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Evidence suggests that Latin Americans display elevated levels of emotional expressivity and positivity. Here, we tested whether Latin Americans possess a unique form of interdependence called expressive interdependence, characterized by the open expression of positive emotions related to social engagement (e.g., feelings of closeness to others). In Study 1, we compared Latin Americans from Chile and Mexico with European Americans in the United States, a group known to be highly independent. Latin Americans expressed positive socially engaging emotions, particularly in response to negative events affecting others, whereas European Americans favored positive socially disengaging emotions, such as pride, especially in response to personally favorable circumstances. Study 2 replicated these findings with another group of Latin Americans from Colombia and European Americans in the United States. Study 2 also included Japanese in Japan, who expressed positive emotions less than Latin and European Americans. However, Japanese displayed a higher tendency to express negative socially engaging emotions, such as guilt and shame, compared to both groups. Our data demonstrate that emotional expression patterns align with overarching ethos of interdependence in Latin America and Japan and independence among European Americans. However, Latin Americans and Japanese exhibited different styles of interdependence. Latin Americans were expressive of positive socially engaging emotions, whereas Japanese were less expressive overall. Moreover, when Japanese expressed emotions, they emphasized negative socially engaging emotions. Implications for theories of culture and emotion are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

This research challenges the idea that teams from more collectivistic cultures tend to perform better. We propose that in contexts in which there are tradeoffs between group goals (i.e., what is best for the group) and relational goals (i.e., what is best for one's relationships with specific group members), people in less collectivistic cultures primarily focus on group goals but those in more collectivistic cultures focus on both group and relational goals, which can lead to suboptimal decisions. An archival analysis of 100 years of data across three major competitive team sports found that teams from more collectivistic nations consistently underperformed, even after controlling for a number of nation and team characteristics. Three follow-up studies with 108 Chinese soccer players, 109 Singapore students, and 119 Chinese and the U.S. adults provided evidence for the underlying mechanism (i.e., prioritizing relational goals over group goals). Overall, this research suggests a more balanced view of collectivism, highlighting an important context in which collectivism can impair team performance., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Extensive research has documented organizational decision-makers' preference for men over women when they evaluate and select candidates for leadership positions. We conceptualize a novel construct-mindsets about the universality of leadership potential-that can help reduce this bias. People can believe either that only some individuals have high leadership potential (i.e., a nonuniversal mindset ) or that most individuals have high leadership potential (i.e., a universal mindset ). Five studies investigated the relationship between these mindsets and decision-makers' gender biases in leader evaluation and selection decisions. The more senior government officials in China held a universal mindset, the less they showed gender bias when rating their subordinates' leadership capability (Study 1). Working adults in the United Kingdom who held a more universal mindset exhibited less gender bias when evaluating and selecting job candidates for a leadership position (Study 2). In an experiment, Singaporean students exposed to a universal mindset exhibited less gender bias when evaluating and selecting candidates than those exposed to a nonuniversal mindset (Study 3). Another experiment with working adults in China replicated this pattern and added a control condition to confirm the directionality of the effect (Study 4). Last, Study 5 showed that a more universal mindset was associated with less gender bias particularly among decision-makers with stronger gender stereotypes in the domain of leadership. This research demonstrates that, although they are seemingly unrelated to gender, mindsets about the universality of leadership potential can influence the extent to which people express gender bias in the leadership context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

According to the theory of mutual constitution of culture and psyche, just as culture shapes people, individuals' psychological states can influence culture. We build on compensatory control theory, which suggests that low personal control can lead people to prefer societal systems that impose order, to examine the mutual constitution of personal control and cultural tightness. Specifically, we tested whether individuals' lack of personal control increases their preference for tighter cultures as a means of restoring order and predictability, and whether tighter cultures in turn reduce people's feelings of personal control. Seven studies (five preregistered) with participants from the United States, Singapore, and China examine this cycle of mutual constitution. Specifically, documenting the correlational link between person and culture, we found that Americans lower on personal control preferred to live in tighter states (Study 1). Chinese employees lower on personal control also desired more structure and preferred a tighter organizational culture (Study 2). Employing an experimental causal chain design, Studies 3-5 provided causal evidence for our claim that lack of control increases desire for tighter cultures via the need for structure. Finally, tracing the link back from culture to person, Studies 6a and 6b found that whereas tighter cultures decreased perceptions of individual personal control, they increased people's sense of collective control. Overall, the findings document the process of mutual constitution of culture and psyche: lack of personal control leads people to seek more structured, tighter cultures, and that tighter cultures, in turn, decrease people's sense of personal control but increase their sense of collective control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Approximately 44% of U.S. workers are low-wage workers. Recent years have witnessed a raging debate about whether to raise their minimum wages. Why do some decision-makers support raising wages and others do not? Ten studies (four preregistered) examined people's beliefs about the malleability of intelligence as a key antecedent. The more U.S. human resource managers (Study 1) and Indian business owners (Study 2) believed that people's intelligence can grow (i.e., had a growth mindset), the more they supported increasing low-wage workers' compensation. In key U.S. swing states (Study 3a), and a nationally representative sample (Study 3b), residents with a more growth mindset were more willing to support ballot propositions increasing the minimum wage and other compensation. Study 4 provided causal evidence. The next two studies confirmed the specificity of the predictor. People's beliefs about the malleability of intelligence, but not personality (Study 5a) or effort (Study 5b), predicted their support for increasing low-wage workers' compensation. Study 6 examined multiple potential mechanisms, including empathy, attributions for poverty, and environmental affordances. The relationship between growth mindset and support for raising low-wage workers' wages was explained by more situational rather than dispositional attributions for poverty. Finally, Studies 7a and 7b replicated the effect of growth mindset on support for increasing low-wage workers' compensation and provided confirmatory evidence for the mediator-situational, rather than dispositional, attributions of poverty. These findings suggest that growth mindsets about intelligence promote support for increasing low-wage workers' wages; we discuss the theoretical and practical implications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

