Nonverbal Behavior
People who do not behave differently with their spouses
than with their bosses are people who will soon be divorced
or fired. The power of the situation is obvious when con-
sidering the contextualized nature of overt behaviors such
as romantic advances versus promotion requests. Many
situations are defined partly by the nonverbal behaviors
appropriate therein such that the most socially success-
ful impression managers are those who effortlessly adapt
and display those appropriate nonverbal behaviors. More
broadly, examining nonverbal behavior across cultures not
only permits inferences about the universality of certain
nonverbal behaviors but also provides substantial informa-
tion about culture itself.
Contextual Control of Nonverbal Behavior
The efficiency with which nonverbal behavior adapts to the
social context is rather striking. Indeed, the social environ-
ment automatically and with great speed initiates changes
in facial expression and paraverbal behavior (Dimberg
et al., 2000; Moody, McIntosh, Mann, & Weisser, 2007;
Neumann & Strack, 2000). This fact can be observed in any
movie theater—smiles and laughter immediately follow
funny scenes, and startle responses occur immediately
following terrifying scenes. Hence, nonverbal behavior
reflects its social context.
Nearly every study to date shows that nonverbal
behavior is different when others are present (vs. absent;
cf. DePaulo, 1992). Perhaps most well known is a study
in which participants viewing a pleasant videotape
alone exhibited little smiling as compared with (a) par-
ticipants who were told that a friend was watching the
472 Nonverbal Behavior
same video or (b) participants for whom a friend was
actually present (Fridlund, 1991). Notably, self-reported
emotion did not differ among conditions, suggesting that
the between-group differences in nonverbal behavior
were expressive, not experiential. Similarly, Cole (1986)
demonstrated that children smiled at an experimenter in
response to a clearly disappointing gift but did not do so
in the absence of an audience. The effect of social context
is not always to increase expressiveness but rather to fit
established norms. For example, Kleck and colleagues
(1976) administered painful electric shock to participants
and observed attenuated nonverbal expressivity with an
audience.
Beyond the clear impact of any audience, the contex-
tualized nature of nonverbal behavior is evident in the
diverging nonverbal behaviors directed toward bosses ver-
sus peers, friends versus strangers, and experts versus non-
experts (e.g., Buck, Losow, Murphy, & Costanzo, 1992;
Fugita, Hogrebe, & Wexley, 1980; Montepare & Vega,
1988; Steckler & Rosenthal, 1985). Situation-specific
goals also contextualize nonverbal behavior. For example,
people are especially likely to smile, nod, and gaze at others
when trying to impress or gain favor (Godfrey, Jones, &
Lord, 1986; Lefebvre, 1973; Rosenfeld, 1966).
The contextualization of some types of nonverbal
behavior appears to be universal. For instance, across cul-
tures, people use a type of speech characterized by high
pitch, variable intonation, and other paraverbal devices
(“baby talk”) when talking to infants and children (as
opposed to normal functioning adults (Ferguson, 1964).
People also use this baby talk with foreigners, the elderly,
developmentally delayed adults, and pets (Caporael, 1981;
DePaulo & Coleman, 1986, 1987).
Although it may be tempting to conclude from this
research that increased conscious control must account
for the influence of the social situation on nonverbal
behavior (DePaulo & Friedman, 1998), many of the
reviewed findings might be interpreted as biologically
prepared or functional responses to social life that either
are hardwired (e.g., responses to higher-status individuals)
or have through learning become automatic (DePaulo &
Friedman, 1998). For example, although people exhibit
predictably negative nonverbal behavior toward stig-
matized individuals, this effect occurs primarily for
highly prejudiced expressers, suggesting a learned but
habitual response (Chaikin, Sigler, & Derlega, 1974;
Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, & Howard, 1997;
Harris, Moniz, Sowards, & Krane, 1994; King, Shapiro,
Hebl, Singletary, & Turner, 2006).
In short, contextual influences on nonverbal behavior
may sometimes reflect conscious control but often reflect
the automatic influence of the environment. More generally,
humans show a remarkable nonverbal ability to efficiently
and enduringly adapt to social situations.
Culture and the Production of Nonverbal Behavior
As numerous anthropological accounts attest, culture
exerts a profound impact on nonverbal behavior. This is
clearly true with respect to gestures. Some of the earliest
empirical work on nonverbal behavior demonstrated that
Sicilian and Lithuanian immigrants exhibited distinct ges-
tures that disappeared as individuals adapted to American
culture (Efron, 1941). The cultural specificity of gestures
is still apparent, of course. For example, walking hand in
hand may be reserved for lovers or parent–child relations
in the West, but in China and other countries, friends often
hold hands. It is also well known that the “a-ok” gesture in
America is an obscene sexual gesture elsewhere. Hence,
gestures are often completely culturally specific.
A more controversial topic is the nonverbal expression
of emotion. With respect to spontaneous emotion expres-
sions, Ekman (1971) observed highly positive correlations
between American and Japanese participants’ patterns of
facial response to neutral and pleasant videos. Similar find-
ings have been observed in at least 10 other studies, sup-
porting universality (Matsumoto, 2006). Yet Russell (1994)
suggests that in many studies, spontaneous facial expres-
sions only exhibit cross-cultural reliability with respect to
general positivity and negativity—not discrete emotions.
Two recent studies provided more conflicting evidence:
Matsumoto and Willingham (2006) demonstrated cross-
cultural stability in emotion expression among Olympic
medal winners, whereas Naab and Russell (2007) demon-
strated little such stability between a preliterature culture
and the United States. It does seem clear that certain spon-
taneous facial movements are universally associated with
certain feeling states, although those feeling states may be
discrete emotions or diffuse affect.
The study of cultural similarity in spontaneous emotion
expressions is supplemented by a much larger literature on
deliberately posed emotion expressions. In most of these
studies, photographers take pictures of people in differ-
ent cultures posing each of several emotions. People from
other cultures then rate the emotion that each facial con-
figuration expressed. In general, there is clear evidence
for cross-cultural similarity in deliberately posed emotion
expressions (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002). Yet these pro-
totypical facial expressions are supplemented by culture-
specific patterns. Facial expressions of fear (for example)
bear considerable similarity across cultures, but subtle dif-
ferences also exist—people within the culture are better
able to recognize fear than are people outside of the culture
(Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002). Indeed, as opposed to neu-
tral facial expressions, emotional facial expressions appear

to reveal culture; in one study, nationality judgments of
Japanese and Japanese Americans were more accurate
when the posers exhibited emotional expressions (Marsh,
Elfenbein, & Ambady, 2003). In short, cultural similarities
in emotion expressions appear to be supplemented by non-
verbal accents in such expression.
Summary: Nonverbal Behavior in Context
(and Culture)
Nonverbal behavior is nothing if not contextually driven, even
if a few universal action tendencies exist. Whether because
of spontaneous or controlled processes, nonverbal behavior
reflects conformity to situational constraints. The efficiency
with which such nonverbal adaptation occurs, the specificity
and duration of context-specific nonverbal behavior, and the
existence of culturally specific patterns of nonverbal activity
all attest to the special role of nonverbal behavior in assimi-
lating to the group and to particular others.
One of the more fascinating things about nonverbal
behavior is that, to the extent that the same contexts and
cultures elicit the same nonverbal behavior, such behav-
ior helps define the context. In fact, the way that cultural
anthropologists and primatologists understand social
situations is by observing nonverbal behaviors—those
behaviors help define the situation, and in some cases,
the culture (Molinsky, Krabbenhoft, Ambady, & Choi,
2005). Thus, nonverbal behavior is crucial not only for an
understanding of contextual and cultural effects but also
for defining the social-psychological situation. Broadly,
then, situational control of nonverbal behavior is benefi-
cial for individuals, as well as for the group. The flexibility
of nonverbal behavior vis-à-vis the situation is clearly an
efficient means of social assimilation that is so important
that it emerges before perhaps any other social ability.
Nonverbal Behavior in Infancy
An understanding of the early stages of life provides a great
deal of information about the natural processes central to
social psychology. Much has been learned about infants’
adaptation to and development within the social world, and
this development typically involves nonverbal behavior.
As explained here, nonverbal behavior represents the sole
means by which young infants engage the social world.
Nonverbal Development: Findings
Anyone who has spent time with infants recognizes that
newborns are not sponges who passively take in informa-
tion. Babies have needs, and when those needs are not met,
they let us know. One important obstacle for infants, then,
is how to let us know what they need or want. The only way
for them to accomplish this is through nonverbal behavior.
Nonverbal Production 473
To spend time with infants is to know that they come
equipped with impressive vocal capacities. Crying is typi-
cally evident at or within a few minutes of birth and when
it is not there could be trouble. Crying has some clear social
functions. For example, infants cry in response to other
infants’ cries, but this same pattern does not occur when
the eliciting stimuli are synthetic cries, the cries of an older
infant, or recordings of infants’ own cries (Martin & Clark,
1982; Sagi & Hoffman, 1976; Simner, 1971). These find-
ings illustrate that crying serves a social function beyond a
simple response to a noxious stimulus. Likewise, if undif-
ferentiated displeasure is all that fueled crying, newborns
should not exhibit acoustically differentiated cries for pain ver-
sus anger, as they do (Lester & Boukydis, 1992; Zeskind &
Collins, 1987). Crying is socially meaningful behavior.
Crying is not the only nonverbal communication skill
displayed by newborns—meaningful facial gestures emerge
quickly. Within 42 minutes of birth, many newborns imi-
tate nonverbal behaviors such as mouth opening and tongue
protrusion; this capacity is especially strong within 12 to
21 days after birth, and it can occur a full day after infants
observe a novel facial expression (Meltzoff & Moore,
1977, 1983, 1994). Within a few months of birth, infants
exhibit spontaneous smiling to human faces, spontane-
ous anger to the removal of a reward, and other nonverbal
emotion expressions (Alessandri, Sullivan, & Lewis, 1990;
Campos, Campos, & Barrett, 1989; Oster, 1978; Sullivan &
Lewis, 2003). These responses may help infants meet a
need, whether that need be affiliation or acquisition of
a rewarding stimulus.
Other difficulties faced by parents may also be attributed
to infant nonverbal communication. For example, putting
an infant in a car seat is not always an easy task for parents,
yet the movements of infants at these times are not com-
pletely random efforts to frustrate adults. Infants use vari-
ous gestures to attract attention and to make requests, and
still other specific body movements are associated with
positive or negative affect (Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1988;
Legerstee, Corter, & Kineapple, 1990). For example, posi-
tive affect is often communicated with open-handed arm
extensions, whereas negative affect is often communicated
with closed hands and arms extended at the sides. Around
1 year, more pleasant “offering” gestures emerge, and by
14 to 16 months toddlers have a broad range of request,
attribute, and pointing gestures (Acredolo & Goodwyn,
1988; Masur, 1983). Note here the continued develop-
ment of gestures following the advent of verbal speech. In
fact, gestures predict changes in language and facilitate the
learning of language (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005).
After the first year of life, children begin to learn dis-
play rules and to adjust their expressions accordingly.
Although not definitively in response to a display rule,
474 Nonverbal Behavior
infants begin to reduce negative gestural responses as early
as 1 year of age (Blake, McConnell, Horton, & Benson,
1992). By 24 months, toddlers can deliberately use facial
expressions to elicit support from caregivers (Buss & Kiel,
2004), although it can be difficult for them to do (joy is the
most reliable controlled expression; Fridlund, Ekman, &
Oster, 1987). The ability to situationally alter nonverbal
expressions appears to improve with age. In Cole’s (1986)
study, 10-year-olds were better at concealing their negative
facial emotion than were 4-year-olds.
Nonverbal Development: Theory and Implications
A variety of developmental theories attempt to account
for early nonverbal expressions—differentiation theories, for
example, emphasize that infants move from expressing
relatively diffuse affect to more differentiated discrete
emotions (Izard, 1991; Sroufe, 1996). One recent theory
offers a fascinating and compelling explanation of how
we develop from undifferentiated emotion expressers into
discrete emotion expressers. This sociocultural internaliza-
tion model (Holodynski & Friedlmeier, 2006) draws on the
robust finding that caregivers mimic their children’s non-
verbal behavior, and vice versa (Malatesta & Izard, 1984).
The idea is that caregivers selectively mimic their children’s
emotional behavior and in exaggerated form. Parents’ selec-
tive and exaggerated mimicry then rubs back off on the
children, who may reduce their unmimicked expressions
and alter their mimicked expressions to better approximate
the parent’s expression. Over time, this process can shape
expression—diffuse affect becomes organized into specific
facial configurations of discrete emotions. This process may
help explain how nonverbal accents (Marsh et al., 2003) are
transmitted within a culture.
Strangely enough, the world of the infant is one that
most of us have difficulty remembering, even though we
all once lived there (e.g., Usher & Neisser, 1993). Perhaps
this has to do, in part, with most of our experiences in that
world being nonverbal. Our faces, nonlinguistic voices,
and bodies were our only means of communicating our
love, distaste, and interest for various aspects of the world.
It thus seems reasonable that this early nonverbal experi-
ence shapes later social adaptation, temperament, cogni-
tion, and behavior—even if we can’t remember that early
experience it perhaps helps to form unique personalities.
Indeed, individual differences in nonverbal behavior may
have important predictive value, a topic we turn to next.
Individual Differences in the Production
of Nonverbal Behavior
In the 2004 American presidential campaign, candidate
Howard Dean exhibited a great deal of excitement in one
speech. At the end of his excited speech, Dean drew a fist
high up in the air and as he vocalized the sound “byah!”
he quickly moved the fist down and forward. This moment
was televised repeatedly in the United States, was ridi-
culed in the media, and many political pundits attributed
the demise of Dean’s campaign to that moment.
Impressions of others are often dominated by nonver-
bal behavior (Argyle et al., 1970, 1971), a fact that may
have undermined Howard Dean’s political ambitions.
Moreover, many scholars believe that individual differ-
ences in nonverbal communication are predictive of more
general social intelligence such that nonverbal behavior
both indexes and contributes to likely social success.
Expressiveness
The two most-studied individual differences in nonverbal
communication are nonverbal expressiveness and gender.
Nonverbal expressiveness is the extent to which nonverbal
behavior reveals feelings (e.g., Buck, 1984). The current
review highlights the facets of nonverbal expressiveness
most relevant to social adaptation (for a complete review,
see Riggio, 1992, 2006). For example, individual differ-
ences in nonverbal expressivity emerge earlier than ver-
bal behavior, coincide with our initial social adaptation in
the world, and are stable throughout childhood (Kagan,
Snidman, & Arcus, 1998). Expressivity also seems to be
stable within families and across generations (Halberstadt,
Fox, & Jones, 1993). Nonverbal expressiveness is criti-
cal to social success, at least within a culture: The mood
of nonverbally expressive people is likely to spread
throughout a social setting (Friedman & Riggio, 1981;
Sullins, 1991), expressiveness appears to be more impor-
tant than even physical attractiveness in first impressions
(Friedman, Riggio, & Casella, 1988), and people tend to be
especially satisfied with expressive physicians, teachers,
and athletes (Abrami, Leventhal, & Perry, 1982; DiMatteo,
1979; Rejeski & Lowe, 1980). Moreover, nonverbal
expressiveness in one arena can carry over to other arenas.
Thus, people who are socially expressive in their nonverbal
behavior also tend to be more expressive in their personal
webpages (Weisbuch, Ivcevic, & Ambady, 2009). The
causal impact of expressiveness on individual and group
life may help to explain broader differences in behavior,
such as those that occur with gender.
Gender
Most people believe that substantial nonverbal differ-
ences exist between men and women. Lay beliefs hold, for
instance, that women speak more softly, gaze more, and
smile more than do men (Briton & Hall, 1995). According
to one provocative theory, women nonverbally behave
in the way that weak and low-status people do and this

behavior helps to account for other gender differences
(Henley, 1977). To what extent are these assumptions
about gender differences supported?
The relationship between gender and nonverbal domi-
nance is not simple. For example, women are more likely
than men to exhibit some nonverbal behaviors empirically
associated with low status, such as a softer voice, but also
some nonverbal behaviors empirically associated with high
status, such as facial expressiveness. Still, women and men
clearly exhibit different nonverbal behaviors, and many
of these confirm stereotypes about nonverbal behavior.
In comparison with men, women smile more, gaze more,
are more facially expressive, exhibit more expressive ges-
tures, touch people more, and maintain smaller interper-
sonal distances (Hall, 1984). Of course, these effects have
many nuances—for example, differences in smiling are
only existent during social interaction (LaFrance, Hecht, &
Levy-Paluck, 2003). Women and men also differ consider-
ably in their movement—from point light displays alone, in
which an actor walks in the dark with lightbulbs affixed to
the joints, perceivers can detect whether that actor is male
or female (Kozlowski & Cutting, 1977). This difference
appears to occur because masculine men exhibit a “swag-
ger,” with lots of shoulder movement and little hip move-
ment, whereas feminine women exhibit a “sway,” with lots
of hip movement but little shoulder movement (Johnson &
Tassinary, 2005).
Summary: Nonverbal Behavior and
Individual Differences
In general, nonverbal behavior is an important component
of personality that is not limited to expressiveness and gen-
der. Extraversion and self-monitoring, for example, have
important nonverbal components. One of the more well-
studied topics in all of psychology, infant temperament,
is based on nonverbal reactions, suggesting the centrality
of nonverbal behavior to the study of personality. Indeed,
infant temperament predicts personality at 10 to 12 years
of age (Kagan & Snidman, 2004). Moreover, the facial
expressions of 18-month-olds were reliable predictors of
the Big Five personality traits 2 years later, even after con-
trolling for relational variables such as attachment at 18
months (Abe & Izard, 1999). In short, nonverbal behavior
appears to play an important role in personality.
Thinking Nonverbally
The production of nonverbal behavior clearly plays an
important role in social adaptation. But might basic social
cognition also be based on nonverbal behavior? Research
on cognitive and perceptual processing is increasingly
informed by the view that people think nonverbally
Nonverbal Production 475
(Barsalou, 1999). Over the last decade, a new model of
cognition has begun to compete with the existing view
that cognitive representation is largely semantic. By the
older view, the category “elderly” would be defined by a
feature list that might include “gray hair,” “slow,” “calm-
ing,” and so on. By the newer “grounded cognition” view
(often described as “embodied cognition”), cognitive repre-
sentations are composed of perceptual information, includ-
ing the motor information involved in nonverbal behavior
(Barsalou, 1999). “Elderly,” for example, would be defined
by visual neurons active with grayness, motor neurons
active with slow movement, limbic system neurons active
with calmness, and so on. Activation of the elderly person
category is just the activation of these neurons; likewise,
activation of these (e.g., “slow” motor) neurons makes it
likely that the category (“elderly”) will become active.
According to this view, category activation is just the acti-
vation of modality-specific neurons, including motor neu-
rons. Nonverbal behavior can thus be part of thinking.
Grounding Social Experience
in Nonverbal Behavior
According to theories of grounded cognition, a pattern of
neuronal activation corresponds to both category activation
and category perception. These theories suggest a critical
role for movement, or the activation of motor neurons, in
category activation. Indeed, people categorize objects most
quickly when making gesturing motions that simulate the
movement they normally make when handling that object
(Barsalou, Niedenthal, Barbey, & Ruppert, 2003; Tucker &
Ellis, 1998). For example, they are fastest to identify a
faucet when moving their hand in a faucet-turning motion.
And when making responses with gentle finger grasping,
people are faster to identify objects that require gentle
motor grasping (a grape) than those that need gross motor
grasping (a hammer; Tucker & Ellis, 2001). Similarly,
when motor components of a category are suppressed, so
is the perception of that category. Participants forced to
hold a pencil sideways between their lips and their teeth
(preventing smiles) were slower than other participants to
detect a change in another’s emotional facial expression
(Niedenthal, Brauer, Halberstadt, & Innes-Ker, 2001).
Moreover, people prevented from moving their faces are
slow to identify emotion expressions in general (Stel &
van Knippenberg, 2008). Finally, feelings of pride after
success are inhibited among people forced to slump versus
those forced to sit upright (Stepper & Strack, 1993).
If smiling produces happiness, then we should like
objects more when we smile in their presence. Indeed,
attitude change toward a counterattitudinal essay was
strongest among participants whose expressions had
been contorted into smiles (vs. frowns) as they wrote
476 Nonverbal Behavior
counterattitudinal essays (Rhodewalt & Comer, 1979). As
compared with smiling participants, frowning participants
do not like cartoons as much (Strack, Martin, & Stepper,
1988), and participants with a disgust expression thought
odors smelled particularly bad (Kraut, 1982). These findings
provide initial evidence that motor representations involv-
ing the face are involved in attitudinal representations.
Other nonverbal movements are involved in representa-
tions of liking and disliking. For example, in one set of stud-
ies, participants were instructed to nod or shake their heads
(to test a pair of headphones) while listening to an argument.
They then stopped moving their heads and indicated the
extent to which they agreed with the argument. Participants
who nodded agreed with the argument to a greater extent
than did participants who shook their heads (Wells & Petty,
1980). Likewise, eye gaze may cause rather than sim-
ply reflect preferences. For example, Shimojo, Simion,
Shimojo, and Scheier (2003) found that before a preferential
decision, the pattern of gaze between two faces eventually
shifted toward the face that was later preferred. Moreover,
manipulations of gaze direction caused predictable changes
in preferences. Indeed, experimental studies have demon-
strated that, for heterosexual individuals, increased gaze
toward opposite sex partners causes increased romantic
attraction (e.g., Kellerman, Lewis, & Laird, 1989).
More evidence that the production of nonverbal behav-
ior facilitates cognitive processing comes from work on
learning. Children who gesture more during instruction
learn more than those who gesture less (Goldin-Meadow &
Wagner, 2005).
The evidence thus far suggests an important role for
nonverbal behavior in basic and social perception, although
a great deal more work remains to be done to explore these
relationships. Beyond social perception, emotion, and atti-
tudes, other effects of nonverbal behavior on social cog-
nition are likely. For example, given substantial evidence
for mood-congruent memory, smiling should and does
promote memory for emotion-congruent material (Laird,
Wagener, Halal, & Szegda, 1982; Riskind, 1983). In gen-
eral, nonverbal behavior plays a foundational role in the
perception and expression of affective phenomena ranging
from emotion to attitudes to memory. The grounded cogni-
tion perspective implies that nonverbal behavior plays a
broader role in social cognition as well.
Grounded Cognition and Nonverbal
Behavior: Redux
The traditional view of expressive behavior, articulated in
the most prominent theories of nonverbal behavior (Ekman,
1999; Fridlund, 1994), is that internal states (emotions, inten-
tions) cause nonverbal expressions. Yet it also appears to be
the case that nonverbal expressions can cause internal states,
influencing introspective judgments, memory, and attitudes.
Although a grounded cognition account offers an engaging
explanation of these effects, other theories can explain at
least portions of them. For example, the ideomotor theory
of perception (Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001) explains how the
perception of behavior produces the same behavior in one-
self, and vice versa. Likewise, the direct effects of nonverbal
behavior on subjective evaluations of emotion and attitudes
can be explained by the idea that people treat their nonver-
bal behaviors as metaperceptual cues to internal states (e.g.,
Brinol & Petty, 2003). In sum, the evidence clearly suggests
an important role for nonverbal behavior in social cognition,
but a grounded cognition account is not the only theory for
describing this role. The next decade should provide evi-
dence that disambiguates the relevant models.
Summary: Nonverbal Production
The production of nonverbal behavior is clearly part of
social adaptation. In this way, humans are not unlike other
primates who use nonverbal behavior to maintain social
structure and to promote affiliation. In adapting to the
social world and setting the foundation for later social cog-
nition, infants rely heavily on nonverbal behavior for get-
ting their needs met. As adults, nonverbal production skills
developed over the millennia and early in individual lives
aid in prompting adaptation to social groups. Such adapta-
tion plays an important role and helps in socialization and
acculturation. Finally, and surprisingly, the production of
nonverbal behavior even plays an important role in basic
cognitive and perceptual processes.
NONVERBAL FOUNDATIONS
OF SOCIAL PERCEPTION
Clearly, the production of nonverbal behavior is central to
various social-psychological processes. But the other side of
the nonverbal equation—nonverbal perception—is perhaps
even more important to social adaptation. As with the pro-
duction of nonverbal behavior, the perception of nonverbal
behavior is foundational. Much learning early in life occurs
via others’ nonverbal behavior, suggesting that the foundation
of our social knowledge is nonverbal. Indeed, adult social
perception and social judgment rely heavily on nonverbal
behavior. Meaningful nonverbal behavior provides some of
the earliest input to social perception and permits rapid and
efficient social judgments (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992).
Nonverbal Perception Processes
The social cognition juggernaut of the 1980s and early
1990s relied heavily on the use of written experimental

materials. The field of social cognition built on the
established base of cognitive psychology and followed its
methods, often using abstract, verbal, and written stimuli.
While this era provided a rich and exciting knowledge
base, it mostly overlooked the importance of social ecol-
ogy in basic cognitive processes (McArthur & Baron,
1983). By the late 1990s, an increasing number of stud-
ies were demonstrating important differences between the
processes that helped to disambiguate written descriptions
of people and the processes that helped to disambiguate
images of real people (Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). In
the last decade, increasing emphasis has been placed on
examining real behavior (Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder,
2007). To that end, it has become increasingly important to
understand the processes that play a role in the perception
of nonverbal behavior. In particular, the next two sections
review the automatic processes involved in nonverbal
perception and how various nonverbal cues contribute to
person perception.
Automatic Processing of Nonverbal Behavior
Are our impressions and conclusions about others driven
by spontaneous processes that escape our awareness? Or
are they the result of conscious deliberation? These are
fundamental questions that highlight the role of nonver-
bal behavior in social processing, judgment, and behavior
(Bargh & Pietromonaco, 1982; Bargh, 1994; Devine, 1989;
Winter & Uleman, 1984).
Automaticity in Nonverbal Perception: Nonconscious
Processing Substantial evidence indicates that facial
expressions are processed and elicit meaningful
responses prior to perceivers’ conscious recognition of those
expressions (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993; Ravaja, Kallinen,
Saari, & Keltikangas-Jarvinen, 2004; Rotteveel, de
Groot, Geutskens, & Phaf, 2001; Stapel, Koomen, &
Ruys, 2002; Strahan, Spencer, & Zanna, 2002;
Winkielman, Berridge, & Wilbarger, 2005). Evidence
from neuroscience details how some of this processing
may occur. For example, the human amygdala responds
to emotional facial expressions even when those facial
expressions are presented subliminally (e.g., Hariri,
Tessitore, Mattay, Fera, & Weinberger, 2002; Liddell
et al., 2005; Ohman, 2002; Whalen et al., 1998, 2004).
The path from the subcortical visual areas to the amyg-
dala may represent the more “ancient” route to emo-
tional understanding found in several species, including
nonmammals (Adolphs, 2006). Moreover, the somato-
sensory system common to mammals is often activated
in response to emotion expressions, a finding that some
scholars regard as evidence for emotional contagion at
the neural level (e.g., Schilbach, Eickhoff, Mojzisch, &
Nonverbal Foundations of Social Perception 477
Vogeley, 2008; Wild, Erb, & Bartels, 2001). Hence,
neural pathways for processing unattended nonver-
bal expressions and producing unintentional nonverbal
behavior appear to be largely subcortical and shared with
other mammals and may account, in part, for meaningful
pre-conscious responses to emotion expressions.
Automatic processing of nonverbal behavior is not lim-
ited to emotion. The extraction of information from non-
verbal behavior proceeds in a relatively automatic fashion
in many domains. For example, limitations imposed
on cognitive processing resources do not interfere with
(1) recognition of social relationship type (e.g., friends vs.
strangers) given strictly nonverbal information, (2) recog-
nition of attitudes based on nonverbal behavior, and (3)
accuracy in nonverbal person perception (Ambady & Gray,
2002; Gilbert & Krull, 1988; Patterson & Stockbridge,
1998). Findings such as these suggest that the processing
of nonverbal behavior is often free of cognitive resources
(i.e., is often automatic).
Perhaps the strongest evidence that nonverbal behavior
is processed automatically comes from research on gaze
following. Even if people think that they can resist the urge
to look where others’ look, research has shown that atten-
tion is obliged to move in the direction of others’ gaze.
Indeed, specific neurons code for eye gaze direction (e.g.,
Calder et al., 2007) and are involved in the orienting of
attention (Rafal, 1996). Within 3 months of birth, infants’
saccadic eye movements appear to follow the dynamic gaze
of caretakers (Farroni, Massaccesi, Pividori, & Johnson,
2004; Hood, Willen, & Driver, 1998), and this gaze fol-
lowing becomes especially strong by 18 months (Brooks &
Meltzoff, 2002, 2005). In adulthood, others’ eye gaze may
be the only visual cue that, placed centrally, reflexively
directs attention toward the periphery. The presentation of
a gaze cue in the center of the screen rapidly shifts atten-
tion in the direction of the gaze (Friesen & Kingstone,
1998). Even when participants are explicitly told that a
target will be in the opposite direction of the eye gaze
image and even when the target typically is in the oppo-
site direction, participants still exhibit a speedy attention-
orienting effect in the gazed-at direction, suggesting that
this effect cannot be suppressed (Driver et al., 1999). Thus,
another’s gaze immediately orients one’s attention, and
this orienting can only be consciously suppressed after a
half second or so—immediate gaze following seems to be
obligatory.
Automaticity in Nonverbal Mimicry: Goal-Dependent
Automaticity A great deal of evidence shows that peo-
ple unintentionally (and often without awareness) mimic
the nonverbal behavior of others (Chartrand & Bargh,
1999; Neumann & Strack, 2000). In one paradigm, slides
478 Nonverbal Behavior
of happy and angry faces elicited facial muscle responses
that corresponded to the presented slides (Dimberg, 1982,
1990). Facial pain appears to elicit expressions of facial
pain in viewers, foot tapping and nose rubbing during
social interaction appear to prompt the same in interac-
tional partners, and infants exhibit facial imitation shortly
after birth (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999; Meltzoff & Moore,
1977; Vaughan & Lanzetta, 1980). In conversation, peo-
ple appear to imitate accents, vocal tone, and vocal speed
(Giles & Powesland, 1975; Neumann & Strack, 2000;
Webb, 1969). And while it is well known that yawning
is contagious among humans (Provine, 1986) even dogs
appear to catch human yawns (Joly-Mascheroni, Senju,
& Shepherd, 2008). The effects of nonverbal mimicry
do not end at the behavior itself, but nonverbal mimicry is
related to emotion in a process referred to as emotion con-
tagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994).
Indeed, evidence now suggests considerable overlap
in the neurons responsible for certain motor movements
and perceiving the same movements in others; this is true
for both monkeys and humans (Rizzolatti & Craighero,
2004). These neurons have been labeled “mirror neurons”
and are thought by some to account for nonverbal mimicry
(Gallese & Goldman, 1998).
Moderated Effects of Nonverbal Mimicry The exis-
tence of neurons dedicated to simulating others’ actions
suggests something special about nonverbal mimicry be-
yond simple perception. Given the importance of group
life and hence social bonding to our species, it could be
that these “special” neurons are dedicated to simulating
the behavior of and thus to understanding our fellow group
members (e.g., Preston & de Waal, 2002).
Recent work is consistent with this idea. For example,
Weisbuch and Ambady (2008a) observed that nonverbal
emotion contagion only occurred when the social perceiver
shared group membership with the social target. Others
have observed increased imitation for ingroup face rubbing
and facial expressions of liked faces; when shown happy
or angry images of then-President Ronald Reagan, people
who did not like Reagan did not exhibit emotion conta-
gion (Likowski, Muhlberger, Seibt, Pauli, & Weyers, 2008;
McHugo, Lanzetta, Sullivan, Masters, & Englis, 1985;
Yabar, Johnston, Miles, & Peace, 2006). Indeed, when
people want to bond or have been socially excluded, they
are especially likely to exhibit nonverbal mimicry toward
ingroup members (Lakin & Chartrand, 2003; Lakin,
Chartrand, & Arkin, 2008). Hence, the evidence appears to
be strong that nonverbal mimicry is especially responsive
to the ingroup. For this reason, it seems likely that affili-
ation goals underlie the simulation of others’ nonverbal
behavior.
If mirror neurons and nonverbal mimicry are driven by
affiliation motives, they may be taken offline when mim-
icry would actually disrupt social interaction. In one study,
for example, individuals were seated facing one another and
participated in a cooperative task (Tiedens & Fragale, 2003).
One of these individuals was a confederate who exhibited
nonverbal dominance or submission via postural expansion
or constriction. Participants’ behavior revealed complemen-
tarity rather than mimicry. Thus, over the course of the inter-
action with a dominant, expansive confederate, participants
exhibited increasing postural constriction and such responses
contributed to positive evaluations of the interaction.
In general, meaningful nonverbal behavior is often pro-
cessed nonconsciously and without cognitive resources.
People clearly have automatic mechanisms in place for
speedy adaptation to the social environment, as communi-
cated via responses to nonverbal behavior. Of course, such
flexibility occurs in responses to real social environments,
the importance of which is reviewed in what follows.
Configural and Featural Processes in Nonverbal
Perception and Judgment
Although political critics and pornographers might disagree,
human bodies have heads and human heads have bodies.
Regions above and below the neck are crucial to social
life, yet just as initial studies on social perception often used
a completely disembodied context, contemporary studies
have used partially disembodied stimuli in an effort to create
a solid scientific basis for future research. For example, the
last decade has witnessed a tremendous amount of research
on how the human face is processed perceptually and cog-
nitively (Macrae, & Quadflieg, this volume; Zebrowitz,
2006). And just as moving from written materials to natu-
ralistic faces has forced a rewriting and rethinking of some
previously “known” phenomena (e.g., Quinn & Macrae,
2005), moving from bodiless faces to a full-human context
may produce some revisions to what has been learned about
social perception from studies of human faces. In this sec-
tion, we describe existing theory and research that models
whole-person perceptual processes.
Feature-Based Perception of the Whole Person Social
psychologists have often used a lens model (Brunswik,
1956) to explore the nonverbal cues that contribute to
social judgment. Studies that use this model to understand
nonverbal behavior first measure characteristics of social
targets (typically via self-report). Then, those social targets
engage in a videotaped task and, based on the generated
videotapes, judges code the targets for various behaviors
(smiling, talking time, etc.). Finally, social perceivers
provide macro-level ratings for the targets on relevant
dimensions (e.g., personality). The resulting analyses

describe the nonverbal cues associated with particular
target characteristics and the nonverbal cues used by social
perceivers in judging those particular target characteristics.
Such an analysis can be informative with respect to both the
nonverbal cues that social perceivers use in general and
the nonverbal cues that accurate social perceivers use.
In one example, groups of three previously unacquainted
college students were asked to converse for about 15 min-
utes on topics of their choosing while seated in an informal
waiting room. The conversations took place a week after
participants had provided self-reported personality ratings.
On the basis of silent videotapes, judges coded the non-
verbal behavior of the targets and social perceivers pro-
vided personality ratings of the targets (Gifford, 1994). The
eight measured personality traits were then analyzed with
a lens model. For example, social perceivers’ ratings of
dominance were based on head orientation, trunk orienta-
tion, self-touching, gesturing, and many more cues. While
perceivers correctly used leg extension and gesturing, the
majority of cues they used were not valid indicators of
dominance. Moreover, they missed several important cues,
such as “left leg lean.” Most traits showed similar patterns
whereby social perceivers correctly used several nonverbal
cues but also failed to use many correct cues and overused
nondiagnostic cues. Various other lens model analyses have
examined the role of particular nonverbal cues in social
judgment, and in general the results suggest widespread
use of nonverbal cues in judgment, even when those cues
are not diagnostic (e.g., Gifford, Ng, & Wilkinson, 1985).
Yet such featural analyses have several important limi-
tations. One unfortunate consequence of the study of dis-
crete nonverbal cues is that while some of these cues may
prove to be widespread across cultures and time in relation
to psychological states and traits (e.g., emotion expres-
sions), many may prove to be culturally specific, lending
to eventual difficulties in replication and in the production
of scientific laws (Gergen, 1973). Complicating matters
further is that even within a culture the production of non-
verbal cues in one setting, such as a group conversation
(e.g., Gifford, 1994), may differ markedly from the pro-
duction of nonverbal cues in another setting, such as read-
ing a standard statement aloud (e.g., Borkenau & Liebler,
1992). Hence, the importance of specific nonverbal cues
to social judgment may be both domain and situation spe-
cific (Ambady et al., 2000). Finally, lens models to date
have disregarded the importance of configural processing
by focusing on specific cues rather than on the interaction
of those cues (Zebrowitz & Collins, 1997).
Configural Processes in Nonverbal Perception:
Ecological Theory One influential perceptual theory
(Gibson, 1979), holds that perceptual processes adapt to the
Nonverbal Foundations of Social Perception 479
environment in which they have evolved—both over the
course of one’s life, and over generations. According to
this theory, perceiving is for doing in that perception is
for extracting the actionable properties of things or the
properties of things that are relevant to well-being. These
self-relevant properties are described as affordances. For
example, lowered eyebrows might afford danger if the
eyebrow-lowering individual is moving toward the self,
is yelling loudly, and exhibits other facial bodily motions
indicative of aggressive intent. The key point for the cur-
rent purposes is that affordances are said to be readily
communicated over multiple modalities and most effec-
tively via the higher-order patterning (or “configuration”)
of cues, rather than single cues in isolation (Zebrowitz &
Collins, 1997). McArthur and Baron (1983), in a position
consistent with Gibson’s, suggested that social percep-
tion also proceeds in an ecologically adaptive manner.
They argued that perceivers extract invariants, or stable
social properties, from higher-order patterns in the social
stimulus array. This social-ecological approach either
implicitly or explicitly anticipated several findings with
respect to the perception and judgment of nonverbal
behavior.
Multichannel Facilitation and Interference in Nonverbal
Perception The social-ecological approach suggests that
modalities combine to inform social perception and judg-
ment. If so, then judgment should be especially fast when
several modalities impart the same information and are
consistent. Moreover, judgment should be impaired or
slowed when the to-be-judged modality imparts informa-
tion that is inconsistent with a second modality.
Multimodal facilitation is clearly demonstrated with
infant identification of emotion expression. Walker-
Andrews and colleagues (for a review, see Walker-Andrews,
2008) have demonstrated, for example, that 3-month-old
infants can recognize facial expressions of emotion but
only when accompanied by a corresponding vocal expres-
sion. Only later do infants develop the ability to recognize
facial expressions in the absence of other communicative
channels. At least with regard to emotion recognition, then,
developing humans require some degree of consistency to
learn the emotional meaning of any particular nonverbal
cue. Multimodal facilitation is also illustrated in observa-
tions of patients. In one case, occipitotemporal damage
was responsible for a patient’s visual agnosia, which pre-
vented her from consciously recognizing emotion in the
face (de Gelder, Pourtois, Vroomen, & Bachoud-Levi,
2000). Yet remarkably, exposure to facial expressions of
emotion influenced her ability to recognize emotions in the
voice, demonstrating an automatic multimodal influence
in nonverbal judgment.
480 Nonverbal Behavior
Among adults, multimodal interference is illustrated
by the so-called McGurk effect: When people are asked
to identify vocal utterances and to ignore images of tar-
gets moving their lips, they are unable to do so. These
participants often misidentify the vocal utterance (“ba”)
in the direction of the lip movement (“ga”; McGurk &
MacDonald, 1976). Hence, in perceiving a paraverbal
cue, a facial cue can interfere. One particularly fascinat-
ing demonstration of multimodal interference used posed
facial expression pictures. These facial expressions were
seamlessly photo-edited onto bodies that expressed a dif-
ferent emotion. For example, a prototypically angry face
was placed on a body that was holding a dirtied pair of
underwear; a prototypically disgusted face was placed on a
body that was holding a fist in the air (as if about to strike
a blow). Although participants were instructed to ignore
the body and focus on the face in making their emotion
decision, they were unable to do so. Thus, disgust facial
expressions were correctly identified 91% of the time
when presented alone, but when presented on bodies hold-
ing fists in the air, these faces were incorrectly judged to be
angry by 87% of participants (Aviezer et al., 2008).
Finally, meaningful physiological states may be best
communicated via multiple channels. Although research
drawing a connection between physiological patterns and
nonverbal behavior has typically examined physiological
responses to facial expressions, one recent study examined
physiological and nonverbal responses to social interac-
tion (Weisbuch, Seery, Ambady, & Blascovich, 2009). The
cardiovascular patterns indicating threat and challenge
could be predicted by social perceivers’ judgments but
only when judgments of facial and vocal confidence were
considered together.
In general, and consistent with social-ecological prin-
ciples, social perception processes appear to have adapted
to the dynamic information inherent to whole beings rather
than to isolated parts of those humans.
Configural and Dynamic Processing of Nonverbal
Channels Although human heads do not normally
express emotions when they are physically separated from
their larger body, research suggests that facial emotion is
perceived in accordance with the broader principles of eco-
logical theories. Specifically, the configural pattern among
expressive facial features is important to the identification
of nonverbal expressions. Removing these configural rela-
tions by inverting the images greatly increases the time nec-
essary to make an emotion judgment (the same is true for
body expressions; Calder & Jansen, 2005; Stekelenburg &
de Gelder, 2004). In addition, supportive of an ecological
account is that dynamic facial expressions appear to reveal
emotion better than static facial expressions. For example,
one study used difficult-to-identify facial expressions and
presented them alone, within a short “movie” in which
the expresser began with a neutral expression (“dynamic”
condition), or within an interrupted movie in which each
frame was separated by visual noise (Ambadar, Schooler, &
Cohn, 2005). The single-frame and interrupted-movie con-
ditions yielded significantly lower accuracy than did the
dynamic movie condition.
Thus, while features can be extracted from faces, higher-
order patterns are clearly important to social perceivers
encountering real nonverbal expressions. This idea can be
illustrated with respect to the combination of eye gaze and
emotion expression. Joy and anger appear to be consider-
ably more intense and easier to identify when combined
with direct than with averted gaze, whereas the opposite
is true for sadness and fear (Adams & Kleck, 2003, 2005).
Adams and colleagues argue that congruence in motiva-
tional meaning (approach vs. avoidance) speeds responses
whereas incongruence slows responses. For example, both
joy and direct gaze signal approach, whereas both fear and
averted gaze signal avoidance; hence, both of these combi-
nations should be and are processed especially quickly.
Configuring Multiple Dimensions of Social Percep-
tion Just as higher-order patterns of nonverbal cues and
modalities inform social perception, ecological principles
suggest that nonverbal patterns may combine with other
social categories and cues to produce affordances in social
perception.
Gender, for example, clearly moderates the meaning
of nonverbal behaviors. Crying babies are perceived as
considerably more angry when they are boys (Condry &
Condry, 1976). During a marital dispute, silence on the
part of husbands is considered loving whereas silence on
the part of wives is considered a sign of hostility (Gaelick,
Bodenhausen, & Wyer, 1985). And happy faces are most
quickly and accurately categorized when those faces are
female (Hugenberg & Sczesny, 2006). Another social
category (race) also moderates the meaning of nonverbal
behaviors. Although negative facial expressions automati-
cally elicit negative affect in social perceivers (Dimberg
et al., 2000; Murphy & Zajonc, 1993; Whalen et al., 1998),
this effect is reversed when the expresser is an outgroup
member (Weisbuch & Ambady, 2008a). In other research,
White social perceivers more readily perceived anger in
Black faces than in White faces (and joy in White than
in Black faces), especially to the degree that White per-
ceivers exhibited implicit prejudice or had a self-protection
goal (Hugenberg, 2005; Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003;
Maner et al., 2005). At the neural level, Chiao and colleagues
(2008) found that the amygdala response of Japanese
and American participants to facial fear was greater when

the observed faces were members of their own culture
relative to members of the other culture. In general, the pat-
tern of findings in this section suggest that it is the mean-
ing of the expression to the perceiver (the affordance)—not
the expression on its own—that dictates the response.
Summary: Implications for Social Perception and
Social Judgment
There is substantial evidence that social perceivers nor-
mally form judgments based on the unique configuration
of the nonverbal elements. Although these effects do not
rule out the possibility that single features provide impor-
tant information about the meaning of nonverbal behavior,
in real life nonverbal judgments proceed configurally and
are enhanced by dynamic movement. In other words, there
appears to be substantial support for social-ecological the-
ories with respect to the perception of nonverbal behavior.
Nonetheless, when important multimodal or dynamic cues
are absent, single features may prove to be especially
influential.
Judgments of Nonverbal Behavior: Surprising
Social Insight
The ability to judge nonverbal behavior may be fundamen-
tal to human intelligence.
Since the early 1980s, some scholars have argued for
the “social brain hypothesis,” which posits that the devel-
opment of the human brain is a direct consequence of the
complexities of human social life. In fact, the size of
the neocortex is correlated with social group size in cross-
species comparisons (Dunbar, 1992, 1995; Gittleman, 1986;
Marino, 1996) but not with other (nonsocial) candidate
causes of larger brains, such as ranging area and diffi-
culty of extracting food from the environment (Dunbar,
1998). Human intelligence may thus be a by-product
of the need to interact in and keep track of an expansive
social group. For this reason, an understanding of how
people achieve accuracy in social judgment is crucial to
understanding the human psyche. To that end, social judg-
ment relies heavily on nonverbal behavior both for what
it communicates directly and for how it alters spoken
content.
Social Intelligence: Early Development
If people are to adapt to the social world early in life, it
must be in the absence of linguistic understanding. We are
born equipped with tools that enable such social adaptation
and perhaps form the basis for nonverbal judgments later in
life. Nonverbal sensitivity in humans begins prenatally, as
people are born sensitive to the prosody of their mother’s
voice (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980). And as noted earlier, even
Nonverbal Foundations of Social Perception 481
45-minute-old neonates imitate open-mouth and tongue
protrusion displays (Meltzoff & Moore, 1983). There is
also the phenomenon of crying contagion described ear-
lier: On hearing another infant in the nursery cry, others
cry as well (Martin & Clark, 1982; Sagi & Hoffman, 1976;
Simner, 1971). And scholars agree that infants are able
to discriminate and not just imitate nonverbal displays of
emotion in the first few months of life (Flom & Bahrick,
2007; Walker-Andrews, 1997). For example, infants respond
differently to approving and disapproving vocalizations
even when those vocalizations are spoken in a foreign lan-
guage (Fernald, 1993).
As their minimal language skills increase, children
appear to be more and not less sensitive to nonverbal
behavior. For example, as infants grow from 3 to 7 months
of age, their skills at decoding nonverbal emotional dis-
plays become increasingly sophisticated (e.g., Flom &
Bahrick, 2007). And infants begin to recognize body
language and movement between 4 and 6 months of age
(Fox & McDaniel, 1982). Indeed, nonverbal perception
skills increase throughout childhood and adolescence
(Rosenthal et al., 1979). In short, extremely young humans
can clearly extract meaningful information from nonver-
bal behavior. To highlight the power of adult analogues to
this skill, the next section details how nonverbal judgment
is robust to many challenges.
Social Intelligence: How Low Can You Go?
The 4-minute mile, the first flight to the moon, and the
peaceful revolution of Gandhi were astounding feats that
highlighted humans’ physical, mental, and spiritual capaci-
ties. Of course, it would not have been astounding to dem-
onstrate that people can run on two legs, that people can
create, or that people can adhere to a moral code—even
though each of these latter capacities is rather astound-
ing when compared with the abilities of other species.
Similarly, it would hardly be astounding to demonstrate
that people can make accurate social judgments if given
enough information, even if this capacity is astounding.
By restricting the amount of physical information provided
to social perceivers, it is possible to examine and perhaps
highlight the human capacity for social intelligence.
Temporally Limited Nonverbal Judgment The greatest
amount of research on degraded social judgment has
been accomplished in the domain of “thin slices” or brief
observations of behavior. A meta-analysis of these stud-
ies revealed that social judgments made from less than
30 seconds of strictly nonverbal exposure accurately pre-
dicted criterion variables with a rather large effect size (Ambady
& Rosenthal, 1992). Moreover, only negligible increases in
accuracy were seen when exposure time was increased
482 Nonverbal Behavior
from 30 seconds to larger increments. Notably, provision
of the verbal channel did not reliably enhance judgment
and in many cases detracted from judgment. Despite the
time limit and the elimination of verbal information, social
judgment operated efficiently and effectively.
It is possible that the robustness of social intelligence
might be limited to more easily observable domains, such
as extraversion. Indeed, with self-report and peer report as
criteria measures, several research groups observed accu-
racy in extraversion judgments based on brief exposure
to participants who varied only in nonverbal behavior
(Borkenau & Liebler, 1992, 1993; Gangestad, Simpson,
DiGeronimo, & Biek, 1992). Yet even in judging extra-
version people exhibited surprising social intelligence.
For example, Borkenau and Liebler (1992) simply asked
their social targets to read a weather report aloud to a video
camera in an otherwise empty room, yet social perceivers
exhibited accuracy in their extraversion judgments.
More importantly, accuracy in judgments from nonver-
bal thin slices is hardly limited to extraversion. Among the
more interesting variables that can be predicted via naïve
observers’ nonverbal thin-slice judgments are sexual ori-
entation (Ambady, Hallahan, & Conner, 1999), sexual pro-
miscuity (Gangestad et al., 1992), racial biases (Richeson &
Shelton, 2005), trial judges’ expectations for trial outcome
(Blanck, Rosenthal, & Cordell, 1985), and status within a
company (Hall & Friedman, 1999). Equally interesting is
a study in which thin-slice judgments were based on targets
behaving in a context different from the outcome measure.
Specifically, judgments based on less than 1 minute of visual
exposure to an informal conversation predicted the intelli-
gence (IQ and peer reports of intelligence) of social targets
(Murphy, Hall, & Colvin, 2003).
In general, research on temporal limitations demon-
strates that major reductions in the amount of physical
information available to social perceivers do little to stifle
social judgment ability, as long as nonverbal behavior is
available.
Spatially Limited Nonverbal Judgment In some work
on social intelligence, special efforts are made to reduce
the amount of spatial information available to social per-
ceivers. The most famous of these manipulations uses min-
iature light-emitting objects placed on social targets’ major
joints (e.g., elbows and knees). In a darkened space, social
targets perform some activity, often walking, such that
their motion is visible but a great deal of important social
information (e.g., the face) is not. In these studies on bio-
logical motion, the light fixtures do not appear to constitute
a human until they begin to move. Given movement, social
perceivers are able to reliably determine identity (friend vs.
stranger), emotion, gender, sexuality, and behavior (Clarke,
Bradshaw, Field, Hampson, & Rose, 2005; Cutting &
Kozlowski, 1977; Johnson, Gill, Reichman, & Tassinary,
2007; Kozlowski & Cutting, 1977; Norman, Payton, Long, &
Hawkes, 2004). Another technique, “content filtering,”
removes high-frequency sounds from speech such that it
is not possible to derive words from the speech but vocal
prosody and other vocal parameters remain. From con-
tent-filtered speech, social perceivers’ judgments reliably
predict job performance of managers and telephone opera-
tors (Ambady, Krabbenhoft, & Hogan, 2006; Hecht &
LaFrance, 1995) and malpractice suits against vocalizing
surgeons (Ambady et al., 2002). Although people are not
good at detecting deception in general (as explained later),
they are better than average when given only content-
filtered speech (Zuckerman et al., 1981).
In sum, across both temporal and spatial restrictions of
information, perceivers exhibit surprising social intelli-
gence as long as they have access to some nonverbal infor-
mation. Interestingly, people are often not aware of their
ability to make accurate judgments, especially from subtle
cues, and their confidence in and predictions of their abil-
ity and their actual performance in this domain are not cali-
brated (Patterson, Foster, & Bellmer, 2001; Rule, Ambady,
Adams, & Macrae, 2008).
Social Intelligence: Specific Domains
Intelligence in nonverbal judgment is especially notewor-
thy with respect to deception detection, emotion recogni-
tion, and individual differences. Each area provides unique
information about the importance and likely development
of social intelligence, and it is perhaps for this reason that
these topics have attracted scholarly interest.
Deception and Deception Detection Deception detection
is a particularly interesting area of research with respect
to social intelligence. Individuals can exhibit social intel-
ligence by successfully deceiving others, whereas social
perceivers can exhibit social intelligence by successfully
detecting deception. Results of a large meta-analysis sug-
gest that social perceivers exhibit just-above-chance accu-
racy in detecting deception (about 54%; Bond & DePaulo,
2006). When provided with only nonverbal (silent video)
information, accuracy slips closer to chance (51%). These
effects suggest that social perceivers are not particularly
intelligent with respect to identifying lies. Although it is
possible that certain people are especially adept at detect-
ing deception, Bond and DePaulo (2008) demonstrated
that the standard deviation of judges’ true ability is less
than 1%. And expertise, experience, and formal train-
ing do not seem to improve lie detection accuracy. In a
meta-analysis of the literature, Aamodt and Custer (2006;
see also Vrij, 1993; Vrij & Semin, 1996) found that

“professional lie catchers” (e.g., police officers, detectives,
judges, secret service agents, and parole officers) were no
more accurate at detecting deception than were students
and other citizens. The professionals had an average accu-
racy rate (56%) only slightly higher than that of novices
(54%). Hence, it is unlikely that certain types of people are
a great deal better than others at detection accuracy. Given
the hypothesis that humans must have evolved social intel-
ligence, why are people not better at detecting deception
from verbal or nonverbal cues?
One explanation is that deception is a special domain.
While perceivers benefit by making accurate assessments,
actors benefit by being able to deceive their counterparts.
Indeed, nonverbal influence theories generally describe a
one-upmanship throughout the ages of human evolution
where, as social perceivers are increasingly able to dis-
criminate signal from noise in nonverbal behavior, it is
increasingly important for social actors to increase noise
or reduce signal so as to accomplish their goals more often
(Owren et al., 2005). Indeed, few nonverbal cues distin-
guish liars from truth-tellers, and those that do are gener-
ally associated with small effect sizes (with the exception
of vocal immediacy and pupil dilation; DePaulo et al.,
2003).
Yet it is important to note that the bulk of research on
deception detection comes from carefully controlled labo-
ratory studies, when the liar’s motivation to be success-
ful may be minimal. In a meta-analysis of the literature,
DePaulo and colleagues (2003) examined whether the cues
to deception become more transparent during “high-stakes”
lies, when the liar has more motivation to be successful.
Their analysis revealed that when liars are more motivated
to succeed, they become tenser; specifically, they use less
eye contact and a higher-pitched voice. Similar results
were reported by Mann, Vrig, and Bull (2004) in a study
of people’s behavior during real-life high-stakes situa-
tions, including murder, rape, and arson suspects undergo-
ing police interrogations. It is as yet unclear whether this
greater transparency during higher-stakes situations reli-
ably results in greater accuracy on the part of perceivers.
Emotion Recognition Whereas social perceivers do not
exhibit particular intelligence in deception detection, emo-
tion recognition is a different story. Even some blind people
can detect, at rates above chance, the emotion expression
on a face presented to the blind visual field (de Gelder,
Vroomen, Pourtois, & Weiskrantz, 1999; Pegna, Khateb,
Lazeyras, & Seghier, 2004). For example, one patient
could not consciously detect movement, colors, or a strong
light source yet was able to guess (at above-chance rates)
the emotion expression on faces presented visually (Pegna
et al.). Notably, these effects appeared to be specific to
Nonverbal Foundations of Social Perception 483
emotion: The patient was not better than chance at detecting
visually presented squares versus circles, authentic ver-
sus jumbled faces, male versus female faces, or positive
versus negative scenes. This patient exhibited more acti-
vation in the right amygdala while viewing emotional ver-
sus nonemotional faces, suggesting a neural pathway for
emotion recognition.
Recognizing others’ emotion may be important for
various reasons. Emotion expressions may provide imme-
diate and dense information about (1) the current social
environment (Dimberg, 1997), (2) information about the
expressive individual’s likely behavior (Owren et al.,
2005), and (3) information relevant for demonstrating
empathy and securing social ties (Preston & de Waal,
2002). “Affective blindsight” and the hundreds of studies
on the recognition of emotion from different channels of
communication suggest an important role for the recogni-
tion of nonverbal emotion in social adaptation. The sections
that follow illustrate the robustness of emotion recognition.
Emotion Recognition Across Cultures Emotion recog-
nition across cultures, where one might expect some error
due to substantial differences in accepted behavior, is sur-
prisingly high. In one meta-analysis of 162 cross-cultural
studies (noted earlier), 99.6% of the studies demonstrated
that people detect emotion from posed pictures at above-
chance levels, with only five studies indicating chance-
level detection for even a single emotion (Elfenbein &
Ambady, 2002). Although emotion recognition is gener-
ally lower from vocal than from facial samples, people
also exhibit cross-cultural accuracy in detecting posed vo-
cal emotion (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002). In one study, for
example, actors emotionally enunciated sets of syllables
constructed by a trained linguist to be language neutral.
Perceivers from nine countries (n > 31), speaking seven
different languages then guessed which emotion was illus-
trated by each vocalization (Scherer, Banse, & Wallbott,
2001). Even the worst-performing country (Indonesia) cor-
rectly identified each emotion at higher than chance, and
on average cross-cultural accuracy (corrected for chance)
was a little higher than 60%.
The evidence with respect to the recognition of
spontaneous emotions across cultures is a bit more ambig-
uous, with some researchers reporting cross-cultural
recognition and others reporting no cross-cultural recogni-
tion (cf. Matsumoto & Willingham, 2006; Naab & Russell,
2007). Perhaps the most conservative way to summarize
this literature is to say that spontaneous emotions are more
difficult to identify than are posed emotions. This makes
sense since posed emotions are prototypes of the sponta-
neous emotions. Posed emotions evoke considerable uni-
versal agreement, suggesting that social intelligence in
484 Nonverbal Behavior
the domain of emotion is guided by biologically prepared
emotion prototypes. Speculatively, these prototypes may
help to support intelligence in emotion recognition, whereas
spontaneous displays built on these prototypes may diverge
on the basis of culture (cf. Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002).
Emotion Recognition with More Subtle Stimuli In-
credibly, people can identify most of the basic emotion
facial expressions (joy, sadness, anger, and disgust) in
only 12 to 25 ms (McAndrew, 1986). People can also
reliably identify emotions from only body postures, whole-
body movement, and even just arm movements (Atkinson,
Dittrich, Gemmel, & Young, 2004; Pollick, Paterson,
Bruderlin, & Sanford, 2001). Touch also appears to convey
emotion. In one study, anger, disgust, fear, gratitude, love,
and sympathy could be differentially identified by perceiv-
ers who were touched on the arm or who viewed another
individual being touched on the arm (Hertenstein, Keltner,
App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006). And although odor pro-
duction is only debatably nonverbal communication, it
seems relevant to note that social perceivers could identify
mood by smelling underarm pads worn by participants who
had viewed mood-inducing movies (Chen & Haviland-
Jones, 2000; see also Levine & McBurney, 1986).
If intelligence in nonverbal judgment reaches its nadir
with identifying deception, it may reach its apex with iden-
tifying emotion. Several basic emotions can be univer-
sally identified (across cultures) by sight or sound. Even
extremely subtle stimuli, such as those expressed for only
12 to 25 ms or those expressed via body posture, can be
reliably identified. Even partially blind people exhibit
visual emotion recognition.
Intelligence in Nonverbal Judgment: Individual
Differences
Between the apex of emotion recognition and the nadir of
deception detection lay considerable individual differences
in nonverbal judgment ability.
Superior Social Intelligence Several groups are
known for their impressive social intelligence. First,
across cultures, nonverbal channels, and ages, women
appear to make more accurate nonverbal judgments than
men (Hall & Andrzejewski, 2008; Rosip & Hall, 2004).
These gender differences hold throughout childhood and
adulthood.
Second, nonverbal judgment appears to improve with
age, up to a certain point. Rosenthal and colleagues used
an uncommonly age-diverse sample to demonstrate devel-
opmental changes in nonverbal judgment. This large-scale
study used a heavily validated measure for examin-
ing accuracy in interpersonal judgment from particular
nonverbal expressions (i.e., facial expression, body move-
ment, and vocal tone). Specifically, this study used the
profile of nonverbal sensitivity (PONS; Rosenthal et al.,
1979), which presents respondents with 2-second video
clips of an actress and asks respondents to indicate the
behavior illustrated by the actress (e.g., talking to a cashier
vs. scolding a child). These are edited clips in which body
parts or aspects of the audio track have been eliminated or
altered. Third graders’ PONS accuracy was approximately
58% for the body, whereas fourth graders’ accuracy was
approximately 68%. Accuracy in nonverbal judgment
continues to improve in a linear fashion after sixth grade,
with “jumps” occurring from sixth grade to junior high and
from high school to college and with accuracy leveling off
around age 25.
Impaired Social Intelligence In the last decade, schol-
ars across disciplines have recognized the importance of
intelligence in nonverbal judgment for normal social func-
tioning. Specifically, autism spectrum disorders, includ-
ing Asperger’s syndrome, appear to be undergirded by a
lack of intelligence in nonverbal judgment (e.g., Baron-
Cohen, 2005). People with autism spectrum disorders are
able to discriminate identity among faces but have much
more difficulty discriminating among the negative facial
expressions (Ashwin, Chapman, Colle, & Baron-Cohen,
2006) and in identifying mental states from eye gaze cues
(Baron-Cohen, Joliffe, Mortimore, & Robertson, 1997).
Indeed, deficits in these areas are now viewed fundamental
to autism spectrum disorders rather than simple concomi-
tants (Baron-Cohen, 2005). Abnormalities in the neural
network known as the “social brain” (which consists of
the medial, inferior frontal, and superior temporal cortices
and the amygdala) may be responsible for these deficits
(Brothers & Ring, 1992; Golan, Baron-Cohen, Hill, &
Golan, 2006).
Similarly, research with schizophrenic patients reveals
that intelligence in nonverbal judgment may be fundamen-
tal to this disease. Various studies have demonstrated that,
as compared with other psychiatric patients, schizophrenic
individuals have difficulty interpreting facial expressions in
particular and nonverbal behavior in general (e.g., Cutting,
1981; Sergi & Green, 2003). Moreover, such difficulty is
associated with lower functional status (Penn, Spaulding,
Reed, & Sullivan, 1996; Sergi, Rassovsky, Nuechterlein, &
Green, 2006), suggesting an important role for nonverbal
judgment abilities in the development of schizophrenia.
Finally, a recent meta-analysis demonstrated that people
who engage in antisocial behaviors, as well as those who
typically show a lack of empathy or remorse (e.g., psycho-
paths) show a specific deficit in the ability to recognize
fearful expressions (Marsh & Blair, 2007). Such findings

are perhaps unsurprising because the accurate perception
of fearful expressions likely contributes to the develop-
ment of more prosocial behavior (Dadds et al., 2006).
In general, clinical deficits in psychosocial functioning
are associated with reductions in social intelligence, as
indicated by judgment in nonverbal behavior. Nonverbal
judgment skills may underlie several disorders that until
recently had been characterized as disorders in cognitive
processing. This is an especially important area of research
that would benefit from experimental and longitudinal
designs to assess causality.
Intelligence in Social Judgment: Social Impact
If superior social intelligence helps individuals to survive
and thrive, superior skill should be related to more positive
outcomes. Intelligence in nonverbal judgment is related to
several positive social outcomes. As compared to people
with less intelligence in nonverbal judgment, those with
more social intelligence are more popular, report less lone-
liness, receive better raises, and tend to attain higher status
(Byron, Terranova, & Nowicki, 2007; Hall & Halberstadt,
1994; Nowicki & Duke, 1994; Pitterman & Nowicki,
2004; Rosenthal et al., 1979; for a meta-analysis, see Hall,
Andrzejewski, & Yopchick, in press).
At first glance, these findings suggest that much can
be gained from heightened intelligence in nonverbal
judgment. Yet most studies on this topic suffer from inter-
pretive issues—it could be the case, for example, that as
a consequence of becoming popular or high status, indi-
viduals attend more to others’ nonverbal behaviors and
enhance their nonverbal judgments. The causal role of
nonverbal judgment in social functioning thus remains
unclear. Moreover, skill at nonverbal judgment does
seem to depend on the channel of communication being
judged. People who make accurate judgments from the
face are not necessarily equally good at making judg-
ments from the voice, and people who are good at judg-
ing emotion are not necessarily good at judging deception
(e.g., Buck, 1976; Hall, 2001). Recent work suggests the
intriguing possibility that specific nonverbal skills might
be associated with superior performance on specific out-
comes. For instance, Marsh and colleagues (2007) found
that accuracy at judging fear expressions predicted proso-
cial tendencies better than did accuracy at judging other
emotions.
Moreover, in some cases, the ability to pick up on emo-
tions from nonverbal behavior is actually associated with
negative outcomes. In particular, people may really want
to keep some of their feelings secret. Although they may
be successful regulating their facial expressions at these
times, vocal and bodily expressions are thought to be more
difficult to control—hence, they may “leak” true feelings
Nonverbal Social Influence 485
(the face; Ekman & Friesen, 1969b; Rosenthal & DePaulo,
1979). If so, the social perceiver who picks up (“eaves-
drops”) on vocal emotion may not be well appreciated by
individuals who are trying to conceal their true feelings. In
one study, individuals who were especially good at pick-
ing up on negative emotion in the voice (but not the face)
were especially disliked by their supervisors and team-
mates in an organization (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002).
Other studies have also demonstrated the negative inter-
personal ramifications of eavesdropping. For example,
eavesdropping among students was associated with poor
interpersonal functioning, as rated by teachers (Rosenthal &
DePaulo, 1979). Moreover, eavesdroppers appeared to
create especially uncomfortable social interactions with
strangers (Puccinelli & Tickle-Degnen, 2004).
Because of difficulties in causal interpretations, this is
an area of research that could benefit from experimental
methods. Training in nonverbal judgment skills—both
general and channel specific—followed by interpersonal
interaction would permit causal analyses of the extent to
which intelligence in nonverbal judgment causes enhanced
popularity and psychosocial functioning.
Summary: Judgments of Nonverbal Behavior
Much like running on two legs, social intelligence is often
taken for granted. Yet social intelligence is a remarkable
feat of evolution that is perhaps responsible for the abilities
of humans to live in groups, to function interpersonally, and
to promote the interests of their genes within a social envi-
ronment. For these reasons, intelligence in nonverbal judg-
ment may have played an important role in the survival of
the human species. A number of empirical findings support
this inference. First, there is a universal ability to decode
affective facial and vocal expressions. Second, people
need little time to come to relatively accurate conclusions
about personality traits on the basis of nonverbal behav-
ior. Third, people need only limited information from the
body, face, or voice to come to accurate conclusions about
many characteristics of others. Fourth, intelligence deficits
in nonverbal judgment appear to play an important role in
the definition of psychiatric abnormality, including autism
and schizophrenia, suggesting that nonverbal judgment is
crucial for social adaptation. And finally, intelligence in
nonverbal judgment is associated with affiliation.
NONVERBAL SOCIAL INFLUENCE
Intelligence in conscious nonverbal judgment is clearly
important to social adaptation. However, the many auto-
matic processes involved in the perception of nonverbal
behavior also allow for efficient social adaptation in the
486 Nonverbal Behavior
absence of conscious judgment. This capacity implies an
important role for nonverbal behavior in social influence.
Most social influence articles use verbal communication
as the medium of influence (Weisbuch & Ambady, 2008c).
Conformity is often manifested by individuals speaking
aloud (“Line A is shorter”) or by written statements about
what most people believe (“78% of people like choco-
late”). Persuasion research almost exclusively employs
written or spoken arguments, partly due to conceptual-
izations of what counts as persuasion. In both domains,
researchers occasionally examine the role of nonverbal
cues, but beliefs are still transmitted via verbal behavior.
And in these cases, the examination of nonverbal cues is
folded into frameworks based on verbal communication
and these cues are treated as moderator variables (Burgoon,
Dunbar, & Segrin, 2002).
Yet nowhere in most definitions of social influence
is there a requirement that beliefs be expressed verbally.
At the broadest level, social influence can be conceptual-
ized as the influence of one person’s expressed beliefs on
another’s personal beliefs, and beliefs may be expressed
nonverbally, through facial expressions, body language,
paraverbal behavior, and subtle touch. If only because of
the ubiquity of nonverbal communication, there is tre-
mendous potential for nonverbal social influence. That
is, people enact a constant stream of nonverbal behavior
but even the most talkative people spend a great deal of
time not speaking or writing. It is impossible to not behave
nonverbally—even the absence of movement may be con-
sidered nonverbal behavior, as when a first date leads a
nervous person to remain perfectly still. Speaking with
a monotone voice is likely to compel inferences of dull-
ness, a lack of facial expression often leads inferences of
aloofness, and nonverbal stiffness often leads to inferences
of anxiety (Banse & Scherer, 1996; LeDoux, 2000; Tickle-
Degnen & Lyons, 2004). Any social activity that can be
imagined includes a constant stream of nonverbal behavior,
whereas only some of these activities include verbal behav-
ior. Thus, we must be exposed to more nonverbal than ver-
bal behavior. The anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell (1970)
claimed that people only speak for about 10 to 11 minutes
per day. Although it is difficult to be precise, scholars have
estimated that within dyadic interaction, there is twice
as much nonverbal as verbal behavior (Birdwhistell,
1970; Knapp, 1978). Nonverbal behavior is—almost by
definition—more prevalent than verbal behavior. The
widespread prevalence of nonverbal behavior suggests
nonverbal social influence may be widespread. Although
this potential has only recently been the subject of formal
examination in social psychology, the following sections
review two forms of nonverbal influence by integrating lit-
eratures across disciplines.
Indirect Nonverbal Influence
Indirect nonverbal influence occurs when the beliefs and
attitudes of the self change after perceiving another’s non-
verbal responses to some stimuli. Among animals and from
childhood to adulthood, there is impressive continuity in
the power of indirect nonverbal influence.
Nonhuman Animals
Long before there was human language, organisms were
responding to conspecifics’ facial expressions, body lan-
guage, gestures, and nonlinguistic vocalizations (Darwin,
1872). Judging by the diversity of organisms that exhibit
meaningful responses to nonverbal behavior, indirect non-
verbal influence may be universal in the animal kingdom.
As but one of many examples, chukar partridge chicks only
eat food items that their mother has pointed at with a partly
opened bill (Avital & Jablonka, 2000). Among fish, min-
nows are sensitive to the “fright behavior” (e.g., dashing
or freezing) of other minnows such that perceiver min-
nows who have observed another minnow’s fright behavior
in response to an object come to avoid that object as well
(Mathis, Chivers, & Smith, 1996). And meerkats are sen-
sitive to nonlinguistic vocalizations, such that one meerkat
vocalization may produce one type of group behavior
(harassment of an otherwise predatory cobra) whereas
another slightly different vocalization might produce another
group response (e.g., flight; Avital & Jablonka, 2000).
Among nonhuman primates, parents’ nonverbal
responses to various animals influence the formation of
predator–nonpredator categorization schemes of young
vervet monkeys (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990). Moreover,
baboons develop dislike for particular colors of banana
after observing other baboons’ negative facial and
bodily responses to these bananas (Jouventin, Pasteur, &
Cambefort, 1976). Likewise, rhesus monkeys develop a
fear of snakes after observing conspecifics’ fear responses
to snakes (e.g., Mineka, Davidson, Cook, & Keir, 1984).
And our nearest nonhuman ancestor—the chimpanzee—is
sensitive to emotional facial expressions and body lan-
guage (Nakayama, 2004; Parr, Waller, & Vick, 2007).
Social influence in the animal kingdom always occurs
in the absence of language. That does not ensure that
such influence is always “nonverbal,” since much animal
learning may occur via explicit behaviors and physical
manipulations. Nonetheless, the main point is that indirect
nonverbal influence is common to a diversity of animals
with whom we share much evolutionary history.
Childhood
As with other animals, if young infants are to be socialized
in their first year or so, it must be in the absence of language.

Shortly after birth and through the first year, infants have
impressive nonverbal perception skills (reviewed earlier)
coupled with a nearly complete absence of linguistic skills.
It appears that the early emergence of nonverbal percep-
tion permits social influence via nonverbal behavior.
Specifically, infants adopt evaluations toward objects by
observing others’ nonverbal behavior. In the presence of
an adult, especially a caretaker, infants reference the care-
taker’s facial and vocal expressions to determine the value
or danger inherent to a nearby object or potential behavior
(Klinnert, 1984; Klinnert, Emde, Butterfield, & Campos,
1986; Mumme & Fernald, 2003; Repacholi & Meltzoff,
2007; Sorce, Emde, Campos, & Klinnert, 1985). This
phenomenon is referred to as social referencing or, here,
“nonverbal social referencing.” One illustration of this
effect is that a toy is especially likely to be approached if
presentation of the toy is simply coupled with others’ posi-
tive facial expressions. This is social influence in that the
infant’s beliefs about the toy (whether implicit or explicit)
have been influenced by the beliefs expressed via the
nonverbal behavior of another individual.
One set of studies in particular demonstrates sophistica-
tion in how nonverbal social influence contributes to infant
belief and behavior. In these studies, infants watched two
experimenters—one experimenter performed an action
toward a toy, while the second experimenter (“emoter”)
directed a negative or neutral nonverbal expression at the
first experimenter. Infants took longer to touch the toys,
touched them for a shorter period, and were less likely to
imitate the first experimenter when the emoter had (vs.
had not) expressed anger toward the first experimenter’s
behavior (Repacholi & Meltzoff, 2007). Although it is dif-
ficult to measure beliefs in infants, these findings strongly
suggest an indirect and nonverbal social influence.
Following infancy into toddlerhood and preschool,
nonverbal social referencing is used extensively by the
developing child (Feinman, 1982; Walden & Ogan, 1988).
Perhaps of greater interest is that the social influence of
nonverbal behavior may be stronger than the social influ-
ence of verbal behavior in 3- to 6-year-old children. In one
study, for example, 3- to 6-year-old children observed a
videotaped social interaction between a White adult and
a Black adult (Castelli, de Dea, & Nesdale, 2008). The ver-
bal and nonverbal behavior of the White adult was varied
orthogonally. Children’s attitudes toward the Black adult
were more positive when the nonverbal behavior of the
White adult (toward the Black adult) was positive (vs. neg-
ative). In a second study, these effects generalized to atti-
tudes toward other Black adults. No similar effect emerged
for verbal behavior. In a different study, similar results were
observed among children who had observed the pairing of
drink ingestion with a negative facial expression—children
Nonverbal Social Influence 487
reported disliking the taste of the drink more following
this manipulation (Baeyens, Vansteenwegen, de Houwer, &
Crombez, 1996). These studies thus provide initial evi-
dence for the special power of nonverbal behavior in social
influence—in particular the role of indirect nonverbal
influence.
In summary, nonverbal communication is necessary
for the transmission of beliefs in the first few months of
life and appears to play an important role in the forma-
tive years even after language has been acquired. Hence,
nonverbal social influence may indeed be one of the pri-
mary mechanisms through which culture is transferred to
children’s minds.
Adults
Only recently have the nonverbal influence processes seen
in children and apes also been observed in human adults. In
one recent study (Weisbuch & Ambady, 2009), female
participants were exposed to a series of brief and silent
video clips featuring actresses of varying body size. As
the actresses’ body sizes (barely) increased, they received
either increasingly positive nonverbal behavior from
other characters (pro-heavy condition) or increasingly
negative nonverbal behavior from the other characters
(pro-slim condition). Females in the pro-slim condition
reported desiring a slimmer body size and admiring slim
women more than did females in the pro-heavy condition.
Remarkably, separate groups of participants could not con-
sciously identify the (pro-heavy or pro-slim) patterns in
these clips even when they were provided with a substan-
tial monetary award. Hence, indirect and nonverbal social
influence continues to exert an (automatic) social influence
among adults.
Other research supports a similar conclusion regarding
nonverbal influence, although through a slightly differ-
ent mechanism. For example, in one study, one member
of a dyad was manipulated to be especially happy just
before the dyad inspected a product together. Participants
interacting with a happy (and silent) dyad partner liked
the product more than those interacting with a neutral
mood dyad partner. Crucially, these effects were mediated
by nonverbal emotional contagion (the amount of smil-
ing passed from the dyad partner to the participant during
product inspection). Indeed, when nonverbal exposure
was blocked (via a translucent screen), no attitude change
occurred (Howard & Gengler, 2001; see also Ramanathan &
McGill, 2007; Tanner, Ferraro, Chartrand, Bettman, & van
Baaren, 2008).
Research more commonly labeled “evaluative condi-
tioning” also supports the role of nonverbal social influ-
ence in belief acquisition. Findings in this domain are
especially noteworthy in that they model a process that
488 Nonverbal Behavior
is likely to happen often in the “real world”: the devotion
of limited conscious resources to nonverbal emotional
behavior in the presence of other objects. For example,
happy facial expressions presented subliminally and just
before a novel symbol facilitate positive evaluations of that
novel symbol, as compared with when the symbol is pre-
ceded by an angry subliminal expression (e.g., Murphy &
Zajonc, 1993). These effects occur whether evaluations of
the symbols are measured with self-report evaluations or
facial electromyography (Rotteveel et al., 2001). In addi-
tion, subliminal happy expressions facilitate drinking
among thirsty people (Winkielman et al., 2005), sublim-
inal sad faces make music seem gloomy (Strahan et al.,
2002), subliminal facial expressions influence ratings of
other people (Stapel et al., 2002), and subliminal happy
faces can increase positive evaluations of television pro-
grams (Ravaja et al., 2004). Moreover, happy faces paired
with self-relevant behavior facilitate positive evaluations
associated with the self (Baccus, Baldwin, & Packer,
2004). And when perceivers are exposed to faces looking
at objects, the displayed facial emotion influences evalua-
tions of the objects (Bayliss, Frischen, Fenske, & Tipper,
2007). Although many of these latter findings are often
considered an aspect of “conditioning” rather than social
influence, it is not clear—given the role of human stimuli—
that these effects should not also be considered social
influence.
Direct Nonverbal Influence in Adults
In the studies reviewed thus far, the impact of the nonverbal
behavior was indirect—it was more about the relationship
between a nonverbal behavior and a second stimulus than
the relationship between the nonverbal behavior and the
self. Direct nonverbal influence occurs when the nonver-
bal behavior of another individual directed toward the self
influences the beliefs and attitudes of the self. Indirect non-
verbal influence effects are perhaps analogous to persua-
sion and conformity, whereas direct nonverbal influence
effects may be more analogous to compliance. For example,
among chimps, the “silent, bared-teeth” display, perhaps
similar to human smiles, elicits affiliative behavior in per-
ceivers of the expression, and the “relaxed, open-mouth”
face seems to reduce aggression and increase interest in
“play” among conspecifics that perceive the facial expres-
sion (Waller & Dunbar, 2005). And wolf pack leaders are
thought to be especially likely to lead the pack in a hunt
after being nuzzled by other wolves in their pack (e.g.,
Mech, 1970). Among humans, two types of direct nonver-
bal influence have received the most attention from social
psychologists: behavioral confirmation and dominance
displays.
Compliance in Nonverbal Social Influence:
Behavioral Confirmation
Behavioral confirmation occurs when the expectations
of another are spontaneously confirmed by the target.
For example, if a White interviewer expects poor perfor-
mance from a Black interviewee, the White interviewer
will exhibit negative nonverbal behavior and the Black
interviewee will, as a consequence, perform more poorly
(Word, Zanna, & Cooper, 1974). Meta-analyses con-
ducted by Harris and Rosenthal (1985) revealed that to the
extent that the sender maintained (with the receiver) eye
contact (r ⫽ 0.33), little interpersonal distance (r ⫽ 0.45),
a high frequency of smiles (r ⫽ 0.29), and a fast speech
rate (r ⫽ 0.48), the receiver was likely to be influenced
and confirm the sender’s positive expectations. Nonverbal
behavioral confirmation occurs in many domains ranging
from job interviews (Word et al., 1974), to courtrooms
(Blanck et al., 1985), to experimenter–participant interac-
tions (Rosenthal, 1966). Expectations communicated non-
verbally are so influential as to exert cross-species effects.
For example, experimenters’ expectations can nonverbally
influence rats’ maze-running and Skinner-box performance
(Rosenthal & Lawson, 1964) and at least one horse’s count-
ing ability (“Clever Hans”; Pfungst, 1911).
Participants’ attitudes and beliefs can also be influ-
enced by nonverbally communicated expectations. For
example, trial judges influence jury verdicts via nonver-
bal behavior directed at the jury (Halverson, Hallahan,
Hart, & Rosenthal, 1997; Hart, 1995). In one study, Hart
(1995) took videotaped footage of judges’ final instruc-
tions to actual juries and showed this footage to mock
jurors who had just observed evidence from a separate
(but real) trial. Judges who expected “innocent” (vs.
“guilty”) verdicts in the original trials were especially
likely to elicit “innocent” verdicts from the mock jurors.
Because the judges gave identical (impartial) verbal
instructions to jurors, the nonverbal behavior of judges
directed at the (mock) jurors must have influenced the
jurors’ beliefs about a third party. The judges elicited
compliance to their expectations via nonverbal behavior.
On the whole, it appears that compliance can be gained
via nonverbal influence.
Compliance in Nonverbal Social Influence:
Dominance Displays
Individuals influence others and gain their compliance via
dominance-related nonverbal behavior. This is perhaps an
artifact of our genetic relationship with other primates. For
example, young monkeys isolated since birth exhibit a fear
response when shown a picture of an older male monkey
making a threat display (Sackett, 1966). Although humans

sometimes direct such anger or dominance displays at
others, nonverbal dominance expressions more commonly
observed in humans include patterns of gestures (Hall
et al., 2005), gaze (Ellyson & Dovidio, 1985), and pos-
tural expansion (Tiedens & Fragale, 2003). The expres-
sion of these dynamic cues gains behavioral compliance
(submissiveness) among humans (e.g., Tiedens & Fragale,
2003) and other primates (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990). For
example, stared-at drivers are more likely to flee an inter-
section, leaving this territory to the staring pedestrian
(Ellsworth, Carlsmith, & Henson, 1972). Likewise, a “dom-
inance stare” directed at people on an elevator speeded exit
time of elevator riders (Elman, Schulte, & Bukoff, 1977).
In each case, compliance occurred as a consequence of
nonverbal dominance directed toward the self.
The idea that responses to nonverbal dominance might
include enduring changes to explicit beliefs about the self
was presaged by Dovidio and Ellyson (1985), who sug-
gested the following:
Messages concerning dominance and relative status may be
communicated and accepted without conscious awareness by
the sender . . . . Interactants may come to explain their behav-
ior with self-attributions that are consistent with their status
relationship. (p. 146)
Hence, a social influence approach to nonverbal domi-
nance displays need not be limited to examining how
nonverbal dominance cues moderate the impact of a verbal
message (Carli, LaFleur, & Loeber, 1995; Lee & Ofshe,
1981).
Given the tremendous capacity of the human mind to
process information automatically, the nonconscious sen-
sitivity of the human mind to nonverbal behavior, and the
ubiquity of nonverbal behavior, a socially situated human
mind should be vulnerable to an enormous amount of non-
verbal social influence occurring outside awareness of that
influence and even outside awareness of the nonverbal
behavior itself (Weisbuch & Ambady, 2008b).
SUMMARY
If many of our social cognitive structures are formed early
in life to enable nonverbal behavior, if the basis of social
life in primates is rooted in nonverbal behavior, and if
social perception, cognition, judgment, relations, and
influence are heavily informed by nonverbal processes, it
seems reasonable to conclude that nonverbal behavior is
an important foundation for social adaptation in humans.
We hope we have illustrated the critical role that nonverbal
behavior plays in influencing basic social-psychological
processes.
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The area of nonverbal behavior has been criticized for
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psychologists who study nonverbal behavior—topics such
as how we perceive and understand the emotions, disposi-
tions, goals, and intentions of other people and how we
communicate our emotions, dispositions, goals, and inten-
tions to them.
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 Chapter 14
Mind Perception
NICHOLAS EPLEY AND ADAM WAYTZ
People seem to have access to the workings of their own
minds but not to the workings of other minds. Philosophically
speaking, this is supposed to create a problem for us.
Because we do not have access to other minds, we cannot
confidently conclude that other people have minds at all.
But most of us do not speak philosophically and therefore
have no trouble talking at length about other people’s
desires, intentions, goals, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions.
Solving this other minds problem at all seems to be no prob-
lem at all. People worry about whether others like them or
not, find them trustworthy or not, or find them attractive or
not. People wonder whether others are being truthful
or deceptive, whether others are motivated by greed or gen-
erosity, and whether others behaved intentionally or acci-
dentally. And people infer their own future mental states
when making decisions designed to create future versions
of themselves that are happy, such as whether to marry or
save for retirement. Once formed, the ability to think about
other minds is so proficient that other minds appear almost
everywhere that people look, from pets that become loving
and considerate, to technological gadgets that become obsti-
nate and vindictive, to gods that have goals and plans for
one’s life. If reasoning about other minds is a problem, it
resembles an addiction more than a conundrum.
Inferences about mental states are often at the very center
of social thought and behavior, and social psychologists
have been working for a long time to understand how,
and how well, people make them. All previous versions of
the Handbook of Social Psychology except the first have
therefore included chapters describing how people under-
stand one another (Bruner & Tagiuri, 1954; Gilbert, 1998;
Ross & Fletcher, 1985; Tagiuri, 1969)—what earlier authors
called “person perception” and what Gilbert called “ordi-
nary personology.” These chapters organize the dominant
research tradition on causal attribution that addresses the
We thank Mark Alicke, Ian Apperly, Susan Fiske, Daniel Gilbert, Bertram Malle, Jason Mitchell, Ara Norenzayan, Emily Pronin, Rebecca
Saxe, Jacquie Vorauer, and Daniel Wegner for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
498
CH14.indd 498
process by which people intuitively explain other people’s
behavior to arrive at impressions of others’ stable disposi-
tions and enduring personalities. Intentional actions reveal
more about someone’s enduring dispositions than acci-
dental actions, meaning that inferences about others’
mental states are often at the heart of the person percep-
tion process. But before an ordinary perceiver can decide
which mental states are responsible for a given action, an
ordinary perceiver needs to at least implicitly determine if
another agent has a mind in the first place, and then deter-
mine that agent’s state of mind in the second place. Interest
in these first two components of the person perception pro-
cess has now attracted so much attention, from so many
converging disciplines, in domains that go so far beyond
basic attributional questions that it necessitates its own
treatment in this handbook. Instead of having only one
chapter addressing how ordinary people understand others,
this handbook therefore has two (see also Macrae &
Quadflieg, this volume). This chapter covers how people
infer that other agents have mental states and then how
people decide what those mental states might be. That
chapter will cover, in part, how ordinary perceivers extract
information from more specific features of persons—
especially their face and body—to form impressions of
other people’s more stable and enduring identities.
Because people are capable of attributing minds to
nonhuman agents such as other animals, gadgets, or gods,
and are also capable of denying mental states to other
humans and treating them like animals or objects, we have
dropped the term person from our title and instead adopted
Wegner ’s (2002) term of mind perception. Although people
seem readily able to solve the classic philosophical version
of the other minds problem, the philosophical version cap-
tures the main theme of all current research on mind per-
ception and therefore is the central guide for this chapter.
12/22/09 3:39:35 PM

People do not have direct information about others’ mental
states and must therefore base their inferences on what-
ever information about others’ mental states they do have
access to. This requires a leap from observable behavior
to unobservable mental states that is so common and rou-
tine that people often seem unaware that they are making
a leap (Ross & Ward, 1996). The sections of this chapter
explain how mind perception differs from the more gen-
eral study of person perception (Mind Perception versus
Person Perception), why people reason about other minds
(Why Mind?), when they are likely to do so (Activating
Mind Perception), how they acquire the capacity for mind
perception (Acquiring Mind Perception), how they use this
capacity (Using Mind Perception), how minds are applied
to a wide range of targets (Targets of Mind Perception),
and why mind perception matters to social psychology
(Consequences of Mind Perception).
MIND PERCEPTION VERSUS
PERSON PERCEPTION
Although other minds cannot be directly observed, they
can be easily defined. People intuitively represent other
minds in two broad sets of psychological capacities—
conscious experience and intentional agency (Gray, Gray, &
Wegner, 2007). Conscious experience involves metacogni-
tive capacities, including secondary emotions (e.g., regret,
rage, sympathy, pride, or joy; Demoulin et al., 2004;
Leyens et al., 2003), conscious awareness of one’s envi-
ronment, and basic psychological states (e.g., fear, hunger,
thirst, or pain). Intentional agency is the capacity to engage
in reasoned action, self-control, strategic planning, or goal-
directed behavior and therefore to possess conscious pref-
erences, beliefs, and explicit knowledge. Agents—entities
that act—are attributed these mental capacities in varying
degrees along a continuum rather than as a dichotomy,
with agents being seen as having more or less of a capacity
rather than all or none of it. Agents can vary along these
two dimensions quite independently; some have a high
degree of both intentional agency and experience (e.g., the
self), whereas others having a high degree of experience
but little agency (e.g., a baby), high agency but little expe-
rience (e.g., God), or little agency or experience (e.g., a
dead person; Gray et al., 2007; cf. Gray & Wegner, 2008).
Social psychological research on mind perception bor-
rows much from its intellectual foundations in person per-
ception but differs from classic work because it is both
narrower and broader than the research in person percep-
tion from which it grew. It is narrower because it focuses
only on inferences about others’ minds—what is often
called “mentalizing” (Frith & Frith, 2003)—rather than
CH14.indd 499
Mind Perception Versus Person Perception 499
the broader host of traits, dispositions, and capacities that
people might attribute to others. People’s attempts to
understand other agents can be organized conceptually
into three questions: (1) Does it have a mind?, (2) What
state might that mind be in?, and (3) Which states of mind
are responsible for the agent’s behavior? Research on mind
perception focuses on the first two questions, whereas
much of the work in person perception has focused on the
processes of integration, correction, and discounting that
guide the third question. In this way, work on mind percep-
tion may be considered a kind of preattributional process,
identifying the kinds of causes that might explain or predict
another ’s behavior. Teenagers, for instance, are capable of
intentional deception whereas toddlers are not, and parents
trying to explain their child’s behavior do well to know the
difference.
Mind perception is also something of a preattribu-
tional process because the presence versus absence of
mind is the defining feature of people’s intuitive distinc-
tions between people and nonpeople. The psychological
line between human and nonhuman—us and them—is
among the most critical distinctions that any person or cul-
ture can make, but it is also among the most difficult to
objectively define (Farah & Heberlein, 2007). A growing
body of literature, which we review later, suggests that
this distinction is intuitively made on the relative presence
versus absence of mind. People can experience conscious
emotions such as shame or pride, contempt or compas-
sion, and suffering or joy, whereas objects or technological
agents are less able to do so. And most people think other
humans are capable of intentional actions, self-control,
and deliberate planning, whereas most people generally
believe that nonhuman animals are less capable. Mind per-
ception is therefore central to phenomena such as anthro-
pomorphism, whereby people treat nonhuman agents
as humanlike (Epley, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2007), and to
the inverse process of dehumanization, whereby people
treat other people like animals or objects (Bandura,
Underwood, & Fromson, 1975; Haslam, 2006; Leyens et al.,
2003). Ordinary perceivers, after all, are capable of treating
their pets as people and their enemies as animals. Without
perceiving minds, people are not “perceiving people.”
In contrast, research on mind perception is also broader
than existing research on person perception because it
expands the scope of agents considered by ordinary per-
ceivers. “Social” agents include any entity that acts inter-
dependently with others, but research in “social cognition”
has almost exclusively addressed how people think about
other people (Kwan & Fiske, 2008). This is unfortunate
because people seem readily able to attribute humanlike
mental states to all sorts of agents. The stock market can
“flirt with 10,000” (Morris, Sheldon, Ames, & Young,
12/22/09 3:39:36 PM
 500 Mind Perception
2007), one’s crashing computer can seem to have a “mind
of its own” (Waytz, Morewedge, Epley, Monteleone,
Gao, & Cacioppo, 2009), and one’s dog can be a loyal
and caring companion (Serpell, 2003). The vast majority
of people living today—and nearly all who have lived in
past centuries—believe in an omniscient God (or set of
gods) whose goals, intentions, and desires can be observed
in the world around them (Guthrie, 1993). Mental states
render an agent’s behavior understandable and predictable
(Baron-Cohen, 1995; Dennett, 1987; Hebb, 1946; Heider,
1958), whether those agents are people or not. Research
on mind perception shifts the focus of attention from the
target being perceived to the person perceiving and thereby
shifts the focus from a specific target to more domain-
general psychological processes involved in mental state
attributions.
The emergence of this particular chapter in the Handbook
of Social Psychology therefore marks an evolution that has
gained both breadth and depth on the problem of how people
think about themselves and others—a change that repre-
sents a collective focusing on topics that have proven of
deep importance across disciplines. Flanking the progress
in social psychology and picking up dramatic speed have
been advances in developmental psychology regarding the
acquisition and uniqueness of mind perception, in clinical
psychology regarding perturbations in the mind perception
process, in neuroscience about the biological architecture
of mind perception, and in anthropology about the impli-
cations and consequences of mind perception across cul-
tures. Social psychology serves as the hub for this research
because it bridges the study of unique populations to the
more general population, translates reductionist labora-
tory work into general mechanisms that govern behavior in
everyday life, and identifies psychological processes that
can predict and explain variability across cultures and levels
of analyses. A chapter on mind perception is therefore per-
fectly suited for the Handbook of Social Psychology, and
the surging interest in mind perception across multiple dis-
ciplines makes this a good time for the first.
WHY MIND?
Articulating why mind perception is important to social
psychologists does not explain why it seems important
to everyone else. The world is full of invisible things that
most people spend no time thinking about, from quarks to
dark matter to what it looks like inside one’s own intestinal
tract. Thinking is for doing (Fiske, 1992; James, 1890), and
the amount of time spent thinking about invisible minds
must be for something. People do not automatically attri-
bute higher-order mental states such as beliefs to others’
CH14.indd 500
actions merely upon observing an action (Apperly, Riggs,
Simpson, Samson, & Chiavarino, 2006), but instead do so
when mental states are most likely to be useful. Given that
our species seems to have acquired a universal capacity to
reason about other minds that is shared only in the dim-
mest capacity by any other species (Hare, 2007; Herrmann,
Call, Hernández-Lloreda, Hare, & Tomasello, 2007; Saxe,
2006), people must get something especially useful out
of mind perception to warrant all of the additional neu-
rons. This turns out to be wrong. People do not just get
something useful, they get at least three things useful—the
abilities to comprehend others’ actions, to understand oth-
ers’ communication, and to coordinate one’s own behavior
with others’ behavior. These benefits matter not only for
explaining why people think about others’ mental states,
but also for predicting when people are most likely to acti-
vate their capacity for mind perception to reason about
other minds.
Comprehension
Spend even 5 minutes watching a foreign film without sub-
titles and you will recognize that uncertainty about one’s
environment is inherently aversive. “Human nature abhors
a lack of predictability and absence of meaning” (Gilovich,
1991, p. 9), putting uncertainty, ambiguity, and unpredict-
ability all on the short list of life’s most unpleasant expe-
riences that people try to overcome whenever possible
(Cohen, Stotland, & Wolfe, 1955; Ellsberg, 1961). White
(1959) suggested that the desire to understand, predict, and
behave competently in one’s environment was the primary
motive guiding all of psychological development, whereas
Kagan (1972) listed understanding and comprehension
as one of four basic motivations and Fiske (2004) listed
it as one of five. Although the number appears open to
debate, the inclusion of understanding and comprehension
as a basic human motivation is not.
When a billiard ball rolls along a pool table after being
struck by another ball, nobody thinks much about the
causal sequence of events. It is an entirely different matter
when a billiard ball rolls without being struck by another
ball. Self-propelled agents cannot be completely explained
by forces outside the agent and instead must be explained by
forces inside the agent—maybe magnetism, maybe
demons, maybe mind? Understanding self-propelled move-
ment requires an explanation of why the agent starts and
stops, the intensity of the action, the direction of the action,
and the nature of the action. The metaphysical language of
mind provides just the kind of satisfactory answers needed
to explain self-propelled action from almost any kind of
agent, perhaps explaining why people seem so readily
inclined to explain others’ actions in terms of underlying
12/22/09 3:39:36 PM

