Jason E. Plaks

• University of Toronto

Understanding how humans adapt their decisionmakingin economic interactions with artificial intelligence (AI)is essential for building socially attuned AI agents. In this study,we analysed human proposers’ behavior in the Ultimatum Game(UG) using interpretable behavioural features and supervisedmachine learning models to classify strategic proposer...

Human moral interactions often assume that resources should be allocated equitably, i.e., one should not take more than one’s fair share. To what extent do people apply this assumption to social AI entities? Using a 21-round Ultimatum Game, we investigated participants’ behavioral, physiological, and affective responses to fair, disadvantageous, an...

Does a harmful act appear more intentional–and worthy of opprobrium–if it was committed by a member of a stigmatized group? In two studies (N = 1,451), participants read scenarios in which an actor caused a homicide. We orthogonally manipulated the relative presence or absence of distal intent (a focus on the end) and proximal intent (a focus on th...

Over the decades, numerous researchers have identified psychological predictors of conservative and liberal political orientation. However, most research teams have focused on a single predictor at a time, occasionally two. Moreover, most researchers have tended to stay within the theoretical and methodological confines of their subdiscipline (e.g....

With two studies ( N=1,257), we examined the aspect-level personality predictors of support for major U.S. presidential candidates in 2016 and 2020. U.S. residents completed measures of aspect-level personality, overall political orientation, and support for each candidate. The profile that predicted support for each candidate diverged from the pro...

Trust is a significant predictor of humans' willingness to engage with robots. What increases – and decreases – human-robot trust? In contrast with research that has focused on robots' physical features and gestures, the present study examined psychological features. We operationalized trust as the willingness to make oneself vulnerable to potentia...

The environmental footprint embedded in the human diet is massive. To convey the enormity of the problem, persuasive environmental messages often report large-scale, aggregate data (such as the billions of tons of greenhouse gases released to the atmosphere annually by the beef industry.) Is this strategy effective? In five studies (total N = 1237)...

Numerous studies have linked political conservatism with negativity bias, whereas others have linked conservatism with indicators of positive adjustment. This research sought to reconcile this seeming contradiction by examining whether distinct dimensions of conservatism differentially predicted measures of negativity bias and positive adjustment....

People often endorse the moral principle that all human lives are equally valuable. At the same time, people often privilege high-status individuals over low-status individuals. These two inclinations come into conflict in a scenario involving the potential killing of a high-status person to save the lives of multiple low-status people. In the pres...

Three studies examined the relationship between emotions and moral judgment from an interpersonal perspective. In Studies 1 and 2, participants justified their decisions in sacrificial dilemmas to an imagined interlocutor. Linguistic analyses revealed that Don’t Sacrifice justifications contained more anger-related language than sadness-related lan...

Researchers examining biases toward the nonreligious often group atheists and agnostics together. Although agnostics are just as common as atheists, there is less empirical work on stereotypes about agnostics than on stereotypes about atheists. The present studies investigated what stereotype content is shared between agnostics and atheists, and wh...

Objectives The present studies examined the linkages between older adults’ lay theories regarding the modifiability of abilities and their intentions to perform preventive health behaviors. The ‘entity theory’ refers to the belief that traits are fixed. The ‘incremental theory’ is the belief that traits are malleable. We hypothesized that older adu...

Introduction Research has consistently revealed positive correlations between political liberalism and Openness to Experience, and between conservatism and Conscientiousness. Most of this research has made use of domain‐level models of the Big Five personality traits. Recent work suggests, however, that each Big Five trait domain can be divided int...

Do mass media preferences help to shape specific political attitudes and voting preferences? In two studies, participants completed measures of media genre preferences, three distinct dimensions of political attitudes, and political candidate endorsement (Study 2 only). We found that higher liking of Active (e.g., action films, adventure books) and...