In the context of COVID-19 government-ordered lockdowns, more individualistic people might be less willing to leave their homes to protect their own health, or they might be more willing to go out to relieve their boredom. Using an Australian sample, a pilot study found that people's lay theories were consistent with the latter possibility, that individualism would be associated with a greater willingness to violate lockdown orders. Using a longitudinal data set containing location records of about 18 million smartphones across the United States, Study 1 found that people in more individualistic states were less likely to comply with social distancing rules following lockdown orders. Additional analyses replicated this finding with reference to counties' residential mobility, which is associated with increased individualism. In a longitudinal data set containing mobility data across 79 countries and regions, Study 2 found that people in more individualistic countries and regions were also less likely to follow social distancing rules. Preregistered Study 3 replicated these findings at the individual level: People scoring higher on an individualism scale indicated that they had violated social distancing rules more often during the COVID-19 pandemic. Study 4 found that the effect of individualism on violating social distancing rules was mediated by people's selfishness and boredom. Overall, our findings document a cultural antecedent of individuals' socially responsible behavior during a pandemic and suggest an additional explanation for why the COVID-19 pandemic has been much harder to contain in some parts of the world than in others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Information security and data breaches are perhaps the biggest challenges that global businesses face in the digital economy. Although data breaches can cause significant harm to users, businesses, and society, there is significant individual and national variation in people's responses to data breaches across markets. This research investigates power distance as an antecedent of people's divergent reactions to data breaches. Eight studies using archival, correlational, and experimental methods find that high power distance makes users more willing to continue patronizing a business after a data breach (Studies 1-3). This is because they are more likely to believe that the business, not they themselves, owns the compromised data (Studies 4-5A) and, hence, do not reduce their transactions with the business. Making people believe that they (not the business) own the shared data attenuates this effect (Study 5B). Study 6 provides additional evidence for the underlying mechanism. Finally, Study 7 shows that high uncertainty avoidance acts as a moderator that mitigates the effect of power distance on willingness to continue patronizing a business after a data breach. Theoretical contributions to the international business literature and practitioner and policy insights are discussed., Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41267-022-00519-5., (© Academy of International Business 2022, corrected publication 2022.)