mental states rather than mitigating environmental forces
(Gilbert & Malone, 1995). Desires and goals describe
why an agent starts and stops, and their strength describes
the intensity of action, whereas beliefs, attitudes, knowl-
edge, motivation, and emotions describe the direction and
nature of the action. The resulting language of intention-
ality combines these mental states with behavioral capacities
of skill and ability (Malle & Knobe, 1997) in a way that
“ties together the cause–effect relations” (Heider, 1958,
p. 100). Although all behavior is caused by underlying
physical properties, whether the machinery of a technolog-
ical agent or the neural firings of a sentient one, the com-
plexity of those physical properties runs into “the problem
of combinatorial explosion” (Dennett, 1987) as a perceiver
moves from explaining a self-propelled billiard ball to a
self-propelled human. The language of intentions and men-
tal states avoids this altogether by using the same terms to
explain and understand all seemingly self-propelled action,
or to predict the behavior of those agents.
That these concepts of mind are imprecise is precisely
irrelevant for their functional value in gaining a sense of
understanding and predictability across a range of agents.
Adopting what Dennett (1987) calls an “intentional stance”
by thinking of others in terms of mental states is a simple
and wide-ranging approximation that serves as a practical
guide for the intuitive psychologist, providing seemingly
adequate reasons that explain actions and events (Malle,
1999). At the least, it works markedly better than an
explanatory system without mental states.
Consider, for instance, the classic film clip of geomet-
rical shapes created by Heider and Simmel (1944). The
film depicts three geometrical shapes moving inside, out-
side, and around a square. The objects move as a group
but in imperfect, apparently self-propelled fashion. Like
a blurry picture coming into focus, the initial movements
of the objects are unclear but quickly take on a coherent
and organizing set of mental states that makes sense of
the otherwise random movements (big square is moving
around . . . and seems unhappy with little square . . . and is
now chasing him around the house . . . ). All but 1 of the
34 participants who initially watched the film described it
using clearly anthropomorphic mental states, and for good
reason:
As long as the pattern of events shown in the film is perceived
in terms of movements as such, it presents a chaos of juxta-
posed items. When, however, the geometrical figures assume
personal characteristics so that their movements are per-
ceived in terms of motives and sentiments, a unified structure
appears. . . . But motives and sentiments are psychological
entities. . . . They are “mentalistic concepts,” so-called inter-
vening variables that bring order into the array of behavior
mediating them. (Heider, 1958, pp. 31–32)
CH14.indd 501
Why Mind? 501
Mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions
provide explanations for otherwise random and seemingly
senseless actions. This does not mean that the mental states
people use to make sense of their world will always seem
sensible to observers, such as when New Orleans Mayor
Ray Nagin explained the unexpectedly horrible disaster of
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as an indication that “God is
angry at America [for] being in Iraq under false pretenses
[and is] upset at Black America, too” (Martel, 2006, p. A4).
Nevertheless, it does help to explain why people are likely
to use their mind perception abilities so widely.
All of this mentalizing can seem a bit silly to grown-ups
who believe they have long stopped believing in imaginary
things. Some people with harder noses than most have tried
hard to avoid it but have inevitably failed. Donald Hebb
(1946, p. 88), for instance, noted that a 2-year effort at the
Yerkes Primate laboratory to avoid using mental states to
describe chimpanzees resulted in nothing more than an
“endless series of specific acts in which no order or mean-
ing could be found,” whereas by using “anthropomorphic
concepts of emotion and attitude one could quickly and
easily describe the peculiarities of individual animals.”
Behaviorists likewise disavowed all talk of mentalizing
and discussion of unobservable cognitive states (Skinner,
1957), but they ultimately fell short of their promises by
never being able to come up with an alternative language
that either they or others were willing to use (Chomsky,
1959). Mental states turn others’ actions into something
meaningful, orderly, and seemingly comprehensible, an
outcome that is deeply satisfying to perceivers so deeply
motivated to understand.
Communication
Mental states enable understanding not only of what other
agents do but also of what others say. Communication
inherently involves getting information from one person’s
head to that of another to achieve shared understanding,
a task that at least implicitly requires considering another
person’s desires, beliefs, intentions, and knowledge (Clark &
Wilkes-Gibbs, 1986; Fussell & Krauss, 1992; Isaacs & Clark,
1987; Schober, 1993; Wilkes-Gibbs & Clark, 1992). Norms
of conversation (Grice, 1975) dictate that people follow the
“principle of optimal design,” sharing only relevant infor-
mation that accounts for the knowledge shared by both
speakers and listeners. From a speaker ’s perspective, know-
ing what is relevant for communication requires thinking
about what listeners know and what they do not. Fewer
details, for instance, are required when giving driving direc-
tions to a local than to a visitor, and people do indeed alter
their communication to match the apparent knowledge of a
listener (Lau, Chiu, & Hong, 2001).
12/22/09 3:39:36 PM
 502 Mind Perception
From a listener ’s perspective, understanding communi-
cation requires clarifying the ambiguity inherent in almost
all spoken language based on the speaker ’s presumed
intentions and goals. The same comment about one’s “nice
work,” “great haircut,” or “brilliant remark” could be inter-
preted as a genuine compliment from a friend or a sarcas-
tic barb from a foe, depending on the speaker ’s presumed
intention. Identical words can therefore communicate
different meanings, and knowledge about the underlying
intention is required for information to be communicated
effectively. Notice, for instance, the importance of a jour-
nalist’s intentions when interpreting the following (genuine)
newspaper headlines: “Prostitutes appeal to Pope,” “Miners
refuse to work after death,” “Red tape holds up new
bridges,” and “Kids make nutritional snacks.”
Because communication relies so heavily on mental
state inferences, language use and mind perception are
close traveling companions in the psychological literature.
When people fail to communicate effectively, it is often
because of a failure of mind perception to know what
needs to be said or to understand what was just said rather
than a more basic failure to know how to use a given lan-
guage (Keysar & Barr, 2002). And people who are slow to
develop language, namely, deaf children whose parents do
not use sign language, are also developmentally delayed
in their abilities to reason about others’ mental states (de
Villiers, 2005). Whether the ability to reason about mental
states is necessary for language to develop (Baron-Cohen,
1995; Bloom, 2000; Hare, 2007), or the other way around
(de Villiers, 2005; Gernsbacher & Frymiare, 2006), is
unclear. What is clear is that the ability to reason about
mental states is a major benefit when communicating with
others, and this benefit is likely one of the reasons that
people think about others’ mental states so readily.
Coordination
Understanding one’s own and others’ behavior is good,
being able to communicate with others is better, but being
able to use this understanding and communication to
predict others’ behavior is the best. Understanding why
another agent performs a particular action is a prerequi-
site for predicting it, and mind perception enables the
ordinary perceiver to reason about mental states that are
positively correlated with subsequent behavior. In a world
of interdependent relationships where people are trying to
cooperate and compete, help and hurt, and persuade and
deceive, being able to reason one step back about medi-
ating mental states allows people to stay one step ahead
of others’ subsequent behavior. Mind perception does not
give people magical powers of foresight that operate with
perfect acuity, but it provides enough predictive validity
CH14.indd 502
that evolutionary psychologists consider the acquisition
of this capacity to be one of the most likely reasons the
human brain is three times larger than that of our nearest
primate relative (Herrmann et al., 2007).
Reasoning about other minds can be useful for coordi-
nating action to achieve a wide variety of goals. Within
groups and societies, for instance, knowing “who knows
what” enables effective decision making. Instead of requir-
ing that each person know the same information within
each group, simply remembering what every other person
in the group (or society) knows enables group members to
identify appropriate experts when necessary. Such “trans-
active memory” (Wegner, 1986) can enable groups to make
decisions more quickly and efficiently (Ren, Carley, &
Argote, 2006; Zhang, Hempel, Han, & Tjosvold, 2007) and
generally improves group performance on interdependent
tasks by giving individuals access to more knowledge than
they could possess alone (Austin, 2003; Lewis, Lange, &
Gillis, 2005; Moreland & Argote, 2003; Wegner, 1995).
In negotiation and conflict resolution, accurately identify-
ing the other side’s preferences can enable more desirable
outcomes for both parties (Elfenbein, Foo, White, Tan, &
Aik, 2007; Galinsky, Maddux, Gilin, & White, 2008;
Neale & Bazerman, 1983; Thompson & Hastie, 1990),
whereas incorrectly identifying the other side’s prefer-
ences and motives can lead to less desirable outcomes
(Epley, Caruso, & Bazerman, 2006). And in almost any
interdependent social relationship where achieving one’s
own goals depends on others, mind perception is centrally
involved in decisions about whether to trust another per-
son and cooperate with them or to distrust and compete
with them (Lee, 2008; McCabe, Smith, & LePore, 2000;
Rilling, Sanfey, Aronson, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2004).
Social interaction is often likened to a game of chess, and
accurately using mental states to predict others’ behavior
enables people to play well.
Perhaps the most basic interpersonal goal facilitated by
mind perception, however, is to affiliate and connect with
desirable others (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). This goal
requires people to think about others’ existing impressions
of the self, to behave in ways that are likely to maintain
those favorable impressions, and to consider how one’s
own behavior is likely to be interpreted by others (Snyder,
1974). For instance, in the Machiavellian classic How
to Win Friends and Influence People (1936/1981), Dale
Carnegie advised readers to “try honestly to see things
from the other person’s point of view” (p. 175) and to
“talk in terms of the other person’s interests” (p. 98).
Indeed, increasing the sense of shared interests among
people also increases social connection and liking (Brewer,
1979; Byrne, 1971; Tajfel, 1981). Considering another ’s
goals, intentions, emotions, and beliefs can lead people to
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identify those who are likely to be good targets for affiliation
and to tune their behavior so that it is consistent with a
target’s presumed beliefs to increase the similarity and con-
nection (Galinsky, Ku, & Wang, 2005; Sinclair, Huntsinger,
Skorinko, & Hardin, 2005). Being finely attuned to others’
mental states can indeed be a fine way to win friends and
influence people, and being oblivious to them is a fine way
to end up alone (Davis, 1983; Galinsky et al., 2005). Given
that social isolation was tantamount to a death sentence
for most of human evolutionary history (Case & Williams,
2004), it is perhaps no surprise that normally developed
humans possess the apparently universal capacity for mind
perception (Baron-Cohen, 1995).
Finally, mind reading is beneficial for coordination in a
slightly different interpersonal context—coordinating one’s
current behavior and goals with one’s future self. People
think about themselves at some point in the future in much
the same way that they think about others (Pronin, Olivola, &
Kennedy, 2008; Pronin & Ross, 2006), using the same
psychological processes that enable people to reason about
mental states in others (Buckner & Carroll, 2007). People
marry, divorce, accept jobs, and save for retirement at least
partly based on beliefs about what will make their future
minds feel happy and contented. Although people often
make the same kinds of mistakes when thinking about
their own future mental states (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005)
as they do when thinking about others’ mental states (e.g.,
Epley, 2008; Keysar & Barr, 2002; Nickerson, 1999; Van
Boven & Loewenstein, 2003), there are also many benefits
to strategic planning and preparation that may ultimately
make it worth the occasional costs of regret and wasted
resources.
Summary: Why Mind?
Ultimately, the only relevant outcomes for the mindless
machinery of natural selection are survival and sexual
reproduction, and the capacities that enable people to live
long enough to have many viable offspring are likely those
passed from one generation to the next. It is not hard to
tell a story about how a keen mind-reading ability would
increase the likelihood of both survival and sex (Nichols &
Stich, 2003). Guthrie (1993), for instance, suggests that
people have a systematic bias toward seeing humanlike
mental states in other agents—even nonhuman agents—
because the consequences of failing to detect an intentional
agent in one’s environment exact a greater cost on one’s
reproductive fitness than mistakenly identifying an inten-
tional agent that is not there. Mithen (1996) suggests that
the attribution of humanlike mental states to nonhuman
stimuli has been adaptive in providing a useful analogy to
reason about both the natural world and technology (tools,
CH14.indd 503
Activating Mind Perception 503
weapons, etc.) that is necessary for survival. Herrmann et al.
(2007) suggest that rampant mind perception and social
intelligence are critical for living successfully in large
groups and societies, evidenced by the strong correlation
between social complexity and brain size among nonhu-
man primates (Dunbar, 2003).
It is not that such evolutionary explanations are likely to
be wrong, but rather that they are extremely difficult
to test. We have therefore focused on more proximal expla-
nations. In particular, knowledge about one’s own and
others’ mental states seems critical for explaining behav-
ior, for communicating effectively, and for coordinating
actions. Although the ability to think about other minds and
get beyond one’s own limited perspective may be among
the most useful capacities that evolution has built into the
human brain, this does not mean that it is used to solve
all of our problems, at all times, and in all circumstances.
Capacities are not to be mistaken for tendencies. The pri-
mary uses of mind perception matter because they provide
insight into when people are likely to activate this capacity
and when they are not.
ACTIVATING MIND PERCEPTION
The benefits of mind perception are inherently social in
nature, enabling interdependent actions across the gap
between self and others, as well as the gap between the
present and the future. Getting into the mind of another
agent is therefore most beneficial when interdependence
exists between self and others or when one’s current deci-
sions are directly related to one’s future reality. As a result,
situational and dispositional factors that increase interde-
pendence also increase attempts to get beyond one’s own
current perspective to consider the minds of others.
Power is perhaps the clearest determinant of social
interdependence. Those in positions of power are indepen-
dent of others because their own outcomes are unaffected
by others’ actions, whereas those without power are inher-
ently interdependent because their outcomes are controlled
by others’ actions (Fiske, 1993). Independence is not an
ancillary feature of social power; it is the defining feature
(Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). And as one would
predict given the benefits of mind perception, people
in positions of power are less likely to consider others’
mental states than are people in positions without power.
The powerful, for instance, are less likely than the
relatively powerless to attend to other people amid social
interactions (Erber & Fiske, 1984; Neuberg & Fiske, 1987;
Ruscher & Fiske, 1990), are less able to accurately identify
others’ interests and attitudes following a social interac-
tion (Keltner & Robinson, 1997), are less likely to report
12/22/09 3:39:37 PM
 504 Mind Perception
trying to see things from the other person’s perspective in
everyday life (Galinsky, Magee, Inesi, & Gruenfeld, 2006),
are less likely to experience empathy and compassion for
the suffering of another person (Van Kleef et al., 2009),
and are more likely to treat others as mindless objects
to achieve their own goals (Gruenfeld, Inesi, Magee, &
Galinsky, 2008). In one simple demonstration, participants
were asked to draw the letter E on their forehead (as a
measure of self-focused attention, Hass, 1984). Those who
had just reflected on a time that they were in a high-power
position were less likely to draw the E in an other-focused
manner so that it could be read from an observer ’s per-
spective compared with those who had just reflected on
a time they had been in a low-power position (Galinsky
et al., 2006). This does not mean that people in a position
of power are unable to consider others’ mental states if
they are specifically motivated to do so (e.g., Overbeck &
Park, 2006), but rather that possessing independence from
others is likely to diminish people’s tendency to use their
mind perception abilities.
Other factors that increase interdependence support this
more general conclusion as well. Those who are especially
motivated to connect with others, for instance, are more
likely to attend to others’ emotions (Pickett, Gardner, &
Knowles, 2004), are more likely to mimic others’ behavior
in a social interaction (Cheng & Chartrand, 2003; Lakin &
Chartrand, 2003), and are more likely to attribute mental
states to nonhuman agents such as electronic gadgets and
pets (Epley, Akalis, Waytz, & Cacioppo, 2008). People are
more likely to seek information about others’ mental states
when they expect to meet them in the future than when
they do not (Douglas, 1984, 1990) and are more likely to
accommodate another ’s perspective when effective com-
munication is important (Higgins, McCann, & Fondacaro,
1982; Higgins & Rholes, 1978; Krauss & Fussell, 1991;
Zajonc, 1960). The actions of those perceived to be a direct
threat to the self—and hence more interdependent on one’s
own actions—are perceived to be more intentional than
the actions of those who are not perceived to be a threat
(Kozak, Czipri, Felczak, & Correll, 2009). Even thinking
about money, the presence of which enables independence
from others (Vohs, Mead, & Goode, 2006), decreases the
tendency to adopt another ’s perspective in social interaction
(Mead, Caruso, Baumeister, & Vohs, 2009). Mind percep-
tion is critical in interdependent contexts, and those contexts
indeed appear to activate one’s mind perception abilities.
Situational influences can alter the tendency to engage
in mind perception from one moment to the next, but
developmental and cultural influences can create longer-
lasting changes from one person to another. Having sib-
lings increases a child’s need to consider other minds, and
children with siblings appear better able to reason about
CH14.indd 504
other minds than do children without siblings (Jenkins &
Astington, 1996; Lewis, Freeman, Kyriakidou, Maridaki-
Kassotaki, & Berridge, 1996; McAlister & Peterson, 2007;
Perner, Ruffman, & Leekam, 1994). Beyond the local cul-
ture of one’s family, the interdependent nature of one’s
broader ethnic or national culture influences mind per-
ception. Markus and Kitayama (1991, p. 229) note that
“the reciprocal interdependence with others that is the sign
of the interdependent self . . . requires inhibiting the
‘I’ perspective and processing instead from the ‘thou’
perspective. . . . The requirement is to ‘read’ the other ’s
mind and thus to know what the other is thinking or feel-
ing.” Collectivist cultures in which the interdependent
self-concept dominates, such as in Southeast Asia, there-
fore tend to produce individuals who are also more likely
to consider other minds in social interactions compared
with members of independent cultures, such as the United
States and Western Europe, who focus more heavily on the
self (Cohen & Gunz, 2002; Leung & Cohen, 2007). When
interpreting spoken instructions, for instance, members of
collectivist cultures tend to consider the speakers’ inten-
tions and visual perspective more readily than do members
of individualist cultures (Wu & Keysar, 2007). Like any
other behavioral tendency, thinking about other minds may
become more habitual in an environment that reinforces
people for doing so.
All of these results suggest that activating one’s capacity
for mind perception can be moderated by the interdepen-
dent nature of the social context. This should not be taken
as evidence, however, that people automatically think
about other minds in interdependent contexts. Monitoring
others’ thoughts requires attention and mental effort, and
people can consider others’ perspectives only after they
have acquired a perspective themselves. People can there-
fore fail to consider others’ mental states because they are
so absorbed in their own. In negotiations between indi-
viduals or groups, for instance, explicitly asking people
to consider the other side’s thoughts and preferences can
significantly alter people’s behavior and the outcomes of
the negotiation, suggesting that negotiators who were not
explicitly instructed were also not naturally considering
others’ perspective to the same degree. Sometimes such
perspective taking can improve negotiation outcomes
because it highlights potential integrative solutions (e.g.,
Galinsky, Maddux, et al., 2008; Neale & Bazerman, 1983;
Thompson & Hastie, 1990), and sometimes it can hinder
negotiations because it highlights selfish and conflicting
motives in others (Epley et al., 2006). Regardless of the
direction, both effects arise because considering others’
thoughts activates information that was not activated
already when people were absorbed in their own perspec-
tive. These results simply serve as a reminder that others’
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mental states are inherently invisible, and that people
are unlikely to see them unless they are actively looking
for them.
Although increasing the degree of interdependence is
the most widely studied moderator of activating the capac-
ity to consider other minds, it is not the only one. For
instance, considering the meaning of an event (i.e., why
an event happened) makes the agent performing the event
seem more mindful compared with focusing on low-level
details of the event (i.e., how an event happened; Kozak,
Marsh, & Wegner, 2006). Likewise, increasing the appar-
ent unpredictability of an agent increases attention to the
agent’s mental states (Barrett & Johnson, 2003; Epley,
Waytz, Akalis, & Cacioppo, 2008; Waytz, Morewedge,
et al., 2009). These additional findings are consistent with
the main benefits of mind perception discussed in the pre-
vious section, suggesting that people are more likely to
think about other minds when explaining, understanding,
or predicting others’ actions.
The results discussed in this section provide some
insight into when people are likely to think about other
minds but not into how people do so once the capacity
is activated. Understanding how people solve the other
minds problem requires first looking beyond the traditional
boundaries in social psychology to understand how people
acquire the capacity to reason about other minds over the
course of development and then identifying tasks that
reveal the mechanisms enabling people to make inferences
about others’ mental states. We take both of these steps in
turn over the next two sections.
ACQUIRING MIND PERCEPTION
Like many desirable human capacities, such as the ability
to effectively use language, tools, or basketballs, people
are not born with the ability to overcome the other minds
problem but instead develop the ability over time. Social
psychologists are not usually excited about explaining
variability in a person’s behavior across time, largely
because they are more interested in explaining variability
in a person’s behavior across situations at a single point in
time. But in this case, longitude informs latitude. The lon-
gitudinal trajectory of mind perception across time pro-
vides insight into variability in mind perception across
situations at any one point in time. Reasoning about some
mental states (intentions and goals) seems to be easy,
whereas reasoning about other mental states seems to be
difficult (mistaken beliefs and differing perspectives). The
speed with which these capacities develop in children can
help to identify which is which. Many errors committed
by children as their capacity develops are the same kinds
CH14.indd 505
Acquiring Mind Perception 505
of errors committed by adults when their capacity is taxed,
differing more in the degree of error rather than in the kind
of error. Understanding how the ability to reason about
mental states comes into being over the course of years has
been fruitful for understanding how this capacity functions
over the course of moments in full-grown adults.
A Theory of Mind
Tracking the development of any capacity requires a con-
crete understanding of the capacity being tracked and how
to measure it. Mind perception involves making infer-
ences about one’s own and others’ mental states by pos-
iting unobservable properties such as intentions, desires,
goals, beliefs, and secondary emotions to serve as media-
tors between people’s sensory input and their subsequent
action. This inferential process is usually referred to as a
theory of mind for two main reasons, “first, because such
[mental] states are not directly observable, and second,
because the system can be used to make predictions, specif-
ically about the behavior of other organisms” (Premack &
Woodruff, 1978, p. 515). Considerable confusion and incon-
sistency has plagued the use of the term “theory of mind”
because it has been used at some times too narrowly by
including only theory-based inferences about other minds
and at other times too broadly by including social cogni-
tive inferences that do not involve mind perception per se
(e.g., dispositional inference). We therefore use “theory
of mind” to refer only to a person’s intuitive belief that
other agents do indeed have minds and that this belief con-
tains some knowledge about how minds work.
Understanding what a theory of mind would entail is
easier than knowing when someone is using it. Premack
and Woodruff (1978) first raised this issue when consid-
ering whether chimpanzees have a theory of mind. They
demonstrated, for instance, that a chimpanzee watching a
person perform a goal-directed action (e.g., struggling to
get a banana out of a locker) would consistently select a
tool that would enable the person to achieve a presumed
goal (e.g., a key) when given the choice between a rele-
vant and an irrelevant tool (e.g., a key or a hose attached
to a water spigot). Three commentators were unimpressed
and independently suggested a different method that has
dominated research in this area ever since—testing cases
in which a target’s mental states differ from a perceiver ’s
own mental states (Bennett, 1978; Dennett, 1978; Harman,
1978). Dennett, for instance, noted that simple associations
and learned experience could create behavior that looked
the same as using a theory of mind. Because true beliefs
tend to correspond with reality, this covariance makes it
difficult to determine whether agents are responding to
their own beliefs about reality or to what they know about
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 506 Mind Perception
another agent’s beliefs. To identify that perceivers are
using a theory of mind would require testing their ability
to reason from another agent’s false beliefs—or another ’s
belief that differs from one’s own belief. More than simply
providing a suggestion, Dennett also provided a method
of experimentation (as did Harman, albeit less explicitly).
What if the key that normally opened the locker had been
moved to a new location by an evil experimenter, who then
swapped a useless key in its usual place? Would the original
experimenter look in the location where the key is usually
kept, and where the original experimenter therefore believes
it to be? Or would the original experimenter look in the new
location, where the perceiver now knows it to be?
This procedure has come to be known as the false belief
task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985; Wimmer &
Perner, 1983). It is generally considered one of the criti-
cal markers of a fully developed theory of mind because it
requires using many of the most sophisticated elements of
mind perception—postulating unobservable mental states,
using those states to predict behavior that would differ
from the way an objective observer would respond, and
using those mental states (in humans) to explain the tar-
get’s mistaken action. Solving the false belief task requires,
at least theoretically, the recognition that others’ mental
states may differ fundamentally from one’s own and that
behavior is determined by others’ beliefs independent of
one’s own beliefs. Armed with a new method and a clear
goal, psychologists raced to discover when this theory of
mind develops in children, who can solve theory of mind
tasks and who cannot, and what factors alter the ability to
solve these tasks. The resulting research produced a flurry
of results and a blizzard of controversy. Once everything
settled, the following firm conclusions remained.
Developing a Theory of Mind
Cross-Age Development Reasoning about other minds
first requires paying some attention to the agents that might
possess minds. This begins early, around 3 months of age,
when children start finding the common targets of mind
perception especially interesting and show preferential
attention toward other people (Legerstee, 1991), animate
objects (Crichton & Lange-Küttner, 1999, and biological
motion (Bertenthal, Proffitt, & Cutting, 1984). This hyper-
sensitivity to agency remains a critical component of mind
perception for the rest of people’s lives (Barrett, 2000).
After attending to agents that might possess a mind,
observers need to develop a tendency to interpret and
understand those agents’ actions in terms of mental states
such as desires and intentions (e.g., she likes that or he
wants to leave). Around 6 months of age, children appear
to distinguish between goal-directed action and simple
biological motion, attending longer to novel goal-related
CH14.indd 506
actions (e.g., an experimenter reaching for a new toy after
reaching repeatedly in the same way for another toy) than
to novel biological action directed toward the same goal
(e.g., an experimenter reaching for the same toy after
repeatedly reaching for it using a different behavioral
grasp; Woodward, 1998). Children as young as 7 months
even imitate another person’s goal-directed reach regard-
less of whether the goal was achieved but do not mimic
accidental or apparently unintentional reaching (Hamlin,
Hallinan, & Woodward, 2008; see also Carpenter, Akhtar, &
Tomasello, 1998; Meltzoff, 1995). By 2 years of age, chil-
dren use an agent’s intentions to encode their actions, such
as using an artist’s intentions when providing names for
drawings (Preissler & Bloom, 2008).
Selectively attending to other agents does not, however,
give insight into other agents’ mental experience without
the additional capacity of sharing their attentional perspec-
tive. Most adults know that if you want to find out what
people are thinking you should pay attention to where they
are looking. Indeed, people not only think about objects
they are led to look at (Grant & Spivey, 2003) but also
tend to look at objects they are thinking about (Rayner,
1998; Tanenhaus, Magnuson, Dahan, & Chambers, 2000;
Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1996).
Children seem to implicitly understand this as early as
2 months, when they look preferentially at a person’s eyes
compared with other aspects of the face (Maurer, 1985), and
by 2 years they can almost perfectly orient themselves in
the direction of another ’s gaze (Baldwin, 1991, 1993). The
eyes may not provide a window into a person’s soul, but
they certainly provide a window into that person’s mind by
developing joint attention between a target and a perceiver.
With these foundational abilities of attending to social
agents, representing desires and goals, and acquiring joint
attention in place, theory of mind begins to develop with
more sophistication. Between 18 months and 2 years, chil-
dren begin to identify intentions from an actor ’s speech
(Baldwin & Moses, 1996) and begin using mental states
(e.g., “want”) in their own speech (Bartsch & Wellman,
1995; Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982; Wellman, 1993).
Children around this time also develop a more complete
understanding of the concept “desire” and its implica-
tions, understanding that people behave in accordance with
their desires and are unhappy if they do not get what they
want (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995). By age 3, children also
develop a more complete understanding of intention, differ-
entiating intended from unintended action (Shultz, 1991),
and between 4 and 5 years children understand intentions
as separate from desires and as separate from the outcomes
of intentional acts (Astington, 1993; Moses, 1993).
A fully sophisticated theory of mind, however, involves
not only the recognition that other agents have mental
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states that predict and explain behavior—children seem
to overcome the philosophical version of the other minds
problem before they are out of diapers—but also the added
ability to recognize that others’ mental states may differ
from one’s own. Differing motivations, goals, intentions,
beliefs, or even vantage point may lead people to perceive,
evaluate, and understand the same stimulus in different
ways. A fully developed theory of mind enables perspec-
tive taking—the ability to reason about others’ mental
states independent of one’s own. Piaget (1959) recognized
that this ability to overcome egocentrism marked the major
difference between children and adults:
We have endeavored to show . . . that thought in the child is
egocentric, i.e., that the child thinks for himself without trou-
bling to make himself understood nor to place himself at the
other person’s point of view. . . . If this be the case, we must
expect childish reasoning to differ very considerably from
ours, to be deductive and above all less rigorous. (p. 1)
Various measures suggest that children, at least in terms
of their theory of mind, start looking more like adults
around the age of 4 or 5 (Deutsch & Pechmann, 1982;
Flavell, 1986; Sonnenschein & Whitehurst, 1984). Most
extensively studied at this age are children’s abilities to
reason about false beliefs. Following the suggestions by
Dennett (1978) and others described earlier, Wimmer and
Perner (1983) developed the false belief task in which par-
ticipants are asked to predict how someone with a false
belief is likely to act. In the typical false belief task, partic-
ipants watch a story in which one character (Sally) places an
object (a key) in a drawer and then leaves the room. While
Sally is away, her sister (Ann) walks into the room and
moves the key to a cupboard on the other side of the room.
Sally then returns to the room, and participants predict
where Sally will look for the key. The obvious answer to
any adult is that Sally will look where she believes the key
to be, namely, in the drawer where she put it. This is not
obvious, however, to a 3-year-old, who is likely to predict
that Sally will look where the child knows the object to be,
namely, in the cupboard. Children start to solve this partic-
ular problem correctly around the age of 4 and do so more
reliably around the age of 5 in cultures around the world
(Callaghan et al., 2005; Perner, Leekam, & Wimmer, 1987;
Perner & Wimmer, 1985).
The development of the ability to reason about false
beliefs in others mirrors the development of the ability to
attribute false beliefs to the self. Three-year-olds who learn
a fact during an experimental session, for instance, tend
to claim that they have always known that fact, whereas
4- and 5-year-olds report that they did not know the fact
before the session (Taylor, Esbensen, & Bennett, 1994).
This difficulty in reasoning about false beliefs in others
CH14.indd 507
Acquiring Mind Perception 507
appears to stem from difficulties inhibiting one’s own
present perspective or knowledge (Carlson, Moses, & Hix,
1998; Carlson & Moses, 2001; Zaitchik, 1991), a difficulty
that leads to conceptually identical egocentric biases in
judgment among full-grown adults (Birch & Bloom, 2007;
Epley, Keysar, Van Boven, & Gilovich, 2004; Keysar &
Barr, 2002). Although this ability to reason about others’
perspectives may not develop quite as quickly as many
parents would like, the basic components of a fully devel-
oped theory of mind are already in place by the time most
children are off to kindergarten.
Cross-Species Development Human infants acquire the
ability to reason about other minds over the course of years,
but Homo sapiens acquired it over the course of millennia.
Notable similarities and differences in mind perception
exist between humans and their closest relatives, similari-
ties that bear testament to a common evolutionary ancestry
and differences that may help to explain notable gaps in
behavioral capacities. Premack and Woodruff (1978) ques-
tioned whether chimpanzees have a theory of mind, and
the answer has proven elusive ever since. Although such
attempts have long been plagued by allegations of ram-
pant anthropomorphism on the part of researchers rather
than actual abilities on the part of primates (Asquith, 1986;
Darwin, 1872/2002; Hebb, 1946; Povinelli & Vonk, 2003),
there are now good reasons to believe that chimpanzees
and some other great apes possess a rudimentary theory of
mind that is similar to that of a developing human (Call &
Tomasello, 2008). Like young infants, chimpanzees pref-
erentially attend to social agents and can track (albeit not
perfectly) another agent’s eye gaze to monitor that agent’s
attention (Povinelli & Eddy, 1996a). Chimpanzees also
have some understanding of goals. Like human infants
(Behne, Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2005), chimpanzees
differentiate between intentional and accidental behavior,
responding differently, for instance, when a person fails to
give them food because of an inability to do so versus an
unwillingness to do so (Call, Hare, Carpenter, & Tomasello,
2004). Chimpanzees also respond differently to accidental
versus intentional actions (Call & Tomasello, 1998), such
as when another chimpanzee steals food versus receives
the same food innocently (Jensen, Call, & Tomasello,
2007). Chimpanzees also imitate an intentional action
even when the action has not been completed (Myowa-
Yamakoshi & Matsuzawa, 2000; Tomasello & Carpenter,
2005). Chimpanzees will hand a person an object they
appear to be reaching for intentionally, for instance, but
not one that the person is “reaching” for only accidentally
(Warneken & Tomasello, 2006).
More advanced capacities also emerge among chimpan-
zees, most notably the recognition that other agents possess
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 508 Mind Perception
beliefs and knowledge. Chimpanzees not only track others’
eye gaze but also communicate in gestures that suggest
an understanding that other agents’ knowledge is at least
partly a function of their visual perspective (Povinelli &
Eddy, 1996b). Chimpanzees, for instance, are more likely
to hide or take food from others when they are not look-
ing or when others’ vision is occluded (Hare, Call, &
Tomasello, 2006; Melis, Call, & Tomasello, 2006).
Although chimpanzees have these basic building blocks
in place for a fully functioning theory of mind, they do
not seem able to understand false beliefs or recognize that
others’ evaluations of a stimulus might differ fundamen-
tally from their own (for reviews, see Call & Tomasello,
2008; Hare, 2007; Penn & Povinelli, 2007). Chimpanzees
fail nonverbal versions of false belief tasks that 5-year-old
humans readily pass (Call & Tomasello, 1999), even when
the task is competitive and rewards are clearly contingent
on performance (Hare, Call, & Tomasello, 2001).
Such a divergence in mind perception could arise either
because humans have acquired more general intelligence
over evolutionary time or because humans have acquired
more social intelligence in particular. Emerging evidence
suggests that evolution may have favored particular over
general. Consider one particularly ambitious set of experi-
ments comparing a sample of more than 100 2.5-year-old
humans with the same number of adult chimpanzees (and
32 more distantly related orangutans for good measure;
Herrmann et al., 2007). No meaningful difference emerged
among these groups in performance on technical or physi-
cal tasks, such as the ability to track a reward after its loca-
tion changed, the ability to understand and use numerical
quantities, or several measures of the ability to understand
causal relations (including using tools). Humans and chim-
panzees solved approximately 68% of these tasks correctly,
and orangutans solved 59% correctly. Large differences
emerged, however, on the three major tests of social
intelligence, including the ability to learn by mimicking
others, the ability to communicate through gestures that
accommodate another ’s attentional state, and two theory
of mind tests (following an actor ’s gaze and understand-
ing an actor ’s intention following an unsuccessful action).
Children solved these social tasks correctly nearly 75% of
the time, whereas chimpanzees and orangutans did so 33%
and 36% of the time, respectively. Although still a matter
of speculation, these authors suggest that this heightened
social intelligence serves “as a kind of ‘bootstrap’ for the
distinctively complex development of human cognition
in general” (Herrmann et al., 2007, p. 1360). Our nearest
primate relatives have the building blocks necessary for
mind perception but not the full ability to reason about oth-
ers’ mental states independent of one’s own. This seem-
ingly unremarkable difference may be the one ability out
CH14.indd 508
of which other sophisticated human capacities develop—
from imagining the future, to reconstructing the past, to
using symbolic language (Hare, 2007). Science may not
end up identifying mind perception as the critical human
capacity that moved us as a species from savannahs to sky-
scrapers, but it is not a bad bet.
Methods of Acquisition
The trajectory through which people develop a theory of
mind does not explain how people acquire it, but under-
standing this process of acquisition provides insight into
how adults in everyday life are likely to use their mind per-
ception faculties. Before psychological science required
calculations to make assertions, many philosophers noted
that the easiest way to solve the other minds problem was
to use one’s own mental experiences as a guide or anal-
ogy (e.g., Hume, 1739/1958; Kant, 1781/1953; Russell,
1948; Smith, 1759/1976). Common to all of these propos-
als is that understanding others’ mental states first requires,
as Mill (1872/1974) suggested, understanding “my own
case”—understanding how one’s own mind works by
noting covariance between one’s own behavior and one’s
inner experience. Theories about other minds may develop
out of childhood experience with one’s own mind follow-
ing basic principles of inference—that agents should have
minds like one’s own to the extent that they appear similar
on relevant dimensions.
Almost immediately after birth, human infants mimic an
adult’s facial expression, head movements, and hand ges-
tures (Meltzoff & Moore, 1997). Such mimicry occurs quite
automatically through the rest of life (Chartrand, Maddux, &
Lakin, 2005). This provides a mechanism for develop-
ing a theory of mind because people tend to use their own
actions and behaviors as information when making infer-
ences about their own experiences, thoughts, and inten-
tions. Adults, for instance, find cartoons to be funnier when
holding a pen in their mouth that forces a smile (Strack,
Martin, & Stepper, 1988), find persuasive messages even
more compelling when nodding their heads up and down
(Wells & Petty, 1980), and rate stimuli more favorably
when moving their arms in an approach-oriented posture
than when moving them in an avoidance-oriented pos-
ture (Cacioppo, Priester, & Berntson, 1993; for a review,
see Semin & Smith, 2008). Others’ emotions and experi-
ence are contagious, at least in part, because humans from
the early moments of life find themselves quite naturally
mimicking others’ actions (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson,
1994; Meltzoff & Brooks, 2001).
Many systematic mistakes that young children make
when reasoning about others suggest that young children
do indeed assume that others’ mental states are the same
as one’s own. For instance, if children are shown a pencil
12/22/09 3:39:39 PM

box containing candy, 3-year-olds mistakenly report that
they knew the contents of the box all along before opening
it and that others will know the actual contents of the box
as well, whereas older children correctly note they believed
the pencil box would contain pencils rather than candy and
that others will also be mistaken (Astington & Gopnik,
1988; Gopnik & Astington, 1988). These mistakes are not
random but instead are systematically egocentric. Children
predict that other agents will know what “I” know and
behave accordingly. When children are able to understand
themselves and the workings of their own mental states,
they readily apply these mental states to others (Harris,
2002; Meltzoff, 2007; Piaget & Inhelder, 1956). The sym-
metrical nature of theory of mind development for perceiv-
ing oneself and for perceiving others suggests that children
may use knowledge about the self to understand others’
minds (Harris, 1991; Johnson, 1988) or that the same theo-
ries and perceptions that guide self-understanding also
guide the understanding of others (Gopnik & Meltzoff,
1994). As we discuss later, it is likely that both of these
processes are operating. To at least some degree, acquir-
ing information about one’s own experiences and resulting
mental states serves as a likely guide to acquiring informa-
tion about others.
If infants begin their education about others’ mental
states by assuming that other minds are similar to one’s own
(Meltzoff, 2007), then they earn their interpersonal doctor-
ates by recognizing the subtle and nuanced ways in which
their own perceptions are unique. Later transitions in theory
of mind development appear to involve acquiring informa-
tion from external observation and through social learning
that suggests one’s own egocentric perspective is an imper-
fect analogy for reasoning about other minds (Gopnik,
1996; Gopnik, Slaughter, & Meltzoff, 1994; Gopnik &
Wellman, 1994). Culture provides one influential source of
such information, and variance in theories of mind appear
to stem at least partly from external knowledge conferred to
young children over the course of development, rather
than simply through egocentric experience. Children living
in rural cultures, for instance, acquire different theories
about nonhuman animal minds compared with children liv-
ing in urban cultures, cross-cultural variance that appears
better explained by differences in socialization than by dif-
ferences in first-person simulation (Anggoro, Waxman, &
Medin, 2008; Lillard, 1998; Shweder & Bourne, 1984).
Similarly, experience that one’s own mental states may differ
from others is gained more quickly when more other minds
are present to learn from. Family members have a critical
influence on theory of mind development, suggesting a
process of apprenticeship whereby children learn about
mental states from close others. Recall that children with
siblings, for example, show reliably better performance
CH14.indd 509
Acquiring Mind Perception 509
on false belief tasks (Perner et al., 1994). Children whose
parents discuss mental state terms early in development
also understand false beliefs more quickly (Dunn, Brown,
Slomkowski, Tesla, & Youngblade, 1991).
Acquiring the ability to reason about other minds occurs
in a relatively predictable pattern, incorporating two broad
sources of information—first-person experience from the
inside and third-person observation from the outside. Of
these, first-person experience appears primary in develop-
ment, with the basic mechanisms that would enable first-
person experience of others’ inner mental states present
already at birth (or at least as close to birth as new moth-
ers are willing to let scientists get). The mistakes made
by young children, as well as by nonhuman primates, are
consistent with an early egocentric view of the world that
is later supplanted by recognition that first-person expe-
rience may be misleading and that one’s egocentric per-
ception may be inappropriate as an analogy for others.
A fully developed theory of mind therefore employs
acquired information about the agent being perceived
and information acquired from a host of external sources and
observations about how particular minds work. How these
two sources of information create a fully developed theory
of mind, and the precise degrees to which first-person per-
ception versus third-person observation are involved, is
actively debated (Goldman, 2008; Nichols & Stich, 2003)
and discussed in more detail in the next section. What
seems clear at the moment is that both sources of infor-
mation appear necessary to explain the entire existing pat-
tern of evidence from early infancy to later childhood, and
attempts to reduce this complexity into a single source of
information so far have favored parsimony over reality.
Summary: Acquiring Mind Perception
Understanding the development of mind perception is rel-
evant for social psychologists not because of the timeline
it produces but rather because of the stairway it suggests.
The precise time at which some capacity can be detected
is at least partly a function of the precision of the measure
to track it. As those measures become more sophisticated
(or as the tasks get easier), the dates at which capacities
emerge become increasingly earlier. This may lead, by
extrapolation, to the feeling that developmental psychol-
ogists will eventually show that an infant can write The
Brothers’ Karamazov if only given the right kind of pen-
cil. One recent study using a nonverbal version of the false
belief task, for instance, reports that children as young as
15 months may be predicting others’ behavior based on the
other person’s presumed beliefs (Onishi & Baillargeon,
2005), instead of at four to five years old as observed in
linguistic versions of the false belief task.
12/22/09 3:39:40 PM
 510 Mind Perception
The more important point is to notice the pattern in
which capacities develop and appear to build on one
another across different measures. Infants do not enter the
world with an intuitive understanding of how minds work,
but they develop it quickly. The process that adults go
through when reasoning about other minds does not liter-
ally recapitulate the developmental trajectory they followed
to acquire that capacity, but there are notable similarities.
Adults tend to naturally mimic other people’s behavior, are
relatively generous in attributing mental states to nonhu-
man agents, reliably use simple mental state concepts such
as intentions and desires to explain others’ behavior but
less reliably use more complicated concepts such as knowl-
edge and beliefs, have an easy time inferring that others’
preferences are similar to their own, and have relatively
more difficulty reasoning about cases when others’ prefer-
ences are different than one’s own. Parents are consider-
ably more adept than their children at mind perception, but
they do not seem to outgrow their childhood tendencies so
much as they effortfully overcome them when engaging
in mind perception. Of course, acquiring a capacity and
using it in everyday life are different things. How adults
use their fully formed capacity for mind perception, how
the surrounding environment enables or disables people’s
ability to reason about other minds, and how mind percep-
tion shapes social life are precisely the kinds of questions
social psychologists care the most about. The rest of the
chapter provides at least a partial answer to each one.
USING MIND PERCEPTION
Oliver Sacks (2003) wrote a vivid account of what it is
like to go blind later in life and unintentionally provided a
revealing example of everyday mind perception. In this
account, Sacks described two extreme outcomes following
adult-onset blindness, one in which people lose their sense
of the visual world altogether and another in which they
develop a heightened sense of the visual world through
extremely vivid and detailed mental imagery. Sacks was
describing a person from this latter vivid imagery group
whose carpentry skills had become so proficient that he was
able to replace all of the roof gutters on his house single-
handedly. This man reported that his neighbors were
understandably startled to see a blind man doing carpen-
try work on his roof, but that they were especially startled
when they saw him working in the dark of night.
This heightened startle comes from the reflexive ease
of imagining oneself on the roof in the dark of night. But
startles are fleeting, and this reflexive egocentrism is sub-
sequently replaced by the recognition that darkness is
no trouble for a man without functioning eyes to see it.
CH14.indd 510
This example illustrates both major pieces of information
people can use when reasoning about other minds, as well
as the process underlying mind perception that is observed
over the course of years in children and over the course
of moments in adults. Understanding another ’s differing
mental states, for the young and the old alike, may first
require overcoming one’s own.
These two sources of information—one’s own mental
states or experience and differentiating information about
other minds, such as causal theories or stereotypes—have
been the backbone of psychological theories designed to
explain the underlying mechanisms that enable mind per-
ception. Simulation theories have posited that people rea-
son about other minds by using themselves to simulate
and reason about others’ mental states, whereas inferential
theories—usually encompassed by the umbrella term theory
theory—have posited that people reason about other minds
like intuitive scientists, using a theory of how minds work
to make inferences about others’ mental states independent
of one’s own psychological perspective.
The debate between simulation and theory theory
accounts of mind perception began like many in psycho-
logical science, with proponents staking out extreme posi-
tions that mind readers use only one source of information
or the other. The years of accumulating research have not
been kind to strict adherents of either position. This debate
is therefore resolving like many others in psychological
science, with hybrid models suggesting that people use
both simulation and theory-driven inference in varying
degrees, depending on the situational context and the
perceiver ’s processing capacity or motivational state.
These theoretical accounts have morphed so extremely
and complexly over time that any attempt to characterize
them invariably misses subtleties across them. None of the
evidence presented in the following paragraphs is com-
pletely consistent with one theoretical proposition and
completely inconsistent with the other, and the empirical
tussle has produced many glancing blows without a single
knockout. Our approach is therefore to review evidence at
least broadly consistent with each general mechanism and
then to describe recent integrative accounts that we believe
are likely to be more comprehensive, more accurate, and
more useful for understanding how people reason about
other minds in everyday life.
Mechanisms of Mind Perception
Simulation Theories
The intuitive solution to the other minds problem is to use
one’s own mind to simulate another ’s mind. As Russell
(1948, p. 483) argued, “The behavior of other people is
in many ways analogous to our own, and we suppose that
12/22/09 3:39:40 PM

it must have analogous causes.” This argument from
analogy has such a long history (Hume, 1739/1958; Mill,
1872/1974; Ryle, 1949; Wittgenstein, 1953) that phi-
losophers defending it in the 1960s were already feeling
somewhat apologetic—“To some it may seem like I am
flogging a dead horse” (Slote, 1966, p. 341). After all,
Kant (1781/1953, p. A353) had nearly two centuries earlier
called the tendency for analogical reasoning about others
to be “obvious.”
Psychologists in the 1960s were just getting started,
however, in refining a descriptive account of the process
by which one’s own mental experience might be used to
solve the other minds problem and were doing so in the
face of attacks from alternative models that were decid-
edly less “obvious.” Floyd Allport had introduced the term
“social projection” in 1924 to describe the positive correla-
tion between students’ reports of their own cheating behavior
and their estimates of others’ cheating (Allport, 1924; see
also Katz & Allport, 1931), but formal accounts of how
the mechanism underlying such projection might operate
did not emerge until considerably later. The culminating
efforts that appear to have sparked subsequent research
occurred in 1986, when Heal, Gordon, and Humphrey
independently refined philosophy’s argument from analogy
by proposing that adults understand others’ mental states
through a process of first-person simulation (or what Heal
called “replication”). By this account, people need not
acquire any abstract or inferential theory of mind but can
instead understand others’ mental states by imagining what
they would think, desire, or intend if they were in the same
situation and then projecting the results of this simula-
tion onto the target (Harris, 1992). “We could . . . imagine
what it’s like to be [others],” Humphrey wrote (1986,
pp. 71–72), “because we know what it’s like to be ourselves
[and] make sense of [others’] behavior by projecting what
I know about my mind into them.” This approach essen-
tially turns the philosophical version of the other minds
problem on its head—people can reason about others’ mental
states precisely because they have first-person access to
their own mental states.
The term simulation is no accident; it specifies when this
process is likely to be used and when it is not. Simulations
are useful for understanding a system when the actual
experience is impractical or imprudent. The likely behav-
ior of a skyscraper in a windstorm, for instance, can be
understood by building a small-scale model and turning
on a fan, or the likely effects of a medical treatment on
humans can be understood by giving the treatment to rats
instead. In the absence of any direct perceptual informa-
tion about another person’s mental states, people may opt to
simulate another’s mental states by using one’s own mental
states. For instance, the consistent introspective experience
CH14.indd 511
Using Mind Perception 511
that one’s own thoughts precede one’s behavior can lead
to the causal inference that thoughts cause actions, even
if the actual neural sequence of events occurs in precisely
the opposite direction (Wegner, 2002). This resulting expe-
rience of intentional causation and free will can then be
used to infer that others’ behavior is caused by their inner
thoughts as well.
A classic objection to the argument from analogy is
that people can viscerally imagine all sorts of experiences that
they have never directly experienced themselves, such as the
pain of having a nail driven into one’s eye or the terror of
being buried alive. These simulation accounts, however,
do not require that people simply project their own past
experience onto others but rather that people possess the
ability to imagine their experiences in another state and
use the output of that simulation as a proxy for others’
mental states (Goldman, 2008). The ability to imagine an
event through fantasy and pretense without actually hav-
ing to experience it is surely on the list of humans’ most
desirable capacities (Hegarty, 2004), enabling people to
efficiently understand and learn about events without
taking the time or risking the danger of living through
all of them.
Of course, simulations are useful only when they are
good analogues for the target or system to be understood.
Giving drugs to rats to simulate their effects on humans
makes reasonable sense; giving drugs to robots for the
same purpose does not. People should therefore naturally
use their own experience and simulation abilities to reason
about others who appear similar on relevant attributes to
the self and should be less inclined to do so to reason about
others who seem different from the self. In the presence of
a person or agent perceived to be similar to oneself, and in
the absence of any other individuating information, using
one’s own introspective experience as a guide may not only
be a perfectly rational thing to do (Krueger & Acevedo,
2005), it may be the only possible thing to do (Dawes &
Mulford, 1996). Although this moderating factor of simi-
larity was not an explicit feature in original accounts of
simulation theories, it was at least implied by the logic of
the theory itself. Simulation may therefore be most use-
fully characterized as just one tool or heuristic that people
have at their disposal for reasoning about other minds, one
that is likely to be used more extensively in some contexts,
overridden in others, or sometimes avoided entirely.
At least four classes of findings are commonly cited as
evidence for a simulation-based mechanism. First, mind
perception exhibits systematic biases consistent with a simu-
lation mechanism. Chief among these are that inferences
about others’ mental states—including goals, intentions,
emotions, attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge—are often
egocentrically biased (see Alicke, Dunning, & Krueger,
12/22/09 3:39:41 PM
 512 Mind Perception
2005, for a review). Consider just a few examples. In
general, people use their own knowledge as a guide to
others’ knowledge, leading people to believe that others’
attitudes and beliefs are relatively similar to their own
(Alicke & Largo, 1995; Babcock & Loewenstein, 1997;
Krueger & Clement, 1994; Ross, Greene, & House, 1977).
People who own an object, for instance, tend to value it
more than people who do not (Kahneman, Knetsch, &
Thaler, 1990), and owners therefore tend to assume that
nonowners will value the object more than nonown-
ers actually do (Loewenstein & Adler, 1995; Van Boven,
Dunning, & Loewenstein, 2000). Conceptually identical
egocentric biases also emerge when people evaluate dis-
tant versions of themselves in the future and past, with
people inferring their preferences, beliefs, and attitudes
in the future and past based on those mental states in the
present (Eich, Reeves, Jaeger, & Graff-Radford, 1985;
Fischhoff, 1975; Goethals & Reckman, 1973; Hawkins &
Hastie, 1990; Loewenstein, O’Donoghue, & Rabin, 2003;
McFarland & Ross, 1987; see also Bernstein, Atance,
Meltzoff, & Loftus, 2007). Anyone who has been confident
of never being hungry again immediately after eating a big
meal has directly experienced the ease with which one’s
current state can be used as a guide to one’s future states
(Gilbert, Gill, & Wilson, 2002; see Loewenstein, 2005, for
a review). This egocentric “curse of knowledge” (Camerer,
Loewenstein, & Weber, 1989) also emerges in people’s
tendency to overestimate the extent to which others can
identify their hidden emotions, preferences, and inten-
tions (Cameron & Vorauer, 2008; Gilovich, Savitsky, &
Medvec, 1998; Keysar & Barr, 2002; Kruger, Epley,
Parker, & Ng, 2005) and in their tendency to use private
self-evaluations as a guide for how they will be evaluated
by others (Chambers, Epley, Savitsky, & Windschitl, 2008;
Gilovich, Kruger, & Medvec, 2002; Kenny & DePaulo,
1993). Simulations produce outputs dependent on fea-
tures of the simulating mechanism itself, and all of these
results suggest that attempts to understand others’ men-
tal states depend critically on self-centered inputs from
one’s own mental states.
Second, simulations can be revealed not only in the
systematic features that are present in the outputs of mind
perception but also in the features that are absent. Mental
simulations differ in several ways from actual experience
(Gilbert & Wilson, 2007), but one especially distinctive
way is that simulations are relatively timeless. Whereas
experience occurs in real time, mental simulations unfold
in an instant. Try, for example, to imagine how happy you
would feel spending a week on vacation in Hawaii. If we
were welcoming you back to this sentence only moments
later rather than a week later, you get the point. Indeed,
people’s inability to accurately incorporate the conse-
CH14.indd 512
quences of time into their evaluations is widely documented
in people’s predictions of their own and others’ future
feelings and preferences (Ratner, Kahn, & Kahneman, 1999;
Read & Loewenstein, 1995; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003), as
well as in the recollection of mental experiences such as pain
and suffering (Ariely, 1998; Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993;
Redelmeier & Kahneman, 1996; Schreiber & Kahneman,
2000). Simulations are often insensitive to the actual time
that characterizes extended human experience, and people’s
assessments of other agents’ mental states often appear to be
relatively insensitive to time as well.
Third, people are often egocentric when considering other
agents’ mental states, but not universally so. Both behav-
ioral and neuroimaging evidence suggest that the perceived
similarity between oneself and a target moderates the extent
to which people use themselves as a guide to others. In one
experiment, for instance, Columbia University students
predicted the preferences of a University of California
at Berkeley student. The more similar participants felt to
UC Berkeley students in general, the more they relied on
their own preferences to estimate the preferences of a parti-
cular UC Berkeley student (Ames, 2004b). In a more recent
neuroimaging experiment, neural regions associated with
self-referential thoughts (especially the ventral medial pre-
frontal cortex) were activated when participants reasoned
about the mental states of a person perceived to be similar
to themselves but not when they reasoned about a person
perceived to be different (Mitchell, Macrae, & Banaji,
2006). More broadly, the extent to which a target looks
like or moves at the same pace as a human moderates the
extent to which people attribute humanlike mental states to
both human and nonhuman targets, at least partly explain-
ing why hummingbirds and sloths seem relatively mind-
less compared with more humanly paced horses or lions
(Morewedge, Preston, & Wegner, 2007). Not only does
perceived similarity appear to increase the tendency to
use oneself as a source of simulation, but the opposite
occurs as well: Being explicitly asked to simulate another
person’s perspective and put oneself in another ’s shoes
increases the perceived similarity between self and other
(Davis, Conklin, Smith, & Luce, 1996; Galinsky et al.,
2005), the amount of empathy viscerally experienced
for another person (Batson, 1998), and the amount of
self-referential thought engaged (Ames, Jenkins, Banaji,
& Mitchell, 2008; Davis et al., 2004). Adopting another ’s
perspective even leads people to behave in ways that
are consistent with the stereotypes associated with a
particular target (Galinsky, Wang, & Ku, 2008). People
seem to egocentrically simulate others’ mental experience
when they perceive others to be similar, and they become
more similar to others once they have simulated others’
mental experience.
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Finally, people appear to simulate others’ experience
not only in their mind but in their whole bodies as well. As
already mentioned, the tendency to mimic others’ behavior
can be observed as soon as mothers allow psychologists
to examine their infants (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977, 1983,
1994). Adults maintain this tendency, mimicking others’
actions such as yawning (Platek, Critton, Myers, & Gallup,
2003) or face rubbing (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). Those
who are dispositionally inclined to engage in perspective
taking (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), or who are especially
motivated to form a social connection with another per-
son (Lakin & Chartrand, 2003; Lakin, Chartrand, & Arkin,
2008), are also the most likely to mimic others’ behavior.
For instance, those who are not in a committed romantic
relationship are more likely to mimic an attractive opposite-
sex partner in an interaction than those who are in a com-
mitted relationship (Karremans & Verwijmeren, 2008).
This mimicry not only makes others’ behaviors contagious
but makes their moods, emotions, and attitudes conta-
gious as well (Neumann & Strack, 2000; for reviews, see
Hatfield et al., 1994; Semin & Smith, 2008). Disabling a
person’s ability to mimic another ’s behavior also seems to
impair one’s ability to recognize the mental states associ-
ated with that behavior. In one experiment, for instance,
participants asked to bite down on a pen were less able to
detect changes in others’ emotional expressions than those
who could move their mouths freely (Niedenthal, Brauer,
Halberstadt, & Innes-Ker, 2001). Participants in another
experiment were less able to accurately identify happi-
ness in another ’s facial expression when biting on a pen
that specifically disabled the ability to smile (Oberman,
Winkielman, & Ramachandran, 2007; see also Niedenthal,
Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005).
Mental states can be produced by actions, and copying
others’ actions provides a plausible mechanism for copy-
ing their mental states.
Recent neuroscientific evidence suggests that such
mimicry may even occur without overt behavioral imita-
tion. We doubt that Hume (1739/1958, p. 365) was think-
ing literally when he wrote that “the minds of men are
mirrors to one another,” but it appears that mimicry may
indeed result from specialized neural circuitry that mir-
rors others’ actions (see Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004, for
a review). Because virtually all humans object to having
probes inserted into their brains, direct evidence of these
“mirror neurons” comes at this point only from macaques
in whom a nontrivial percentage of cells (roughly 10% to
15%) in the premotor cortex become active both when they
are performing an action (e.g., reaching for food) and when
they are observing the same action performed by others
(Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Rizzolatti, 1996; Keysers
et al., 2003; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, & Fogassi, 1996).
CH14.indd 513
Using Mind Perception 513
These mirror neurons are more active when others are
performing intentional actions (e.g., reaching toward food)
than when performing unintentional actions (e.g., the same
reaching behavior in the absence of food; Fogassi et al.,
2005; Umilta et al., 2001).
More indirect evidence for a highly complex mirror neu-
ron system in humans comes from less invasive techniques
of functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroen-
cephalograms showing similar activation for performing
versus observing intentional actions (Buccino, Binkofski, &
Riggio, 2004; Buccino et al., 2001; Decety et al., 1997;
Iacoboni et al., 2001) and for experiencing versus observing
emotions (Jabbi, Swart, & Keysers, 2007). This mirror
system is involved not only in simulating the actions
of human agents but also in simulating the actions of non-
human agents such as robots and simple shapes (Gazzola,
Rizzolatti, Wicker, & Keysers, 2007; Wheatley, Milleville, &
Martin, 2007). Because simulating others’ mental states
requires matching representations of the self with repre-
sentations of others, these mirror neurons may provide
the neural architecture for this exact matching function in
mind reading and serve as the mechanism that enables empa-
thy with others (Ferrari et al., 2006; Gallese & Goldman,
1998; Gallese, Keysers, & Rizzolatti, 2004; Rizzolatti,
Fogassi, & Gallese, 2001).
Discovery of the mirror neuron system is recent, and
enthusiasm for potential implications is vastly outpac-
ing empirical support for them (Saxe, 2005; Southgate &
Hamilton, 2008). Many implications of the mirror neuron
system for broader social functioning remain highly specu-
lative, and their direct links to mind perception have not yet
been demonstrated. Adult macaques, for instance, do not
appear to engage in overt behavioral mimicry even though
they possess mirror neurons (although infant macaques
mimic in the first days of life; Ferrari et al., 2006), nor
is there strong evidence that macaques can represent oth-
ers’ mental states. Research establishing the connections
among mirror neurons, mimicry, and mind perception will
likely fill psychology journal pages for years to come.
Nevertheless, these emerging findings in neuroscience,
along with long-standing evidence of egocentric biases
in judgment, moderation of self-referential reasoning by
perceived similarity, and behavioral evidence of mim-
icry, make it clear that people at least sometimes under-
stand others’ mental states through a process of simulation.
When Slote (1966) worried that other philosophers would
perceive him as “beating a dead horse,” it was not because
simulation in mind perception had been conclusively dem-
onstrated but rather because its validity as a logical form
of reasoning had been so widely and thoroughly attacked
by other philosophers (Plantinga, 1966). Psychological
research has not so much revived this particular dead
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 514 Mind Perception
horse as shown that its appeal to ordinary perceivers as a
psychological mechanism for knowing other minds was
never in much doubt.
Theory Theories
An account of mind perception based only on simulation
seems to echo Piaget’s assessment that people possess only
a “protoplasmic consciousness unable to make any distinc-
tion between the self and things” (1929, p. 235). But Piaget
was talking about 2-year-olds. What makes adult mind
readers remarkable is not their ability to perceive similari-
ties between themselves and others but rather their ability
to perceive differences. The developmental trajectory
described earlier is marked by impressive changes in the
ability to recognize that others’ mental states are different
from one’s own, that the self is distinct from others, and
that people’s overt behaviors may be deceptive and there-
fore inconsistent with their underlying beliefs. As adults,
the self is defined by features that make it different from
others (e.g., needs Sports Illustrated, has fishing poles,
likes sauerkraut) rather than by the features that make
it similar to others (e.g., needs oxygen, has arms, likes
money; Kihlstrom et al., 1988; Markus & Sentis, 1982).
If the self is a tool that is used to simulate similar others’
mental states, then it might not come in handy as often as
one might suspect.
One way to explain these changes is that people learn
how other minds work over time and acquire an intui-
tive understanding of psychology, just as a scientist learns
about a topic under study by testing hypotheses and attend-
ing to available evidence (Churchland, 1984). People do
not understand others’ behavior on these theory-driven
accounts by imagining themselves in another ’s shoes and
simulating the mental states that would result—an egocen-
trically based process. Rather, they use an intuitive theory
of mind that explains behavior in terms of underlying men-
tal states—an allocentrically based process (Flavell, 1988;
Gopnik, 1993; Leslie, 1987; Perner, 1991). People learn
that their mothers are to be trusted but their politicians are
not, and they use their existing knowledge about these tar-
gets to predict their goals, intentions, preferences, or other
mental states rather than using an egocentrically based
simulation. The content of these theory-driven inferences
can come through observations of others’ actions, interpre-
tations of one’s own actions, or culturally conferred stereo-
types and associations that form the basis of knowledge
about the relationship between mental states and behavior.
Understanding the mental states of other agents is no dif-
ferent on this account than any other kind of inferential rea-
soning that posits invisible forces such as goals or gravity
to explain observable actions such as fighting or falling
(Baker, Tenenbaum, & Saxe, 2008).
CH14.indd 514
This proposition is old news to social psychologists.
Theories of person perception have long proposed the
same idea—that people understand an actor ’s intentions
and the behavioral dispositions that are likely to result by
either implicitly or explicitly performing a causal analy-
sis of the person’s behavior based on individuating or cat-
egorical knowledge. Indeed, the entire history of research
on causal attribution in social psychology posits theory-
driven processes of inference to make sense of oneself
and others (Bruner & Tagiuri, 1954; Gilbert, 1998; Jones,
1990; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000). Understanding other
people’s momentary mental states, as well as their endur-
ing dispositions, requires attention to a person’s behavior
across time and situations in comparison with other people’s
behavior. These causal attribution theories proposed that
people attend to covariation between an actor ’s behavior
and its consequences to reveal underlying intentions, in
which unconventional or unique behaviors (i.e., noncom-
mon effects) were the most likely to reveal unique and
informative intentions about the person (Jones & Davis,
1965). Stable behavioral dispositions that distinguish one
person from another are revealed by a more complicated
test (a three-way analysis of variance, in fact) that considers
the extent to which a person’s behavior occurs only in the
presence of a particular stimulus or entity (its distinctive-
ness), occurs consistently over time in the presence of the
same stimulus or entity (its consistency), and is similar to
others’ behavior in the same circumstance (its consensus;
Kelley, 1967, 1973).
As with simulation accounts, several classes of findings
are broadly consistent with this theory-driven account of
mind perception. First, when introspective signals are weak
or ambiguous, people appear to reason about their own men-
tal states by using the same process of theoretical inference
that they use to reason about others (Bem, 1972; Gopnik,
1993; Karniol, 2003; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Ryle, 1949).
People presume, for instance, a consistent correspondence
between a person’s beliefs and their resulting behavior (e.g.,
she said she loved me because she really loves me), and
decades of research shows that people are inclined to draw
this correspondent inference even when alternate causal
explanations are available (e.g., a preceding plea to “just
tell me you love me”; Gilbert & Jones, 1986).
People under certain conditions exhibit this correspon-
dence bias when observing their own behavior as well
(Gilbert & Gill, 2000). If, for instance, people are induced
through subtle experimental manipulation to behave in a
way that is inconsistent with their previously expressed
(but easily forgotten) attitudes, people change their own
attitudes to be consistent with their behavior. People make
the same kinds of inferences about another person’s under-
lying beliefs (Bem & McConnell, 1970). Because people’s
12/22/09 3:39:42 PM

inferences about the causes of their own actions sometimes
follow the same set of logical inferences made about
others, it is reasonable to presume that mental state infer-
ences are often based on the same process of theoretical
inference. “The way the mind seems to its owner is the
owner’s best guess at its method of operation, not a revealed
truth” (Wegner, 2005, p. 33). If putting oneself in one’s own
shoes requires some theoretical guesswork, then surely
putting oneself in another person’s shoes does so as well.
Second, adults’ ability to reason about the conse-
quences of others’ false beliefs provides evidence consis-
tent with a theory-driven account of mind perception (for
reviews, see Malle, 2005; Saxe, 2008). Children’s ability
to explain another ’s actions in terms of underlying mental
states (e.g., a false belief) seems to precede their ability to
accurately predict another ’s behavior based on false beliefs
(Amsterlaw, 2006), suggesting that an intuitive under-
standing of mental states precedes the ability to predict the
behavioral consequences of them. Among adults, neuroim-
aging suggests regions specifically dedicated to reasoning
about others’ beliefs. Although early evidence suggested a
wider network of regions involved in theory-based mental
inferences, accumulating evidence suggests that the tem-
poroparietal junction bilaterally is the most selectively
active region for solving false belief tasks in particular
(Saxe, 2008). This region is also selectively active when
people listen to a story focused on another person’s inner
thoughts (e.g., a belief) compared with other inner attri-
butes such as their bodily states (e.g., hunger or sick-
ness) or their outer appearance (e.g., tall or thin; Saxe &
Powell, 2006, but see Mitchell, 2008, for an alternative
interpretation).
Finally, people do not rely on egocentric simulations
when reasoning about others who are different from them;
instead, they rely on individuating or categorical informa-
tion (Krueger, 1998; Vorauer, Hunter, Main, & Roy, 2000).
For instance, asking people to write about the ways in
which they are different from the average MBA student
increases the use of stereotypes about the average MBA
student to predict this target’s preferences, and diminishes
the use of one’s own preferences (Ames, 2004a, 2004b). The
number of articles reporting the pervasive influence of ste-
reotypes in social judgments is now so extensive that it is
more easily weighed than counted, and receives consider-
able treatment in other chapters of this handbook (Dovidio &
Gaertner, volume 2; Fiske, volume 2; Macrae & Quadflieg,
this volume; Yzerbyt & Demoulin, volume 2). Although
stereotypes are not exclusively used to make mental state
inferences, they are the kinds of representations that can
be used to make theoretical predictions about them and are
therefore consistent with theory-driven accounts of mind
perception.
CH14.indd 515
Using Mind Perception 515
Integrative Accounts: Mind Perception as
Inductive Inference
Whenever opposing sides of a scientific dispute generate
so much evidence and so little resolution, it is a good guess
that participants in the debate are talking past each other
rather than to each other. Classic debates in psychology
about nature versus nurture, motivation versus cognition,
and dissonance versus self-perception invariably end not
by one side beating the other into submission but rather by
delineating territory to understand the domains in which
each set of forces is likely to operate. Luckily for progress
in understanding mind perception, the entrenched either–
or debates about a single underlying mechanism are giv-
ing way to calls for integration (e.g., Apperly, 2008; Keysers
&Gazzola, 2007; Mitchell, 2006) and even a few sugges-
tions for how to do so (Ames, 2004a; Epley, Morewedge, et
al., 2004; Keysar & Barr, 2002; Malle, 2005; Mussweiler,
2003; Nichols & Stich, 2003; Saxe, 2008; Zaki & Ochsner,
in press). People appear able to use both simulation and
theory-driven strategies for solving the other minds prob-
lem. The trick for psychologists is to understand when
people adopt one, another, or some combination of both.
One promising integration is to recognize that reasoning
about other minds represents a more basic process of induc-
tion, whereby people reason about unobservable mental
states in others by starting from an inductive base of readily
accessible knowledge. Like any process of induction, men-
tal state reasoning should be guided by the basic cognitive
operations of knowledge activation and subsequent appli-
cation (Gilbert & Hixon, 1991; Higgins, 1996). This latter
application stage includes attempts to correct or adjust an
intuitive response in light of less accessible information also
activated at the time of judgment. Such correction processes
are notoriously difficult, requiring mental effort (i.e., exec-
utive control) to integrate information, test alternatives, or
inhibit a highly accessible default (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull,
1988). As a result, inductive inferences are consistently
biased in the direction of the most readily accessible infor-
mation. Such dual process accounts have dominated theo-
ries of human judgment in social psychology because they
have proven fruitful in explaining judgments that seem to
be based on a combination of intuitive and reflective
responses, as well as the systematic biases in judgment that
result (e.g., Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Epley, Keysar, et al.,
2004; Gilbert & Malone, 1995; Kahneman & Frederick,
2002; Lieberman, Gaunt, Gilbert, & Trope, 2002).
Dual-process models appear useful for reconciling
when people are likely to use their own mental states and
experiences as a guide to others’ momentary and transitory
mental states rather than using their developed theory of
mind based on known attributes about others. In particular,
12/22/09 3:39:42 PM
 516 Mind Perception
several findings suggest that egocentric simulation can be
a default mechanism for predicting others’ mental states,
activated automatically and only subsequently adjusted
to accommodate for perceived differences between self
and others. The reason is that one’s own perspective is
not simply a source of analogy for other minds but is also
the source through which people construct and understand
reality (Asch, 1952; Krech & Crutchfield, 1948). People
see the world through their own eyes, experience it through
their own senses, and have ready access to their own
knowledge and attitudes. These inputs are distinctly per-
spective bound, and they influence how people understand
and interpret their perceptions or how people imagine and
construe events when direct perceptual inputs are absent
(e.g., when imagining hypothetical or future events com-
pared with directly observing another ’s behavior). These
top-down influences work automatically and reflexively,
enabling a person to understand an otherwise ambiguous
action at the time that an event is encoded but leaving no
trace of its effects. As a result, people tend to be naïve
realists, assuming that their own perceptions are an objec-
tive reflection of the way the world is rather than merely a
reflection of the way the world appears to them (Ross &
Ward, 1996).
If mental states are produced by people’s subjective
interpretation of reality, then one’s own assessment of
the real world is a sensible and rational starting point for
reasoning about others’ mental states (Dawes & Mulford,
1996; Krueger & Acevedo, 2005). But adults also learn over
the course of development that their own perceptions may
be a bad stopping point in social judgment because oth-
ers’ perspectives may differ from their own and that their
resulting mental states can differ (Epley, Morewedge, &
Keysar, 2004; Gilbert & Gill, 2000). In the language of
dual-process models, simulation may be an automatic
process necessary to characterize an event, whereas using
one’s theory of mind is a controlled process of correction
or adjustment of an egocentric anchor that requires effort-
ful attention, deliberate activation, and intentional control.
Consider, for instance, the paradigmatic test of mental
state reasoning—the false belief task: If Sally places her
key in a drawer and her sister, Ann, then moved it to the
cupboard while Sally is at school, then where will Sally
look when she comes back to look for her key? In this task,
one’s own knowledge differs from the target’s knowledge,
and people have to rely on what the target knows to predict
Sally’s behavior. Young children appear to use their own
knowledge to simulate Sally’s behavior, predicting that she
will look in the cupboard. Older children appear to over-
come their own knowledge and predict that Sally will look
where she believes the key to be. This potential shift from
simulation to theory-driven prediction appears to take place
CH14.indd 516
over the course of years in young children, and it suggests
that older children adopt a more sophisticated method of
reasoning about minds than young children.
This same shift appears to take place over the course
of moments in adults. Adults do not seem to outgrow
their tendency to simulate others’ experience; rather, they
develop the ability to subsequently overcome and suppress
it when clearly required to do so. Performance on theory of
mind tasks in children, for instance, is at least partly
determined by the simultaneously developing capacity
to inhibit default responses (Carlson, Moses, & Claxton,
2004). In false belief tasks with adults, evidence of ego-
centric anchoring emerges when more subtle prediction
measures are used, such as indicating the likelihood that
a target will look in a given location rather than simply
being asked where the target will look (Birch & Bloom,
2007). Reasoning about others’ differing (false) beliefs
also appears to require more effortful cognitive processing
than reasoning about others’ similar (true) beliefs (Apperly,
Back, Samson, & France, 2008), and decreasing people’s
tendency to engage in effortful thought (e.g., by putting
them in a happy mood) increases egocentric biases in false
belief tasks (Converse, Lin, Keysar, & Epley, 2008).
Several other findings are consistent with this egocen-
tric default and correction account. For instance, the ego-
centric biases described earlier in which people tend to use
their mental states as a guide to others do not show evidence
of complete egocentrism, but are moderated in a direction
that suggests an effortful and deliberate attempt to incorpo-
rate information about how others’ mental states might dif-
fer from one’s own. People who own an item, for instance,
know that buyers are likely to value it less than they do, and
buyers likewise know that owners value an item more than
they do themselves (Van Boven et al., 2000). These distinc-
tions show evidence of using one’s own mental states and
evaluations as a guide to others, as well as using theoretical
inferences about others’ differing mental states that make
their own evaluations unique. These results simultaneously
provide evidence of egocentric anchoring in the strong cor-
relations between self and other and evidence of theory-
driven correction in the mean differences between self and
other (McFarland & Miller, 1990).
More revealing, however, is that egocentric biases—
such as those stemming from the “curse of knowledge”—
increase when people are asked to respond quickly, and
when they are especially inclined to accept default responses
in judgment (e.g., when they are nodding their heads com-
pared with shaking them from side to side), but decrease
when people are motivated to engage in additional effort-
ful thought by financial incentives for accuracy (Epley,
Keysar, et al., 2004). People also appear to interpret others’
spoken language egocentrically and only subsequently
12/22/09 3:39:42 PM
 Targets of Mind Perception 517

accommodate another ’s differing perspective. Participants Summary: Using Mind Perception

in one experiment, for instance, were asked by an experi-
People appear to use multiple strategies to solve the other
mental confederate to move objects around a vertical grid
minds problem, not only using the self as a source of anal-
(Keysar, Barr, Balin, & Brauner, 2000). Some objects
ogy or simulation but also using theory-driven inferences
could be seen only from the participant’s own perspective,
about how particular minds work. However, determining
whereas others were mutually visible to the participant and
whether recent attempts to integrate these two sources of
the confederate. On critical trials, the confederate provided
information into a more general theoretical model are suc-
an ambiguous instruction that could refer to two objects,
cessful is unfortunately a task for the future rather than for
one hidden from the confederate and one mutually observ-
the present. At present, the rapidly accumulating evidence
able. Results showed that participants tended to look first
from varying domains suggests that simple solutions to the
at the hidden object suggested by an egocentric interpre-
other minds problem are likely to explain some phenomena
tation of the instruction and only subsequently to look at
but not others, and that a full theory of how people make
the mutually observable object suggested by knowledge
inferences about unobservable mental states will have to
of the other person’s perspective. Highlighting how this
attend to the complexities of everyday life more than to the
process in adults is similar to that in children, an experiment
dictates of Occam’s razor. If social psychologists are to be
comparing children and their parents using the same eye-
a part of this solution, it will require looking far beyond
tracking paradigm demonstrated that children and adults
our usual interests to consider how this process develops
did not differ in the speed with which they interpreted an
and how it varies across species. It will require going far
instruction egocentrically (after correcting for baseline dif-
beyond the typical behavioral methods that have defined
ferences) but did differ in the speed with which they cor-
the discipline to integrate emerging discoveries in neuro-
rected that egocentric interpretation (Epley, Morewedge,
science. It will require retaining a focus on key phenomena
et al., 2004). Adults may not end up solely using their own
in everyday life and using highly controlled experiments to
perspective as a guide to others’ mental states, but they
shed light on phenomena that people outside the discipline
may well begin there.
care about. But most of all, it will require transcending
Although people can sometimes appear to be using a
the natural tendency to reason about problems from our
combination of simulation and theory-driven mechanisms
own disciplinary perspective in order to integrate a dizzy-
to make inferences about other minds, they are not nec-
ing array of findings emerging far beyond the traditional
essarily using them in equal degrees across all situations.
bounds of social psychology and identify a common lan-
Factors that increase the tendency to use the self as an
guage that everyone can understand to discuss it. Despite
inductive anchor in prediction should therefore moder-
being the central focus of frenzied activity in psychology
ate the extent to which people rely on simulation-based
for decades, and in philosophy for centuries, the enormous
mechanisms centered on one’s own perceptions and beliefs
existing literature on how people solve the other minds
versus more theory-driven inferences based on one’s devel-
problem in everyday life does not, as yet, provide a com-
oped theory of mind. Perceived similarity to the self is the
prehensive solution. It provides a call to action.
most obvious determinant. As already mentioned, people
use themselves as a source of information when reasoning
about similar others, but rely more heavily on stereotypes
and categorical information about others who seem to TARGETS OF MIND PERCEPTION
be different from them. When stereotypes about a target
are highly accessible, self-relevant information may not be Understanding how a process functions is important not
used. We believe it is telling that most demonstrations simply for curiosity’s sake, but also for application’s
of egocentric biases consistent with a simulation account sake. Social psychologists care about the mechanisms
involve reasoning about an unspecified or ambiguous tar- that enable mind perception because they care even more
get (e.g., the average American, another participant in this about how people apply this capacity to understand other
experiment, or a fictional character in a story), whereas minds in everyday life and the consequences that result.
most demonstrations consistent with theory-based infer- The mechanisms of mind perception allow people to “see”
ences come from contexts in which categorical informa- other minds, but they do not tell us what people will
tion about a target is highly relevant and clearly specified see when they think about those minds. Humans and other
(e.g., the target’s gender, race, or ethnicity). Without spe- animals can appear mindful or mindless, hurricanes can be
cific information about other minds, simulation is not only seen to reveal the mind of God or as random acts of nature,
a reasonable strategy for inductive inference—it may be and at times a computer may seem to have a mind of its
the only possible strategy. own. The basic mechanisms of mind perception discussed

CH14.indd 517 12/22/09 3:39:43 PM

 518 Mind Perception
in the previous section appear to operate in a relatively
similar fashion across various targets, from evaluations of
one’s own mental states, to the evaluation of other people’s
mental states, to the evaluation of nonhuman agents such
as animals, gadgets, and gods. Research investigating how
people assess the mental states of these various targets can
be divided into three broad categories—own versus other
minds, close versus distant other minds, and human versus
nonhuman minds. Although the mechanisms that enable
mind perception across each of these distinctions appear
to be the same, the way in which they are applied and the
outcomes that result are anything but.
Own Versus Other Minds
The philosophical version of the other minds problem
makes a critical distinction between the seemingly direct
way people experience their own mental states from the
inside and the indirect way people experience others’
mental states from the outside. People experience their own
minds directly, whereas other minds are inherently invis-
ible and must be inferred using the “outside” mechanisms
of simulation and theory-driven inferences. John Locke
(1690/1975) suggested that this implied a kind of sixth
sense of “introspection” that allows people to perceive
their own mental states, and René Descartes (1637/1998)
was so convinced that his sixth sense operated truthfully
that he staked both his own existence, as well as God’s, on
it. Introspection provides an intimate look into the deep-
est parts of ourselves, apparently revealing truths about our
mental processes that simply cannot be identified any other
way. C. S. Lewis (1952, p. 33) described the common senti-
ment best when he argued that the self was the only thing
“in the whole universe which we know more about than
we could learn from external observation . . . In this case we
have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know.”
Both Descartes and Lewis were wrong. Descartes
was wrong because introspection does not operate truth-
fully but rather interpretively, making sense of the brain’s
operation and sensory experiences more than directly
reporting on the causes of one’s judgments and behavior
(Bargh & Morsella, 2008; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977;
Wegner, 2002; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). Lewis was wrong
because a reliance on introspection to predict one’s own
behavior from the inside perspective can sometimes be
less calibrated than predictions based on information
observed from an outside perspective (Bass & Yammarino,
1991; Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994; Epley & Dunning,
2000, 2006; Koehler & Poon, 2006; MacDonald & Ross,
1999; Risucci, Tortolani, & Ward, 1989). Although both
Descartes and Lewis were wrong about the actual validity of
introspection, they were right about its apparent validity
CH14.indd 518
to ordinary perceivers. People tend to rely on introspective
access to their own mental states when understanding their
own mind, adopting an “inside” perspective, but rely more
heavily on observed or recalled behavior when reasoning
about others, adopting more of an “outside” perspective
(for a review, see Pronin, in press).
For instance, people tend to use their intentions more
heavily when inferring their own enduring traits and dis-
positions than they do when inferring others’ traits and
dispositions. People may think that they are conscientious
for merely planning to throw a birthday party, but need to
see an actual party to infer that another person is equally
conscientious (Kruger & Gilovich, 2004). Explanations of
one’s own behavior also tend to focus more on unobserv-
able reasons (mental states such as beliefs, intentions, and
motives), whereas explanations of others’ behavior tends
to focus on past behavior (causal histories that explain
the progression of one event to another with less focus
on inner mental states and experiences; Malle, Knobe, &
Nelson, 2007). People also consult their current intentions
when predicting their own future behavior (e.g., such as
their good intentions to donate to a charity) but tend to rely
more heavily on general behavioral base rates or obvious
external influences when predicting others’ behavior (e.g.,
such as how often people normally donate in such char-
ity drives or how difficult it would be to donate; Buehler
et al., 1994; Epley & Dunning, 2000; MacDonald & Ross,
1999). And because of the general preference for intro-
spection when thinking about oneself, people prefer inside
information over outside observation when predicting their
future emotional reactions that would enable introspective
simulation. When women in one experiment wanted to
predict, for instance, how much they would enjoy “speed-
dating” a man, they preferred to know information about
the man’s identity more than to know how much another
woman liked her speed-date, even though the latter infor-
mation produces more accurate predictions than the former
(Gilbert, Killingsworth, Eyre, & Wilson, 2009).
Notice that the major cause of the asymmetry in these
findings is not so much between self and other as between
an inside approach to prediction and explanation that relies
heavily on introspective experience and an outside approach
that reasons more heavily from observed or presumed
behavior (Jones & Nisbett, 1972; see also Kahneman &
Lovallo, 1993; Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). As a result,
this same asymmetry in attention to introspective mental
states arises across other forms of psychological distance,
not simply between self and other but also between self
in the present and self in the future. Some evidence does
indeed suggest that people represent future versions of
themselves in ways that are similar to how they represent
others, again using introspective experience more when
12/22/09 3:39:43 PM

evaluating themselves or making decisions in the present
but focusing more on observable attributes of the situation
and context when evaluating themselves in the future or pre-
dicting their future behavior (Pronin et al., 2008; Pronin &
Ross, 2006).
Although the mechanisms that enable mind percep-
tion are designed to help ordinary perceivers narrow the
gap between the observability of one’s own mental states
and the observability of others’ mental states, these results
make it clear that they are unlikely to close the gap entirely.
Empathizing with another ’s pain, for instance, generates
affective reactions consistent with experiencing pain but
not the intense sensory stimulation of actually experienc-
ing pain (Singer et al., 2004). This suggests that the other
minds problem might pose something of a problem after
all: If introspection vividly illuminates the workings of
one’s own mind, it may in many ways seem “brighter” than
the minds of others that are viewed less directly through the
mechanisms of simulation and theory-driven inference. If
people cannot see others’ mental states as easily as they
can perceive their own, then they may indeed believe that
others have less mind than they have themselves.
Numerous findings converge on this “lesser minds”
problem. The most direct comes from studies showing that
people believe they possess more mentally complex traits
(e.g., “analytic,” “imaginative,” and “sympathetic”) than
others do (Haslam & Bain, 2007; Haslam, Bain, Douge,
Lee, & Bastian, 2005), possess more complicated moral
sentiments than others do (Epley & Dunning, 2000; Heath,
1999; Kahn, 1958; Miller, 1999), and are therefore more
likely to be influenced by these secondary emotional
states and moral sentiments than others are (Epley &
Dunning, 2000; Hsee & Weber, 1997; Koehler & Poon,
2006; McFarland & Miller, 1990; Miller & McFarland,
1987, 1991; Sabini, Cosmas, Siepmann, & Stein, 1999;
Van Boven, 2000). People also report that they are better
able to reason objectively about the external world and
are therefore less biased in their judgment than the more
simplistic reasoning of others (Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross,
2004), are better able to resist persuasive appeals and mass
media attempts to influence their judgment (Davison, 1983;
Perloff, 1993; see also Pronin, Berger, & Molouki, 2007),
and are more psychologically responsive to the demands
of a situation than are others who are seen as responding
more mindlessly on the basis of stable and enduring traits
(Kammer, 1982; Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, & Marecek,
1973). People even report that they are more capable mind
readers than others, having more insight into other people’s
“true selves” than others have into their own “true selves”
(Pronin, Kruger, Savitsky, & Ross, 2001).
Beyond these self-reported capacities, evidence that
others seem to have “lesser minds” emerges from people’s
CH14.indd 519
Targets of Mind Perception 519
explanations of behavior. People tend to explain their own
behavior by appealing to more complicated mental states
of beliefs and knowledge—more complicated and late-
developing concepts in one’s theory of mind—whereas
they explain others’ action by appealing to the more sim-
plistic mental concepts of wants and desires (Malle et al.,
2007). People also recognize more complex relations
between their own mental states and behavior than they
appear to do when explaining others’ behavior. When vot-
ing in an election, for instance, people can recognize that
the correspondence between their belief and actual voting
may be complicated—that they can vote for a candidate
not because they truly like the candidate (an approach
motivation) but rather because they actively dislike the
opposing candidate (an avoidance motivation). Even when
people experience this disconnect between their thoughts
and their behavior, they nevertheless assume a simple cor-
respondent relationship in others’ behavior—that others
vote for a candidate because they like that particular candi-
date (Miller & Nelson, 2002).
This can, under certain circumstances, create a state of
pluralistic ignorance whereby most people assume that their
own mental states (attitudes, beliefs, intentions, or goals)
differ from the majority of others in a group despite identi-
cal overt behavior (Allport, 1924). People may, for instance,
privately feel that norms of political correctness have gone
too far or that lenient drinking norms on campus are a
real cause for concern, but they follow these norms none-
theless because they interpret others’ identical behavior in
following the norm to indicate that others are actually
in favor of the norm (Miller & McFarland, 1987, 1991;
Prentice & Miller, 1993; Van Boven, 2000). If introspection
enables the observation of complex relationships between
one’s mental states and one’s behavior, its absence leaves
relatively simple relationships between mental states and
behavior in others, and relatively simpler minds as well.
Some of these tendencies are almost certainly self-
satisfying and may therefore appear to stem from the
motivation to think well of oneself rather than from the dif-
ferential access to one’s own versus others’ mental states
and experience. Believing oneself to be more thoughtful,
emotionally complex, or behaviorally sophisticated than
others is surely better than more thoughtless, simpler,
or mindlessly reflexive. But these are not the only infer-
ences that introspection enables. It can also lead people
to think that their fear of embarrassment is more intense
and crippling than others’ (Van Boven, Loewenstein, &
Dunning, 2005), that their experience of disgust is more
likely to keep them from behaving charitably than others’
less intense experience (Pronin et al., 2008), that they are
being judged more harshly for a self-deprecating blun-
der than they actually are (Epley, Savitsky, & Gilovich,
12/22/09 3:39:44 PM
 520 Mind Perception
2002; Savitsky, Epley, & Gilovich, 2001), that their own
negative intentions have caused more harm than have
another person’s negative intentions (Pronin, Wegner,
McCarthy, & Rodriguez, 2006), or that their own futures are
more unpredictable than others’ futures (Pronin & Kugler,
2007). More important, increasing access to others’ mental
states and intentions, or decreasing access to one’s own,
reliably diminishes the distinctions people make between
their own minds and other minds (e.g., Epley & Dunning,
2000; Kruger & Gilovich, 2004; Pronin, in press; Savitsky
et al., 2001). Access to one’s own mental states may cer-
tainly, at times, be self-satisfying, but self-satisfaction is far
from a completely satisfying explanation for these results.
More powerful, it appears, is the asymmetry between
the direct experience of one’s own mind versus the indi-
rect experience of other minds, a gap that no amount of
simulation or theory-driven inference can close entirely.
When people perceive an object to be dim because they
are wearing dark sunglasses, they may fail to fully recog-
nize the influence of the interpretive lens and conclude that
the object is dimmer than it actually is (Rock & Nijhawan,
1989). This problem seems to confront mind readers as
well. People can perceive others’ mental states, but they do
so through the darkened lens provided by mechanisms of
simulation and theory-driven inference rather than through
the relatively bright light of introspection.
Close Versus Distant Other Minds
Not all other minds are created equal, nor are all other
minds equally “other.” The relative invisibility of others’
mental states appears to increase as the gap between self
and other becomes greater across social distance and as
other minds are understood from an outside perspective
focused on behaviors and actions rather than on an inside
perspective focused in mental states and experiences.
As the gap between oneself and others grows larger, so
does the difficulty of bridging that gap to recognize similar
mental states in others.
Many relative differences in how mind readers under-
stand their own mental capacities compared with those
of others are mimicked in how people compare the minds of
close versus distant others. As already discussed, perceived
similarity increases the tendency to use one’s own mental
states as a guide to others’ beliefs, attitudes, and prefer-
ences (Ames, 2004a, 2004b; Krueger, 1998; Mitchell et al.,
2006), thereby enabling people to use their sixth sense of
introspection and their powers of simulation when reason-
ing about others who are close to the self compared with
those more distant from it. The mental capacities attributed
to distant others therefore tend to be dimmer than those
attributed to close others.
CH14.indd 520
Most evidence consistent with this conclusion comes
from differences in representations of, and mental capaci-
ties attributed to, ingroup versus outgroup members.
Compared with more distant outgroup members, ingroup
members are seen as more capable of experiencing second-
ary emotions that require higher-order mental states such
as love, hope, contempt, or resentment (Demoulin et al.,
2004; Gaunt, Leyens, & Demoulin, 2002; Leyens et al., 2000)
and as more likely to experience the moral sentiments nec-
essary for prosocial actions such as empathy and compas-
sion (Opotow, 1990; Staub, 1989). These mental states are
the ones that people perceive to be uniquely human mental
capacities (Leyens et al., 2000), and denying these capaci-
ties in others strips them of their minds, as well as their
humanity (Haslam, 2006). Indeed, members of outgroups
can often be represented as animals both through spoken
metaphors and through artistic depictions (Goff, Eberhardt,
Williams, & Jackson, 2008; Viki et al., 2006). This denial
of mind to distant outgroup members, especially in capaci-
ties related to agency (e.g., competence) or experience
(e.g., interpersonal warmth), is the most prevalent for
the most distant outgroups such as drug addicts and the
homeless (Harris & Fiske, 2006).
Liking for a target has closely related effects on the
attribution of mental capacities, with well-liked individuals
being seen as possessing the full catalogue of mental
capacities compared with those of relatively disliked indi-
viduals, who have relatively lesser minds. People are more
likely to adopt the perspective of a liked target than that
of a disliked target (Frantz & Janoff-Bulman, 2000), con-
strue their actions in a higher level of abstraction focused
on the meaning of an action rather than in its low-level
behavioral attributes (Kozak et al., 2006), and believe that
liked targets have more well-developed mental capacities
(e.g., the ability to experience emotions and intentionally
control their actions) than those of disliked targets (Kozak
et al., 2006). In romantic relationships, feeling close to
another person is related to the feeling of empathic under-
standing (e.g., Kahn, 1970; Noller & Ruzzene, 1991). This
increased perception of mental similarity and self–other
overlap increases prosocial actions toward a relationship
partner (Aron, Aron, Tudor, & Nelson, 1991), as well as
the strength and length of the romantic relationship
(Aron, Aron, & Smollan, 1992), even when the perceived
similarity in preferences, motives, and beliefs is illusory
(Lemay & Clark, 2008; Murray, Holmes, Bellavia, Griffin, &
Dolderman, 2002).
Human Versus Nonhuman Minds
If the gap between one’s own mind and other people’s
minds is large, the gap between one’s own mind and
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nonhuman minds is immense. But as with other human
minds, not all nonhuman minds are created equal. The
determinants that induce people to perceive mental states
in other humans—from self-propelled action to interde-
pendence to causal uncertainty—operate with nonhumans
as well, as do the basic mechanisms that enable the per-
ception of mental states and behavioral traits (Gosling,
Kwan, & John, 2003; Kwan, Gosling, & John, 2008).
These determinants can make some nonhuman agents
appear more mindful than others. The consequences of
perceiving mental states in these agents are also qualita-
tively similar to mind perception with human agents—they
increase feelings of social connection and support, enable
understanding and apparent predictability, and serve as
potent explanations for observed behavior. Because the
biological differences between humans and nonhumans
are so transparently obvious, we focus not on the perceived
absence of mind in nonhuman agents but rather on factors
that increase the perceived presence of mind. The aware-
ness that people can anthropomorphize nonhuman agents,
attributing humanlike mental states and capacities to them,
is at least as old as the sixth century B.C. (Lesher, 1992)
and has been a topic of heated debate in intellectual dis-
course ever since (Broadhurst, 1963; Darwin, 1872/2002;
Feuerbach, 1873/2004; Guthrie, 1993; Hebb, 1946; Hume,
1757/1957; Pepperberg, 2002; Povinelli & Vonk, 2003;
Ruskin, 1923). Understanding the psychological processes
that enable such anthropomorphism, however, is only just
beginning (for reviews, see Epley et al., 2007; Kwan &
Fiske, 2008; Mitchell, Thompson, & Miles, 1997).
Biological Agents
The gap between human and nonhuman minds may appear
great, but the factors that increase the perception of mental
states across nonhuman agents are largely identical. People
are more likely to anthropomorphize animals that are simi-
lar to humans in either morphology or motion (e.g., Eddy,
Gallup, & Povinelli, 1993; Morewedge et al., 2007), and
this tendency is moderated by cultural beliefs and practices
related to biological agents (e.g., Asquith, 1996; Medin &
Atran, 2004; Waxman & Medin, 2007). Factors that
increase interdependence with a nonhuman agent, such
as the motivation to understand and explain an animal’s
behavior or to establish social connection (Epley, Akalis,
et al., 2008), or the appearance of interdependent and
socially responsive action from the agent itself also increase
the tendency to perceive mental states in nonhuman ani-
mals (Johnson, 2003). Some evidence demonstrates that
stereotypes and categorical information about animals,
such as the belief that “Rottweilers are vicious,” is accessed
to make inferences about these nonhuman animals (Kwan
et al., 2008) and can act as a prime to influence a person’s
CH14.indd 521
Targets of Mind Perception 521
subsequent judgment and behavior (Chartrand, Fitzsimons, &
Fitzsimons, 2008). The extent to which such inferences
are guided by mechanisms of simulation or theory-driven
inferences, however, is unclear.
Technological Agents
Anyone who has noticed a snarl in the grill of a sports car
has also noticed engineers’ attempts to humanize technol-
ogy (Welsh, 2006; for a broader review, see Reeves &
Nass, 1996). Advances in artificial intelligence have
produced robots that can convey emotion (Breazeal &
Aryananda, 2002), can recognize emotions and social cues
(Breazeal, 2003), and can even imitate human actions and
behave interdependently (Breazeal & Scassellati, 2002).
These factors can give technological agents the appearance
of both mindful agency and experience that would make
them seem like moral agents capable of both perform-
ing harm and experiencing harm from others (Floridi &
Sanders, 2004). Social cues that increase the tendency to
think of other people’s mental states—such as the presence
of eyes and directed gaze, goal-directed motion, and self-
propelled motion—also increase the likelihood of attrib-
uting humanlike mental states to technological agents or
behaving toward these agents as if they had mental states
(Guajardo & Woodward, 2004; Johnson, Booth, & O’Hearn,
2001; Woodward, 1998). In one study, the degree of human
resemblance in a computerized poker partner (e.g., the pres-
ence of a face) was positively related to the partner ’s per-
ceived intelligence (Koda & Maes, 1996; see also Moreale &
Watt, 2004; Nass, Moon, Fogg, Reeves, & Dryer, 1995). In
another, a computer-generated agent (specifically, a human-
like face) appeared more trustworthy and persuasive when
it matched the participant’s ethnicity than when it did not
match (Nass, Isbister, & Lee, 2000). These findings suggest
that it is relatively easy to attribute at least some humanlike
mental states to technological agents and to behave toward
these agents as if they indeed possess minds (Reeves &
Nass, 1996). This tendency has actually posed something
of an unexpected problem to survey researchers using com-
puters to collect data, not because people find it difficult to
use such technology but rather because people sometimes
respond in a more socially desirable fashion when complet-
ing a questionnaire on a computer than when they do so on
a piece of paper (Lautenschlager & Flaherty, 1990).
Supernatural Agents
The perception of anthropomorphic mental states extends
not only to materially present agents but also to meta-
physical agents such as gods and ghosts. The default
representation of God in virtually all religions is deeply
anthropomorphic, complete with mental states of inten-
tions, goals, purpose, and emotions (Guthrie, 1993). People
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 522 Mind Perception
likewise report that ghosts are capable of suffering (Hinde,
1999), capable of being internally motivated (Lillard,
1998), and capable of controlling the actions of humans
(Parish, 1991, 1994), despite recognizing the absence of
biological states such as hunger or thirst (Bering, 2002).
Religious belief appears to come so naturally to people
partly because it also appears to be a natural by-product of
the near-universal capacity for mind perception that leads
ordinary perceivers to identify intentions, goals, and pur-
poses to physical and natural events in the environment
(e.g., Atran & Norenzayan, 2004; Barrett, 2000; Bloom,
2004; Boyer, 2003; Gilbert, Brown, Pinel, & Wilson, 2000;
Guthrie, 1993). People acquire more specific beliefs from
various religious traditions as they age, much like people
acquire specific beliefs about other people, but the psycho-
logical foundation for belief in supernatural agents appears
to be acquired in lockstep with the development of one’s
theory of mind.
Children through 14 years of age, for instance, are
likely to hold highly anthropomorphic representations of
God (Heller, 1986; Landy, 2001; Mudge, 1923). Adults are
less anthropomorphic but continue to hold subtle anthro-
pomorphic representations that may even conflict with the
theological tenets of their reported religious beliefs. For
instance, Christianity dictates that God is not embodied in
space or time (is omnipresent), has complete knowledge
(is omniscient), and has unlimited power (is omnipotent).
Christian participants in one study explicitly reported
believing that God indeed possessed these properties con-
sistent with theological teachings. When asked to recall
God’s behavior in various experimental scenarios, however,
these same participants reported that God was in only one
place at a time, had been mistaken, and had limited power
(Barrett & Keil, 1996). All of these inferences were biased
memories of the actual stories consistent with an anthro-
pomorphic representation of God rather than a theological
representation. Conceptually identical results emerged in a
similar study with Hindu participants (Barrett, 1998).
Such egocentric biases also emerge when religious
believers are asked to report God’s beliefs on important
social issues, such as abortion, the death penalty, or sup-
port for legalizing same-sex marriages or marijuana. In
one series of experiments (Epley, Converse, Delbosc,
Monteleone, & Cacioppo, in press), the correspondence
between people’s own beliefs on these issues and God’s
beliefs was consistently stronger than it is with other
human targets (including liked targets, disliked targets,
and “average” others), and manipulating people’s beliefs
altered their estimates of God’s beliefs in a similar fash-
ion more so than for other human targets. A functional
neuroimaging study in this same series also revealed that
the same regions were active when thinking about one’s
CH14.indd 522
own beliefs as when reasoning about God’s beliefs but that
consistent differences emerged when reasoning about the
“average American’s” beliefs across a series of issues. As
with inferences about other people, people use their own
mental states as a guide to others unless they have explicit
cues to suggest that their own mental states are likely to be
fundamentally different from others’ mental states.
Even when people are not wholly egocentric thinking
about the minds of religious agents, attributes of the self
often influence evaluations of God’s internal states. In one
study, Catholic students with particularly high self-esteem
saw God as more accepting, loving, saving, forgiving,
and approving, whereas low self-esteem participants saw
God as more restricting, controlling, strict, and demand-
ing (Benson & Spilka, 1973). In another, people who
reported being particularly lonely also perceived God to
be less helpful and more wrathful (Schwab & Petersen,
1990). Conceptually similar egocentric tendencies emerge
when people evaluate the mental states of other people as
well. Those who are afraid, for instance, perceive a threat-
ening target to be angrier than do those who are not, and
men interested in dating a woman tend to perceive her as
more sexually aroused than do men not interested in dating
(Maner et al., 2005).
As with mind perception more generally, motivations
that increase interdependence—such as the motivation for
social connection with others—also appear to influence
religious representations. Religious agents are generally
perceived to be strong sources of social connection and
support (Burris, Batson, Altstaedten, & Stephens, 1994;
Kirkpatrick, 1999; Luhrmann, 2004), and those induced to
feel lonely or isolated report believing in God more than
those who are not induced to feel lonely (Epley, Akalis,
et al., 2008). People who feel socially disconnected
more routinely, such as those who are recently divorced
(Cain, 1988), lonely (Rokach & Brock, 1998), or single
(Granqvist & Hagekull, 2000), also show an increased ten-
dency to represent God as a socially responsive and sup-
portive agent. Experiencing social loss from the death of
a close other also increases the likelihood of forming a
connection with God (McIntosh, Silver, & Wortman, 1993;
Spilka, Hood, & Gorsuch, 1985; Wuthnow, Christiano, &
Kozlowski, 1980).
This research suggests that mind perception is involved
in religious belief and experience, but the complexity of
religious and supernatural beliefs around the world also
makes it clear that mind perception is going to be only
one piece of a larger puzzle (Atran, 2002; Boyer, 2001;
Wilson, 2002). The power of religious systems to serve
as social controls and enable organization (Norenzayan &
Shariff, 2008), the capacity for specific religious beliefs
to seem simultaneously intuitive and counterintuitive
12/22/09 3:39:45 PM