Individuals who are more easily disgusted tend to be more politically conservative. Individuals who have a preference for order also tend to be more politically conservative. In the present research, we hypothesised that these three variables are psychologically interrelated. Specifically, trait disgust encourages a generalised search for order, wh...

Romantic pursuit decisions often require a person to risk one of the two errors: pursuing a romantic target when interest is not reciprocated (resulting in rejection) or failing to pursue a romantic target when interest is reciprocated (resulting in a missed romantic opportunity). In the present research, we examined how strongly people wish to avo...

Objectives: Although numerous studies have documented that negative age stereotypes and perceived age discrimination are related to older adults’ lower well-being, few studies have investigated the mechanisms underlying these relationships. In this study, we tested whether self-perceptions of aging and subjective age would help to account for the r...

DOI:10.1080/00223891.2017.1339711The cohen’s d’s were not calculated correctly in the descriptive statistics for Study 1–the effect sizes in the paper are double what they should be. On Page 3, the cohen’s d’s in the following paragraph should read as follows: We performed Bonferroni-corrected pairwise t tests to examine differences in composite sc...

The covariation model of attribution holds that when an actor's behavior varies across situations, observers make situational, rather than dispositional, inferences about the actor. We conducted four studies to test the hypothesis that situationally variable behavior can also elicit strong dispositional inferences when the behavior follows a system...

Moral judgment research has often assumed that when laypeople evaluate a moral dilemma, they focus on answering the question “Is action X wrong?” An alternative approach, inspired by virtue ethics, asserts that, in addition, laypeople seek to answer the question: “Would a good person do X?” As such, moral observers are sensitive to information that...

Models of moral judgment have linked generalized emotionality with deontological moral judgment. The evidence, however, is mixed. Other research has linked the specific emotion of disgust with generalized moral condemnation. Here too, the evidence is mixed. We suggest that a synthesis of these two literatures points to one specific emotion (disgust...

Inferences regarding actors' intentions play an important role in social and moral cognition. Numerous studies have operationalized intentionality in a binary fashion (i.e., an act is either "intentional" or "unintentional"). The authors suggest, however, that when determining the degree to which an act was intentional, lay observers consider two i...

Romantic pursuit decisions often require a person to risk one of two errors: pursuing a romantic target when interest is not reciprocated (resulting in rejection), or failing to pursue a romantic target when interest is reciprocated (resulting in a missed romantic opportunity). In the present research, we examined how strongly people wish to avoid...

A voluminous literature has documented the importance of emotion regulation for health and well-being. The studies in this literature, however, have generally focused on the down-regulation of negative affect. Few studies have examined the down-regulation of positive affect. In Study 1, we constructed a scale, the revised Regulatory Emotional Self-...

Implicit theories are a priori beliefs about the features and properties of objects, including humans. In this chapter, I describe research examining the effects of implicit theories on different points of the social information processing stream. Much of this research has focused on comparing people with an “entity theory” (the belief that human q...

Do different cultures hold different views of intentionality? In four studies, participants read scenarios in which the actor's distal intent (a focus on a broader goal) and proximal intent (a focus on the mechanics of the act) were manipulated. In Studies 1-2, when distal intent was more prominent in the actor's mind, North Americans rated the act...

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We review existing research on the associations between political orientation and Big Five traits such as Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness. We suggest that analyzing these traits at the aspect level sheds light on motivational mechanisms underlying these links. For example, we present evidence that only one of the two aspects of Conscie...

Two components of lay observers' calculus of moral judgment are proximal intent (the actor's mind is focused on performing the action) and distal intent (the actor's mind is focused on the broader goal). What causes observers to prioritize one form of intent over the other? The authors observed whether construal level (Studies 1–2) and beliefs abou...

Previous studies suggest that conservatives in the United States are happier than liberals. This difference has been attributed to factors including differences in socioeconomic status, group memberships, and system-justifying beliefs. We suggest that differences between liberals and conservatives in personality traits may provide an additional acc...

