Xijing Wang

City University of Hong Kong | CityU · Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences

It is generally believed that people prefer societies with economic equality. No studies thus far have systematically examined sex differences in this preference specifically concerning mating—an important life stage. Building upon theoretical frameworks of mating strategies (i.e., hypergyny), we hypothesized that men, in comparison to women, are l...

Little attention has been given to self-objectification, which refers to viewing oneself as an instrument or object rather than a full human, in an educational context. To address this gap, the current research aims to test self-objectification among students, and we hypothesized that a performance goal orientation would result in self-objectificat...

Objectives: We explored the roles of personal values and value congruence一the alignment between individual and national values一in predicting public support for pandemic restrictions across 20 European countries. Study design: Cross-sectional study. Methods: We analyzed multinational European survey data (N = 34,356) using Schwartz's values theory a...

Self-objectification, defined as an excessive focus on one’s physical appearance over non-observable qualities, has attracted considerable attention from feminist scholars. In the current research, we hypothesized that cultural tightness (i.e., strong social norms and severe sanctions against norm-deviant behavior) predicts and increases self-objec...

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Overweight or obesity, often linked to excessive consumption of unhealthy foods, increases the risk of developing various chronic diseases. The present study aims to systematically investigate the effect of suffering from objectification on a preference for indulgent food. We found across five studies (Chinese participants, N = 1011) that individua...

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the role of group identification in shaping collective health behaviors. Using the novel Pronoun-Influenced Collective Health Model — an integrated framework combining elements from health and social psychology theories — we investigated the relationship between online first-person plural pronoun usage and adhe...

The benefits of self-authenticity have been well-documented, although courage is needed to be true to oneself. The present work aims to test whether courage is associated with and promotes self-authenticity. This hypothesis was confirmed across six studies (N = 3868). Study 1 showed that courage was positively related to self-authenticity. Having p...

Infidelity has destructive effects on romantic relationships. Several idiographic characteristics or experiences in an intimate relationship have been linked to unfaithfulness. Yet, relatively little research has been paid to investigate how sexist beliefs might sabotage relationships by incurring infidelity. The present research examined the assoc...

Interpersonal objectification, treating people as tools and neglecting their essential humanness, is a pervasive and enduring phenomenon. Across five studies ( N = 1183), we examined whether subjective economic inequality increases objectification through a calculative mindset. Study 1 revealed that the perceptions of economic inequality at the nat...

Existing research has suggested a predominantly negative view of dependency-oriented help. In contrast, the current research aims to test the positive function of dependency-oriented help in intimate relationships where interpersonal dependency is valued. We hypothesized that dependency-oriented help-seeking could function in communicating liking a...

(To access the full article, click on https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563224000827?dgcid=author) Although the relationship between self-objectification and selfie-related behaviors has been extensively investigated, limited attention has been given to understanding how women's self-objectification impacts their attitudes tow...

Advancements in vaccination technologies mitigate disease transmission risks but may inadvertently suppress the behavioral immune system, an evolved disease avoidance mechanism. Applying behavioral immune system theory and utilizing robust big data analytics, we examined associations between rising vaccination coverage and government policies, publ...

Attributing humanness to oneself (i.e., self-humanity) can be malleable and can lead to various crucial outcomes. Researchers have not investigated whether and how awe as a self-related emotion affects people’s perception of their own humanness. We proposed two competing hypotheses: awe impairs self-humanity via self-smallness, and awe promotes sel...

Economic inequality has been shown to increase the social distance between people. However, we proposed that people’s affiliation with others in more unequal societies depends on whether the relationship is instrumental to self-enhancement goals. The results from four experiments (total N = 823) supported our proposition. We found that economic ine...

Cultural tightness is characterized by strong norms and harsh punishments for deviant behaviors. We hypothesized that followers in tight (vs. loose) cultures would more strongly prefer muscular leaders. This hypothesis was confirmed across seven studies (N = 1,615) employing samples from the United States, the United Kingdom, and China. Using actua...

Many important family decisions, such as when to have offspring, essentially manifest different life history strategies, ranging from slow to fast ones. The current research examined how one critical societal factor, social mobility (i.e., the shift of socioeconomic status in a society), may contribute to such slow (vs. fast) life history strategie...

Hostile sexism is a blatant and explicit form of sexism consisting of antagonistic attitudes toward women. We hypothesized that men's personal relative deprivation, a subjectively perceived disadvantage, would predict their hostile sexism toward women. In addition, we expected that, if this effect occurs, a sense of control would act as a mediator....

Self-objectification can be considered as a specific kind of self-dehumanization that consists of a perception of oneself as more instrument-like than human-like and a decreased self-attribution of mental states. Self-objectification is commonly observed, and its contributing factors need to be better understood. In the present research, we examine...

A substantial amount of research has demonstrated that good-looking individuals are perceived and treated in a favorable manner; however, relatively little research has examined how attractive people actually behave. There are two predominant theories on attractiveness: the self-fulfilling nature of “what is beautiful is good” from social psycholog...