(Boyer, 2003), the desire for ultimate meaning and fear of
death (Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006), and the dynamics
of persuasion and influence certainly operate to create the
complex and persistent manifestations of religious systems
in the world today. How big a role mind perception plays
in religious experience, religious beliefs, or the continued
popularity of religious worldviews even in modern indus-
trialized societies, compared with all of these other influ-
ences, is unknown.
Summary: Targets of Mind Perception
The mechanisms that enable people to understand other
minds appear to operate similarly across various other minds,
including other people, past and future versions of the
self, and nonhuman agents ranging from other animals to
supernatural agents. Social psychology has generally been
a person-centered discipline, equating “others” with other
people. But social life is richer than that. The overwhelm-
ing majority of people living today believe that a mind-
ful God controls their future (Harris Poll, 2003). Rapid
advancements in technology means that many people in
the industrialized world now spend more of their day inter-
acting with technological agents than they do with other
people (Gallegos, 2007). The distinction between human
and nonhuman—between us and them—is often central
to conflicts over environmental policy, social and cultural
practices, ethical conduct of scientific research, and cul-
ture wars between religion and science about the origin
of our species, among many others. Social psychologists
interested in mind perception can contribute more to the
world’s understanding of social life than simply the study
of interpersonal interaction.
CONSEQUENCES OF MIND PERCEPTION
Calling research “academic” outside of laboratories and
universities is a kind way of demeaning it as irrelevant to
everyday life. Research on mind perception is indeed con-
ducted by academics, but its implications and consequences
are hardly “academic.” Explaining, understanding, and
predicting both ourselves and other agents, from people to
gadgets to gods, is what much of everyday social thought
is all about. Mind perception matters because it is often the
critical mediator between others’ real or imagine dactions
and our reactions or between our current predictions and our
subsequent decisions. Although the consequences of mind
perception range widely, we wish to focus here on three
of the most basic consequences that result from the per-
ceived presence or absence of mind in others. First, mind-
ful agents are capable of reasoned thought and intentional
CH14.indd 523
Consequences of Mind Perception 523
action and can therefore be held causally responsible for
their actions. Second, mindful agents are autonomous
agents that can have conscious goals and aspirations but
can also suffer and experience emotions that render them
moral agents worthy of respect, empathic concern, and the
basic human right of autonomy. Third, mindful agents are
capable of having thoughts and forming impressions that
render them agents of surveillance, who may be evaluating
us and whose impressions we may try to anticipate, moni-
tor, or influence. Mind matters for judgments of responsi-
bility, for moral agency and ethical action, and for social
surveillance (for more detailed treatments of these topics,
see Kovera & Borgida, volume 2; Haidt & Kesebir, volume
2; Leary, volume 2; Swann & Bosson, this volume).
Responsibility
People explain behavior, at least in part, by attending to an
agent’s intentions. Determining whether an act was inten-
tional or accidental is therefore an important component
when determining the causes of a given action and when
determining responsibility and blame (Heider, 1958; Malle,
1999). Intentions can create what appear to be intentional
(or purposeful) actions when they are combined with the
ability to control the action, the desire to attain a particular
outcome, a belief that an action will attain a particular out-
come, and an awareness of the intention when performing
the action (Malle & Knobe, 1997). All of these causal fac-
tors reside squarely within the agent and place causal
responsibility for controlling the action squarely within the
agent (Alicke, 2000). The extent to which agents appear
capable of intentional action is therefore directly related
to their perceived responsibility for performing the action
(Fincham & Emery, 1988; Roberts & Golding, 1991) and
their willingness to punish agents for a negative or immoral
action (Gray et al., 2007; Hogue & Pebbles, 1997; Kleinke,
Wallis, & Stadler, 1992). In times past and cultures more
distant, where people did not so naturally restrict inten-
tional capacities to humans, animals (e.g., rats) and objects
(e.g., “possessed” statues) were targets of criminal pros-
ecution (Berman, 1994; see also Sunstein & Nussbaum,
2004). Beyond attributing responsibility to others, reducing
the extent to which people believe they can intentionally
control their own behavior appears to diminish their sense
of personal responsibility. Undermining people’s belief in
their own “free will,” for instance, increases the likelihood
of behaving unethically by cheating on a test or harming
another person (Baumeister, Masicampo, & DeWall, 2009;
Vohs & Schooler, 2008).
Although intentionality—a guilty mind, or mens rea—
has been necessary to find a defendant guilty of a crime
in most of the world’s criminal courts, it is not strictly
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 524 Mind Perception
necessary for assigning responsibility for most of the
world’s ordinary perceivers but instead intensifies percep-
tions of responsibility. We are angered when our neighbor
takes our morning paper accidentally, but we are enraged
when our neighbor does so intentionally (Alicke, 2000;
Heider, 1958; Malle & Bennett, 2002; Weiner, 1995). This
“intensification effect” emerges not only in judgments of
praise and blame (Malle & Bennett, 2002) but also in inten-
sity of consequences that result from intentional versus
unintentional actions. Unintentional sexism makes a per-
son appear somewhat prejudiced, but intentional sexism
makes the person appear blatantly prejudiced and dis-
criminatory (Swim, Scott, Sechrist, Campbell, & Stangor,
2003). Unintentional harm seems to hurt another per-
son and is judged to be immoral, but intentional harm is
worse (Cushman, 2008; Darley & Shultz, 1990; Kohlberg,
1969). And being unintentionally shocked with electricity
by another person hurts, but being intentionally shocked by
another person hurts even more (Gray & Wegner, 2008).
Such sensitivity to intentional versus unintentional
actions can appear perfectly logical, but these findings sug-
gest that there may be some residual illogic as well because
people still show a pervasive and consistent tendency to
assign considerable personal responsibility to acciden-
tal or unintentional actions (Walster, 1966). People may
unreasonably blame victims for their misfortunes (Lerner,
1977; Maes, 1994) or assume that an actor ’s intentions are
consistent with the consequences of an action—especially
a negative action—even when the consequence appears
accidental (Alicke, Weigold, & Rogers, 1990; Knobe,
2003; Leslie, Knobe, & Cohen, 2006; Mazzocco, Alicke, &
Davis, 2004). And anyone who has ever momentarily felt
like thrashing the kitchen cabinet for getting in the way of
his or her head can appreciate that even mindless objects
can seem to perform intentional harm, even if only for
a moment (Schultz, Imamizu, Kawato, & Frith, 2004).
These less logical findings appear to reflect the more gen-
eral tendency described already for ordinary perceivers
to automatically assume a correspondence between agents’
actions and their underlying intentions and dispositions
and then discount those default inferences insufficiently
for unintentional causes that explain the action (Gilbert &
Malone, 1995; Rosset, 2008). This general tendency to
infer consistent intentions from observable actions may
therefore lead to a greater number of angry neighbors, bro-
ken cabinets, and guilty defendants than a purely logical
analysis of responsibility would produce (Alicke, 2000).
Moral Agency and Ethical Action
Fully mindful agents are perceived to have goals and
intentions, be capable of reasoned thought and deliberate
CH14.indd 524
action, have the ability to consider perspectives other than
their own, and experience everything from suffering and
regret to compassion and joy. Mental states do not merely
grant useful explanations or enable future predictions, they
also grant an agent moral worth and value. The most basic
of all human rights is the principle of autonomy—that
because all people have the same minimal capacity to suf-
fer, deliberate, and choose, no person can compromise the
body, life, or freedom of another person. “When moral
worth is in question, it is not a matter of actions which one
sees but of their inner principles which one does not see”
(Kant, 1785/2002, p. 23).
Ordinary perceivers listen to rules from philosophers
like teenagers listen to rules from their parents, but this
basic principle of autonomy is followed at least somewhat
in both moral judgment and moral action. Attributing basic
mental states of experience and agency to others confers
the basic rights of “personhood” (even to distinctly non-
human agents) that can engender empathic and altruistic
responses, whereas denying those mental states in others
appears to be the essence of dehumanization that can
engender mistreatment and aggression (Haslam, 2006).
How mind perception influences moral value and ethi-
cal treatment, however, appears to depend on the mental
states being inferred. Perceiving mindful agency (inten-
tions, planning, and deliberate thought) is related to the
judgments of causal responsibility and consequent praise
or blame for an agent’s actions. Perceiving the capacity for
mindful experience (conscious awareness, secondary emo-
tions, suffering, and pain) appears to guide empathy, com-
passion, and the willingness to harm or impinge on the basic
rights of another agent (Gray et al., 2007). In one study,
for instance, people were interested in helping the victims
of a massive hurricane to the extent that they perceived
those victims to be experiencing secondary emotions such
as anguish and remorse (Cuddy, Rock, & Norton, 2007).
In another, the extent to which people were dispositionally
inclined to attribute humanlike mental states to nonhuman
agents also predicted the extent to which it appeared mor-
ally wrong to harm a nonhuman agent, such as destroy-
ing IBM’s legendary computer Big Blue or even trampling
over a bed of flowers (Waytz, Cacioppo, & Epley, 2009).
And in general, the extent to which an agent has the capac-
ity for mindful experience predicts how unpleasant people
report it would be to hurt that agent if they had to do so
(Gray et al., 2007).
This connection between mind perception and moral
action does not simply influence moral reasoning; it influ-
ences moral action as well. Cultures that are especially
likely to perceive minds in their surrounding natural envi-
ronment also exhibit the least harmful ecological prac-
tices (Atran & Medin, 2008; Atran et al., 2002). Being
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environmentally conscious is partly determined, it appears,
by the extent to which a person perceives the environment
as being conscious. Attending to the mental experience
of another agent in pain by actively engaging in perspec-
tive taking also increases empathic concern for the agent
(including nonhuman agents; Schultz, 2000) and increases
the likelihood of behaving altruistically to help an agent in
need (for reviews, see Batson, 1994, 1998). Increasing the
likelihood of spontaneously considering another ’s mental
experience, such as by increasing the sense of similarity or
desire to affiliate, also increases the extent to which people
experience empathic concern for another ’s pain or suf-
fering (Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce, & Neuberg, 1997;
Pickett et al., 2004; Preston & de Waal, 2002). The essence
of the autonomy principle is to treat other agents as ends
in themselves rather than as means to an end, and actively
considering others’ mental experiences appears critical for
producing such treatment.
If mindful experience is critical for treating others with
the basic human right of autonomy, then failing to perceive
mindful experience in others should lead people to treat
others as mindless agents or objects. Indeed, the essence of
dehumanization is denying mental states and experiences to
others by representing them as either unthinking savages or
unfeeling automata (Haslam, 2006; Loughnan & Haslam,
2007). Just as perceiving an agent’s capacity to suffer
makes harming that agent appear immoral and unethical,
denying an agent the capacity to suffer makes aggression
and otherwise immoral harm seem permissible (Bandura,
2002). Dehumanizing outgroup members by denying them
mindful capacities increases the extent to which violence
and aggression toward the outgroup appears acceptable and
justified (Castano & Giner-Sorolla, 2006; Goff et al.,
2008), increases actual aggression toward the outgroup
(Bandura et al., 1975), and increases negative attitudes
toward the outgroup (Hodson & Costello, 2007). Some of
the most chilling images ever captured on film are of Nazi
doctors sitting calmly beside Jewish prisoners amid hor-
rific medical experiments, calmly monitoring humans who
had been thoroughly dehumanized to the point of being
treated as mice in a laboratory (Spitz, 2005).
Failing to consider an agent’s own intentions, goals, or
mental experience can also lead to objectification whereby
people represent others in terms of their instrumental
qualities—how that agent can be used to achieve one’s own
goals—rather than as a mindful agent with goals, inten-
tions, and desires to be considered. Treating women as sex
objects, for instance, involves attending to a woman’s
physical attributes rather than to her mental attributes
(Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). Some determinants already
discussed that reduce a person’s tendency to consider
another agent’s mental states, such as putting a person in a
CH14.indd 525
Consequences of Mind Perception 525
position of power, increase the tendency to objectify others
as well (Gruenfeld et al., 2008).
The consequences of mind perception for moral judg-
ment and behavior are not only relevant to everyday
interactions among individuals or groups but also feature
prominently in societal debates on moral issues including
animal rights, euthanasia, the death penalty, and abortion.
The importance of mind in these debates is clear:
Some think it’s obvious that a ten-week-old fetus has a mind,
and others think it’s obvious that it does not. If it does not, then
the path is open to argue that it has no more interest than, say,
a gangrenous leg or an abscessed tooth—it can be destroyed
to save the life of (or just to suit the interests of ) the mind-
haver of which it is a part. If it does already have a mind, then,
whatever we decide, we obviously have to consider its inter-
ests along with the interests of its temporary host. (Dennett,
1996, p. 6)
Whether understanding the processes that increase
or decrease the perception of mind provides insight into
resolving these seemingly intractable disputes remains
to be seen, but research on mind perception is beginning to
actively inform at least some ethical debates and legal
decisions (Rogers & Kaplan, 2004). The Spanish govern-
ment, for instance, recently extended limited human rights
to captive chimpanzees based on research demonstrat-
ing their humanlike cognitive capacities (Abend, 2008).
Determining how far such influence might extend will
require rigorous programs of research that test scientific
hypotheses rather than relying on current arguments from
anecdotes or intuitions.
Social Surveillance
Mindful agents have intentions and goals and are thus
responsible for their actions, they experience suffering
and pain and therefore deserve moral care and concern,
but they also have attitudes, hold beliefs, and form impres-
sions. Other minds are therefore sources of surveillance
that may be forming attitudes, beliefs, or impressions
about us. People care deeply about how they are viewed
by others (Leary & Kowalski, 1995), attempt to under-
stand and anticipate others’ impressions as best they can
(Kenny, 1994), and actively try to manage others’ impres-
sions through self-presentational strategies (Jones &
Pittman, 1982; Leary, 1995). People are especially sen-
sitive to others’ negative impressions that might lead to
social disconnection or ostracism, and for good reason.
Being socially disconnected or ostracized by others is
deeply painful (Williams, 2001), increases the incidence
of depression and suicide ideation (Heinrich & Gullone,
2006), and decreases the quality of one’s health and
12/22/09 3:39:46 PM
 526 Mind Perception
the length of one’s life (Cacioppo, Hawkley, & Berntson,
2003; Hawkley, Masi, Berry, & Cacioppo, 2006; House,
Landis, & Umberson, 1988).
At the most basic level, surveillance by other mindful
agents can have two effects on ordinary perceivers. First,
monitoring others’ attitudes and impressions can be both
cognitively taxing (i.e., it consumes working memory
resources) and stressful (due to heightened concerns of
negative evaluations), thereby influencing performance
while under social scrutiny. Monitoring others’ impressions
increases the attention people pay to themselves and their
own behavior in social interaction to discern others’ evalu-
ations (Buss, 1980; Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Fenigstein,
1979), and in intergroup interactions monitoring increases
the accessibility of stereotypes about how one’s own
group is likely to be evaluated by other groups (Vorauer
et al., 2000).
This increase in self-focused attention can lead people
to exaggerate the extent to which they think others are
attending to them (Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 2000),
the extent to which they think others’ behavior is explicitly
targeted at them (Fenigstein, 1984; Zuckerman, Kernis,
Guarnera, Murphy, & Rappoport, 1983), and the extent to
which they believe their own inner thoughts and experi-
ences are transparent to others (Cameron & Vorauer, 2008;
Gilovich et al., 1998; Vorauer & Ross, 1999). At a more
extreme level, hyperattentiveness to others’ impressions
can lead to persecutory delusions and intense paranoia
(Martin & Penn, 2001). Emerging research suggests that
an overactive theory of mind may be the core mechanism
underlying schizophrenia (Abu-Akel, 1999; Abu-Akel &
Bailey, 2000; Badcock, 2004; Crespi & Badcock, 2008;
Freeman & Garety, 2004).
Actively attending to others’ impressions and evalua-
tions also consumes cognitive resources (e.g., working
memory) and thus diminishes performance on cognitively
demanding tasks, such as solving math problems (Beilock &
Carr, 2005) or delivering a speech (Savitsky & Gilovich,
2003). This can disrupt otherwise automatic behavior by
increasing conscious attention to the behavior, such as
swinging a golf club among expert golfers (see Beilock &
Gray, 2007, for a review). These impairments are espe-
cially likely in social interactions characterized by the most
extreme evaluative concerns, such as in interracial interac-
tions (Shelton & Richeson, 2006; Vorauer, 2006), and are
diminished when others are unlikely to be evaluating the
self (Bray & Sugarman, 1980; Feinberg & Aiello, 2006;
Geen, 1981; Paulus & Murdoch, 1971). In one experiment,
participants performed a difficult counting task either in
the presence of their friend or in the presence of a dog.
Participants had elevated stress responses and poorer per-
formance in the presence of their evaluative friend but not
CH14.indd 526
in the presence of the relatively nonevaluative dog (Allen,
Blascovich, Tomaka, & Kelsey, 1991). In fact, the presence of
one’s nonevaluative pet before a stressful experience can
have a more positive influence on anxiety and psycho-
physical responses to stress than the presence of one’s
highly evaluative spouse (Allen, Blascovich, & Mendes,
2002). Mindful agents require conscious monitoring, and
that monitoring can alter attention, consume cognitive
resources, and meaningfully affect behavior.
Second, surveillance from other mindful agents can
serve as a source of social control, leading people to
behave in more socially desirable and prosocial ways than
they would when alone or when not attending to others’
evaluations. Imagine, for instance, the things you might do
if you were given a cloak that would make you invisible
and you will get this point. People behave more desirably
to the extent that they think about, and care about, the kinds
of impressions they convey to others (Leary, 1995). That
mindful surveillance increases socially desirable behav-
ior is clear, but it is especially interesting because such
effects emerge even when under the presumed surveil-
lance of mindful agents. The essence of many large-scale
world religions, for instance, is the constant presence of
at least one supernatural agent, an unseen source of social
surveillance that can control behavior and enable coopera-
tive social organization. Omnipresent surveillance from a
religious agent solves the most basic problem facing any
cooperative organization—the difficulty of controlling
individuals when a leader or group organizer is absent—
and may be the primary reason for the success of religious
belief systems across generations of cultural evolution
(Irons, 1991; Johnson & Bering, 2006; Johnson & Kruger,
2004; Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008; Sosis & Ruffle, 2004;
Wilson, 2002). Priming people with religious concepts,
for instance, increases prosocial behavior in a competitive
interaction compared with priming them with neutral con-
cepts (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007). Cross-cultural evi-
dence suggests a positive association between the extent of
belief in an evaluative moral deity and the cultural group
size (Norenzayan & Shariff, 2008). Beyond surveillance
by presumed religious agents, people behave more pro-
socially while playing an economic game on a computer
when it is displaying animated eyes than when there are
no eyes (Haley & Fessler, 2005). And participants in one
experiment were less likely to cheat on a test in a labora-
tory after being told by the experimenter that the ghost of
a dead graduate student (“Paul”) had been seen repeatedly
in the laboratory room (Bering, McLeod, & Shackelford,
2005). Mindful agents also appear to serve as a powerful
source of social influence and control, increasing adherence
to socially accepted norms of conduct whether those others
are actually present or merely presumed to be present.
12/22/09 3:39:47 PM

Most parents have told their children to “mind your
manners” in the presence of others, and this bit of folk wis-
dom captures the two most basic effects of social surveil-
lance on behavior—needing to mind or monitor others’
impressions and then behaving in a way that is consistent
with accepted social norms and conventions. These effects
are first-order consequences that result from perceiving the
presence or absence of mindful surveillance. Once under
mindful surveillance, more complicated second-order con-
sequences arise that stem from the specific thoughts, beliefs,
or attitudes that those surveilling minds might possess. In
intergroup interactions, the exaggerated belief that one’s
own group is disliked by the other group increases anxiety
in social interaction, diminishes the likelihood of intergroup
contact, increases defensiveness once amid an interac-
tion, and ultimately tends to confirm the mistaken belief
about the other side’s negative evaluations (Cameron,
Holmes, & Vorauer, 2009; Shelton & Richeson, 2006;
Vorauer, Main, & O’Connell, 1998; Vorauer & Sakamoto,
2006). People also tend to overestimate the extent to which
others are motivated simply by their own self-interest, a cyn-
icism that can in turn operate as a social norm and increase
people’s tendency to behave selfishly themselves (Miller,
1999). Adopting another person’s perspective in these cases
can actually exaggerate the impact of these mistaken beliefs
about others’ thoughts and evaluations, further diminishing
interest in intergroup interaction (Vorauer & Sasaki, 2009)
or further increasing selfishness in a competitive interaction
(Epley et al., 2006). Minding your manners may be a more
complicated business than your parents would have guessed.
CONCLUSION
Science is sometimes accused of diminishing people’s
sense of wonder and amazement by providing sensible
explanations for life’s deepest mysteries. Scientists illu-
minating how people reason about other minds, in many
ways, are doing precisely the opposite by taking a process
that seems so easy that children can do it before tying their
shoes and revealing complexity that makes it seem some-
what amazing that anyone can do it at all. Philosophers
have recognized this problem, calling into question the
ability to conclude that any minds exist other than one’s
own. Everyone else rolls their eyes at such skepticism
because they have acquired the requisite machinery to
reason quite easily about other minds. We have sought to
explain how people solve this other minds problem with
such apparent ease and why people’s intuitive solutions to
this problem matter so deeply for everyday social life.
A chapter of this length has said much, but it has also left
much unsaid. We have said much about how mind perception
CH14.indd 527
Conclusion 527
differs from the broader topics of person perception and
social cognition, focusing on inferences about momentary
mental states of intentions, desires, motivations, and beliefs
rather than on inferences about more invariant and endur-
ing dispositions or traits. This not only represents an
increased focus on the initial moments of the causal attribu-
tion process that enables people to explain others’ behavior
and infer more enduring dispositional tendencies but also
represents a considerable expansion of research interests
to include a more earnest focus on ongoing social inter-
actions, future predictions, and the relation between self
and other. The capacity to get inside the minds of others
enables not only an understanding of others’ actions in the
course of a social interaction but also the visceral expe-
rience of others’ current mental states and foresight into
their future actions or experiences. Mind perception is
therefore critical to the relational capacities of empathy,
compassion, trust, cooperation, and strategic interaction.
The tendency to mentalize also goes far beyond perceiv-
ing other humans, as people see minds in various biologi-
cal, technological, and supernatural agents. When Gordon
Allport (1968) said that social psychology is “an attempt
to understand how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or
implied presence of others,” he did not constrain “others”
to refer only to other people. Mind perception interprets
“others” more generally and is therefore relevant to a rap-
idly expanding set of topics, including religion, dehuman-
ization, and anthropomorphism.
We have said little, however, about how inferences
about momentary mental states relate to inferences about
more stable and invariant features of another agent such
as dispositions or abilities. That is not because the relation
is simple or uninteresting—indeed, more connecting work
needs to be done—but rather because that is a topic for
another chapter (Gilbert, 1998; Macrae & Quadflieg, this
volume). Mind perception tells us about another agent’s
state at a given moment (what it is currently thinking, feel-
ing, believing, or intending), and these inferences are then
shuffled along to the causal calculus of attribution theory
and social cognition to tell us what others are like more
generally (whether others are generally lazy or lively, bum-
bling or brilliant, and callous or caring).
We have also said much about how people reason about
other minds, focusing on the ability to simulate others’
experience by imagining oneself in another ’s shoes and
the ability to make inferences about mental states based
on more general theoretical inferences. We have sug-
gested, in line with more recent theoretical accounts, that
people likely use both of these mechanisms in varying
degrees depending on the context. We believe that think-
ing of mind perception as a basic process of induction will
12/22/09 3:39:47 PM
 528 Mind Perception
help to provide a more integrative account of mental state
inferences, but this is a topic of heated debate and frenzied
research activity. The coming years of integration will be
exciting to those who care deeply about these basic mecha-
nisms and, we hope, clarifying for people who care about
the consequences of these mechanisms for everyday social
interaction.
We have said little, however, about how accurately people
make inferences about other minds. At times, this ques-
tion is unanswerable. Nonhuman animals may or may not
actually have the mental capacities that people attribute to
them. Whether other people actually have beliefs or free
will has been debated for centuries with little meaningful
progress. And knowing the actual beliefs and intentions of
religious agents is—well, complicated. At other times the
question has too many answers. People in some situations
show an amazing ability to accurately intuit others’ mental
states and at other times seem to have no ability (e.g., Ickes,
2003; Kenny, 1994). A speaker may be reasonably good,
for instance, at determining whether a speech was gener-
ally liked or disliked by the crowd, but may be no better
than chance at determining which audience members actu-
ally liked the talk and which did not (Kenny & DePaulo,
1993). When predicting future emotional experiences or
even behavioral tendencies, there is often a strong corre-
lation between predictions and reality, but there may be
consistent biases that distort everyone’s predictions (e.g.,
Epley & Dunning, 2006; Gagné & Lydon, 2004; Gilovich
et al., 1998; Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, & Axsom,
2000). And at times people seem to overestimate how
similar others’ beliefs and preferences will be to their own
(Krueger & Clement, 1994), but at other times they tend
to underestimate such similarities (Hoch, 1987). A better
understanding of the mechanisms that enable mind percep-
tion will begin providing better insight into when people
are likely to be systematically accurate and when they are
not, as well as how to improve accuracy when it would
be desirable to do so.
We have also said much about when people are likely
to consider other minds and when they are not, suggest-
ing that interdependence is a critical determinant. Factors
that increase the need to explain, predict, or understand
another agent’s behavior are likely to increase the attention
paid to other minds, as is the basic motivation to estab-
lish a social connection with another agent. The ability to
get beyond one’s own immediate perspective and imagine
what it is like inside the head of another person is surely
one of humans’ greatest capacities, and interdependence
facilitates people’s actual use of this capacity.
We have said little, however, about how this capacity
to transcend one’s own egocentric experience to reason
about other minds might be related to other seemingly
CH14.indd 528
related capacities and whether mind perception is therefore
a small piece of a larger evolved capacity or whether it is a
relatively distinct neural module. Not only can people tran-
scend their own skulls to think about other minds, but they
can also transcend the present to think about the future or
past and they can transcend their current location to imagine
themselves moving in another location. These seemingly
distinct capacities appear to use the same neural circuitry
(Buckner & Carroll, 2007), suggesting that these capacities
may be deeply related to one another, and their behavioral
consequences might therefore be deeply related as well. Is
temporal discounting—underweighting future events com-
pared with current events—related to biases in perspective
taking and the tendency to consider others’ mental states?
Are extreme temporal discounters also inaccurate mind
readers? Are the clinical extremes of mind perception—
possibly autism on the capacity’s low end and schizophrenia
on the high end—also related to variability in foresight
or spatial reasoning? Does increasing people’s future-
mindedness also increase their perspective-taking ability?
Are religious experiences of transcendence—reasoning about
one’s ultimate purpose, considering the image of God, or
meditative experiences—part of this shared neural net-
work? The brain is a cobbled piece of machinery shaped
by specific demands of survival and reproduction. These
varied tasks and experiences need not be related to one
another. They need not be completely unrelated, either.
We have said much about why mind perception matters
to social psychology, but interest in how people understand
other minds is now among the dominant research topics
in other areas of psychology as well, with our developmen-
tal, cognitive, and neuropsychological colleagues actively
participating, along with philosophers, sociologists, and
biologists. At present, there is insufficient conversation
among these groups, and no consistent language enables
everyone to understand the rapidly expanding body of
findings and how they relate to one another. This is the
first chapter explicitly addressing mind perception in this
handbook, but we doubt it will be the last. Whether this
topic will morph into another, adopt different language
to describe itself, or again be subsumed into the broader
literature on person perception is unclear. It is, however,
unlikely to disappear. There is much left to be said.
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Chapter 15
Judgment and Decision Making
THOMAS D. GILOVICH AND DALE W. GRIFFIN
Making judgments and decisions are the most important
things people do. People must assess adversaries and
decide to fight, flee, or raise the white flag. They must size
up the pool of potential mates and choose one to woo—
or decide to stay out of the game altogether. And in the
modern world, they must evaluate and choose careers, cell
phone providers, plasma versus LCD televisions, even
what religion to raise the kids. Decision making, defined as
the choice of one path among many based on an evaluation
of the possible outcomes, necessarily involves judgment—
the evaluation process itself—but judgment also occurs
in the absence of choice.
Given the centrality of judgment and decision making (JDM)
to nearly everything that is important in life, it stands to reason
that scholars from many disciplines have been interested in
understanding how people go about judging and deciding. This
means that JDM is something of an orphan field, lacking a ded-
icated and exclusive academic home. Notable contributions to
the field have been made by cognitive psychologists (Kelly &
Jacoby, 1998; Markman & Medin, 1995; Shafir, Simonson, &
Tversky, 1993; Sloman, 1996; Slovic & Lichtenstein, 1968;
Tversky & Kahneman, 1974, 1979), social psychologists
(Dawes, 1988; Miller & Taylor, 1995; Nisbett & Ross,
1980; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003), economists (Camerer, 1990;
Loewenstein, 1987, 1996; Thaler, 1980), marketing schol-
ars (Johnson, Hershey, Meszaros, & Kunreuther, 1993;
Simonson, 1989), and academics in a host of other disci-
plines (Rachlinski, 1998; Redelmeier, Koehler, Liberman, &
Tversky, 1995; Simon, 1957; Ubel, Spranca, DeKay, Hershey,
& Asch, 1998).
But having many homes can lead to uncertain member-
ship in any one family. And, in one sign of JDM’s quasi-
orphan status, questions have been repeatedly raised about
whether some of the core topics in JDM should be included
in social psychology textbooks and taught in social psy-
chology survey courses. Updated and put in terms more
relevant to the present volume, Why is there—or should
there even be—a chapter on judgment and decision mak-
ing in the Handbook of Social Psychology?
542
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
We believe that the connections between the fields of
social psychology and JDM run deep and that to exclude
judgment and decision making from the study of social
psychology would rob social psychology of much of what
is important in everyday experience. One way to make the
case for a natural connection between the two fields would
be to list all of the topics or findings in JDM with direct
and powerful implications for social life. It would be a long
list. We have chosen to make the case differently. We aim
to clarify the substantive overlap between the two fields
by highlighting the tremendous influence they have had
on each other, thus showing how the two fields are inex-
tricably linked, to the benefit of both. More specifically,
after a brief history of the development of JDM, we illus-
trate the deep connections between social psychology and
JDM in three ways. We first discuss three important ideas
from JDM that have shaped how social psychologists think
about long-standing issues in their field. We then examine
three ideas from social psychology that have had an endur-
ing impact on the study of JDM. To further show the strong
and natural links between the two fields, we then discuss
three important ideas and areas of investigation that have
arisen independently in each field, with mutually reinforc-
ing effect. We end with some thoughts about the application
of the ideas developed in social psychology and JDM to
solving some of the most pressing problems confronting
the world today.
PROLOGUE: THREE FOUNDING STORIES
Before discussing the rich interconnections between JDM
and social psychology, we look back at the origins of the
field of judgment and decision making. The founders of
modern social psychology (Kurt Lewin, Solomon Asch,
Fritz Heider, and Leon Festinger among them) often
explored such questions as how people decide whether to
join a group, go along with others, or change their previous
opinions. Notably, Festinger wrote a book titled Conflict,

Decision, and Dissonance (1964), and Lewin authored
an influential paper titled “Group Decision and Social
Change” (1952). The study of judgment was also central to
such classic social psychological topics as attitude change
and prejudice toward outgroups. When Sherif and Hovland
(1961) developed social judgment theory, they drew on
perceptual psychology and the concepts of assimilation
and contrast to explain when persuasive messages are
likely to be accepted or rejected. Our opening conundrum
thus arises again: If theories about decision making and
judgment have always been intrinsic to social psychology,
why do we need to chart a separate path of influence on the
part of the “field” of JDM? And why was this influence on
social psychology most pronounced during the 1970s?
Surprisingly, given the long interest in decision making
among scholars in a wide range of disciplines, the field of
JDM as we know it today is a relatively modern invention,
with its birth in the 1950s. The modern field is defined
by the linkage of the study of actual behavioral tendencies
with the specification of formal mathematical models of
judgment and decision-making developed in more prescrip-
tive fields such as statistics, economics, and the philosophy
of logic. It is the tension between the careful analysis of how
judgment and decisions ought to be made and the careful
observation of how decisions are actually made that defines
the modern field. Formal models of judgment and decision
making are built from a set of fundamental axioms that
represent the most basic building blocks of logical analy-
sis as applied to uncertainty, valuation, and choice among
alternatives. It is astonishing to realize that these axiomatic
models that were built up in mathematics, philosophy, and
economics are largely inventions of the 20th century
and were not fully presented until the 1950s. This explains
why JDM—as the confluence of formal models and psy-
chological description—was not born until the 1950s and
consequently only started to exert its full influence on
social psychology in the 1970s and 1980s.
The First Behavioral Economist
The first tale of the founding of JDM focuses on Herbert
Simon, a Nobel Prize winner in economics who, paradoxi-
cally, was one of the fiercest critics of microeconomic the-
ory. Simon was trained in the field of public administration
and was interested in modeling how bureaucracies worked (a
goal more focused on “description” than on “prescription”).
The phenomena that Simon and colleagues observed could
be described as “muddling through”—large organizations
seemed to operate on simple rules of thumb in an environ-
ment in which no one person or department knows everything
but somehow everyone knows just enough to produce a sat-
isfactory overall outcome when the individual contributions
Prologue: Three Founding Stories 543
are added together (Simon, 1947). Such organizational
behavior was strikingly at variance with the dominant eco-
nomic models of the time (and even today), which posited
that organizations and humans were rational (in the eco-
nomic sense of making ideal, profit-maximizing decisions,
not in the Freudian sense of being in touch with reality).
The heart of Simon’s critique was that full economic
rationality was simply an unrealizable model for human
judgment and decision making (Simon, 1955). The “ratio-
nal man” at the center of his critique was a 20th-century
invention built on advances in statistics and choice theory
offered by von Neumann and Morganstern (1944) and
Savage (1954) and developed by Nash (1950) into mod-
ern game theory. In essence, the rational models required
the decision-maker to consider every possible action, the
outcome of every possible action in every possible future
state of the world and the probability of that state, and to
calculate the choice that would lead to the best outcome
(and in the case of game theory, to correctly forecast how
others would respond to each action). Simon (1957) noted
that these theories were computationally unrealistic as
either guides to or descriptions of actual human decision
making because they required prodigious knowledge, an
immense calculation ability that surpassed the capabilities
of any computer at that time, and perfect prescience on the
part of the decision-makers regarding their own (future)
preferences.
Simon did not build his theory on specific psychological
principles or processes: He explicitly noted that psycholog-
ical theories of choice processes were not yet sufficiently
developed to inform economics. Instead, he used general
psychological principles to outline some broad, realistic
constraints on rational models as models of actual decision
making. These general psychological principles reflected
the zeitgeist of cognitive psychology at the time, which
focused on the limits of memory and attention.
Simon’s realistic constraints set the stage for the field of
JDM as we know it today. Most generally, he asserted that
people cannot—and do not want to—carry out the complex
and time-consuming calculations necessary to determine
the ideal choice out of all possible actions. Instead, they
simplify the choice process by searching for a satisfactory
outcome (Simon, 1957). This satisficing generally consists of
three elements: a strategy that examines local or easy
options before looking further afield, a stopping rule that
specifies an aspiration level that must be met and hence
how far afield the search should continue, and a simpli-
fied assessment of future value that provides a rather
vague clue as to the actual value of the choice. Another,
less well-known side to Simon’s critique emphasized that
such simplified methods of choice can do surprisingly
well relative to optimizing methods and that “bounded
544 Judgment and Decision Making
rationality” could still be evolutionarily successful (Simon,
1957, 1990).
Simon offered the field of economics two other familiar
psychological insights that were to echo repeatedly in the
development of JDM. First, the human mind (as well as
the aggregate mind of the organization) can only hold on
to two or three alternatives at one time. Second, attention
is a precious and costly commodity, a fact that must be
considered in any description of how judgment and choice
processes operate (Simon, 1957). Thus, in the vocabulary
later introduced by Kahneman and Tversky, Simon had
both a negative agenda (explaining how ideal, rational
models were unrealistic and descriptively invalid) and a
positive agenda (providing guidelines as to how humans—
and animals—might make highly sensible, if simplified,
choices).
Simon was thus the first acknowledged “behavioral
economist” who strove to incorporate psychological real-
ism into economic models and explanations. The second
founding tale of JDM focuses on the individual most
responsible for creating information flow in the opposite
direction, importing economic and statistical models into
psychology.
The First Behavioral Decision Theorist
In 1954, Ward Edwards published a review paper that
introduced the formal theories of decision making to
the broader field of psychology. He introduced the now-
formalized subjective expected utility (SEU) model of
decision making, with its distinctions between objective
value (e.g., money) and subjective utility and between
objective probability (e.g., the proportion of sixes expected
when rolling a fair die) and subjective probability (a per-
sonal belief about the likelihood that a six will turn up).
Although the notion of utility had been part of econom-
ics at least since Bentham (1789/1948), it received a sharp
twist in the new formal models (Kahneman, Wakker, &
Sarin, 1997). Now, instead of referring to the pleasure or
pain a person received from an outcome—that is, experi-
enced utility, as originally used by Bentham—it referred to
the predicted utility associated with a given choice.
In a follow-up 1961 review, Edwards coined the term
“behavioral decision theory” and reviewed the now-
burgeoning literature on empirical tests of the founda-
tions of SEU and related models. Edwards also introduced
Bayesian statistical methods to psychologists in a review
coauthored with a leading statistician (Edwards, Lindman, &
Savage, 1963).
In addition to providing influential reviews of formal deci-
sion models and relevant empirical evidence, Edwards and his
colleagues conducted programs of empirical research aimed
at reconciling formal models and actual behavior. Notably,
he studied how gamblers used probabilities in Las Vegas and
how computer programs might bridge the gap between actual
and ideal decision making (Edwards, Lindman & Savage,
1963). He chronicled a long list of failures of the formal mod-
els to match actual judgment and decision making, noting
that people reacted differently to gains and losses and seemed
to be most responsive to comparative values rather than
absolute values, consistent with Lewin’s expectancy-value
model of aspiration level (Lewin, Dembo, Festinger, & Sears,
1944). However, because of his deep interest in decision
analysis—which was the new subdiscipline of using formal
tools and models to provide useful guides to decision-makers—
Edwards was reluctant to discard what quickly became known
as the “classical” formal models and preferred to use them as
approximations to human judgment and decision making.
Thus, although his dissertation began with the clear statement:
“People in gambling situations do not make choices in such
a way as to maximize their expected winnings or minimize
their expected losses” (Edwards, 1953 p. 349), Edwards
continued to use the formal models throughout his career
as the core of his explanatory frameworks and maintained
an optimistic outlook as to the perfectibility of human judg-
ment through decision aids. Famously, he and his colleagues
concluded that human judgment could be characterized as
“approximately Bayesian,” implying that people largely fol-
lowed the rules of subjective probability (or Bayesian prob-
ability) as defined in SEU theory (Edwards, 1968).
The Third Path to the Psychology
of Judgment and Decision Making
The heuristics and biases program of research instigated
by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has come to
define JDM in many social psychology textbooks and in
the minds of many social psychologists, not least because
of the Nobel Prize awarded to Kahneman in 2002 for his
joint work with Tversky. Although the program grew out
of the zeitgeist created by Simon, Edwards, and many oth-
ers, it had a radically different agenda. The program began
when Tversky, a mathematical psychologist who had worked
with Edwards and others on formal measurement models,
described the current state of the behavioral decision theory
paradigm circa 1968 to Kahneman, his colleague in the
Psychology Department at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Kahneman found the idea of tinkering with formal models
such as SEU to make them fit the accumulating empirical
evidence to be an unpromising approach to understanding the
psychological processes involved in judgment and choice.
Instead, he argued, based on his own research on visual
attention and processing, the principles of cognition under-
lying judgment should follow the principles of perception.

Thus, instead of starting with formal models as the basis
of descriptive accounts of judgment and decision making,
Kahneman and Tversky started with principles of percep-
tion and psychophysics and extended them to the kind of
processing necessary to evaluate probabilities and assess
subjective values.
This approach immediately suggested a guiding para-
digm for research on judgment and decision-making: the
study of visual illusions. The logic of studying percep-
tual illusions is that failures of a system are often more
diagnostic of the rules the system follows than are its
successes. Consider, for example, the moon illusion:
The full moon looks enormous as it sits on the horizon
but more modestly sized when high in the sky. Little can
be learned from the constancy of the perceived size of the
moon along the long arc of the overhead sky, but its illusory
magnification when it sits on the horizon provides insight
about the way that the visual system uses contextual detail
to compute perceived distance and hence perceived size.
The visual illusion paradigm, like the cognitive illusion
approach patterned on it, does not imply that judgments
of size are typically wrong—in fact, it provides a map to
those situations in which intuitive perceptions are likely
to be correct—but it highlights the processes by which per-
ception or judgment is constructed from imperfect cues.
Thus, the resulting guiding logic in the study of judg-
ment was in practice the opposite of the approach cham-
pioned by Simon, who had urged researchers to seek out
and understand the environmental factors that maximized
the success of simple processes (Simon, 1955, 1990). The
cognitive illusion paradigm seeks out those environments
or problem descriptions in which the judgment and choice
processes people rely on lead to clear errors. The purpose
was not to emphasize the predominance of bias over accu-
racy but to find the clearest testing grounds for diagnosing
the underlying simple processes or judgmental heuristics
that people habitually employ.
The heuristics that Kahneman and Tversky identified
were also suggested by the principles of perceptual psy-
chology, especially the organizing principles of Gestalt
psychology (e.g., Koffka, 1935). Gestalt psychology
emphasized how the perceptual system effortlessly and
without awareness creates whole forms even when the infor-
mation reaching the receptors is incomplete and indetermi-
nate. According to the heuristics and biases approach—and
according to the pertinent evidence—these underlying
heuristics are not a simplified version of an ideal statisti-
cal analysis but are instead something completely differ-
ent. This constituted a key point of differentiation between
the heuristics and biases model and the other models
before it: “In his evaluation of evidence, man is apparently
not a conservative Bayesian: he is not Bayesian at all”
Prologue: Three Founding Stories 545
(Kahneman & Tversky, 1972, p. 450; italics in original).
Unfortunately, or so it seems to us, this statement was taken
by some to imply that the heuristics and bias (hu)man was
not simply un-Bayesian but was rather stupid.
In a second phase of their collaborative research, Kahneman
and Tversky took the perceptual framework they had used
to study probability judgment and used it to illuminate deci-
sion making, leading to their most complete and formal
model, prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Here,
fundamental perceptual principles such as comparison lev-
els and adaptation (Helson, 1964), diminishing sensitivity,
and the privileged status of pain were the primitives of a
model that again used specific biases and errors as tools of
diagnosis.
It is illuminating to compare the evolutionary impli-
cations of Simon’s bounded rationality and the heuristics
and biases approach. For Simon, the guiding evolutionary
principle was computational realism (i.e., simplified
approximation) that nonetheless was well adapted to fit the
information environment. For Kahneman and Tversky,
the guiding evolutionary principle was that existing pro-
cesses in perceptual analysis were co-opted as tools for
higher-level cognitive processing. Although these tools
might work well in many environments, they also lead
to signature biases that are endemic to human intuition.
In many cases, the biases that to Kahneman and Tversky
were signals of underlying heuristics were already well
known. For example, Meehl and Rosen (1955) had warned
clinicians of the danger of neglecting base rates in psycho-
logical diagnoses. In other cases, the biases were identified
by informal observation, whether of psychologists who
seemed to neglect power and underestimate sample sizes,
Israeli army officers who neglected regression effects in
determining the value of rewards versus punishment, or
army selection personnel who maintained their belief in
the efficacy of interviews despite statistical evidence to the
contrary.
Without these three founding stories, the field of JDM
would look different from its appearance today, if indeed
it existed at all. Of course, many other influences shaped
JDM and, through it, social psychology. For example, the
study of logical reasoning in cognitive psychology became
an important strand of JDM as errors in reasoning became
a focus of study. As we shift the focus back to social psy-
chology, we are in a position to answer the why and when
questions. JDM had its impact on social psychology starting
in the late 1960s and early 1970s for three main reasons.
First, formal theories of judgment and decision making blos-
somed in the 1950s and provided a vocabulary for talking
about and studying the processes of judgment and decision
making. Second, the work of the three founding paradigms
just described provided a new and stimulating way to think
546 Judgment and Decision Making

about rationality and error in human thought and behav-
ior. Third, the methodology of the heuristics and biases
framework—simple pencil-and-paper demonstrations of
judgment and decision errors—was easily extended to the
investigation of issues central to social psychology, espe-
cially the cognitive social psychology of the 1970s.
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY’S DEBT TO
JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING
If the field of JDM never existed, social psychology would
be different in several ways from what it is now. Social
psychologists would have to reach for different terms to
characterize the phenomena they study if their field’s acces-
sible lexicon did not include the JDM terms base rates,
counterfactuals, heuristics, illusory correlation, “a proper
Bayesian,” and countless others. And the acknowledged
importance of such things as heuristics, counterfactuals, and
illusory correlations also means that social psychologists
must now confront journal editors and reviewers armed
with additional alternative interpretations of experimental
results. Social psychologists must now show that their find-
ings are not “just” the reflection of a particular heuristic,
a possible counterfactual comparison, or a quasi-Bayesian
analysis. Even the need to rule out regression artifacts—an
important caution in social psychology methods courses
long before the field’s connection to JDM—would likely
not be as accessible, and hence raised as often, if the regres-
sion fallacy and the psychological mechanisms that give
rise to it were not such prominent topics in JDM.
To illustrate how much JDM has influenced what the
field of social psychology looks like, how social psycholo-
gists think, and how they conduct their research—to high-
light the debt that social psychology owes to JDM—we
discuss three particularly important ideas developed in
JDM that have found their way to social psychology.
In particular, we discuss how the notion of confirmation
bias, the concept of heuristics, and the application of nor-
mative theories have largely originated in the field of JDM
and come to influence theoretical development and empiri-
cal research in social psychology.
Confirmation Bias
Suppose a friend gives you a bunch of hostas from her gar-
den for you to plant in yours. “I don’t really know what
I’m talking about,” she adds, “but I suspect they need a lot
of water. You might want to test that out.” How would you
conduct your test? If you are like most people, you would
plant them, give them a lot of water, and see how they fare.
What you would not do is give a lot of water to some, give
little to the others, and compare the results.
If so, your actions would reflect a common tendency in
inductive reasoning typically referred to as a confirmation
bias (Beyth-Marom & Fischhoff, 1983; Crocker, 1982;
Klayman & Ha, 1987; Mynatt, Doherty, & Tweney, 1977;
Skov & Sherman, 1986). When evaluating a proposition
(hostas need a lot of water, happy people live longer, or
Japanese Americans are more self-critical than European
Americans), we more readily, reliably, and reflexively look
for evidence that would support the proposition than for
evidence that would contradict it. The nomenclature is
important but potentially misleading. At times, we want
a given proposition to be true, so we energetically, and
not disinterestedly, sift through the pertinent evidence in
an effort to uncover information that confirms its validity
(Dawson, Gilovich, & Regan, 2002; Ditto & Lopez, 1992;
Ditto, Scepansky, Munro, Apanovich, & Lockhart, 1998;
Gilovich, 1983, 1991; Hsee, 1995, 1996; Kruglanski &
Webster, 1996; Kunda, 1990; Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979;
Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987). But that is not the case
in most investigations of the confirmation bias. The par-
ticipants have no stake in the outcome and are not trying to
confirm the proposition they are testing. But they neverthe-
less tend to look for and examine information that would
fit the proposition being tested more than information that
would contradict it. Partly to try to head off any confusion
between these two strategies, some have suggested the
term positive test strategy for the disinterested form of this
tendency (Klayman & Ha, 1987).
Interest in the confirmation bias among JDM research-
ers was sparked by a pair of experimental paradigms pio-
neered by Peter Wason. In the first, participants were told
that the experimenter had in mind a rule specifying accept-
able sets of three integers and that one acceptable set was
2 4 6. The participants were to generate their own sets of
three integers and the experimenter would indicate whether
each one satisfied the rule. Participants were allowed to
record their sets and the experimenter ’s response, and they
were to tell the experimenter what they thought the rule
was once they were sure they had figured it out.
Performance on the task was not impressive, with an
apparent confirmation bias getting in participants’ way
(Wason, 1960). That is, participants tended to generate
only positive instances of the rules they were entertaining,
which, given the rule Wason had in mind (any ascending
sequence), made it virtually impossible for them to be dis-
abused of their hypotheses. For example, someone with
the hypothesis “equally spaced ascending integers” would
tend to offer sets such as 10 15 20 or 25 50 75. This
would result in consistent feedback that the set fit the rule,
increased confidence on the part of participants that they had
figured it out, and then consternation when they learned that
their assessment was incorrect. The tendency to construct

positive tests of their hypotheses, in other words, made it
difficult for them to discern that they were not on the right
track when a negative test would readily have done so (the
experimenter would have said, for example, that 10 11 15
fit the rule, making it clear that “equally spaced ascending
integers” was not on the mark).
The second paradigm, one that has inspired hundreds of
replications, has come to be known as the Wason selection
task. In the usual variant, participants are shown four cards
(often just pictures of four cards on a piece of paper or
computer screen), each said to have a number on one side
and a letter on the other. The participant’s task is to specify
which cards need to be turned over to determine whether
a given rule is valid—say, “All cards with a vowel on one
side have an even number on the other.” In this case, par-
ticipants might be shown cards with A, B, 2, and 3 face up
(Wason & Johnson-Laird, 1972).
What Wason and many others have found is that a con-
siderable majority of participants state that either the A card
has to be turned over or the A card and 2 card (Evans, 2007;
Evans, Newstead, & Byrne, 1993; Wason & Johnson-Laird,
1972). The latter response appears to reflect the use of a
positive test strategy. The rule says that all vowels have an
even number on the other side, so one looks at the vowel
and even-number cards to see whether evidence to support
the rule is obtained. Here, too, people do not tend to pur-
sue a disconfirmatory strategy that would allow them to
adequately assess the rule—they do not turn over the
potentially decisive 3 card (which, if it had a vowel on
the other side, would invalidate the rule).
Content and Domain Influences on
Hypothesis Testing
As one would expect, performance on the Wason selection
task is improved if the rule to be evaluated is more engag-
ing than “every card with a vowel on one side has an even
number on the other” (Cheng & Holyoak, 1985; Cox &
Griggs, 1982; Holyoak & Cheng, 1995; Johnson-Laird,
Legrenzi, & Legrenzi, 1972; Wason & Shapiro, 1971;
Yachanin & Tweney, 1982). But it is not a case of simply
making the content of the task more like the real world.
Instead, there appear to be two broad classes of selection
tasks, indicative and deontic, and thematic content tends to
have a bigger facilitory effect on the latter (Evans, 2007;
Manktelow & Over, 1991). Indicative rules refer simply
to empirical regularities—for example, all individuals with
red hair have freckles. Deontic rules involve permissions
or obligations—for example, everyone riding in a car must
wear a seat belt.
People are more likely to select the equivalent of the
3 card for deontic rules rich in content. The best known
and most widely cited example is the drinking age
Social Psychology’s Debt to Judgment and Decision Making 547
problem: “If a person is drinking beer in a bar, then he or
she is 21 or older.” Most people find this problem easy.
If shown the four statements “drinking beer,” “drinking
soda,” “22 years old,” and “16 years old,” they quickly and
reliably select “drinking beer” and “16 years old”—here, in
other words, they quite naturally look for disconfirmatory
evidence (Griggs & Cox, 1982). Evolutionary psycholo-
gists have interpreted this result as evidence of an innate
module dedicated to reasoning about social contracts and
the detection of “cheaters” (Cosmides, 1989; Pinker, 1997;
Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). This claim has been criticized
on several grounds (Cheng & Holyoak, 1989; Evans &
Over, 1996; Fodor, 2000; Sperber, Cara, & Girotto, 1995;
Sperber & Girotto, 2002), and without independent sub-
stantiating evidence, it rests on an invalid chain of logic.
That is, the claim that enhanced performance on social-
contract versions of the selection task stems from an
evolved, domain-specific module is essentially a claim that
the following syllogism is valid:
Performance on most versions of the Wason selection
task is poor.
Performance on social-contract versions of the task is
quite good.
Therefore, the ability to reason through social-contract
versions is handled by a domain-specific module evolved
through natural selection.
Exactly why deontic versions of the selection task are
typically easier remains an issue of great interest and con-
troversy. Many argue for an evolutionary account (Fiddick,
Spampinato, & Grafman, 2005; Stone, Cosmides, Tooby,
Kroll, & Knight, 2002), whereas others maintain that it
stems from differential cuing (Sperber & Girotto, 2002) or
the subtly different goals that are evoked by deontic and
indicative versions of the selection task (Evans & Over,
1996; Manktelow & Over, 1991; Oaksford & Chater,
1994).
Hypothesis Testing in Social Life
Whatever the cause of the pronounced content effects on
performance on selection tasks, social psychologists were
quick to see the relevance of the confirmation bias for every-
day social life. In one often-cited study, Snyder and Swann
(1978) asked half of their participants to interview a target
individual and ascertain whether that person was an extra-
vert. The remaining participants were to ascertain whether the
target was an introvert. Participants selected their interview
questions from a list provided. Those charged with ascertain-
ing whether the target was an extravert tended to ask ques-
tions that focused on sociability (“In what situations are you
548 Judgment and Decision Making
most talkative?”), whereas those charged with ascertaining
whether the target was an introvert tended to ask questions
that focused on social withdrawal (“In what situations do you
wish you could be more outgoing?”). In an important wrin-
kle that shows the powerful implications of relying on such
an information-search strategy, Snyder and Swann tape-
recorded the interview sessions, edited out the questions
so that only the responses remained, and then played the
responses to another, uninformed set of participants. These
latter participants rated those who had been interviewed
by someone testing whether they were extraverted as more
outgoing than those who had been interviewed by some-
one testing whether they were introverted.
This work and much that followed showed how a
positive test strategy can elicit behavior that confirms,
erroneously, the very hypothesis being tested. Because
people tend to be agreeable and hence somewhat acqui-
escent in most social interactions, they tend to respond in
ways that accept the thrust of the questions they are asked
(Zuckerman, Knee, Hodgins, & Miyake, 1995). Extending
this idea further, social psychologists were particularly
interested in exploring how these processes can cement and
exacerbate erroneous stereotypes. Entertaining the possi-
bility that members of a particular group might conform to
a prevailing stereotype can lead people to behave toward
them in ways that elicit stereotype-consistent behavior
(Hebl, Foster, Mannix, & Dovidio, 2002; Word, Zanna, &
Cooper, 1974).
The idea of a confirmation bias has also been invoked
to advance social psychologists’ understanding of a topic
of long-standing interest to the field: social comparison.
Mussweiler (2003) argues that social comparison involves
a two-step process. First, a person makes a quick, holis-
tic assessment of whether someone is similar to or dif-
ferent from a comparison target. For example, a person
might make a snap implicit judgment that a target is differ-
ent from someone who is the opposite gender, a different
race, or thought of as an extreme exemplar (Albert Einstein,
Angelina Jolie, LeBron James). Second, we tend to look
for similarities between self and similar targets but dissimi-
larities between self and dissimilar targets—that is, to seek
out confirmatory information—with predictable effects on
self-assessment.
In one notable study in support of this model, Mussweiler,
Ruter, and Epstude (2004) had participants think about
their own athletic ability while being subliminally primed
with the names of individuals regarded as extremely high
or low in athleticism (basketball star Michael Jordan and
Pope John Paul II) or moderately high or low in athleti-
cism (racecar driver Niki Lauda and former President Bill
Clinton). Participants were then asked to estimate how
many pushups they could do and how fast they could run
100 meters. What Mussweiler and colleagues found was
that participants primed with moderate exemplars looked
for similarities between themselves and the targets, result-
ing in assimilation. Those primed with Lauda thought they
were stronger and faster than those primed with Clinton.
Those primed with extreme exemplars, in contrast, looked
for dissimilarities between themselves and the targets,
resulting in contrast. Those primed with Jordan thought
they were weaker and slower than those primed with the
pope. Further studies have shown that these effects are
the product of the enhanced accessibility of target-consis-
tent self-knowledge under conditions that foster similarity
testing and target-inconsistent self-knowledge under con-
ditions that foster dissimilarity testing (Dijksterhuis et al.,
1998; Mussweiler & Bodenhausen, 2002; Mussweiler
et al., 2004).
Heuristics
If we were to identify the most important event that ties
together the fields of social psychology and JDM, it
would surely be Tversky and Kahneman’s short (seven-
page) paper in Science in 1974. In that paper, Tversky
and Kahneman described three heuristics—anchoring,
availability, and representativeness—that influence judg-
ment in a stunningly wide range of areas and that provide
a unifying explanation of otherwise-isolated phenom-
ena. In that paper, heuristics were described as “rules of
thumb” that provide serviceable, but imperfect, answers to
difficult judgment problems. They were contrasted with
algorithms, which are more labor intensive but yield pre-
cise and perfectly accurate answers. For example, we can
determine the number of people in a lecture hall by exhaus-
tively counting each person in attendance (the algorithmic
solution), or we can simply estimate the average number
of people in a representative row and multiply by the esti-
mated number of rows (the heuristic solution). The heuris-
tic in this example is a narrow one that applies only to the
special purpose of estimating attendance in an auditorium.
One of the reasons that Tversky and Kahneman’s work had
such impact is that they identified several general-purpose
heuristics that apply to all sorts of judgments.
From the moment these three heuristics were intro-
duced, most readers tended to think of them as serving
an effort-saving role, an interpretation that helped inspire
and give shape to early “dual process” theories in social
psychology (described later), such as the elaboration like-
lihood (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) and heuristic–system-
atic (Chaiken, 1980) models of persuasion. According
to these models, a motivated person is likely to respond to
a persuasive message by carefully processing all informa-
tion it contains and its implications and hence is likely to

be influenced (or not) by the soundness of the arguments
presented. A less motivated person is inclined to give the
message minimal attention and hence is likely to be influ-
enced by such superficial features as the attractiveness of
the communicator or the number (rather than the quality)
of the arguments presented.
Later refinements of dual-process accounts of cognition
postulate that the two processes or systems of thought oper-
ate in less of an either–or fashion (Epstein, 1991; Evans,
2007; Gilbert, 1999; Kahneman & Frederick, 2002; Sloman,
1996; Stanovich, 1999; Strack & Deutsch, 2004). These
later models stipulate that the two systems operate in paral-
lel, with the relative impact of each determined by the extent
to which the characteristics of the problem at hand activate
the different cognitive processes that constitute the two
systems. Heuristics, from this revised perspective, are auto-
matic computations made by the reflexive, associative sys-
tem (often referred to as system 1) that either powerfully
influence the more reflective, rule-based analyses (known
as system 2) or that are simply taken as acceptable answers
to the judgment problem at hand (Kahneman, 2003;
Kahneman & Frederick, 2002). When reading a letter of
recommendation, for example, one automatically assesses
the similarity between the candidate being described and the
various prototypes of individuals who have previously
occupied the position (“jack of all trades,” “brilliant but
sloppy,” or “a grinder”). The similarity to the prototype
then either strongly influences a more reflective assessment
of the applicant’s likely success or entirely substitutes for
such an assessment (“that type never works out here”).
Tversky and Kahneman initially identified the three
heuristics of availability, representativeness, and anchor-
ing and adjustment. We therefore focus our review of heu-
ristics on these three, and then briefly discuss additional
heuristics that have been proposed since.
Availability
Given that there are a lot of Jewish comedians, you can
probably think of particular examples readily. There is
merit, then, in turning this around and concluding that if
you have an easy time thinking of Jewish comedians, there
probably are a lot of them. The logic is generally sound,
and it constitutes the essence of the availability heuristic,
or the tendency to use the ease with which one can generate
examples as a cue to category size or likelihood. But the
“probably” in this inference is important. There can be other
reasons why examples of a given category are easy or hard
to generate, so availability is not always a reliable guide to
actual frequency or probability (Folkes, 1988; Kahneman &
Tversky, 1973; Macleod & Campbell, 1992; Oppenheimer,
2004; Rothbart, Fulero, Jensen, Howard, & Birrell, 1978;
Tversky & Kahneman, 1983).
Social Psychology’s Debt to Judgment and Decision Making 549
Kahneman and Tversky (1973) first demonstrated this
in a series of classic experiments. In one, participants were
asked whether there are more words that begin with the
letter r or that have r as the third letter. Because it is easier
to generate words that start with r (red, rabid, ratatouille,
etc.) than words that have an r in the third position (Huron,
herald, unreasonable, etc.), most participants thought there
were more of the former than the latter. In reality, there are
three times as many words with an r in the third position.
Ross and Sicoly (1979) explored the implications of
the availability heuristic for everyday social life. They
asked couples to specify their own percentage contribu-
tion to various tasks and outcomes that come with living
together—keeping the house clean, maintaining the social
calendar, starting arguments, and so on. They predicted
that each person’s contributions would be more salient
than their partner ’s contributions and thus that both part-
ners would overestimate their own role. And that is just
what participants did. When the estimates made by each
member of a couple were summed, they tended to exceed
the logical maximum of 100%. This was true, notably, for
negative actions (e.g., starting fights), as well as for posi-
tive actions—evidence that the availability heuristic, not
self-enhancing motivations, is responsible for this effect.
Norbert Schwarz and colleagues have shown how the
availability heuristic can influence people’s self-assess-
ments. In so doing, they settled an important concep-
tual issue that lies at the core of the availability heuristic
(Schwarz & Vaughn, 2002; Schwarz et al., 1991; see also
Gabrielcik & Fazio, 1984). Recall that people are assumed
to use the ease with which they can come up with instances
of a given category when making judgments about the
category. But note that if instances are easy to generate,
people will probably come up with a lot of them. So how
can we be sure that people are influenced by the ease with
which they generate instances (a metacognitive feature)
rather than the number of instances they generate (a cogni-
tive feature)? Typically, we cannot be sure. What Schwarz
and colleagues did was to disentangle these two, usually
intertwined features. In one representative experiment, they
asked half their participants to think of times they had been
assertive and the other half to think of times they had
been unassertive. Some participants in each group were
asked to think of 6 examples, and the others were asked to
think of 12 examples. The required number of instances, 6
and 12, were carefully chosen so that thinking of 6 examples
would be easy but thinking of 12 would be a challenge.
This manipulation separates ease of generation (pro-
cess) from number of examples generated (content). Those
asked to think of 12 examples of their assertiveness (or
unassertiveness) will think of more examples than those
asked to think of 6, but they will have a harder time doing
550 Judgment and Decision Making
so. What Schwarz and colleagues found was that those
asked to think of 6 examples of their past assertiveness
later rated themselves as more assertive than those asked
to think of 12 examples. The same pattern held for those
asked to think of past examples of unassertiveness. Thus,
it is the ease with which people can recall examples, not
the number of examples recalled, that dominates people’s
judgments. The effect was so strong that those asked to
come up with 12 examples of their own unassertiveness
(and who thus had lots of examples of their failure to be
assertive on the top of their heads) rated themselves as
more assertive than those asked to come up with 12 exam-
ples of assertiveness (and who thus had lots of examples of
their past assertiveness on the top of their heads). Schwarz
and colleagues have shown that the metacognitive experi-
ence of the ease with which people can access pertinent
evidence affects their judgments of their own vulnerability
to sexual assault and heart disease (Grayson & Schwarz,
1999; Rothman & Schwarz, 1998), the quality of their
memory (Winkielman, Schwarz, & Belli, 1998), and the
pleasantness of their childhood (Winkielman & Schwarz,
2001). Other investigators have shown that this instance-
listing procedure influences people’s estimates of their past
behavior (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 1999), their assessments
of how much their hometowns and high-school friends
have changed (Eibach, Libby, & Gilovich, 2003), and their
attitudes toward proposed policy changes (Brinol, Petty, &
Tormala, 2006).
In a wry application of this paradigm, Craig Fox had
students list either 2 or 10 ways a course could be improved
as part of the standard end-of-the-term course evaluation
process (Fox, 2006). Students asked to list 10 possible
improvements apparently had difficulty doing so because
they rated the course significantly more favorably (median
of 5.5 on a 7.0-point scale) than students asked to list 2
ways to improve (median of 5.0).
Availability’s Close Cousin: Fluency The mere act of
imagining an outcome can make it seem more likely to
occur. Imagining one candidate winning an election makes
it seem more likely that that candidate will triumph (Carroll,
1978), and imagining what it would be like to have a disease
makes it seem that one is more at risk of getting it (Sherman,
Cialdini, Schwartzman, & Reynolds, 1985). This effect was
originally interpreted as the result of availability. Imagining
the event made it more cognitively available; hence, it was
judged more likely.
But is availability really the culprit? After all, the con-
cept of, say, getting an ulcer is made highly available—
perhaps maximally available—by the very question that
elicits the judgment of likelihood: whether one had earlier
imagined having an ulcer or not. How hard can it be for the
thought of having an ulcer to “come to mind” when one
has just been presented the words “what are the chances
that you will someday have an ulcer?” And what exactly
are the “relevant instances” that easily (or not) come to
mind when one is asked to estimate the likelihood of hav-
ing an ulcer?
The point here is that the very question about likelihood
puts the target event at the forefront of one’s mind regard-
less of whether one had earlier imagined it. But thinking of
the target event is nonetheless likely to have a different feel
if one had, in fact, mentally tried it on earlier. It is likely to
feel more “fluent.” Fluency refers to the experience of ease
or difficulty associated with information processing. A clear
image is easy to process, and fluent. A phonemically irreg-
ular word is hard to process, and disfluent. People use the
metacognitive experience of fluency as a cue when making
inferences about all sorts of judgments (Jacoby & Dallas,
1981; Oppenheimer, 2008). People judge fluent names to
be more famous (Jacoby, Woloshyn, & Kelley, 1989), flu-
ent objects to be better category members (Whittlesea &
Leboe, 2000), and adages that rhyme to be more valid
than those that do not (McGlone & Tofighbakhsh, 2000).
In addition to these direct effects on judgment, flu-
ency appears to influence how people process relevant
information. In many respects, the feeling of fluency or
disfluency has the same effects as being in a good or bad
mood (see the mood effects on judgment described later).
A feeling of disfluency while processing information
appears to undermine people’s confidence in what they
are doing, leading to something of a “go slow, be care-
ful” approach to judgment and decision making. Thus,
people are more likely to choose a default option when
choosing among consumer products that are made dis-
fluent (Novemsky, Dhar, Schwarz, & Simonson, 2007).
The shift to more cautious information processing was
shown even more directly in a study by Alter and col-
leagues (2007), who gave participants the cognitive
reflection task (Frederick, 2005) in either a normal or a
degraded font. The cognitive reflection task requires sti-
fling an immediate gut reaction to arrive at the correct
answer to each question. For example, participants are
given the question, “A bat and ball cost $1.10 in total.
The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the
ball cost?” The participants must think beyond the imme-
diate response of 10 cents to arrive at the correct response
of 5 cents. Alter and colleagues found that participants
answered more questions correctly when the questions
were presented in a degraded, and hence disfluent, font
(Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, & Eyre, 2007).
Fluency also appears to influence the level of abstrac-
tion at which information is encoded. As described later in
our discussion of temporal construal theory (Trope

& Liberman, 2003), the same event (taking a test) can
be construed relatively concretely (answering questions)
or abstractly (assessing aptitude), and it has been shown
that physically distant objects tend to be construed more
abstractly (Fujita, Henderson, Eng, Trope, & Liberman,
2006) than close objects. Given that blurry (disfluent)
objects tend to appear to be farther away than distinct objects
(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), we might expect disflu-
ent entities more generally to appear relatively far away.
Indeed, Alter and Oppenheimer (2008) found that cities are
judged to be farther away when their names are presented
in a difficult-to-read font. To link this finding to construal
level, they then examined archival records of an online
Balderdash tournament, in which players make up bogus
definitions for obscure words. They found that participants
provided more abstract definitions of more phonemically
complex, or disfluent, words.
Representativeness
Jenna Jones, nutrition program manager for Cornell
Cooperative Extension (a component of Cornell’s land-
grant mission to disseminate information to the public),
informs readers of her column that a tomato “has four
chambers and is red” and that eating tomatoes is good for
the heart; a walnut “looks like a little brain” and “we now
know that walnuts help develop more than three dozen
neuron-transmitters (sic) for brain function”; and kidney
beans assist with the healthy functioning of their organ name-
sake (Jones, 2008). Jones’s advice to her readers appears to
be heavily influenced by a second heuristic identified by
Kahneman and Tversky: representativeness.
Making judgments on the basis of representative-
ness reflects the mind’s tendency to automatically assess
the similarity between two entities under consideration
and to use that assessment as input to a judgment about
likelihood. Judgments about the likelihood of an object
belonging to a category are powerfully influenced by how
similar the object is to the category prototype (Kahneman &
Tversky, 1972, 1973; Tversky & Kahneman, 1983).
Judgments of the likelihood that an outcome stems from a
particular cause are powerfully influenced by the similar-
ity between putative cause and observed effect (Gilovich &
Savitsky, 2002; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Judgments about
the likelihood of obtaining a given result are powerfully
influenced by the similarity between the features of the
imagined result and those of the processes thought to be
at work (Kahneman & Tversky, 1972, 1973; Tversky &
Kahneman, 1971).
The most compelling way to demonstrate that judg-
ments are “powerfully” influenced by a hypothesized pro-
cess is to show that they are excessively influenced. Much
of the research on representativeness has therefore sought
Social Psychology’s Debt to Judgment and Decision Making 551
to show that the heuristic leads people to make judgments
that violate clear normative standards. Judging whether a
sample is likely to have come from a particular generating
process by assessing the similarity between the two, for
example, has been shown to give rise to a “law of small
numbers,” or a tendency to believe, contrary to probability
theory, that even small samples should be representative of
the populations from which they are drawn (which is true
of large samples and is captured in the law of large num-
bers). The belief in a law of small numbers has been estab-
lished by studies showing that people (including expert
statisticians and psychologists) are excessively confident
about the replicability of research findings (Tversky &
Kahneman, 1971), have difficulty recognizing or generat-
ing random sequences (Falk & Konold, 1997; Gilovich,
Vallone, & Tversky, 1985; Wagenaar, 1972), and are
overly influenced by the relative proportion of successes
and failures, and insufficiently influenced by sample size,
in assessments of how confident they can be in a particular
hypothesis (Griffin & Tversky, 1993).
The work on representativeness that garnered the most
attention and sparked the greatest controversy, however,
involved experiments demonstrating that the allure of rep-
resentativeness can prevent people from using base rates
or basic set-inclusion principles when making predictions.
In one now-classic study (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973),
participants were given the following description of an
individual enrolled in graduate school:
Tom W. is of high intelligence, although lacking in true cre-
ativity. He has a need for order and clarity, and for neat and
tidy systems in which every detail finds its appropriate place.
His writing is rather dull and mechanical, occasionally enliv-
ened by somewhat corny puns and by flashes of imagination
of the sci-fi type. He has a strong drive for competence. He
seems to have little feel and little sympathy for other people
and does not enjoy interacting with others. Self-centered,
he nonetheless has a deep moral sense. (p. 238)
One group of participants was asked to rank nine disci-
plines in terms of how closely Tom resembled the typical
student in that field. A second group ranked them in terms
of the likelihood that Tom was actually enrolled in each. A
third group simply estimated the percentage of all graduate
students in the United States who were enrolled in each dis-
cipline. There were two critical findings. First, the rankings
of the likelihood that Tom actually studied each of the disci-
plines were virtually identical to the rankings of how similar
he seemed to the typical student in each field. Participants’
assessments of likelihood, in other words, were powerfully
influence by representativeness. Second, the rankings of like-
lihood did not correspond with what the participants knew
about the popularity of the different disciplines. Information
552 Judgment and Decision Making
about the base rate, or the a priori likelihood of Tom being a
student in each of the fields, was simply ignored.
Experiments like this sparked a long-running con-
troversy about whether and when people are likely to
ignore or underutilize base rates (Cosmides & Tooby,
1996; Gavanski & Hui, 1992; Gigerenzer, 1991; Griffin &
Buehler, 1999; Koehler, 1996). The controversy was pro-
ductive, as it yielded such findings as people are more
likely to use base rate information if it is presented after
the information about the individual (Krosnick, Li, &
Lehman, 1990), if the base rate is physically instantiated
in a sampling paradigm (Gigerenzer, Hell, & Blank, 1988,
but see Poulton, 1994, p. 153), and if the base rate is caus-
ally related to the to-be-predicted event (Ajzen, 1977;
Tversky & Kahneman, 1982). But in an important respect
the controversy was misguided because the essential idea
being put forward was that people’s judgments are power-
fully influenced by representativeness, not that people can-
not, or typically do not, use base rates. Instead, the Tom W.
studies and others like it were existence proofs. They
showed that, however often or intelligently people might
use base rates in their everyday and professional lives, the
allure of representativeness is so strong that it can blind
them to the relevance of information they would otherwise
use quite readily. In fact, the more people typically use
base rates, the stronger the demonstration: Showing that
representativeness leads people to ignore information they
are too keen to ignore anyway is not impressive; show-
ing that it leads them to ignore information they typically
embrace is.
Every bit as controversial as the work on representa-
tiveness and base rates were Tversky and Kahneman’s
(1983) demonstrations that the allure of representativeness
could lead people to commit the “conjunction fallacy” and
end up judging that the conjunction of two events is more
likely than either of the two events alone. For example,
participants in one study were given the following descrip-
tion of an individual:
Bill is 34 years old. He is intelligent but unimaginative, com-
pulsive, and generally lifeless. In school, he was strong in math-
ematics but weak in social studies and humanities. (p. 297)
They were then asked to rank the likelihood of eight
possible life outcomes for Bill, including (1) Bill is an
accountant, (2) Bill plays jazz for a hobby, and (3) Bill is
an accountant who plays jazz for a hobby. Of the respon-
dents, 92% assigned a higher rank to outcome 3 than
to outcome 2, even though any state of the world that satis-
fies outcome 3 automatically satisfies outcome 2 and thus
outcome 3 cannot be more likely than outcome 2. (The
results were the same for Bill’s better-known counterpart
Linda, the feminist bank teller; we present the results for
Bill to bring him out from Linda’s long shadow.)
Because the conjunction fallacy violates one of the most
basic rules of probability theory, Tversky and Kahneman
(1983) anticipated controversy and provided a wide-rang-
ing discussion of alternative interpretations. They included
additional controls for the possibility that respondents
misunderstood the words “and” or “or”; they made sure
that the same effects occurred with frequencies, as well as
probabilities, and that the effect applied when reasoning
about heart attacks, not just when reasoning about person-
ality descriptions; and they made sure that the same effects
were obtained with political forecasters as with students
from Stanford University and the University of British
Columbia. Nonetheless, the anticipated controversy
ensued, centering on participants’ interpretation of the con-
junction (e.g., Mellers, Hertwig, & Kahneman, 2001), the
effects of frequency versus probability response formats
(Hertwig & Gigerenzer, 1999), and the limits of laboratory
research.
Anchoring
Suppose someone asks you how long it takes Venus to orbit
the sun. You reply that you do not know (few people do),
but your interrogator then asks for an estimate. How do
you respond? You might think to yourself that Venus is
closer than the earth to the sun and therefore that it proba-
bly takes fewer than the 365 days it takes the earth to make
its orbit. You might then move down from that value of
365 days and estimate that a year on Venus consists of, say,
275 days. (The correct answer is 224.7.)
To respond in this way is to use what Tversky and
Kahneman referred to as the anchoring and adjustment
heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). One starts with a
salient or convenient value and adjusts to an estimate that
seems right. The most notable feature of such adjustments
is that they tend to be insufficient. In most investigations
of such “anchoring effects,” the investigators take care to
ensure that the respondents know that the anchor value is
entirely arbitrary and therefore carries no implication about
what the right value might be. In the initial demonstration,
Tversky and Kahneman (1974) spun a “wheel of fortune”
device and then asked participants whether the percent-
age of African countries in the United Nations is higher
or lower than the number that came up. After participants
indicated whether they thought it was higher or lower, they
were asked to estimate the actual percentage of African
countries in the United Nations. What they found was
that the transparently arbitrary anchor value significantly
influenced participants’ responses. Those who confronted
larger numbers from the wheel of fortune gave signifi-
cantly higher estimates than those who confronted lower

numbers. Anchoring effects using paradigms like this have
been observed in people’s evaluation of gambles (Carlson,
1990; Chapman & Johnson, 1999), estimates of risk and
uncertainty (Plous, 1989; Wright & Anderson, 1989), per-
ceptions of self-efficacy (Cervone & Peake, 1986), antici-
pations of future performance (Switzer & Sniezek, 1991),
and answers to general knowledge questions (Jacowitz &
Kahneman, 1995; Mussweiler & Strack, 1999, 2000;
Strack & Mussweiler, 1997).
As the research on anchoring evolved, comparable
effects using all sorts of other paradigms have been
observed and it appears that such effects are not always
the result of insufficient adjustment. Indeed, probably the
fairest reading of the anchoring literature is that there is
not one anchoring effect produced by insufficient adjust-
ment but, rather, a family of anchoring effects produced by
at least three distinct types of psychological processes
(Epley, 2004). Epley and Gilovich (2001, 2004, 2005,
2006) provided evidence that people do indeed adjust
insufficiently from at least some anchor values, par-
ticularly those that people generate themselves (like the
question about Venus given earlier). They have found,
for example, that people articulate a process of adjusting
from self-generated anchors and that manipulations that
should influence adjustment, but not other potential causes
of anchoring, have a significant effect on people’s judg-
ments. In particular, people who are incidentally nodding
their heads while answering, are cognitively busy, or lack
incentives for accurate responding tend to be more influ-
enced by self-generated anchor values than those who are
incidentally shaking their heads, are not busy, or are given
incentives for accuracy.
Manipulations such as these, however, have generally
been shown to have no effect on participants’ responses in
the standard (experimenter-generated) anchoring paradigm
pioneered by Tversky and Kahneman (Chapman & Johnson,
1999; Epley & Gilovich, 2001, 2005; Tversky & Kahneman,
1974; Wilson, Houston, Etling, & Brekke, 1996). At first
glance, this is a bit of a puzzle because it raises the question
of why, without insufficient adjustment, anchoring effects
would occur. Why, if not because of insufficient adjustment,
do people’s estimates tend to assimilate toward anchor val-
ues presented to their attention? This question has been
addressed most extensively by Thomas Mussweiler and
Fritz Strack (Mussweiler, 2002; Mussweiler & Strack, 1999,
2000; Strack & Mussweiler, 1997). They maintain that most
anchoring effects are the result of the enhanced accessibility
of anchor-consistent information. The attempt to answer the
initial question put to them by the investigator—“Is
the Nile longer or shorter than 5,000 [or 800] miles?”—
leads the individual to first test whether the given value is
correct—Is the Nile 5,000 (or 800) miles long? Because
Social Psychology’s Debt to Judgment and Decision Making 553
people evaluate hypotheses by attempting to confirm them
(Evans, 2007; Snyder & Swann, 1978; Skov & Sherman,
1986), such a search generates evidence disproportionately
consistent with the anchor. Mussweiler and Strack (2000)
provide support for their analysis by showing that informa-
tion consistent with the anchor value presented to partici-
pants is indeed disproportionately accessible. For example,
participants who were asked whether the price of an average
German car is higher or lower than a high value were subse-
quently quick to recognize words associated with expensive
cars (Mercedes, BMW); those asked whether the price of an
average German car is higher or lower than a modest value
were subsequently quick to recognize words associated with
less expensive cars (Volkswagen, Golf ).
Oppenheimer, LeBoeuf, and Brewer (2008) have
recently shown that the semantic activation elicited by dif-
ferent anchors can be quite general. They asked one group
of participants whether the Mississippi River was longer
or shorter than 4,800 miles and another group whether it
was longer or shorter than 15 miles. They then asked their
participants to draw a line equal to the length of a standard
toothpick. Those exposed to the high initial anchor drew
longer toothpicks than those exposed to the low initial
anchor. This suggests that exposure to the initial anchor
activated the general concept of “long” or “short,” which
influenced their representation (and production) of a stan-
dard toothpick. To test this idea, Oppenheimer and col-
leagues had participants in a follow-up experiment perform
a word completion task after being exposed to high or low
anchor values. Participants exposed to the high anchors
were more likely to form words connoting bigness (“big”
for “b_g”, “long” for “_ong”) than were those exposed to
the low anchors.
Recent research suggests that there is likely a third source
of anchoring effects—pure numerical priming. That is, an
anchor activates its own numerical value and those close to
it, which are then highly accessible and influential when the
person tries to fashion a response. In one notable experiment,
participants were asked whether the runway at Hong Kong
International Airport was longer or shorter than 7.3 kilome-
ters or 7,300 meters and were then asked to estimate the cost
of an unrelated project. Those asked the question in terms of
meters gave higher estimates on the second, unrelated task
than those asked the question in terms of kilometers—
presumably because the latter primed smaller absolute num-
bers (Wong & Kwong, 2000). Although some have argued
otherwise, this does not appear to be the result of the differ-
ential accessibility of semantic information consistent with
the initial anchor because 7.3 kilometers and 7,300 meters
represent the same value, just in different units. More recent
research casts further doubt on the possibility that the differ-
ential accessibility of anchor-consistent semantic information
554 Judgment and Decision Making
is responsible for such effects. Critcher and Gilovich (2008)
asked participants what the percentage of the sales of a
P-97 (or P-17) cell phone would be in the European mar-
ket. Participants estimated a higher percentage of European
sales for the P-97 than the P-17. Note that the process that
gives rise to anchor-consistent semantic accessibility is test-
ing whether the anchor value might be the correct value.
Here it seems far-fetched to maintain that participants asked
themselves whether part of the model label (97 or 17) might
be the European market share.
Social psychologists have made great use of the idea of
anchoring, citing it as a core component of such diverse
phenomena as trait inference (Gilbert, 1989, 2002), self-
enhancement (Kruger, 1999), self-efficacy (Cervone &
Peake, 1986), perspective taking (Ames, 2004; Epley,
Keysar, Van Boven, & Gilovich, 2004), language produc-
tion and comprehension (Keysar & Barr, 2002), and the
twin egocentric biases known as the “spotlight effect”
(Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 2000) and the “illusion
of transparency” (Gilovich, Savitsky, & Medvec, 1998;
Holder & Hawkins, 2007; Miller & McFarland, 1987;
Savitsky & Gilovich, 2003; Van Boven, Gilovich, &
Medvec, 2003; Vorauer & Cameron, 2002; Vorauer &
Ross, 1999). Some accounts of social psychological phe-
nomena that are based on anchoring simply draw on the
idea that people’s judgments are assimilated to prominent
anchor values. Others draw more specifically on the notion
that people adjust from an initial mental representation but
do so insufficiently.
Probably the most influential of these accounts is
Gilbert’s correction model of causal attribution (Gilbert,
1989). According to Gilbert, we first characterize people
in terms of the behavior we see them perform. Someone
acting angrily is initially categorized as an angry person.
But we later note the prevailing situational constraints act-
ing on the person in question and, if those constraints call
for it, we adjust our initial, unmitigated impression. The
initial phase of characterizing individuals in line with their
behavior is thought to be automatic, unavoidable, and
effortless. The later correction phase, however, is thought
to be effortful and therefore insufficient whenever ade-
quate cognitive resources are scarce (Epley & Gilovich,
2006; Quattrone, Lawrence, Finkel, & Andrus, 1981). The
result is that observers end up falling prey to the “corre-
spondence bias” (Gilbert & Jones, 1986) or “fundamen-
tal attribution error” (Ross, 1977), believing that people’s
personal dispositions are a more important cause of their
behavior than is justified.
Other Heuristics
Kahneman and Tversky did not offer their three heuris-
tics of availability, representativeness, and anchoring and
adjustment thinking that those were the complete set of
all general-purpose heuristics. Indeed, other heuristics
have been identified since the publication of their semi-
nal work, although perhaps fewer than they might have
expected. We have already seen that a fluency heuristic
should be included. Kahneman and Tversky themselves
added the notion of a simulation heuristic, by which the
likelihood and emotional impact of an event are influenced
by the ease with which alternatives to its occurrence can
be imagined in a simulated mental scenario (Kahneman &
Tversky, 1982). Such mental simulations can yield a sense
of causal propensity and related feelings of surprise, both of
which have also been argued to function much like heu-
ristics (Kahneman & Miller, 1986; Kahneman & Varey,
1990). The heuristic that has probably captured the most
attention since Kahneman and Tversky’s Big Three is
the affect heuristic, which involves using immediate
good–bad affective reactions to stimuli as a cue to vari-
ous judgments and decisions, such as valuation and, most
important, approach and avoidance (Slovic, Finucane,
Peters, & MacGregor, 2002).
A host of decision or choice heuristics has also been pro-
posed (see Frederick, 2002, for a discussion). Two notable
programs of research that examine such heuristics are the
adaptive decision-maker framework (Payne, Bettman, &
Johnson, 1990) and the fast and frugal heuristics framework
(e.g., Gigerenzer, Todd, and the ABC Research Group,
1999). Both derive from Simon’s (1990) call for delineat-
ing the satisficing rules people use that are well adapted
to particular task or information environments. The adap-
tive decision-maker model describes the role of effort–
accuracy trade-offs in the selection of decision strategies
and the use of more or less complex heuristics as a function
of problem complexity and importance. The fast and fru-
gal program identifies heuristics that maximize simplicity
and accuracy within a given task structure. Both programs
of research are highly compatible with the strong influ-
ence in social psychology of the cognitive miser analogy
(e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 2007) and the related effort–accuracy
models of social cognition (e.g., Petty & Cacioppo, 1986),
but despite—or because of—the overlap, the concept of
choice heuristics has thus far had little impact on social
psychology.
Normative Theories
It is hard to imagine how someone could be interested
in judgment and decision making without being inter-
ested in how to make the best judgments and decisions.
As a result, there has always been a normative bent to
JDM research, with the existence and character of the most
prominent normative theories shaping the kind of research

JDM scholars conduct. The existence of agreed-on norma-
tive theories leads naturally to investigations of how well
actual judgments and decisions measure up to the ideal.
They also provide researchers with readily specified null
hypotheses, a useful attribute for a science that places
such great emphasis on significance testing. Indeed, the
most prominent normative theories have often provided
researchers the most convenient null hypotheses—straw
men, really, that are easy to shoot down and allow the
investigators in question to stake a claim for the impor-
tance, and publishability, of a set of findings. For example,
the null hypothesis that people are entirely selfish and
have no concern about fairness, although important to
investigate given the theoretical lay of the land at the time
(Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986), was not one that
had any real chance of standing.
JDM research is intricately connected to two crucial
normative theories—SEU theory for choice and Bayes’
theorem for probability judgment (note that these theo-
ries are intertwined, as Bayesian probability is used as the
“expectation” component of SEU). According to SEU the-
ory, a decision-maker assigns a utility to each possible out-
come for each course of action and weights each outcome
by its perceived probability of occurrence. The decision-
maker then chooses the course of action with the highest
expected utility. Few people find this idea objectionable or
even noteworthy. More noteworthy, however, is the speci-
fication of several axioms and principles that one’s choices
must follow to ensure that one maximizes overall utility.
Among these are the axioms of transitivity (if x is preferred
to y, and y is preferred to z, then x should be preferred to z),
independence (if x is preferred to y, then x or a given chance
of z should be preferred to y or an equivalent chance of z),
and consistency (if x is preferred to y, then some probabil-
ity mixture of receiving x or y should be preferred to y)
and the principle of invariance (one’s preference between
x and y should not depend on the surface descriptions of x
and y or the method by which one’s preference is elicited).
Few people find any of the axioms objectionable either,
but JDM researchers have had no trouble demonstrating
that although people endorse these axioms in principle
they often violate them in practice.
For example, the principle of invariance is violated by
people’s responses to one of the most famous decision
problems in the JDM literature, Kahneman and Tversky’s
“Asian disease” problem (1984). Faced with the outbreak
of a disease that “is expected to kill 600 people,” nearly
three quarters of the respondents preferred a policy that
would save 200 lives for sure over a policy with a one
third chance of saving 600 and a two thirds chance of
saving none. In other words, most respondents were risk
averse in that they chose the guaranteed outcome over the
Social Psychology’s Debt to Judgment and Decision Making 555
risky gamble even though the “expected” number of lives
saved would be equal. However, most respondents were
risk seeking when presented with a different version of
the problem in which the same policies were described in
terms of the number of lives lost rather than lives saved.
That is, only about 20% of the respondents preferred the
policy that would result in 400 people dying over the pol-
icy with a one third chance of nobody dying and a two
thirds chance of 600 dying. Participants’ responses are
clearly not always invariant across different descriptions
of the same problem.
Tversky and Kahneman (1986) have used this discrep-
ancy between what people agree to in the abstract and what
they do in concrete choice contexts to make the point that
there can never be a single theory of decision making that is
both normatively valid and descriptively adequate. The
normative force of the axioms of rational choice is unas-
sailable and hence cannot be dispensed with. And yet it is
an empirical fact that people’s choices often fail to conform
to the axioms. SEU theory thus serves as an ideal to which
people’s decisions can be compared. And this comparison
guides a great deal of research in JDM. It quite naturally
raises the question of how decisions might be improved,
but it also frames the effort to understand what it is that
people are doing when they are making choices if they are
not doing what the axioms prescribe.
Bayes’ theorem plays much the same role in the study
of judgment. It provides a mathematical specification of
how much one’s initial belief should change in response
to new information. Consider hypothesis A: People’s judg-
ments are predictably biased. Now consider event B: the
cumulative research of Kahneman and Tversky. How
much should we change our belief in the probability of
hypothesis A (predictably biased judgment) given event B
(the evidence reported by Kahneman and Tversky)? The
probability form of Bayes’ theorem is as follows:
P(A|B)
[P(A)  P(B|A)]/P(B)
Thus, to determine the subjective probability of systematic
bias given the evidence, we take our prior belief in sys-
tematic bias, P (A) (which can vary from person to person
and hence puts the “subjective” in subjective probability), and
adjust it by multiplying it by the extent to which the exper-
imental evidence is consistent with systematic bias, P (B | A).
The result is then further adjusted by the unconditional
probability of finding the evidence whether or not people
are systematically biased, P (B).
Early research comparing people’s probability judg-
ments with Bayes’ theorem indicated that people were
too slow to revise their prior beliefs. They were “con-
servative Bayesians” (Edwards, 1968). A big part of the
556 Judgment and Decision Making
heuristics and biases program of research, however, was
the demonstration that on many occasions people are overly
influenced by new case-specific information (Tversky &
Kahneman, 1971). A great deal of work in JDM is focused
on understanding the psychological processes that yield
judgmental conservatism versus judgmental rashness and on
specifying the features of the presented information and
of the problem context that give rise to each (Griffin &
Tversky, 1993).
The field of social psychology was always at least some-
what concerned with normative issues, of course, because it
is a field with considerable interest in applied issues and in
improving the human condition—minimizing group con-
flict, extinguishing prejudice, overcoming excessive group
influence, and so on. But the effect of normative thinking
on research in social psychology was amplified by Nisbett
and Ross’s (1980) treatise on human inference, a work
that brought JDM front and center to social psychology.
Nisbett and Ross delineated many of the most important
inferential tasks facing the social perceiver—covariation
detection, causal analysis, prediction, and belief revision—
and explicitly compared how the average person approaches
those tasks with the procedures scientists use to approach
them. The direct comparison between formal and lay
approaches to social judgment necessarily invokes a
consideration of normative principles. Sometimes, as in
the case of prediction and belief revision, the relevant nor-
mative standard is the Bayesian analysis so commonly
invoked in JDM (cf. Ajzen & Fishbein, 1975). At other
times, however, Nisbett and Ross took the general JDM
focus on normative comparison and invoked, opportunis-
tically, more circumscribed normative considerations that
apply only to a particular inferential problem. For exam-
ple, they considered what happens when two groups, on
opposite sides of a policy debate, are exposed to a mixed
body of evidence germane to the debate. It is hard to con-
ceive of a normative analysis that would not dictate that the
two sides’ opinions should converge to some degree. But
because each side readily accepts the evidence that supports
its position and finds fault with the evidence that sup-
ports the other side, the two groups’ opinions can actually
diverge, not converge (Lord et al., 1979). They also consid-
ered what happens when the evidential basis of one’s opin-
ion is invalidated. When the entire set of reasons one had
for holding a particular belief are unambiguously shown to
be in error, logic dictates that one should “start over” and
have the same opinions as those who were never exposed
to the misleading information that gave rise to the belief.
But what has been found in numerous studies is that the
initial, unfounded belief hangs tough and survives to some
degree after its foundation is undercut (Anderson, 1995;
Anderson & Lindsay, 1998; Anderson, Ross, & Lepper,
1980; Davies, 1997; Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975;
Sherman & Kim, 2002; Walster, Berscheid, Abrahams, &
Aronson, 1967).
Nisbett and Ross’s explicit treatment of normative issues
accentuated the consideration of normativity in several
areas of social psychology that had always had something
of a normative focus. Early treatments of attribution the-
ory, for example, viewed the basic principles of attribu-
tion—covariation and discounting or augmentation—as
principles a person should follow in assigning causes to
effects. Although it was generally thought that people typi-
cally did follow these principles, some attention was paid
to those instances in which the attributions that people
made departed from the dictates of the theory (Kelley,
1973). The most notable departure is the tendency of peo-
ple to make person-centered attributions when the behav-
ior in question can be entirely explained by the dictates of
the prevailing situation (Gilbert & Jones, 1986; Gilbert &
Malone, 1995). There is little question that research on
this correspondence bias (Gilbert & Jones, 1986) or fun-
damental attribution error (Ross, 1977) took something of
a different shape as a result of the heightened concern with
normativity that was inherited from JDM. This is reflected
in how the phenomenon was cast, in how the research was
conducted (Gilbert & Jones, 1986; Quattrone, 1982), and
in the nature of the theoretical controversies that were
sparked (Funder, 1987; Hilton, 1990).
Another area of research in social psychology that was
greatly affected by the enhanced emphasis on norma-
tivity that came from JDM is the study of stereotyping.
The field had always been marked by the conviction that
there was something “wrong” with stereotyping. Although
it was granted that some stereotypes are valid (Volvo
and Prius owners are more likely to listen to National
Public Radio), the research was motivated and shaped by
the concern that many stereotypes are erroneous and do
a great deal of harm, particularly to those belonging to
the stereotyped group. It had long been recognized that
stereotypes could sometimes arise not from base human
motives or intergroup rivalry but from faulty information
processing alone (Allport, 1954). But the rise of the cog-
nitive revolution in psychology, and the emergence of the
subfield of social cognition in particular, greatly accentu-
ated this recognition. And the notion that information pro-
cessing might be “faulty” necessitates a consideration—a
consideration made easier because of the groundwork laid
by JDM—of what constitutes sound thinking. It is one
thing to say that the distinctiveness of negative behavior
on the part of minority group members is troublesome;
it is quite another to specify how it is inferentially out
of line (Fiedler, 1991; Hamilton & Gifford, 1976; Risen,
Gilovich, & Dunning, 2007). It is one thing to bemoan the

fact that stereotypes often survive exposure to stereotype-
inconsistent information; it is something else to identify
the normative principle it violates.
JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING’S
DEBT TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Because humans are a social species, many of our most
important judgments and decisions are those that take place
in a social context and concern other people. It would be
odd indeed, then, if JDM research did not deal extensively
with the social embeddedness of judgments and deci-
sions. And it would be odder still if JDM research were
not heavily influenced by the one subdiscipline of psychol-
ogy specifically devoted to the inherently social nature of
human life.
In fact, JDM researchers have had a long-standing inter-
est in judgments about people and in social life, from the
inherently social element of game theory (Axelrod, 1984;
Nash, 1950), to the comparison of clinical versus statisti-
cal prediction (Dawes & Corrigan, 1974; Meehl, 1954), to
applications of Brunswik’s lens model (Hammond, 1996).
And this interest has served to develop and strengthen the
ties between JDM and social psychology. Just as social
psychology would look different today if not for the influ-
ence of JDM, the latter field would look different if not
for the influence of social psychology. To showcase that
influence, we discuss three particularly important ideas
from social psychology that have had—and are having—a
substantial impact on JDM. In particular, we discuss how
social psychological theorizing about channel factors,
emotion, and norms and identity has influenced the field
of JDM.
Channel Factors
Kurt Lewin is generally credited with noticing that when
people try to change someone else’s behavior they typi-
cally try to increase the person’s motivation to behave dif-
ferently. They try to increase the “push” toward the desired
behavior. Lewin recognized that often people are already
motivated to perform the desired behavior but cannot get
themselves to translate their good intentions into effective
action. A more effective strategy for changing behavior is
to figure out what is preventing the desired behavior and
then to eliminate any sources of resistance. Rather than
increase the push, it is often more effective to dampen the
pushback.
Related to this analysis is Lewin’s concept of “channel
factors” (Lewin, 1952), or the notion that seemingly minor
details of the situational context can powerfully facilitate
Judgment and Decision Making’s Debt to Social Psychology 557
or block desired behavior—an idea championed and elabo-
rated by Ross and Nisbett (1991). Subtle and often invis-
ible elements of the surrounding situation, in other words,
create a channel that leads people down one path rather
than another. A study often used to illustrate the notion
of channel factors is one that examined the effectiveness of
different efforts to convince Yale University undergradu-
ates to get their free tetanus vaccines (Leventhal, Singer, &
Jones, 1965). One attempt centered on frightening the stu-
dents with all the ways one can get tetanus and what the
late stages of lockjaw look like. The students were told
they could avoid such an awful fate by going to the health
center on campus at any time and getting a free inocula-
tion. This succeeded in impressing the students about
the severity of the disease and the importance of getting
inoculated, but almost none of them actually did so. In
an alternative approach, other participants were likewise
given the scary materials, but they were also handed a map
of the Yale campus with the health center circled and they
were asked to review their schedules and come up with
a convenient time to visit the center and get their shots.
These seemingly trivial details—pointing out the health
center ’s location and encouraging thoughts about the best
time to visit—increased the rate at which students actually
got their shots by a factor of nine. In other words, sim-
ply increasing students’ motivation to get inoculated had
almost no effect; creating a channel that made the desired
behavior easier had a considerable effect.
A similar effect of channel factors can be found in peo-
ple’s use of health services more generally. One of the most
powerful predictors of whether people will use the services
available to them, more powerful than attitudes about
health and various demographic variables such as age,
gender, and socioeconomic status, is the distance between
an individual’s residence and the closest facility (Van
Dort & Moos, 1976). When the University of Rochester
moved its student health center from the campus to an off-
campus site, usage of the facility declined 37% (Simon &
Smith, 1973).
Another telling and illustrative study examined efforts
to get U.S. citizens to buy war bonds during World War II
(Cartwright, 1949). The war bond campaign, with memo-
rable posters featuring vulnerable American children and
scary Axis warmongers, was generally considered effec-
tive and raised a considerable amount of money for the
war effort. Nevertheless, when the slogans depicted on
the posters were altered slightly (changing “Buy War
Bonds” to “Buy an Extra $100 Bond Today”) or the request
was made more specific (“Buy Them When the Solicitor at
Your Workplace Asks You to Sign Up”) to create a channel
that would smooth the path to donation, sales of war bonds
doubled.
558 Judgment and Decision Making

It does not take much thought to recognize the relevance As Figure 15.1 so clearly shows, opt-out policies that
of the idea of channel factors to JDM. The structure of require people to take steps to avoid being organ donors
various problems, or the context surrounding those prob- “channel” donation and thus lead to rates of willingness to
lems, channel or facilitate certain responses (creating what donate that are near ceiling. In contrast, opt-in policies that
one might call “downhill” responses) and block or impede reverse the burden of action put up a formidable barrier to
others (what one might call “uphill” responses). This has donation, leading to donation rates that fall well short of
been powerfully demonstrated in research documenting the need for healthy organs for transplant.
the tremendous impact that defaults and status quo options Defaults appear to have such powerful effects on peo-
can have on people’s choices. One early and noteworthy ple’s choices for several reasons. For one thing, the default
investigation examined the automobile insurance purchase option—the deepest, clearest channel—profits from lazi-
decisions of consumers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, ness, mindlessness, and decision paralysis (Iyengar &
two adjacent states that offered their residents essentially Lepper, 2000; Langer, 1989; Schwartz, 2004). When one
the same pair of options but with opposite defaults (Johnson cannot be bothered to figure out the right choice, forgets to
et al., 1993). One option was a “full-priced” policy that figure out the right choice, or cannot discern, despite con-
included the right to sue for any vehicle-related injury; siderable effort, what the right choice might be, the default
the other, cheaper option did not include the right to sue. becomes the choice. Second, that a particular option had
Pennsylvania offered the full-priced policy as the default, been selected as the default is often taken as informative
allowing residents to opt for the less expensive policy if (McKenzie, Liersch, & Finkelstein, 2006). It is often inter-
they chose to forgo the right to sue. In contrast, the less preted as a hint of what the best option might be—however
expensive policy was the default in New Jersey, but con- mindlessly the default may have been selected. Finally,
sumers could obtain the right to sue by paying more. In a the default is also often experienced as the status quo from
striking demonstration of the power of defaults, only about which people have been shown to be reluctant to deviate
20% of New Jersey residents thought it was in their best (Baron & Ritov, 1994; Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988;
interests to have the full-priced policy, compared with 75% Schweitzer, 1995).
of Pennsylvania residents. The existence of such a status quo bias makes it clear that
An even more striking demonstration of the influence there are other types of privileged options beyond defaults.
of defaults comes from a study of organ donation rates in In particular, although they are often conflated, the adher-
countries that have explicit consent (“opt-in”) or presumed ence to defaults, the status quo bias, and the omission bias
consent (“opt-out”) policies (Johnson & Goldstein, 2003). constitute separate influences on choice (Schweitzer, 1994).

Opt-In Countries Opt-Out Countries

99.98 98 99.91 99.97 99.5 99.64

100

90 85.9
Effective Consent Percentage

80

70

60

50

40

30 27.5

20 17.17
12
10 4.25
0
Netherlands

United
Kingdom

Germany

Austria

Belgium

France

Hungary

Poland

Sweden
Portugal
Denmark

Figure 15.1 Organ donation rates in countries with explicit consent (opt-in) and
presumed consent (opt-out) donation policies.

