Hans Alves

Ruhr University Bochum | RUB · Social Cognition

The density hypothesis states that positive information is more similar than negative information, resulting in higher density of positive information in mental representations. The present research applies the density hypothesis to recognition memory to explain apparent valence asymmetries in recognition memory, namely, a recognition advantage for...

The present research suggests that people adjust their mental response scales to an object's distance and construal level. People make use of wider response categories when they judge distant and abstract as compared with close and concrete stimuli. Across five experiments, participants worked on visual and verbal estimation problems (e.g., length...

Statements' rated truth increases when people encounter them repeatedly. Processing fluency is a central variable to explain this truth effect. However, people experience processing fluency positively, and these positive experiences might cause the truth effect. Three studies investigated positivity and fluency influences on the truth effect. Study...

Illusory correlations are thought to underlie many undesirable judgements and behaviours, such as those that result in out-group discrimination. In this research, illusory correlations are investigated in a dynamic fashion using the serial reproduction paradigm. Specifically, participants learned about members of certain groups and behaviours that...

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a key effect in attitude formation, leading to changes in the liking of neutral attitude objects due to their pairing with positive or negative stimuli. Despite EC’s significance, current theories and most empirical findings are limited to stimulus pairings with a single affective stimulus at a time. In contrast, soc...

In diversifying societies, people are inevitably exposed to an increasing number of outgroups. As impressions of outgroups are more negative than those of ingroups, this may overall lead to more negative social attitudes and behaviors. In six preregistered experiments (N total = 1832) using a minimal group paradigm, we investigated whether the mere...

Most psychological theories are expressed in natural language terms, which incurs a number of important problems (e.g., vagueness, limited refutability, lack of parsimony, possible contradictiveness, redundancy and specification gaps). Better theory specification has been called for many times, and formalization is a means of achieving it. We prese...

Evaluative Conditioning (EC), the change in liking towards a neutral stimulus due to its pairing with a positive/negative unconditioned stimulus, is a central effect in attitude formation. Current research emphasizes the role of explicit memory in EC. However, human memory is no passive information-storage device, but people actively monitor and co...

People perceive out-groups, minorities, and novel groups more negatively than in-groups, majorities, and familiar groups. Previous research has argued that such intergroup biases may be caused by the order in which people typically encounter social groups. Groups that are relatively novel to perceivers (e.g., out-groups, minorities) are primarily a...

We investigate how the complexity of the social environment (more vs. less groups) influences attitude formation. We hypothesize that facing a larger number of groups renders learning processes about these groups noisier and more regressive, which has two important implications. First, more-complex social environments should lead perceivers to unde...

According to the cognitive–ecological model of social perception, biases toward individuals can arise as by-products of cognitive principles that interact with the information ecology. The present work tested whether negatively biased person descriptions occur as by-products of cognitive differentiation. Later-encountered persons are described by t...

Recent work shows that people judge an outcome as less likely when they learn the probabilities of all single pathways that lead to that outcome, a phenomenon termed Unlikelihood Effect (Karmarkar & Kupor, 2023). The initial explanation of this effect is that the low pathway probabilities trigger thoughts that deem the outcome unlikely. We tested t...

We investigate self-appraisals over time using a cognitive–ecological approach. We assume that ecologically, negative person attributes are more diverse than positive ones, while positive person attributes are more frequent than negative ones. We combine these ecological properties with the cognitive process of similarity- and differences-based soc...

Evaluative Conditioning (EC) is the change in liking of an object due to its mere pairing with a positive/negative stimulus. A central question in EC research is whether EC effects also emerge without awareness of the stimulus pairings. This is often tested by asking participants after the conditioning whether an object had been paired with positiv...

Evaluative Conditioning (EC) is the change in liking of stimuli due to their co-occurrence with other valenced stimuli. Recent research has shown stronger EC effects for more agreeable individuals. Because EC procedures are prone to demand characteristics, we hypothesized that more agreeable individuals might simply play the role of good study part...

Sampling approaches to judgment and decision making are distinct from traditional accounts in psychology and neuroscience. While these traditional accounts focus on limitations of the human mind as a major source of bounded rationality, the sampling approach originates in a broader cognitive-ecological perspective. It starts from the fundamental as...

The cumulative redundancy bias (CRB) refers to people's difficulty in ignoring the redundancy in cumulatively presented information. When people consider which of two competing agents is better, they are influenced by the sequence of events that led to their accumulative total performance. If one agent was ahead most of the time, people consider th...

A key challenge for social psychology is to identify unifying principles that account for the complex dynamics of social behaviour. We propose psychological relativity and its core mechanism of comparison as one such unifying principle. To support our proposal, we review recent evidence investigating basic processes underlying and novel application...

Competitions in sports, business, or politics often provide perceivers with cumulative standings over time. Recent research suggests that people fail to accurately update their impressions from cumulative observations as they are influenced by previous standings. This cumulative redundancy bias (CRB) implies that competitors that are leading during...

We address an apparent discrepancy in the literature on how context stimuli influence evaluations of target stimuli. While a rich literature suggests that target evaluations are often contrasted away from the valence of context stimuli, reported effects of evaluative conditioning (EC) are almost exclusively assimilative. Specifically, when a neutra...

Sharing attitudes leads to liking. While this similarity effect is well-established, past research rarely addressed whether positive and negative attitudes differ in their potential to elicit liking. Hence, it is unclear whether people prefer others who share their likes or others who share their dislikes. Four studies (N = 402) showed that likes h...