People are excessively confident that they can judge others' characteristics from their appearance. This research identifies a novel antecedent of this phenomenon. Ten studies ( N = 2,967, 4 preregistered) find that the more people believe that appearance reveals character, the more confident they are in their appearance-based judgments, and therefore, the more they support the use of facial profiling technologies in law enforcement, education, and business. Specifically, people who believe that appearance reveals character support the use of facial profiling in general (Studies 1a and 1b), and even when they themselves are the target of profiling (Studies 1c and 1d). Experimentally inducing people to believe that appearance reveals character increases their support for facial profiling (Study 2), because it increases their confidence in the ability to make appearance-based judgments (Study 3). An intervention that undermines people's confidence in their appearance-based judgments reduces their support for facial profiling (Study 4). The relationship between the lay theory and support for facial profiling is weaker among people with a growth mindset about personality, as facial profiling presumes a relatively unchanging character (Study 5a). This relationship is also weaker among people who believe in free will, as facial profiling presumes that individuals have limited free will (Study 5b). The appearance reveals character lay theory is a stronger predictor of support for profiling than analogous beliefs in other domains, such as the belief that Facebook likes reveal personality (Study 6). These findings identify a novel lay theory that underpins people's meta-cognitions about their confidence in appearance-related judgments and their policy positions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Cultural psychology-the research field focusing on the mutual constitution of culture and the mind-has made great strides by documenting robust cultural variations in how people think, feel, and act. The cumulative evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that Westerners are independent, whereas those in the rest of the world are interdependent. Although this research traditionally examined North Americans and East Asians, recent research has extended this literature to other non-Western regions. We review this emerging research and describe four distinct forms of interdependence in four non-Western cultural zones. Specifically, interdependence is promoted through (a) conflict avoidance (dominant in much of East Asia), (b) self-assertion for ingroup protection (dominant in Arab regions), (c) expression of emotions that promote interpersonal resonance (dominant in Latin America), and (d) argumentation for conflict resolution (dominant in South Asia). Furthermore, we propose that the Modern West adopted the existing signature features of interdependence in the neighboring cultural zones (notably, self-assertion, emotional expression, and argumentation) and redefined the psychological function and social meaning of these features; instead of promoting interdependence, they became means to achieve independence. This theoretical integration suggests that cultural variation in basic psychological processes emerged over the last several 1,000 years under the influence of ecology, migration, and intergroup relations. The current effort underscores the need to globalize psychological science. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The tension between self-interest and the collective good is fundamental to human societies. We propose that the idea of choice is a key lever that nudges people to act in a self-interested manner because it leads people to value independence. Making one inconsequential choice at the beginning of an incentive-compatible lab experiment made people 41% more likely to choose a monetary allocation that maximized their own payoff while minimizing the total payoff of their group (Studies 1A and 1B). The next two studies featured seven-participant experimental markets in which sellers decided whether to produce conventional goods (which imposed costs on others) or socially responsible goods (which did not impose any costs), and buyers decided which goods to purchase. In markets in which members made a single inconsequential choice, the market share of the socially responsible good was reduced by a factor of 34% (Studies 2A and 2B). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, framing socially responsible actions as choices increased people's willingness to hoard and violate social distancing rules (Study 3). Highlighting the idea of choice reduced people's desire to engage in corporate social responsibility, and this effect was mediated by an increased emphasis on independence (Study 4). Finally, using cell phone location data, an archival study found that in states in which people were more likely to search for choice-related words on the internet in 2019, residents were more likely to leave their homes following a stay-at-home order, after controlling for state-level income, education, diversity, population density, and political orientation (Study 5)., (© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences.)

How should I greet her? Should I do what he requests? Newcomers to a culture learn its interpersonal norms at varying rates, largely through trial-and-error experience. Given that the culturally correct response often depends on conditions that are subtle and complex, we propose that newcomers' rate of acculturation depends on not only their explicit aptitude (e.g., reasoning ability) but also their implicit aptitude (e.g., pattern recognition ability). In Studies 1-3, participants experienced a range of influence situations sourced from a foreign culture. Across many trials, they decided whether or not to comply and then received accuracy feedback (based on what a majority of locals indicated to be the appropriate action in each situation). Across the 3 studies, stronger implicit aptitude was associated with greater improvement from trial-and-error experience, whereas stronger explicit aptitude was not. In Studies 4-6, participants experienced a range of greeting situations from a foreign culture. Across many trials, implicit aptitude predicted experiential learning, especially under conditions that impede reasoning: multiple cues, subliminal feedback, or inconsistent feedback. Study 7 found that the predictiveness of implicit aptitude was weaker under a condition that impedes associative processing: delayed feedback. These findings highlight the important role of implicit aptitude in helping people learn interpersonal norms from trial-and-error experience, particularly because in real-life intercultural interactions, the relevant cues are often complex, and the feedback is often fleeting and inconsistent but immediate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

High levels of income inequality can persist in society only if people accept the inequality as justified. To identify psychological predictors of people's tendency to justify inequality, we retrained a pre-existing deep learning model to predict the extent to which World Values Survey respondents believed that income inequality is necessary. A feature importance analysis revealed multiple items associated with the importance of hard work as top predictors. As an emphasis on hard work is a key component of the Protestant Work Ethic, we formulated the hypothesis that the PWE increases acceptance of inequality. A correlational study found that the more people endorsed PWE, the less disturbed they were about factual statistics about wealth equality in the US. Two experiments found that exposing people to PWE items decreased their disturbance with income inequality. The findings indicate that machine learning models can be reused to generate viable hypotheses., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Building on past research in risky decision making, the present research investigated whether the cancellation heuristic is evident in intertemporal choice. Specifically, the cancellation heuristic posits that whenever choice options are partitioned into multiple components, people ignore seemingly identical components and compare the non-identical components. We nudged people to employ the cancellation heuristic by partitioning both the smaller earlier reward and the larger later reward into a seemingly identical component and a non-identical component. Given diminishing marginal utility, we hypothesized that people would perceive an identical difference between the smaller earlier reward and the larger later reward as being subjectively greater when both amounts are smaller in magnitude, thereby increasing the relative attractiveness of the larger later reward in the partition condition. We conducted four studies, including two incentive-compatible lab experiments, one incentive-compatible lab-in-the-field experiment, and one survey study using choices among both gains and losses. We consistently found that this choice architecture intervention significantly increased people's likelihood of choosing the larger later reward. Furthermore, we provide evidence of the underlying mechanism-people's intertemporal decisions shifted to a greater extent in the cancellation condition, particularly if their marginal utility diminished faster. The findings indicate that two features of human psychology-diminishing marginal utility and the cancellation heuristic-can be simultaneously utilized to nudge people to make decisions that would be better for them in the long run., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