The omission bias refers to the tendency to judge harmful
actions more harshly than harmful inactions and the con-
comitant reluctance in many circumstances to go out on a
limb by taking action (Gleicher et al., 1990; Kahneman &
Miller, 1986; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982; Spranca,
Minsk, & Baron, 1991). All of these tendencies speak to the
power of norms (which we discuss more extensively later),
and the influence of each stems partly from the anticipated
regret that would come with a counternormative choice.
To defy a default is to alter the way things are preset to be. To
defy the status quo is to depart from tradition. And to defy
the omission bias is to shoulder an extra burden of respon-
sibility. All of this makes one vulnerable to self-criticism
and the second-guessing of others. There are times, of
course, when the default or status quo is to take action, and
when it is, people tend to experience more regret for fail-
ing to act rather than for acting—that is, the omission bias
is turned on its head (Connolly & Zeelenberg, 2002; Davis,
Lehman, Wortman, Silver, & Thompson, 1995; Gilovich &
Medvec, 1995; Seta, McElroy, & Seta, 2001; Zeelenberg,
Van den Bos, Van Dijk, & Pieters, 2002).
Although default and status quo effects are perfect illus-
trations of the power of channel factors, they attracted the
interest of JDM researchers simply because they are such
prominent elements of the landscape of decision making.
Recently, however, JDM researchers have pursued research
agendas inspired directly by the theoretical notion of chan-
nel factors. This is particularly true of scholars associated
with the field of behavioral economics. The aim of many
behavioral economists is to figure out why many people do
not spend, save, invest, or borrow as wisely as they might
and to design interventions that make it easier for people to
act in accordance with their economic interests.
Investigations of employee participation in company-
sponsored retirement plans, for example, have found that
the channel leading people to productive savings tends to be
blocked by the provision of numerous investment options
(Iyengar, Jiang, & Huberman, 2004) but is deepened when
employers offer automatic (Madrian & Shea, 2001) or easy
enrollment (Choi, Laibson, & Madrian, 2009) options.
Taking advantage of the fact that people find it easier to
commit unpleasant or costly actions in the future than in
the present, Benartzi and Thaler (2004) found that sav-
ings rates increased substantially when employees could
sign up for increased (automatic) deductions from future
raises—their “save more tomorrow” plan.
Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar
Shafir (2004, 2006) have applied the idea of channel factors
to better understand, and to improve, the financial decisions
made by the poor. For instance, many poor households do
not participate in the banking system, a decision that can cost
them dearly as they are forced rely on alternative financial
Judgment and Decision Making’s Debt to Social Psychology 559
institutions, such as check cashers and unregulated money
lenders, that exact higher transaction costs. Many poor
households also fail to take advantage of various welfare
services for which they are eligible. Bertrand and colleagues
have explored how several modest interventions—such as
simplifying application forms and consolidating informa-
tional meetings and enrollment sessions into one encounter—
can dramatically increase the use of banking and welfare
services on the part of the poor.
More broadly, channel factors play a prominent role in
Thaler and Sunstein’s advocacy of “libertarian paternal-
ism” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2003, 2008; see also Camerer,
Issacharoff, Loewenstein, O’Donoghue, & Rabin, 2003).
The choice environment in which individuals confront
many important decisions are often unintentionally struc-
tured in ways that steer people away from acting in their best
interests—for example, arbitrary and counterproductive
defaults, bewildering presentations of available options,
and salient displays of the most troublesome alternatives.
Rather than mandating actions that are deemed to be in
the best interests of most citizens—that is, paternalism—
the choice environment can be structured in ways that foster
better decisions. No one is compelled to make a particular
choice; they are simply nudged in the right direction—that
is, libertarian paternalism. And much of the nudging they
recommend involves creating the right channels in the
choice environment to encourage sound decision making
and enhanced well-being.
Affective Influences on Judgment and Decisions
It is surely no accident that social psychology and JDM
became heavily intertwined in the 1970s, the heyday of
cognitive theorizing in psychology. The roots of JDM in
mathematical decision theory, in reasoning, and in statistical
prediction guaranteed a pronounced, if not exclusive, focus
on cognitive mechanisms of judgment and choice. Such a
focus found a ready match in the predominant theoretical
perspectives and research interests of social psychologists at
that time. But although social psychologists were obsessed
with determining how virtually every social psychological
phenomenon might be explained solely with reference to
cognitive processes, the field did not abandon its historical
interest in emotional influences on behavior (see Bruner,
1992; Bruner & Goodman, 1947; Bruner & Klein, 1960;
and Bruner & Postman, 1947, for earlier treatments of the
effects of motivation on perception and judgment). And
when the “cognitive revolution” ebbed, there was a rapid
and pronounced return to the study of emotion (Keltner &
Lerner, this volume). Given the new tight links between
JDM and social psychology, the latter’s renewed interest
560 Judgment and Decision Making
in emotion was certain to have a pronounced influence
on JDM.
Social psychologists had earlier studied the impact of
emotion on behavior, with a particular focus on the influ-
ence of various affective states on compliance. Feeling
guilty, for example, has been shown to increase peo-
ple’s willingness to comply with requests from strangers
(Carlsmith & Gross, 1969; Cialdini, Darby, & Vincent,
1973; Darlington & Macker, 1966; Regan, 1971; Regan,
Williams, & Sparling, 1972). On the other end of the emo-
tional spectrum, being in a good mood has also been shown
to increase compliance (Carlson, Charlin, & Miller, 1988;
Isen, Clark, & Schwartz, 1976; Isen & Levin, 1972).
Inspired partly by findings such as these, Johnson and
Tversky (1983) examined whether incidental affective
states influence people’s assessments of risk. They had
participants first rate the journalistic quality of news stories
depicting anxiety-provoking, depressing, or uplifting events
and then had them estimate the number of people who die
each year as a result of such things as traffic accidents,
leukemia, and homicide. Those who had read news stories
that induced anxiety and depression provided significantly
higher estimates than those who had read either neutral or
uplifting stories (see also Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, &
Welch, 2001; Slovic & Peters, 2006). Subsequent work
established that hypnotically induced mood states have the
same effect: Those in a good mood estimated higher prob-
abilities of occurrence for such things as world peace and a
cure for cancer, and those in a bad mood estimated higher
probabilities for such things as nuclear power accidents
and automobile injuries (Wright & Bower, 1992).
More dramatic manifestations of this effect can be found
in studies of stock market returns. An examination of stock
markets in 26 countries over a 15-year period found that
the amount of sunshine on a given day was positively cor-
related with market performance. The investigators sug-
gested that this effect was due to investors attributing their
weather-induced good moods to positive economic circum-
stances rather than the true source, sunshine (Hirshleifer &
Shumway, 2003; Kamstra, Kramer, & Levi, 2003). A similar,
more recent study found that stock market returns decline
when a country’s soccer team is eliminated from a promi-
nent tournament such as the World Cup and that similar dips
occur in countries following losses in other sports (cricket,
rugby, and basketball) popular in those countries (Edmans,
Garcia, & Norli, 2007).
Three explanations have been offered for the influence
of mood on judgment. According to the priming account,
positive and negative moods activate positive and negative
information, respectively, and the enhanced accessibility of
one type over the other distorts how objects or propositions
are evaluated (Bower, 1981; Isen, Shalker, Clark, & Karp,
1978; Mayer, Gaschke, Braverman, & Evans, 1992; Mayer,
Gayle, Meehan, & Haarman, 1990). A considerable body
of research has examined this explanation, but it remains
controversial (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007).
According to an alternative account, the affect-as-
information hypothesis, mood and emotional states are cues
about how one feels about a given stimulus (Clore, 1992;
Clore & Huntsinger, 2007; Schwarz, 1990; Schwarz & Clore,
2003; Sechrist, Swim, & Mark, 2003). Positive stimuli
typically induce positive affect, so people implicitly rea-
son that if they feel good while confronting or contem-
plating a given stimulus they must think it has positive
features. And the same applies for negative moods and
emotions. In the most widely cited study in support of
this idea, students at a midwestern university were called
on the telephone (by someone claiming to be from out of
town) and asked a few questions about their life satisfac-
tion (Schwarz & Clore, 1983). Some calls were made on
sunny days and others on gloomy days, and as predicted,
respondents reported that they were significantly happier
and more satisfied with their lives overall if they were
contacted on one of the sunny days. In a critical addi-
tional condition of the study, half the respondents were
asked before the life-satisfaction questions, “By the way,
how’s the weather down there?” Asking this question
erased the impact of the weather on respondents’ ratings
of happiness and satisfaction with life. This manipula-
tion almost certainly did not influence the respondents’
moods, but it did influence what they understood
their moods to signify about their lives. Without the
question about the weather, respondents interpreted their
feelings as indicative of their overall satisfaction with
life; with the question, they did not.
As research on the affect-as-information hypothesis
progressed, it became clear that the informative value of
moods was quite a bit more general than originally envi-
sioned and had implications far beyond their influence
on evaluative judgments (Schwarz, 1990). This led to
the third account of the influence of mood and emotion
on judgment, the processing style perspective. The idea
here is that people implicitly understand that their moods
reflect the state of their environment. A bad mood may
signify a troublesome situation, serving as something
of a “trouble ahead, slow down” sign and leading to an
information-processing style that is careful, systematic,
and deliberate. A happy mood, in contrast, may signify
a benign situation and serve as something of a “smooth
sailing” sign, leading people to process information more
heuristically and reflexively. A great deal of research
supports this view, with people in positive moods being
shown to engage more than those in negative moods
in top-down rather than bottom-up analysis, heuristic

rather than systematic processing, and global or abstract
thought rather than specific or concrete thought (Bless,
Mackie, & Schwarz, 1992; Bless, Schwarz, & Wieland,
1996; Bodenhausen, Kramer, & Susser, 1994; Forgas, 1998;
Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005; Gasper & Clore, 2002;
Park & Banaji, 2000).
Beyond Positive and Negative
Our emotional lives, of course, are more complex than feel-
ing bad and feeling good, so there is more to emotion than
positive or negative feelings. Many emotion researchers
maintain that a key element of what distinguishes various
emotional states is the pattern of cognitions—appraisals—
associated with each (Lazarus, 1991; Smith & Ellsworth,
1985). The good–bad dimension may be the primary
appraisal, but it is not the only one. Anger, for example,
is not just negative; it is also associated with appraisals of
harm to oneself or someone one cares about, the source
of the harm, and the attribution of the harm to an agent.
And just as the positivity or negativity of an incidental
emotional state might spill over and influence an unrelated
judgment, so can these other appraisals. Most research that
has examined this issue has focused on the appraisal of
certainty. Emotions associated with certainty—anger, dis-
gust, and happiness—are thought to be characterized by a
sense of confidence about what is happening in the situa-
tion, how to respond, and what will happen next, whereas
emotions associated with uncertainty—fear, sadness, and
hope—are characterized by less confidence in these assess-
ments (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985).
In one study of the impact on judgment of emotions that
differ in certainty appraisals, Lerner and Keltner (2001)
found that participants who had been asked to think about
events from their lives that made them angry (high cer-
tainty) gave lower estimates of the likelihood of suffering
various maladies than did those who had been asked to
think about events that made them afraid (low certainty).
The feeling of certainty associated with anger made vari-
ous hazards seem less likely (see also Leith & Baumeister,
1996; Taylor, Lerner, Sage, Lehman, & Seeman, 2004;
Tiedens & Linton, 2001). In a notable extension of this
finding, a national sample of Americans was contacted 2
months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Some respon-
dents were led to focus on fear-inducing elements of the
attacks, others on anger-inducing elements. The angry
participants gave lower estimates of the likelihood of both
future terrorist attacks and other, unrelated risks (Lerner,
Gonzalez, Small, & Fischhoff, 2003).
Another examination of the impact of the certainty
appraisals associated with different emotional states went
beyond perceptions of risk. Tiedens and Linton (2001)
Judgment and Decision Making’s Debt to Social Psychology 561
found that participants led to feel angry or content (high
certainty) relied more on the source of a persuasive commu-
nication when evaluating its merits than did participants led
to feel worried or surprised (low certainty). The feeling of
certainty associated with anger and contentment apparently
encouraged participants to think that they had a handle on
things and could rely on relatively superficial cues, such as
who was pitching the message. This conclusion was rein-
forced by the results of another study in which participants
led to feel disgusted (high certainty) were more likely to
use stereotypes in making predictions about another person
than were participants led to feel anxious (low certainty).
In an investigation of the impact of other appraisals
associated with different emotions, Lerner, Small, and
Loewenstein (2004) examined how the incidental emo-
tional states of disgust and sadness might influence the
endowment effect, or the tendency for owners of a good to
value it more than those considering owning it (Kahneman,
Knetsch, & Thaler, 1991; Thaler, 1980). Disgust is associ-
ated with the appraisal of being too close to an entity or
idea, so the investigators predicted that it would lead to
a desire to expel close objects and hence would under-
mine the endowment effect. It did. After having earlier
seen a film that elicited feelings of disgust, those given a
small gift and asked how much they would sell it for did
not inflate their asking price—in marked contrast to sell-
ers in a control condition. The investigators also predicted
that sadness, associated with the implicit goal of changing
one’s current circumstances, would lead to a reversal of
the endowment effect. Those endowed with the gift would
want to change by getting rid of what they have and those
not given the gift would want to change by acquiring it.
And they did. Sellers stated a significantly lower price for
the gift than neutral choosers did.
Noninferential Effects of Emotion
All theoretical accounts of the impact of affective states
on judgment discussed thus far posit an element of reason-
ing as a critical component of the reported effects. More
specifically, by these accounts, emotions are seen as cues.
According to the mood-as-information account, positive
feelings are taken as a cue that the stimulus being con-
fronted or the thought being entertained must be congenial.
According to the processing-style perspective, negative
feelings are taken as a cue that not all is right in the world
and one must be careful and process all incoming infor-
mation carefully. Such cognitive elements in theories of
emotional influence are to be expected, as people’s cogni-
tive and affective systems are tightly interconnected and
emotions typically have much of their effects through their
impact on cognitive processes.
562 Judgment and Decision Making
But emotions sometimes have simpler, more direct
effects. We often think of emotion not as intertwined with
reason, but as highjacking reason. And we sometimes think
of emotions as at odds with reason and as exerting an influ-
ence on our behavior that is too strong to be overcome by
our “better judgment.” Is there evidence of more direct,
and less inferential, emotional influence on judgment and
decisions?
One program of research that addresses the direct influ-
ence of emotion on judgment and behavior examines how
people physiologically encode the affective consequences of
different courses of action and how these “somatic markers”
influence action (Bechara, Damasio, & Damasio, 2000;
Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1997; Damasio,
1994; Damasio, Bechara, & Damasio, 2002; Hinson,
Jameson, & Whitney, 2002; but see Dunn, Dalgleish, &
Lawrence, 2006; Tomb, Hauser, Deldin, & Caramazza,
2002). The researchers investigated the impact of somatic
markers by giving participants a stack of play money and
having them play a card game in which the goal was to win
as much money as possible by turning over cards that spec-
ified wins and losses of varying amounts. Players selected
cards from one of four decks, without knowing (at first) the
composition of the decks or how long the game would last.
The composition of the decks is depicted in Table 15.1.
Note that the decks that often provide participants with a
$50 payout have a positive expected value and should be
pursued; the decks that provide a $100 payout have a nega-
tive expected value and should be avoided.
Do participants learn to choose wisely from decks C and
D and to avoid decks A and B? All of them did—initially.
But participants with damage to their orbitofrontal cortex
quickly resumed picking from the high-gain, high-loss
decks. It thus appears that although all participants knew
these decks were excessively risky, those with damage to
the orbitofrontal cortex could not stop themselves from
going after the alluring $100 payout. Furthermore, patients
without brain damage, but not those suffering from damage
to the orbitofrontal cortex, soon developed a pattern of skin
conductance that preceded their choices from the exces-
sively risky decks. Thus, the orbitofrontal cortex appears
Table 15.1 Composition of the Card Decks Used by Bechara,
Damasio, & Damasio (2000)
Deck A Deck B Deck C Deck D
Reward $100 $100 $50 $50
Punishment $150–350 $1,250 $25–75 $250
P (punishment) .5 .1 .5 .1
Expected value $25 $25 $25 $25
Punishment refers to how much the participant can lose; P(punishment)
refers to the probability of punishment
to be a critical region for uniting factual knowledge and
somatic markers, or emotional reactions. If this region is
not intact, individuals still recognize the long odds against
a given course of action but do not experience the emo-
tional warning signal—the somatic marker—that steers
them away from it. Note that it is the emotion itself, not an
inference drawn from the emotion (even participants with
orbitofrontal damage have drawn the right inferences), that
directs behavior.
At times, however, ignoring such emotional warning sig-
nals results in better decisions. In these cases, the absence
of somatic markers improves decision making. Most peo-
ple, for example, will not accept 50–50 odds of winning
$200 or losing $150 despite the positive expected value of
such a bet because the fear of losing $150 looms too large.
Basketball coaches who find their teams trailing by two
points, but in possession of the ball, are reluctant to set up
a game-settling three-point shot even though the chances of
making it and winning the game (~33%) are greater than the
chances of making a two-point shot and then winning
the game in overtime (~50% chance of making the shot 
~50% chance of winning the overtime period
~25%). In
situations like these, patients with damage to critical brain
regions have been found to make better decisions because
they do not have the normal level of risk aversion (Shiv,
Loewenstein, Bechara, Damasio, & Damasio, 2005).
Emotional Influences on Probability Assessment
Another possible direct effect of emotion on judgment
involves the tendency for emotionally laden events to dis-
tort the weights people assign to the events’ probability
of occurrence (Rottenstreich & Hsee, 2001). According
to standard models of decision making, people indepen-
dently assess the valence of an event and its likelihood of
occurrence and then combine the two to decide on the best
course of action. This can seem psychologically unreal-
istic, however, as the following thought experiment sug-
gests. Suppose you were to roll a die and, if it lands on six,
you pay a fine of $10. How likely does it seem that a
six will come up? Now suppose you play Russian roulette
with one bullet in a six-chambered revolver. How likely
does it seem that it will end in disaster? Most people report
that they recognize the odds of a bad outcome are the same
in the two scenarios but that the odds “feel” less favorable in
the latter.
The contamination of an event’s perceived likelihood
by its valence appears to be partly responsible for people’s
reluctance to “tempt fate.” People know that a negative
outcome will be experienced as especially negative if
they will not be able to shake the thought that, accurate or
not, they did something to bring it about. Getting rained
on feels bad, but getting rained on after deciding not to

carry an umbrella feels worse; the end of a winning streak
feels bad, but having it end after calling attention to the
streak feels worse. And it appears to be the very negativity
of imagined negative outcomes that follow from actions
that tempt fate that makes them especially accessible and
makes them seem especially likely to occur (Risen &
Gilovich, 2007, 2008).
If the emotions elicited by anticipating different uncer-
tain events—emotions like excitement and dread—influence
the impact of their subjective probability of occurrence, we
might expect a “compression” of people’s reactions to
varying probabilities of experiencing an emotionally rich
outcome. Rottenstreich and Hsee (2001) found just such
an effect, showing that people’s willingness to pay to avoid
an electric shock, an affect-rich outcome, was relatively
insensitive to the probability of receiving the shock. In
contrast, their willingness to pay to avoid losing $20, a less
affectively rich outcome, was sensitive to the probability
of the loss. Thus, a very low probability of experiencing a
dreaded outcome can seem too likely, and a very low prob-
ability of a delightful treat can be enough to maintain hope.
Ditto, Pizarro, Epstein, Jacobson, and MacDonald (2006)
obtained similar results in an experiment in which partici-
pants were given the opportunity to play a game in which
winning would result in their getting to eat chocolate chip
cookies but losing would result in their having to work on
a boring task for an extra half hour. Half of the participants
were simply told about the cookie reward; for the other
half, the cookies had been freshly baked and placed in
front of the participants as they decided whether to play
the game. In line with the results of Rottenstreich and Hsee
(2001), the participants’ willingness to play the game was
sensitive to their odds of winning when the cookies were
described abstractly but insensitive to the probability of
winning when the aroma and sight of the cookies got their
juices flowing.
Visceral Influence on Behavior
Strong visceral feelings can not only distort our sense of
the likelihood of an emotionally laden event, or the psy-
chological weight that we assign to its likelihood, but also
can directly influence our actions, sometimes leading us
to act in ways that are at variance with our better judg-
ment (Ainslie, 1975). The average person has no difficulty
appreciating this idea, as nearly everyone is familiar with
such expressions as “I must have been crazy when I . . . ,” “I
just couldn’t control myself and . . . ,” and “My emotions just
got the better of me.” George Loewenstein (1996) provided
a formal account of visceral influences on behavior, with
the aim of making the study of such influences a central
component of the science of decision making. In one nota-
ble experimental investigation inspired by this analysis,
Judgment and Decision Making’s Debt to Social Psychology 563
Ariely and Loewenstein (2005) examined the effects of
sexual arousal on male participants’ self-reported will-
ingness to engage in problematic sexual behavior. All of
their participants were asked to answer several questions
on a laptop computer loaned to them for the experiment.
Control participants answered the questions in their nor-
mal, presumably not intensely aroused, state. Experimental
participants did so in the course of following instructions
to begin masturbating while viewing erotica. Aroused par-
ticipants reported that they would be less likely to use a
condom during intercourse, that they would be more likely
to lie to obtain sex and persist in the effort to do so more
vigorously after a woman said no, and that they found
practices such as S&M, anal sex, and sex with a wider age
range of partners more appealing. Note that the aroused
participants’ physiological state did not influence their per-
ceptions of the dangers of some of these activities. They
were no less likely than control participants, for example,
to agree with the statement, “If you pull out before you
ejaculate, a woman can still get pregnant.” But their aware-
ness of the dangers notwithstanding, the heat of the moment
had a pronounced effect on their inclinations to engage
in behavior that more dispassionate participants view
as highly questionable (see also Loewenstein, Nagin, &
Paternoster, 1997). As Loewenstein (1996) pointed out,
theories that fail to take account of the impact of visceral
states like sexual arousal, hunger, thirst, and tiredness
fail to capture some of the most common and most power-
ful determinants of the choices people make.
Norms and Identity
The study of norms has always been an important part of
social psychology and doubtless will always remain an
important area of investigation. At least two reasons exist
for this, one of them being the undeniable fact that norms
determine so much of human behavior. Consider what a
snapshot of rush hour at Grand Central Station would look
like in 1935 and, say, 50 years later. Two things would
immediately stand out. The overwhelming majority of
the people in the 1935 photo would be men, but the 1985
photo would be more gender balanced. And nearly all men
in 1935 would be wearing hats. The only explanation for
this would be the change in norms governing fashion and
work outside the home. (A less attention-grabbing norm
in the same scene, one present in both 1935 and 1985, is
the one that prevents everyone from bumping into one
another—that of staying to the right as they walk.)
The second reason that norms are so important for
social psychologists to study is that they are often invis-
ible. People follow them but often do not know and can-
not articulate what they are following. For many of the
564 Judgment and Decision Making
most basic and powerful norms, people only notice their
existence on those rare occasions when someone violates
them, engaging in what Erving Goffman (1963) referred
to as “negatively eventful actions.” Thus, norms are an
important focus of social psychological research because
they hide in plain sight.
Norms influence human behavior in two ways. First, they
impart meaning to the situations and stimuli a person encoun-
ters and to the different courses of action a person must
choose between. This is a big component of what social psy-
chologists have long referred to as “informational social
influence” (Deutsch & Gerard, 1955). Norms provide
answers to the implicit questions “What kind of situation is
this?” and “What would this response mean?” A series of
studies by Kay, Wheeler, Bargh, and Ross (2004) provides
an informative illustration (see also Chen, Lee-Chai, &
Bargh, 2001; Fitzsimons, Chartrand, & Fitzsimons, 2008;
Gilovich, 1981). They exposed some participants to several
objects associated with business environments—a brief-
case, a boardroom table, fountain pens—before having
them participate in the ultimatum game. In this game, one
of two participants proposes how a sum of money given by
the experimenter should be split between them. The second
participant can either accept the proposed split or reject it, in
which case neither participant receives anything (Camerer &
Thaler, 1995; Güth, 1995; Thaler, 1988). As Kay and col-
leagues anticipated, exposure to the objects associated with
the business world activated the competitive norms associ-
ated with that environment, leading those participants to
make less generous offers compared with those made by
participants in a control condition.
Norms also influence behavior through the identities
they establish. They influence both how one views one-
self and how one is viewed and treated by others (opening
the door to the “normative social influence” long discussed
by social psychologists). To follow a norm is to align one-
self with others and thereby signal respect for their take
on the world. To go against the norm, in contrast, is to
stand against others and can therefore be an implicit slap
in the face, an action not to be taken lightly. To go against
the norm is to be a renegade, for both good (if that is the
identify one seeks) or for ill (if one would prefer to fit in).
Note that our review of research on norms in both JDM
and social psychology is especially selective, both because
much of the relevant literature is covered in the chapter on
social influence (Hogg, volume 2) and because we exam-
ine how meaning is assigned to situations and to actions
in our discussion of construal that follows. Note also that
it is not possible to completely separate the two ways that
norms have their influence because the first, the meaning
one attaches to a stimulus or one’s response to it, deter-
mines the second, the sorts of identities that fall out or can
be claimed. Consider the impact that training in economics
has on contributions to the public good. Academic econo-
mists are less likely than their peers in other academic dis-
ciplines to contribute to charity, and economics majors are
more likely than students majoring in other disciplines to
defect in the prisoner ’s dilemma game (Frank, Gilovich, &
Regan, 1993). The disciplinary training one receives in
economics doubtless influences the meaning one assigns to
ambiguous situations such as the prisoner ’s dilemma game
(“Is this about maximizing my own profit or about being
cooperative?”). But in so doing, it also influences the iden-
tities one ascribes to an individual who cooperates (a kind
soul vs. a sap) or defects (a selfish opportunist vs. a savvy
player). The two components of the power of norms—the
assignment of meaning to situations and the assignment of
identities to individuals—cannot be cleanly separated.
Nearly all social behavior can be viewed through the
lens of people’s understanding, often implicit, of prevailing
norms and the importance they attach to them (Bicchieri,
2006; Cialdini, 2007; Cialdini, Kallgren, & Reno, 1991;
McKirnan, 1980; Miller, 2006). The growing influence of
this insight from social psychology on JDM is apparent
in several areas, including several demonstrations of the
influence of norms in commercial and economic contexts.
Consider two illustrative examples. Goldstein, Cialdini,
and Griskevicius (2008) examined the efforts of hotel
managers to get their “guests” to reuse their towels as part
of an effort to conserve water and energy. They found that
when the small card placed in the bathroom urging guests
to reuse their towels contained a statement that a majority
of past guests had chosen to reuse their towels, a signifi-
cantly higher percentage of the current guests complied.
Interestingly, the rate of compliance was increased even
further when the card stated that a majority of guests who
“stayed in this room” reuse their towels. A parallel effect
was observed in an examination of efforts to improve
income tax compliance (Coleman, 1996). Tax payers in
Minnesota were sent one of several letters containing dif-
ferent types of information—for example, what services
their tax dollars provide, what would happen if they were
found not to be in compliance, and how they might get
help in filling out their returns. One letter informed tax-
payers of the norm of compliance: “Many Minnesotans
believe other people routinely cheat on their taxes. This is
not true, however. Audits by the Internal Revenue Service
show that people who file tax returns report correctly and
pay voluntarily 93 percent of the income taxes they owe.
Most taxpayers file their returns accurately and on time.”
Notably, only the letter informing citizens of the typical
behavior of their peers significantly increased compliance.
Certainly the biggest determinant of the prevailing
norms, and one’s understanding of those norms, is the
 Concepts That Have Arisen Independently in Social Psychology and Judgment and Decision Making 565
culture in which one is embedded. A culture is a nexus of
norms. It stands to reason, then, that a great deal of recent
work on the impact of norms on judgment and decision
making would take a cross-cultural perspective. This has
been particularly true of research on cooperation and
resource allocation. This work takes its start from earlier
evidence that people do not act in the completely self-
interested fashion postulated by traditional economics. In
the ultimatum game, for example, the traditional economic
prediction is clear: If splitting, say, $10, the first person will
propose keeping $9.99 and giving $0.01 to the other. The
second person will accept, on the principle that a penny is
more than nothing. This virtually never happens. In reality,
50–50 offers are common and those much below 50–50
are often rejected.
There thus appears to be a powerful norm of fairness
governing people’s behavior in the ultimatum game.
Proposers’ awareness of the norm makes them disinclined
to make an offer much different from 50–50, and they
recognize that the other person is aware of the norm and
hence unlikely to accept an imbalanced offer. Indeed, brain
imaging studies have shown that imbalanced offers tend
to activate brain regions such as the anterior insular cortex
that are associated with disgust (Sanfey, Rilling, Aronson,
Nystrom, & Cohen, 2002). But is this the case in all cul-
tures? One study compared the behavior in the ultimatum
game of the Machiguenga, a largely hunter–gatherer peo-
ple in the Peruvian Amazon, with that of various control
groups consisting of participants from Pittsburgh, Tokyo,
Jerusalem, and so on (Henrich, 2000). Machiguengan pro-
posers were stingier than their counterparts in the other
societies, offering the other person an average of only 26%
of the total. The Machiguengan respondents did not seem
to expect more than this, as nearly all offers were accepted,
even the stingiest (less than 5% of the offers were refused).
More extensive examination (Henrich et al., 2001) has
linked the extent to which participants adhere to norms of
fairness to the degree of market integration in their culture.
Markets require mutually beneficial exchange and thus
encourage norms of fairness and trust. These norms define
imbalanced offers as unfair, triggering emotions like anger
and disgust that lead to rejection of offers that, in the short
term at least, would advance participants’ material inter-
ests. Interestingly, Murnighan and Saxon (1998) found that
American kindergarteners acted much like respondents in
cultures with little market integration, being more willing
to accept a minimal contribution in the ultimatum game
(one candy M&M or 1 cent) than were older children. This
implicates the role of learned norms in perceived fairness.
The predominance of nonselfish behavior in experimen-
tal games is a major challenge for economic theory rooted
in utility maximization. However, several recent models
have attempted to generalize the notion of utility to include
the pleasure of seeing others appropriately rewarded.
Rabin (1993) included the psychological concept of attri-
butions in the model of “fairness equilibriums,” arguing
that the utility of a given action in experimental games is
determined not only by the behavior of the other but also
by interpretations of the other ’s intentions, leading to a
positive utility for seeing the unkind punished and the kind
rewarded. Camerer and Thaler (1995, p. 216) went beyond
the concept of utility and concluded that “the outcomes of
ultimatum, dictatorship, and many other bargaining games
have more to do with manners than altruism.” In other
words, even in economics, norms rule!
CONCEPTS THAT HAVE ARISEN
INDEPENDENTLY IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
AND JUDGMENT AND DECISION MAKING
To understand social life, one must understand how people
make judgments about the social stimuli they confront and
the social dilemmas they face. And to understand judg-
ment, one must understand that many of our most impor-
tant judgments are made in a social context and are about
social phenomena. It thus stands to reason that, as we have
seen, social psychologists have drawn productively on
ideas developed in the field of JDM and JDM research-
ers have drawn productively on ideas developed in social
psychology. And given this substantial overlap in the con-
cerns of both fields, it would be odd indeed if some impor-
tant ideas and perspectives had not arisen independently in
both social psychology and JDM.
As it happens, there are several examples of similar
ideas being developed in the two fields, and we focus on
three of them. We first discuss how both fields have strug-
gled to understand how people make some judgments and
decisions relatively quickly and intuitively and others with
greater effort and deliberation. We then discuss the impor-
tance both fields have attached to the way people construct
or construe the stimuli they encounter. We end with a dis-
cussion of the emphasis in both fields on what might be
called the “givenness” of experience. Social psychologists
have explored people’s predisposition toward naïve real-
ism, or the tendency to treat one’s understandings of the
world not as subjective constructions but as direct reflec-
tions of how the world really is. Research in JDM has
uncovered a parallel tendency for people to accept a given
frame or construction of a problem without seeing, or try-
ing to see, how it can be framed or constructed differently
and what the implications of alternative frames and con-
structions might be.
566 Judgment and Decision Making
Table 15.2 Attributes Generally Attributed to the Two Systems of
Human Thought
System 1 System 2
Fast Slow
Automatic Deliberate
Associative Rule based
Relatively effortless Effortful
Parallel operations Serial operations
Concrete Can be abstract
Nonconscious Conscious
Dual-Process and Two-Systems Theories
As Neisser (1963) noted in an early review of dual
“modes” of cognition, “The psychology of thinking seems
to breed dichotomies.” Consistent with this, social psy-
chologists and JDM researchers have both recognized
that people appear to approach various cognitive tasks in
two ways (Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Evans, 2004; Sloman,
1996; Strack & Deutsch, 2004). One involves mental pro-
cesses that are fast, associationist, and often automatic
and uncontrolled. The other involves processes that are
slower, rule based, and more deliberate. Scholars in both
disciplines have devoted a lot of energy trying to specify
the nature of these two types of processes, or “systems”
of thought, and to delineate when each is operative and
how they interact when people make a judgment or choose
a course of action. The two systems have been given many
names and, following Stanovich (1999), we refer to them
simply as system 1 and system 2 for ease of exposition.
The most agreed-on characteristics of the two systems are
depicted in Table 15.2.
Dual-Process Theories in Social Psychology
Dual-process or two-systems theories arose in social psy-
chology out of the effort to understand how people attach
meaning to the information they encounter. How does
one know that a gesture is threatening, a person is kind,
or a persuasive message is worth taking seriously? Doing
so clearly takes some combination of top-down, theory-
driven, categorical processes on the one hand and bottom-
up, data-driven, piecemeal processes on the other. Some
have argued that bottom-up processing is more effortful
than top-down processing. In their review of the history
of dual-process theories in social psychology, for example,
Moskowitz, Skurnik, and Galinsky (1999) explicitly equate
top-down processes with effortless, mindless processes and
bottom-up processes with effortful, mindful processes. It is
an important assumption in nearly all dual-process models
in social psychology that people are motivated to minimize
the amount of effort they devote to information processing.
People are likened to “cognitive misers” (Fiske & Taylor,
1991) who follow a “principle of least effort” in forming
impressions of others and thus can be expected to rely
heavily on relatively effortless top-down processes (Allport,
1954; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993; Tajfel, 1969).
This distinction between top-down and bottom-up pro-
cesses, with top-down processing viewed as less effortful,
is present in Fiske and Neuberg’s (1990) continuum model
of person perception. In this model, perceivers are thought
to quickly (and often automatically) assign target individu-
als to a category and then apply the attributes of the cat-
egory to the individual in question. The target person is
understood in terms of these attributes. If the attributes do
not fit other information about the target, if they violate
the perceiver ’s preferences, or if the perceiver is espe-
cially motivated to form an accurate impression, this initial
category-based impression is effortfully refined or replaced
by individuating information about the target person. It
is assumed that “perceivers tend toward category-based
processes as default processes” (Fiske, Lin, & Neuberg,
1999).
With varying levels of commitment, many of the most
prominent dual-process models in social psychology also
imply something of an either–or operation of the two sets
of mental operations. Perceivers are thought to most often
go with an immediate, category-based judgment and to
sometimes supplant that judgment with a more careful,
individuated analysis. The continuum model (as the name
suggests) specifies some feedback between the two pro-
cesses, resulting in impressions that can be a blend of the
two. Gilbert’s (1989, 2002) correction model also entails
considerable interaction between the two systems. An
initial, effortless impression of people in line with their
behavior is corrected by a more deliberate and effortful
recognition of prevailing situational constraints.
But an either–or nature of the two processes is empha-
sized in other influential dual-process accounts, such as
Petty and Cacioppo’s (1986) elaboration likelihood model
of persuasion. The elaboration likelihood model proposes
two routes to persuasion—a central route in which persua-
sive arguments are thought about in depth and detail, and a
peripheral route in which one attends (minimally) to more
superficial features of the persuasive communication, such
as how many arguments were offered and who offered them
(Albarracı́n & Vargas, this volume). Note that the theory’s
very labels testify to the presumed either–or nature of the
two processes: One cannot be in two places at one time;
hence, one is either on one “route” or the other. This either–or
assumption is also present in a close cousin of the elaboration
likelihood model, Chaiken’s (1980) heuristic–systematic
model of persuasion. This assumption of the model
is implicit in the statement that “recipients will employ
 Concepts That Have Arisen Independently in Social Psychology and Judgment and Decision Making 567
a systematic strategy when reliability concerns outweigh
economic concerns, and a heuristic strategy when eco-
nomic concerns predominate” (Chaiken, 1980, p. 754). Note
that it is one or the other.
Another important building block in the development
of dual-process theories in social psychology was the
awareness that social perception involves both implicit and
explicit processes and draws on both implicit and explicit
knowledge. This awareness was aided by Schneider and
Shiffrin’s (1977) work on automatic and controlled infor-
mation processing, by Nisbett and Wilson’s (1977) influ-
ential paper on people’s lack of awareness of many of their
most consequential thought processes (see also Wilson,
2002), and from outside of psychology, by the availability
of desktop computers. The latter made it easy for research-
ers to use subliminal priming and reaction time procedures
to reveal the frequent rift between implicit attitudes and
beliefs, on the one hand, and consciously accessible con-
victions, on the other (Banaji & Heiphetz, this volume).
One particularly influential paper used such procedures
to demonstrate that pejorative stereotypes can influence
the inferences made by individuals who would (genuinely)
deny making any negative assumptions about members of
an outgroup (Devine, 1989). Devine subliminally presented
participants with either neutral words or words stereo-
typically associated with African Americans (“welfare,”
“jazz,” and “busing”) and then had both groups read a
vignette about a person who acted in an ambiguously hos-
tile manner. Participants who had just been primed with
words associated with African Americans, even those
who showed no trace of bias on the modern racism scale
(McConahay, Hardee, & Batts, 1981), rated the person as
more hostile and more negative overall.
This and other conceptually (if not methodologically)
similar studies led to all manner of theorizing about the
nature of implicit and explicit attitudes and to consider-
able controversy over whether and how readily implicit
attitudes can be consciously controlled (Fazio & Olson,
2003; Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). It also inspired
several empirical studies that probe the potentially destruc-
tive real-world consequences of implicit stereotyping and
prejudice on the part of individuals who would deny being
in any way bigoted (Dovidio & Gaertner, volume 2). Most
noteworthy are studies showing that participants who deny
having any prejudice toward African Americans (nota-
bly, in some experiments, African American participants
themselves) are more likely to decide that a target person
is holding a handgun rather than an innocuous object if
the target person is Black than if the target is White—and
to react accordingly (Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink,
2002; Judd, Blair, & Chapleau, 2004; Payne, 2001; Payne,
Lambert, & Jacoby, 2002).
Dual-Process Theories in Judgment
and Decision Making
Dual-process theories in JDM arose in response to questions
different from those that motivated social psychologists, so
it stands to reason that the accounts in the two fields differ
somewhat in their details. JDM came to consider the ques-
tion of whether there were two systems of thought by the
simple observation that when making various judgments
and (especially) decisions, people often experience a con-
flict between a “gut feeling” and a more considered analy-
sis (Denes-Raj & Epstein, 1994; Epstein, 1991; Hammond,
1996; Sloman, 1996; Tversky & Kahneman, 1983). JDM
thus inherited the long-standing concern of philosophers
about the nature of “intuition” and “reason.”
To the extent that there is a consensus in JDM about the
features of system 1 and system 2, it is a consensus that has
evolved slowly. Several strands of research were particu-
larly influential. One was the study of reasoning, which
uncovered evidence of apparent conflict between two
types of thinking on the part of participants asked to tackle
various deductive and inductive problems. (To our knowl-
edge, the term “dual processes” first appeared in Wason &
Evans, 1975.) In particular, “belief bias” in syllogistic rea-
soning (i.e., the tendency to accept syllogistic conclusions
to the extent that they agree with prior beliefs) and “match-
ing bias” in the Wason selection task (i.e., selecting cards
that match those mentioned in the rule to be tested) came to
be seen as results of an intuitive system yielding tenta-
tive responses based on relatively superficial features of
the information presented—responses that are sometimes
overridden by more reflective evaluations of an analytical
system (see Evans, 2004, 2007, 2008, for reviews). Such
a conclusion was strongly reinforced by evidence that
performance on tasks that tap mainly analytical processes
tends to correlate with overall cognitive ability but per-
formance on tasks that largely tap intuitive processes do
not (Stanovich, 1999; Stanovich & West, 2008). This bol-
stered the idea that judgment is controlled by at least two
types of cognitive processes with different constraints.
Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of two mental sys-
tems that guide judgment and behavior is Epstein’s work
on the “ratio bias” phenomenon (Denes-Raj & Epstein,
1994; Epstein, 1991). Epstein told participants that they
could win a prize by blindly selecting a jellybean of a given
color from one of two urns. One urn had 1 winning jelly-
bean and 9 of another, losing color. The second urn had,
say, 9 winning jellybeans and 91 of the losing color. The
participants’ task was to select an urn from which to draw
and then to try to pull out a winner. What Epstein found
was that many participants chose to select from the larger
urn that offered lower odds of winning because they could
568 Judgment and Decision Making
not resist the thought that the larger urn had more winning
beans. They did so even though the chances of winning with
each of the urns were explicitly provided for them. When
the choice was between a 10% chance in the small urn
and a 9% chance in the large urn, 61% of the participants
chose the large urn. When it was a contest between 10% in
the small urn and 5% in the large urn—odds only half as
good in the latter—23% of the participants still chose the
large urn.
Epstein attributes this decidedly irrational result to an
“experiential” system of reasoning that operates on con-
crete representations and hence finds the greater number
of winning jellybeans in the large urn to be more promis-
ing. This experiential or intuitive impulse, however, usu-
ally conflicts with the rational realization that the actual
odds are better in the small urn. Some participants explic-
itly stated that they knew they should pick the smaller urn,
but they nonetheless were going with a gut feeling that
they were more likely to pick a winner from the large one.
This experience of being pulled in two different directions
suggests that there are two things—two mental systems—
doing the pulling. This was emphasized by Sloman (1996),
who described a possible cognitive architecture consist-
ing of two relatively independent systems to explain the
diverse findings implicating dual processes in reasoning,
choice, and judgment.
Similarities, Differences, and Extensions
Although developed to address different questions, the
two-systems or dual-process models in JDM closely
resemble those in social psychology. Because the system
1 processes highlighted by JDM researchers are fast and
relatively untaxing, they are consistent with the first wave
of dual-process theories in social psychology that empha-
sized cognitive economy. But as we saw earlier, many of
those models specified relatively effortless and effortful
processes that operate in a largely one-or-the-other fash-
ion (although some did allow for interaction and mutual
influence; see Gilbert, 1999). In contrast, the two-systems
accounts in JDM, precisely because they were inspired
by the conflict between rational and intuitive impulses,
more pointedly emphasized the contemporaneous, side-
by-side operation of the two systems. System 1 operates
more quickly, so its output is often available sooner. But
according to these accounts, one does not “choose” to
respond reflexively because of laziness. System 2 is typi-
cally engaged as well, unless the output of system 1 seems
particularly compelling.
Kahneman and Frederick (2002) highlighted these
relations between system 1 and system 2 in their influ-
ential restatement of the heuristics and biases program
of research. In their “attribute substitution” account,
system 1 automatically computes an assessment with
some connection to the task at hand—an emotional reac-
tion, a sense of fluency, the similarity between examples
or between an example and a category. Both the perceived
relevance of the assessment and its immediacy often give
rise to the sense that the task is done and that the assess-
ment produced by system 1 is the answer being sought.
For example, one cause of death is judged to be more com-
mon than another because it is easier to think of examples
of the former (Slovic, Fischhoff, & Lichtenstein, 1982).
One attribute (ease of retrieval) substitutes for another,
desired attribute (likelihood).
In many circumstances, however, and for various rea-
sons, system 2 intervenes and deems the automatic assess-
ment inadequate for the task at hand. A more deliberate,
rule-based response is given. For example, one might
consciously realize, especially if one has received training
in statistics and threats to validity, that a given cause of
death is highly available because it is often discussed in
the media. Kahneman and Frederick’s attribute substitu-
tion model has captured a great deal of attention because it
offered a unified account of a diverse set judgmental phe-
nomena, such as the impact of heuristics, duration neglect,
and the problems inherent in contingent valuation methods
used to assess people’s willingness to pay for such things
as environmental remediation.
The Two-Systems Frontier
Although dual-process theories in social psychology
had somewhat different origins and therefore differed in
some details from those developed in JDM, the interac-
tion between the two fields has been pronounced and their
perspectives have converged over time. Current theorizing
in both fields, furthermore, is being shaped by the same
forces. One of these is the field of neuroscience. Brain
imaging studies have, in fairly short order, uncovered evi-
dence consistent with the broad outlines of a two-systems
view of judgment and decision making.
One notable study (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom,
Darley, & Cohen, 2001) found that people’s different reac-
tions to the moral dilemmas posed in the “trolley” and
“footbridge” dilemmas are matched by different patterns
of brain activation. In the trolley dilemma, participants are
told that a trolley is heading down a track and will run over
and kill an unseen group of five people in its path. The
five deaths can be avoided, however, if the participant is
willing to flip a switch, which will move it to another track
and lead to the death of a single individual. Most people
endorse the idea of flipping the switch to reduce the car-
nage from five to one. And, if asked to think about this
dilemma while in a functional magnetic resonance imag-
ing machine, they reveal activation in regions associated
 Concepts That Have Arisen Independently in Social Psychology and Judgment and Decision Making 569
with working memory—consistent with the idea that they
are rationally deliberating about the proper response. In
the footbridge dilemma, a trolley headed down a track is,
again, about to kill five people, but participants are asked to
imagine that they are standing next to a heavyset man on a
footbridge spanning the track. The man can be pushed off
the footbridge, killing him but sending the train off the track
and sparing the five individuals in its path. (It is explained
that the participant is not heavy enough to derail the train—
ruling out a self-sacrificial solution—and that the derailing
of the train would not result in harm to anyone on board.)
Most people say it is not appropriate to push the person off
the footbridge even though it involves the very one-for-five
exchange that they endorse in the trolley dilemma. And
thinking about this dilemma reveals enhanced activation
of brain regions associated with emotional responding—
consistent with the “gut feeling” that it would be wrong to
sacrifice the man, even if it would save five others.
Building on findings such as this, Lieberman (2003;
Lieberman, Gaunt, Gilbert, & Trope, 2002; Lieberman,
Jarcho, & Satpute, 2004) presented neuroscientific evi-
dence in support of an X system (for reflexive) and a C
system (for reflective). The reflective system involves the
prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate nucleus, and
the medial–temporal lobe. These regions have been impli-
cated in executive control and explicit learning and thus
are responsible for most of the heavy lifting of system 2.
The reflexive system, in contrast, consists, in part, of the
basal ganglia, the amygdala, and the lateral temporal cor-
tex. These regions have been linked to associative learning
and hence the implicit processes of system 1.
Another influence on current views of the two systems
of thought is the recognition that system 1 is almost cer-
tainly not as unitary as system 2. System 2 may indeed be
a single system involving deliberate, conscious, rule-based
cognition. System 1, in contrast, may be more accurately
described as a set of processes with some similar properties.
Stanovich (2004) refers to them as a “set of autonomous
subsystems.” The processes assigned to system 1 include
(1) some sort of general, associative learning mechanism;
(2) pragmatic inference processes that nonconsciously sup-
ply system 2 with information for conscious processing;
(3) once-deliberate processes that have become automated
as a result of frequent use; and (4) something like a set
of modules devoted to perception and language process-
ing. A key question that will doubtless attract attention in
the coming years is whether an increased understanding of
these subsystems will undermine the whole two-systems
framework or whether it will still be conceptually useful to
link them together as the drivers of human thought.
Another development that has attracted attention and
might be considered something of a challenge to current
conceptions of the two systems of thought is Dijksterhuis’s
work on the capacity of what he calls nonconscious
thought to make accurate judgments and beneficial deci-
sions (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren, &
von Baaren, 2006). Dijksterhuis argues that refraining
from consciously thinking about a decision and instead
turning the task over to nonconscious thought typically
leads to higher-quality decisions if the decision is com-
plex (Dijksterhuis, this volume). He bases this prediction
on the relatively unlimited capacity of the associative, par-
allel processes of nonconscious thought and the limited,
serial processes of consciousness. Dijksterhuis argues that
if a great number of different cues need to be integrated to
make the best decision, conscious thought will not be up
to the task. Better decisions will be made if the decision-
maker is distracted and the decision is made largely non-
consciously. The experimental demonstrations of this
“deliberation-without-attention” effect have been contro-
versial (Acker, 2008; Evans, 2008). The point we wish to
make here is that if the effect were to prove reliable and
robust (and if participants in nonconscious thinking con-
ditions really are not devoting any conscious thought to
the task), it would constitute something of a challenge
to current perspectives on the two systems of judgment.
The results do not fit with the view that a set of quick
assessments are made by system 1, which are then (some-
times) elaborated and modified by system 2. In this case,
both systems do a lot of deliberating.
Theoretical anomalies like that of Dijksterhuis and fur-
ther neuroscientific experiments are especially important
given how firmly dual-process theories have taken root in
both social psychology and JDM. At least some reference
is made to reflexive and deliberate thought in virtually all
textbook and trade book treatments of human cognition
and decision making. And several scholars have confessed
that they worry that the distinction may be too convenient
and that they are now hard pressed to think about any
higher-order cognitive output without reference to the two-
systems dichotomy. It is precisely in situations like this in
which theoretical perspectives benefit from being tested
and pushed to the limit.
The Primacy of Representation:
There’s No “There” in There
Both social psychology and JDM rely on insights about
the malleable, constructed nature of the represented world
to explain many of their central findings. This parallel
development is not surprising given the influence of per-
ceptual psychology, especially Gestalt psychology, on the
fields’ founders, including Kurt Lewin, Soloman Asch, and
Fritz Heider in social psychology and Egon Brunswik,
570 Judgment and Decision Making
Ken Hammond, and Daniel Kahneman in JDM. As
described earlier, Gestalt psychology focuses on how the
perceptual system constructs meaningful patterns out of
isolated cues. A few lines can suggest the face of an old
witch; but looking again, the viewer sees a smiling girl.
Thus, the act of construction can cause the same cues to
give rise to different experiences, experiences that seem
equally real. A person’s perceptions, moreover, although
constructed, feel immediate, raw, and impervious to delib-
erate reconstruction.
Beyond this common foundation, there are two other
reasons that fated social psychology and JDM to embrace
construction and construal as primary mechanisms. First,
each field faced a hegemonistic neighbor. For social psy-
chology, the neighbor was behaviorism, which threatened
to engulf all of American psychology in the 1930s in
stimulus–response learning theory. According to the behav-
iorists, social behavior such as aggression, compliance, and
prejudice could be explained, predicted, and controlled in
terms of the objective contingencies, the punishments
and rewards, that followed behavior. This explanatory
rival pushed social psychology to be even more cogni-
tivist in outlook and to emphasize the importance of the
individual’s active search for meaning in social situations.
In particular, it gave extra prominence to demonstrations
that seemed to defy reinforcement or stimulus–response
explanations—for example, that less money could lead to
greater attitude change (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959), that
too much praise or unnecessary rewards could undermine
intrinsic motivation (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973), or
that a person’s reaction to an event was a critical deter-
minant of the degree of emotion it elicited (Schachter &
Singer, 1962).
For JDM, the threatening neighbor has always been eco-
nomics, with its well-developed formal theories built on
the twin foundations of hyperrationality and self-interest,
which also assigned a privileged role to (objective) finan-
cial incentives. Again, this led to a concern with phenom-
ena that were interestingly countereconomic—how more
choice can lead to more misery rather than more pleasure
(Iyengar, Jiang, & Huberman, 2004; Iyengar & Lepper,
2000; Schwartz, 2004) or how 60 seconds of ownership
can lead to a doubling of the perceived value of a mug or
pen (Kahneman et al., 1991).
Both fields also confronted the empirical fact of wide-
spread instability and unpredictability of behavior. Why
was it so difficult for social psychologists to predict on
the basis of measured attitudes how people would behave
in the polling booth or when told to administer electric
shock? Why did people change their consumer choices
when an additional but less-preferred alternative was added
to the choice set (Simonson, 1989)? Both fields needed
to embrace such instability—not explain it away as
measurement or response “errors”—and to account for
changing and unstable behaviors and choices in a sys-
tematic way. Both fields emphasize the importance of the
“three Cs” in understanding the malleability of behavior.
That is, reactions to a given stimulus differ across time and
situations because of (1) the construal of the object of judg-
ment; (2) the construction of the perceiver ’s own attitudes,
values, and preferences; and (3) the context-dependent
processes of evaluation. The choice between an apple and
a piece of chocolate cake depends not only on the construal
of the object (is the apple a symbol of self-deprivation or of
the fresh delights of Mother Nature, is the cake represented
as a tempting treat or as a member of an abstract category
of desserts) but also on the guiding attitudes and values
that come to mind (perhaps a prior donation to a charity
has “licensed” indulgence as the guiding consideration)
and the decision processes and routines suggested by the
surrounding context (perhaps adding a salad to the menu
of choices would highlight the distinctive properties of
the cake).
Situational construal (Griffin & Ross, 1991; Ross &
Nisbett, 1991) refers to the subjective representation
of a stimulus or a person’s “definition of the situation”
(Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918). The notion that an individ-
ual’s response to a situation can be predicted only from
knowledge of the meaning assigned to it has long been a
central tenet of social psychology (Fazio, 1990), a perspec-
tive powerfully shaped by Jerome Bruner ’s (1957a, 1957b)
account of how people “go beyond the information given”
to determine the meaning of a social stimulus and by Asch’s
(1940, 1952) discussion of “change of meaning” effects in
persuasion and conformity. Following Kant (1965/1781),
Bruner pointed out that all perceptual and social stimuli
are inherently ambiguous (e.g., a secondhand account of a
riot) and cannot be understood without the perceiver “fill-
ing in” details of context and content (e.g., the intentions
and expressions of the rioters). He also proposed that in
addition to chronic differences among people in their biases
toward interpreting or categorizing behavior along certain
dimensions—construal biases that might result from differ-
ing motivations or ideologies (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954)—
there is also systematic variability within people in the
way they interpret or categorize the same stimulus at differ-
ent times. In particular, an individual may construe the same
act, event, or object in different ways according to whatever
category label is most cognitively accessible at the moment
or what aspects of the situation happen to be most imme-
diately salient or eye catching. This provided a conceptual
foundation for the remarkably rich body of research that has
used priming manipulations to shape situational construal
by altering the cognitive accessibility of different labels or
 Concepts That Have Arisen Independently in Social Psychology and Judgment and Decision Making 571
schemas (Gilovich, 1981; Higgins & Bargh, 1987; Wyer &
Srull, 1989), goals (Ferguson & Bargh, 2004), or identities
(Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martínez, 2000).
The key mediating role of representation or construal
has remained in the forefront of social psychology and has
been used to explain such biases as the actor–observer
difference in attribution (Jones & Nisbett, 1972), the solo
actor effect (Taylor & Fiske, 1978), the false consensus
effect (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977), and the fundamen-
tal attribution error (Ross, 1977; Ross & Nisbett, 1991).
Gilovich (1990) provided direct evidence that construal
differences were associated with false consensus, the ten-
dency to exaggerate the commonness of one’s own beliefs,
preferences, and actions. In one study, he found that those
who preferred 1960s music to 1980s music brought to mind
different exemplars of each era than did those who pre-
ferred 1980s music—and that the sixties’ exemplars from
the sixties’ lovers were indeed more consensually positive
when rated by independent judges. In a social psycho-
logical study with direct implications for JDM, Liberman,
Samuels, and Ross (2002) found that merely renaming the
prisoner ’s dilemma game as the “community game” led to
twice as much cooperation as renaming it the “Wall Street
game.”
Liberman and Trope’s (1998) temporal construal theory
spans social psychology and JDM, but its explicit focus
on the content of representation places it firmly in the
social psychology tradition. According to the theory, and
substantiated in many empirical tests, events or options in
the near future are represented in terms of low-level concrete
attributes embedded in a context; those in the distant future
are represented in terms of high-level abstractions removed
from any particular context (Liberman, Sagristano, &
Trope, 2002; Liberman & Trope, 2008; Trope & Liberman,
2003; Wakslak, Nussbaum, Liberman, & Trope, 2008). A
request to write a chapter that is due in 6 months leads to
a representation in terms of a rewarding scholarly accom-
plishment, whereas a chapter due next week is represented
in terms of the painful specific actions needed to complete
it within a well-specified context. More abstract, decon-
textualized (future) representations lead to more optimistic
expectations because the low-level details that make them
difficult are absent from the representation. Numerous
demonstrations testify that confidence and optimism are
higher for events in the far future and that such events
are represented in a simpler, more summary fashion
(Gilovich, Kerr, & Medvec, 1993; Nussbaum, Liberman, &
Trope, 2006; Shepperd, Ouellete, & Fernandez, 1996;
Taylor & Shepperd, 1998). Another central and well-
documented aspect of temporal construal theory is that
distant-future events are evaluated primarily in terms of
their desirability, whereas near-future events are evaluated
primarily in terms of their feasibility (Liberman & Trope,
1998). Note that the basic principles of temporal “distance”
apply to social and physical distance as well (Trope &
Liberman, 2003; Trope, Liberman, & Wakslak, 2007).
These differences leave people open to manipulation
because the definition of “near” is to some extent arbitrary
and can be set by context and instructions (e.g., Broemer
Grabowski, Gebauer, Ermel, & Diehl, 2008).
Representation and construal also play decisive roles
in judgment biases and attempts to ameliorate them.
Consider base rate neglect and the role of causal versus
statistical representation, described earlier. When the
base rate of accidents for one particular taxi company is
described purely statistically (85% of cabs in the city are
Blue cabs), this information is ignored in favor of the tes-
timony of a witness (Ajzen, 1977; Tversky & Kahneman,
1980). However, when the base rate is described in causal
terms that imply a propensity for some types of cabs to
have accidents (85% of the accidents in the city involve
Blue cabs), the information is readily used, presumably be-
cause the causal base rate or individual propensity is
compatible with such system 1 assessments as associa-
tive strength and causal simulation. A similar explanation
speaks to the apparent paradox between the overuse of
stereotypes (which imply a propensity for the members
of the category to act a particular way) and the underuse of
statistical base rates.
Many attempts at debiasing judgments focus on making
set-based representations more readily available; in essence,
using representations to engage system 2 reasoning rather
than system 1 operations. For example, many authors (e.g.,
Cosmides & Tooby, 1996; Gigerenzer & Hoffrage, 1995;
Kahneman & Tversky, 1983) have proposed that problems
presented in a frequency format (e.g., how many accidents
out of 100 will involve a Blue cab?) should result in more
sound statistical reasoning than problems presented in a
probability format (e.g., what is the probability that an acci-
dent will involve a Blue cab?). However, different authors
call on different theories to account for the facilitation of
statistical reasoning by frequency formats. Kahneman and
Tversky (1983) proposed that frequency formats trigger a
representation that makes the set inclusion relations more
transparent and hence increase the apparent relevance of
set-based reasoning that underlies statistical logic. Others
explain the superior performance of frequency formats by
appealing to evolved special-purpose reasoning modules
that are compatible with natural frequencies but not prob-
abilities (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1996; Gigerenzer &
Hoffrage, 1995). Overall, the evidence for the efficacy of
frequency formats alone to improve Bayesian performance
is mixed (Griffin & Buehler, 1999; Tversky & Kahneman,
1983; Barbey & Sloman, 2007) and most consistent with
572 Judgment and Decision Making
the view that frequency presentations and other format
changes are effective when they engage a problem repre-
sentation that highlights and makes concrete the set inclu-
sion relations. The most effective way to do this appears to
be to draw out the probability logic in graphic formats such
as decision trees or Venn diagrams, rather than to rely on a
frequency format per se (see Barbey & Sloman, 2007, for
a review).
Thinking about aggregate frequencies rather than indi-
vidual outcomes may not lead to Bayesian reasoning, but
it does change many important aspects of the problem rep-
resentation. As charity fund-raisers well know, individual
bears, tigers, or babies evoke a more emotionally charged
representation than groups or aggregates—the “identifi-
able victim effect” (Jenni & Loewenstein, 1997; Small &
Loewenstein, 2003; Small, Loewenstein, & Slovic, 2007).
For example, Redelmeier and Tversky (1990) found that
practicing physicians gave different treatment recommen-
dations when they were presented with a problem faced
by a specific young woman than when told about the same
problem faced by a set of young women. Those presented
with the individual case were almost twice as likely to rec-
ommend an additional blood test and were significantly
more likely to suggest a follow-up appointment than those
who were presented with the aggregate case.
The prominent role of normative theories in JDM in
defining what is interesting and worth investigating has led
JDM researchers to focus more on value or preference con-
struction than on stimulus construal. Subjectivity enters the
SEU model in at least two ways. First, the objective stimu-
lus (whether money, kisses, or electric shocks) is translated
into subjective utility through a psychophysical function
that is characterized by decreasing marginal utility—that
is, $2 or two kisses are generally less than twice as reward-
ing as one (Bentham, 1789/1948; Bernoulli, 1738/1954). A
second psychophysical element arises in decisions across
time, such that future events, whether rewards or punish-
ments, are discounted and worth less as they extend further
into the future (Frederick, Loewenstein, & O’Donoghue,
2002; Read, 2004). However, once these psychophysi-
cal translations have occurred, rational models assume an
underlying true and enduring preference relation among
alternatives. An individual’s choice among alternatives is
assumed to be consistent, coherent, and determined only
by relevant, available alternatives. If one is willing to walk
farther to eat sushi than to eat pizza, then one should also
pay more to eat sushi than pizza (invariance across mea-
surement, or consistency). If one is willing to pay more
for sushi than pizza, and more for pizza than falafel, then
one should be willing to pay more for sushi than falafel
(transitivity of choice, or coherence). One’s preference
between pizza and falafel should not depend on whether
sushi is also listed on the menu (independence of irrele-
vant alternatives). Violations of these principles not only
have special significance in theoretical terms, but also cast
doubt on the most fundamental tool of applied economics,
the idea that individuals have a unique “reference price”
or “stable preference” for each outcome (Knetsch & Tang,
2003; Loomes, 1999).
The idea of constructive preferences goes beyond a mere denial
that observed preferences result from reference to a master list in
memory. . . . It appears that decision-makers have a repertoire
of methods for identifying their preferences and developing
their beliefs. (Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1992, p. 89)
In a pioneering demonstration, Tversky (1969) showed
that people would make intransitive choices in even the
most simple problems. Recall that transitivity is a key
normative axiom and one that virtually all people read-
ily endorse in the abstract. Moreover, intransitivity is
not merely a theoretical nicety: Intransitivity cannot be
rationalized because it can lead a consumer to become
a “money pump”: Because pizza is preferred to falafel,
the consumer will pay a premium to give up falafel and
receive pizza; then because sushi is preferred to pizza, the
consumer will pay a premium to give up pizza and receive
sushi. However, an intransitive chooser could prefer falafel
to sushi and pay a premium to get the falafel; thus, the
cycle of preference would start again with the consumer
paying a premium to receive pizza rather than the falafel
currently held, and so on.
Tversky’s demonstration required participants to choose
which of a pair of university applicants should be admitted.
He carefully set up the attributes of the various applicants
so that adjacent pairs differed only slightly in intelligence
(the most important dimension), but more substantially on
other dimensions. Thus, Bob would be chosen over Ace
even though Ace was somewhat more intelligent, because
this slight difference was outweighed by Bob being nota-
bly more sociable and balanced that Ace. Cal would in turn
be chosen over Bob, Deb would be chosen over Cal, and
Ed over Deb for the same reason. However, even though Ed
stood at the top of the pairwise choice chain, he would be
rejected when paired with Ace, at the bottom of the chain.
Ace would be chosen over Ed because the difference in the
most important attribute, intelligence, was too big to ignore
and overwhelmed even the sizable differences in the less
important attributes of balance and sociability. According
to this account, people were using the stimulus array—the
choice context—to decide what differences were worth
attending to and hence showed predictable incoherence
in their pattern of choices. Tversky suggested that many
people would show the same preference incoherence when
choosing optional equipment for a car: They would usually
 Concepts That Have Arisen Independently in Social Psychology and Judgment and Decision Making 573
choose to add a single additional option because it added a
negligible difference in price, but they would also tend to
choose the basic model over the fully “loaded” car.
The notion of a stable, underlying reference price or a
true valuation was further undermined by the observation of
systematic preference reversals between choice and valua-
tion (Lichtenstein & Slovic, 1971, 1973; Tversky, Slovic, &
Kahneman, 1990). People—including experienced gam-
blers in Las Vegas—regularly choose high-probability, low-
value bets (P bets) over low-probability, high-value bets
($ bets) but place a higher cash equivalent (buying price)
on $ bets. Thus, a typical participant prefers a P bet offering
a 35-in-36 chance of winning $4 (and a 1-in-36 chance to
lose $1) to a $ bet offering an 11-in-36 chance of winning
$16 (and a 25-in-36 chance of losing $1.50) but offers a
higher price to purchase the $ bet than the P bet. So which
bets do people “really” prefer? The answer, it seems, is “it
depends on how they are asked.” This result was so shock-
ing in its implications for the lability of preferences that a
pair of leading experimental economists (Grether & Plott,
1979) conducted a series of follow-up studies, offering as
one hypothesis that the nonrationality of the subjects was
due to the original studies being conducted by psycholo-
gists! (Note that even when conducted by economists, that
is, by Grether and Plott themselves, the preference reversals
proved robust to economic manipulations such as the mag-
nitude of incentives.) Slovic, Griffin, and Tversky (1990)
explained preference reversals and other related examples
of violations of procedural invariance in terms of the scale
compatibility hypothesis—that is, that attributes that are
more compatible with the output task (e.g., choice or pric-
ing), in the sense of being easy to translate onto the output
scale, receive more weight than less compatible attributes
(see also Fischer & Hawkins, 1993). In the preceding exam-
ple, the dollar value of the bet is more compatible with pric-
ing and thus is weighted more heavily in pricing than in
choice, leading to greater preference—as implied by higher
prices—for the $ bet. Tversky, Sattath, and Slovic (1988)
proposed the related prominence effect, whereby choice
(a qualitative procedure) is most influenced by a quali-
tative comparison of which option is higher on the most
important dimension and is less affected than quantitative
procedures—such as pricing, matching, or rating—by the
option’s actual values on the set of attributes.
A family of related phenomena testifies to people con-
structing their preferences at least partly based on the stim-
ulus array itself—that is, the context of choice. Consider a
consumer who is indifferent between a moderately priced,
average-quality pair of speakers and a high-priced, high-
quality set. When a low-priced, low-quality pair of speak-
ers is added to the comparison set, the consumer becomes
considerably more favorable toward the moderately priced
speaker set. Why? Because the moderate price and qual-
ity is a compromise on both dimensions and provides a
defensible and convincing argument to buy it. This com-
promise effect (Simonson, 1989) illustrates the importance
of the context in resolving conflict. The context provided
by the other choice options can be said to “construct” an
observed preference (Shafir, Simonson, & Tversky, 1993).
A similar analysis can be made of the attraction effect
(Simonson, 1989) originally known as the asymmetric
dominance effect (Huber, Payne, & Puto, 1982). Here, a
difficult choice between two or more options becomes
easier when a dominated option is added to the choice set.
Choosing between a laptop computer that is fast but heavy
and one that is slower but light becomes easier when a
moderately slow but extremely heavy laptop is added to
the choice set. That is, adding an additional option that is
inferior to one of the original choices (and only one) on all
dimensions provides a knockout argument in favor of that
choice—the fast, heavy laptop dominates the moderately
slow, extremely heavy laptop. This provides a clear reason
to choose one of the original laptops over the other. Even
though the dominated model is irrelevant and should be
disregarded in the choice process, its presence adds to the
attraction of one of the options by providing a strong rea-
son to choose it. Again, an element of the choice context
guides and even controls preferences.
The notion of constructed preferences or constructive
choice processes is often explained with reference to an
old joke about three umpires discussing their philosophy
of calling balls and strikes:
Umpire 1: I call them as I see them.
Umpire 2: I call them as they are.
Umpire 3: They ain’t nothing ’til I call them.
These three epistemological perspectives could be
called “social construal,” “naïve realism,” and “social con-
struction” (Griffin & Ross, 1991). Naïve realism refers to
the tendency of social observers to treat their social (and
physical) perceptions as veridical copies of the outside
world. Both social psychology and JDM recognize that
many phenomena result not simply because subjective rep-
resentation is important but because the act of representa-
tion is transparent to the actor—that is, social observers
look through their lenses rather than at them (Bem, 1993;
Goffman, 1963); hence, social perception is experienced
as “calling them as they are.”
The “Givenness” of Experience and the
Transparency and Persistence of Representations
Both social psychologists and JDM researchers acknowledge
that often it is not enough to explain certain phenomena by
574 Judgment and Decision Making
noting that the objective world is represented subjectively
and that people act on their subjective representations. It
is also necessary to understand that subjective represen-
tations are experienced as objective copies of the world.
Because the represented or perceived world “in here” is
experienced phenomenologically as veridically mirroring
what is “out there,” human judgment is susceptible to a
host of egocentric biases that promote misunderstanding
and fuel conflict. For example, in a classic demonstration
of the hindsight bias, Fischhoff and Beyth (1975) found
that when individuals were provided with the outcome
of a historical battle, their knowledge contaminated their
judgments of the inevitability of that outcome, presumably
because their knowledge altered their construal of the cir-
cumstances at the beginning of the conflict (Hawkins &
Hastie, 1990; Sanna & Schwartz, 2006). This effect of
outcome knowledge makes the world seem more predict-
able than it is and hence makes individuals who suffer
misfortune seem more culpable than they are (Kamin &
Rachlinski, 1995). In their analysis of the curse of knowl-
edge, Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber (1989) generalize
this finding to stock traders who have inside knowledge
of a company’s fate. This inside knowledge can be a
curse rather than a blessing because the insiders act as if
everyone else perceives the world the same way they do—
and they actually lose money because their knowledge
Naive Realism
Illusion of
personal objectivity
I “see” the
world “as it is”
Biased assimilation
of new evidence
Overconfidence about
“verdict” of third parties
Reasonable
others should Overconfidence in
“see” it the social prediction
same way
False consensus effect
Infer other is
If they don’t, uninformed
why?
Infer other is biased
Infer other is guided by
idiosyncratic traits
Figure 15.2 A guiding model of naïve realism and construal in social psychology.
contaminates their ability to forecast others’ behavior. The
implication of the curse of knowledge for overconfidence
and human misunderstanding was illustrated by Newton
(1990) in a notable tapping study (described in Griffin &
Ross, 1991). When Stanford University undergraduates were
given a list of songs to communicate to listener subjects by
tapping on a table, the “tappers” were relatively confident—
providing estimates of at least a 50–50 chance—that they
could communicate such tunes as “The Star-Spangled
Banner.” But the listeners caught on less than 3% of the
time. This pronounced mismatch between expectation and
reality resulted from the tappers’ inability to undo the rich
representation of the song they had in their heads while
they tapped out their impoverished rhythms.
Lee Ross and colleagues (e.g., Pronin, Gilovich, &
Ross, 2004; Ross & Nisbett, 1991; Ross & Ward, 1996)
have linked naïve realism to the maintenance of ideologi-
cal enmity and the breakdown of negotiations. If people
believe that their perceptions are deeply rooted in reality,
it stands to reason that they would expect any reasonable
person to see things the way they do. In Ichheiser ’s classic
words, “We thus imply, of course, that things are in fact
as we see them, and that our ways are the normal ways.”
(1949, p. 39). A summary of the diverse applications of
naïve realism to bias, misperception, and misunderstand-
ing is presented in Figure 15.2.
Unwarranted belief perseverance
“Attitude polarization” effects
Assumed “transparency”
of own beliefs
Perceived ease of persuading
others
Hostile media/mediator effects
False polarization effect
Fundamental attribution error
 Concepts That Have Arisen Independently in Social Psychology and Judgment and Decision Making 575
A second implication of naïve realism is that people
hold but a single representation without any aware-
ness of—or adjustment for—alternative representations
or what is not represented (Griffin, Dunning, & Ross,
1990). Fischhoff, Slovic, and Lichtenstein (1978, p. 333)
described this as “what is out of sight is also out of
mind.” This simple principle underlies at least three
major research areas in JDM: framing effects on choice,
description effects on probability judgment, and “inside”
biases in prediction. In each case, the richness of per-
ceived experience crowds out any awareness of other
perspectives or of the constructed nature of a representa-
tion. Like reversing optical illusions, people can see only
one perspective at a time.
The various “framing effects” documented by JDM
researchers involve instances in which choices are influ-
enced by different descriptions of the same objective
information, as illustrated by the Asian disease problem
described earlier. In each case, whether it is gain–loss fram-
ing, temporal framing, narrow framing, attribute framing,
or goal framing, the respondent is manipulated by the
given frame because people do not typically transform
the information given to them into some canonical or
“neutral” representation (Benartzi & Thaler, 1995; Read,
Loewenstein, & Rabin, 1999; Tversky & Kahneman,
1981).
Framing is a key mechanism in Kahneman and
Tversky’s prospect theory (1979). Prospect theory follows
the basic logic of the classical normative SEU theory—that
is, choices are made to optimize the combination of the
subjective probability of gaining an outcome and its sub-
jective value (or utility)—with four important alterations.
First, an editing phase is introduced to capture the sim-
plifying heuristics that individuals use to reduce the com-
plexity of many of the choices they confront. Second, a
reference point is introduced to capture that new options
are evaluated in terms of the gain or loss relative to
some expectation, comparison, or aspiration level. This
reflects the perceptual principle that sensation is partic-
ularly sensitive to changes or differences (and adapts to
steady states) and that declining marginal utility applies
to both gains and losses. Third, losses relative to the
reference point have disproportionate hedonic impact
compared with the same magnitude of gains (loss aver-
sion), again reflecting a basic principle of sensation and
perception—pain dominates pleasure (Baumeister,
Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001; Rozin & Royzman,
2001). Fourth, probabilities are weighted nonlinearly,
such that the change from impossibility to possibility and
from high probability to certainty are noted and weighted
more than changes in the intermediate ranges of the prob-
ability scale.
Framing—and the role of the reference point in trigger-
ing risk seeking or risk aversion—can be seen in the fol-
lowing simple example (Tversky & Kahneman, 1986):
A. Assume you are richer by $300 than you are today
and you have to choose between the following:
a sure gain of $100 (72%)
a 50% chance to gain $200 and a 50% chance to
gain nothing (28%)
OR
B. Assume you are richer by $500 than you are today
and you have to choose between the following:
a sure loss of $100 (36%)
a 50% chance to lose nothing and a 50% chance to
lose $200 (64%)
Note first that both pairs of choices are objectively
identical (providing a final outcome of $400 for sure vs.
50% chance of $500 and $300) but are framed to evoke
thoughts of gaining or losing money relative to an imag-
ined reference point. The critical point is that people accept
the frame as given and do not bother to (or have no way
to) create a common overall representation. After accept-
ing the frame, most people choosing between relatively
balanced gains prefer the sure thing over a risky chance
of a bigger prize—this risk aversion in gains is due to the
decline in marginal utility between $100 and $200 (that is,
the perceived difference between $0 and $100 is greater
than that between $100 and $200.) A gain of $100 is expe-
rienced as more than half as valuable as a gain of $200,
so why gamble to get $200? However, because declining
marginal utility also operates on losses, people choosing
between relatively balanced losses prefer a risky chance
to lose nothing or lose $200 to a sure loss of $100—and
thus are risk seeking in losses. A loss of $100 is more than
half as painful as a loss of $200, so why not gamble to
(possibly) avoid a loss altogether? The impact of gain–loss
framing around a reference point has been found for many
kinds of outcomes beyond money. For example, medical
recommendations made by experienced physicians are
influenced by whether the outcomes are framed in terms
of survival rates versus mortality rates (McNeil, Pauker,
Sox, & Tversky, 1982), and negotiations fail more often
when outcomes are framed in terms of losses versus gains
(Bazerman, 1983).
Loss aversion, the psychophysical principle that losses
have greater hedonic impact than comparable gains, inter-
acts with framing to make some (objectively identical)
frames more acceptable than others. For example, credit
card companies require that any consumer charges for
using credit cards be described in terms of regular prices
(with the credit card charges built in) and cash discounts,
576 Judgment and Decision Making
rather than regular prices (without the credit card charges)
and credit card surcharges. Using the card thus becomes a
foregone gain rather than the source of a loss. Similarly,
the tax break associated with having children can either
be framed as a deduction associated with each of the first
two children (that is, a reference point of zero children and
gains associated with having children) or framed as an
additional tax for those with fewer than two children (that
is, a reference point of two children and losses associated
with not having children; Schelling, 1981). Clearly, the
loss frame is painful and hence politically unacceptable.
As discussed earlier, the endowment effect refers to a
manifestation of loss aversion whereby ownership—even
randomly allocated ownership—immediately increases the
selling price of an item partly because exchanging the item
for money means exchanging a loss for a gain (Kahneman,
Knetsch, & Thaler, 1991; Thaler, 1980). Studies with mugs,
pens, and many other items of exchange show that the sell-
ing prices specified by owners are generally about twice as
much as the buying prices of those who were not endowed
with the good. Interestingly, as predicted by prospect the-
ory, items that are held specifically for trading purposes do
not show the endowment effect (List, 2003).
Temporal framing (Loewenstein, 1987) also uses the
principle of loss aversion and framing but does so in
the context of time. Imagine that a desired gift, say a new
television, is to be shipped to you in 2 (4) weeks. How much
money would have to be taken off (added to) the price to
delay (expedite) the shipping by 2 weeks? For the refer-
ence point of 2 weeks, an additional 2-week delay is a loss,
whereas for the reference point of 4 weeks, expediting by
2 weeks is a gain; thus, the discount one would demand for
a delay is greater than the fee one would be willing to pay
for expediting.
Narrow framing refers to the tendency to treat choices
one at a time and resist aggregating them (Benartzi &
Thaler, 1995; Kahneman & Lovallo, 1993). This can lead
to myopic loss aversion, as illustrated in the well-known
Samuelson paradox: Even economists will turn down a bet
offering a 50–50 chance to win $200 and lose $100 but are
happy to play a set of 10 such bets. Each bet individually is
unattractive (when framed narrowly), but the set is attrac-
tive (because of its broader frame). People, whether gam-
blers, managers, or stock market investors, often respond
to each risky choice in its own separate frame, rather than
combining them across time or portfolios (Thaler, 1999).
Because individual investors assess their stockholdings
frequently—and are averse to losses—they find holding
stocks to be relatively painful. This leads to the “equity
premium”—the discrepancy in payoffs between holding
(safe) bonds and (risky) stocks. If individual investors were
to broaden their framing and evaluate either a longer time
period or a broader portfolio of stocks, the chance of expe-
riencing the painful loss would be lowered and the equity
premium would be smaller. Narrow framing also explains
the behavior of New York cab drivers who quit earlier
during their most profitable days (Camerer, Babcock,
Loewenstein, & Thaler, 1997). The cab drivers lease their
cabs for a daily fixed fee and set a daily income target. This
leads them to work longer hours during slow-traffic days
and shorter hours during high-traffic days. If, instead, they
framed their income targets more broadly (per week or per
month) they could allocate their time more efficiently by
driving longer when business was most profitable (and
shorter when it was unrewarding)—and thus provide better
service to customers as well.
The family of framing effects also includes phenom-
ena that are not directly linked to losses or gains. In
attribute framing, the same quantitative information is
expressed using either the positive or the negative end
of the scale as a reference point. For example, consum-
ers evaluate beef described as 75% lean more positively
than beef described as 25% fat (Levin & Gaeth, 1988)
and students evaluate a condom described as having a
90% success rate more positively than one with a 10%
failure rate (Linville, Fischer, & Fischhoff, 1993). Once
again, the striking aspect of these results is that people
fail to see through the frame they are given. Attribute
framing is generally attributed to the salience of the posi-
tive or negative information highlighted by the valence
of the frame. In goal framing (also known as mes-
sage framing), the outcome of some preventive effort is
described either in terms of the positive effects of engag-
ing in the action or the negative effects of failing to engage
in the action (e.g., Detweiler, Bedell, Salovey, Pronin, &
Rothman, 1999). Messages that emphasize the latter typi-
cally have greater impact. (Note, however, that many stud-
ies in this tradition do not provide identical information in
the two “framing” conditions and thus would not fit our
technical definition of framing.)
Some framing effects are self-inflicted but are none-
theless effective. For example, people allocate money
to certain “mental accounts” and treat their funds in dif-
ferent accounts differently (Epley, Mak, & Idson, 2006;
Thaler, 1980; Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). Money won
in a casino is treated differently than money inherited from
a Puritan aunt. A lost $100 ticket to the opera prevents the
purchase of another ticket, but a loss of $100 cash on
the way to the opera does not. Mental accounting violates the
economic principle of the fungibility of wealth (that is,
that all of one’s monetary assets should be interchange-
able, regardless of how they were acquired). But as Thaler
(1999) notes, mental accounts are just as binding for econ-
omists as for anyone else.
 Concepts That Have Arisen Independently in Social Psychology and Judgment and Decision Making 577
Probability judgments are also remarkably frame depen-
dent. In one classic example, Fischhoff, Slovic, and
Lichtenstein (1978) asked automobile mechanics to judge
the probability that a particular engine malady was caused
by various mechanical failures. Several possible causes were
specified, along with a residual category labeled “all other
causes.” Remarkably, the probability allocated to the resid-
ual category did not increase when important causes were
removed or “pruned” from the list. That is, the mechanics
seemed to consider only the specific causes they were pro-
vided and divided the allotted 100% among them.
Support theory (Rottenstreich & Tversky, 1997; Tversky &
Koehler, 1994) was developed to explain the role of rep-
resentation in intuitive judgments. According to support
theory, subjective probability is attached not to events but to
descriptions of events, a tenet that acknowledges that rep-
resentations are crucially important in driving perceptions
of likelihood. For example, the probability of an earth-
quake killing 1,000 people this year may seem greater
than the probability of a natural disaster killing 1,000 peo-
ple this year. And the probability of a homicide in Detroit
on a given day may be judged higher than the probabil-
ity of homicide that day in Michigan as a whole. In both
cases, the more specific event is a subset of the second
more inclusive event and cannot be more likely—but the
more specific and concrete representation provides a better
search cue to bring to mind evidence and examples, hence
increasing the support for that hypothesis.
Support theory provides a formal symbolic account of
the operation of judgment heuristics by proposing support
as an intervening psychological construct between repre-
sented hypotheses and expressed probability. Subjective
probability is constructed as a ratio of the support for vari-
ous competing hypotheses, and support itself is constructed
from the balance of evidence for the hypotheses in question
(Brenner, Koehler, & Rottenstreich, 2002). A key explana-
tory principle in support theory, akin to framing in prospect
theory, is unpacking, the process of breaking a superordinate
or inclusive description into the sum of its parts. For exam-
ple, respondents judged the probability of death from natu-
ral causes to be 58% but also judged that the probability of
death by heart disease was 22%, by cancer 18%, and by all
other natural causes 33%. Thus, by unpacking the category of
death by natural causes into three subsets, the total probabil-
ity assigned to this category rose from 58% to 73% (22% 
18%  33%). The unpacking effect works with counts of
frequency as well as probability, so it is not simply a case
of an unfamiliar scale driving a contrived bias.
Forecasting and Planning
Many of our most important judgments are forecasts and
predictions. What will life be like after we are married?
Will I be happier if I move to Sydney? How much time will
a chapter in this handbook take? Clearly, predictions about
the future involve irreducible uncertainty of many kinds,
including uncertainty about what will happen and how
we will respond when it does. However, the tendency for
representations to be concrete, singular, and experienced
as copies of the outside world also characterizes intuitive
prediction and forecasting. Kahneman and Tversky (1979,
1982; see also Kahneman & Lovallo, 1993) contrasted the
inside view of prediction with an outside view. The inside,
singular, or case-based view focuses on the unique details
of the problem at hand and involves a scenario representing
the most (subjectively) important and available details. The
outside, distributional, or class-based view focuses on
the set of comparable instances and gives little weight to
what is unique about the current problem. The planning
fallacy illustrates the intuitive appeal of the inside approach
and the biases that can result.
The planning fallacy is the juxtaposition of a general
belief that some class of tasks generally take longer to
complete than expected, with a specific belief that a par-
ticular current task will be completed in a shorter time
than usual. The cardinal example is the case of a group
of academics predicting that their joint textbook would
be completed within a couple of years, even when every
one of them had firsthand knowledge that similar projects
had taken quite a bit longer and many were never finished
(Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Because predictions are
made from an inside perspective, the textbook writers came
up with detailed plans for completion, without considering
(and adjusting for) the many unspecified and unspecifiable
things that might go wrong. However, a consideration of
the relevant distribution of textbook projects as a whole
might have—and should have—triggered the necessary
adjustment. There is considerable empirical support for
the idea that the tendency to adopt an inside perspective
underlies the planning fallacy (Buehler, Griffin, & Ross,
2002), including (1) thought protocols showing the pre-
ponderance of scenario planning and the scarcity of either
distributional thinking or representations of uncertainty,
(2) evidence that increasing the focus on details increases
the magnitude of the optimistic bias, (3) evidence that
making the distribution of past outcomes more obviously
relevant to the present case reduces the optimistic bias, and
(4) evidence that predicting from a third-person perspec-
tive reduces the exclusive focus on case-based planning.
The inside approach to prediction also leads to sys-
tematic biases in forecasting one’s own future reactions.
Studies of affective forecasting (Buehler & McFarland,
2001; Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 2002;
Gilbert & Wilson, 2000; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003) have
documented a general bias to overpredict the magnitude
578 Judgment and Decision Making
and duration of emotional responses to a given future
event, whether it be a family holiday, a major professional
setback, a loss by one’s favorite sports team, or a win by a
hated presidential candidate. The existence of this robust
bias is particularly noteworthy, given that we make such
forecasts and experience the resulting outcomes day in
and day out. Two explanations have been offered. One is
focalism: People’s attempts to simulate their future emo-
tional experience focus entirely on the target event itself
and neglect the many situational details and distractions
that will reduce the impact of the event when it actually
unfolds (Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, & Axsom,
2000; also called focusing bias by Schkade & Kahneman,
1998). Focalism also gives rise to the overweighting of
intentions in predicting one’s future actions. For example,
stated intentions to give blood almost perfectly map onto
behavioral predictions, but the observed relation between
intentions and actual donation is more moderate because
of the intervening effects of other situational variables,
such as competing priorities (Koehler & Poon, 2006; see
also Kruger & Gilovich, 2004). A second reason that peo-
ple overpredict their emotional reactions to future events
is their failure to anticipate the operation of adaptation and
rationalization, or what Gilbert, Wilson, and colleagues
call the psychological immune system (e.g., Gilbert, Pinel,
Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998). As with the plan-
ning fallacy, people fail to learn sufficiently from the past
and thus do not adjust their construals of the future to take
into account that the effects of even very good and very
bad events regularly and predictably are less enduring than
their mental simulations lead them to believe.
In research on both the planning fallacy and affective
prediction, we see a complete overlap between social psy-
chology and JDM, begging the question of how much it is
possible to distinguish the two overlapping fields and their
mutual influence on current work.
SUMMARY
We began this chapter with the questions of why JDM can
be considered a part of—or at least necessary for—social
psychology and why there should be a chapter such as this
one in the Handbook of Social Psychology. We confined
our answer to historical and formal causes, focusing on
the history of how the two fields mutually influenced each
other and on the inherent overlap in their intellectual con-
tent and guiding concerns.
We would now like to end by noting a teleological rea-
son that the two fields are substantially conjoined. Aligning
them serves a purpose. Drawing on the ideas that originated
in the two fields, or those that originated in one and were
further developed in the other, allows us, as we have seen,
to better explain a range of diverse phenomena. Because
of their distinct history and theoretical tools, the two fields
are complementary and able to reach different audiences.
But note that the ideas advanced and investigated in the
twin fields also hold considerable promise for helping
people solve some of the most pressing problems humans
face and hence offer great promise for improving human
lives. If we are to dampen global conflict, head off global
warming, or remediate environmental degradation, we
will have to thoroughly understand and wisely use channel
factors, cleverly frame the issues and potential outcomes,
manage emotional hot buttons, and mix appeals to reason
with those to emotion and intuition. In short, solving the
most important problems of today and tomorrow requires
the combined wisdom of the twin fields of social psychol-
ogy and JDM.
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 Chapter 16
Self and Identity
WILLIAM B. SWANN JR AND JENNIFER K. BOSSON
From the beginning, psychology’s relationship with the
“self ”has been a tempestuous one. When, for example,
William James (1890/1950) marched the self to psychology’s
center stage in his classic text, the field promptly ushered
it to the wings. There it languished for more than half a
century, ignored by a psychological mainstream whose
embrace of positivism made it squeamish about constructs
that seemed to lack clear empirical referents (e.g., Allport,
1943). And when the self finally did gain admission into
the social psychological mainstream in the 1960s, it had
been stripped of some crucial features of the construct
that James introduced. Whereas James saw the self as a
source of continuity that gave the individual a sense of
“connectedness” and “unbrokenness” (p. 335), the 1960s
were dominated by an ephemeral, shape-shifting self that
routinely reinvented itself in the service of winning social
approval (e.g., Scheibe, 1985).
Happily, over the last few decades, conceptualiza-
tions of the self have reclaimed much of the richness and
integrity with which James (1890/1950) first imbued the
construct. Moreover, contemporary social-personality psy-
chologists have warmly embraced these emerging, “neo-
Jamesian” visions of the self: Between 1972 and 2002,
the percentage of self-related studies published in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology increased
fivefold (Swann & Seyle, 2005). The rejuvenated image
of the self is multidimensional. Most researchers now
assume that the self has a rich history, some of which is
conscious and accessible through self-reports and some
of which is presumably nonconscious and accessible pri-
marily through indirect measures. Although a strong belief
still exists in the prepotency of a desire to win approval
from others, most theorists acknowledge the significance
of rival motivational forces, particularly in non-Western
We are grateful to Jennifer Beer, Matt Brooks, Serena Chen, Susan Fiske, Dan Gilbert, Josh Hart, Steven Heine, Stan Klein, Tracy
Kwang, Andrea Lindzey, Thomas Pyszczynski, and Morgan Ward, for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
589
CH16.indd 589
cultural settings (e.g., Banaji & Prentice, 1994). And
modern researchers have complemented their long-stand-
ing interest in personal self-views or identities (we use
these terms interchangeably) with investigations of social
identities. It was this growing interest in social identity
that prompted us to cover this work and title the chapter
“Self and Identity” instead of simply “The Self,” the title
of Baumeister’s (1998) earlier contribution to this volume.
Before turning to the specific substantive issues that
we cover here, we place our analysis in historical context.
In particular, we briefly describe the chain of events that led
to the legitimization of a multifaceted, enduring conception
of the self.
EMERGENCE OF THE “NEO-JAMESIAN” SELF
Psychology’s failure to follow up on James’s (1890/1950)
initial investigation of the self left a void that scholars
from other fields quickly stepped in to fill. Two of the most
prominent such scholars, the sociologists Charles Horton
Cooley and George Herbert Mead, rallied behind the banner
of a theoretical perspective known as symbolic interaction-
ism (Cooley, 1902; Mead, 1934). This theory was designed
to illuminate the nature and origins of self-knowledge,
especially the reactions of others and the roles people play.
We know ourselves, the theory assumed, by observing
how we fit into the fabric of social relationships and how
others react to us. In its emphasis on the social construc-
tion of the self, symbolic interactionism zeroed in on the
aspect of self that James dubbed the “social self” and about
which he famously noted that “a man has as many social
selves as there are individuals who recognize him and
carry an image of him in their mind” (1890/1950, p. 294).
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 590 Self and Identity
Conspicuously absent from these accounts were the other,
more enduring aspects of the self that figured prominently in
James’s account, notably the “empirical self,” which includes
the physical self, and the “spiritual self,” which consists of
beliefs about one’s qualities. As symbolic interaction-
ism assumed center stage in the scientific community’s
emerging understanding of the nature of the self, James’s
relatively enduring forms of self-knowledge faded into
obscurity.
Several decades later, the dominance of the social self
was augmented by one of symbolic interactionism’s most
prominent intellectual progeny, the dramaturgical move-
ment. Spearheaded by Goffman (1959), this movement
assumed that people are like actors in a play who perform
for different audiences. As people take on various identi-
ties, the self is merely a consequence, rather than a cause,
of the performance, a “product of the scene that comes off”
(p. 252). Once people lay claim to an identity, they are obli-
gated to remain “in character” until they move to the next
scene, at which point the former self is discarded in favor
of a self that fits the new context. For Goffman, there was
no enduring sense of self; instead, Goffman envisioned the
self as an ahistorical construction that emerged and van-
ished at the whim of the situational cues that regulated its
form and structure.
When mainstream social psychologists developed an
interest in the systematic study of the self in the 1960s,
they looked to sociology for a promising paradigm. They
were smitten with Goffman’s (1959) newly minted vision
of self and identity. Goffman’s influence is most obvious
in accounts of impression management (Jones, 1964),
accounts that were later embellished by Edward Jones’s
students (e.g., Roy Baumeister and Fred Rhodewalt), as
well as others (Schlenker, 1980; Tedeschi, 1981). These
theorists proved to be extremely influential in shaping
early social psychological views of the self. But Goffman’s
vision of the self had broader impacts as well. First, if any-
one could assume any identity that the situation demanded,
then people were essentially interchangeable. This senti-
ment helped legitimize a situationist approach to the self
and identity. Second, the theatre metaphor that Goffman
used to exemplify social interaction led researchers to focus
narrowly on a single goal: gaining the approval of “the audi-
ence” (i.e., other people). From this vantage point, people
were presumably in the business of constructing whichever
identities they believed would help them win the favor of
their interaction partners, with the only proviso being that
they should strive to prevent observers from viewing them
as inconsistent or dishonest (e.g., Schlenker, 1980, 1985).
Nowhere in this scheme was there an intrinsic need to rec-
oncile the presented self with an enduring, underlying, or
authentic sense of self. For social psychologists of the day,
CH16.indd 590
the world was, as Daniel Webster put it, “governed more
by appearances than by reality” (D. Webster, F. Webster,
Sanborn, 1857, p. 146).
Even when researchers became interested in motives that
seemed superficially incompatible with approval seeking
or “self-enhancement,” these motives were not informed
by an enduring sense of self. For example, when research-
ers began to examine “self-consistency,” they typically left
the enduring self out of the equation. Dissonance research-
ers, for instance, would subtly persuade participants to
behave in ways that made them look more or less deficient
and then observe their subsequent efforts to save face (e.g.,
Aronson, 1968). Again, social actors were presumed to be
interchangeable. Consequently, researchers had no need
to consider how an enduring sense of self might influence
people’s reactions to the situations in which they found
themselves.
It was not until the 1970s that the paradigm began to
shift and the enduring sense of self began to gain currency
within mainstream social psychology. Snyder (1974)
developed a personality measure (the “self-monitoring”
scale) that distinguished people who were thought to be
perpetually engaged in Goffman-esque impression man-
agement activities from those whose actions were guided
by a deep-seated, enduring sense of self that valued cross-
situational consistency. In a somewhat parallel effort that
drew on developments in cognitive psychology, Markus
(1977) introduced the idea that some people possessed
enduring “self-schemas” that systematically guided infor-
mation processing about the self. Shortly afterwards,
Kuiper and Rogers (1979) provided evidence that people
store representations of the self in memory and that these
mental representations facilitate the retrieval of self-
relevant information.
By 1980, the stage had been set for a wide-ranging
examination of the nature and consequences of a multi-
faceted self that featured enduring, as well as relatively
fleeting, components (Markus & Wurf, 1987; Swann,
1983). No longer were social psychologists’ conceptualiza-
tions of the self hitched to the wagon of pretense stubbornly
intent on self-enhancement. Increasingly, researchers were
abandoning the stage-acting metaphor of the self and the
superficial relationships it illuminated and instead turning
their attention to the relatively stable identities that people
negotiated in their ongoing social relationships. This is not
to say that all prominent social psychologists followed this
trend. But even the few who continued to emphasize the
ephemeral self over the enduring self updated and refined
their analyses considerably (e.g., Gergen, 1991). And when
more mainstream self theorists began to acknowledge
people’s stable identities, they quickly came to embrace the
richness and complexity of the multifaceted, neo-Jamesian
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conception of self. In the following section, we begin to
examine the fruits of these efforts by turning to work that
conceptualizes the self as a mental representation.
SELF AS A MENTAL REPRESENTATION
Although we believe that psychology’s love affair with
logical positivism explains most of its historical ambiva-
lence toward the self, an additional problem has been
that the term “self ” has been used in multiple, sometimes
contradictory ways (Leary, 2004). In its most common
usage, the self refers to a representation or set of represen-
tations about oneself, parallel to the representations people
have of other individuals. This is the most straightforward
and common usage of the term and the one on which we
focus most of our attention in this chapter. It is the “me,” or
self-as-object, about which James (1890/1950) wrote—the
entire set of beliefs, evaluations, perceptions, and thoughts
that people have about themselves.
Nevertheless, the term “self ” has also been substituted
for “behavior,” as in “self-regulation.” Our review does not
focus on work exemplifying the latter usage, partly because
this work was covered comprehensively in Baumeister ’s
(1998) chapter. In addition, however, we are concerned that
if the boundary conditions of the subarea “self” are relaxed
to encompass all research that involves behavior, then vir-
tually any activity can be incorporated within the domain
of self-psychology simply by prefixing it with “self-.” For
these reasons, our review focuses on work that directly or
indirectly involves the represented self.
Types of Self-Representations
In what follows, we identify and define several important
distinctions that underlie people’s mental representations
of self. Although not exhaustive, this list is intended to
capture most major forms that self-views (self-concepts
and self-esteem) assume.
Active Versus Stored Self-Knowledge
The amount of self-knowledge—beliefs, thoughts, mem-
ories, and feelings about the self—that people possess is
theoretically unlimited in quantity and scope. As such, it
cannot all be brought to attention at once. Beginning in the
late 1960s, researchers began to acknowledge this fact by
differentiating between active and stored self-knowledge.
Active self-knowledge includes information about oneself
that is held in consciousness. It has been referred to as the
phenomenal self (Jones & Gerard, 1967), the spontaneous
self-concept (McGuire, McGuire, Child, & Fujioka, 1978),
and the working self-concept (Markus & Kunda, 1986).
CH16.indd 591
Self as a Mental Representation 591
In contrast, stored self-knowledge includes information about
the self that is held in memory but is not being attended to.
Thus, whereas most self-knowledge is at least theoretically
accessible to conscious awareness, only information in the
working self-concept is available for immediate reflection.
The working self-concept is highly responsive to con-
text, such that people are particularly likely to bring to mind
aspects of the self that stand out or differentiate them from
others (e.g., McGuire et al., 1978). One consequence of
this malleability is that self-knowledge can shift somewhat
easily to fit the demands of the current situation, without
eliciting troubling feelings of inconsistency or inauthentic-
ity (e.g., Swann, Bosson, & Pelham, 2002). We have more
to say about this later.
Semantic Versus Episodic Self-Knowledge
Based on Tulving’s (1983) distinction between two types of
declarative memory, Klein and Loftus (1993) distinguished
semantic and episodic representations of the self. Semantic
memory is relatively abstract, context-free knowledge such
as “Elephants are heavy” and “George H. W. Bush was
considered unpopular until his son brought new meaning
to the word.” Although semantic memory is not necessarily
linked to the self, it can consist of propositions about the
self (e.g., “I have brown hair”). More relevant here,
the semantic memory system may contain a subsystem
in which information about one’s qualities, traits, and
social roles is stored (e.g., “I can be assertive if pushed”).
Such a system would be useful to those who are asked to
describe themselves quickly and succinctly. For example,
first dates, job interviews, and other first-time encounters
often compel people to generate global self-characterizations
with little time to consult the evidence on which such char-
acterizations are based.
As the name implies, episodic memories encapsulate
specific episodes or events that occurred in a person’s life.
When accessed, the retrieved events are experienced in
conjunction with a conscious awareness that they actually
occurred in the person’s life (e.g., Suddendorf & Corballis,
1997). Most people can recall hundreds if not thousands
of episodic memories, including events in the distant
past (e.g., their first kiss) or only moments ago (e.g., the
sentence they just finished reading).
Although it is obvious that episodic self-knowledge is
based on specific events in people’s lives, it is less obvious
where semantic self-knowledge comes from. At first blush,
it might seem that self-knowledge is organized inductively,
with specific episodes of episodic self-knowledge giving
rise to and supporting semantic knowledge about the self.
Although this surely occurs in some instances, the research
literature shows clearly that this is not always so. Instead,
at least some semantic beliefs about the self seem to be
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 592 Self and Identity
formed and stored quite independently of specific episodic
memories. Early support for this generalization came from
studies of normal college students who completed priming
tasks. The results showed that priming a trait stored in
semantic memory (e.g., “Does ’stubborn’ describe you?”)
does not facilitate the recall of corresponding episodic
memories, namely, behavioral incidents that exemplify the
trait (e.g., Klein & Loftus, 1993; Klein, Loftus, Trafton, &
Fuhrman, 1992). Moreover, semantic and episodic self-
representations seem to be stored in different regions of
the brain. For example, participants who were asked to
judge trait adjectives for self-descriptiveness showed acti-
vation of cortical areas associated with semantic memory
retrieval (left frontal regions) but not of areas associated
with episodic memory (right frontal regions; e.g., Kelley
et al., 2002).
Converging evidence for the independence of seman-
tic and episodic representations of self comes from case
studies of people with various cognitive impairments (e.g.,
amnesia, autism, and Alzheimer ’s dementia). For example,
patients with brain injuries that make them unable to access
and recall episodic memories are nevertheless able to make
accurate judgments about their own traits. In addition,
people with impaired episodic memories are capable of
updating their semantic memories to accommodate newly
acquired self-knowledge (e.g., Klein, Loftus, & Kihlstrom,
1996; for a review, see Klein, 2004).
Implicit Versus Explicit Self-Knowledge
Like other types of knowledge stored in memory, self-
knowledge varies in how explicit it is. Whereas explicit
self-knowledge is relatively controllable and deliberate,
implicit self-knowledge is relatively uncontrollable and
automatic (Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986).
Moreover, explicit self-knowledge is readily reported but
implicit self-knowledge is often gleaned indirectly by
observing its effects on people’s feelings and automatic
behaviors. Indeed, Greenwald and Banaji (1995, p. 11)
defined implicit self-esteem as “the introspectively uniden-
tified (or inaccurately identified) effect of the self-attitude
on evaluation of self-associated and self-dissociated
objects.”
Although indirect measures might ordinarily seem less
desirable than measures that assess the target construct
directly, some suggest that implicit self-esteem measures
circumvent self-presentational processes to lay bare the
unvarnished self (Farnham, Greenwald, & Banaji, 1999).
Others propose that implicit self-esteem measures circum-
vent deliberative thought processes and thus reveal the
“intuitive” self (Jordan, Whitfield, & Zeigler-Hill, 2007).
So enticing is the prospect of bypassing respondents’
deliberative self-views that research on the nature, origins,
CH16.indd 592
and consequences of the “implicit self” has grown at a
remarkable rate. At the time of this writing, a PsycINFO
search for publications with keywords including “implicit”
and either “self ” or “identity” yielded 292 publications
between 2000 and 2009, as compared to only 50 such pub-
lications during the preceding decade.
Research on the implicit self explores several themes.
Some work focuses on documenting a positivity bias on
implicit measures of self-knowledge that parallels the
positivity bias observed with explicit measures of self-
knowledge (Taylor & Brown, 1988). At the trait level, people
generally display highly favorable self-views and high self-
esteem when these variables are measured implicitly (e.g.,
Kitayama & Karasawa, 1997; Yamaguchi et al., 2007). At
the group level, however, members of minority and low-
status groups display relatively weak implicit liking for
their own social group relative to comparison majority or
high-status groups (Jost, Pelham, & Carvallo, 2002; Nosek,
Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002). These findings are consis-
tent with work suggesting that members of disadvantaged
groups can preserve their personal feelings of self-worth
while still recognizing that their social groups are devalued
by the wider culture (Crocker & Major, 1989).
Another research theme explores the manner in which
implicitly measured self-knowledge shapes people’s thoughts,
feelings, or behaviors. For example, in their work on implicit
egotism—an automatic preference for things that resemble
the self—Pelham, Carvallo, and Jones (2005) argue that
people’s implicit feelings about the self guide many of their
most important life decisions, including choice of occupa-
tion, romantic partner, and residence. Because most people
feel quite favorably toward the self, they tend to seek out
people, places, and things that remind them of the self.
A third theme in research on the implicit self focuses on
the emotional and behavioral implications of discrepancies
between people’s implicitly and explicitly measured self-
knowledge. For instance, some work reveals that people
who display favorable self-views on explicit measures, but
relatively unfavorable self-views on implicit measures, are
characterized by heightened levels of self-aggrandizement
(e.g., Bosson, Brown, Zeigler-Hill, & Swann, 2003; Jordan,
Spencer, Zanna, Hoshino-Browne, & Correll, 2003), ver-
bal defensiveness (Kernis, Lakey, & Heppner, 2008), and
belief conviction (McGregor & Marigold, 2003). Thus, it
appears that discrepancies between implicitly and explic-
itly measured self-knowledge may predict a defensive
tendency to present the self in an overly zealous manner.
Despite the attention that implicit self-knowledge—and
implicit self-esteem in particular—has commanded in
recent years, troubling questions have been raised regarding
several fundamental issues, including what the construct
is. There are currently (at least) two competing schools of
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thought on the distinction between explicit and implicit
self-knowledge. One perspective, exemplified in Epstein’s
(1994) cognitive–experiential self theory, assumes that
explicit self-knowledge and implicit self-knowledge rep-
resent fundamentally distinct constructs that derive from
different types of learning experiences; have independent
effects on thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; and may even
be processed via separate systems in the brain. Some advo-
cates of this perspective assume further that implicit self-
knowledge is nonconscious. That is, not only do people
lack conscious awareness of the effects of implicit self-
knowledge on their behavior—as Greenwald and Banaji
(1995) initially asserted about implicit self-esteem—but
people may also lack conscious awareness of the contents
of their implicit self-knowledge (e.g., Devos & Banaji,
2003). As such, the same self-views measured via explicit
and implicit methods should not necessarily be expected to
correlate; in fact, they often do not (e.g., Bosson, Swann, &
Pennebaker, 2000).
The other perspective, exemplified in Fazio’s motivation
and opportunity as determinants model (Fazio & Towles-
Schwen, 1999), holds that explicit and implicit measures
of the same self-view often do access the same underlying
attitude. According to this perspective, factors such as
people’s opportunity and motivation to control their
behavioral responses determine the degree of correspon-
dence between a self-view that is measured by self-report
(an explicit method) and the same self-view measured by an
implicit method such as response latency. Advocates of
this perspective assume that both types of measures tap the
same self-view but that explicit measures afford respon-
dents more opportunities to influence the manner in which
they present the self than do implicit measures (Olson &
Fazio, 2008; Olson, Fazio, & Hermann, 2007). Thus, explicit
and implicit measures of the same self-view predict dif-
ferent outcomes, but this need not imply that these mea-
sures access different underlying constructs. At present,
the debate between these two perspectives continues.
Concerns have also been raised about whether implicit
measures can, in principle, deliver on their promise. Initial
enthusiasm for measures of implicit self-esteem was based
on the hope that they would tap an unvarnished or “true”
form of self-esteem and would therefore outpredict measures
of explicit self-esteem in at least some domains. This theory
has received some support (e.g., Spalding & Hardin, 1999)
but likely not as much as hoped. One reason for this may be
that, like explicit self-esteem, implicit self-esteem is a
broad-based construct that has a wide bandwidth (Marsh &
Craven, 2006; Swann, Chang-Schneider, & McClarty, 2007).
If so, it may not be feasible to assess implicit self-esteem
by way of a simple association between one or more spe-
cific characteristics and the self. Instead, it seems likely
CH16.indd 593
Self as a Mental Representation 593
that people have many nonconscious associations with
various aspects of themselves. This might explain why dif-
ferent measures of implicit self-esteem are often uncorre-
lated with one another (Bosson et al., 2000).
A final concern is specific to measures of implicit
self-esteem that are based on minimizing the ability of
participants to reflect before responding (Farnham et al.,
1999). This approach, which is used in some of the most
popular measures such as the Implicit Association Test,
presumably reduces the capacity of respondents to engage
in self-presentation. This is not necessarily true, as self-
presentational activity can be automatized (Paulhus, 1993).
In addition, depriving respondents of the opportunity to
reflect may have the additional effect of preventing them
from accessing autobiographical knowledge, an activity that
requires cognitive work. Therefore, when they are deprived
of cognitive resources, people with negative and positive
self-views tend to respond similarly to self-relevant feedback
(Hixon & Swann, 1993; Swann, Hixon, Stein-Seroussi, &
Gilbert, 1990). Such findings raise the possibility that
measures that diminish the capacity to reflect may unin-
tentionally throw out the self-knowledge baby with the
self-presentational bathwater. This possibility is supported
by evidence that responses to the Implicit Association
Test predict theoretically relevant outcomes more strongly
when they are contaminated by recently activated explicit
beliefs about the self (e.g., Bosson et al., 2000).
Together, these considerations raise vexing questions
about whether implicit measures of self-esteem do in
fact provide clearer insight into people’s self-views than
do explicit measures. An alternative view is that implicit and
explicit measures both reveal valid information about people’s
self-knowledge but that the image of self that emerges from
such measures may differ as a result of various underlying
processes and situational features. Recent research and the-
ory offers insight into the processes that underlie responses
to implicit and explicit measures of attitudes in general (e.g.,
Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Nosek, 2005). Time will
tell whether these insights from the general attitudes litera-
ture will generalize to attitudes toward the self.
Actual Versus Possible Self-Views
Whereas we have restricted our discussion thus far to self-
knowledge that people hold about themselves in the pres-
ent, several influential theories focus instead on potential
or possible self-knowledge. For example, E. Tory Higgins’s
(1987; Higgins, Klein, & Strauman, 1985) self-discrepancy
theory proposes that people store self-knowledge not only
in the form of actual beliefs about the self but also in the
form of ideal and ought beliefs about the self. The ideal self
contains people’s beliefs about their personal aspirations,
as well as their beliefs about important others’ hopes for
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 594 Self and Identity
them; the ought self contains people’s beliefs about their
personal obligations and duties, as well as their beliefs
about important others’ expectations for them. According to
self-discrepancy theory, discrepancies between actual and
ideal selves are associated with heightened levels of sad-
ness and dejection, while actual–ought discrepancies are
associated with fear and anxiety. Thus, the ideal and ought
selves serve as guides that motivate behaviors aimed at
minimizing existing discrepancies. Initial support for these
predictions (e.g., Higgins, Bond, Klein, & Strauman, 1986;
Strauman & Higgins, 1988) was followed by the publica-
tion of some inconsistent findings (Tangney, Niedenthal,
Covert, & Barlow, 1998). In an effort to reconcile these
inconsistencies, researchers subsequently identified modera-
tors of the effects such as the magnitude and importance of
the self-discrepancy, the accessibility of the self-discrepancy,
and the applicability and relevance of the self-discrepancy in
a current context. Eventually, Higgins (1998) developed his
ideas into a new theory of regulatory focus.
Similar to Higgins’s (1987) self-guides, Markus and
Nurius (1986) proposed the construct of possible selves,
which are people’s projections about what they might
become, would like to become, and are afraid to become
in the future. Possible selves motivate behaviors intended
to achieve desired possible selves and to avoid feared ones
(e.g., Oyserman, Bybee, Terry, & Hart-Johnson, 2004).
Nevertheless, possible selves alone may not be sufficient
to motivate effective behaviors unless they are accompa-
nied by plausible strategies for achieving desired goals
(Oyserman, Bybee, & Terry, 2006).
Global Versus Specific Self-Knowledge
Self-views vary in their breadth or specificity, which corre-
sponds directly to the amount of information they convey
(Hampson, John, & Goldberg, 1987). At the broadest level,
global self-views are generalized beliefs that encompass a
range of personal qualities (e.g., “I am worthwhile” and “I
like myself ”). At the narrowest level, specific self-views or
self-concepts pertain to relatively specific qualities (e.g.,
“I am a world-class guitarist”). Between these extremes
lie midlevel self-views that convey a moderate amount
of information about the self (e.g., “I am cooperative” and
“I lack common sense”).
The distinction between global and specific self-views
offers an alternative means of conceptualizing self-esteem.
Instead of conceptualizing self-esteem as primarily affec-
tive (i.e., how people feel about the self) and self-concepts
as primarily cognitive (i.e., what people believe about
the self), as have some theorists (Baumeister, Campbell,
Krueger, & Vohs, 2003), it is possible to think of self-
esteem as a global belief about the self and self-concepts as
relatively specific beliefs about the self (Marsh & Craven,
CH16.indd 594
2006; Shavelson, Hubner, & Stanton, 1976; Swann et al.,
2007). The latter approach assumes that self-knowledge is
structured hierarchically in memory, with global self-esteem
at the top of the hierarchy. Beneath global self-esteem lie
more specific self-concepts nested within domains such as
academic, physical, and social. Empirical investigations
support this hierarchical model. For example, evidence
indicates that individual self-concepts, measured sepa-
rately, combine statistically to form a superordinate global
self-esteem factor (Marsh & Hattie, 1996).
Conceptualizing self-esteem as a global representa-
tion of the self can shed light on an ongoing debate in
the self-esteem literature. Whereas some suggest that
global self-esteem lacks predictive ability when it comes
to important life outcomes (e.g., Baumeister et al., 2003),
others find that global self-esteem does predict important
outcomes, as long as those outcomes are measured at a
global level, such as several outcomes bundled together
(e.g., Donnellan, Trzesniewski, Robins, Moffitt, & Caspi,
2005; Trzesniewski et al., 2006). Thus, recognizing that
self-knowledge assumes both global and specific forms may
bear practical fruit by increasing researchers’ ability to pre-
dict criterion variables of interest (e.g., Swann, et al., 2007).
Some theorists seek a middle ground between concep-
tualizing self-esteem as a single global entity and seeing it
as numerous specific self-views. Based on the assumption
that agency and communion represent universal dimen-
sions that underlie much of human behavior and thought
(e.g., Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002; Wiggins, 1979),
this “middle ground” approach identifies two components
of global self-esteem that correspond to agency and com-
munion (e.g., Franks & Marolla, 1976; Gecas, 1971).
Tafarodi and Swann (2001) labeled these components self-
competence, an evaluation of one’s ability to bring about
desired outcomes, and self-liking, an evaluation of one’s
goodness, worth, and lovability. Supporting this distinc-
tion, research indicates that self-competence and self-liking
predict unique outcomes (e.g., Bosson & Swann, 1999;
Tafarodi & Vu, 1997).
Personal Versus Social Self-Knowledge
Within social psychology, social identity theorists were among
the first to distinguish personal from social self-knowledge
(Tajfel & Turner, 1979, 1986). Whereas personal self-views
refer to individual, trait-like attributes (e.g., submissive, intel-
ligent), social self-views consist of people’s knowledge of the
social groups to which they belong, along with their feelings
about those groups. One important consequence of this dis-
tinction is the recognition that people can derive feelings of
value and worth not only from their personal qualities but also
from their associations with valued groups (e.g., Luhtanen &
Crocker, 1992; Tajfel & Turner, 1986).
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Further refining the personal–social distinction, some
theorists propose the existence of several levels at which
self-knowledge is represented (e.g., Brewer & Gardner,
1996). According to these perspectives, self-knowledge
pertaining to people’s distinct traits and qualities, or per-
sonal self-views, is stored at the individual level. At the
interpersonal level reside relational self-views, which
describe qualities that are relevant to people’s social roles
and relationships (e.g., protective older sister). Finally,
two types of self-views associated with group member-
ships can be distinguished, collective self-views and group
identities. Collective self-views refer to personal qualities
that are associated with people’s group memberships (e.g.,
open-minded Democrat; Chen, Chen, & Shaw, 2004), and
group identities refer to characteristics of a group that may
or may not describe an individual member of that group
(Lemay & Ashmore, 2004). For example, people may
hold convictions about the groups to which they belong
(“Spaniards are impulsive”) that conflict with their per-
sonal self-views (“I am cautious”).
Although all people presumably store self-knowledge at
all three levels (personal, relational, and group), there exist
stable individual differences in the extent to which people
focus on, value, and derive self-esteem from each form
of self-view. For example, people from collectivistic cul-
tures tend to focus more on their relational and collective
self-knowledge, whereas those from individualistic cul-
tures tend to focus more on their personal self-knowledge
(Cousins, 1989; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Moreover,
whereas women emphasize their relational self-views
more than men, men emphasize their collective self-
views more than women (Gabriel & Gardner, 1999). These
differences in chronic focus suggest that people’s cultural
background and gender play important roles in the types
of self-relevant information they are most likely to notice,
recall, and be influenced by.
Metacognitive Aspects of Self-Knowledge
Metacognitive aspects of self-knowledge refer to charac-
teristics—such as importance, certainty, and stability—that
differentiate some self-views from others. Here, we cover
several metacognitive aspects of self-knowledge that have
attracted substantial empirical scrutiny.
Valence of Self-Knowledge
Not surprisingly, robust associations exist between the
valence of people’s specific self-views and their global feel-
ings of self-esteem, such that people higher in self-esteem
tend to have more positive self-views and fewer negative
ones (Brown, 1998; Pelham & Swann, 1989). Theorists
have explained this relation in two ways. According to the
CH16.indd 595
Self as a Mental Representation 595
bottom-up perspective, global self-esteem derives from
the overall valence of individual self-views in the self-
concept (e.g., Marsh, 1990). As such, a woman who thinks
of herself as intelligent, sociable, and attractive has higher
global self-esteem than a woman who thinks of herself
as unintelligent, socially awkward, and unattractive. The
competing, top-down perspective, holds that feelings of
global self-esteem are the driving force behind the valence
of people’s relatively specific self-views (e.g., Brown,
Dutton, & Cook, 2001). According to this perspective,
people develop global feelings of self-esteem early in life,
and their global regard for the self determines whether they
subsequently develop positive or negative beliefs about the
self within specific domains. Thus, a man who has high
global self-esteem thinks of himself as more intelligent,
sociable, and attractive than a man who has low global
self-esteem. At present, evidence exists for both of these
perspectives, pointing to an interactive effect wherein bidi-
rectional, direct and indirect links are found between the
valence of self-knowledge and the valence of global self-
esteem (Showers & Zeigler-Hill, 2006).
Importance of Self-Knowledge
James (1890/1950) first observed that self-views can vary in
importance and that such variation can have important impli-
cations for the self. In fact, this observation led to his classic
formula in which self-esteem equals success (actual achieve-
ments) divided by pretensions (desired achievements). Thus,
competent performance in important domains fosters self-
esteem, but incompetence does not threaten self-esteem if it
occurs in devalued domains. As James put it, “I, who for the
time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mor-
tified if others know much more psychology than I. But I
am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek”
(1890/1950, p. 310). Initial attempts to test James’s formula
were unsupportive (Hoge & McCarthy, 1984; Marsh, 1986).
Later work, however, revealed that the importance of self-
views is related to self-esteem primarily among people who
have relatively negative self-views overall but are highly cer-
tain of their positive self-views (Pelham, 1995; Pelham &
Swann, 1989).
The importance that people place on their specific self-
views predicts other self-relevant phenomena. For example,
when people deem a self-view high in importance they
are more likely to behave in accordance with it (Pelham,
1991), and they demonstrate higher levels of cross-
situational consistency in their self-descriptions of it
(English & Chen, 2007). Indeed, people behave so as to
protect and maintain their highly important self-views. For
instance, people exhibit stronger resistance to challenges
to highly important self-views than to self-views that are
less important (Markus, 1977), and they work especially
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 596 Self and Identity
hard to surround themselves with people and feedback
that verify the self-views they deem most important (Chen
et al., 2004; Swann & Pelham, 2002). Moreover, people
avoid painful social comparisons when the domain of com-
parison is linked to their most important self-views (Wood,
1989), and they may even distance themselves from
close friends who outperform them in such domains
(Tesser, 1988).
Just as specific self-views can vary in importance, so can
collective self-views and group identities. Whereas some
people place great importance on their memberships in
various social groups, others attribute little significance to
“being male” or “being Native American” (e.g., Luhtanen &
Crocker, 1992; Turner & Brown, 2007). Placing a lot of
stock in collective self-views is linked to both positive and
negative outcomes. On the one hand, for members of nega-
tively stereotyped social groups, placing importance on the
collective self can serve as a buffer against the hurtful effects
of discrimination on self-esteem and well-being (Crocker &
Major, 1989; Wong, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2003). On the other
hand, those who value strongly their group memberships
are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of stereo-
types about their group, and they display heightened levels
of conformity to maladaptive group norms. We have more
to say about these effects of group identification in our
discussions of social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and
stereotype threat (Steele, 1997) theories.
Certainty and Clarity of Self-Knowledge
The certainty with which people hold self-views has impor-
tant implications for the self. Increases in the certainty
of people’s self-views, for example, are associated with
increases in global self-esteem (Baumgardner, 1990; Story,
2004). Conversely, low levels of self-view certainty are
associated with increased tendencies toward maladaptive
psychological conditions, such as social phobia (Wilson &
Rapee, 2006).
As with important self-views, people work espe-
cially hard to maintain their highly certain self-views.
For instance, people who are more certain of their self-
views tend to behave more consistently across situations
(Baumgardner, 1990). Similarly, people are more likely to
seek (Pelham, 1991) and receive (Pelham & Swann, 1994)
interpersonal feedback that is consistent with self-views of
which they are highly certain. When confronted with feed-
back that challenges highly certain self-views, people dis-
play resistance (Swann & Ely, 1984), and such resistance
efforts may further buttress the certainty of their self-views
(Swann, Pelham, & Chidester, 1988).
Closely related to self-view certainty is self-concept
clarity, which is defined as the extent to which self-views
are clear, confident, consistent, and stable across time
CH16.indd 596
(Campbell et al., 1996). Like certainty, the clarity of people’s
self-views is associated with higher global self-esteem
(Campbell, 1990). Moreover, heightened self-concept clarity
is associated with decreased neuroticism (Campbell et al.,
1996), more adaptive coping skills (Smith, Wethington, &
Zhan, 1996), and increased psychological adjustment
(Campbell, Assanand, & Di Paula, 2003).
Stability of Self-Knowledge
Despite an overall tendency toward stability across long
periods (see the section on Identity Negotiation and
Change), some self-views fluctuate a great deal across
shorter time frames. Much of the research on short-term
fluctuations in self-knowledge focuses on individual dif-
ferences in self-esteem stability. Whereas some people
provide similar ratings of their global self-esteem from
one measurement to the next, others experience relatively
frequent, transient fluctuations in state self-esteem (e.g.,
Kernis, Cornell, Sun, Berry, & Harlow, 1993). Moreover,
although there is a modest, positive association between
the level and stability of self-esteem (e.g., Kernis, Paradise,
Whitaker, Wheatman, & Goldman, 2000), high levels of
instability may occur at any level of global self-esteem.
In general, higher levels of self-esteem stability are asso-
ciated with superior psychological well-being. For example,
independent of their self-esteem level, people with more
stable self-esteem are more likely to pursue everyday
goals for intrinsic reasons (e.g., interest and enjoyment)
rather than extrinsic reasons (e.g., feeling forced), and they
feel less anxiety associated with the pursuit of such goals
(Kernis et al., 2000). People higher in self-esteem stability
also report fewer depressive symptoms in the face of daily
stressors (Kernis, Grannemann, & Barclay, 1989).
To date, much of the research on self-esteem stability
focuses on the experiences of people with stable versus
unstable high self-esteem. Compared with their stable high
self-esteem peers, individuals with unstable high self-esteem
appear hypervigilant for social feedback, and they react to
negative performance feedback with heightened anger, hos-
tility, and defensiveness (e.g., Kernis et al., 1989). Because
of its high reactivity to events that challenge the self, Kernis
(2003) calls unstable high self-esteem a form of “fragile”
high self-esteem.
Note that actual stability of self-knowledge and perceived
stability of self-knowledge are independent. For instance,
those who assume that their belief structures tend to
remain stable across time may perceive greater consis-
tency between their past and their present attitudes than
is actually the case (Ross, 1989). Conversely, those whose
implicit theories lead them to expect that training programs
will improve their skills (e.g., Conway & Ross, 1984), or
that personal and social adjustment generally increase with
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age (Woodruff & Birren, 1972), may perceive less stability
across time in these self aspects than they actually display.
For these reasons and related ones, people’s beliefs about
the stability of their self-knowledge may fail to track the
actual stability of such knowledge.
Organization of Self-Knowledge
Research suggests that people differ in terms of how they
organize self-knowledge in memory. Much of this research
considers four features of the structure of self-knowledge.
First is the number of different self-aspects—superordinate
traits or roles (e.g., wife and social self)—that house all
lower-order pieces of self-knowledge in the self-concept
(e.g., Linville, 1987). Next is the valence of self-knowledge,
often measured as a function of the ratio of positive to neg-
ative self-views in the self-concept (Showers, 1992). Third
is the level of compartmentalization versus integration that
characterizes the self-aspects. Compartmentalization refers
to the tendency to store positive and negative self-views
within separate self-aspects, whereas integration refers to
the tendency to store both positive and negative self-views
within the same self-aspects. Finally, some researchers
consider the importance that people place on their different
self-aspects, with the assumption that more important self-
aspects—and their accompanying contents—are likely to
be activated most frequently (Showers, 1992).
Consideration of these features of the self-concept has
led to several important insights into the links between
self-concept and mental health. For example, work done
by Showers and colleagues (Showers, 1992; Showers &
Kling, 1996) reveals that compartmentalization is gener-
ally associated with higher self-esteem and reduced depres-
sion among people who place importance on their positive
self-aspects. For such individuals, compartmentalization
limits their cognitive access to painful or threatening self-rel-
evant information. Conversely, integrative self-structures are
associated with higher self-esteem and lower depression for
people who place importance on their negative self-aspects,
because experiences that activate negative self-aspects call
to mind both negative and positive pieces of self-knowledge.
Integration also promotes resilience in the face of extreme
stress or adversity (Showers & Zeigler-Hill, 2007) or intense
negative mood states (Showers & Kling, 1996).
Contingency of Self-Esteem
The contingency of self-esteem refers to the extent to which
people base their feelings of self-worth on their ability to
achieve specific outcomes or match specific standards. As
noted by Kernis (2003), at least two different approaches
exist to the study of contingent self-esteem. One approach
assumes that most people have contingent self-esteem but
that they differ in the particular domains on which they
CH16.indd 597
Self as a Mental Representation 597
base their self-esteem (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001). According
to this perspective, college students differ reliably in
the extent to which they base their self-esteem on their
accomplishments within seven broad domains: academics,
appearance, approval from others, competition, family sup-
port, God’s love, and virtue (Crocker, Luhtanen, Cooper, &
Bouvrette, 2003). Moreover, consistent with James’s
(1890/1950) self-esteem formula, people’s feelings of
global self-esteem tend to fluctuate as a function of their
successes and failures primarily within domains in which
they are psychologically invested (Crocker, Karpinski,
Quinn, & Chase, 2003; Crocker, Sommers, & Luhtanen,
2002). Although some work suggests that contingencies
of self-worth can interfere with adaptive functioning (e.g.,
Crocker & Luhtanen, 2003), some domains of contingency
may be healthier than others. For instance, basing self-
esteem on internal contingencies, such as virtue or God’s
love, is associated with fewer signs of psychological dis-
tress than basing self-esteem on external contingencies,
such as appearance or others’ approval.
The other approach to contingent self-esteem assumes
individual differences exist in the overall extent to which
people possess contingent versus “true” (noncontingent)
self-esteem (Deci & Ryan, 1995). According to this perspec-
tive, contingent and true self-esteem represent two types of
self-esteem that derive from different learning experiences.
Contingent self-esteem develops when individuals learn
that their worth and lovability depend on their attainment
of specific outcomes. Having internalized this belief, indi-
viduals with contingent self-esteem tend to pursue goals for
extrinsic reasons (e.g., others’ approval) rather than intrinsic
reasons (e.g., interest), and they show heightened levels of
conformity to external forces (Gagné, Ryan, & Bargmann,
2003; Ryan, Sheldon, Kasser, & Deci, 1996). Conversely,
true high self-esteem develops when individuals learn that
they are valued for who they are and receive high levels of
care and autonomy in the pursuit of their goals. Not surpris-
ingly, true self-esteem is associated with a reduced focus
on extrinsic reinforcers and higher levels of psychological
adjustment (Kasser, Ryan, Zax, & Sameroff, 1995).
Although these approaches focus on different aspects
of contingent self-worth, they need not be viewed as
antagonistic. Indeed, while people do differ in the specific
domains on which they base their self-esteem (Crocker,
Luhtanen, et al., 2003), meaningful overall differences
also occur in the degree to which people exhibit contingent
versus true self-esteem (Kernis et al., 2008; Neighbors,
Larimer, Markman Geisner, & Knee, 2004).
Narcissism: A Special Case of Fragile Self-Esteem
Whereas most metacognitive features of self-knowledge
discussed thus far have been unidimensional, narcissism
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 598 Self and Identity
is a multidimensional construct. Some qualities associated
with narcissism were discussed earlier, including highly
positive self-views (in agentic domains; Campbell, Bosson,
Goheen, Lakey, & Kernis, 2007; Campbell, Rudich, &
Sedikides, 2002), low levels of certainty and clarity, and
contingent self-esteem within competitive, but not affili-
ative, domains (Crocker, Luhtanen,et al., 2003; Zeigler-
Hill, Clark, & Pickard, 2008). We include narcissism in
our list of metacognitive features because narcissism has
broad effects on how people value, select, organize, store,
and activate self-knowledge (Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001;
Rhodewalt, 2005).
Freud (1914/1957) first introduced the idea of narcis-
sism to the psychoanalytical literature, viewing it as a dis-
order that arises when individuals attach too much libido,
or psychic energy, to the self and not enough to their inter-
nalized representations of relationship partners. As a result,
the individual develops excessive levels of self-regard but
does not feel sufficient love for others. Later psychoana-
lytical theorists (e.g., Kernberg, 1986; Kohut, 1966, 1971)
differed from Freud in their understanding of the origins
of narcissism but still conceptualized it as an outgrowth of
troubled relationships and unmet needs early in life (see
Bosson et al., 2008).
Although narcissism is typically viewed as a person-
ality disorder among clinical psychologists (American
Psychiatric Association, 2000; Westen, 1990), social and
personality psychologists often treat it as an individual dif-
ference variable that can be assessed meaningfully within
any population. This approach gave rise to the Narcissistic
Personality Inventory (Raskin & Hall, 1981), a scale
designed to measure narcissistic tendencies within normal,
nonpathological populations. When treated as a unidimen-
sional scale, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory assesses
grandiose narcissism, which is characterized by high self-
esteem, vanity, entitlement, a willingness to manipulate
and exploit others for personal gain, and high levels of
defensiveness in response to self-threats (e.g., Paulhus,
Robins, Trzesniewski, & Tracy, 2004; Raskin, Novacek, &
Hogan, 1991). Like individuals with unstable high self-
esteem and contingent self-esteem, those high in grandi-
ose narcissism appear to have “fragile” high self-esteem
because their self-esteem is easily threatened and requires
constant validation (Kernis, 2003).
Recently, theorists have given increasing attention to a
second narcissistic subtype referred to as vulnerable nar-
cissism (see Dickinson & Pincus, 2003). Like grandiose
narcissists, vulnerable narcissists entertain self-aggran-
dizing fantasies about themselves, and they demonstrate
a heightened sense of entitlement and a willingness to
exploit others. In contrast to grandiose narcissists, how-
ever, vulnerable narcissists report feelings of inferiority,
CH16.indd 598
shame-proneness, and low self-esteem (Cooper &
Ronningstam, 1992; Gramzow & Tangney, 1992). Moreover,
vulnerable narcissists tend to hide their feelings of grandi-
osity behind a façade of modesty. Thus, whereas grandiose
narcissists demand admiration and respect from others,
vulnerable narcissists crave approval but are too inhibited
to demand it.
ORIGINS OF SELF-REPRESENTATIONS
The forms and features of self-knowledge described in the
preceding sections do not arise in a vacuum. Self-knowledge
is shaped by numerous interacting forces, both biological
and social. Here, we outline some of the raw materials of
self-knowledge, as well as the mechanisms through which
people develop mental representations of the self. We also
consider questions and findings concerning the accuracy of
people’s representations of the self.
Biological Origins of the Self and Identity
Brain
Where, in the brain, is the “self ” represented? Although this
question defies a simple answer, researchers have begun
to specify the neurological correlates of various aspects of
self-knowledge. In general, much of this work converges on
the conclusion that self-referential tasks—such as thinking
about one’s traits or feelings or evaluating the self—trigger
heightened activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC;
e.g., Johnson et al., 2002; Kelley et al., 2002; Mitchell,
Banaji, & Macrae, 2005; Ochsner et al., 2004; Saxe,
Moran, Scholz, & Gabrieli, 2006). Notably, heightened
MPFC activity is also observed when people think about
the traits and mental states of close others (Ochsner et al.,
2005), suggesting that the MPFC may be part of a network
of brain systems that mediates social knowledge in general.
Moreover, different areas of the brain become active when
people report on the self-descriptiveness of trait terms
associated with domains with which they have high versus
low levels of personal experience (Lieberman, Jarcho, &
Satpute, 2004). This latter work is interpreted as evidence
that different brain systems process evidence-based (high
personal experience) and intuition-based (low personal
experience) self-knowledge. The larger point here is that
no single brain system or area of the brain appears to
be, of itself, responsible for our sense of self. Instead, mul-
tiple systems work together to create the sense of a unitary
self, and some of the same systems that mediate self-
knowledge are involved in mediating knowledge about
others’ traits and states.
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 Origins of Self-Representations 599