The cumulative redundancy bias (CRB) refers to people’s difficulty to ignore the redundancy in cumulatively presented information. For instance, when people consider which of two teams is better, they should focus on the total number of points that each team has at the time. Yet, people are also influenced by the sequence of events that led to that...

When judging whether someone is trustworthy, people rely on the perceptual typicality of a person’s face. We tested whether a more general typical-is-trustworthy heuristic exists based on the descriptive typicality of a person. In four experiments, we provided participants with descriptive information about the typicality of target persons’ attribu...

In response to a growing consumer trend towards meat reduction and more plant-based diets, the food industry develops meat-reduced food innovations, such as blended products which replace part of their meat with plant-based ingredients. These products are usually promoted as being more sustainable than existing products. However, it is not clear wh...

According to the evaluative information ecology model of social-comparison, people are more similar on their positive traits and tend to differ on their negative traits. This means that comparisons based on differences will naturally produce negative evaluations, whereas those based on similarities will produce positive evaluations. In this researc...

In a recent study, Shin and Niv explain both negativity and positivity biases in social evaluations as a function of the diversity and low frequency of events. We discuss why negative information is indeed more diverse and less frequent, and highlight the implications beyond social evaluations.

To address the growing health awareness of consumers, the food industry designs novel food alternatives, which are similar but not identical to existing foods (e.g., meat‐reduced or plant‐based burgers). The idea is that consumers can continue to eat their preferred kind of food and still follow a healthy diet. However, we argue that it is too shor...

According to the evaluative information ecology model of social-comparison, people are more similar on their positive traits and tend to differ on their negative traits. This means that com- parisons based on differences will naturally produce negative evaluations, whereas those based on similarities will produce positive evaluations. In this resea...

Distinguishing between “good” and “bad” is a fundamental task for all organisms. However, people seem to process positive and negative information differentially, described in the literature as instances of negativity bias, positivity bias, or valence asymmetries. We provide an overview of these processing differences and their explanations. First,...

Past research has shown that mimicry has a number of pro-social consequences for interaction partners. However, such research has almost exclusively focused on its effects among interaction dyads. As social interactions are often witnessed by third-party observers, the question arises which inferences perceivers draw from observing mimicry. In the...

People often form attitudes about objects, individuals, or groups by examining and com-paring their attributes. Such attribute-based attitude formation is guided by a differentiation principle: Whether people come to like or dislike an attitude object depends on the object’s attributes that differentiate it from other objects. Attributes that are r...

People often form attitudes about objects, individuals, or groups by examining and comparing their attributes. Such attribute-based attitude formation is guided by a differentiation principle: Whether people come to like or dislike an attitude object depends on the object's attributes that differentiate it from other objects. Attributes that are re...

Past research has shown that mimicry has a number of pro-social consequences for interaction partners. However, such research has almost exclusively focused on its effects among interaction dyads. As social interactions are often witnessed by third-party observers, the question arises which inferences perceivers draw from observing mimicry. In the...

We propose the Evaluative Information Ecology (EvIE) model as a model of the social environment. It makes two assumptions: Positive “good” information is more frequent compared to negative “bad” information and positive information is more similar and less diverse compared to negative information. We review support for these two properties based on...

The present work identifies a so-far overlooked bias in sequential impression formation. When the latent qualities of competitors are inferred from a cumulative sequence of observations (e.g., the sum of points collected by sports teams), impressions should be based solely on the most recent observation because all previous observations are redunda...

People judge positive information to be more alike than negative information. This good-bad asymmetry in similarity was argued to constitute a true property of the information ecology (Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2017). Why good is more alike than bad: Processing implications. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 69–79). Alternatively, the a...

People often hold negative attitudes toward out-groups and minority groups. We argue that such intergroup biases may result from an interaction of basic cognitive processes and the structure of the information ecology. This cognitive-ecological model assumes that groups such as minorities and out-groups are often novel to a perceiver. At the level...

People like others who share their attitudes. Online dating platforms as well as other social media platforms regularly rely on the social bonding power of their users’ shared attitudes. However, little is known about moderating variables. In the present work, I argue that sharing rare compared with sharing common attitudes should evoke stronger in...

Positive attributes are more prevalent than negative attributes in the social environment. From this basic assumption, 2 implications that have been overlooked thus far: Positive compared with negative attributes are more likely to be shared by individuals, and people's shared attributes (similarities) are more positive than their unshared attribut...

Humans process positive information and negative information differently. These valence asymmetries in processing are often summarized under the observation that ‘bad is stronger than good’, meaning that negative information has stronger psychological impact (e.g., in feedback, learning, or social interactions). This stronger impact is usually attr...

Previous research argued that stereotypes differ primarily on the 2 dimensions of warmth/communion and competence/agency. We identify an empirical gap in support for this notion. The theoretical model constrains stereotypes a priori to these 2 dimensions; without this constraint, participants might spontaneously employ other relevant dimensions. We...

The density hypothesis (Unkelbach, Fiedler, Bayer, Stegmüller, & Danner, 2008) claims a general higher similarity of positive information to other positive information compared with the similarity of negative information to other negative information. This similarity asymmetry might explain valence asymmetries on all levels of cognitive processing....

Past research showed that people accumulate more knowledge about other people and objects they like compared to those they dislike. More knowledge is commonly assumed to lead to more differentiated mental representations; therefore, people should perceive others they like as less similar to one another than others they dislike. We predict the oppos...

The present experiments tested the hypothesis that observers engage in more literal imitation of a model when the model is psychologically near to (vs. distant from) the observer. Participants learned to fold a dog out of towels by watching a model performing this task. Temporal (Experiment 1) and spatial (Experiment 2) distance from the model were...