This study examines people's intention to get COVID-19 vaccines and some of the psychological factors, that can facilitate the vaccination process. Using the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as a theoretical framework, we hypothesized that the key constructs of TPB (attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control) would explain people's intention to get COVID-19 vaccines. Belief in COVID-19-related misinformation and vaccine confidence were added to the TPB framework in order to comprehensively assess the predictors of COVID-19 vaccine intentions. Data was collected from 400 Indian respondents electronically during Feb-March, 2021. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to analyze the data. The Three components of TPB collectively explained 41% of the variance in the intention to get COVID-19 vaccines. Belief in COVID-19-related misinformation and vaccine confidence, on the other hand, had no significant impact on the intention to get COVID-19 vaccines. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these results.

What attitudes, values, and beliefs serve as key markers of cultural change? To answer this question, we examined 221,485 respondents from the World Values Survey, a multiwave cross-country survey of people's attitudes, values, and beliefs. We trained a machine learning model to classify respondents into seven waves (i.e., periods). Once trained, the machine learning model identified a separate group of 24,611 respondents' wave with a balanced accuracy of 77%. We then queried the model to identify the attitudes, values, and beliefs that contributed the most to its classification decisions, and therefore, served as markers of cultural change. These included religiosity, social attitudes, political attitudes, independence, life satisfaction, Protestant work ethic, and prosociality. Although past research in cultural change has discussed decreasing religiosity and increasing liberalism and independence, it has not yet identified Protestant work ethic, political orientation, and prosociality as values relevant to cultural change. Thus, the current research points to new directions for future research on cultural change that might not be evident from either a deductive or an inductive approach. This research illustrates that the abductive approach of machine learning, which focuses on the most likely explanations for an outcome, can help generate novel insights. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

More than ever before, people across the world are exposed to ideas of choice and have opportunities to make choices. What are the consequences of this rapidly expanding exposure to the ideas and practice of choice? The current research investigated an unexamined and potentially powerful consequence of this salience of choice: an awareness and experience of independence. Four studies ( n = 1,288) across three cultural contexts known to differ in both the salience of choice and the cultural emphasis on independence (the United States, Singapore, and India) provided converging evidence of a link between the salience of choice and independence. Singaporean students who recalled choices rather than actions represented themselves as larger than their peers (study 1). Conceptually replicating this finding, study 2 found that Americans who recalled choices rather than actions rated themselves as physically stronger. In a word/nonword lexical decision task (study 3), Singaporean students who recalled choices rather than actions were quicker at identifying independence-related words, but not neutral or interdependence-related words. Americans, Singaporeans, and Indians all indicated that when working in an organization that emphasized choice, they would be more likely to express their opinions. Similarly, Americans, Singaporeans, and Indians reported a preference for working in such an organization (studies 4a and 4b). The findings suggest that the salience of personal choice may drive an awareness and experience of independence even in contexts where, unlike in the United States, independence has not been the predominant ethos. Choice may be an unmarked and proximate mechanism of cultural change and growing global individualism., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interest.

How can we nudge people to not engage in unethical behaviors, such as hoarding and violating social-distancing guidelines, during the COVID-19 pandemic? Because past research on antecedents of unethical behavior has not provided a clear answer, we turned to machine learning to generate novel hypotheses. We trained a deep-learning model to predict whether or not World Values Survey respondents perceived unethical behaviors as justifiable, on the basis of their responses to 708 other items. The model identified optimism about the future of humanity as one of the top predictors of unethicality. A preregistered correlational study ( N = 218 U.S. residents) conceptually replicated this finding. A preregistered experiment ( N = 294 U.S. residents) provided causal support: Participants who read a scenario conveying optimism about the COVID-19 pandemic were less willing to justify hoarding and violating social-distancing guidelines than participants who read a scenario conveying pessimism. The findings suggest that optimism can help reduce unethicality, and they document the utility of machine-learning methods for generating novel hypotheses.

Science is undergoing rapid change with the movement to improve science focused largely on reproducibility/replicability and open science practices. This moment of change-in which science turns inward to examine its methods and practices-provides an opportunity to address its historic lack of diversity and noninclusive culture. Through network modeling and semantic analysis, we provide an initial exploration of the structure, cultural frames, and women's participation in the open science and reproducibility literatures ( n = 2,926 articles and conference proceedings). Network analyses suggest that the open science and reproducibility literatures are emerging relatively independently of each other, sharing few common papers or authors. We next examine whether the literatures differentially incorporate collaborative, prosocial ideals that are known to engage members of underrepresented groups more than independent, winner-takes-all approaches. We find that open science has a more connected, collaborative structure than does reproducibility. Semantic analyses of paper abstracts reveal that these literatures have adopted different cultural frames: open science includes more explicitly communal and prosocial language than does reproducibility. Finally, consistent with literature suggesting the diversity benefits of communal and prosocial purposes, we find that women publish more frequently in high-status author positions (first or last) within open science (vs. reproducibility). Furthermore, this finding is further patterned by team size and time. Women are more represented in larger teams within reproducibility, and women's participation is increasing in open science over time and decreasing in reproducibility. We conclude with actionable suggestions for cultivating a more prosocial and diverse culture of science., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interest., (Copyright © 2020 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.)