Genes and Heredity and worth early in life, before they have self-awareness.
Working models reflect the consistency and responsiveness
Much of what is known about the genetic bases of the
of treatment that infants receive from primary caregiv-
self comes from the personality literature, which typically
ers. Specifically, caregiving that is both consistent and
assesses personality by having people report their self-
adequately responsive to infants’ needs should convince
views (e.g., Vazire, 2006). Based largely on twin studies,
them that they are worthy of love and capable of effica-
this research indicates a substantial genetic basis to people’s
cious action. This, in turn, should instill in children the
self-views within the broad, “Big Five,” personality
foundations of favorable self-concepts and high global
factors of extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, con-
self-esteem (Bretherton, 1988; Verschueren, Marcoen, &
scientiousness, and openness. Specifically, approximately
Schoefs, 1996). Conversely, caregiving that is inconsis-
40% to 60% of the population variance in self-reports of
tent, unresponsive, neglectful, or abusive teaches children
the Big Five factors is accounted for by genes (for a review,
that they are not valuable, that others are not trustworthy
see Bouchard & Loehlin, 2001). The remaining variance
and dependable, or both. In such cases, relatively negative
is typically attributed to environmental influences, gene–
self-concepts and low esteem will likely result.
environment interactions, and chance factors.
This is not to suggest, however, that young children with
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in under-
negative models of self will describe themselves in unfa-
standing the genetic bases of global self-esteem. Thus far,
vorable terms. In fact, young children appear to display
researchers in this area have demonstrated that self-esteem
what Swann and Schroeder (1995, p. 1310) refer to as a
is heritable (McGuire et al., 1999) and that genes explain
“positive tropism”—a cognitively simplistic, automatic,
approximately 30% to 50% of the population variance in self-
and adaptive propensity to seek positive evaluations and
esteem (Kamakura, Ando, & Ono, 2007; Kendler, Gardner, &
avoid negative ones. Indeed, research reveals that young
Prescott, 1998). Heredity also appears to explain a substantial
children generally describe their qualities and skills in an
amount of the variance in self-esteem stability and change
extremely positive manner (Harter, 1999), and the ten-
across time (Neiss, Sedikides, & Stevenson, 2006).
dency to endorse positive self-descriptions emerges before
Despite the vigor with which some theorists have inte-
the tendency to endorse negative ones (e.g., Benenson &
grated genetic influences into broad, biosocial models of
Dweck, 1986; Stipek & Tannatt, 1984). This may occur
the self (e.g., Tesser, 2002), the biology of the self remains
because, before middle childhood, children lack the cogni-
an area of inquiry in which research lags behind theory.
tive capacity to differentiate between their actual and ideal
One interesting challenge for future researchers will be to
selves, and they answer questions about the self primar-
specify the biological bases of distinctions that are basic
ily in terms of their ideals (Harter, 2006; Turner, 1968).
to the area, such as enduring versus weakly held identities.
Alternatively, it may be that children in the West are social-
One possibility is suggested by a general theory of learning
ized to embrace positive evaluations spontaneously and
known as Hebb’s (1949) law. The law states that if one neu-
without reflection (e.g., Heine & Hamamura, 2007). In any
ron (A) is repeatedly involved in causing another neuron
event, around middle childhood, children begin to display
(B) to fire, metabolic changes occur in one or both cells
a more nuanced understanding of the self, and stable indi-
that enhance the ability of A to cause B to fire. Simply put,
vidual differences in self-concepts and self-esteem emerge.
cells that “fire together, wire together.” Insofar as this prin-
Specifically, children at this age begin to internalize
ciple applies to the clusters of neurons or pathways that are
the appraisals of others (see the next section). Thus, it
associated with self-knowledge, then it may be that endur-
may be that the working models developed during infancy
ing self-representations are simply ones that have been
provide a lens through which children interpret others’
activated repeatedly in the past (which makes them more
reactions to them. Indeed, some research suggests that
readily activated in the future). Although this particular
the working models that are set in place during infancy
account is speculative, it is clear that further elaboration of
continue to influence people’s interpretations of social
the neural bases of self-knowledge could be extremely ben-
feedback into adulthood (e.g., Hazan & Shaver, 1987). It
eficial to the development of theory within the subarea.
is important to note, however, that a substantial minority
(30–45%) of people change their attachment style—their
Interpersonal Origins of the Self and Identity characteristic pattern of relating to others—across time
(e.g., Cozzarelli, Karafa, Collins, & Tagler, 2003).
Attachment Relationships
Appraisals
According to attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969; Hazan &
Shaver, 1994), infants begin to formulate rudimentary Whereas working models presumably filter people’s
schemas—or working models—about their lovability interpretations of self-relevant experiences and feedback,

CH16.indd 599 10/22/09 2:50:05 PM

 600 Self and Identity
appraisals are part of the raw materials from which people
derive specific beliefs about the self. As noted earlier,
Cooley (1902) and Mead (1934) relied on the theory of
symbolic interactionism to explain how people translate
others’ reactions into self-knowledge. According to this
theory, people come to know their own abilities, traits, and
qualities by seeing themselves through other people’s eyes.
More specifically, the symbolic interactionists described a
sequence in which we (a) observe others’ reactions to our
behaviors; (b) use others’ reactions to construct reflected
appraisals, or inferences about how others perceive us;
(c) internalize these reflected appraisals as elements of the
self-concept; and (d) use the self-concept to guide subse-
quent behaviors. Thus, the self is created socially and is
subsequently sustained in a cyclical, self-perpetuating
manner.
Because children younger than 8 years lack the
perspective-taking skills to evaluate themselves through
the eyes of others (e.g., Selman, 1980), they do not typi-
cally demonstrate an awareness of others’ appraisals until
middle childhood. It is most likely for this reason that clear
individual differences in self-reported self-esteem do not
emerge until middle childhood (Harter, 1999). At this point,
people who perceive that they are respected, admired, and
loved accordingly internalize these appraisals as positive
self-views, whereas those who perceive that they are eval-
uated unfavorably develop negative self-views. In turn,
people’s self-views shape their subsequent interpretations
of others’ reactions to them: Whereas people high in self-
esteem believe that others perceive them quite favorably,
those low in self-esteem tend to underestimate how favor-
ably they are appraised by others (Bohrnstedt & Felson,
1983; Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 2000).
Despite the intuitive appeal of symbolic interactionism
in its original form, research has necessitated significant
refinements of some of its tenets (see Tice & Wallace,
2003, for a review). In particular, while it is clear that
people’s reflected appraisals correlate strongly with their
self-views—that is, people see themselves the way they
believe that others see them—it is not clear that people’s
reflected appraisals correspond to others’ actual evalua-
tions of them (Shrauger & Schoeneman, 1979). Moreover,
little evidence indicates that people observe specific oth-
ers’ reactions to them and then base their self-views on that
feedback. Instead, people’s own beliefs about the self seem
to shape their assumptions about how others view them
(Kenny & DePaulo, 1993). Finally, people have a more
accurate understanding of how they are perceived by others
in general than of how they are perceived uniquely by
specific others (Kenny & Albright, 1987), a finding that
further challenges the notion that people internalize the
feedback they receive from specific others. Thus, although
CH16.indd 600
people undoubtedly base their self-knowledge to some
degree on the feedback they receive from others, they have
other influential sources of self-knowledge.
Social Comparisons
According to Festinger ’s (1954) social comparison theory,
people develop self-knowledge by comparing their own
traits, abilities, opinions, and emotions with those of similar
others (for reviews, see Suls & Wills, 1991; Taylor & Lobel,
1989). Moreover, the direction of comparison that people
make—upward versus downward—is assumed to influence
their resulting self-views and feelings of self-esteem. For
example, while comparing oneself with someone who is
better than the self on a particular dimension of evaluation
(an upward comparison) can diminish a person’s feeling
of self-esteem, comparing oneself with someone who is
worse off than the self (a downward comparison) tends
to boost self-esteem (e.g., Helgeson & Mickelson, 1995;
Marsh & Parker, 1984).
Besides increasing people’s self-knowledge, social
comparisons serve an important motivational purpose.
For instance, sufferers of stressful events and painful life
experiences can facilitate their own coping and improve
their affective state by comparing themselves with others
who are worse off than them (Wood, Taylor, & Lichtman,
1985). Indeed, a large body of research suggests that people
tend to make downward social comparisons when under
conditions of threat (Taylor & Lobel, 1989). When moti-
vated to improve the self, however, people may make
upward comparisons with those who embody excellence
along particular dimensions (Blanton, Buunk, Gibbons, &
Kuyper, 1999).
As with reflected appraisals, research suggests that
people do not develop the cognitive ability to compare the
self explicitly with others until middle childhood (Harter,
1999; Ruble, Boggiano, Feldman, & Loebl, 1980). Once this
ability emerges, social comparisons tend to occur spontane-
ously, effortlessly, and even unintentionally. For example,
some work demonstrates that people change their self-
views automatically on comparison with both appropriate
and inappropriate comparison partners. Given adequate
mental resources, however, people “mentally undo” modi-
fications to the self-concept that are based on inappropriate
comparisons (Gilbert, Giesler, & Morris, 1995).
Incorporating Others’ Qualities
As we saw in the previous three sections, people can
acquire novel self-knowledge through their interactions
with significant relationship partners. Self-expansion the-
ory (Aron & Aron, 1996), however, highlights yet another
route through which people’s interactions with close others
can lead to changes in the self. The theory predicts that
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as closeness between two people grows, they gradually
come to experience a cognitive “overlapping” of their self-
concepts. As a consequence, relationship partners begin
to act as if the resources, perspectives, and characteristics
of the close other are at least partially their own (Aron,
Aron, Tudor, & Nelson, 1991). Thus, in close relation-
ships, people acquire novel self-knowledge in the form of
features of the close other that have been subsumed into
the self-concept. Support for these ideas can be found in
research demonstrating that people cognitively confuse
the self more with close others than they do with non-
close, but equally familiar, others (e.g., Mashek, Aron, &
Boncimino, 2003). Similarly, people’s self-concepts
contain more self-descriptive information in the weeks
immediately after, versus before, they fall in love (Aron,
Paris, & Aron, 1995), suggesting that features of the new
loved one are incorporated into the self.
Influences of Culture and Gender
To a large degree, people’s self-knowledge reflects the cul-
ture in which they are socialized. Researchers interested
in the effects of culture on the self have long assumed that
the broad dimensions of collectivism and individualism
differentiate not only the normative rules and structures of
societies but the self-structures of individuals as well (for
a review, see Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002).
Individualism refers to a set of beliefs and values that has, at
its core, the assumption that individuals are ascendant over
the groups to which they belong. Conversely, collectiv-
ism holds that individuals are mutually interdependent and
that groups take priority over individuals (Hofstede, 1980;
Triandis, 1995). Given these different emphases on the
individual versus the group, it is not surprising that people
who are socialized in different cultures often display
self-concepts with remarkably different structures, proper-
ties, and contents.
In their review of cross-cultural differences in the self,
Markus and Kitayama (1991) proposed that collectivistic
cultures generally give rise to people with interdependent
selves, whereas individualistic cultures engender people
with independent selves. In the interdependent self, the
individual is connected to significant others, relatively
undifferentiated, and fluid across contexts and time; in
the independent self, the individual is distinct from oth-
ers, autonomous, and stable across contexts and time.
Consistent with the different values that underlie collec-
tivism versus individualism, people with interdependent
versus independent selves tend to exhibit divergent motiva-
tions regarding the self. For instance, whereas people with
interdependent selves appear to value modesty and self-
criticism (Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999), those
with independent selves prefer being better than others
CH16.indd 601
Origins of Self-Representations 601
(Alicke & Govorun, 2005; Taylor & Brown, 1988). As a
result, people who are raised in individualistic cultures
report substantially higher global self-esteem than do peo-
ple raised in collectivistic cultures (Heine & Hamamura,
2007). In analyses that treat culture as the unit of analysis,
there is a strong positive correlation between a culture’s
individualism and the global self-esteem of its inhabit-
ants (Oyserman et al., 2002).
Using a two-component definition of self-esteem,
however, may lead to a more nuanced understanding of
the effects of culture on the positivity of the self-concept.
Consider research showing that people raised in collectivistic
cultures demonstrate relatively high levels of self-liking,
whereas those raised in individualistic cultures demonstrate
relatively high levels of self-competence (Tafarodi, Lang, &
Smith, 1999; Tafarodi & Swann, 1996). As noted earlier,
self-liking reflects people’s evaluations of themselves in
terms of qualities that link them to others; conversely, self-
competence reflects people’s evaluations of themselves in
terms of qualities that distinguish the self from others. If
collectivistic cultures value the group over the individual,
then it makes sense that people with interdependent selves
derive self-esteem primarily from those qualities that make
them good group members, such as loyalty (Sedikides,
Gaertner, & Vevea, 2005; but see Heine, Kitayama, &
Hamamura, 2007, who raise serious questions regarding the
evidentiary basis of this assertion). It is also no surprise
that people with independent selves tend to derive self-
esteem primarily from the qualities that make them stand
out from others. Within their cultural contexts, each way of
constructing self-esteem makes adaptive sense.
Mirroring these cultural differences are gender differ-
ences in the extent to which people exhibit interdependent
versus independent selves. Whereas girls are often social-
ized to prioritize the qualities that align them to others,
boys are taught to prioritize the qualities that distinguish
and differentiate them from others (e.g., Spence, Deaux, &
Helmreich, 1985). Accordingly, women tend to develop
more interdependent selves, and men tend to develop more
independent selves (Cross, Bacon, & Morris, 2000; Cross &
Madson, 1997). Moreover, women tend to link their self-
esteem to their relational qualities, whereas men link
their self-esteem to their independent qualities (Josephs,
Markus, & Tafarodi, 1992).
Intrapsychic Origins of the Self and Identity
Self-Perception
Like outside observers, people sometimes learn about them-
selves by observing their own behavior, and the situation in
which it occurs, and then inferring their underlying attitudes
and dispositions (Bem, 1972). According to self-perception
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 602 Self and Identity
theory, people are most likely to acquire self-knowledge
through observation of their own behavior when their self-
knowledge is weak, ambiguous, or difficult to interpret.
Moreover, many attributional principles that guide people’s
perceptions of others also operate when they infer their own
dispositions via self-perception. Thus, for example, the self-
knowledge that people acquire through self-perception of
their behavior is less certain to the extent that multiple pos-
sible causes exist for that behavior (Kelley, 1971). As such,
an overjustification effect occurs when people lose intrinsic
motivation to perform a certain activity because extrinsic
rewards convince them that they are performing the behav-
ior merely to obtain the rewards (for reviews, see Deci,
Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Lepper, Henderlong, & Gingras,
1999).
As noted earlier, research on the inaccuracy of reflected
appraisals casts doubt on the notion that others truly serve
as “looking glasses” in which people see the self reflected
(Cooley, 1902; Mead, 1934). On this point, self-perception
theory may provide an answer. Instead of accurately per-
ceiving themselves through the eyes of others, people may
engage in self-perception of their own behaviors and then
attribute these perceptions of the self to others (Kenny &
DePaulo, 1993). If so, then self-perceptions of behavior
may play an important role in two related, but distinct,
self-knowledge processes: First, self-perceptions are used
as a basis for inferring one’s own internal qualities, traits,
attitudes, and the like, and second, self-perceptions are
used as a basis for inferring how others view the self.
In an interesting twist on self-perception theory, Goldstein
and Cialdini (2007) proposed that people can learn about
their own internal states—at least their temporary ones—by
observing the behavior of others with whom their identities
are merged. The logic is that, when viewing a close other
perform a behavior, people vicariously infer novel informa-
tion about the self, resulting in a change in the self-concept.
Although the notion of “vicarious self-perception” is rela-
tively new, it fits well with the general idea that people mod-
ify the self to achieve greater congruence with the presumed
beliefs, self-views, and attitudes of close others (Baldwin,
Carrell, & Lopez, 1990; Hinkley & Andersen, 1996).
Introspection
Unlike self-perception, which involves observing one’s
overt behaviors and using them to infer one’s internal
qualities, introspection involves deliberate attempts to
achieve self-knowledge by directing attention “inward.”
While introspecting about the self seems like a fairly
obvious route to self-knowledge, research suggests that
people spend surprisingly little time (about 8% of total
thoughts) reflecting on themselves (Csikszentmihalyi &
Figurski, 1982).
CH16.indd 602
When people do engage in introspection, the fruits
of their efforts are sometimes rather bitter. For example,
introspection about the reasons behind one’s attitudes,
behaviors, and feelings is likely to produce inaccurate self-
knowledge (Wilson, Laser, & Stone, 1982). As a conse-
quence, when people introspect about the reasons behind
their feelings, they sometimes change their feelings to
match the reasons they generate (Wilson & Kraft, 1993),
which can lead them to make decisions that they later
regret (Wilson et al., 1993).
Introspection can also lead people to compare their cur-
rent achievements and behaviors with their beliefs about
how they should or ought to be, which can create dis-
comfort if there is a disparity (Duval & Wicklund, 1972;
Higgins, 1987). Falling short of internal standards can pro-
duce painful feelings of shame for those who are prone to
attribute their shortcomings to their whole self (Tangney &
Dearing, 2002). Some propose that this state of self-aware-
ness can be so troubling that people go to great lengths to
“escape the self ” through activities such as drinking, drug
use, binge eating, and even suicide (Baumeister, 1991).
Introspection can also have desirable effects, however.
Introspecting about who one is, for example, can produce
accurate self-knowledge if people have sufficient cogni-
tive resources (Hixon & Swann, 1993). Similarly, when
self-reflection reveals that one meets or exceeds one’s
standards, positive feelings result (Greenberg & Musham,
1981; Silvia & Abele, 2002). Moreover, people are more
likely to behave in line with their personal values when
in a state of self-awareness, suggesting that introspection
can promote adaptive (or at least self-consistent) self-
regulation (e.g., Beaman, Klentz, Diener, & Svanum, 1979;
Gibbons, 1978).
Experiencing the Subjective Self
Yet another source of self-knowledge is the continual,
ever-changing “stream of consciousness” about which
James (1890/1950) wrote—the spontaneous thoughts,
feelings, and reactions that constitute the self-as-subject
(or “I”). Experiencing the subjective self differs from both
self-perception and introspection in fundamental ways. For
instance, whereas both self-perception and introspection
involve reflection on the self, experiencing the subjective
self can involve an outward focus, a full engagement in
the moment that draws attention away from the self (e.g.,
Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Moreover, whereas behaviors
provide the raw material for self-perception processes,
private thoughts and feelings provide the raw material for
subjective self processes.
Research suggests that people rely more on their sub-
jective experiences than on their overt behaviors when con-
structing self-knowledge (Andersen, 1984; Andersen & Ross,
10/22/09 2:50:06 PM

1984), and when people encounter others who share their
subjective reactions to the world, they feel especially
attracted to them (Pinel, Long, Landau, Alexander, &
Pyszczynski, 2006). Apparently, when people sense that
they and others perceive the world through the same psy-
chological “lens,” their confidence in the validity of their
own visions of reality is reinforced. Such “I-sharing” may
constitute a powerful antidote to the problem of existential
isolation.
Accuracy of Self-Knowledge
Humans routinely assert that they know themselves. Most
people assert that they know themselves better than oth-
ers do (Pronin, Kruger, Savitsky, & Ross, 2001). And it
is not just laypeople who harbor this belief in the fidelity
of self-knowledge: Behavioral scientists harbor this same
conviction. For example, in 2003, 70% of the studies pub-
lished in a leading personality psychology journal (Journal
of Research in Personality) relied on self-reports as the
index of personality (Vazire, 2006). Such confidence in
the veracity of self-knowledge is challenged by a spate of
demonstrations, mostly conducted in the laboratory, indicat-
ing that some aspects of self-knowledge are simply wrong
(e.g., Epley & Dunning, 2006; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003;
for non-laboratory studies, see Gosling, John, Craik, &
Robins, 1998; Vazire & Mehl, 2008). At least two potential
sources of such errors exist. In the tradition of Freud, many
have argued that people unconsciously or consciously sup-
press unwanted thoughts and feelings. Although intrigu-
ing, these processes have been notoriously difficult to
demonstrate empirically (for reviews, see Erdelyi, 1974,
1993). The other source of errors in self-knowledge is that
people simply lack access to many processes that give rise
to self-relevant behaviors, which throws a wrench into
the process of introspection. As a result, people err when
asked about the causes of their actions (Nisbett & Wilson,
1979), their attitudes (e.g., Galdi, Arcuri, & Gawronski,
2008), or their future emotional reactions (e.g., Wilson &
Gilbert, 2003; for a review, see Wilson & Dunn, 2004). In
the end, such errors could undermine the veracity of peo-
ple’s representations of themselves.
Such sharp clashes between people’s intuitions and the
results of systematic research invariably led theorists and
researchers to ask which source—individuals or research
findings—really is more accurate. Such questions regard-
ing the validity of self-knowledge are particularly vexing
due to the criterion problem: It is easy to say whether or
not someone has brown eyes or even a pleasant smile, but
the problem of assessing the validity of self-knowledge is
knotty indeed (e.g., Kruglanski, 1989; Swann, 1984). For
example, when it comes to high-level, global self-views
CH16.indd 603
Motivational Properties of the Self 603
such as “worthwhile,” questions of accuracy are impossible
to answer definitively because choosing one or more crite-
ria is inherently subjective. More specific self-views such
as “extroverted” or “fastidious,” however, have relatively
clear empirical referents. Empirical assessments of accu-
racy have therefore focused on lower-level self-views.
Some of the most telling studies of accuracy of self-
knowledge involve comparing the capacity of people’s
self-ratings and the ratings of peers to predict some objec-
tive outcome, such as the ratings of observers, or some
naturally occurring outcome, such as success in military
training. Different methodologies lead to different conclu-
sions, but the studies using the strongest methodologies
generally conclude that well-acquainted observers are
at least as accurate as are people themselves. The results
of one recent study (Vazire & Mehl, 2008) suggest that
the specific content of criterion behaviors may be criti-
cal. These researchers compared the ability of individuals
and acquainted others to predict naturally occurring behav-
iors over a 4-day period. Findings revealed that individuals
were more accurate in predicting some of their behaviors
(e.g., deliberate behaviors such as arguing) but acquain-
tances were more accurate in predicting other behaviors
(e.g., spontaneous behaviors such as talking one on one).
Although it is too early to draw definitive conclusions
from this work, it is probably safe to say that people
are accurate about the self within some arenas but that
others—particularly close others—may be better able to
predict people’s reactions within other arenas, especially
when people’s own wishes and desires compromise their
objectivity. Therefore, some analysts have concluded that
accurate self-knowledge is best obtained not from intro-
specting but instead from consulting with friends and
acquaintances or observing one’s own behavior (Wilson &
Dunn, 2004).
MOTIVATIONAL PROPERTIES OF THE SELF
My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my
doing.
—William James (1890/1950, p. 333)
Although James believed that the major function of self-
knowledge was to guide action, this proposition has proven
surprisingly controversial in certain quarters. Indeed, some
prominent thinkers have gone as far as to take the oppo-
site position, suggesting instead that self-knowledge is
an epiphenomenal product of social relations that has no
causal status. In self-perception theory, for example, Daryl
Bem (1972) proposed that the flow of influence between
behavior and the self is unidirectional: We infer who we
by observing our own behavior and the conditions under
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 604 Self and Identity
which it unfolds, but self-knowledge has no impact on
subsequent action. Theorists from different theoretical tra-
ditions have echoed Bem’s assertions. Group researcher
John Turner, for example, contended that personal self-
views are “there to be explained, not in themselves expla-
nations” (Turner, Reynolds, Haslam, & Veenstra, 2006,
p. 25). Such pockets of skepticism notwithstanding, it
is fair to say that today the self ’s motivational proper-
ties are widely accepted among most students of the self
(e.g., Higgins & Pittman, 2008; Pittman & Zeigler, 2007).
Testimony to contemporary enthusiasm for motivational
processes is offered by the burgeoning literature on self-
enhancement processes.
Self-Enhancement Motive
The self-enhancement motive has been defined in many
ways, but it is most commonly conceptualized as a desire
to maximize the positivity of one’s self-views (e.g.,
Leary, 2007). The notion that people prefer and seek self-
enhancement is enormously popular, with one landmark
statement of the viewpoint—Taylor and Brown’s (1988)
literature review—garnering more than 2,200 citations.
The popularity of the self-enhancement motive is easy to
understand. After all, the notion that people want positive
evaluations seems like a relatively simple and readily test-
able argument. In addition, and perhaps more importantly,
the notion that self-enhancement is a basic human motive
lends scientific credibility to the cultural assumptions and
normative behaviors of the researchers conducting the
research, most of whom happen to be Westerners.
Little wonder, then, that self-enhancement assumptions
have found their way into an extraordinarily wide range
of contemporary theories (e.g., Hoyle, Kernis, Leary, &
Baldwin, 1999; Sedikides & Gregg, 2003). Purported
evidence for the theory abounds. One popular phenom-
enon is the “better-than-average effect,” wherein most
people assert that they are above average, a mathematical
impossibility. For example, college students overwhelm-
ingly report that they are above-average drivers (Svenson,
1981). Ironically, when told of the existence of such “posi-
tive illusions,” people claim that they are less susceptible
to them than most others are (Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross,
2004). At this juncture, dozens of such self-enhancing
illusions have been reported in the research literature (for
reviews, see Helweg-Larsen & Shepperd, 2001; Sedikides &
Gregg, 2008).
Yet, in recent years, researchers have begun to voice
reservations about social psychology’s motivational cen-
terpiece. Some findings suggest that some specific effects
reflect the failure of participants to comprehend fully what
they are being asked when they are encouraged to estimate
CH16.indd 604
their standing relative to others. Kruger and Dunning
(1999), for example, had participants estimate their perfor-
mance on dimensions such as humor, grammar ability, and
logical reasoning. Regardless of their actual performance,
participants estimated that they scored in the 60th to 70th
percentile. The result was that low scorers overestimated
their performance but high scorers underestimated their
performance. Similarly, other findings reinforce the notion
that people’s performance estimates should not be taken at
face value. Indeed, in estimating performance relative to
“average performance,” people seem to rely on a heuris-
tic that leads them to rate everyone—including unknown
strangers—slightly above average (Klar & Giladi, 1997).
To be sure, some researchers (Alicke, Klotz,
Breitenbecher, Yurak, & Vredenburg, 1995) have shown
that people display self-enhancing performance estimates
even when asked to compare themselves against specific
others. Nevertheless, evidence that such biases are stronger
when people have positive self-views (Brown, 1986) raises
a further issue regarding the mechanism that gives rise to
these effects. That is, almost all studies that are taken as evi-
dence of self-enhancement suffer from a serious potential
confound. Researchers have been aware of this confound
for some time but have failed to appreciate its full implica-
tions. For example, in their review of the positive illusions
literature, Taylor and Brown (1988) noted the following:
One caveat, however, deserves mention. A considerable amount
of the research cited demonstrates that people solicit and receive
self-confirming feedback, not necessarily positive feedback. For
example, a woman who thinks of herself as shy may seek and
receive feedback that she is (see Swann, 1983). At first, these
results may seem contradictory with the position that social feed-
back fosters positive self-conceptions, but in fact, they are not.
Because most people think well of themselves on most attributes,
confirming feedback is typically positive feedback. (p. 202)
Taylor and Brown (1988) were alluding to an ambiguity
imposed by almost all research on self-enhancement having
been conducted on unselected participants, roughly 70% of
whom have positive self-views (Diener & Diener, 1995).
Therefore, evidence of self-enhancement may reflect, to an
unknown degree, a desire for confirmation of chronic self-
views (e.g., Kwan, John, Kenny, Bond, & Robins, 2004;
Kwan, John, Robins, & Kuang, 2008).
To illustrate the import of Taylor and Brown’s (1988)
caveat, consider one of the most robust findings in the self-
enhancement literature: the tendency for people to make
self-serving attributions (e.g., Mezulis, Abramson, Hyde, &
Hankin, 2004; Miller & Ross, 1975). When researchers
conducted a parallel study in which they measured the self-
views of participants, they discovered that those with posi-
tive self-views displayed the self-serving pattern but those
10/22/09 2:50:07 PM

with negative self-views displayed precisely the opposite
pattern, perceiving negative evaluators to be more accurate
than positive evaluators (e.g., Swann, Predmore, Griffin, &
Gaines, 1987). This pattern of data clearly indicates that a
desire to confirm, rather than enhance, self-views under-
lies participants’ responses.
Another finding that has widely been attributed to
self-enhancement strivings is the tendency for people
to selectively recall positive feedback about themselves
(Sanitioso & Wlodarski, 2004). Again, when researchers
measured the self-views of participants in such studies,
they discovered that their responses seemed to be driven by
a desire for self-confirmation. That is, only those with posi-
tive self-views preferentially recalled positive feedback;
people with negative self-views displayed the opposite ten-
dency, recalling more negative than positive feedback (e.g.,
Story, 1998; Swann & Read, 1981). Similarly, people’s ten-
dency to define virtues as qualities they possess and vices as
qualities they lack (Dunning, Perie, & Story, 1991) appears
to be due primarily to people who have relatively positive
views of themselves (Beauregard & Dunning, 2001).
The upshot of such findings is simple: Although “self-
enhancement strivings” seem to be pervasive, the motive that is
driving such strivings may be self-confirmation rather than
self-enhancement. And even if it turns out that such puta-
tive self-enhancement strivings among people with positive
self-views are indeed compelled by a self-enhancement
motive, self-enhancement theory still cannot account for
the responses of those with negative self-views. This is
problematic for a propensity that is alleged to represent a
basic human motivation. If the self-enhancement motive
is so basic, why has this news escaped the attention of the
roughly 30% of the population who possess negative self-
views? The nonenhancing responses of people with negative
self-views are particularly perplexing when we consider that
when most human needs are frustrated people redouble their
efforts to gratify those needs. Instead, people with nega-
tive self-views actually embrace negative evaluations (for a
review, see Swann, Chang-Schneider, & Angulo, 2007).
Even if evidence of self-enhancement from participants
in the West could be assumed to reflect a desire for self-
enhancement, growing evidence indicates that such striv-
ings do not generalize across cultures. Japanese people,
for example, posses a relatively strong desire to be viewed
as modest, and this desire causes them to eschew positive
evaluations at times. In addition, a relatively strong interest
in self-improvement among the Japanese seems to make
them more receptive to negative feedback than Americans
are (e.g., Heine, Kitayama, & Lehman, 2001). Japanese
participants are also less unrealistically optimistic about
their futures when compared with American participants
(Chang, Asakawa, & Sanna, 2001).
CH16.indd 605
Motivational Properties of the Self 605
Some counter such contentions by arguing that the East–
West difference in behaviors related to self-enhancement
reflects a difference not in the strength of the self-enhance-
ment motive itself but only in how people pursue this
motive (e.g., Kurman, 2003; Yik, Bond, & Paulhus, 1998).
Japanese are modest, the argument goes, as a means of
attaining social acceptance, which is considered self-
enhancing in Japanese culture (e.g., Sedikides, Gaertner, &
Toguchi, 2003). Although this tactic may appear to rescue
self-enhancement theory from disconfirmation, it does so at
the cost of redefining self-enhancement from a theory about
a preference for positive evaluations to a theory about a
desire for social acceptance or communion. As we argue later,
the two motives are quite different in form, structure, and
consequence. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge,
no one ever contended that the Japanese eschewed social
acceptance or communion. To the contrary, it would seem
that, if anything, Japanese individuals are especially inter-
ested in social acceptance and communion (Kitayama,
Markus, Matsumoto, & Norasakkunkit, 1997).
A final concern grows out of mounting evidence that
self-enhancement strivings can degrade the quality of
people’s relationships and even their well-being (Colvin,
Block, & Funder, 1995; Paulhus, 1998; Robins & Beer,
2001; for a review, see Crocker & Park, 2004). Such evi-
dence leads one to wonder why the pursuit of a suppos-
edly basic human motivation should be associated with
dysfunctional outcomes.
There are, then, reasons to ask whether the superficial
charms of self-enhancement theory and research are out-
weighed by some fundamental difficulties with the theory
and the data that ostensibly support it. We think that
the answer to this question is yes, and we accordingly pro-
pose an alternative approach to self-related motivation in
the next section. Our goal is not to banish self-enhancement
theory. Rather, we seek to partition it into two motives that
we perceive as more viable, both logically and empiri-
cally. We then add an additional motive to the mix. The
result is three broad self-motives that serve to guide most
identity-relevant functioning.
Before turning to our three-motive scheme, let us add
three caveats. Our goal is to identify three broad self motives.
One can surely make fine-grained distinctions among vari-
ants of each of our motives, and it is no doubt useful to do so
in certain contexts. In addition, our scheme is limited to iden-
tity-related motives and hence excludes biological motives
(e.g., sex), as well as other motives that have appeared in
formulations that are broader in scope (e.g., Fiske, 2004).
Finally, although we believe that this scheme offers a useful
lens for viewing the self literature, we see its role as lim-
ited to just that; we make no claim to having discovered the
motives that underlie all human social behavior.
10/22/09 2:50:07 PM
 606 Self and Identity
Tripartite Motivational Approach
There is no doubt that people prefer and enjoy positive over
negative evaluations when they perceive that such evalua-
tions are appropriate and deserved (e.g., Swann, Krull, &
Pelham, 1989). Nevertheless, we suggest that obtain-
ing positive evaluations cannot be an end in itself (e.g.,
Leary, 2007). Like paper currency, positive evaluations
are valuable more for what they symbolize than for their
intrinsic properties. In particular, positive evaluations are
valued because they are markers of one’s social worth (and
thus satisfy a desire for communion) and competence
(and thus satisfy a desire for agency). From this vantage
point, motives for communion (belonging and interpersonal
connectedness) and agency (autonomy and competence)
may be responsible for the phenomena that researchers
have attributed to self-enhancement strivings.
The desires for communion and agency have a promi-
nent history in the psychological literature. The needs for
communion and agency are assumed to underlie many
aspects of personality and social behavior (Baumeister &
Leary, 1995; Wiggins & Broughton, 1991), and theories of
optimal functioning emphasize the importance of meeting
both needs (e.g., Ryff, 1989). In the domain of attitudes,
researchers suggest that constructs similar to communion
and agency (i.e., warmth and competence) represent the
two basic dimensions of attitudes (e.g., Abele & Wojciszke,
2007; Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007; Fiske et al., 2002;
Judd, James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005). Of
even more relevance here, communion and agency corre-
spond with the dual forms of self-esteem discussed ear-
lier in this chapter (e.g., Franks & Marolla, 1976; Gecas,
1971). Using Tafarodi and Swann’s (2001) terms, the need
for communion motivates a desire for self-liking and the
need for agency motivates a desire for self-competence.
Replacing the self-enhancement motive with the com-
munion and agency motives evades the reservations raised
earlier regarding self-enhancement. For example, whereas
the self-enhancement formulation requires that people
with both positive and negative self-views prefer positive
evaluations over negative ones, our formulation does not.
Therefore, evidence that people with negative perceptions
of their social worth and competence fail to embrace posi-
tive evaluations of themselves on these dimensions (e.g.,
Bosson & Swann, 1999) does not challenge the assumption
that such individuals want to enjoy feelings of communion
and agency. Rather, communion and agency motives theo-
retically encourage people to achieve actual communion
and agency rather than merely seeking positive evaluations
for their own sake. Finally, although evidence indicates
that people from Southeast Asia are less inclined to self-
enhance than Westerners (e.g., Heine et al., 1999), the needs
for communion and agency appear to be pancultural.
CH16.indd 606
In addition to the desires for communion and agency,
we propose a third motive: the desire for coherence. In
our usage, coherence encompasses feelings of regularity,
predictability, meaning, and control. Coherence is distinct
from consistency, which emerges whenever any two psy-
chological elements follow logically from each other (e.g.,
Festinger, 1957). Thus, to maintain consistency between
two elements, such as a behavior and a related identity,
one can change either element. In contrast, coherence is
a special case of consistency that refers specifically to the
degree of correspondence between one’s enduring self-
concept and the other elements in one’s psychological uni-
verse (English, Chen, & Swann, 2008).
In some respects, the coherence motive may be even more
fundamental than the desires for communion and agency
(Guidano & Liotti, 1983; Popper, 1963). After all, those who
lack the conviction that their knowledge system offers coher-
ent and trustworthy insights into the world around them are
unable to evaluate evidence of social worth or competence
because they are not confident that they know such evi-
dence when they see it. If the self-views serve as the lenses
through which people perceive reality, incoherence degrades
the vision of reality that these lenses offer. Deprived of a
clear vision of reality, people have little means of knowing
whether what they “see” faithfully reflects reality. Indeed, if
people completely lose faith in the veracity of their knowl-
edge system, their sense of self begins to unravel and they fall
into a state of disintegration anxiety (Kohut, 1971). Deprived
of stable self-knowledge, people feel that they have no basis
for knowing how to act, and guiding action is the primary
objective of thinking in the first place (James, 1890/1950).
Consider evidence that people who experienced events
that bolstered their feelings of communion or agency, or
both, also suffered deficits in mental and physical health
if those events challenged their need for coherence (e.g.,
Swann et al., 2007). This research was based on the
assumption that experiences that challenge one’s enduring
self-views are stressful enough that, over time, they may
actually be physically debilitating. The first two studies
(Brown & McGill, 1989) examined the impact of posi-
tive life events on the health outcomes of people with low
and high self-esteem. Positive life events (e.g., improve-
ment in living conditions or getting a high grade) pre-
dicted increases in health among high self-esteem people
but decreases in health among people low in self-esteem.
A more recent study (Shimizu & Pelham, 2004) extended
these results by demonstrating that the effects replicated
even while controlling for negative affectivity (thus under-
mining the rival hypothesis that negative affect influenced
both self-reported health and reports of symptoms).
But if the desire for coherence may sometimes override
the desires for communion and agency, we do not mean
to imply this is always the case. Whereas some degree
10/22/09 2:50:07 PM

of coherence may be necessary for people to effectively
pursue their communion and agency needs, the opposite
may also be true.
At first blush, it might seem that the three-motive con-
ceptualization overlooks several motives that other theo-
rists have deemed important. For example, whereas some
propose motives that are somewhat overlapping with ours
(acceptance, status, and meaning; Hogan & Shelton, 1998),
others differentiate between motives that we instead classify
together (autonomy and competence; Deci & Ryan, 1995)
or introduce other motives into the mix (self-assessment;
Sedikides & Strube, 1997). Still others propose a six-motive
scheme (i.e., self-esteem, continuity, distinctiveness, belong-
ing, efficacy, and meaning; Vignoles, Regalia, Manzi,
Golledge, & Scabini, 2006) that appears broader than our
approach. Nevertheless, our approach incorporates most of
these other motives if one allows that several of the motives
distinguished by previous researchers in fact reflect the same
core motive with different criteria used to gauge its gratifica-
tion. In what follows, we consider several examples of these
phenomena.
Communion
The communion motive is designed to maximize feelings
of acceptance, belongingness, and social worth. Humans
evolved in the context of small, close-knit groups, and the
need for communion remains a constant theme in the con-
struction and maintenance of the self and identity (Bowlby,
1969; McAdams, 1989). On a biological level, evidence sug-
gests that people require a minimum number of close, posi-
tive, interpersonal connections to thrive. Those who lack such
connections exhibit relatively poor physical health, weak-
ened immune functioning, and even higher mortality rates
(House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988; Uchino, Cacioppo, &
Kiecolt-Glaser, 1996). On a psychological level, people
who lack positive affiliations with others experience trou-
bling feelings of loneliness (Archibald, Bartholomew, &
Marx, 1995; Newcomb & Bentler, 1986), while those with
rich social networks report higher levels of happiness and
life satisfaction (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999). So
central is communion to humans’ existence that Baumeister
and Leary (1995) deemed the need to belong a “fundamen-
tal” human motive. Although researchers generally agree
that the criterion for this motive should be the appraisals
of others, the precise nature of these appraisals has varied.
Whereas advocates of the self-enhancement motive argue
for the importance of positive evaluations (e.g., Murray,
Holmes, & Griffin, 1996; Sedikides & Strube, 1997), others
emphasize feelings of connectedness or belonging (e.g.,
Baumeister & Leary, 1995).
In recent years, the desire for communion assumed
center stage in one prominent approach: Leary’s socio-
meter theory (Leary & Downs, 1995). Leary and colleagues
CH16.indd 607
Motivational Properties of the Self 607
assumed that people are profoundly invested in estimating
the extent to which they are valued by interaction partners,
group members, and relationship partners. Signs of rejec-
tion trigger an alarm reaction that is punctuated by a loss
of self-esteem. Thus, self-esteem is a psychological “fuel
gauge” that is sensitive to variations in perceived inclusion.
Support for sociometer theory comes from evidence that
manipulations that convey rejection, disapproval, or disin-
terest on the part of others tend to lower participants’ state
self-esteem (e.g., Leary, Tambor, Terdal, & Downs, 1995;
Nezlek, Kowalski, Leary, & Holgate, 1997). Similarly,
field studies demonstrate that self-esteem dips when
people experience rejection (Murray, Griffin, Rose, &
Bellavia, 2003) and ostracism (e.g., Williams, 2001).
Moreover, longitudinal research shows that perceived rela-
tional value is linked to changes in self-esteem over time
(Srivastava & Beer, 2005).
Sociometer theory has performed the useful service of
focusing attention on the utility of people’s efforts to forge
connections with others. From an evolutionary perspec-
tive, positive evaluations and the feelings of self-esteem
that they foster are useful not because of their intrinsic
value but because they are markers of acceptance within a
larger social group whose protection and shared resources
were vital to humans’ survival. Conceivably, the argu-
ment could be taken even further, such that all self-views
serve as indices of the manner in which we are perceived
by others. Accepting this broader interpretation, however,
could lead one to question the novel contribution of soci-
ometer theory, because the notion that self-views provide
a window into the perceptions of others has been around
for more than a century (e.g., Cooley, 1902). These and
other considerations led some theorists to raise troubling
indictments of the theory (e.g., Pyszczynski, Greenberg,
Solomon, Arndt, & Schimel, 2004). A further limitation
of the model, however, is that although people are aware of
how others perceive them in general, they seem fairly inept
at discriminating the appraisals of specific other individu-
als (e.g., Kenny & DePaulo, 1993). Therefore, the “self-
esteem fuel gauge” sometimes offers faulty information.
In addition, it is clear that self-esteem tracks more than
simply social acceptance. For example, self-esteem seems
acutely sensitive to indicators of agency.
Agency
The agency motive is theoretically designed to maximize
feelings of autonomy (e.g., self-determination) and compe-
tence. The need for agency begins to guide behavior early
in life, such as when infants strain to escape their caregivers
so that they can explore and manipulate the world around
them (Bowlby, 1969). Later in life, people’s sense of effi-
cacy forms a core component of personality (Bandura, 1991)
and contributes to psychological well-being (Ryff, 1989).
10/22/09 2:50:07 PM
 608 Self and Identity
In the most general case, the agency motive encourages
people to strive for successful performance of valued activ-
ities. A special case of agency strivings emerges when peo-
ple seek to improve themselves (e.g., Heine, Kitayama, &
Lehman, 1999; Taylor, Neter, & Wayment, 1995). Self-
improvement strivings are presumably initiated when peo-
ple focus on negative aspects of the self that they need to
change to meet personal or social standards.
Some theorists argue that the prevalence of the self-
improvement motive is strongly influenced by cultural
factors. In particular, researchers suggest that East Asian
cultures place an emphasis on self-improvement at the
expense of self-enhancement (e.g., Heine et al., 1999;
Kitayama & Markus, 1999). The rationale for this conten-
tion rests largely on the relative levels of individualism ver-
sus interdependence in East Asian versus Western cultures.
Individualistic cultures (e.g., those in United States and
Australia) place a premium on independence and therefore
emphasize individual needs, goals, and rights. In contrast,
collectivistic cultures (e.g., those in East Asia and Latin
America) emphasize ingroup goals, needs, and obligations
and thus strongly value interdependence. In such cultures,
it is particularly crucial to attend to others’ perspectives
so as to meet the expectations of ingroup members and
maintain interpersonal harmony (Heine et al., 1999). This
greater sensitivity to social standards presumably explains
the relative eagerness of East Asians to improve them-
selves to meet others’ expectations.
Coherence
Widespread support exists for the notion that people have a
deep-seated need for psychological coherence (Guidano &
Liotti, 1983; Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006). As Popper
(1963) contended, infants are born with a predisposition to
identify patterns and regularities. Without this predisposi-
tion, they would be incapable of learning:
The expectation of finding a regularity . . . connected with an
inborn propensity to look for regularities, or with a need to
find regularities. . . . This “instinctive” expectation of find-
ing regularities . . . is logically a priori to all observational
experience, for it is prior to any recognition of similarities . . .
and all observation involves the recognition of similarities (or
dissimilarities). (pp. 47–48)
The coherence construct has gone by several labels,
including security in Maslow’s (1954) motivational hierar-
chy, need for closure in Kruglanski’s (1990) formulation,
need for structure in Neuberg and Newsom’s (1993) model,
and meaning according to Hogan and Shelton (1998).
Evidence of the coherence need has surfaced in many cul-
tures in addition to North America, including countries in
Eastern and Western Europe, as well as in Australia, Korea,
CH16.indd 608
and China, suggesting that it is not limited to a specific
cultural milieu (e.g., Heine et al., 2006).
Moreover, two self theories feature a desire for coherence
as the primary motivational mechanism: self-assessment
(e.g., Trope, 1983) and self-verification (Swann, 1983).
Each theory focuses on different criteria for assessing the
coherence of self-related information. Self-assessment
theorists have suggested that when people are uncertain
of their self-views they seek relatively objective, diagnos-
tic information about themselves. A series of laboratory
studies provides support for this general approach (e.g.,
Brown, 1990; Strube, 1990). While the issue of the relative
potency of self-assessment strivings remains to be deter-
mined, its range of application is limited to self-views of
which people are uncertain. This is an important limita-
tion, for people tend to be highly certain of the qualities
that they care about. Such highly certain self-views have
been the province of various self-confirmation theories
(e.g., Lecky, 1945; Secord & Backman, 1965), the most
recent of which is self-verification theory (Swann, 1983).
Self-verification theory assumes that, out of a desire for
social worlds that are coherent and predictable, people
want others to see them as they see themselves. This desire
can be understood on both epistemic and pragmatic levels.
Epistemically, receiving self-verifying evaluations reas-
sures people that their self-views accurately reflect social
reality and that they can count on their self-views to guide
their behavior. Pragmatically, self-verifying appraisals
signal to people that others hold appropriate expectations
of them and that their interactions will therefore proceed
smoothly. Among people with positive self-views, the
desire for self-verification works with the desires for com-
munion or agency, as all of these motives encourage people
who view themselves positively to embrace positive evalu-
ations. Among people with negative self-views, however,
self-verification theory predicts that they will seek nega-
tive evaluations (e.g., Swann et al., 1989). Self-verification
theory thus makes divergent predictions for people with
enduring positive versus negative self-views.
One focus of research has been on the variables that
determine when people will prioritize self-verification
over the competing desire for positive feedback. The
desire for self-verification prevails (e.g., people with nega-
tive self-views prefer and seek negative evaluations) when
the self-view is firmly held (i.e., certain and important;
Pelham & Swann, 1994; Swann & Pelham, 2002) or extreme
(Giesler, Josephs, & Swann, 1996), when the relationship
is relatively enduring (Campbell, Lackenbauer, & Muise,
2006; Swann, De La Ronde, & Hixon, 1994), and when
people have the cognitive resources needed to compare
the feedback against a relevant mental self-representation
(Hixon & Swann, 1993; Swann et al., 1990). In addition,
10/22/09 2:50:08 PM

challenges to a self-view will trigger compensatory activity
that shores up that self-view or some other component of
the self-system (Swann & Hill, 1982; Swann, Wenzlaff, &
Tafarodi, 1992). Interestingly, such compensatory reac-
tions are symmetrical with respect to self-esteem; just as
high self-esteem people strive to reaffirm their positive
self-views in the wake of negative feedback, those with
low self-esteem strive to reaffirm their negative self-views
in the wake of positive feedback (Swann & Read, 1981;
Swann, Wenzlaff, & Tafarodi, 1992). Finally, whereas the
foregoing research focused on personal self-views, other
research extended the findings to collective self-views
(Chen et al., 2004; Lemay & Ashmore, 2004) and group
identities (Gómez, Seyle, Huici, & Swann, in press).
Researchers have identified several distinct strategies
of self-verification. For example, people gravitate toward
self-verifying environments, such as interaction partners
who see them congruently and who are apt to provide them
with self-verification (e.g., Robinson & Smith-Lovin,
1992; Swann, Wenzlaff, Krull, & Pelham, 1992). Once
in a given setting, people display “identity cues” (i.e., overt
signs of who they are, such as clothing or office décor)
that communicate their identities to others (Gosling, Ko,
Mannarelli, & Morris, 2002). In addition, people can elicit
self-verifying reactions by behaving in ways that evoke
such responses (Swann & Hill, 1982; Swann & Read,
1981). And if these strategies fail to evoke self-verifying
evaluations, people can distort nonverifying feedback
through preferential attention and recall (Swann & Read,
1981), construe the feedback in ways that make it fit with
their enduring self-views (Swann et al., 1987), or even
leave the relationship (Swann & Pelham, 2002).
Hybrid Theories
Elements of the three motives described above can be
found in two major social psychological theories of
the self, self-affirmation theory and terror management
theory. Self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1988) combines
elements of the agency and coherence motives (see also
self-esteem maintenance theory, Tesser, 1988). This
theory focuses on how people react when they encoun-
ter challenges to their positive self-views—specifically,
challenges to the sense of being a moral, adaptive, and
capable person. The theory assumes that the self-system
is composed of many interrelated parts that interact with
one another. As a result, shoring up one component of
the system can buttress other components against threats.
Thus, whereas people ordinarily respond defensively
when they receive information that challenges a positive
self-view, these defensive reactions can be attenuated by
inoculating them with positive feedback.
CH16.indd 609
Motivational Properties of the Self 609
Interestingly, people strive to affirm their positive self-
views in ways that may have little to do with the nature of
the self-threat (Aronson, Cohen, & Nail, 1999; Tesser &
Cornell, 1991). In some early research, the researchers
used a cognitive dissonance paradigm to show that the
self-threat that arises from counterattitudinal behavior can
be alleviated by having participants first affirm an impor-
tant, self-relevant value in a domain unrelated to that of the
dissonant behavior (Steele & Liu, 1983). In a similar vein,
later studies indicated that people were more willing to
examine useful but potentially threatening feedback about
themselves if they first enjoyed success on an unrelated
task (Trope & Pomerantz, 1998).
One especially fruitful line of research was designed to
explore the health implications of self-affirmation theory.
The results of one study indicated that people were more
willing to examine potentially threatening information
related to AIDS prevention after an important but unre-
lated value was affirmed (e.g., Sherman, Nelson, & Steele,
2000). In this and related studies, researchers appear to
have uncovered an effective strategy for neutralizing the
defensive reactions that have long impeded efforts to enlist
the compliance of people who engage in risky behav-
iors (e.g., Jemmott, Ditto, & Croyle, 1986; Liberman &
Chaiken, 1992).
Within our scheme, another hybrid approach is terror
management theory (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski,
2004). At its core, this theory is concerned with people’s
attempts to evade the existential anxiety that arises from
awareness of their own mortality. To quell the fear of
death, people work to convince themselves that they are
worthwhile actors who are playing an important role in
a world that has meaning and purpose. More specifically,
people rely on their self-concepts (beliefs about the self
relative to culturally valued standards), their cultural
worldviews (sets of socially shared beliefs and values),
and their close relationships to help them manage the fear
of death. When people encounter challenges to any compo-
nents of this belief system, death awareness increases and
existential anxiety ensues (Schimel, Hayes, Williams, &
Jahrig, 2007). Note that self-views, worldviews, and rela-
tionships provide much (if not all) of the raw material
through which people meet their needs for agency, coher-
ence, and communion. Moreover, clear parallels can be
drawn between the needs for self-esteem, meaning, and
relationships, as discussed in terror management theory,
and the three motives that we emphasize here. Thus,
while sharing our recognition of the importance of the tri-
partite self-motives, terror management theory uniquely
proposes that people pursue these three self motives as
a means of buffering themselves against a primitive and
basic fear of death.
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 610 Self and Identity
Not surprisingly, people react strongly when their mortal-
ity is made salient (for a review, see Solomon et al., 2004). In
dozens of inventive and provocative studies, researchers have
shown that those who are reminded of their own mortality are
more concerned with having high self-esteem (Greenberg,
Solomon, et al., 1992) and are more inclined to behave in
ways that defend and maximize self-esteem (Taubman Ben-
Ari, Florian, & Mikulincer, 1999). Mortality salience manip-
ulations also have a bearing on group relations. For example,
those high in mortality salience are especially motivated to
defend their cultural worldviews by derogating people who
challenge these beliefs (e.g., Florian & Mikulincer, 1997;
Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Lyon,
1989). Notably, the tendency for mortality salience to trig-
ger such activities is diminished among people with elevated
levels of self-esteem (e.g., Greenberg, Solomon, et al., 1992)
and among those in whom hope for an afterlife has been
primed (Dechesne et al., 2003).
Terror management theory has also helped illuminate
recent political trends in the United States. For many
Americans, the attack on the World Trade Center on
September 11, 2001, was a naturally occurring manipulation
of mortality salience. Terror management theory suggests
that under such conditions people reach out for a strong-
willed and decisive leader who promises to defend and
protect them. U.S. President George W. Bush represented
just such a leader to many, and as the theory would predict,
his popularity soared after the attacks on the twin towers.
More impressive evidence for the theory was provided by
a series of experiments indicating links among the attacks,
mortality salience, and endorsement of Bush. For exam-
ple, subliminal exposure to stimuli related to September
11 increased participants’ death-related thoughts, as well
as their support for Bush. Furthermore, mortality salience
made participants more inclined to vote for Bush in the
upcoming presidential election and less inclined to vote for
his opponent, Senator John Kerry (Landau et al., 2004).
More generally, death anxiety appears to be a robust pre-
dictor of rightwing, conservative thinking (Jost, Glaser,
Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003), and salient encounters
with mortality-threatening events can compel people to
adopt more politically conservative values and beliefs
(Bonanno & Jost, 2006). It is important to note, however,
that the link between mortality salience and political con-
servatism is not always so direct. Among both strong adher-
ents of political liberalism and those in whom the value
of tolerance has been primed, mortality salience actually
increases acceptance of differing worldviews (Greenberg,
Simon, Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Chatel, 1992).
In short, terror management theory raises the interesting
possibility that many everyday behaviors that have tradition-
ally been chalked up to motives such as agency, coherence,
CH16.indd 610
and communion are really performed in the service of
fending off anxiety associated with death. Yet some have
raised serious challenges to this assumption. For example,
Hart and colleagues independently threatened each of these
three self-motives and found that, at least among some indi-
viduals (those who had insecure attachment styles), each
type of threat produced defensive reactions that were similar
in character to those produced by mortality salience manip-
ulations (Hart, Shaver, & Goldenberg, 2005). From this
vantage point, reminders of death may gain their potency
because they represent a triple whammy: they simultane-
ously undermine the assumptions that we have a future
self to which we can aspire (challenging coherence needs),
we have enduring relationships (challenging communion
needs), and we will accomplish things in the future (chal-
lenging agency needs; for a similar view, see McGregor,
Gailliot, Vasquez, & Nash, 2007). This reasoning raises a
critically important question: Is fear of death the ultimate
motivator of behavior that terror management theory would
have us believe it is, or are other high-level motives (such
as our tripartite motives) of themselves responsible, with
the potency of mortality salience manipulations residing in
their capacity to activate all three motives simultaneously?
At this juncture, this question remains unanswered.
SELF IN RELATIONSHIP TO OTHERS
The idea that the self is socially constructed was first elabo-
rated by the symbolic interactionists (Cooley, 1902; Mead,
1934). Since then, numerous theorists have emphasized the
fundamentally interpersonal nature of the self (for a review,
see Markus & Cross, 1990). So crucial are social interac-
tions to the construction and maintenance of the self-concept
that people surely would not possess self-views were it not
for their interactions with others. Consider Gallup’s (1977)
seminal work on self-awareness in chimpanzees, which
compared the self-recognition abilities of chimps raised
in isolation with those of chimps raised with conspecifics.
Whereas the chimps with prior social experience readily
recognized their own reflections in a mirror, those raised
in isolation showed no signs of self-recognition. Although
they undoubtedly saw themselves reflected in the surface
before them, the isolated chimps possessed no basis for
understanding exactly who or what they were looking at.
Our genetic similarity to chimps suggests that a similar
fate might befall humans raised in isolation.
To make sense of the vast theoretical and empirical
literatures on the interpersonal self, Markus and Cross
(1990) identified three ways in which others shape the self.
First, individuals come to know who they are, within a
larger social structure, through their interactions with others.
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This type of interpersonal influence occurs when individuals
internalize the values, attitudes, thoughts, feelings, and
social roles to which they are exposed. It refers to those
aspects of the self that are acquired via ongoing interac-
tions with significant others and that become internalized
so thoroughly by the individual that “they seem the natural
and inevitable consequences of his or her own thoughts”
(Markus & Cross, 1990, p. 582). Next, people rely on feed-
back and information from others to form the basis of their
self-knowledge, as well as to evaluate, maintain, and regu-
late the self. This type of interpersonal influence is exem-
plified by work on symbolic interactionism (Cooley, 1902;
Mead, 1934), social comparisons (Festinger, 1954), self-
presentation (Tedeschi, 1981), and self-verification (Swann,
1983), among other theories. What these approaches share
is an emphasis on the ways in which the self is influenced
by others’ real, perceived, and imagined reactions. Finally,
people’s interpersonal relationships themselves become
part of the self, as when individuals store mental representa-
tions of close others alongside information about the self in
memory. Work on self-expansion (Aron & Aron, 1996) and
individual differences in individualism versus collectivism
(Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1995) illustrates this
type of interpersonal influence on the self. An assumption
that underlies this work is that close relationship partners
do not just exist outside of us—in a real sense, close part-
ners “get inside our heads.”
In what follows, we consider theories of self and iden-
tity that illustrate each of Markus and Cross’s (1990) three
types of interpersonal influence. Note that much of the
material discussed elsewhere in this chapter (e.g., symbolic
interactionism, attachment dynamics, and self-motives)
could fit just as easily in this section. To avoid redundancy,
however, we confine this section to material that we have
not discussed at length elsewhere. Moreover, the placement
of theoretical approaches into one of the three categories of
influence is, admittedly, rough at times. Certainly, the
processes by which people construct, maintain, and store
self-knowledge will, at times, reflect multiple forms of
interpersonal influence. Nonetheless, we impose order by
discussing social identity, self-categorization, and stereo-
type approaches under the Constructing the Self heading;
desires for self-consistent versus overly positive partner
appraisals under the Evaluating and Maintaining the Self
heading; and broad cognitive models of the interpersonal
self under the Including Others in the Self heading.
Constructing the Self
Social Identity Approach
Social identities refer to people’s knowledge of their mem-
berships in social groups and the emotional significance
CH16.indd 611
Self in Relationship to Others 611
that they attach to these memberships (Tajfel, 1981;
Tajfel & Turner, 1979). These identities presumably
emerge throughout the life span, beginning when children
learn, through interactions and communications with care-
givers and others, the normative behaviors, feelings, and
values associated with the various social groups to which
they belong. Once formed, social identities seem to exert a
powerful influence on social thought and behavior. Indeed,
some argue that because social identities are the building
blocks of personal identities, social identities are more apt
to influence behavior than are personal identities (Turner
et al., 2006).
One version of social identity theory assumes that people
enter groups that they perceive as both positive and distinc-
tive as a means of self-enhancement (e.g., Abrams & Hogg,
1988). Consistent with this idea, evidence indicates that
people display a strong ingroup bias, or tendency to favor
their own group relative to outgroups (e.g., Brewer & Kramer,
1985; Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament, 1971). Combined
with the outgroup homogeneity effect—the perception of
greater similarity among the members of outgroups as com-
pared with ingroups (Linville & Jones, 1980)—this bias
facilitates people’s ability to dehumanize members of out-
groups by perceiving them as lacking in human qualities.
Dehumanization, in turn, plays a role in the justification and
maintenance of intergroup prejudice and conflict (Cortes,
Demoulin, Rodriguez, Rodriguez, & Leyens, 2005; Vaes,
Paladino, Castelli, Leyens, & Giovanazzi, 2003).
In recent years, social identity approaches have shifted
away from an emphasis on self-enhancement as the opera-
tive motive. Self-categorization theory avoids the issue
of motivation altogether, stressing instead that the per-
ceptual processes that prompt humans to parse the world
into “us” and “them” are hardwired and basic to human
existence (Turner, 1985; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, &
Wetherell, 1987). Other approaches argue that social
identities reduce uncertainty (e.g., Hogg, 2000; Hogg &
Mullin, 1999), make the world more sensible and coher-
ent (e.g., Ellemers & Van Knippenberg, 1997), or pro-
tect people from the existential terror of death (Castano,
Yzerbyt, Paladino, & Sacchi, 2002). Whatever the nature
of the motive that causes people to identify with groups, it
is ironic that although group memberships are essential for
survival, they also place people in grave danger, such as
when social identities motivate people to confront or even
kill one another.
Of course, considerable individual differences exist in
how central of a role social identities play in people’s lives.
Most people perceive gender and ethnicity to be impor-
tant social identities, but variation occurs in the strength
of people’s identification with these groups (Luhtanen &
Crocker, 1992). Moreover, the centrality of people’s social
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 612 Self and Identity
identities varies not only as a function of the desirability of
the group (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) but also as a function
of the group’s structure, such as its size and distinctiveness
relative to outgroups (Brewer, 2003).
Placing importance on one’s social identities can yield
both positive and negative consequences. On the positive
side, for members of low-status groups, higher levels of
group identification can provide a psychological buffer
against the negative effects of discrimination on self-
esteem, well-being, and achievement (e.g., Wong et al.,
2003). Some propose that strong identification with stig-
matized ingroups at least partially explains the relatively
high self-esteem and favorable self-views of members of
many low-status groups (Branscombe, Schmitt, & Harvey,
1999; see also Crocker & Major, 1989). On the negative
side, those who identify more strongly with their social
groups are more likely to display the perceptual and moti-
vational processes that contribute to intergroup conflict
and prejudice (e.g., Branscombe & Wann, 1994; Feather,
1994; Jetten, Spears, & Manstead, 1996). Strong identifi-
cation with social groups can also encourage rigid com-
pliance with the group’s behavioral norms, even when
noncompliance would be beneficial. For example, some
research reveals that members of ethnic minority groups
avoid beneficial health behaviors—such as exercise and
eating healthy foods—to the extent that they perceive those
behaviors as violating their ingroup’s norms (Oyserman,
Fryberg, & Yoder, 2007). Thus, stronger identification
with ingroups increases people’s motivation to defend and
uphold group norms even when these norms are harmful.
Since its inception, social identity theory has offered a
powerful and generative framework for understanding how
individuals connect themselves to the larger social structure
and rely on groups to provide them with self-knowledge,
meaning, and purpose. Although the seeds of the theory
were sewn during post–World War II Europe (e.g., Tajfel,
Jaspars, & Fraser, 1984), social identity theory’s impact
now extends far beyond the continent of its birth and it
is considered a major social psychological theory on an
international level. As evidence of the theory’s genera-
tivity, a PsycINFO search of articles and chapters with
keywords of “social identity,” “ingroup,” or “outgroup”
produced more than 3,000 publications at the time of this
writing. Moreover, the theory has been revitalized by
new approaches (e.g., Oyserman et al., 2007; Vaes et al.,
2003), as well as applications to diverse subareas within
the behavioral sciences.
Interplay of Personal and Social Selves
Self-categorization theory (Turner et al., 1987) proposes
that the relationship between personal and social self-
views is hydraulic. For example, the principle of functional
CH16.indd 612
antagonism posits that as the salience of group identities
increases, the salience of personal identities decreases.
Similarly, the theory argues that when people enter groups,
they undergo a “depersonalization” process wherein they
come to see themselves as categorically interchangeable
with other group members. Recently, some theorists have
suggested that these principles may not always apply
(e.g., Postmes & Jetten, 2006; Simon, 2004). A case in
point is offered by a recent study of compensatory self-
verification among “fused” people, that is, people whose
personal and social self-views have fused. Compensatory
self-verification refers to the tendency for people to react
to self-discrepant (i.e., overly positive or negative) evalu-
ations by intensifying their efforts to elicit self-verifying
evaluations (e.g., Swann & Read, 1981). Because the per-
sonal and social identities of fused people are functionally
equivalent, challenging either type of identity should fuel
behavioral efforts to reaffirm the other type of identity.
Consistent with this reasoning, when researchers presented
participants with overly positive feedback that challenged
the validity of their personal self-views, fused participants
(but not nonfused participants) compensated by affirming
their social self-views. Specifically, they expressed greater
willingness to fight and die for their country (Swann,
Gómez, Seyle, Morales, & Huici, 2009). Such findings
indicate that personal and social self-views may sometimes
combine synergistically rather than at cross-purposes (see
also Jetten, Branscombe, & Spears, 2002).
In a related vein, optimal distinctiveness theory sug-
gests that just as people have an inherent drive to identify
with groups, they also have an opposing drive for individu-
ation (Brewer, 1991). To cope with these conflicting agen-
das, people strike a balance by finding a point of “optimal
distinctiveness,” an identity that simultaneously addresses
their needs for affiliation and individuation. This approach
shares with self-verification theory the assumption that
group members remain interested in being individuated
and attaining verification of their personal identities when
they enter groups. One could go even further to suggest that
people may affiliate (at least in part) as a means of obtain-
ing verification for their personal identities. An example of
this would be a woman who joins a chess club to verify her
personal identity as highly intelligent.
Researchers operating outside the social identity tradi-
tion have independently investigated the interplay between
personal and social self-views. One line of research
focused on what happens when the social stereotypes of
some individuals (“perceivers”) channeled their behavior
toward other individuals (“targets”). This work revealed
that perceivers elicited behaviors from targets that con-
firmed their stereotypes (Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid,
1977). Subsequent investigations examined the conditions
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under which targets who confirmed the expectations of
perceivers internalized these expectations into correspond-
ing self-views (for a review, see Snyder & Klein, 2005).
In more recent years, researchers have suggested that,
even if stereotypes do not cause perceivers to behaviorally
constrain the response options of targets, the mere exis-
tence of a stereotype may shape the behavior of targets in
undesirable ways. In part, this research was a reaction to
indictments of Black American culture that can be traced
to the anthropologist John Ogbu. On the basis of anecdotal
evidence, Ogbu suggested that in the United States, the
Black minority culture gradually developed an “opposi-
tional” orientation that encouraged them to disengage from
the educational system, which was perceived as a “White”
domain (e.g., Fordham & Ogbu, 1986). This argument
gained widespread acceptance in the popular media, which
used it to explain the Black–White achievement gap.
Although the validity of Ogbu’s assertions was never
established, the psychological literature offers some evi-
dence that people who identify themselves as having low
status sometimes embrace these negative identities (e.g.,
Spears, Jetten, & Scheepers, 2002) or even the political
systems that perpetuate their low status (Jost, Banaji, &
Nosek, 2004). Moreover, the more people face discrimi-
nation, the more they emphasize the devalued identity
(Branscombe, Ellemers, Spears, & Doosje, 1999; Jetten,
Branscombe, Schmitt, & Spears, 2001).
More direct evidence that cultural groups differ in the
extent to which they promote academic achievement has
come from researchers who asked why Asian Americans
(specifically Chinese and Korean immigrants) outperform
both Blacks and Whites on most indices of academic per-
formance. Adopting an interactionist framework, some
argue that the relatively high academic performance of
Asian Americans is multiply determined (Portes & Zhou,
1993). For example, factors such as immigration selectivity,
above-average levels of pre- and postmigration socioeco-
nomic status, and ethnic social structures are thought to
interact with immigrant optimism and the belief in edu-
cation to override blocked mobility (Zhou & Kim, 2006).
From this perspective, it is overly simplistic to blame the
underperformance of some groups on constructs such as
“oppositional culture,” since social structural variables
must surely play a role as well. At a minimum, a culture of
achievement requires economic resources to support it.
Others have developed formulations that attempt to
explain the underachievement of minorities and other
negatively stereotyped groups without referring to cultural
variables. For example, Steele (1997) contended that for
the marginalized, stereotypes represent a “threat in the
air” that can trigger anxiety—even when the stereotypes
are recognized as fallacious. Research supports the notion
CH16.indd 613
Self in Relationship to Others 613
that, in performance settings, anxiety due to stereotypes
can distract the individual and cause poor performance
and failure. Such failure may, in turn, cause the marginal-
ized group member to disengage from the activity. If the
activity happens to involve education, such disengagement
may undercut the future socioeconomic viability of the
marginalized group (see Aronson & Steele, 2005). Such
effects appear to be strongest when the targets of stereo-
types value strongly their group identities. That is, targets
who value their group memberships are more likely to
perceive discrimination against their group (Eccleston &
Major, 2006; Major, Quinton, & Schmader, 2003), and
their performance is more likely to suffer when they
are reminded of negative stereotypes about their group
(Kiefer & Sekaquaptewa, 2007; Schmader, 2002).
Evaluating and Maintaining the Self
In Orson Welles’s (1941) Citizen Kane, Charles Foster
Kane holds grandiose illusions about his wife’s talents
as an opera singer. So smitten is Kane with Susan’s sing-
ing voice that he uses his wealth and power to secure her
headlining roles in world-class venues. Sadly, however,
Susan knows that she is not the musical virtuoso that Kane
believes her to be. Painfully aware of her vocal limitations,
Susan grows increasingly traumatized by the humiliation
of having to parade her mediocrity in front of an audience.
Eventually, the pressure of Kane’s misguided illusions
grows too much for Susan to bear, and she tries to escape
by taking her own life. Although Susan survives, she never
forgives Kane for refusing to see her for who she really is.
The relationship experiences of Kane—one of the most
unique and memorable movie characters of all time—are
by no means typical. Nonetheless, we believe that his con-
flict with Susan illustrates a fairly common relationship
problem. Specifically, when couples disagree about “who
is who” within the relationship, unhappiness ensues.
As noted in our discussion of the coherence motive,
people desire appraisals from their relationship partners that
verify their highly certain and important self-views, even if
these self-views are negative. Moreover, the need for self-
confirming appraisals runs particularly strong in the context
of relationships characterized by high levels of interdepen-
dence. For example, among both college roommates and
married couples, people with positive self-concepts prefer
partners who view them favorably, whereas those with
negative self-concepts prefer partners who view them nega-
tively (Swann & Pelham, 2002; Swann et al., 1994). And
when people’s spouses view them in a manner that is dis-
crepant with their stable self-views, their relationships are
characterized by high levels of marital distress (Schafer,
Wickrama, & Keith, 1996). Indeed, as illustrated by the
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 614 Self and Identity
case of Susan Kane, psychological health and well-being
may suffer when people’s close relationship partners dis-
agree with them about who they are (Swann et al., 2007).
And yet, despite the results of research demonstrating
that people desire consistent appraisals from their close
relationship partners, some research suggests instead that
people prefer overly positive evaluations from their part-
ners. For example, Murray and colleagues find that even
people with negative self-views feel most satisfied in their
relationships, and closest to their partners, when partners
view them more favorably than they view themselves (e.g.,
Murray et al., 1996). Furthermore, Murray suggests that the
tendency to idealize romantic partners facilitates relation-
ship success by assuaging people’s doubts and giving them
the confidence to trust each other (Murray et al., 2000).
From this perspective, it is overly positive appraisals—
not self-confirming ones—that members of intimate rela-
tionships crave.
What might account for the apparent discrepancy
between these two bodies of work? One possibility con-
cerns the level of abstraction (e.g., global versus specific)
at which these two sets of researchers typically mea-
sure partners’ self-views and perceptions of each other.
Whereas most desires for self-verifying appraisals occur at
the level of specific self-views (“My partner think I am
at the 55th percentile in cooking ability”), most desires
for illusory appraisals occur at the level of global self-
views (“My partner thinks I am loving and kind”). Thus,
it may be that members of happy couples maintain ador-
ing appraisals of their partners at a global level while also
appraising their partners accurately at a more specific level
(e.g., Neff & Karney, 2002). Indeed, the results of longitu-
dinal investigations suggest that marriages are most likely
to endure over the long haul when partners’ global love for
each other is based on an accurate understanding of each
other ’s specific traits and qualities (Neff & Karney, 2005).
As such, overly positive appraisals of partners may promote
relationship satisfaction, provided that they are grounded
in reality.
One shortcoming of the global-enhancement, specific-
verification argument is that there is no theoretical reason
people should suspend their self-verification attempts once
self-views exceed some threshold of globality. After all,
if the primary function of self-views is to enable people
to understand the world and guide behavior, then people
should be motivated to verify their global self-views in
non-relational contexts. In fact, research on depression
(e.g., Giesler et al., 1996; Swann, Wenzlaff, Krull, &
Pelham, 1992; Swann, Wenzlaff, & Tafarodi, 1992 ) and
self-esteem (Wiesenfeld, Swann, Brockner & Bartel, 2007)
has shown that people are indeed motivated to verify their
global negative self-views.
CH16.indd 614
An approach that confronts this issue directly assumes
that it is a covariate of self-view globality—relationship
relevance—that is critical. Whereas Swann and colleagues
(1994) tend to measure people’s self-views within domains
that vary in their relevance to relationship satisfaction and
functioning (e.g., intelligence, social skills, artistic abili-
ties, and physical attractiveness), Murray and colleagues
limit their focus to domains that are high in relationship
relevance, such as warmth, kindness, and dependability
(e.g., Murray et al., 1996). Stated differently, whereas
Swann and colleagues consider self-views that fall along
both agentic and communal dimensions, Murray and col-
leagues focus primarily on communal self-views. Given
the critical importance of communal qualities in the context
of relationships, it is perhaps not surprising that Murray’s
research participants were particularly happy with part-
ners who held idealized images of their communal traits.
Consistent with this possibility, Swann et al. (2002) found
that romantic partners preferred appraisals from their part-
ners that matched their self-views in most domains but
desired overly positive appraisals in domains that they
considered highly important for relationship satisfaction,
such as physical attractiveness.
Including Others in the Self
Several theorists have examined the ways in which close
relationships alter and influence the cognitive contents of
the self. For instance, as noted earlier, research on self-
expansion reveals that people incorporate the perspectives,
resources, and characteristics of close others into their own
self-concepts (Aron et al., 1991). Thus, closeness with
others inevitably leads to an expansion of the self, as the
self-concept grows to incorporate new features (e.g., Aron
et al., 1995). One consequence of this cognitive overlap
between self and other is that people sometimes display
“self–other confusions” (Mashek et al., 2003), suggest-
ing that information about close others and the self is pro-
cessed similarly.
Whereas self-expansion research focuses on the ten-
dency to assume the features of close relationship part-
ners, other approaches look at how cognitive processes
are shaped more broadly by relationships. For example,
Baldwin (1992) proposes that people store information
about relationship partners in the form of relational sche-
mas, or mental models consisting of scripts that describe
typical interaction patterns, as well as representations of
the self and other that capture how the self typically feels
and behaves when interacting with the other. As such, cues
that bring a particular relationship partner to mind also
activate people’s mental representations of self with other
(Ogilvie & Ashmore, 1991) and call to mind those aspects
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of self-knowledge that are contained within that relational
schema (Hinkley & Andersen, 1996).
Similar assumptions form the foundation of Andersen
and Chen’s (2002) relational self theory. In their theory,
Andersen and Chen suggest that people’s stored represen-
tations of self and others play important roles in shaping
personality and the self by guiding the cognitive, affec-
tive, motivational, and behavioral patterns that become
activated in particular contexts. Because representations
of the self are linked in memory with representations of
significant others, any chronic or transient reminders
of significant others activate particular relational selves
and their accompanying styles of thinking, feeling, and
acting. Thus, personality and the self are interpersonal
patterns that reflect the various selves an individual has
constructed in the context of relationships with signifi-
cant others. Although they acknowledge that the self most
likely contains some aspects that are not directly related to
representations of significant others, Andersen and Chen
propose that the bulk of self-knowledge is acquired in the
context of relationships and that significant others are thus
“basic to self-experience” (p. 638).
IDENTITY NEGOTIATION AND CHANGE
People can take on numerous identities. The same man, for
example, may be warm with his children, guarded with his
co-workers, and a blend of both with his neighbors. This
fact of social life can prove challenging for those who are
trying to predict what their partners are going to do next.
We propose that people meet this challenge through the
process of identity negotiation, which allows relationship
partners to establish “who is who” via ongoing, mutual,
give-and-take interactions with each other. Once people
establish a “working consensus” that is agreeable to both
parties (e.g., Goffman, 1959; Swann & Bosson, 2008),
their mutually agreed on expectations transform discon-
nected individuals into collaborators who have common
obligations, goals, and often, a modicum of commitment
to each other. In this way, identity negotiation processes
provide the “interpersonal glue” that allies people with
one another. More generally, just as identities define
people and make them viable as humans, identity negotia-
tion processes define relationships and make them viable
as a foundation for organized social activity.
Identity negotiation theory (Swann & Bosson, 2008;
Swann, Johnson, & Bosson, in press) elaborates on the
interpersonal principles that guide identity negotiations.
People follow these processes, albeit largely unintention-
ally, during each of several successive stages of social
interaction. Typically, the principles of identity negotiation
CH16.indd 615
Identity Negotiation and Change 615
encourage people to negotiate identities that are compatible
with their chronic self-views. At times, however, target
individuals may encounter partners who are unable or
unwilling to honor their chronic identities. To the extent
that targets are invested in the identity (e.g., it is high in
certainty and importance), they may intensify their efforts
to elicit self-verifying evaluations. If investment is low and
resistance from the perceiver is high, however, targets may
behaviorally confirm the expectations of perceivers (e.g.,
Snyder & Klein, 2005). Eventually, they may internalize
the new behaviors into their self-concept, resulting in iden-
tity change.
Identity Negotiation in the East and West
Like most psychological structures, identities survive only
insofar as they receive periodic nourishment from the
social environment. Therefore, characteristics of the social
milieu are a key determinant of how much identity change
any given individual experiences. Consider Western versus
Eastern cultures. Western cultures encourage identity sta-
bility by placing a premium on consistency in the identities
people negotiate both over time and across settings. Given
this, it is not surprising that identity stability seems to be
relatively high in samples of Western participants. For
instance, people’s self-descriptions on the Big Five factors
of extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeable-
ness, and openness remain stable (correlations between
.30 and .50) over periods of up to 20 years (e.g., Conley,
1985). Stability estimates are even higher (correlations in
the .55–.85 range) if the measurement period is reduced to
several years (e.g., Costa & McCrae, 1988) or if the self-
views are high in importance or certainty (English & Chen,
2007; Pelham, 1991).
Relative to Western culture, the culture of East Asians
places more emphasis on relationships, connectedness, and
belonging. This makes East Asians particularly inclined to
conform their identities to the expectations and preferences
of their current interaction partner. As a result, relative to
North Americans, East Asians show lower cross-situational
stability in their self-descriptions (Kanagawa, Cross, &
Markus, 2001; Suh, 2002). Furthermore, when describing
themselves, East Asians are especially inclined to endorse
semantically opposite self-views (Choi & Choi, 2002) and
contradictory statements about themselves (Cousins, 1989;
Spencer-Rodgers, Peng, Wang, & Hou, 2004).
On the surface, evidence that the identities of East
Asians appear to be relatively situation specific may seem
to undermine the notion that there exists a universal desire
for coherence. But perhaps not. For those who define
themselves in relational terms, coherence may hinge on
the propensity to honor identities that are negotiated with
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 616 Self and Identity
specific others. Consistent with this reasoning, among the
Japanese, cross-situational consistency is less valued and
more weakly related to the sense of having a “true” self
than it is among Westerners (Kashima et al., 2004).
From this vantage point, there appear to be some intriguing
differences in identity negotiation processes in the East
versus the West. It is tempting, for example, to conclude
that the tendency for behavioral confirmation to trump self-
verification is more prevalent in East Asian than in Western
cultures. Although this characterization seems technically
accurate, it is probably somewhat misleading because self-
verification may simply take a different form in Eastern
cultures. More specifically, highly relational cultures may
prioritize the tendency for relationship partners to remain
true to the identities that they have negotiated within the
relationship while being relatively unconcerned with
the partner ’s behavior outside the confines of the relation-
ship (see the discussion of circumscribed versus global accu-
racy in Gill & Swann, 2004). More generally, evidence that
East Asians display less cross-situational consistency
than Westerners does not necessarily imply that Asians
routinely experience true changes in their identities. In
the section that follows, we suggest that for true identity
change to occur a relatively dramatic shift in the social
environment must occur that supports the change.
Antecedents of Identity Change
Our emphasis on the importance of coherence thus far
would suggest that changes in identity are typically unwel-
come phenomena that can confuse or even derail the process
of identity negotiation (as well as cause stress and under-
mine health at the individual level). Yet as wrenching
as identity changes may sometimes be, they are a natu-
ral and critically important part of life (Robins, Noftle,
Trzesniewski, & Roberts, 2005). Although many identity
changes are triggered by events over which the person has
no control, at times people disregard their coherence striv-
ings and deliberately attempt to change their identities.
Note, for example, that communion or agency motives
may sometimes override the desire for coherence, and the
former motives may sometimes require identity change if
they are to be gratified. In what follows, we consider four
sets of conditions that foster identity change.
Sociocultural and Environmental Changes
Over the past half century, the United States saw sweeping
changes in cultural expectations regarding groups that were
historically saddled with minority status. For example, the
Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements altered cul-
tural expectations for Blacks and women, respectively. These
shifting expectations gradually influenced the identities of
CH16.indd 616
members of these groups. The Women’s Liberation movement,
for instance, led to the erosion of cultural stereotypes that char-
acterized women as weak and dependent (e.g., Spence et al.,
1985). As these stereotypes lost force and more egalitarian
attitudes took hold, girls and women adopted corresponding
changes in their identities and associated behaviors.
Changes in people’s immediate social environment can
also foster identity change. When, for example, people
enter college or move they may encounter relatively unique
expectations and behavioral norms among the locals (e.g.,
Iyer, Jetten, & Tsivrikos, 2008). By altering the way people
relate to others, new settings may encourage people to alter
their self-views (Hormuth, 1990). In addition, new envi-
ronments may foster identity change because they lack
the opportunity structures (McCall & Simmons, 1966)
that once nurtured and sustained the original identity. For
people to sustain their identities, on entering a new set-
ting they must remoor their identities within the new social
structure (Ethier & Deaux, 1994). Failure to do so results
in identity change.
Developmental Growth and Role Changes
When the community recognizes a significant change in an
individual, it may set in motion a sequence of events that
produces identity change. Examples of such community-
initiated changes include changes in age (e.g., when
adolescents become adults), status (e.g., when graduate
students become professors), or social role (e.g., when sin-
gles get married). When such transformations occur, com-
munities may abruptly alter the way they treat the person.
Even if targets of such differential treatment resist change
at first, eventually they recognize the inevitable, become
less invested in maintaining the initial identity, and bring
their identities into agreement with the treatment they
receive. Studies of adolescence support this reasoning.
Theory and research alike suggest that late adolescence
marks a developmental period during which changing
treatment and expectations trigger dramatic identity change
(Arnett, 2000; Erikson, 1959; Pals, 1999).
Acquisition and Loss of Abilities
The process of maturation is marked by the acquisition
of new competencies and the loss of established ones.
Whether one gains or loses an ability, the associated iden-
tity needs to be updated. This may explain why people’s
identities are especially turbulent early and late in life.
Although both gains and losses are sprinkled throughout
the life span, gains tend to occur often during the early
years (e.g., acquiring the ability to scale mountains and
drive automobiles) and losses tend to occur during the later
years (e.g., losing the ability to scale mountains and drive
automobiles). Indeed, one of the most troubling aspects of
10/22/09 2:50:10 PM

