Luciano Arcuri

• retired professor
• Professor Emeritus at University of Padua

A lack of empathy, interpersonal dominance, aggression and the exploitation of others are the key features of both narcissism and psychopathic disorders. With the aim to better capture the shared facets of these traits, this study developed a new tool named the Capability to Influence Others (CIO) Inventory, which is based on the pleasantness evalu...

The present research aims to verify the presence of linguistic biases in crime news reports (Study 1) and their role (Study 2) in activating a crime stereotype toward racial/ethnic minorities. In a first content analysis study, the natural occurrence of a set of linguistic biases was analyzed in Italian news articles that described comparable crime...

Implicit measures have become very popular in virtually all areas of basic and applied psychology. However, there are empirical and theoretical arguments that might raise doubts about their usefulness in research on political attitudes. Based on a review of relevant evidence, we argue that implicit measures can be useful to identify distal sources...

Implicit measures have become very popular in virtually all areas of basic and applied psychology. However, there are empirical and theoretical arguments that might raise doubts about their usefulness in research on political attitudes. Based on a review of relevant evidence, we argue that implicit measures can be useful to identify distal sources...

In questo lavoro viene valutata l'incidenza dei fattori interpersonali e situazionali nella rievocazione dei tratti di personalità riferiti a sé. La dimensione interpersonale presa in considerazione si riferisce ai motivi di auto-accrescimento e coerenza del sé che guidano la codifica delle informazioni riferite a sé. I soggetti, suddivisi in due g...

Objective: To test for differences between experts and lay people in assessment of the degree to which a doctor engaged in a shared decision making (SDM) with a patient using the OPTION scale and a movie clip as stimulus material. Methods: A segment of the movie 'Wit', depicting the communication of the diagnosis and the therapy proposed of a ca...

Presents a taxonomy of some of the main prejudice measures available to social psychologists, the decision dilemma regularly faced by researchers when selecting these measures, the need for a consideration of both situational and personality variables in the selection process, and open problems in the field. Measures discussed include traditional s...

The present work was aimed at investigating whether the emergence of shared representations, considered as the building blocks of shared action, is influenced by social variables such as group membership and perceived interdependence between co-acting individuals. In two experiments we required two participants to perform together a Simon task (i.e...

People often show a preference for information that confirms their attitudes and beliefs, and this tendency is reduced for opinions that are not held with conviction. The present study shows that both decided and undecided individuals show a tendency to selectively expose themselves to confirmatory information, albeit with different antecedents and...

Two experiments were conducted to assess whether the emergence of shared representations, as indexed by the joint Simon effect, is modulated by perceived group membership. In both experiments, participants were required to perform a Simon task along another person who was perceived as belonging either to the same group or to a different group. In E...

The perception of similarity between voters and politicians deeply affects political judgments. In the present work we investigated how voters may selectively attempt to increase their perceived similarity with liked political leaders by means of projection processes. In two studies, participants had to guess the month of birth of several politicia...

Extending recent investigations into the malleability of implicit ingroup favoritism, three experiments examined the role of indirect activation of equality and loyalty. Results showed that priming equality decreased implicit favoritism, measured through the Implicit Association Test and Go/No-Go Association Task, whereas priming loyalty enhanced i...

Common wisdom holds that choice decisions are based on conscious deliberations of the available information about choice options. On the basis of recent insights about unconscious influences on information processing, we tested whether automatic mental associations of undecided individuals bias future choices in a manner such that these choices ref...

Six studies (N = 491) investigated the inductive potential of nouns versus adjectives in person perception. In the first 5 studies, targets were either described by an adjective (e.g., Mark is homosexual) or by the corresponding noun (e.g., Mark is a homosexual) or by both (Study 3). The authors predicted and found that nouns, more so than adjectiv...

Two studies assessed the predictive validity of implicit political attitudes in relation to voting behavior. In Study 1, we demonstrated the validity of the adopted measure (i.e., the IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) with a sample of voters who clearly sided with one of the opposing parties. In Study 2, implicit political preferences were...

The present research investigated the development of multiple in-group identities among minority group members within a higher status majority. Explicit and implicit identification with the in-group (Southern Italy), out-group (Northern Italy), and a superordinate category (Italy) was examined in 29 Southern Italian students living in Northern Ital...