Recent decades have seen increased variability in diverse domains, such as the climate and asset prices. As more resources are required to cope with greater variability in the outside world, exposure to greater variability can make people feel that society is more vulnerable. This sense of vulnerability, in turn, can lead people to judge and punish wrongdoers more harshly. Studies 1a-2c found that people who were exposed to graphs representing greater variability were more willing to punish wrongdoers, both in domains that were related to the source of variability and those that were unrelated. Studies 3 and 4 found that people who experienced more variable dice rolls were more likely to punish unethical behaviors in hypothetical scenarios and in experimental games, even at a financial cost to themselves. Studies 5a and 5b provided evidence for the underlying mechanism-sense of vulnerability-using correlational designs. Study 6 provided experimental evidence for the underlying mechanism. These findings suggest that increasing variability in diverse domains can have unexpected psychological consequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Is cultural knowledge unique to a culture and inaccessible to other cultures, or is it a tool that can be recruited by individuals outside of that culture when the situation renders it relevant? As one test of this idea, we explored whether the applicability and benefits of a lay belief that originated from Chinese collective wisdom extends beyond cultural boundaries: negotiating with fate . Negotiating with fate postulates that fate imposes boundaries within which people can shape their outcomes through their actions. This belief contrasts fatalism, which has been traditionally interpreted as believing that fate dictates people's life outcomes and renders their actions largely irrelevant. We found that the belief in negotiating with fate (but not fatalism) was strengthened when individuals recalled instances in which they were constrained, compared to when individuals recalled instances in which they were free to choose (Experiments 1 and 2). Subsequent studies found that after recalling a constraining event, exposure to the belief in negotiating with fate (but not exposure to fatalism) decreased repetitive thoughts (Experiment 3), increased the conviction that personal actions contributed to the event (Experiment 4), increased acceptance and positive reinterpretation of the event (Experiment 5), and increased how meaningful the event was (Experiment 6). Thus, when faced with constraints, acknowledging fate does not necessarily lead people to believe that their actions are irrelevant. Instead, when individuals face constraining circumstances in which potential courses of actions are clearly limited, they are more likely to believe that they are able to negotiate with fate, and this belief can help them move forward from negative outcomes. We found that the belief in negotiating with fate, although originating from Chinese folk culture, is spontaneously activated when people experience constraints even in a non-Chinese culture, and helps people cope with those constraints., (Copyright © 2019 Au and Savani.)

Drawing on self-determination theory, this research investigates whether the motivation behind employees' helping behaviors is associated with their positive affect and their subsequent help provision, and whether citizenship pressure moderates these relationships. A recall-based experiment and an experience-sampling study capturing helping episodes among fulltime employees found that when employees helped coworkers because of higher autonomous (controlled) motivation in a helping episode, they experienced higher (lower) positive affect, and they had stronger (weaker) helping intentions and helped coworkers more (less) subsequently. We further found that citizenship pressure enhanced the positive relationship between episodic autonomous motivation and positive affect. Overall, the results challenge the universality of the "doing good-feeling good" effect and explicate the joint roles of citizenship pressure and helpers' episodic motivation in influencing employees' positive affect and their subsequent helping behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Extensive research has shown that when a social identity is made salient, people tend to embrace positive identities (e.g., being a voter) and shy away from negative identities (e.g., being a cheater). The present research proposes that this effect of identity salience could be reversed for identities that cannot be attained or rejected by engaging in simple behaviors (e.g., being a leader). People perceived leadership education programs that highlighted the leader identity as more difficult (Studies 1 and 3), and were less interested in signing up for such programs (Study 2). People performed worse when learning educational material framed in terms of the leader identity (Study 4). However, a growth mindset about leadership ability reduced the negative effects of identity frames on performance (Study 4). These findings highlight that the motivational effects of making identities salient might not hold for identities that cannot be attained by executing simple behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

In six studies ( N = 2,340), we identified one source of people's differential support for resettling refugees in their country-their beliefs about whether the kind of person someone is can be changed (i.e., a growth mind-set) or is fixed (i.e., a fixed mind-set). U.S. and UK citizens who believed that the kind of person someone is can be changed were more likely to support resettling refugees in their country (Studies 1 and 2). Study 3 identified a causal relationship between the type of mind-set people hold and their support for resettling refugees. Importantly, people with a growth mind-set were more likely to believe that refugees can assimilate in the host society but not that they should assimilate, and the belief that refugees can assimilate mediated the relationship between people's mind-sets and their support for resettling refugees (Studies 4-6). The findings identify an important antecedent of people's support for resettling refugees and provide novel insights into the science of mind-sets.