the aging process is not age itself but the loss of capacities
that have become essential to the person’s feelings of
agency. From this vantage point, it is easy to understand
how the physical changes that accompany aging can take a
toll on people’s identities (Whitbourne, 1996).
Self-Initiated Changes
When people recognize that an identity is undermining
their capacity to achieve a valued goal, they may negotiate
a different identity within a circumscribed set of circum-
stances. If the fruits of such negotiations remain in effect
for an extended period, the changes may generalize to other
settings and eventually lead to permanent identity change.
Consider, for example, a woman who suspects that her low
self-perceived attractiveness will block her efforts to win
the heart of a would-be lover. Recognizing the dilemma, she
may strive to be exceptionally attractive in the presence of
her love interest (Swann et al., 2002). If she succeeds and
wins her beloved’s affections, she may internalize his
appreciation of her beauty and upgrade her self-perceived
attractiveness (Jones, Gergen, & Davis, 1962).
The foregoing scenario is just one example of a larger
class of instances in which people initiate an identity change
either because they want to repair an unsatisfying life situ-
ation or because they aspire to self-improvement. Some
evidence indicates that such intentional identity change
requires a self-focused state of mental preparedness or sub-
jective readiness to change (Anthis & LaVoie, 2006). Even
for those who feel prepared for change, the tendency to
ensconce oneself in self-verifying social environments (e.g.,
Swann et al., 2007) may complicate the business of identity
change. For the effects of self-initiated identity change to
be permanent, people must change not only their own self-
views and narratives but also the social environments that
typically support those self-views and narratives.
SUMMARY
What does it mean to have a sense of “self ”? Is there a
single self, or does the self have multiple, independent
components? Are there aspects of the self that cannot be
accessed consciously, and if so, can they be measured?
How do people derive and maintain a sense of self, and
once they do, can it be altered? Do people from different
cultures experience the self in the same way? And what
are the personal and social consequences of our represen-
tations of self?
This chapter was designed to address these and related
questions. We began with a brief history of the self, noting
that in recent decades social psychology has at long last
embraced some seminal conceptions of the self offered by
CH16.indd 617
References 617
James (1890/1950) more than a century ago. The result of
this neo-Jamesian approach to the self has been an unprec-
edented explosion of conceptual and methodological inno-
vations that have breathed new life into the subarea.
But if this sudden burst of creativity has had clear bene-
fits, it has had costs as well. To us, the most worrisome risk
is that the subarea will become so broad that it will begin
to lose focus. Eventually, newcomers may begin to wonder
whether there is any “there, there.” To avert this unhappy
outcome, we suggest setting a boundary condition for the
subarea: Work on the self should involve some consider-
ation of the self as a mental representation.
A secondary concern is the lack of integration both
within and across topic areas. This is understandable
given the complexity of the subject matter and the result-
ing challenge of constructing meaningful integrations.
Nevertheless, if the field is ever to develop a unified theory
of the self, it is critical that theorists continue to forge con-
nections among different themes in the literature.
As future researchers rise to the challenge of forging such
connections, they will build on the fundamental truths that
are gradually emerging in the literature. One truth that has
already been distilled is that the self is, as the symbolic inter-
actionists have long emphasized (e.g., Stryker, 2000), a social
phenomenon. From our first inklings of self-awareness to our
final reflections on the meaning of life, our social interactions
define, nurture, and alter our sense of self. This basic truth
has given rise to a range of investigations that are continuing
to provide crucial insights into the nature of the self.
Many more such truths are within the grasp of contem-
porary self psychologists. Indeed, if our review of the lit-
erature has left us with a single impression, it is that as
the topic area has increasingly attracted attention, the rate
of scientific advances has accelerated proportionally. We
are left with a strong feeling of optimism and a conviction
that, in the future, the answers will come even faster.
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Chapter 17
Gender
WENDY WOOD AND ALICE H. EAGLY
Why is this chapter titled Gender? Why not Sex? The
terms “sex” and “gender” are closely intertwined in
science. Sex often connotes sexuality, and gender has come
to refer to the cross-disciplinary field of study devoted to
understanding the origins and consequences of being
male or female. This chapter reviews this field of study.
Specifically, it considers the joint influence of biological
and sociocultural factors on the behavior of women and
men. It provides a broad biosocial framework to organize
the state of the evidence on the social thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors of and about women and men.
Within psychology, the terms gender and sex are often
understood to represent distinct sets of causes for the behavior
of women and men. Feminist researchers separated sex from
gender during the 1970s and 1980s to distinguish between
female and male biology and the meanings that societies and
individuals ascribe to male and female categories (e.g., Unger,
1979). In so doing, they were casting off the assumption
that observable differences between the sexes arise because of
inborn, biological factors that are impervious to social input.
In an ironic twist, gender as a scientific term was apparently
used first in the medical literature to describe the psychology
accompanying certain biological conditions (Haig, 2004).
Gender referred to the masculine or feminine self-concepts
of individuals whose physical anomalies did not fit usual
genital designation as male or female (Money, Hampson, &
Hampson, 1955). Nonetheless, gender became the standard
term for cultural distinctions between men and women and
sex the standard term for biological distinctions (American
Psychological Association, 2001). Whereas in the 1960s
social science publications rarely mentioned gender, by the
turn of this century they used it more than twice as often as
sex (Haig, 2004).
This chapter was prepared while Wendy Wood was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The authors would like to thank
Amanda Diekman, Paul Eastwick, Elizabeth Garrett, Peter Glick, Melissa Hines, Robert A. Josephs, Anne Koenig, N. Pontus Leander,
Laurie Rudman, Janet Spence, and Carmen Tanner for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of the chapter.
629
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Just as psychologists seemed to be reaching agreement
that gender is to sociocultural causes as sex is to biological
ones, empirical findings muddied any such neat distinction.
By the 1990s, it was clear that the biology and psychology
of masculinity and femininity could not be boxed into sepa-
rate theories. Biological sex and the social environment are
now understood to work together in influencing the attri-
butes and behavior of women and men. If most differences
between males and females are joint products of biology
and society, then psychologists face a conundrum: Should
the modifier of differences and similarities between women
and men be “gender” or “sex”? What about the modifiers
for roles, stereotypes, and identities—“sex” or “gender”?
The underlying questions about causes cannot be answered
through mere labeling. Establishing the contributions of
biological and sociocultural causation is the end product
of research, not its starting point.
This dilemma can be resolved by abandoning the now-
traditional biology versus culture meaning of sex versus
gender in favor of definitions that recognize the intertwin-
ing of nature and nurture. “Sex” is defined in this chapter
by the common-language meaning of male and female
as categories (e.g., “into which humans and most other
living things are divided on the basis of their reproduc-
tive functions”; Oxford English Dictionary, 2009). These
two groups are based on a biological reality of differing
chromosomes and associated hormonal and reproductive
differences. Yet this classification in daily life is a social
act based on personal assessments or observers’ judgments
of maleness or femaleness (Kessler & McKenna, 1978).
Therefore, visible cues of sex can sometimes contradict
chromosomes. And the classification has to be expanded
beyond two categories to include individuals who are
630 Gender
intersexed and thus possess both male and female biologi-
cal characteristics or are transsexual and have undertaken
surgery or hormone therapy to change their biological
sex (Fausto-Sterling, 1993). Nonetheless, the term “sex”
designates female and male categories that fit the great
majority of humans, and, in our usage, the terms sex differ-
ences and sex similarities do not imply particular types of
underlying causes.
The term “gender” refers to the meanings that individuals
and societies ascribe to males and females—meanings
that rest on a biology in which most humans possess the
standard XX or XY chromosomes. As this chapter explains,
this biological difference emerges in human societies as a
division of labor between men and women, which in turn
drives the meanings that cultures impute to male and female
and the meanings that individuals impute to themselves.
Terms such as gender role and gender identity refer to cultural
meanings in this sense. Sex and gender thus are separated
into convenient categories that reflect the natural language
definition of these words and simultaneously acknowledge
the intertwining of nature and nurture. With this distinction,
research findings and not terminologies do the heavy lifting
of identifying the causes of sex and gender.
In brief, the present chapter reviews the research evi-
dence on the biological and sociocultural causes of the
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of and about men and
women. Our scope is necessarily broad and considers
causes at multiple levels, including individual-level causes
of hormones and personal identities, societal-level causes in
stereotypical beliefs about the sexes, and evolutionary
pressures that influence men’s and women’s behavior.
Building on these various causes, the chapter considers the
evidence for sex differences in aggression and prosocial
behavior. It concludes with a discussion of how biosocial
processes account for change and stability in men’s and
women’s roles in society. The next sections explain our
approach, first by outlining why it is necessary to consider
both biological and social influences and then by organiz-
ing these various causes into a coherent theory.
BIOSOCIAL CAUSES OF MEN’S
AND WOMEN’S BEHAVIOR
The biological and social causes of sex differences are
closely interlinked in their effects. This presents a Gordian
knot of complexity, with the threads of the knot representing
the intertwined biological and sociocultural influences.
To disentangle these causes, researchers do not have the
mythical power of Alexander the Great who with a single
cut from his sword sliced the Gordian knot in two. Yet,
some psychologists do continue to apply simple, unitary
explanations that they hope will allow them to master the
complexities of sex and gender. Some such accounts focus
exclusively on hormones and other biological processes,
and they fail to acknowledge how these processes depend
on sociocultural factors. Others focus exclusively on socio-
cultural factors such as the social construction of gender
and do not recognize how these are grounded in biology.
However, contemporary science has revealed the value of
a different approach—one that recognizes the inherent depen-
dence between biological and sociocultural causes in produc-
ing and erasing differences between women and men.
In striking evidence of this dependence, researchers
who pursue causal threads associated with the biological
factors of sex-related genes and hormones sometimes have
found themselves revealing the influences of socialization
and culture. This interdependence reflects that the effects
of male and female biology are moderated by aspects of the
social environment. Genes function not like encapsulated
units of heredity but instead like response systems that
are highly contingent on environmental input (Lickliter &
Honeycutt, 2003). Illustrating this contingency, the onset
of menarche in girls is now understood to depend on
the psychosocial environment (Ellis, 2004). Girls begin
menstruating as early as around 12 years in some urban
postindustrial societies and as late as 18 years or more
in rural highland Papua New Guinea or high altitude
Nepali groups. Age of onset is regulated biologically by
the maturation of the adrenal glands and the hypothalamic–
pituitary–gonadal axis. The rate of this maturation is
increased by psychosocial stressors such as father absence,
emotionally distant mother–daughter relationships, depres-
sion, and exposure to family conflicts. As Ellis (2004,
p. 948) indicated, until recently, “the notion that social
experiences influence something as biological and presum-
ably genetic as pubertal timing was not taken seriously” by
the research community.
Is the reverse also true—that the influence of sociocul-
tural factors depends on biology? If so, in the Gordian knot
of causal influences, research that pulls a thread associ-
ated with the social determinants of sex differences would
reveal the effects of genes and hormones. We are not refer-
ring to the obvious idea that men and women are living
beings whose survival and reproduction is undergirded by
biological processes. Instead, in its more profound mani-
festation, the sociocultural meaning of gender is grounded
partly in biological differences between the sexes. As an
illustration, boys’ preferences for masculine, wheeled toys
that afford motion can be traced to more than the socializa-
tion of toy preferences by parents, peers, and the media.
Masculine toy preferences also appear to have a hormonal
basis in prenatal androgen exposure. Girls with congenital
adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a disorder involving exposure

to high levels of prenatal androgen, show these mascu-
line toy preferences along with other boyish attributes—
elevated activity levels and greater rough-and-tumble play
(Hines, 2009). Also suggesting that toy preferences have
a hormonal basis, male juvenile vervet and rhesus mon-
keys, much like young boys, showed a stronger prefer-
ence for wheeled toys than did their female counterparts
(Alexander & Hines, 2002; Hassett, Siebert, & Wallen,
2008). The socialization of children elaborates this ini-
tial hormonal effect by fostering different toy choices and
play activities in girls and boys within societies (Lytton &
Romney, 1991).
The interwoven influences of biology and culture in
enhancing and reducing sex differences might seem to over-
whelm personality and social psychological approaches
by adding a laundry list of genetic and hormonal variables
to investigations of female and male behavior. Worse yet,
studying these intertwined influences might seem to place
social and personality psychologists at risk for relocating
their labs in the biology building on campus. Fortunately,
theorizing about the various causes has kept pace with the
emerging complexity of empirical findings. In particular,
biosocial theories, which consider the interface between bio-
logical and sociocultural influences, articulate a clear role
for social and personality psychology variables in scientific
models about sex differences in behavior, as well as in peo-
ple’s beliefs about men and women.
DISTAL AND PROXIMAL CAUSES OF SEX
DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES
From the biosocial perspective of this chapter, sex and
gender constructs in psychology are part of a nomological
net, or series of connected theoretical concepts and
observable properties, within which the constructs have a
particular meaning (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). By looking
upward in the net toward the distal, fundamental causes
of male and female behavior, we can answer the kind of
big picture questions about women and men that a Martian
might puzzle over when landing on earth for the first time
and observing any human society. In all known societies,
men and boys to some extent specialize in activities differ-
ent from those favored by women and girls. An extrater-
restrial visitor thus is likely to wonder why the sexes fill
different social roles and thereby engage in a division of
labor. Answering this question at a societal level of analy-
sis illuminates the biosocial interaction writ large. That is,
the division of labor arises from the ways in which cultural
and ecological forces in a society interact with humans’
biology in terms of female and male physical attributes and
reproductive activities (Wood & Eagly, 2002). Because
Gender Roles 631
women bear and nurse children and men possess greater
size, speed, and strength, especially in the upper body,
certain activities in a society are more efficiently accom-
plished by one sex than the other. In short, the division of
labor arises because it can be easier for one sex to perform
certain tasks of daily life.
By looking downward in the nomological net toward
the more proximal causes of individuals’ behavior, we can
identify the immediate determinants of differences between
male and female behavior, as well as differences within each
sex. Social and personality psychologists typically ask
questions about proximal causes, such as why women gen-
erally are more nurturant than men toward close others and
why individual women vary in their propensity to nurture.
As this chapter explains, the proximal causes of sex differ-
ences in individual behavior are framed by gender roles, or
the shared beliefs that apply to individuals on the basis of
their socially identified sex (Eagly, 1987; Eagly, Wood, &
Johannesen-Schmidt, 2004).
Gender roles, as well as specific social roles such as
daughter, boss, and friend, influence the behavior of indi-
vidual women and men through more immediate causes.
We consider a trio of proximal causes of sex differences and
similarities that reflect the biosocial interaction close-up:
Roles influence behavior through chemical signals of hor-
monal changes in interaction with personal gender identity
and others’ stereotypical expectations. The second and
third of these causes, which are the sociocultural aspects
of this biosocial model, are reminiscent of Deaux and
Major ’s (1987) argument that gender is enacted in dyadic
interactions as a function of gendered beliefs about the self,
others’ expectations, and contextual influences that make
gender more or less salient (see also Deaux & LaFrance,
1998). The next sections of the chapter first outline the
nature and functioning of gender roles and then address
the immediate biosocial mechanisms by which these
beliefs about women and men influence behavior.
GENDER ROLES
Gender role beliefs arise from the specific social roles
occupied by women and men—that is, from the division
of labor in society. Most social behavior is embedded in
the performance of specific roles, and gender roles serve
as a backdrop that pervades the performance of such spe-
cific roles. Because in all cultures women and men tend
to specialize in different behaviors, people have different
beliefs about what each sex can and should do. These beliefs
constitute socially shared stereotypes within a society. In
essence, gender roles are reflected in a society’s stereo-
types about men and women. Thus, women may be viewed
632 Gender
as kind and compassionate and men as bold and fearless.
Gender stereotypes might also include specific skills, such
as women having the ability to weave baskets and men to
tend crops, or vice versa (Murdock & Provost, 1973).
Our definition of gender roles derives from the broader
concept of social role, which refers to the shared beliefs
that apply to people who occupy a certain social position
or are members of a particular social category (e.g., Biddle,
1979). For gender roles, these social categories are male
and female. In the mind of individuals, roles are schemas,
or abstract knowledge structures, pertaining to a group of
people. When role schemas are shared among members
of a society, they constitute structures at the societal level, as
well as the individual level. Roles are thus symbolic
aspects of social structure, which consists of persisting and
bounded patterns of behavior and social interaction (e.g.,
House, 1995).
Gender roles, like roles based on group memberships
such as age, social class, and race, apply to many aspects of
daily life. In their Handbook of Social Psychology chapter
on gender, Deaux and LaFrance (1998) likened this aspect
of gender to air—a pervasive, ever-present part of people’s
experience. In contrast, more specific roles based on fac-
tors such as family relationships (e.g., father or daughter)
and occupations (e.g., teacher or police officer) are rele-
vant mainly to behavior in a particular social context. For
example, occupational roles are pertinent mostly at work.
Given their general applicability across settings, gender
roles influence behavior simultaneously with specific roles
and roles based on other group memberships (e.g., racial
groups). These intersections of gender roles with other
roles lend complexity to female and male behavior.
Gender roles specify what men and women usually do
and what they should do—that is, roles are descriptive and
prescriptive (or injunctive; Cialdini & Trost, 1998; Prislin &
Wood, 2005). The descriptive aspect of gender roles indi-
cates what is typical for each sex. People rely on this
descriptive information when they are concerned about
what is normal for their sex. Especially if a situation is
ambiguous or confusing, people tend to enact sex-typical
behaviors. The prescriptive aspect of gender roles describes
what is desirable and admirable for each sex. People rely
on this prescriptive information when they are motivated
to gain social approval or to bolster their own esteem.
Content of Gender Roles
What are the gender role beliefs that people commonly
hold about women and men? Research on gender stereo-
types reveals this content (see review by Kite, Deaux, &
Haines, 2007). Most people’s beliefs about men and women
can be summarized in two dimensions, which are most
often labeled agency, or self-assertion, and communion, or
connection with others (Bakan, 1966). These basic dimen-
sions, in various forms, underlie people’s beliefs about
different social groups (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu,
2002; Judd, James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005).
Men, more than women, are thought to be agentic—that
is, masterful, assertive, competitive, and dominant (e.g.,
Newport, 2001; Spence & Buckner, 2000). Women, more than
men, are thought to be communal—that is, friendly, unself-
ish, concerned with others, and emotionally expressive. The
expressiveness accorded to women extends to a range of emo-
tions, including sadness, embarrassment, fear, distress, sym-
pathy, love, and happiness, but not to anger and pride, which
are ascribed more to men than to women (Alexander &
Wood, 2000; Plant, Hyde, Keltner, & Devine, 2000).
Agency and communion were the predominant themes
that emerged in the foundational studies of gender stereo-
types. When respondents in such research listed the ways
in which men and women differ, a high proportion of the
most consensual attributes were either agentic or communal
(Broverman, Vogel, Broverman, Clarkson, & Rosenkrantz,
1972). When respondents in another study free associated
to the terms masculine and feminine, the great majority of
these associations were agentic or communal traits (Deaux &
Lewis, 1983). These stereotypes emerge with implicit
measures, such as the Implicit Association Test, as well as
with traditional explicit measures based on rating scales
(Rudman, Greenwald, & McGhee, 2001). Male agency
and female communion also appear to be pancultural,
albeit with some variation across cultures (Best & Thomas,
2004; Williams & Best, 1990).
Agency and communion are not the whole story on gen-
der stereotypes. People also take into account contrasting
features of male and female bodies. They regard men as
muscular, strong, and tall and women as pretty, sexy, and
petite (Cejka & Eagly, 1999; Deaux & Lewis, 1984). With
respect to the mind, intellectual ability is regarded as having
subtly different contours in women and men, with women
being more creative and verbally skilled and men more
analytical and quantitatively skilled (Cejka & Eagly, 1999;
Swim, 1994). Sheer intelligence is ascribed somewhat
more to women than men in contemporary U.S. repre-
sentative surveys (Newport, 2001; Pew Research Center,
2008), as opposed to the earlier tendency to ascribe greater
intelligence to men (e.g., Fernberger, 1948).
People readily take other group memberships and social
roles into account along with gender roles. The meaning
of male and female social categories differs depend-
ing on group membership such as nationality (Eagly &
Kite, 1987), age (Kite, Deaux, & Miele, 1991), race, and
ethnicity (Timberlake & Estes, 2007). To give one illustra-
tion, sexual orientation makes a difference: Homosexual

individuals are regarded as similar to opposite-sex
heterosexuals—that is, gay men as more feminine and les-
bian women as more masculine—than typical members of
their sex group (Kite & Deaux, 1987). Specific social roles
also moderate gender roles. For example, acknowledging
women’s domestic role, perceivers accord more agency
to women than men in some domestic contexts (Mendoza-
Denton, Park, & O’Connor, 2008). In addition, portraying
women and men in the same specific social role (e.g., occu-
pation) appears to reduce the impact of gender stereotypes
(Eagly & Steffen, 1984; Eagly & Wood, 1982).
Also reflecting that gender roles coexist with other
social roles, the general categories of men and women
are composed of subtypes. Vonk and Ashmore (2003)
identified more than 200 masculine and feminine sub-
types that varied in their young versus old and traditional
versus modern meaning. Gender subtypes represent men
and women in, for example, occupations such as busi-
nessman and career woman and interpersonal roles such
as family man and lover (Carpenter & Trentham, 1998;
Eckes, 2002). New subtypes continually emerge, such
as Joe six-pack and hockey mom to represent the intersec-
tions of gender with political interest groups in the 2008
U.S. presidential election campaign.
Children gradually gain sophistication in their thinking
about the sexes. Young children do not stereotype at the
abstract level of the agentic and communal personality
traits that dominate adults’ gender stereotypes (see Miller,
Trautner, & Ruble, 2006, for a review). Instead, children
as young as 3 years associate concrete objects and activi-
ties with each sex—for example, dolls, hairbrushes, and
sewing with females and baseball bats, cars, and playing
basketball with males. Also, young children link qualities
such as pink and softness with females and blue and rough-
ness with males. In middle childhood, the core agency and
communion stereotypes start to emerge. With maturity,
perceivers acquire a rich set of social psychological con-
cepts for thinking about men and women.
Roots of Gender Roles in the Division of Labor
The gender role beliefs, or stereotypes shared within a
society, are not arbitrary or random. Instead, they are
firmly rooted in a society’s division of labor whereby peo-
ple observe men and women engaged in different types of
activities (Eagly, Wood, & Diekman, 2000). From these
observations, people develop beliefs about women’s and
men’s attributes, especially their personality traits. How do
perceivers make their way from observations of concrete
behaviors to abstract ideas about traits?
As a first step, people’s behaviors are assumed to
reflect their intrinsic characteristics. This cognitive process
Gender Roles 633
of inferring traits from observed behavior is known as
correspondent inference or correspondence bias (Gilbert,
1998). For example, on observing an act of kindness, per-
ceivers automatically identify the behavior in trait terms
and characterize the actor by the trait that is implied—as
a nice, caring person. By making this inference, people
commit the fundamental attribution error by assuming
that people are what they do. This process is widespread
(Gawronski, 2003; Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz, 1977) and
largely spontaneous (Uleman, Saribay, & Gonzalez, 2008).
From observations of individuals, perceivers then gen-
eralize to the traits of entire groups of people—that is, to
group stereotypes. Illustrating how thinking proceeds from
individuals to groups, Ridgeway and Erickson (2000)
created differential status between two individuals by
having one person (an experimental confederate) act in a
deferential or a superior way to the other person (the par-
ticipant). These two people had been arbitrarily assigned
to different nominal groups, A or B. The status difference
established between these two individuals then was gen-
eralized, by the research participants and by observers, to
other members of A and B groups, as if it were a character-
istic of the groups (see also Ridgeway, 2006b). Perceivers
appear to be especially adept at jumping from observations
of even a single man or woman to generalizations about
qualities typical of each sex (Prentice & Miller, 2006).
If gender stereotypes are largely data driven, what
are the observations that feed them? Because the divi-
sion between female domestic labor and male wage labor
remains partially intact (Bianchi, Robinson, & Milkie,
2006), people have many opportunities to observe women
and men engaging in different behaviors. They tend to
see women engaged in supportive, nurturing behaviors in
their domestic role and in occupations (e.g., teacher and
nurse) that emphasize communal characteristics (Cejka &
Eagly, 1999; England, Budig, & Folbre, 2002). Also, peo-
ple tend to see men in family roles of provider and head
of household, as well as in certain occupations that foster
assertive, task-oriented behaviors (Cejka & Eagly, 1999).
Additionally important are indirect observations provided
by media portrayals and cultural lore. Given repeated
observations of men and women engaging in different
types of behaviors, gender roles effortlessly emerge.
Do these observations of male and female roles boil
down to sex differences in observed social status, as
some social psychologists have argued (e.g., Conway,
Pizzamiglio, & Mount, 1996; Ridgeway & Bourg, 2004)?
People often observe men in higher-status roles and women
in lower-status ones—for example, male executives inter-
acting with female secretaries and clerks. Accordingly,
perceivers infer that men have the correspondent attri-
butes of competitiveness and agency and women have the
634 Gender
attributes of compliance and supportiveness (Wood &
Karten, 1986). However, status is more strongly related to
agency than to communion (e.g., Conway et al., 1996) and
thus is more suited to explaining stereotypes of men.
The perception that women are communal can be
traced largely to their cooperative interdependence with
other groups (e.g., men, children, and the elderly; Fiske
et al., 2002). These helpful and supportive social relation-
ships underlie the “women are wonderful” effect, whereby
the female stereotype is often more favorable than the
male stereotype (Eagly & Mladinic, 1994; Rudman &
Goodwin, 2004).
Women’s greater cooperative interdependence and men’s
greater status also have a dark side (Spence, Helmreich, &
Holohan, 1979). Social perceivers regard women as more
vulnerable than men to a communal focus on others that
results in neglect of oneself (e.g., inability to say no and
excessive concern with others’ problems). They also
regard men as more vulnerable than women to an agentic
self-focus that results in neglect of others (e.g., arrogant,
greedy, and cynical; Helgeson & Fritz, 1999). Thus, gen-
der ’s troubled waters consist of agency not blended with
some communion and communion not blended with some
agency.
Accuracy of Gender Stereotypes
Are gender stereotypes accurate? Yes and no. To the extent
that stereotypes are grounded in reality, they inevitably
possess a kernel of truth. People’s frequent observations of
male and female behavior provide myriad opportunities to
correct biased beliefs (Fiedler & Walther, 2004). Moreover,
categorizing people as female and male would not be use-
ful unless the meanings associated with the categories were
at least broadly accurate. But saying “yes, stereotypes are
accurate on average,” could mean “no” for any specific
instance. An intelligent answer separates the accuracy of
beliefs about a category from those about individual cat-
egory members (Ryan, 2002). Beliefs about groups may be
quite accurate based on group averages (e.g., men like to
shop for tools) but inaccurate when applied to individuals
within the groups (e.g., Steve is a man, so he will enjoy
tool shopping). For people not typical of their sex, stereo-
typical judgments are necessarily inaccurate.
Providing fairly good evidence of accuracy, research has
related gender stereotypes to the sex differences and simi-
larities established in psychological research. Participants’
beliefs about the direction and magnitude of sex differences
are moderately correlated with the findings of meta-analyses
of studies that compared the sexes on a range of person-
ality traits, abilities, and social behaviors (Briton & Hall,
1995; Hall & Carter, 1999a; Swim, 1994). For example,
people believe that women smile more than men, and
research has found this to be a sex difference (LaFrance,
Hecht, & Paluck, 2003). Also suggesting accuracy, gender
stereotypical beliefs were correlated with men’s and
women’s experiences of the emotions of anger, fear, love,
joy, and sadness (Grossman & Wood, 1993). In addition,
people can successfully estimate the social attitudes held
by men and women on various topics (Diekman, Eagly, &
Kulesa, 2002). Furthermore, Hall and Carter (1999a) found
that people with more accurate gender stereotypes were
also more interpersonally sensitive and believed more in the
accuracy of their social perceptions.
Despite this evidence of a substantial kernel of truth,
cognitive processes can exaggerate people’s judgments of
male–female differences. Categorizing people by sex is
one such process. When individuals are categorized into
groups, they might seem more similar to other group mem-
bers than they actually are, as well as more different from
members of other groups (e.g., Tajfel, 1981; Wilder, 1984).
Sex provides the strongest basis of categorizing people,
even when compared with race, age, and occupation
(Fiske, Haslam, & Fiske, 1991; Stangor, Lynch, Duan, &
Glass, 1992; but see Quinn & Macrae, 2005).
Stereotypes also slant the way in which people encode
instances of behavior. By assimilating women and men to
gender stereotypes, perceivers may not judge them accu-
rately (von Hippel, Sekaquaptewa, & Vargas, 1995). In
illustration, research participants informed about another
person’s agentic acts of leadership (e.g., “when speaking,
motivates employees”) were more likely to activate in
memory the implied agentic traits (e.g., “charismatic”) when
the other person was male (Scott & Brown, 2006). Thus,
given the same act of agency, observers are more likely to
accord men than women the correspondent trait because
agency is regarded typical of men. As a result of such biased
processes, an assertive, decisive woman might not be con-
sidered for leadership positions (Eagly & Carli, 2007).
As another source of inaccuracy, differences are over-
estimated when men and women are viewed as opposites
along a masculine–feminine bipolar dimension (Green,
Ashmore, & Manzi, 2005; Krueger, Hasman, Acevedo, &
Villano, 2003) or as having opposing group interests
(Diekman et al., 2002). Nevertheless, empirical support for
the exaggeration of group-level sex differences is mixed,
with some studies showing overestimation (Allen, 1995;
Martin, 1987) and others showing underestimation (e.g.,
Cejka & Eagly, 1999; Swim, 1994; see discussion in sec-
tion, Sex Differences in Psychological Research).
Popular media also reduce stereotype accuracy by exag-
gerating differences between the sexes, despite occasional
counterstereotypical portrayals (e.g., a female U.S. president
in the television series Commander in Chief). One such

bias is that men are depicted more often than women in
prime-time television commercials and more often in pri-
mary roles (Furnham & Mak, 1999; Ganahl, Prinsen, &
Netzley, 2003). Media also mirror the division of labor,
with prime-time television programming of situation com-
edy, drama, and reality offering 23% more men than women
in employment-related roles and 33% more women than
men in interpersonal roles involving family, romance, and
friends (Lauzen, Dozier, & Horan, 2008). These paycheck-
earning men and relationship-focused women fuel gender
stereotypes in a media-intensive society. Suggesting the
influence of media portrayals, frequent television viewing
is associated with more stereotypical beliefs about women
and men (Morgan & Shanahan, 1997).
Other stereotyping processes compromise accuracy by
minimizing people’s reports of sex differences. This effect
occurs when perceivers use shifting standards to judge
men and women. If people compare women with other
women and men with other men, then the sexes are judged
by different standards (Biernat, 2003, 2005). To illustrate,
consider athleticism, a set of skills in which men predomi-
nate so much that athletic competitions are typically segre-
gated by sex. When people describe a woman and a man as
“athletic,” they usually mean that the woman is athletic for
a woman, just as the man is athletic for a man. Given typi-
cally lesser athletic prowess in women, observers would
judge a woman athlete by a different and lower standard
than a man. The result could be that a man and woman are
judged as equally “athletic,” for example, on a subjective
rating scale ranging from “very athletic” to “not at all ath-
letic.” Yet, if observers judged this man and woman by the
same, or common, standard (e.g., “how far can he or she
throw a ball?”), the (accurate) stereotype of greater male ath-
leticism would ordinarily dominate judgments (Biernat &
Vescio, 2002).
Stereotypes also are minimized when perceivers con-
trast individual men’s and women’s behavior with gender
stereotypes. For example, when confronted with unam-
biguously counterstereotypical behavior, perceivers may
try to explain the unusual behavior and end up conclud-
ing that the individuals possess especially strong attributes
corresponding to the behavior. Thus, perceivers observing
exceptional service from a female financial adviser or a
male wedding planner inferred that they must possess spe-
cial competence at financial or wedding services (Matta &
Folkes, 2005).
In summary, gender stereotypes are subject to conflict-
ing pressures: People’s many opportunities to observe
males and females ensure overall group-level accuracy
despite the various sources of bias that can exaggerate or
minimize genuine differences between the sexes.
Gender Roles 635
Controlling Detrimental Effects of Gender Roles
on Judgments of Individuals
The accuracy of gender stereotypes at the group level
does not make stereotypes benign influences in daily life.
Instead, stereotypes constrain behavior and foster sanc-
tions for deviation (see the later section Influence of Social
Expectations). Stereotypes also help to retain traditional
patterns of behavior: Gender stereotypes derive from
observing women and men enacting a division of labor and
in turn hold people into the very roles that make up the
division of labor.
Controversy surrounds the question of whether people
can inhibit stereotypes about social groups. Consistent
with the inevitability of stereotyping are numerous experi-
ments suggesting that stereotype activation does not
require intentional control or conscious awareness. For
example, priming of gender stereotypical words (e.g.,
jobs such as “nurse” or “doctor”) versus nonstereotypical
words led participants to classify quickly gender-matched
pronouns (e.g., “he” or “she”) into male and female
categories (e.g., Banaji & Hardin, 1996). Similarly, implicit
priming induced by having participants unscramble
sentences with male or female stereotypical (vs. nonste-
reotypical) content produced more stereotypical ratings of
a target person of the sex implied by the priming (Banaji,
Hardin, & Rothman, 1993). Such phenomena suggest
that perceivers have acquired a network of associations
about men and women that are ordinarily activated by rel-
evant concepts (Bargh, 1999; Fiske, 1998).
Questioning the inevitability of stereotyping are experi-
ments demonstrating that mere exposure to sex-related
cues does not necessarily bring gender stereotypes to
mind, at least not in their generic form. For example,
after imagining a “strong woman,” such as a business-
woman in charge of others or a female athlete, perceivers
indicated less extreme gender stereotypes on the Implicit
Association Test (Blair, Ma, & Lenton, 2001). A host of
other factors can modulate the activation of gender ste-
reotypes, including time pressure and other cognitive
constraints (Blair & Banaji, 1996), perceivers’ processing
goals (Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, Thorne, & Castelli,
1997; Moskowitz, Gollwitzer, Wasel, & Schaal, 1999), and
a social environment with women in leadership positions
(Dasgupta & Asgari, 2004). Such phenomena suggest that
gender stereotypes are fluid, contextually sensitive, and
potentially controllable.
Even when stereotypes have been activated, they are not
always used in judging others (Devine, 1989). Information
about individuals’ other qualities can restrain the applica-
tion of stereotypes to some extent (Fiske, 1998). Thus, in
newly formed discussion groups, members perceived men
636 Gender
as higher in agency than women except when given direct
information about the others’ relative aptitudes (Wood &
Karten, 1986). In addition, the application of stereotypes
depends on a complex of cognitive and motivational vari-
ables (Blair, 2002; Kunda & Spencer, 2003). For example,
perceivers can inhibit stereotyping when they have suffi-
cient cognitive resources and motivation (e.g., Dasgupta &
Rivera, 2006; see Fazio & Olson, 2003). Their motiva-
tion to restrain prejudicial reactions can reflect internal,
personal desires to avoid sexism and external pressures
deriving from others’ reactions (Klonis, Plant, & Devine,
2005). Nonetheless, the motivation to correct for gender
stereotypes is not guaranteed. People feel less compunc-
tion when they are confronted with their own sexism,
compared with their other types of biases (e.g., Czopp &
Monteith, 2003).
In summary, perceptions of individuals are not always
at the mercy of gender stereotypes. Although social catego-
ries such as gender may be automatically activated outside
of awareness and without conscious intent, such activa-
tion does not always occur. Even when gender stereotypes
have been activated, perceivers can control their potential
effects on judgments, given sufficient motivation and cog-
nitive resources. However, in the hurly-burly of daily life,
people often lack the motivation or resources to exert this
control (see Macrae & Quadflieg, this volume).
Potency of Gender Roles
Gender roles do not always influence judgments and
behavior, but they wield considerable power in various
circumstances. The strength of gender roles arises from
several sources: The shared beliefs that comprise these
roles seem consensual, they have an injunctive or prescrip-
tive quality, and they appear to describe qualities that are
deeply embedded in human nature.
Stereotypical beliefs that are supported by social con-
sensus seem valid—after all, others endorse them, and this
consensus establishes pressures to comply (Crandall &
Stangor, 2005). In research manipulating the consen-
sus behind racial stereotypes, college students with the
impression that their anti-Black beliefs were shared by
other students sat further from an African American
(Sechrist & Stangor, 2001). Similarly, the widespread con-
sensus about female communion and male agency fuels the
effects of these stereotypes on judgments and behavior.
Gender roles acquire additional power from their pre-
scriptiveness. Gender stereotypical ways of behaving seem
generally desirable for that sex (Prentice & Carranza, 2002;
Spence & Helmreich, 1978). For example, if women, far
more than men, care for infants and young children, it
is reasonable that people prefer that women be kind and
nurturing. In general, the more attributes actually differ
between women and men, the more desirable they seem
to be for one sex as opposed to the other (Hall & Carter,
1999b). This prescriptiveness makes sense, given that gen-
der roles capture the qualities that facilitate sex-typical
activities in society.
As an additional contribution to the power of ste-
reotypes about women and men, sex strikes people as a
natural-kind category, associated with a deep, inherent
quality that makes the attributes linked with it seem rela-
tively unalterable. For many social perceivers, women
possess an essential nature that is different from that of
men. Of 40 social categories, male–female categories were
judged as the most natural, necessary, immutable, dis-
crete, and stable (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). As
a consequence, people often regard feminine or masculine
attributes and behaviors as inherent, stable properties of
the sexes (Prentice & Miller, 2006).
In the next sections of this chapter, we consider
various mechanisms through which gender roles and spe-
cific social roles are enacted to produce the behavior of
men and women. For social and personality psychologists,
this is where the rubber meets the road—where theories
about psychological and biological processes are tested as
predictors of behavior. However, within the nomological
network of gender constructs, equally important are the
distal biosocial causes of gender roles that we consider
toward the end of the chapter.
ROLES GUIDE BEHAVIOR
Proximal Influences
In daily life, people carry out gender roles as they enact
specific social roles such as athlete, employee, and par-
ent. Performing social roles is enabled by biological and
psychological mechanisms that interact in various ways.
Biological processes include hormones acting as chemi-
cal signals and psychological mechanisms include gender
identities and others’ expectations. These factors work in
tandem to promote role performance.
To understand how hormonal and psychological factors
work together to guide behavior, consider the aggressive,
competitive behaviors required to win athletic contests.
Performance of these behaviors is promoted by increases
in the steroid hormone, testosterone, which is an andro-
gen secreted in men by the testes and in women to a lesser
extent by the adrenal gland and ovaries. Athletic competi-
tion also is promoted by a masculine, agentic identity, as
athletes regulate their behavior in line with this gendered
self-view. Athletic performance also is likely to be highly

responsive to the agentic expectations of fans, other players,
and coaches. In short, fluctuations in testosterone guide
responses when people are engaged in roles involving
dominance and competition, as defined by their identities
and by others’ expectations. Thus, the biosocial interaction
reflects the selective recruitment of hormones and other
neurochemical processes for particular roles, given men’s
and women’s gender identities and others’ expectations for
role performance.
The biological and psychological influences we identify
in this chapter are honed through socialization to support
men’s and women’s role performances. Through socializa-
tion for particular roles, boys and girls learn to channel
and respond to neurochemical signals, gender identities, and
expectations of others in ways that enable them to carry
out their everyday social roles.
Hormonal Influences
Gender roles and specific social roles guide behavior
partly through the activation of hormonal changes. The
hormones most relevant to understanding sex differences
are testosterone (T), oxytocin (OT), and to some extent
cortisol (C). These hormones act as chemical transmitters
in the brain that promote performance of certain social
behaviors. With culturally masculine roles, higher levels
of T are associated with dominance, or behaviors that gain
or maintain status. In humans, such behaviors often entail
competition, risk taking, and aggression that may harm or
injure others (Booth, Granger, Mazur, & Kivlighan, 2006).
In contrast, with culturally feminine roles, higher levels
of OT (as well as reduced C and T) are associated with
behaviors that produce parental bonding, nurturance, and
intimacy (Campbell, 2008).
According to the biosocial interaction, T is relevant
when, due to personal identities and social expectancies,
people experience social interactions as dominance con-
tests. OT is relevant when, due to personal identities and
social expectancies, people define social interactions as
involving bonding and affiliation with close others. T and
OT promote role performance in conjunction with other
hormones, including C, a hormone associated with the
experience of stress that is secreted by the adrenal gland.
Lowered C may facilitate bonding with others, and height-
ened C may facilitate aggression and dominance. And
other neurochemical processes, especially those associated
with rewards and learning of particular behaviors, supple-
ment or even supplant influences of T and OT.
Hormones and Masculine Social Roles
In Mazur and Booth’s (1998) classic model, performance
of dominant, aggressive behaviors activates T. That is, T is
Roles Guide Behavior 637
recruited for performance of roles involving competitive
dominance. The model also postulates a reciprocal rela-
tion by which increased T promotes dominant, aggres-
sive responding. That is, circulating T orients people to
assume roles or engage in behaviors involving competitive
dominance.
Providing evidence that T is recruited in performance
of social roles or in reaction to situational provocations,
T levels among men rise in anticipation of athletic and
other competition and in response to insults, presumably to
energize and direct their physical and cognitive performance
(e.g., Cohen, Nisbett, Bowdle, & Schwarz, 1996; Suay et al.,
1999). This relation was secured in Archer ’s (2006) meta-
analysis in which T rose in men anticipating and playing
sports and other competitions (e.g., video games), espe-
cially among the contest winners. In addition, higher
T levels among male financial traders predicted their daily
profitability (Coates & Herbert, 2008). This finding sug-
gests that T facilitates competition even against the gen-
eralized competitors who make up financial markets.
C levels also may be implicated, given that these have
been found to rise in male and female athletes before and
during a match (Bateup, Booth, Shirtcliff, & Granger,
2002; Edwards, Wetzel, & Wyner, 2006).
T does not increase in the absence of social roles or
situational provocations that call for aggressive, dominant
behavior. Thus, men’s T did not reliably increase in con-
trived laboratory competitions (Archer, 2006). Also, in
women’s competitions, T did not rise in players of a video
game before a contest (Mazur, Susman, & Edelbrock,
1997), but it rose in female rugby and soccer players before
and during a match (Bateup et al., 2002; Edwards et al.,
2006). Hence, despite women’s production of only one fifth
to one tenth of men’s T levels, the hormone is activated in
both sexes by interactions that are interpreted as dominance
contests. Because men and women may not always agree in
their interpretations of dominance interactions, some differ-
ences may occur in the details of these effects. Nonetheless,
consistent with the classic model, role performances involv-
ing competitive dominance activate T.
How about the reciprocal relation whereby T activates
competitive, dominant behavior, as also stipulated by the
classic model? A meta-analysis of 11 studies that experi-
mentally injected men with T or related synthetic andro-
gens found no systematic rise in anger, aggression, or
hostility (Archer, 2006). It may be that the experimental
contexts did not reliably activate masculine identities and
social expectations. In the absence of competition, circu-
lating T appears largely unrelated to behavior. Instead, it
shows effects primarily when dominance battles are immi-
nent (e.g., Josephs, Sellers, Newman, & Mehta, 2006;
Mehta, Jones, & Josephs, 2008).
638 Gender
In humans, dominance contests and displays are highly
varied, with most occurring without physical aggression
(Mazur & Booth, 1998). Thus, it is not surprising that only
a small, positive association emerged in a meta-analytical
review of the relation between circulating T and various
behavioral and self-report measures of aggression (meta-
analytical r
.08, k
42; Archer, Graham-Kevan, &
Davies, 2005). High levels of circulating T might activate
behavior in a range of dominance-provoking situations, not
just those associated with aggression. In support, high T
in men is associated with criminal acts, especially violent
crime, and some antisocial behaviors (Booth et al., 2006;
Dabbs & Dabbs, 2000). In addition, higher T characterizes
occupations such as professional football, in which suc-
cess involves self-aggrandizing displays of dominance in
face-to-face confrontations, compared with occupations
such as minister, which generally involve selflessness and
concern for others (Dabbs & Dabbs, 2000). Also, experi-
mental manipulations of T in college women appeared to
heighten their tendencies to dress and groom their hair
attractively—behaviors that may yield popularity and
social power in everyday competition for young women
(Dabbs et al., 2003). Additionally suggesting a role for
T in displays of dominance, men with high circulating T
smiled less in facial photographs (Dabbs, 1997). In these
ways, hormonal processes facilitate various behaviors as
people interact with others and carry out social roles.
Hormones and Feminine Social Roles
OT and other neurochemicals that promote the expression
of intimacy and caring for others are relevant to the per-
formance of roles involving nurturance and affiliation.
OT also influences the experience of stress and may have
a dual function in promoting affiliative behavior to cope
with stress and in reflecting the level of stress experienced
in relationships (Taylor et al., 2000, 2006). OT is especially
relevant to women because of the regulation of OT recep-
tors by estrogen and OT’s stimulation of uterine contrac-
tions during labor and milk expression during lactation.
The enhancement of maternal bonding by OT is most
evident in rodents and sheep, which have been subjected
to experimental manipulations of hormones. In humans,
women’s OT levels increase in contexts involving intimacy
and caring for others. For example, OT rises in women dur-
ing childbirth (Takagi et al., 1985) and with massage and
sexual contact (Insel, 2000; Pedersen, 2004). Moreover,
women with higher OT in early pregnancy and postpar-
tum engaged in more maternal bonding behaviors such as
gazing at the infant’s face, affectionate touch, and speak-
ing in the high-pitched, expressive tones of motherese
(Feldman, Weller, Zagoory-Sharon, & Levine, 2007). Also,
brain regions associated with OT receptors were activated
in mothers viewing pictures of their infants and in male
and female lovers viewing pictures of their romantic part-
ners (Bartels & Zeki, 2004).
In humans and other large-brained primates, parental
bonds and affiliation are promoted not only by OT but
also by hormones involved in reward learning, including
opioids and dopamine (Depue & Morrone-Strupinsky,
2005; Taylor, 2002). Reward mechanisms enable bonds to
develop even without the hormones of pregnancy, parturi-
tion, and lactation. For example, close bonds to infants can
develop in adoptive relationships. Fathers and other rela-
tives and caretakers also bond with infants. Such bonding
is promoted by experiences of reward that can be triggered
by infants’ vulnerability and need, by physical sensations
of tactile contact and smell, and by the high value societies
place on children. Underlying this positive affect are neuro-
chemical reward systems that promote nurturing separately
from the hormones of pregnancy. According to Kendrick
(2004), these learned rewards can account for much of the
positive affect arising from human maternal behavior. In
evidence, manipulations of neurochemicals associated with
reward influence bonding even in nonhuman primates (e.g.,
Kalin, Shelton, & Lynn, 1995). Thus, humans and other
large-brained primates establish and maintain social bonds
through both hormonal activation and reward learning.
This dual basis of relational bonding reflects “evolution-
ary progression away from hormonal-centric determinants
of maternal behaviour to emotional, reward-fulfilling
activation” (Broad, Curley, & Keverne, 2006, p. 2204).
Other hormones also promote intimacy and tending of
others. The stress hormone C and T both are implicated in
performance of spousal and caretaking roles. A drop in C ordi-
narily accompanies initiation of the parental role, especially
among mothers, evidently to support nurturing (Corter &
Fleming, 1995; Fleming, Ruble, Krieger, & Wong, 1997).
In addition, fathers’ anticipation and vicarious experience of
childbirth produce a fall in T, as well as hormonal changes in
estradiol, C, and prolactin that mimic the changes that occur
in mothers (Berg & Wynne-Edwards, 2001, 2002; Storey,
Walsh, Quinton, & Wynne-Edwards, 2000). Also, men’s T
levels decline with marriage, an effect that may favor enact-
ment of the caring spousal and parental roles (Booth et al.,
2006). Consistent with this idea, lower levels of circulating
T are associated with married men’s close involvement with
their spouse and emotional responsiveness to their infants’
cries (e.g., Fleming, Corter, Stallings, & Steiner, 2002; Gray,
Kahlenberg, Barrett, Lipson, & Ellison, 2002).
In general, performance of roles that involve dominance
and competition is associated with increased T levels.
Performance of roles involving nurturance and intimacy
coincides with increased OT levels and reduced C and T. It
might seem plausible that this hormonal regulation is more

reliable in the sex that has chronically higher levels of a
hormone, or at least that the regulatory processes func-
tion somewhat differently for the sexes, given differences
in biology (e.g., T in men is generated through the tes-
tes). Nonetheless, women’s competitiveness and aggres-
siveness are associated with increments of T (Archer
et al., 2005). When T was calculated as a percentage
increase in each sex above basal levels, T increased 24%
in female rugby players anticipating a game and 49% in
those playing it, as well as 36% in male tennis players
anticipating a match and 6% in those playing it, along
with a 12% rise in male wrestlers during a match (Bateup
et al., 2002). Also, under conditions of stress, artificially
increasing OT in men appears to promote their bonding and
affiliation (Heinrichs, Baumgartner, Kirshbaum, & Ehlert,
2003). Additionally enabling flexibility in male and female
role performance, the neurochemical systems that under-
pin reward learning work, in addition to OT, to regulate
attach ments in both sexes. Research has yet to fully clarify
the extent to which these neurochemical systems that regu-
late culturally masculine and feminine behavior—that is,
dominant, competitive behavior and nurturing, supportive
behavior—function differently in men and women (Bateup
et al., 2002; Broad et al., 2006).
Organizing Influences of Hormones
The responsiveness of OT, T, and C to performance of
social roles explained in the prior section can be termed
activational effects. Also, gonadal hormones, especially
androgens, have organizational effects during early devel-
opment and adolescence that produce enduring changes in
the nervous system and brain structure (Cohen-Bendahan,
van de Beek, & Berenbaum, 2005; Sisk & Zehr, 2005).
Exposure to androgens during these periods affects the
developing brain in ways that masculinize or defeminize
certain behaviors and establish differential receptivity to
particular socializing influences. Thus, organizational
effects might modulate the interactions between neuro-
chemical and psychological processes described in the
prior section, with the result that men might be disposed
toward certain activities and women toward others.
The prenatal development of males and females
diverges primarily because the testes of the developing
XY fetus secrete T during gestation. The ovaries of the XX
fetus produce minimal hormones, but the placenta exposes
both XY and XX fetuses to high levels of estrogen. Without
some exposure to T, development follows a female-
typical course. Despite some limited evidence of direct,
nonhormonal genetic effects on male and female develop-
ment (Arnold, 2004), the organizing effects that have been
clearly established involve prenatal (and early postnatal)
exposure to androgens. Because androgen receptors are
Roles Guide Behavior 639
found in several brain systems early in life, each of which
is active at different developmental time points, androgen
exposure might affect various behaviors through somewhat
separate brain mechanisms (Hines, 2009).
Extensive research has examined the effects of prenatal
androgen exposure on nonhuman primates. For example,
in rhesus monkeys, artificially increasing the exposure of
female fetuses to prenatal androgens enhanced masculine
behaviors of juvenile rough-and-tumble play and foot-clasp
mounting (a male sexual posture), whereas increasing the
exposure of male fetuses to androgen agonists decreased
these behaviors (Wallen, 1996, 2005). Prenatal androgens
had less consistent effects on other sex-typical behaviors,
including aggression, threat, and submission, which dif-
fered between normal males and normal females only in
some rearing environments and social contexts.
In human studies, naturally occurring variation in pre-
natal hormones has sometimes, although not consistently,
related to the differing behavior patterns of girls and boys
(Auyeung et al., 2009). In contrast, masculinized and
defeminized behaviors occur in girls with CAH disorder,
which involves levels of prenatal androgen exposure that
are comparable to those of normal males (Cohen-Bendahan
et al., 2005). CAH girls, more than normal girls, play with
construction and transportation toys, choose boys as play-
mates, and engage in physically aggressive, highly active,
rough-and-tumble play (Pasterski et al., 2007). In addition,
although CAH girls were found in one meta-analytical
review to perform better than normal girls on tests of men-
tal rotation, an aspect of spatial ability (Puts, McDaniel,
Jordan, & Breedlove, 2008), a subsequent meta-analysis
of the same data revealed no significant difference (Hines,
2009). Also, as adults, women with CAH are less likely to be
heterosexual than are other women (e.g., Hines, Brook, &
Conway, 2004). Such effects may be partially due to envi-
ronmental causes because the masculinization of CAH
girls’ external genitalia plausibly alerts them and their par-
ents to their atypical status. Nonetheless, parents of CAH
girls have been observed to encourage sex-typical toy play
in their CAH daughters, as well as in their other daughters
(Pasterski et al., 2005).
As we noted in the introduction to this chapter, exposure
to prenatal androgens influences children’s play preferences
and activity levels and may thereby affect their receptivity
to some socializing efforts of parents and peers (Beaulieu &
Bugental, 2006). Fathers and male peers may respond
to boys’ play in ways that promote learning of particular
social skills (Pellis & Pellis, 2007), especially those associ-
ated with the agentic, dominant performance of masculine
roles in adulthood (Pellegrini, 1995). These themes may
be elaborated further in fantasy play, which emerges by
the age of 3. Compared with girls’ play about domestic
640 Gender
situations and close relationships, boys’ play more often
involves action adventures of pursuit and conquest (Leaper &
Friedman, 2006). With increasing maturity, girls continue
to favor relational themes and boys to favor aggression and
adventure themes, often in the context of video games
and sports. Through these experiences, boys and girls
develop distinctive expectations, preferences, and abilities
(Bussey & Bandura, 1999).
In general, prenatal exposure to androgens biases the
biosocial processes that produce sex differences in some
behaviors by increasing boys’ activity levels, preferences
for active toys, and rough-and-tumble play. These factors
may orient boys toward particular socialization experiences,
especially ones that involve vigorous pursuit and physical
dominance contests. As a result of this socialization,
men may develop personal identities that are relatively
agentic, and others may expect them to act in agentic ways.
Consequently, men may be especially suited to perform
roles that require agency combined with brief bursts of
energy, strength, and speed.
INFLUENCE OF GENDER IDENTITIES
Gender roles influence people’s self-concepts and thereby
become gender identities—individuals’ sense of them-
selves as female or male. Gender identities arise because
most people accept, or internalize, at least some aspects
of cultural meanings associated with their sex—meanings
that in turn arise from the differing social roles of men and
women (Wood & Eagly, 2009). Gender identities thereby
put the culture inside the person.
People differ in the extent to which they incorporate
gender roles into their self-concepts. These individual
differences have varying origins, including socialization
experiences, role occupancies (e.g., paid occupations), and
early hormonal influences. Also, not everyone does mas-
culine and feminine in the same way—people differ in the
aspects of gender roles that they adopt. For example, men
who regard themselves as masculine could be invested
in culturally masculine traits such as aggressiveness and
dominance or in masculine interests such as football
and hunting. Historically, most research on gender iden-
tity has emphasized the agentic and communal person-
ality traits established as the core of gender role beliefs
(Bem, 1974; Spence & Helmreich, 1978). This approach
illustrates personality psychologists’ search for traits that
directly represent male and female gender and that thereby
can account for individual differences in masculine and
feminine behaviors.
Gender identities motivate responding through self-
regulatory processes. That is, people use their gender identity
as a standard against which to regulate their behavior
(Wood, Christensen, Hebl, & Rothgerber, 1997). People
who have a masculine self-concept involving traits of
dominance and assertiveness might regulate their behavior
by, for example, seeking opportunities for leadership. Self-
regulation proceeds in stages, beginning with testing the
extent to which current behavior matches self-standards
(e.g., Carver & Scheier, 2008). Closer matches produce
positive emotions and increased self-esteem, whereas mis-
matches produce negative emotions and decreased esteem.
When signaled by negative feelings, people operate on
their behavior to bring it more in line with the desired
standard. In this way, esteem and emotions constitute feed-
back about whether adjustments are necessary to meet
standards.
Illustrating such self-regulation, Wood and colleagues
(1997) first assessed the strength of participants’ gender
identities on items that evaluated, for example, the impor-
tance of being similar to the ideal man or woman in society.
Then participants imagined acting in masculine (dominant
and assertive) or feminine (warm and communal) ways.
People who were strongly identified with their sex showed
a self-evaluation boost when their vicarious experience was
congruent with that identity—that is, dominant behavior
for men and communal behavior for women. Additional
research extended these findings to everyday behavior by
having participants keep diaries of their social interactions
for a week (Witt & Wood, in press). When men acted in
masculine ways or women in feminine ways, those with
a stronger gender identity reported higher self-esteem and
more positive feelings.
According to gender schema theory (Bem, 1981), self-
regulation works not only through motivational signals of
affect and self-esteem but also through enhanced attention,
processing, and recall of information relevant to gender
standards. For example, those who are highly identified
with culturally feminine warmth and concern for others
may especially attend to, process, and recall information
relevant to these qualities in themselves and others.
Following the logic of self-regulation, role congruity
theory (Diekman & Eagly, 2008) anticipates that men and
women select into certain social roles because those roles
afford pursuit of valued goals and thereby promote positive
outcomes and well-being (Evans & Diekman, 2009). For
example, because women on average place more impor-
tance than men on caregiving goals, including in fam-
ily relationships and marriage (Cinamon & Rich, 2002),
they pursue communally demanding occupations such as
nurse and teacher (Evans & Diekman, 2009) and are more
involved in family roles (Abele, 2003).
Also in line with self-regulation, the greater importance
of close relationships for women renders their well-being

especially sensitive to relationship quality. Thus, being
married, although beneficial for both sexes’ well-being, is
associated for women with greater emotional highs, as well
as greater lows (Wood, Rhodes, & Whelan, 1989). Physical
health outcomes yield the same pattern: Both sexes benefit
from marriage, but women show especially negative out-
comes from marital distress (Kiecolt-Glaser & Newton,
2001). Also, men have been found to value employment
roles more than women (Cinamon & Rich, 2002), espe-
cially positions affording social status (Evans & Diekman,
2009), and extent of satisfaction with paid employment
tends to be more important to men’s well-being (Aldous &
Ganey, 1999). In these ways, the life roles that men and
women value influence their role pursuit and also influ-
ence how much role-related outcomes impact happiness
and life satisfaction.
With development, children learn to regulate their
behavior according to their sense of themselves as female
or male. For instance, in a study of children ranging from
2 to 4 years, only the older children anticipated feeling
better about themselves after playing with toys typical of
their own sex (Bussey & Bandura, 1992). Furthermore,
these older children’s anticipatory affective reactions pre-
dicted their subsequent toy choices.
Types of Gender Identity
The most basic type of gender identity, ordinarily found
in children as young as 2 years, is experiencing oneself
as male or female (Kohlberg, 1966; Ruble, Martin, &
Berenbaum, 2006). With this realization, young children
also tend to prefer their own sex. Because collective
identities link people to their various roles and groups,
maturation brings individuals multiple identities, based on,
for example, family status, occupation, religion, race and
ethnicity, and sexual orientation (Stewart & McDermott,
2004). Gender is not necessarily the most important of
these identities (Smith, 2007). Among schoolchildren,
for example, gender identity is more important than eth-
nic identity for members of the majority ethnicity, but the
two identities are equally important for minority ethnicities
(Turner & Brown, 2007).
Adults experience themselves as male or female when
they align themselves psychologically with their own
sex, as in, “I identify with women/men.” These collective
social identities can reflect what is normative for gender
groups in either a descriptive sense (“I am a typical guy”;
Luhtanen & Crocker, 1992) or a prescriptive sense (“I am
an ideal guy”; Wood et al., 1997). Also, given women’s
changing roles in postindustrial societies, their identities
may encompass a progressive view of women as having
careers and sharing domestic work with men or with a more
Influence of Gender Identities 641
traditional view of women as homemakers. Supporting
this distinction, women with stronger collective identity
expressed more sexist attitudes if this identity referred to
traditional rather than progressive relations between the
sexes (Becker & Wagner, 2009).
A collective identity as a man or women reflects
the classification of people into two categories, male
or female. Alternative collective gender identities also
exist—for example, intersex, intergender, pangender, and
genderqueer—all of which refer to individuals whose gen-
der identity is a combination of male and female or invokes
a third sex. And transgender rejects the biological inevi-
tability of being one sex or the other. Additional variants
depart from normative heterosexuality, including gay, bear,
fag, lesbian, butch, femme, and bisexual. In some societ-
ies, certain of these alternative identities are not rare, such
as the kathoey or ladyboy identity adopted by feminine
boys and men in Thailand, comprising about 10% of the
male population. Suggesting increasing acceptance, boys
with this identity have been assigned transgender toilet
facilities in some secondary schools (Head, 2008).
The most popular measures of gender identity assess
not collective identification with a gender group but rather
beliefs about self attributes, in particular the agentic and
communal personality traits that reflect the main compo-
nents of gender stereotypes. Specifically, personality traits
more stereotypical of one sex than the other and more
favorably evaluated in that sex constitute the items of
the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI; Bem, 1974) and
Spence and Helmreich’s (1978) closely related Personal
Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ). These measures yield
one scale of self-reported feminine, communal traits (e.g.,
warm and gentle) and another of self-reported mascu-
line, agentic traits (e.g., aggressive and self-confident).
With these two dimensions, it is possible to represent a
masculine identity of high masculinity and low femininity,
a feminine identity of high femininity and low masculinity,
and identities with similar levels of masculinity and
femininity (Bem, 1974).
Agentic and communal identities develop relatively
slowly in children. Preschool children self-attribute
primarily favorable characteristics, not gender stereotypi-
cal traits (e.g., Aubry, Ruble, & Silverman, 1999; Cowan &
Hoffman, 1986). By middle childhood, most children
ascribe gender-stereotypical personality traits to them-
selves, and this tendency grows stronger in adolescence
(Ruble et al., 2006).
Despite psychologists’ reliance on the BSRI and PAQ,
people ascribe gender-stereotypical attributes to themselves
on dimensions other than agency and communion. For
example, people also possess a gender identity based on sex-
differentiated vocations and interests (Lippa, 2001, 2005).
642 Gender
Additional facets of gender identity reflect investment
in an individual versus social sense of self. Cross and
Madson (1997) built on the cultural dimensions of individ-
ualism and collectivism to define masculine identity as an
independent sense of self highlighting individuals’ unique
attributes and feminine identity as an interdependent sense
of self highlighting relationships and group memberships.
However, other researchers parsed the interdependence
dimension into a masculine focus on oneself within teams
and organizations and a feminine focus on oneself within
relationships with close others such as friends and family
(Baumeister & Sommer, 1997; Gardner & Gabriel, 2004).
These two aspects of interdependence link identities to
the differing role occupancies of men and women,
whereby more men than women strive for status within
organizations and collectives and more women than men
invest in close relationships through their caring activities
in families and other relationships.
Group identities can emerge and fade, depending on
the context (Sinclair, Hardin, & Lowery, 2006), although
psychologists typically have treated these identities as
chronic self-attributes. Identities shift with the specifics of
the local contexts in which people interact (Burke, 2004;
Tajfel, 1978). For example, gender identity can become
salient through being a solo representative of one’s sex
in a mixed-sex group (e.g., Sekaquaptewa & Thompson,
2002). Also, gender identity varies in strength depending
on features of the situation such as the sex of an interaction
partner (e.g., Leszczynski & Strough, 2008).
Predicting Behavior From Gender Identity
Measures of gender identity are useful for research to the
extent that they predict relevant behaviors. Often they do not
predict behavior—and they should not be expected to do so.
Gender identity measures, like personality trait and attitude
measures, predict behavior successfully when the content of
the behavioral measure is compatible with the content of the
predictive measure (Ajzen, 2005; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993).
Consistent with this compatibility principle, the strength
of one’s collective identification with men or women pre-
dicts not all culturally masculine and feminine behaviors
but instead group-related phenomena such as a preference
for one’s own sex and self-stereotyping on gender stereo-
typical qualities (Wood & Eagly, 2009). Measures based on
agency and communion self-ratings, the BSRI and PAQ, are
not general-purpose predictors of all sex-related behaviors
(e.g., interest in fashion). Instead, these scales predict spe-
cifically whether people will act in agentic or communal
ways (Spence & Buckner, 2000; Taylor & Hall, 1982).
Other identity measures also predict compatible behaviors.
Gender identities involving vocational and leisure-time
interests predict the differing occupational preferences
of women and men (Lippa, 2005). Feminine relational
measures assessing one’s feelings of interdependence with
close others predict attention to and valuing of close rela-
tionships (e.g., Gabriel & Gardner, 1999; Gore, Cross, &
Morris, 2006). The logic of compatibility follows from
self-regulation: People with a strong gender identity in
one domain regulate their behavior in that domain. Thus,
people who define themselves as highly agentic act in dom-
inant, assertive ways, whereas those who define themselves
as highly interdependent bond with significant others.
In general, individuals regulate their behavior in line
with their gender identities, whether these are based on
collective male and female groups, gender-stereotypical
traits, or relational closeness to others. Through self-
regulatory mechanisms, people enact these personally
defining gender roles as they carry out such everyday roles
as parent and employee. Regulation of behavior by gen-
der identities is one facet of our biosocial model of sex
and gender. This mechanism works in conjunction with
hormonal processes and neurochemical mechanisms asso-
ciated with reward to enable successful role performance.
In line with this analysis, women high in masculinity on the
BSRI, who perceived themselves as self-directed, action
oriented, and resourceful, were likely to have higher circu-
lating T (Baucom, Besch, & Callahan, 1985). Given that T
is recruited in the service of role performance, this pattern
suggests that agentic women are sensitive to dominance
issues in daily life and recruit T as they assert domi-
nance. Other neurochemicals associated with reward also
might be implicated in the performance of gender-typical
behavior, including dopamine reactivity in the brain that
underlies the learning of preferences (Schultz, 2006).
INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS
Gender roles permeate social expectations, as well as indi-
viduals’ sense of themselves as male or female. Simply put,
we expect men to act in masculine ways and fill male-
typical roles (e.g., primary family provider) and women to
act in feminine ways and to fill female-typical roles (e.g.,
primary caretaker of children). Gender role expectations
influence behavior through their social consequences.
Conformity to gender expectations usually garners
social rewards, and nonconformity usually garners fewer
rewards and even social rejection. Social expectations
shaped by gender thereby influence social interaction.
Social constructionists refer to this process as doing
gender, as people recurrently produce behaviors stereo-
typical of their sex as they interact with others (West &
Zimmerman, 1987).

Consensual gender role expectations exert influence not
only through the beliefs and actions of specific interaction
partners but also through individuals’ expectations about
the beliefs and probable reactions of others who are not
present (Allport, 1954). Such expectations are not neces-
sarily explicit but often implicit and influential largely
outside of awareness. Also, interaction partners often are
unable or unwilling to acknowledge their gender-based
expectations and instead communicate them in subtle ways
(e.g., falling silent or standing farther away).
Social Expectations Promote
Behavioral Confirmation
People generally approve of others who conform to gender
roles and penalize others who counter them. This approval
is directed even toward young children, whose parents
tend to encourage activities and toys that are typical for
children’s sex (Lytton & Romney, 1991; Pasterski et al.,
2005). This is not to say that people favor hyperfeminized
women and hypermacho men. But conformity to gender
roles garners rewards because it validates shared beliefs
about women and men and promotes social interaction that
is easy to follow and understand.
Positive and negative sanctions for gender conformity
and deviation are evident in the prevalence of approving,
benevolent beliefs about women who conform to tradi-
tional gender roles and of disapproving, hostile beliefs
about those who violate them (Glick & Fiske, 2001). On
individual difference measures, hostile and benevolent
beliefs were correlated—that is, they were two sides of the
same coin. Thus, the people who endorsed negative beliefs
about nontraditional women (labeled hostile sexists by
Glick and Fiske, 2001) tended to be the same people who
endorsed positive beliefs about traditional women (labeled
benevolent sexists).
People commonly express hostility to various coun-
terstereotypical behaviors. Children disapprove of peers’
violations of gender norms concerning clothing, hair-
styles, and styles of play (e.g., Blakemore, 2003). Adults
react similarly in more mature domains. For example, in
small-group interaction, women who behave in a dominant
or extremely competent manner tend to lose likability and
influence (Carli, 2001; Shackelford, Wood, & Worchel,
1996). Women in supervisory roles may be penalized
for failing to attend to others’ emotions or for expressing
angry emotions (Brescoll & Uhlmann, 2008; Byron, 2007),
as well as for performing at outstanding levels in stereo-
typically masculine roles (Heilman, Wallen, Fuchs, &
Tamkins, 2004). In contrast, men, more than women, tend
to lose social status for behaving passively, unassert-
ively, anxiously, and negatively (e.g., Anderson, John,
Influence of Social Expectations 643
Keltner, & Kring, 2001), and modest and unassuming men
are viewed as insufficiently competent for leadership roles
(Rudman, 1998; Rudman & Glick, 2001). Nonetheless,
sometimes the benefits of gender nonconformity outweigh
its social costs, motivating people to act in ways that coun-
ter gender stereotypes, such as when women anticipate gen-
der prejudice (e.g., Kaiser & Miller, 2001).
People often attempt to deflect negative responses to
their nonconforming behaviors by reclaiming a conven-
tional gender identity. For example, men and women who
believed that they had performed well on a task typical
of the other sex attempted to hide their success from oth-
ers, falsely claimed success on a task typical of their own
sex, and expressed greater interest in same-sex activities
(Rudman & Fairchild, 2004). These mitigating strategies
were stronger among those who reported expecting repri-
sals from others for their gender nonconformity. Also, men
experiencing discomfort from performing the feminine
task of braiding hair successfully reduced this discomfort
by publicly claiming a conventional sexual orientation
(“I am heterosexual,” e.g., Bosson, Prewitt-Freilino, &
Taylor, 2005). Some evidence also suggests that men’s
gender identity (i.e., their collective identity or “man-
hood”) requires continual social proof and thus is more
easily threatened than women’s identity (or “womanhood”;
Vandello, Bosson, Cohen, Burnaford, & Weaver, 2008).
Instilling conformity to gender norms does not require
overt rewards and punishments. Instead, the explicit commu-
nication of stereotypical expectations by influential others
can be sufficient. In a classic demonstration, female stu-
dents shaped their self-presentations to fit the preferences
of a highly eligible male interaction partner (Zanna & Pack,
1975). When this man reported preferring women who were
traditional (vs. nontraditional), these young women pre-
sented themselves as conforming to his preferences and fur-
thermore performed worse on a test of intellectual aptitude
that was to be shared with this male partner. This stereotype
confirmation is not surprising given that these female stu-
dents anticipated meeting a desirable man who had explic-
itly stated his preferences (see the conceptual replication
with male participants in Morier & Seroy, 1994).
In the standard account, such behavioral confirmations
emerge through social perceivers forming expectancies
about an individual target based on gender stereotypes and
then behaving toward that individual as if the stereotypical
beliefs were true (Olson, Roese, & Zanna, 1996). The target
person responds so as to confirm the gender stereotype, and
the perceiver interprets the target’s behavior in line with the
expectancy. The perceiver then encodes yet another
instance of stereotype-consistent behavior and thereby
strengthens gender role expectations. Although the link
between expectancies and behavior is contingent on various
644 Gender
conditions (Olson et al., 1996), the behavioral confirmation
of gender-based expectations through this sequence serves
to maintain, propagate, and justify people’s stereotypes
about women and men.
Even without the explicit statement of gender norms,
people often conform to interaction partners’ presumed
gender stereotypical expectancies (see review by Geis,
1993). For example, in an experiment by Skrypnek and
Snyder (1982), task partners negotiated a more traditional
division of labor when they believed that their (unseen)
partner was of the other sex, regardless of their partner ’s
actual sex. In addition, lack of awareness of certain stages
in the confirmation process enhances such effects. If per-
ceivers were aware that they caused another ’s gender ste-
reotypical behavior, they would not attribute the behavior
to that person’s disposition or conclude support for gender
stereotypes. Also, if targets were aware of a perceiver ’s
stereotypical expectations, they might act to counter
instead of fulfill them (Miller & Turnbull, 1986).
Consistent with current understanding of behavioral
confirmation, these effects do not require and may even be
impaired by the explicit communication of expectations. In
the new generation of confirmation research, this insight is
shrinking the importance of explicit expectations in produc-
ing behavioral confirmation. In one study that eliminated
the necessity for perceivers’ conscious expectations, prim-
ing men to think of women as sexual objects made them
more likely to treat an individual woman applicant in a sex-
ual way during a mock job interview (Rudman & Borgida,
1995). If women respond in stereotypical ways, then the
perceivers’ initial impressions are supported (see Chen &
Bargh, 1997). Eliminating the necessity for perceiver expec-
tations altogether, subtle cues such as nonverbal behavioral
mimicry from an interaction partner could yield conformity
to gender stereotypes (Leander, Chartrand, & Wood, 2009).
Specifically, following mimicry by an interaction partner,
participants apparently increased their desire to affiliate and
therefore enhanced their conformity to gender stereotypes
that presumably were shared with their partner. Thus, mim-
icked women performed worse on a math test. These find-
ings suggest that people’s own imaginings about interaction
partners’ and others’ expectations are sufficient to promote
stereotype-consistent behavior.
Stereotype Threat
Gender expectations also influence behavior when they
are simply “in the air” and not held by any specific inter-
action partner or social audience. Because gender stereo-
types specify task abilities, they can establish performance
expectations in culturally masculine or feminine domains.
Men are expected to have advantage at masculine tasks
involving, for example, mechanics, math, and leadership
and women to excel at feminine tasks involving social
sensitivity, sewing, and emotional intelligence. When
one of these abilities is evaluated, activating expectations
about the inferior competence of one sex can impair their
performance. This phenomenon is called stereotype threat
(Steele, 1997; Steele & Aronson, 1995).
Negative performance stereotypes can be activated in
various ways immediately before a test or competition.
For example, performance decrements occurred when par-
ticipants in a laboratory experiment were told that one sex
excelled at the task in the past (e.g., Johns, Schmader, &
Martens, 2005), were presented as the solo member of their
sex in a competition (e.g., Ben-Zeev, Fein, & Inzlicht, 2005),
or were exposed to stereotypical media portrayals of their
sex (e.g., Davies, Spencer, Quinn, & Gerhardstein, 2002).
Activated gender stereotypes impair performance when
individuals become anxious about confirming the negative
stereotype in others’ eyes or in their own. This anxiety can
result in impairments in working memory (Schmader & Johns,
2003), mental intrusions (Dardenne, Dumont, & Bollier,
2007), physiological stress responses (Murphy, Steele, &
Gross, 2007), and perhaps depletion of self-control strength
(Inzlicht, McKay, & Aronson, 2006). People feel anxious
because their self-integrity is threatened by the simultaneous
activation of three conflicting beliefs (Schmader, Johns, &
Forbes, 2008): (a) the group stereotype of inferior ability (e.g.,
women cannot read maps), (b) personal identification with
the group (e.g., I am a woman), and (c) knowledge of one’s
own ability (e.g., I am good at map reading). Because these
beliefs are imbalanced only when people initially believe in
their own ability, stereotype threat is experienced most often
by people who are highly identified in a counterstereotypic
domain, including, for example, women who view them-
selves as mathematically talented.
Stereotype threat often produces a decrement in test
performance in the unfavorably stereotyped sex. For
example, women’s math test performance is sensitive to
negative ability stereotypes (e.g., Spencer, Steele, & Quinn,
1999; Steele, Spencer, & Aronson, 2002), and women’s will-
ingness to lead appears to be lessened by stereotype threat
(Davies, Spencer, & Steele, 2005). In mirror fashion, when
gender stereotypes are salient, men’s performance falters
at tasks involving social sensitivity (Koenig & Eagly,
2005), emotional intelligence (Keller & Bless, 2005), and
affective information processing (Leyens, Désert, Croizet, &
Darcis, 2000). In addition, the sex that is stereotyped as
superior in an ability can experience improved perfor-
mance, or stereotype lift, from downward comparison with
the less able group. Yet, this lift typically is weaker than the
decline in performance experienced by the unfavorably
stereotyped sex (Walton & Cohen, 2003).

Performance does not always falter when the lesser ability
of one’s group is made salient. It remains unclear whether the
mild forms of stereotype threat inherent in asking students
to note their sex on high-stakes tests such as the SAT rou-
tinely affect performance (Cullen, Waters, & Sackett, 2006;
Stricker & Ward, 2004). Also, a counterreaction of enhanced
performance can emerge among threatened individuals
who are especially confident in their own ability (Hoyt &
Blascovich, 2007). And when individuals have more than one
identity relevant to a domain, as with Asian women and math
aptitude, performance depends on which identity is salient—
Asian identity enhanced math performance, but female iden-
tity reduced it (Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady, 1999).
In general, people conform to gender role expectations
that are explicitly communicated, just implied or expected, or
merely floating in the air. Resistance is possible but unlikely
when these expectations hide out below the level of conscious
awareness. Others’ expectations work to promote role perfor-
mance in conjunction with self identities and with the hor-
monal processes and neurochemical mechanisms associated
with reward. Thus, in our three-way biosocial model empha-
sizing others’ expectations, gender identity, and hormonal
processes, a woman holding an infant might be responding
to others’ expectations and to her own identity as a nurturer.
Such close contact can activate OT and neurochemicals of
reward that further promote attachment (Taylor, 2002).
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FOR SEX
DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES
At the beginning of this chapter, we claimed that a Martian
landing anywhere on earth would puzzle over why men and
boys engage in different activities than women and girls.
That is, sex differences in everyday activities are large
enough to be readily apparent without the aid of statisti-
cal analyses or controlled research designs. Any observer
of humans’ daily lives would be struck also by variability
in sex differences across contexts. These patterns of vari-
ability depend partly on how male and female reproductive
and physical attributes facilitate or impair performance at
specific life tasks that emerge within a given society. Thus,
in a society that engages in warfare, men might display
marked physical aggression on the battlefield but much
less aggression in friendships and family relationships.
Sex Differences in Psychological Research
Many studies that have been conducted include compari-
sons of female and male behavior; thus, sex differences
were an early and continuing target of meta-analytical
integrations. Quantitative syntheses estimate the size and
Empirical Evidence for Sex Differences and Similarities 645
variability of sex differences in many aspects of social
behavior. Aggregating across all available meta-analyses
that had compared female and male social behavior,
Richard, Bond, and Stokes-Zoota (2003) concluded that
sex differences were somewhat smaller (r
.13) than
effects averaged across the entire field of social psychology
(r
.22). Yet, the average magnitude of the sex effects was
comparable to the effects in several foundational research
areas in social psychology, including attribution (r
.14)
and social influence (r
.13). Similarly, Hyde (2005,
2007) aggregated 128 meta-analytical effects representing
sex differences and similarities in personality, social, and
cognitive psychology. While noting the importance of con-
textual variation, Hyde highlighted the evidence for simi-
larities between women and men. Specifically, she termed
almost half of the meta-analytical results “small” effects,
notwithstanding the larger sex differences that emerged
with motor performance, sexuality, and aggression.
Are sex differences small? Even if they are, small does
not mean unimportant. Small effects can have substantial
impact when they reliably characterize behavior across
time and experiences (e.g., Abelson, 1985). But questions
about effect size are not answered effectively by aggre-
gating results across many meta-analyses. Such superag-
gregations of sex comparisons are not theory driven and
thus do not distinguish between the behavioral domains
that theoretically should versus should not yield sex differ-
ences. Moreover, each individual meta-analysis typically
aggregates findings across a broad behavioral category,
often collapsing across contexts and behaviors for which
theories hold that sex differences are more or less likely.
The standard result in individual quantitative synthe-
ses comparing women and men is that some studies yield
large sex differences, most yield smaller sex differences,
and a few yield reversals of the overall tendency, just as for
other phenomena in social and personality psychology. The
principle that virtually all psychological phenomena vary
across settings, methods, and participant attributes has been
labeled contextualism by McGuire (1983) and other meth-
odologists, who argue that this is the very patterning theo-
rists of social behavior are obliged to address. Researchers
can focus on the rich tapestry of difference and similar-
ity and build their theories to address this complexity. The
alternative is for researchers to bury within aggregates
the striking sex differences that people recognize in daily life
as characteristic of male or female behavior. To illustrate these
issues, we consider the bad and the good of social behavior—
that is, aggressive behavior and prosocial behavior.
Aggressive Behavior
In view of the association of agency with men, it is not
surprising that people ordinarily ascribe aggressiveness
646 Gender
more to men than to women (e.g., Williams & Best, 1990).
Aggression, as behavior intended to harm others, might
seem less related to communion. Nevertheless, the ascrip-
tion to women of passive–aggressive traits such as whiny,
complaining, and nagging suggests forms of female aggres-
sion (Spence et al., 1979; Williams & Best, 1990), espe-
cially relational acts that can wreak psychological harm.
As expected given the biosocial constraints of men’s
greater size and strength, physical aggression produced
the largest sex differences favoring men, with meta-
analytical effects as large as r
.41 (Knight, Fabes, &
Higgins, 1996; see summary in Hyde, 2005). Research with
children and adolescents yielded a similar effect favoring
boys (r
.34; Card, Stucky, Sawalani, & Little, 2008).
Much larger sex differences are found with extreme forms
of real world aggression, as reflected in crime statistics that
more men than women commit murders (r
.93), all kinds
of violent crime (r
.81), and property crime (r
.56;
U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2008).
In contrast to findings involving physical aggression,
direct verbal aggression generally produces smaller sex
differences in the male direction (e.g., Eagly & Steffen,
1986). Also, indirect forms of aggression that involve,
for example, gossiping and spreading damaging rumors
produce small meta-analytical differences in the female
direction (Archer & Coyne, 2005; Card et al., 2008). In
addition, in interactions between heterosexual intimate
partners, meta-analytical data show that physically damag-
ing aggression is male dominated but everyday, minor acts
of physical aggression (e.g., slapping) are slightly female
dominated (Archer, 2000).
The logic behind this variability lies in culturally shared
gender role beliefs. At the descriptive level, these beliefs
accurately track the variability in findings across studies.
Specifically, in Eagly and Steffen’s (1986) meta-analysis,
judges contemplated the aggressive acts examined in
each of the studies in the review. As expected, the more
likely these judges thought it would be for typical men
(vs. women) to engage in a behavior, the larger was the
behavioral sex difference in the meta-analyzed studies.
Thus, beliefs about men and women predicted the size of
the actual sex differences in aggressive acts.
Because gender role beliefs are prescriptive, as well as
descriptive, people are attentive to others’ expectations about
their aggressive behavior. For example, the usual tendency
for men to aggress more than women in a game situation
disappeared when participants were deindividuated—
that is, made anonymous to one another, thus nullifying the
effects of others’ expectations (Lightdale & Prentice, 1994).
Also, in meta-analytical data, provocation of research partici-
pants reduced the sex difference in aggression. When con-
fronted by insults or negative evaluations, women became
somewhat more aggressive than men, presumably because
such behaviors violated social norms about behaving
politely toward women (Bettencourt & Miller, 1996).
Consistent with men’s greater physical strength, the more
that female (vs. male) judges perceived acts likely to cause
harm to others and danger to themselves, the larger the sex
difference in the male direction in the original research
(see also Bettencourt & Miller, 1996). Women are thus not
expected to confront others physically in clearly dangerous
situations.
In summary, although aggression is often in the male
domain, the equation between men and aggressiveness is
most valid for physical aggression. It is illustrated dramati-
cally in extreme forms of damaging violence. However,
women and girls can sometimes be more indirectly aggres-
sive than men and boys. Also, women’s aggressiveness is
likely to equal or exceed men’s when others violate social
norms by being mean to women or when gender norms are
nullified by anonymity.
Prosocial Behavior
Consistent with gender role beliefs, sex differences in
prosocial behavior, ordinarily defined by psychologists
as acts intended to help others, depend on whether such
acts invoke communion or agency. The female gender
role’s demand for communal behavior fosters acts of caring
for others and tending to their individual needs, primarily in
close relationships. The male gender role’s demand for agen-
tic behavior can foster some forms of prosocial behavior,
especially physically challenging acts of rescuing and the
chivalrous protection of dependent others (see Eagly &
Koenig, 2006, for review; Eagly, in press).
This variability across types of prosocial behaviors is
mirrored in gender role beliefs. In a meta-analysis inte-
grating studies of varied helping behaviors (Eagly &
Crowley, 1986), judges’ estimates of the likelihood that
women versus men would engage in the behaviors thus
accurately tracked the sex differences obtained in the
studies.
Culturally feminine prosocial behavior includes com-
munally caring for and supporting others. In the United
States, for example, women comprise approximately 75%
of caregivers for older family members and friends and
approximately 63% of grandparents living with and caring
for grandchildren (U.S. Health Resources and Services
Administration, 2005). Consistent with these findings, the
moral reasoning of women (vs. men) is based somewhat
more on caring and responsibility to others (r
.14; Jaffee &
Hyde, 2000). Emotional support of others is facilitated by
the greater emotional expressiveness of women than men,
especially their more frequent and intense expressions of
joy, love, fear, and happiness (Grossman & Wood, 1993).