People give widely varying estimates for the amount of genetic overlap that exists between humans. While some laypeople believe that humans are highly genetically similar to one another, others believe that humans share very little genetic overlap. These studies examine how beliefs about genetic overlap affect neural and evaluative reactions to rac...

The present study examined whether perceivers' implicit theories about the fixedness of intelligence would modulate neurophysiological responses to stereotype-violating and stereotype-confirming information. Brain activity was recorded using EEG as participants read a series of stereotype-confirming or stereotype-violating behaviors performed by a...

Research on deontological versus utilitarian moral reasoning has been largely silent on how interpersonal experiences shape moral judgment. We hypothesized that both anxious and avoidant attachment would predict the propensity to make utilitarian versus deontological judgments, but via different pathways. In Studies 1 and 2, the link between anxiou...

We hypothesize that two distinct facets of religiosity—orthodoxy (an emphasis on belief) and orthopraxy (an emphasis on behavior)—predict differential sensitivity to an actor’s intent when making moral judgments. Participants judged actors who performed misdeeds intentionally or unintentionally. In Study 1, high orthopraxy predicted harsher judgmen...

We review the emerging evidence suggesting that the largely separate research areas of romantic relationships and judgment and decision making (JDM) can usefully inform each other. First, we present evidence that decisions in more traditional JDM domains (e.g., consumerism, economics) share important features with romantic-relationship decisions, i...

The authors examined whether older adults' implicit theories regarding the modifiability of memory in particular (Studies 1 and 3) and abilities in general (Study 2) would predict memory performance. In Study 1, individual differences in older adults' endorsement of the "entity theory" (a belief that one's ability is fixed) or "incremental theory"...

Does accountability (the expectation that one will be called on to justify one's beliefs or actions to others) attenuate or amplify stereotyping? The authors hypothesized that the effect of accountability on stereotype use in impression formation depends on perceivers' implicit theory (entity versus incremental). The authors assessed the effects of...

OBJECTIVE: The present work examined whether conservatives and liberals differ in their anticipation of their own emotional reactions to negative events. METHODS: In two studies, participants imagined experiencing positive or negative outcomes in domains that do not directly concern politics. In Study 1, 190 American participants recruited online (...

Although regret plays a central role in decision making, few studies have explored the nature of regret in close relationships. We hypothesized that anxiously attached individuals, who are hypersensitive to relationship threat and prone to ambivalence in close relationships, would be particularly likely to experience regret over relationship-relate...

What role do folk beliefs about human genetic variation play in racial categorization and evaluation? In two studies, the authors assessed or manipulated participants' estimates of the percentage of genetic material that human beings have in common and examined whether this variable would predict categorization (Study 1) and evaluation (Study 2) of...

How do perceivers combine information about perceptually obvious categories (e.g., Black) with information about perceptually ambiguous categories (e.g., gay) during impression formation? Given that gay stereotypes are activated automatically, we predicted that positive gay stereotypes confer evaluative benefits to Black gay targets, even when perc...

Strategies, by definition, involve adopting different behaviors in different situations. Thus, it follows that in strategic interactions, inferences about counterparts would be based on how their behavior varies across situations. Yet, little research has examined inferences about counterparts as a function of strategic variation in behavior. In tw...

What is the role of ecology in automatic cognitive processes and social behavior? Our motivated-preparation account posits that priming a social category readies the individual for adaptive behavioral responses to that category-responses that take into account the physical environment. We present the first evidence showing that the cognitive respon...

The present research capitalized on the prominence and multiracial heritage of U.S. 2008 presidential election candidate Barack Obama to examine whether individual differences in classifying him as Black or as multiracial corresponded to differences in implicit perception of race. This research used a newly developed task (Sedlins, Malahy, & Shoda,...

The authors propose that two central ingredients in lay models of intentionality are (a) "distal intent" (the actor's mind is focused on a broader goal) and (b) "proximal intent" (the actor's mind is focused narrowly on the act itself). Study 1 established that participants rate an actor with both forms of intent more responsible than an actor with...