We investigated the role of metacognition in the process by which people learn new cultural norms from experiential feedback. In a lab paradigm, participants received many trials of simulated interpersonal situations in a new culture, each of which required them to make a choice, and then provided them with evaluative feedback about the accuracy of their choice with regard to local norms. Studies 1 to 3 found that participants higher on an individual difference dimension of metacognitive proclivity learned to adhere to the local norms faster. This relationship held up in simple and complex situations, that is, when the feedback was noisy rather than completely reliable, and it also held up when possibly confounding individual differences were controlled (Study 2). Further evidence suggested that the underlying mechanism is the largely implicit process of error monitoring and reactive error-based updating. A measure of surprise (an indicator of error monitoring) mediated the link between metacognitive proclivity and faster learning (Study 3). In experiments that varied the task so as to afford different kinds of metacognitive processing, participants learned faster with posterror prompts but not with postaccuracy prompts (Study 4). Further, they learned faster with nondirected prompts that merely provided a break for processing rather with prompts that directly instructed them to reason explicitly (Study 5). We discuss the implications of these findings for models of culture, first- and second-culture learning, and for training and selecting people for foreign or intercultural roles. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

We demonstrate that a difference exists between objectively having and psychologically perceiving multiple-choice options of a given decision, showing that morality serves as a constraint on people's perceptions of choice. Across 8 studies (N = 2,217), using both experimental and correlational methods, we find that people deciding among options they view as moral in nature experience a lower sense of choice than people deciding among the same options but who do not view them as morally relevant. Moreover, this lower sense of choice is evident in people's attentional patterns. When deciding among morally relevant options displayed on a computer screen, people devote less visual attention to the option that they ultimately reject, suggesting that when they perceive that there is a morally correct option, they are less likely to even consider immoral options as viable alternatives in their decision-making process. Furthermore, we find that experiencing a lower sense of choice because of moral considerations can have downstream behavioral consequences: after deciding among moral (but not nonmoral) options, people (in Western cultures) tend to choose more variety in an unrelated task, likely because choosing more variety helps them reassert their sense of choice. Taken together, our findings suggest that morality is an important factor that constrains people's perceptions of choice, creating a disjunction between objectively having a choice and subjectively perceiving that one has a choice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

In Western theories of motivation, autonomy is conceived as a universal motivator of human action; enhancing autonomy is expected to increase motivation panculturally. Using a novel online experimental paradigm that afforded a behavioral measure of motivation, we found that, contrary to this prevailing view, autonomy cues affect motivation differently among American and Indian corporate professionals. Autonomy-supportive instructions increased motivation among Americans but decreased motivation among Indians. The motivational Cue × Culture interaction was extraordinarily large; the populations exhibited little statistical overlap. A second study suggested that this interaction reflects culturally specific norms that are widely understood by members of the given culture. When evaluating messages to motivate workers, Indians, far more than Americans, preferred a message invoking obligations to one invoking autonomous personal choice norms. Results cast doubt on the claim, made regularly in both basic and applied psychology, that enhancing autonomy is a universally preferred method for boosting motivation.

The current research investigates people's perceptions of others' lay theories (or mindsets), an understudied construct that we call meta-lay theories. Six studies examine whether underrepresented students' meta-lay theories influence their sense of belonging to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The studies tested whether underrepresented students who perceive their faculty as believing most students have high scientific aptitude (a universal metatheory) would report a stronger sense of belonging to STEM than those who think their faculty believe that not everyone has high scientific aptitude (a nonuniversal metatheory). Women PhD candidates in STEM fields who held universal rather than nonuniversal metatheories felt greater sense of belonging to their field, both when metatheories were measured (Study 1) and manipulated (Study 2). Undergraduates who held more universal metatheories reported a higher sense of belonging to STEM (Studies 3 and 4) and earned higher final course grades (Study 3). Experimental manipulations depicting a professor communicating the universal lay theory eliminated the difference between African American and European American students' attraction to a STEM course (Study 5) and between women and men's sense of belonging to STEM (Study 6). Mini meta-analyses indicated that the universal metatheory increases underrepresented students' sense of belonging to STEM, reduces the extent of social identity threat they experience, and reduces their perception of faculty as endorsing stereotypes. Across different underrepresented groups, types of institutions, areas of STEM, and points in the STEM pipeline, students' metaperceptions of faculty's lay theories about scientific aptitude influence their sense of belonging to STEM. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

Five studies tested the hypothesis that people living in more diverse neighborhoods would have more inclusive identities, and would thus be more prosocial. Study 1 found that people residing in more racially diverse metropolitan areas were more likely to tweet prosocial concepts in their everyday lives. Study 2 found that following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, people in more racially diverse neighborhoods were more likely to spontaneously offer help to individuals stranded by the bombings. Study 3 found that people living in more ethnically diverse countries were more likely to report having helped a stranger in the past month. Providing evidence of the underlying mechanism, Study 4 found that people living in more racially diverse neighborhoods were more likely to identify with all of humanity, which explained their greater likelihood of having helped a stranger in the past month. Finally, providing causal evidence for the relationship between neighborhood diversity and prosociality, Study 5 found that people asked to imagine that they were living in a more racially diverse neighborhood were more willing to help others in need, and this effect was mediated by a broader identity. The studies identify a novel mechanism through which exposure to diversity can influence people, and document a novel consequence of this mechanism. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