Also, in a meta-analysis of personality research, women’s
(vs. men’s) self-ratings indicated more tender-minded and
nurturant personalities (r
.35; Feingold, 1994).
Research has documented similar findings with chil-
dren. In Eisenberg and Fabes’s (1998) meta-analysis of pro-
social behavior, girls were slightly more helpful than boys
overall (r
.09) but more so when helping expressed
kindness and consideration (r
.21). In close relation-
ships among adults, women generally provide more sensi-
tive emotional support (see review by Burleson & Kunkel,
2006). This pattern extends to same-sex and other-sex
friendships (e.g., Rose & Rudolph, 2006) and to marital
relationships (e.g., Cutrona, 1996), especially in women’s
provision of emotional support to their spouse when it is
most needed (Neff & Karney, 2005).
Women’s caring and emotional support should be
enhanced by their tendencies to manifest empathy and
sympathy and to be sensitive to subtle cues conveying oth-
ers’ emotional states. Meta-analyses of empathy and sym-
pathy have favored girls and women, with developmental
trends showing an increase in this sex difference with age
(Eisenberg, Fabes, & Spinrad, 2006). Meta-analyses exam-
ining various forms of nonverbal sensitivity also have gener-
ally favored women and girls (Hall, 2006).
Studies of helping behavior in social psychology have
not usually addressed caring behavior in close relationships.
Instead, most studies examined brief encounters between
strangers, often in field experiments conducted in natural
settings (see meta-analysis by Eagly & Crowley, 1986).
Given that most of these studies involved bystander inter-
ventions or polite, chivalrous behaviors, it is not surpris-
ing that men helped somewhat more than women in these
studies (r
.17). The power of social norms to induce this
type of masculine behavior is revealed in the substantial
sex difference in the male direction when onlookers were
present (r
.37), compared with its absence when the
potential helpers were alone (r
.01).
Helping in these social psychological studies did not
always require assertive intervention (Eagly & Crowley,
1986). To identify behaviors requiring an active, agentic
approach, this meta-analysis separated the studies accord-
ing to whether a need merely presented itself to partici-
pants (e.g., observing that someone is ill or endangered) or
an explicit request to help was directed to them (e.g., ask-
ing for a charity contribution). Consistent with the agentic
theme of the male gender role, men were especially more
helpful than women when the need was merely presented
and the helper therefore had to take the initiative to offer
aid (r
.28), compared with when a request was made
explicitly (r
.04).
Parallel to findings on aggressive behavior, when
independent judges evaluated the studies in Eagly and
Empirical Evidence for Sex Differences and Similarities 647
Crowley’s (1986) review, men were more helpful in the
original research to the extent that women perceived help-
ing as more dangerous than did men or that masculine skills
were required (e.g., changing a tire). Consistent with these
findings, the predominance of men among helpers is espe-
cially large in the extremely dangerous forms of help-
ing that yield Carnegie Hero Medals (r
.82; Becker &
Eagly, 2004). These awards recognize public acts of
extremely risky prosocial behavior, such as saving people
from fires, drownings, attacks by animals, and assaults by
criminals. However, in a different type of extremely danger-
ous situation—the rescuing of Jews during the holocaust—
women helped as often as men. In addition, women were
represented somewhat more often than men as donators of
living kidneys, volunteers for the Peace Corps, and medical
volunteers in dangerous settings. These prosocial actions
that were not male dominated, especially holocaust rescuing,
entailed risk but rarely required highly strength-intensive
actions that can result in Carnegie Medals (Becker & Eagly,
2004). In addition, most of these actions likely involved a
mix of agentic and communal behaviors.
Conclusions About Sex Differences and Similarities
Both aggression and prosocial behavior are highly varied
domains that can yield a range of sex difference findings.
As evident from the preceding brief review, researchers’
claims about difference or similarity depend on the level at
which they choose to aggregate their data. Simple aggre-
gation of either aggressive or prosocial behavior overall
or many of its manifestations can suggest only relatively
small differences and no consistent pattern. However,
framing expectations for differences in terms of gender
roles highlights the conditions under which similarity or
difference is more likely. With this simple understanding,
psychology researchers can be as accurate as everyday per-
ceivers, whose descriptive knowledge of gender roles accu-
rately tracks the direction and magnitude of sex differences
both across different categories of behaviors (e.g., Hall &
Carter, 1999a) and across specific instances of behaviors
within such categories (Eagly & Crowley, 1986; Eagly &
Steffen, 1986).
Reaching beyond simple observations of difference
and similarity, social role theory adds the proposition that
the size and direction of sex differences in aggressive and
prosocial behaviors depend partly on whether the behaviors
require agentic attributes associated with masculinity or
communal attributes associated with femininity. Prosocial
behavior seems to be the more variable domain in terms of
clearly encompassing both communal and agentic behav-
iors. Whether the differences implied by gender roles are
manifested in behavior also depends on features of the sit-
uation (e.g., the presence of onlookers) and of individuals
648 Gender
(e.g., their gender identities, Cohn & Zeichner, 2006). In
addition, male physical prowess yields male advantage
in both aggression and prosocial behavior when actions
require physical strength or threaten physical retaliation.
Thus, men tend to be heroic helpers in emergencies and
with violent criminals’ and women are inclined to be care-
takers of children and elderly relatives and sensitive sup-
porters of spouses and friends.
Although the pattern of meta-analytical findings is gen-
erally consistent with a gender role account, most of the
research has not directly identified the proximal processes
that produce sex differences in aggression or prosocial
behavior. From our perspective, the direct precursors of
these sex differences are likely to be gendered self-concepts,
others’ expectations, and hormonal processes, with T being
especially relevant to aggressive behavior and assertive pro-
social interventions and OT pertinent to nurturing and caring
forms of prosocial behavior.
Sex Differences in Organizational Settings
In typical organizational settings, people contend with
their job roles along with their gender roles. Illustrating the
influence of these roles is a study that sampled Canadian
employees’ agentic and communal behaviors in their
workplaces (Moskowitz, Suh, & Desaulniers, 1994).
Demonstrating the influence of job roles, employees of
both sexes behaved most agentically when interacting with
a subordinate and least agentically when interacting with a
superior. Also, demonstrating the influence of gender
roles, women, regardless of their workplace status, deliv-
ered more communal behaviors, such as friendly, unself-
ish, and expressive acts, especially when interacting with
other women. Similarly, meta-analyses of research on
physicians’ interactions with their patients yielded effects
reflecting both gender roles and job roles. Specifically,
female physicians, although the same as male physicians
in providing medical information, displayed more com-
munal behaviors than the men, including more positive
talk, psychosocial counseling, emotion-focused talk, and
nodding and smiling (Roter, Hall, & Aoki, 2002). It thus
appears that agentically demanding supervisory and physi-
cian roles are sufficiently flexible to allow women to enact
them while displaying communal behavior consistent with
gender role norms.
Despite the apparent flexibility of many occupa-
tional roles, conflicts between demands of gender and
workplace roles can pose challenges. Such conflicts are not
marked for female nurses, male truck drivers, and others
employed in sex-typical occupations. However, conflicts are
more common for people in job roles dominated by the other
sex. For example, in military settings, women experience
such conflicts because effective soldiering is believed to
require possession of masculine and rejection of feminine
attributes (Biernat, Crandall, Young, Kobrynowicz, &
Halpin, 1998; Boldry, Wood, & Kashy, 2001).
Inconsistencies between gender roles and workplace
roles can produce prejudice and discrimination, which
has been studied most extensively in relation to women in
leader and manager roles (Eagly & Carli, 2007; Heilman,
2001). People commonly believe that managers and other
leaders are endowed with masculine agentic qualities of
ambition, confidence, self-sufficiency, and dominance
and less endowed with feminine communal qualities (e.g.,
Powell, Butterfield, & Parent, 2002). This “think manager–
think male” effect (Schein, 2001) is robust, despite some
recent weakening (e.g., Duehr & Bono, 2006). The incon-
gruity between beliefs about what it means to be a good
leader and what it means to be female (e.g., Eagly &
Karau, 2002) can generate the perception that women do
not have what it takes to lead. The incompatible beliefs
place female leaders in a dilemma—a double bind (Eagly &
Carli, 2007): Communal female leaders may be criti-
cized for not being agentic enough and not properly tak-
ing charge, and agentic female leaders may be criticized
for lacking communion and not being nice enough (e.g.,
Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2004; Rudman & Glick, 2001).
Illustrating the double bind, a meta-analysis of experi-
ments that varied the sex of leaders while holding constant
their other attributes showed stronger prejudice against
women leaders when they managed others in stereotypi-
cally masculine ways (Eagly, Makhijani, & Klonsky, 1992).
Thus, a male manager who acts in a forceful or assertive
manner is perceived as behaving appropriately, whereas a
female leader who behaves in exactly the same way may
be considered unacceptably pushy. To cope with the dou-
ble bind, women managers might offer a blend of mascu-
line and feminine behaviors (Eagly & Carli, 2007). This
style has proven effective at enhancing women’s influence
in small, mixed-sex discussion groups (Shackelford et al.,
1996). In general, women entering engineering and other
traditionally male fields cope through various mecha-
nisms, such as garnering social support from family and
friends outside of work settings (Richman, van Dellen, &
Wood, in press).
MALE AND FEMALE SOCIAL ROLES ARE
ROOTED IN A BIOSOCIAL REALITY
Gender roles are not arbitrary or random. Instead, they are
firmly rooted in a society’s division of labor and the social
roles filled by men and women. Up to this point, the chapter
considered how this division shapes the proximal, immediate
 Male and Female Social Roles Are Rooted in a Biosocial Reality 649
causes of sex differences and similarities. In brief, from
observation of women’s and men’s activities, people infer
the attributes of each sex. These gender role beliefs in turn
influence behavior through the trio of proximal causes that
we considered, including hormonal changes, self-regulation
of identities, and social expectations. But what are the
origins of the human division of labor? In the nomological
network of gender constructs, this question addresses the
distal, evolutionary causes of male and female behavior.
The origins of the division of labor can be traced partly
to humans’ evolved capacities to invent new solutions to
adaptive problems and to share these innovations through
complex forms of social learning that include teaching,
imitation, and conformity. With these capacities, cultural
knowledge, including beliefs about female and male roles,
cumulates with modifications across generations and cul-
tures. Humans’ extended juvenile period further favors the
transmission of cultural knowledge. Children engage in
exploratory play and practice female and male roles, and
societies socialize boys and girls by encouraging skills
and preferences suited to the prevailing division of labor.
Variability in the roles of women and men occurs within
the framework of the sexes’ physical and reproductive
attributes (Wood & Eagly, 2002). Specifically, women
bear and nurse infants, and men have greater size, upper-
body strength, and speed. These attributes organize behav-
ioral and psychological sex differences and similarities
across societies. The specific pattern of female and male
behavior in a society emerges from the biosocial interac-
tion between socioeconomic and cultural factors and the
sexes’ physical and reproductive attributes. This interaction
influences behavior because some activities are more effi-
ciently accomplished by one sex than the other, depending
on societal conditions. Although these differences in
physical characteristics and reproductive activities do not
apply to all men or women (e.g., some women are taller or
stronger than some men), social norms emerge that support
the performance of tasks by the more efficient sex and dis-
courage their performance by the other sex.
Women’s Reproductive Activities and Men’s Size,
Strength, and Speed
Women’s reproductive activities are especially important in
shaping female and male social roles. Because women are
responsible for gestating, nursing, and caring for infants,
they perform childcare roles across societies (Barry &
Paxson, 1971). In societies without effective birth control
technology, fertile women on average have a child every
3.7 years and nurse each child for 2.8 years, with frequent
suckling being the norm (Huber, 2007; Sellen, 2007). These
activities limit women’s ability to perform certain other
tasks, especially those that require speed, uninterrupted
periods of activity and training, or long-distance travel away
from home. Yet, reproductive activities have less impact on
women’s roles in societies with low birthrates, much less
reliance on lactation for feeding infants and young children,
and more nonmaternal care of young children. These condi-
tions hold in postindustrial societies.
Men’s larger size and greater upper-body strength and
speed also shape the division of labor. In addition, social-
ization channels boys’ masculinized play preferences and
high activity levels to hone males’ skills in physically
intensive activities. Because of these intrinsic differences
in size, strength, speed, and activity level, the average
man is more likely than the average woman to perform
efficiently tasks that demand brief bursts of force and upper-
body strength. In foraging, horticultural, and agricultural
societies, these tasks include hunting large animals, plow-
ing, and conducting warfare (Murdock & Provost, 1973).
Nonetheless, some tasks usually performed by women
require considerable strength, including fetching water,
carrying children, and doing laundry (Mukhopadhyay &
Higgins, 1988). Whatever the advantages are of men’s
ability to execute highly strength-intensive tasks, these
attributes have less effect on role performance in postin-
dustrial and other societies in which few occupational roles
demand these attributes.
Were men’s size and strength sculpted by sexual selec-
tion pressures? Perhaps ancestral males who were larger,
stronger, and more aggressive had better fitness outcomes
because they were able to compete with other males for
access to many mates. Some researchers have argued that
sexual selection pressures organized human psychology
and physical attributes in these ways (Kenrick, Maner, &
Li, 2005; see Neuberg, Kenrick, & Schaller, volume 2).
However, comparative research with primates suggests
that differences between men and women require a more
complex explanation. Evaluated in relation to other anthro-
poid primate species, humans proved to have relatively
“low” male–female dimorphism in both body weight and
canines (i.e., the size and shape of teeth; Plavcan & van
Schaik, 1997, p. 351). Even though across all primate
species greater bodily dimorphism was associated with
polygynous mating and male–male competition, dimor-
phism at the low levels existing in humans “can be found
among species with various mating systems and competi-
tion levels” (Plavcan, 2000, p. 338). It follows that the rela-
tively small amount of bodily dimorphism in humans does
not imply sexual selection for particular psychological or
physical characteristics. Also undermining sexual selection
accounts is evidence that both size and canine dimorphism
were likely influenced by selection of females, as well as
males (Plavcan & van Schaik, 2005; Wood & Eagly, 2002).
650 Gender
Selection pressures on females are especially plausible
given that the decreasing size dimorphism as homi-
nids evolved from the earlier Australopithecus to Homo
was due to an increase in the size of females relative to
males (McHenry & Coffing, 2000).
In general, human bodily dimorphism follows from a
complex set of factors and cannot be adequately explained
merely by sexual selection pressures involving male com-
petition and female choice. Also, this dimorphism does not
imply that any particular psychological sex differences are
characteristic of humans as a species or caused by sexual
selection pressures on males (e.g., competition among males
for sexual access to females). Instead, the distal, evolution-
ary causes of male and female psychology lie in the ways
that men’s physical attributes and women’s reproductive
activities interact with sociocultural conditions. As we have
argued, the resulting division of labor and associated gender
role beliefs in turn frame the interactions among hormonal
processes, self-regulatory mechanisms, and social expecta-
tions that produce sex differences in behavior.
Evolutionary Origins of
Human Cultural Variation
The specific roles that men and women perform in the divi-
sion of labor vary across societies partly because humans
developed abilities to innovate and to engage in complex
forms of social learning and knowledge sharing. These
capacities also have evolutionary origins: They developed
because they solved problems of reproduction and survival.
Specifically, humans and their ancestors became increas-
ingly adept at responding with behavioral flexibility and
generating cultural solutions to variability in evolutionary
environments (Potts, 1998; Richerson & Boyd, 2005).
The extraordinary variability in ancestral environ-
ments was due partly to environmental changeability in
the late Pleistocene climate. The increasing climate varia-
tion over the last 3 million years represented major shifts
in vegetation, water, and other resources that sometimes
emerged abruptly between periods of relative stability
(e.g., Ditlevsen, Ditlevsen, & Andersen, 2002). Diversity
in adaptive conditions also arose from the piecemeal devel-
opment of human attributes, each constellation of which
yielded unique selection pressures on human ancestors
(Foley, 2007). Because the suite of uniquely human attri-
butes developed in fits and starts, human evolution was
marked by a sequence of significant changes (e.g., develop-
ment of stone tools followed by growth in human societies)
and thus of adaptive problems to be solved. Additionally
contributing to diversity in adaptive conditions, humans
engage in extensive niche construction through which they
alter the environments in which they live (Odling-Smee,
Laland, & Feldman, 2003). Niche construction plausibly
accelerated the pace of humans’ environmental change
by promoting the development of new technologies,
resources, and social organizations that supported the eco-
logical and geographical expansion of humans across the
globe (Sterelny, 2003).
By developing mechanisms for innovation and intensive
social learning, ancestral humans developed the capacity
for a cumulative form of culture that accrues modifications
over time. As illustrated by clothing manufacture, one per-
son or group initially cut and draped hides or skins, and
others subsequently modified this practice by sewing
and perhaps adding woven materials. Such simple con-
struction was then adopted by others, possibly for genera-
tions and only eventually modified further. This process
depends on several evolved capacities, including initial
innovation of an artifact or practice, faithful cultural trans-
mission that works as a sort of ratchet to retain that knowl-
edge (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005),
and cumulative modifications of the original. The human
flexibility inherent in this cultural progression does not
imply that the mind is a blank slate. Instead, humans pos-
sess a suite of cognitive and social abilities that enable the
production and sharing of novel solutions to the challenges
of reproduction and survival.
The idea that social learning evolved as an adaptive
response to changing environments is buttressed by the
evidence that even in nonhuman species the relations
between males and females are responsive to some extent
to social learning, despite their more constraining adapta-
tions to specific ecologies and climates. Through social
and sexual interaction, individuals in many species learn
basic capacities such as discriminating between males and
females, a precondition for mating with a particular sex
(Woodson, 2002), and learn about the range of attributes
of potential mates (Dukas, 2008). Socially learned infor-
mation complements genetically coded preferences and
behavior patterns, allowing animals to fine-tune behavior
to local circumstances.
Socialization in Humans
Opportunities for social learning are extensive in humans
because their relatively long juvenile period allows child-
hood play and socialization to prepare children for the
adult roles of their society. As already noted at various
points in this chapter, socialization enlists various cogni-
tive and social learning processes; it emanates from par-
ents, the extended family, peers and other community
members, media, religion, and other social institutions.
Play and socialization enable children to acquire skills and
preferences compatible with sex-typical social roles. For
 Male and Female Social Roles Are Rooted in a Biosocial Reality 651
example, as shown by Barry, Bacon, and Child’s (1957)
classic study of child rearing in 110 cultures, in most of the
societies, girls were encouraged more than boys to be nur-
turant. Also, the structuring of childhood activities to give
girls greater practice in nurturing was a clear-cut finding
in the Six Cultures Project, which involved the collection
of extensive data on children’s lives in diverse cultures
(Whiting & Edwards, 1988; Whiting & Whiting, 1975).
Amplifying these classic cross-cultural investigations,
Lytton and Romney’s (1991) meta-analysis of studies of
parents’ differential treatment of girls and boys yielded the
clearest evidence for gender-stereotypical play, games, and
chores. Such play activity generally models and provides
tutelage in adult roles; for example, doll play models car-
ing for children, and play with action figures models more
violent and warlike activity. Also, the common tendency of
parents to assign household chores such as lawn mowing
and kitchen work on the basis of their children’s sex pro-
vides apprenticeship in sex-typical adult roles.
Whether parents encourage the development of sex-
typical personality attributes such as warmth and aggres-
siveness has remained more ambiguous (Lytton & Romney,
1991). Some have argued that parents may not convey
such qualities explicitly but instead do so subtle ways—
for example, by noting and contrasting female and male
categories (e.g., Gelman, Taylor, & Nguyen, 2004). Obser-
vational learning is an ongoing feature of family life as
well; parents’ and other family members’ own behavior
and activities convey adult roles and sex-differentiated
behavior patterns to children.
Through these various socialization experiences, girls
and boys develop self-efficacy beliefs that they can engage
in behavior typical of their sex and develop gender iden-
tities incorporating sex-typical attributes. Such beliefs
enable children to administer self-praise or self-criticism
when they conform to their personal standards for gender-
appropriate behavior (Bussey & Bandura, 1999). Also,
distinctive boy and girl cultures emerge, enhanced by con-
siderable voluntary sex segregation in childhood (Maccoby,
1998). As a result, boys and girls tend to develop the skills
and preferences that equip them to enact their society’s
division of labor.
Evolutionary Accounts of Sex Differences in
Human Behavior
A biosocial evolutionary theory provides an organizing
framework to understand sex differences and similarities
in behavior (Wood & Eagly, 2002, 2007). From this per-
spective, humans’ capacity for innovation and social learn-
ing enabled flexibility in the behavior and social roles of
men and women, within the constraints that followed from
men’s physical attributes and women’s reproductive activi-
ties. We illustrate this biosocial interaction by analyzing the
conditions under which men and women express particular
mate preferences and societies develop patriarchal social
structures.
Mate Preferences
Mate preferences are inherently closely linked to evolu-
tionary processes because differential reproduction, along
with survival selection, drives evolutionary outcomes. In
our analysis, these preferences vary as women and men
attempt to maximize their outcomes given the prevailing
division of labor and gender ideology. In demonstration
of how this works, Eagly and Wood (1999) reanalyzed the
data from Buss’s (1989) study of the mate preferences of
young adults from 37 diverse, primarily urbanized, cash-
economy cultures. In societies with a strong division of
labor between male providers, and female homemakers,
women were more likely to prefer a mate with resources
who could be a good provider, and men were more likely
to prefer a mate who was a skilled homemaker and child
caretaker (see also Lippa, 2007). This marital system of a
good provider paired with a domestic worker also gener-
ated a spousal age difference, given that older men were
more likely to have acquired resources and younger women
without resources were more likely to value marriage and
older partners with resources.
The importance of the marital division of labor to these
mate preferences is consistent with experiments in which
envisioning oneself as a future homemaker caused partici-
pants of both sexes to increase their preference for a mate
with good provider qualities and older age, compared with
envisioning oneself as a future family provider (Eagly,
Eastwick, & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2009). Analogously,
within each of nine nations, more traditional gender ideol-
ogy, as manifested in individuals’ sexist attitudes toward
women or men, was associated with conventional sex-typing
of mate preferences—that is, men’s preferences for mates
with homemaking skills and younger age and women’s for
mates with provider skills and older age (Eastwick et al.,
2006). And sex-typical courtship roles may directly influence
mate preferences. The agentic act of physically approaching
a potential romantic partner, a behavior that is normatively
more expected of men than women, increased students’
attraction to potential partners and reduced their selectivity
in a speed-dating study (Finkel & Eastwick, 2009).
Additional evidence that mate preferences emerge flex-
ibly from the division of labor comes from Sweeney’s
(2002) investigation of cross-temporal changes within the
U.S. population in the relation between economic pros-
pects and marriage formation. The traditional tendency
for higher earnings to increase the likelihood of marriage
652 Gender
for men but not women has changed over time as earnings
have become more important for women’s marital pros-
pects. As a result, the relation between earning and mar-
riage is now similar for men and women. Also, the age gap
in first marriages in the United States has declined from
husbands being 2.8 years older than wives in 1940 to 1.8
years in 2005 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2006). The findings
of variability in mate preference suggest flexibility in
response to current conditions.
Patriarchy
Societies also vary in whether they have a social hierarchy
in which men have more status and power than women, with
patriarchy becoming more widespread as societies devel-
oped greater complexity (Wood & Eagly, 2002). In contrast,
some evolutionary scientists have argued that early humans
evolved in the context of patriarchy fueled by males’ desire
for paternity certainty and the importance of male hunting
and provisioning (e.g., Kaplan & Robson, 2002; Sidanius &
Pratto, 1999). Contrary to this view of human evolution,
recent evidence supports the survival value of female coali-
tions in early human societies, with mothers garnering help
from grandmothers and female kin, as well as from pair-
bonded men (e.g., Opie & Power, 2008).
As societies advanced and human activities became
more specialized, patriarchal relations emerged from men’s
greater upper-body strength and speed giving them facility
to perform physically demanding activities (e.g., warfare
and plow technology) that can confer decision-making
power, authority, and access to resources. Patriarchy also
emerged when women’s reproductive activities interfered
with performing the activities that yielded the most status
and power in a society. Although women combined their
reproductive responsibilities with gathering in foraging
societies, gestation and lactation limited their participation
in the newly emerging roles (e.g., blacksmith and warrior)
that required intensive specialized training, acquisition
of complex skills, and extended, uninterrupted periods of
task performance (Huber, 2007). With little participation
in such activities, women lacked influence outside of the
household and acquired few resources valuable for trade in
the broader economy. Because simple economies in which
people subsist by nomadic foraging lacked the special-
ized roles that gave some subgroups power over others,
especially men over women, the contrasting physical and
reproductive attributes of the sexes had weaker influence
on power and status in such societies, which were gener-
ally more egalitarian (e.g., Salzman, 1999).
In summary, ancestral humans evolved a suite of social
and cognitive skills that, along with a long juvenile period,
promoted flexible performance of male and female roles. This
flexibility was structured by men’s physical attributes and
women’s reproductive activities, such that both women and
men more efficiently performed certain roles given the con-
ditions of their society. Therefore, mate preferences varied
with the division of labor within a society and with indi-
viduals’ endorsement of that division. Patriarchy emerged
with the development of social roles, assumed largely by
men, that provided privileged access to power and author-
ity. Thus, the evolutionary origins of men’s and women’s
role performance took the form of a biosocial interaction
between the differing physical attributes and reproduc-
tive activities of the sexes and the local socioeconomic,
cultural, and ecological conditions.
TEMPORAL AND CULTURAL CHANGE
IN SEX DIFFERENCES
Variation over time and across cultures in sex differences
in psychological dispositions and behaviors should reflect
changes in women’s and men’s social roles. Simply put,
as the division of labor changes, the demands on women
and men change. Gender role beliefs mirror the changing
content of each sex’s roles and in turn influence gender
identities and stereotypical social expectations.
Given that role change is linked to psychological change,
the apron-wearing homemakers enshrined in U.S. situa-
tion comedies of the mid-20th century were psychologi-
cally different from the uniformed or professionally attired
working women of the 21st century. To understand these
differences, we first outline the U.S. sociodemographic
shifts that have placed many women in formerly male-
dominated roles yet largely retained women’s participation
in childcare and other forms of caring for others. Then we
evaluate cross-cultural variation in men’s and women’s
roles and in the attributes of each sex. This discussion sets
the stage to analyze the equality of men and women in the
Summary section of the chapter.
Variation in the United States Over Time
Traditionally, men’s labor force participation was much
higher than women’s. In the United States since the mid-
20th century, women greatly increased and men slightly
decreased their employment, with women’s labor force par-
ticipation nearly doubling in the last half of the century (e.g.,
Eagly & Carli, 2007). By 2009, the labor force participation
of Americans 20 years and older was 61% for women and
75% for men (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009). In
terms of hours on the job per week between 1965 and 2003,
employed men’s work declined by more than 6 hours,
whereas employed women’s increased by more than 3 hours
(Aguiar & Hurst, 2007). Yet, the traditional sex difference

remains in weakened form. From 2003 to 2006, even when
men and women filled the same roles of being married, par-
ents, and employed full time, men devoted 1.25 hours to
their jobs for every hour devoted by women and enjoyed
1.30 hours of leisure and sport for every hour enjoyed by
women (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2008b).
Sex segregation in the workplace also declined over
this period (Tomaskovic-Devey et al., 2006), with women
increasing substantially in professional occupations and
especially in managerial occupations (Wootton, 1997).
Women now constitute 51% of individuals in manage-
ment, professional, and related occupations (U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics, 2008a).
Other sociodemographic shifts include the increas-
ing education of women, who earned 58% of bachelor ’s
degrees in 2006 versus 43% in 1970 (U.S. National Center
for Education Statistics, 2007a, 2007b). Strikingly, women
earned 46% of all doctoral degrees in the United States
in 2006, an increase from 25% in 1977 (Welch, 2008). In
addition, patterns of course taking have changed, with
high school girls as likely as boys to take calculus and
women earning 48% of undergraduate degrees in math-
ematics (Hyde, Lindberg, Linn, Ellis, & Williams, 2008).
Women and girls now also participate more in sports,
with women occupying 45% of Division 1 collegiate
athletic positions in 2006 compared with 31% in 1992
(National Collegiate Athletic Association, 2008). With
these female inroads into the formerly male-dominated
domains of management and professions, higher education,
mathematics, and sport, more women are entering roles
that require agentic behavior and quantitative competence.
Some research indicates that women are increasing
in agency, consistent with their changing social roles.
A meta-analysis of self-reported agentic traits from 1973
to 1993 found that the sex difference decreased over time;
specifically, agency rose for both sexes but especially
among women (Twenge, 1997). Similarly, a meta-analysis
that focused more narrowly on the personality traits of
assertiveness and dominance found little change in men,
but women’s scores rose from 1931 to 1945, dropped from
1946 to 1967, and rose again from 1968 to 1993 (Twenge,
2001), apparently mirroring 20th-century fluctuations in
women’s employment roles. However, other research has
found that, despite the increase in both sexes’ agency, men
are still higher (e.g., Feingold, 1994; Lueptow, Garovich-
Szabo, & Lueptow, 2001). In general, the direction and
magnitude of the sex difference may depend on what spe-
cific aspect of self-reported agency is being evaluated.
Traditional sex differences favoring men may still be pres-
ent in some aspects of agency, whereas other aspects favor
women (see Costa, Terracciano, & McCrae, 2001, for
male–female comparisons on specific facets of Big Five
Temporal and Cultural Change in Sex Differences 653
personality traits). Additional complexities enter when
researchers compare the variabilities of male and female
test scores, in addition to mean differences. Although
the classic hypothesis of greater male variability enjoys
some support (e.g., Archer & Mehdikhani, 2003; Johnson,
Carothers, & Deary, 2008), causation continues to be
debated among theories emphasizing sexual selection,
sampling artifacts, and differential opportunities for devel-
oping abilities and traits.
Also linking women’s personal attributes to their employ-
ment, research has shown that both full-time employment
and employment in higher-prestige occupations predicted
U.S. mothers’ self-reported agency (Kasen, Chen, Sneed,
Crawford, & Cohen, 2006). Among German university
graduates of both sexes, self-reported agency predicted
career success, which in turn enhanced agency (Abele,
2003). Women’s increasing agency includes ambition for
careers outside of the home. In multiple surveys of college
freshmen conducted between 1966 and 2006, the career
goals of men and women converged, primarily because
of women’s increased aspiration for traditionally male-
dominated careers (Pryor, Hurtado, Saenz, Santos, & Korn,
2006). In addition, among high school seniors in 2004,
slightly more women (93%) than men (90%) rated “being
successful at work” as an important life value, indicating
a reversal from the greater male emphasis on this value in
the 1970s (U.S. National Center for Education Statistics,
2007a, 2007b). In a meta-analysis of the attributes valued
in jobs, many sex differences weakened over time among
adults in similar occupations, including the traditionally
greater male preferences for leadership, promotions, and
autonomy (Konrad, Ritchie, Lieb, & Corrigall, 2000).
The changes in the roles of men and women since the mid-
20th century are not symmetrical. Although women have
been moving into many traditionally male-dominated occu-
pational roles, traditionally female-dominated roles involving
caretaking of others continue to be female dominated.
Women still are the majority in occupations such as elemen-
tary school teacher, social worker, and nurse that emphasize
caring for others or communal characteristics more gener-
ally (Cejka & Eagly, 1999; England et al., 2002; U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics, 2008a). Women also continue to take
primary responsibility for childcare and other household
service work, despite some increase in men’s childcare and
housework and a decrease in women’s housework (Aguiar &
Hurst, 2007; Bianchi et al., 2006). From 2003 to 2006, even
for men and women who fill the same role—married par-
ents who were employed full time, women devoted 1.5 hours
to childcare for every hour devoted by men, as well as 1.5
hours to other household work for every hour devoted by
men (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2008b). Less equality
prevails when mothers are employed part time or not at all.
654 Gender
Consistent with this continuity in women’s caretaking
of others, the sex difference in communal orientation has
remained relatively unchanged over time. In a meta-analysis
of self-reported personality characteristics, communal
characteristics were fairly stable from 1973 to 1993
(Twenge, 1997). The continuation of higher levels of self-
reported communion in women than men also was present
in a meta-analysis of self-reports of caring (or “tender-
minded”) personality traits (Feingold, 1994), as well as
in a single investigation spanning 1974 to 1997 (with evi-
dence of increasing female communion; Lueptow et al.,
2001). Life goals concerning family also have retained tra-
ditional sex differences—for example, among high school
seniors in 2004, more women (53%) than men (45%) rated
“having children” as an important life value (U.S. National
Center for Education Statistics, 2007a, 2007b).
Sex differences also were stable across time in communal-
related values and attitudes. Women, more than men,
valued the welfare of others in the 1970s, and this effect
persisted in the 1990s (Beutel & Marini, 1995). From
1973 to 1998, women’s (vs. men’s) stronger endorse-
ment of socially compassionate social policies (e.g., sup-
port for disadvantaged groups) showed no change (Eagly,
Diekman, Johannesen-Schmidt, & Koenig, 2004). Also
stable over time was women’s greater endorsement of tradi-
tional morality (e.g., disapproval of divorce or extramarital
relations), which upholds communal-oriented institutions,
such as marriage, the family, and organized religion.
In general, although women have entered the workplace
in large numbers, they continue to be underrepresented in
the more lucrative positions and in positions that confer high
levels of authority (e.g., Helfat, Harris, & Wolfson, 2006).
Thus, despite women’s increasing agency, sex differences
remain in some agentic attributes and beliefs. Less evi-
dence exists of change in sex-differentiated attributes and
beliefs related to communal qualities, perhaps due to the
continuing female predominance in caretaking roles, both
in the family and in the labor force. These trends closely
match people’s everyday understanding of changes over
time in sex differences. Research on the stereotypical traits
ascribed to women and men of the past, present, and future
showed that social perceivers view the sex difference in
communal qualities as remaining relatively constant over
time, even though they view the sex difference in agency as
eroding as women gain more of these qualities (Diekman &
Eagly, 2000).
Despite the role changes of recent years, overall stereo-
types about women and men have apparently not under-
gone marked shifts (Lueptow et al., 2001). Although
conclusions about change of gender stereotypes require
additional research evidence, the idea that these beliefs
change more slowly than roles is consistent with the
concept of cultural lag (Brinkman & Brinkman, 1997;
Ogburn, 1922/1964). Traditional representations of women
also continue, despite the addition of nontraditional rep-
resentations. Not only does cultural lore still feature fairy-
tale princesses and ecstatic brides, but people’s personal
encounters with occupants of roles such as primary care-
taker and teacher of children also are overwhelmingly with
women. Traditional assumptions about gender are perpetu-
ated in various other ways, such as being embedded in lan-
guage use and grammatical forms (e.g., Stahlberg, Braun,
Irmen, & Sczesny, 2007).
Variation Across Cultures
Just as the psychology of women has changed across time
in the United States, with changes mainly in women’s roles,
the values and attributes of men and women should differ
across cultures depending on the distribution of women
and men into social roles. That is, the attributes and beliefs
of women and men should take a traditional form in societ-
ies with greater male–female inequality. In such societies,
women generally have limited participation in the paid
labor force and are otherwise restricted by, for example,
having less access to education than men and by the segre-
gation of women and men into different life roles.
Across societies, a patriarchal division of labor is reflected
in gender role beliefs (Inglehart & Norris, 2003). For exam-
ple, across 19 world societies, women’s greater access to
resources and power was associated with lesser sexism in
the form of both benevolent beliefs about traditional women
and hostile beliefs about nontraditional women (Glick &
Fiske, 2001). Moreover, these hostile and benevolent beliefs
tended to coincide in nations (Glick et al., 2000). Gender role
beliefs about men similarly depend on the division of labor,
with people believing more in men’s inherent dominance in
patriarchal societies (Glick et al., 2004). Providing causal
evidence that women’s labor force participation influences
gender role beliefs, Seguino (2007) evaluated, for a sample of
world societies, the effects of increases in women’s share
of economic activity. Across societies, the social experience of
women moving into paid employment increased beliefs in
equality between the sexes.
Sex differences in self-ratings on personality attributes
and abilities across cultures are difficult to interpret because
they can be influenced by various features of women’s and
men’s roles. In particular, the extent of segregation of men
and women into social roles likely influences the com-
parison standard that people use to evaluate themselves
and others (see the discussion of shifting standards in the
earlier section titled Accuracy of Gender Stereotypes). In
traditional cultures in which occupational and other roles
tend to be segregated by sex, men and women would judge

their own and others’ psychological attributes through a
comparison with salient others, who are mainly of the
same sex. Thus, a man might rate himself as only moder-
ately assertive because he is comparing himself with other
men, who are generally somewhat assertive in his society.
In contrast, in more egalitarian societies with less sex-
segregated roles, a man might compare himself with indi-
viduals of both sexes and conclude that he is relatively
assertive. The result of this shifting comparison standard
is that sex differences should appear to be smaller in less
egalitarian, more hierarchical societies in which individu-
als compare themselves with their own sex (Guimond et al.,
2007; see also Lippa, in press).
In line with this shifting standards prediction, several
studies have found stronger sex differences in self-reports
and other reports in more egalitarian societies. For example,
across world societies, men place greater value on power,
social status, and prestige, whereas women place greater
value on benevolence and concern for the welfare of close
others. These sex differences were larger in more egalitar-
ian societies (Schwartz & Rubel, 2005). Self-reported emo-
tions showed a similar pattern across cultures, with larger
sex differences in less traditional societies (Fischer &
Manstead, 2000). In addition, in comparisons of personality
traits across societies, women are generally higher in neu-
roticism, agreeableness, warmth, and openness to feelings,
whereas men are higher in assertiveness and openness to
ideas. These personality differences were more pronounced
in more egalitarian societies (Costa et al., 2001). A simi-
lar pattern was found for observers’ ratings of men’s and
women’s personality traits (McCrae et al., 2005).
This variation in self-reported personality traits across
cultures is less congenial with an alternative explanation in
which, “in the ancestral past, as hunter gatherers, men and
women naturally developed sexually selected differences
in personality traits such that men were more risk taking
and dominance seeking and women were more nurturing”
(Schmitt, Realo, Voracek, & Allik, 2008, pp. 178–179).
Supposedly, more prosperous, egalitarian societies are sup-
portive of the expression of these innate sex differences
because they are similar in crucial aspects to the egalitar-
ian, hunter–gatherer societies in which humans evolved.
However, the pattern of change in the sex differences is
not consistent with this claim. Specifically, in the data from
Schmitt et al., the larger sex differences in egalitarian soci-
eties were primarily due to men scoring lower on neuroti-
cism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, as well as on
extroversion, which reflects men’s view of themselves as
less depressed and anxious, cooperative and outgoing, dis-
ciplined and dutiful, and friendly and assertive in egalitarian
societies than patriarchal societies. Thus, this pattern of sex
differences suggests that a “male slacker” effect is emerging
Summary 655
in the more egalitarian societies, not an enhancement of
presumably sexually selected personality traits of risk tak-
ing and dominance. However, such data remain clouded by
possible shifting judgment standards across cultures.
In summary, variation over time and across cultures in
the roles of men and women corresponds to variation
in sex-typical psychological traits. As women have entered
the workforce in increasingly large numbers in postindus-
trial societies, they have acquired agentic traits so that they
have become more comparable to men in these qualities.
In more traditional societies with greater sex segregation,
fewer sex differences are evident in self-rated traits and
abilities, presumably because these men and women tend
to judge themselves in relation to salient others who are
of the same sex. The logic of the shifting sex differences
in psychological data over time and cultures thus derives
from changes in men’s and women’s roles in society.
SUMMARY
Psychologists’ debates about sex differences and simi-
larities and their causes have important implications for
people’s lives, especially for women’s potential to attain
equality in power and status in industrialized societies.
This equality issue lurks in the background of many debates
about gender, especially given that the second-wave feminist
movement fueled the upsurge of gender research that began
in the 1970s. Relevant to equality are some researchers’
claims that women and men are similar on most conse-
quential psychological attributes (Hyde, 2005). If similarity
is present, few intrinsic psychological barriers to equality
exist. The implication is that both sexes should have access
to all societal roles and that behavioral differences held in
place by societal expectations, gender identities, and hor-
monal influences are likely to erode over time.
One prominent example of sex similarities is the equiv-
alent performance of girls and boys on standardized tests
of math achievement in grade school through high school
(Hyde et al., 2008). Additionally provocative are contem-
porary findings of female advantage in domains that tradi-
tionally advantaged men—for example, in leadership styles
associated with effective management (Eagly, Johannesen-
Schmidt, & van Engen, 2003) and in performance in certain
task-oriented groups (Wood, 1987). Reports of null sex dif-
ferences and of female advantage have been enthusiastically
received by those who are committed to furthering gender
equality. The reaction is understandable, given that evi-
dence of male superiority in traditionally male-advantage
domains tends to disqualify women in relation to attractive
roles and opportunities and even to justify unequal treat-
ment under the law (Barnett & Rivers, 2004; Hyde, 2005).
656 Gender
In contrast to these concerns about impediments to
women’s occupancy of masculine roles, equality can be
compromised by women’s privileged access to feminine
roles. Evidence of female advantage on communal attri-
butes has such implications, given that nurturance and
concern for other people are compatible with women’s tra-
ditional caretaking roles in the family and in communally
demanding occupations. Examples include Gilligan’s
(1982) claims that women take a caring approach to moral
reasoning and Taylor and colleagues’ (2000; Taylor, 2002)
proposal that women react to stress not by fight or flight
but by tending children and befriending allies. Other
reports have highlighted women’s greater social sensitiv-
ity (Hall, 2006) and emotional intelligence (e.g., Brackett,
Rivers, Shiffman, Lerner, & Salovey, 2006).
Psychologists have offered various opinions about
whether sex differences that remain in agentic and commu-
nal traits are due to socialization and situational influences
or to intrinsic, hardwired causes deriving from genetic dif-
ferences between the sexes. Advocating for environmental
influences are many developmental psychologists (e.g.,
Bussey & Bandura, 2004), plus social constructionists in
many social science fields (e.g., Marecek, Crawford, &
Popp, 2004). Advocating for intrinsic causes are evolu-
tionary psychologists who trace sex differences in modern
human psychology to sexual selection pressures on human
ancestors (e.g., Browne, 2002; Kenrick, Trost, & Sundie,
2004; Schmitt et al., 2008; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).
Our biosocial theory falls into neither of these two
camps. Our review of the empirical evidence identified
sex differences in several important personal attributes and
behaviors, especially in natural settings. These differences
take various forms, depending on men’s and women’s
roles in society. The differences between male and female
behavior that emerge in daily life reflect the immediate,
proximal causes of hormonal regulation, self-regulation by
gender identities, and social regulation by others’ sanctions
and rewards. Women’s nurturing thus arises from the inclu-
sion of caring qualities in their personal identities, as well
as social expectations that they manifest such behavior,
both of which recruit supportive neurochemical processes
(e.g., increased OT and mechanisms of reward). In essence,
female and male psychology is not fixed but emerges from
interactions across multiple biological and sociocultural
factors. The varying forms of this interaction depend on
the division of labor within a society and the ways in which
boys and girls are socialized into sex-typical roles.
The psychological attributes of men and women vary
across cultures and time periods depending on the demands
of their social roles: Women more than men have under-
gone role transitions on a major scale in the United States
and many other industrialized nations. Therefore, changes
in personality in recent decades have been asymmetrical,
with evidence that women are adopting some of men’s
masculine, agentic characteristics and that men are not
adopting women’s feminine, communal characteristics. We
ascribed this shift in women’s personal attributes mainly to
their increasing labor force participation, including inroads
into many jobs once dominated by men.
From our social role perspective, men’s psychological
attributes will shift to the extent that they perform more
family-caring activities and enter into more communally
demanding occupations. But only modest changes can be
seen in men’s activities thus far, in either domestic work
(Bianchi et al., 2006) or paid employment (Queneau, 2006).
Men have not undergone major transitions in their daily
activities in the United States or other industrialized nations.
Is it possible for men to adopt more communal roles
and develop more communal-oriented personalities?
The answer requires knowledge of the biosocial roots of
the role structure and the limits it may impose on role flex-
ibility. As we have explained, these roots lie mainly in the
ways in which male size and strength and female repro-
ductive activities interact with socioeconomic complexity.
Through human history, as societies shifted from simple
foraging through agricultural and eventually to industrial
economies, patriarchy became the dominant form of rela-
tions between the sexes. This transition emerged with
several societal developments, including technologies such
as the plow, provisioning by hunting large animals, and
societal structures such as organized warfare. The biosocial
restraints of male size and strength and female reproduc-
tive activity increasingly gave men better access to the new
roles (e.g., farmer, hunter, and warrior) that yielded wealth
and prestige, thereby reducing women’s share of economic
contribution while retaining their domestic obligations.
Patriarchy has eroded in most industrialized societies,
especially in the second half of the 20th century, as women
have gained power and status. This shift reflects the loosen-
ing of biosocial restraints on women’s roles through sharp
reductions in birth rates and length of lactation, combined
with shifts in the occupational structure. The occupations
that now garner status, power, and resources reward brains,
not brawn. This shift toward intellectual demands dimin-
ishes the male advantage once inherent in their physical
prowess, which in turn derives partly from the organizing
effects of male hormones. In addition, leadership roles are
increasingly defined as requiring an androgynous mix of
culturally masculine and feminine abilities and personal-
ity traits (Eagly & Carli, 2007). Nonetheless, these several
changes have so far produced only semiequality between
the sexes. Men continue to dominate leadership roles
at highest levels (e.g., Helfat et al., 2006), and women
continue to take responsibility for the majority of childcare

and housework (e.g., Bianchi et al., 2006). Furthermore,
on many attitudinal and behavioral indicators in the United
States, changes toward gender equality appear to be slow-
ing down, and sociologists debate why this is happening
(Blau, Brinton, & Grusky 2006).
The continuing wage and authority gaps in the work-
force can be traced partly to women continuing to fill care-
taking roles, especially childcare. Childcare roles that take
women out of the labor force or reduce their employment to
part time lessen their training and experience. Even many
privileged women who have high educational credentials
and outstanding career potential reduce their employment
to accommodate family obligations (Hewlett, 2007). This
reduced participation in employment is compounded by job
discrimination against mothers (e.g., Correll, Benard, &
Paik, 2007) and tax laws that encourage women to be pri-
mary family caretakers (McCaffery, 1999). These effects
lessen women’s opportunities to attain jobs that offer high
wages and substantial workplace authority (Polachek,
2006). Thus, the historical origins of patriarchy continue
to play out in modern times through women’s childcare
activities that reduce their access to roles that confer status,
high wages, and prestige.
What explains men’s continued low levels of childcare
and limited interest in communally demanding occupa-
tions? Barriers to men taking on such roles include lower
monetary compensation of communally demanding occu-
pations (England, 2006), social expectations that men are
less well endowed with the necessary communal skills
(Cejka & Eagly, 1999), and stigma associated with nontra-
ditional male communal roles such as stay-at-home dads
(Brescoll & Uhlmann, 2005).
Women specialize in childcare partly because of the
continuing efficiency for women of performing these roles.
The energetic demands of bearing children and the health
benefits of some months of breast-feeding can orient moth-
ers away from continued paid employment and toward
infant care. This arrangement is fostered by socialization
of women and societal beliefs that promote sex-typical
role performance. Hormonal processes also may encourage
mothers’ childcare, as the cascading hormones of pregnancy
and lactation support women’s tending (Campbell, 2008;
Taylor, 2002). Research is still discovering these nurturing
effects, and one possibility is that OT’s activating effects on
human behavior function primarily in the service of ongo-
ing social roles, as does T. If so, then OT largely accom-
modates and supports the expression of self and social
expectations for maternal behavior within a society. Within
families, paternal behavior also is supported by hormonal
processes, as fathers show parallel hormonal accommoda-
tion to parenthood (Berg & Wynne-Edwards, 2001, 2002).
In both sexes, caretaking is facilitated by neurochemical
References 657
mechanisms of reward learning that can undergird
nurturing of infants and young children (Broad et al., 2006;
Depue & Morrone-Strupinsky, 2005). Fathering activities
also are supported by changing norms and attitudes in the
United States, especially among younger adults, who have
become considerably more accepting of men’s equal par-
ticipation in childcare (e.g., Milkie, Bianchi, Mattingly, &
Robinson, 2002).
Change in social roles is slowed by societal ideolo-
gies and status beliefs that legitimize social inequalities
on the basis of sex and other attributes (Ridgeway, 2006a;
Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). To some extent, even women and
members of other subordinated groups accept the system-
justifying ideologies of the dominant group (Jost, Pelham,
Sheldon, & Sullivan, 2003) and endorse paternalistic,
benevolently sexist ideas (Glick & Fiske, 2001). However,
women’s attitudes and ideologies are more progressive
than men’s (e.g., Eagly & Diekman, 2006; Eagly et al.,
2004; Seguino, 2007), and their political commitments
and actions can speed social change (e.g., Dodson, 2006).
For those committed to gender equality, the major chal-
lenge for the future is to encourage both men and women
to occupy a wider range of social roles.
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Chapter 18
Personality in Social Psychology
DAVID C. FUNDER AND LISA A. FAST
Social psychology and personality psychology have
the same job: to seek to understand the meaningful, con-
sequential, and mostly social behaviors of daily life.
Cognitive psychology examines component processes such
as memory, perception, and cognition. Biological psychol-
ogy seeks to understand the physical underpinnings of
behavior in the anatomy, physiology, functional organiza-
tion, genetic basis, and evolutionary history of the nervous
system. Developmental psychology explores the roots of
behavior in genetics and early childhood experience and
changes across the life course. All of these fields could be
viewed as foundational for the common concern of social
and personality psychology, which is to understand what
people do every day. In this light, it is unsurprising that
courses in social and personality psychology are among
the most popular offerings on most college campuses; their
subject matter is not only important but also personally rel-
evant and intrinsically interesting.
Social and personality psychology began to come into
their own about the same time—the 1920s and 1930s—
through the work of many of the same people, such as the
Allport brothers, Floyd and Gordon (F. H. Allport, 1924;
G. W. Allport, 1931, 1937; F. H. Allport & G. W. Allport,
1921). What is surprising, in retrospect, is how the two fields
diverged over the subsequent decades. Social psychology
came to specialize in the study of what people have in com-
mon, in particular how aspects of situations can change
what people, on average, will do. Personality psychology
came to specialize in the study of how people differ from
one another psychologically and ways to characterize and
measure these differences. This division of labor makes a
certain amount of sense, but problems arose as the fields
gradually became so specialized that many practitioners of
each field became unaware of the basic principles, find-
ings, and methods of the other. The difficulties grew worse
when social psychologists began to suspect that personal-
ity psychology’s emphasis on individual differences was
misguided. In his memoirs, the eminent social psychologist
668
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Roger Brown described one memorably awkward encounter
between the two traditions:
As a psychologist, in all the years . . . I had thought individual
differences in personality were exaggerated. . . . I had once
presumed to say to Henry A. Murray, Harvard’s distinguished
personologist: “I think people are all very much the same.”
Murray’s response had been; “Oh you do, do you? Well, you
don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” And I hadn’t.
(Brown, 1996, p. 169)
This little exchange illustrates the odd historical fact
that although social and personality psychology were born
about the same time, of the same or closely related par-
ents, the relationship between these sibling sciences often
has been uneasy, bordering at times on outright estrange-
ment. This is unfortunate given that the two fields not only
share a common goal but also offer complementary—not
conflicting—methodological approaches.
At their core, social and personality psychology focus
on two orthogonal main effects. On the one hand, the clas-
sic method of social psychology uses experimental designs
that manipulate elements of situations to show how those
elements affect what people do. On the other hand, the
classic method of personality psychology uses correla-
tional methods to assess how psychological properties of
people—personality traits—covary with individual differ-
ences in behavior. Arguments about whether the situational
effects uncovered by social psychological research are or
are not stronger than the dispositional effects uncovered
by personality research dominated an important subset of
the psychological literature for decades. The best avail-
able evidence indicates that at a hugely aggregate level the
effect sizes in both fields average out to be about the same
(Richard, Bond, & Stokes-Zoota, 2003). But that is get-
ting ahead of our story. Ordinary observation of the social
world is enough to verify that (1) people do different things
in different situations and (2) even in the same situation,

different people often do different things. And those two
conclusions are enough to verify that a complete under-
standing of why people behave the way they do naturally
requires social and personality psychology to be informed
by each other.
The goal of the present chapter is to help to rebuild the
bridge between social and personality psychology. The chap-
ter is organized into six parts. The first three parts provide a
basic outline of personality psychology and an overview of
some current research. The first part defines the field, and
the second part describes the basic conceptual and theoreti-
cal approaches to studying personality. It is proposed that, to
the degree that each basic approach to personality represents
empirical science, they all depend on the assessment of indi-
vidual differences through behavior. This dependency puts
the trait approach at the center of personality psychology. The
third part discusses current research and outlines some ways
in which behavior has been used to assess personality. These
not only include the prominent method of self-report but also
include peers’ judgments and other, wider-ranging and cre-
ative techniques for observing and measuring behavior.
The last three parts of this chapter deal with the com-
petition that has characterized the relationship between
personality and social psychology for the past 40 years or
so. The fourth part describes the intersection of personal-
ity and social psychology. It focuses on research in person
perception and accurate personality judgment and the con-
trast between these two traditions. The fifth part outlines
the basis and unfortunate evolution of the estrangement
between personality and social psychology, which appears
to be slowly ending. The final part offers suggestions for
reintegrating these fields toward a relationship that can
become more cooperative and less competitive.
PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY
Personality can be defined as an individual’s characteristic
patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with
the psychological mechanisms—hidden or not—behind
those patterns (Funder, 2007). The goal of personality psy-
chology is to explain every individual from the inside out.
The mission includes describing, measuring, and explain-
ing how people differ from one another; uncovering
the conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings that
drive behavior; and predicting what people will do in the
future. But this mission has one problem: It is impossible.
The complete study of the individual encompasses too many
considerations at once to be feasibly pursued by investiga-
tors with human limitations of time and intelligence.
One way to make personality research more manageable
is to divide it into organized chunks. Rather than trying
Basic Approaches to Studying Personality 669
to look at every possible aspect of personality at the same
time, personality research proceeds along different theo-
retical avenues. Some researchers examine the biological
underpinnings of personality, others look at developmental
trajectories, others examine how the environment affects
personality, others study how people differ in how they
perceive and process information, and still others—and all
of them, in some sense—seek to discover and assess the
basic psychological dimensions along which individuals
differ. All of these areas of research are similar in that they
focus on individual differences and patterns of behavior
but are guided by different paradigmatic frameworks that
specify which phenomena are the focus of attention (e.g.,
particular traits and behaviors) and which mechanisms are
used for explanation (e.g., genes vs. the environment vs.
cognition). The basic approaches to studying personality
are biological, psychoanalytic, humanistic, learning based,
cognitive, and trait based (Funder, 2007).
Although the different approaches sometimes com-
pete with one another for the ultimate status of explaining
everything there is to know about personality, the reality is
that different research questions are better addressed through
different paradigmatic perspectives. For example, the
principles of behaviorism can be used to explain how gam-
bling behavior is maintained but say nothing about why
those who have gambling addictions are often unable
to admit that they have a problem. In contrast, psycho-
analysis has much to say about denial and other defense
mechanisms but offers little toward understanding how the
intermittent reinforcement schedule associated with gam-
bling can make this maladaptive behavior so persistent.
Therefore, it makes more sense to view each approach
as useful for addressing its own key concerns rather than
viewing them as mutually exclusive alternatives.
BASIC APPROACHES TO STUDYING
PERSONALITY
Biological Approach
The biological approach to studying personality searches
for the organic roots of individual differences using anat-
omy, physiology, genetics, and evolutionary theory.
Anatomy
Research focusing on anatomy attempts to identify brain
structures that play a role in various personality traits. For
example, research using functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) has shown that shy people, compared with
people described as “bold,” respond to pictures of unfamil-
iar people with bilateral activation of the amygdala and to
670 Personality in Social Psychology
pictures of familiar people with activation on just the left
side of this organ (Beaton et al., 2008). Bolder individu-
als respond to pictures of familiar and unfamiliar people
with stronger activation in their nucleus accumbens com-
pared with activation in shy people. Research by Barrett
(2006) also shows that the amygdala plays an important
role in positive emotions such as sexual responsiveness.
Another intriguing finding is that activity in the left fron-
tal lobe appears to be associated with pleasant emotion
and motivation to approach attractive people and objects
while activity in the right frontal lobe seems to be associ-
ated with unpleasant emotion and motivation to withdraw
(Davidson, Ekman, Saron, Senulis, & Frisesen, 1990;
Hewig, Hagemann, Seifert, Naumann, & Bartussek, 2004).
Areas of the brain traditionally associated with emotional
responsiveness (e.g., the posterior cingulate and the insula)
appear to be particularly active in response to images rele-
vant to rejection in individuals who suffer from a syndrome
known as rejection sensitivity (Kross, Egner, Ochsner,
Hirsch, & Downey, 2007).
Findings like these continue to accumulate rapidly in
the research literature and are yielding the beginning of a
map of locations in the brain that might be the basis of
specific personality traits—the amygdala for emotionally
relevant traits, hemispheric dominance for overall positive
and negative affectivity, the posterior cingulate for rejec-
tion sensitivity, and so on. The findings are complex, how-
ever, and the intricate experimental controls that this kind
of research requires and the typical focus, in a single study,
on just one or a few brain regions makes interpretation and
firm conclusions difficult. Questions have also been raised
about the way effect sizes in this literature are calculated.
Sometimes quite dramatic correlations in the range of .70
to .90 between levels of brain activation and personality
have been reported, but these numbers are probably exag-
gerated (Vul, Harris, Winkielman, & Pashler, 2009).
Moreover, the larger implications for personality theory
have yet to become clear. To put the matter bluntly: If shy-
ness is indeed associated with specific processes in the
amygdala, for example, what difference does that make?
In what way does this finding lead us to think differently
about shyness? Indeed, some researchers have worried
that fMRI and other imaging technologies yield a “new
phrenology” that produces brain maps in lieu of psycho-
logical insight (Uttal, 2001). The challenges for the next
generation of research are to use these intriguing findings
to illuminate aspects of personality that were not previ-
ously apparent and to outline psychological processes and
interactions among them that are not detectable from overt
behavioral data alone. Modern imaging technology offers
a theoretical promissory note that will someday be paid
but, to date, remains to be cashed.
Physiology
Biological research on personality also addresses physi-
ology, examining biochemicals (neurotransmitters and
hormones) that might be associated with individual differ-
ences in behavior. Dopamine and serotonin are widely stud-
ied neurotransmitters. Research suggests that dopamine is
involved in the experience of reward and the reinforce-
ment of behavior (Blum, Cull, Braverman, & Comings,
1996) while serotonin plays a role in emotional regulation
and feelings of well-being (Knutson et al., 1998). The hor-
mone testosterone has received considerable attention; it
appears to play important roles in sexual behavior and in
aggression (Zuckerman, 1991, and Dabbs & Morris, 1990,
respectively). Cortisol, the well-known “fight or flight”
hormone associated with anxiety, fear, and aggressive
response, appears to be surprisingly low in shy individuals
(Beaton et al., 2006). But it also is low in people high on
the trait of sensation seeking, so the situation, as always,
is complicated (Zuckerman, 1998). Like the fMRI work
surveyed earlier, these studies are tantalizingly sugges-
tive of the possible chemical bases of aggression, sexual
response, and motivation, and of personality traits such
as aggressiveness, hypersexuality, depression, emotional
resiliency, and shyness. Their findings can have direct
implications for therapeutic interventions; for example,
drugs to increase levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin
(selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac,
generically fluoxetine) and doses of the hormone testoster-
one have been used in the treatment of depression.
Although psychophysiology has provided insights about
the biological basis of behavior and individual differences
in personality traits, researchers must be careful about
inferring causal relationships. For example, Bernhardt,
Dabbs, Fielden, and Lutter (1998) found that, after watch-
ing a World Cup playoff game, fans of the winning soccer
team had higher testosterone levels than fans of the los-
ers. And psychotherapy can change measurable aspects of
brain activity (Isom & Heller, 1999). Findings like these
suggest that biology is not just a cause of individual dif-
ferences in behavior and psychological experience; it is
also an effect. Neuroanatomy, physiology, and patterns of
behavior and experience are complicated phenomena, and
the relationship between personality and biology is surely
even more complex, with causal arrows pointing in both
directions.
Behavioral Genetics
Behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology both
focus on the inheritance of individual differences in
behavior. For the good and the bad, we are more similar to
people with whom we share more genes (e.g., our parents)

than fewer genes (e.g., our cousins). We look like our par-
ents, we are more likely to have high blood pressure if our
parents do, and we even have an IQ level similar to that
of our parents. Behavioral genetics extends this knowl-
edge and studies the following question: Are those who
are more genetically similar (e.g., monozygotic twins)
more similar in personality compared with those who are
less genetically similar (e.g., dizygotic twins)? Decades
of research has established that most and perhaps all per-
sonality traits are heritable to some degree. Indeed, one
authoritative researcher seriously suggested that “the first
law of behavioral genetics” should be everything is heri-
table (Turkheimer, 1998, p. 789). Genes matter, to at least
some degree, to any psychological outcome and certainly
any personality trait.
Having established this fact, current research is directed
toward more fine-tuned questions, such as how genes affect
personality and how genes and the environment interact to
influence personality outcomes. For example, Caspi and
colleagues (2002) found that boys whose genes caused a
low level of expression of an enzyme called monoamine
oxidase (MAO) were more likely to be antisocial if they
were maltreated as children. If, however, their genes caused
a high level of expression of MAO, they were protected
to some degree from such adverse effects. As the field of
behavioral genetics continues to develop, the goal will be
to generate increasingly fine-grained accounts, such as the
one just emerging concerning MAO, of how genes inter-
act with the environment to create brain structures and
aspects of physiology that lead to individual differences in
behavior.
Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary psychology studies behavioral patterns pro-
posed to have been adaptive during the development of the
human species. It assumes that behaviors that are common
to humans (1) have a genetic basis and (2) increased the
likelihood of survival, reproduction, or both during evo-
lutionary history. The more a behavior helps an individual
survive and reproduce, the more likely the behavior is to
be genetically transmitted and, therefore, appear in sub-
sequent generations. Evolutionary psychology has par-
ticularly focused on variation in sexual behavior between
males and females. It is commonly hypothesized that gen-
der differences in behavior that are still present today exist
because, in the history of evolution, the behaviors that
increased the likelihood of reproduction for males were
different from the behaviors that increased the likelihood
of reproduction for females.
Sexual jealousy has been a hot topic in evolutionary
research. Buss, Larsen, Westen, and Semmelroth (1992)
observed that females are more distressed by imagining
Basic Approaches to Studying Personality 671
their mate being emotionally unfaithful than sexually
unfaithful, whereas males are more distressed by imagin-
ing sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity. The expla-
nation for this gender difference is that attending to cues of
sexual infidelity (becoming distressed) resulted in greater
reproductive fitness for males in evolutionary history
because males face paternal uncertainty. It was more costly
for a male to mate with a female who might be mating
with other males and possibly invest in offspring who were
not his own than to mate with a female who might form
an emotional attachment with another male. Attending to
cues of emotional infidelity, however, resulted in greater
reproductive fitness for females because females do not
face parental uncertainty. It was more costly for a female
to mate with a partner who might form an emotional bond
with another female and fail to provide resources for her
offspring than to mate with a male who might have other
sexual partners. Although the male might have other off-
spring, his emotional attachment ensures that he provides
resources to the female’s offspring and thus promotes her
genetic fitness.
Are the conclusions of evolutionary psychology rel-
evant to personality? If one assumes that men and women
have different “personalities”—and they certainly are indi-
viduals who, as a group, differ from each other—then the
answer would seem to be yes. Evolutionary theorizing pro-
vides an explanation of one area of behavior in which the
big two groups of humans appear to be characteristically
different. But mostly personality is defined at a level more
specific than “typical male” or “typical female,” and it is
less clear how to apply evolutionary theorizing to explana-
tions of personality traits. Indeed, some researchers have
argued that evolutionary theory almost implies that indi-
vidual differences do not matter, because any traits that
were disadvantageous for survival and reproduction should
have been selected out of the gene pool long ago (Tooby &
Cosmides, 1990).
However, a trait that is disadvantageous in one context
may be helpful in another. A tendency to be agreeable
might make one more susceptible to being swindled but
also would allow one to make more friends. As a result,
through the generations, people high and low in agreeable-
ness both tend to succeed, in different settings, and across
individuals differences between people high and low on
this trait continue to be found.
Another evolutionary explanation for the existence of
individual differences is that some traits may evolve as
responses to particular environmental contingencies and
are designed to come “online” only under certain circum-
stances, just as one develops calluses on one’s hands only
if they are used in manual work (Buss & Greiling, 1999).
For example, many of us might have a latent tendency to
672 Personality in Social Psychology
be aggressive, but only a few people have experienced
environments that have brought that trait into behavioral
reality—presumably, environments similar to those that in
evolutionary history made aggressiveness advantageous.
Similarly, potential traits might or might not develop
depending on whether they will promote outcomes for
particular individuals. The aggressive style works bet-
ter for boys who are big and strong rather than for boys
who are small and weak; this might be why the former
are more likely to become juvenile delinquents (Glueck &
Glueck, 1956). Still other traits might have evolved to be
frequency dependent, meaning that they appear depend-
ing on how prevalent the trait already is in the population.
One theory of primary psychopathy claims that this style
of conscienceless and exploitative behavior is biologically
controlled to appear only in a small number of individu-
als, because if it grew to be more widespread the behavior
would become self-defeating (Mealy, 1995).
Whatever one thinks about its accounts for specific
traits and behaviors, evolutionary theorizing does offer a
distinctive route for explaining why people do what they
do. Considering the question of why a behavior might have
been or may still be evolutionarily adaptive—especially
when the answer is not immediately obvious—can be illu-
minating. And the more complex questions concerning
when certain behaviors might be or have been adaptive can
be even more interesting.
Beyond the explanatory stories it offers, evolutionary
psychology can serve one other purpose: as a constraint
on theorizing. Psychological scientists are used to evaluat-
ing theories on the basis of their internal consistency and
parsimony. Evolutionary theory offers an additional crite-
rion for evaluating theories: their evolutionary plausibility.
For example, versions of psychoanalytic theory that posit
a drive toward seeking one’s own death and destruction
would seem to fail this elementary test.
For another example, a tradition in cognitive psychology
and some parts of social psychology examines the inferen-
tial capabilities of the human mind and concludes that in
some respects these capabilities are fundamentally flawed
(e.g., Gilovich, 1993; Ross, 1977). Evolutionary consider-
ations suggest that any such suggestion must be examined
closely. On the one hand, evolutionary reasoning does not
suggest that the mind should have evolved to be perfect,
any more than it suggests that our biceps should have
evolved to lift unlimited amounts of weight. Some objects
are too heavy for us to lift; presumably we have evolved
to be strong enough to lift what our ancestors had to deal
with. Current-day adult humans cannot lift an automo-
bile, but almost everyone can lift a baby. In a similar vein,
our minds make many mistakes of memory and inference
but a mind that was not smart enough to make essential
decisions relevant to survival and reproduction would not
have allowed its body to pass genes to succeeding genera-
tions. This line of reasoning suggests that the basic mecha-
nisms of cognitive inference that have survived millennia
of harsh environments and reproductive competition are
more likely to be adaptive than fundamentally flawed
(Gigerenzer, Todd, & the ABC Research Group, 2000;
Haselton & Funder, 2006). In this and other ways, evo-
lutionary considerations offer new ways to look at estab-
lished theories in social and personality psychology and
new grounds on which to evaluate them.
Psychoanalytic Approach
While biological research seeks to identify the specific
physical foundations of behavior and personality, the psy-
choanalytic approach often operates on a level of almost
metaphysical abstraction—one that, nonetheless, leads
to unique insights and, occasionally, testable hypotheses.
Psychoanalysis seeks to understand personality at the deep-
est psychological level and takes on the unique challenge
of explaining what is going on in the hidden and some-
times dark recesses of the human mind. From a psychoana-
lytic perspective, personality is shaped by early childhood
experiences and behavior is determined by the outcomes
of unconscious processes and conflict. The psychoanalytic
approach focuses on constructs such as the unconscious
mind, defense mechanisms, attachment, and ego strength.
Psychoanalysis has long been criticized for being unsci-
entific because it was historically based on subjective
interpretations of patients by clinical practitioners—most
notably Sigmund Freud—using the case study method.
However, aspects of psychoanalytic theory sometimes have
received empirical tests, and some of those tests have been
successful (for reviews, see Baumeister, Dale, & Sommer,
1998; Westen, 1998).
Freud died in 1939, but his theory lives on in several
forms. In one form, Freud himself is still the issue. A small
psychoanalytic community continues to take Freud’s writ-
ings literally as infallible sources of truth; a countercom-
munity continues to attack everything from his research
methods to his personal life (Crews, 1996; Masson, 1984).
Both of these effectively allied groups miss the point
because psychoanalytic theory continues to evolve and
has become detached from and largely independent of its
long-deceased creator. This development was seen in the
neo-Freudians (who are themselves no longer “neo” or
even, mostly, alive), such as Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Erik
Erikson, and Karen Horney, and in the growth of psycho-
analytically inspired approaches such as object relations
theory (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983) and attachment the-
ory (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007).

The most interesting modern manifestation of psycho-
analytic theory has arisen among researchers who are cur-
rently using rigorous methodologies to test psychoanalytic
ideas, with or without acknowledging their Freudian roots.
According to Westen (1998, pp. 334–335), five key postu-
lates of psychoanalytic theory are often studied and gener-
ally supported:
1. Much of mental life is unconscious, which means that
people may do or think things that they do not them-
selves understand.
2. Different mental processes can operate at the same
time, and this parallel processing can produce conflict-
ing thoughts and behavioral impulses.
3. The roots of adult personality can be found in child-
hood, and early experience has especially important
implications for how individuals form later social
relationships.
4. Social interactions are shaped by psychological repre-
sentations of the self, others, and relationships.
5. Personality development involves learning to regulate
sexuality and aggression as an individual moves from
immaturity and dependence on others to maturity and
independence.
Among the research that supports one or more of these
tenets are studies that show that a part of the mind (i.e.,
the unconscious) perceives things that the conscious
mind does not (Bornstein, 1999; Erdelyi, 1974; see also
Dijksterhuis, this volume), behavior and consciousness
are a result of numerous independently operating mental
subsystems (Rumelhart, McClelland, & the PDP Research
Group, 1986), the unconscious mind can prevent the con-
scious mind from perceiving anxiety-provoking stimuli
(Erdelyi, 1985), and childhood attachment with one’s par-
ents may translate into styles of adult romantic attachment,
with important consequences for emotional life (Hazan &
Shaver, 1990; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). Overall, psy-
choanalysis is the most widely and heavily criticized of all
approaches to studying personality; however, it continues
to provoke interest and raises questions that the rest of psy-
chology sometimes ignores.
Humanistic Approach
The humanistic approach was originally based on an even
less scientific tradition than psychoanalysis. Early pioneers,
such as Carl Rogers (1951) and Abraham Maslow (1987),
believed that personality is a special entity that cannot be
studied dispassionately from a distance. They argued that
unlike rocks and trees, people can perceive, think, and feel,
which makes the study of people fundamentally different
Basic Approaches to Studying Personality 673
from other sciences and more difficult than is usually
acknowledged. The humanistic approach proposes that
understanding behavior requires appreciating each indi-
vidual from his or her own unique perspective. Humanism
is also different from the other approaches in that it focuses
on human strength, growth, and well-being, rather than
human weakness. Although early humanism was most
influential within clinical and developmental psychology,
it has inspired modern empirical personality research that,
unlike its humanistic precursors, uses rigorous empirical
methods. Core ideas from the humanistic perspective can
be found in current research in “positive psychology” and
cross-cultural studies.
The newly emerging area of positive psychology iden-
tifies human strengths and studies how they can be used
to increase well-being and happiness. Positive psychology
has provided useful insights about how cognitive processes
affect individual differences in happiness. For example,
studies suggest that people who engage in unproductive
rumination and do not take the time to appreciate the good
things in life are less likely to be happy (Lyubomirsky,
2001; Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005). A more
basic question concerns the definition of happiness or
well-being. Some researchers have defined happiness in
terms of high positive affect, low negative affect, and high
life satisfaction (hedonic well-being), while others have
defined happiness in terms of striving toward meaning and
self-actualization (eudaimonic well-being). These concep-
tualizations are theoretically distinct and lead to different
predictions about how happy people feel and behave. For
example, those who are higher in eudaimonic well-being
may not necessarily be low in negative affect because striv-
ing for meaning in life can involve enduring struggle and
adversity. Although the different conceptualizations of
happiness seem to have different implications, self-reports
of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being have been observed
to have highly similar external correlates; therefore, they
might overlap empirically more than they do theoretically
(Nave, Sherman, & Funder, 2008; Ryan & Deci, 2001).
Humanistic psychology’s core concern with how people
construct their views of reality is echoed in cross-cultural
research, which involves understanding the ways in which
people from different cultures may have fundamentally
different views of the world. Triandis (1994, 1997) pro-
poses that one of the ways in which members of different
cultures might experience reality differently concerns the
degree to which the cultures are individualistic versus col-
lectivistic. Individualistic cultures (including most Western
cultures) have a sharp boundary between the self and
others and value independence over interdependence. In
collectivistic cultures (including most Eastern cultures),
the boundary between self and others is more blurry and the
674 Personality in Social Psychology
well-being of the group is seen as more important than that of
any individual. In support, research suggests that people in
collectivist cultures are more likely to report experiencing
other-focused emotions (e.g., sympathy) while people in
individualist cultures are more likely to experience self-
focused emotions (e.g., anger; Markus & Kitayama, 1991).
More recent research branches out in various directions,
including the study of cultural groups that go beyond the
traditional East–West dichotomy (e.g., Nisbett & Cohen,
1996; Tsai & Chentsova-Dutton, 2003), a closer examina-
tion of multicultural individuals (e.g., Benet-Martínez &
Haritatos, 2005), and a renewed focus on the elements of
human nature that are similar, as well as different, across
cultural contexts (e.g., Matsumoto, 2007; Oishi, Diener,
Napa Scollon, & Biswas-Diener, 2004).
Learning-Based Approaches
Classic behaviorists ignore concepts like happiness and
construals of reality because their approach strictly dictates
that they study only that which can be directly observed.
Behaviorism is a learning-based approach to studying per-
sonality, and it places heavy emphasis on overt behavior
and the rewards and punishments in the environment that
condition individuals to behave in certain ways. From this
perspective, personality is simply the behaviors that an
individual performs as a result of environmentally imposed
reinforcement contingencies. Although some research-
ers still conduct classic behavioral research (e.g., applied
behavioral analysis), most psychologists now recognize that
pure behaviorism leaves out important psychological ingre-
dients. For example, one’s beliefs about reinforcements,
not just the reinforcements themselves, play an important
role in determining behavior. In particular, the evaluative
properties of rewards can be as important as the rewards
themselves and can, depending on the circumstances,
undermine or enhance their effects (Harackiewicz &
Sansone, 2000). People also learn how to act by watching
the behaviors and consequences of the behaviors of others.
Considerations such as these led to the development of the
social learning theories.
Social learning theories stay true to behaviorism in
acknowledging the importance of environmental influ-
ences on behavior, but they add unobservable elements
that make their theories more attractive, and perhaps
more plausible. Julian Rotter ’s (1954, 1982) social learn-
ing theory discusses the importance of expectations for
behavior and proposes that behavioral decisions are based
on one’s beliefs about the attractiveness of reinforcements
and the perceived likelihood of attaining reinforcements.
Like Rotter, Albert Bandura’s (1971, 1977a, b) social learn-
ing theory recognizes the importance of expectations of
reinforcements, but his theory also emphasizes expecta-
tions about the self. Bandura’s version explains how beliefs
about one’s own capabilities (e.g., self-efficacy) influence
what one attempts to do and how watching the behavior of
others (e.g., observational learning) influences one’s own
actions.
Walter Mischel’s “cognitive affective personality sys-
tem” (CAPS) is a social learning theory specifically
intended to explain personality (Mischel, 1999; Mischel &
Shoda, 1995). CAPS proposes that personality is a system
composed of several person variables that interact with each
situation in which people find themselves. Person variables
include mental abilities and behavioral skills, ways of con-
struing reality and efficacy expectations, procedures for
controlling behavior, and affects or emotions. According
to the CAPS theory, each individual can be characterized
by a unique set of “if–then” statements that describe what
a person will do in different situations. For example, “if ” a
conflict arises, one person might “then” become confronta-
tional and escalate the hostilities, whereas “if ” in conflict,
another individual might “then” seek to withdraw from the
situation. Thus, the situation is the “if ” and the behavior
is the “then,” and every individual is characterized by a
pattern of reactions to particular situational stimuli. This
description of personality is, in some ways, reminiscent of
the stimulus–response personality theory of John Watson
(1930). The approach is also reminiscent of classic behav-
iorism in its reluctance to acknowledge the importance
of unobservable mental structures. As Mischel recently
wrote, “whatever way one chooses to define ‘personality’
it is certainly not a de-contextualized ‘entity within the
mind’” (Mischel, 2009, p. 289).
Cognitive Approach
The cognitive approach, which evolved from and over-
laps with the social learning theories, focuses on percep-
tual processes, thoughts and beliefs, and motivational
processes that form the basis of personality and behavior.
One way of conceptualizing personality traits is to think of
them as dimensions along which people think and perceive
information differently. For example, one person might
have the disposition to have positive thoughts more readily
accessible, whereas another person might have the dispo-
sition to have negative thoughts more accessible. Gordon
Allport pointed out this possibility many years ago, when
he wrote
For some the world is a hostile place where men are evil and
dangerous; for others it is a stage for fun and frolic. It may
appear as a place to do one’s duty grimly; or a pasture for cul-
tivating friendship and love. (Allport, 1961, p. 266)

Individuals who perceive the world differently might
be expected to behave accordingly, and research has con-
firmed this expectation. Downey and Feldman (1996) pro-
posed that individuals who are higher in the trait of rejection
sensitivity, for whom thoughts of rejection are readily
available, are more likely to interpret any ambiguous sig-
nal as confirmation that their partner is about to abandon
them. The slightest expression of irritation from a partner
invokes panic, and because the person has a negative reac-
tion toward the partner every time a threat is perceived, the
person indeed becomes more likely to be rejected. Such
individual differences in “chronic accessibility” may also
be involved in aggression. Dodge and Frame (1982) found
that aggressive boys were quick to perceive hostility in the
characters of a short story, whereas nonaggressive boys
generally reached a more benign interpretation.
Trait-Based Approach
The trait-based approach to studying personality places
individual difference constructs (i.e., personality traits)
front and center. According to Gordon Allport (1931), traits
are psychological mechanisms that determine people’s
responses to stimuli. He believed that traits motivate and
organize an individual’s behavior and knowing an indi-
vidual’s traits requires observing that person’s behavior
repeatedly. Such observation reveals the consistent behav-
ioral patterns from which the underlying psychological
mechanisms can be inferred.
From this perspective, traits are like gravity. Gravity
is a concept that describes the force of attraction between
objects and explains a range of astronomical observations
(e.g., how planets orbit the sun). Similarly, traits are psy-
chological concepts that are used to describe individual
differences in behavior and give coherence to a range of
psychological observations. For example, “narcissism” is
a construct that ties together a complex pattern of attitudes
and behaviors of people who believe they are exceptional
individuals entitled to exploit others for their own advan-
tage (Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001; Vazire & Funder, 2006).
Nobody has ever seen either gravity or narcissism directly,
but important aspects of their nature can be discerned from
their effects.
The main aims of trait research include identifying and
conceptualizing important personality traits, accurately
measuring individual differences in traits, and using traits
to understand behavior. Trait research also examines the
developmental antecedents of personality and seeks to pre-
dict short-term behaviors (e.g., delay of gratification and
cooperation with others in a group task) and long-term out-
comes (e.g., job performance, health, and divorce). Perhaps
the most well-known area of trait research concerns the
Basic Approaches to Studying Personality 675
Big Five personality traits—extraversion, neuroticism,
conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness or intel-
lect or culture—which can be measured by any of several
different, widely used questionnaires (McCrae & Costa,
1987; Saucier & Goldberg, 2003). Research suggests that
individuals’ standing on the Big Five begins to stabilize in
their thirties (Caspi, Roberts, & Shiner, 2005) but contin-
ues to change to a smaller degree thereafter. Basic traits
(including traits in addition to the Big Five) that continue
to rise between ages 30 and 70 include social dominance,
agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability.
Openness to experience appears to remain about stable,
on average, and social vitality goes down over this period
(Roberts, Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006). Traits like these
predict a range of important behaviors and life outcomes,
such as happiness, social adjustment, marital satisfaction,
career choice, job performance, and civic engagement
(Ozer & Benet-Martínez, 2006; Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner,
Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007).
One common critique of traits is that while they describe
patterns of behavior, they do not explain where those pat-
terns come from (Pervin, 1994). For example, a person
who constantly worries and has an intense reaction to stress
could be described as high in neuroticism. But where does
neuroticism come from? What are the psychological mech-
anisms that produce and maintain neuroticism? Although
traits are insufficient to fully explain behavior, they (1)
provide an efficient means for describing how individu-
als are different from one another (e.g., not all individuals
are neurotic, an interesting observation), (2) offer a basis
from which to predict future behavior (e.g., you can expect
people high in neuroticism to be upset regardless of what
is going on in their life), and (3) provide a useful explana-
tory resting point (Funder, 1994). That is, once traits have
been identified and validly measured, research can be
directed toward deeper explanation. The other approaches
to studying personality, discussed earlier, are partly an
attempt to push the explanatory regress one or more steps
deeper, but they all depend on this first step, of identify-
ing and measuring consistent individual differences in
behavior.
The basic approaches to personality are committed to a
particular way of explaining these differences: the biologi-
cal approach in anatomy, physiology, genetics, and evolu-
tion; the psychoanalytic approach in unconscious processes
and early experience; the humanistic approach in individual
construals of reality; the learning approaches in responses
to reward and punishment; and the cognitive approach in
processes of perception and thought. The exception is the
trait approach, which is primarily methodological (as seen
in its emphasis on psychometric technology) and stands
apart from a commitment to any particular explanation of
676 Personality in Social Psychology
the individual differences it identifies and measures. This
atheoretical stance might be viewed as a weakness, but it
puts the trait approach at the center of personality psychol-
ogy because it provides an outlook and technology that is
critical to all the approaches, and indeed to any researcher
who would seek to understand how individuals are psy-
chologically different from one another.
For example, a positive psychologist who studies hap-
piness must create a valid method of measuring it and
observe how individual differences in happiness are asso-
ciated with differences in behavior. Similarly, a behavioral
geneticist who is interested in the inheritance of psycho-
pathology must find an appropriate way to measure indi-
vidual differences in various aspects of maladjustment.
In short, if one is interested in psychological dimensions
along which people differ, then there is no escaping the
basic issues of psychometrics, whether one chooses to
label one’s construct as a “trait,” a “person variable,” or
some other near synonym.
Moreover, descriptions of person variables or other
individual difference constructs labeled with terms other
than “trait” often amount to restatements. For example, the
cognitive measures such as self-descriptive reaction
time associated with “self-schemas” in the research by
Markus (1977) are similarly associated with scores from
conventional self-report scales such as the California
Psychological Inventory (Fuhrman & Funder, 1995). One
can also observe that the “if–then” statements that char-
acterize the CAPS theory largely amount to operational
definitions of personality traits. Whereas in trait terms one
might say that a person who is more extraverted is more
likely to be talkative in social situations, the CAPS theory
would more specifically claim that “if ” a particular per-
son perceives a situation as social, “then” that individual
will talk. There is not much difference between these state-
ments, and one might even suggest that the trait descrip-
tion is more economical. Therefore, the remainder of this
chapter is oriented toward trait psychology. It focuses on
the conceptualization and measurement of individual dif-
ferences, which is a core issue in personality research
regardless of deeper theoretical preference.
BEHAVIORAL ASSESSMENT
OF PERSONALITY
The foundation of empirical personality psychology is the
observation of behavior—the only way to examine a per-
sonality construct is to propose a behavioral manifestation
and then observe it. This is true regardless of the nature of
the construct, which, as we have seen, might be anything
from stimulus generalization, to rejection sensitivity, to
self-esteem, to conscientiousness, to gender identity. The
scientific study of personality rests on the following simple
formula: P → B. A researcher might theoretically view P as
causing B, or view P as a summary of B, but the method of
study remains the same.
A range of techniques can be used to examine the behav-
iors associated with personality, but in practice the most
common method is self-report. Self-report has at least three
advantages for personality assessment (along with some
important disadvantages that are considered later). First,
a person lives through many different situations and is the
only one who has had a chance to observe his or her own
behavior in all of them. The self is also the only observer
with direct access to the inner mental life, which is largely
invisible from the outside. In short, the self has more infor-
mation than anyone else and has unique access to some
information.
Second, self-views tend to have a causal force. Research
on self-verification (Swann, Chang-Schneider, & Angulo,
2007) suggests that people actively seek to behave in ways
that confirm what they believe to be true about themselves.
Studies of self-efficacy (e.g., Bandura, 1977a) show how
what people attempt to do depends on they believe about
their capabilities.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly in practice, self-
reports are the simplest and easiest type of data to obtain.
Gathering observational behavioral data, assessing life out-
comes, or recruiting friends or family to provide personal-
ity judgments of target individuals is expensive and time
consuming. Self-report allows researchers to quickly col-
lect information about many people at relatively little cost.
Self-reports yield behavioral data in two senses. First,
many questions on self-report inventories are questions
about behavior, ranging from whether the person goes
to many parties to how often the individual gets angry. To
the extent that the answers to these questions are accurate,
self-report offers an efficient method to gather wide-ranging
information about what people do in daily life. Second,
self-report is itself a behavior (Hogan & Nicholson, 1988).
The act of claiming that one is friendly or hostile is a
self-presentation that may be interesting in its own right.
Hundreds and perhaps thousands of self-report person-
ality questionnaires are available and are widely used in
research, business, and clinical settings. Some self-report
inventories measure one specific personality trait, others
measure numerous traits, and others measure a few essen-
tial traits.
Single Traits
When a researcher develops a personality test that mea-
sures a single trait, the trait is usually one that that seems

particularly important and a huge effort may be made to
explore all possible implications. The traits that receive
this kind of attention vary over the years, for reasons that
may be less than clear. Some traits appear to become well
known and widely researched because they address a social
issue that seems particularly important at the time. For
example, the post–World War II years saw an explosion of
research on authoritarianism (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik,
Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), a trait hypothesized to
underlie the combination of racism and reverence for tra-
ditional authority that allowed the Nazi atrocities. Other
traits might come into prominence because of the ingenu-
ity of their researchers, such as the creative investigations
Richard Christie (Christie & Geis, 1970) conducted while
illuminating the trait of effective manipulativeness that he
called Machiavellianism. Or perhaps they just fit the cul-
tural zeitgeist for some ineffable reason, such as may have
been manifested by the surge of interest in locus of control
during the 1960s and 1970s (Rotter, 1954, 1982).
Three traits that are of current interest, probably for a
combination of all these reasons, are self-esteem, self-mon-
itoring, and attributional complexity. The concept of self-
esteem (see Swann & Bosson, this volume) originates in
the humanistic tradition. Rogers (1951) laid the theoretical
groundwork when he introduced the concept of uncondi-
tional positive regard. According to Rogers, people who
accept themselves as they are and regard themselves in a
positive manner unconditionally will enjoy better psycho-
logical health. Years later, Rosenberg (1965) developed a
self-report questionnaire that measures individual differ-
ences in self-esteem such that those who score higher are
hypothesized to have a positive self-orientation and believe
they have value and worth. Indeed, research suggests that
low self-esteem is related to various negative outcomes
such as depression, hopelessness, dissatisfaction with life
(Crocker & Wolfe, 2001), and loneliness (Cutrona, 1982).
Self-esteem was regarded as so important that the California
legislature set up a task force to increase self-esteem as part
of a phenomenon known as the self-esteem movement.
More recently, research has suggested that self-
esteem cuts both ways. While low self-esteem is unhealthy,
extremely high self-esteem may lead to abusive, even crim-
inal behavior. Baumeister, Bushman, and Campbell (2000)
argue that extremely high self-esteem, or inflated beliefs
about one’s superiority over others, underlies aggression,
and a literature review provided evidence that extreme
favorable self-regard is related to various violent behav-
iors such as murder, rape, and spousal abuse (Baumeister,
Smart, & Boden, 1996). One reason unrealistically high
self-esteem could be bad is that low self-esteem may be
an adaptive danger signal. According to sociometer theory
(Leary, 1999), self-esteem is a mechanism that allows
Behavioral Assessment of Personality 677
people to gauge how well they are doing socially. It tends
to be lower when one has disappointed a social group, and
the negative feeling that accompanies low self-esteem
should motivate a person to restore the previous reputation.
Therefore, a person with unrealistically high self-esteem
might fail to detect when others are unhappy with him or
her and fail to respond in an appropriate manner. Overall,
it seems that adaptive self-esteem is based on legitimate
accomplishment, rather than having an extremely high or
low level independent of reality.
Self-monitoring is another personality trait that has been
widely studied, its prominence pushed along by the highly
productive original investigator Mark Snyder and various
creative studies by him and others. The self-monitoring
scale measures individual differences in the degree to
which a person is concerned with the impression made on
others and adjusts behavior to each social situation to bring
about the desired impression (Snyder, 1974). According to
theory, high self-monitors are sensitive to situational cues
and monitor their behavior to behave in socially desirable
ways. In contrast, low self-monitors are less concerned
with the social climate and act more consistently, regard-
less of the situation. Not surprisingly, high self-monitors
are more likely to be described as popular, expressive, and
socially poised, whereas low self-monitors are more likely
to be described as introspective and independent (Funder &
Harris, 1986). Individuals higher in self-monitoring also
perform better in job interviews (Osborn, Field, & Veres,
1998), use more strategies to influence their co-workers
(Caldwell & Burger, 1997), and are more willing to lie to
get a date (Rowatt, Cunningham, & Druen, 1998). Finally,
research suggests that high self-monitors are more likely
to look to the social environment to gauge how they are
feeling, whereas low self-monitors are more likely to look
within (Graziano & Bryant, 1998).
Attributional complexity is an individual difference
construct that may have arisen to exceptional prominence
because of the innovative way it attempts to bridge tra-
ditional concerns of personality and social psychology.
The attributional complexity scale (Fletcher, Danilovics,
Fernandez, Peterson, & Reeder, 1986) was developed to
reconcile two opposing views concerning how lay social
perceivers determine whether the causes of another per-
son’s behavior are internal, external, or a combination
of the two. One view proposes that people are cognitive
misers who rely on simple heuristics when attributing the
causes of other ’s behavior (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974),
while the other view holds that the attributional process
is complex (Ross & Fletcher, 1985). Rather than viewing
all social perceivers as either simple or complex, the attri-
butional complexity scale measures individual differences
in the motivation and preference for complex attributions.
678 Personality in Social Psychology
Those higher in attributional complexity are more likely
to consider both dispositional and situational factors when
trying to understand others’ behavior, while those lower in
attributional complexity are less likely to think about the
causes of behavior or to consider multiple causes. Research
has shown that, compared with those lower in attributional
complexity, individuals higher in this trait are relatively
less likely to fall prey to various errors of social judg-
ment (Follett & Hess, 2002; Schaller, Boyd, Yohannes, &
O’Brien, 1995) and, under some circumstances, are better
at “mind reading” the thoughts of others in social interac-
tion (Thomas & Fletcher, 2000). Research also suggests
that individuals who are higher in attributional complexity
are more likely to be described as thoughtful, empathic,
open to experience, and generally likable (Fast, Reimer, &
Funder, 2008).
Multiple Traits
Other widely used personality tests measure numerous
traits at once. The “many trait” inventories are typically
used to examine the many possible psychological charac-
teristics related to an important behavior or life outcome.
For example, the California Adult Q-set1 (CAQ; Bem &
Funder, 1978; Block, 1978, 2007) consists of 100 descrip-
tions of specific psychological attributes (e.g., “is critical,
skeptical, not easily impressed” and “is a genuinely depend-
able and responsible person”). Raters use the CAQ by sort-
ing the items into nine categories that range from “highly
characteristic” (category 9), to “neither characteristic nor
uncharacteristic” (category 5), to “highly uncharacteristic”
(category 1). The resulting set of ratings is quasinormally
distributed because the technique prescribes that a pre-
determined number of items be placed in each category.
The largest number of items must be placed in category 5,
and only a few items can be placed in the extreme categories
(1 and 9). The advantage of the Q-sort rating method is
that it forces raters to make fine-grained distinctions about
the person being rated and reduces social desirability and
various response sets (Block, 1978, 2007).
Raters completing the CAQ may include acquaintances
of the individual, therapists, researchers, or the individuals
themselves. The CAQ has been used to study the psycho-
logical correlates of many behaviors. Funder, Block, and
Block (1983) used the CAQ to examine sex differences
in delay of gratification. They found that boys and girls
described by teachers and researchers as reflective and
1 A setof items that are sorted into a predetermined, forced distri-
bution is called a “Q-set”; the act of rating them in this format is
“Q-sorting,” and a completed set of ratings is a “Q-sort.”
planful are more likely to delay gratification; however,
girls who delay are also more intelligent, competent, and
resourceful, whereas boys who delay are more shy, compli-
ant, and anxious. The explanation offered for this finding
was that girls are taught by society to be controlled, whereas
boys are taught to be more rambunctious. Therefore, boys
who delay gratification may be slightly less adjusted in
terms of the social lessons that they absorb.
The CAQ has also been used to examine the develop-
mental antecedents of political orientation. Block and
Block (2006) reported that children who were described
by their teachers (using a version of the Q-set adapted for
use with children) as anxious, unable to handle stress, and
tending to feel guilty were more likely to describe them-
selves as politically conservative 20 years later. On the
other hand, children who grew up to see themselves as lib-
eral were described years earlier as self-reliant, confident,
and independent. These findings suggest that psychological
attributes already apparent in childhood can anticipate adult
political orientation, and they are consistent with indepen-
dent findings that political conservatism in adults is asso-
ciated with traits including death anxiety, intolerance of
ambiguity, (low) openness to experience, and fear of threat
and loss (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003).2
Essential Traits
Finally, some personality research is motivated by the fol-
lowing question: Which personality traits are the most
important? Currently, the most widely accepted answer to
this question is the Big Five. The Big Five represent the
culmination of more than 100 years of research aimed at
reducing the many possible personality traits to an essential
few (Allport & Odbert, 1936; Cattell, 1943; Digman, 1990;
Fiske, 1949; Galton, 1884; Goldberg, 1990; McCrae &
Costa, 1987; Norman, 1967; Thurstone, 1934; Tupes &
Christal, 1961). Research on the Big Five traits is based,
in part, on the lexical hypothesis (e.g., Goldberg, 1981),
which proposes that anything truly important to human
life will be labeled with words. This idea suggests that the
most important personality traits are encoded in language.
Therefore, researchers extracted trait-adjective words from
the Oxford English Dictionary and factor analyzed ratings
of them, many times over, along with scores on a multitude
2 There is clearly more to this story, however, because conserva-
tives also apparently are happier than liberals (Taylor, Funk, &
Craighill, 2006). Maybe this is because they are good at rational-
izing inequality (Napier & Jost, 2008), but it should be observed
that characterizing a particular, widely held political belief sys-
tem as essentially pathological entails philosophical and ethical
issues (Haidt, 2008).

of personality inventories. Eventually, a consensus emerged
that much of the variance in trait words and personality rat-
ings is captured by the Big Five. Ozer and Benet-Martínez
(2006) conducted a massive research synthesis and summa-
rized the most robust correlates of these traits, mostly but
not exclusively measured via self-report:
• The first factor, extraversion, refers to the degree to
which an individual is outgoing, is energetic, and ex-
periences positive emotion.3 Those individuals who are
higher in extraversion are more likely to attend parties,
are higher in subjective well-being and happiness, are
more likely to attain positions of leadership, are more
popular, and live longer.
• Neuroticism involves the degree to which an individual
worries, is reactive to stress, and experiences negative
emotion. Those who are higher in neuroticism are more
likely to become unhappy, depressed, and anxious and
are more likely to have family problems, to be dis-
satisfied with their jobs, and to experience conflict in
romantic relationships.
• Conscientiousness involves the degree to which an indi-
vidual is dependable, organized, and punctual. People
who are higher in conscientiousness are less likely to
engage in risky behavior, which is possibly one reason
they live longer, and they perform better and have more
success in the workplace.
• Agreeableness refers to the degree to which an indi-
vidual is cooperative, warm, and gets along well with
others. Not surprisingly, individuals higher in this trait
enjoy better peer acceptance. They also are more satis-
fied with their dating partners, more likely to volunteer,
and less likely to suffer heart disease.
• Finally, openness to experience is the most controversial
trait of the Big Five in that researchers have disagreed
about which characteristics should be subsumed by this
factor and what it should be called (e.g., openness vs.
intellect vs. culture). However, in general, this trait
involves the degree to which an individual is creative,
open minded, and aesthetic. Individuals who are higher
in openness are more likely to pursue investigative, artistic,
or both types of careers and are more likely to have left-
leaning, liberal values (Ozer & Benet-Martínez, 2006).
Beyond Self-Report
Although self-report questionnaires have traditionally dom-
inated the literature and probably deserve credit for having
3Different researchers emphasize slightly different aspects of the
Big Five traits, but in this chapter we emphasize the aspects of
each trait that are common across researchers.
Behavioral Assessment of Personality 679
contributed most of what has been learned about personality,
they entail two major disadvantages. First, people may
sometimes be unwilling to reveal undesirable aspects of
their personalities. Second, people are not always aware
of every aspect of themselves. Several studies suggest
that people rate themselves higher on socially desirable
characteristics (e.g., trustworthiness) and rate themselves
lower on undesirable characteristics (e.g., laziness). For
example, Funder and Dobroth (1987) found that people’s
self-ratings of extraversion (a relatively neutral trait)
tended to agree better with their friends’ ratings of their
extraversion than self-ratings of neuroticism and friends’
ratings of neuroticism (a relatively undesirable trait).
Perhaps more telling, people’s reports of their own behav-
ior do not always agree with direct observations (Gosling,
John, Craik, & Robins, 1998; Vazire & Mehl, 2008). For
these reasons, personality psychology increasingly empha-
sizes two methods that go beyond self-report: acquain-
tances’ judgments of personality and direct behavioral
observation.
The people who share one’s social space are in a posi-
tion to observe many behaviors under realistic, meaning-
ful, and consequential circumstances. In various studies,
these observers have included friends, acquaintances,
teachers, interviewers, and therapists. As a result of their
observations, considerable evidence shows, their judg-
ments of personality tend to be accurate. Peers’ judgments
of personality largely agree with self-judgments, with
some exceptions (Funder & Colvin, 1997), and are predic-
tive of directly observed behavior in the laboratory (e.g.,
Funder & Colvin, 1991) and in daily life (e.g., Vazire &
Mehl, 2008). Teachers’ ratings of children’s personality
can predict personality, behavior, and important life out-
comes such as physical health and even longevity years
later (e.g., Friedman et al., 1993; Hampson, Goldberg,
Vogt, & Dubanoski, 2006).
Turning to direct behavioral observation, a study by
Borkenau, Mauer, Riemann, Spinath, and Angleitner (2004)
suggests that personality information can be revealed even in
seemingly trivial scenarios that observers view only briefly.
Participants were videotaped performing 15 tasks that var-
ied from 1 minute to 12 minutes in length. Tasks included
telling a joke to a confederate, introducing a stranger to the
experimenter, inventing a definition for a neologism, read-
ing newspaper headlines, and singing a song. These vid-
eotapes were later viewed by judges who had never met
the participants. Each judge viewed only one videotaped
task of each participant. Judges then rated the participants
along the Big Five traits and intelligence. Results indicated
that judges’ personality ratings were positively correlated
with participant’s self-ratings, as well as ratings provided by
the participants’ close acquaintances.
680 Personality in Social Psychology
The authors also examined the possibility that some of
the 15 tasks might be especially diagnostic of personality
traits. Results indicated that judges’ ratings of extraversion,
neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness agreed
with self and acquaintance ratings equally well across all
tasks. However, judges’ ratings of openness agreed most
strongly with self and acquaintance ratings when judges
viewed the task in which participants described multiple
uses of a brick using pantomime. Also, judges’ ratings
of intelligence were more strongly correlated with par-
ticipant’s objective intelligence scores in the tasks where
participants read newspaper headlines and invented a defi-
nition for a neologism. This suggests that social aspects
of personality generally leak out regardless of what one
is doing but that judging an individual’s intelligence and
openness requires specific observations of ability-demand-
ing behavior.
Gosling, Ko, Mannarelli, and Morris (2002) examined
the possibility that the environments that people construct
for themselves contain information about their personali-
ties. They argued that people craft their environments to be
consistent with and reinforce their self-views and to display
their identity to others. Judges viewed the offices or bed-
rooms of participants and then rated the participants along
the Big Five traits. Judges’ personality ratings were found
to positively correlate with participant’s own personality
ratings, as well as ratings provided by close acquaintances.
Judges’ ratings of openness were most strongly correlated
with self and peer ratings, followed by conscientiousness,
emotional stability, extraversion, and agreeableness.
Furthermore, many cues from the offices and bedrooms
that judges used to form their personality judgments were
found to be valid. For example, judges reported that their
ratings of openness were based on cues such as number of
and variety of books and magazines, and indeed, individu-
als higher in openness were found to have a higher number
of and wider variety of books and magazines. Also, judges’
personality ratings of extraversion were validly based on
cues such as clutter and colorfulness and personality rat-
ings of conscientiousness were validly based on cues such
as organization and cleanliness. This study suggests that the
environments that people inhabit contain a wealth of infor-
mation about their personalities and that casual observers
of these environments are sometimes able to detect and use
this information.
Using an even more subtle possible behavioral indicator of
personality, Asendorpf, Banse, and Mücke (2002) employed
the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, &
Schwartz, 1998; Banaji & Heiphetz, this volume) to
examine the possibility that explicit and implicit measures
of shyness might be differentially related to more and less
controllable aspects of shy behavior. They reasoned that,
because shyness evokes a moderately negative evaluation
in Western cultures, individuals might downplay their
shyness on explicit self-report questionnaires and use
impression management strategies to conceal their shy-
ness. Explicit shyness was measured by asking individuals
to rate the degree to which shyness adjectives described
them. Implicit shyness was measured via reaction time,
such that participants who were quicker to associate self-
relevant words (such as “self ” ) than other-relevant words
(such as “them”) to the word “shy” were considered higher
in implicit shyness. Shy behavior was coded from a video-
taped situation in which participants were told to get to know
an interaction partner for 5 minutes. The authors hypoth-
esized that duration of speech within the interaction was
a relatively controllable shy behavior, whereas self-
stimulation and body tension were less controllable shy
behaviors. Results indicated that explicit ratings of shy-
ness were more highly correlated with observations of con-
trolled shy behavior than were implicit ratings and implicit
ratings of shyness were more highly correlated with obser-
vations of uncontrollable shy behavior than were explicit
ratings. This study broadly suggests that people may be
unable or unwilling to accurately assess certain aspects
of their own personalities, which might still leak out via
behaviors that they are unable to consciously control.
Finally, Fast and Funder (2008) examined the possibil-
ity that personality is manifested in the words that people
use. This study was based on the idea that words are one
of the most explicit means through which people express
their thoughts and emotions; therefore, the frequency with
which people use different kinds of words might reveal
aspects of their personalities. Word use was measured by
counting the number of words that each participant used in
66 categories (e.g., positive emotion words, negative emo-
tion words, and achievement words). The frequency with
which individuals used words in categories was correlated
with self-reports of personality, personality judgments by
close acquaintances, and direct observations of behav-
ior. For example, those who used more sexuality words
(e.g., “horny” and “nude”) were described by themselves
and acquaintances and were directly and independently
observed to be high in the need for attention. Those who
used more certainty words (e.g., “absolutely” and “clearly”)
were rated as and directly and independently observed
to be generally more smart, thoughtful, and likable.
This study suggests that word choice is a subtle manife-
station of personality that relates to how people view them-
selves, how they are described by their acquaintances, and
how they are observed to behave.
In summary, several methods can be used to study per-
sonality, and each type of behavioral information provides a
different perspective. Self-report is by far the most common

type of data gathered in personality research; however,
researchers are increasingly using reports by friends,
acquaintances, teachers, and other observers and putting
serious effort into the development of direct and subtle
behavioral indicators of personality.
PERSON PERCEPTION AND ACCURACY
The way that an individual is perceived by others is highly
consequential. Reputation determines the opportunities that
others will make available to the individual and the expecta-
tions they will hold. A person with a good reputation will be
trusted and will find that other people like him or her; a per-
son with a bad reputation probably will not get a desired job,
will not attract his or her love interest, and will be generally
disliked. Moreover, people tend to live up or down to their
good or bad reputations because they tend to behave in ways
that confirm the expectations of others (Rosenthal & Rubin,
1978; Snyder & Swann, 1978). The study of how people per-
ceive one another is a major research topic in social and per-
sonality psychology (Macrae & Quadflieg, this volume). It is
called “person perception research” within social psychology
and “accuracy research” within personality psychology. The
difference in labels is more than superficial. The two research
paradigms are based on fundamentally different philosophi-
cal perspectives, focus on different aspects of social percep-
tion, and are studied using different methodologies.
Person Perception Research
Person perception research in social psychology is based
on social constructivism, in the sense that it treats the
views people have of one another as mental constructions,
a property of the social perceiver rather than of the person
who is described. Therefore, the focus of person percep-
tion research is on the cognitive processes that underlie the
construction of impressions. One common methodology
used to examine such processes involves creating an artifi-
cial social stimulus (such as description of a hypothetical
person), proposing an optimal model for how the stimu-
lus ought to be processed, and observing whether or not
participants process the stimulus in the proposed optimal
manner. To the extent that participants fail to process the
stimulus correctly in this sense, they are presumed to be in
error, and the cognitive processes that led to the error are
inferred by the researcher (Krueger & Funder, 2004).
In a classic study, Jones and Harris (1967) asked partici-
pants to read essays for and against favor of Fidel Castro
that, participants were told, were written by individuals
who had been instructed in which position to take. The par-
ticipants then estimated the essay writers’ actual opinions.
Person Perception and Accuracy 681
They tended to conclude that pro-Castro authors held
relatively pro-Castro opinions, compared with anti-Castro
authors, despite having been told the authors had no choice
in what to write and therefore were deemed by the experi-
menters to have committed an attribution error that Gilbert
and Jones (1986) later called the “correspondence bias.” In
other writings the bias was dubbed the “fundamental attri-
bution error” (FAE), and the original study was described as
establishing “people’s overwillingness to ascribe behavior
to enduring dispositions” (Nisbett & Ross, 1980, p. 131).
We consider the fundamental status of the error later, but for
now the methodological point concerns the way this study
exemplifies a research design in which hypothetical stimuli
are used to test putatively optimal models of information
processing, which participants generally fail to follow. This
design is typical of much research in person perception.
An essential characteristic of this design is that it pro-
vides little or no information about the variables that might
influence accuracy outside the laboratory. For example,
in the study by Jones and Harris, participants were clearly
wrong to ascribe different attitudes to the pro- and anti-
Castro essay writers, because in similar experimental con-
texts nearly everybody agrees to write the prescribed essay
regardless of actual opinion. In real life, however, people
perhaps more often say (and write) what they believe.4 Even
though a strategy of inferring corresponding beliefs from
written statements leads to error in Jones and Harris’s exper-
iment, the same strategy might produce correct judgments in
realistic contexts. An analogous situation is found in dem-
onstrations of visual effects such as the Ponzo or “railroad
lines” illusion (Funder, 1987). Looking at Figure 18.1, a
Figure 18.1 The Ponzo illusion.
Source: Tony Phillips. Downloaded November 26, 2008 from
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/24jun_moonillusion.htm.
4 Under some circumstances, they also may come to believe what
they have said or written (Bem, 1972).
682 Personality in Social Psychology
subject who believes the upper line to be longer than the lower
line is simply wrong. In real-life settings with a similar
appearance, however, such as two objects sitting on a set
of actual railroad tracks, the upper object really would be
larger.
In general, a bias to ascribe behavior to dispositional
causes promotes accuracy in real life to the extent that
behavior does tend to be dispositionally determined, just
as visual effects such as the Ponzo illusion reveal biases
that cause two-dimensional pictures to be misperceived
but allow correct judgments in three-dimensional contexts.
Person perception research is silent on this critical point.
The typical research design can demonstrate the direction
of a bias but does not provide evidence concerning the
degree to which the bias undermines or promotes accuracy
under realistic circumstances. For just this reason, the pio-
neering person perception researcher E. E. Jones once com-
mented that the common experimental paradigm “solved
the accuracy problem by bypassing it” (1985, p. 77).
He did not intend this comment as a complaint, or confes-
sion. Rather, he was expressing appreciation for the way
person perception research had managed to develop exper-
imental methods that could address interesting questions
while bypassing the difficult issues entailed in the study
of judgmental accuracy. Ironically, however, subsequent
work within this paradigm often was interpreted as demon-
strating shortcomings of human judgment.
Accuracy Research
Accuracy research within personality psychology follows a
fundamentally different strategy. It is based on critical real-
ism (Rorer, 1990), a philosophical approach asserting that
the best way to assess a judgment is in terms of multiple
fallible external criteria that probabilistically indicate the
degree to which it is a true reflection of reality.5 Therefore,
accuracy research focuses on establishing criteria by which
to evaluate accuracy and identifying the factors that make
accurate personality judgment more or less likely.
Methods of Accuracy Research
The primary methodology involves comparing multiple
sources of information about a person to evaluate the
degree to which a personality judgment is accurate. For
example, if person A is judged to be high in extraversion
by an acquaintance, we can evaluate this judgment by
comparing it with person A’s self-judgment of the degree
to which he or she is extraverted, with direct observations
5The distinction between constructivism and critical realism was
discussed as “logical” versus “objective” by Gilbert (1998).
of person A’s behavior (e.g., Does person A talk more than
others?), and with relevant life outcomes (e.g., Does person
A successfully engage in an occupation that requires being
outgoing and energetic?). If sources of data converge with
one another (e.g., person A describes himself or herself as
extraverted, talks a lot, and is a successful salesperson), we
can be reasonably confident that person A’s acquaintance
has provided an accurate personality judgment. Accuracy
research differs from person perception research in that
the typical study uses real people as the target of judgment
and gathers personality judgments from people who know
them in real life, along with other indicators such as self-
judgments, behavioral observations, and life outcomes.
History of Accuracy Research
Accuracy research in this sense has a history that goes back
more than 70 years (e.g., see Chapter 18 in Allport, 1937).
Early studies focused on agreement between self and oth-
ers’ judgments of personality in search of correlates of the
“good judge” (Estes, 1938; Taft, 1955). Research activity
in this area almost came to a halt in the 1950s, however,
for at least three reasons (Funder, 1995, pp. 653–654).
First, few consistent findings concerning the correlates of
judgmental ability emerged from a multitude of studies.
Second, severe critiques of the methods used by almost
all the studies of the time concluded that the numbers used
to index self–other agreement—the typical standard for
accuracy—were possibly confounded by actual and
assumed similarity between judge and target and response
sets such as positivity and acquiescence (Cronbach, 1955;
Gage & Cronbach, 1955). While the problems the critiques
raised were not insurmountable, the difficulty that appeared
to be entailed in overcoming them discouraged many
researchers from further studies in the area. The third reason
for the falloff in accuracy research was that it began to be
supplanted by experimental research in person perception
(e.g., Tagiuri & Petrullo, 1958)—an approach that, as Jones
noted, solved the problem of accuracy by bypassing it.
Accuracy research began to revive in the early 1980s,
however, as investigators turned their attention to the
issues Cronbach had raised and developed new meth-
ods for addressing accuracy issues. Kenny (e.g., 1994)
developed statistical tools (and associated computer pro-
grams) for decomposing interpersonal judgments into
their components, along with a theoretical model of how
information is combined to yield personality judgments.
A robust, general finding of this research has been that
people generally judge one another accurately on impor-
tant traits such as aggressiveness (e.g., Kenny et al., 2007).
Other researchers showed how even brief observations
of behavior, called “thin slices,” can yield surprisingly
valid judgments of personality and important interpersonal

outcomes (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992, 1993; Rule, Ambady,
Adams, & Macrae, 2008).
Moderators of Accuracy
Research has identified four basic moderators that affect
the likelihood of making an accurate personality judgment:
(1) properties of the judge, (2) properties of the target indi-
vidual who is being judged, (3) properties of the trait that
is being judged, and (4) properties of the information on
which the personality judgment is based.
The oldest and perhaps most studied moderator is prop-
erties of the judge. Early research suggested that judges
who are highly intelligent and conscientious render the
most accurate judgments of personality; however, this was
the research that was harshly criticized for using inadequate
methods (e.g., Colvin & Bundick, 2001; Cronbach, 1955).
More recent research suggests that judges who are higher
in “communion,” invested in developing and maintain-
ing interpersonal relationships, are more accurate judges
of personality (Vogt & Colvin, 2003). Another study sug-
gests that people who generally describe others in favor-
able terms (e.g., friendly and helpful) are more likely to be
accurate because most people are generally friendly and
helpful (Letzring & Funder, 2006).
Overall, the good judge seems to be someone who is
socially engaged and optimistic about people (Letzring,
2008). However, there may be subtle differences in the per-
sonality characteristics that are associated with accuracy
between male and female judges. Kolar (1996) found that
the most accurate male judges of personality have a confi-
dent and outgoing interpersonal style, while the most accu-
rate female judges are more likely to be open to and have a
high interest in others. This finding hints that being a good
judge has important consequences for the judge, consistent
with a recent report that people who are good at identifying
facial expressions associated with fear tend to act in proso-
cial ways such as donating money or helping someone in
need (Marsch, Kozak, & Ambady, 2007).
Another moderator of accuracy concerns the target, or
the person who is judged. Some people seem like an open
book, while other people are more elusive and difficult to
know. Colvin (1993) found that individuals who behave
in a more consistent manner, regardless of the situation or
the people with whom they are interacting, are easier to
accurately judge than people who seem to have a different
personality for every situation and person they encounter.
Interestingly, Jourard (1971) hypothesized that individuals
who put on a psychological façade, and for whom there
is a large discrepancy between who they are on the inside
and what they display on the outside, are more likely to
be psychologically maladjusted. This suggests that individ-
uals who behave the same regardless of who they are with
Person Perception and Accuracy 683
or where they are may be better adjusted than individuals
who are more difficult to judge. In the end, the “what you
see is what you get” factor appears to be an important
property of the target individual that affects the likelihood
of accurate personality judgment.
Personality traits also vary in the degree to which they
are easy to judge. For example, imagine someone you know
and rate the degree to which that person is talkative on a
scale of 1 to 5. It seems easy enough. Now try to rate the
degree to which that person is deceptive. At first glance this
task might seem easy, but further consideration reveals that
it is not straightforward. By definition, deception is a trait
that describes people who purposefully lead others to form
false impressions of them. Therefore, if you know a person
who is skilled in deception, then you really do not know
that person and your personality judgment will be inaccu-
rate. It is no surprise, then, that those personality traits that
are more evaluatively neutral (neither socially desirable nor
socially undesirable) and traits associated with observable
behaviors are more likely to be judged accurately (Funder &
Dobroth, 1987; John & Robins, 1993). Talkativeness
can be judged with a high degree of accuracy because it
is a trait that is relatively neutral and it can be directly
observed. Deception, on the other hand, usually cannot be
judged with a high degree of accuracy because, although
it is possible to imagine overt behaviors that would allow
deception to be identified (e.g., a behavior that contradicts
a false impression), these behaviors are purposefully con-
cealed and are therefore not easily observed.
Those who wonder just which traits are visible and
which are not probably already know the answer. Funder
and Dobroth (1987) asked undergraduates to rate the
degree to which each of the 100 personality attributes in
the CAQ was easy or difficult to judge. The aggregate of
their ratings correlated r ⫽ .42 (p < .001) with the degree to
which these attributes manifested good interjudge agree-
ment (between self and others’ ratings and between the
ratings of different raters of the same target) in judg-
ments of real target people. Consistent findings have since
been reported many times, including studies by Bernieri,
Zuckerman, Koestner, and Rosenthal (1994); Borkenau
and Liebler (1995); Kenny, Albright, Malloy, and Kashy
(1994); McCrae (1982); Park and Judd (1989); and Watson
(1989). The most visible traits tend to be relevant to attri-
butes such as social skill and extraversion, and the least
visible traits are associated with relatively difficult-to-see
attributes such as “motivation to work” (Gifford, Ng, &
Wilkinson, 1985).
This finding might seem obvious, and it probably is,
at least in retrospect. It amounts to the profound conclu-
sion that more visible traits are easier to see. However,
the research has two important implications. One stems
684 Personality in Social Psychology
from the finding that people in general can rate trait vis-
ibility accurately. When set against research implying
people are poor interpersonal judges, it suggests at least
one area in which people know when their judgments
are more likely and less likely to be accurate. A second
implication concerns the suggestion, sometimes raised,
that personality judgments by acquaintances are based on
overheard reputation or superficial stereotypes rather than
behavioral observation (e.g., McClelland, 1972). But arti-
ficially constructed reputations or superficial stereotypes
could concern nonvisible traits, as well as visible ones.
More interjudge agreement is found for visible traits, sug-
gesting that one basis of this agreement is valid behavioral
observation.
Finally, the information that personality judgments are
based on plays an important role in the degree to which they
are accurate. Two properties of information affect accuracy:
quantity and quality. In terms of quantity, it is generally
found that more information is better. Personality judg-
ments by close acquaintances have been observed to agree
better with self-judgments of personality than judgments
by strangers (Funder & Colvin, 1988), and longer peri-
ods of observation lead to greater accuracy (Blackman &
Funder, 1998). However, there seems to be at least one cir-
cumstance under which judgments by strangers can be as
accurate as judgments by acquaintances. Colvin and Funder
(1991) found that the advantage of acquaintances over
strangers vanishes when their personality judgments are
used to predict the behavior of a target person in a situation
that is similar to one in which the stranger has observed the
target but the acquaintance has not. For example, your par-
ents have known you throughout your entire life but might
not ever have seen you deliver an academic lecture. If your
mother was asked to predict how you would act during a
lecture and one of your students was asked the same ques-
tion, Colvin and Funder ’s findings suggest that your mom
and the student would make approximately equally accu-
rate predictions. However, if asked how you would behave
in any other situation, the prediction by your mom would
likely be more accurate than the prediction by the student.
The quality of the information also affects accuracy.
Information that is gathered in relatively weak situations
may be better for purposes of personality judgment than
information that is gathered in strong situations (Snyder &
Ickes, 1985). Strong situations have social norms that
restrict how people behave in them, so they dilute indi-
vidual differences and personality relevant information,
whereas weak situations are less socially scripted and allow
for wider variation in behavior. For example, a person’s
behavior during Sunday Mass is largely a function of the
rules of the situation, and observing behavior would not
likely yield much information about personality; however,
a person is relatively free to behave as he or she wishes at a
party, and observing behavior in that situation would likely
be more revealing. Letzring, Wells, and Funder (2006)
observed that people who met in an unstructured situa-
tion, where they could talk about whatever they wanted,
made more accurate personality judgments of one another
compared with those who met under more structured cir-
cumstances, in which they were given specific goals and
instructions on what to do. Situations relevant to the per-
sonality trait being judged are also more likely to provide
better-quality information. For example, if you have never
observed someone in a situation that affords the opportu-
nity to demonstrate courage, then it would be difficult to
make an accurate judgment of that person’s courageous-
ness. Similarly, to judge a person’s sociability, observa-
tions of that person at a party would be more informative
than observations while the person is studying alone at the
library (e.g., Freeberg, 1969).
Realistic Accuracy Model
The moderators that affect accuracy can be explained in
terms of the realistic accuracy model, which proposes
that the achievement of accurate personality judgment
has four necessary stages: relevance, availability, detec-
tion, and utilization (Funder, 1995, 1999). First, the per-
son being judged must do something relevant. That is, the
target of judgment must do something informative about
the trait being judged. If we want to judge the degree to
which someone is narcissistic, that person must display
a behavior that pertains to narcissism (e.g., excessively
brag). Second, the relevant information must be avail-
able to observe. If the target of judgment excessively
brags only in contexts that the judge does not share, then
the judge will not have access to this information. Third, the
judge of personality must detect the relevant and available
information. If the judge is distracted or does not notice
the narcissist’s bragging, then the information will not
figure into the judgment. Finally, the judge must cor-
rectly use the relevant and available information that was
detected. If the judged noticed the narcissist bragging but
interpreted this behavior as charming confidence, then
accurate judgment has failed at the final stage.
The realistic accuracy model in Figure 18.2 has several
implications. The first is that accurate personality judgment
is difficult. Four hurdles need to be overcome to achieve
accuracy, and a failure at any step in the process leads to
an inaccurate judgment. Second, the model provides a way
to anticipate and explain the four moderators previously
discussed. For example, a good judge of personality is
someone who spends enough time around people to detect
available and relevant information and is able to use this
information correctly. A good target is someone who emits