Air pollution is a major global environmental issue, yet its psychological consequences have only started to receive attention from scholars. We examined whether and how air pollution would lead to self- and other-dehumanization. Across one field study and five pre-registered experimental studies, we showed that air pollution increased people's deh...

When are we more likely to permit immoral behaviors? The current research examined a generalized compensation belief hypothesis that individuals, as observers, would morally tolerate and accept someone paying forward unfair treatment to an innocent person as a means to compensate for the perpetrator's previously experienced mistreatment. Across fiv...

When are we more likely to permit immoral behaviours? The current research examined a generalized compensation belief hypothesis that individuals, as observers, would morally tolerate and accept someone paying forward unfair treatment to an innocent person as a means to compensate for the perpetrator's previously experienced mistreatment. Across fi...

Competitions are ubiquitous, and their psychological consequences for women have not received sufficient attention. For this research, we tested whether competition, in either work settings or a broader form of competition for resources, would interact with the sex is power belief to result in self-objectification among women. This prediction was c...

Although the possession of instrumentality (i.e., partner B being useful to partner A’s goal pursuit) can facilitate relationship satisfaction, taking an instrumental approach (i.e., A focusing on B’s usefulness and seeing B as a tool to facilitate personal goal attainment), is (often) considered as a callous and depersonalized approach to forming...

While ample evidence supports an association between power and dominance, little is still known about how temporary experiences of power influence the way people come to see themselves and others. The present research investigates the effect of social power on self- and other-face recognition, and examines whether gender modulates the direction of...

Objectification, treating others merely as things or tools while denying their personhood, results in severe consequences. While prior research predominantly focused on the triggers of objectification, we aimed to investigate a possible intervention. We hypothesized that gratitude could reduce objectification toward general others (i.e., people who...

The ongoing coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has had a profound impact on people’s wellbeing. Here, we proposed that an individual characteristic might be associated with wellbeing; that is, materialism. Specifically, we conducted three studies (total N = 3219) to examine whether people with high levels of materialism would experience poorer...

Economic inequality has been shown to increase the social distance between groups. We proposed that in more unequal societies, people’s affiliation with others depends on whether a relationship partner is instrumental for self-enhancement goals. The results from four experiments supported our proposition. We found that inequality increased people’s...

The present study investigated the effect of interpersonal mistreatment on the perpetrators’ mental health. We proposed that the threat of COVID-19 will increase people’s mental health problems through their on-line aggression toward stigmatized groups accused of spreading the disease and that there might be potential gender differences in such eff...

Compared to loose cultures, tight cultures are characterized by stronger norm adherence and sanctioning of norm deviant behavior. In the current research, we proposed that culture tightness (vs. looseness) triggers a desire for physical formidability (being big and muscular), and interpersonal dominance. Fives studies converged to sup�port our hy...

Previous research on money and prosociality has described a monotonic pattern, showing that money reduces generosity. The present research aimed to examine whether money differently impairs generosity when arising from altruistic versus egoistic motives. To this end, we employed economic games designed to study generosity (e.g., the Dictator game)...

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic threatens physical and psychological health. We examined whether social dominance orientation (SDO), a preference for inequality among social groups, contributes to mental health during the pandemic. In particular, we predicted that people high in SDO would experience higher levels of depression than others low in S...

Psychology research focuses primarily on male competition. This research, however, investigates women’s competition for love and the ideal partner in the mating market, and reveals one psychological consequence for women, i.e., beautification. This is demonstrated with ecologically valid, real-world archive and online search query data, a quasi-exp...

Many empirical studies have demonstrated the psychological effects of various aspects of money, including the aspiration for money, mere thoughts about money, possession of money, and placement of people in economic contexts. Although multiple aspects of money and varied methodologies have been focused on and implemented, the underlying mechanisms...

Emotional expressions significantly influence perceivers’ behavior in economic games and negotiations. The current research examined the interpersonal effects of emotions when such information cannot be used to guide behavior for increasing personal gain and when monetary rewards are made salient. For this, a one-shot Public Goods Game (Studies 1,...

While robots were traditionally built to achieve economic efficiency and financial profits, their roles are likely to change in the future with the aim to provide social support and companionship. In this research, we examined whether the robot’s proposed function (social vs. economic) impacts judgments of mind and moral treatment. Studies 1a and 1...

A great deal of research has shown that dominant-looking faces are afforded power. In this research, we tested the reverse link. As such, we examined whether knowledge of a target’s power would lead to a dominance bias in face perception. Five studies were conducted by applying face morphing techniques to both controlled facial stimuli and faces of...

This work tested whether attributions of emotional experience vary with the perceived functionality of robots. When robots were described in terms of their social value, participants assigned greater levels of emotional experience compared to when robots merely seemed to fulfil economic needs. However, increased perceptions of experience elicited m...

Objectification, which refers to the treatment of others as objectlike things, has long been observed in capitalism. While the negative impact of money on interpersonal harmony has been well documented, the social cognitive processes that underlie them are relatively unknown. Across four studies, we explored whether the love of money leads to objec...