Recent research has questioned the automaticity of stereotypical thinking by identifying factors that moderate the elicitation of this process. Extending this general line of inquiry, the present experiments investigated the effects of contextual factors on stereotype activation. It was anticipated that the manner in which triggering categorical cu...

The present article focuses on the automatic evaluation of exemplars whose category membership has been learned in the past. Studies 1 and 2 confirmed the hypothesis that once an exemplar has been encoded as a member of a given group, at a later encounter the evaluation associated with the group will be unintentionally retrieved from memory, even w...

Previous studies have shown that people subtly conform more to ingroup members who use stereotype-consistent rather than stereotype-inconsistent information when describing an outgroup member (Castelli, Vanzetto, Sherman, & Arcuri, 2001). In the present article, we will address two important issues. First, we will examine whether this subtle confor...

Investigated how various emotional expressions impact on gender categorization. Two concurrent measures--response latencies and prototypicality judgments--were collected and compared in 3 experiments in which participants viewed pictures selected from a standardized set of emotional expressions. Ss were college students. The results showed that emo...

The effects that emerge when one observes an in-group member using a stereotype are investigated. It is hypothesized that, despite open disapproval (pilot study), people are more likely to conform to such a source rather than to a source who does not rely on stereotypes. In both the reported studies, participants were presented with the description...

This study investigates the effects of exemplar activation on the verbal responses of participants. Two-hundred people were sent a clearly miss-addressed e-mail message. The name of the sender was manipulated so that he could have the same name as a famous positive exemplar or as a famous negative exemplar. Replies (15%) showed no effect on the num...

O conjunto de tetos que integram este livro, todos eles construídos a partir de estudo empíricos, visa contribuir para uma análise do racismo em Portugal, que vá para além das perguntas irrelevantes sobre quantos racistas há no nosso país, se há mais racistas aqui do que noutros lados, ou se os portugueses são ou não racistas. A perspectiva compara...

Cognitive and motivational factors determining group stereotypes and intergroup perception will be analyzed. Among the cognitive factors, we will discuss the tendency to accentuate similarity among group members and to accentuate differences between groups. We will also discuss the salience of a category as a determinant of Stereotypic perceptions...

Examined the relation between the "linguistic intergroup bias" and the locus of causality and stability implicit in verbs. This bias is the tendency to describe positive in-group (IG) and negative out-group (OG) behaviors in more abstract terms than negative IG and positive OG behaviors. 49 high school students were presented with episodes of succe...

This research explores the role of perspective taking in self-serving biases. Assisted by a confederate, 80 subjects performed an impression-formation task and were given either success or failure bogus feedback. One week later, half of the subjects watched their performance on videotape and provided causal attributions (‘observers’). The other hal...

Three experiments examine how the type of language used to describe in-group and out-group behaviors contributes to the transmission and persistence of social stereotypes. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that people encode and communicate desirable in-group and undesirable out-group behaviors more abstractly than undesirable in-group and desi...

Three experiments examine how the type of language used to describe in-group and out-group behaviors contributes to the transmission and persistence of social stereotypes. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that people encode and communicate desirable in-group and undesirable out-group behaviors more abstractly than undesirable in-group and desi...

Three studies were carried out in order to account for development of word definitions. Study i was aimed at analysing the role of class inclusion skills and age (5– and 7–year-olds and adults) in production of definitions containing superordinate categorical terms. No differences were found between 7-year-olds who had passed a class inclusion task...

Subjects were presented with incomplete patterns of data featuring the co-occurence frequencies for two dichotomous variables. In the first experiment frequency data showing no empirical relation between variables were presented in two different ways (diagonally or by column). The subject's task was to estimate the degree of relationship between th...

Subjects in Western and westernized literate cultures have always recognized facial expression of emotions more accurately than those tested in nonwesternized cultures. Is this difference attributable only to a different degree of familiarity with the experimental conditions or is this also due to different degrees of familiarity with the expressio...

Studied within the framework of accentuation theory the effects of three categorization conditions on attribution memory. Using the experimental approach proposed by Taylor et al (1978) we have tested the hypothesis that subject's discriminative accuracy in associating the sentences to the pictures of the person who produced them depends on the use...