Relevance Availability Detection
Personality
(Achievement)
genuine cues that are personality relevant in a range of
settings, enhancing the availability of these cues. A good
trait is one for which many relevant cues are available for
detection, and finally, good information involves expo-
sure to relevant cues. The final implication of the realistic
accuracy model is that it suggests four ways to improve
the accuracy of personality judgment. Much person per-
ception research in social psychology focuses on cogni-
tive errors and biases that occur at the utilization stage of
the realistic accuracy model; however, accurate personal-
ity judgment is more than correct thinking, and judgment
could be improved at the three other stages.
One way to be a better judge of personality is simply
to pay more attention to people (i.e., detection). If relevant
and available cues are flying around but a judge is not pay-
ing attention, then accurate judgment fails. Another way to
become a better judge is to behave in ways that create situ-
ations in which people express their true selves. Letzring
(2008) found that observers were able to make more accu-
rate judgments of people observed in situations that included
individuals who were good judges themselves. People might
be more inclined to “be themselves” in social situations
where they feel comfortable. When people are self-conscious
or worried about the impression they are making, they are
probably less likely to emit personality relevant information.
This might be why socially skilled and agreeable people tend
to make more accurate judgments of personality. Finally,
another way to be a better judge is to spend a lot of time with
the target one wishes to judge. Observing people in numer-
ous and various situations makes it more likely that relevant
cues will become available. For example, when trying to get
to know a potential love interest on a first date, it is probably
not the best idea to go to a movie. This kind of situation offers
little chance to observe much about personality, whereas tak-
ing someone on a hike or to the zoo (situations that allow for
interpersonal interaction) would likely yield better informa-
tion and a more accurate first impression.
COMPETITION
Although the accuracy and person perception paradigms
differ in many ways, they are potentially complementary.
Competition 685
Utilization
Judgment
Figure 18.2 The realistic accuracy model.
It is not difficult to imagine an interdisciplinary effort that
combined social cognition and accuracy research into one
big theory that explained how people perceive one another.
However, deep philosophical and methodological differ-
ences between social and personality psychology have
stood in the way of this integration.
The differences in research methodology are also asso-
ciated with differences in data analysis. Social psychology
research almost always analyzes data using analysis of
variance, which prominently displays p levels and obscures
effect sizes.6 In contrast, personality psychology almost
always uses correlational and regression analyses, and
these analyses are fundamentally based on and reported
in terms of effect size. Effect sizes and p levels have an
algebraic equivalence that allows one to be converted into
the other (the only additional piece of information needed
is N, the sample size), but this simple fact and its impli-
cations have not been universally appreciated. The blind
spot concerning effect sizes and the mutual failure of each
field to fully appreciate the methodological and philo-
sophical approach of the other left the fields of personality
and social psychology vulnerable to two key influences:
Mischel’s (1968) critique of personality traits and Lee
Ross’s (1977) descriptions of the shortcomings of every-
day social perceivers.
Two Converging Critiques
Mischel (1968) reviewed various empirical personality
studies to evaluate a core assumption of trait theory that,
in his opinion, had not been adequately addressed previ-
ously. He examined evidence concerning the degree to
which behavior is consistent across different situations and
concluded that observations of similar behaviors rarely
6 Experimental research focuses on p levels rather than effect
sizes because laboratory studies aim to demonstrate the exis-
tence of causal effects rather than their size, which in a labora-
tory is largely determined by specific aspects of the experimental
procedure (e.g., how prominently a stimulus is displayed). The
real-world importance of experimentally discovered effects must
be determined in field studies, often with correlational design
(Mook, 1983).
686 Personality in Social Psychology
correlate with each other greater than r ⫽ .30. Mischel
cautioned readers against being misled by a “significant”
correlation of this size. He argued that a .30 correlation
could be significant if a sample size is large enough and
that squaring a correlation (to yield the percentage of vari-
ance explained) is more informative than focusing on
p levels. This led to the conclusion that a correlation of
.30 among behaviors is small because it means that traits
account for less than 10% of the variance. By subtraction,
it was implicitly assumed that the remaining 90% of vari-
ance in behavior must be accounted for by details of the
situation.7 In Mischel’s (1968, p. 37) own words, “It is evi-
dent that the behaviors which are often construed as stable
personality trait indicators actually are highly specific and
depend on the details of the evoking situations.” This mes-
sage—sometimes called “situationism” (Bowers, 1973)—
was accepted by many readers and created an adverse
climate for personality research.
Meanwhile, research on person perception was blos-
soming in social psychology. Although some researchers
focused on demonstrating that social perceivers follow
logical or rational models when making judgments (Kelley,
1967; McArthur, 1972), others concentrated on demon-
strating biases, errors, and imperfections. Jones’s (1985)
comment notwithstanding, their findings were generally
interpreted as showing how and when people were wrong.
People were observed to erroneously attribute the causes of
their failure to external sources and the causes of their suc-
cess to internal sources (Davis & Davis, 1972), erroneously
use self-referent information as an anchor from which to
infer information about others (the false consensus effect;
Ross, Greene, & House, 1977), and as previously men-
tioned, erroneously assume a correspondence between an
author ’s written opinions and private opinions, even when
armed with the knowledge that the author had no choice
in the point of view expressed (Jones & Harris, 1967).
Ross (1977) summarized this literature and proposed
that many errors in social judgment could be explained
by an underlying illusion common to everyday social per-
ceivers and personality psychologists alike. The FAE, he
proposed, is the tendency for people to overestimate the
influence of dispositional factors on behavior and to under-
estimate the influence of situational factors. Ross (1977)
cited Mischel’s (1968) critique of trait theory as further
evidence of this illusion and proposed that an important
direction for social psychology was to continue document-
ing the ways in which everyday social perceivers and trait
theorists fail to appreciate the power of situations.
7For a discussion of the common but questionable practice of
squaring r’s to yield “variance explained” (see Ozer, 1985).
In principle, there is no necessary connection between
the situationist critique of personality and the promulga-
tion of the FAE within social psychology. A particular trait
might have a powerful influence on a particular behavior,
and people still might overestimate its effect by believing
it to be even stronger than it is.8 However, such a connec-
tion was established. Prominent writers drew direct analo-
gies between the shortcomings of personality psychology
identified by the Mischelian critique and the shortcomings
of “lay personality theory” exemplified by the FAE (e.g.,
Ross & Nisbett, 1991, pp. 120–139). This convergence
led to the establishment of the FAE as a foundation of the
way that social psychology came to view personality psy-
chology. The main message of social psychology became
advertised as “the power of the social situation is much
greater than most people believe.” One major introductory
textbook describes this claim as “perhaps the single most
important lesson from social psychology” (both quotes
from Gazzaniga & Heatherton, 2006, p. 634). A fairly
direct implication of this lesson would seem to be that per-
sonality matters less than most people, including personal-
ity psychologists, believe.
A classic example that is often cited as strong evi-
dence of situational power is Milgram’s obedience study.
Milgram (1963, 1974/2004) demonstrated that a surprising
number of people will administer lethal shocks to an inno-
cent victim if a perceived authority figure commands it.
Furthermore, a panel of psychiatrists erroneously predicted
that fully 98% of Milgram’s participants would disobey
such an order. In textbook after textbook, this study has
been described as demonstrating the power of situations
to elicit bad behavior and the vulnerability of even expert
psychological judges to the FAE.
Evaluating the Power of Personality
After 40 years of research, a variety of evidence indicates
that personality research was given a bad rap. Starting with
Mischel (1968), the critique of traits was based on a lim-
ited perspective on trait theory and an incomplete analysis
of the implications of effect sizes. The basic critique relies
on the assumption that the viability of trait psychology
requires that a single trait predict a single behavior. For
example, Mischel reported a study in which the correlation
between positive attention-seeking behavior (e.g., seeking
praise) and negative attention-seeking behavior (e.g., dis-
ruption) in preschool children was r ⫽ .23 (Sears, 1963).
This correlation was deemed low because both behaviors are
thought to be indicators of the broader trait of dependency.
8I thank the editors of this book for raising this important point.
 Competition 687

To the eyes of a trait theorist, however, .23 is a surprisingly Table 18.1 The BESD for a Study in Which a Drug Had No
Effect
high correlation for the two behaviors because, although
they might both be manifestations of dependency, it is easy Alive Dead Total

to imagine other traits that would independently influ- Treatment 50 50 100

ence each of them. A highly agreeable child who is high Control 50 50 100
in dependency would probably seek positive attention but Total 100 100 200
not negative attention, and a highly aggressive child who BESD, binomial effect size display.
is high in dependency would probably seek negative atten-
tion but not positive attention. In short, trait theory does
Table 18.2 The BESD for a Drug Study with an Effect Size of
not assume that one trait can perfectly predict one behav- r ⴝ .30
ior; rather, it expects that any number of traits can influ- Alive Dead Total
ence a single behavior.
Treatment 65 35 100
Ahadi and Diener (1989) used Monte Carlo simulations
Control 35 65 100
to determine the maximum possible correlation that a per-
Total 100 100 200
sonality researcher could hope to find given that multiple
BESD, binomial effect size display.
traits influence a given behavior. They found that when
three traits influence two behaviors and the two behaviors
are influenced by one common trait, the upper bound corre- Table 18.3 The BESD for a Study of Job Performance with an
lation between the two behaviors is approximately r ⫽ .30. Effect Size of r ⴝ .30

When they adjusted the model so that four traits influenced High Performance Low Performance Total
two behaviors and the two behaviors were influenced by High 65 35 100
conscientious
one common trait, the upper bound correlation between the
two behaviors was approximately r ⫽ .25. These estimates Low 35 65 100
conscientious
(.30 and .25) are comparable to the magnitude of correla-
Total 100 100 200
tion previously mentioned regarding dependency behav-
iors, and more importantly, the estimates are comparable BESD, binomial effect size display.

to the correlations typically found in personality research.

Moreover, Ahadi and Diener ’s (1989) data analytical model
assumed that only five personality traits exist and behav-
ior is completely determined by those five traits, so their
model overestimates the correlations among behaviors that
we would expect to find in the real world where situations,
moods, and various other factors influence behavior. Their
findings suggest that the typical correlation among behav-
iors in different situations, r ⫽ .30, is impressive rather
than trivial.
A second problem with the critique involves the idea
that r ⫽ .30 is a small effect because squaring it reveals
how little behavioral variance (e.g., 9%) is explained by
traits. Rather than squaring correlations, another, perhaps
more informative way to evaluate an effect size is to calcu-
late the binomial effect size display (BESD; Rosenthal &
Rubin, 1982). The BESD is an intuitively accessible way to
display the practical importance of an effect size in terms
of dichotomous outcomes. For example, imagine that
a researcher has conducted a study examining the effect
of a medication in which 100 participants received the
medication and 100 participants were in the control group.
If the medication had zero effect (e.g., r ⫽ 0), then people
in the treatment and control groups would be equally likely
to live or die. This outcome is displayed in Table 18.1.
However, suppose that the experimenter observed that
participants in the treatment group were significantly more
likely to be alive at the end of the study than participants
in the control group and that the magnitude of effect for the
treatment was r ⫽ .30. To display the effect size in terms of
the likely outcome in the four cells of Table 18.2, the fol-
lowing equation is used to determine the number of people
who achieve the predicted outcome: 50 ⫹ (r/2 ⫻ 100.)
In this case, the calculation is: 50 ⫹ (.30/2 ⫻ 100) ⫽ 65,
where 65 represents the number of people that would be
expected to live out of 100 people in the treatment group
(the upper left-hand cell of the table). Because this table
has one degree of freedom, the numbers in the remaining
cells can be computed by simple subtraction.
It should be apparent from Table 18.2 that a treatment
with an effect size of .30 increases the survival rate from
35% to 65% and that this is indeed a notable difference.
Would you want the treatment? In terms of personality
coefficients, suppose that a researcher found that ratings of
conscientiousness (e.g., high ratings vs. low ratings) cor-
related with work performance (e.g., high performance vs.
low performance) at r ⫽ .30. As can be seen in Table 18.3,
this means that a recruiter could greatly increase the
chances of correctly hiring a high-performing employee by
selecting applicants who score high on conscientiousness
688 Personality in Social Psychology
(e.g., 65% of those who are high in conscientiousness will
perform well, and 65% of those who are low in conscien-
tiousness will perform poorly). The BESD illustrates how
an effect size of .30 is large enough to be important under
many circumstances.
Finally, Funder and Ozer (1983) examined three promi-
nent studies in social psychology that are universally rec-
ognized as impressive demonstrations of the influence of
situational factors on behavior. These studies included
Festinger and Carlsmith’s (1959) study of attitude report
as a function of incentive for counterattitudinal advo-
cacy, Darley and Latané’s (1968) and Darley and Batson’s
(1973) studies of bystander intervention as a function of
the number of other people who are present and the degree
to which one is in a hurry, and Milgram’s (1974/2004)
study on obedience to instructions to harm another person
as a function of the proximity of the authority figure and
proximity of the victim. For each of these studies, analy-
sis of variance procedures or t-tests were originally used
to demonstrate situational effects; however, Funder and
Ozer (1983) used the available published data to calculate
the corresponding effect sizes and found that they ranged
from .36 to .42, a magnitude often observed in personality
research. Of course, these effect sizes were calculated from
some of the most prominent studies in the social psycho-
logical literature. A more thorough review found that the
average effect size of social psychological experiments is
equivalent to an r ⫽ .21 (sd ⫽ .15; Richard et al., 2003).
Personality traits and situations cannot be distinguished
from one another on the basis of effect size, at least not to
the advantage of situations.
Fundamental Attribution Error Reconsidered
This conclusion suggests that the everyday social percep-
tion that people behave in a relatively consistent manner is
more than mere illusion. Therefore, social perceivers’ ten-
dency to infer dispositional causes as the source of others,
behavior may not be an error, much less a fundamental one.
We do not argue that the FAE really runs in the opposite
direction (that personality is more powerful than is usually
acknowledged), but a surprising number of studies, as well
as everyday observations, suggest this might sometimes be
the case.
Empirical Considerations
An intriguing early study by Strickland (1958) found that
supervisors trust employees less the more they supervise
them. In a context where workers actually perform the
same whether they are supervised or not, supervisors over-
attribute the work they directly supervise to the situation—
they believe the workers are performing only because they
are being watched—instead of (more correctly) to the
diligence of the workers themselves.
Overattribution to the situation occurs in the domains
of emotion and happiness, as well as in the world of work.
People overestimate the long-term effects of positive and
negative events on their emotional well-being; one team of
researchers surmised on the basis of their results that even
the effects of seemingly strong situations as winning the
Nobel Prize or having one’s academic department abol-
ished might have weaker long-term effects than we tend
to assume (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley,
1998, p. 617). Their research on “emotional forecasting”
shows that people overestimate the affective impact of life
events. More generally, research from several laboratories
has consistently shown that people tend to overestimate the
influence of the situation on happiness and underestimate
the influence of dispositional factors (Diener & Lucas,
1999; Lykken & Tellegen, 1996; Lyubomirsky et al.,
2005). As one investigator summarized the evidence,
Research shows that external life circumstances have a sur-
prisingly small effect on happiness and well-being. In con-
trast, personality traits and other stable factors appear to play
a more important role in happiness. Happiness is heritable,
stable over time, and moderately to strongly associated with
personality characteristics. (Lucas, 2007, p. 168, emphasis
added; see also Lucas, 2008)
The study that most directly showed the FAE going
opposite to the traditionally expected direction was an
experiment by Quattrone (1982). In a close replication of
the pioneering study by Jones and Harris (1967), Quattrone
asked subjects to estimate the situational forces that deter-
mined the essay-writing behavior by authors who, subjects
were clearly informed, had free choice of what to write.
By making situational forces instead of attitudes salient,
and asking participants the opposite question from the one
employed in the classic study, Quattrone reversed the clas-
sic correspondence bias—in this case, subjects overattrib-
uted to the situation.
Everyday experience suggests that such reversals occur
outside the laboratory as well. For example, recall the last
time that you discussed politics with someone holding
contrary beliefs. Regardless of how elegant, rational, and
convincing your arguments might have been, did this con-
versational situation change the other person’s mind about
anything? To frame this question in terms of the direction
of attributional error, did your lucid arguments affect the
other person’s beliefs more, or less, than you expected?
Other illuminating examples arise when a parent tries to
affect the behavior of a child or spouses try to change each
other ’s behavior. Countless books offer advice on how to

parent children and how to change behavior in relationships;
but ask any parent or couple about their ability to effec-
tively influence what the other person does—regardless
of the degree of control one has of that individual’s situa-
tion (which in the case of parents and relationship partners
is considerable)—and most likely you will hear frustrated
reports about a disappointing—and, somehow, always
surprising—failure to bring about the desired change.
A final example is provided by the many expensive
governmental and other programs intended to curb drug
abuse, risky sexual activity, drunk driving, and other unde-
sirable behaviors. It would not be correct to say that these
programs are never effective, but it does seem safe to
observe that they generally have less success than is hoped
for and expected in their optimistic early days. In all of
these examples, the moral is clear: People often are just
going to do what they are going to do. Attempts to derail
these tendencies through manipulations of the situational
context are difficult at best and, often, are more difficult
than would-be behavior changers expect.
Conceptual Considerations
A deeper, conceptual complication with the “situations are
more powerful than people think” mantra is that explana-
tions for behavior that exclusively attribute causality to
either the person or the situation may not be as coherent as
they seem. Consider two possible ways in which a mother
might explain the cause of her child’s behavior: “Joey didn’t
finish his homework because it was too hard” versus “Joey
didn’t finish his homework because he gives up too easily.”
Although the first explanation seems to attribute causality
to the situation (the homework) and the second explanation
seems to attribute causality to the person (Joey), an inter-
nal versus external dichotomy oversimplifies what these
explanations imply. The seemingly situational explanation
implies something about personality; it implies that Joey
has a disposition toward giving up when things are tough.
Moreover, the seemingly dispositional explanation implies a
situational influence; it implies that something about Joey’s
homework (i.e., it must be difficult because it requires per-
sistence) influenced his behavior. Almost any explanation
for the cause of a behavior implies something about the per-
son and the situation. Especially smart psychologists (e.g.,
Gilbert, 1998; Ross, 1977) have long understood that the
distinction between personal and situational causation is
fuzzier and more complex than it might seem at first.
Consider, again, the Milgram obedience study. Looked
at broadly, the experimental situation contains at least two
situational forces and two dispositional ones. The experi-
menter’s orders constitute an obvious situational force in the
direction of obedience; the victim’s cries are a situational
force in the direction of disobedience. As Milgram noted,
Competition 689
The principal conflict of the experiment . . . is between
the experimenter’s demands that he continue to administer the
electric shock and the learner ’s demands, which become
increasingly insistent, that the experiment be stopped.
(1974/2004, p. 26)
Indeed, Milgram found that as each force increased it
affected behavior in a predictable manner: The closer the
experimenter was to the subject, the more obedience was
obtained; the closer the victim was to the subject, the more
disobedience was obtained.
In addition, the experiment evokes two dispositional
forces toward compassion and compliance, which also
compete within every subject. As Milgram noted,
There were both obedient and defiant outcomes, frequently
accompanied by extreme tension. A conflict develops between
the deeply ingrained disposition not to harm others and the
equally compelling tendency to obey others who are in author-
ity. (1974/2004, pp. 42–43)
Thus, the surprising degree of obedience obtained by
Milgram can be explained in one of four ways:
1. The situational forces toward obedience (e.g., the orders
of the authority figure) were stronger than the situational
forces toward compassion (e.g., the victim’s cries).
2. The subjects’ dispositions toward obedience were stron-
ger than the subjects’ dispositions toward compassion.
3. The situational forces toward obedience were stronger
than the dispositional forces toward compassion.
4. The dispositional forces toward obedience were stron-
ger than the situational forces toward compassion.
Explanation 3 is the standard one found in many text-
books. Explanation 4 reverses the FAE, and might be
considered heretical. However, explanations 3 and 4 are
actually equivalent (they mean the same thing). Worse,
both are incoherent because they rely on a simple inter-
nal versus external dichotomy that pits the person against
the situation. The reality is that at any given point, person
variables and situational variables both affect behavior and
they both take part in the net result. One of them does not
“win” because each is necessary for the other. The situa-
tional force toward obedience in the Milgram study would
have no effect on someone lacking an inclination to obey,
and an inclination to obey produces no harmful effect in
the absence of orders.
In contrast, explanations 1 and 2 are coherent and cor-
rect, but they are also equivalent to each other. The situ-
ational forces toward obedience were stronger than the
690 Personality in Social Psychology
situational forces toward compassion, and the disposi-
tion to obey was generally stronger than the disposition
to resist. Notice that these two statements are equivalent
because, again, situational forces work in inextricable tan-
dem with the dispositions to respond to them.9
Is there any way to separate situational from dispo-
sitional causation of behavior? Ross (1977) provided an
interesting solution to this conundrum. He suggested
that situational causes can be distinguished from disposi-
tional causes by examining the degree to which a behav-
ior is unique or uncommon. When all or almost all people
behave the same way in a situation, it seems fair to con-
clude that the behavior was situationally influenced. But
when behavior varies within a situation (at the extreme,
50% of people behave in one way and 50% in the other),
then behavior would seem more influenced by individual
dispositions.
This method of distinguishing situational from disposi-
tional causation is illuminating and according to one writer,
is “a logical standard [that] does not seem . . . to have any
serious competition” (Gilbert, 1998, p. 135). However, it
has some surprising implications. For example, it means
that the widely studied “false consensus bias” (Ross et al.,
1977), in which people see their own behavior as more
common than it really is, leads people to over estimate the
influence of the situation on themselves rather than, as is
more commonly argued, underestimating the effect of the
situation on other people.10
The application of this standard to the FAE in Milgram’s
study is even more surprising, because it sets the standard
interpretation on its head. When Milgram’s panel of psy-
chiatrists predicted that 98% of participants would behave
the same way (by disobeying), the psychiatrists underes-
timated the amount of behavioral variance and, therefore,
over estimated the power of the situation. They expected a
98–2 split; the real split was much closer to even.11 By the
9 There is a good chance that Milgram would have agreed. He
once wrote that the “social psychology of the reactive individual,
the recipient of forces and pressures emanating from outside one-
self . . . represents, of course, only one side of the coin of social
life” (Milgram, 1977, quoted in Blass, 2004, p. 290).
10Thus, studies of the false consensus bias could be added to the
earlier list of reversals of the FAE.
11
In the two most famous conditions, in which the experimenter
was present and the victim could be heard but not seen, the rates of
obedience were 63% (at Yale University) and 48% (at the fictitious
“Research Associates of Bridgeport”); the overall average rate of
obedience across 18 experimental conditions was 37.5% (Milgram,
1974/2004, Tables 2–5; see Krueger & Funder, 2004, p. 327).
standard offered by Ross (1977) and Gilbert (1998), the
psychiatrists committed the inverse of the FAE.
As we promised, the purpose of this discussion is not
to argue that personality factors are generally more power-
ful than situational factors or to assert that the consistent
direction of the FAE is opposite to the one traditionally
claimed. Rather, we hope to offer a reductio ad absurdum
in support of the point that an adversarial contrast between
situations and people has for too long defined much of the
relationship between personality and social psychology. A
more productive direction will involve turning attention to
how situational and personality variables together deter-
mine behavior—in another word, interactionism.
TOWARD A COOPERATIVE SOCIAL–
PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY
The most useful way to consider situational and personal
variables is as interactional partners. This view was oper-
ationalized in Lewin’s (1936) well-known formula B ⫽ f
(P,S), which explicitly defines behavior as a function of the
person and the situation. This equation implies that if we
knew all relevant psychological properties of a person and
all relevant properties of that individual’s situation, we could
predict with high precision what the person would do.
Lewin’s equation can be further arranged to illumi-
nate other associations among behavior, personality,
and situations (Bandura, 1978). P ⫽ f (B,S) implies that
people can be conceptualized in terms of their behav-
iors in every situation of their lives. This arrangement
of the equation exemplifies classical Watsonian behav-
iorism (Watson, 1930) and characterizes Mischel and
Shoda’s (1995) “if–then” statements. Another way to
arrange the equation, S ⫽ f (B,P), suggests that a situa-
tion can be understood in terms of the behaviors that
different people might perform in it. This idea formed the
basis for the template-matching technique introduced by
Bem and Funder (1978). For example, it is possible to
describe a college campus in terms of the kind of people
who commonly attend it and do well there. A college cam-
pus in which students who are introverted, philosophical,
and intellectual do well is a very different situation from
a campus where better outcomes are attained by students
who are extraverted, athletic, and rambunctious.
The psychological triad represented by these three
formulae suggests that people, situations, and behav-
iors should be studied in unison (Funder, 2006). A seri-
ous obstacle to achieving this goal concerns the uneven
development of conceptualizations and measurement
technologies. Although many methods are available for
assessing personality, relatively fewer methods have been

established for studying behavior and almost no methods
exist for describing situations.
The conceptualization and measurement of personality
traits are well developed and range from the assessment
of a small number of essential global traits (e.g., the Big
Five) to large, comprehensive sets of midlevel character-
istics that describe many ways in which individuals dif-
fer (e.g., the CAQ). Moreover, numerous trait measures
come packaged with a theory that explains the behaviors
and outcomes to which the trait is purportedly related and
an adequate validity literature that addresses psychometric
properties and observed external correlates.
In contrast, true behavioral measurement (i.e., direct
observations of behavior by independent observers who
describe a behavior that they have seen someone do) is rarer
than one might think (Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2007).
Systematic attempts to develop a taxonomy of behavior
within a theoretical framework are even rarer. Behavior,
when it is actually observed, is almost always chosen to
illustrate a particular theoretical prediction, and the typi-
cal study uses one behavior, which might be something
as detached from real-life action as a button press on a
computer keyboard or a questionnaire response. Although
classic social psychology studies in the 1960s and 1970s
sometimes directly observed single behaviors that were
important and consequential (e.g., bystander intervention
and obedience), focusing on a single behavior provides a
narrow view of the many different things that people might
be doing at the same time. For example, when people obey
commands by an authority figure to shock a victim, do they
plead with the authority figure that shocking the victim
seems wrong? Do they ask the authority figure how dan-
gerous the shocks are? Do they try to communicate with
the victim? (Milgram, 1974/2004, informally reported that
his subjects did all of these things but did not provide any
direct measurements.) In short, broader conceptualization
and measurement of behavior is sorely needed.
The Riverside Behavioral Q-set (RBQ; Funder, Furr, &
Colvin, 2000; RBQ 3.0) is one possible, partial solution
to this problem. The RBQ is a comprehensive set of 67
items that describe a range of socially relevant behaviors.
RBQ items describe behavior at a midlevel of generality so
that the behaviors that are coded are not too microscopic
(e.g., eye blinks) or too macroscopic (e.g., socially suc-
cessful). The items were originally derived from the items
of the CAQ (Bem & Funder, 1978; Block, 1978, 2007) and
were reworded to emphasize behavioral display rather than
trait inference. For example, an item in the CAQ reads “is
critical, skeptical, not easily impressed” and the associated
RBQ item reads “expresses criticism.” The RBQ is a valu-
able tool for a researcher who is interested in measuring
various behaviors that are relevant to a range of personality
Toward a Cooperative Social–Personality Psychology 691
constructs and social situations. It has been used to illus-
trate the independence of behavioral change and consis-
tency (Funder & Colvin, 1991), the behavioral correlates
of various personality traits (e.g., Fast, Reimer, & Funder,
2008), and for many other purposes.12
Numerous researchers have complained about the lack of
methods for describing features of situations (e.g., Funder,
2000; Hogan & Roberts, 2000; Reis, 2008; Swann &
Seyle, 2005). In social psychological experiments, a situa-
tional manipulation is typically chosen to test a specific the-
oretical prediction, not because it is necessarily viewed as
an important dimension of situations in general. Social psy-
chology could be said to contain a huge amount of informa-
tion about how narrowly defined situations affect behavior,
but this knowledge is fragmented because there exists no
method for organizing findings into a coherent summary.
What is needed is a way to conceptualize and measure the
active ingredients of situations. This goal requires identify-
ing attributes that can be used to describe all situations, a
daunting task. Gilbert and Malone (1995, p. 25) observed
that “when one tries to point to a situation, one often stabs
empty air. Indeed, the constructs to which the word situa-
tion refers often have little or no physical manifestation.”
Thus far, researchers have suggested that situations can
be described along three conceptual levels (Block & Block,
1981; Saucier, Bel-Bahar, & Fernandez, 2007). Level 1,
the broadest level, involves objective aspects of situations
that are relatively resistant to differences in perception.
According to Saucier et al. (2007), this includes factors
such as temperature and the number of people present.
Level 2 involves describing situations in terms of an over-
arching characterization that most people in the situation
would agree on—a research seminar, a funeral, a party, and
so on. Level 3 is comparatively subjective and involves
properties of situations that are psychologically provoking;
for each individual, the specific provoking properties may
be different.
The problem with the level 1 description is that it is
unlikely to capture the psychologically active features of
situations. Gilbert and Malone (1995) suggest that more
subtle aspects, such as another person smiling or making
eye contact with a person, are likely to provoke psycho-
logical reactions. The problem with level 3 is that it is too
solipsistic and renders the study of people in situations
impossible (Reis, 2008). Indeed, it absorbs the analysis
of situations into the analysis of people, because it would
require, for example, that a “noisy party” be described as
12For the current version of the RBQ and other Q-sets, and a free
computer program that simplifies the process of Q-sorting, see
http://www.rap.ucr.edu/qsorter.
692 Personality in Social Psychology
attractive for an extravert and aversive for an introvert.
Redescribed in that way, the noisy party disappears. In
contrast, level 2 is at a midlevel of analysis that has the
potential to reveal psychologically active features of situa-
tions in an empirical, reasonably consensual manner.
The Riverside Situational Q-set (RSQ: Funder &
Wagerman, 2008; Wagerman & Funder, 2009) has been
offered as a new method to describe situations at level 2.
Similar to the RBQ previously discussed, the items of the
RSQ derive from the items of the CAQ (Bem & Funder,
1978; Block, 1978, 2007). The 100 CAQ items were exam-
ined for situational relevance and reworded to describe
characteristics of situations that afford the opportunity to
express each of the corresponding personality characteris-
tics. For example, the CAQ item, “is critical, skeptical, not
easily impressed” has an associated RSQ item that reads,
“Someone is trying to impress someone or convince some-
one of something.” The idea is that the degree to which
an individual is critical or skeptical might be revealed in
a situation in which another person is trying to be impres-
sive or convincing. The advantage of basing the RSQ on
the CAQ is that items are specifically intended to describe
aspects of situations that are personologically relevant.
Likely, the particular items of the RBQ and the RSQ fail
to address all essential attributes of behavior and of situa-
tions, and certainly their representation of these domains is
incomplete. The development of theoretical conceptions of
behaviors and situations, and of the assessment tools to
make these conceptions addressable through empirical
research, is a long-term project that will take long years
of work by many investigators before it comes to fruition.
The intention of this section of this chapter is simply to
suggest that it is time to begin.
An important agenda for future research is to return our
attention to important behaviors in meaningful situations,
where situational and personality variables are assessed
alongside each other and treated in an equivalent manner.
A catalogue of the main effects of situational variables
on behavior, to place alongside the (too thin, but slowly
expanding) catalogue of main effects of personality vari-
ables on behavior, would offer a useful contribution to psy-
chological understanding.
It is worth pausing for a moment to realize how impor-
tant an accomplishment it would be to have a map of how a
range of personality variables affect behavior, alongside
a map of how a range of situational variables (not just a
few) affect behavior. This endeavor might come to be the
psychological equivalent of the human genome project.
This project would not itself be theoretical (neither is the
human genome project) but rather would be a wide-ranging
descriptive enterprise to gather descriptions of what people
actually do in the diverse situations of their lives.
The next step, mapping the interactions between
personality and situational variables, will also be necessary
but difficult. Interactions only get the variance left after the
main effects of people and situations have had their way.
So as any active researcher knows, they tend to be frag-
ile things, difficult to find and more difficult to replicate
(Chaplin, 1991). Perhaps it is enough to ask, for now, for a
renewed research focus on these critically important main
effects, of people and situations on behavior, about which
we still know far too little. This enterprise may offer the
best hope of at last reuniting the long-estranged siblings
of personality and social psychology in a way that would
have made their parents proud.
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Chapter 19
Health
SHELLEY E. TAYLOR
Social psychologists have had an enduring interest in
health. As early as the 1950s, Irving Janis conducted land-
mark studies with hospital patients to understand how fear
affects the understanding of information about surgery and
the recovery process (Janis, 1958). Not until the mid- to
late 1970s, however, was a field of health psychology for-
malized. Since that time, social psychologists have consis-
tently made important contributions to this field.
Health psychology is devoted to understanding psycho-
logical influences on how people stay healthy, why they
become ill, and how they respond when they do get ill.
Health psychologists conduct research on these issues
and promote interventions to help people stay well or
get over illness. The field is guided by the World Health
Organization’s 1948 holistic definition of health as “a
complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being
and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (World
Health Organization, 1948). The breadth of this definition
indicates that health psychology is concerned with health
promotion and illness prevention; the treatment of illness;
the etiology and correlates of health, illness, and disability;
improvement of the health care system; and formulation
of health policy. Thus, there is a broad role for social psy-
chologists to play in these endeavors.
There are at least two important things to note about the
WHO’s guiding definition of health. The first is the date:
this holistic view of health was recognized to be important
in 1948, yet health psychologists still encounter outmoded
beliefs about health as purely physical in origin. Second is
the World Health Organization’s specific endorsement of
“holism.” In recent years, this term has come to be asso-
ciated with alternative medical practices, such as herbal
medicine, acupuncture, and other less traditional interven-
tions (at least for Western societies). However, holism, in
fact means the integration of physical, mental, and social
Preparation of this chapter was supported by research grants from the National Institute of Aging (AG030309) and the National Science
Foundation (SES-0525713 and BCS-0729532).
698
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey.
Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
perspectives on health and not the endorsement of specific
therapeutic techniques. Adopting this holistic perspective,
this chapter reviews the current status of health psychol-
ogy research, especially from the vantage point of social
psychology.
Although social psychologists have contributed to vir-
tually every aspect of health psychology, in this chapter,
I focus on three areas in which the contributions have
been most plentiful and fruitful. These are health behav-
iors, stress and coping, and social support. The reader
should note that the previous edition of The Handbook
of Social Psychology included a chapter on health behav-
iors (Salovey, Rothman, & Rodin, 1998) that covered this
area in depth. Accordingly, the current coverage avoids
substantial overlap with that more detailed contribution,
which remains an important review of social psychological
contributions to health behaviors and their modification.
Several central themes guide the coverage in this chap-
ter. The first is that social psychologists who study health
are not applied social psychologists. Rather, health is an
important domain in which social psychological theories
can be tested, and the results of investigations in health
settings often feed back to suggest modifications to the
theories and provide guidance about underlying mecha-
nisms. A second theme is that through our contributions
to health, social psychology is integrated into the biologi-
cal and medical sciences and thus contributes to the inte-
grative science that unites insights from psychology with
those of other scientific disciplines. A third theme is that
health is an important area in which social psychologists
have implemented interventions that make a difference
in people’s lives. As such, social psychological contri-
butions to health embody Kurt Lewin’s famous dictum:
“There is nothing so practical as a good theory” (Lewin,
1943, 9. 118).

HEALTH BEHAVIORS
The study of health behaviors is guided by the philosophy
of health promotion, namely, the idea that good health is
a personal and collective achievement. For the individual,
it involves developing good health habits early in life and
carrying them through to old age. For the health practitio-
ner, it involves teaching people how to achieve a healthy
lifestyle and helping people at risk for a health problem
offset or monitor that risk. For the psychologist, health
promotion involves research on and the development of
interventions to help people practice healthy behaviors
and change poor ones. This, in turn, feeds into commu-
nity and national health policy to help people to develop
and maintain healthy lifestyles and to create resources and
facilities that aid that process.
At the turn of the 20th century, the major health problems
facing the United States were acute infectious disorders
such as tuberculosis, influenza, measles, and poliomyelitis,
conditions that are not strongly influenced by personal
attitudes and behavior. As a result of treatment innova-
tions and changes in public health standards, these health
problems have been made more tractable. However, there
has been an increase in what have been called the prevent-
able disorders, including cancers, especially lung cancer,
cardiovascular disease, alcohol and other substance abuse,
and vehicular accidents. The role of behavioral factors
in these disorders is clear. It is estimated that nearly half
the deaths in the United States are caused by preventable
factors, with smoking, obesity, and alcoholism being
the top three. Uncovering the psychological technology
that will make a dent in these problems is an important
national priority.
What are the important health habits that are targets for
modification? Sleeping 7 to 8 hours a night, not smoking,
consuming a healthy diet, having no more than one or two
alcoholic drinks each day, getting regular exercise, being no
more than 10% overweight, and practicing sun protection
are among the most important health habits for ensuring
good health (e.g., Belloc & Breslow, 1972; Taylor, 2009).
Yet health habits are notoriously difficult to modify.
Many of them become ingrained early in life and, once
learned, are difficult to change. Moreover, habits devel-
oped during childhood and adolescence when most people
are healthy provide little incentive for change because the
cumulative damage that these behaviors may cause will not
be apparent for years (Johnson, McCaul, & Klein, 2002).
Health habits are typically only modestly related to each
other. The person who controls her weight may continue
to smoke, and the person who exercises faithfully does
not necessarily wear his seatbelt. Different health habits
are controlled by different factors, and those factors may
Health Behaviors 699
change across the life span. For example, most smokers
begin to smoke because of contact with a smoking peer
group, but long-term smoking may be maintained because
it helps reduce feelings of stress.
Accordingly, a debate is taking shape as to whether
social engineering solutions to health problems might be
more practical and, ultimately, more successful than indi-
vidual or group interventions developed by social psy-
chologists. For example, to influence obesity levels, one
could intervene at the individual or community level to
teach people about good eating habits or one could ban
trans fats from foods and eliminate vending machines in
schools. Similarly, a health intervention could help smokers
develop the motivation and skills to stop smoking, or
smoking could be heavily taxed and restricted to particular
areas. Do social engineering solutions to major health
problems obviate the need for social psychological inter-
ventions? Absolutely not. The two approaches complement
each other. For example, unless people are persuaded of the
need for social engineering solutions, the implementation
of such solutions can produce resentment and retaliatory
political action. Moreover, many health habits cannot be
controlled or controlled completely through social engi-
neering. For example, people who consume a high-fat
diet may still find the products they want on their super-
market shelves, and smokers who may find their access to
smoking areas restricted nonetheless know where they can
smoke. Other health habits can be only minimally changed
by social engineering solutions. For example, legislation
that bans premarital or extramarital sex would likely be
quite ineffective, as would legislation requiring the use of
condoms. Laws that cannot be enforced have little impact
on behavior. Accordingly, social engineering solutions to
health problems work hand-in-hand with social psycho-
logical interventions to educate, coax, and nudge people
into the health habits that will serve them well. Moreover,
social psychologists have particular skills that can be used
to improve the nature of social engineering interventions at
the individual, community, state, or even federal level.
Social psychologists are masters at identifying and mod-
ifying situational influences on behavior, and as such, they
can identify and make creative use of those circumstances
when people may be most motivated to change their health
behaviors. For example, the concept of teachable moment
refers to the fact that certain times are better than others
for changing particular health practices. Many teachable
moments arise in early childhood when parents teach their
children basic safety behaviors, such as using a car seat or
a seatbelt. Moreover, because well-baby visits are a fixture
of early health care, well-baby care visits provide teachable
moments for pediatricians to check on the basics of health
habits, accident prevention, and safety in the home. Late
700 Health
elementary school and junior high school represent teachable
moments for smoking and drug abuse, and many social
psychological interventions that have been implemented
through academic classrooms have made use of these
windows of opportunity (e.g., Evans, Powers, Hersey, &
Renaud, 2006). Pregnancy represents a teachable moment
for several health habits, including stopping smoking and
improving diet. When people are newly diagnosed with a
chronic disease, such as lung cancer or heart disease, they
may be especially motivated to modify their health behav-
iors as well. On what social psychological technologies
have such interventions drawn?
Attitude Change
Principles of attitude change from social psychological
research have been useful for designing persuasive com-
munications that address health habits. Some of these
involve educating the public about health risks. Educational
appeals make the assumption that people will change their
health habits if they have correct information. Attitude
change research, derived from social learning perspectives
and from dual processing perspectives, has provided the
following guidelines as to the best ways to persuade people
through educational appeals:
• The communicator should be expert, prestigious, trust-
worthy, likable, and similar to the audience. For example,
a health message will be more persuasive if it comes
from a respected, credible physician rather than from
the proponent of a health fad.
• Communications should be colorful and vivid rather
than steeped in statistics and jargon. If possible, they
should also use case histories. For example, a vivid
account of the health benefits of regular exercise, cou-
pled with a case history of someone who took up bicy-
cling after a heart attack, may be persuasive to someone
at risk for heart disease.
• Strong arguments should be presented at the beginning
and end of a message, not buried in the middle.
• Messages should be short, clear, and direct.
• Messages should state conclusions explicitly. For
example, a communication extolling the virtues of a
low-cholesterol diet should explicitly advise the reader
to alter his or her diet to lower cholesterol.
• Extreme messages produce more attitude change, but
only up to a point. Very extreme messages are discounted.
For example, a message that urges people to exercise for
at least 3 hours a week will be more effective than one
that recommends 3 hours of exercise a day.
• For illness detection behaviors (such as HIV testing or
obtaining a mammogram), emphasizing the problems that
may occur if it is not undertaken will be most effective.
For health promotion behaviors (such as sunscreen
use), emphasizing the benefits to be gained may be
more effective.
• If the audience is receptive to changing a health habit,
then the communication should include only favorable
points, but if the audience is not inclined to accept the
message, the communication should discuss both sides
of the issue. For example, messages to smokers ready
to stop should emphasize the health risks of smoking.
Smokers who have not yet decided to stop may be more
persuaded by a communication that points out its risk
while acknowledging and rebutting its pleasurable
effects.
Providing information does not ensure that people will
perceive that information accurately. When people receive
negative information about risks to their health, they
sometimes process that information defensively (Millar &
Millar, 1996). Instead of making appropriate health behav-
ior changes, the person may come to view the problem as
less serious or more common than previously believed,
particularly if the person intends to continue the behavior
(Gerrard, Gibbons, Benthin, & Hessling, 1996). Smokers,
for example, know that they are at a greater risk for lung
cancer than are nonsmokers, but they see lung cancer as
less likely or problematic and smoking as more common
than do nonsmokers.
Fear Appeals
In part because of these problems, attitudinal approaches
to changing health habits often use fear appeals. This
approach assumes that if people are fearful a particular
habit is hurting their health, they will change their behav-
ior to reduce their fear. Common sense suggests that the
relationship between fear and behavior change should be
direct: The more fearful an individual is, the more likely
he or she will be to change the relevant behavior. However,
this relationship does not always hold. Persuasive mes-
sages that elicit too much fear may actually undermine
health behavior change (Becker & Janz, 1987). Moreover,
research suggests that fear alone may not be sufficient to
change behavior. Sometimes fear can affect intentions
to change health habits (for example, Sutton & Eiser, 1984),
but it may not produce long-lasting changes in health
habits unless it is coupled with recommendations for action
or information about the efficacy of the health behavior
(Self & Rogers, 1990).
Building on these findings, protection motivation the-
ory (Maddox & Rogers, 1983) maintains that the effect
of fear appeals on health behavior change is importantly
influenced by whether people are motivated to protect

themselves. Feelings of fear motivate behavior by altering
perceptions of vulnerability and severity. An original
component of this theory also included the prediction that
strong fear motivates behavior only if it is accompanied by
feelings of self-efficacy. However, self-efficacy appears to
exert effects on behavioral intentions directly, not necessar-
ily in conjunction with fear. Perceived vulnerability appears
to affect behavioral intentions directly as well, whereas per-
ceived severity appears to have a lesser impact on behavior.
Generally speaking, the predictions of the model have been
supported, albeit weakly, and critics have suggested that pro-
tection motivation theory may be more useful when mod-
erators are considered along with the primary elements of
the theory (Salovey et al., 1998).
Message Framing
Any health message can be phrased in positive or negative
terms. For example, a reminder letter to get a flu immunization
can emphasize the benefits of being immunized or empha-
size the discomfort of the flu itself (McCaul, Johnson, &
Rothman, 2002). Which of these methods is more success-
ful? Messages that emphasize potential problems work
better for behaviors that have uncertain outcomes, whereas
messages that stress benefits may be more persuasive for
behaviors with certain outcomes (Apanovitch, McCarthy, &
Salovey, 2003). As is the case with fear appeals, recom-
mendations regarding exactly how to take the action
increase effectiveness (McCaul et al., 2002).
Which kind of message framing will most affect behavior
also depends on people’s own motivation. Some people
have a promotion or behavioral approach orientation
(Gray, 1990) that emphasizes approaching opportunities.
People with a behavioral approach orientation respond
positively to such statements as “I go out of my way to
get things I want.” Such people are especially influenced
by messages phrased in terms of benefits (e.g., “calcium
will keep your bones healthy”). Other people have a pre-
vention or avoidance orientation that emphasizes minimiz-
ing risks. They respond positively to such statements as
“I worry about making mistakes.” They are more influ-
enced by messages that stress the risks of not performing
a health behavior (e.g., “a low calcium intake will increase
bone loss”). Messages that match a person’s behavioral
orientation produce more behavior change than those that
do not (Mann, Sherman, & Updegraff, 2005).
Most of the preceding points regarding how to change
health behaviors have implicitly drawn on either a social
learning approach to attitude change or on social cogni-
tion research. Expectancy value theories are also useful
in the health domain to both explain why people practice
the health habits they do and to provide frameworks for
changing health behaviors. These theories assume that
Health Behaviors 701
people adopt a health behavior on the basis of its expected
utility; utility is the subjective value attached to each pos-
sible outcome associated with the behavior weighted by
the perceived likelihood of the outcome. So, for example,
if a person is choosing between continuing to smoke and
attempting to quit, the expected utility of each alternative
would be based on the relative importance attached to
the pleasure of smoking versus the importance of health
weighted by the likelihood that stopping smoking would
actually improve health. According to the theory, a person
chooses among possible courses of action by selecting
the choice that provides the greatest utility. Usually, this
means comparing one’s current behavior with some new
health behavior.
The theory we consider in this context, the health behav-
ior model, posits utility functions for choosing to practice
(or not) a recommended health behavior and generates
predictions about what beliefs might be targeted to change
behavior. As will become evident, however, subjective
expected utility theory does not take account an important
aspect of behavior change in the health domain, namely,
the perception that one will be able to change the behav-
ior in question (i.e., self-efficacy). This point, as will be
seen, is important because such behaviors as altering diet
or stopping smoking are often difficult to change.
Health Belief Model
The earliest attitude theory of why people practice health
behaviors was the health belief model (Hochbaum, 1958;
Rosenstock, 1966). This model states that whether a person
practices a particular health behavior can be understood by
knowing two factors: whether the person perceives a per-
sonal health threat and whether the person believes that a
particular health practice will be effective in reducing that
threat. The perception of a personal health threat is itself
influenced by at least three factors: general health values,
which include concern about health; specific beliefs about
personal vulnerability to a particular disorder; and beliefs
about the consequences of the disorder, such as whether
they are serious. For example, people may change their
diet to include low cholesterol foods if they value health,
feel threatened by the possibility of heart disease, and
perceive that the threat of heart disease is severe (e.g.,
Brewer et al., 2007).
Whether a person believes that a health measure will
reduce a threat has two subcomponents: whether the per-
son thinks a health practice will be effective and whether
the cost of undertaking the measure exceeds its benefits.
For example, a person urged to change his diet in response
to vulnerability to heart disease may believe that dietary
change alone would not reduce the risk of a heart attack or
702 Health
that changing his diet would interfere with his enjoyment
of life too much to justify taking the action. Thus, although
he may recognize his personal vulnerability to heart dis-
ease, if he lacks the belief that dietary change would
reduce his risk, he would likely not make any changes in
his behavior.
The health belief model explains people’s practices of
health habits quite well and has been widely used for sev-
eral decades to understand health behaviors (Taylor, 2009,
for a review). The health belief model also predicts some
of the circumstances under which people’s health behav-
iors will change. Interventions that highlight perceived
vulnerability but simultaneously increase the perception
that a particular health behavior will reduce the threat are
somewhat successful in changing health behaviors such as
smoking and preventive dental care (e.g., Eiser, van der
Plight, Raw, & Sutton, 1985; Ronis, 1992).
Criticisms of the health belief model focus on three
issues. The first is that the model addresses risk-related
beliefs rather than emotional responses to perceived risk;
emotional responses may better predict behavior (e.g.,
Beckjord, Rutten, Arora, Moser, & Hesse, 2008; Lawton,
Conner, & Parker, 2007; Weinstein et al., 2007). Second,
the health belief model does not provide an analysis
of behavior and the situational forces that may undermine
behavior change. In important respects, this represents a
reflection of the attitude–behavior problem, namely, that
attitudes predict behavior best under certain circumstances.
Environmental factors that exert tugs on behavior but not
necessarily on attitudes are one source of this discrepancy.
Behavior is often under the control of specific situational
cues or social norms that may supplant attitudes that would
otherwise influence behavior. For example, a person who
is trying to stop smoking may find that the urge for an
after-dinner cigarette undermines his resolve.
A third more general issue concerns the ability to
actually perform the health behaviors in question (e.g.,
Bandura, 1991; Murphy et al., 2001). Self-efficacy refers
to the belief that one will be able to perform a specific
behavior, and often, sense of self-efficacy is low. If a per-
son does not believe he will be able to stop smoking, for
example, then he may be unlikely to try. A theory that
links attitudes directly to behavior and that takes account
of the need for a sense of behavioral control is the theory of
planned behavior.
Theory of Planned Behavior
According to the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen &
Madden, 1986), a health behavior is the direct result of a
behavioral intention. Behavioral intentions are made up
of three components: attitudes toward the specific action,
subjective norms regarding the action, and perceived
behavioral control. Attitudes toward the action include
beliefs about the likely outcomes of the action and eval-
uations of those outcomes. Subjective norms are what a
person believes others think that person should do (norma-
tive beliefs) and the motivation to comply with those nor-
mative beliefs. Perceived behavioral control occurs when
an individual feels able to perform the action and that the
action undertaken will have the intended effect; this com-
ponent of the model is similar to self-efficacy. These factors
combine to produce a behavioral intention and, ultimately,
behavior change. To take a simple example, smokers who
believe that smoking causes serious health outcomes,
who believe that other people think they should stop smok-
ing, who are motivated to comply with those normative
beliefs, and who believe that they are capable of stopping
smoking will be more likely to intend to stop smoking
than individuals who do not hold these beliefs. Behavioral
intentions then predict behavior.
The theory of planned behavior suggests points of
attack in the design of persuasive messages designed
to change health behaviors. A first intervention point is to
change attitudes toward the specific action, as by provid-
ing information about the likely outcomes of behavior
change. Subjective norms, that is, what people believe
others think they should do, can also be altered through
persuasive communications. For example, binge drink-
ing among college students is a serious problem, but most
college students think they are in a minority in regarding
it as such. The statistics, in fact, suggest the majority of
college students are against binge drinking, and so making
these subjective norms more salient can motivate students
to alter their behavior (Chan, Neighbors, Gilson, Larimer, &
Marlatt, 2007). Perceived behavioral control, that is, the
person’s perceived ability to perform the action and belief
that it will have its intended effect, can also be directly
addressed through persuasive messages. If people are told,
for example, about the numbers of smokers who succeed
in stopping on their own and that often it takes several
efforts before one is successful, this may help to motivate
the would-be ex-smoker to change behavior.
Finally, the theory of planned behavior provides a novel
point of intervention at the level of behavioral intentions.
Schweiger Gallo and Gollwitzer (2007), for example,
have found that when people are induced to set a specific
day, time, and place to begin a target behavior, they are
more likely to do so than if they merely express a desire
to change a behavior. This technology can be profitably
used to modify health behaviors as well (Sullivan &
Rothman, 2008).
Thus, the theory of planned behavior is not only a
strong theoretical model but also acts as a methodological

heuristic for which cognitions and behaviors can be
targeted in interventions. The theory of planned behavior
has been applied to many health behaviors, including exer-
cise (Baker, Little, & Brownell, 2003), consumption of soft
drinks among adolescents (Kassem & Lee, 2004), partici-
pation in health screening programs (Sheeran, Conner, &
Norman, 2001), and follow-up appointments for abnormal
cervical screening results (Orbell & Hagger, 2006).
Attitude–Behavior Relationship
As theories of health behaviors move closer to predicting
behavior, the attitude–behavior relation assumes expected
importance. Many communications designed to change
people’s attitudes can evoke defensive or irrational pro-
cesses that undermine behavior change. People may per-
ceive a threat to be less relevant to themselves than it really
is (e.g., Liberman & Chaiken, 1992), they may falsely see
themselves as less vulnerable than others with the same
risks (Clarke, Lovegrove, Williams, & Macpherson, 2000),
or they may perceive themselves as dissimilar to people
who have succumbed to a particular health threat, thereby
distancing themselves from the threat (Thornton, Gibbons, &
Gerrard, 2002). Moreover, continued practice of a risky
behavior can itself compromise the assessment of personal
risk (Halpern-Felsher et al., 2001). With these multiple
abilities to distort the relevance of health threats, even
carefully designed messages may be unable to get around
biases in information processing.
Mass Media Messages
Messages in the mass media have been both blamed for
poor health habits and credited with helping to change bad
ones. On the negative side, when people are confronted
with images in the media of people exhibiting poor health
behaviors, such as smoking or restricted eating, it can affect
their behavior (Anschutz, Van Strein, & Engels, 2008).
Yet theories and methods of attitude change can also be
used to design mass media messages. The goal of health
promotion is to reach as many people as possible and con-
sequently, the mass media can achieve this goal. Evaluations
of the effectiveness of mass media appeals, however, sug-
gest some qualifications regarding their success (e.g., Lau,
Kane, Berry, Ware, & Roy, 1980). The mass media appear
to be most effective in alerting people to health risks
that they might otherwise not know about. For example,
mass media attention to the Surgeon General’s report on
the health risks of smoking alerted millions of people to the
problem faster than would otherwise have occurred (U.S.
Public Health Service, 1982). The media helped spread the
safe sex message after sexual practices were implicated in
Health Behaviors 703
HIV infection. However, whether such messages actually
change behavior has been in doubt. The reduction in smok-
ing following the Surgeon General’s announcement was
not especially impressive. Presenting a consistent media
message over time, however, can have a cumulative effect
in changing opinions and values associated with health
practices. For example, although initially many people
counterargued the antismoking messages that the media
put forth, the climate of public opinion shifted over time to
the side of the nonsmoker (Lichtenstein & Cohen, 1990).
Whether mass media messages alone and, by impli-
cation, persuasive communications alone can actually
change behavior without behavior change technology, such
as cognitive–behavioral interventions, is unclear. Although
cognitive–behavioral interventions are one of the most
effective ways of attacking health behaviors (see Taylor,
2009, for a review), the effectiveness of mass media mes-
sages may have been underestimated. For example, follow-
ing the initial release of the Surgeon General’s report in
1982, many millions of people quit smoking on their own in
the years that followed. It often takes several efforts before
a person is successful in stopping smoking (Lichtenstein &
Cohen, 1990). As such, the mass media may have motivated
quitting efforts that eventually were successful. The fact
that so many people alter their health habits successfully
on their own without medical or psychological interven-
tions implicitly suggests that the cumulative effects of mass
media educational interventions may have been underesti-
mated (McBride et al., 2001). Whether currently obese or
overweight people will be able to lose weight on their own
will provide another interesting test of this point.
Even soap operas have been used in some countries to
get people to change their health habits (Williams, 2001),
and this venue can be more successful in producing behav-
ior change than lectures or pamphlets, especially in devel-
oping countries. When people listen to the radio or watch
the stars of their favorite TV dramas practice good health
habits, they are more inclined to do the same. For example,
with problems such as teen pregnancy and AIDS, dra-
matic portrayals show some success in changing behavior
(Vaughan, Rogers, Singhal, & Swalehe, 2000).
An additional benefit of attitude change campaigns
through the mass media is that they may foster a receptive
climate for social engineering responses to health prob-
lems. For example, without public service announcements
addressing the dangers of secondhand smoke or safety
restraints for infants, many state legislatures might have left
the passive smoking and infant car seat issues unaddressed.
A promising but as yet underutilized tool for modifying
health habits is the Internet. The Internet provides low-cost
access to health messages for millions of people who can
benefit from the information, suggestions, and techniques
704 Health

for behavior change offered on websites. The Internet also
allows researchers to recruit large numbers of participants
for studies at relatively low cost, thus enabling data collec-
tion efforts as well (e.g., Lenert & Skoczen, 2002).
In summary, social psychologists have been heavily
involved in the development and testing of models of health
behavior change, with considerable success. These mod-
els are widely used to develop persuasive communications
to motivate people to change their health habits. In addi-
tion, social psychological research has provided inputs to
understanding the attitude–behavior discrepancy that can
characterize health behaviors. Clearly social psychological
approaches to health behavior change will not be sufficient
in their own right. For example, social engineering solutions
that address unhealthy behaviors by simply outlawing or
controlling their practice have the potential to achieve mass
behavior change. Without social psychological research,
though, understanding the particular times and ways in which
people will adhere to health behavior change or comply
with social engineering solutions would be incomplete.
STRESS AND ITS MANAGEMENT
Stress and how people manage it is one of the central topics
of health psychology, and social psychologists have made
substantial contributions to this research area. Stress is a
negative emotional experience accompanied by predictable
biochemical, cognitive, and behavioral changes that are
directed either toward altering the stressful event or accom-
modating to its effects (Baum, 1990). The study of stress
and how people deal with it is important for several rea-
sons. First, many people experience their lives as stressful,
and so the problem is widespread. Second, stress compro-
mises health. Chronic stress leads to predictable changes
in biological regulatory systems—in particular, the sym-
pathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-
adrenocortical axis (McEwen, 2008; see Figure 19.1).
When a person encounters an event that is perceived as
harmful or threatening, a set of biobehavioral reactions is
initiated. Information from the cortex is transmitted to the
hypothalamus, which initiates sympathetic nervous system
arousal, or the fight-or-flight response first described by
Walter Cannon (1932). Sympathetic arousal stimulates
the medulla of the adrenal glands, which in turn secrete the
catecholamines epinephrine (EP) and norepinephrine
(NE). This sympathetic arousal in turn leads to increases
in blood pressure, heart rate, sweating, and constriction
of peripheral blood vessels, among other changes. The
result is the cranked up feeling that people usually experi-
ence in response to stress. In addition, the hypothalamic-
pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is also activated. The hypothal-
amus releases corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF), which
stimulates the pituitary gland to secrete adrenocorticotropic

Demands from the Changes in blood

environment act on the cortex pressure, heart rate,
Higher brain sweating, peripheral
regions blood vessels, etc.

Hypothalamus

Autonomic CRH
nervous system

Catecholamines
Pituitary Gland Corticosteroids (EP, NE)
ACTH

Adrenal cortex Adrenal medulla

Immune System

Figure 19.1 The body’s stress systems. ACTH
adrenocorticotropic hormone; CRH
corticotrophin-releasing hormone; EP

epinephrine; NE
norepinephrine.

hormone (ACTH), which in turn stimulates the adrenal
cortex to release glucocorticoids. Of these, cortisol is espe-
cially significant, because it helps conserve stores of car-
bohydrates and helps reduce inflammation in the case of
an injury. It also helps the body return to its steady state
following stress.
Engagement of these two stress systems on the short
term mobilizes an organism for action, and, thus, these sys-
tems are critical for meeting stressful or threatening circum-
stances. In human prehistory, when these systems evolved,
many threats (e.g., attack by a predator, attack by a conspe-
cific, flood or other natural disaster) required instantaneous
action, and so biological systems that respond quickly and
strongly would have been selected for through the pro-
cess of natural selection. However, at present, most of the
stressors that people encounter are not threats of this nature
but are rather grinding, chronic problems such as work
stress, commuting, and chronic unpleasant relationships,
but these threats, nonetheless, engage these same biologi-
cal stress regulatory systems. So protective on the short
term, the chronic or recurring engagement of these systems
is destructive on the long term. The stress systems may lose
their resilience or elasticity and, over time, lay the ground-
work for a broad array of chronic illnesses (McEwen,
1998). Accordingly, understanding what experiences are
stressful and what individual differences and group pro-
cesses help people manage stress better is a high-priority
topic in health psychology.
Initially, researchers focused on stressful events them-
selves, called stressors. Such events include noise, crowd-
ing, a bad relationship, or a round of job interviews, for
example. However, in the best tradition of Emmanuel
Kant and Kurt Lewin, researchers soon came to realize
that stress is not inherent in events themselves; it depends
heavily on how it is appraised and interpreted. Events are
perceived as more stressful when personal resources
are perceived to be insufficient to meet the demands of
the environment. Stress, then, is determined by person–
environment fit (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984).
Early research on stress focused on the fight-or-flight
response, a perspective that initially grew out of animal
research addressing aggression and fleeing in response
to stressful events. Walter Cannon (1932) imported this
perspective to human behavior. That is, in response to
stress a person may fight or mount aggressive or asser-
tive responses to stress, or flee, which in humans, is often
manifested as social withdrawal or withdrawal through
substance use. Even such behaviors as television watching
may be interpreted as “flight.” Social psychologists, how-
ever, have noted that social responses to stress are the most
common ways in which human beings deal with it. This
has given rise to a focus on affiliative responses to stress.
Stress and Its Management 705
Specifically, Taylor and colleagues (2000) suggested that in
addition to behavioral manifestations of fight-or-flight,
people tend-and-befriend. Tending involves nurturant
activities that protect offspring and that promote safety and
reduce distress. Befriending is the creation and mainte-
nance of social networks that aid in this process. We return
to this issue in the section on social support.
Perceptions of Stress
Social cognition approaches to stress have led to several
important insights. Because the construal of events so heav-
ily influences the experience of stress, psychologists often
look at both the objective and the subjective experience of
stress to predict mental and physical health outcomes. For
example, Cohen, Tyrrell, and Smith (1993) asked com-
munity residents to indicate whether specific events had
occurred in their lives that are consensually judged to
be stressful and also to complete a measure of perceived
stress. They then exposed these participants to a common
cold virus and found that both objectively assessed stress-
ful life events and perceived stress both predicted whether
people developed a cold. Studies such as these indicate
clearly that the perception of stress is important to the psy-
chological and physical fallout that results.
Because events are not always inherently stressful, peo-
ple respond to cues that make them more likely to appraise
events as stressful. What are those cues? People are more
vulnerable to stress when the events occur in central
life domains than in peripheral ones. Work and relation-
ship stressors, for example, are typically important ones.
Events are also more likely to be perceived as stressful if
they are negative, uncontrollable, ambiguous, and over-
whelming. Although any event that produces change in
one’s life activities can be perceived as stressful, negative
experiences, such as coping with a death in the family or
getting divorced, produce more psychological distress and
physical symptoms then do positive ones (see Taylor, 2009,
for a review).
Uncontrollable or unpredictable events are more stress-
ful than controllable or predictable ones. When people
feel that they can predict, modify, or terminate an aversive
event, or at least feel that they have access to someone who
can, they experience it as less stressful (Thompson, 1981).
Ambiguous events are typically perceived to be more
stressful than clear-cut ones because in the former case,
energy must be devoted to understanding the stressor rather
than finding solutions to it. The ability to take confrontative
action or at least adjust emotionally to a well-defined stressor
usually produces less distress, better coping, and lower
biochemical responses to stress. Finally, overloaded people
are more stressed than people with fewer tasks to perform.
706 Health
In the work literature, job overload, or the perception that
one must do too much in too short a period of time, is a
chief cause of job dissatisfaction (e.g., Pearson, 2008), and
it contributes to adverse health outcomes as well (Steptoe,
Siegrist, Kirschbaum, & Marmot, 2004).
Stressors need not be present for people to experience
stress. The anticipation of stress can be at least as threaten-
ing as its occurrence (Wirtz et al., 2006), and aftereffects
of stress often last indefinitely. For example, in one study,
medical students wore blood pressure monitors on an
unstressful lecture day, the day before an important exam,
and during the exam itself. Although the lecture day was
characterized by stable patterns of cardiovascular activity,
cardiovascular activity on the preexamination day when
the students were worried about the exam was as high as
that seen during the examination itself (Sausen, Lovallo,
Pincomb, & Wilson, 1992).
Although the anticipation of stress and its aftereffects
can be inherently stressful, people also are resilient. They
have the ability to adapt psychologically to moderate or
predictable stressors. With the exception of vulnerable
people, such as children, the elderly, and people already
under intense stress, most people are able to incorporate
some stress into their lives (Wirtz et al., 2006). What makes
people resilient?
An early insight from social psychology (Linville,
1987) maintained that when people are invested in multi-
ple aspects of their lives, as opposed to focusing their per-
sonal rewards primarily on one life domain, they may be
buffered against setbacks in other areas. Research on occu-
pational stress has provided substantial support for this
hypothesis. Married, working women have been heavily
studied because of the potential for role conflict among
the worker, wife, and mother roles and for potential role
overload due to the sheer number of activities those roles
encompass. Initially, psychologists anticipated that work-
ing, married women with responsibilities for child care
would be overwhelmed and, consequently, be one of the
most stressed groups among working adults. Surprisingly,
there appear to be positive effects of combining home and
work responsibilities. On the one hand, juggling heavy
responsibilities at both work and home can undermine
the enjoyment of both sets of tasks, but combining moth-
erhood with employment can be beneficial for women’s
well-being, improving self-esteem, self-efficacy, and life
satisfaction (Verbrugge, 1983). These findings occur pri-
marily for women who have enough help in the home.
Combining employment and marriage may be protective
for men as well, with respect to both health and mental
health (Burton, 1998).
This research on multiple roles is converging on the idea
that stress is lower when one has sources of meaning in
one’s life. The protective effects of employment, marriage,
and parenting on psychological distress and health attest
to the salutary effects of meaningful social roles (Burton,
1998). We return to this issue.
Coping With Stress
People manage to tolerate stress in their lives primarily
because they develop effective ways of coping. Coping
is defined as the thoughts and behaviors that people use
to manage the internal and external demands of situations
that are appraised as stressful (Taylor & Stanton, 2007).
Because stress is so heavily dependent on appraisals, social
psychologists have studied individual differences in how a
potentially stressful event is appraised and how people will
cope with that event as a result.
First, we consider people who do not handle stress well.
Certain people are predisposed by their personalities to
experience stressful events as especially stressful, which
in turn affects their psychological distress, social relation-
ships, physical symptoms, and rates of illness. This research
has focused especially on negative affectivity, a pervasive
negative mood marked by anxiety, depression, and hostility.
Closely related to neuroticism, negative affectivity predicts
both psychological distress and stronger biological stress
responses, which may provide a biopsychosocial pathway
linking negative affectivity to adverse health events (e.g.,
Polk, Cohen, Doyle, Skoner, & Kirschbaum, 2005).
In some social psychological research, negativity is
treated as a nuisance variable, in that people who report
high levels of negative affectivity also report high levels
of distressing physical symptoms (Watson & Pennebaker,
1989); in many cases, there is no evidence of an underlying
physical disorder (see, for example, Cohen, Doyle, Turner,
Alper, & Skoner, 2003). Although negative affectivity no
doubt inflates people’s perception of stress and contrib-
utes to self-reports of physical symptoms and psychologi-
cal distress, chronic negative affect also directly affects
the likelihood of physical health disorders (e.g., Charles,
Gatz, Kato, & Pedersen, 2008). For example, depression
is a well-documented contributor to a risk for coronary
artery events and for a repeat event following an initial one
(Bleil, Gianaros, Jennings, Flory, & Manuck, 2008;
Musselman & Nemeroff, 2000). As such, chronic negative
affect needs to be considered as not only a potential nui-
sance variable that conflates reports of symptoms, but also
as a psychobiological pathway to disease.
Coping Resources
Just as negative affect and neuroticism adversely affect
health, positive mental states and psychosocial resources
are associated with better mental and physical health

(Cohen & Pressman, 2006; Ironson & Hayward, 2008).
Social psychologists have been actively involved in identi-
fying the specific psychosocial resources that people bring
to stressful events to help them cope more effectively. One
such resource is optimism (Scheier, Carver, & Bridges,
1994). People who are high in dispositional optimism cope
more effectively with stress and reduce their risk for illness
and improve their chances for recovery (e.g., Ironson &
Hayward, 2008; Segerstrom, 2006). An important reason
why optimism is a valuable resource is because it leads
people to take more active coping measures (Nes &
Segerstrom, 2006). For example, optimists cope more
effectively with the stress of college because they are
more likely to seek out social support and to reinterpret
positively the stressful circumstances they encounter
(Brissette, Scheier, & Carver, 2002).
When people have a dispositional sense of psychological
control, namely, that they can determine their own behav-
ior, influence the environment, and bring about desired
outcomes, they cope more successfully. Perceived control
is related to self-efficacy, which is the more narrow percep-
tion that one can take the necessary actions to obtain a spe-
cific outcome in a specific situation (Bandura, 1977). Both
types of beliefs (control, self-efficacy) help people cope
with a wide variety of stressful events (e.g., Schwerdtfeger,
Konermann, & Schönhofen, 2008; Wrosch, Schulz, Miller,
Lupien, & Dunne, 2007).
A sense of control is especially important for vulner-
able populations such as medical patients, children, and
the elderly who are at risk for health problems (Wrosch
et al., 2007). Initially spawned by social psychologist
Irving Janis’s work with medical patients, the princi-
ple of psychological control is so powerful that it is now
used extensively in medical interventions to help people
cope with surgery and other noxious medical procedures.
As noted earlier, it is also used in interventions to
promote good health habits. Certainly there are qualifications
to the idea that psychological control is always beneficial
(e.g., Thompson, Cheek, & Graham, 1988). For example, con-
trol may be aversive if it gives people more responsibility
than they want or feel able to assume (e.g., Chipperfield &
Perry, 2006), but on the whole, it is a beneficial resource
(e.g., P. Smith, Frank, Bondy, & Mustard, 2008).
However, limitations on attention can themselves lead
to loss of control. When attentional resources are limited,
people focus on the most salient cues in the environment
and neglect less salient stimuli. The resulting “attentional
myopia” can lead to a loss of control over behavior if the
cues that are salient promote a behavior that violates per-
sonal standards or intentions (Mann & Ward, 2007). Thus,
for example, with attentional load, self-control over eating
may erode, and a person may end up eating much more than
Stress and Its Management 707
would otherwise be the case. However, if the salient cues in
the environment suggest self-control, for example, cues sug-
gesting the importance of a healthy diet, then limitations on
attention may actually lead to more self-control rather
than less self-control. The attentional myopia model has
been examined with respect to eating and smoking, among
other health behaviors, and, as such, implicates stress and
attentional processes in the ability to exert self-control over
health behaviors (Mann & Ward, 2007).
Research on the self has been an especially valuable
source of insights and interventions for understanding suc-
cessful coping. Self-esteem can act as a resource to help
people appraise stressful events as less so. For example, in
one study of students facing exams, those with high self-
esteem were less likely to be anxious (Shimizu & Pelham,
2004). These appraisal effects of self-esteem appear to
be most protective at low to moderate effects of stress;
at higher levels of stress, the events themselves can over-
whelm the beneficial contribution of self-esteem (e.g.,
Whisman & Kwon, 1993). Self-esteem appears to affect
health at least in part by affecting the quality of social ties
(Stinson et al., 2008).
Interventions to enhance a sense of self improve
responses to stressful events. Drawing on Steele’s (1988)
self-affirmation theory, for example, Creswell and associ-
ates (Creswell, Welch, Taylor, Sherman, Gruenewald, &
Mann, 2005) assigned some people to focus on and write
about their most important value, whereas others wrote about
a less important value. All participants then went through
laboratory stress tasks including mental arithmetic and
delivering a speech to an unresponsive audience. People
who had affirmed an important personal value showed
lower biological responses to stress and, among those
with high self-esteem, experienced less psychological dis-
tress as well.
Related to self-esteem is a cluster of personal quali-
ties that has been called ego strength, characterized by
dependability, emotional stability, trust, and lack of
impulsivity (e.g., Terracciano, Löckenhoff, Zonderman,
Ferrucci, & Costa, 2008). This cluster also has health
benefits. For example, in a longitudinal investigation,
Friedman and colleagues (1995) studied children who
had first been interviewed in 1947. Some had impulsive
and undercontrolled personalities, whereas others showed
signs of ego strength. Those high in ego strength as chil-
dren lived longer as adults. One reason is that those high
in ego strength were less likely to practice bad health hab-
its, including smoking and excessive alcohol consump-
tion. Related to these findings, conscientiousness also
affects health and longevity. In a meta-analysis of 20 stud-
ies, Kern and Friedman (2008) found that conscientious-
ness was strongly related to health across the life span.
708 Health
Conscientious people may be more successful in avoiding
situations that could harm them or may more reliably
practice good health habits (Hampson, Goldberg, Vogt, &
Dubanoski, 2006).
In short, a broad array of individual differences that
include both protective and vulnerability factors have
been studied by personality and social psychologists and
yielded the conclusion that, just as some people appear to
have an illness-prone personality marked by neuroticism
and negative affect, others possess a health-prone person-
ality characterized by optimism, a sense of control, consci-
entiousness, self-esteem, and resilience.
Approach and Avoidance Coping
Social psychologists have also studied broad proclivities
for managing stressful events. For example, some people
cope with threatening events by using an avoidant or mini-
mizing coping style, whereas others are more likely to use
an approach-oriented style that is confrontative or at least
vigilant, by gathering information or taking direct action.
Reflecting a core motivational construct (e.g., Davison,
Pennebaker, & Dickerson, 2000), the approach–avoidance
continuum maps onto broader theories of biobehavioral
functioning, including Gray’s (1990) behavioral approach
and inhibition orientations, referred to earlier. Examples of
active and approach-oriented coping are problem solving,
seeking social support, and creating outlets for emotional
expression. Coping through avoidance includes both cog-
nitive (distraction) and behavioral (substance abuse) meth-
ods. Some approaches, such as spiritual coping, can serve
either approach-oriented or avoidance goals. Although
neither style is always more effective in managing stress,
approach-related coping is more successful when one can
focus on the information in the situation and if there are
specific actions that can ameliorate the stressor (Taylor &
Stanton, 2007).
Why are approach-related coping methods generally
more successful than avoidant ones? People who cope
with threatening events through approach-related methods
engage in the cognitive and emotional efforts needed to
manage long-term threats. Although they may pay a price
in anxiety and biological reactivity in the short term (e.g.,
T. W. Smith, Ruiz, & Uchino, 2000), in the long term, they
may successfully modify the stressor and change their
reactions to it as well. For example, people who coped
with the September 11 attacks through avoidant coping
strategies fared worse psychologically over the long term
compared with those who coped with their distress through
more active coping (Silver, Holman, McIntosh, Poulin, &
Gil-Rivas, 2002). Disengaging from coping efforts, then,
can predict psychological difficulties over time.
Problem-Focused and Emotion-Focused Coping
Another useful distinction in the science of coping is
between problem-focused coping, which involves attempts
to do something active or constructive about the stressful
event, and emotion-focused coping, which involves a focus
on or effort to regulate emotions experienced in response to
the stressful event (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Typically,
people use both problem-focused and emotion-focused
coping to deal with stressful events.
Emotion-focused coping, however, includes coping of
two kinds. Ruminating over a stressful event, that is, hav-
ing negative, recurring thoughts, is generally maladaptive
for both psychological and physical health (e.g., Thomsen
et al., 2004). However, emotional-approach coping, which
involves clarifying, focusing on, and working through
the emotions experienced in conjunction with a stressor
(Stanton, Danoff-Burg, Cameron, & Ellis, 1994), has ben-
efits for a broad array of stressful situations.
Resilience
Increasingly, social psychologists have turned their atten-
tion to the origins and effects of resilience. Positive life
events, positive emotions, and opportunities for rest, relax-
ation, and renewal can help people cope more effectively
with life stressors or prevent stressful events from taking a
toll on health (e.g., Ong, Bergeman, Bisconti, & Wallace,
2006; Ryff & Singer, 2000). Psychological well-being
reliably affects long-term survival in both healthy people
and people with health disorders (Chida & Steptoe, 2008).
Even an action as simple as taking a vacation is benefi-
cial for middle-aged men at risk for heart disease (Gump &
Matthews, 2000) and perhaps for other groups as well.
Resilience is also a reliable individual difference. Some
people recover from stressful events quickly, whereas others
do not. Psychological resilience is characterized by the
ability to bounce back from negative emotional experi-
ences by adapting flexibly to the changing demands of the
environment. Research on emotions, such as Fredrickson’s
theory that positive emotions allow people to “broaden
and build” their coping resources (Tugade & Fredrickson,
2004), has provided an important theoretical and empirical
base for both understanding people’s reactions to stressful
events and creating interventions to improve coping (e.g.,
Fredrickson, Tugade, Waugh, & Larkin, 2003). Being able
to experience positive emotions in the context of otherwise
intensely stressful events is one of the coping methods
on which resilient people typically draw. For example,
being able to experience positive events such as grati-
tude or love following the September 11 attacks enabled
many people to cope with these distressing events and to

experience posttraumatic growth (Tugade & Fredrickson,
2004). Resilience can be characterized by posttraumatic
growth: people report many ways in which they have actu-
ally benefited from traumatic events, such as reordering
their priorities, more fully appreciating what they have,
and valuing personal relationships more (Low, Bower,
Kwan, & Seldon, 2008; Taylor, 1983).
Emotional Disclosure
Considerable social psychological research has examined
the mental and physical health benefits of emotional dis-
closure, especially in the context of traumatic or stressful
events. Fairly consistently, this research finds beneficial
effects on health (Pennebaker & Chung, 2007). The benefits
of disclosure stem in part from the research just discussed,
which reveals the benefits of emotion-focused coping.
For years, researchers suspected that when people
undergo traumatic events and cannot or do not communicate
about them, those events may fester inside them, producing
obsessive thoughts and physiological reactivity. Indeed, the
more people are forced to inhibit thoughts, emotions, and
behaviors, the more their underlying physiological activ-
ity increases (Pennebaker, 1997). Consequently, the ability
to confide in others or to consciously confront one’s feel-
ings may eliminate the need to obsess about and inhibit the
trauma and reduce concomitant physiological reactivity.
In an initial investigation of this intriguing hypothesis,
Pennebaker and Beall (1986) had 46 undergraduates write
about either the most traumatic and stressful event in their
lives or about trivial topics. Although writing about trau-
mas was more upsetting immediately after the essays were
completed than writing about trivial topics, the students
were less likely to visit the student health center for illness
for the following 6 months. Subsequent research found
that when people talked about traumatic events, their skin
conductance, heart rate, and blood pressure all decreased
(Pennebaker, Hughes, & O’Heeron, 1987). Research has
also uncovered beneficial long-term effects of emotional
disclosure on immune functioning (e.g., Petrie, Booth,
Pennebaker, Davison, & Thomas, 1995).
Drawing on this method, interventions have employed
written or oral exercises designed to encourage emotional
expression. Such interventions have lead to improved
health among AIDS patients (e.g., Petrie, Fontanilla,
Thomas, Booth, & Pennebaker, 2004), breast cancer
patients (Stanton et al., 2002), and asthma and rheuma-
toid arthritis patients, among other conditions (Norman,
Lumley, Dooley, & Diamond, 2004). Even writing about
emotional topics via e-mail can improve health (Sheese,
Brown, & Graziano, 2004). Writing interventions have also
been used to help people cope with debilitating treatments
Stress and Its Management 709
such as postoperative recovery (Solano, Donati, Pecci,
Persichetti, & Colaci, 2003).
Examining the process of emotional disclosure in health
settings has been helpful for understanding the underlying
mechanisms whereby these effects occur, and as a result,
has enriched the theory that gave rise to these studies.
There are cognitive benefits associated with talking about
or writing about a traumatic event such as organizing one’s
thoughts and being able to find meaning in the experi-
ence (Lepore, Ragan, & Jones, 2000). Talking or writing
about traumatic or stressful events provides an opportunity
for emotional-approach coping (Lepore & Smyth, 2002)
and for affirming personal values (Creswell et al., 2007).
Talking with others allows one to gain information or
insight about a stressful event or about effective coping.
It may also elicit emotional support from others.
Coping With Chronic Illness
Social psychologists have also studied how people cope
with, adjust to, and manage the threats associated with
chronic illness, and these insights have enriched social
psychological theories. Clinical health psychologists study-
ing coping with chronic illness tend to focus on the prob-
lems people experience and on psychological distress. By
contrast, social psychologists have focused on responses to
chronic illness that help restore or maintain psychological
functioning. As the next section shows, attribution theory
and social cognition provide valuable frameworks for
addressing these issues.
Beliefs About the Cause of an Illness
People with chronic illnesses often develop theories about
the origins of the illness (e.g., Costanzo, Lutgendorf,
Bradley, Rose, & Anderson, 2005). These theories include
stress, physical injury, disease-causing bacteria, and God’s
will. Of potentially greater significance is where patients
ultimately place the blame or responsibility for their ill-
ness: Do they blame themselves, another person, the envi-
ronment, or a quirk of fate?
Self-blame for chronic illness is widespread. Patients
frequently believe they brought on their illnesses through
their own actions. Sometimes, these perceptions are to
some extent correct. Poor health habits, such as smoking,
improper diet, or lack of exercise, contribute to heart dis-
ease, stroke, or cancer. But in many cases, a patient’s self-
blame is ill placed, as when a disease is caused primarily
by a genetically based defect. What are the consequences of
self-blame? Unfortunately, there is no definitive answer to
this question. Some researchers have found that self-blame
can lead to guilt, self-recrimination, or depression (e.g.,
Bennett, Compas, Beckjord, & Glinder, 2005). However,
710 Health
perceiving the cause of one’s illness as self-generated may
also represent an effort to assume control over the disor-
der; such feelings can be adaptive for coming to terms with
the disorder. It may be that self-blame is adaptive under
certain conditions but not others (Taylor, 2009).
Research uniformly suggests that blaming another per-
son for one’s disorder is maladaptive (Affleck, Tennen,
Pfeiffer, & Fifield, 1987; Taylor, Lichtman, & Wood, 1984).
For example, some patients believe that their disorder
was brought about by stress caused by family members,
ex-spouses, or colleagues at work. Blame of this other per-
son or persons may be tied to unresolved hostility, which
can interfere with adjustment to the disease. By contrast,
forgiveness is tied to fewer health complaints (Lawler et al.,
2005).
Beliefs About the Controllability of the Illness
Patients develop a number of control-related beliefs with
respect to chronic illness. They may believe, as do many
cancer patients, that they can prevent a recurrence of the
disease through good health habits or even sheer force of
will. They may believe that by complying with treatments
and physicians’ recommendations, they achieve vicarious
control over their illness (e.g., Helgeson, 1992). They may
believe that they personally have direct control over the ill-
ness through self-administration of a treatment regimen.
These control-related beliefs may or may not be accurate.
For example, if patients do maintain a treatment regimen,
they can exercise real control over the possibility of recur-
rence or exacerbation of their illness. On the other hand,
the belief that one’s illness can be controlled through a
positive attitude may or may not be correct.
Beliefs in control (or a sense of self-efficacy) with
respect to the disease and its treatment are generally but
not always adaptive. For example, cancer patients who
believe that they have control over their illness are better
adjusted than are patients without such beliefs (Thompson,
Nanni, & Levine, 1994). A sense of control or self-efficacy
improves adjustment among people with a variety of
chronic health problems, such as sickle-cell disease
(Edwards, Telfair, Cecil, & Lenoci, 2001), chronic obstruc-
tive pulmonary disease (Kohler, Fish, & Greene, 2002),
AIDS (Taylor, Helgeson, Reed, & Skokan, 1991), ovarian
cancer (Norton et al., 2005), and patients recovering from
angioplasty (Helgeson & Fritz, 1999). Children also benefit
from perceived control. Griffin and Chen (2006), for exam-
ple, found that high perceived control was associated with
better asthma control. Even for patients who are physically
or psychosocially badly off, perceptions of control facili-
tate psychological adjustment (McQuillen, Licht, & Licht,
2003). Perceived control or self-efficacy may even help to
prolong life. A study of patients with chronic obstructive
pulmonary disease found that those with high self-efficacy
expectations lived longer than those without such expecta-
tions (Kaplan, Ries, Prewitt, & Eakin, 1994).
Not all studies find that feelings of control are adap-
tive in adjusting to chronic conditions. When real control
is low, efforts to induce it or exert it may be unsuccessful
and backfire (Burish et al., 1984; Tennen, Affleck, Urrows,
Higgins, & Mendola, 1992; Toshima, Kaplan, & Ries,
1992). When perceived control is dramatically discon-
firmed, as with a cancer recurrence, worse adjustment may
result. For example, Tomich and Helgeson (2006) found
that initial perceptions of personal control over breast can-
cer were associated with women’s reports of worse mental
and physical functioning 5 years later if they had sustained
a recurrence. On the whole, however, control appears to be
helpful for coping with many aspects of chronic illness.
Positive Changes in Response to Chronic Illness
As noted, clinical health psychology research has focused
disproportionately on the negative emotions and expe-
riences that are produced by chronic illness. However,
many people experience positive emotions or beliefs
(Cordova, Cunningham, Carlson & Andrykowski, 2001;
McFarland & Alvaro, 2000; Ryff & Singer, 1996; Scheier,
Weintraub, & Carver, 1986), including personal growth or
a sense of meaning in life (Taylor, 1983). These reactions
may occur because chronically ill people perceive that
they have narrowly escaped death or because they have
reordered their priorities in a more satisfying way.
Studies with a broad array of chronically ill populations
have found that many, sometimes most, chronically ill patients
find at least some beneficial changes in their lives, including
an increased ability to appreciate each day and the inspiration
to do things now rather than postponing them (R. L. Collins,
Taylor, & Skokan, 1990; Ostir, Berges, Ottenbacher, Clow, &
Ottenbacher, 2008; Mohr et al., 1999). People report that they
are putting more effort into their relationships and believe
they have acquired more awareness of others’ feelings and
more empathy and compassion for others. They report feel-
ing stronger and more self-assured as well. Benefit finding
and positive emotions correlate not only with psychological
adjustment but also with better social functioning and health
(Aspinwall & MacNamara, 2005; Danoff-Burg & Revenson,
2005; Low, Stanton, & Danoff-Burg, 2006). Two studies
compared the quality of life experienced by cancer patients
with a normal sample free of chronic disease, and both stud-
ies found the quality of life experienced by the cancer sample
to be higher than that of the non-ill sample (Danoff, Kramer,
Irwin, & Gottlieb, 1983; Tempelaar et al., 1989).
Helgeson, Reynolds, and Tomich (2006) completed a
meta-analysis of the benefit-finding literature and found

that, for the most part, perceived growth is related to posi-
tive emotional functioning and low risk of depression. The
ability to reappraise one’s situation positively is related
to a more positive mood (Pakenham, 2005) and to post-
traumatic growth in women with breast cancer (Manne
et al., 2004; Sears, Stanton, & Danoff-Burg, 2003), espe-
cially among women with more advanced disease. Finding
meaning in a chronic illness and coping through religion
can also improve adjustment to chronic illness (Calhoun,
Cann, Tedeschi, & McMillan, 2000; Helgeson, 2003;
Schanowitz & Nicassio, 2006). Perceptions of growth are
related to lower anxiety, reduced distress, better quality of
life, and a more positive subjective rating of physical health.
Some investigators have used the theory of cognitive
adaptation to examine patients’ reactions to chronic illness.
The theory of cognitive adaptation (Taylor, 1983) main-
tains that following a severe threat to the self, such as a
chronic illness diagnosis, people are able to restore their
psychological functioning by shoring up their self-esteem,
their sense of mastery over the events around them, opti-
mism about the future, and the experience of meaning
in the event or in their lives more generally. In a test of
this theory, Moore, Norman, Harris, and Makris (2007)
recruited patients with venous thrombosis, had them com-
plete measures of these variables, and related them to out-
come variables of anxiety, depression, thrombosis-related
worries, and quality of life. Mastery, self-esteem, and opti-
mism were significantly associated with good adjustment,
as the theory predicts. Similarly, using this theoretical
framework, Helgeson (2003) found that a positive sense of
self, optimism, and personal control were associated pro-
spectively with good adjustment to coronary heart disease
and a reduced likelihood of a repeat cardiac event over a
4-year follow-up, controlling for initial adjustment (see
also Helgeson & Fritz, 1999).
There is, however, some contradictory evidence
regarding perceived control and recurrence. Because per-
sonal growth also arises in the context of coping with an
extremely stressful event, perceived growth can be tied to
more intrusive thoughts about the event. This seemingly
paradoxical relationship between experiencing intrusive
thoughts and the perception of personal growth may be
signs that people are working through the implications of
the event for their lives. In the process of conducting this
cognitive and affective work, personal growth may result,
but intrusive thoughts may be inevitable as well. For exam-
ple, Moore and colleagues (2007) found that finding mean-
ing in the illness experience was associated with elevated
distress, perhaps indicative of enduring concern about the
disorder (see also Tomich & Helgeson, 2004). This pattern
indicates that perceived growth is not merely the result of
a halo effect induced by successful coping with a stressor
Social Support 711
but neither is perceived growth a definitive pathway to
good psychological functioning.
As these findings suggest, the time that has elapsed
since a trauma may be an important moderator predicting
the relation of personal growth to psychological adjust-
ment (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996). Personal growth can-
not occur immediately following an event, and in the early
stages of adjusting, benefit finding is likely to co-occur
with psychological distress. Over time, however, distress
may recede, whereas personal growth may be maintained
or enhanced (Helgeson et al., 2006). From the standpoint of
basic research, the findings suggest the importance of dif-
ferent coping strategies for different phases of adaptation
to disorders, indicating the fact that the search for meaning
may be more beneficial at some times than at others. In
terms of applications, the findings suggest that interven-
tions to help people restore their sense of self-esteem, opti-
mism, and mastery about the future may be useful.1
In the realm of psychosocial resources and coping, one
resource in particular stands out, and that is social support.
Because social psychologists have made extensive contri-
butions to this literature, I cover it in detail here.
SOCIAL SUPPORT
A topic central to social psychologists’ health-related
research is social support. Social support is the percep-
tion or experience that one is loved and cared for by
others, esteemed and valued, and part of a social net-
work of mutual assistance and obligations (Wills, 1991).
Social support may come from a partner, relative, friends,
coworkers, social and community ties, or even a devoted
pet (dogs are the best; Allen, 2003). The benefits of social
support are thought to have evolved from human beings’
most significant adaptation to threat, namely, group living.
Whereas other animals are armed with sharp teeth or claws
and defensive resources such as thick skin or speed, pri-
mates depend critically on group living for survival.
Taxonomies of social support have suggested several
specific beneficial forms. Informational support occurs
when one person helps another person to understand
stressful conditions better and to select what resources
1Of interest is the fact that benefit finding is related to reduced
distress especially for health stressors, relative to other stressors
involving personal trauma. However, studies of personal growth
and health disproportionately use cross-sectional as opposed to
longitudinal data and show a modest gender skew in the direc-
tion of more female participants, and so the contribution of these
issues to the conclusions in the literature is difficult to assess.
712 Health
and coping strategies may be needed to deal with these
conditions. Instrumental support involves the provision of
tangible assistance such as services, financial support, and
other forms of specific aid or goods. Emotional support
involves providing warmth or nurturance to another per-
son and reassuring the person that he or she is a valuable
individual for whom others care. Critical to the definition
of social support, however, is the fact that the perception
that these resources are available, should they be needed,
is beneficial, and not only the actual experience of social
support. Indeed, as will be evident later in this section,
sometimes the actual use of social support resources has
hidden costs.
Social support is typically measured either in terms
of structural social support or functional support (Thoits,
1995). Structural support is the number of social relation-
ships a person has and the interconnectedness among those
relationships, an assessment also known as social integra-
tion. Functional support is assessed in terms of the specific
functions (informational, instrumental, and emotional)
that a specific member of one’s network may serve for
a person.
An early debate in the social support literature ques-
tioned whether social support is generally beneficial to
mental and physical health during nonstressful as well as
stressful times (the direct effects hypothesis) or whether
the health and mental health benefits of social support are
evident chiefly during periods of high stress (the buffering
hypothesis; Cohen & Wills, 1985). Both effects appear to
hold. When social support is assessed through measures of
social integration, direct effects of support on mental and
physical health are typically found (Thoits, 1995), but not
buffering effects, whereas the perception that emotional
support is available is tied to both direct and buffering
effects (e.g., Wethington & Kessler, 1986).
Benefits of Social Support
Hundreds of studies attest to the fact that social support
consistently reduces psychological distress during times
of stress, such as depression and anxiety. It also promotes
isolation is a significant risk for morbidity and mortality
with effect sizes on par with or exceeding those of smok-
ing, blood pressure, lipids, obesity, and physical activity
(House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988).
By what biological routes does social support affect
health outcomes? Much research has focused on stress
pathways. As noted, although sympathetic and HPA axis
responses to stress have short-term protective effects, over
time they have adverse long-term implications for health,
including an elevated risk for many chronic diseases
(McEwen, 2008; Saxbe, Repetti, & Nishina, 2008). Stress
also affects the risk for adverse health outcomes by altering
immune functioning in ways that leave a person vulnerable
to opportunistic diseases and infections or by diminishing
immune system sensitivity to cortisol, which would nor-
mally terminate stress-induced inflammation; these twin
effects account for the fact that stress may both increase the
risk for infectious disorders (immunosuppression) and also
exacerbate or confer risk for diseases in which the central
feature is excessive inflammation, such as allergies, auto-
immune disease, rheumatoid disorders, and cardiovascu-
lar disorders (Miller, Cohen, & Ritchey, 2002). All of the
bodily systems’ functioning is interrelated. To the extent
that social support can keep sympathetic nervous system
and HPA axis responses to stress low, it may have benefi-
cial effects on other systems, such as immune functioning,
as well and thus affect health in a positive direction.
There may be other biological systems that underlie
the benefits of social support. Oxytocin and the opioid
system (the body’s natural pain reduction system) may be
implicated in the neuroendocrine and physiological ben-
efits of social support. For example, oxytocin is known to
be released in response to social contact, and it has been
tied to reduced sympathetic nervous system and HPA axis
responses to stress (Taylor & Seeman, 2000).
The benefits of social support are experienced, in part,
because it helps people to stave off illness altogether. For
example, Cohen and associates intentionally infected
healthy community volunteers with a cold or flu virus by
swabbing the inside of their nasal passages with virus-
soaked cotton swabs. They found th