Lay theories (or ‘implicit theories’) are cornerstones for social cognition: people use lay theories to help them make sense of complex and ambiguous behavior. In this study, we describe recent research on the entity and incremental theories (the belief that personality is fixed or malleable). In so doing, we demonstrate that each theory does not a...

The authors propose that two central ingredients in lay models of intentionality are (a) “distal intent” (the actor’s mind is focused on a broader goal) and (b) “proximal intent” (the actor’s mind is focused narrowly on the act itself). Study 1 established that participants rate an actor with both forms of intent more responsible than an actor with...

Why are errors of omission regretted more than errors of commission in the distant past, whereas the reverse is true for the near past? The authors hypothesized that abstract versus concrete representation is a significant contributor to this effect. In Study 1, the authors assessed participants' regret for errors of commission versus omission occu...

The authors hypothesized that reactions to performance feedback depend on whether one's lay theory of intelligence is supported or violated. In Study 1, following improvement feedback, all participants generally exhibited positive affect, but entity theorists (who believe that intelligence is fixed) displayed more anxiety and more effort to restore...

When judging morally ambiguous action, how much weight do laypeople place on whether the actor's behavior was (a) driven by a prior goal versus (b) performed under intentional control? Based on a growing research literature in contemporary social-cognitive psychology, we hypothesized that perceivers' emphasis on the prior goal versus intentional co...

Perceivers’ shared theories about the social world have long featured prominently in social inference research. Here, we investigate how fundamental differences in such theories influence basic inferential processes. Past work has typically shown that integrating multiple interpretations of behavior during social inference requires cognitive resour...

The authors propose that automatic social behavior may result from perceivers preparing to interact with primed social group members. In Study 1, participants primed with a disliked outgroup (gay men) showed evidence of interaction preparation (aggression) rather than direct stereotypic trait expression (passivity). In Study 2, participants with im...

Beginning with the assumption that implicit theories of personality are crucial tools for understanding social behavior, the authors tested the hypothesis that perceivers would process person information that violated their predominant theory in a biased manner. Using an attentional probe paradigm (Experiment 1) and a recognition memory paradigm (E...

An actor may display inconsistent behavior across different situations (e.g., conscientious in one situation, nonconscientious in another) and yet still be perceived as a coherent person. How do perceivers accomplish this? To investigate this question, in two experiments, participants read about a target person whose behavior across eight situation...

How do people respond to information that counters a stereotype? Do they approach it or avoid it? Four experiments showed that attention to stereotype-consistent vs. -inconsistent information depends on people's implicit theories about human traits. Those holding an entity theory (the belief that traits are fixed) consistently displayed greater att...

How do people respond to counterstereotypic information? Prior research has yielded conflicting results, with some research suggesting that people ignore such information, and other research suggesting that people generally approach such information. Less work has examined variables that may predict who will follow which route and when. The present...

Research on lay theories suggests that people who begin the task of social perception with different starting assumptions follow different cognitive paths and reach different social endpoints. In this article, we show how laypeople's fixed (entity) versus dynamic (incremental) theories of human nature foster different meaning systems for interpreti...

Using 4 experiments, the authors examined how stereotypic information about teammates influences social loafing and compensation during collective tasks. In each experiment, participants performed better on cognitive tasks when there was a poor (vs. good) fit between the stereotypic strengths of their partner and the requirements of the task. This...

Using 4 experiments, the authors examined how stereotypic information about teammates influences social leafing and compensation during collective tasks. In each experiment, participants performed better on cognitive tasks when there was a poor (vs. good) fit between the stereotypic strengths of their partner and the requirements of the task. This...

In this chapter, we have proposed that rather than there being one "gold standard" representation for every group around which people cluster, such representations are in the eye of the beholder: Differences in group representation covary meaningfully with the perceiver's lay theory. Lay theories consistently influence the extent to which people se...