The strength model of self-control has been predominantly tested with people from Western cultures. The present research asks whether the phenomenon of ego-depletion generalizes to a culture emphasizing the virtues of exerting mental self-control in everyday life. A pilot study found that whereas Americans tended to believe that exerting willpower on mental tasks is depleting, Indians tended to believe that exerting willpower is energizing. Using dual task ego-depletion paradigms, Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c found reverse ego-depletion among Indian participants, such that participants exhibited better mental self-control on a subsequent task after initially working on strenuous rather than nonstrenuous cognitive tasks. Studies 2 and 3 found that Westerners exhibited the ego-depletion effect whereas Indians exhibited the reverse ego-depletion effect on the same set of tasks. Study 4 documented the causal effect of lay beliefs about whether exerting willpower is depleting versus energizing on reverse ego-depletion with both Indian and Western participants. Together, these studies reveal the underlying basis of the ego-depletion phenomenon in culturally shaped lay theories about willpower. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).)

Choice is a behavioral act that has a variety of well-documented motivational consequences-it fosters independence by allowing people to simultaneously express themselves and influence the environment. Given the link between independence and analytic thinking, the current research tested whether choice also leads people to think in a more analytic rather than holistic manner. Four experiments demonstrate that making choices, recalling choices, and viewing others make choices leads people to think more analytically, as indicated by their attitudes, perceptual judgments, categorization, and patterns of attention allocation. People who made choices scored higher on a subjective self-report measure of analytic cognition compared to whose did not make a choice (pilot study). Using an objective task-based measure, people who recalled choices rather than actions were less influenced by changes in the background when making judgments about focal objects (Experiment 1). People who thought of others' behaviors as choices rather than actions were more likely to group objects based on categories rather than relationships (Experiment 2). People who recalled choices rather than actions subsequently allocated more visual attention to focal objects in a scene (Experiment 3). Together, these experiments demonstrate that choice has important yet previously unexamined consequences for basic psychological processes such as attention and cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).)

Does every child have a fundamental right to receive a high-quality education? We propose that people's beliefs about whether "nearly everyone" or "only some people" have high intellectual potential drive their positions on education. Three studies found that the more people believed that nearly everyone has high potential, the more they viewed education as a fundamental human right. Furthermore, people who viewed education as a fundamental right, in turn (a) were more likely to support the institution of free public education, (b) were more concerned upon learning that students in the country were not performing well academically compared with students in peer nations, and (c) were more likely to support redistributing educational funds more equitably across wealthier and poorer school districts. The studies show that people's beliefs about intellectual potential can influence their positions on education, which can affect the future quality of life for countless students.

Previous research has suggested that stability of self-concept differs across cultures: in North American cultural contexts, people's self-concept is stable across social contexts, whereas in Japan, different self-concepts are activated within specific social contexts. We examined the implications of this cultural difference for preference-choice consistency, which is people's tendency to make choices that are consistent with their preferences. We found that Japanese were less likely than Americans to choose items that they liked the most, showing preference-choice inconsistency. We also investigated the conditions in which Japanese might exhibit greater preference-choice consistency. Consistent with research showing that in Japanese culture, the self is primarily conceptualized and activated by social contexts, we found that subtle social cues (e.g., schematic representations of human faces) increased preference-choice consistency among Japanese, but not among Americans. These findings highlight that choices do not reveal preferences to the same extent in all cultures, and that the extent to which choices reveal preferences depends on the social context.

The United States must improve its students' educational achievement. Race, gender, and social class gaps persist, and, overall, U.S. students rank poorly among peers globally. Scientific research shows that students' psychology-their "academic mindsets"-have a critical role in educational achievement. Yet policymakers have not taken full advantage of cost-effective and well-validated mindset interventions. In this article, we present two key academic mindsets. The first, a growth mindset, refers to the belief that intelligence can be developed over time. The second, a belonging mindset, refers to the belief that people like you belong in your school or in a given academic field. Extensive research shows that fostering these mindsets can improve students' motivation; raise grades; and reduce racial, gender, and social class gaps. Of course, mindsets are not a panacea, but with proper implementation they can be an excellent point of entry. We show how policy at all levels (federal, state, and local) can leverage mindsets to lift the nation's educational outcomes., (© The Author(s) 2015.)

This study proposes a dynamic reparatory model of voluntary work behavior. We test the hypothesis that when people are made aware of their high level of negative behavior at work (i.e., counterproductive work behavior) and are informed that their behavior is counternormative and undesirable, the knowledge that they violated social norms induces guilt. This guilt, in turn, results in compensatory behavior that is positive in nature (i.e., organizational citizenship behavior). We report results from a field experiment involving normative feedback about employees' counterproductive work behavior to support this model. The findings indicate that undesirable behaviors in the workplace can be redressed by making employees aware of the negative consequences of these behaviors., ((c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.)

Two studies investigate whether interpersonally engaging emotions--those that bring the self closer to others (e.g., affection, shame)--are central to the model of self and relationships prevalent in Mexican cultural contexts. Study 1 demonstrated that compared to people in European American contexts, people in Mexican contexts were more likely to report experiencing interpersonally engaging emotions and less likely to report experiencing interpersonally disengaging emotions. Study 2 found that interpersonally engaging emotions had a substantial influence on performance motivation in Mexican contexts--Mexican participants solved more word search puzzles after recalling instances in which they experienced positive interpersonally engaging emotions, and fewer after recalling negative interpersonally disengaging emotions; in contrast, there were no differences by condition for European Americans. These findings significantly extend previous research by documenting the implications of relational concerns (e.g., simpatia, personalismo) for emotion and motivation in Mexican contexts, and are the first to demonstrate the motivational effects of interpersonally engaging emotions.

We identify a novel dimension of people's beliefs about intelligence: beliefs about the potential to become highly intelligent. Studies 1-3 found that in U.S. American contexts, people tend to believe that only some people have the potential to become highly intelligent. In contrast, in South Asian Indian contexts, people tend to believe that most people have the potential to become highly intelligent. To examine the implications of these beliefs, Studies 4-6 measured and manipulated Americans' beliefs about the potential for intelligence and found that the belief that everyone can become highly intelligent predicted increased support for policies that distribute resources more equally across advantaged and disadvantaged social groups. These findings suggest that the belief that only some people have the potential to become highly intelligent is a culturally shaped belief, and one that can lead people to oppose policies aimed at redressing social inequality., ((c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved.)

Wealth inequality has significant psychological, physiological, societal, and economic costs. In six experiments, we investigated how seemingly innocuous, culturally pervasive ideas can help maintain and further wealth inequality. Specifically, we tested whether the concept of choice, which is deeply valued in American society, leads Americans to act in ways that perpetuate wealth inequality. Thinking in terms of choice, we argue, activates the belief that life outcomes stem from personal agency, not societal factors, and thereby leads people to justify wealth inequality. The results showed that highlighting the concept of choice makes people less disturbed by facts about existing wealth inequality in the United States, more likely to underestimate the role of societal factors in individuals' successes, less likely to support the redistribution of educational resources, and less likely to support raising taxes on the rich-even if doing so would help resolve a budget deficit crisis. These findings indicate that the culturally valued concept of choice contributes to the maintenance of wealth inequality.

We examine the claim that Indians are more likely than Americans to act deferentially in the presence of authority figures and explore 2 possible psychological mechanisms for this cultural difference: introjected goals and injunctive norms. Studies 1 and 2 showed that after reflecting upon an authority's expectations, Indians were more likely than Americans to make clothing and course choices consistent with the authority's expectations, but there was no such cultural difference for peers' expectations. Study 3 showed that merely activating the concept of authority figures, without highlighting specific expectations, was sufficient to influence Indians' choices but not their evaluations. Examining a more basic distinction underlying introjected goals versus injunctive norms, Study 4 showed that authority primes influenced Indians' sense of what they should do but not what they want to do. Study 5 showed that, inconsistent with the internalized goal mechanism, the effect of explicit authority primes did not increase after brief delays. However, Indian participants who were less likely to accommodate to the salient authority experienced more guilt across delay conditions, which supported the injunctive norms mechanism. The findings suggest that manipulating injunctive norms can be an effective means for inducing or eliminating deferential behaviors in Indian settings., ((c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved.)

Negotiable fate refers to the idea that one can negotiate with fate for control, and that people can exercise personal agency within the limits that fate has determined. Research on negotiable fate has found greater prevalence of related beliefs in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe and English-speaking countries. The present research extends previous findings by exploring the cognitive consequences of the belief in negotiable fate. It was hypothesized that this belief enables individuals to maintain faith in the potency of their personal actions and to remain optimistic in their goal pursuits despite the immutable constraints. The belief in negotiable fate was predicted to (a) facilitate sense-making of surprising outcomes; (b) increase persistence in goal pursuits despite early unfavorable outcomes; and (c) increase risky choices when individuals have confidence in their luck. Using multiple methods (e.g., crosscultural comparisons, culture priming, experimental induction of fate beliefs), we found supporting evidence for our hypotheses in three studies. Furthermore, as expected, the cognitive effects of negotiable fate are observed only in cultural contexts where the fate belief is relatively prevalent. Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the intersubjective approach to understanding the influence of culture on cognitive processes (e.g., Chiu, Gelfand, Yamagishi, Shteynberg, & Wan, 2010), the sociocultural foundations that foster the development of a belief in negotiable fate, and an alternative perspective for understanding the nature of agency in contexts where constraints are severe. Future research avenues are also discussed.